TOWARDS THE GOAL

By MRS. HUMPHRY WARDAuthor of "ENGLAND'S EFFORT, " etc. 

With an introduction byTHE HON. THEODORE ROOSEVELT

1917

ToANDRÉ CHEVRILLONTrue Son of FranceTrue Friend of EnglandI dedicate this book. 

INTRODUCTION

England has in this war reached a height of achievement loftier thanthat which she attained in the struggle with Napoleon; and she hasreached that height in a far shorter period. Her giant effort, crownedwith a success as wonderful as the effort itself, is worthily describedby the author of this book. Mrs. Ward writes nobly on a noble theme. 

This war is the greatest the world has ever seen. The vast size of thearmies, the tremendous slaughter, the loftiness of the heroism shown, and the hideous horror of the brutalities committed, the valour of thefighting men, and the extraordinary ingenuity of those who have designedand built the fighting machines, the burning patriotism of the peoplewho defend their hearthstones, and the far-reaching complexity of theplans of the leaders--all are on a scale so huge that nothing in pasthistory can be compared with them. The issues at stake are elemental. The free peoples of the world have banded together against tyrannousmilitarism and government by caste. It is not too much to say that theoutcome will largely determine, for daring and liberty-loving souls, whether or not life is worth living. A Prussianised world would be asintolerable as a world ruled over by Attila or by Timur the Lame. 

It is in this immense world-crisis that England has played her part; apart which has grown greater month by month. Mrs. Ward enables us to seethe awakening of the national soul which rendered it possible to playthis part; and she describes the works by which the faith of the souljustified itself. 

What she writes is of peculiar interest to the United States. We havesuffered, or are suffering, in exaggerated form, from most (not all) ofthe evils that were eating into the fibre of the British character threeyears ago--and in addition from some purely indigenous ills of our own. If we are to cure ourselves it must be by our own exertions; our destinywill certainly not be shaped for us, as was Germany's, by a few toweringautocrats of genius, such as Bismarck and Moltke. Mrs. Ward shows us thepeople of England in the act of curing their own ills, of making good, by gigantic and self-sacrificing exertion in the present, the folly andselfishness and greed and soft slackness of the past. The fact thatEngland, when on the brink of destruction, gathered her strength andstrode resolutely back to safety, is a fact of happy omen for us inAmerica, who are now just awaking to the folly and selfishness and greedand soft slackness that for some years we have been showing. 

As in America, so in England, a surfeit of materialism had produced alack of high spiritual purpose in the nation at large; there was muchconfusion of ideas and ideals; and also much triviality, which wasespecially offensive when it masqueraded under some high-sounding name. An unhealthy sentimentality--the antithesis of morality--has gone handin hand with a peculiarly sordid and repulsive materialism. The resultwas a soil in which various noxious weeds flourished rankly; and ofthese the most noxious was professional pacificism. The professionalpacificist has at times festered in the diseased tissue of almost everycivilisation; but it is only within the last three-quarters of a centurythat he has been a serious menace to the peace of justice andrighteousness. In consequence, decent citizens are only beginning tounderstand the base immorality of his preaching and practice; and he hasbeen given entirely undeserved credit for good intentions. In England asin the United States, domestic pacificism has been the most potent allyof alien militarism. And in both countries the extreme type has shownitself profoundly unpatriotic. The damage it has done the nation hasbeen limited only by its weakness and folly; those who have professed ithave served the devil to the full extent which their limited powerspermitted. 

There were in England--just as there are now in America--even worse foesto national honour and efficiency. Greed and selfishness, amongcapitalists and among labour leaders, had to be grappled with. Thesordid baseness which saw in the war only a chance for additional moneyprofits to the employer was almost matched by the fierce selfishnesswhich refused to consider a strike from any but the standpoint ofthe strikers. 

But the chief obstacle to be encountered in rousing England was sheershort-sightedness. A considerable time elapsed before it was possible tomake the people understand that this was a people's war, that it was amatter of vital personal concern to the people as a whole, and to allindividuals as individuals. In America we are now encountering much thesame difficulties, due to much the same causes. 

In England the most essential thing to be done was to wake the people totheir need, and to guide them in meeting the need. The next mostessential was to show to them, and to the peoples in friendly lands, whether allied or neutral, how the task was done; and this both as areason for just pride in what had been achieved and as an inspiration tofurther effort. 

Mrs. Ward's books--her former book and her present one--accomplish bothpurposes. Every American who reads the present volume must feel a heartyand profound respect for the patriotism, energy, and efficiency shown bythe British people when they became awake to the nature of the crisis;and furthermore, every American must feel stirred with the desire to seehis country now emulate Britain's achievement. 

In this volume Mrs. Ward draws a wonderful picture of the English in thefull tide of their successful effort. From the beginning England's navaleffort and her money effort have been extraordinary. By the time Mrs. Ward's first book was written, the work of industrial preparedness wasin full blast; but it could yet not be said that England's army in thefield was the equal of the huge, carefully prepared, thoroughlycoordinated military machines of those against whom and beside whom itfought. Now, the English army is itself as fine and as highly efficienta military machine as the wisdom of man can devise; now, the valour andhardihood of the individual soldier are being utilised to the full undera vast and perfected system which enables those in control of the greatengine to use every unit in such fashion as to aid in driving the massforward to victory. 

Even the Napoleonic contest was child's play compared to this. Never hasGreat Britain been put to such a test. Never since the spacious days ofElizabeth has she been in such danger. Never, in any crisis, has sherisen to so lofty a height of self-sacrifice and achievement. In thegiant struggle against Napoleon, England's own safety was secured by thedemoralisation of the French fleet. But in this contest the German navalauthorities have at their disposal a fleet of extraordinary efficiency, and have devised for use on an extended scale the most formidable anddestructive of all instruments of marine warfare. In previous coalitionsEngland has partially financed her continental allies; in this case theexpenditures have been on an unheard-of scale, and in consequenceEngland's industrial strength, in men and money, in business andmercantile and agricultural ability, has been drawn on as never before. As in the days of Marlborough and Wellington, so now, England has senther troops to the continent; but whereas formerly her expeditionaryforces, although of excellent quality, were numerically too small to beof primary importance, at present her army is already, by size as wellas by excellence, a factor of prime importance, in the militarysituation; and its relative as well as absolute importance issteadily growing. 

And to her report of the present stage of Great Britain's effort in thewar, Mrs. Ward has added some letters describing from her own personalexperience the ruin wrought by the Germans in towns like Senlis andGerbéviller, and in the hundreds of villages in Northern, Central, andEastern France that now lie wrecked and desolate. And she has told indetail, and from the evidence of eye-witnesses, some of the piteousincidents of German cruelty to the civilian population, which arealready burnt into the conscience of Europe, and should never beforgotten till reparation has been made. 

Mrs. Ward's book is thus of high value as a study of contemporaryhistory. It is of at least as high value as an inspiration toconstructive patriotism. 

THEODORE ROOSEVELT. 

SAGAMORE HILLS, _May 1st_, 1917. 

CONTENTS

No. 1

England's Effort--Rapid March of Events--The Work of the Navy--A NavalBase--What the Navy has done--The Jutland Battle--The SubmarinePeril--German Lies--Shipbuilding--Disciplined Expectancy--Crossing theChannel--The Minister of Munitions--Dr. Addison--Increase ofMunitions--A Gigantic Task--Arrival in France--German Prisoners--A FatFactory--A Use for Everything--G. H. Q. --Intelligence Department--"TheIssue of the War"--An Aerodrome--The Task of the Aviators--TheVisitors' Chateau. 

No. 2

A French School--Our Soldiers and French Children--Nissen Huts--Tanks--APrimeval Plough--A Division on the March--Significant Preparations--Increase of Ammunition--"The Fosses"--A Sacred Spot--VimyRidge--The Sound of the Guns--A Talk with a General--Why the GermansRetreat--Growth of the New Armies--Soldiers at School. 

No. 3

America Joins the Allies--The British Effort--Creating an Army--_L'UnionSacrée_--Registration--Accommodation--Clothing--Arms and Equipment--ACritical Time--A Long-continued Strain--Training--O. T. C. 'S--BoyOfficers--The First Three Armies--Our Wonderful Soldiers--An AdvancedStage--The Final Result--Spectacle of the Present--Snipers andAnti-snipers--The Result. 

No. 4

Vimy Ridge--The _Morale_ of our Men--Mons. Le Maire--UbiquitousSoldiers--The Somme--German Letters--German Prisoners--Amiens--"TakingOver" a Line--Poilus and Tommies--"Taking Over" Trenches--FrenchTrenches--Unnoticed Changes--Amiens Cathedral--German Prisoners--Confidence. 

No. 5

German Fictions--Winter Preparation--Albert--La Boisselle andOvillers--In the Track of War--Regained Ground--EnemyPreparations--German Dug-outs--"There were no Stragglers"--Contalmaison--Devastation--Retreating Germans--Death, Victory, Work--Work of the R. E. --A Parachute--Approaching Victory. 

No. 6

German Retreat--Enemy Losses--Need of Artillery--Awaiting theIssue--Herr Zimmermann--Training--A National Idea--Training--Fightingfor Peace--Stubbornness and Discipline--Training of Officers--Responsibility--The British Soldier--Soldiers' Humour--A BoyHero--"They have done their job"--Casualties--Reconnaissance--AirFighting--Use of Aeroplanes--Terms of Peace. 

No. 7

Among the French--German Barbarities--Beauty of France--FrenchFamilies--Paris--To Senlis--Senlis--The Curé of Senlis--The GermanOccupation--August 30th, 1914--Germans in Senlis--German Brutality--ASavage Revenge--A Burning City--Murder of the Mayor--The Curé in theCathedral--The Abbé's Narrative--False Charges--Wanton Destruction--ASudden Change--Return of the French--Ermenonville--Scenes ofBattle--Vareddes. 

No. 8

Battle of the Ourcq--Von Kluck's Mistake--Anniversary of theBattle--Wreckage of War--A Burying Party--A Funeral--A Five Days'Battle--Life-and-Death Fighting--"_Salut au Drapeau_"--Meaux--Vareddes--Murders at Vareddes--Von Kluck's Approach--TheTurn of the Tide--The Old Curé--German Brutalities--Torturers--The Curé's Sufferings--"He is a Spy"--A Weary March--Outrages--Victims--Reparation--To Lorraine. 

No. 9

Épernay-Châlons--Snow--Nancy--The French People--_L'UnionSacrée_--France and England--Nancy--Hill of Léomont--The GrandCouronné--The Lorraine Campaign--Taubes--Vitrimont--Miss Polk--ARestored Church--Society of Friends--Gerbéviller--SoeurJulie--Mortagne--An Inexpiable Crime--Massacre of Gerbéviller--"LesCivils ont tiré"--Soeur Julie--The Germans come--GermanWounded--Barbarities in Hospital--Soeur Julie and Germans--The FrenchReturn--Germans at Nancy--Nancy saved--A Warm Welcome--Adieu to Lorraine

No. 10

Doctrine of Force--Disciplined Cruelty--German Professors--Professor vonGierke--An Orgy of Crime--Return Home--Russia--The Revolution--Libertylike Young Wine--What will Russia do?--America joins--America andFrance--The British Advance--British Successes--The Italians--ASoldier's Letter--Aircraft and Guns--The German Effort--AprilHopes--Submarines--Tradition of the Sea--Last Threads--The FoodSituation--More Arable Land--Village Patriotism--Food Prices--The LabourOutlook--Finance--Messines--The Tragedy of War--A Celtic Legend--Europeand America

TOWARDS THE GOAL

No. 1

_March 24th, 1917. _

DEAR MR. ROOSEVELT, --It may be now frankly confessed--(you, some timeago, gave me leave to publish your original letter, as it might seemopportune)--that it was you who gave the impulse last year, which led tothe writing of the first series of Letters on "England's Effort" in thewar, which were published in book form in June 1916. Your appeal--that Ishould write a general account for America of the part played by Englandin the vast struggle--found me in our quiet country house, busy withquite other work, and at first I thought it impossible that I couldattempt so new a task as you proposed to me. But support andencouragement came from our own authorities, and like many otherthousands of English women under orders, I could only go and do my best. I spent some time in the Munition areas, watching the enormous and rapiddevelopment of our war industries and of the astonishing part played init by women; I was allowed to visit a portion of the Fleet, and finally, to spend twelve days in France, ten of them among the great supply basesand hospital camps, with two days at the British Headquarters, and onthe front, near Poperinghe, and Richebourg St. Vaast. 

The result was a short book which has been translated into many foreigntongues--French, Italian, Dutch, German, Russian, Portuguese, andJapanese--which has brought me many American letters from many differentStates, and has been perhaps most widely read of all among our ownpeople. For we all read newspapers, and we all forget them! In this vastand changing struggle, events huddle on each other, so that the newblurs and wipes out the old. There is always room--is there not?--forsuch a personal narrative as may recall to us the main outlines, and thechief determining factors of a war in which--often--everything seems tous in flux, and our eyes, amid the tumult of the stream, are apt to losesight of the landmarks on its bank, and the signs of theapproaching goal. 

And now again--after a year--I have been attempting a similar task, withrenewed and cordial help from our authorities at home and abroad. And Iventure to address these new Letters directly to yourself, as to thatAmerican of all others to whom this second chapter on England's Effortmay look for sympathy. Whither are we tending--your country and mine?Congress meets on April 1st. Before this Letter reaches you greatdecisions will have been taken. I will not attempt to speculate. Thelogic of facts will sweep our nations together in some sort of intimateunion--of that I have no doubt. 

How much further, then, has Great Britain marched since the Spring oflast year--how much nearer is she to the end? One can but answer suchquestions in the most fragmentary and tentative way, relying for themost part on the opinions and information of those who know, those whoare in the van of action, at home and abroad, but also on one's ownpersonal impressions of an incomparable scene. And every day, almost, atthis breathless moment, the answer of yesterday may become obsolete. 

I left our Headquarters in France, for instance, some days before thenews of the Russian revolution reached London, and while the Sommeretirement was still in its earlier stages. Immediately afterwards theevents of one short week transformed the whole political aspect ofEurope, and may well prove to have changed the face of the war--althoughas to that, let there be no dogmatising yet! But before the pace becomesfaster still, and before the unfolding of those great and perhaps finalevents we may now dimly foresee, let me try and seize the impressions ofsome memorable weeks and bring them to bear--so far as the war isconcerned--on those questions which, in the present state of affairs, must interest you in America scarcely less than they interest us here. Where, in fact, do we stand?

Any kind of answer must begin with the Navy. For, in the case of GreatBritain, and indeed scarcely less in the case of the Allies, that is thefoundation of everything. To yourself the facts will all befamiliar--but for the benefit of those innumerable friends of the Alliesin Europe and America whom I would fain reach with the help of yourgreat name, I will run through a few of the recent--the ground--facts ofthe past year, as I myself ran through them a few days ago, before, withan Admiralty permit, I went down to one of the most interesting navalbases on our coast and found myself amid a group of men engaged nightand day in grappling with the submarine menace which threatens not onlyGreat Britain, not only the Allies, but yourselves, and every neutralnation. It is well to go back to these facts. They are indeed worthy ofthis island nation, and her seaborn children. 

To begin with, the _personnel_ of the British Navy, which at thebeginning of the war was 140, 000, was last year 300, 000. This year it is400, 000, or very nearly three times what it was before the war. Then asto ships, --"If we were strong in capital ships at the beginning of thewar"--said Mr. Balfour, last September, "we are yet strongernow--absolutely and relatively--and in regard to cruisers and destroyersthere is absolutely no comparison between our strength in 1914 and ourstrength now. There is no part of our naval strength in which we havenot got a greater supply, and in some departments an incomparablygreater supply than we had on August 4th, 1914.... The tonnage of theNavy has increased by well over a million tons since war began. "

So Mr. Balfour, six months ago. Five months later, it fell to Sir EdwardCarson to move the naval estimates, under pressure, as we all know, ofthe submarine anxiety. He spoke in the frankest and plainest language ofthat anxiety, as did the Prime Minister in his now famous speech ofFebruary 22nd, and as did the speakers in the House of Lords, LordLytton, Lord Curzon and Lord Beresford, on the same date. _The attack isnot yet checked. The danger is not over. _ Still again--look at some ofthe facts! In two years and a quarter of war--

 Eight million men moved across the seas--almost without mishap. 

 Nine million and a half tons of explosives carried to our own armies and those of our Allies. 

 Over a million horses and mules; and--

 Over forty-seven million gallons of petrol supplied to the armies. 

 And besides, twenty-five thousand ships have been examined for contraband of war, on the high seas, or in harbour, since the war began. 

And at this, one must pause a moment to think--once again--what itmeans; to call up the familiar image of Britain's ships, large andsmall, scattered over the wide Atlantic and the approaches to the NorthSea, watching there through winter and summer, storm and fair, and socarrying out, relentlessly, the blockade of Germany, through everycircumstance often of danger and difficulty; with every considerationfor neutral interests that is compatible with this desperate war, inwhich the very existence of England is concerned; and without thesacrifice of a single life, unless it be the lives of British sailors, often lost in these boardings of passing ships, amid the darkness andstorm of winter seas. There, indeed, in these "wave-beaten" ships, as inthe watching fleets of the English Admirals outside Toulon and Brest, while Napoleon was marching triumphantly about Europe, lies the rootfact of the war. It is a commonplace, but one that has been "proved uponour pulses. " Who does not remember the shock that went throughEngland--and the civilised world--when the first partial news of theBattle of Jutland reached London, and we were told our own losses, before we knew either the losses of the enemy or the general result ofthe battle? It was neither fear, nor panic; but it was as though thenation, holding its breath, realised for the first time where, for it, lay the vital elements of being. The depths in us were stirred. We knewin very deed that we were the children of the sea!

And now again the depths are stirred. The development of the submarineattack has set us a new and stern task, and we are "straitened till itbe accomplished. " The great battle-ships seem almost to have left thestage. In less than three months, 626, 000 tons of British, neutral andallied shipping have been destroyed. Since the beginning of the warwe--Great Britain--have lost over two million tons of shipping, and ourAllies and the neutrals have lost almost as much. There is a certainshortage of food in Great Britain, and a shortage of many other thingsbesides. Writing about the middle of February, an important Germannewspaper raised a shout of jubilation. "The whole sea was as if sweptclean at one blow"--by the announcement of the intensified "blockade" ofthe first of February. So the German scribe. But again the facts shootup, hard and irreducible, through the sea of comment. While the Germannewspapers were shouting to each other, the sea was so far from being"swept clean, " that twelve thousand ships had actually passed in and outof British ports in the first eighteen days of the "blockade. " And atany moment during those days, at least 3, 000 ships could have been foundtraversing the "danger zone, " which the Germans imagined themselves tohave barred. One is reminded of the _Hamburger Nachrichten_ last year, after the Zeppelin raid in January 1916. "English industry lies inruins, " said that astonishing print. "The sea has been swept clean, "says one of its brethren now. Yet all the while, there, in the dangerzone, whenever, by day or night, one turns one's thoughts to it, are thethree thousand ships; and there in the course of a fortnight, are thetwelve thousand ships going and coming. 

Yet all the same, as I have said before, there is danger and there isanxiety. The neutrals--save America--have been intimidated; they arekeeping their ships in harbour; and to do without their tonnage is aserious matter for us. Meanwhile, the best brains in naval England areat work, and one can feel the sailors straining at the leash. In thefirst eighteen days of February, there were forty fights withsubmarines. The Navy talks very little about them, and says nothing ofwhich it is not certain. But all the scientific resources, all thefighting brains of naval England are being brought to bear, and we athome--well, let us keep to our rations, the only thing we can do to helpour men at sea!

How this grey estuary spread before my eyes illustrates and illuminatesthe figures I have been quoting! I am on the light cruiser of a famousCommodore, and I have just been creeping and climbing through asubmarine. The waters round are crowded with those light craft, destroyers, submarines, mine-sweepers, trawlers, patrol boats, on whichfor the moment at any rate the fortunes of the naval war turns. And takenotice that they are all--or almost all--_new_; the very latest productsof British ship-yards. We have plenty of battle-ships, but "we must nowbuild, as quickly as possible, the smaller craft, and the merchant shipswe want, " says Sir Edward Carson. "Not a slip in the country will beempty during the coming months. Every rivet put into a ship willcontribute to the defeat of Germany. And 47 per cent, of the MerchantService have already been armed. " The riveters must indeed have beenhard at work! This crowded scene carries me back to the Clyde where Iwas last year, to the new factories and workshops, with theirever-increasing throng of women, and to the marvellous work of theship-yards. No talk now of strikes, of a disaffected and revolutionaryminority, on the Clyde, at any rate, as there was twelve months ago. Broadly speaking, and allowing for a small, stubborn, but insignificantPacifist section, the will of the nation, throughout all classes, hasbecome as steel--to win the war. 

Throughout England, as in these naval officers beside me, there is thesame tense yet disciplined expectancy. As we lunch and talk, on thiscruiser at rest, messages come in perpetually; the cruiser itself isready for the open sea, at an hour and a half's notice; the seaplanespass out and come in over the mouth of the harbour on their voyages ofdiscovery and report, and these destroyers and mine-sweepers that he soquietly near us will be out again to-night in the North Sea, grapplingwith every difficulty and facing every danger, in the true spirit of awonderful service, while we land-folk sleep and eat in peace;--grumblingno doubt, with our morning newspaper and coffee, when any of the Germandestroyers who come out from Zeebrugge are allowed to get home with awhole skin. "What on earth is the Navy about?" Well, the Navy knows. Germany is doing her very worst, and will go on doing it--for a time. The line of defensive watch in the North Sea is long; the North Sea is abig place; the Germans often have the luck of the street-boy who rings abell and runs away, before the policeman comes up. But the Navy has nodoubts. The situation, says one of my cheerful hosts, is "quite healthy"and we shall see "great things in the coming months. " We had betterleave it at that!

Now let us look at these destroyers in another scene. It is the last dayof February, and I find myself on a military steamer, bound for a FrenchPort, and on my way to the British Headquarters in France. With me isthe same dear daughter who accompanied me last year as "dame secrétaire"on my first errand. The boat is crowded with soldiers, and before wereach the French shore we have listened to almost every song--old andnew--in Tommy's repertory. There is even "Tipperary, " a snatch, a ghostof "Tipperary, " intermingled with many others, rising and falling, noone knows why, started now here, now there, and dying away again after aline or two. It is a draft going out to France for the first time, northcountrymen, by their accent; and life-belts and submarines seem to amusethem hugely, to judge by the running fire of chaff that goes on. But, after a while, I cease to listen. I am thinking first of what awaits uson the further shore, on which the lights are coming out, and of thoseinteresting passes inviting us to G. H. Q. As "Government Guests, " whichlie safe in our handbags. And then, my thoughts slip back to aconversation of the day before, with Dr. Addison, the new Minister ofMunitions. 

A man in the prime of life, with whitening hair--prematurely white, forthe face and figure are quite young still--and stamped, so far asexpression and aspect are concerned, by those social and humaneinterests which first carried him into Parliament. I have been longconcerned with Evening Play Centres for school-children in Hoxton, oneof the most congested quarters of our East End. And seven years ago Ibegan to hear of the young and public-spirited doctor and man ofscience, who had made himself a name and place in Hoxton, who had wonthe confidence of the people crowded in its unlovely streets, had workedfor the poor, and the sick, and the children, and had now beaten theTory member, and was Hoxton's Liberal representative in the newParliament elected in January 1910, to deal with the Lords, after thethrowing out of Lloyd George's famous Budget. Once or twice since, I hadcome across him in matters concerned with education--cripple schools andthe like--when he was Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Education, immediately before the war. And now here was the doctor, the HunterianProfessor, the social worker, the friend of schools and school-children, transformed into the fighting Minister of a great fighting Department, itself the creation of the war, only second--if second--in itsimportance for the war, to the Admiralty and the War Office. 

I was myself, for a fortnight of last year, the guest of the Ministry ofMunitions, while Mr. Lloyd George was still its head, in some of themost important Munition areas; and I was then able to feel the currentof hot energy, started by the first Minister, running--not of coursewithout local obstacles and animosities--through an electrified England. That was in February 1916. Then, in August, came the astonishing speechof Mr. Montagu, on the development of the Munitions supply in one shortyear, as illustrated by the happenings of the Somme battlefield. Andnow, as successor to Mr. Montagu and Mr. Lloyd George, Dr. Addison satin the Minister's chair, continuing the story. 

What a story it is! Starting from the manufacture of guns, ammunitionand explosives, and after pushing that to incredible figures, thenecessities of its great task has led the Ministry to one forward stepafter another. Seeing that the supply of munitions depends on the supplyof raw material, it is now regulating the whole mineral supply of thiscountry, and much of that of the Allies; it is about to work qualitiesof iron ore that have never been worked before; it is deciding, over thelength and breadth of the country, how much aluminium should be allowedto one firm, how much copper to another; it is producing steel for ourAllies as well as for ourselves; it has taken over with time the wholeMotor Transport of the war, and is now adding to it the RailwayTransport of munitions here and abroad, and is dictating meanwhile toevery engineering firm in the country which of its orders should comefirst, and which last. It is managing a whole gigantic industry withemployes running into millions, half a million of them women, andmanaging it under wholly new conditions of humanity and forethought; itis housing and feeding and caring for innumerable thousands;transforming from day to day, as by a kind of by-work, the industrialmind and training of multitudes, and laying the foundations of a new, and surely happier England, after the War. And, finally, it isadjusting, with, on the whole, great success, the rival claims of thefactories and the trenches, sending more and more men from the workshopsto the fighting line, in proportion as the unskilled labour of thecountry--men and women, but especially women--is drawn, more and morewidely, into the service of a dwindling amount of skilled labour, moreand more "diluted. "

 * * * * *

But the light is failing and the shore is nearing. Life-belts are takenoff, the destroyers have disappeared. We are on the quay, kindlywelcomed by an officer from G. H. Q. Who passes our bags rapidly throughthe Custom House, and carries us off to a neighbouring hotel for thenight, it being too late for the long drive to G. H. Q. We are in Franceagain!--and the great presence of the army is all about us. The quaycrowded with soldiers, the port alive with ships, the grey-blue uniformsmingling with the khaki--after a year I see it again, and one's pulsesquicken. The vast "effort of England" which last year had alreadyreached so great a height, and has now, as all accounts testify, been soincredibly developed, is here once more in visible action, before me. 

Next day, the motor arrives early, and with our courteous officer whohas charge of us, in front, we are off, first, for one of the greatcamps I saw last year, and then for G. H. Q. Itself. On the way, as wespeed over the rolling down country beyond the town, my eyes are keen tocatch some of the new signs of the time. Here is the first--a railwayline in process of doubling--and large numbers of men, some of themGerman prisoners, working at it; typical both of the immense railwaydevelopment all over the military zone, since last year, and of theextensive use now being made of prisoners' labour, in regions wellbehind the firing line. They lift their heads, as we pass, looking withcuriosity at the two ladies in the military car. Their flat round capsgive them an odd similarity. It is as if one saw scores of the sameface, differentiated here and there by a beard. A docile hard-workingcrew, by all accounts, who give no trouble, and are managed largely bytheir N. C. O. 's. Are there some among them who saw the massacre atDinant, the terrible things in Lorraine? Their placid, expressionlessfaces tell no tale. 

But the miles have flown, and here already are the long lines of thecamp. How pleasant to be greeted by some of the same officers! We gointo the Headquarters Office, for a talk. "Grown? I should think wehave!" says Colonel----. And, rapidly, he and one of his colleagues runthrough some of the additions and expansions. The Training Camp has beenpractically doubled, or, rather, another training camp has been added tothe one that existed last year, and both are equipped with an increasednumber of special schools--an Artillery Training School, an EngineerTraining School, a Lewis Gun School, a Gas School, with an actual gaschamber for the training of men in the use of their gas helmets, --andothers, of which it is not possible to speak. "We have put through halfa million of reinforcements since you were here last. " And close upontwo million rations were issued last month! The veterinary accommodationhas been much enlarged, and two Convalescent Horse Depots have beenadded--(it is good indeed to see with what kindness and thought the Armytreats its horses!). But the most novel addition to the camp has been aFat Factory for the production of fat, --from which comes the glycerineused in explosives--out of all the food refuse of the camp. The fatproduced by the system, here and in England, has already providedglycerine _far millions of eighteen-pounder shells_; the problem of camprefuse, always a desperate one, has been solved; and as a commercialventure the factory makes 250 per cent. Profit. 

Undeterred by what we hear of the smells! we go off to see it, and theenthusiastic manager explains the unsavoury processes by which the bonesand refuse of all the vast camp are boiled down into a white fat, thatlooks _almost_ eatable, but is meant, as a matter of fact, to feed notmen but shells. Nor is that the only contribution to the fighting linewhich the factory makes. All the cotton waste of the hospitals, withtheir twenty thousand beds--the old dressings and bandages--come here, and after sterilisation and disinfection go to England for gun-cotton. Was there ever a grimmer cycle than this, by which that which feeds, andthat which heals, becomes in the end that which kills! But let me try toforget that side of it, and remember, rather, as we leave the smellsbehind, that the calcined bones become artificial manure, and go backagain into the tortured fields of France, while other bye-products ofthe factory help the peasants near to feed their pigs. And anything, however small, that helps the peasants of France in this war, comfortsone's heart. 

