The French inhabitants were in huts on the outskirts of the village towards Monchy. They were mostly timid, pitiful figures who had suffered bitterly from the war. Children played without a thought on the threshold of the ruinous houses, and old men went with bent heads through the busy scenes that with brutal ruthlessness made the place where they had lived their lives no longer recognizable. The young people had to present themselves every morning before Lieutenant Oberländer, the town-major, whose rule was a strict one, in order to have their tasks allotted them in the cultivation of the land within the village boundaries. We only came in contact with the natives when we took our clothes to be washed or bought eggs and butter. Intimate relations were very rare. Love had no place in this stark and devastating machinery.
There were two French boys, orphans, one eight, the other twelve years old, who became attached to the troops in the most extraordinary way. They wore nothing but field grey, spoke fluent German, and saluted all officers in the prescribed manner. They spoke of their fellow-countrymen contemptuously and called them “Schangels” as they heard the soldiers doing. Their great desire was to go into the line with their company. They were proficient in drill and fell in on the left of the company at roll-call, and when they wished to accompany the canteen orderlies on an expedition to buy provisions at Cambrai they duly asked for leave. When the 2nd Battalion went to Quéant for a few weeks’ training, one of the two, called Louis, was, by order of Colonel von Oppen, to remain behind in Douchy, so that no occasion for false reports should be given to the civil population. During the march he was nowhere to be seen, but when the battalion arrived he jumped out of one of the transport wagons, where he had hidden himself. Unfortunately some of the more thoughtless of the men used to take them with them into the canteen for the amusement of teaching them to drink. Later, I believe, the elder was sent to a N.C.O. course in Germany.
Scarcely an hour by road from Douchy lay Monchy-au-Bois, the village where the two companies in reserve were quartered. This place was the occasion of bitter fighting in the autumn of 1914. At length it remained in German hands, and the fighting came to a standstill in a shallow ellipse round the ruins of the once prosperous place. The houses were now burnt and shot to bits. The waste gardens were churned up by shells and the fruit trees split and riven. The wilderness of stone had been adapted for defence by trenches, barbed wire, barricades, and concrete emplacements. The streets could all be swept with machine-gun fire from a central concrete emplacement, the Torgau Redoubt. There was another, the Altenburg Redoubt, an entrenched post on the right of the village, which concealed one platoon of the reserve company. There was a quarry out of which in times of peace limestone had been got for building, and this was an important part of the defences. It had been discovered only by chance. A company cook, whose bucket had fallen into a well of spring water, went down after it and discovered a hole that seemed to connect with a large cave. The matter was looked into, and a second entrance was broken through into a bombproof refuge that held a considerable body of men.
On the lonely hill on the road to Ransart there was a ruin that once had been an estaminet. It was called Bellevue because of the extensive view from there over the front. In spite of its danger it had great attractions for me. The eye could travel for miles over the ruined landscape, whose dead villages were connected by roads where no vehicle moved and no living being was to be seen. Further back were the faint outlines of Arras, the forsaken city, and further to the right gleamed the chalk-mine craters of St. Eloi. The waste and overgrown fields, with great cloud shadows flitting over them, checkered and crossed the network of trenches with yellow lines. Only here and there the smoke of a shell wavered up, as though propelled by a ghostly hand, and fluttered loose in the air; or the ball of a shrapnel hovered over the desert land like a great flock of wool, and slowly dissolved away. The face of the earth was dark and fabulous, for the war had expunged the pleasant features of the countryside and engraved there its own iron lines that in a lonely hour made the spectator shudder.
The forlornness and the profound silence, broken now and then by the deep tones of the guns, were emphasized by the sad marks of devastation. Torn packs, broken rifles, pieces of equipment, and among them, in grim contrast, a child’s plaything; shell fuses, deep shell-holes, water-bottles, torn books, broken utensils, holes whose mysterious darkness suggests a cellar in which, perhaps, the bones of the unfortunate tenant have been gnawed clean by the never idle swarms of rats; a peach-tree, whose supporting wall has gone, stretching out its branches for help, the skeletons of the domestic animals still tied by their heads in their stalls, trenches cut through the deserted gardens where,
