“What do you think about this German offensive?” I asked the general of a London division (General Gorringe of the 47th) standing on a wagon and watching a tug-of-war. From that place also we could see the German positions.
“G.H.Q. has got the windup,” he said. “It is all bluff.”
General Hall, temporarily commanding the Irish Division, was of the same opinion, and took some pains to explain the folly of thinking the Germans would attack. Yet day after day, week after week, the Intelligence reports were full of evidence of immense movements of troops westward, of intensive training of German divisions in back areas, of new hospitals, ammunition-dumps, airplanes, battery positions. There was overwhelming evidence as to the enemy’s intentions. Intelligence officers took me on one side and said: “England ought to know. The people ought to be prepared. All this is very serious. We shall be ‘up against it.’ ” G.H.Q. was convinced. On February 23rd the war correspondents published articles summarizing the evidence, pointing out the gravity of the menace, and they were passed by the censorship. But England was not scared. Dances were in full swing in London. Little ladies laughed as usual, lighthearted. Flanders had made no difference to national optimism, though the hospitals were crowded with blind and maimed and shell-shocked.
“I am skeptical of the German offensive” said Mr. Bonar Law.
Nobody believed the war correspondents. Nobody ever did believe us, though some of us wrote the truth from first to last as far as the facts of war go apart from deeper psychology, and a naked realism of horrors and losses, and criticism of facts, which did not come within our liberty of the pen.
They were strange months for me. I felt that I was in possession, as indeed I was, of a terrible secret which might lead to the ending of the world—our world, as we knew it—with our liberties and power. For weeks I had been pledged to say no word about it, to write not a word about it, and it was like being haunted by a specter all day long. One laughed, but the specter echoed one’s laughter and said, “Wait!” The mild sunshine of those spring days was pleasant to one’s spirit in the woods above La Fère, and in fields where machine-guns chattered a little, while overhead our airplanes dodged German “Archies.” But the specter chilled one’s blood at the reminder of vast masses of field-gray men drawing nearer to our lines in overwhelming numbers. I motored to many parts of the front, and my companion sometimes was a little Frenchman who had lost a leg in the war—D’Artagnan with a wooden peg, most valiant, most gay. Along the way he recited the poems of Ronsard. At the journey’s end one day he sang old French chansons, in an English mess, within gunshot of the German lines. He climbed up a tree and gazed at the German positions, and made sketches while he hummed little tunes and said between them, “Ah, les sacrés Boches! … If only I could fight again!”
I remember a pleasant dinner in the old town of Noyon, in a little restaurant where two pretty girls waited. They had come from Paris with their parents to start this business, now that Noyon was safe. (Safe, O Lord!) And everything was very dainty and clean. At dinner that night there was a hostile air raid overhead. Bombs crashed. But the girls were brave. One of them volunteered to go with an officer across the square to show him the way to the A.P.M., from where he had to get a pass to stay for dinner. Shrapnel bullets were whipping the flagstones of the Grande Place, from antiaircraft guns. The officer wore his steel helmet. The girl was going out without any hat above her braided hair. We did not let her go, and the officer had another guide. One night I brought my brother to the place from his battery near St.-Quentin. We dined well, slept well.
“Noyon is a good spot,” he said. “I shall come here again when you give me a lift.”
A few days later my brother was firing at masses of Germans with open sights, and the British army was in a full-tide retreat, and the junior officer who had played his gramophone was dead, with other officers and men of that battery. When I next passed through Noyon shells were falling into it, and later I saw it in ruins, with the glory of the Romanesque cathedral sadly scarred. I have ofttimes wondered what happened to the little family in the old hotel.
So March 21st came, as we knew it would come, even to the very date, and Ludendorff played his trump cards and the great game.
Before that date I had an interview with General Gough, commanding the Fifth Army. He pulled out his maps, showed his method of forward redoubts beyond the main battle zone, and in a quiet, amiable way spoke some words which froze my blood.
“We may have to give ground,” he said, “if the enemy attacks in strength. We may have to fall back to our main battle zone. That will not matter very much. It is possible that we may have to go farther back. Our real line of defense is the Somme. It will be nothing like a tragedy if we hold that. If we lose the crossings of the Somme it will, of course, be serious. But not a tragedy even then. It will only be tragic if we lose Amiens, and we must not do that.”
“The crossings of the Somme … Amiens!”
Such a thought had never entered my imagination. General Gough had suggested terrible possibilities.
All but the worst happened. In my despatches, reprinted in book form with explanatory prefaces, I have told in full