A	»	B	»	C	»	D	»	E
F	»	G	»	H	»	I	»	J
K	»	L	»	M	»	N	»	O
P	»		R	»	S	»		T
U	»		V	»	W	»		Z

Phillip Parker King - "Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2]"

E. Arnold Bennett - "Sacred And Profane Love "

W.W. Jacobs - "Captains All and Others"

Clarence Darrow - "Crime: Its Cause and Treatment"

Local Bookstores Band Together To Help Mecklenburg County Libraries
Moreover Technologies - Premier purveyor of real-time news and RSS feeds from across the Web

Cut Price Kindle Hit Amazon Figures
Ad - FREE Daily Alerts On Stock Gains Topping Charts Over 600%!!!

Amazon.com to introduce Kindle to mainland China
CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- Local Bookstores are joining forces to help cash-strapped libraries in Mecklenburg County. Eighteen local bookstores will team up for a book fair the first week of August to help raise money for libraries to buy new books. Last month,

The Soul of the War by Philip Gibbs

P >> Philip Gibbs >> The Soul of the War




It was like the war itself, which was utterly shrouded in these parts by
a fog of mystery. Watching it close at hand (when things are more
difficult to sort into any order of logic) my view was clouded and
perplexed by the general confusion. A few days previously, it seemed
that the enemy had abandoned his attack upon the coast-line and the
country between Dixmude and Nieuport. There was a strange silence
behind the mists, but our aeroplanes, reconnoitring the enemy's lines,
were able to see movements of troops drifting southwards towards
the region round Ypres.

Now there was an awakening of guns in places from which they
seemed to be withdrawn. Dixmude, quiet in its ruins, trembled again,
and crumbled a little more, under the vibration of the enemy's shells,
firing at long range towards the Franco-Belgian troops.

Here and there, near Pervyse and Ramscapelle, guns, not yet
located, fired "pot shots" on the chance of killing something--soldiers
or civilians, or the wounded on their stretchers.

Several of them came into Furnes, bursting quite close to the
convent, and one smashed into the Hotel de la Noble Rose, going
straight down a long corridor and then making a great hole in a
bedroom wall. Some of the officers of the Belgian staff were in the
room downstairs, but not a soul was hurt.

French and Belgian patrols thrusting forward cautiously found
themselves under rifle-fire from the enemy's trenches which had
previously appeared abandoned. Something like an offensive
developed again, and it was an unpleasant surprise when Dixmude
was retaken by the Germans.

As a town its possession was not of priceless value to the enemy.
They had retaken a pitiful ruin, many streets of skeleton houses filled
with burnt-out ashes, a Town Hall with gaping holes in its roof, an
archway which thrust up from a wreck of pillars like a gaunt rib, and a
litter of broken glass, bricks and decomposed bodies.

If they had any pride in the capture it was the completeness of their
destruction of this fine old Flemish town.

But it was a disagreeable thing that the enemy, who had been thrust
back from this place and the surrounding neighbourhood, and who
had abandoned their attack for a time in this region, should have
made such a sudden hark-back in sufficient strength to regain ground
which was won by the Belgian and French at the cost of many
thousands of dead and wounded.

The renewed attack was to call off some of the allied troops from the
lines round Ypres, and was a part of the general shock of the
offensive all along the German line in order to test once more the
weakest point of the Allies' strength through which to force a way.


25


The character of the fighting in this part of Flanders entered into the
monotone of the winter campaign and, though the censorship was
blamed for scarcity of news, there was really nothing to conceal in the
way of heroic charges by cavalry, dashing bayonet attacks, or rapid
counter-movements by infantry in mass. Such things for which public
imagination craved were not happening.

What did happen was a howling gale shrieking across the dunes, and
swirling up the sands into blinding clouds, and tearing across the flat
marshlands as though all the invisible gods of the old ghost world
were racing in their chariots.

In the trenches along the Yser men crouched down close to the moist
mud to shelter themselves from a wind which was harder to dodge
than shrapnel shells. It lashed them with a fierce cruelty. In spite of all
the woollen comforters and knitted vests made by women's hands at
home, the wind found its way through to the bones and marrow of the
soldiers so that they were numbed. At night it was an agony of cold,
preventing sleep, even if men could sleep while shells were searching
for them with a cry of death.

The gunners dug pits for themselves, and when they ceased fire for a
time crawled to shelter, smoking through little outlets in the damp
blankets in which they had wrapped their heads and shoulders. They
tied bundles of straw round their legs to keep out the cold and packed
old newspapers inside their chests as breast-plates, and tried to keep
themselves warm, at least in imagination.

