Towards the Goal

Battle of the Ourcq--Von Kluck's Mistake--Anniversary of the Battle--Wreckage of War--A Burying Party--A Funeral--A Five Days' Battle--Life-and-Death Fighting--"_Salut au Drapeau_"--Meaux --Vareddes--Murders at Vareddes--Von Kluck's Approach--The Turn of the Tide--The Old Curé--German Brutalities--Torturers --The Curé's Sufferings--"He is a Spy"--A Weary March--Outrages --Victims--Reparation--To Lorraine.

Then came a pause. The War Office, snowed under, not knowing where to turn for clothes, boots, huts, rifles, guns, ammunition, tried to check the stream by raising the recruits' standards. A mistake!--but soon recognised. In another month, under the influence of the victory on the Marne, and while the Germans were preparing the attacks on the British Line so miraculously beaten off in the first battle of Ypres, the momentary check had been lost in a fresh outburst of national energy. You will remember how the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee came into being, that first autumn?--how the Prime Minister took the lead, and the two great political parties of the country agreed to bring all their organisation, central or local, to bear on the supreme question of getting men for the Army. Tory and Radical toured the country together. The hottest opponents stood on the same platform. _L'union sacrée_--to use the French phrase, so vivid and so true, by which our great Ally has charmed her own discords to rest in defence of the country--became a reality here too, in spite of strikes, in spite of Ireland.

"Our casualties are _really_ light," writes an officer in reference to some of the hot fighting of the past month. Thanks, apparently, to the ever-growing precision of our artillery methods; which again depend on aeroplane and balloon information. So it is that the flying forms in the upper air become for the soldier below so many symbols of help and protection. He is restless when they are not there. And let us remember that aeroplanes were first used for artillery observation, not three years ago, in the battle of Aisne, after the victory of the Marne.

With this second intention, I was to have combined, by the courtesy of the French Headquarters, a visit to certain central portions of the French line, including Soissons, Reims, and Verdun. But by the time I reached France the great operations that have since marked the Soissons-Reims front were in active preparation; roads and motor-cars were absorbed by the movements of troops and stores; Reims and Verdun were under renewed bombardment; and visits to this section of the French line were entirely held up. The French authorities, understanding that I chiefly wished to see for myself some of the wrecked and ruined villages and towns dealt with in the French official reports, suggested, first Senlis and the battle-fields of the Ourcq, and then Nancy, the ruined villages of Lorraine, and that portion of their eastern frontier line where, simultaneously with the Battle of the Marne, General Castelnau directed from the plateau of Amance and the Grand Couronné that strong defence of Nancy which protected--and still protects--the French right, and has baulked all the German attempts to turn it.

_Tanks_! The officer in front points smiling to a field just ahead. There is one of them--the monster!--taking its morning exercise; practising up and down the high and almost perpendicular banks by which another huge field is divided. The motor slackens, and we watch the creature slowly attack a high bank, land complacently on the top, and then--an officer walking beside it to direct its movements--balance a moment on the edge of another bank equally high, a short distance away. There it is!--down!--not flopping or falling, but all in the way of business, gliding unperturbed. London is full of tanks, of course--on the films. But somehow to be watching a real one, under the French sky, not twenty miles from the line, is a different thing. We fall into an eager discussion with Captain F. in front, as to the part played by them in the Somme battle, and as to what the Germans may be preparing in reply to them. And while we talk, my eye is caught by something on the sky-line, just above the tank. It is a man and a plough--a plough that might have come out of the Odyssey--the oldest, simplest type. So are the ages interwoven; and one may safely guess that the plough--that very type!--will outlast many generations of tanks. But, for the moment, the tanks are in the limelight, and it is luck that we should have come upon them so soon, for one may motor many miles about the front without meeting with any signs of them.