We climb up to the high ground of the camp for a general view before wego on to G. H. Q. And I see it, as I saw it last year, spread under theMarch sunshine, among the sand and the pines--a wonderful sight. "Everything has grown, you see, except the staff!" says the Colonel, smiling, as we shake hands. "But we rub along!"

Then we are in the motor again, and at last the new G. H. Q. --howdifferent from that I saw last year!--rises before us. We make our wayinto the town, and presently the car stops for a minute before abuilding, and while our officer goes within, we retreat into a sidestreet to wait. But my thoughts are busy. For that building, of whichthe side-front is still visible, is the brain of the British Army inFrance, and on the men who work there depend the fortunes of thatdistant line where our brothers and sons are meeting face to face thehorrors and foulnesses of war. How many women whose hearts hang on thewar, whose all is there, in daily and nightly jeopardy, read the words"British Headquarters" with an involuntary lift of soul, an invocationwithout words! Yet scarcely half a dozen Englishwomen in this war willever see the actual spot. And here it is, under my eyes, the cold Marchsun shining fitfully on it, the sentry at the door, the khaki figurespassing in and out. I picture to myself the rooms within, and the newsarriving of General Gough's advance on the Ancre, of that German retreatas to which all Europe is speculating. 

But we move on--to a quiet country house in a town garden--theHeadquarters Mess of the Intelligence Department. Here I find, among ourkind hosts, men already known to me from my visit of the year before, men whose primary business it is to watch the enemy, who know whereevery German regiment and German Commander are, who through the aerialphotography of our airmen are now acquainted with every step of theGerman retreat, and have already the photographs of his second line. Allthe information gathered from prisoners, and from innumerable othersources, comes here; and the department has its eye besides oneverything that happens within the zone of our Armies in France. For awoman to be received here is an exception--perhaps I may say anhonour--of which I am rather tremulously aware. Can I make it worthwhile? But a little conversation with these earnest and able men showsplainly that they have considered the matter like any other incident inthe day's work. _England's Effort_ has been useful; therefore I am to beallowed again to see and write for myself; and therefore, whatinformation can be given me as to the growth of our military power inFrance since last year will be given. It is not, of course, a questionof war correspondence, which is not within a woman's powers. But it is aquestion of as much "seeing" as can be arranged for, combined with asmuch first-hand information as time and the censor allow. I begin tosee my way. 

The conversation at luncheon--the simplest of meals--and during a strollafterwards, is thrilling indeed to us newcomers. "The coming summer'scampaign _must_ decide the issue of the war--though it may not see theend of it. " "The issue of the war"--and the fate of Europe! "Aninconclusive peace would be a victory for Germany. " There is no doubthere as to the final issue; but there is a resolute refusal to fixdates, or prophesy details. "Man for man we are now the better army. Ourstrength is increasing month by month, while that of Germany is failing. Men and officers, who a year ago were still insufficiently trained, arenow seasoned troops with nothing to learn from the Germans; and thetroops recruited under the Military Service Act, now beginning to comeout, are of surprisingly good quality. " On such lines the talk runs, andit is over all too soon. 

Then we are in the motor again, bound for an aerodrome forty or fiftymiles away. We are late, and the last twenty-seven kilometres fly by inthirty-two minutes! It is a rolling country, and there are steepdescents and sharp climbs, through the thickly-scattered andcharacteristic villages and small old towns of the Nord, villagescrowded all of them with our men. Presently, with a start, we findourselves on a road which saw us last spring--a year ago, to the day. The same blue distances, the same glimpses of old towns in the hollows, the same touches of snow on the heights. At last, in the cold sunsetlight, we draw up at our destination. The wide aerodrome stretchesbefore us--great hangars coloured so as to escape the notice of a Bocheoverhead--with machines of all sizes, rising and landing--coming out ofthe hangars, or returning to them for the night. Two of the officers incharge meet us, and I walk round with them, looking at the varioustypes--some for fighting, some for observation; and understanding--whatI can! But the spirit of the men--that one can understand. "We areaccumulating, concentrating now, for the summer offensive. Of course theGermans have been working hard too. They have lots of new and improvedmachines. But when the test comes we are confident that we shall downthem again, as we did on the Somme. For us, the all-important thing isthe fighting behind the enemy lines. Our object is to prevent the Germanmachines from rising at all, to keep them down, while our airmen arereconnoitering along the fighting line. Awfully dangerous work! Lotsdon't come back. But what then? They will have done their job!"

The words were spoken so carelessly that for a few seconds I did notrealise their meaning. But there was that in the expression of the manwho spoke them which showed there was no lack of realisation there. Howoften I have recalled them, with a sore heart, in these recent weeks ofheavy losses in the air-service--losses due, I have no doubt, to thespecial claims upon it of the German retreat. 

The conversation dropped a little, till one of my companions, with asmile, pointed overhead. Three splendid biplanes were sailing above us, at a great height, bound south-wards. "Back from the line!" said theofficer beside me, and we watched them till they dipped and disappearedin the sunset clouds. Then tea and pleasant talk. The young men insistthat D. Shall make tea. This visit of two ladies is a unique event. Forthe moment, as she makes tea in their sitting-room, which is now full ofmen, there is an illusion of home. 

Then we are off, for another fifty miles. Darkness comes on, the roadsare unfamiliar. At last an avenue and bright lights. We have reached theVisitors' Château, under the wing of G. H. Q. 

No. 2

_March 31st, 1917_. 

DEAR MR. ROOSEVELT, --My first letter you will perhaps remember took usto the Visitors' Château of G. H. Q. And left us alighting there, to begreeted by the same courteous host, Captain----, who presided last yearover another Guest House far away. But we were not to sleep at theChâteau, which was already full of guests. Arrangements had been madefor us at a cottage in the village near, belonging to the villageschoolmistress; the motor took us there immediately, and after changingour travel-stained dresses, we went back to the Château for dinner. Manyguests--all of them of course of the male sex, and much talk! Some ofthe guests--members of Parliament, and foreign correspondents--had beenover the Somme battlefield that day, and gave alarmist accounts of theeffects of the thaw upon the roads and the ground generally. Banishedfor a time by the frost, the mud had returned; and mud, on the front, becomes a kind of malignant force which affects the spirits ofthe soldiers. 

The schoolmistress and her little maid sat up for us, and shepherded uskindly to bed. Never was there a more strangely built little house! Theceilings came down on our heads, the stairs were perpendicular. Butthere was a stove in each room, and the beds though hard, and the floorthough bare, were scrupulously clean. In the early morning I woke up andlooked out. There had been a white frost, and the sun was just rising ina clear sky. Its yellow light was shining on the whitewashed wall of thenext cottage, on which a large pear-tree was trained. All round werefrost-whitened plots of garden or meadow--_préaux_--with tall poplars inthe hedges cutting the morning sky. Suddenly, I heard a continuousmurmur in the room beneath me. It was the schoolmistress and her maid atprayer. And presently the house door opened and shut. It wasMademoiselle who had gone to early Mass. For the school was an _écolelibre_, and the little lady who taught it was a devout Catholic. Therich yet cold light, the frosty quiet of the village, the thin Frenchtrees against the sky, the ritual murmur in the room below--it was likea scene from a novel by René Bazin, and breathed the old, thetraditional France. 

We were to start early and motor far, but there was time before westarted for a little talk with Mademoiselle. She was full of praise forour English soldiers, some of whom were billeted in the village. "Theyare very kind to our people, they often help the women, and they nevercomplain. " (Has the British Tommy in these parts really forgotten how togrouse?) "I had some of your men billeted here. I could only give them aroom without beds, just the bare boards. 'You will find it hard, ' Isaid. 'We will get a little straw, ' said the sergeant. 'That will be allright. ' Our men would have grumbled. " (But I think this wasMademoiselle's _politesse_!) "And the children are devoted to yoursoldiers. I have a dear little girl in the school, nine years old. Sometimes from the window she sees a man in the street, a soldier wholodges with her mother. Then I cannot hold her. She is like a wild thingto be gone. 'Voilà mon camarade!--voilà mon camarade!' Out she goes, andis soon walking gravely beside him, hand in hand, looking up at him. ""How do they understand each other?" "I don't know. But they have alanguage. Your sergeants often know more French than your officers, because they have to do the billeting and the talking to our people. "

The morning was still bright when the motor arrived, but the frost hadbeen keen, and the air on the uplands was biting. We speed first acrossa famous battlefield, where French and English bones lie mingled belowthe quiet grass, and then turn south-east. Nobody on the roads. Thelines of poplar-trees fly past, the magpies flutter from the woods, andone might almost forget the war. Suddenly, a railway line, a steepdescent and we are full in its midst again. On our left an encampment ofNissen huts--so called from their inventor, a Canadian officer--thosenew and ingenious devices for housing troops, or labour battalions, orcoloured workers, at an astonishing saving both of time and material. Inshape like the old-fashioned beehive, each hut can be put up by four orsix men in a few hours. Everything is, of course, standardised, and thewood which lines their corrugated iron is put together in the simplestand quickest ways, ways easily suggested, no doubt, to the Canadianmind, familiar with "shacks" and lumber camps. We shall come across themeverywhere along the front. But on this first occasion my attention issoon distracted from them, for as we turn a corner beyond the hutsettlement, which I am told is that of a machine-gun detachment, thereis an exclamation from D----. 

_Tanks_! The officer in front points smiling to a field just ahead. There is one of them--the monster!--taking its morning exercise;practising up and down the high and almost perpendicular banks by whichanother huge field is divided. The motor slackens, and we watch thecreature slowly attack a high bank, land complacently on the top, andthen--an officer walking beside it to direct its movements--balance amoment on the edge of another bank equally high, a short distance away. There it is!--down!--not flopping or falling, but all in the way ofbusiness, gliding unperturbed. London is full of tanks, of course--onthe films. But somehow to be watching a real one, under the French sky, not twenty miles from the line, is a different thing. We fall into aneager discussion with Captain F. In front, as to the part played by themin the Somme battle, and as to what the Germans may be preparing inreply to them. And while we talk, my eye is caught by something on thesky-line, just above the tank. It is a man and a plough--a plough thatmight have come out of the Odyssey--the oldest, simplest type. So arethe ages interwoven; and one may safely guess that the plough--that verytype!--will outlast many generations of tanks. But, for the moment, thetanks are in the limelight, and it is luck that we should have come uponthem so soon, for one may motor many miles about the front withoutmeeting with any signs of them. 

Next, a fine main road and an old town, seething with all the stir ofwar. We come upon a crowded market-place, and two huge convoys passingeach other in the narrow street beyond--one, an ammunition column, intowhich our motor humbly fits itself as best it can, by order of theofficer in charge of the column, and the other, a long string ofmagnificent lorries belonging to the Flying Corps, which defiles past uson the left. The inhabitants of the town, old men, women and children, stand to watch the hubbub, with amused friendly faces. On we go, for atime, in the middle of the convoy. The great motor lorries filled withammunition hem us in till the town is through, and a long hill isclimbed. At the top of it we are allowed to draw out, and motor slowlypast long lines of troops on the march; first, R. E. 's with their storewaggons, large and small; then a cyclist detachment; a machine-gundetachment; field kitchens, a white goat lying lazily on the top of oneof them; mules, heavily laden; and Lewis guns in little carts. Theninfantry marching briskly in the keen air, while along other roads, visible to east and west, we see other columns converging. A division, apparently, on the march. The physique of the men, their alert andcheerful looks, strike me particularly. This pitiless war seems to haverevealed to England herself the quality of her race. Though some creditmust be given to the physical instructors of the Army!--who in the lasttwelve months especially have done a wonderful work. 

At last we turn out of the main road, and the endless columns pass awayinto the distance. Again, a railway line in process of doubling; beyond, a village, which seems to be mainly occupied by an Army Medicaldetachment; then two large Casualty Clearing Stations, and a DivisionalDressing Station. Not many wounded here at present; the section of theline from which we are only some ten miles distant has beencomparatively quiet of late. But what preparations everywhere! Whatsigns of the coming storm! Hardly a minute passes as we speed alongwithout its significant sight; horse-lines, Army Service depots burstingwith stores, --a great dump of sandbags--another of ammunition. 

And as I look out at the piles of shells, I think of the most recentfigures furnished me by the Ministry of Munitions. Last year, when theSomme offensive began, and when I was writing _England's Effort_, the_weekly_ output of eighteen-pounder shells was 17-1/2 times what it wasduring the first year of the war. _It is now_ 28 _times as much_. Field howitzer ammunition has _almost doubled_ since last July. That ofmedium guns and howitzers _has more than doubled_. That of the heaviestguns of all (over six-inch) _is more than four times_ as great. By thegrowth of ammunition we may guess what has been the increase in guns, especially in those heavy guns we are now pushing forward after theretreating Germans, as fast as roads and railway lines can be made tocarry them. The German Government, through one of its subordinatespokesmen, has lately admitted their inferiority in guns; their retreat, indeed, on the Somme before our pending attack, together with the stateof their old lines, now we are in and over them, show plainly enoughwhat they had to fear from the British guns and the abundance of Britishammunition. 

But what are these strange figures swarming beside the road--blacktousled heads and bronze faces? Kaffir "boys, " at work in some quarries, feeling the cold, no doubt, on this bright bitter day, in spite of theirlong coats. They are part of that large body of native labour, Chinese, Kaffir, Basuto, which is now helping our own men everywhere to push onand push up, as the new labour forces behind them release more and moreof the fighting men for that dogged pursuit which is going on_there_--in that blue distance to our right!--where the German lineswings stubbornly back, south-east, from the Vimy Ridge. 

The motor stops. This is a Headquarters, and a staff officer comes outto greet us--a boy in looks, but a D. S. O. All the same! His small carprecedes us as a guide, and we keep up with him as best we may. Theseare mining villages we are passing through, and on the horizon are someof those pyramidal slag-heaps--the Fosses--which have seen some of thefiercest fighting of the war. But we leave the villages behind, and aresoon climbing into a wooden upland. Suddenly, a halt. A notice-boardforbids the use of a stretch of road before us "from sun-rise tosunset. " Evidently it is under German observation. We try to findanother, parallel. But here, too, the same notice confronts us. We dashalong it, however, and my pulses run a little quicker, as I realise, from the maps we carry, how near we are to the enemy lines which liehidden in the haze, eastward; and from my own eyes, how exposed is thehillside. But we are safely through, and a little further we come to awood--a charming wood, to all seeming, of small trees, which in a weekor two will be full of spring leaf and flower. But we are no sooner init, jolting up its main track, than we understand the grimness of whatit holds. Spring and flowers have not much to say to it! For this woodand its neighbourhood--Ablain St. Nazaire, Carency, Neuville St. Vaast--have seen war at its cruellest; thousands of brave lives havebeen yielded here; some of the dead are still lying unburied in itsfurthest thickets, and men will go softly through it in the years tocome. "Stranger, go and tell the Lacedaemonians that we lie here, obedient to their will:"--the immortal words are in my ears. But howmany are the sacred spots in this land for which they speak!

We leave the motor and walk on through the wood to the bare uplandbeyond. The wood is still a wood of death, actual or potential. Our ownbatteries are all about us; so too are the remains of French batteries, from the days when the French still held this portion of the line. Wewatch the gunners among the trees and presently pass an encampment oftheir huts. Beyond, a high and grassy plateau--fringes of wood on eitherhand. But we must not go to the edge on our right so as to look downinto the valley below. Through the thin leafless trees, however, we seeplainly the ridges that stretch eastward, one behind the other, "suffused in sunny air. " There are the towers of Mont St. Eloy--ours;the Bertonval Wood--ours; and the famous Vimy Ridge, blue in the middledistance, of which half is ours and half German. We are very near theline. Notre Dame de Lorette is not very far away, though too far for usto reach the actual spot, the famous bluff, round which the battle ragedin 1915. And now the guns begin!--the first we have heard since wearrived. From our left--as it seemed--some distance away, came the shortsharp reports of the trench mortars, but presently, as we walked on, guns just behind us and below us, began to boom over our heads, and weheard again the long-drawn scream or swish of the shells, rushing ontheir deadly path to search out the back of the enemy's lines in thehaze yonder, and flinging confusion on his lines of communication, hissupplies and reserves. He does not reply. He has indeed been strangelymeek of late. The reason here cannot be that he is slipping away fromour attack, as is the case farther south. The Vimy Ridge is firmly held;it is indeed the pivot of the retreat. Perhaps to-day he is economising. But, of course, at any moment he might reply. After a certain amount ofhammering he _must_ reply! And there are some quite fresh shell-holesalong our path, some of them not many hours old. Altogether, it is withrelief that as the firing grows hotter we turn back and pick up themotor in the wood again. 

And yet one is loath to go! Never again shall I stand in such ascene--never again behold those haunted ridges, and this wood of deathwith the guns that hide in it! To have shared ever so little in such abit of human experience is for a woman a thing of awe, if one has timeto think of it. Not even groups of artillery men, chatting or completingtheir morning's toilet, amid the thin trees, can dull that sense in me. _They_ are only "strafing" Fritz or making ready to "strafe" him; theyhave had an excellent midday meal in the huts yonder, and they whistleand sing as they go about their work, disappearing sometimes intomysterious regions out of sight. That is all there is in it for them. They are "doing their job, " like the airmen, and if a German shell findsthem in the wood, why, the German will have done _his_ job, and theywill bear no grudge. It is simple as that--for them. But to theonlooker, they are all figures in a great design--woven into theterrible tapestry of war, and charged with a meaning that we of thisactual generation shall never more than dimly see or understand. 

Again we rush along the exposed road and back into the mining region, taking a westward turn. A stately chateau, and near it a smaller house, where a General greets us. Lunch is over, for we are late, but it ishospitably brought back for us, and the General and I plunge into talkof the retreat, of what it means for the Germans, and what it will meanfor us. After luncheon, we go into the next room to look at theGeneral's big maps which show clearly how the salients run, the smallerand the larger, from which the Germans are falling back, followedclosely by the troops of General Gough. News of the condition of theenemy's abandoned lines is coming in fast. "Let no one make any mistake. They have gone because they _must_--because of the power of ourartillery, which never stops hammering them, whether on the line orbehind the line, which interferes with all their communications andsupplies, and makes life intolerable. At the same time, the retreat isbeing skilfully done, and will of course delay us. That was why they didit. We shall have to push up roads, railways, supplies; the bringing upof the heavy guns will take time, but less time than they think! Our menare in the pink of condition!"

On which again follows very high praise of the quality of the men nowcoming out under the Military Service Act. "Yet they are conscripts, "says one of us, in some surprise, "and the rest were volunteers. " "Nodoubt. But these are the men--many of them--who had to balanceduties--who had wives and children to leave, and businesses whichdepended on them personally. Compulsion has cut the knot and eased theirconsciences. They'll make fine soldiers! But we want more--_more!_" Andthen follows talk on the wonderful developments of training--even sincelast year; and some amusing reminiscences of the early days of England'sastounding effort, by which vast mobs of eager recruits without guns, uniforms, or teachers, have been turned into the magnificent armies nowfighting in France. 

The War Office has lately issued privately some extremely interestingnotes on the growth and training of the New Armies, of which it is onlynow possible to make public use. From these it is clear that in theGreat Experiment of the first two years of war all phases of intellectand capacity have played their part. The widely trained mind, takinglarge views as to the responsibility of the Army towards the nationdelivered into its hands, so that not only should it be disciplined forwar but made fitter for peace; and the practical inventive gifts ofindividuals who, in seeking to meet a special need, stumble on somethinguniversal, both forces have been constantly at work. Discipline andinitiative have been the twin conquerors, and the ablest men in theArmy, to use a homely phrase, have been out for both. Many a fresh, andvaluable bit of training has been due to some individual officer struckwith a new idea, and patiently working it out. The special "schools, "which are now daily increasing the efficiency of the Army, if you askhow they arose, you will generally be able to trace them back to someeager young man starting a modest experiment in his spare time for theteaching of himself and some of his friends, and so developing it thatthe thing is finally recognised, enlarged, and made the parent ofsimilar efforts elsewhere. 

Let me describe one such "school"--to me a thrilling one, as I saw it ona clear March afternoon. A year ago no such thing existed. Now each ofour Armies possesses one. 

But this letter is already too long!

No. 3

_Easter Eve_, 1917. 

DEAR MR. ROOSEVELT, --Since I finished my last letter to you, before themeeting of Congress, great days have come and gone. 

_America is with us!_

At last, we English folk can say that to each other, without reserve orqualification, and into England's mood of ceaseless effort and anxietythere has come a sudden relaxation, a breath of something canning andsustaining. What your action may be--whether it will shorten the war, and how much, no one here yet knows. But when in some great strain afriend steps to your side, you don't begin with questions. He is there. Your cause, your effort, are his. Details will come. Discussion willcome. But there is a breathing space first, in which feeling rests uponitself before it rushes out in action. Such a breathing space forEngland are these Easter days!

Meanwhile, the letters from the Front come in with their new note ofjoy. "You should see the American faces in the Army to-day!" writes one. "They bring a new light into this dismal spring. " How many of them?Mayn't we now confess to ourselves and our Allies that there is already, the equivalent of an American division, fighting with the Allied Armiesin France, who have used every honest device to get there? They havecome in by every channel, and under every pretext--wavelets, forerunnersof the tide. For now, you too have to improvise great armies, as weimprovised ours in the first two years of war. And with you as with us, your unpreparedness stands as your warrant before history, that not fromAmerican minds and wills came the provocation to this war. 

But your actual and realised co-operation sets me on lines of thoughtthat distract me, for the moment, from the first plan of this letter. The special Musketry School with which I had meant to open it, must waittill its close. I find my mind full instead--in connection with the newsfrom Washington--of those recently issued War Office pamphlets of whichI spoke in my last letter; and I propose to run through their story. These pamphlets, issued not for publication but for the information ofthose concerned, are the first frank record of _our national experience_in connection with the war; and for all your wonderful American resourceand inventiveness, your American energy and wealth, you will certainly, as prudent men, make full use of our experience in the coming months. 

Last year, for _England's Effort_, I tried vainly to collect some ofthese very facts and figures, which the War Office was stilljealously--'and no doubt quite rightly--withholding. Now at last theyare available, told by "authority, " and one can hardly doubt that eachof these passing days will give them--for America a double significance. Surpass the story, if you can; we shall bear you no grudge! But up tillnow, it remains a chapter unique in the history of war. Many Americans, as your original letter to me pointed out, had still, last year, practically no conception of what we were doing and had done. Themajority of our own people, indeed, were in much the same case. Whilethe great story was still in the making, while the foundations werestill being laid, it was impossible to correct all the annoyingunderestimates, all the ignorant or careless judgments, of people whotook a point for the whole. The men at the heart of things could onlyset their teeth, keep silence and give no information that could helpthe enemy. The battle of the Somme, last July, was the first realtesting of their work. The Hindenburg retreat, the successes inMesopotamia, the marvellous spectacle of the Armies in France--andbefore this letter could be sent to Press, the glorious news from theArras front!--are the present fruits of it. 

Like you, we had, at the outbreak of war, some 500, 000 men, all told, ofwhom not half were fully trained. None of us British folk will everforget the Rally of the First Hundred Thousand! On the 8th of August, four days after the Declaration of War, Lord Kitchener asked for them. He got them in a fortnight. But the stream rushed on--in the fifth weekof the war alone 250, 000 men enlisted; 30, 000 recruits--the yearlynumber enlisted before the war--joined in one day. Within six or sevenweeks the half-million available at the beginning of the war had been_more than doubled. _

Then came a pause. The War Office, snowed under, not knowing where toturn for clothes, boots, huts, rifles, guns, ammunition, tried to checkthe stream by raising the recruits' standards. A mistake!--but soonrecognised. In another month, under the influence of the victory on theMarne, and while the Germans were preparing the attacks on the BritishLine so miraculously beaten off in the first battle of Ypres, themomentary check had been lost in a fresh outburst of national energy. You will remember how the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee came intobeing, that first autumn?--how the Prime Minister took the lead, and thetwo great political parties of the country agreed to bring all theirorganisation, central or local, to bear on the supreme question ofgetting men for the Army. Tory and Radical toured the country together. The hottest opponents stood on the same platform. _L'union sacrée_--touse the French phrase, so vivid and so true, by which our great Ally hascharmed her own discords to rest in defence of the country--became areality here too, in spite of strikes, in spite of Ireland. 

By July 1915--the end of the first year of war--more than 2, 000, 000 menhad voluntarily enlisted. But the military chiefs knew well that it wasbut a half-way house. They knew, too, that it was not enough to get menand rush them out to the trenches as soon as any kind of training couldbe given them. The available men must be sorted out. Some, indeed, mustbe brought back from the fighting line for work as vital as thefighting itself. 

_So Registration came_--the first real step towards organising thenation. 150, 000 voluntary workers helped to register all men and womenin the country, from eighteen to sixty-five, and on the results LordDerby built his group system, which _almost_ enabled us to do withoutcompulsion. Between October and December 1915, another two million and aquarter men had "attested"--that is, had pledged themselves to come upfor training when called on. 

But, as every observer of this new England knows, we have here less thanhalf the story. From a nation not invaded, protected, on the contrary, by its sea ramparts from the personal cruelties and ravages of war, togather in between four and five million voluntary recruits was a greatachievement. But to turn these recruits at the shortest possible notice, under the hammer-blows of a war, in which our enemies had every initialadvantage, into armies equipped and trained according to modernstandards, might well have seemed to those who undertook it animpossible task. And the task had to be accomplished, the riddle solved, before, in the face of the enemy, the incredible difficulties of itcould possibly be admitted. The creators of the new armies worked, asfar as they could, behind a screen. But now the screen is down, and weare allowed to see their difficulties in their true perspective--as theyexisted during the first months of the war. 

In the first place--accommodation! At the opening of war we hadbarrack-room for 176, 000 men. What to do with these capped, bare-headed, or straw-hatted multitudes who poured in at Lord Kitchener's call! Theywere temporarily housed--somehow--under every kind of shelter. Butmilitary huts for half a million men were immediately planned--then fornearly a million. 

Timber--labour--lighting--water--drainage--roads--everything, had to beprovided, and was provided. Billeting filled up the gaps, and largecamps were built by private enterprise to be taken in time by theGovernment. Of course mistakes were made. Of course there were somedishonest contractors and some incompetent officials. But the breath, the winnowing blast of the national need was behind it all. By the endof the first year of war, the "problem of quartering the troops in thechief training centres had been solved. "

In the next place, there were no clothes. A dozen manufacturers of khakicloth existed before the war. They had to be pushed up as quickly aspossible to 200. Which of us in the country districts does not rememberthe blue emergency suits, of which a co-operative society was able by alucky stroke to provide 400, 000 for the new recruits?--or the othermotley coverings of the hosts that drilled in our fields and marchedabout our lanes? The War Office Notes, under my hand, speak of thesemonths as the "tatterdemalion stage. " For what clothes and boots therewere must go to the men at the Front, and the men at home had just totake their chance. 

Well! It took a year and five months--breathless months of strain andstress--while Germany was hammering East and West on the long-drawnlines of the Allies. But by then, January 1916, the Army was not onlyclothed, housed, and very largely armed, but we were manufacturing forour Allies. 

As to the arms and equipment, look back at these facts. When theExpeditionary Force had taken its rifles abroad in August 1914, 150, 000rifles were left in the country, and many of them required to beresighted. The few Service rifles in each battalion were handed round"as the Three Fates handed round their one eye, in the story ofPerseus"; old rifles, and inferior rifles "technically known as D. P. , "were eagerly made use of. But after seven months' hard training withnothing better than these makeshifts, "men were apt to get depressed. "

It was just the same with the Artillery. At the outbreak of war we hadguns for eight divisions--say 140, 000 men. And there was no plantwherewith to make and keep up more than that supply. Yet guns had to besent as fast as they could be made to France, Egypt, Gallipoli. How werethe gunners at home to be trained?

It was done, so to speak, with blood and tears. For seven months it wasimpossible for the gunner in training even to see, much less to work orfire the gun to which he was being trained. Zealous officers provideddummy wooden guns for their men. All kinds of devices were tried. Andeven when the guns themselves arrived, they came often without theindispensable accessories--range-finders, directors, and the like. 

It was a time of hideous anxiety for both Government and War Office. Forthe military history of 1915 was largely a history of shortage of gunsand ammunition--whether on the Western or Eastern fronts. All the same, by the end of 1915 the thing was in hand. The shells from the newfactories were arriving in ever-increasing volume; and the guns werefollowing. 

