The Soul of the War by Philip Gibbs

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The roads were encumbered with long convoys of provisions for the
troops, ambulances, Red Cross motor-cars, gun-wagons, and farm
carts. Two regiments of Belgian cavalry--the chasseurs a cheval--
were dismounted and bivouacked with their horses drawn up in single
line along the roadway for half a mile or more. The men were splendid
fellows, hardened by the long campaign, and amazingly careless of
shells. They wore a variety of uniforms, for they were but the
gathered remnants of the Belgian cavalry division which had fought
from the beginning of the war. I was surprised to see their horses in
such good condition, in spite of a long ordeal which had so steadied
their nerves that they paid not the slightest heed to the turmoil of the
guns.

Near the line of battle, through outlying villages and past broken
farms, companies of Belgian infantry were huddled under cover out of
the way of shrapnel bullets if they could get the shelter of a doorway
or the safer side of a brick wall. I stared into their faces and saw how
dead they looked. It seemed as if their vital spark had already been
put out by the storm of battle. Their eyes were sunken and quite
expressionless. For week after week, night after night, they had been
exposed to shell-fire, and something had died within them--perhaps
the desire to live. Every now and then some of them would duck their
heads as a shell burst within fifty or a hundred yards of them, and I
saw then that fear could still live in the hearts of men who had
become accustomed to the constant chance of death. For fear exists
with the highest valour, and its psychological effect is not unknown to
heroes who have the courage to confess the truth.

14

"If any man says he is not afraid of shell-fire," said one of the bravest
men I have ever met--and at that moment we were watching how the
enemy's shrapnel was ploughing up the earth on either side of the
road on which we stood--"he is a liar!" There are very few men in this
war who make any such pretence. On the contrary, most of the
French, Belgian, and English soldiers with whom I have had wayside
conversations since the war began, find a kind of painful pleasure in
the candid confession of their fears.

"It is now three days since I have been frightened," said a young
English officer, who, I fancy, was never scared in his life before he
came out to see these battlefields of terror.

"I was paralysed with a cold and horrible fear when I was ordered
to advance with my men over open ground under the enemy's
shrapnel," said a French officer with the steady brown eyes of a man
who in ordinary tests of courage would smile at the risk of death.

But this shell-fire is not an ordinary test of courage. Courage is
annihilated in the face of it. Something else takes its place--a
philosophy of fatalism, sometimes an utter boredom with the way in
which death plays the fool with men, threatening but failing to kill; in
most cases a strange extinction of all emotions and sensations, so
that men who have been long under shell-fire have a peculiar rigidity
of the nervous system, as if something has been killed inside them,
though outwardly they are still alive and untouched.

The old style of courage, when man had pride and confidence in his
own strength and valour against other men, when he was on an
equality with his enemy in arms and intelligence, has almost gone. It
has quite gone when he is called upon to advance or hold the ground
in face of the enemy's artillery. For all human qualities are of no avail
against those death-machines. What are quickness of wit, the
strength of a man's right arm, the heroic fibre of his heart, his cunning
in warfare, when he is opposed by an enemy's batteries which belch
out bursting shells with frightful precision and regularity? What is the
most courageous man to do in such an hour? Can he stand erect
and fearless under a sky which is raining down jagged pieces of
steel? Can he adopt the pose of an Adelphi hero, with a scornful
smile on his lips, when a yard away from him a hole large enough to
bury a taxicab is torn out of the earth, and when the building against
which he has been standing is suddenly knocked into a ridiculous
ruin?

It is impossible to exaggerate the monstrous horror of the shell-fire,
as I knew when I stood in the midst of it, watching its effect upon the
men around me, and analysing my own psychological sensations with
a morbid interest. I was very much afraid--day after day I faced that
musis and hated it--but there were all sorts of other sensations
besides fear which worked a change in me. I was conscious of great
physical discomfort which reacted upon my brain. The noises were
even more distressing to me than the risk of death. It was terrifying in
its tumult. The German batteries were hard at work round Nieuport,
Dixmude, Pervyse, and other towns and villages, forming a crescent,
with its left curve sweeping away from the coast. One could see the
stabbing flashes from some of the enemy's guns and a loud and
unceasing roar came from them with regular rolls of thunderous noise
interrupted by sudden and terrific shocks, which shattered into one's
brain and shook one's body with a kind of disintegrating tumult. High
above this deep-toned concussion came the cry of the shells--that
long carrying buzz--like a monstrous, angry bee rushing away from a
burning hive--which rises into a shrill singing note before ending and
bursting into the final boom which scatters death.

