With our army in Flanders

by Valentine Williams

“I’d like to be, I’d like to be,
I’d like to be right home in Dixie....”

Cheery and confident like all our men, they heed neither the menace of death which those whistling shells convey nor the grim signs that meet them on their way of the harvest the Reaper has gathered in those peaceful cornfields. Here the trench passes a little burial-ground in an orchard, lying between an old farm-house and its deep broad moat, the branches of the apple and pear trees leaning down until they seem to caress with their gnarled fingers the little white crosses of the graves. Now the trench stops by a sunken ditch, where a faint and horrible odour speaks of fallen Germans buried in the slime. The men cross the ditch by its little bridge with exaggerated sounds expressive of disgust, with a joke, in which horror has no place. “Heute Dir, morgen mir” is the philosophy of the trenches, and a laughing philosophy it is.

Some day a poet shall sing the song of the communication trench, when peace has come back to the land and the long grasses, springing up, have smothered the narrow way that once upon a time led up to the fiery ordeal of battle. He shall tell of the men who dug the trench by night, toiling in the silver radiance of the moon among the eerie shadows flitting in and out of ruined hamlets and deserted farms. He shall conjure up the hard, black silhouette of the group, standing out against the light of the German star-shells soaring skyward with a hissing screech, making the countryside as bright as day.

His verse shall carry in its swing the dull thud of pick and shovel on the soft ground blending with the hurried gasping of the machine-guns and the crack of the rifles in the firing-line. He shall sing of the men who have trodden the marshy bottom of the trench going gladly forth into battle—of those who went up and came down, of those who went up and were presently laid to rest in that earth to which, by the Heavenly Will, all men must return. And for the brave smiles and calm resolution those narrow ditches have seen, my poet shall sing of them, not as a place of horror, not as the ante-chamber of death, but as the strait path that leads to glory.

Imperceptibly the winding course of the communication trench brings you nearer to noises of which you are aware without seeking to fathom their meaning. There are sounds like those produced by running a stick along an iron railing, there are individual, crisp noises like the smack of a mass of butter on a marble slab, vague echoes in the air like the rustling of gigantic wings, and here and there explosions, now loud and insistent and close and terrifying, now distant and muffled like the bark of an old dog. Then, as you realize with a flash that these are the sounds of war, and begin to distinguish between the rap-rap of the machine-gun, the hard crepitation of the rifle-bullet, and the dull boom of a shell, you find you are in the firing-line.

What the eye focusses is merely a scene of some disorder, where the communication trench debouches into the open and fades away opposite a line of sandbags. Here is all the bustle of the bivouac, soldiers grouped about fires on which pots are simmering, others polishing accoutrements, “cleaning up,” writing letters. But the eye does not take in this picture. It is looking farther afield to where, on a low platform behind a neat row of sandbags, the sentries are standing immobile beside their rifles. Their bandoliers are strapped across them, their bayonets are fixed. Their backs are turned to you. They look forward with an air of strained attention. They are the look-out men in the fire-trench.

Piles of sandbags and a great deal of timber-work, timber flooring, and timber supports, as neat and prosaic as a street excavation in London, is what the eye sees. But my first view of that line of men standing on guard at the parapet stimulated my imagination more than any other picture I have seen in this war; for I realized that these quiet figures behind their stout rampart are the bulwark of our civilization, an infinitesimal fraction of the line which the Allies have flung from the Channel to the Alps.

“Our world has passed away,
In wantonness o’erthrown.
There is nothing left to-day
But steel and fire and stone.”

Here, in the firing-line, one stands on the ruins of that world of ours, in Kipling’s fine symbolism, that passed away at the menace of the Hun. The little strip of parapet before us, like all the rest of the line winding its way from the sands of Nieuport to the frontier of Switzerland, is the boundary-line between civilization and barbarism, the bourne which marks the frontier between idealism and materialism.

Beyond the parapet is broken ground, utterly uninteresting, utterly prosaic, for all that it is the realm of death. Immediately in front of the trench is barbed wire, new and taut and cleanly grey, fastened in a perplexing criss-cross work to lines of stout wooden posts driven deep in the ground; beyond that a stretch of flat field, of corn or grass or stubble, with a ditch here and a tree there, and maybe a pile of blackened bricks that once was a farm. Between corn and grass and stubble the earth has been turned up in places—you may see it brown or white beneath its cloak of scarlet poppies or azure cornflowers. An irregular cluster of posts from which hang jagged fragments of barbed wire, a whitish line in the ground marking an old trench, something like an old grey coat lying humped up on the grass or a pair of boots thrust out from a hole in the ground, which, if you have seen a battlefield before, you know to be unburied corpses—all these are relics of former fighting.