In a chapter of _England's Effort_ I have described the amazingdevelopment of some of the great armament works in order to meet thiscry for guns, as I saw it in February 1916. The second stage of the warhad then begun. The first was over, and we were steadily overtaking ourcolossal task. The Somme proved it abundantly. But the expansion _still_goes on; and what the nation owes to the directing brains and ceaselessenergy of these nominally private but really national firms has neverbeen sufficiently recognised. On my writing-desk is a letter received, not many days ago, from a world-famous firm whose works I saw last year:"Since your visit here in the early part of last year, there have beenvery large additions to the works. " Buildings to accommodate newaeroplane and armament construction of different kinds are mentioned, and the letter continues: "We have also put up another gun-shop, 565feet long, and 163 feet wide--in three extensions--of which the third isnearing completion. These additions are all to increase the output ofguns. The value of that output is now 60 per cent, greater than it wasin 1915. In the last twelve months, the output of shells has been oneand a half times more than it was in the previous year. " No wonder thatthe humane director who writes speaks with keen sympathy of the"long-continued strain" upon masters and men. But he adds--"When we allfeel it, we think of our soldiers and sailors, doing theirduty--unto death. "

And then--to repeat--if the _difficulties of equipment_ were huge, theywere almost as nothing to the _difficulties of training_. The facts asthe War Office has now revealed them (the latest of these mostilluminating brochures is dated April 2nd, 1917) are almost incredible. It will be an interesting time when our War Office and yours come tocompare notes!--"when Peace has calmed the world. " For you are nowfacing the same grim task--how to find the shortest cuts to the makingof an Army--which confronted us in 1914. 

In the first place, what military trainers there were in the country hadto be sent abroad with the first Expeditionary Force. Adjutants, N. C. O. 's, all the experienced pilots in the Flying Corps, nearly all thequalified instructors in physical training, the vast majority of all theseasoned men in every branch of the Service--down, as I have said, tothe Army cooks--departed overseas. At the very last moment an officer ortwo were shed from every battalion of the Expeditionary Force to trainthose left behind. Even so, there was "hardly even a nucleus of expertsleft. " And yet--officers for 500, 000 men had to be found--_within amonth_--from August 4th, 1914. 

How was it done? The War Office answer makes fascinating reading. Thesmall number of regular officers left behind--200 officers of the IndianArmy--retired officers, "dug-outs"--all honour to them!--wounded officersfrom the Front; all were utilised. But the chief sources of supply, aswe all know, were the Officers' Training Corps at the Universities andPublic Schools which we owe to the divination, the patience, the hardwork of Lord Haldane. _Twenty thousand potential officers were supplied_by the O. T. C's. What should we have done without them?

But even so, there was no time to train them in the practical businessof war--and such a war! Yet _their_ business was to train recruits, while they themselves were untrained. At first, those who were granted"temporary commissions" were given a month's training. Then even thatbecame impossible. During the latter months of 1914 "there waspractically no special training given to infantry subalterns, withtemporary commissions. " With 1915, the system of a month's training wasrevived--pitifully little, yet the best that could be done. But duringthe first five months of the war most of the infantry subalterns of thenew armies "had to train themselves as best they could in the intervalsof training their men. "

One's pen falters over the words. Before the inward eye rises thephantom host of these boy-officers who sprang to England's aid in thefirst year of the war, and whose graves lie scattered in an endlessseries along the western front and on the heights of Gallipoli. Withoutcounting the cost for a moment, they came to the call of the GreatMother, from near and far. "They trained themselves, while they weretraining their men. " Not for them the plenty of guns and shells that nowat least lessens the hideous sacrifice that war demands; not for themthe many protective devices and safeguards that the war itself hasdeveloped. Their young bodies--their precious lives--paid the price. Andin the Mother-heart of England they lie--gathered and secure--for ever. 

 * * * * *

But let me go a little further with the new War Office facts. 

The year 1915 saw great and continuous advance. During that year, an_average number of over a million troops_ were being trained in theUnited Kingdom, apart from the armies abroad. The First, Second, andThird Armies naturally came off much better than the Fourth and Fifth, who were yet being recruited all the time. What equipment, clothes andarms there were the first three armies got; the rest had to wait. Butall the same, the units of these later armies were doing the best theycould for themselves all the time; nobody stood still. Andgradually--surely--order was evolved out of the original chaos. The ArmyOrders of the past had dropped out of sight with the beginning of thewar. Everything had to be planned anew. The one governing factor was the"necessity of getting men to the front at the earliest possible moment. "Six months' courses were laid down for all arms. It was very rare, however, that any course could be strictly carried out, and after thefirst three armies, the training of the rest seemed, for a time, to beall beginnings!--with the final stage farther and farther away. Andalways the same difficulty of guns, rifles, huts, and the rest. 

But, like its own tanks, the War Office went steadily on, negotiatingone obstacle after another. Special courses for special subjects beganto be set up. Soon artillery officers had no longer to join theirbatteries _at once_ on appointment; R. E. Officers could be given a sevenweeks' training at Chatham; little enough, "for a man supposed to knowthe use and repairs of telephones and telegraphs, or the way to build ordestroy a bridge, or how to meet the countless other needs with which asapper is called upon to deal!" Increasing attention was paid to stafftraining and staff courses. And insufficient as it all was, for months, the general results of this haphazard training, when the men actuallygot into the field--all short-comings and disappointments admitted--werenothing short of wonderful. Had the Germans forgotten that we are andalways have been a fighting people? That fact, at any rate, was broughthome to them by the unbroken spirit of the troops who held the line inFrance and Flanders in 1915 against all attempts to break through; andat Neuve Chapelle, or Loos, or a hundred other minor engagements, onlywanted numbers and ammunition--above all ammunition!--to win them thefull victory they had rightly earned. 

Of this whole earlier stage, the _junior subaltern_ was the leadingfigure. It was he--let me insist upon it anew--whose spirit made the newarmies. If the tender figure of the "_Lady of the Lamp_" has become formany of us the chief symbol of the Crimean struggle, when Britain comesto embody in sculpture or in painting that which has touched her mostdeeply in this war, she will choose--surely--the figure of a boy ofnineteen, laughing, eager, undaunted, as quick to die as to live, carrying in his young hands the "Luck" of England. 

 * * * * *

But with the end of 1915, the first stage, the elementary stage, of thenew Armies came to an end. When I stood, in March 1916, on theScherpenberg hill, looking out over the Salient, new conditions reigned. The Officer Cadet Corps had been formed; a lively and continuousintercourse between the realities of the front and the training at homehad been set up; special schools in all subjects of military interesthad been founded, often, as we have seen, by the zeal of individualofficers, to be then gradually incorporated in the Army system. Meninsufficiently trained in the early months had been given theopportunity--which they eagerly took--of beginning at the beginningagain, correcting mistakes and incorporating all the latest knowledge. Even a lieutenant-colonel, before commanding a battalion, could go toschool once more; and even for officers and men "in rest, " there were, and are, endless opportunities of seeing and learning, which few wishto forgo. 

And that brings me to what is now shaping itself--the final result. Theyear just passed, indeed--from March to March--has practically roundedour task--though the "learning" of the Army is never over!--and has seenthe transformation--whether temporary or permanent, who yet cantell?--of the England of 1914, with its zealous mobs of untrained and"tatterdemalion" recruits, into a great military power, [This letter wasfinished just as the news of the Easter Monday Battle of Arras wascoming in. ] disposing of armies in no whit inferior to those of Germany, and bringing to bear upon the science of war--now that Germany hasforced us to it--the best intelligence, and the best _character_, of thenation. The most insolent of the German military newspapers are alreadybitterly confessing it. 

 * * * * *

My summary--short and imperfect as it is--of this first detailed accountof its work which the War Office has allowed to be made public--hascarried me far afield. 

The motor has been waiting long at the door of the hospitableheadquarters which have entertained us! Let me return to it, to thegreat spectacle of the present--after this retrospect of the Past. 

Again the crowded roads--the young and vigorous troops--the manifoldsights illustrating branch after branch of the Army. I recall a draft, tired with marching, clambering with joy into some empty lorries, andsitting there peacefully content, with legs dangling and the everblessed cigarette for company, then an aeroplane station--then afootball field, with a violent game going on--a Casualty ClearingStation, almost a large hospital--another football match!--a battery ofeighteen-pounders on the march, and beyond an old French market towncrowded with lorries and men. In the midst of it D---- suddenly draws myattention to a succession of great nozzles passing us, with their teamsand limbers. I have stood beside the forging and tempering of theirbrothers in the gun-shops of the north, have watched the testing andcallipering of their shining throats. They are 6-inch naval guns ontheir way to the line--like everything else, part of the storm to come. 

And in and out, among the lorries and the guns, stream the French folk, women, children, old men, alert, industrious, full of hope, withfriendly looks for their Allies. Then the town passes, and we are outagain in the open country, leaving the mining village behind. We are notvery far at this point from that portion of the line which I saw lastyear under General X's guidance. But everything looks very quiet andrural, and when we emerged on the high ground of the school we had cometo see, I might have imagined myself on a Surrey or Hertfordshirecommon. The officer in charge, a "mighty hunter" in civil life, showedus his work with a quiet but most contagious enthusiasm. The problemthat he, and his colleagues engaged in similar work in other sections ofthe front, had to solve, was--how to beat the Germans at their own gameof "sniping, " which cost us so many lives in the first year and a halfof war; in other words, how to train a certain number of men to an artof rifle-shooting, combining the instincts and devices of a "Pathfinder"with the subtleties of modern optical and mechanical science. "Don'tthink of this as meant primarily to kill, " says the Chief of the School, as he walks beside me--"it is meant primarily to _protect_. We lost ourbest men--young and promising officers in particular--by the scorebefore we learnt the tricks of the German 'sniper' and how to meetthem. " German "sniping, " as our guide explains, is by no means alltricks. For the most part, it means just first-rate shooting, combinedwith the trained instinct and _flair_ of the sportsman. Is thereanything that England--and Scotland--should provide more abundantly?Still, there are tricks, and our men have learnt them. 

Of the many surprises of the school I may not now speak. Above all, itis a school of _observation_. Nothing escapes the eye or the ear. Everypoint, for instance, connected with our two unfamiliar figures will havebeen elaborately noted by those men on the edge of the hill; the officerin charge will presently get a careful report on us. 

"We teach our men the old great game of war--wit against wit--courageagainst courage--life against life. We try many men here, and reject agood few. But the men who have gone through our training here arevaluable, both for attack and defence--above all, let me repeat it, theyare valuable for _protection_. "

And what is meant by this, I have since learnt in greater detail. Beforethese schools were started, _every day_ saw a heavy toll--especially ofofficers' lives--taken by German snipers. Compare with this one of thelatest records: that out of fifteen battalions there were only nine menkilled by snipers _in three months. _

We leave the hill, half sliding down the frozen watercourse that leadsto it, and are in the motor again, bound for an Army Headquarters. 

No. 4

_April 14th_, 1917. 

DEAR MR. ROOSEVELT, --As the news comes flashing in, these April days, and all the world holds its breath to hear the latest messages fromArras and the Vimy ridge, it is natural that in the memory of a womanwho, six weeks ago, was a spectator--before the curtain rose--of theactual scene of such events, every incident and figure of that pastexperience, as she looks back upon it, should gain a peculiar andshining intensity. 

The battle of the Vimy Ridge [_April 8th_] is clearly going to be thesecond (the first was the German retreat on the Somme) of those"decisive events" determining this year the upshot of the war, to whichthe Commander-in-Chief, with so strong and just a confidence, directedthe eyes of this country some three months ago. When I was in theneighbourhood of the great battlefield--one may say it now!--the wholecountryside was one vast preparation. The signs of the coming attackwere everywhere--troops, guns, ammunition, food dumps, hospitals, airstations--every actor and every property in the vast and tragic playwere on the spot, ready for the moment and the word. 

Yet, except in the Headquarters and Staff Councils of the Army nobodyknew when the moment and the word would come, and nobody spoke of them. The most careful and exact organisation for the great movement was goingon. No visitor would hear anything of it. Only the nameless stir in theair, the faces of officers at Headquarters, the general alacrity, theendless _work_ everywhere, prophesied the great things ahead. Perpetual, highly organised, scientific drudgery is three parts of war, it seems, as men now wage it. The Army, as I saw it, was at work--desperately atwork!--but "dreaming on things to come. "

One delightful hour of that March day stands out for me in particular. The strong, attractive presence of an Army Commander, whose name will befor ever linked with that of the battle of the Vimy ridge, surrounded bya group of distinguished officers; a long table, and a too brief stay;conversation that carries for me the thrill of the _actual thing_, closeby, though it may not differ very much from wartalk at home: these arethe chief impressions that remain. The General beside me, with that lookin his kind eyes which seems to tell of nights shortened by hard work, says a few quietly confident things about the general situation, andthen we discuss a problem which one of the party--not a soldier--starts. 

Is it true or untrue that long habituation to the seeing or inflictingof pain and death, that the mere sights and sounds of the trenches tendwith time to brutalise men, and will make them callous when they returnto civil life? Do men grow hard and violent in this furnace after awhile, and will the national character suffer thereby in the future? TheGeneral denies it strongly. "I see no signs of it. The kindness of themen to each other, to the wounded, whether British or German, to theFrench civilians, especially the women and children, is as marked as itever was. It is astonishing the good behaviour of the men in theseFrench towns; it is the rarest thing in the world to get a complaint. "

I ask for some particulars of the way in which the British Army "runs"the French towns and villages in our zone. How is it done? "It is allsummed up in three words, " says an officer present, "M. Le Maire!" Whatwe should have done without the local functionaries assigned by theFrench system to every village and small town it is hard to say. Theyare generally excellent people; they have the confidence of their fellowtownsmen, and know everything about them. Our authorities on taking overa town or village do all the preliminaries through M. Le Maire, and allgoes well. 

The part played, indeed, by these local chiefs of the civil populationthroughout France during the war has been an honourable and arduous--inmany cases a tragic--one. The murder, under the forms of acourt-martial, of the Maire of Senlis and his five fellow hostagesstands out among the innumerable German cruelties as one of peculiarhorror. Everywhere in the occupied departments the Maire has been thesurety for his fellows, and the Germans have handled them often as acruel boy torments some bird or beast he has captured, for the pleasureof showing his power over it. 

From the wife of the Maire of an important town in Lorraine I heard thestory of how her husband had been carried off as a hostage for threeweeks, while the Germans were in occupation. Meanwhile German officerswere billeted in her charming old house. "They used to say to me everyday with great politeness that they _hoped_ my husband would not beshot. 'But why should he be shot, monsieur? He will do nothing todeserve it. ' On which they would shrug their shoulders and say, 'Madame, c'est la guerre!' evidently wishing to see me terrified. But I nevergave them that pleasure. "

A long drive home, through the dark and silent country. Yet everywhereone feels the presence of the Army. We draw up to look at a sign-post atsome cross roads by the light of one of the motor lamps. Instantly acouple of Tommies emerge from the darkness and give help. In passingthrough a village a gate suddenly opens and a group of horses comes out, led by two men in khaki; or from a Y. M. C. A. Hut laughter and song floatout into the night. And soon in these farms and cottages everybody willbe asleep under the guard of the British Forces, while twenty milesaway, in the darkness, the guns we saw in the morning are endlesslyharassing and scourging the enemy lines, preparing for the day when thethoughts now maturing in the minds of the Army leaders will leap inflame to light. 

 * * * * *

To-day we are off for the Somme. I looked out anxiously with the dawn, and saw streaks of white mist lying over the village and the sunstruggling through. But as we start on the road to Amiens, the mistgains the upper hand, and we begin to be afraid that we shall not getany of those wide views from the west of Albert over the Somme countrywhich are possible in clear weather. Again the high upland, and thistime _three_ tanks on the road, but motionless, alack! the nozzles oftheir machine guns just visible on their great sides. Then a main road, if it can be called a road since the thaw has been at work upon it. Every mile or two, as our chauffeur explains, the pavé "is all burst up"from below, and we rock and lunge through holes and ruts that only anArmy motor can stand. But German prisoners are thick on the worst bits, repairing as hard as they can. Was it perhaps on some of these men thatcertain of the recent letters that are always coming into G. H. Q. Havebeen found? I will quote a few of those which have not yet seenthe light. 

Here are a batch of letters written in January of this year from Hamburgand its neighbourhood:

"It is indeed a miserable existence. How will it all end? There isabsolutely nothing to be got here. Honey costs _6s. 6d_. A pound, goosefat _18s_. A pound. Lovely prices, aren't they? One cannot do much byway of heating, as there is no coal. We can just freeze and starve athome. Everybody is ill. All the infirmaries are overflowing. Small-poxhas broken out. You are being shot at the front, and at home we aregradually perishing. "

" ... On the Kaiser's birthday, military bands played everywhere. Whenone passes and listens to this tomfoolery, and sees the emaciated andoverworked men in war-time, swaying to the sounds of music, and enjoyingit, one's very gall rises. Why music? Of course, if times weredifferent, one could enjoy music. But to-day! It should be the aim ofthe higher authorities to put an end to this murder. In every sound ofmusic the dead cry for revenge. I can assure you that it is verysurprising that there has not been a single outbreak here, but itneither can nor will last much longer. How can a human being subsist on1/4 lb. Of potatoes a day? I should very much like the Emperor to tryand live for a week on the fare we get. He would then say it isimpossible.... I heard something this week quite unexpectedly, whichalthough I had guessed it before, yet has depressed me still more. However, we will hope for the best. "

"You write to say that you are worse off than a beast of burden.... Icouldn't send you any cakes, as we had no more flour.... We haveabundant bread tickets. From Thursday to Saturday I can still buy fiveloaves.... My health is bad; not my asthma, no, but my whole body iscollapsing. We are all slowly perishing, and this is what it is allcoming to. "

" ... The outlook here is also sad. One cannot get a bucket of coal. Thestores and dealers have none. The schools are closing, as there is nocoal. Soon everybody will be in the same plight. Neither coal norvegetables can be bought. Holland is sending us nothing more, and wehave none. We get 3-1/2 lb. Of potatoes per person. In the next few dayswe shall only have swedes to eat, which must be dried. "

 * * * * *

A letter written from Hamburg in February, and others from Coblenz aretragic reading:

" ... We shall soon have nothing more to eat. We earn no money, absolutely none; it is sad but true. Many people are dying here frominanition or under-feeding. "

Or, take these from Neugersdorf, in Saxony:

"We cannot send you any butter, for we have none to eat ourselves. Forthree weeks we have not been able to get any potatoes. So we only haveturnips to eat, and now there are no more to be had. We do not know whatwe can get for dinner this week, and if we settle to get our food at thePublic Food-Kitchen we shall have to stand two hours for it. "

"Here is February once more--one month nearer to peace. Otherwise all isthe same. Turnips! Turnips! Very few potatoes, only a little bread, andno thought of butter or meat; on the other hand, any quantity of hunger. I understand your case is not much better on the Somme. "

Or this from a man of the Ersatz Battalion, 19th F. A. R. , Dresden:

"Since January 16th I have been called up and put into the FootArtillery at Dresden. On the 16th we were first taken to theQuartermaster's Stores, where 2, 000 of us had to stand waiting in therain from 2. 30 to 6. 30.... On the 23rd I was transferred to the tennisground. We are more than 100 men in one room. Nearly all of us havefrozen limbs at present. The food, too, is bad; sometimes it cannotpossibly be eaten. Our training also is very quick, for we are to go_into the field in six weeks_. "

Or these from Itzehoe and Hanover:

"Could you get me some silk? It costs 8s. A metre here.... To-day, the24th, all the shops were stormed for bread, and 1, 000 loaves were stolenfrom the bakery. There were several other thousand in stock. In someshops the windows were smashed. In the grocers' shops the butter barrelswere rolled into the street. There were soldiers in civilian dress. TheMayor wanted to hang them. There are no potatoes this week. "

"To-day, the 27th, the bakers' shops in the ---- Road were stormed.... This afternoon the butchers' shops are to be stormed. "

"If only peace would come soon! We have been standing to for an alarmthese last days, as the people here are storming all the bakers' shops. It is a semi-revolution. It cannot last much longer. "

To such a pass have the Kaiser and the Junker party brought theircountrymen! Here, no doubt, are some of the recipients of such lettersamong the peaceful working groups in shabby green-grey, scattered alongthe roads of France. As we pass, the German N. C. O. Often looks up tosalute the officer who is with us, and the general aspect of the men--atany rate of the younger men--is cheerfully phlegmatic. At least they aresafe from the British guns, and at least they have enough to eat. As tothis, let me quote, by way of contrast, a few passages from letterswritten by prisoners in a British camp to their people at home. Onemight feel a quick pleasure in the creature-comfort they express but forthe burning memory of our own prisoners, and the way in which thousandsof them have been cruelly ill-treated, tormented even, in Germany--worstof all, perhaps, by German women. 

The extracts are taken from letters written mostly in December andJanuary last:

(_a_) " ... Dear wife, don't fret about me, because the English treat usvery well. Only our own officers (N. C. O. 's) treat us even worse thanthey do at home in barracks; but that we're accustomed to.... "

(_b_) " ... I'm now a prisoner in English hands, and I'm quite comfortableand content with my lot, for most of my comrades are dead. The Englishtreat us well, and everything that is said to the contrary is not true. Our food is good. There are no meatless days, but we haven't anycigars.... "

(_c_) Written from hospital, near Manchester: " ... I've been a prisonersince October, 1916. I'm extremely comfortable here.... Considering thetimes, I really couldn't wish you all anything better than to behere too!"

(_d_) " ... I am afraid I'm not in a position to send you very detailedletters about my life at present, but I can tell you that I am quite allright and comfortable, and that I wish every English prisoner were thesame. Our new Commandant is very humane--strict, but just. You can telleverybody who thinks differently that I shall always be glad to provethat he is wrong.... "

(_e_) " ... I suppose you are all thinking that we are having a very badtime here as prisoners. It's true we have to do without a good manythings, but that after all one must get accustomed to. The English arereally good people, which I never would have believed before I was takenprisoner. They try all they can to make our lot easier for us, and youknow there are a great many of us now. So don't be distressedfor us.... "

X is passed, a large and prosperous town, with mills in a hollow. Weclimb the hill beyond it, and are off on a long and gradual descent toAmiens. This Picard country presents everywhere the same generalfeatures of rolling downland, thriving villages, old churches, comfortable country houses, straight roads, and well-kept woods. Thebattlefields of the Somme were once a continuation of it! But on thisMarch day the uplands are wind-swept and desolate; and chilly whitemists curl about them, with occasional bursts of pale sun. 

Out of the mist there emerges suddenly an anti-aircraft section; then agreat Army Service dump; and presently we catch sight of a row ofhangars and the following notice, "Beware of aeroplanes ascending anddescending across roads. " For a time the possibility of charging into abiplane gives zest to our progress, as we fly along the road which cutsthe aerodrome; but, alack! there are none visible and we begin to droptowards Amiens. 

Then, outside the town, sentinels stop us, French and British; ourpasses are examined; and, under their friendly looks--betraying a littlesurprise!--we drive on into the old streets. I was in Amiens two yearsbefore the war, between trains, that I might refresh a somewhat fadedmemory of the cathedral. But not such a crowded, such a busy Amiens asthis! The streets are so full that we have to turn out of the mainstreet, directed by a French military policeman, and find our way by adétour to the cathedral. 

As we pass through Amiens arrangements are going on for the "takingover" of another large section of the French line, south of Albert; asfar, it is rumoured, as Roye and Lagny. At last, with our new armies, wecan relieve more of the French divisions, who have borne so gallantlyand for so many months the burden of their long line. It is true thatthe bulk of the German forces are massed against the British lines, andthat in some parts of the centre and the east, owing to the nature ofthe ground, they are but thinly strung along the French front, whichaccounts partly for the disproportion in the number of kilometrescovered by each Ally. But, also, we had to make our Army; the French, God be thanked, had theirs ready, and gloriously have they stood thebrunt, as the defenders of civilisation, till we could take ourfull share. 

And now we, who began with 45 kilometres of the battle-line, havegradually become responsible for 185, so that "at last, " says a Frenchfriend to me in Paris, "our men can have a rest, some of them for thefirst time! And, by Heaven, they've earned it!"

Yet, in this "taking over" there are many feelings concerned. For theFrench _poilu_ and our Tommy it is mostly the occasion for as muchfraternisation as their fragmentary knowledge of each other's speechallows; the Frenchman is proud to show his line, the Britisher is proudto take it over; there are laughter and eager good will; on the whole, it is a red-letter day. But sometimes there strikes in a note "too deepfor tears. " Here is a fragment from an account of a "taking over, "written by an eye-witness:

Trains of a prodigious length are crawling up a French railway. Onefollows so closely upon another that the rear truck of the first israrely out of sight of the engine-driver of the second. These trains arefull of British soldiers. Most of them are going to the front for thefirst time. They are seated everywhere, on the trucks, on the roof--legsdangling over the edge--inside, and even over the buffers. Presentlythey arrive at their goal. The men clamber out on to the siding, collecttheir equipment and are ready for a march up country. A few children runalongside them, shouting, "Anglais!" "Anglais!" And some of them takethe soldiers' hands and walk on with them until they are tired. 

Now the trenches are reached, and the men break into single file. Butthe occasion is not the usual one of taking over a few trenches. _We arerelieving some sixty miles of French line. _ There is, however, noconfusion. The right men are sent to the right places, and everything isdone quietly. It is like a great tide sweeping in, and another sweepingout. Sixty miles of trenches are gradually changing their nationality. 

The German, a few yards over the way, knows quite well what ishappening. A few extra shells whizz by; a trench mortar or two spluttera welcome; but it makes little difference to the weary German who mansthe trenches over against him. Only, the new men are fresh and untired, and the German has no Ally who can give him corresponding relief. 

It has all been so quietly done! Yet it is really a great moment. Thestore of man power which Great Britain possesses is beginning to takepractical effect. The French, who held the long lines at the beginningof war, who stood before Verdun and threw their legions on the road toPéronne, are now being freed for work elsewhere. They have "carried on"till Great Britain was ready, and now she is ready. 

 * * * * *

This was more than the beginning of a new tour of duty [says anotherwitness]. I felt the need of some ceremony, and I think others felt theneed of it too. There were little half-articulate attempts, in thedarkness, of men trying to show what they felt--a whisper or two--in thequeer jargon that is growing up between the two armies. An Englishsentry mounted upon the fire-step, and looked out into the darknessbeside the Frenchman, and then, before the Frenchman stepped down, patted him on the shoulder, as though he would say: "Thesetrenches--_all right_!--we'll look after them!"

Then I stumbled into a dug-out. A candle burnt there, and a Frenchofficer was taking up his things. He nodded and smiled. "I go, " he said. "I am not sorry, and yet----" He shrugged his shoulders. I understood. One is never sorry to go, but these trenches--these bits of France, where Frenchmen had died--would no longer be guarded by Frenchmen. Thenhe waved his hand round the little dug-out. "We give a little more ofFrance into your keeping. " His gesture was extravagant and light, buthis face was grave as he said it. He turned and went out. I followed. Hewalked along the communication trench after his men, and I along theline of my silent sentries. I spoke to one or two, and then stood on thefire-step, looking out into the night. I had the Frenchman's words in myhead: "We give a little more of France into your keeping!" It was notthese trenches only, where I stood, but all that lay out there in thedarkness, which had been given into our keeping. Its dangers were oursnow. There were villages away there in the heart of the night, stillunknown to all but the experts at home, whose names--like Thiepval andBazentin--would soon be English names, familiar to every man in Britainas the streets of his own town. All this France had entrusted to ourcare this night. 

Such were the scenes that were quietly going on, not much noticed by thepublic at home during the weeks of February and March, and such were thethoughts in men's minds. How plainly one catches through the words ofthe last speaker an eager prescience of events to come!--the sweep ofGeneral Gough on Warlencourt and Bapaume--the French reoccupationof Péronne. 

One word for the cathedral of Amiens before we leave the bustlingstreets of the old Picard capital. This is so far untouched andunharmed, though exposed, like everything else behind the front, to thebombs of German aeroplanes. The great west front has disappeared behinda mountain of sandbags; the side portals are protected in the same way, and inside, the superb carvings of the choir are buried out of sight. But at the back of the choir the famous weeping cherub sits weeping asbefore, peacefully querulous. There is something irritating in hisplacid and too artistic grief. Not so is "Rachel weeping for herchildren" in this war-ravaged country. Sterner images of Sorrow arewanted here--looking out through burning eyes for the Expiation to come. 

 * * * * *

Then we are off, bound for Albert, though first of all for theHeadquarters of the particular Army which has this region in charge. Theweather, alack! is still thick. It is under cover of such an atmospherethat the Germans have been stealing away, removing guns and storeswherever possible, and leaving rear-guards to delay our advance. Butwhen the rear-guards amount to some 100, 000 men, resistance is stillformidable, not to be handled with anything but extreme prudence bythose who have such vast interests in charge as the Generals ofthe Allies. 

