With our army in Flanders

by Valentine Williams

This sordid patch of ravaged fields is the theatre of war. These crumbling ditches and broken posts, these obliterated farmsteads, these lamentable dead, and, always opposite, the long, low line of sandbags marking the German trenches, make up the setting of so many great dramas in our history of to-day. On this scene our young men gaze as they take a final look about them before plunging forward to the assault that is to lead them to their death. In these surroundings are performed those great deeds of gallantry which stir our race to the core. Whether you are in Flanders or the Argonne, in flat or undulating country, the space between the lines is always the same. It is as dead as the castle of la Belle au Bois dormant, the only truly neutral ground in Europe to-day.

An extraordinarily untidy-looking jumble of multi-coloured sandbags, white and blue and green and stripey (like the ticking of a mattress), marks the German line.

You will be disposed to think that the German trenches must be ill-constructed until you have seen our line from the outside. Then you will understand that, under the weight of the parapet and the influence of the wet, sandbags get squeezed out of their regular line, many besides being constantly ripped open by the bullets plunging through their canvas into the mud within with a sharp smack.

The German trench-line looks old and untidy and weather-beaten. The only neat thing about it are the dark grey steel plates let in at intervals all along the line. These are the plates with a loophole that may be opened or shut for firing purposes.

The trench-line is finite. Here England, the Empire, ends. Up to the line, by grace of the A.S.C., you may live your life as an Englishman, eat your bully beef and drink your dixie of tea, receive your two posts a day and your newspaper, and enjoy the safety of the strong iron ring which the Grand Fleet has thrown about our vast possessions. Beyond the line the Polizei-Staat very soon begins. Behind the parapet across the intervening space framed in the little loophole of our firing-plate everything is feldgrau. As regular and universal as the drab grey uniform of the German hordes is the mentality of that people moving like one man to the wires pulled in Berlin—wires that stretch from the ugly yellow building of the Grosser General Stab, by the Koenigsplatz, to this narrow ditch in Flanders.

It is overwhelming, this first glance into the enemy’s country. Spires and towers, mine-shafts and chimney-stacks, are as fingers beckoning to the Allies, pointing to them the path of duty and honour. A forest of tall factory chimneys, seen cold and smokeless in the blue of the horizon, mark where Lille waits feverishly the hour of her deliverance. From all parts of our line I have gazed long into the zone of the German Army, from the banks of the Yser Canal in the north, down to the heart of the Artois country in the south, and woven for myself mental pictures of the life of the Germans in the field, with only a hundred yards or so separating them from our lines, nearer than most of them have ever been to England or, please God, ever will be. Did ever, in the whole course of history, a hundred yards bridge a gulf so vast as that existing here—between individual liberty and chivalry and mutual forbearance, on the one hand, and, on the other, a police-controlled mentality, a blind adoration of brute force, and a cynical disregard of the teachings of Christ?

With the combatants on both sides securely hidden from view deep in the ground, there is little opportunity in this siege warfare of seeing the daily life of the German at the front. A French General who had been in the field since last October jubilantly informed a friend of mine one day this summer that he had that morning seen a German for the first time. I may therefore, I presume, esteem myself fortunate to have seen quite a number of Germans in their lines in the course of my journeyings up and down the front.

I shall never forget the first German I saw. It is true that he was not in the German lines, but in the British military hospital installed in the Trianon Palace Hotel at Versailles. It was in September, and the army was on the Aisne. This German was lying in a tent in the beautiful garden of the hotel abutting on the park of Versailles. He was dying of gangrene, and his condition made it impossible to keep him indoors in a ward with the other wounded. His bed had therefore been moved into this tent—a large, airy place. With him there was another gangrene victim, a British soldier.

It was a grim and poignant meeting. A civilian doctor, who was with me, whispered, directly he saw the man and breathed the air of that tent, that the case was hopeless. The German was a thick-set, bearded Landsturm man, nearing the fifties. His face was very bronzed, and looked almost black beside the whiteness of his pillow. He was fiercely and bitterly hostile, and his eyes, already dulling with the shadow of approaching death, blazed for a moment with unconcealed enmity as he looked at the Englishman by his bedside.

I spoke to him in German. He never took his eyes off my face as he heard again the familiar sounds of his mother-tongue. I asked him his name. He told me. I have forgotten it, but I remember he said he was a farmer from near Hanover. His voice was very, very weak, and the intonation was indescribably sad. I asked him how he felt. “Es geht mit mir zu Ende!” (I am all but finished), he replied slowly.