And Fromelles church on the hill has been rased to the ground. The English dead have been taken away—only French remain, and amidst the great smash-up of tombstones are seven or eight wooden crosses for Chasseurs Alpins and French dragoons.
So 1914 passed and the new year opened with a long war penitence when in two months a battalion in the line lost but four or five men. Both sides were short of shells and were saving themselves for the Spring. We shall march soon to Neuve Chapelle. Meanwhile men are practising in the use of the jam-tin and the hair-brush bombs—for the British army went to war without a bomb, despised bombs. It went also without helmets, without metal hats. Men went to war in service hats. It will take some maniac-(sic) patriot to jump from the gallery of the House of Commons into the midst of dreaming politicians, yelling "Give them metal helmets" ere something of the kind be furnished. There are now proceeding rehearsals of a battle behind the lines. Neuve Chapelle is being thoroughly rehearsed against a dummy foe. The power of shrapnel to destroy barbed wire is being tried—the verdict being that the narrower the front attacked the more chance of completely destroying the wire. As the war was eventually decided on the broadest of fronts, so the new phase of the war which started with Neuve Chapelle was begun on the narrowest of fronts. Be it noted, a continuation of the grand strategic movements of 1914 has already been rendered impracticable by the organisation of trench defences.
On March 10th was the first concentration on the enemy's line, the first attempt to pierce it. Behold the once crowded breastworks on the road to Aubers and Neuve Chapelle. The great shaggy earthwork is covered with dense thistle now. There are mounds of filled sand-bags all hanging in clots like shirt-tails of innumerable men. This was the jumping-off point for the attack. It was bristling with tense excited soldiers that wild March morning, but no one lives there now—only swarms of whispering grasshoppers. The earth-wave goes on across the flat country; it is uncontrollably wild, and the peasants who work on the fields before and in front of it have left it alone as a work of despair to clear. It looks like an old Roman line.
It is pitiful and pathetic now to walk to Neuve Chapelle and Aubers—where officers clutched their revolvers, and men with bayonets fixed thought their last thoughts of home whilst they plunged perchance to death. All the German defences are in concrete—the wonderful 1916 concrete, massive, impregnable. At Aubers there are six hundred and eighty block-houses of concrete, with walls three feet thick. There are impudent watch-towers of it.
The roadway, still littered with shrapnel and fragments of rifles and bombs, crawls across disintegrated Nature to ramshackle Neuve Chapelle, and then there is that beautiful wood beyond, so often sketched, not dead, leafing from all its trunks. As one looks on its lacework of loveliness set against the sky one thinks of a martyr whose faith has been proved—rescued from fire in time to avert destruction.
Neuve Chapelle however was no victory as also it was no defeat. GOOD NEWS TO-NIGHT said the placards of the London papers, but what had happened was merely a rehearsal with many accidents. The fighting lasted three days. The enemy gave as much as he took. Men spent the night in trenches waist-deep in water, and were shelled mercilessly. They got up prematurely to attack; to face fires of execution—the serried array of the enemy's machine gunnery. Did not a battalion of Guards lose three officers and a hundred men whilst speeding over a mere hundred and fifty yards? On the other hand certainly German positions were isolated and hundreds of foemen walked demurely into captivity behind the British lines.
You will look in vain for the graves of thousands of heroes. The bodies have been taken far away, but Neuve Chapelle has its cemetery of exhumés covered with brown level-raked earth behind a fertile beanfield. Captain Sir Edward Hulse, hero of a night raid at Fromelles, lies buried by the wayside, and he died at Neuve Chapelle. As for German dead, there is a strange absence of graves, but beyond Neuve Chapelle is a field of outrageous thistles and broad-bladed rotting crosses, some down, some standing, all with faded inscriptions, but the thistles are so thick and high one might easily pass by without observing an old graveyard of our dread enemy. It would be interesting to read a German account, oh, not an official one, of this battle of Neuve Chapelle, an account by one of the common soldiers who fraternised with his enemy on Christmas Day and had to kill him ere Easter had arrived.
A long black touring-car has drawn up at the side of the road at Neuve Chapelle, and a handsome grey-haired English gentleman looks on the ruins. Says a small boy to him, "Daddy, what did the Germans do here?"
"I don't know, my boy," says he. "But there was a great battle here early in the war, and we tried to win it. I don't think anybody won."