Then there is a third party, which says that the Germans were going to use the dead man for food. This being a most improbable story is one of the most readily believed by the public.
On leaving the canal bank and clambering up the stairs we were able to see on left and right the trench systems built by the Germans, the massive parapets, the long communication trenches, the emplacements for guns, the pill-boxes and the rows of barbed wire entanglement. How this place was stormed and taken by the British soldiery is a miracle. How they managed to lacerate the German sinews of defence, to hack their way through and batter down the lines erected by Hindenburg is one of the marvels of war.
The story can never be told. Historians will arise one day and tell how the infantry advanced taking so many kilometres of ground despite great opposition and formidable defence. At dawn they left the village of A——, the historian will tell us, and at dusk they captured the hamlet of B——. But that will never make the whole story of the operations manifest to the eyes of men. Even knowing the place on which the battle was fought, knowing it as it is now with the trenches still remaining and the lines of wire entanglements still standing, it is impossible to tell the story of the encounter. Little details, incidents which meant life or death to one, two or a dozen men, the taking of a dug-out, the capture of a machine-gun emplacement, the scramble across the broken wire on the trail of a tank, the hand-to-hand fight in a dark cellar are forgotten, even by those who have taken part in them. Only the principal outlines and outstanding features of the gigantic contest can be portrayed by the historian. Little personal affairs, stories of squads and crews, belong, as Napoleon once remarked, "rather to the biography of the regiments than to the history of the Army." And the exploits of small bodies of men, of infantry squads, of machine-gun crews will live for a little while only when veterans of the war exchange confidences over a backyard fence in days of peace and when they fight their battles over again, tracing with their pipe shanks on their hands the lines of trench taken and held, the redoubt lost, the ground on which the hand-to-hand conflict took place and all other various little doings which were part and parcel of the greater battle.
The historian will give the mere outlines of the struggle. In four lines of cold print he shall tell how —— Regiment left the village of A—— at dawn and in face of almost insurmountable difficulties took the hamlet of B—— at dusk. Here the regimental historian may come in and add a little, telling how "B" company was held up by the wires, how "A" company with reckless dash, came to the assistance of their mates, how Sergeant —— urged the men forward, how no one faltered, how, with set teeth, they set themselves to the task of getting through and how in the end victory was gained. But still there is a lot more to be told, the pining and waiting of the women left at home, the sleepless nights when letters from the loved ones have not come to hand, the weary misery of mothers who have lost their sons, of wives who have lost their husbands. In this story of war there is laughter and tears, courage and timidity, weakness and strength, sorrow and death. Even those who have fought know very little of what took place, they have been mere atoms moving backward and forward in the vast fluctuation, blinded in the obscurity of the conflict. For them the battle has been a mirage having in it nothing that is fixed or stable, a great hallucination.
The line was taken, but even those who took part in the operations know not how the superhuman was accomplished, how the miracle was performed.
"It was a tough nut to crack," said a Digger to whom I spoke, asking him of the battle. "But we got through somehow."
"It was damned stiff," said another, shrugging his shoulders as if to belittle the effort of men in the operations. "Damned stiff, but we had the guns and the tanks."
"For God's sake don't put your hand on that!"
It was an officer with two rows of ribbons on his breast and the gold stripe in triplicate on his sleeve who spoke. He was a veteran soldier who had fought in many campaigns and who knew war as it is waged on more than one continent. Now he was looking at one of our party who had bent to lift a German helmet from the ground near the mouth of the tunnel. The souvenir searcher held himself erect and fixed a look of inquiry on the officer.