It seems incredible that life should have been at all possible along the front as one goes over these battlefields and takes note of conditions. The trenches have partly fallen in; but it takes little imagination to recreate the scene. Here are the abominable mud ditches which were dignified by the name of trenches, the funk-holes in the mud walls, the dug-outs, the long winding and partly sunken roads of approach, the slightly more commodious trenches in reserve and the camps behind. Judged by any accepted standard of living in 1913—or 1923—one would say that a Hottentot or an Australian bushman, indurated to living under the most primitive conditions, would find life intolerable here in a fortnight's time apart altogether from any question of danger from external causes. That gently-nurtured men from homes, where loving mothers or assiduous wives made the mustard plaster or the hot-water bottle the sure sequel for an inadvertent wetting, should have "toughed" it here for months and years under all the variegated brands of European weather, including that damnable combination of rain, fog, damp and chill which they call winter in those parts, under the always imminent possibility of sudden and terrible death without becoming brutalized is a heartening proof of the greatness of the human soul and its power over the influences that make for baseness. It was not incredible to me that Canadian men should have stormed Vimy Ridge, breaking through the elaborate German defences as though they were made of pack-thread; what was incredible was that they had lived under conditions of constant danger and never-relaxing strain in burrows along the foot of the hill for months before the attack, with their food and supplies brought in precariously at night over level fields completely dominated by the German guns on the top of the hill. It was the high faith that failed not by the way even more than the iron valor that prevailed in the hour of battle that reveals most surely the heroic qualities of our soldiers in the field. Some few miles of the original battlefields showing the opposing fronts, the original trenches, the deep pock-marks of the shell holes, no man's lands with its markings of secret, nightly warfare should be kept intact in order that posterity may appreciate in some little measure what life in the front line meant in the Great War.
Everywhere as one goes through the battle area, there can be seen one ever-recurring mark of battle that will endure—the graves of those who fell. The war area is in truth one vast cemetery. Look almost where one will from the road and he will see, here and there, the white cross, or clusters of them, showing where soldiers were buried where they fell. (A stick driven in the ground with a helmet on the top of it—there are almost forests of these along the Cambrai road—marks the grave of a German soldier). There was never a war where so much care was taken to keep a record of the resting place of fallen soldiers; and as time passes bodies will be taken from their isolated graves on the battlefields and placed in great military cemeteries where they will receive in perpetuity the care of a reverent posterity. In the main the unplaced dead will be those who fell in territory which, as the result of the action, passed into enemy hands for the time being. Everywhere along the roadways there are small Canadian graveyards, many of which will doubtless remain undisturbed for all time. Thus no one will ever propose to disturb the slumbers of the seventy or eighty Canadians—among them Lance-Corporal Sifton, V.C.—who rest in a huge mine crater on Vimy Ridge. The crater has been rounded and smoothed; a huge cross outlined on the earth at the bottom of the hole marks the common grave; and at the rim of the crater, visible from the roadside, is a modest, temporary memorial bearing the names of the fallen.
As we crossed the battlefields of Courcelette by the Bapaume-Albert highway Canadian soldiers in numbers appeared by the roadside. Upon inquiry we learned that nearly 400 Canadians, representing most branches of the service, were engaged in collecting the Canadian dead of the Somme battlefields into one large cemetery which will be maintained by the Canadian authorities. Further along the road towards Albert we came to two wayside cemeteries. One to the right showed a profusion of white crosses arranged not in orderly rows but in little groups, showing that the soldiers whose graves were thus marked had been buried where they fell. This marked the resting place of the Tyneside-Scottish battalion which was wiped out in the attack upon La Boisselle on July 1, 1916—the opening day of the Somme battle. The other graveyard, on the other side of the road further on, was in neat and perfect order behind a trim railing. Here there are Canadians, British, South African and Australian graves—the Canadians predominating although the striking large cross which marks the cemetery is erected to the memory of the Australian Expeditionary Force. The place made such an appeal that we stopped for a closer inspection. As I stepped through the gate into the trim enclosure the first name I saw was that of an old personal friend and fellow-craftsman—brave, gentle, kindly, generous John Lewis, editor of the Montreal Star, who fell in October, 1916. Lewis, American-born but Canadian by adoption and by the great sacrifice, sleeps between two young Canadians—to the left the young son of the Bishop of Quebec, to the right Lieutenant Outerson, of the Winnipeg Grenadiers. Among the other graves here is that of Lieutenant H. H. Scott, of Quebec, whose body was retrieved from the battlefield by his own father, Canon Frederick George Scott—churchman, poet and hero—and by him buried in this God's acre where dust of the British race from the uttermost parts of the earth and the isles of the sea slumbers in the "rest after stormie seas," bespoken by the poet as a high measure of human felicity.
