What the German is going through on his side of the muddy landscape is described in another chapter. For our grand men—and though to be called a hero is the last thing most Australians desire, the men are never grander than at these times—the Australian Comforts Fund, the Y.M.C.A. and the canteen groceries provide almost all the comfort that ever enters that grim region. In the areas to which those tired men come for a spell, the Comforts Fund is beginning to give them theatres for concert troupes and cinemas. It provides some hundreds of pounds to be spent locally on the most obtainable small luxuries at Christmas, besides such gifts in kind as Christmas brings.
But, for those who are actually in the front or just behind it, one cup of warm coffee in a jam-tin from a roadside stall has been, in certain times and places, all that can be given; the Fund has given that, and it has been the landmark in the day for many men. In those conditions there was but one occasional solace. A friend of mine found an Australian in the trenches in those days, standing in mud nearly to his waist, shivering in his arms and every body muscle, leaning back against the trench side, fast asleep.
CHAPTER XXIX
AS IN THE WORLD'S DAWN
France, December 20th.
Yesterday morning we were looking across a bare, shallow valley at the opposite knuckle of hill-side, around the foot of which the valley doubled back out of sight. A solitary grey line of broken earth ran like a mole burrow up the bare knuckle and vanished over the top. A line of bare, dead willow stumps marked a few yards of the hollow below. On the skyline, beyond the valley's end, stood out a distant line of ghostly trees—so faint and blue as to be scarcely distinguishable from the sky. There was nothing else in the landscape—absolutely nothing but the bare, blank shape of the land; save for those old ghosts of departed willows—no trees—no grass—no colour—no living or moving or singing or sounding thing.
Only—that morning at dawn had found a number of men tumbling, jumping, running, dodging in and out of the shell-holes across that slope, making towards our lines. The peck of occasional rifles came from some farther part of the grey, featureless hill-side—the report was the only trace of the rifles or of the men firing them. But as the men who were dodging back were Australians the rifles must have been the rifles of Germans, in trenches or shell-holes, somewhere on the face of that waste. Who these Australians were, the men who watched from where we stood did not know. Apparently they were men who had lost their way in the dark and wandered beyond our trenches; as the light grew they had suddenly realised that they were in front of our front line, and not behind it, as they thought, and had come tumbling back over the craters. They all reached the trench safely.
For this battle has now reached such a formless, featureless landscape, that it is a hard thing to tell whether you are looking at your own country or the German country, or the country between the lines. The stretch between the two sides has for the moment widened, the Germans abandoning many of their waterlogged, sodden ditches close in front of our lines, and contenting themselves with fighting a sort of rearguard action there, while they tunnel, bore, dig, burrow like moles into the farther heights where their reserve line runs near Bapaume. The battle has widened out generally over the landscape.
It is a very great difference from that boiling, bursting nightmare of Pozières, where the whole struggle tightened down to little more than one narrow hill-top. This battle is now being fought in a sort of dreamland of brown mudholes, which the blue northern mist turns to a dull purple grey. The shape of the land is there, the hills, valleys, lines of willow stumps, ends of broken telegraph poles. But the colour is all gone. It is as though the bed of the ocean had suddenly risen, as though the ocean depths had become valleys and the ocean mudbanks hills, and the whole earth were a creation of slime. It is as though you suddenly looked out upon the birth of the world, before the grass had yet begun to spring and when the germs of primitive life still lay in the slime which covered it; an old, old age before anything moved on the earth or sang in the air, and when the naked bones of the earth lay bare under the naked sky century after century, with no change or movement save when the cloud shadows chased across it, or the storms lashed it, or the evening sunlight glinted from the water trapped in its meaningless hollows. It is to that unremembered chaos that German ideas of life have reduced the world.