There was no battlefield in the old idea of the world. How often must
one say this to people at home who think that a modern army is
encamped in the fields with bivouac fires and bell tents? The battle
was spread over a wide area of villages and broken towns and
shattered farmhouses, and neat little homesteads yet untouched by
fire or shell. The open roads were merely highways between these
points of shelter, in which great bodies of troops were huddled--the
internal lines of communication connecting various parts of the
fighting machine.

It was rather hot, as well as cold, at Oudecapelle and Nieucapelle,
and along the line to Styvekenskerke and Lom-bardtzyde. The
enemy's batteries were hard at work again belching out an
inexhaustible supply of shells. Over there, the darkness was stabbed
by red flashes, and the sky was zigzagged by waves of vivid
splendour, which shone for a moment upon the blanched faces of
men who waited for death.

Through the darkness, along the roads, infantry tramped towards the
lines of trenches, to relieve other regiments who had endured a spell
in them. They bent their heads low, thrusting forward into the heart of
the gale, which tore at the blue coats of these Frenchmen and
plucked at their red trousers, and slashed in their faces with cruel
whips. Their side-arms jingled against the teeth of the wind, which
tried to snatch at their bayonets and to drag the rifles out of their grip.
They never raised their heads to glance at the Red Cross carts
coming back.

Some of the French officers, tramping by the side of their men,
shouted through the swish of the gale:

"Courage, mes petits!"

"II fait mauvais temps pour les sales Boches!"

In cottage parlours near the fighting lines--that is to say in the zone of
fire, which covered many villages and farmsteads, French doctors,
buttoned up to the chin in leather coats, bent over the newest
batches of wounded.

"Shut that door! Sacred name of a dog; keep the door shut! Do you
want the gale to blow us up the chimney?"

But it was necessary to open the door to bring in another stretcher
where a man lay still.

"Pardon, mon capitaine," said one of the stretcher-bearers, as the
door banged to, with a frightful clap.

Yesterday the enemy reoccupied Dixmude.

So said the official bulletin, with its incomparable brevity of eloquence.


26


For a time, during this last month in the first year of the war, I made
my headquarters at Dunkirk, where without stirring from the town
there was always a little excitement to be had. Almost every day, for
instance, a German aeroplane--one of the famous Taube flock--
would come and drop bombs by the Town Hall or the harbour, killing
a woman or two and a child, or breaking many panes of glass, but
never destroying anything of military importance (for women and
children are of no importance in time of war), although down by the
docks there were rich stores of ammunition, petrol, and material of
every kind. These birds of death came so regularly in the afternoon
that the Dunquerquoises, who love a jest, even though it is a bloody
one, instead of saying "Trois heures et demie," used to say, "Taube
et demie" and know the time.

There was a window in Dunkirk which looked upon the chief square.
In the centre of the square is the statue of Jean-Bart, the famous
captain and pirate of the seventeenth century, standing in his sea-
boots (as he once strode into the presence of the Sun-King) and with
his sword raised above his great plumed hat. I stood in the balcony of
the window looking down at the colour and movement of the life
below, and thinking at odd moments--the thought always thrust
beneath the surface of one's musings--of the unceasing slaughter of
the war not very far away across the Belgian frontier. All these people
here in the square were in some way busy with the business of death.
They were crossing these flagged stones on the way to the
shambles, or coming back from the shell-stricken towns, la bas, as
the place of blood is called, or taking out new loads of food for guns
and men, or bringing in reports to admirals and the staff, or going to
churches to pray for men who have done these jobs before, and now,
perhaps, lie still, out of it.

This square in Dunkirk contained many of the elements which go to
make up the actions and reactions of this war. It seemed to me that a
clever stage manager desiring to present to his audience the typical
characters of this military drama--leaving out the beastliness, of
course--would probably select the very people and groups upon
whom I was now looking down from the window. Motor-cars came
whirling up with French staff officers in dandy uniforms (the stains of
blood and mud would only be omitted by Mr. Willie Clarkson). In the
centre, just below the statue of Jean-Bart, was an armoured-car
which a Belgian soldier, with a white rag round his head, was
explaining to a French cuirassier whose long horse-hair queue fell
almost to his waist from his linen-covered helm. Small boys mounted
the step and peered into the wonder-box, into the mysteries of this
neat death-machine, and poked grubby fingers into bullet-holes which
had scored the armour-plates. Other soldiers--Chasseurs Alpins in
sky-blue coats, French artillery men in their dark-blue jackets, Belgian
soldiers wearing shiny top-hats with eye-shades, or dinky caps with
gold or scarlet tassels, and English Tommies in mud-coloured khaki--
strolled about the car, and nodded their heads towards it as though to
say, "That has killed off a few Germans, by the look of it. Better sport
than trench digging."

