So it was when I went through Armentières within easy range of the enemy’s guns. Already six hundred civilians—mostly women and children—had been killed there. But, still, other women were chatting together through broken windowpanes, and children were staring into little shops (only a few yards away from broken roofs and shell-broken walls) where Christmas toys were on sale.
A wizened boy, in a pair of soldier’s boots—a French Hop o’ My Thumb in the giant’s boots—was gazing wistfully at some tin soldiers, and inside the shop a real soldier, not a bit like the tin one, was buying some Christmas cards worked by a French artist in colored wools for the benefit of English Tommies, with the aid of a dictionary. Other soldiers read their legends and laughed at them: “My heart is to you.” “Good luck.” “To the success!” “Remind France.”
The man who was buying the cards fumbled with French money, and looked up sheepishly at me, as if shy of the sentiment upon which he was spending it.
“The people at home will be glad of ’em,” he said. “I s’pose one can’t forget Christmas altogether. Though it ain’t the same thing out here.”
Going in search of Christmas, I passed through a flooded countryside and found only scenes of war behind the lines, with gunners driving their batteries and limber down a road that had become a riverbed, fountains of spray rising about their mules and wheels, military motorcars lurching in the mud beyond the pavé, despatch-riders side-slipping in a wild way through boggy tracks, supply-columns churning up deep ruts.
And then into the trenches at Neuve Chapelle. If Santa Claus had come that way, remembering those grown-up boys of ours, the old man with his white beard must have lifted his red gown high—waist-high—when he waded up some of the communication trenches to the firing-lines, and he would have staggered and slithered, now with one top-boot deep in sludge, now with the other slipping off the trench boards into five feet of water, as I had to do, grasping with futile hands at slimy sandbags to save a headlong plunge into icy water.
And this old man of peace, who loved all boys and the laughter of youth, would have had to duck very low and make sudden bolts across open spaces, where parapets and earthworks had silted down, in order to avoid those sniping bullets which came snapping across the dead ground from a row of slashed trees and a few scarred ruins on the edge of the enemy’s lines.
But sentiment of that sort was out of place in trenches less than a hundred yards away from men lying behind rifles and waiting to kill.
There was no spirit of Christmas in the tragic desolation of the scenery of which I had brief glimpses when I stood here and there nakedly (I felt) in those ugly places, when the officer who was with me said, “It’s best to get a move on here,” and, “This road is swept by machine-gun fire,” and, “I don’t like this corner; it’s quite unhealthy.”
But that absurd idea—of Santa Claus in the trenches—came into my head several times, and I wondered whether the Germans would fire a whizzbang at him or give a burst of machine-gun fire if they caught the glint of his red cloak.
Some of the soldiers had the same idea. In the front-line trench a small group of Yorkshire lads were chaffing one another.
“Going to hang your boots up outside the dugout?” asked a lad, grinning down at an enormous pair of waders belonging to a comrade.
“Likely, ain’t it?” said the other boy. “Father Christmas would be a bloody fool to come out here … They’d be full of water in the morning.”
“You’ll get some presents,” I said. “They haven’t forgotten you at home.”
At that word “home” the boy flushed and something went soft in his eyes for a moment. In spite of his steel helmet and mud-stained uniform, he was a girlish-looking fellow—perhaps that was why his comrades were chaffing him—and I fancy the thought of Christmas made him yearn back to some village in Yorkshire.
Most of the other men with whom I spoke treated the idea of Christmas with contemptuous irony.
“A happy Christmas!” said one of them, with a laugh. “Plenty of crackers about this year! Tom Smith ain’t in it.”
“And I hope we’re going to give the Boches some Christmas presents,” said another. “They deserve it, I don’t think!”
“No truce this year?” I asked.
“A truce? … We’re not going to allow any monkey-tricks on the parapets. To hell with Christmas charity and all that tosh. We’ve got to get on with the war. That’s my motto.”
Other men said: “We wouldn’t mind a holiday. We’re fed up to the neck with all this muck.”
The war did not stop, although it was Christmas Eve, and the only carol I heard in the trenches was the loud, deep chant of the guns on both sides, and the shrill soprano of whistling shells, and the rattle on the keyboards of machine-guns. The enemy was putting more shells into a bit of trench in revenge for a raid. To the left some shrapnel shells were bursting, and behind the lines our “heavies” were busily at work firing at long range.
“On earth peace, goodwill toward men.”
The message was spoken at many a little service on both sides of that long line where great armies were entrenched with their death-machines, and the riddle of life and faith was rung out by the Christmas bells which came clashing on the rain-swept wind, with the reverberation of great guns.
Through the night our men in the trenches stood in their waders, and the