Our way takes us first through a small forest, where systematic fellingand cutting are going on under British forestry experts. The work isbeing done by German prisoners, and we catch a glimpse through the treesof their camp of huts in a barbed-wire enclosure. Their guards sleepunder canvas! ... And now we are in the main street of a largepicturesque village, approaching a château. A motor lorry comes towardsus, driven at a smart pace, and filled with grey-green uniforms. Prisoners!--this time fresh from the field. We have already heardrumours on our way of successful fighting to the south. 

The famous Army Commander himself, who had sent us a kind invitation tolunch with him, is unexpectedly engaged in conference with a group ofFrench generals; but there is a welcome suggestion that on our way backfrom the Somme he will be free and able to see me. Meanwhile we go offto luncheon and much talk with some members of the Staff in a house onthe village street. Everywhere I notice the same cheerful, one mighteven say radiant, confidence. No boasting in words, but a convictionthat penetrates through all talk that the tide has turned, and that, however long it may take to come fully up, it is we whom it is floatingsurely on to that fortune which is no blind hazard, but the child ofhigh faith and untiring labour. Of that labour the Somme battlefields wewere now to see will always remain in my mind--in spite of ruin, inspite of desolation--as a kind of parable in action, never to beforgotten. 

No. 5

_April 26th_, 1917. 

DEAR MR. ROOSEVELT, --Amid the rushing events of these days--Americarousing herself like an eagle "with eyes intentive to bedare the sun";the steady and victorious advance along the whole front in France, whichday by day is changing the whole aspect of the war; the Balfour Mission;the signs of deep distress in Germany--it is sometimes difficult tothrow oneself back into the mood of even six weeks ago! History iscoming so fast off the loom! And yet six weeks ago I stood at thepregnant beginnings of it all, when, though nature in the bitter frostand slush of early March showed no signs of spring, the winter lull wasover, and everywhere on the British front men knew that great thingswere stirring. 

Before I reached G. H. Q. , Field-Marshal Sir Douglas Haig had alreadyreported the recapture or surrender of eleven villages on the Ancreduring February, including Serre and Gommecourt, which had defied ourefforts in the summer of 1916. That is to say, after three months oftrench routine and trench endurance imposed by a winter which seemed tohave let loose every possible misery of cold and wet, of storm anddarkness, on the fighting hosts in France, the battle of the Somme hadmoved steadily forward again from the point it had reached in November. Only, when the curtain rose on the new scene it was found that duringthese three months strange things had been happening. 

About the middle of November, after General Gough's brilliant strokes onthe Ancre, which gave us St. Pierre Divion, Beaucourt, and BeaumontHamel, and took us up to the outskirts of Grandcourt, the _FrankfurterZeitung_ wrote--"For us Germans the days of the crisis on the Somme areover. Let the French and English go on sacrificing the youth of theircountries here. They will not thereby achieve anything more. " Yet whenthis was written the German Higher Command was already well aware thatthe battle of the Somme had been won by the Allies, and that it would beimpossible for Germany to hold out on the same ground against anothersimilar attack. 

Three months, however, of an extraordinarily hard winter gave them arespite, and enabled them to veil the facts from their own people. Thepreparations for retirement, which snow and fog and the long nights ofJanuary helped them to conceal in part from our Air Service, must haveactually begun not many weeks after General Gough's last successes onthe Ancre, when the British advance paused, under stress of weather, before Grandcourt and Bapaume. So that in the latter half of February, when General Gough again pushed forward, it was to feel the German lineyielding before him; and by March 3rd, the day of my visit to the Somme, it was only a question of how far the Germans would go and what theretreat meant. 

Meanwhile, in another section of the line our own plans were maturing, which were to bear fruit five weeks later in the brilliant capture ofthat Vimy ridge I had seen on March 2, filling the blue middle distance, from the bare upland of Notre Dame de Lorette. If on the Somme the anvilwas to some extent escaping from the hammer, in the coming battle ofArras the hammer was to take its full revenge. 

These things, however, were still hidden from all but the few, and inthe first days of March the Germans had not yet begun to retire in frontof the French line further south. The Somme advance was still the centreof things, and Bapaume had not yet fallen. As we drove on towards Albertwe knew that we should be soon close behind our own guns, and withinrange of the enemy's. 

No one who has seen it in war-time will ever forget the market-place ofAlbert--the colossal heaps of wreck that fill the centre of it; the new, pretentious church, rising above the heaps, a brick-and-stucco buildingof the worst neo-Catholic taste, which has been so gashed and torn andbroken, while still substantially intact, that all its mean and tawdryornament has disappeared in a certain strange dignity of ruin; and last, the hanging Virgin, holding up the Babe above the devastation below, indumb protest to God and man. The gilded statue, which now hangs at rightangles to the tower, has, after its original collapse under shell-fire, been fixed in this position by the French Engineers; and it is to behoped that when the church comes to be rebuilt the figure will be leftas it is. There is something extraordinarily significant and dramatic inits present attitude. Whatever artistic defects the statue may have areout of sight, and it seems as it hangs there, passionately hovering, above the once busy centre of a prosperous town, to be the very symboland voice of France calling the world to witness. 

A few more minutes, and we are through the town, moving slowly along theAlbert-Bapaume road, that famous road which will be a pilgrims' way forgenerations to come. 

"To other folk, " writes an officer quoted by Mr. Buchan in his _Battleof the Somme_, "and on the maps, one place seems just like another, Isuppose; but to us--La Boisselle and Ovillers--my hat!"

To walk about in those hells! I went along the "sunken road" all the wayto Contalmaison. Talk about sacred ground! The new troops coming up nowgo barging across in the most light-hearted way. It means no more tothem than the roads behind used to mean to us. But when I think how wewatered every yard of it with blood and sweat! Children might play therenow, if it didn't look so like the aftermath of an earthquake. I have asort of feeling it ought to be marked off somehow, a permanent memorial. 

The same emotion as that which speaks in this letter--so far, at least, as it can be shared by those who had no part in the grim sceneitself--held us, the first women-pilgrims to tread these roads andtrampled slopes since the battle-storm of last autumn passed over them. The sounds of an immortal host seemed to rush past us on theair--mingled strangely with the memory of hot July days in an Englishgarden far away, when the news of the great advance came thundering inhour by hour. 

"The aftermath of an earthquake!" Do the words express the realitybefore us as we move along the mile of road between Albert and LaBoisselle? Hardly. The earth-shudder that visits a volcanic district maytopple towns and villages into ruins in a few minutes. It does not tearand grind and pound what it has overturned, through hour after hour, till there is nothing left but mud and dust. 

Not only all vegetation, but all the natural surface of the ground herehas gone; and the villages are churned into the soil, as though some"hundred-handed Gyas" had been mixing and kneading them into a devil'sdough. There are no continuous shell-holes, as we had expected to see. Those belong to the ground further up the ridge, where fourteen squaremiles are so closely shell-pocked that one can hardly drive a stakebetween the holes. But here on the way to La Boisselle and Contalmaisonthere is just the raw tumbled earth, from which all the natural coveringof grass and trees and all the handiwork of man have been stripped andtorn and hammered away, so that it has become a great dark wound on thecountryside. 

Suddenly we see gaping lines of old trenches rising on either side ofthe road, the white chalk of the subsoil marking their course. "British!" says the officer in front--who was himself in the battle. Only a few steps further on, as it seems, we come to the remains of theGerman front line, and the motor pauses while we try to get ourbearings. There to the south, on our right, and curving eastward, aretwo trench lines perfectly clear still on the brown desolation, theBritish and the enemy front lines. From that further line, at half-pastseven on the summer morning for ever blazoned in the annals of ourpeople, the British Army went over the parapet, to gather in the victoryprepared for it by the deadly strength and accuracy of British guns;made possible in its turn by the labour in far-off England of millionsof workers--men and women--on the lathes and in the filling factories ofthese islands. 

We move on up the road. Now we are among what remains of the trenchesand dug-outs described in Sir Douglas Haig's despatch. "During nearlytwo years' preparations the enemy had spared no pains to render thesedefences impregnable, " says the Commander-in-Chief; and he goes on todescribe the successive lines of deep trenches, the bomb-proof shelters, and the wire entanglements with which the war correspondence of thewinter has made us at home--on paper--so familiar. "The numerous woodsand villages had been turned into veritable fortresses. " The deepcellars in the villages, the pits and quarries of a chalk country, provided cover for machine guns and trench mortars. The dug-outs wereoften two storeys deep, "and connected by passages as much as thirtyfeet below the surface of the ground. " Strong redoubts, mine-fields, concrete gun emplacements--everything that the best brains of the GermanArmy could devise for our destruction--had been lavished on the Germanlines. And behind the first line was a second--and behind the secondline a third. And now here we stand in the midst of what was once sovast a system. What remains of it--and of all the workings of the Germanmind that devised it? We leave the motor and go to look into thedug-outs which line the road, out of which the dazed and dying Germansflung themselves at the approach of our men after the bombardment, andthen Captain F. Guides us a little further to a huge mine crater, and wesink into the mud which surrounds it, while my eyes look out over whatonce was Ovillers, northward towards Thiépval, and the slopes behindwhich runs the valley of the Ancre; up and over this torn and nakedland, where the new armies of Great Britain, through five months of someof the deadliest fighting known to history, fought their way yard byyard, ridge after ridge, mile after mile, caring nothing for pain, mutilation and death so that England and the cause of the Alliesmight live. 

"_There were no stragglers, none_!" Let us never forget that cry ofexultant amazement wrung from the lips of an eye-witness, who saw theyoung untried troops go over the parapet in the July dawn and disappearinto the hell beyond. And there in the packed graveyards that dot theseslopes lie thousands of them in immortal sleep; and as the Greeks inafter days knew no nobler oath than that which pledged a man by thosewho fell at Marathon, so may the memory of those who fell here burn everin the heart of England, a stern and consecrating force. 

 "Life is but the pebble sunk, Deeds the circle growing!"

And from the deeds done on this hillside, the suffering endured, thelife given up, the victory won, by every kind and type of man within theBritish State--rich and poor, noble and simple, street-men from Britishtowns, country-men from British villages, men from Canadian prairies, from Australian and New Zealand homesteads--one has a vision, as onelooks on into the future, of the impulse given here spreading outthrough history, unquenched and imperishable. The fight is not over--thevictory is not yet--but on the Somme no English or French heart candoubt the end. 

The same thoughts follow one along the sunken road to Contalmaison. Here, first, is the cemetery of La Boisselle, this heaped confusion ofsandbags, of broken and overturned crosses, of graves tossed into acommon ruin. And a little further are the ruins of Contalmaison, wherethe 3rd Division of the Prussian Guards was broken and 700 of them takenprisoners. Terrible are the memories of Contalmaison! Recall one letteronly!--the letter written by a German soldier the day before the attack:"Nothing comes to us--no letters. The English keep such a barrage on ourapproaches--it is horrible. To-morrow morning it will be seven dayssince this bombardment began; we cannot hold out much longer. Everythingis shot to pieces. " And from another letter: "Every one of us in thesefive days has become years older--we hardly know ourselves. "

It was among these intricate remains of trenches and dug-outs, round thefragments of the old chateau, that such things happened. Here, and amongthose ghastly fragments of shattered woods that one sees to south andeast--Mametz, Trônes, Delville, High Wood--human suffering and heroism, human daring and human terror, on one side and on the other, reachedtheir height. For centuries after the battle of Marathon sounds of armedmen and horses were heard by night; and to pry upon that sacredrendezvous of the souls of the slain was frowned on by the gods. Onlythe man who passed through innocently and ignorantly, not knowing wherehe was, could pass through safely. And here also, in days to come, thosewho visit these spots in mere curiosity, as though they were anyordinary sight, will visit them to their hurt. 

 * * * * *

So let the first thoughts run which are evolved by this brown and torndevastation. But the tension naturally passes, and one comes back, first, to the _victory_--to the results of all that hard and relentlessfighting, both for the British and the French forces, on this memorablebattlefield north and south of the Somme. Eighty thousand prisoners, between five and six hundred guns of different calibres, and more than athousand machine guns, had fallen to the Allies in four months and ahalf. Many square miles of French territory had been recovered. Verdun--glorious Verdun--had been relieved. Italy and Russia had beenhelped by the concentration of the bulk of the German forces on theWestern front. The enemy had lost at least half a million men; and theAllied loss, though great, had been substantially less. Our new armieshad gloriously proved themselves, and the legend of Germaninvincibility was gone. 

So much for the first-fruits. The _ultimate results_ are only nowbeginning to appear in the steady retreat of German forces, unable tostand another attack, on the same line, now that the protection of thewinter pause is over. "How far are we from our guns?" I ask the officerbeside me. And, as I speak, a flash to the north-east on the higherground towards Pozières lights up the grey distance. My companionmeasures the hillside with his eyes. "About 1, 000 yards. " Theirobjective now is a temporary German line in front of Bapaume. But weshall be in Bapaume in a few days. And then?

_Death_--_Victory_--_Work_; these are the three leading impressions thatrise and take symbolic shape amid these scenes. Let me turn now to thelast. For anyone with the common share of heart and imagination, thefirst thought here must be of the dead--the next, of swarming life. Forthese slopes and roads and ruins are again alive with men. Thousands andthousands of our soldiers are here, many of them going up to or comingback from the line, while others are working--working--incessantly atall that is meant by "advance" and "consolidation. "

The transformation of a line of battle into an efficient "back of theArmy" requires, it seems, an amazing amount of human energy, contrivance, and endurance. And what we see now is, of course, a secondor third stage. First of all there is the "clearing up" of the actualbattlefield. For this the work of the men now at work here--R. E. 's andLabour battalions--is too skilled and too valuable. It is done byfatigues and burying parties from the battalions in occupation of eachcaptured section. The dead are buried; the poor human fragments thatremain are covered with chlorate of lime; equipments of all kinds, thelitter of the battlefield, are brought back to the salvage dumps, thereto be sorted and sent back to the bases for repairs. 

Then--or simultaneously--begins the work of the Engineers and the Labourmen. Enough ground has to be levelled and shell-holes filled up for thedriving through of new roads and railways, and the provision of placeswhere tents, huts, dumps, etc. , are to stand. Roughly speaking, I see, as I look round me, that a great deal of this work is here already faradvanced. There are hundreds of men, carts, and horses at work on theroads, and everywhere one sees the signs of new railway lines, either ofthe ordinary breadth, or of the narrow gauges needed for the advancedcarriage of food and ammunition. Here also is a great encampment ofNissen huts; there fresh preparations for a food or an ammunition dump. 

With one pair of eyes one can only see a fraction of what is in truthgoing on. But the whole effect is one of vast and increasing industry, of an intensity of determined effort, which thrills the mind hardly lessthan the thought of the battle-line itself. "Yes, war _is_ work, " writesan officer who went through the Somme fighting, "much more than it isfighting. This is one of the surprises that the New Army soldiers findout here. " Yet for the hope of the fighting moment men will gocheerfully through any drudgery, in the long days before and after; andwhen the fighting comes, will bear themselves to the wonder ofthe world. 

On we move, slowly, towards Fricourt, the shattered remnants of theMametz wood upon our left. More graveyards, carefully tended; spaces ofpeace amid the universal movement. And always, on the southern horizon, those clear lines of British trenches, whence sprang on July 1st, 1916, the irresistible attack on Montauban and Mametz. Suddenly, over thedesolate ground to the west, we see a man hovering in mid-air, descending on a parachute from a captive balloon that seems to havesuffered mishap. The small wavering object comes slowly down; we cannotsee the landing; but it is probably a safe one. 

Then we are on the main Albert road again, and after some rapid miles Ifind myself kindly welcomed by one of the most famous leaders of thewar. There, in a small room, which has surely seen work of the firstimportance to our victories on the Somme, a great General discusses thesituation and the future with that same sober and reasoned confidence Ihave found everywhere among the representatives of our Higher Command. "Are we approaching victory? Yes; but it is too soon to use the greatword itself. Everything is going well; but the enemy is still verystrong. This year will decide it; but may not end it. "

 * * * * *

So far my recollections of March 3rd. But this is now April 26th, andall the time that I have been writing these recollections, thought hasbeen leaping forward to the actual present--to the huge struggle nowpending between Arras and Rheims--to the news that comes crowding in, day by day, of the American preparations in aid of the Allies--to allthat is at stake for us and for you. Your eyes are now turned like oursto the battle-line in France. You triumph--and you suffer--with us!

No. 6

_May 3rd_, 1917. 

DEAR MR. ROOSEVELT, --My last letter left me returning to our villagelodgings under the wing of G. H. Q. After a memorable day on the Sommebattle-fields. That night the talk at the Visitors' Château, during andafter a very simple dinner in an old panelled room, was particularlyinteresting and animated. The morning's newspapers had just arrived fromEngland, with the official communiques of the morning. We were pushingnearer and nearer to Bapaume; in the fighting of the preceding day wehad taken another 128 prisoners; and the King had sent hiscongratulations to Sir Douglas Haig and the Army on the Germanwithdrawal under "the steady and persistent pressure" of the BritishArmy "from carefully prepared and strongly fortified positions--afitting sequel to the fine achievements of my Army last year in theBattle of the Somme. " There was also a report on the air-fighting andair-losses of February--to which I will return. 

It was, of course, already obvious that the German retreat on the Sommewas not--so far--going to yield us any very large captures of men orguns. Prisoners were indeed collected every day, but there were no"hauls" such as, little more than a month after this evening of March3rd, were to mark the very different course of the Battle of Arras. Discussion turned upon the pace of the German retreat and the possiblerate of our pursuit. "Don't forget, " said an officer, "that they aremoving over good ground, while the pursuit has to move over badground--roads with craters in them, ground so pitted with shell-holesthat you can scarcely drive a peg between them, demolished bridges, villages that give scarcely any cover, and so on. The enemy has his gunswith him; ours have to be pushed up over the bad ground. Hismachine-guns are always in picked and prepared positions; ours have tobe improvised. "

And also--"Don't forget the weather!" said another. Every misty day--andthere were many in February--was very skilfully turned to account. Whenever the weather conditions made it impossible to use the eyes ofour Air Service, men would say to each other on our side, "He'll go backa lot to-day!--somewhere or other. " But in spite of secrecy and fog, howlittle respite we had given him! The enemy losses in casualties, prisoners, and stores during February were certainly considerable; notto speak of the major loss of all, that of the strongly fortified lineon which two years of the most arduous and ingenious labour that evenGermany can give had been lavished. "And almost everywhere, " writes aneye-witness, "he was hustled and harried much more than is generallyknown. " As you go eastward, for instance, across the evacuated groundyou notice everywhere signs of increasing haste and flurry, such as theless complete felling of trees and telegraph posts. It was really a fineperformance for our infantry and our cavalry patrols, necessarilyunsupported by _anything like our full artillery strength, _ to keep upthe constant pressure they did on an enemy who enjoyed almost the fullprotection of his. It was dreadful country to live and fight in afterthe Germans had gone back over it, much worse than anything that troopshave to face after any ordinary capture of an enemy line. 

The fact is that old axioms are being everywhere revised in the light ofthis war. In former wars the extreme difficulty of a retreat in the faceof the enemy was taken for granted. But this war--I am trying tosummarise some first-hand opinion as it has reached me--has modifiedthis point of view considerably. 

We know now that for any serious attack on an enemy who has plenty ofmachine-guns and plenty of successive well-wired positions a great massof heavy and other artillery is absolutely indispensable. And overground deliberately wrecked and obstructed such artillery _must_ taketime to bring up. And yet--to repeat--how rapidly, how "persistently"all difficulties considered, to use the King's adjective, has theBritish Army pressed on the heels of the retreating enemy!

None of the officers with whom I talked believed that anything morecould have been done by us than was done. "If it had been we who wereretreating, " writes one of them, "and the Germans who were pursuing, Ido not believe they would have pushed us so hard or caused us as muchloss, for all their pride in their staff work. "

And it is, of course, evident from what has happened since I parted frommy hosts at the Château, that we have now amply succeeded during thelast few weeks in bringing the retreating enemy to bay. No more maskedwithdrawals, no more skilful evasions, for either Hindenburg or hisarmies! The victories of Easter week on and beyond the Vimy Ridge, andthe renewed British attack of the last few days--I am writing on May1st--together with the magnificent French advance towards Laon and tothe east of Reims, have been so many fresh and crushing testimonies tothe vitality and gathering force of the Allied armies. 

What is to be the issue we wait to see. But at least, after the winterlull, it is once more joined; and with such an army as the War Officeand the nation together, during these three years, have fashioned to hishand--so trained, so equipped, so fired with a common and inflexiblespirit--Sir Douglas Haig and his lieutenants will not fail the hopes ofGreat Britain, of France--and of America!

At the beginning of March these last words could not have been added. There was an American professor not far from me at dinner, and wediscussed the "blazing indiscretion" of Herr Zimmermann's Mexicanletter. But he knew no more than I. Only I remember with pleasure thegeneral tone of all the conversation about America that I either engagedin or listened to at Headquarters just a month before the historicmeeting of Congress. It was one of intelligent sympathy with thedifficulties in your way, coupled with a quiet confidence that the callof civilisation and humanity would very soon--and irrevocably--decidethe attitude of America towards the war. 

 * * * * *

The evening at the Château passed only too quickly, and we were sad tosay good-bye, though it left me still the prospect of furtherconversation with some members of the Intelligence Staff on my returnjourney from Paris and those points of the French line for which, thanksto the courtesy of the French Headquarters, I was now bound. 

The last night under the little schoolmistress's quiet roof amid thedeep stillness of the village was a wakeful one for me. The presence ofthe New Armies, as of some vast, impersonal, and yet intensely livingthing, seemed to be all around me. First, as an organisation, as theamazing product of English patriotic intelligence devoted to one soleend--the defence of civilisation against the immoral attack of thestrongest military machine in the world. And then, so to speak, as amoral entity, for my mind was full of the sights and sounds of thepreceding days, and the Army appeared to me, not only as the mightyinstrument for war which it already is, but as a training school for theEmpire, likely to have incalculable effect upon the future. 

How much I have heard of _training_ since my arrival in France! It isnot a word that has been so far representative of our English temper. Far from it. The central idea of English life and politics, said Mr. Bright, "is the assertion of personal liberty. " It was, I suppose, thisassertion of personal liberty which drove our extreme Liberal wingbefore the war into that determined fighting of the Naval and MilitaryEstimates year after year, that determined hatred of anything thatlooked like "militarism, " and that constant belittlement of the soldierand his profession which so nearly handed us over, for lack of areasonable "militarism, " to the tender mercies of the German variety. 

But, years ago, Matthew Arnold dared to say, in face of the generalBritish approval of Mr. Bright, that there is, after all, somethinggreater than the "assertion of personal liberty, " than the freedom to"do as you like"; and he put forward against it the notion of "thenation in its collected and corporate character" controlling theindividual will in the name of an interest wider than that ofindividuals. 

What he had in view was surely just what we are witnessing in GreatBritain to-day--what we are about to witness in your own country--anation becoming the voluntary servant of an idea, and for that ideasubmitting itself to forms of life quite new to it, and far removed fromall its ordinary habits; giving up the freedom to do as it likes;accepting the extremities of discomfort, hardship, and pain--deathitself--rather than abandon the idea; and so putting itself to school, resolutely and of its own free will, that when its piece of self-imposededucation is done, it can no more be the same as it was before than theyouth who has yielded himself loyally to the pounding and stretching ofany strenuous discipline, intellectual or physical. 

Training--"askêsis"--with either death, or the loss of all that makeshonourable life, as the ultimate sanction behind the process, that isthe present preoccupation of this nation in arms. Even the footballgames I saw going on in the course of our drive to Albert were all partof this training. They are no mere amusement, though they are amusement. They are part of the system by which men are persuaded--not driven--tosubmit themselves to a scheme of careful physical training, even intheir times of rest; by which they find themselves so invigorated thatthey end by demanding it. 

As for the elaboration of everything else in this frightful art of war, the ever-multiplying staff courses, the bombing and bayonet schools, thespecial musketry and gas schools, the daily and weekly development ofaviation, the technical industry and skill, both among the gunnersabroad and the factory workers at home, which has now made our artillerythe terror of the German army: a woman can only realise it with ashudder, and find comfort in two beliefs. First, that the whole horribleprocess of war has _not_ brutalised the British soldier--you rememberthe Army Commander whom I quoted in an earlier letter!--that he stillremains human and warm-hearted through it all, protected morally by theideal he willingly serves. Secondly, in the conviction that thisrelentless struggle is the only means that remains to us of so chainingup the wild beast of war, as the Germans have let it loose upon theworld, that our children and grandchildren at least shall live in peace, and have time given them to work out a more reasonable scheme of things. 

But, at any rate; we have gone a long way from the time when MatthewArnold, talking with "the manager of the Claycross works in Derbyshire"during the Crimean War, "when our want of soldiers was much felt andsome people were talking of conscription, " was told by his companionthat "sooner than submit to conscription the population of that districtwould flee to the mines, and lead a sort of Robin Hood lifeunderground. " An illuminating passage, in more ways than one, by theway, as contrasted with the present state of things!--since it bothshows the stubbornness of the British temper in defence of "doing as itlikes, " when no spark of an ideal motive fires it; and also brings outits equal stubbornness to-day in support of a cause which it feels to besupreme over the individual interest and will. 

But the stubbornness, the discipline, the sacrifice of the armies in thefield are not all we want. The stubbornness of the nation _at home_, ofthe men and the women, is no less necessary to the great end. In theseearly days of March every week's news was bringing home to England thegrowing peril of the submarine attack. Would the married women, theelder women of the nation, rise to the demand for personal thought andsaving, for _training_--in the matter of food--with the same eagergoodwill as thousands of the younger women had shown in meeting thearmies' demand for munitions? For the women heads of households have itlargely in their hands. 

The answer at the beginning of March was matter for anxiety. It is stillmatter for anxiety now--at the beginning of May. 

Let us, however, return for a little to the Army. What would themarvellous organisation which England has produced in three years availus, without the spirit in it, --the body, without the soul? All throughthese days I have been conscious, in the responsible men I have beenmeeting, of ideals of which no one talks, except when, on very rareoccasions, it happens to be in the day's work like anything else to talkof ideals--but which are, in fact, omnipresent. 

I find, for instance, among my War Office Notes, a short address givenin the ordinary course of duty by an unnamed commandant to hisofficer-cadets. It appears here, in its natural place, just as part ofthe whole; revealing for a moment the thoughts which constantlyunderlie it. 

"Believe me when I tell you that I have never found an officer whoworked who did not come through. Only ill-health and death stand in yourway. The former you can guard against in a great measure. The lattercomes to us all, and for a soldier, a soldier's death is the finest ofall. Fear of death does not exist for the man who has led a good andhonest life. You must discipline your bodies and your minds--your bodiesby keeping them healthy and strong, your minds by prayer and thought. "

As to the relation between officers and men, that also is not talkedabout much, except in its more practical and workaday aspects--theinterest taken by officers in the men's comfort and welfare, theirreadiness to share in the men's games and amusements, and so on. And noone pretends that the whole British Army is an army of "plaster saints, "that every officer is the "little father" of his men, and allrelations ideal. 

But what becomes evident, as one penetrates a little nearer to the greatorganism, is a sense of passionate responsibility in all the finer mindsof the Army towards their men, a readiness to make any sacrifice forthem, a deep and abiding sense of their sufferings and dangers, of allthat they are giving to their country. How this comes out again andagain in the innumerable death-stories of British officers--those fewwords that commemorate them in the daily newspapers! And how evident isthe profound response of the men to such a temper in their officers!There is not a day's action in the field--I am but quoting theeye-witnesses--that does not bring out such facts. Let a seniorofficer--an "old and tried soldier"--speak. He is describing a walk overa battlefield on the Ancre after one of our victories therelast November:

"It is a curious thing to walk over enemy trenches that I have watchedlike a tiger for weeks and weeks. But what of the boys who took thosetrenches, with their eleven rows of barbed wire in front of them? Idon't think I ever before to-day rated the British soldier at his propervalue. His sufferings in this weather are indescribable. When he is notin the trenches his discomforts are enough to kill any ordinary mortal. When he is in the trenches it is a mixture between the North Pole andHell. And yet when the moment comes he jumps up and charges at theimpossible--and conquers it! ... Some of the poor fellows who lay thereas they fell looked to me absolutely noble, and I thought of theirfamilies who were aching for news of them and hoping against hope thatthey would not be left unburied in their misery. 

"All the loving and tender thoughts that are lavished on them are notenough. There are no words to describe the large hearts of these men. God bless 'em! And what of the French on whose soil they lie? Can theyever forget the blood that is mingled with their own? I hope not. Idon't think England has ever had as much cause to be proud as shehas to-day. "

Ah! such thoughts and feelings cut deep. They would be unbearable butfor the saving salt of humour in which this whole great gathering ofmen, so to speak, moves suspended, as though in an atmosphere. It iseverywhere. Coarse or refined, it is the universal protection, whetherfrom the minor discomforts or the more frightful risks of war. Volumescould be filled, have already been filled, with it--volumes to whichyour American soldier when he gets to France in his thousands will addconsiderably--pages all his own! I take this touch in passing from arecent letter:

"A sergeant in my company [writes a young officer] was the other dayburied by a shell. He was dug out with difficulty. As he lay, notseriously injured, but sputtering and choking, against the wall of thetrench, his C. O. Came by. 'Well, So-and-so, awfully sorry! Can I doanything for you?' 'Sir, ' said the sergeant with dignity, stillstruggling out of the mud, '_I want a separate peace_!'"

