June 22nd.
My first waking thought was: "How time flies! It must be the
Fourteenth of July!" I knew it could not be the Fourth of that
specially commemorative month, because I was just awake enough to be
sure I was not in America; and the only other event to justify such
a terrific clatter was the French national anniversary. I sat up and
listened to the popping of guns till a completed sense of reality
stole over me, and I realized that I was in the inn of the Wild Man
at Cassel, and that it was not the fourteenth of July but the
twenty-second of June.
Then, what--? A Taube, of course! And all the guns in the place were
cracking at it! By the time this mental process was complete, I had
scrambled up and hurried downstairs and, unbolting the heavy doors,
had rushed out into the square. It was about four in the morning,
the heavenliest moment of a summer dawn, and in spite of the tumult
Cassel still apparently slept. Only a few soldiers stood in the
square, looking up at a drift of white cloud behind which--they
averred--a Taube had just slipped out of sight. Cassel was evidently
used to Taubes, and I had the sense of having overdone my excitement
and not being exactly in tune; so after gazing a moment at the white
cloud I slunk back into the hotel, barred the door and mounted to my
room. At a window on the stairs I paused to look out over the
sloping roofs of the town, the gardens, the plain; and suddenly
there was another crash and a drift of white smoke blew up from the
fruit-trees just under the window. It was a last shot at the
fugitive, from a gun hidden in one of those quiet provincial gardens
between the houses; and its secret presence there was more startling
than all the clatter of mitrailleuses from the rock.
Silence and sleep came down again on Cassel; but an hour or two
later the hush was broken by a roar like the last trump. This time
it was no question of mitrailleuses. The Wild Man rocked on its
base, and every pane in my windows beat a tattoo. What was that
incredible unimagined sound? Why, it could be nothing, of course,
but the voice of the big siege-gun of Dixmude! Five times, while I
was dressing, the thunder shook my windows, and the air was filled
with a noise that may be compared--if the human imagination can
stand the strain--to the simultaneous closing of all the iron
shop-shutters in the world. The odd part was that, as far as the
Wild Man and its inhabitants were concerned, no visible effects
resulted, and dressing, packing and coffee-drinking went on
comfortably in the strange parentheses between the roars.
We set off early for a neighbouring Head-quarters, and it was not
till we turned out of the gates of Cassel that we came on signs of
the bombardment: the smashing of a gas-house and the converting of a
cabbage-field into a crater which, for some time to come, will spare
photographers the trouble of climbing Vesuvius. There was a certain
consolation in the discrepancy between the noise and the damage
done.
At Head-quarters we learned more of the morning's incidents.
Dunkerque, it appeared, had first been visited by the Taube which
afterward came to take the range of Cassel; and the big gun of
Dixmude had then turned all its fury on the French sea-port. The
bombardment of Dunkuerque was still going on; and we were asked, and
in fact bidden, to give up our plan of going there for the night.
After luncheon we turned north, toward the dunes. The villages we
drove through were all evacuated, some quite lifeless, others
occupied by troops. Presently we came to a group of military motors
drawn up by the roadside, and a field black with wheeling troops.
"Admiral Ronarc'h!" our companion from Head-quarters exclaimed; and
we understood that we had had the good luck to come on the hero of
Dixmude in the act of reviewing the marine fusiliers and
territorials whose magnificent defense of last October gave that
much-besieged town another lease of glory.
We stopped the motor and climbed to a ridge above the field. A high
wind was blowing, bringing with it the booming of the guns along the
front. A sun half-veiled in sand-dust shone on pale meadows, sandy
flats, grey wind-mills. The scene was deserted, except for the
handful of troops deploying before the officers on the edge of the
field. Admiral Ronarc'h, white-gloved and in full-dress uniform,
stood a little in advance, a young naval officer at his side. He had
just been distributing decorations to his fusiliers and
territorials, and they were marching past him, flags flying and
bugles playing. Every one of those men had a record of heroism, and
every face in those ranks had looked on horrors unnameable. They had
lost Dixmude--for a while--but they had gained great glory, and the
inspiration of their epic resistance had come from the quiet officer
who stood there, straight and grave, in his white gloves and gala
uniform.
One must have been in the North to know something of the tie that
exists, in this region of bitter and continuous fighting, between
officers and soldiers. The feeling of the chiefs is almost one of
veneration for their men; that of the soldiers, a kind of
half-humorous tenderness for the officers who have faced such odds
with them. This mutual regard reveals itself in a hundred
undefinable ways; but its fullest expression is in the tone with
which the commanding officers speak the two words oftenest on their
lips: "My men."
