"Where my caravan has rested

Flowers I leave you on the grass;

All the flowers of love and memory;

You will find them when you pass."

THOMAS TIPLADY.

BRITISH EXPEDITIONARY FORCE, FRANCE.

CONTENTS

CHAP.

  1. [The Swan at Ypres]
  2. [The Roadmakers]
  3. [The Glamour of the Front]
  4. [A White Handkerchief]
  5. [The Songs Our Soldiers Sing]
  6. [Easter Sunday]
  7. ["Now the Day is Over"]
  8. [Sons of the Motherland]
  9. [The Terror by Night]
  10. ["Eton Boys Never Duck!"]
  11. ["Missing"]
  12. ["It Must be Sunday"]
  13. [Our Tommies Never Fail Us]
  14. [The Cross at Neuve Chapelle]
  15. [The Children of Our Dead]
  16. [A Funeral under Fire]
  17. [A Soldier's Calvary]
  18. [The Hospital Train]
  19. [After Winter, Spring]

I

THE SWAN AT YPRES

For three years the storm center of the British battle front has been at Ypres. Every day and night it has been the standing target of thousands of guns. Yet, amid all the havoc and thunder of the artillery, the graceful white form of a swan had been seen gliding over the water of the moat. It never lacked food, and was always welcome to a share of Tommy's rations. In the Battle of Messines--I had the story first-hand from a lieutenant of artillery whose battery was hidden close by, and who was an eye-witness of the incident--a shell burst near the swan, and it was mortally wounded. For three long years it had spread its white wings as gallantly as the white sails of Drake's flagship when he sailed out of Plymouth Sound to pluck the beard of the Spaniard. But now its adventurous voyaging was over. Another beautiful and innocent thing had been destroyed by the war and had passed beyond recall. There was no dying swan-song heard on the waters, but all who saw its passing felt that the war had taken on a deeper shade of tragedy.

Many a "white man" had been slain near the spot but somehow the swan seemed a mystical being, and invulnerable. It was a relic of the days of peace, and a sign of the survival of purity and grace amid the horrors and cruelties of war. It spoke of the sacred things that yet remain--the beautiful things of the soul upon which war can lay no defiling finger. Now it had gone from the water and Ypres seems more charred than ever, and the war more terrible. The death of the swan revealed against its white wings the peculiar inhumanity of the present war. It is a war in which the enemy spares nothing and no one. He is more blind and merciless than the Angel of Death which swept over Egypt, for the angel had regard to the blood which the Israelites had sprinkled over the lintels of their doors and he passed by in mercy. To the German Eagle every living creature is legitimate prey. No blood upon the lintel can save the inmate; not even the cross of blood on the hospital tent or ship. Wounded or whole, combatant or non-combatant, its beak and talons tear the tender flesh of all and its lust is not sated.

In Belgium and Serbia it is believed that more women and children perished than men. Things too hideous for words were done publicly in the market-squares. Neither age nor sex escaped fire and sword. The innocent babe was left to suck the breast of its dead mother or was dandled on the point of the bayonet. What resistance can the Belgian swan make to the German eagle? It needs must lie torn and bleeding beneath its talons. The German Emperor has waded deeper in blood than Macbeth, and has slain the innocent in their sleep. Even the sea is full of the women, children, and non-combatant men he has drowned. His crown is cemented together with innocent blood and its jewels are the eyes of murdered men and women. The wretched man has made rivers of blood to flow yet not a drop in them is from his own veins or the veins of his many sons. Napoleon risked his life with his men in every battle but this man never once. While sending millions to their death he yet consents to live, and protects his life with the anxious care a miser bestows on his gold. Alone among large families in Germany his household is without a casualty. Though a nation be white and innocent as the Belgian swan it will not escape his sword, and he will swoop upon it the more readily because it is unarmed. The swan cannot live where the eagle flies, and one or the other must die.