Now It Can Be Told

of it. The woman behind the counter was a comely soul, and laughed because she had no change. Only two days before a seventeen-inch shell had burst fifty yards or so away from her shop, which was close enough for death. I marveled at the risk she took with cheerful smiles. Was it courage or stupidity?

One of the old women in the street grasped my arm in a friendly way and called me cher petit ami, and described how she had been nearly killed a hundred times. When I asked her why she stayed she gave an old woman’s cackling laugh and said, “Que voulez-vous, jeune homme?” which did not seem a satisfactory answer. As dusk crept into the streets of Arras I saw small groups of boys and girls. They seemed to come out of holes in the ground to stare at this Englishman in khaki. “Are you afraid of the shells?” I asked. They grimaced up at the sky and giggled. They had got used to the hell of it all, and dodged death as they would a man with a whip, shouting with laughter beyond the length of his lash. In one of the vaulted cellars underground, when English soldiers first went in, there lived a group of girls who gave them wine to drink, and kisses for a franc or two, and the Circe cup of pleasure, if they had time to stay. Overhead shells were howling. Their city was stricken with death. These women lived like witches in a cave⁠—a strange and dreadful life.

I walked to the suburb of Blangy by way of St.-Nicolas and came to a sinister place. Along the highroad from Arras to Douai was a great factory of some kind⁠—probably for beet sugar⁠—and then a street of small houses with back yards and gardens much like those in our own suburbs. Holes had been knocked through the walls of the factory and houses, the gardens had been barricaded with barbed wire and sandbags, and the passage from house to house and between the overturned boilers of the factory formed a communication trench to the advanced outpost in the last house held by the French, on the other side of which is the enemy. As we made our way through these ruined houses we had to walk very quietly and to speak in whispers. In the last house of all, which was a combination of fort and dugout, absolute silence was necessary, for there were German soldiers only ten yards away, with trench-mortars and bombs and rifles always ready to snipe across the walls. Through a chink no wider than my finger I could see the redbrick ruins of the houses inhabited by the enemy and the road to Douai⁠ ⁠… The road to Douai as seen through this chink was a tangle of broken bricks.

The enemy was so close to Arras when the French held it that there were many places where one had to step quietly and duck one’s head, or get behind the shelter of a broken wall, to avoid a sniper’s bullet or the rattle of bullets from a machine-gun.

As I left Arras in that November evening, darkness closed in its ruined streets and shells were crashing over the city from French guns, answered now and then by enemy batteries. But in a moment of rare silence I heard the chime of a church clock. It seemed like the sweet voice of that old-time peace in Arras before the days of its agony, and I thought of that solitary bell sounding above the ruins in a ghostly way.

XV

While we hung on the news from Verdun⁠—it seemed as though the fate of the world were in Fort Douaumont⁠—our own lists of death grew longer.

In the casualty clearing station by Poperinghe more mangled men lay on their stretchers, hobbled to the ambulance-trains, groped blindly with one hand clutching at a comrade’s arm. More, and more, and more, with head wounds, and body wounds, with trench-feet, and gas.

“O Christ!” said one of them whom I knew. He had been laid on a swing-bed in the ambulance-train.

“Now you will be comfortable and happy,” said the R.A.M.C. orderly.

The boy groaned again. He was suffering intolerable agony, and, grasping a strap, hauled himself up a little with a wet sweat breaking out on his forehead.

Another boy came along alone, with one hand in a big bandage. He told me that it was smashed to bits, and began to cry. Then he smudged the tears away and said:

“I’m lucky enough. I saw many fellows killed.”

So it happened, day by day, but the courage of our men endured.

It seemed impossible to newcomers that life could exist at all under the shellfire which the Germans flung over our trenches and which we flung over theirs. So it seemed to the Irish battalions when they held the lines round Loos, by that Hohenzollern redoubt which was one of our little hells.

“Things happened,” said one of them, “which in other times would have been called miracles. We all had hairbreadth escapes from death.” For days they were under heavy fire, with 9.2’s flinging up volumes of sand and earth and stones about them. Then waves of poison-gas. Then trench-mortars and bombs.

“It seemed like years!” said one of the Irish crowd. “None of us expected to come out alive.”

Yet most of them had the luck to come out alive that time, and over a midday mess in a Flemish farmhouse they had hearty appetites for bully beef and fried potatoes, washed down by thin red wine and strong black coffee.

Round Ypres, and up by Boesinghe and Hooge⁠—you remember Hooge?⁠—the 14th, 20th, and 6th Divisions took turns in wet ditches and in shell-holes, with heavy crumps falling fast and roaring before they burst like devils of hell. On one day there were three hundred casualties in one battalion The German gunfire lengthened, and men were killed on their way out to “rest”⁠—camps