The Irish have something to say!—The Irish in America—The misguided Germans—The American’s visit an event—Veterans of Mons—Eggs in the trenches!—Irish hospitality—A dum-dum souvenir—A memorable drink—Sixty yards from the Germans—The Germans at work—British discipline, a comparison—A vision of the German dead—German diaries—Pawns of war—A heaven of soap and hot water—In the captain’s “house”—Soldier shop talk—Trench appetite—A village literally flailed—Pity the refugees.

Here, not the Irish Sea lay between the broad a and the brogue, but the space between two sentries or between two rifles with bayonets fixed, lying against the wall of the breastworks ready for their owners’ hands when called to arms in case of an alarm. One stepped from England into Ireland; and my prediction that the Irish would have something to say was correct. They had; for that matter, there are always individual Irishmen in the English regiments, lest English phlegm should let conversation run short.

The first man who made his presence felt was a good six feet in height, with a heavy moustache, and the ear-pieces of his cap tied under his chin though the night was not cold. He placed himself fairly in front of me in the narrow path back of the breastworks and he looked a cowled and sinister figure in the faint glow from a brazier. I certainly did not want any physical argument with a man of his build.

“Who are you?” he demanded, as stiffly as if I had broken in at the veranda window with a jimmy.

For the nearer you get to the front, the more you feel that you are in the way. You are a stray extra piece of baggage; a dead human weight. Every one is doing something definite as a part of the machine except yourself; and in your civilian clothes you feel the self-conscious conspicuousness of appearing on a dancing-floor in a dressing-gown.

Captain P—— was a little way back in another passage. I was alone and in a rough tweed suit—a strange figure in that world of khaki and rifles.

“A German spy! That’s why I am dressed this way, so as not to excite suspicion,” I was going to say, when a call from Captain P—— identified me, and the sentry’s attitude changed as suddenly as if the inspector of police had come along and told a patrolman that I might pass through the fire-lines.

“So it’s you, is it, right from America?” he said. “I’ve a sister living at Nashua, New Hampshire, U.S.A., with three brothers in the United States army.”

Whether he had or not you can judge as well as I by the twinkle in his eye. He might have had five, and again he might not have one. I was a tenderfoot seeing the trenches.

“It’s mesilf that’s going to America when me sarvice in the army is up in one year and six months,” he continued. “That’s some time yet. I’m going if I’m not killed by the Germans. It’s a way that they have, or we wouldn’t be killing them.”

“What are you going to do in America? Enlist in the army?”

“No. I’m looking for a better job. I’m thinking I’ll be one of your millionaires. Shure, but that would be to me taste.”

“What do you think of the Germans?”

“It’s little thinking we’re doing and more shooting. Now do ye know our opinion of them?”

“Some of the Irish in America are pro-German.”

“Now will ye listen to that! Their words come out of their mouths without acquainting their heads and hearts with what they are saying. Did you ever find nine Irishmen on the right side without one doing the talking for the divil for the joy of argument? It’s the Irish that would be at home in the German army doing the goose-step and taking orders from the Kaiser, is it not, now?”

“And what about the Germans—are they winning?”

“They started out strong, singing and goose-stepping high, for the Kaiser had told them that if they died for him they could burgle the world, and they thought it a grand idea. Shure, we accommodated them. There’s plenty of them dead, and some of them are wondering if, when they’re all dead, the Kaiser will have any more of the world than when he started, which makes them sorry for him and they give him another ‘Hoch’! ’Tis the nature of them, because they’ve never been told different.”

Not one Irishman was speaking really, but a dozen. They came out of their little houses and dugouts to gather around the brazier; and for every remark I made I received a fusillade in reply. It was an event, an American appearing in that trench in the small hours of the morning.

“I’ve a brother in Oklahoma!” said one. “Is he a millionaire yet?” I asked.

“If he is he’s keeping it a secret!”