But more awful was the noise of our own guns. At Nieuport I stood
only a few hundred yards away from the warships lying off the coast.
Each shell which they sent across the dunes was like one of Jove's
thunderbolts, and made one's body and soul quake with the agony of
its noise. The vibration was so great that it made my skull ache as
though it had been hammered. Long afterwards I found myself
trembling with those waves of vibrating sounds. Worse still, because
sharper and more piercingly staccato, was my experience close to a
battery of French cent-vingt. Each shell was fired with a hard metallic
crack, which seemed to knock a hole into my ear-drums. I suffered
intolerably from the noise, yet--so easy it is to laugh in the midst of
pain---I laughed aloud when a friend of mine, passing the battery in
his motor-car, raised his hand to one of the gunners, and said, "Un
moment, s'il vous plait!" It was like asking Jove to stop his
thunderbolts.

Some people get accustomed to the noise, but others never. Every
time a battery fired simultaneously one of the men who were with me,
a hard, tough type of mechanic, shrank and ducked his head with an
expression of agonized horror. He confessed to me that it "knocked
his nerves to pieces." Three such men out of six or seven had to be
invalided home in one week. One of them had a crise de nerfs, which
nearly killed him. Yet it was not fear which was the matter with them.
Intellectually they were brave men and coerced themselves into
joining many perilous adventures. It was the intolerable strain upon
the nervous system that made wrecks of them. Some men are
attacked with a kind of madness in the presence of shells. It is what a
French friend of mine called la folie des obus. It is a kind of spiritual
exultation which makes them lose self-consciousness and be caught
up, as it were, in the delirium of those crashing, screaming things. In
the hottest quarter of an hour in Dixmude one of my friends paced
about aimlessly with a dreamy look in his eyes. I am sure he had not
the slightest idea where he was or what he was doing. I believe he
was "outside himself," to use a good old-fashioned phrase. And at
Antwerp, when a convoy of British ambulances escaped with their
wounded through a storm of shells, one man who had shown a
strange hankering for the heart of the inferno, stepped off his car, and
said: "I must go back, I must go back! Those shells call to me." He
went back and has never been heard of again.

Greater than one's fear, more overmastering in one's interest is this
shell-fire. It is frightfully interesting to watch the shrapnel bursting
near bodies of troops, to see the shells kicking up the earth, now in
this direction and now in that; to study a great building gradually losing
its shape and falling into ruins; to see how death takes its toll in an
indiscriminate way--smashing a human being into pulp a few yards
away and leaving oneself alive, or scattering a roadway with bits of
raw flesh which a moment ago was a team of horses, or whipping the
stones about a farmhouse with shrapnel bullets which spit about the
crouching figures of soldiers who stare at these pellets out of sunken
eyes. One's interest holds one in the firing zone with a grip from which
one's intelligence cannot escape whatever may be one's cowardice.
It is the most satisfying thrill of horror in the world. How foolish this
death is! How it picks and chooses, taking a man here and leaving a
man there by just a hair's-breadth of difference. It is like looking into
hell and watching the fury of supernatural forces at play with human
bodies, tearing them to pieces with great splinters of steel and
burning them in the furnace-fires of shell-stricken towns, and in a
devilish way obliterating the image of humanity in a welter of blood.

There is a beauty in it too, for the aestheticism of a Nero. Beautiful
and terrible were the fires of those Belgian towns which I watched
under a star-strewn sky. There was a pure golden glow, as of liquid
metal, beneath the smoke columns and the leaping tongues of flame.
And many colours were used to paint this picture of war, for the
enemy used shells with different coloured fumes, by which I was told
they studied the effect of their fire. Most vivid is the ordinary shrapnel,
which tears a rent through the black volumes of smoke rolling over a
smouldering town with a luminous sphere of electric blue. Then from
the heavier guns come dense puff-balls of tawny orange, violet, and
heliotrope, followed by fleecy little cumuli of purest white. One's mind
is absorbed in this pageant of shell-fire, and with a curious intentness,
with that rigidity of nervous and muscular force which I have
described, one watches the zone of fire sweeping nearer to oneself,
bursting quite close, killing people not very far away.

