August 18th.
Today again we started early for the mountains. Our road ran more to
the westward, through the heart of the Vosges, and up to a fold of
the hills near the borders of Lorraine. We stopped at a
Head-quarters where a young officer of dragoons was to join us, and
learned from him that we were to be allowed to visit some of the
first-line trenches which we had looked out on from a high-perched
observation post on our former visit to the Vosges. Violent fighting
was going on in that particular region, and after a climb of an hour
or two we had to leave the motor at a sheltered angle of the road
and strike across the hills on foot. Our path lay through the
forest, and every now and then we caught a glimpse of the high-road
running below us in full view of the German batteries. Presently we
reached a point where the road was screened by a thick growth of
trees behind which an observation post had been set up. We scrambled
down and looked through the peephole. Just below us lay a valley
with a village in its centre, and to the left and right of the
village were two hills, the one scored with French, the other with
German trenches. The village, at first sight, looked as normal as
those through which we had been passing; but a closer inspection
showed that its steeple was shattered and that some of its houses
were unroofed. Part of it was held by German, part by French troops.
The cemetery adjoining the church, and a quarry just under it,
belonged to the Germans; but a line of French trenches ran from the
farther side of the church up to the French batteries on the right
hand hill. Parallel with this line, but starting from the other side
of the village, was a hollow lane leading up to a single tree. This
lane was a German trench, protected by the guns of the left hand
hill; and between the two lay perhaps fifty yards of ground. All
this was close under us; and closer still was a slope of open ground
leading up to the village and traversed by a rough cart-track. Along
this track in the hot sunshine little French soldiers, the size of
tin toys, were scrambling up with bags and loads of faggots, their
ant-like activity as orderly and untroubled as if the two armies had
not lain trench to trench a few yards away. It was one of those
strange and contradictory scenes of war that bring home to the
bewildered looker-on the utter impossibility of picturing how the
thing _really happens._
While we stood watching we heard the sudden scream of a battery
close above us. The crest of the hill we were climbing was alive
with "Seventy-fives," and the piercing noise seemed to burst out at
our very backs. It was the most terrible war-shriek I had heard: a
kind of wolfish baying that called up an image of all the dogs of
war simultaneously tugging at their leashes. There is a dreadful
majesty in the sound of a distant cannonade; but these yelps and
hisses roused only thoughts of horror. And there, on the opposite
slope, the black and brown geysers were beginning to spout up from
the German trenches; and from the batteries above them came the puff
and roar of retaliation. Below us, along the cart-track, the little
French soldiers continued to scramble up peacefully to the
dilapidated village; and presently a group of officers of dragoons,
emerging from the wood, came down to welcome us to their
Head-quarters.
We continued to climb through the forest, the cannonade still
whistling overhead, till we reached the most elaborate trapper
colony we had yet seen. Half underground, walled with logs, and
deeply roofed by sods tufted with ferns and moss, the cabins were
scattered under the trees and connected with each other by paths
bordered with white stones. Before the Colonel's cabin the soldiers
had made a banked-up flower-bed sown with annuals; and farther up
the slope stood a log chapel, a mere gable with a wooden altar under
it, all tapestried with ivy and holly. Near by was the chaplain's
subterranean dwelling. It was reached by a deep cutting with
ivy-covered sides, and ivy and fir-boughs masked the front. This
sylvan retreat had just been completed, and the officers, the
chaplain, and the soldiers loitering near by, were all equally eager
to have it seen and hear it praised.
The commanding officer, having done the honours of the camp, led us
about a quarter of a mile down the hillside to an open cutting which
marked the beginning of the trenches. From the cutting we passed
into a long tortuous burrow walled and roofed with carefully fitted
logs. The earth floor was covered by a sort of wooden lattice. The
only light entering this tunnel was a faint ray from an occasional
narrow slit screened by branches; and beside each of these
peep-holes hung a shield-shaped metal shutter to be pushed over it
in case of emergency.
