LEAVES FROM A VILLAGE DIARY

Sunday, —th.—This morning a Taube came over our village, dropping bombs. They all fell in the neighbouring wood. Our aircraft defences made a fervent response, but ineffectual.

At 6.30 this evening I counted eighteen of our 'planes flying home. They have a facetious trick of shutting off their engines high and far from home and floating down on resistance. It's curious watching a 'plane suddenly dissociated from the raucous buzz of its engine.

To-night the whole eastern sky is illuminated as though by summer lightning in which there are no intervals—an unintermittent flap-flap. The din is tremendous and heart-shaking. This is war—"and no error." Anzac was hard. The country was rough and untenable—a hell, in our strip, of lice, stinks, flies, mal-nutrition and sudden death. Food was repulsive, and even so you did not get as much as you desired. You got clean in the Ægean at peril of your life. Here, on the other hand, is fighting-space gentle and smiling—a world of pastures, orchards, streams, groves, and white winding roads, with room to sanitate and restrain plagues. There is an over-generous ration of food that tempts you to surfeit; Expeditionary Force canteens, as well stocked as a London grocer's, as far up as the riskiest railhead; snug farmhouse billets, with un-infested straw; hot baths behind the lines; cinemas for resting battalions. But Anzac never knew the relentlessness of this offensive fighting. There we faced an enemy with whom fighting was a hobby, taken sportingly, if earnestly. Here we wrestle at sweaty and relentless grips with a foe to whom the spirit of sport is strange and repulsive, and who never had a sense of humour; who fights hating blindly and intensely. Most days you could not jab a pin between the gun-belches. You feel the whole world is being shaken, and, if this goes on for long, will crumble in a welter of blood and hate. It cannot last at this rate: that's the assurance that rises day by day and hour by hour within you. But the assurance is melancholy: how much of either side is going to survive the intensity of it? What will be the state, when all is over, of the hardly-victorious?

Monday, —th.—To-day, in nine hours, three divisions were rushed through this town for the —— sector. They came in motor-'buses. At twelve miles an hour they tore through the astonished streets, which got themselves cleared quickly enough. The military police tried to restrain the pace. They were French 'buses driven by Frenchmen who had got a fever of excited speed in their blood. They cleared the military police off the route with impatient gestures, as one waves aside an impertinence.... This is mobility.

Feverish processions of this kind are altogether apart from battalions marching, cavalry clattering, engineers lumbering. A fifteen-inch gun, distributed over five steam tractors, goes through at midnight with flares and clamour. One trusts that such engines offer compensation for their unwieldiness, for that is incredible: five gigantic tractors with trailers, to move one of them at this strident snail's pace. The nine-point-two's are accommodated each on one tractor. The field-guns, tossed on to waggons, hurry through, toys by comparison.

Tuesday, —th.—I was on the —— Road this morning in the gusty drizzle. A column of artillery was moving towards ——. It was miserable weather for horsed-transport. All the men had wry-necks, with the list against the wind. The flanks of the officers' horses were overspread by the voluminous waterproof cape. At —— there was a horse column encamped. Nothing could appear more miserable than the dejected horse lines in the sea of mud—manes and draggle-tails blown about in the murk.

A party of ineligible Frenchmen were road-patching near ——. The main roads have them at work always. They fill the holes and minute valleys that military traffic makes continuously. Lorry-holes are insidious things. They magnify at an astonishing rate if left for two days. They must be treated at once. The gangs move up and down the roads with mobile loads of earth and gravel, treating all the depressions and maintaining a surface tolerable for Colonels' cars. (You can judge the freight of a car by its speed; the pace of Majors is slightly less fierce than that of Colonels. Brigadiers make it killing.) The road-menders get in where they can between the flights. It's a disjointed business, and a mucky one, this weather. A Colonel's car-wheels spurt into the green fields. The gangers get mottled with the thin brown fluid. They are a pathetically decrepit folk—men too old or infirm for the trenches and boys who are too young. But this work, in this weather, carries a test almost as severe as that of trench-warfare.

