note that every single man of these broken and decimated detachments was in good humour, though dog tired; and that every single one of them had kept his accoutrements and his rifle; and that every single one of them, whether moving under orders or acting upon his own initiative, was intent upon just two things and two things only – to get back into the maelstrom from which temporarily he had been spewed forth, and pump more lead into the living tidal wave of grey coats. Some that we overtook were singing, and singing lustily too. Than this no man could ask to see a finer spectacle of fortitude, of pluck and of discipline, and I am sure that in his heart each one of us, while having no doubt of the outcome of the fiery test, prayed that our own soldiers, when their time of trial by battle came, might under reverses and under punishment acquit themselves as well as had these British veterans, Yorkshire and Bedfordshire and Canada, who came trudging along behind us, swallowing our dust. What impressed us as most significant of all was that only once that day did we see a scrap of personal equipment that had been cast aside. This was a cartridge belt of English make, with its pouches empty and its tough leather tom almost in two, lying like a broken-backed brown snake in a ditch.
Already from wounded English soldiers and from exhausted English hospital workers whom we had seen back in Soissons we comprehended a measure of appreciation of what these battered fragments of the forces had been called upon to endure during four days and five nights. We knew as surely as though we had stopped to take down the story of each one of the wearied, cheerful, resolute chaps, that they had their fill of killing the enemy and of seeing their mates about them blown to bits by high explosives or mowed down by rifle fire. I recalled what a bedraggled young surgeon, a Highlander by his accent, had said the night before:
“I crave never to pass through this experience again. I have seen so much of death since this battle started that I have in me now contempt not only for death but for life too. I thought last year on the Somme I saw real fighting. Man, it was but child’s play to what I saw the day before yesterday!
“From the casualty dressing post where I was on duty I could see the fighting spread out before me like a cinema show. For our shelter – we were in a concrete dugout – was in the side of a hill with a wide sweep of lowland below and beyond us, and it was here in this valley that the Germans came at our people. Between jobs in the operating theatre – and God knows we had enough of them – I would slip out for a breath of air, and then I could watch through my glasses what went on.
“In wave after wave the Germans came on, marching close together in numbers incredible. They were like ants; they were like flies; like swarming grasshoppers. At first they tried a frontal attack against our trenches, but even the Germans, driven on as they must have been like cattle to the slaughter, couldn’t stand what they got there. Within two hours they charged three times! Each time they fell back again, and each time they left their dead lying so thickly behind that finally the ground seemed as though it were covered with a grey carpet.
“That happened in the first day of their drive against our part of the line, which was the third line back, the two front lines having already been taken by them. So on the next day, which was the day before yesterday, they worked their way round to the south a bit and tried a flanking advance. Then it was I saw this, just as I’m telling it to you. I saw them caught by our machine-gun fire and piled up, heap on heap, until there was a windrow of them before the British trenches that must have been six feet high.
“They went back, but they came again and again, and they kept on coming. They climbed right over that wall of their own dead – I myself watched them scrambling up among the bodies – and they slid down on the other side and ran right into the wire entanglements, where those of them that were killed hung in the wires like garments drying on a line. They died there in such numbers that they fairly clogged the wires. And still they kept on coming.
“When our line began to bend in, farther away to the west, we got orders to evacuate the station; and the men in the trenches where I had seen the fighting got orders – what were left of them – to fall back too. They were Scotchmen, these laddies, and they were fairly mad with the fighting. They didn’t want to go, and they refused to go. I’m told by reliable witnesses that their officers had almost to use force against them – not to make them keep on fighting but to make them quit fighting.”
He looked into the coals of the wood fire and shivered.
“Man, it’s not war any more; it’s just plain slaughter. Mark my word – there’ll never be another war such as this one has been or another battle such as the one that still goes on yonder. ‘Tis not in flesh and blood to endure its repetition once the hate has been cooled by a taste of peace.”
The men about us for the most part must have taken part as actors in scenes such as the young surgeon had described as an onlooker. But about them there was no sign of reluctance or of surcease. We realised as thoroughly as though we had been eyewitnesses to their conduct that they had carried on like brave men; and without being told we realised, too, that they were made of the stuff which keeps carrying on as long as there is life left in it. They were of the breed of the bulldog, and clean strain, at that.
Frenchmen grew fewer in number along the route we travelled; Britishers became more and more numerous. Where byways crossed the highroad and in wrecked villages the British already had posted military policemen to guide the traffic and point out the proper directions to bodies of men passing through. Those men stood in midroad giving their orders as calmly and as crisply as though they had been bobbies on the Strand. Even this emergency John Bull’s military system did not disintegrate. As long as the organism lasted the organisation would last too. Nowhere was there any suggestion of confusion or conflict of will. I am prone to think that in the years to come the chief outstanding fact about the great spring offensive of 1918 will be not the way the Germans came forward but the way in which the British fell back.
Until now we had seen only British foot soldiers, and once or twice officers in motor cars or on horseback; but soon we came upon a battery of British light artillery. It was jolting across muddy pasture among the stumps of apple trees which the Germans with malignant thoroughness had felled before their big retreat of twelve months before. The place had been an orchard once. Now it was merely so much waste land, dedicated to uselessness by efficiency and kultur. The trees, as we could see, had not been blown down by shell fire or hewn down with axes. They had been neatly and painstakingly sawed through, clear down to the earth. Some of the butts measured a foot and a half across, and to have bolls of this size, fruit trees in this country must have attained great age.
The battery took position and went into immediate action behind a covert of willows and scrub at the far side of the ruined orchard. At the moment we did not know that the thicket was a screen along the southern bank of the Oise. At the left of where the guns were speaking was a group of empty and shattered cottages stretching along a single narrow street that ran almost due north and south. Coming opposite the foot of this street we glimpsed at the other end of it a glint of running water, and in the same instant, perhaps two or three miles away farther on across the river, we made out the twin spires of the cathedral of Noyon, for which, as we know, the contending armies had striven for forty-eight hours, and which the evening before had fallen into the enemy’s hands. Literally we were at the front of the Front.
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