Some of them had been at Mons; a few of them had gone through the whole campaign without a scratch; more had been wounded and returned to the front. I like to ask that question, “Were you at Mons?” and get the answer, “Yes, sir, I was; I was through it all!” without boasting—a Mons veteran need not boast—but in the spirit of pride. To have been at Mons, where that hard-bought retreat of one against five began, will ever be enough glory for English, Scotch, Irish, or Welsh. It is like saying, “I was in Pickett’s charge!”

A trench-toughened, battle-toughened old sergeant was sitting in the doorway of his dugout, frying a strip of bacon over one rim of the brazier and making tea over the other. The bacon sizzled with an appetising aroma and a bullet sizzled harmlessly overhead. Behind that wall of sandbags all were perfectly safe, unless a shell came. But who worries about shells? It is like worrying about being struck by lightning when clouds gather in a summer sky.

“It looks like good bacon,” I remarked.

“It is that!” said the sergeant. “And the hungrier ye are the better. It’s your nose that’s telling ye so this minute. I can see that ye’re hungry yoursilf!”

“Then you’re pretty well fed?”

“Well fed, is it? It’s stuffed we are, like the geese that grow the patÉ what-do-you-call-it? Eating is our pastime. We eat when we’ve nothing else to do and when we’ve got to do something. We get eggs up here—a fine man is Lord Kitchener—yes, sir, eggs up here in the trenches!” When they seemed to think that I was sceptical, he produced some eggs in evidence.

“And if ye’ll not have the bacon, ye’ll have a drop of tea. Mind, now, while your tongue is trying to be polite, your stomach is calling your tongue a liar!”

Irish hospitality responded to the impulse of a warm Irish heart. Wouldn’t I have a souvenir? Out came German bullets and buckles and officers’ whistles and helmets and fragments of shells and German diaries.

“It’s easy to get them out there where the Germans fell that thick!” I was told. “And will ye look at this and take it home to give your pro-German Irish in America, to show what their friends are shooting at the Irish? I found them mesilf on a dead German.”

He passed me a clip of German bullets with the blunt ends instead of the pointed ends out. The change is readily made, for the German bullet is easily pulled out of the cartridge case and the pointed end thrust against the powder. Thus fired, it goes accurately four or five hundred yards, which is more than the average distance between German and British trenches. When it strikes flesh the effect is that of a dum-dum and worse; for the jacket splits into slivers, which spread through the pulpy mass caused by the explosion. A leg or an arm thus hit must almost invariably be amputated. I am not suggesting that this is a regular practice with German soldiers, but it shows what wickedness is in the power of the sinister one.

“But ye’ll take the tea,” said the sergeant, “with a little rum hot in it. ’Twill take the chill out of your bones.” “What if I haven’t a chill in my bones?”

“Maybe it’s there without speaking to ye and it will be speaking before an hour longer—or afther ye’re home between the sheets with the rheumatiz, and ye’ll be saying, ‘Why didn’t I take that glass?’ which I’m holding out to ye this minute, steaming its invitation to be drunk.”

Held out by a man who had been at Mons and “through it all”! It was a memorable drink. Champagne poured out by a butler at your elbow is insipid beside it. Snatches of brogue followed me from the brazier’s glow when I insisted that I must be going.

Now our breastworks took a turn and we were approaching closer to the German breastworks. Both lines remained where they had “dug in” after the counter-attacks which had followed the battle had been checked. Ground is too precious in this siege warfare to yield a foot. Soldiers become misers of soil. Where the flood is checked there you build your dam against another flood.

“We are within about sixty yards of the Germans,” said Captain P——, at length, after we had gone in and out of the traverses and left the braziers well behind.

Between the spotty, whitish wall of German sandbags, quite distinct in the moonlight, and our parapet were two mounds of sandbags about twenty feet apart. Snug behind one was a German and behind the other an Irishman, both listening. They were within easy bombing range, but the homicidal advantage of position of either resulted in a truce. Sixty yards! Pace it off. It is not far. In other places the enemies have been as close as five yards—only a wall of earth between them. Where a bombing operation ends in an attack, a German is naturally on one side of a traverse and a Briton on the other.

