There are still other impressions, many of than, big and little, that are going always to stick in my brain—the smell of the crisp brown crusty loaves, mingling with the smell of the wood fires at the bakery where half a million bread rations are cooked and shipped every day, seven days a week; the sight at the motor reception park, where a big proportion of the 60,000 motor vehicles of all sorts that are called for in our programme, as it stands now, can be stored at one time; the miles upon miles of canned goods through which I have passed, with the boxes towering in walls upon either side of me; the cold-storage chamber as big as a cathedral, where a supply of 5,000 tons of fresh meat is kept on hand and ready for use; a cemetery for our people, only a few months old, but lovely already with flowers and grass and neat gravel paths between the mounds; a blacksmith riveting about the left wrists of Chinese labourers their steel identification markers so that there may always be a positive and certain way of knowing just who is who in the gang, since to stupid occidental eyes all Chinamen look alike and except for these little bangles made fast upon the arms of the wearers there would be complications and there might be wilful falsifications in the pay rolls; a spectacled underofficer hailing us in perfect but plaintive English from a group of prisoners mending roads, to say in tones of deep lament that he used to be a dentist in Baltimore but made the mistake of going back to Germany for a visit to his old home just before the war broke out; a Catholic chaplain superintending the beautifying of a row of graves of Mohammedans who had died in our service, and who had been laid away according to the ritual of their own faith in a corner of a burying ground where Christians and Jews are sleeping together; a maimed Belgian soldier with three medals for valour on his shirt front, cobbling shoe soles in the salvage plant; a French waiter boy in a headquarters mess learning to pick out the chords of Dixie Land on an American negro's homemade guitar; a room in the staff school where a former member of the Cabinet of the United States, an ex-Congressman, an ex-police commissioner of New York City and one of the richest men in America, all four of them volunteer officers, sat at their lessons with their spines fish-hooked and their brows knotted; nineteen-year-old Yankee apprentice flyer doing such heart-stopping stunts in a practice plane as I never expect to see equalled by any veteran airman; the funeral, on the same day and at the same time, of one of his mates, who had been killed by a fall upon the field over which this daring youth now cavorted, with the coffin in an ambulance and a flag over the coffin, and behind the ambulance the firing squad, the Red Cross nurses from the local hospital and a company of his fellow cadets marching.
And seeing all these sights and a thousand more like unto them I found myself as I finished my tour along the winding lengths of the great snake we call the Service of Supplies, wondering just who, of all the thousands among the men that labour behind the men behind the guns, deserve of their countrymen the greatest meed of credit—the high salaried executives out of civilian life who dropped careers and comforts and hope of preferment in their professions at home, to give of the genius of their brains to this cause; or the officers of our little old peacetime Army who here serve so gladly and so efficiently upon the poor pay that we give our officers, without hope ever of getting a proper measure of national appreciation for their efforts, since this war is so nearly an anonymous war, where the performances of the individual are swallowed up in the united efforts of the mass; or the skilled railway trainmen volunteering to work on privates' wages for the period of the war; or the plain enlisted man cheerfully, eagerly, enthusiastically toiling here, so far back of the Front, when in his heart he must long to be up there with his fellows where the big guns boom.
CHAPTER XXIV. FROM MY OVERSEAS NOTE-BOOK
BLOWS with a hammer may numb one, but it is the bee-sting that quickens the sensibilities to a realisation of what is afoot. That is why, I suppose, the mighty thing called war is for me always summed up in small, incidental but outstanding phases of it. In its complete aspect it is too vast to be comprehended by any one mind or any thousand minds; but by piecing together the lesser things, one after a while begins in a dim groping fashion to get a concept of the entirety.
When I went up to Ypres, it was not the unutterable desolation and hideousness of what had been once one of the fairest spots on earth that especially impressed me: possibly because Ypres to-day is a horror too terrible and a tragedy too utter for human contemplation save at the risk of losing one's belief in the ultimate wisdom of the cosmic scheme of things. Nor was it the wreck of the great Cloth Hall which even now, with its overthrown walls and its broken lines and its one remaining spindle of ruined tower, manages to retain a suggestion of the matchless beauty which forevermore is gone. Nor yet was it the cemetery, whereon for sheer, degenerate malignity the Germans targeted their heavy guns until they had broached nearly every grave, heaving up the dead to sprawl upon the displaced clods. One becomes, in time, accustomed to the sight of dead soldiers lying where they have fallen, because a soldier accepts the chances of being killed and of being left untombed after he is killed. The dread spectacle he presented is part and parcel of the picture of war. But these men and women and babes that the shells dispossessed from their narrow tenements of mould had died peacefully in their beds away back yonder—and how long ago it seems now!—when the world itself was at peace. They had been shrouded in their funeral vestments; they had been laid away with cross and candle, with Book and prayer; over them slabs of the everlasting granite had been set, and flowers had been planted above them and memorials set up; and they had been left there beneath the kindly loam, cradled for all eternity till Gabriel's Trump should blow.
But when I came there and saw what Kul-tur had wrought amongst them—how with exquisite irony the blasts had shattered grave after grave whose stones bore the carved words Held in Perpetuity and how grandmothers and grandsires and the pitiable small bones of little children had been flung forth out of the gaping holes and left to moulder in the rags of their cerements where all who passed that way might see them—why, it was a blasphemy and an indecency and a sacrilege which no man, beholding it, could ever, so long as he lived, hope to forget.
And yet, as I just said, it was not the defilement of the cemetery of Ypres which impressed me most when I went up to Ypres. It was the lamp-posts.
Ypres had been studded thick with lampposts; ornamental and decorative standards of wrought iron they were, spaced at intervals of forty yards or so for the length of every street and on both sides of every street. And every single lamp-post in Ypres, as I took the pains to see for myself, had been struck by shells or by flying fragments of shells. Some had been hit once or twice, some had been quite hewn down, some had been twisted into shapeless sworls of tortured metal; not one but was scathed after one mutilating fashion or another.