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A CORNER OF A TRENCH WITH A TRAVERSE ON THE EXTREME LEFT " " 24

THE WAR OF BOMB AND KNIFE; FRENCH SOLDIERS WITH MASKS AND STEEL HELMETS " " 28

A BURSTING MINE " " 34

MAP TO ILLUSTRATE THE SECOND BATTLE OF YPRES " " 49

BILLETS IN THE FIELD: THE BRITISH SOLDIER AND HIS PEASANT HOSTS " " 126

CRICKET AT THE FRONT " " 132

A SCENE AT A BASE " " 160

"THE CHIEF" " " 170

UNDER THE EYE OF "THE CHIEF"--TROOPS MARCHING PAST SIR JOHN FRENCH AT THE FRONT " " 180

IN A GERMAN TRENCH " " 202

GERMAN PRISONERS " " 230

BIG SHELL EXPLODING ON A ROAD IN FRANCE--GERMAN SOLDIERS IN FOREGROUND " " 266

INDIAN CAVALRY IN A FRENCH VILLAGE " " 288

INDIAN INFANTRY ON THE MARCH " " 296

WITH OUR ARMY IN FLANDERS

OF OUR ARMY IN THE FIELD

All wars present a series of contrasts. Is not war itself the greatest of all contrasts of life? The antithesis of Man at Peace and Man at War is one with which the poets and artists have familiarized mankind all through the ages. And so, though we are in the thirteenth month of the overwhelming change which this, the greatest of all wars, has wrought in our lives, I find, on sitting down to record my impressions of the life and work of the British Army in the field, that I am continually reverting to the perpetual, the confounding contrast between the world at peace and the world at war.

Never were contrasts so marked as in this war. To cast the mind back a twelvemonth is like looking back on one's early childhood. "This time last year!..." How often one hears the phrase out here, with recollections of last year's glorious, golden Ascot, of distant, half-forgotten strife about Ulster, of a far rumbling, as yet indistinctly heard, in the Balkans, where swift and sudden death was preparing for that sinister Prince whose passing plunged the world into war.

"This time last year ..."--Aldershot, its ugly barrack buildings standing out hard in the brilliant sunlight, went peacefully about its routine pursuits of war. Maybe the stray bullet that was destined to put a premature end to the splendid career of General John Gough, best beloved of Aldershot Staff officers, had not yet been cast. The army officer went in mufti save in the intervals of duty; the general public had never heard of General Sam Browne and his famous belt. At the Curragh, still seething with the bubbles of the Ulster whirlpool which had swept John French from the War Office, the training went on as before. The machine-gun was still a weapon preeminently of experts, not common to the army at large, its paramount usefulness as an added strength to the forces not yet realized.

"This time last year ..."--polo at Ranelagh, where neither of the immortal Grenfell twins, the Castor and Pollux of our glorious army, saw Black Care that sits behind the horseman, cricket at Lord's, throngs at Boulter's Lock, lunchings and dinings and dancings innumerable....

"This time last year ..."--joyful holidays at Blackpool, New Brighton, or the Isle of Man at hand for the workers of the north, the brief relaxation from the loom, the spindle, the mine, the shipyard. All the life of England, in fine, ran along in its accustomed groove. We made a great deal of money; we spent a great deal more; we played our games; we talked them to the exclusion of topics of vital national importance; we rocked ourselves with dreams of universal peace based on political cries, such as "Two keels to one," or the "pacific policy of the German Emperor." One of the leading pacificist societies was arranging a great international peace congress at Vienna.

All at once, in a few hours of a hot August night, with great crowds waiting breathlessly in Whitehall, with a mob surging and singing round Buckingham Palace, it was swept away. The old life stopped. The new life began. Slowly, haltingly, as is our wont, we realized we were at war, though the process of mobilization was hindered by such idiotic cries as "Business as usual!" the contraption of the astute City man who would save what business there was to save at the expense of the army, a catchword that kept the able-bodied young man at the counter measuring out yards of ribbon when he should have been shouldering a rifle at the front. Business as usual, indeed, when nothing was as usual in the world, when the Hun was halfway through Belgium, blasting his path with Titan howitzers larger than any the Allies possessed, and with machine-guns which he elected and made to be the primary weapon of the war, firing villages as he went to light up his work of murder and rapine! Business as usual when our little Expeditionary Force had not even set foot on the ships destined to transport it to France!