The Germans were as busy as beavers dam building. They had a lot of work to do before they had their new defences right. We heard them driving stakes and spading; we heard their voices with snatches of sentences intelligible and occasionally the energetic, shouted, guttural commands of their officers. All through that night I never heard a British officer speak above a conversational tone. The orders were definite enough, but given with a certain companionable kindliness. I have spoken of the genuine affection which his men showed for Captain P——, and I was beginning to appreciate that it was not a particular instance.

“What if you should shout at Tommy in the German fashion?” I asked.

“He wouldn’t have it; he’d get rebellious,” was the reply. “No, you mustn’t yell at Tommy. He’s a little temperamental about some things and he will not be treated as if he were just a human machine.”

Yet no one will question the discipline of the British soldier. Discipline means that the officer knows his men, and British discipline, which bears a retreat like that from Mons, requires that the man likes to follow his officers, believes in his officers, loves his officers. Each army and each people to its own ways.

Sixty yards! And the dead between the trenches and death lurking ready at a trigger’s pull should life show itself! When daylight comes the British sing out their “Good morning, Germans!” and the Germans answer, “Good morning, British!” without adding, “We hope to kill some of you to-day!” Ragging banter and jest and worse than jest and grim defiance are exchanged between the trenches when they are within such easy hearing distance of each other; but always from a safe position behind the parapet which the adversaries squint across through their periscopes. The thing was ridiculous.

At the gibe business the German is, perhaps, better than the Briton. Early in the evening a regiment on our right broke into a busy fusillade at some fancied movement of the enemy. In trench talk, that is getting “jumpy.” The Germans in front roared out their contempt in a chorus of guying laughter. Toward morning, these same Germans also became “jumpy” and began tearing the air with bullets, firing against nothing but the blackness of night. Tommy Atkins only made some characteristic comments; for he is a quiet fellow, except when he is played on the music hall stage. Possibly he feels the inconsistency of laughter when you are killing human beings; for, as his officers say, he is temperamental and never goes to the trouble of analysing his emotions. A very real person and a good deal of a philosopher is Mr. Atkins, Britain’s professional fighting man, who was the only kind of fighting man she had ready for the war.

Any small boy who had never had enough fireworks in his life might be given a job in the German trenches, with the privilege of firing flares till he fell asleep from exhaustion. All night they were going, with the regularity of clockwork. The only ones sent up from our side that night were shot in order that I might get a better view of the German dead.

You know how water lies in the low places on the ground after a heavy rain. Well, the patches of dead were like that, and dark in the spots where they were very thick—dark as with the darkness of deeper water. There were also irregular tongues of dead and scattered dead, with arms outstretched or under them as they fell, and faces white even in the reddish glare of the rockets and turned toward you in the charge that failed under the withering blasts of machine guns, ripping out two or three hundred shots a minute, and well-aimed rifle bullets, each bullet getting its man. Threatening that charge would have seemed to a recruit, but measured and calculated in certainty of failure in the minds of veteran defenders, who knew that the wheat could not stand before their mowers. Man’s flesh is soft and a bullet is hard and travels fast.

One bit of satire which Tommy sent across the field covered with its burden of slaughter to the Germans who are given to song, ought to have gone home. It was: “Why don’t you stop singing and bury your dead?” But the Germans, having given no armistice in other times when British dead lay before the trenches, asked for none here. The dead were nearer to the British than to the Germans. The discomfort would be in British and not German nostrils. And the dead cannot fight; they can help no more to win victory for the Fatherland. And the time is A.D., 1915. Two or three thousand German dead altogether, perhaps—not many out of the Kaiser’s millions. Yet they seemed a great many to one who saw them lying there.

We stopped to read by the light of a brazier some German soldiers’ diaries that the Irishmen had. They were cheap little books, bought for a few cents, each one telling the dead man’s story and revealing the monotony of a soldier’s existence in Europe to-day. These pawns of war had been marched here and there, they never knew why. The last notes were when orders came entraining them. They did not know that they were to be sent out of those woods yonder to recover Neuve Chapelle—out of those woods in the test of all their drill and waiting.

