Over the way at Vraucourt Copse, perched high in a sun-kissed wheatfield lies Lieut. A. S. Robinson of the Royal Scots, with 22 private soldiers' names inscribed on his cross. One wondered if it would be true to say—"Here he lies where he longed to be" and did he love Stevenson and often quote
Under the wide and starry sky
Dig my grave and let me lie.
These Royal Scots have the widest of all starry skies above them and the unbarred gate of heaven in its midst.
A little further still and you have the Australian cemetery at Noreuil at the corner of the road, rectilinear, handsome, clean and cared-for, neatly fenced in with wire and having a little white gate by which to enter. But outside the cemetery and as it were falling back in every attitude of banishment and despair, the old faded wood and broken crosses of the Germans, overgrown with weeds, crazy-roofed crosses, aslant, tumbled. In 1916 the enemy began to bury here. In 1917 he left his dead behind. In 1918 he recaptured them and repaired the crosses—and added to them. In 1918 it was a decent graveyard; one could read the names of all the dead. But their kindred went away and forgot. Their crosses are the monuments of the forgotten and the vague memorial of a useless sacrifice.
Doubtless the drama of the penultimate year 1917 did not centre in the supra-Somme country. Its scenes of action were at Lens and Vimy, at Pilkelm Ridge and Passchendaele. The year which ran on from the German retirement was the strangest of the war, promising everything, fulfilling nothing, beginning with Haig's victory interview and ending with the failures in Flanders and the German break-through from Cambrai. It was the year of American self-announcement, of the Russian revolution, of the pros and contras of peace at Stockholm, of the victory of the Bolsheviks, of the Italian debacle. Germany seemed to grow stronger all the year, and the morale of the Allies waned. Men no longer betted one another that it would be all over by Christmas. Lord Grey's supposed prediction was forgotten. The whisper went abroad that "it might last a lifetime," and then in mock cynicism, They say the first seven years will be the worst. New units hitherto untried in the war still made their appearance, whole battalions whose war-history commences with the conflicts about Lens or the battles for Passchendaele Ridge. The Derby drafts were reputed to come marching to the strains of "The Church's One Foundation" singing their own confession—
We are Lord Derby's Army
Just come across the sea.
We cannot march, we cannot shoot,
What bloomin' good are we?
And the old army said "Where have you been this long while?" The conscripts however were to follow in even more desperate case, and when they first reached France and their tender feet struck the cobbled roadways they sang—not a hymn, but a new version of "Auld Lang Syne"—
We're here because we're here,
Because we're here, because we're here,
We're here because we're here,
Because we're here, because we're here.
"Take me back to dear old Blighty!" was the song of the whole army and had completely displaced Tipperary.
No doubt owing to the German withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line the Allied plan of attack for the summer had been foiled. All the machinery of assault had been arranged for a stubborn and dreadful prolongation of the Somme battle between the horizons where winter had halted it. The greatest concentration of guns which the war had seen had to be liquidated. New gun-positions had to be dug and a new concentration achieved. Telephone and telegraph had to be brought up to a new line. Organisation work which would ordinarily have been accomplished in the quiet winter months had to be done through the campaigning season of Spring and Summer. Men looked less seriously on the war, though the war was not less serious for them. Witness the sinister stare of the Lens country which knew the 1917 army and has looked on terrible things. We made Lens in 1917 into a narrow deep pocket full of Germans. The taking of it was confidently anticipated. Fleet Street wanted it to serve on a platter to Herod. But it could not be had though thousands died for it. The enemy held it by miracle. It was impossible to hold such a position but the impossible held.