“Vous n'avez pas peur, meme de la mort?” (“You are not afraid, even of death?”) I asked.
She shrugged her shoulders.
“Je m'en fiche de la mort!” (“I don't care a damn for death!”)
The Hotel du Sauvage was a pleasant rendezvous, but barred for a time to young gentlemen of the air force, who lingered too long there sometimes and were noisy. It was barred to all officers for certain hours of the day without special permits from the A.P.M., who made trouble in granting them. Three Scottish officers rode down into Cassel. They had ridden down from hell-fire to sit at a table covered with a table-cloth, and drink tea in a room again. They were refused permission, and their language to me about the A.P.M. was unprintable. They desired his blood and bones. They raised their hands to heaven to send down wrath upon all skunks dwelling behind the lines in luxury and denying any kind of comfort to fighting-men. They included the P.M. in their rage, and all staff-officers from Cassel to Boulogne, and away back to Whitehall.
To cheer up the war correspondents' mess when we assembled at night after miserable days, and when in the darkness gusts of wind and rain clouted the window-panes and distant gun-fire rumbled, or bombs were falling in near villages, telling of peasant girls killed in their beds and soldiers mangled in wayside burns, we had the company sometimes of an officer (a black-eyed fellow) who told merry little tales of executions and prison happenings at which he assisted in the course of his duty.
I remember one about a young officer sentenced to death for cowardice (there were quite a number of lads like that). He was blindfolded by a gas-mask fixed on the wrong way round, and pinioned, and tied to a post. The firing—party lost their nerve and their shots were wild. The boy was only wounded, and screamed in his mask, and the A.P.M. had to shoot him twice with his revolver before he died.
That was only one of many little anecdotes told by a gentleman who seemed to like his job and to enjoy these reminiscences.
The battles of Flanders ended with the capture of Passchendaele by the Canadians, and that year's fighting on the western front cost us 800,000 casualties, and though we had dealt the enemy heavy blows from which he reeled back, the drain upon our man-power was too great for what was to happen next year, and our men were too sorely tried. For the first time the British army lost its spirit of optimism, and there was a sense of deadly depression among many officers and men with whom I came in touch. They saw no ending of the war, and nothing except continuous slaughter, such as that in Flanders.
Our men were not mythical heroes exalted by the gods above the limitations of nature. They were human beings, with wives and children, or mothers and sisters, whom they desired to see again. They hated this war. Death had no allurement for them, except now and then as an escape from intolerable life under fire. They would have been superhuman if they had not revolted in spirit, though still faithful to discipline, against the foul conditions of warfare in the swamps, where, in spite of all they had, in that four months or so of fighting, achieved the greatest effort of human courage and endurance ever done by masses of men in obedience to command.