"This time last year ..."--the men who use the phrase to me are in the trenches now, Aldershot and Curragh regulars, City men in the famous London Territorial regiments, miners and factory hands and workers from all over the country, in the horse or foot or artillery or air corps or supply services. Every time I pass a regiment on the roads here, or meet one in the trenches, I find myself wondering what most of them did in civil life, what they would look like in civilian clothes.

"All wars are abnormal" is a saying of Sir John French. Though the civilized world must now perforce accept as a normal state of things the organized slaying which is going on right across Europe and over a good part of the rest of the world. I for one cannot bring my mind to adapt itself to the spectacle of the British people in arms as I see it day by day on all sides of me in this narrow but all-important wedge of the allied battle-line, where the ultimate fate of the British Empire will be sealed. The mind boggles at almost every one of the great stream of fresh impressions which pour in upon it in an irresistible torrent every day, the sea of English faces surging down a white ribbon of Flemish road, the unfamiliar sound of our mother tongue in settings which you intuitively know demand the smooth flow of French, the plain wooden cross over a simple grave which, without realizing it, you automatically accept as containing the mortal remains of a man you loved or admired, or maybe even disliked, one who had made his name in England, not in this bloody business of war, but at the Bar or in politics or in the City, at polo or at golf or football.

No, war is not normal, as all nations, except the Germans, know. It is abnormal in the events it produces as in the passions and virtues it engenders. Particularly it is abnormal to the British, strangest of all peoples, quick at a bargain and keenly sensible, singularly lacking in intuition, absorbed in business, slow to move, slow to mistrust, now, after basking in the sunshine of decades of peace , saved only from the fate of Belgium by the ever-sounding sea that has stood so often between England and her enemies.

Yet, while following the fortunes of our army in the field, I have often found myself pondering the fact whether, after all, war is such an abnormal thing to this great host of ours, Britishers of all stamps and from every clime drawn to the fighting-line by the same high ideal. The world, I grant you, has never seen so many men of Britain arrayed for battle on their own or any other soil. Yet we were once a military nation. The whole history of these lands of Picardy and Flanders, where our army is now fighting, during the past six centuries proclaims it. Since the days of the third Edward to the present time Englishmen have fought at intervals in these richly cultivated fields. The bones of many a fair-haired, straight-backed bowman of England are crumbling beneath the smiling plains through which our trenches run in a long winding line.

I went to the field of Agincourt. It was a pious pilgrimage. As another son of England with England's fighting men in Picardy, I wanted to stretch forth a hand across that gulf of 500 years, and say to those stout English bowmen, who from their native shires followed their knights and squires across the sea, "It is well. We are carrying on. You may rest in peace." I wanted to tell them in their graves beneath the warm grass ablaze, as I saw it, with buttercups and daisies and the gentle speedwell, that theirs was a clean fight that had left no bitter memories, that the gentlemen of France who fought so valiantly at Agincourt are with us to-day in spirit as surely as their descendants are with us in the flesh; that, like the Dickons and Peterkins and Wats of Agincourt, our men in Picardy and Flanders are brave and steadfast and true till death.

A little grove of trees enclosing a great crucifix planted in a solid base of brick is the only memorial on the battlefield. On a slab of stone affixed to the plinth the inscription runs:

There were woods on either side of the battlefield, possibly occupying the site of the woods in which our archers of Agincourt waited for the French. But there was no visible means of following the course of the fight from the conformation of the ground. A friendly peasant who was passing, and who proved to be the holder of some of the land, vouchsafed the information that the cur? knew all the details of the battle. But the cur? was in church.

Maybe many of the bowmen sleeping under the green grass of Agincourt would recognize the speech of the army that is fighting in France to-day. Every accent, every burr and brogue, every intonation and inflexion, which one may meet with between Land's End and the Hebrides, between the Wash and the Bay of Galway, may be heard in the ranks of our great volunteer army, in its way unique amongst the armed hosts standing in the field.

