From Bapaume to Passchendaele, 1917

by Philip Gibbs

The trees are turning brown also, deepening to a reddish tint in all the woods between Boulogne and the battlefields, where there are only dead trees. Round about Poperinghe the trailing hops have been pulled down from their poles, already stripped in places by last month's gale, and the sticks are all bare. Outside the wooden huts built on the edge of war by refugees from Ypres and shell-broken villages, Flemish women sit with the hops in their laps and in great baskets beside them, and British soldiers on the march with dry throats exchange remarks about the good beer which they may never have the luck to drink. White cloud-mountains which turn black and threaten a deluge between bursts of sunshine are banked up above the russet foliage and the brown earth and the old black windmills which wave their arms across the landscape, and in the wind there is a smell of moisture and mist, and the first faint sniff of rotting leaves. It is the autumn touch—the autumn touch of a war in which some of us have seen four harvests gathered into French barns and four winters come. It makes one feel a bit sad, that thought. It puts an autumn touch for a second or two into the souls of men coming back from leave as I came back with some of them two days ago.

By day the sky out here is full of interest, for one cannot go anywhere near the lines without seeing that aerial activity which has become intense and fierce lately. Yesterday I saw a great flight of our aeroplanes over the dead town of Armentières. There were between twenty and thirty of them making their way over the German lines, and the enemy hated the sight of them. His anti-aircraft guns got to work savagely and bursts of black shrapnel filled the sky all about those steady wings, but did not bring them down. He hated other aircraft watching over his lines—a long line of kite-balloons, "clustered like grapes," as some one described them, in our side of the sky. They were as white as snow when the sun touched them, and made tempting targets for long-range guns. Some German gunners registered on one of them nearest to Armentières, and I saw a terrific burst of yellow smoke, so close to it that it seemed like a hit. But the smoke cleared, and the kite balloon stayed calmly on its wire, and there was no parachute demonstration by our observers in the basket. The drone of our aeroplanes and the reports of German anti-aircraft guns made the only noise in Armentières—that and the sound of two men's footsteps as I and another walked through the streets of that town which is dead.

It is a queer thing to walk through a big town out of which all life has gone, and queer to me especially in Armentières, because I knew it not long ago when there were many women and girls about its streets, and when one could take one's choice of tea-shops—though only eighteen hundred yards away from the German line—and get an excellent little dinner in more than one restaurant. One could have one's hair cut and a shampoo to the musical accompaniment of field-batteries outside the town, and buy most of the things a man wants in the simple life of war (except peace) in shops kept by brave Frenchwomen—women too brave and too rash because they lived within 1800 yards of the enemy's line as though it were eighteen miles. Armentières was a modern little manufacturing town for lace and thread, with neat red-brick houses kept by well-to-do people who liked good comfortable furniture, and put a piano into their front parlour and a little marble Venus and other knick-knacks of art on the drawing-room table as a proof of good taste above the mere sordid interest of money-making.

For a long time in the war that town has been known to British soldiers who have passed it on their way to Plug Street as "Armentears." They made friends with some of the girls in the tea-shops, and said "Hallo, granny! Tray bong!" to old ladies who sold them picture post cards. Now it is a town of tears to any people who once lived there. The tea-shops have been smashed to bits and the women and the girls have gone, unless their bodies lie in the cellars beneath the ruins. The agony of Armentières began at the end of June, when the enemy first began to bombard it with systematic violence, and though there is no life left in it the broken houses are still battered by more shells when the enemy's gunners have nothing else to do. When I walked through its streets yesterday I was the witness of the horror that had passed. The German bombardment began quite suddenly one night, and the old women and the girls and the children were in their beds. They rushed down into their cellars, not for the first time, because during nearly three years of war stray shells had often come into the town. But never like this. These were not random shells, scattered here and there. They came with a steady and frightful violence into every part of the town, sweeping down street after street, blowing houses to dust, knocking the fronts off the shops, playing fantastic, horrible tricks of choosing and leaving, as shell-fire does in any town of this size. There were gas-shells among the high explosives, and their poison filtered down into the cellars. A fire broke out in one of the squares beyond the old church of St.-Vaast, and the houses were gutted by flames, which licked high above their roofless walls.

The fires were out when I walked there yesterday, and the church of St.-Vaast was surrounded by its own ruins—great blocks of masonry hurled from its dome and buttresses amidst a mass of broken glass. Inside there is a tragic ruin, and rows of cane chairs lie in wild chaos among the broken pillars and the piled stones. The pipes of the great organ have been flung out of their framework, but curiously the side altars, with the figures of apostles and saints, and the central figure of the Sacred Heart, are hardly touched, and stand unscathed amidst this great destruction. There is nothing new in all this. For three years I have been walking through destroyed towns and villages, but it has the grim interest of recent history, and Armentières is the scene of a tragedy to its civilian population which makes one's heart ache with a new revolt against this monstrous cruelty of war upon the innocent and the helpless.

It was easy to see what had happened during those days and nights of terror some weeks ago. I looked into the blown-out fronts of little shops and houses, and saw how everything had been abandoned in that rush of women and children to the cellars. In spite of the wreckage of the upper stories and of the walls about them, some of the rooms were intact. Here were the remains of an estaminet, with its cash-box on the bar counter, and games such as soldiers love—dominoes and darts, and quoits and bagatelle, set out as though for an evening's entertainment. Here was a chemist's shop, with many bottles unbroken on the shelves, though most of the house was blown across the street. I looked through a hole in the wall to a drawing-room, with a piano, standing amid a litter of broken furniture, as though some madman had wreaked his fury on the sofa and chairs.

But it was in the cellars that the pitiful drama had been—in those cellars down which I peered wondering whether any poor bodies lay there still. The shells had pierced down to some of the women hiding in them. Poison-gas came to choke some of them. Rescue parties of our R.A.M.C. went into Armentières immediately to get the poor creatures away, and risked their lives a score of times on each journey they made. It is an amazing thing that even then, in spite of their terror and their agony and their wounds, many of the old women could hardly be made to leave the town, and clung desperately to their homes, though these had fallen down on top of them.

Outside Armentières yesterday I met one of the R.A.M.C. lads who had helped in this rescue work—he has been given a Military Medal for it—and he told me of his trouble with two old ladies when things were at their worst. Neither had a rag of clothing on except the blankets he wrapped round them as they lay on stretchers; but when his attention wandered from them, owing to shells which burst close to the ambulance, one of these old dames scrambled up and ran off naked down the street. He went after her, and on his return found that the other old lady had given him the slip.

He had astounding experiences, this Wessex boy who is an expert in bandaging wounds, and through many days of dreadfulness and many nights he worked in Armentières under heavy fire, and did not turn a hair. He was such a Mark Tapley that when everything was falling about him and Hell was let loose he became more and more cheerful and refused to take things seriously.

"I don't think I ever laughed so much," he told me yesterday. "I don't know how it was, but I couldn't help seeing the comical side of it all, in spite of the ghastly sights." I suppose this boy's sense of humour was touched by the monstrous idiocy of the shell-fire, which produced effects like those on a music-hall stage when the funny man breaks all the crockery and brings the roof down over his head. He laughed like anything when he was shelled out of his makeshift dressing-station on one side of the street, and had to establish his quarters on the other side of another street.