The road-signs—admonitory, hortatory, prohibitive—are raised at very frequent intervals. Military routes behind the lines are in a state of continual flux—to such a degree that road-maps are not only useless, but misleading, to drivers of vehicles. Their best course is to ignore the map, watch the road-directions as they are approached, and use their horse-sense. Signs are quite explicit: "Closed to lorries and ambulances"; "Closed to traffic in this direction" (arrowhead). The distance and direction of every village, however small, is put up with a clearness that excludes the possibility of error. The location of every ammunition-dump, supply-dump, railhead, camping-ground, billeting area, watering-place, intelligence Headquarters, motor-tyre press (an institution much in demand), is indicated very exactly. Most other signs are designed to regulate speed: "Maximum speed through village ---- for lorries and ambulances, —— for light tractors, —— for cars"; "Danger: cross-roads"; "Lorry-park; slow down"; "Go slow past aerodrome to avoid injuring engines through dust." (Can you conceive British administration in the Army giving the reason, thus, for an order?)

Some French signs persist: Attention aux trains.

Some signs are not official: "Level crossing ahead: keep your blood-shot eyes open."

The village streets show signs that have no reference to speed. Most estaminets publish "English Stout"; "Good beer 3d., best beer 4d."; "Officers' horses, 10"; "Cellar, 50"—i.e., we have a cellar that will billet fifty men. The villages are very quiet and old-time—grey and yellow walls abutting directly on the roads (footpaths are unknown); thatch or slate roofs; low windows from which, sitting, your feet would touch road; tortuous streets; plentiful girl and women denizens; a wayside Calvary on the outskirts; a church spire rising somewhere from the roofs; a preponderance of taverns, estaminets, cafÉs, and sweet-shops in the chief street.

Wednesday, —th.—I got some notion this morning of life on the ambulance trains. They move between railhead and the bases with the ebb and flow of the offensive tide. After their load is discharged to a base they garage at a siding erected in this station for the purpose, and await orders. They may rest three days or three hours. Sisters and M.O.'s have lived on the same train—some of them—for twelve or fifteen months, but are too busy to be mutually bored. At the garage you will see them dismounted from the train taking their lunch among the hay-ricks in the harvested field beside the line. An orderly will alight from the train and race across the field, and you'll see the party rise, hastily pitch their utensils incontinently into a rug, and climb aboard as the train steams out. The order has come to move up again and "take on." ... This is one aspect of the state of flux in which the world behind the lines stands day and night, month after month.

At the gare here is a canteen for voyageurs exclusively. A blatant and prohibitory notice says so with no uncertainty. This is English. An English girl is in charge of it. She gets as little respite as the chef de gare. Who can say when she sleeps? She is supplying tea and cakes and cigarettes to troops every day and every night. No one is refused at any hour, however unhallowed. French railway-stations on the lines of communication all carry such an English girl for such a purpose; and usually they are in the front rank of English aristocracy. The English nobility have not spared themselves for "the Cause." Their men have fallen thick; their women have resigned the luxury of their homes to minister to the pain and the hunger of the force in France. And they do it with a thoroughness apparently incompatible (though only apparently so) with the thoroughgoing luxury and splendour of their civilian way of life.

Thursday, —th.—This afternoon I walked down the river that winds through the town and goes south. It is a comfortable, easy-flowing trout-stream. Beyond the town bridge it turns into pastures and orchards and cultivated fields, nosing a way through stretches of brown stubble, apple-groves, and plantations of beet. Groves of elm and beech overspread the high grass on its brink. The hop clusters with the wild-strawberry and the red currant: a solitary trouter stands beyond the tangle. The fields slope gently away from the stream—very gently—up to the tree-lined road on the ridge. The brown-and-gold stubble rises, acre beyond acre, to the sky-line; and in the evening light takes on a rich investiture of colour that is bold for stubble, but not the less lovely because it is virtual only. As the evening wears on, this settles into a softness of hue that you cannot describe.

Such is the Somme country: such is the land of war.

At nine to-night all the station lights were switched off. Advice had come from —— of enemy aircraft approaching this junction. They did not come—not to our knowledge. But the chef de gare waddled over to his private house and bundled wife and children down into the cellar—and cave, as they call it—and when he had seen them safely stowed, returned to his station to await orders. The French girls and women inhabit the cellar with alacrity at such times. Every house has its funk-hole, for there is hardly a dwelling so small as to neglect a vault for cidre and vin ordinaire. "In the season" they lay up a year's store; as a rule, the cidre is home-brewed, too. At table the jug goes round, filling the glass of the enfant and the pÈre without discrimination. By the end of the meal the colour has mounted in the cheeks of the little girls, and they are garrulous and the boys noisy. Amongst the cidre barrels there is good and secure cover from Taubes.