These notes on the mementoes which war has left in its train may be perhaps closed by one more cheerful and hopeful in character. This was a scene on the Roye-Amiens highway midway between these towns; not in itself unique for we saw it repeated elsewhere in what might be called the sub-area of war. It had within it the promise of a future that will, so far as this is now possible, repair the past. We had just passed the "front" as it was during the summer of 1916. First come two shallow French trenches not strongly guarded by wire entanglements; then 500 yards of no-man's-land; then the formidable German defences—three offensive lines of entrenchments heavily wired; and after a short interval two further lines equally strong. It must be admitted that the Germans were watchful and industrious. The wire, weather-beaten by exposure, stretched across the countryside like wide black ribands.
As we passed into the relatively unharmed country beyond we saw, standing by the roadside, a one-horse wagon piled high with simple household necessities—bedding, furniture and food. Around it was a family group, with actually shining, smiling faces—a rarity this, these days, in the once gay land of France. There were the middle-aged father and mother, a young man in war-worn uniform, safely home from the wars, a fair young girl of perhaps seventeen and a younger girl. They were busily engaged in unloading the wagon and carrying their household goods—where? No building was anywhere in sight—nothing but the inevitable pile of rubbish by the roadway. But on a closer look we saw that the cellar of the house that had once stood there had been fitted over with a rude temporary roof and to this refuge this reunited family, after the hardships and perils of the war, had come home with a joy and thanksgiving that shone in their eyes. This was Home!
Thus the human heart, unconquerable by adversity, resolutely sets about repairing the ravages of time and war! Man rebuilds his ruined home, sets up again the family altars, renews the sweet amenities of life, refills the fields. The soldier, husbandman once more, turns the brown furrow—"God-like making provision for mankind"—and sees the cheerful smoke from his household fires mark the citadel of his happiness, the shrine of his desires! Behind lies the wreckage, the pain, the terrors of those impossible, those unimaginable years of war—ahead stretches the future of clean and fruitful work, the dear rewards of love and affection, the blessings of a healing and fruitful Peace, never to be broken again—else these millions have died in vain—by the trumpets of the Lords of War!
CHAPTER V
THE CANADIAN HAMMER STROKES
The epic of the Canadian achievement in the last hundred days of the Great War must be written if there is in Canada a man capable of writing it. It must be accurate in its technique; but no technical accuracy will suffice to tell the story. There must be told not only the record of the actual achievements, but their relationship to the wider strategy of the war. Their impact upon the final issue of this super-human struggle must be interpreted, that the Canadians of to-day and their posterity forever may know what contribution Canada made to the freeing of the world from the menace of Prussianism. All Canadians know that in August the Canadian corps made an unexampled advance near Amiens in the great offensive on the British front; that nearly a month later they smashed their way through the "impregnable" Drocourt-Queant line; that by a brilliant tactical stroke they crossed the Canal du Nord and captured Bourlon Wood; that they outflanked Cambrai from the north compelling its evacuation; that they wrested Valenciennes from the enemy by a concentric movement from the north and south; that, assisted at times by two British divisions, they, four divisions strong, met and defeated during the three months 47 German divisions with immense captures of men, guns and supplies.
These, considered by themselves, were great feats worthy of commemoration but it is only when they are viewed in their relation to the great struggle that raged from the Alps to the sea that their full significance and value are revealed. These achievements were a series of successive hammerstrokes upon the whole western German position; and more than any other related series of military operations they contributed to the collapse, at a date far earlier than the most hopeful had dared to fix, of that huge fortress which for four years had defied the genius, the resourcefulness and the valor of the Allied western powers. This is the plain, simple truth; and it is the business of Canada to see that in the final telling of the last phases of the war this fact—of such immense bearing upon our future national development and our status in the world—is not allowed to be obscured.