“It ain’t a paper,” said another. “It’s the States—he’s a Yank!” The War Office put it on the American cousin’s arm, and wherever it goes it seems welcome. It may puzzle the gunners when the American says, “That was a peach of a shot, right across the pan!” or the infantry when he says, “It cuts no ice!” and there is no ice visible in Flanders; he speaks about typhoid to the medical corps which calls it enteric; and “fly-swatting” is a new word to the sanitarians, who are none the less busily engaged in that noble art. Lessons for the British in the “American language” while you wait! In return, the American is learning what a “stout-hearted thruster” and other phrases mean in the Simon-pure English.
The correspondents are the spoiled spectators of the army’s work; the itinerants of the road of war. Nobody sees so much as we, because we have nothing to do but to see. An officer looking at the towers of Ypres cathedral, a mile away from the trench where he was, said: “No, I’ve never been in Ypres. Our regiment has not been stationed in that part of the line.”
We have sampled all the trenches; we have studied the ruins of Ypres with an archæologist’s eye; we know the names of the estaminets of the villages, from “The Good Farmer” to “The Harvester’s Rest” and “The Good Cousin,” not to mention “The Omnibus Stop” on the Cassell Hill. Madame who keeps the hotel in the G. H. Q. town knows me so well that we wave hands to each other as I pass the door; and the clerks in a certain shop have learned that the American likes his fruit raw, instead of stewed in the English fashion, and plenty of it, especially if it comes from the South out of season, as it does from Florida or California to pampered human beings at home, who, if they could see as much of this war as I have seen, would appreciate what a fortunate lot they are to have not a ribbon of salt water but a broad sea full of it, and the British navy, too, between them and the thing on the other side of the zone of death.
G. H. Q. means General Headquarters, and B. E. F., which shows the way for your letters from England, means British Expeditionary Force. The high leading, the brains, of the army are theoretically at G. H. Q. That word theoretically is used advisedly in view of opinion at other points. An officer sent from G. H. Q. to command a brigade had not been long out before he began to talk about those confounded one-thing-and-another fellows at G. H. Q. When he was at G. H. Q., he used to talk about those confounded one-thing-and-another fellows who commanded corps, divisions, and brigades at the front. The philosophers of G. H. Q. smiled and the philosophers of the army smiled—it was the old story of the staff and the line; of the main office and the branches. But the line did the most smiling to see the new brigadier getting a taste of his own medicine.
G. H. Q. directs the whole; here every department of all that vast concern which supplies the hundreds of thousands of men and prepares for the other hundreds of thousands is focussed. The symbol of its authority is a red band around the cap, which means that you are a staff officer. No war at G. H. Q., only the driving force of war. It seems as far removed from the front as the New York office of a string of manufacturing plants.
If one follows a red-banded cap into a door he sees other officers and clerks and typewriters, and a sign which says that a department chief has his desk in the drawing-room of a private house—where he has had it for months. Go to one mess and you will hear talk about garbage pails and how to kill flies; to another, about hospitals and clearing stations for the wounded; to another, about barbed wire, sandbags, spades, timber, and galvanised iron—the engineers; to another, about guns, shells, rifles, bullets, mortars, bombs, bayonets, and high explosives—the ordnance; to another, about jam, bread, bacon, uniforms, iron rations, socks, underclothes, canned goods, fresh beef, and motor trucks—the Army Service Corps; to another, about attacks, counter-attacks, and salients, and about what the others are doing and will have to do—the operations.
The chief of staff drives the eight-horse team. He works sixteen hours a day. So do most of the others. This is how you prove to the line that you have a right to be at G. H. Q. When you get to know G. H. Q. it seems like any other business institution. Many are there who don’t want to be there; but they have been found out. They are specialists, who know how to do one thing particularly well and are kept doing it. No use of growling that you would like a “fighting job.”
G. H. Q. is the main station on the road of war, which hears the sound of the guns faintly. Beyond is the region of all the activities that it commands, up to the trenches, where all roads end and all efforts consummate. One has seen dreary, flat lands of mud and leafless trees become fair with the spring, the growing harvests reaped, and the leaves begin to fall. Always the factory of war was in the same place; the soldiers billeted in the same villages; the puffs of shrapnel smoke over the same belt of landscape; the ruins of the same villages being pounded by high explosives. Always the sound of guns; always the wastage of life, as passing ambulances, the curtains drawn, speed by, their part swiftly and covertly done. The enormity of the thing holds the imagination; its sure and orderly processes of an organised civilisation working at destruction win the admiration. There is a thrill in the courage and sacrifice and the drilled readiness of response to orders.
One is under varying spells. To-day he seems in the midst of a fantastic world, whose horror makes it impossible of realisation. To-morrow, as his car takes him along a pleasant by-road among wheat-fields where peasants are working and no soldier is in sight, it is a world of peace, and one thinks that he has mistaken the roar of a train for the distant roar of gun-fire. Again, it seems the most real of worlds, an exclusive man’s world, where nothing counts but organised material force, and all those cleanly, well-behaved men in khaki are a part of the permanent population.
One sees the war as a colossal dynamo, where force is perpetual like the energy of the sun. The war is going on forever. The reaper cuts the harvest, but another harvest comes. War feeds on itself, renews itself. Live men replace the dead. There seems no end to supplies of men. The pounding of the guns, like the roar of Niagara, becomes eternal. Nothing can stop it.