And here is another incident that has just come across me. Whether it isHumour or Pathos I do not know. In this scene they are pretty closetogether--the great Sisters!

A young flying officer, in a night attack, was hit by a shrapnel bulletfrom below. He thought it had struck his leg, but was so absorbed indropping his bombs and bringing down his machine safely that, althoughhe was aware of a feeling of faintness, he thought no more of it till hehad landed in the aerodrome. Then it was discovered that his leg hadbeen shot away, was literally hanging by a shred of skin, and how he hadescaped bleeding to death nobody could quite understand. As it was, hehad dropped his bombs, and he insisted on making his report in hospital. 

He recovered from the subsequent operation, and in hospital, some weeksafterwards, his C. O. Appeared, with the news of his recommendation forthe D. S. O. The boy, for he was little more, listened with eyes of amusedincredulity, opening wider and wider as the Colonel proceeded. When thecommunication was over, and the C. O. , attributing the young man'ssilence to weakness or grateful emotion, had passed on, the nurse besidethe bed saw the patient bury his head in the pillow with a queer soundof exasperation, and caught the words, "I call it _perfectly childish!_"

That an act so simple, so all in the bargain, should have earned theD. S. O. Seemed in the eyes of the doer to degrade the honour!

 * * * * *

With this true tale I have come back to a recollection of the words ofthe flying officer in charge of the aerodrome mentioned in my secondletter, after he had described to me the incessant raiding and fightingof our airmen behind the enemy lines. 

"Many of them don't come back. What then? _They will have done theirjob. _"

The report which reaches the château on our last evening illustratesthis casual remark. It shows that 89 machines were lost during February, 60 of them German. We claimed 41 of these, and 23 British machines were"missing" or "brought down. "

But as I write the concluding words of this letter (May 3rd) a far morestartling report--that for April--lies before me. "There has not been amonth of such fighting since the war began, and the losses have neverreached such a tremendous figure, " says the _Times_. The record numberso far was that for September 1916, in the height of the Sommefighting--322. But during April, according to the official reports, "theenormous number of 717 aeroplanes were brought to earth as the result ofair-fights or by gun-fire. " Of these, 369 were German--269 of thembrought down by the British and 98 by the French. The British lost 147;the French and Belgian, if the German claims can be trusted, 201. 

It is a terrible list, and a terrible testimony to the extremeimportance and intensity of the air-fighting now going on. How few ofus, except those who have relatives or dear friends in the air-service, realise at all the conditions of this fighting--its daring, its epicrange, its constant development!

All the men in it are young. None of them can have such a thing as anerve. Anyone who betrays the faintest suspicion of one in his firstflights is courteously but firmly returned to his regiment. In peace theairman sees this solid earth of ours as no one else sees it; and in warhe makes acquaintance by day and night with all its new and strangeaspects, amid every circumstance of danger and excitement, with deathalways at hand, his life staked, not only against the enemy and all hisdevices on land and above it, but against wind and cloud, against thetreacheries of the very air itself. 

In the midst of these conditions the fighting airman shoots, dodges, pursues, and dives, intent only on one thing, the destruction of hisenemy, while the observer photographs, marks his map with everygun-emplacement, railway station, dump of food or ammunition, unconcerned by the flying shells or the strange dives and swoops ofthe machine. 

But apart from active fighting, take such a common experience as what iscalled "a long reconnaissance. " Pilot and observer receive their ordersto reconnoitre "thoroughly" a certain area. It may be winter, and thecold at the height of many thousand feet may be formidable indeed. Nomatter. The thing is done, and, after hours in the freezing air, themachine makes for home; through a winter evening, perhaps, as we saw thetwo splendid biplanes, near the northern section of the line, sailingfar above our heads into the sunset, that first day of our journey. Thereconnaissance is over, and here is the first-hand testimony of one whohas taken part in many, as to what it means in endurance and fatigue:

"Both pilot and observer are stiff with the cold. In winter it is oftennecessary to help them out of the machine and attend to the chilledparts of the body to avoid frost-bite. Their faces are drawn with thecontinual strain. They are deaf from the roar of the engine. Their eyesare bloodshot, and their whole bodies are racked with every imaginableache. For the next few hours they are good for nothing but rest, thoughsleep is generally hard to get. But before turning in the observer mustmake his report and hand it in to the proper quarter. "

So much for the nights which are rather for observation than fighting, though fighting constantly attends them. But the set battles in the air, squadron with squadron, man with man, the bombers in the centre, thefighting machines surrounding and protecting them, are becoming morewonderful, more daring, more complicated every month. "You'll see"--Irecall once more the words of our Flight-Commander, spoken amid thenoise and movement of a score of practising machines, five weeks beforethe battle of Arras--"when the great move begins _we shall get themastery again, as we did on the Somme. _"

Ask the gunners in the batteries of the April advance, as they workbelow the signalling planes; ask the infantry whom the gunners somarvellously protect, as to the truth of the prophecy!

"Our casualties are _really_ light, " writes an officer in reference tosome of the hot fighting of the past month. Thanks, apparently, to theever-growing precision of our artillery methods; which again depend onaeroplane and balloon information. So it is that the flying forms in theupper air become for the soldier below so many symbols of help andprotection. He is restless when they are not there. And let us rememberthat aeroplanes were first used for artillery observation, not threeyears ago, in the battle of Aisne, after the victory of the Marne. 

But the night in the quiet village wears away. To-morrow we shall beflying through the pleasant land of France, bound for Paris andLorraine. For I am turning now to a new task. On our own line I havebeen trying to describe, for those who care to listen, the crowdingimpressions left on a woman-witness by the huge development in the lasttwelve months of the British military effort in France. But now, as I goforward into this beautiful country, which I have loved next to my ownall my life, there are new purposes in my mind, and three memorablewords in my ears:

"_Reparation--Restitution--Guarantees!_"

No. 7

_May 10th_, 1917. 

DEAR MR. ROOSEVELT, --We are then, for a time, to put France, and not theBritish line, in the forefront of these later letters. For when I wentout on this task, as I think you know, I had two objects inmind--intimately connected. The first was to carry on that general storyof the British effort, which I began last year under your inspiration, down to the opening of this year's campaign. And the second was to tryand make more people in this country, and more people in America, realise--as acutely and poignantly as I could--what it is we are reallyfighting for; what is the character of the enemy we are up against; whatare the sufferings, outrages, and devastations which have been inflictedon France, in particular, by the wanton cruelty and ambition of Germany;for which she herself must be made to suffer and pay, if civilisationand freedom are to endure. 

With this second intention, I was to have combined, by the courtesy ofthe French Headquarters, a visit to certain central portions of theFrench line, including Soissons, Reims, and Verdun. But by the time Ireached France the great operations that have since marked theSoissons-Reims front were in active preparation; roads and motor-carswere absorbed by the movements of troops and stores; Reims and Verdunwere under renewed bombardment; and visits to this section of the Frenchline were entirely held up. The French authorities, understanding that Ichiefly wished to see for myself some of the wrecked and ruined villagesand towns dealt with in the French official reports, suggested, firstSenlis and the battle-fields of the Ourcq, and then Nancy, the ruinedvillages of Lorraine, and that portion of their eastern frontier linewhere, simultaneously with the Battle of the Marne, General Castelnaudirected from the plateau of Amance and the Grand Couronné that strongdefence of Nancy which protected--and still protects--the French right, and has baulked all the German attempts to turn it. 

Meanwhile, in the early days of March, the German retreat, south of theSomme and in front of the French line, was not yet verified; and theworst devastation of the war--the most wanton crime, perhaps, thatGermany has so far committed--was not yet accomplished. I had leftFrance before it was fully known, and could only realise, by hotsympathy from a distance, the passionate thrill of fury and wild griefwhich swept through France when the news began to come in from theevacuated districts. British correspondents with the advancing armies ofthe Allies have seen deeds of barbarism which British eyes and heartswill never forget, and have sent the news of them through the world. Thedestruction of Coucy and Ham, the ruin and plunder of the villages, theshameless loot everywhere, the hideous ill-treatment of the countryfolk, the deportation of boys and girls, the massacre of the fruittrees--these things have gone deep into the very soul of France, burningaway--except in the minds of a few incorrigible fanatics--whateverfoolish "pacificism" was there, and steeling the mind and will of thenation afresh to that victory which can alone bring expiation, punishment, and a peace worth the name. But, everywhere, the ruins withwhich northern, central, and eastern France are covered, whether theywere caused by the ordinary processes of war or not, are equally part ofthe guilt of Germany. In the country which I saw last year on theBelgian border, from the great phantom of Ypres down to Festubert, theravage is mainly the ravage of war. Incessant bombardment from thefighting lines has crumbled village after village into dust, or gashedthe small historic towns and the stately country houses. There is nodeliberate use of torch and petrol, as in the towns farther south andeast. Ypres, however, was deliberately shelled into fragments day afterday; and Arras is only a degree less carefully ruined. And whatever themilitary pretext may be, the root question remains--"Why are the Germans_in France at all_?" What brought them there but their owndetermination, in the words of the Secret Report of 1913 printed in theFrench Yellow book, to "strengthen and extend _Deutschtum_ (Germanism)throughout the entire world"? Every injury that poor France inself-defence, or the Allies at her side, are forced to inflict on thevillages and towns which express and are interwoven with the history andgenius of the French, is really a German crime. There is no forgivenessfor what Germany has done--none! She has tried to murder a people; andbut for the splendid gifts of that people, she would have achievedher end. 

Perhaps the tragedy of what is to be seen and heard at Senlis, on thebattle-grounds of the Ourcq, and in the villages of Lorraine, washeightened for me by the beauty of the long drive south from theneighbourhood of G. H. Q. --some hundred and forty miles. It was a cold butclear March day. We had but parted from snow a little while, and we weresoon to find it again. But on this day, austerely bright, the land ofFrance unrolled before us its long succession of valley and upland, upland and valley. Here, no trace of the invader; generally speaking nosigns of the armies; for our route lay, on an average, some forty milesbehind the line. All was peace, solitude even; for the few women, oldmen, and boys on the land scarcely told in the landscape. But every milewas rich in the signs and suggestion of an old and most humancivilisation--farms, villages, towns, the carefully tended woods, thefine roads running their straight unimpeded course over hill and dale, bearing witness to a _State sense, _ of which we possess too little inthis country. 

We stopped several times on the journey--I remember a puncture, involving a couple of hours' delay, somewhere north of Beauvais--andfound ourselves talking in small hot rooms with peasant families of allages and stages, from the blind old grandmother, like a brooding Fate inthe background, to the last toddling baby. How friendly they were, intheir own self-respecting way!--the grave-faced elder women, the youngwives, the children. The strength of the _family_ in France seems to mestill overwhelming--would we had more of it left in England! Theprevailing effect was of women everywhere _carrying on_--making noparade of it, being indeed accustomed to work, and familiar with everydetail of the land; having merely added the tasks of their husbands andsons to their own, and asking no praise for it. The dignity, theessential refinement and intelligence--for all their homely speech--ofthese solidly built, strong-faced women, in the central districts ofFrance, is still what it was when George Sand drew her Berri peasants, nearly a hundred years ago. 

Then darkness fell, and in the darkness we went through an old, old townwhere are the French General Headquarters. Sentries challenged us toright and left, and sent us forward again with friendly looks. The dayhad been very long, and presently, as we approached Paris, I fell asleepin my corner, only to be roused with a start by a glare of lights, andmore sentries. The _barrière_ of Paris!--shining out into the night. 

Two days in Paris followed; every hour crowded with talk, and the vividimpressions of a moment when, from beyond Compiègne and Soissons--somesixty miles from the Boulevards--the French airmen flying over theGerman lines were now bringing back news every morning and night offresh withdrawals, fresh villages burning, as the sullen enemyrelaxed his hold. 

On the third day, a most courteous and able official of the FrenchForeign Office took us in charge, and we set out for Senlis on a morningchill and wintry indeed, but giving little sign of the storm it heldin leash. 

To reach Senlis one must cross the military _enceinte_ of Paris. Manyvisitors from Paris and other parts of France, from England, or fromAmerica, have seen by now the wreck of its principal street, and havetalked with the Abbé Dourlent, the "Archiprêtre" of the cathedral, whosestory often told has lost but little of its first vigour and simplicity, to judge at least by its effect on two of his latest visitors. 

We took the great northern road out of Paris, which passes scenesmemorable in the war of 1870. On both sides of us, at frequentintervals, across the flat country, were long lines of trenches, andbelts of barbed wire, most of them additions to the defences of Parissince the Battle of the Marne. It is well to make assurance doubly sure!But although, as we entered the Forest of Chantilly, the German line wasno more than some thirty-odd miles away, and since the Battle of theAisne, two and a half years ago, it has run, practically, as it stillran in the early days of this last March, the notion of any fresh attackon Paris seemed the merest dream. It was indeed a striking testimony tothe power of the modern defensive--this absolute security in which Parisand its neighbourhood has lived and moved all that time, with--up to afew weeks ago--the German batteries no farther off than the suburbs ofSoissons. How good to remember, as one writes, all that has happenedsince I was in Senlis!--and the increased distance that now divides theGerman hosts from the great prize on which they had set their hearts. 

How fiercely they had set their hearts on it, the old Curé of Senlis, who is the chief depository of the story of the town, was to make usfeel anew. 

One enters Senlis from Paris by the main street, the Rue de laRépublique, which the Germans deliberately and ruthlessly burnt onSeptember 2nd and 3rd, 1914. We moved slowly along it through theblackened ruins of houses large and small, systematically fired by theGerman _pétroleurs_, in revenge for a supposed attack by civilians uponthe entering German troops. _Les civils ont tiré_--it is the universalexcuse for these deeds of wanton barbarism, and for the hideouscruelties to men, women, and children that have attended them--beginningwith that incident which first revealed to a startled world the truecharacter of the men directing the German Army--the burning and sack ofLouvain. It is to be hoped that renewed and careful investigation willbe made--(much preliminary inquiry has already of course takenplace)--after the war into all these cases. My own impression from whatI have heard, seen, and read--for what it may be worth--is that the pleais almost invariably false; but that the state of panic and excitementinto which the German temperament falls, with extraordinary readiness, under the strain of battle, together with the drunkenness of troopstraversing a rich wine-growing country, have often accounted for anhonest, but quite mistaken belief in the minds of German soldiers, without excusing at all the deeds to which it led. Of this abnormalexcitability, the old Curé of Senlis gave one or two instances whichstruck me. 

We came across him by chance in the cathedral--the beautiful cathedral Ihave heard Walter Pater describe, in my young Oxford days, as one of theloveliest and gracefullest things in French Gothic. Fortunately, thoughthe slender belfry and the roof were repeatedly struck by shrapnel inthe short bombardment of the town, no serious damage was done. Wewandered round the church alone, delighting our eyes with the warmgolden white of the stone, the height of the grooved arches, the flamingfragments of old glass, when we saw the figure of an old priest comeslowly down the aisle, his arms folded. He looked at us rather dreamilyand passed. Our guide, Monsieur P. , followed and spoke to him. "Monsieur, you are the Abbé Dourlent?"

"I am, sir. What can I do for you?"

Something was said about English ladies, and the Curé courteously turnedback. "Will the ladies come into the Presbytère?" We followed him acrossthe small cathedral square to the old house in which he lived, and wereshown into a bare dining-room, with a table, some chairs, and a few oldreligious engravings on the walls. He offered us chairs and satdown himself. 

"You would like to hear the story of the German occupation?" He thoughta little before beginning, and I was struck with his strong, tired face, the powerful mouth and jaw, and above them, eyes which seemed to havelost the power of smiling, though I guessed them to be naturally full ofa pleasant shrewdness, of what the French call _malice_, which is notthe English "malice. " He was rather difficult to follow here and there, but from his spoken words and from a written account he placed in myhands, I put together the following story:

"It was August 30th, 1914, when the British General Staff arrived inSenlis. That same evening, they left it for Dammartin. All day, and thenext two days, French and English troops passed through the town. Whatwas happening? Would there be no fighting in defence of Paris--onlythirty miles away? Wednesday, September 2nd--that was the day the gunsbegan, our guns and theirs, to the north of Senlis. But, in the courseof that day, we knew finally there would be no battle between us andParis. The French troops were going--the English were going. They leftus--marching eastward. Our hearts were very sore as we saw them go. 

"Two o'clock on Wednesday--the first shell struck the cathedral. I hadjust been to the top of the belfry to see, if I could, from whatdirection the enemy was coming. The bombardment lasted an hour and ahalf. At four o'clock they entered. If you had seen them!"

The old Curé raised himself on his seat, trying to imitate the insolentbearing of the German cavalry as they led the way through the old townwhich they imagined would be the last stage on their way to Paris. 

"They came in, shouting '_Paris_--_Nach Paris!'_ maddened withexcitement. They were all singing--they were like men besidethemselves. "

"What did they sing, Monsieur le Curé?--Deutschland über alles'?"

"Oh, no, madame, not at all. They sang hymns. It was an extraordinarysight. They seemed possessed. They were certain that in a few hours theywould be in Paris. They passed through the town, and then, just south ofthe town, they stopped. Our people show the place. It was the nearestthey ever got to Paris. 

"Presently, an officer, with an escort, a general apparently, rodethrough the town, pulled up at the Hôtel de Ville, and asked for theMaire--angrily, like a man in a passion. But the Maire--M. Odent--wasthere, waiting, on the steps of the Hôtel de Ville. 

"Monsieur Odent was my friend--he gave me his confidence. He hadresisted his nomination as Mayor as long as he could, and accepted itonly as an imperative duty. He was an employer, whom his workmen loved. One of them used to say--'When one gets into M. Odent's employ, onelives and dies there. ' Just before the invasion, he took his familyaway. Then he came back, with the presentiment of disaster. He said tome--'I persuaded my wife to go. It was hard. We are much attached toeach other--but now I am free, ready for all that may come. '

"Well, the German general said to him roughly:

"'Is your town quiet? Can we circulate safely?'

"M. Odent said, 'Yes. There is no quieter town in France than Senlis. '

"'Are there still any soldiers here?'

"M. Odent had seen the French troops defiling through the town all themorning. The bombardment had made it impossible to go about the streets. As far as he knew there were none left. He answered, 'No. '

"He was taken off, practically under arrest, to the Hôtel, and told toorder a dinner for thirty, with ice and champagne. Then his secretaryjoined him and proposed that the _adjoints_, or Mayor's assistants, should be sent for. 

"'No, ' said M. Odent, 'one victim is enough. ' You see he foresaweverything. We all knew what had happened in Belgium and the Ardennes. 

"The German officer questioned him again. 

"'Why have your people gone?--why are these houses, these shops, shut?There must be lights _everywhere_--all through the night!'

"Suddenly--shots!--in the Rue de la République. In a few seconds therewas a furious fusillade, accompanied by the rattle of machine guns. Theofficer sprang up. 

"'So this is your quiet town, Monsieur le Maire! I arrest you, and youshall answer with your life for the lives of my soldiers. '

"Two men with revolvers were set to guard him. The officer himselfpresently took him outside the town, and left him under guard, at thelittle village of Poteau, at the edge of a wood. "

 * * * * *

What had happened? Unluckily for Senlis and M. Odent, some of the Frenchrear-guard--infantry stragglers, and a small party of Senegalesetroops--were still in the southern quarter of the town when the Germansentered. They opened fire from a barrack near the Paris entrance and asharp engagement followed which lasted several hours, with casualties onboth sides. The Germans got the better, and were then free to wreaktheir fury on the town. 

They broke into the houses, plundered the wine shops, first of all, andtook fifty hostages, of whom twenty-six perished. And at half-past five, while the fighting was still going on, the punitive burning of the townbegan, by a cyclist section told off for the work and furnished withevery means for doing it effectively. These men, according to aneyewitness, did their work with wild shouts--"_cris sauvages_. "

A hundred and seventeen houses were soon burning fiercely. On that hotSeptember evening, the air was like a furnace. Before long the streetswere full of blazing débris. Two persons who had hidden themselves intheir cellars died of suffocation; yet to appear in the streets was torisk death at the hands of some drunk or maddened soldier. 

At the opening of the French attack, a German officer rushed to thehospital, which was full of wounded, in search of francs-tireurs. Arrived there, he saw an old man, a chronic patient of the hospital andhalf idiotic, standing on the steps of the building. He blew the oldman's brains out. He then forced his way into the hospital, pointing hisrevolver at the French wounded, who thought their last hour had come. Hehimself was wounded, and at last appeared to yield to the remonstrancesof the Sister in charge, and allowed his wound to be dressed. But in themiddle of the dressing, he broke away without his tunic, and helmetless, in a state of mad excitement, and presently reappeared with a file ofsoldiers. Placing them in the street opposite the rooms occupied by theFrench wounded, he ordered them to fire a volley. No one was hurt, though several beds were struck. Then the women's wards were searched. Two sick men, _éclopés_ without visible wounds, were dragged out oftheir beds and would have been bayoneted then and there but for theentreaties of the nurses, who ultimately released them. 

An awful night followed in the still burning or smouldering town. Meanwhile, at nine o'clock in the evening a party of German officersbetook themselves to the hamlet of Poteau--a village north ofSenlis--where M. Odent had been kept under guard since the afternoon. Six other hostages were produced, and they were all marched off to afield near Chamant at the edge of a wood. Here the Maire was called upand interrogated. His companion, eight or nine metres away, too far tohear what was said, watched the scene. As I think of it, I seem to seein the southern sky the glare of burning Senlis; above it, and spreadover the stubble fields in which the party stood, a peaceful moonlight. In his written account, the Curé specially mentions the brightness ofthe harvest moon. 

Presently the Maire came back to the six, and said to one, BenoitDecreys, "Adieu, my poor Benoit, we shall not see each other again--they are going to shoot me. " He took his crucifix, his pursecontaining a sum of money, and some papers, out of his pocket, and askedthat they should be given to his family. Then pressing the hands heldout to him, he said good-bye to them all, and went back with a firm stepto the group of officers. Two soldiers were called up, and the Maire wasplaced at ten paces' distance. The soldiers fired, and M. Odent fellwithout a sound. He was hastily buried under barely a foot of earth, andhis six companions were left on the spot through the night expecting thesame fate, till the morning, when they were released. Five otherhostages, "gathered haphazard in the streets, " were shot the same nightin the neighbourhood of Chamant. 

Meanwhile the Curé, knowing nothing of what was happening to the Maire, had been thinking for his parishioners and his church. When thebombardment began he gathered together about a hundred and twenty ofthem, who had apparently no cellars to take refuge in, and aftersheltering them in the Presbytère for a time, he sent them with one ofhis _vicaires_ out of the town. Then--to continue his narrative:

"I went to the southern portal of the cathedral, and stood theretrembling at every burst of shrapnel that struck the belfry and theroof, and running out into the open, at each pause, to be sure that thechurch was still there. When the firing ceased, I went back to thePresbytère. 

"Presently, furious sounds of blows from the _place_. I went out. I sawsome enemy cyclists, armed with fragments of stone, breaking in one ofthe cathedral doors, another, with a hatchet, attacking the belfry door. At the sight of me, they rushed at me with their revolvers, demandingthat I should take them to the top of the belfry. 'You have a machinegun there!' 'Nothing of the sort, monsieur. See for yourselves. ' Iunlocked the door, and just as I put my foot on the first step, thefusillade in the town began. The soldiers started. 'You are ourprisoner!' cried their chief, turning to me, as though to seize me. 

"'I know it. You have me in your hands. ' I went up before them, asquickly as my age allowed. They searched everywhere, and, of course, found nothing. They ran down and disappeared. "

But that was not the end of the Abbé's trouble. He was presently sentfor to the German Headquarters, at the Hotel du Grand Cerf, where thetable spread for thirty people, by the order of M. Odent, was stillwaiting for its guests. The conversation here between the Curé and theofficer of high rank who spoke to him is worth repeating. From the tenorof it, the presumption is that the officer was a Catholic--probablya Bavarian. 

"I asked leave to go back to the Presbytère. 

"'Better stay here, Monsieur le Curé. You will be safer. The burning isgoing on. To-morrow, your town will be only a heap of ruins. '

"'What is our crime?'

"'Listen to that fusillade. Your inhabitants are attacking us, as theydid at Louvain. Louvain has ceased to exist! We will make of Senlisanother Louvain, so that Paris and France may know how we treat thosewho may imitate you. We have found small shot (_chevrotines_) in thebody of one of our officers. '

"'Already?'--I thought. How had there been any time for the post-mortem?But I was too crushed to speak. 

"'And also from your belfry we have been fired on!'

"At that I recovered myself. 

"'Sir--what may have passed in the streets, I cannot say. But as to thecathedral I formally deny your charge. Since war broke out, I havealways had the keys of the belfry. I did not even give them to yoursoldiers, who made me take them there. Do you wish me to swear it?'

"The officer looked at me. 

"'No need. You are a Catholic priest. I see you are sincere. '

"I bowed. "

A scene that throws much light! A false charge--an excited reference toLouvain--monstrous threat--the temper, that is, of panic, which is themother of cruelty. At that very moment, the German troops in the Rue dela Republique were driving parties of French civilians in front of them, as a protection from the Senegalese troops who were still firing fromhouses near the Paris exit from the town. Four or five of these poorpeople were killed by French bullets; a child of five forced along, withher mother, was shot in the thigh. Altogether some twenty or thirtycivilians seem to have been killed. 

Next day more houses were burnt. Then, for a time, the quiet ofdesolation. All the normal population were gone, or in the cellars. Buttwenty miles away to the southeast, great things were preparing. TheGerman occupation of Senlis began, as we have seen, on a Wednesday, September 2nd. On Saturday the 5th, as we all know, the first shots werefired in that Battle of the Ourcq which was the western section of theBattle of the Marne. By that Saturday, already, writes theAbbé Dourlent:

"There was something changed in the attitude of the enemy. What hadbecome of the brutal arrogance, the insolent cruelty of the first days?For three days and nights, the German troops, an army of 300, 000 men, defiled through our streets. It was not the road to Paris, now, thatthey asked for--it was the way to Nanteuil, Ermenonville, the directionof the Marne. On the faces of the officers, one seemed to readdisappointment and anxiety. Close to us, on the east, the guns werespeaking, every day more fiercely. What was happening?"

All that the Curé knows is that in a house belonging to persons of hisacquaintance, where some officers of the rear-guard left behind inSenlis are billeted, two of the young officers have been in tears--it issupposed, because of bad news. Another day, an armoured car rushes intoSenlis from Paris; the men in it exchange some shots with the Germansoldiers in the principal _place_, and make off again, calling out, "Courage! Deliverance is coming!"

Then, on the 9th, just a week from the German entry, there is anotherfusillade in the streets. "It is the Zouaves, knocking at the doors, dragging out the conquerors of yesterday, now a humbled remnant, withtheir hands in the air. "

And the Curé goes on to compare Senlis to the sand which the Creatorshowed to the sea. "Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther. " "The grainof sand is Senlis, still red with the flames which have devoured her, and with the blood of her victims. To these barbarians she cries--'Youwant Paris?--you want France? Halt! No road through here!'"

 * * * * *

This combination of the Curé's written and spoken account is as close tothe facts as I can make it. His narrative as he gave it to me, of whathe had seen and felt, was essentially simple, and, to judge from theFrench official reports, with which I have compared it, essentiallytrue. There are some discrepancies in detail, but nothing that matters. The murder of M. Odent, of the other hostages, of the civilians placedin front of the German troops, and of four or five other victims; theburning out by torch and explosive of half a flourishing town, becauseof a discreditable mistake, the fruit of panic and passion, --thesecrimes are indelibly marked on the record of Germany. She has done worseelsewhere. All the same, this too she will never efface. Let us imaginesuch things happening at Guildford, or Hatfield, or St. Albans!

We parted with M. Le Curé just in time to meet a pleasant party of warcorrespondents at the very inn, the Hôtel du Cerf, which had been theGerman Headquarters during the occupation. The correspondents were ontheir way between the French Headquarters and the nearest points of theFrench line, Soissons or Compiègne, from whose neighbourhood every daythe Germans were slowly falling back, and where the great attacks of themonth of April were in active preparation. Then, after luncheon, wesallied out into the darkening afternoon, through the Forest ofErmenonville, and up to the great plateau, stretching north towardsSoissons, southwards towards Meaux, and eastwards towards the Ourcq, where Maunoury's Sixth Army, striking from Paris and the west, and theEnglish Army, striking from the south--aided by all the gallant Frenchline from Château Thierry to the Grand Couronné--dealt that staggeringblow against the German right which flung back the German host, and, weary as the way has been since, weary as it may still be, in truth, decided the war. 

