It may be thought that this sentiment would not comfort a man lying on his stomach as sentinel on outpost duty, staring through the mist and rain, and listening for the slightest sound of an approaching enemy, or a man crouching beneath a ledge of earth, waiting for the quiet words of En avant! which would make him scramble up and go into a storm of shells with a fair chance of being cut to bits by flying scythes. But in truth the sentiment that came welling up to those men at the front was of infinite comfort and kept alight a flame in them which no winter wind could douse. That sentinel on his stomach, gripping a cold rifle with numbed hands, and cursing silently the fate which had brought him to this agony, checked the fear that Avas creeping up to his heart—was that a line of Boches stealing through the mist?—when he thought that the women he knew, the folk in the Normandy village, the old curé, and all the spirit of France had made a hero of him and expected him to bear himself bravely, and in imagination stood beside him to share his vigil. In order not to spoil the image they had made of him, to live up to their ideals of him he must hold on and kill these little devils of fear, and die, if need be, as a gallant soldier of France. It would be fine to come back with a stripe on his arm, perhaps with the military medal on his breast… But oh, the pain in those frozen feet of his! and the coldness of this bed of mud!
Poor devils! hundreds of them have told me their stories and at the end of a tale of misery have said: "I do not complain, you know. It's war, and I am glad to do my duty for the sake of France." And yet sometimes, when they thought back, to the homes they had left, and their old ways of civil life, they had moments of weakness in which all the strength of their souls seemed to ebb away.
"It's fatal to think of one's life before the war," said a young Frenchman who sat with me at the table of a little café not far from the front. He was a rich young man, with a great business in Paris which had been suspended on the first day of mobilization, and with a pretty young wife who had just had her first baby. Now he was a simple soldier, and for nine months he had not seen Paris or his home or his pretty wife. The baby's eyes were grey-blue, it seemed, but he had not been able to test the truth of that description.
"As a rule," he said, "one doesn't think back to one's old life. A great gulf lies between us and the past and it is as though one had been born again just to be a soldier in this war. The roots of our former existence have been torn up. All one's old interests have been buried. My wife? I hardly ever think of her. My home? Is there such a place? It is only at night, or suddenly, sometimes, as one goes marching with one's company that one's thoughts begin to roam back over old grounds for a moment or two. The other fellows know what one's silence means, and one's deafness, so that one doesn't hear a neighbour's joke or answer his question. It gives one a horrible heartache and one is overwhelmed with depression… Great God, how long is this war going to last?"
21
It is only those who have been to the front in France who can realize the life of the men there as it went on month after month—the misery of it, the dreariness of it, the lack of any thrill except that of fear. At the end of April in this year 1915 I went to the most desolate part of the French front, along the battlefields of Champagne, where after nine months of desperate fighting the guns were still at work ceaselessly and great armies of France and Germany were still divided from each other by a few barren meadows, a burnt wood or two, a river bank, a few yards of trenches and a zone of Death.
It was in Champagne-Pouilleuse—mangy Champagne it is called, because it has none of the richness of the vineyard country, but is a great stretch of barren land through which the chalk breaks out in bald patches. The spirit of war brooded over all this countryside, and I passed through many ruined villages, burnt and broken by incendiarism and shell-fire. Gradually as we approached nearer to the front, the signs of ordinary life were left behind, and we came into a region where all the activities of men were devoted to one extraordinary purpose, and where they lived in strange conditions.
No civilian came this way unless as a correspondent under the charge of a staff officer. The labourers on the roadside—carting stones to this country of chalk—were all in uniform. No women invaded this territory except, where, here and there, by rare chance, a wrinkled dame drove a plough across a lonely field. No children played about the brooks or plucked the wild flowers on the hillsides. The inhabitants of this country were all soldiers, tanned by months of hard weather, in war-worn clothes, dusty after marching down the long, white roads, hard and tough in spite of a winter's misery, with calm, resolute eyes in spite of the daily peril of death in which they live.
They lived in a world which is as different from this known world of ours as though they belonged to another race of men inhabiting another planet, or to an old race far back behind the memory of the first civilization. For in this district of Champagne, the soldiers of France were earth-men or troglodytes, not only in the trenches, but for miles behind the trenches. When the rains came last autumn they were without shelter, and there were few villages on this lonely stretch of country in which to billet them. But hère were soft, chalky ridges and slopes in which it was not difficult to dig holes and caverns. The troops took to picks and shovels, and very soon they built habitations for themselves in which they have been living ever since when not in the trenches.
I was invited into some of these subterranean parlours, and ducked my head as I went down clay steps into dim caves where three or four men lived in close comradeship in each of them. They had tacked the photographs of their wives or sweethearts on the walls, to make these places "homelike," and there was space in some of them for wood fires, which burned with glowing embers and a smoke that made my eyes smart, so that by the light of them these soldiers would see the portraits of those who wait for them to come back, who have waited so patiently and so long through the dreary months.