A Bavarian officer—for these were Bavarians—actually rode in that charge. He must have worked himself up to a strangely exalted optimism and contempt of British fire. Or was it that he, too, did not know what he was going against? that only the German general knew? Neither he nor his horse lasted long; not more than a dozen seconds. The thing was so splendidly foolhardy that in some little war it might have become the saga of a regiment, the subject of ballads and paintings. In this war it was an incident heralded for a day in one command and forgotten the next.

“Good night!” called the Irish.

“Good night and good luck!”

“Tell them in America that the Irish are still fighting!”

“Good luck, and may your travelling be aisy; but if ye trip, may ye fall into a gold mine!”

We were back with the British regulars; and here, also, many of the men remained up around the braziers. The hours of duty of the few on watch do not take many of the twenty-four hours. One may sleep when he chooses in the little houses behind the breastworks. Night melts into day and day into night in the monotony of mud and sniping rifle-fire. By-and-by it is your turn to go into reserve; your turn to get out of your clothes—for there are no pajamas for officers or men in these “crawls,” as they are sometimes called. Boots off is the only undressing; boots off and puttees unloosed, which saves the feet. Yes, by-and-by the march back to the rear, where there are tubs filled with hot water and an outfit of clean clothes awaiting you, and nothing to do but rest and sleep.

“How soon after we leave the trenches may we cheer?” officers have been asked in the dead of winter, when water stood deep over the porous mud and morning found a scale of ice around the legs.

You, nicely testing the temperature of your morning tub; you, satisfied only with faucets of hot and cold water and a mat to stand on—you know nothing about the joy of bathing. Your bath is a mere part of the daily routine of existence. Try the trenches and get itchy with vermin; then you will know that heaven consists of soap and hot water.

No bad odour assails your nostrils wherever you may go in the British lines. Its cleanliness, if nothing else, would make British army comradeship enjoyable. My wonder never ceases how Tommy keeps himself so neat; how he manages to shave every day and get a part, at least, of the mud off his uniform. It makes him feel more as if he were “at home” in barracks.

From the breastworks, Captain P—— and I went for a stroll in the village, or the site of the village, silent except for the occasional singing of a bullet. When we returned he lighted the candle on a stick stuck into the wall of his little earth-roofed house and suggested a nap. It was three o’clock in the morning. Now I could see that my rubber boots had grown so heavy because I was carrying so much of the soil of Northern France. It looked as if I had gout in both feet—the over-bandaged, stage type of gout—which were encased in large mud poultices. I tried to stamp off the incubus, but it would not go. I tried scraping one foot on the other, and what I scraped off seemed to reattach itself as fast as I could remove it.

“Don’t try!” said the captain. “Lie down and pull your boots off in the doorway. Perhaps you will get some sleep before daybreak.”

Sleep! Does a dÉbutante go to sleep at her first ball? Sleep in such good company, the company of this captain, who was smiling all the while with his eyes; smiling at his mud house, at the hardships in the trenches, and, I hope, at having a guest, who had been with armies before!

It was the first time that I had been in the trenches all night; the first time, indeed, when I had not been taken into them by an escort in a kind of promenade. On this visit I was in the family. If it is the right kind of a family that is the way to get a good impression. There would be plenty of time to sleep when I returned to London.

So Captain P—— and I lay there talking. One felt the dampness of the earth under his body and the walls exuded moisture. The average cellar was dry by comparison. “You will get your death of cold!” any mother would cry in alarm if her boy were found even sitting on such cold, wet ground. For it was a clammy night of early spring. Yet, peculiarly enough, few men get colds from this exposure. One gets colds from draughts in overheated rooms much oftener. Luckily, it was not raining; it had been raining most of the winter in the flat country of Northern France and Flanders.

“It is very horrible, this kind of warfare,” said the captain. He was thinking of the method of it, rather than of the discomforts. “All war is very horrible, of course.” Regular soldiers rarely take any other view. They know war.

“With your wounded arm you might be back in England on leave,” I suggested.

“Oh, that arm is all right!” he replied. “This is what I am paid for”—which I had heard regulars say before. “And it is for England!” he added, in his quiet way. “Sometimes I think we should fight better if we officers could hate the Germans,” he went on. “The German idea is that you must hate if you are going to fight well. But we can’t hate.”

