It pleases me to think of him meeting Bacchus and Binty and the rest and arguing out the meaning of it all. Does he know now, I wonder, the colossal issues that were at stake during that terrible fortnight between Mons and the Marne, and does he forgive us our seeming cruelty?
I hope so. I like to think that Bilfred understands.
THE SPIRIT OF FRANCE.
BY LIEUT. F. J. SALMON.
We had been away from our area for several days on a special mission and were the guests of the French Staff at X. The programme for the day included a visit to an observation post, the exact position of which was not known to our guide, and it was necessary to call at a French battery and pick up someone to show us the way. A very cheering description of the situation at Verdun by an officer who had just come from there had kept us rather later than usual at lunch, a fact to which we owed our escape from a very unpleasant bit of ‘strafing.’ We had still some 200 yards to go to reach the battery when the Huns started shelling it furiously. A few ‘overs’ came within about 100 yards of us and there was rather an unpleasant whirr of splinters, so we took refuge behind a house.
The crash of the first salvo had aroused a good woman and her baby and she came out, smiling, to see what was happening. Carrying the baby, she went out into the road and stood in the line of fire watching the fun. She occasionally dodged back behind the wall when the bits flew too near, just as a child would run from a snowball. She said her man was in the ‘Chasseurs Alpins’ and had been in the Vosges since the beginning—he was not afraid of the Boches, why should she be? A French ‘poilu’ passing by scolded her for exposing the child and she disappeared.
After five minutes of hot shelling the Huns stopped, and Lieutenant M., our guide, proposed that we should continue. The Hun usually caters for those people who ‘carry on’ at once, so we decided to visit a friend whose office was only two doors off. Lieutenant R. was delighted to see us. Yes, this particular Boche battery was ‘dégoûtant.’ It fired like a mitrailleuse, yes, and some of the ‘overs’ came this way. He had the honour to announce to us that ‘there was an unexploded 77-shell in his ceiling—no, it had not been there long and was probably still warm.’ Two more rounds battery fire then came over and we judged the trouble past for the time being. When we reached the battery we found they had had a bad time. It was an old territorial field battery—there was probably not a gunner less than forty in it. One of the guns had had a direct hit. The wheel and part of the carriage were smashed. Two of the other gun emplacements had been knocked in. The German battery responsible for this had been located, and the bearded old Frenchmen were getting ready for retaliation. Three of the guns were already ready for action, and efforts were being made to heave the broken one up on to a temporary carriage so that at least one more shot might be got out of it! A telephone message had been sent up from the brigade asking them to have a guide ready for us, but the matter had been forgotten. There was far more excitement about this than about the bombardment. Lieutenant M. called up the Sergeant-Major and ‘strafed’ him unmercifully. The Sergeant-Major was ‘désolé,’ but at the moment he had been ‘très occupé.’ He was ‘confus’ and would ‘mon capitaine’ accept his apology—the ‘cochons de Bosches’ were far more responsible than he was. Lieutenant M. said it was all right, called him ‘mon vieux,’ and we departed for our post with a fit-up guide who persisted that he did not know the way, but who nevertheless got us there in the end and we had a good look at the enemy lines and the country beyond. On our return we passed a small cottage which had been hit by something big. More than half of it had been blown away and there was no roof left at all. The chimney, however, was still there and it poured forth a defiant stream of smoke as the owner cooked his dinner in a temporary shelter near the fireplace.
The French Headquarters mess was more than usually cheery that evening. The enemy had had another setback at Verdun.
The British, too, were going to take over more line from the French, and this brought the subject round to Great Britain and what she was doing in the war. This was a point I should have preferred to have left undiscussed at a time when the French were engaged in perhaps the greatest struggle in the war with, apparently, no direct assistance from us. Our hosts, however, insisted that, under the circumstances, we were doing a good deal more than could be expected of us. They were unanimous that the most remarkable achievement of this greatest of all wars was the raising of our large Imperial army. It was one thing to make good use of a working organisation as the Germans had, but, as staff officers, they would have believed it impossible for any country to have done what we have done. Each one was able to show the insuperable difficulties that would have arisen in his own department, and there was nothing one could do but bow and agree with them.