I scrawled a line of letter for some of them; they all wanted it said that it had been "hell"; that they were glad to be out; but not sorry to have been in. Many wanted advice added to "brother Tom" or "cousin Dick" not to rush into it; but they knew themselves, as anyone who knows the breed would know, that it was just that scrap that would make Tom or Harry mad that he had not been in it too!
The French were more absorbed and aloof, less of "professional" fighters. They could not do without the personal touch. A little group of the Line sat before a burnt cottage sharpening and caressing their bayonets—"Rosalie" they call them, for love of their bloodstained edges.
Soissons has suffered little less than Rheims. Not from fire as yet, but six or more dark, jagged holes showed where the cathedral has been shelled. The town looks more than half in desolate ruins.
The fighting here has been indescribably fierce. At Bucy-le-Long, just to the north-east, the Germans dropped shells into a school converted into a Red Cross ambulance, killing many wounded. One of the wounded assistants described the scene. "They didn't intend it, probably; we had troops coming up just behind, and they're poor shots!"
Description of the sights and sounds of past battlefields are monotonously grim, and useless to repeat. But the villages and country in the track of this long battle, along the south of the Aisne, cannot be left unmentioned, if war is to be recognised as reality.
To move here is to move in a country of abandoned trenches, half used as graves; to move through the tainted air of the unburied; to see the countless dead, broken life, broken humanity, burning, or being thrust, with the fortunate callousness of the peasant, into trench and pit; to meet at every turn some deadly reminder of mortality; to see every house and field flecked with some pitiable wreck or litter of battle. The details need not even be imagined.
But the wounded, as I saw them, returning in car and train, lying in temporary shelters or waiting their turn at wayside stations, are at once a more painful, more real reminder. British, and French, and African, side by side, patient, courageous, appreciative of the little help that can be given by the few hands. It is the one sight that can still move one—that look of youth and hope struck out of the face of the young soldier, the dulled expression, of just clinging on to consciousness of life, that alone survives.
At Villers Cotterets and Crepy I saw and talked with many of them; but not for news of their exploits. We shared a common weariness of war-talk—the details were too present; and most of them characteristically, when they had asked for news about "the victory," spoke most of the peasants, and the hardship and suffering they had seen in the villages; very little about themselves or the friends they had seen killed.
South of Rheims, Tuesday.
With even more difficulty to-day we made our way up again into the battle region. Rheims was the first object. I managed to get to a point where I could look down and out at the city from its southern heights. Picture it for yourself, the long, rolling, wooded circle of hills, the broad green plateau of trees and houses, dipping to the irregular town; and in the centre, an immense landmark, the high, grey cathedral, with its two crowned towers of elaborate stone-work.