But the clouds hang lower as we emerge on the high bare plain. A fewflakes--then, in a twinkling, a whirling snow-storm through which we canhardly see our way. But we fight through it, and along the roads everyone of which is famous in the history of the battle. At our northernmostpoint we are about thirty miles from Soissons and the line. Columns ofFrench infantry on the march, guns, ammunition, stores, field kitchens, pass us perpetually; the motor moves at a foot's pace, and we catch theyoung faces of the soldiers through the white thickened air. And ourmost animated and animating companion, Monsieur P----, with hiswonderful knowledge of the battle, hails every landmark, identifiesevery farm and wood, even in what has become, in less than an hour, awhite wilderness. But it is of one village only, of these many whosenames are henceforth known to history, that I wish to speak--thevillage of Vareddes. In my next letter I propose to tell the ghastlystory of the hostages of Vareddes. 

No. 8

_May 17th_, 1917. 

DEAR MR. ROOSEVELT, --Shall I ever forget that broad wintry plateau ofthe Ourcq, as it lay, at the opening of March, under its bed of snow, with its ruined villages, its graves scattered over the fields, itsutter loneliness, save for the columns of marching soldiers in theroads, and the howling wind that rushed over the fields, the graves, thecemeteries, and whistled through the gaping walls of the poor churchesand farms? This high spreading plain, which before the war was one sceneof rural plenty and industrious peace, with its farm lands and orchardsdropping gently from the forest country of Chantilly, Compiègne, andErmenonville, down to the Ourcq and the Marne, will be a place ofpilgrimage for generations to come. Most of the Battle of the Marne wasfought on so vast a scale, over so wide a stretch of country--about 200miles long, by 50 broad--that for the civilian spectator of the futureit will never be possible to realise it as a whole, and very difficulteven to realise any section of it, topographically, owing to thecomplication of the actions involved. But in the Battle of the Ourcq, the distances are comparatively small, the actions comparatively simpleand intelligible, while all the circumstances of the particular struggleare so dramatic, and the stakes at issue so vast, that every incidentis, as it were, writ large, and the memory absorbs them more easily. 

An Englishwoman, too, may be glad it was in this conspicuous section ofthe battle-field, which will perhaps affect the imagination of posteritymore easily than any other, that it fell to the British Army to play itspart. To General Joffre the glory of the main strategic conception ofthe great retreat; to General Gallieni the undying honour of the rapidperception, the quick decision, which flung General Maunoury, with the6th Army, on Von Kluck's flank and rear, at the first hint of the Germangeneral's swerve to the southeast; to General Maunoury himself, and hissplendid troops, the credit of the battle proper, across the broadharvest fields of the Ourcq plateau. But the advance of the Britishtroops from the south of the Marne, on the heels of Von Kluck, was intruth all-important to the success of Maunoury on the Ourcq. It was theBritish Expeditionary Force which made the hinge of the battle-line, andif that hinge had not been strong and supple--in all respects equal toits work--the sudden attack of the 6th Army, on the extreme left of thebattle-line, and the victory of General Foch in the centre, might nothave availed. In other words, had Von Kluck found the weak spot hebelieved in and struck for, all would have been different. But the weakspot existed only in the German imagination. The British troops whom VonKluck supposed to be exhausted and demoralised, were in truth nothing ofthe sort. Rested and in excellent condition, they turned rejoicing uponthe enemy, and, in concert with the French 6th Army, decided the Germanwithdrawal. Every one of the six Armies aligned across France, fromParis to the Grand Couronne, had its own glorious task in the defeat ofthe German plans. But we were then so small a proportion of the whole, with our hundred and twenty thousand men, and we have become since soaccustomed to count in millions, that perhaps our part in the "miracleof the Marne" is sometimes in danger of becoming a little blurred in thepopular English--and American--conception of the battle. Is not thetruth rather that we had a twofold share in it? It was Von Kluck'smiscalculation as to the English strength that tempted him to hiseastward march; it was the quality of the British force and leadership, when Sir John French's opportunity came, that made the mistake afatal one. 

How different the aspect of the Ourcq plateau at the opening of thebattle in 1914, from the snowy desolation under which we saw it! Perfectsummer weather--the harvest stacks in the fields--a blazing sun by day, and a clear moon by night. For the first encounters of the five days'fighting, till the rain came down, Nature could not have set a fairerscene. And on the two anniversaries which have since passed, summer hasagain decked the battle-field. Thousands have gone out to it from Paris, from Meaux, and the whole country-side. The innumerable graves, singleor grouped, among the harvest fields and the pastures, have been coveredwith flowers, and bright, mile after mile, with the twinkling tricolour, as far as the eye could see. At Barcy and Etrépilly, the centres of thefight, priests have blessed the graves, and prayed for the dead. 

There has been neither labour nor money indeed as yet wherewith torebuild the ruined villages and farms, beyond the most necessaryrepairs. They stand for the most part as the battle left them. And thefields are still alive with innumerable red flags--distinct from thetricolour of the graves--which mark where the plough must avoid anunexploded shell. In a journal of September 1914, a citizen of Senlisdescribes passing in a motor through the scene of the fight, immediatelyafter the departure of the Germans, when the scavenging and buryingparties were still busy. 

"How can I describe it? Where to begin? Abandoned farms, on hills ofdeath! The grain-giving earth, empty of human beings. No labourers--nohousehold smoke. The fire of the burning villages has smouldered out, and round the houses, and in the courtyards, lie the debris of theirnormal life, trampled, dirty and piecemeal, under foot. Poor farms ofthe Ile-de-France!--dwellings of old time, into whose barns the richharvests of the fields had been joyously gathered year by year--oldtiled roofs, clothed with ancestral moss--plain hospitable rooms wheremasters and servants met familiarly together:--you are no more thancalcined and blackened stones! Not a living animal in the ruined stalls, not an ox, not a horse, not a sheep. One flies from the houses, only tofind a scene more horrible in the fields. Corpses everywhere, of men andhorses. And everywhere in the fields unexploded shells, which it wouldbe death to touch, which have already made many unsuspecting victims. 

"Sometimes, as the motor draws near, a man or a woman emerges from abuilding, having still on their faces the terror of the hours they havelived through. They scarcely look at us. They are absorbed in theirlosses, in the struggle to rescue something from the wreck. As soon asthey are sure it is not the Germans come back, they turn away, with slowsteps, bewildered by what they have suffered. "

The small party in the motor includes a priest, and as it passes nearBetz, at the northern end of the battle-field, they see a burying-partyof French Territorials at work. The officer in charge beckons to thepriest, and the priest goes to speak to him. 

"Monsieur l'Abbé, we have just buried here twenty-two French soldiers. "He points to a trench freshly dug, into which the earth has just beenshovelled. 

"They are Breton soldiers, " the officer explains, "and the men of myburying company are Bretons too. They have just discovered that thesedead men we have gathered from the fields were soldiers from a regimentrecruited in their own district. And _seven_ of them have recognisedamong these twenty-two dead, one a son, one a son-in-law, one a brother. Will you come, Monsieur l'Abbé, and say a few words to thesepoor fellows?"

So the Abbé goes to the new-made grave, reads the _De Profundis_, says aprayer, gives the benediction, and then speaks. Tears are on the strong, rugged faces of the bare-headed Bretons, as they gather round him. Agroup, some little distance off, which is writing the names of the deadon a white cross, pauses, catches what is going on, and kneels too, withbent heads.... 

It is good to linger on that little scene of human sympathy andreligious faith. It does something to protect the mind from the horrorof much that has happened here. 

 * * * * *

In spite of the storm, our indefatigable guide carried us through allthe principal points of the battle-line--St. Soupplêts--Marcilly--Barcy--Etrépilly--Acy-en-Multien; villages from which one by one, bykeen, hard fighting, the French attack, coming eastwards from Dammartinto Paris, dislodged the troops of Von Kluck; while to our right layTrocy, and Vareddes, a village on the Ourcq, between which points ranthe strongest artillery positions of the enemy. At Barcy, we stopped afew minutes, to go and look at the ruined church, with its fallen bell, and its graveyard packed with wreaths and crosses, bound with thetricolour. At Etrépilly, with the snow beating in our faces, and thewind howling round us, we read the inscription on the national monumentraised to those fallen in the battle, and looking eastwards to the spotwhere Trocy lay under thick curtains of storm, we tried to imagine themagnificent charge of the Zouaves, of the 62nd Reserve Division, underCommandant Henri D'Urbal, who, with many a comrade, lies buried in thecemetery of Barcy. 

Five days the battle swayed backwards and forwards across this scene, especially following the lines of the little streams flowing eastwardsto the Ourcq, the Thérouanne, the Gergogne, the Grivette. "From villageto village, " says Colonel Buchan, "amid the smoke of burning haystacksand farmsteads, the French bayonet attack was pressed home. "

"Terrible days of life-and-death fighting! [writes a Meaux resident, Madame Koussel-Lepine] battles of Chambry, Barcy, Puisieux, Acy-en-Multien, the 6th, 7th, and 8th of September--fierce days to whichthe graves among the crops bear witness. Four hundred volunteers sent toattack a farm, from which only seven come back! Ambuscades, barricadesin the streets, loopholes cut in the cemetery walls, trenches hastilydug and filled with dead, night fighting, often hand to hand, surprises, the sudden flash of bayonets, a rain of iron, a rain of fire, mills andhouses burning like torches--fields red with the dead and with theflaming corn fruit of the fields, and flower of the race!--the sacrificeconsummated, the cup drunk to the lees. "

Moving and eloquent words! They gain for me a double significance as Ilook back from them to the little scene we saw at Barcy under thesnow--a halt of some French infantry, in front of the ruined church. The"_salut an drapeau_" was going on, that simple, daily rite which, like asecular mass, is the outward and visible sign to the French soldier ofhis country and what he owes her. This passion of Frenchpatriotism--what a marvellous force, what a regenerating force it hasshown itself in this war! It springs, too, from the heart of a racewhich has the Latin gift of expression. Listen to this last entry in thejournal of Captain Robert Dubarle, the evening before his deathin action:

"This attack to-morrow, besides the inevitable emotion it rouses inone's thoughts, stirs in me a kind of joyous impatience, and the prideof doing my duty--which is to fight gladly, and die victorious. To thelast breath of our lives, to the last child of our mothers, to the laststone of our dwellings, all is thine, my country! Make no hurry. Choosethine own time for striking. If thou needest months, we will fight formonths; if thou needest years, we will fight for years--the children ofto-day shall be the soldiers of to-morrow. 

"Already, perhaps, my last hour is hastening towards me. Accept the giftI make thee of my strength, my hopes, my joys and my sorrows, of all mybeing, filled with the passion of thee. Pardon thy children their errorsof past days. Cover them with thy glory--put them to sleep in thy flag. Rise, victorious and renewed, upon their graves. Let our holocaust savethee--_Patrie, Patrie_!"

An utterance which for tragic sincerity and passion may well comparewith the letter of an English officer I printed at the end of_England's Effort_. 

On they go, into the snow and the mist, the small sturdy soldiers, boundnorthwards for those great and victorious attacks on the Craonneplateau, and the Chemin des Dames, which were to follow so close on ourown British victory on the Vimy Ridge. They pass the two ladies in themotor car, looking at us with friendly, laughing eyes, and disappearinto the storm. 

Then we move on to the northern edge of the battle-field, and at Rosoywe turn south towards Meaux, passing Vareddes to our left. The weatherclears a little, and from the high ground we are able to see Meaux tothe west, lying beside its great river, than which our children'schildren will greet no more famous name. The Marne winds, steely grey, through the white landscape, and we run down to it quickly. Soon we aremaking our way on foot through the dripping streets of Meaux to the oldbridge, which the British broke down--one of three--on their retreat--sosoon to end! Then, a few minutes in the lovely cathedral--its beauty wasa great surprise to me!--a greeting to the tomb of Bossuet--ah! what a_Discours_ he would have written on the Battle of the Marne!--and arapid journey of some twenty-five miles back to Paris. 

But there is still a story left to tell--the story of Vareddes. 

"Vareddes"--says a local historian of the battle--"is now a very quietplace. There is no movement in the streets and little life in thehouses, where some of the injuries of war have been repaired. " But thereis no spot in the wide battle-field where there burns a more passionatehatred of a barbarous enemy. "Push open this window, enter this house, talk with any person whatever whom you may happen to meet, and they willtell you of the torture of old men, carried off as hostages and murderedin cold blood, or of the agonies of fear deliberately inflicted on oldand frail women, through a whole night. "

The story of Vareddes is indeed nearly incredible. That English, orFrench, or Italian troops could have been guilty of this particularcrime is beyond imagination. Individual deeds of passion and lust arepossible, indeed, in all armies, though the degree to which they haveprevailed in the German army is, by the judgment of the civilised worldoutside Germany, unprecedented in modern history. But the instances oflong-drawn-out, cold-blooded, unrelenting cruelty, of which the Germanconduct of the war is full, fill one after a while with a shudderingsense of something wholly vile, and wholly unsuspected, which Europe hasbeen sheltering, unawares, in its midst. The horror has now thrown offthe trappings and disguise of modern civilisation, and we see it andrecoil. We feel that we are terribly right in speaking of the Germans asbarbarians; that, for all their science and their organisation, theyhave nothing really in common with the Graeco-Latin and Christiancivilisation on which this old Europe is based. We have thought of them, in former days, --how strange to look back upon it!--as brothers andco-workers in the human cause. But the men who have made and aresustaining this war, together with the men, civil and military, who havebreathed its present spirit into the German Army, are really moraloutlaws, acknowledging no authority but their own arrogant and cruelwills, impervious to the moral ideals and restraints that govern othernations, and betraying again and again, under the test of circumstance, the traits of the savage and the brute. 

And as one says these things, one could almost laugh at them!--so strongis still the memory of what one used to feel towards the poetic, thethinking, the artistic Germany of the past. But that Germany was a mereblind, hiding the real Germany. 

Listen, at least, to what this old village of the Ile-de-France knows ofGermany. 

With the early days of September 1914, there was a lamentable exodusfrom all this district. Long lines of fugitives making for safety andthe south, carts filled with household stuff and carrying the women andchildren, herds of cattle and sheep, crowded the roads. The Germans werecoming, and the terror of Belgium and the Ardennes had spread to theseFrench peasants of the centre. On September 1st, the post-mistress ofVareddes received orders to leave the village, after destroying thetelephone and telegraphic connections. The news came late, but panicspread like wildfire. All the night, Vareddes was packing and going. Of800 inhabitants only a hundred remained, thirty of them old men. 

One of the emigrants did not get far from home. He was a man of seventy, Louis Denet by name. He left Vareddes with his wife, in a farm-cart, driving a cow with them. They went a day's journey, and put up for a fewdays at the farm of a friend named Roger. On Sunday the 6th, in themorning, four Germans arrived at the farm. They went away and came backagain in the afternoon. They called all the inmates of the farm out intothe yard. Denet and Roger appeared. "You were three men this morning, now you are only two!" said one of the Germans. And immediately theytook the two old men a little distance away, and shot them both, withinhalf a mile of the farm. The body of Roger was found by his wife the dayafter; that of Denet was not discovered for some time. Nobody has anyidea to this day why those men were shot. It is worth while to try andrealise the scene--the terror-stricken old men dragged away by theirmurderers--the wives left behind, no doubt under a guard--the sound ofthe distant shots--the broken hearts of the widow and the orphan. 

But that was a mere prelude. 

On Friday, September 4th, a large detachment of Von Kluck's army invadedVareddes, coming from Barcy, which lies to the west. It was no doubtmoving towards the Marne on that flank march which was Von Kluck'sundoing. The troops left the village on Saturday the 5th, but only tomake a hurried return that same evening. Von Kluck was already aware ofhis danger, and was rapidly recalling troops to meet the advance ofMaunoury. Meanwhile the French Sixth Army was pressing on from the west, and from the 6th to the 9th there was fierce fighting in and roundVareddes. There were German batteries behind the Presbytère, and thechurch had become a hospital. The old Curé, the Abbé Fossin, at the ageof seventy-eight, spent himself in devoted service to the woundedGermans who filled it. There were other dressing stations near by. TheMairie, and the school, were full of wounded, of whom there wereprobably some hundreds in the village. Only 135 dead were buried in theneighbourhood; the Germans carried off the others in great lorriesfilled with corpses. 

By Monday the 7th, although they were still to hold the village till the9th, the Germans knew they were beaten. The rage of the great defeat, ofthe incredible disappointment, was on them. Only a week before, they hadpassed through the same country-side crying "Nach Paris!" and polishingup buttons, belts, rifles, accoutrements generally, so as to enter theFrench capital in _grande tenue. _ For whatever might have been the realplans of the German General Staff, the rank and file, as they came southfrom Creil and Nanteuil, believed themselves only a few hours from theBoulevards, from the city of pleasure and spoil. 

What had happened? The common cry of men so sharply foiled went up. "Nous sommes trahis!" The German troops in Vareddes, foreseeingimmediate withdrawal, and surrounded by their own dead and dying, mustsomehow avenge themselves, on some one. "Hostages! The village hasplayed us false! The Curé has been signalling from the church. We are ina nest of spies!"

So on the evening of the 7th, the old Curé, who had spent his day in thechurch, doing what he could for the wounded, and was worn out, had justgone to bed when there was loud knocking at his door. He was dragged outof bed, and told that he was charged with making signals to the FrenchArmy from his church tower, and so causing the defeat of the Germans. 

He pointed out that he was physically incapable of climbing the tower, that any wounded German of whom the church was full could have seen himdoing it, had the absurd charge been true. He reminded them that he hadspent his whole time in nursing their men. No use! He is struck, hustled, spat upon, and dragged off to the Mairie. There he passed thenight sitting on a hamper, and in the morning some one remembers to haveseen him there, his rosary in his hand. 

In one of the local accounts there is a touching photograph, taken, ofcourse, before the war, of the Curé among the boys of the village. Amild reserved face, with something of the child in it; the face of a manwho had had a gentle experience of life, and might surely hope for agentle death. 

Altogether some fourteen hostages, all but two over sixty years of age, and several over seventy, were taken during the evening and night. Theyask why. The answer is, "The Germans have been betrayed!" One man isarrested because he had said to a German who was boasting that theGerman Army would be in Paris in two days--"All right!--but you're notthere yet!" Another, because he had been seen going backwards andforwards to a wood, in which it appeared he had hidden two horses whomhe had been trying to feed. One old man of seventy-nine could only walkto the yard in which the others were gathered by the help of his wife'sarm. When they arrived there a soldier separated them so roughly thatthe wife fell. 

Imagine the horror of the September night!--the terror of the women who, in the general exodus of the young and strong, had stayed behind withtheir husbands, the old men who could not be persuaded to leave thefarms and fields in which they had spent their lives. "What harm canthey do to us--old people?" No doubt that had been the instinctivefeeling among those who had remained to face the invasion. 

But the Germans were not content without wreaking the instinct--which isthe savage instinct--to break and crush and ill-treat something whichhas thwarted you, on the women of Vareddes also. They gathered them outof the farmyard to which they had come, in the hopes of being allowed tostay with the men, and shut them up in a room of the farm. And there, with fixed bayonets, the soldiers amused themselves with terrifyingthese trembling creatures during a great part of the night. They madethem all kneel down, facing a file of soldiers, and the women thoughttheir last hour had come. One was seventy-seven years old, threesixty-seven, the two others just under sixty. The eldest, MadameBarthélemy, said to the others--"We are going to die. Make your'contrition' if you can. " (The Town Librarian of Meaux, from whoseaccount I take these facts, heard these details from the lips of poorMadame Barthélemy herself. ) The cruel scene shapes itself as we think ofit--the half-lit room--the row of kneeling and weeping women, thegrinning soldiers, bayonet in hand, and the old men waiting in theyard outside. 

But with the morning, the French mitrailleuses are heard. The soldiersdisappear. 

The poor old women are free; they are able to leave their prison. 

But their husbands are gone--carried off as hostages by the Germans. There were nineteen hostages in all. Three of them were taken off in anorth-westerly direction, and found some German officers quartered in achâteau, who, after a short interrogation, released them. Of the othersixteen, fifteen were old men, and the sixteenth a child. The Curé iswith them, and finds great difficulty, owing to his age, the exhaustionof the night, and lack of food, in keeping up with the column. It wasnow Thursday the 10th, the day following that on which, as is generallybelieved, the Kaiser signed the order for the general retreat of theGerman armies in France. But the hostages are told that the French Armyhas been repulsed, and the Germans will be in Paris directly. 

At last the poor Curé could walk no farther. He gave his watch to acompanion. "Give it to my family when you can. I am sure they mean toshoot me. " Then he dropped exhausted. The Germans hailed a passingvehicle, and made him and another old man, who had fallen out, follow init. Presently they arrive at Lizy-sur-Ourcq, through which thousands ofGerman troops are now passing, bound not for Paris, but for Soissons andthe Aisne, and in the blackest of tempers. Here, after twenty-four morehours of suffering and starvation, the Curé is brought before acourt-martial of German officers sitting in a barn. He is once morecharged with signalling from the church to the French Army. He againdenies the charge, and reminds his judges of what he had done for theGerman wounded, to whose gratitude he appeals. Then four German soldiersgive some sort of evidence, founded either on malice or mistake. Thereare no witnesses for the defence, no further inquiry. The president ofthe court-martial says, in bad French, to the other hostages who standby: "The Curé has lied--he is a spy--_il sera jugé_. "

What did he mean--and what happened afterwards? The French witnesses ofthe scene who survived understood the officer's words to mean that theCuré would be shot. With tears, they bade him farewell, as he satcrouched in a corner of the barn guarded by two German soldiers. He wasnever seen again by French eyes; and the probability is that he was shotimmediately after the scene in the barn. 

Then the miserable march of the other old men began again. They aredragged along in the wake of the retreating Germans. The day is veryhot, the roads are crowded with troops and lorries. They are hustled andhurried, and their feeble strength is rapidly exhausted. The older onesbeg that they may be left to die; the younger help them as much as theycan. When anyone falls out, he is kicked and beaten till he gets upagain. And all the time the passing troops mock and insult them. Atlast, near Coulombs, after a march of two hours and a half, a man ofseventy-three, called Jourdaine, falls. His guards rush upon him, withblows and kicks. In vain. He has no strength to rise, and his murderersfinish him with a ball in the head and one in the side, and bury himhastily in a field a few metres off. 

The weary march goes on all day. When it ends, another oldman--seventy-nine years old--"le père Milliardet"--can do no more. Thenext morning he staggered to his feet at the order to move, but fellalmost immediately. Then a soldier with the utmost coolness sent hisbayonet through the heart of the helpless creature. Another falls on theroad a little farther north--then another--and another. All are killed, as they lie. 

The poor Maire, Liévin, struggles on as long as he can. Two otherprisoners support him on either side. But he has a weak heart--his faceis purple--he can hardly breathe. Again and again he falls, only to bebrutally pulled up, the Germans shouting with laughter at the old man'smisery. (This comes from the testimony of the survivors. ) Then he, too, falls for the last time. Two soldiers take him into the cemetery ofChouy. Liévin understands, and patiently takes out his handkerchief andbandages his own eyes. It takes three balls to kill him. 

Another hostage, a little farther on, who had also fallen was beaten todeath before the eyes of the others. 

The following day, after having suffered every kind of insult andprivation, the wretched remnant of the civilian prisoners reachedSoissons, and were dispatched to Germany, bound for the concentrationcamp at Erfurt. 

Eight of them, poor souls! reached Germany, where two of them died. Atlast, in January 1915, four of them were returned to France throughSwitzerland. They reached Schaffhausen with a number of other_rapatriés, _ in early February, to find there the boundless pity withwhich the Swiss know so well how to surround the frail and torturedsufferers of this war. In a few weeks more, they were again at home, among the old farms and woods of the Ile-de-France. "They are now inpeace, " says the Meaux Librarian--"among those who love them, and whoseaffection tries, day by day, to soften for them the cruel memory oftheir Calvary and their exile. "

A monument to the memory of the murdered hostages is to be erected inthe village market-place, and a _plaque_ has been let into the wall ofthe farm where the old men and the women passed their first nightof agony. 

 * * * * *

What is the moral of this story? I have chosen it to illustrate againthe historic words which should be, I think--and we know that what is inour hearts is in your hearts also!--the special watchword of the Alliesand of America, in these present days, when the German strength _may_collapse at any moment, and the problems of peace negotiations _may_ beupon us before we know. 

_Reparation_--_Restitution_--_Guarantees_!

The story of Vareddes, like that of Senlis, is not among the vilest--bya long, long way--of those which have steeped the name of Germany ineternal infamy during this war. The tale of Gerbéviller--which I shalltake for my third instance--as I heard it from the lips ofeye-witnesses, plunges us in deeper depths of horror; and the pages ofthe Bryce report are full of incidents beside which that of Vareddeslooks almost colourless. 

All the same, let us insist again that no Army of the Allies, or ofAmerica, or of any British Dominion, would have been capable of thetreatment given by the soldiers of Germany to the hostages of Vareddes. It brings out into sharp relief that quality, or "mentality, " to use thefashionable word, which Germany shares with Austria--witness theAustrian doings in Serbia--and with Turkey--witness Turkey's doings inArmenia--but not with any other civilised nation. It is the quality of, or the tendency to, deliberate and pitiless cruelty; a quality whichmakes of the man or nation who shows it a particularly terrible kind ofanimal force; and the more terrible, the more educated. Unless we canput it down and stamp it out, as it has become embodied in a Europeannation, European freedom and peace, American freedom and peace, haveno future. 

But now, let me carry you to Lorraine!--to the scenes of that short butglorious campaign of September 1914, by which, while the Battle of theMarne was being fought, General Castelnau was protecting the right ofthe French armies; and to the devastated villages where Americankindness is already at work, rebuilding the destroyed, and comfortingthe broken-hearted. 

No. 9

_May 24th_, 1917. 

DEAR MR. ROOSEVELT, --To any citizen of a country allied with France inthe present struggle, above all to any English man or woman who isprovided with at least some general knowledge of the Battle of theMarne, the journey across France from Paris to Nancy can never fail tobe one of poignant interest. Up to a point beyond Châlons, the "Ligne del'Est" follows in general the course of the great river, and thereforethe line of the battle. You pass La Fertée-sous-Jouarre, where the ThirdCorps of General French's army crossed the river; Charly-sur-Marne, where a portion of the First Corps found an unexpectedly easy crossing, owing, it is said, to the hopeless drunkenness of the enemy rear-guardcharged with defending the bridge; and Château Thierry, famous in theolder history of France, where the right of the First Corps crossedafter sharp fighting, and, in the course of "a gigantic man-hunt" in andaround the town, took a large number of German prisoners, before, bynightfall, coming into touch with the left of the French Fifth Armyunder Franchet d'Espercy. At Dornans you are only a few miles north ofthe Marshes of St. Gond, where General Foch, after some perilousmoments, won his brilliant victory over General Billow and the GermanSecond Army, including a corps of the Prussian Guards; while at ChâlonsI look up from a record I am reading of the experiences of the Dioceseduring the war, written by the Bishop, to watch for the distantcathedral, and recall the scene of the night of September 9th, when theGerman Headquarters Staff in that town, "flown with insolence and wine, "after what is described as "an excellent dinner and much riotousdrinking, " were roused about midnight by a sudden noise in the Hôtel, and shouts of "The French are here!" "In fifteen minutes, " writes anofficer of the Staff of General Langle de Gary, "the Hôtel was empty. "

At Épernay and Châlons those French officers who were bound for thefighting line in Champagne, east and west of Reims, left the train; andsomewhere beyond Épernay I followed in thought the flight of anaeroplane which seemed to be heading northwards across the ridges whichbound the river valley--northwards for Reims, and that tragic ghostwhich the crime of Germany has set moving through history for ever, never to be laid or silenced--Joan of Arc's Cathedral. Then, at last, weare done with the Marne. We pass Bar-le-Duc, on one of her tributaries, the Ornain; after which the splendid Meuse flashes into sight, runningnorth on its victorious way to Verdun; then the Moselle, with Toul andits beautiful church on the right; and finally the Meurthe, on whichstands Nancy. A glorious sisterhood of rivers! The more one realiseswhat they have meant to the history of France, the more one understandsthat strong instinct of the early Greeks, which gave every river itsgod, and made of the Simois and the Xanthus personages almost as real asAchilles himself. 

But alas! the whole great spectacle, here as on the Ourcq, was sorelymuffled and blurred by the snow, which lay thick over the whole lengthand breadth of France, effacing the landscape in one monotonouswhiteness. If I remember rightly, however, it had ceased to fall, andtwenty-four hours after we reached Nancy, it had disappeared. It lastedjust long enough to let us see the fairy-like Place Stanislas raise itsbeautiful gilded gates and white palaces between the snow and themoon-light--a sight not soon forgotten. 

