The challenge of the dead

by Stephen Graham

Amiens, whose fate was in the balance for so many days, became baptised as a shrine of the war as the enemy long-range guns sent to it fire and death unintermittently.

What new fields and cities the enemy had opened for destruction! Had the Germans stayed before the city, the Cathedral of St. Firmin might have become as remarkable a ruin as the shrine of St. Vaast. St. Firmin is the patron saint of Amiens and is supposed to hold the city in his protection, and the pious of Amiens prayed to St. Firmin and to God in March 1918 as never before. That their prayers availed whereas other cities had fallen despite all prayer is not a fact on which to lay much stress. But it was just six months to the festival of St. Firmin, and ere that happy day came round the dreadful menacing demon had fled far from their walls.

Two years later behold the procession of the relics of St. Firmin at Amiens. The Church parades in praise and mediæval glory—cherubic boys in crimson and white lace, young tonsured monks with health and life throbbing from their close-cropped skulls, aged ecclesiastics with Latinised faces, beautiful youths carrying emblems and banners, and then supported on either hand by wise and reverend fathers comes the Bishop, crowned with a gilded mitre crimson within and golden without, and streaming with two golden streamers hanging behind. He bears his golden crook, and before his arrested step and hand held up in blessing the people sway like reeds when the wind which bloweth where it listeth passes over them. From his uplifted hand and his arrested pose there flung out mysterious power. You felt it; it was the blessing of the Church imparted with all the consciousness of true succession even from Peter and from Christ.

So they bear what is left of the memory and the dust of St. Firmin, nodding as they go, looking like an ecclesiastical picture on a vast canvas, and singing to their measured steps—Salve, Salve.

The second round of 1918 was fought on the Lys when the Germans 'twixt Ypres on the north and Bethune in the south plunged towards Hazebrouck and St. Omer. Bailleul and Merville fell, the eminence of Kemmel was taken and Locre, and it seemed likely that the enemy would do with the sanctuary of Ypres what he had done with that of Albert.

The smashed centre of Bethune and the wilderness of its Grande Place testifies to the violence of the onset, and Hazebrouck still bears the marks of a great trembling and nervous shock. Hazebrouck had its three days of anguish when all its people fled, and the town, like a victim in a dungeon, awaited the coming of the persecutor. The cross-roads at Vieux Berquin are almost as sinister in the after-the-war light as they were then, and in all the waste fields which ran with destiny and khaki that April the rusty wire still lies in tangles. Rain streams on the choked cemeteries once but sparse with graves, now full and overflowing with the dead and their crosses. But you seek in vain for hundreds and thousands of defenders, names of V.C.'s, names of the brave undecorated—all lost now in the unknown, the plenitude of unknown soldiers.

The German won his second round, though not too well, not shaping very well. There were hammer-blows, but not the dreadful death-dealing weight of the March fighting. French troops had been hurried to Belgium by Foch, and once more they stopped the rot and possibly saved our now rather nervy army. Certainly the enemy was now having matters his own way. But Arras fortunately held, and that was our centre of defence. All expected that the next attack would be upon the city, an attempt at encirclement from the north and from the south. A wet spring wore on to early summer and all the army waited.

The third attack was of an entirely unexpected kind, being an almost overwhelming blow at France and France alone—an attempt to put her entirely out of gear and make it impossible for Foch to send more troops to help the British army, an attempt to destroy the spirit and the mobility of the army of France. The enemy advanced on a front broader even than that of March 21st, and found an even thinner, weaker line of defenders. Once more Germany was able to do even more than she dreamed, and plunged towards Paris, making the sky drone and tremble with the ominous thunder of her approaching guns.

As we all know now the enemy went too far, and had not the men to man his greatly extended lines or the labour to reorganise the new rear. He had spent his energy too lavishly, and Foch had all that was necessary, the one extra punch which sent the German reeling even in the moment which should have held his greatest pride. The fourth round was won by Foch and the Americans. The fifth by the British when they rolled the foe back from Amiens. After that Fritz was a lost man and floundered backward homeward, playing only for time, and only on his defensive, with all the triumph gone, hope gone, faith gone, and only punishment and humiliation ahead of him. In but a short while after the most terrible defeats it could be said that the Allies had won the war.

The land o'er which the great advance was made is quiet enough now. To the towns and cities of the back areas the circus is coming for the first time since the war. After the leaping from trapeze to trapeze in mid-air, after the walking the tight rope, and the facing wild beasts in their cages, and other feats of daring, the clowns come tumbling into the arena. So it is also in life. There is one all in Turkey-red riding backward on an ass, telling all and sundry how much more clever he is than the genuine heroes they have been clapping. He gains in the long run more applause than the tight-rope dancer. Then two funny Columbines with air-blown bladders pretend to fight and whack at one another with resounding boshes, clumps and raps, laying one another out, panting for breath, exhausting themselves, almost expiring, and yet weakly hitting out with their quaint weapons. And the populace forgets the thrill of the spectacle of the man in the lions' cage making wild beasts jump through hoops of fire. The clowns are to its taste. The scene-shifters are quietly preparing the arena for the next heroic item—"A Roman spectacle when the gladiators meet"—and the clowns divert public attention from the carpentering of such a show until all is ready for the heroes to come out. A fourth clown all the while strikes heroic attitudes and mimics the after-the-war celebrities with apt buffoonery—now he is Wilson with the fourteen points, now he is D'Annunzio in mock heroic pose saying "J'y suis, j'y reste," now Lloyd George making the Germans pay by letting the Germans off paying. The malice of the buffoons provokes great mirth and takes the attention of the crowd so well that the heroes are almost forgotten, Tom Wildwest glowering from one of the exits and handling his rope and running noose as if he'd like to lasso the whole bunch of clowns and pull them out of the arena and the public gaze.