When the lights got switched on again, the detraining of the ——th Division resumed....

Friday —th.—I was wakened at two o'clock this morning by the hum of their collective conversation. Sergeants-major were roaring commands in the moonlight; some of them were supplemented by remarks not polite. Many English sergeants-major speak in dialect: most of them do. There is something repellent about words of command issued in dialect. Why can't England cut-out dialect? It's time it went. Dialect is a very rank form of Conservatism. Why can't a uniform pronunciation of vowels be taught in English schools? Active-service over a term of years will perhaps help to bring about a standardising of English speech. One hopes so....

I got up and looked out. As far as could be seen along any street, and all over the square, was a faintly mobile sea of black on which danced the glow of the cigarette (damnable, how the cigarette has put out the pipe!). Detachments were still marching from the train to the halting-places, and detachments were moving out momentarily on the night march.

"Hark, I hear the tramp of thousands,
And of armÉd men the hum."

They moved off—some to drum and fife band; some to the regimental song; some to the regimental whistle; some to the unrhythmic accompaniment of random conversation. The general impression they gave, at two in the morning, was of an abnormal cheerfulness.

A French ambulance-train came in this afternoon crowded with slightly wounded—sitting cases. They were immensely cheerful, though there was not by any means sitting accommodation for all. These were all nice light "Blighty" wounds; they meant respite from the dam'd trenches without dishonour. The fellows were immensely cheered by this. They were more like a train-load of excursionists than a body of wounded warriors from a hell like the Somme. They had hundredweights of German souvenirs. Most of it was being worn—helmets, tunics, arms, and the like. I bought several pieces. They were not expensive. A French Poilu's pay is cinq sous (twopence ha'penny) per day: fifteen or twenty francs means about three months' pay for him. He'll part with a lot of souvenir for that. And he has such a bulk of it that a few casques, trench daggers, rifles, and telescopic sights, more or less, are neither here nor there.

The English girls who administer the gare canteen move up and down with jugs of coffee. They are thanked (embraced, if they'd stand it) with embarrassing profusion.

Saturday, —st.—Bombs were dropped in the Citadelle moat to-day. The Citadelle is now a casualty clearing station. This is not incongruous with its history. It was besieged in the fifteenth century. No doubt there were casualties within it then—though, judging its defensive properties at this distance of time, there were more without: many more. It's tremendously strong still—an incredible depth of dry moat, thickness of wall, and height of rampart surmounting it: outer ramparts on three sides from which the defenders retired across the bridges—still standing—after they had done their worst. And there are bowels in the place from which galleries set out to neighbouring villages whence reinforcements used to be brought up. You can walk miles in these galleries beneath the Citadelle itself, without journeying beneath the surrounding country; for the ground-plan of the Citadelle is not small. A walk round the walls will lead you a mile and a half, traversing buttresses and all: the buttresses bulge hugely into the moat-bed.

The whole area is terraced, originally for strategic purposes. The buildings are many and strong and roomy.

A fine hospital it happens to have made. The multiplicity of buildings offers all a C.O. could ask in the way of distribution of wards and facilities for segregation, and isolated buildings for stores, messes, Sisters' quarters, officers' quarters, operating-theatres, laboratories.

His convalescents can bask and promenade on the ramparts in the winter sunshine, and stroll healthfully through the groves and about the paths of the area. In the wide level, grassy, moat-basin the orderlies play their football matches and the C.O. takes his revolver practice.

The ghastliness of the wards is all out of harmony with this. There is a gas-ward, hideously filled—blackened faces above the ever-restless coverlets. The surgical wards in a station so near the line hold the grimmest cases—cases too critical for movement down to a base: head wounds, abdominal wounds, spinal cases that can bear transport no farther, and that have almost no hope of recovery as it is. Men plead piteously here for the limbs that a cruelly-kind surgeon can do nothing with but amputate. "Doctor, I've lost the arm; that won't be so bad if you'll only leave the leg." The plea is usually put in this form, which implies the power of choice in the M.O. between alternatives; whereas the gangrenous limb leaves him no room for debate.

In a station so close, too, the operating-theatre cannot afford to be either small or idle—no mere cubicle with two tables; but two large wards with six tables each, and (when a push has been made in the line) with every table in use late in the night: a bloody commentary on the righteousness of war.