We were welcomed at Nancy by the Préfet of the Department, Monsieur LéonMirman, to whom an old friend had written from Paris, and by thecourteous French officer, Capitaine de B. , who was to take us in charge, for the French Army, during our stay. M. Mirman and his active andpublic-spirited wife have done a great work at Nancy, and in thedesolated country round it. From the ruined villages of the border, thepoor _réfugiés_ have been gathered into the old capital of Lorraine, andwhat seemed to me a remarkably efficient and intelligent philanthropyhas been dealing with their needs and those of their children. Nor isthis all. M. Mirman is an old Radical and of course a Governmentofficial, sent down some years ago from Paris. Lorraine is ardentlyCatholic, as we all know, and her old Catholic families are not thenatural friends of the Republican _régime_. But President Poincaré'shappy phrase, _l'union sacrée_--describing the fusion of all parties, classes, and creeds in the war service of France, has nowhere found astronger echo than in Lorraine. The Préfet is on the friendliest ofterms with the Catholic population, rich and poor; and they, on theirside, think and speak warmly of a man who is clearly doing his patrioticbest for all alike. 

Our first day's journeyings were to show us something of the qualitiesof this Catholic world of Lorraine. A charming and distinguishedFrenchwoman who accompanied us counted, no doubt, for much in the warmthof the kindness shown us. And yet I like to believe--indeed I amsure--that there was more than this in it. There was the thrilling senseof a friendship between our two nations, a friendship new andfar-reaching, cemented by the war, but looking beyond it, which seemedto me to make the background of it all. Long as I have loved and admiredthe French, I have often--like many others of their English friends andadmirers--felt and fretted against the kind of barrier that seemed toexist between their intimate life and ours. It was as though, at bottom, and in the end, something cold and critical in the French temperament, combined with ignorance and prejudice on our own part, prevented a realcontact between the two nationalities. In Lorraine, at any rate, and forthe first time, I felt this "something" gone. Let us only carry forward_intelligently_, after the war, the process of friendship born from thestress and anguish of this time--for there is an art and skill infriendship, just as there is an art and skill in love--and new horizonswill open for both nations. The mutual respect, the daily intercourse, and the common glory of our two armies fighting amid the fields andwoods of France--soon to welcome a third army, your own, to their greatfellowship!--are the foundations to-day of all the rest; and next comethe efforts that have been made by British and Americans to help theFrench in remaking and rebuilding their desolated land, efforts thatbless him that gives and him that takes, but especially him that gives;of which I shall have more to say in the course of this letter. But acommon victory, and a common ardour in rebuilding the waste places, andbinding up the broken-hearted: even they will not be enough, unless, beyond the war, all three nations, nay, all the Allies, do not setthemselves to a systematic interpenetration of life and thought, morally, socially, commercially. As far as France and England areconcerned, English people must go more to France; French people mustcome more to England. Relations of hospitality, of correspondence, ofwide mutual acquaintance, must not be left to mere chance; they must befurthered by the mind of both nations. Our English children must go forpart of their education to France; and French children must besystematically wooed over here. Above all the difficulty of languagemust be tackled as it has never been yet, so that it may be a realdisadvantage and disgrace for the boy or girl of either country who hashad a secondary education not to be able to speak, in some fashion, thelanguage of the other. As for the working classes, and the countrypopulations of both countries, what they have seen of each other, asbrothers in arms during the war, may well prove of more lastingimportance than anything else. 

 * * * * *

But I am wandering a little from Nancy, and the story of our longSunday. The snow had disappeared, and there were voices of spring in thewind. A French Army motor arrived early, with another French officer, the Capitaine de G----, who proved to be a most interesting andstimulating guide. With him I drove slowly through the beautiful town, looking at the ruined houses, which are fairly frequent in its streets. For Nancy has had its bombardments, and there is one gun of long rangein particular, surnamed by the town--"la grosse Bertha, " which has done, and still does, at intervals, damage of the kind the German loves. Bombs, too, have been dropped by aeroplanes both here and at Lunéville, in streets crowded with non-combatants, with the natural result. It hasbeen in reprisal for this and similar deeds elsewhere, and in the hopeof stopping them, that the French have raided German towns across thefrontier. But the spirit of Nancy remains quite undaunted. The childrenof its schools, drilled to run down to the cellars at the first alarm asour children are drilled to empty a school on a warning of a Zeppelinraid, are the gayest and most spirited creatures, as I saw them at theirgames and action songs; unless indeed it be the children of the_réfugiés_, in whose faces sometimes one seems to see the reflection ofscenes that no child ought to have witnessed and not even a child canforget. For these children come from the frontier villages, ravaged bythe German advance, and still, some of them, in German occupation. Andthe orgy of murder, cruelty, and arson which broke out at Nomény, Badonviller, and Gerbéviller, during the campaign of 1914, has scarcelybeen surpassed elsewhere--even in Belgium. Here again, as at Vareddes, the hideous deeds done were largely owing to the rage of defeat. TheGermans, mainly Bavarians, on the frontier, had set their hearts onNancy, as the troops of Von Kluck had set their hearts on Paris; andGeneral Castelnau, commanding the Second Army, denied them Nancy, asMaunoury's Sixth Army denied Paris to Von Kluck. 

But more of this presently. We started first of all for a famous pointin the fighting of 1914, the farm and hill of Léomont. By this time theday had brightened into a cold sunlight, and as we sped south from Nancyon the Lunéville road, through the old town of St. Nicholas du Port, with its remarkable church, and past the great salt works at Dombasle, all the country-side was clear to view. 

Good fortune indeed!--as I soon discovered when, after climbing a steephill to the east of the road, we found ourselves in full view of thefighting lines and a wide section of the frontier, with the Forest ofParroy, which is still partly German, stretching its dark lengthsouthward on the right, while to the north ran the famous heights of theGrand Couronné;--name of good omen!--which suggests so happily thehistorical importance of the ridge which protects Nancy and covers theFrench right. Then, turning westward, one looked over the valley of theMeurthe, with its various tributaries, the Mortagne in particular, onwhich stands Gerbéviller; and away to the Moselle and the Meuse. But thepanoramic view was really made to live and speak for me by the able manat my side. With French precision and French logic, he began with thegeography of the country, its rivers and hills and plateaux, and itsnatural capacities for defence against the German enemy; handling theview as though it had been a great map, and pointing out, as he went, the disposition of the French frontier armies, and the use made of thisfeature and that by the French generals in command. 

This Lorraine Campaign, at the opening of the war, is very littlerealised outside France. It lasted some three weeks. It was preceded bythe calamitous French reverse at Morhange, where, on August 20th, portions of the 15th and 16th Corps of the Second Army, young troopsdrawn from south-western France--who in subsequent actions fought withgreat bravery--broke in rout before a tremendous German attack. Thedefeat almost gave the Germans Nancy. But General Castelnau and GeneralFoch, between them, retrieved the disaster. They fell back on Nancy andthe line of the Mortagne, while the Germans, advancing farther south, occupied Luneville (August 22nd) and burnt Gerbéviller. On the 23rd, 24th, and 25th there was fierce fighting on and near this hill on whichwe stood. Capitaine de G---- with the 2nd Battalion of Chausseurs, underGeneral Dubail, had been in the thick of the struggle, and he describedto me the action on the slopes beneath us, and how, through his glasses, he had watched the enemy on the neighbouring hill forcing parties ofFrench civilians to bury the German dead and dig German trenches, underthe fire of their own people. 

The hill of Léomont, and the many graves upon it, were quiet enough aswe stood talking there. The old farm was in ruins; and in the fieldsstretching up the hill there were the remains of trenches. All aroundand below us spread the beautiful Lorraine country, with its rivers andforests; and to the south-east one could just see the blue mass of MontDonon, and the first spurs of the Vosges. 

"Can you show me exactly where the French line runs?" I asked mycompanion. He pointed to a patch of wood some six miles away. "There isa French battalion there. And you see that other patch of wood a littlefarther east? There is a German battalion there. Ah!" Suddenly he brokeoff, and the younger officer with us, Capitaine de B----, came runningup, pointing overhead. I craned my neck to look into the spring blueabove us, and there--7, 000 to 8, 000 feet high, according to theofficers--were three Boche aeroplanes pursued by two French machines. Inand out a light band of white cloud, the fighters in the air chased eachother, shrapnel bursting all round them like tufts of white wool. Theywere so high that they looked mere white specks. Yet we could followtheir action perfectly--how the Germans climbed, before running forhome, and how the French pursued! It was breathless while it lasted! Butwe did not see the end. The three Taubes were clearly driven back; andin a few seconds they and the Frenchmen had disappeared in distance andcloud towards the fighting-line. The following day, at a point fartherto the north, a well-known French airman was brought down and killed, injust such a fight. 

Beyond Léomont we diverged westward from the main road, and foundourselves suddenly in one of those utterly ruined villages which nowbestrew the soil of Northern, Central, and Eastern France; of thatFrance which has been pre-eminently for centuries, in spite ofrevolutions, the pious and watchful guardian of what the labour of deadgenerations has bequeathed to their sons. Vitrimont, however, wasdestroyed in fair fight during the campaign of 1914. Bombardment hadmade wreck of the solid houses, built of the warm red stone of thecountry. It had destroyed the church, and torn up the graveyard; andwhen its exiled inhabitants returned to it by degrees, even Frenchcourage and French thrift quailed before the task of reconstruction. Butpresently there arrived a quiet American lady, who began to make friendswith the people of Vitrimont, to find out what they wanted, and toconsult with all those on the spot who could help to bring the visionsin her mind to pass, --with the Préfet, with the officials, local andgovernmental, of the neighbouring towns, with the Catholic women of thericher Lorraine families, gentle, charitable, devout, who quicklyperceived her quality, and set themselves to co-operate with her. It wasthe American lady's intention--simply--to rebuild Vitrimont. And she issteadily accomplishing it, with the help of generous money subsidiescoming, month by month, from one rich American woman--a woman of SanFrancisco--across the Atlantic. How one envies that American woman!

The sight of Miss Polk at work lives indeed, a warm memory, in one'sheart. She has established herself in two tiny rooms in a peasant'scottage, which have been made just habitable for her. A few touches ofbright colour, a picture or two, a book or two, some flowers, withfurniture of the simplest--amid these surroundings on the outskirts ofthe ruined village, with one of its capable, kindly faced women to runthe _ménage_, Miss Polk lives and works, realising bit by bit the plansof the new Vitrimont, which have been drawn for her by the architect ofthe department, and following loyally old Lorraine traditions. Thechurch has been already restored and reopened. The first mass within itsthronged walls was--so the spectators say--a moving sight. "_That sadword--Joy_"--Landor's pregnant phrase comes back to one, as expressingthe bitter-sweet of all glad things in this countryside, which hasseen--so short a time ago--death and murder and outrage at their worst. The gratitude of the villagers to their friend and helper has takenvarious forms. The most public mark of it, so far, has been Miss Folk'sformal admission to the burgess rights of Vitrimont, which is one of theold communes of France. And the village insists that she shall claim herrights! When the time came for dividing the communal wood in theneighbouring forest, her fellow citizens arrived to take her with themand show her how to obtain her share. As to the affection and confidencewith which she is regarded, it was enough to walk with her through thevillage, to judge of its reality. 

But it makes one happy to think that it is not only Americans who havedone this sort of work in France. Look, for instance, at the work of theSociety of Friends in the department of the Marne, --on that fragment ofthe battlefield which extends from Bar-le-Duc to Vitry St. François. "Goand ask, " wrote a French writer in 1915, "for the village of Huiron, orthat of Glannes, or that other, with its name to shudder at, splashedwith blood and powder--Sermaize. Inquire for the English Quakers. Books, perhaps, have taught you to think of them as people with long blackcoats and long faces. Where are they? Here are only a band of workmen, smooth-faced--not like our country folk. They laugh and sing while theymake the shavings fly under the plane and the saw. They are buildingwooden houses, and roofing them with tiles. Around them are poor peoplewhose features are stiff and grey like those of the dead. These are thewomen, the old men, the children, the weaklings of our sweet France, whohave lived for months in damp caves and dens, till they look likeLazarus rising from the tomb. But life is beginning to come back totheir eyes and their lips. The hands they stretch out to you tremblewith joy. To-night they will sleep in a house, in _their_ house. Andinside there will be beds and tables and chairs, and things to cookwith.... As they go in and look, they embrace each other, sobbing. "

By June 1915, 150 "Friends" had rebuilt more than 400 houses, andrehoused more than seven hundred persons. They had provided ploughs andother agricultural gear, seeds for the harvest fields and for thegardens, poultry for the farmyards. And from that day to this, theadorable work has gone on. "_By this shall all men know that ye are Mydisciples, if ye love one another_. "

 * * * * *

It is difficult to tear oneself away from themes like this, when thestory one has still to tell is the story of Gerbéviller. At Vitrimontthe great dream of Christianity--the City of God on earth--seems stillreasonable. 

At Hérémenil, and Gerbéviller, we are within sight and hearing of deedsthat befoul the human name, and make one despair of a world in whichthey can happen. 

At luncheon in a charming house of old Lorraine, with an intellectualand spiritual atmosphere that reminded me of a book that was one of theabiding joys of my younger days--the _Récit d'une Soeur_--we heard fromthe lips of some of those present an account of the arrival at Lunévilleof the fugitives from Gerbéviller, after the entry of the Bavarians intothe town. Women and children and old men, literally mad with terror, hadescaped from the burning town, and found their way over the thirteenkilomètres that separate Gerbéviller from Lunéville. No intelligibleaccount could be got from them; they had seen things that shatter thenerves and brain of the weak and old; they were scarcely human in theirextremity of fear. And when, an hour later, we ourselves reachedGerbéviller, the terror which had inspired that frenzied flight became, as we listened to Soeur Julie, a tangible presence haunting theruined town. 

Gerbéviller and Soeur Julie are great names in France to-day. Gerbéviller, with Nomény, Badonviller, and Sermaize, stand in France forwhat is most famous in German infamy; Soeur Julie, the "chère soeur" ofso many narratives, for that form of courage and whole-hearted devotionwhich is specially dear to the French, because it has in it a touch of_panache_, of audacity! It is not too meek; it gets its own back when itcan, and likes to punish the sinner as well as to forgive him. SisterJulie of the Order of St. Charles of Nancy, Madame Rigard, in civilparlance, had been for years when the war broke out the head of a modestcottage hospital in the small country town of Gerbéviller. The town wasprosperous and pretty; its gardens ran down to the Mortagne flowing atits feet, and it owned a country house in a park, full of treasures newand old--tapestries, pictures, books--as Lorraine likes to have suchthings about her. 

But unfortunately, it occupied one of the central points of the fightingin the campaign of Lorraine, after the defeat of General Castelnau'sArmy at Morhange on August 20th, 1914. The exultant and victoriousGermans pushed on rapidly after that action. Lunéville was occupied, andthe fighting spread to the districts south and west of that town. Thecampaign, however, lasted only three weeks, and was determined by thedecisive French victory of September 8th on the Grand Couronné. BySeptember 12th Nancy was safe; Lunéville and Gerbéviller had beenretaken; and the German line had been driven back to where we saw itfrom the hill of Léomont. But in that three weeks a hell of cruelty, inaddition to all the normal sufferings of war, had been let loose on thevillages of Lorraine; on Nomény to the north of Nancy, on Badonviller, Baccarat, and Gerbéviller to the south. The Bavarian troops, whoserecord is among the worst in the war, got terribly out of hand, especially when the tide turned against them; and if there is onecriminal who, if he is still living, will deserve and, I hope, get animpartial trial some day before an international tribunal, it will bethe Bavarian General, General Clauss. 

Here is the first-hand testimony of M. Mirman, the Prefét of theDepartment. At Gerbeviller, he writes, the ruin and slaughter of thetown and its inhabitants had nothing to do with legitimate war:

"We are here in presence of an inexpiable crime. The crime was signed. Such signatures are soon rubbed out. I saw that of the murderer--and Ibear my testimony. 

"The bandits who were at work here were assassins: I have seen thebodies of their victims, and taken the evidence on the spot. They shotdown the inhabitants like rabbits, killing them haphazard in thestreets, on their doorsteps, almost at arm's length. Of these victims itis still difficult to ascertain the exact number; it will be more thanfifty. Most of the victims had been buried when I first entered thetown; here and there, however, in a garden, at the entrance to a cellarthe corpses of women still awaited burial. In a field just outside thetown, I saw on the ground, their hands tied, some with their eyesbandaged--fifteen old men--murdered. They were in three groups of five. The men of each group had evidently clung to each other before death. The clenched hand of one of them still held an old pipe. They were allold men--with white hair. Some days had elapsed since their murder; buttheir aspect in death was still venerable; their quiet closed eyesseemed to appeal to heaven. A staff officer of the Second Army who waswith me photographed the scene; with other _pièces de conviction_; thephotograph is in the hands of the Governmental Commission charged withinvestigating the crimes of the Germans during this war. "

The Bavarian soldiers in Gerbéviller were not only murderers--they wereincendiaries, even more deliberate and thorough-going than the soldiersof Von Kluck's army at Senlis. With the exception of a few houses beyondthe hospital, spared at the entreaty of Soeur Julie, and on her promiseto nurse the German wounded, the whole town was deliberately burnt out, house by house, the bare walls left standing, the rest destroyed. Andas, _after the fire_, the place was twice taken and retaken underbombardment, its present condition may be imagined. It was during theburning that some of the worst murders and outrages took place. Forthere is a maddening force in triumphant cruelty, which is deadlier thanthat of wine; under it men become demons, and all that ishuman perishes. 

The excuse, of course, was here as at Senlis--"les civils ont tiré!"There is not the slightest evidence in support of the charge. As atSenlis, there was a French rear-guard of 57 Chasseurs--left behind todelay the German advance as long as possible. They were told to holdtheir ground for five hours; they held it for eleven, fighting withreckless bravery, and firing from a street below the hospital. TheGermans, taken by surprise, lost a good many men before, at small lossto themselves, the Chasseurs retreated. In their rage at the unexpectedcheck, and feeling, no doubt, already that the whole campaign was goingagainst them, the Germans avenged themselves on the town and itshelpless inhabitants. 

Our half-hour in Soeur Julie's parlour was a wonderful experience!Imagine a portly woman of sixty, with a shrewd humorous face, talkingwith French vivacity, and with many homely turns of phrase drawnstraight from that life of the soil and the peasants amid which sheworked; a woman named in one of General Castelnau's Orders of the Dayand entitled to wear the Legion of Honour; a woman, too, who has seenhorror face to face as few women, even in war, have seen it, yet stillsimple, racy, full of irony, and full of heart, talking as a mothermight talk of her "grands blessés"! but always with humorous asides, andan utter absence of pose or pretence; flashing now into scorn and nowinto tenderness, as she described the conduct of the German officers whosearched her hospital for arms, or the helplessness of the wounded menwhom she protected. I will try and put down some of her talk. It threwmuch light for me on the psychology of two nations. 

"During the fighting, we had always about 300 of our wounded (_nos chersblessés_) in this hospital. As fast as we sent them off, others came in. All our stores were soon exhausted. I was thankful we had some good winein the cellars--about 200 bottles. You understand, Madame, that when wego to nurse our people in their farms, they don't pay us, but they liketo give us something--very often it is a bottle of old wine, and we putit in the cellar, when it comes in handy often for our invalids. Ah! Iwas glad of it for our _blessés_! I said to my Sisters--'Give it them!and not by thimblefuls--give them enough!' Ah, poor things!--it madesome of them sleep. It was all we had. One day, I passed a soldier whowas lying back in his bed with a sigh of satisfaction. '_Ah, ma Soeur, ça resusciterait un mort!_' (That would bring a dead man to life!) So Istopped to ask what they had just given him. And it was a large glass ofLachryma Christi!

"But then came the day when the Commandant, the French Commandant, youunderstand, came to me and said--'Sister, I have sad news for you. I amgoing. I am taking away the wounded--and all my stores. Those aremy orders. '

"'But, mon Commandant, you'll leave me some of your stores for thegrands blessés, whom you leave behind--whom you can't move? _What_!--youmust take it all away? Ah, ça--_non_! I don't want any extras--I won'ttake your chloroform--I won't take your bistouris--I won't take yourelectric things--but--hand over the iodine! (_en avant l'iode_!) handover the cotton-wool!--hand over the gauze! Come, my Sisters!' I cantell you I plundered him!--and my Sisters came with their aprons, andthe linen-baskets--we carried away all we could. "

Then she described the evacuation of the French wounded at night--300 ofthem--all but the 19 worst cases left behind. There were no ambulances, no proper preparation of any kind. 

"Oh! it was a confusion!--an ugly business!" (_ce n'etait pas rose_!). The Sisters tore down and split up the shutters, the doors, to serve asstretchers; they tore sheets into long strips and tied "our poorchildren" on to the shutters, and hoisted them into country carts ofevery sort and description. "Quick!--Quick!" She gave us a wonderfulsense of the despairing haste in which the night retreat had to beeffected. All night their work went on. The wounded never made asound--"they let us do what we would without a word. And as for us, mySisters bound these big fellows (_ces gros et grands messieurs_) on tothe improvised stretchers, like a mother who fastens her child in itscot. Ah! Jésus! the poverty and the misery of that time!"

By the early morning all the French wounded were gone except thenineteen helpless cases, and all the French soldiers had cleared out ofthe village except the 57 Chasseurs, whose orders were to hold the placeas long as they could, to cover the retreat of the rest. 

Then, when the Chasseurs finally withdrew, the Bavarian troops rushed upthe town in a state of furious excitement, burning it systematically asthey advanced, and treating the inhabitants as M. Mirman has described. Soon Soeur Julie knew that they were coming up the hill towards thehospital. I will quote the very language--homely, Biblical, direct--inwhich she described her feelings. "_Mes reins flottaient comme ça--ilsallaient tomber à mes talons. Instantanément, pas une goutte de salivedans la bouche!_" Or--to translate it in the weaker English idiom--"Myheart went down into my heels--all in a moment, my mouth was dry asa bone!"

The German officers drew up, and asked for the Superior of the hospital. She went out to meet them. Here she tried to imitate the extraordinaryarrogance of the German manner. 

"They told me they would have to burn the hospital, as they wereinformed men had been shooting from it at their troops. 

"I replied that if anyone had been shooting, it was the FrenchChasseurs, who were posted in a street close by, and had every rightto shoot!"

At last they agreed to let the hospital alone, and burn no more houses, if she would take in the German wounded. So presently the wards of thelittle hospital were full again to overflowing. But while the Germanwounded were coming in the German officers insisted on searching thenineteen French wounded for arms. 

"I had to make way for them--I _had_ to say, '_Entrez, Messieurs!_'"

Then she dropped her voice, and said between her teeth--"Think how hardthat was for a Lorrainer!"

So two German officers went to the ward where the nineteen Frenchmenlay, all helpless cases, and a scene followed very like that in thehospital at Senlis. One drew his revolver and covered the beds, theother walked round, poniard in hand, throwing back the bedclothes tolook for arms. But they found nothing--"_only blood_! For we had hadneither time enough nor dressings enough to treat the wounds properlythat night. "

A frightful moment!--the cowering patients--the officers in a state ofalmost frenzied excitement, searching bed after bed. At the last bed, occupied by a badly wounded and quite helpless youth, the officercarrying the dagger brought the blade of it so near to the boy's throatthat Soeur Julie rushed forward, and placed her two hands in front ofthe poor bare neck. The officer dropped both arms to his side, she said, "as if he had been shot, " and stood staring at her, quivering all over. But from that moment she had conquered them. 

For the German wounded, Soeur Julie declared she had done her best, andthe officer in charge of them afterwards wrote her a letter of thanks. Then her mouth twisted a little. "But I wasn't--well, I didn't _spoil_them! (_Je n'étais pas trop tendre_); I didn't give them our best wine!"And one officer whose wounds she dressed, a Prussian colonel who neverdeigned to speak to a Bavarian captain near him, was obliged to accept agood many home truths from her. He was convinced that she would poisonhis leg unless he put on the dressings himself. But he allowed her tobandage him afterwards. During this operation--which she hinted she hadperformed in a rather Spartan fashion!--"he whimpered all the time, " andshe was able to give him a good deal of her mind on the war and thebehaviour of his troops. He and the others, she said, were alwaystalking about their Kaiser; "one might have thought they saw him sittingon the clouds. "

In two or three days the French returned victorious, to find the burntand outraged village. The Germans were forced, in their turn, to leavesome badly wounded men behind, and the French _poilus_ in their mingledwrath and exultation could not resist, some of them, abusing the Germanwounded through the windows of the hospital. But then, with a keendramatic instinct, Soeur Julie drew a striking picture of the contrastbetween the behaviour of the French officer going down to the basementto visit the wounded German officers there, and that of the Germanofficers on a similar errand. She conveyed with perfect success the coldcivility of the Frenchman, beginning with a few scathing words about thetreatment of the town, and then proceeding to an investigation of thepersonal effects of the Boche officers. 

"Your papers, gentlemen? Ah! those are private letters--you may retainthem. Your purses?"--he looks at them--"I hand them back to you. Yournote-books? _Ah! ça--c'est mon affaire!_ (that's my business). I wishyou good morning. "

Soeur Julie spoke emphatically of the drunkenness of the Germans. Theydiscovered a store of "Mirabelle, " a strong liqueur, in the town, andhad soon exhausted it, with apparently the worst results. 

Well!--the March afternoon ran on, and we could have sat there listeningtill dusk. But our French officers were growing a little impatient, andone of them gently drew "the dear sister, " as every one calls her, towards the end of her tale. Then with regret one left the plainparlour, the little hospital which had played so big a part, and thebrave elderly nun, in whom one seemed to see again some of thosequalities which, springing from the very soil of Lorraine, and in theheart of a woman, had once, long years ago, saved France. 

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How much there would be still to say about the charm and the kindness ofLorraine, if only this letter were not already too long! But after thetragedy of Gerbéviller I must at any rate find room for the victoryof Amance. 

Alas!--the morning was dull and misty when we left Nancy for Amance andthe Grand Couronné; so that when we stood at last on the famous ridgeimmediately north of the town which saw, on September 8th, 1914, thewrecking of the final German attempt on Nancy, there was not muchvisible except the dim lines of forest and river in the plain below. Ourview ought to have ranged as far, almost, as Metz to the north and theVosges to the south. But at any rate there, at our feet, lay the Forestof Champenoux, which was the scene of the three frantic attempts of theGermans debouching from it on September 8th to capture the hill ofAmance, and the plateau on which we stood. Again and again the 75's onthe hill mowed down the advancing hordes and the heavy guns behindcompleted their work. The Germans broke and fled, never to return. Nancywas saved, the right of the six French Armies advancing across France, at that very moment, on the heels of the retreating Germans, in theBattle of the Marne, was protected thereby from a flank attack whichmight have altered all the fortunes of the war, and the course ofhistory; and General Castelnau had written his name on the memoryof Europe. 

_But_--the Kaiser was not there! Even Colonel Buchan in his admirablehistory of the war, and Major Whitton in his recent book on the campaignof the Marne, repeat the current legend. I can only bear witness thatthe two French staff officers who walked with us along the GrandCouronné--one of whom had been in the battle of September 8th--werepositive that the Kaiser was not in the neighbourhood at the time, andthat there was no truth at all in the famous story which describes himas watching the battle from the edge of the Forest of Champenoux, andriding off ahead of his defeated troops, instead of making, as he hadreckoned, a triumphant entry into Nancy. Well, it is a pity the gods didnot order it so!--"to be a tale for those that should come after. "

One more incident before we leave Lorraine! On our way up to the highvillage of Amance, we had passed some three or four hundred Frenchsoldiers at work. They looked with wide eyes of astonishment at the twoladies in the military car. When we reached the village, Prince R----, the young staff officer from a neighbouring Headquarters who was to meetus there, had not arrived, and we spent some time in a cottage, chattingwith the women who lived in it. Then--apparently--while we were on theridge word reached the men working below, from the village, that we wereEnglish. And on the drive down we found them gathered, three or fourhundred, beside the road, and as we passed them they cheered usheartily, seeing in us, for the moment, the British alliance!

So that we left the Grand Couronné with wet eyes, and hearts allpassionate sympathy towards Lorraine and her people. 

No. 10

_June 1st_, 1917. 

DEAR MR. ROOSEVELT, --In looking back over my two preceding letters, Irealise how inadequately they express the hundredth part of that vastand insoluble debt of a guilty Germany to an injured France, therealisation of which became--for me--in Lorraine, on the Ourcq, and inArtois, a burning and overmastering thing, from which I was rarely ornever free. And since I returned to England on March 16th, the conductof the German troops, under the express orders of the German HigherCommand, in the French districts evacuated since February byHindenburg's retreating forces, has only sharpened and deepened thejudgment of civilised men, with regard to the fighting German and allhis ways, which has been formed long since, beyond alteration or recall. 