And as I look out at the piles of shells, I think of the most recent figures furnished me by the Ministry of Munitions. Last year, when the Somme offensive began, and when I was writing _England's Effort_, the _weekly_ output of eighteen-pounder shells was 17-1/2 times what it was during the first year of the war. _It is now_ 28 _times as much_. Field howitzer ammunition has _almost doubled_ since last July. That of medium guns and howitzers _has more than doubled_. That of the heaviest guns of all (over six-inch) _is more than four times_ as great. By the growth of ammunition we may guess what has been the increase in guns, especially in those heavy guns we are now pushing forward after the retreating Germans, as fast as roads and railway lines can be made to carry them. The German Government, through one of its subordinate spokesmen, has lately admitted their inferiority in guns; their retreat, indeed, on the Somme before our pending attack, together with the state of their old lines, now we are in and over them, show plainly enough what they had to fear from the British guns and the abundance of British ammunition.

Last year, for _England's Effort_, I tried vainly to collect some of these very facts and figures, which the War Office was still jealously--'and no doubt quite rightly--withholding. Now at last they are available, told by "authority," and one can hardly doubt that each of these passing days will give them--for America a double significance. Surpass the story, if you can; we shall bear you no grudge! But up till now, it remains a chapter unique in the history of war. Many Americans, as your original letter to me pointed out, had still, last year, practically no conception of what we were doing and had done. The majority of our own people, indeed, were in much the same case. While the great story was still in the making, while the foundations were still being laid, it was impossible to correct all the annoying underestimates, all the ignorant or careless judgments, of people who took a point for the whole. The men at the heart of things could only set their teeth, keep silence and give no information that could help the enemy. The battle of the Somme, last July, was the first real testing of their work. The Hindenburg retreat, the successes in Mesopotamia, the marvellous spectacle of the Armies in France--and before this letter could be sent to Press, the glorious news from the Arras front!--are the present fruits of it.

The battle of the Vimy Ridge [_April 8th_] is clearly going to be the second (the first was the German retreat on the Somme) of those "decisive events" determining this year the upshot of the war, to which the Commander-in-Chief, with so strong and just a confidence, directed the eyes of this country some three months ago. When I was in the neighbourhood of the great battlefield--one may say it now!--the whole countryside was one vast preparation. The signs of the coming attack were everywhere--troops, guns, ammunition, food dumps, hospitals, air stations--every actor and every property in the vast and tragic play were on the spot, ready for the moment and the word.

And that brings me to what is now shaping itself--the final result. The year just passed, indeed--from March to March--has practically rounded our task--though the "learning" of the Army is never over!--and has seen the transformation--whether temporary or permanent, who yet can tell?--of the England of 1914, with its zealous mobs of untrained and "tatterdemalion" recruits, into a great military power,[This letter was finished just as the news of the Easter Monday Battle of Arras was coming in.] disposing of armies in no whit inferior to those of Germany, and bringing to bear upon the science of war--now that Germany has forced us to it--the best intelligence, and the best _character_, of the nation. The most insolent of the German military newspapers are already bitterly confessing it.

Meanwhile, in another section of the line our own plans were maturing, which were to bear fruit five weeks later in the brilliant capture of that Vimy ridge I had seen on March 2, filling the blue middle distance, from the bare upland of Notre Dame de Lorette. If on the Somme the anvil was to some extent escaping from the hammer, in the coming battle of Arras the hammer was to take its full revenge.

It was, of course, already obvious that the German retreat on the Somme was not--so far--going to yield us any very large captures of men or guns. Prisoners were indeed collected every day, but there were no "hauls" such as, little more than a month after this evening of March 3rd, were to mark the very different course of the Battle of Arras. Discussion turned upon the pace of the German retreat and the possible rate of our pursuit. "Don't forget," said an officer, "that they are moving over good ground, while the pursuit has to move over bad ground--roads with craters in them, ground so pitted with shell-holes that you can scarcely drive a peg between them, demolished bridges, villages that give scarcely any cover, and so on. The enemy has his guns with him; ours have to be pushed up over the bad ground. His machine-guns are always in picked and prepared positions; ours have to be improvised."

So much for the nights which are rather for observation than fighting, though fighting constantly attends them. But the set battles in the air, squadron with squadron, man with man, the bombers in the centre, the fighting machines surrounding and protecting them, are becoming more wonderful, more daring, more complicated every month. "You'll see"--I recall once more the words of our Flight-Commander, spoken amid the noise and movement of a score of practising machines, five weeks before the battle of Arras--"when the great move begins _we shall get the mastery again, as we did on the Somme._"