21

It is only those who have been to the front in France who can realize the life of the men there as it went on month after month—­the misery of it, the dreariness of it, the lack of any thrill except that of fear.  At the end of April in this year 1915 I went to the most desolate part of the French front, along the battlefields of Champagne, where after nine months of desperate fighting the guns were still at work ceaselessly and great armies of France and Germany were still divided from each other by a few barren meadows, a burnt wood or two, a river bank, a few yards of trenches and a zone of Death.

It was in Champagne-Pouilleuse—­mangy Champagne it is called, because it has none of the richness of the vineyard country, but is a great stretch of barren land through which the chalk breaks out in bald patches.  The spirit of war brooded over all this countryside, and I passed through many ruined villages, burnt and broken by incendiarism and shell-fire.  Gradually as we approached nearer to the front, the signs of ordinary life were left behind, and we came into a region where all the activities of men were devoted to one extraordinary purpose, and where they lived in strange conditions.

No civilian came this way unless as a correspondent under the charge of a staff officer.  The labourers on the roadside—­carting stones to this country of chalk—­were all in uniform.  No women invaded this territory except, where, here and there, by rare chance, a wrinkled dame drove a plough across a lonely field.  No children played about the brooks or plucked the wild flowers on the hillsides.  The inhabitants of this country were all soldiers, tanned by months of hard weather, in war-worn clothes, dusty after marching down the long, white roads, hard and tough in spite of a winter’s misery, with calm, resolute eyes in spite of the daily peril of death in which they live.

They lived in a world which is as different from this known world of ours as though they belonged to another race of men inhabiting another planet, or to an old race far back behind the memory of the first civilization.  For in this district of Champagne, the soldiers of France were earth-men or troglodytes, not only in the trenches, but for miles behind the trenches.  When the rains came last autumn they were without shelter, and there were few villages on this lonely stretch of country in which to billet them.  But here were soft, chalky ridges and slopes in which it was not difficult to dig holes and caverns.  The troops took to picks and shovels, and very soon they built habitations for themselves in which they have been living ever since when not in the trenches.

I was invited into some of these subterranean parlours, and ducked my head as I went down clay steps into dim caves where three or four men lived in close comradeship in each of them.  They had tacked the photographs of their wives or sweethearts on the walls, to make these places “homelike,” and there was space in some of them for wood fires, which burned with glowing embers and a smoke that made my eyes smart, so that by the light of them these soldiers would see the portraits of those who wait for them to come back, who have waited so patiently and so long through the dreary months.