The noise of men's voices and laughter--they laugh a good deal in
war time, outside the range of shells--came up to the open window;
overpowered now and then by the gurgles and squawks of motor-
horns, like beasts giving their death-cries. With a long disintegrating
screech there came up a slate-grey box on wheels. It made a
semicircular sweep, scattering a group of people, and two young
gentlemen of the Royal Naval Air Service sprang down and shouted
"What-ho!" very cheerily to two other young gentlemen in naval
uniforms who shouted back "Cheer-o!" from the table under my
balcony.

I knew all of them, especially one of the naval airmen who flies what
he calls a motor-bus and drops bombs with sea curses upon
the heads of any German troops he can find on a morning's
reconnaissance. He rubs his hand at the thought that he has "done
in" quite a number of the "German blighters." With a little luck he
hopes to nobble a few more this afternoon. A good day's work like
this bucks him up wonderfully, he says, except when he comes down
an awful whop in the darned old motor-bus, which is all right while she
keeps going but no bloomin' use at all when she spreads her skirts in
a ploughed field and smashes her new set of stays. Oh, a bad old
vixen, that seaplane of his! Wants a lot of coaxin'.

A battery of French artillery rattled over the cobblestones. The wheels
were caked with clay, and the guns were covered with a grey dust.
They were going up Dixmude way, or along to Ramscapelle. The
men sat their horses as though they were glued to the saddles. One
of them had a loose sleeve pinned across his chest, but a strong grip
on his bridle with his left hand. The last wheels rattled round the
corner, and a little pageant, more richly coloured, came across the
stage. A number of Algerian Arabs strode through the square, with a
long swinging gait. They were wearing blue turbans above the flowing
white "haik" which fell back upon their shoulders, and the white
burnous which reached to their ankles. They were dark, bearded
men; one of them at least with the noble air of Othello, the Moor, and
with his fine dignity.

They stared up at the statue of Jean-Bart, and asked a few questions
of a French officer who walked with a shorter step beside them. It
seemed to impress their imagination, and they turned to look back at
that figure with the raised sword and the plumed hat. Three small
boys ran by their side and held out grubby little hands, which the
Arabs shook, with smiles that softened the hard outlines of their
faces.

Behind them a cavalcade rode in. They were Arab chiefs, on little
Algerian horses, with beautifully neat and clean limbs, moving with
the grace of fallow deer across the flagged stones of Dunkirk. The
bridles glistened and tinkled with silver plates. The saddles were
covered with embroidered cloths. The East came riding to the West.
These Mohammedans make a religion of fighting. It has its ritual and
its ceremony--even though shrapnel makes such a nasty mess of
men.

So I stood looking down on these living pictures of a city in the war
zone. But now and again I glanced back into the room behind the
window, and listened to the scraps of talk which came from the
lounge and the scattered chairs. There was a queer collection of
people in this room. They, too, had some kind of business in the job
of war, either to kill or to cure. Among them was a young Belgian
lieutenant who used to make a "bag" of the Germans he killed eaeh
day with his mitrailleuse until the numbers bored him and he lost
count. Near him were three or four nurses discussing wounds and
dying wishes and the tiresome hours of a night when a thousand
wounded streamed in suddenly, just as they were hoping for a quiet
cup of coffee. A young surgeon spoke some words which I heard as I
turned my head from the window.

"It's the frightful senselessness of all this waste of life which makes
one sick with horror..."

Another doctor came in with a tale from Ypres, where he had taken
his ambulances under shell-fire.

"It's monstrous," he said, "all the red tape! Because I belong to a
volunteer ambulance the officers wanted to know by what infernal
impudence I dared to touch the wounded. I had to drive forty miles to
get official permission, and could not get it then... And the wounded
were lying about everywhere, and it was utterly impossible to cope
with the numbers of them... They stand on etiquette when men are
crying out in agony! The Prussian caste isn't worse than that."

I turned and looked out of the window again. But I saw nothing of the
crowd below. I saw only a great tide of blood rising higher and higher,
and I heard, not the squawking of motor-horns, but the moans of men
in innumerable sheds, where they lie on straw waiting for the
surgeon's knife and crying out for morphia. I saw and heard, because
I had seen and heard these things before in France and Belgium.

In the room there was the touch of quiet fingers on a piano not too
bad. It was the music of deep, soft chords. A woman's voice spoke
quickly, excitedly.