Men who have been in the trenches under heavy shell-fire,
sometimes for as long as three days, come out of their torment like
men who have been buried alive. They have the brownish, ashen
colour of death. They tremble as through anguish. They are dazed
and stupid for a time. But they go back. That is the marvel of it. They
go back day after day, as the Belgians went day after day. There is
no fun in it, no sport, none of that heroic adventure which used
perhaps--gods know--to belong to warfare when men were matched
against men, and not against unapproachable artillery. This is their
courage, stronger than all their fear. There is something in us, even
divine pride of manhood, a dogged disregard of death, though it
comes from an unseen enemy out of a smoke-wracked sky, like the
thunderbolts of the gods, which makes us go back, though we know
the terror of it. For honour's sake men face again the music of that
infernal orchestra, and listen with a deadly sickness in their hearts to
the song of the shell screaming the French word for kill, which is tue!
tue!

It was at night that I used to see the full splendour of the war's infernal
beauty. After a long day in the fields travelling back in the repeated
journeys to the station of Fortem, where the lightly wounded men
used to be put on a steam tramway for transport to the Belgian
hospitals, the ambulances would gather their last load and go
homeward to Furnes. It was quite dark then, and towards nine o'clock
the enemy's artillery would slacken fire, only the heavy guns sending
out long-range shots. But five towns or more were blazing fiercely in
the girdle of fire, and the sky throbbed with the crimson glare of their
furnaces, and tall trees to which the autumn foliage clung would be
touched with light, so that their straight trunks along a distant highway
stood like ghostly sentinels. Now and again, above one of the burning
towns a shell would burst as though the enemy were not content with
their fires and would smash them into smaller fuel.

As I watched the flames, I knew that each one of those poor burning
towns was the ruin of something more than bricks and mortar. It was
the ruin of a people's ideals, fulfilled throughout centuries of quiet
progress in arts and crafts. It was the shattering of all those things for
which they praised God in their churches--the good gifts of home-life,
the security of the family, the impregnable stronghold, as it seemed,
of prosperity built by labour and thrift now utterly destroyed.

15

I motored over to Nieuport-les-Bains, the seaside resort of the town of
Nieuport itself, which is a little way from the coast. It was one of those
Belgian watering-places much beloved by the Germans before their
guns knocked it to bits--a row of red-brick villas with a few pretentious
hotels utterly uncharacteristic of the Flemish style of architecture,
lining a promenade and built upon the edge of dreary and
monotonous sand-dunes. On this day the place and its neighbourhood
were utterly and terribly desolate. The only human beings I passed
on my car were two seamen of the British Navy, who were fixing
up a wireless apparatus on the edge of the sand. They stared at
our ambulances curiously, and one of them gave me a prolonged
and strenuous wink, as though to say, "A fine old game, mate,
this bloody war!" Beyond, the sea was very calm, like liquid lead,
and a slight haze hung over it, putting a gauzy veil about a line of
British and French monitors which lay close to the coast. Not a soul
could be seen along the promenade of Nieuport-les-Bains, but the
body of a man--a French marine--whose soul had gone in flight upon
the great adventure of eternity, lay at the end of it with his sightless
eyes staring up to the grey sky. Presently I was surprised to see an
elderly civilian and a small boy come out of one of the houses. The
man told me he was the proprietor of the Grand Hotel, "but," he
added, with a gloomy smile, "I have no guests at this moment In a
little while, perhaps my hotel will have gone also." He pointed to a
deep hole ploughed up an hour ago by a German "Jack Johnson." It
was deep enough to bury a taxicab.

For some time, as I paced up and down the promenade, there was
no answer to the mighty voices of the naval guns firing from some
British warships lying along the coast. Nor did any answer come for
some time to a French battery snugly placed in a hollow of the dunes,
screened by a few trees. I listened to the overwhelming concussion of
each shot from the ships, wondering at the mighty flight of the shell,
which travelled through the air with the noise of an express train
rushing through a tunnel. It was curious that no answer came! Surely
the German batteries beyond the river would reply to that deadly
cannonade.