Think of it! It cries to heaven. Think of Reims and Arras, of Verdun andYpres, think of the hundreds of towns and villages, the thousands ofindividual houses and farms, that lie ruined on the old soil of France;think of the sufferings of the helpless and the old, the hideous loss oflife, of stored-up wealth, of natural and artistic beauty; and then letus ask ourselves again the old, old question--why has this happened? Andlet us go back again to the root facts, from which, whenever he or sheconsiders them afresh--and they should be constantly consideredafresh--every citizen of the Allied nations can only draw fresh courageto endure. The long and passionate preparation for war in Germany; thehalf-mad literature of a glorified "force" headed by the Bernhardis andTreitschkes, and repeated by a thousand smaller folk, before the war;the far more illuminating manifestoes of the intellectuals since thewar; Germany's refusal of a conference, as proposed and pressed by GreatBritain, in the week before August 4th, France's acceptance of it;Germany's refusal to respect the Belgian neutrality to which she hadsigned her name, France's immediate consent; the provisions of mercy andof humanity signed by Germany in the Hague Convention trampled, almostwith a sneer, under foot; the jubilation over the _Lusitania_, and thearrogant defence of all that has been most cruel and most criminal inthe war, as necessary to Germany's interests, and therefore moral, therefore justified; let none--none!--of these things rest forgotten inour minds until peace is here, and justice done!

The German armies are capable of "_no undisciplined cruelty_, " said the93 Professors, without seeing how damning was the phrase. No!--theirswas a cruelty by order, meditated, organised, and deliberate. Thestories of Senlis, of Vareddes, of Gerbéviller which I have speciallychosen, as free from that element of sexual horror which repels manysensitive people from even trying to realise what has happened in thiswar, are evidences--one must insist again--of a national mind andquality, with which civilised Europe and civilised America can make notruce. And what folly lies behind the wickedness! Let me recall toAmerican readers some of the phrases in the report of your formerMinister in Belgium--Mr. Brand Whitlock--on the Belgian deportations, the "slave hunts" that Germany has carried out in Belgium and "whichhave torn from nearly every humble home in the land, a husband, father, son, or brother. "

These proceedings [says Mr. Whitlock] place in relief the Germancapacity for blundering almost as sharply as the German capacity forcruelty. They have destroyed for generations any hope whatever offriendly relations between themselves and the Belgian people. For thesethings were done not, as with the early atrocities, in the heat ofpassion and the first lust of war, but by one of those deeds that makeone despair of the future of the human race--a deed coldly planned, studiously matured, and deliberately and systematically executed, a deedso cruel that German soldiers are said to have wept in its execution, and so monstrous that even German officers are now said to be ashamed. 

But the average German neither weeps nor blames. He is generally amazed, when he is not amused, by the state of feeling which such proceedingsexcite. And if he is an "intellectual, " a professor, he will exhausthimself in ingenious and utterly callous defences of all that Germanyhas done or may do. An astonishing race--the German professors! The yearbefore the war there was an historical congress in London. There was ahospitality committee, and my husband and I were asked to entertain someof the learned men. I remember one in particular--an old man with whitehair, who with his wife and daughter joined the party after dinner. Hisname was Professor Otto von Gierke of the University of Berlin. Igathered from his conversation that he and his family had been verykindly entertained in London. His manner was somewhat harsh andover-bearing, but his white hair and spectacles gave him a venerableaspect, and it was clear that he and his wife and daughter belonged to acultivated and intelligent _milieu_. But who among his English hostscould possibly have imagined the thoughts and ideas in that grey head? Ifind a speech of his in a most illuminating book by a Danish professoron German Chauvinist literature. [_Hurrah and Hallelujah!_ By J. P. Bang, D. D. , Professor of Theology at the University of Copenhagen, translated by Jessie Bröchner. ] The speech was published in a collectioncalled _German Speeches in Hard Times_, which contains names once sodistinguished as those of Von Wilamovitz and Harnack. 

Professor von Gierke's effusion begins with the usual German falsehoodsas to the origin of the war, and then continues--"But now that weGermans are plunged in war, we will have it in _all its grandeur andviolence_! Neither fear nor _pity_ shall stay our arm before it hascompletely brought our enemies to the ground. " They shall be reduced tosuch a condition that they shall never again dare even to snarl atGermany. Then German Kultur will show its full loveliness and strength, enlightening "the understanding of the foreign races absorbed andincorporated into the Empire, and making them see that only from Germankultur can they derive those treasures which they need for their ownparticular life. "

At the moment when these lines were written--for the book was publishedearly in the war--the orgy of murder and lust and hideous brutalitywhich had swept through Belgium in the first three weeks of the war wasbeginning to be known in England; the traces of it were still fresh intown after town and village after village of that tortured land; whilethe testimony of its victims was just beginning to be sifted by theexperts of the Bryce Commission. 

The hostages of Vareddes, the helpless victims of Nomény, ofGerbéviller, of Sermaize, of Sommeilles, and a score of other places inFrance were scarcely cold in their graves. But the old white-hairedprofessor stands there, unashamed, unctuously offering the kultur of hiscriminal nation to an expectant world! "And when the victory is won, " hesays complacently--"the whole world will stand open to us, our warexpenses will be paid by the vanquished, the black-white-and-red flagwill wave over all seas; our countrymen will hold highly respected postsin all parts of the world, and we shall maintain and extend ourcolonies. "

_God, forbid!_ So says the whole English-speaking race, you on your sideof the sea, and we on ours. 

But the feeling of abhorrence which is not, at such a moment as this, sternly and incessantly translated into deeds is of no account! So letme return to a last survey of the War. On my home journey from Nancy, Ipassed through Paris, and was again welcomed at G. H. Q. On my way toBoulogne. In Paris, the breathless news of the Germans' quickeningretreat on the Somme and the Aisne was varied one morning by the welcometidings of the capture of Bagdad; and at the house of one of the mostdistinguished of European publicists, M. Joseph Reinach, of the_Figaro_, I met, on our passage through, the lively, vigorous man, withhis look of Irish vivacity and force--M. Painlevé--who only a few dayslater was to succeed General Lyautey as French Minister for War. At ourown headquarters, I found opinion as quietly confident as before. Wewere on the point of entering Bapaume; the "pushing up" was goingextraordinarily well, owing to the excellence of the staff-work, and theenergy and efficiency of all the auxiliary services--the Engineers, andthe Labour Battalions, all the makers of roads and railways, thebuilders of huts, and levellers of shell-broken ground. And the vitalimportance of the long struggle on the Somme was becoming every day moreevident. Only about Russia, both in Paris and at G. H. Q. , was there akind of silence which meant great anxiety. Lord Milner and GeneralCastelnau had returned from Petrograd. In Paris, at any rate, it was notbelieved that they brought good news. All the huge efforts of the Alliesto supply Russia with money, munitions, and transport, were they to gofor nothing, owing to some sinister and thwarting influence which seemedto be strangling the national life?

Then a few days after my return home, the great explosion came, and whenthe first tumult and dust of it cleared away, there, indeed, was astrangely altered Europe! From France, Great Britain, and America wentup a great cry of sympathy, of congratulation. The Tsardom wasgone!--the "dark forces" had been overthrown; the political exiles werefree; and Freedom seemed to stand there on the Russian soil shading herbewildered eyes against the sun of victory, amazed at her own deed. 

But ten weeks have passed since then, and it would be useless todisguise that the outburst of warm and sincere rejoicing that greetedthe overthrow of the Russian autocracy has passed once more intoanxiety. Is Russia going to count any more in this great struggle for aliberated Europe, or will the forces of revolution devour each other, till in the course of time the fated "saviour of society" appears, andold tyrannies come back? General Smuts, himself the hero of a nationalstruggle which has ended happily for both sides and the world, has beengiving admirable expression here to the thoughts of many hearts. Firstof all to the emotion with which all lovers of liberty have seen the allbut bloodless fall of the old tyranny. "It might have taken anotherfifty years or a century of tragedy and suffering to have brought itabout! But the enormous strain of this war has done it, and the Russianpeople stand free in their own house. " Now, what will they do with theirfreedom? Ten weeks have passed, and the Russian armies are stilldisorganised, the Russian future uncertain. Meanwhile Germany has beenable to throw against the Allies in France, and Austria has been able tothrow against Italy on the Isonzo, forces which they think they need nolonger against Russia, and the pace of victory has thereby beenslackened. But General Smuts makes his eloquent appeal to the Russiawhich once held and broke Napoleon:

"Liberty is like young wine--it mounts to your head sometimes, andliberty, as a force in the world, requires organisation anddiscipline.... There must be organisation, and there must be discipline. The Russian people are learning to-day the greatest lesson of life--thatto be free you must work very hard and struggle very hard. They have thesensation of freedom, now that their bonds and shackles are gone, and nodoubt they feel the joy, the intoxication, of their new experience; butthey are living in a world which is not governed by formulas, howevercleverly devised, but in a world of brute force, and unless that issmashed, even liberty itself will suffer and cannot live. "

Will the newly-freed forget those that are still suffering and bound?Will Russia forget Belgium?--and forget Serbia?

"Serbia was the reason why we went to war. She was going to be crushedunder the Austrian heel, and Russia said this shall not be allowed. Serbia has in that way become the occasion probably of the greatestmovement for freedom the world has ever seen. Are we going to forgetSerbia? No! We must stand by those martyr peoples who have stood by thegreat forces of the world. If the great democracies of the world becometired, if they become faint, if they halt by the way, if they leavethose little ones in the lurch, then they shall pay for it in wars morehorrible than human mind can foresee. I am sure we shall stand by thoselittle ones. They have gone under, but we have not gone under. Englandand America, France and Russia, have not gone under, and we shall seethem through, and shame on us if ever the least thought enters our mindsof not seeing them through. "

 * * * * *

Noble and sincere words! One can but hope that the echoes of them mayreach the ear and heart of Russia. 

But if towards Russia the sky that seemed to have cleared so suddenly isat present clouded and obscure--"westward, look, the land is bright!"

A fortnight after the abdication of the Tsar, Congress met inWashington, and President Wilson's speech announcing war between Germanyand America had rung through the world. All that you, sir, the constantfriend and champion of the Allies, and still more of their cause, andall that those who feel with you in the States have hoped for so long, is now to be fulfilled. It may take some time for your country, acrossthose thousand miles of sea, to _realise_ the war, to feel it in everynerve, as we do. But in these seven weeks--how much you have done, aswell as said! You have welcomed the British mission in a way to warm ourBritish hearts; you have shown the French mission how passionatelyAmerica feels for France. You have sent us American destroyers, whichhave already played their part in a substantial reduction of thesubmarine losses. You have lent the Allies 150 millions sterling. Youhave passed a Bill which will ultimately give you an army of two millionmen. You are raising such troops as will immediately increase the numberof Americans in France to 100, 000--equalling five German divisions. Youare sending us ten thousand doctors to England and France, and hundredsof them have already arrived. You have doubled the personnel of yourNavy, and increased your Regular Army by nearly 180, 000 men. You areconstructing 3, 500 aeroplanes, and training 6, 000 airmen. And you arenow talking of 100, 000 aeroplanes! Not bad, for seven weeks!

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For the Allies also those seven weeks have been full of achievement. OnEaster Monday, April 9th, the Battle of Arras began, with the brilliantcapture by the Canadians of that very Vimy Ridge I had seen on March2nd, from the plateau of Notre Dame de Lorette, lying in the middledistance under the spring sunshine. That exposed hill-side--thosebatteries through which I had walked--those crowded roads, andtravelling guns, those marching troops and piled ammunition dumps!--howthe recollection of them gave accent and fire to the picture of thebattle as the telegrams from the front built it up day by day beforeone's eyes! Week by week, afterwards, with a mastery in artillery and inaviation that nothing could withstand, the British Army pushed onthrough April. After the first great attack which gave us the Vimy Ridgeand brought our line close to Lens in the north, and to theneighbourhood of Bullecourt in the south, the 23rd of April saw thesecond British advance, which gave us Gravrelle and Guemappe, and madefurther breaches in the Hindenburg line. On April 16th the French madetheir magnificent attack in Champagne, with 10, 000 prisoners on thefirst day (increased to 31, 000 by May 24th)--followed by the capture ofthe immensely important positions of Moronvillers and Craonne. Altogether the Allies in little more than a month took 50, 000 prisoners, and large numbers of guns. General Allenby, for instance, captured 150guns, General Home 64, while General Byng formed three "Pan-Germanicgroups" out of his. We recovered many square miles of the robbedterritory of France--40 villages one day, 100 villages another; whilethe condition in which the Germans had left both the recovered territoryand its inhabitants has steeled once more the determination of thenations at war with Germany to put an end to "this particular form ofill-doing on the part of an uncivilised race. "

During May there has been no such striking advance on either the Frenchor British fronts, though Roeux and Bullecourt, both very importantpoints, from their bearing on the Drocourt-Quéant line, behind which lieDouai and Cambrai, have been captured by the British, and the Frenchhave continuously bettered their line and defied the most desperatecounter-attacks. But May has been specially Italy's month! The Italianoffensive on the Isonzo, and the Carso, beginning on May 14th, in tendays achieved more than any onlooker had dared to hope. In the sectionbetween Tolmino and Gorizia where the Isonzo runs in a fine gorge, thewestern bank belonging to Italy, and the eastern to Austria, all theimportant heights on the eastern bank across the river, except one thatmay fall to them any day, have been carried by the superb fighting ofthe Italians, amongst whom Dante's fellow citizens, the Florentineregiment, and regiments drawn from the rich Tuscan hills have speciallydistinguished themselves. While on the Carso, that rock-wilderness whichstretches between Gorizia and Trieste, where fighting, especially in hotweather, supplies a supreme test of human endurance, the Italians havepushed on and on, from point to point, till now they are within tenmiles of Trieste. British artillery is with the Italian Army, andBritish guns have been shelling military quarters and stores in theoutskirts of Trieste, while British monitors are co-operating at sea. The end is not yet, for the Austrians will fight to their last man forTrieste; and owing to the Russian situation the Austrians have been ableto draw reinforcements from Galicia, which have seriously stiffened thetask of Italy. But the omens are all good, and the Italian nation ismore solidly behind its army than ever before. 

So that in spite of the apparent lull in the Allied offensive on theFrench front, during the later weeks of May, all has really been goingwell. The only result of the furious German attempts to recover theground lost in April has been to exhaust the strength of the attackers;and the Allied cause is steadily profited thereby. Our own troops havenever been more sure of final victory. Let me quote a soldier's plainand graphic letter, recently published:

"This break-away from trench war gives us a much better time. We knownow that we are the top dogs, and that we are keeping the Germans on themove. And they're busy wondering all the time; they don't know where thenext whack is coming from. Mind you, I'm far from saying that we can getthem out of the Hindenburg line without a lot of fighting yet, but it isonly a question of time. It's a different sensation going over the topnow from what it was in the early days. You see, we used to know thatour guns were not nearly so many as the Germans', and that we hadn't thestuff to put over. Now we just climb out of a trench and walk behind acurtain of fire. It makes a difference. It seems to me we are steadilybeating the Boche at his own game. He used to be strong in the matter ofguns, but that's been taken from him. He used gas--do you remember theway the Canadians got the first lot? Well, now our gas shells are a bittoo strong for him, and so are our flame shells. I bet he wishes nowthat he hadn't thought of his flame-throwers! ... Then there's anotherthing, and that's the way our chaps keep improving. The Fritzes are notso good as they used to be. You get up against a bunch now and againthat fight well, but we begin to see more of the 'Kamerad' business. It's as much up to the people at home to see this thing through as it isto the men out here. We need the guns and shells to blow the Germans outof the strong places that they've had years to build and dig, and thefolks at home can leave the rest to us. We can do the job all right ifthey back us up and don't get tired. I think we've shown them that too. You'll get all that from the papers, but maybe it comes better from asoldier. You can take it from me that it's true. I've seen thebeginning, and I've been in places where things were pretty desperatefor us, and I've seen _the start of the finish_. The difference ismarvellous. I've only had an army education, and it might strike youthat I'm not able to judge. I'm a soldier though, and I look at it as asoldier. I say, give us the stuff, keep on giving us the tools and themen to use them, and--it may be soon or it may be long--we'll beat theBoche to his knees. "

The truth seems to be that the Germans are outmatched, first andforemost, in aircraft and in guns. You will remember the quiet certaintyof our young Flight-Commander on March 1st--"When the next big offensivecomes, we shall down them, just as we did on the Somme. " The prophecyhas been made good, abundantly good!--at the cost of many a preciouslife. The air observation on our side has been far better and moredaring than that on the German side; and the work of our artillery hasbeen proportionately more accurate and more effective. 

As to guns and ammunition, "the number of heavy shells fired in thefirst week of the present offensive"--says an official account--"wasnearly twice as great as it was in the first week of the Sommeoffensive, and in the second week it was 6-1/2 times as great as it wasin the second week of the Somme offensive. As a result of this greatartillery fire, which had never been exceeded in the whole course of thewar, a great saving of British life has been effected. " And no praisecan be too high for our gunners. In a field where, two years ago, Germany had the undisputed predominance, we have now beaten her alike inthe supply of guns and in the daring and efficiency of our gunners. 

Nevertheless, let there be no foolish underestimate of the stillformidable strength of the Germans. The British and French missions willhave brought to your Government all available information on this point. There can be no doubt that a "wonderful" effort, as one of our Ministerscalls it, has been made by Germany during the past winter. She hasmobilised all her people for the war as she has never done yet. She hasincreased her munitions and put fresh divisions in the field. Theestimates of her present fighting strength given by our military writersand correspondents do not differ very much. 

Colonel Repington, in _The Times_, puts the German fighting men on bothfronts at 4, 500, 000, with 500, 000 on the lines of communication, and amillion in the German depots. Mr. Belloc's estimate is somewhat less, but not materially different. Both writers agree that we are in presenceof Germany's last and greatest effort, that she has no more behind, andthat if the Allies go on as they have begun--and now with the help ofAmerica--this summer should witness the fulfilment at least of thatforecast which I reported to you in my earlier letters as so generalamong the chiefs of our Army in France--_i. E. _ "this year will see thewar _decided_, but may not see it ended. " Since I came home, indeed, more optimistic prophecies have reached me from France. For some weeksafter the American declaration of war, "We shall be home by Christmas!"was the common cry--and amongst some of the best-informed. 

But the Russian situation has no doubt: reacted to some extent on theseApril hopes. And it is clear that, during April and early May, under thestimulus of the submarine successes, German spirits have temporarilyrevived. Never have the Junkers been more truculent, never have thePan-Germans talked wilder nonsense about "annexation" and "indemnities. "Until quite recently at any rate, the whole German nation--except nodoubt a cautious and intelligent few at the real sources ofinformation--believed that the submarine campaign would soon "bringEngland to her knees. " They were so confident, that they ran the lastgreat risk--they brought America into the War!

How does it look now? The situation is still critical and dangerous. ButI recall the half-smiling prophecy of my naval host, in the middle ofMarch, as we stood together on the deck of his ship, looking over hiscurtseying and newly-hatched flock of destroyers gathered round him inharbour. Was it not, perhaps, as near the mark as that of our airmenhosts on March 1st has proved itself to be? "Have patience and you'llsee great things! The situation is serious, but quite healthy. " Twomonths, and a little more, since the words were spoken:--and week byweek, heavy as it still is, the toll of submarine loss is at least keptin check, and your Navy, now at work with ours--most fitting andwelcome Nemesis!--is helping England to punish and baffle the"uncivilised race, " who, if they had their way, would blacken and defilefor ever the old and glorious record of man upon the sea. You, who storesuch things in your enviable memory, will recollect how in the Odyssey, that kindly race of singers and wrestlers, the Phaeacians, are theescorts and conveyers of all who need and ask for protection at sea. They keep the waterways for civilised men, against pirates andassassins, as your nation and ours mean to keep them in the future. Itis true that a treacherous sea-god, jealous of any interference with hisright to slay and drown at will, smote the gallant ship that boreOdysseus safely home, on her return, and made a rock of her for ever. Poseidon may stand for the Kaiser of the story. He is gone, however, with all his kin! But the humane and civilising tradition of the sea, which this legend carries back into the dawn of time--it shall be forthe Allies--shall it not?--in this war, to rescue it, once and for ever, from the criminal violence which would stain the free paths of oceanwith the murder and sudden death of those who have been in all historythe objects of men's compassion and care--the wounded, the helpless, thewoman, and the child. 

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For the rest, let me gather up a few last threads of this secondinstalment of our British story. 

Of that vast section of the war concerned with the care and transport ofthe wounded, and the health of the Army, it is not my purpose to speakat length in these Letters. Like everything else it has been steadilyand eagerly perfected during the past year. Never have the wounded inbattle, in any war, been so tenderly and skilfully cared for;--neverhave such intelligence and goodwill been applied to the healthconditions of such huge masses of men. Nor is it necessary to dwellagain, as I did last year, on the wonderful work of women in the war. Ithas grown in complexity and bulk; women-workers in munitions are nownearly a fifth of the whole body; but essentially the general aspect ofit has not changed much in the last twelve months. 

But what has changed is _the food situation_, owing partly to submarineattack, and partly to the general shortage in the food-supply of theworld. In one of my earlier letters I spoke with anxiety of the stillunsettled question--Will the house-wives and mothers of the nationrealise--in time--our food necessities? Will their thrift-work in thehomes complete the munition-work of women in the factories? Or must wesubmit to the ration-system, with all its cumbrous inequalities, and itshosts of officials; because the will and intelligence of our people, which have risen so remarkably to the other tasks of this war, are notequal to the task of checking food consumption without compulsion?

It looks now as though they would be equal. Since my earlier letter thecountry has been more and more generally covered with the National WarSavings Committees which have been carrying into food-economy the energythey spent originally on the raising of the last great War Loan. Theconsumption of bread and flour throughout the country has gone down--notyet sufficiently--but enough to show that the idea has takenhold:--"_Save bread, and help victory_!" And since your declaration ofwar it strengthens our own effort to know that America with herboundless food-supplies is standing by, and that her man-and sea-powerare now to be combined with ours in defeating the last effort of Germanyto secure by submarine piracy what she cannot win on the battle-field. 

Meanwhile changes which will have far-reaching consequences after thewar are taking place in our own home food-supply. The long neglect ofour home agriculture, the slow and painful dwindling of our countrypopulations, are to come to an end. The Government calls for the sowingof three million additional acres of wheat in Great Britain; andthroughout the country the steam tractors are at work ploughing up landwhich has either never borne wheat, or which has ceased to bear it fornearly a century. Thirty-five thousand acres of corn land are to beadded to the national store in this county of Hertfordshire alone. Thewages of agricultural labourers, have risen by more than one-third. Thefarmers are to be protected and encouraged as they never have been sincethe Cobdenite revolution; and the Corn Production Bill now passingthrough Parliament shows what the grim lesson of this war has done tochange the old and easy optimism of our people. 

As to the energy that has been thrown into other means of food-supply, let the potatoes now growing in the flower-beds in front of BuckinghamPalace stand for a symbol of it! The potato-crop of this year--barringaccidents--will be enormous; and the whole life of our country villageshas been quickened by the effort that has been made to increase theproduce of the cottage gardens and allotments. The pride and pleasure ofthe women and the old men in what they have been able to do at home, while their sons and husbands are fighting at the front, is moving tosee. Food prices are very high; life in spite of increased wages ishard. But the heart of England is set on winning this war; and theletters which pass between the fathers and mothers in this village whereI live, and the sons at the front, in whom they take a daily and hourlypride, would not give Germany much comfort could she read them. I takethis little scene, as an illustration, fresh from the life of myown village:

Imagine a visitor, on behalf of the food-economy movement, endeavouringto persuade a village mother to come to some cookery lessons organisedby the local committee. 

Mrs. S. Is discovered sitting at a table on which are preparations for ameal. She receives the visitor and the visitor's remarks with anair--quite unconscious--of tragic meditation; and her honestlabour-stained hand sweeps over the things on the table. 

"Cheese!"--she says, at last--"_eightpence_ the 'arf pound!"

A pause. The hand points in another direction. 

"_Lard--sevenpence_--that scrubby little piece! _Sugar_! sixpence'a'penny the pound. The best part of two shillin's gone! Whatever _are_we comin' to?"

Gloom descends on the little kitchen. The visitor is at a loss--whensuddenly the round, motherly face changes. --"But _there_ now! I'm goin'to smile, whatever 'appens. I'm not one as is goin' to give in! And we'ad a letter from Arthur [her son in the trenches] this morning, to say'is Company's on the list for leave, and 'e's applied. --Oh dear, Miss, just to _think_ of it!"

Then, with a catch in her voice:

"But it's not the comin' home, Miss--it's _the goin' back again_! Yes, I'll come to the cookin', Miss, if I _possibly_ can!"

There's the spirit of our country folk--patriotic, patient, true. 

As to labour conditions generally. I spoke, perhaps, in my first letterrather too confidently, for the moment, of the labour situation. Therehas been one serious strike among the engineers since I began to write, and a good many minor troubles. But neither the Tyne nor the Clyde wasinvolved, and though valuable time was lost, in the end the men werebrought back to work quite as much by the pressure of public opinionamong their own comrades, men and women, as by any Government action. The Government have since taken an important step from which much ishoped, by dividing up the country into districts and appointing localcommissioners to watch over and, if they can, remove the causes of"unrest"--causes which are often connected with the inevitable frictionof a colossal transformation, and sometimes with the sheer fatigue ofthe workers, whose achievement--munition-workers, ship-wrights, engineers--during these three years has been nothing short ofmarvellous. 

As to finance, the colossal figures of last year, of which I gave asummary in _England's Effort, _ have been much surpassed. The Budget ofGreat Britain for this year, including advances to our Allies, reachesthe astounding figure of two thousand three hundred million sterling. Our war expenditure is now close upon six million sterling a day(£5, 600, 000). Of this the expenditure on the Army and Navy and munitionshas risen from a daily average of nearly three millions sterling, as itstood last year, to a daily average of nearly five millions. 

But the nation has not spent in vain!

"Compare the first twenty-four days of the fighting on the Somme lastyear, "--said Mr. Bonar Law in a recent speech--"with the firsttwenty-four days of the operations of this spring. Four times as muchterritory had been taken from the enemy in this offensive as was takenin the Somme, against the resistance of double the number of Germandivisions. And of those divisions just one-half have had to bewithdrawn--shattered--from the fighting line while the Britishcasualties in the offensive have been from 50 to 75 per cent, less thanthe casualties in the Somme fighting. "

Consider, too, the news which is still fresh as I finish thisletter--(June 11th)--of the victory of Messines; perhaps the mostcomplete, the most rounded success--so far--that has fallen to theBritish armies in the war! Last year, in three months' fighting on theSomme, we took the strongly fortified Albert ridge, and forced theGerman retreat of last February. On April 8th of this year began thebattle of Arras which gave us the Vimy Ridge, and a free outlook overthe Douai plain. And finally, on June 7th, four days ago, the Messinesridge, which I saw last year on March 2nd--apparently impregnable andinaccessible!--from a neighbouring hill, with the German trenches scoredalong its slopes, was captured by General Plumer and his splendid armyin a few hours, after more than twelve months' preparation, with lightercasualties than have ever fallen to a British attack before, with heavylosses to the enemy, large captures of guns, and 7, 000 prisoners. Ourtroops have since moved steadily forward; and the strategic future isrich in possibilities. The Germans have regained nothing; and the Germanpress has not yet dared to tell the German people of the defeat. Let usremember also the victorious campaign of this year in Mesopotamia; andthe welcome stroke of the past week in Greece, by which King "Tino" hasbeen at last dismissed, and the Liberal forces of the Greek nationset free. 

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Aye, we do consider--we do remember--these things! We feel that the goalis drawing slowly but steadily nearer, that ultimate victory is certain, and with victory, the dawn of a better day for Europe. But who, least ofall a woman, can part from the tragic spectacle of this war withoutbitterness of spirit?

_"Who will give us back our children?"_

Wickedness and wrong will find their punishment, and the dark Hours nowpassing, in the torch-race of time, will hand the light on to Hours ofhealing and of peace. But the dead return not. It is they whoseappealing voices seem to be in the air to-day, as we think of America. 

Among the Celts of ancient Brittany there was a belief which stillsurvives in the traditions of the Breton peasants and in the name ofpart of the Breton coast. Every All Souls' Night, says a story at leastas old as the sixth century, the souls of the dead gather on the cliffsof Brittany, above that bay which is still called the "Bai desTrépassés, " waiting for their departure across the ocean to a far regionof the west, where the gods sit for judgment, and the good find peace. On that night, the fishermen hear at midnight mysterious knockings attheir doors. They go down to the water's edge, and behold, there areboats unknown to them, with no visible passengers. But the fishermentake the oars, and though they see nothing, they feel the presence ofthe souls crowding into the boats, and they row, on and on, into thewest, past the farthest point of any land they know. Suddenly, they feelthe boats lightened of all that weight of spirits, and the souls aregone--streaming out with solemn cries and longing into the wideillimitable ocean of the west, in search of some invisible shore. 

So now the call of those hundreds of thousands who have given theiryoung lives--so beloved, so rich in promise!--for their country and thefreedom of men, is in your ears and ours. The dead are witnesses of thecompact between you and us. For that cause to which they brought theirungrudged sacrifice has now laid its resistless claim on you. Together, the free peoples of Europe and America have now to carry it to victory--victory, just, necessary, and final. 

MARY A. WARD.