"Oh! Some one can play. Ask him to play! It seems a thousand years
since I heard some music. I'm thirsty for it!"

A friend of mine who had struck the chords while standing before the
piano, sat down, and smiled a little over the notes.

"What shall it be?" he asked, and then, without waiting for the answer,
played. It was a reverie by Chopin, I think, and somehow it seemed to
cleanse our souls a little of things seen and smelt. It was so pitiful that
something broke inside my heart a moment. I thought of the last time
I had heard some music. It was in a Flemish cottage, where a young
lieutenant, a little drunk, sang a love-song among his comrades, while
a little way off men were being maimed and killed by bursting shells.

The music stopped with a slur of notes. Somebody asked, "What was
that?"

There was the echo of a dull explosion and the noise of breaking
glass. I looked out into the square again from the open window, and
saw people running in all directions.

Presently a man came into the room and spoke to one of the doctors,
without excitement.

"Another Taube. Three bombs, as usual, and several people
wounded. You'd better come. It's only round the corner."

It was always round the corner, this sudden death. Just a step or two
from any window of war.


27


Halfway through my stay at Dunkirk I made a trip to England and
back, getting a free passage in the Government ship Invicta, which
left by night to dodge the enemy's submarines, risking their floating
mines. It gave me one picture of war which is unforgettable. We were
a death-ship that night, for we carried the body of a naval officer who
had been killed on one of the monitors which I had seen in action
several times off Nieuport. With the corpse came also several
seamen, wounded by the same shell. I did not see any of them until
the Invicla lay alongside the Prince of Wales pier. Then a party of
marines brought up the officer's body on a stretcher. They bungled
the job horribly, jamming the stretcher poles in the rails of the
gangway, and, fancying myself an expert in stretcher work, for I had
had a little practice, I gave them a hand and helped to carry the
corpse to the landing-stage. It was sewn up tightly in canvas, exactly
like a piece of meat destined for Smithfield market, and was treated
with no more ceremony than such a parcel by the porters who
received it.

"Where are you going to put that, Dick?"

"Oh, stow it over there, Bill!"

That was how a British hero made his home-coming.

But I had a more horrible shock, although I had been accustomed to
ugly sights. It was when the wounded seamen came up from below.
The lamps on the landing-stage, flickering in the high wind, cast their
white light upon half a dozen men walking down the gangway in
Indian file. At least I had to take them on trust as men, but they
looked more like spectres who had risen from the tomb, or obscene
creatures from some dreadful underworld. When the German shell
had burst on their boat, its fragments had scattered upwards, and
each man had been wounded in the face, some of them being
blinded and others scarred beyond human recognition. Shrouded in
ship's blankets, with their heads swathed in bandages, their faces
were quite hidden behind masks of cotton-wool coming out to a point
like beaks and bloody at the tip. I shuddered at the sight of them, and
walked away, cursing the war and all its horrors.

After my return to Dunkirk, I did not stay very long there. There was a
hunt for correspondents, and my name was on the black list as a
man who had seen too much. I found it wise to trek southwards,
turning my back on Belgium, where I had had such strange
adventures in the war-zone. The war had settled down into its winter
campaign, utterly dreary and almost without episodes in the country
round Furnes. But I had seen the heroism of the Belgian soldiers in
their last stand against the enemy who had ravaged their little
kingdom, and as long as life lasts the memory of these things will
remain to me like a tragic song. I had been sprinkled with the blood of
Belgian soldiers, and had helped to carry them, wounded and dead. I
am proud of that, and my soul salutes the spirit of those gallant men--
the remnants of an army--who, without much help from French or
English, stood doggedly in their last ditches, refusing to surrender,
and with unconquerable courage until few were left, holding back the
enemy from their last patch of soil. It was worth the risk of death to
see those things.




Chapter VIII
The Soul Of Paris



1


In the beginning of the war it seemed as though the soul had gone
out of Paris and that it had lost all its life.

I have already described those days of mobilization when an
enormous number of young men were suddenly called to the colours
out of all their ways of civil life, and answered that summons without
enthusiasm for war, hating the dreadful prospect of it and cursing the
nation which had forced this fate upon them. That first mobilization
lasted for twenty-one days, and every day one seemed to notice the
difference in the streets, the gradual thinning of the crowds, the
absence of young manhood, the larger proportion of women and old
fogeys among those who remained. The life of Paris was being
drained of its best blood by this vampire, war. In the Latin Quarter
most of the students went without any preliminary demonstrations in
the cafe d'Harcourt, or speeches from the table-tops in the cheaper
restaurants along the Boul' Miche, where in times of peace any
political crisis or intellectual drama produces a flood of fantastic
oratory from young gentlemen with black hair, burning eyes, and dirty
finger-nails. They had gone away silently, with hasty kisses to little
mistresses, who sobbed their hearts out for a night before searching
for any lovers who might be left.

