Chapter IV

Our new passes took us to the top of a hill well known to the few onlookers of which this war admits. The motor stopped at a point on the road where a picket was stationed, who examined our papers. Then came a stiff and muddy climb, past a dugout for protection in case of shelling, Captain ---- carrying the three gas-helmets. At the top was a flat green space--three or four soldiers playing football on it!--and an old windmill, and farm-buildings.

We sheltered behind the great beams supporting the windmill, and looked out through them, north and east, over a wide landscape; a plain bordered eastward by low hills, every mile of it, almost, watered by British blood, and consecrate to British dead. As we reached the windmill, as though in sombre greeting, the floating mists on the near horizon seemed to part, and there rose from them a dark, jagged tower, one side of it torn away. It was the tower of Ypres--mute victim!--mute witness to a crime, that, beyond the reparations of our own day, history will avenge through years to come.

A flash!--another!--from what appear to be the ruins at its base. It is the English guns speaking from the lines between us and Ypres; and as we watch we see the columns of white smoke rising from the German lines as the shells burst. There they are, the German lines--along the Messines ridge. We make them out quite clearly, thanks to a glass and Captain ----'s guidance. Their guns, too, are at work, and a couple of their shells are bursting on our trenches somewhere between Vlamertinghe and Dickebusche. Then the rattle of our machine-guns--as it seems from somewhere close below us, and again the boom of the artillery.

The counter-action is in progress, and we watch what can be seen or guessed of it, in fascination. We are too far off to see what is actually happening between the opposing trenches, but one of the chief fields of past and present battle, scenes which our children and our children's children will go to visit, lie spread out before us. Half the famous sites of the earlier war can be dimly made out between us and Ypres. In front of us is the gleam of the Zillebeke Lake, beyond it Hooge. Hill 60 is in that band of shadow; a little farther east the point where the Prussian Guard was mown down at the close of the first Battle of Ypres; farther south the fields and woods made for ever famous by the charge of the Household Cavalry, by the deeds of the Worcesters, and the London Scottish, by all the splendid valour of that "thin red line," French and English, cavalry and infantry, which in the first Battle of Ypres withstood an enemy four times as strong, saved France, and thereby England, and thereby Europe. In that tract of ground over which we are looking lie more than 100,000 graves, English and French; and to it the hearts of two great nations will turn for all time. Then if you try to pierce the northern haze, beyond that ruined tower, you may follow in imagination the course of the Yser westward to that Belgian coast where Admiral Hood's guns broke down and scattered the German march upon Dunkirk and Calais; or if you turn south you are looking over the Belfry of Bailleul, towards Neuve Chapelle, and Festubert, and all the fierce fighting-ground round Souchez and the Labyrinth. Once English and French stood linked here in a common heroic defence. Now the English hold all this line firmly from the sea to the Somme; while the French, with the eyes of the world upon them, are making history, hour by hour, at Verdun.

So to this point we have followed one branch--the greatest--of England's effort; and the mind, when eyes fail, pursues it afresh from its beginnings when we first stood to arms in August, 1914, through what Mr. Buchan has finely called the "rally of the Empire," through the early rush and the rapid growth of the new armies, through the strengthening of Egypt, the disaster of Gallipoli, the seizure of the German Colonies; through all that vast upheaval at home which we have seen in the munition areas; through that steady, and ever-growing organisation on the friendly French soil we have watched in the supply bases. Yet here, for us, it culminates; and here and in the North Sea, we can hardly doubt--whatever may be the diversions in other fields--will be fought, for Great Britain, the decisive battles of the war. As I turn to those dim lines on the Messines ridge, I have come at last to sight of whither it all moves. There, in those trenches is _The Aggressor_--the enemy who has wantonly broken the peace of Europe, who has befouled civilisation with deeds of lust and blood, between whom and the Allies there can be no peace till the Allies' right arm dictates it. Every week, every day, the British Armies grow, the British troops pour steadily across the Channel, and to the effort of England and her Allies there will be no truce till the righteous end is won.

But the shadows are coming down on the great scene, and with the sound of the guns still in our ears we speed back through the crowded roads to G.H.Q., and these wonderful days are over. Now, all that remains for me is to take you, far away from the armies, into the English homes whence the men fighting here are drawn, and to show you, if I can, very shortly, by a few instances, what rich and poor are doing as individuals to feed the effort of England in this war. What of the _young_, of all classes and opportunities, who have laid down their lives in this war? What of the mothers who reared them, the schools and universities which sent them forth?--the comrades who are making ready to carry on their work? You ask me as to the _spirit_ of the nation--the foundation of all else. Let us look into a few lives, a few typical lives and families, and see.