The little review over, we went on to Admiral Ronarc'h's quarters in
the dunes, and thence, after a brief visit, to another brigade
Head-quarters. We were in a region of sandy hillocks feathered by
tamarisk, and interspersed with poplar groves slanting like wheat in
the wind. Between these meagre thickets the roofs of seaside
bungalows showed above the dunes; and before one of these we
stopped, and were led into a sitting-room full of maps and aeroplane
photographs. One of the officers of the brigade telephoned to ask if
the way was clear to Nieuport; and the answer was that we might go
on.
Our road ran through the "Bois Triangulaire," a bit of woodland
exposed to constant shelling. Half the poor spindling trees were
down, and patches of blackened undergrowth and ragged hollows marked
the path of the shells. If the trees of a cannonaded wood are of
strong inland growth their fallen trunks have the majesty of a
ruined temple; but there was something humanly pitiful in the frail
trunks of the Bois Triangulaire, lying there like slaughtered rows
of immature troops.
A few miles more brought us to Nieuport, most lamentable of the
victim towns. It is not empty as Ypres is empty: troops are
quartered in the cellars, and at the approach of our motor knots of
cheerful zouaves came swarming out of the ground like ants. But
Ypres is majestic in death, poor Nieuport gruesomely comic. About
its splendid nucleus of mediaeval architecture a modern town had
grown up; and nothing stranger can be pictured than the contrast
between the streets of flimsy houses, twisted like curl-papers, and
the ruins of the Gothic Cathedral and the Cloth Market. It is like
passing from a smashed toy to the survival of a prehistoric
cataclysm.
Modern Nieuport seems to have died in a colic. No less homely image
expresses the contractions and contortions of the houses reaching
out the appeal of their desperate chimney-pots and agonized girders.
There is one view along the exterior of the town like nothing else
on the warfront. On the left, a line of palsied houses leads up like
a string of crutch-propped beggars to the mighty ruin of the
Templars' Tower; on the right the flats reach away to the almost
imperceptible humps of masonry that were once the villages of St.
Georges, Ramscappelle, Pervyse. And over it all the incessant crash
of the guns stretches a sounding-board of steel.
In front of the cathedral a German shell has dug a crater thirty
feet across, overhung by splintered tree-trunks, burnt shrubs, vague
mounds of rubbish; and a few steps beyond lies the peacefullest spot
in Nieuport, the grave-yard where the zouaves have buried their
comrades. The dead are laid in rows under the flank of the
cathedral, and on their carefully set grave-stones have been placed
collections of pious images gathered from the ruined houses. Some of
the most privileged are guarded by colonies of plaster saints and
Virgins that cover the whole slab; and over the handsomest Virgins
and the most gaily coloured saints the soldiers have placed the
glass bells that once protected the parlour clocks and
wedding-wreaths in the same houses.
From sad Nieuport we motored on to a little seaside colony where
gaiety prevails. Here the big hotels and the adjoining villas along
the beach are filled with troops just back from the trenches: it is
one of the "rest cures" of the front. When we drove up, the regiment
"au repos" was assembled in the wide sandy space between the
principal hotels, and in the centre of the jolly crowd the band was
playing. The Colonel and his officers stood listening to the music,
and presently the soldiers broke into the wild "chanson des zouaves"
of the --th zouaves. It was the strangest of sights to watch that
throng of dusky merry faces under their red fezes against the
background of sunless northern sea. When the music was over some one
with a kodak suggested "a group": we struck a collective attitude on
one of the hotel terraces, and just as the camera was being aimed at
us the Colonel turned and drew into the foreground a little grinning
pock-marked soldier. "He's just been decorated--he's got to be in
the group." A general exclamation of assent from the other officers,
and a protest from the hero: "Me? Why, my ugly mug will smash the
plate!" But it didn't--
Reluctantly we turned from this interval in the day's sad round, and
took the road to La Panne. Dust, dunes, deserted villages: my memory
keeps no more definite vision of the run. But at sunset we came on a
big seaside colony stretched out above the longest beach I ever saw:
along the sea-front, an esplanade bordered by the usual foolish
villas, and behind it a single street filled with hotels and shops.
All the life of the desert region we had traversed seemed to have
taken refuge at La Panne. The long street was swarming with throngs
of dark-uniformed Belgian soldiers, every shop seemed to be doing a
thriving trade, and the hotels looked as full as beehives.