I had not long to wait for the inevitable response. It came with a
shriek, and a puff of bluish smoke, as the German shrapnel burst a
hundred yards from where I stood. It was followed by several shells
which dropped into the dunes, not far from the French battery of cent-
vingt. Another knocked off the gable of a villa.

I had been pacing up and down under the shelter of a red-brick wall
leading into the courtyard of a temporary hospital, and presently,
acting upon orders from Lieutenant de Broqueville, I ran my car up
the road with a Belgian medical officer to a place where some
wounded men were lying. When I came back again the red-brick wall
had fallen into a heap. The Belgian officer described the climate as
"quite unhealthy," as I went away with two men dripping blood on the
floor of the car. They had been brought across the ferry, further on,
where the Belgian trenches were being strewn with shrapnel. Another
little crowd of wounded men was there. Many of them had been
huddled up all night, wet to the skin, with their wounds undressed,
and without any kind of creature comfort. Their condition had reached
the ultimate bounds of misery, and with two of these poor fellows I
went away to fetch hot coffee for the others, so that at last they might
get a little warmth if they had strength enough to drink... That
evening, after a long day in the fields of death, and when I came back
from the village where men lay waiting for rescue or the last escape, I
looked across to Nieuport-les-Bains. There were quivering flames
above it and shells were bursting over it with pretty little puffs of
smoke which rested in the opalescent sky. I thought of the proprietor
of the Grand Hotel, and wondered if he had insured his house against
"Jack Johnsons."

16

Early next morning I paid a visit to the outskirts of Nieuport town,
inland. It was impossible to get further than the outskirts at that time,
because in the centre houses were falling and flames were licking
each other across the roadways. It was even difficult for our
ambulances to get so far, because we had to pass over a bridge to
which the enemy's guns were paying great attention. Several of their
thunderbolts fell with a hiss into the water of the canal where some
Belgian soldiers were building a bridge of boats. It was just an odd
chance that our ambulance could get across without being touched,
but we took the chance and dodged between two shell-bursts. On the
other side, on the outlying streets, there was a litter of bricks and
broken glass, and a number of stricken men lay huddled in the
parlour of a small house to which they had been carried. One man
was holding his head to keep his brains from spilling, and the others
lay tangled amidst upturned chairs and cottage furniture. There was
the photograph of a family group on the mantelpiece, between cheap
vases which had been the pride, perhaps, of this cottage home. On
one of the walls was a picture of Christ with a bleeding heart.

I remember that at Nieuport there was a young Belgian doctor who
had established himself at a dangerous post within range of the
enemy's guns, and close to a stream of wounded who came pouring
into the little house which he had made into his field hospital. He had
collected also about twenty old men and women who had been
unable to get away when the first shells fell. Without any kind of help
he gave first aid to men horribly torn by the pieces of flying shell, and
for three days and nights worked very calmly and fearlessly, careless
of the death which menaced his own life.

Here he was found by the British column of field ambulances, who
took away the old people and relieved him of the last batch of
blesses. They told the story of that doctor over the supper-table that
night, and hoped he would be remembered by his own people.

17

There were picnic parties on the Belgian roadsides. Looking back
now upon those luncheon hours, with khaki ambulances as shelters
from the shrewd wind that came across the marshes, I marvel at the
contrast between their gaiety and the brooding horror in the
surrounding scene. Bottles of wine were produced and no man
thought of blood when he drank its redness, though the smell of
blood reeked from the stretchers in the cars. There were hunks of
good Flemish cheese with' fresh bread and butter, and it was
extraordinary what appetites we had, though guns were booming a
couple of kilometres away and the enemy was smashing the last
strongholds of the Belgians. The women in their field kit, so feminine
though it included breeches, gave a grace to those wayside halts,
and gave to dirty men the chance of little courtesies which brought
back civilization to their thoughts, even though life had gone back to
primitive things with just life and death, hunger and thirst, love and
courage, as the laws of existence. The man who had a corkscrew
could command respect. A lady with gold-spun hair could gnaw a
chicken bone without any loss of beauty. The chauffeurs munched
solidly, making cockney jokes out of full mouths and abolishing all
distinctions of caste by their comradeship in great adventures when
their courage, their cool nerve, their fine endurance at the wheel, and
their skill in taking heavy ambulances down muddy roads with
skidding wheels, saved many men's lives and won a heartfelt praise.
Little groups of Belgian soldiers came up wistfully and lingered round
us as though liking the sight of us, and the sound of our English
speech, and the gallantry of those girls who went into the firing-lines
to rescue their wounded.