In all the streets of Paris there was a shutting up of shops. Every day
put a new row of iron curtains between the window panes, until at the
end of the twelfth day the city seemed as dismal as London on a
Sunday, or as though all the shops were closed for a public funeral.
Scraps of paper were pasted on the barred-up fronts.

"Le magasin est ferme a cause de la mobilisation."
"M. Jean Cochin et quatre fils sont au front des armees."
"Tout le personel de cet etablissement est mobilise."

A personal incident brought the significance of the general
mobilization sharply to my mind. I had not realized till then how
completely the business of Paris would be brought to a standstill, and
how utterly things would be changed. Before leaving Paris for Nancy
and the eastern frontier, I left a portmanteau and a rug in a hotel
where I had become friendly with the manager and the assistant
manager, with the hall porter, the liftman, and the valet de chambre. I
had discussed the war with each of these men and from each of
them had heard the same expressions of horror and dismay. The hall
porter was a good-humoured soul, who confided to me that he had a
pretty wife and a new-born babe, who reconciled him to the
disagreeable side of a life as the servant of any stranger who might
come to the hotel with a bad temper and a light purse...

On coming back from Nancy I went to reclaim my bag and rug. But
when I entered the hotel something seemed different. At first I could
not quite understand this difference. It seemed to me for a moment
that I had come to the wrong place. I did not see the hotel porter nor
the manager and assistant manager. There was only a sharp-
featured lady sitting at the desk in loneliness, and she looked at me,
as I stared round the hall, with obvious suspicion. Very politely I
asked for my bag and rug, but the lady's air became more frigid when
I explained that I had lost the cloak-room ticket and could not
remember the number of the room I had occupied a few days before.

"Perhaps there is some means by which you could prove that you
stayed here?" said the lady.

"Certainly. I remember the hall porter. His name is Pierre, and he
comes from the Midi."

She shook her head.

"There is no hall porter, Monsieur. He has gone."

"And then the valet de chambre. His name is Francois. He has curly
hair and a short brown moustache."

The lady shook her head in a most decided negative.

"The present valet de chambre is a bald-headed man, and clean-
shaven, monsieur. It must have been another hotel where you
stayed."

I began to think that this must undoubtedly be the case, and yet I
remembered the geography of the hall, and the pattern of the carpet,
and the picture of Mirabeau in the National Assembly.

Then it dawned on both of us.

"Ah! Monsieur was here before August 1. Since then everyone is
mobilized. I am the manager's wife, Monsieur, and my husband is at
the front, and we have hardly any staff here now. You will describe
the shape of your bag..."


2


The French Government was afraid of the soul of Paris. Memories of
the Commune haunted the minds of men who did not understand
that the character of the Parisian has altered somewhat since 1870.
Ministers of France who had read a little history, were terribly afraid
that out of the soul of Paris would come turbulence and mob-passion,
crises de nerfs, rioting, political strife, and panics. Paris must be
handled firmly, sobered down by every possible means, kept from the
knowledge of painful facts, spoon-fed with cheerful communiques
whatever the truth might be, guarded by strong but hidden force,
ready at a moment's notice to smash up a procession, to arrest
agitators, to quell a rebellion, and to maintain the strictest order.

Quietly, but effectively, General Galieni, the military governor of "the
entrenched camp of Paris," as it was called, proceeded to place the
city under martial law in order to strangle any rebellious spirit which
might be lurking in its hiding places. Orders and regulations were issued
in a rapid volley fire which left Paris without any of its old life or
liberty. The terrasses were withdrawn from the cafes. No longer could
the philosophic Parisian sip his petit verre and watch the drama of the
boulevards from the shady side of a marble-topped table. He must sit
indoors like an Englishman, in the darkness of his public-house, as
though ashamed of drinking in the open. Absinthe was banned by a
thunder-stroke from the Invalides, where the Military Governor had
established his headquarters, and Parisians who had acquired the
absinthe habit trembled in every limb at this judgment which would
reduce them to physical and moral wrecks, as creatures of the drug
habit suddenly robbed of their nerve-controlling tabloids. It was an
edict welcomed by all men of self-control who knew that France had
been poisoned by this filthy liquid, but they too became a little pale
when all the cafes of Paris were closed at eight o'clock.