Englishmen travel but little in their own country. I am no exception to the rule, though I can plead in excuse a long period of service abroad as a newspaper correspondent. But a morning spent among the troops of the great army which has sprung from our little Expeditionary Force is equivalent to a six weeks' tour of the British Isles. Going from regiment to regiment, you pass from county to county, with its characteristic speech, its colouring, its fetishes, its customs. At the end of my first day with the army, as long ago as last March, when reinforcements came very slowly, and a Territorial Division was a thing to take guests to see, "to write home about," as the saying goes , I felt that I had seen the microcosm of Britain, this Empire so vast, so widespread, so heterogeneous, that its essence has never been distilled before.

One of the most fascinating things to me about our army in France are the variations of speech. I have sometimes closed my eyes when a battalion has been marching past me on the road, and tried to guess, often with some measure of success, at the recruiting area of the regiment from the men's accents or from their tricks of speech.

Take the Scottish regiments, for instance. I have little acquaintance with the dialects of Scotland, but my ear has told me that the speech of almost every Scottish regiment, save such regiments as the Gordons and the Black Watch, that attract men from all over the United Kingdom, differs. I spent a most fascinating half-hour one morning with a handful of Glasgow newsboys serving in a famous Scottish regiment that wears the trews. Their speech was unmistakably the speech of the Glasgow streets, and their wits were as sharp as their bayonets. I told them they were newsboys, and newsboys they were, or of the same class, van-boys and the like. I visited the Cameron Highlanders--what was left of their Territorial battalion--after the second battle of Ypres, and heard, in the speech of Inverness-shire, their story of the battle. Many of them speak Gaelic. One of their officers confided to me that during the battle, requiring two men to go down to the rear, the wires being cut, to ascertain the whereabouts of the brigade headquarters, he selected two notorious deer poachers as likely to have their wits about them. How many poachers of the red deer of Sherwood or the New Forest were there not at Agincourt?

Leaving the red tartan of the Camerons and getting back to the trews, I remember an afternoon spent with the shattered remnants of the Scottish Rifles, about 150 men all told led out of action at Neuve Chapelle by a Second Lieutenant of Special Reserve. The Cameronians, which is the official title of the regiment, recruit in Lanarkshire and Aberdeenshire, and their speech was, I presume, the speech of those parts, for it was an accent--a Scottish accent--different from any other I had heard from the other Scotsmen out here.

Of that race our army in the field is the quintessence. The voluntary system may collect the scallywags, but it primarily attracts, in circumstances like those of to-day, that brand of Englishman who has done everything worth doing in England's history "for conscience' sake." There was a theory freely ventilated at the front at one time to the effect that the first of the new armies raised by Lord Kitchener would not be of the same material, morally and physically, as the succeeding ones, owing to the fact that, on the outbreak of the war, many men flocked to the colours because they had lost their employment. The second and third armies, it is alleged, being principally composed of men who, having taken a few months to wind up their affairs, had joined alone from a high feeling of duty to their country, would be of a better stamp. This theory does not hold water. Everyone who has seen the men of the new armies at the front has been alike impressed by their fine physique, their magnificent military bearing, their smart, soldierly appearance. "They're all right" is the verdict. No body of troops in an army in the field wants higher praise than this.

Fortune, the fair goddess, has high jinks at the front. I wanted to find a relation of mine, a sergeant in a famous London regiment, and wrote to his people to get the number of his battalion and his company. When the reply came I discovered that the man I wanted was billeted not a hundred yards from me in the village, in which the War Correspondents' Headquarters were situated, where he had come with the shattered remnant of his battalion to rest after the terrible "gruelling" they sustained in the second battle of Ypres. At the front one constantly witnesses joyous reunions, brother meeting brother in the happy, hazardous encounter of two battalions on the road or in the trenches. The very first man I met on coming out to the front was a motorcar driver whose father had particularly asked me to look out for his boy. I discovered that he was the man appointed to drive me!

