Yet this was not bravado for, so far as they knew, no one was watching them. It was due to a certain dignity peculiar to our fighting man. He is too proud to acknowledge defeat. He is a man, and whether any one is watching or not, he is not going to run away from a shell. Hundreds of lives must have been lost through this stubborn pride but, on the other hand, thousands of lives must have been saved by it, for it makes the Army absolutely proof against panic, than which, nothing is so fatal in war. In eighteen months on the Front I have never seen or heard of a single case of panic either with many or few. Our soldiers are always masters of themselves. They have the coolness to judge what is the wisest thing to do in the circumstances, and they have the nerve to carry it out. They run unnecessary risks through pride but never through panic. All that day on the bridge, a military policeman stood at his post of duty. Like Vesuvius of old the exploding shells in the Square sent up their deadly eruption, and like the Roman sentry at Pompeii, he stood at his post. As he stood there I saw a young French woman leave her house and pass him on the bridge. She was leaving the village for a safer place but she seemed quite composed and carried a basket on her left arm.
While our village was being destroyed we were startled by a tremendous explosion a few miles away; and looking to our left we saw a huge tongue of flame leap up to the sky, followed by a wonderful pillar of smoke which stood rigid for some moments like a monster tower of Babel reaching up to the heavens. Evidently a dump of cordite had been fired by an enemy shell. Farther off still, another dump was on fire. Time and again, bright flames leapt from the ground only to be smothered again by dense curling masses of smoke. It seemed as if our whole front was on fire, and news came to us that our main road of communication had been heavily shelled, and was now strewn with dead horses and men. Before the battle of the Somme there were no signs and portents so terrible as these: It was evident that the enemy knew what was in store for him on the morrow, and was preparing against it, but if the prelude was so magnificent in its terror, what would the battle be? Imagination staggered under the contemplation. By four o'clock the bombardment was almost at an end, and nearly all the shells in the Square had exploded. The soldiers began to creep out of the cellars. On passing through the Square we were amazed at the sight. In fact the Transport Officer passed through at my side without recognizing the place. At the entrance was a team of six dead mules lying prone on the ground and terribly torn. Two rows of houses had disappeared, leaving mere heaps of stones in their places. The pavement was torn up, and the wrecks of the ammunition wagons lay scattered about. Two houses were still burning. Our colonel and adjutant we found by the side of the stream. They had been in a cellar near the Square all day but, fortunately, they were little the worse for the experience. They were giving orders for the assembling of the scattered regiment.
By this time, civilians were leaving the cellars, and with armfuls of household goods hastening from the village. To them it seemed the end of all things--the day of doom. Some of them had slight wounds and as they passed us they cried mournfully, "Finis, Messieurs, Finis." All was lost. This exodus of the despairing civilians was the saddest sight of the day. By sunset the regiment had been gathered together--all except the wounded who had been sent to the Main Dressing Station and the dead who had been placed side by side and covered with blankets. Most of our officers and men had lost all their belongings, but in the twilight they marched out of the village and took their places in the reserve trenches near the other battalions. These had suffered no losses. They had been saved the long day's agony. Early in the morning the battle was to begin but the Westminsters knew that no worse experience could await them than that through which they had already passed.
Next morning I buried, near the ruined church, the bodies of the sergeants who had been killed a few doors from us; and on the following day I laid to rest, side by side, in one long grave, two drivers who had died at their posts in the Square, together with an officer and twenty men belonging to the 1st Queen's Westminster Rifles.
VII
"NOW THE DAY IS OVER"
Achicourt is a little village about a mile out of Arras. It has two churches, one Roman Catholic, the other, Lutheran. The former church has been utterly destroyed by German shells, and will have to be rebuilt from the foundations. The Lutheran church was less prominently placed, and its four walls are still standing. Its humility has saved it, but, as by fire. All its windows are gone, and its walls are torn and scarred by fragments of shells. Most of its slates have been destroyed and the rain pours through the roof. But, on dry days, and until the Battle of Arras, it was a beloved little place for services. It stood, however, at a corner of the village Square, and the Square was destroyed by hundreds of exploding shells on Easter Sunday. As I passed it in the afternoon of that day, and saw how it had suffered, my heart grew sad within me.
Often it had sheltered us at worship, and many of our most sacred memories will, for ever, cling like ivy to its walls. The door was smashed in, the vestibule torn into strips as by lightning. The pews were strewn on the floor with their backs broken; even the frames of the windows had been blown out. There was a little portable organ that we had used with our hymns, and it lay mutilated on the floor like a slaughtered child. The floor was white with plaster, as when a sharp frost has brought low the cherry blossom. Never again, I thought, should I gather my men for worship within its humble, hospitable walls. One more of the beautiful and sacred things of life had perished in this all-devouring war. Only the fields remained, and there all my future services must be held.
But "fears may be liars" and so mine proved. I had reckoned without the man in khaki--that master of fate whose head "beneath the bludgeonings of chance, is bloody but unbowed." In a week he had cleared the Square of its dead--mules and men--filled in its craters, and cleared away the debris that blocked the roads. He was even removing the fallen houses in order to mend the roads with their bricks and stones; and he had thrown together all the scraps of iron for salvage. There I found, lying side by side, the burned tin-soldiers of the children; officers' revolvers which, being loaded, had exploded in the heat; bayonets and rifle-barrels of the men; broken sewing machines of the women. He had taken in hand, too, the little church. Sacking was spread across the windows; the remnants of the little organ were carefully placed under the pulpit where they lay like the body of a saint beneath an altar; the floor was swept of its fallen plaster. The pews were repaired and placed in order again, and a new door was made. Even timber was brought for a new vestibule. The wood was rough and unpainted--Tommy had to use what he could get--but it served. The twisted railings were drawn away from the entrance, and, on the following Sunday, we were back in our old sanctuary. We felt that it was more sacred than ever. These are the deeds of our fighting-man that make us love him so much, and these are the acts of kindness and common sense that make us admire our commanders. Both officers and men have the heart of a lion in the hour of battle, the gentleness of a lamb when it is over. Whatever their circumstances, they cannot cease to be gentlemen, nor forget the fathers that begat them.
Let him who doubts the future of England come hither. He will see the past through the present, and the future through both. Tommy's eyes are the crystal gazing-glasses in which he will discern the future. Tommy is living history and the prophecy of the future made flesh. The pessimists have not seen Tommy here, and that is why they are what they are. "Age cannot wither nor custom stale" his infinite freshness and resource. He is a sword that the rust of time cannot corrode, nor the might of an enemy break, and he will be found flashing wherever there are wrongs to right and weak to be defended. On Easter Sunday he was calmly enduring the horror of the German bombardment and the explosions of his own dump of shells. On Easter Monday he was driving the Germans at the point of his bayonet, or accepting their surrender at the doors of their dug-outs! On Easter Tuesday and Wednesday he was repairing a little French chapel for worship. Take him which day you will, and you will find him mighty hard to match. To me he is the king of men, and his genius, cheerfulness and resourcefulness beyond the range of explanations.