II
THE ROADMAKERS
We had just marched from one part of the Front to another and by a round-about way. Each morning the Quartermaster and "the billeting party" went on before, and each evening we slept in a village that was strange to us. Each of the men carried on his back a pack and equipment weighing about eighty or ninety pounds. Through sleet and blizzard and, for the most part, through open, exposed country, we continued our march without a day of rest. By the fifth evening we reached the village where we were to have three or four weeks of rest and training before entering the trenches for the spring offensive. We had unpacked and were sitting at dinner when a telegram came announcing that all previous plans were canceled, and that at dawn we must take to the road again. Something unexpected had happened, good or ill, we knew not which, and we had to enter the line in front of Arras. For three days more we marched. Daily the sound of the guns came nearer, and the men were tired and footsore. They were also deeply disappointed of the long rest to which they had been looking forward after a winter in the trenches at Neuve Chapelle. Yet they marched cheerily enough. "It's the War!" they said one to another and, true to their own philosophy, "packed up their troubles in their old kit bags and smiled." When any man faltered a bit, as if about to fall out by the way, the others cheered him on by singing "Old Soldiers never die" to the tune of the old Sunday school hymn, "Kind words can never die." Sometimes an officer would shoulder a man's rifle to the end of the march, or until he felt better. In eight unbroken days of marching we covered ninety-eight miles and finally arrived at a camp of huts within a day's march of the trenches we are to occupy. Here, where our huts stand like islands in a sea of mud, we are, unless suddenly needed, to take a few days' rest.
On the ninety-eight miles of road over which we tramped, we passed company after company of British roadmakers. In some parts they were widening the road, in other parts repairing it. The roads of Northeastern France are handed over to our care as completely as if they were in England. Our road-makers are everywhere, and as we pass they stand, pick or shovel in hand, to salute the colonel and shout some humorous remark to the laughing riflemen--only to get back as much as they give.
This morning I visited the neighboring village to arrange for a Sunday service. The roads are hopeless for bicycles at this time of the year, so I fell back on Adam's method of getting about. The road to the village was torn and broken, and "thaw precautions" were being observed. Everywhere it was ankle-deep in mud and, in the holes, knee-deep. Innumerable motor-wagons had crushed it beneath their ponderous weight, and my feet had need of my eyes to guide them. In skirting the holes and rough places, I added quite a mile to the journey.
It was annoying to get along so slowly, and I called the road "rotten" and blamed the War for its destructive work. Then I saw that I had been unjust in judgment. The War had constructed more than it had destroyed. The road had been a little muddy country lane, but the soldiers had made it wide as Fleet Street, and it was bearing a mightier traffic than that famous thoroughfare night and day. The little road with its mean perfections and imperfections had gone, and the large road with big faults and big virtues had come. This soldiers' road has faults the farmers' road knew not, but then it has burdens and duties unknown before, and it has had no time to prepare for them. Like our boy-officers who are bearing grown men's burdens of responsibility and bearing them well, the road has had no time to harden. To strengthen itself for its duties, it eats up stones as a giant eats up food. I had no right to look for the smoothness of Oxford Street or the Strand. Such avenues represent the work of centuries, this of days. They have grown with their burdens, but this has had vast burdens thrown upon it suddenly, and while it was immature. Oxford Street and Fleet Street are the roads of peace, and laden with wealth and luxury, law and literature--things that can wait. But on this road of the soldiers' making, nothing is allowed except it be concerned with matters of life and death. It is the road of war, and there is a terrible urgency about it. Over it pass ammunition to the guns, rations to the soldiers in the trenches, ambulances bearing back the wounded to the hospital. Whatever its conditions the work must be done, and there is no room for a halting prudence or the pride of appearance. Rough though it is and muddy, over it is passing, for all who have eyes to see, a new and better civilization and a wider liberty. I had grumbled at the worn-out road when I ought to have praised it. I was as an ingrate who finds fault with his father's hands because they are rough and horny.
It was a group of soldier-roadmakers who brought me to my senses. They were making a new road through the fields, and it branched off from the one I was on. I saw its crude beginning and considered the burdens it would soon have to bear. As I stood watching these English roadmakers my mind wandered down the avenues of time, and I saw the Roman soldiers building their immortal roads through England. They were joining town to town and country to country. They were introducing the people of the North to those of the South, and bringing the East into fellowship with the West. I saw come along their roads the union of all England followed at, some distance, by that of England, Scotland and Wales; and I regretted that there was no foundation on which they could build a road to Ireland. I saw on those soldier-built roads, also, Christianity and Civilization marching, and in the villages and towns by the wayside they found a home whence they have sent out missionaries and teachers to the ends of the earth.
"The captains and the kings depart." The Roman Empire is no more, but the Roman roads remain. They direct our modern life and business with an inevitability the Roman soldiers never exercised. In two thousand years the Empire may have fallen apart and become a thing of the past; but the roads her sons have built in France, these two-and-a-half years, will abide forever and be a perpetual blessing; for, of things made by hands, there is, after the church and the home, nothing more sacred than the road. The roadmaker does more for the brotherhood of man and the federation of the world than the most eloquent orator. The roadmaker has his dreams and visions as well as the poet, and he expresses them in broken stones. He uses stones as artists use colors, and orators words. He touches them--transient as they are--with immortality. A little of his soul sticks to each stone he uses, and though the stone perishes the road remains. His body may perish more quickly than the stones and be laid in some quiet churchyard by the wayside, but his soul will never utterly forsake the road he helped to make. In man's nature, and in all his works, there is a strange blending of the temporal and the eternal, and in nothing is it more marked than in the roads he builds.
The roadmaker is the pioneer among men and without him there would be neither artist nor orator. He goes before civilization as John the Baptist went before Christ, and he is as rough and elemental. Hard as his own stones, without him mankind would have remained savage and suspicious as beasts of prey; and art, science and literature would have had no beginning. His road may begin in war, but it ends in peace.
The pioneers I saw roadmaking were, for the greater part, over military age, and such as I had often seen leaning heavily on the bar of some miserable beer-house. In those days they seemed of the earth, earthy, and the stars that lure to high thoughts and noble endeavors seemed to shine on them in vain. But one never knows what is passing in the heart of another. Of all things human nature is the most mysterious and deceptive. God seems to play at hide-and-seek with men. He hides pearls in oysters lying in the ooze of the sea; and gold under the everlasting snows of the Arctic regions. Diamonds he buries deep down in the dirt beneath the African veldt. He places Christ in a carpenter's shop, Joan of Arc in a peasant's dwelling, Lincoln in a settler's cabin, and Burns in a crude cottage built by his father's own hands. He hides generous impulses and heroic traits in types of men that in our mean imaginations we can only associate with the saw-dust sprinkled bar-room. Only when war or pestilence have kindled their fierce and lurid flames do we find the hidden nobility that God has stored away in strange places--places often as foul and unlikely as those where a miser stores his gold.