Chapter XIII: The Shadow of the War

There could be no object in making further visits to the deadlock along the Aisne. The German advance, which I had followed across Belgium in the beginning of the war, and met again where it shattered upon the Allied position east of Paris, had failed. Their rapid consequent retreat on to the heights of the Aisne, and the reassembling of their armies, had been successfully accomplished. Both sides had been unable to convert the end of the first great move into decisive victory or defeat, and had dug themselves, after desperate initial efforts, into impregnable entrenched positions. The serpents of war were dragging their slow coils west and north, seeking more open ground for a fresh grapple.

The new development had to be looked for in the north. Time must elapse before it could take definite shape. The first phase of the war was ended.

In the interval, before the next began, like a foiled snake drawing in its head and thickening its coils, back in Belgium the huge length of the German army was beginning slowly to swell itself out, forcing the last of the unhappy population out of town and village, to the coast, and to the sea itself. For "military reasons," doubtless. No difficulty in assigning them. Only, if there has been one happening more than any other which has revealed to those outside the war atmosphere, the utter negation of personal life and moral law that is covered by our easy talk of "strategy," "tactics," and "moves," it has been this further persecution of the Belgian people. We may discuss it, as critics, as an excusable part of a defensive campaign. We feel in our hearts, that it is no other than the instinctive ferocity of the beast of prey, headed off its next kill, and recoiling to savage its last victim.

War, the war of Ilium, of Agincourt, of Waterloo, used to be a brilliant affair. Death harnessed to a glittering car of Juggernaut. Men went under the wheels in the rush and flame of colours, and to the sound of bands and the applause of multitudes. The car is now hidden in a dull, deadly rolling cloud. We can only hear the rumour of the hidden wheels. Our sons and friends move into the darkness. Of many of them, all we shall ever know is that they have not returned. The greater heroes, that they go as gladly as ever did a chosen knight into crowded lists. The finer men, that they fight as stoutly with no record of their gallantry, no mark even of their death-place.

But we must make no confusion. It is the men who are to be praised: for their sacrifice of all they know to be better in life, for their acceptance of the fantastic chance which is forced upon them by their devotion to an ideal. War itself, fighting, is a mad anachronism. We can judge of its folly the better, because we are now allowed to know so little of its secret noise and flame. We are not dazzled by its incidents; but its shadow falls on us all.

But then, afterwards, there must be no sentimentalising over the glitter of a splendour we have not seen; no wilful blindness when, the cloud cleared away, the light of sanity falls again upon the nakedness of its inhuman mechanism, the hideous squalor and vulgarity of its monstrous destructiveness.

A few days ago I was waiting with a crowd outside a Bureau in Paris. Anxious, resigned faces passed me going in or out. No tragedy, no moving emotion. The families of the soldiers in the front were making their weekly inquiry for the little numbered disc each soldier wears for identification. The best they could hope for was to receive nothing, to have to come and ask again, and again, till the end of the war. The only break would come when the little disc at last might be handed them, and they would know that son or husband, somewhere, somehow, had vanished in the shadow of war for all time.

In Wavre, where I used to pass continually on the way to the Belgian lines, was a small welcome restaurant, kept by a cheerful pretty girl, her young husband, and a baby. There was laugh and joke as to "what would happen if the Prussians came!" On the morning of the day of evacuation I passed again. Still only quiet anxiety and less ready smiles. Three hours later I returned. The Uhlans were entering the edges of the town. A peasant rushed into the swarming square, waving a Uhlan helmet. There was a savage rush; and a woman shrieked: "It's the head of the devil who wore it I want!" It was the young wife. A fury, raging at her husband; for the men had been told to disarm. "Take it," she screamed furiously, thrusting his rifle at him, "never see me again, if our house is entered without one brute shot." Blanched, shaking with passion, and speechless, the young man walked out. I saw her again on the road to Brussels, aged, scarcely sane. The man had not come back. She had lost her child.

In west Flanders, on the day that the Prussian columns were pouring across Belgium, I passed in the morning a remote, picturesque little crossing. A very old peasant, in a smock, deaf and almost blind, acting as a Civil Guard, gave me great difficulty. He had blocked the road with harrows, and threatened viciously with an old muzzle-loader and rusty bayonet of the time of Waterloo. In the evening, carrying some wounded soldiers, we passed again. He was still hugging the bayonet. We persuaded him to let us bury it, his useless death-warrant, for the Uhlans were flooding behind us. With that, realisation at last came to him. He walked deliberately back towards the cottage. "All that I had left, for my son is dead. But I will destroy this too. The Prussians shall not shelter there."

The same night I was driving on the long dark roads back to the coast. Occasionally the lights flashed on lines of women, in widows' black, returning in silence from the shrines. Now and again a blaze of light startled us from the roadside. The shrines of saints, bright with votive candles all this night of terror. And remote from their homesteads, and from the war, the heads of crowds of small children showed black on the steps against the altar lights; while in a semicircle on the road outside knelt the shadows of women, enclosing their children, the last possession left to them. I stopped the car before one shrine, and a high woman's voice, in which all emotion was dead, called out from the darkness: "Is that death?"

South of Peronne, hardly a week ago, we gave a lift to four refugee peasant-women, trudging heavily back to their homes. Two weeks before some German cavalry had swept suddenly into their small village. Ten men had been ordered to go with them, the husbands of two of the women, the sons of two others. They had disappeared in the shadow, and not one had returned. We reached the outlying cottage of the first. Some small skirmish had raged there. The house was half destroyed, and three or four dead horses lay grotesquely rotting on the field. The woman stood for a moment unmoved, and then turned to a neighbour: "War has taken my sons, and has left me these."

Four days ago a French soldier of the line stopped me just south of Vic-sur-Aisnes. He was hobbling back from the trenches, wounded in the knee. He was clearly half stupid with fatigue and the detonation of the days of firing. He kept repeating to himself, over and over again: "I cannot remember: there were five, all killed near me; and three said to tell somebody a message, before they died. I cannot remember what it was, or who they were. I cannot remember: there were five----" and so over again. These were the last messages out of the edge of the shadow, and they were lost. But there would always be the discs. Better that the details should not come. There would then be still the chance of imagining some heroic setting of death.

We may well remember that such death is heroic, whatever its loneliness or its revolting circumstances. But let us borrow no false colour from an imaginary pomp and circumstance in war itself. It is dissolution and the end of hope that is hidden in the cloud. In England we are happily still free to interpret the obscurity according to our fancy, to picture death in battle as somehow not death. For those who have moved by the edge of the shadow there is no illusion left. The cloud shifts from village to village, from week to week, only to let us see in its track nature outraged, emotion degraded, humanity defaced.

We have chosen war, and must follow it to its undiscriminating end. Let us see to it that it is for the last time.