The passage wound down the hill, almost doubling on itself, in order
to give a view of all the surrounding lines. Presently the roof
became much higher, and we saw on one side a curtained niche about
five feet above the floor. One of the officers pulled the curtain
back, and there, on a narrow shelf, a gun between his knees, sat a
dragoon, his eyes on a peep-hole. The curtain was hastily drawn
again behind his motionless figure, lest the faint light at his back
should betray him. We passed by several of these helmeted watchers,
and now and then we came to a deeper recess in which a mitrailleuse
squatted, its black nose thrust through a net of branches. Sometimes
the roof of the tunnel was so low that we had to bend nearly double;
and at intervals we came to heavy doors, made of logs and sheeted
with iron, which shut off one section from another. It is hard to
guess the distance one covers in creeping through an unlit passage
with different levels and countless turnings; but we must have
descended the hillside for at least a mile before we came out into a
half-ruined farmhouse. This building, which had kept nothing but its
outer walls and one or two partitions between the rooms, had been
transformed into an observation post. In each of its corners a
ladder led up to a little shelf on the level of what was once the
second story, and on the shelf sat a dragoon at his peep-hole.
Below, in the dilapidated rooms, the usual life of a camp was going
on. Some of the soldiers were playing cards at a kitchen table,
others mending their clothes, or writing letters or chuckling
together (not too loud) over a comic newspaper. It might have been a
scene anywhere along the second-line trenches but for the lowered
voices, the suddenness with which I was drawn back from a slit in
the wall through which I had incautiously peered, and the presence
of these helmeted watchers overhead.
We plunged underground again and began to descend through another
darker and narrower tunnel. In the upper one there had been one or
two roofless stretches where one could straighten one's back and
breathe; but here we were in pitch blackness, and saved from
breaking our necks only by the gleam of the pocket-light which the
young lieutenant who led the party shed on our path. As he whisked
it up and down to warn us of sudden steps or sharp corners he
remarked that at night even this faint glimmer was forbidden, and
that it was a bad job going back and forth from the last outpost
till one had learned the turnings.
The last outpost was a half-ruined farmhouse like the other. A
telephone connected it with Head-quarters and more dumb dragoons sat
motionless on their lofty shelves. The house was shut off from the
tunnel by an armoured door, and the orders were that in case of
attack that door should be barred from within and the access to the
tunnel defended to the death by the men in the outpost. We were on
the extreme verge of the defences, on a slope just above the village
over which we had heard the artillery roaring a few hours earlier.
The spot where we stood was raked on all sides by the enemy's lines,
and the nearest trenches were only a few yards away. But of all this
nothing was really perceptible or comprehensible to me. As far as my
own observation went, we might have been a hundred miles from the
valley we had looked down on, where the French soldiers were walking
peacefully up the cart-track in the sunshine. I only knew that we
had come out of a black labyrinth into a gutted house among
fruit-trees, where soldiers were lounging and smoking, and people
whispered as they do about a death-bed. Over a break in the walls I
saw another gutted farmhouse close by in another orchard: it was an
enemy outpost, and silent watchers in helmets of another shape sat
there watching on the same high shelves. But all this was infinitely
less real and terrible than the cannonade above the disputed
village. The artillery had ceased and the air was full of summer
murmurs. Close by on a sheltered ledge I saw a patch of vineyard
with dewy cobwebs hanging to the vines. I could not understand where
we were, or what it was all about, or why a shell from the enemy
outpost did not suddenly annihilate us. And then, little by little,
there came over me the sense of that mute reciprocal watching from
trench to trench: the interlocked stare of innumerable pairs of
eyes, stretching on, mile after mile, along the whole sleepless line
from Dunkerque to Belfort.
My last vision of the French front which I had traveled from end to
end was this picture of a shelled house where a few men, who sat
smoking and playing cards in the sunshine, had orders to hold out to
the death rather than let their fraction of that front be broken.