Sound views he had about the war; sounder than I have heard from the lips of cabinet ministers. For these regular officers are specialists in war.

“Do you think that we shall starve the Germans out?”

“No. We must win by fighting,” he replied. This was in March, 1915. “You know,” he went on, taking another tack, “when one gets back to England out of this muck he wants good linen and everything very nice.”

“Yes. I’ve found the same after roughing it,” I agreed. “One is most particular that he has every comfort to which civilisation entitles him.”

We chatted on. Much of our talk was soldier shop talk, which you will not care to hear. Twice we were interrupted by an outburst of firing, and the captain hurried out to ascertain the reason. Some false alarm had started the rifles speaking from both sides. A fusillade for two or three minutes and the firing died down to silence.

Dawn broke and it was time for me to go; and with daylight, when danger of a night surprise was over, the captain would have his sleep. I was leaving him to his mud house and his bed on the wet ground without a blanket. It was more important to have sandbags up for the breastworks than to have blankets; and as the men had not yet received theirs, he had none himself.

“It’s not fair to the men,” he said. “I don’t want anything they don’t have.”

No better food and no better house and no warmer garments! He spoke not in any sense of stated duty, but in the affection of the comradeship of war; the affection born of that imperturbable courage of his soldiers, who had stood a stone wall of cool resolution against German charges when it seemed as if they must go. The glamour of war may have departed, but not the brotherhood of hardship and dangers shared.

What had been a routine night to him had been a great night to me; one of the most memorable of my life.

“I was glad you could come,” he said, as I made my adieu, quite as if he were saying adieu to a guest at home in England.

Some of the soldiers called their cheery good-byes; and with a lieutenant to guide me, I set out while the light was still dusky, leaving the comforting parapet to the rear to go into the open, four hundred yards from the Germans. A German, though he could not have seen us distinctly, must have noted something moving. Two of his bullets came rather close before we passed out of his vision among some trees.

In a few minutes I was again entering the peasant’s cottage that was battalion headquarters; this time by daylight. Its walls were chipped by bullets that had come over the breastworks. The major was just getting up from his blankets in the cellar. By this time I had a real trench appetite. Not until after breakfast did it occur to me, with some surprise, that I had not washed my face.

“The food was just as good, wasn’t it?” remarked the major. “We get quite used to such breaches of convention. Besides, you had been up all night, so your breakfast might be called your after-the-theatre supper.”

With him I went to see what the ruins of Neuve Chapelle looked like by daylight. The destruction was not all the result of one bombardment, for the British had been shelling Neuve Chapelle off and on all winter. Of course, there is the old earthquake comparison. All writers have used it. But it is quite too feeble for Neuve Chapelle. An earthquake merely shakes down houses. The shells had done a good deal more than that. They had crushed the remains of the houses as under the pestle head in a mortar; blown walls into dust; taken bricks from the east side of the house over to the west and thrown them back with another explosion.

Neuve Chapelle had been literally flailed with the high explosive projectiles of the new British artillery, which the British had to make after the war began to compete with what the Germans already had; for poor, lone, wronged, bullied Germany quite unprepared—Austria with her fifty millions does not count—was fighting on the defensive against wicked, aggressive enemies who were fully prepared. This explains why she invaded France and took possession of towns like Neuve Chapelle to defend her poor, unready people from the French, who had been plotting and planning “the day” when they would conquer the Germans.

Bits of German equipment were mixed with ruins of clocks and family pictures and household utensils. I noticed a bicycle which had been cut in two, its parts separated by twenty feet; one wheel was twisted into a spool of wire, the other simply mashed.

Where was the man who had kept the shop with a few letters of his name still visible on a splintered bit of board? Where the children who had played in the littered square in front of the church, with its steeples and walls piles of stone that had crushed the worshippers’ benches? Refugees somewhere back of the British lines, working on the roads if strong enough, helping France any way they could, not murmuring, even smiling, and praying for victory, which would let them return to their homes and daily duties. To their homes!