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.