"They are wonderful, your English ladies," said a bearded man. He
hesitated a moment and then asked timidly: "Do you think I might
shake hands with one of them?"

I arranged the little matter, and he trudged off with a flush on his
cheeks as though he had been in the presence of a queen, and
graciously received.

The Belgian officers were eager to be presented to these ladies and
paid them handsome compliments. I think the presence of these
young women with their hypodermic syringes and first-aid bandages,
and their skill in driving heavy motor-cars, and their spiritual disregard
of danger, gave a sense of comfort and tenderness to those men
who had been long absent from their women-folk and long-suffering
in the bleak and ugly cruelty of war. There was no false sentiment, no
disguised gallantry, in the homage of the Belgians to those ladies. It
was the simple, chivalrous respect of soldiers to dauntless women
who had come to help them when they were struck down and needed
pity.

Women, with whom for a little while I could call myself comrade, I
think of you now and marvel at you! The call of the wild had brought
some of you out to those fields of death. The need of more
excitement than modern life gives in time of peace, even the chance
to forget, had been the motives with which two or three of you, I think,
came upon these scenes of history, taking all risks recklessly, playing
a man's part with a feminine pluck, glad of this liberty, far from the
conventions of the civilized code, yet giving no hint of scandal to
sharp-eared gossip. But most of you had no other thought than that
of pity and helpfulness, and with a little flame of faith in your hearts
you bore the weight of bleeding men, and eased their pain when it
was too intolerable. No soldiers in the armies of the Allies have better
right to wear the decorations which a king of sorrow gave you for your
gallantry in action.

18

The Germans were still trying to smash their way through the lines
held by the Belgians, with French support. They were making
tremendous attacks at different places, searching for the breaking-
point by which they could force their way to Furnes and on to Dunkirk.
It was difficult to know whether they were succeeding or failing. It is
difficult to know anything on a modern battlefield where men holding
one village are ignorant of what is happening in the next, and where
all the sections of an army seem involved in a bewildering chaos, out
of touch with each other, waiting for orders which do not seem to
come, moving forward for no apparent reason, retiring for other
reasons hard to find, or resting, without firing a shot, in places
searched by the enemy's fire.

The enemy had built eight pontoon bridges over the Yser canal, but
all of them had been destroyed. This was a good piece of news. But
against it was the heavy loss of a Belgian company holding another
bridge further down the river. At Dixmude the Belgians held the outer
streets. Outside there had been heavy trench fighting. The enemy
had charged several times with the bayonet, but had been raked
back by the mitrailleuses.

Things were going on rather well at most parts of the line.

The French batteries were getting the range every time, and their
gunners were guessing at heaps of German dead. The Belgian
infantry was holding firm. Their cavalry was out of action for the time,
trying to keep warm on the roadsides.

That was all the truth that I could get out of a tangle of confused
details. All through another day I watched the business of battle--a
strange, mysterious thing in which one fails to find any controlling
brain. Regiments came out of the trenches and wandered back,
caked with clay, haggard for lack of sleep, with a glint of hunger in
their eyes. Guns passed along the roads with ammunition wagons,
whose axles shrieked over the stones. For an hour a Belgian battery
kept plugging shots towards the enemy's lines. The artillerymen were
leisurely at their work, handling their shells with interludes of
conversation. At luncheon time they lay about behind the guns
smoking cigarettes, and I was glad, for each of their shots seemed to
wreck my own brain. At a neighbouring village things were more
lively. The enemy was turning his fire this way. A captive balloon had
signalled the position, and shrapnels were bursting close. One shell
tore up a great hole near the railway line.

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