What is it that has knit this great and representative body of the British people into one splendid harmonious whole, capable of gallantry and tenderness such as Homer sang, of steadfast endurance which Leonidas in Elysian fields must contemplate smiling through tear-dimmed eyes? We know that there is a deep strain of idealism in our race, lying far below a granite-like surface of cynical indifference, of frigid reserve. But who should have suspected its existence in the crowd of underground strap-hangers and tramway passengers, in the noonday throngs pouring out of the factories and workshops, in all that immense mass of workaday, civilian England from which our firing-line in France is now being fed? You cannot go among our soldiers in the field without becoming conscious of the fact that, beneath their unflagging high spirits, their absolute indifference to danger, their splendid tenacity, there burns an immense determination of purpose, an iron determination to set wrong right. For in the mind of the British soldier, who wastes no time over the subtleties of high politics, the world is wrong as long as the German is free to work his own sweet will in it.

Humour is probably the largest component part of the spirit of the British soldier, a paradoxical, phlegmatic sense of humour that comes out strongest when the danger is the most threatening. A Jack Johnson bursts close beside a British soldier who is lighting his pipe with one of those odious French sulphur matches. The shell blows a foul whiff of chemicals right across the man's face. "Oh dear! oh dear!" he exclaims with a perfectly genuine sigh, "these 'ere French matches will be the death o' me!" A reply which is equally characteristic of the state of mind of the British soldier who goes forth to war is that given by the irate driver of a Staff car to a sentry in the early days of the war. The sentry, in the dead of night, had levelled his rifle at the chauffeur because the car had not stopped instantly on challenge. The driver backed his car towards where the sentry was standing. "I'll 'ave a word with you, young feller," he said. "Allow me to inform you that this car can't be stopped in less than twenty yards. If you go shoving that rifle of yours in people's faces someone will get shot before this war's over!"

The great strain of tenderness in the British soldier comes out most strongly in his attitude of mind towards the wounded and the dead. No British soldier will rest quiet in his trench whilst there are wounded lying out in front, and the deeds of heroism performed by men in rescuing the wounded have been so numerous in this war that it has been found necessary to restrict the number of Victoria Crosses awarded for this class of gallant action. No British soldier will lie quiet while our dead are unburied. Men will expose themselves fearlessly to recover the body of a comrade and give it decent burial.

A friend of mine in the Cavalry gave me a striking account of a burial service he conducted thus on the Marne. A shrapnel burst right over him and his troop, but by great good luck only one man was killed. The troop was on the move, and it was necessary to bury the man at once. No military funeral this, with the chaplain reciting, "I am the Resurrection and the Life ..." and a fiss year," she sighed. "Ziss makes ze fine flavor--ze earth all around. You see?"

"It's a dandy place to hide," said Archer.

"There ain't anything to be sorry about," said Tom. "There's lots of room in there--more than there is in a bivouac tent. And it'll be comfortable on that straw, that's one sure thing. If you knew the kind of place we slept in up there in the prison you'd say this was all right. We'll stay here and rest all day tomorrow and after you bring us the things at night we'll sneak out and hike it along."

"I will not dare to come in ze daytime," said Florette, "but after it is dark, zen I will come. You must have ze cover almost shut and I will pull ze vines over it."

"We'll tend to that," said Tom.

"We'll camouflage it, all right," Archer added.

For a moment she lingered as if thinking if there were anything more she might do for their comfort. Then against her protest, Tom accompanied her part way back and they paused for a moment under the thickly covered trellis, for she would not let him approach the house.

"I'm sorry we made you so much trouble," he said; "it's only because we want to get to where we can fight for you."

"Oh, yess, I know," she answered sadly. "My pappa, it break his heart because he cannot make you ze true welcome. But you do not know. We are--how you say--persecute--all ze time. Zey own Alsace, but zey do not love Alsace. It is like--it is like ze stepfather--you see?" she added, her voice breaking. "So zey have always treat us."

For a few seconds Tom stood, awkward and uncomfortable; then clumsily he reached out his hand and took hers.

"You don't mean they'll take you like they took the people from Belgium, do you?" he asked.

"Ziss is worse zan Belgium," Florette sobbed. "Zere ze people can escape to England."

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