Читать книгу Verdun to the Vosges: Impressions of the War on the Fortress Frontier of France - Gerald Campbell - Страница 5

Table of Contents

In Paris, when we passed through it, it was still possible for inoffensive travellers to feel themselves free men. At Dijon we had our first real taste of the restrictions on personal liberty imposed by the war in the zone of the armies. Each time that we came to a new place we had to get at least three separate signed and stamped permits (from three or more officials) empowering us to leave the station, to stay, even for an hour, in the town, and to go into the station again, or anywhere outside the town, when our business was done. To all such applications the attitude of officialdom, entrenched behind barriers and supported by bayonets, and vindictive or regretful according to the temperament of the individual representative of the law and the degree of exasperation to which he had been brought by previous encounters with the public, was, as a rule, one of uncompromising refusal. At first that kind of thing, even when it has become a commonplace of one’s existence, is rather trying. The shock to one’s self-esteem and the sense of confinement are both extremely galling. It is not pleasant day after day to put yourself in a position in which you are liable to be treated like a naughty schoolboy, nor to feel that you are as restricted in your walks abroad as a Dartmoor convict. From the abominable feeling of being shut up in a cage there was, with rare exceptions, no escape, any more than there is for the lions at the Zoo. But we soon found that the chase after permits, if we treated it as a kind of game, was tolerable and even exciting, because each time we played it, though with The Times as our trump card we almost invariably won, we stood a good chance of losing. The real skill consisted in knowing when it was wise and safe to play it. Our opponents, destined in time to become our friends, were generals, staff officers, gendarmes, station guards and their commandants, military police commissaires, civil police “agents,” and other officials of all sorts and sizes. Most of them started by being suspicious of us and our mission, and generally speaking the more humble their post the more they wanted humouring before they could be brought to see that the rules of the game might perhaps be slightly relaxed in our favour. But once they had reached that point, as soon, that is to say, as they got to know us for what we said we were, they were ready to do anything in their power, because we were allies and representatives of The Times—which has not yet been burnt, and never will be, on any Bourse in the east of France. With the exception of a fierce-moustachioed warrior who had a holy horror of German spies (and therefore, if you see the connexion, of English journalists) the only French officials, high or low, who persistently refused anything important for which we asked them, were a distinguished General Officer and his Chief of Staff, who always dealt with us through their subordinates. If only we could have seen and known the General himself I firmly believe that he would have been as kind as all the rest. But he had other things to do, or else he never got our cards and letters.

Having got into Dijon, and having received reluctant permission to stay there, first for a night, and then for as much longer as we liked, the next thing was to get out of it, using it, if it would allow itself so to be used, as a stepping stone to higher things. It was occupied at that time by the 20th (Reserve) Army Corps, which had its staff headquarters at the hotel where we put up. Both before and after we received the news of the Battle of the Marne all the officers whom we met there were chafing to be at the front, and openly envious of our poor little chance of getting there before them. They little knew how slender it was. However, in General Brissaud, the Governor of the town, we found after a time a real friend, and from him we got a personal visa as far as Besançon, which was the limit of his jurisdiction, together with a verbal recommendation that we should be passed on to Belfort. At Besançon we had a bad quarter of an hour, as the station-commandant hesitated a long time before he agreed to let us go on, and we only just escaped being sent back to Paris. Something, however, turned the scale in our favour, and at last, though with rather a wry face, he sent us on our way rejoicing, greatly relieved at our escape, but careful not to show it till we were safe in our carriage.

It was long after dark when we got to Belfort. There was nowhere for us to sleep in the station, and no return train. Otherwise I think the little knot of officers who shook their heads doubtfully over our passports on the dimly lit platform would certainly have packed us into it straight away. There were some grounds for their hesitation. We had reached one of the chief of the gates of France, and were getting near the enemy. The Trouée de Belfort, the wide flat opening between the foothills of the Vosges and the Jura mountains, had to be defended from possible foes within as well as without. War, as the warrior with the fierce moustachios remarked to me a month or two later, is a serious matter, and nowhere were the French taking it more seriously than in the war-worn outpost fortress that stands sentinel in front of the Belfort gap, linked to the heart of the Republic by the long chain of lonely sentries that guarded the railway night and day all the way to Paris. Outside it very little was known at that time—in England nothing at all—of its then condition. Even the Germans knew nothing, so they, or their newspapers, invented lies about it, and said that it was closely invested. But though no German soldier, except in an aeroplane, ever got within miles of it, the state of siege proclaimed by the Governor was enforced with rigid strictness, and the whole of the civil population, except those who catered for the needs of the garrison, had been evacuated some days before we got there. At the best, therefore, however genuine our passports and however innocent our appearance, we were two bouches inutiles who would have to be fed; at the worst, as journalists, the chances were that we should be indiscreet (that is the normal view); and anyhow it was very doubtful if we had any right to be there at all. But there, undeniably, we were, and so—well, perhaps after all the best way out of the difficulty was to send us to the Governor’s headquarters and leave him to deal with our case. So to the General’s quarters, the heart of the fortress, which we were as anxious as any German to reach, we set out, under the escort of Private Jouanard, election agent and newspaper correspondent, a convinced socialist and anti-militarist, but, like his idol Jaurès, a Frenchman first of all, and therefore an ardent soldier of France, a warm admirer of England, and a bitter enemy of the Boche and all his works.

I suppose that long before this book is published England will have at last realized the truth of the creed of French soldiers like Private Jouanard, and will have demanded as one man to be put, like France, on the footing of national service. But I may be too sanguine; we may have to grapple with the industrial revolution threatened by Mr. J. H. Thomas, M.P. In any case I should like to quote once more a proclamation written by Private Jouanard for l’Humanité, which, before our acquaintance was twelve hours old, he gave me for publication in The Times. It was addressed “Aux Camarades Socialistes,” and signed “L. J. A mobilized comrade.”

“We are now at the parting of the ways. After having fought stubbornly against that human scourge—war, the insatiable ambition of a despot forces us to take up arms. Despite the immense sorrow that grips us at the thought of being the involuntary murderers of those Germans and Austrians who have the same communion of ideas, in their name and in our own, for humanity, socialism, right against the arbitrary, civilization against barbarism, in the name of all these sacred principles, our brothers of England, of Belgium, of Russia, and ourselves have answered ‘Present’ with one voice to the call of our native land. Each one filled with emotion and confident in the justice of our cause, we have flown to arms at the cry of Liberty, like the great revolutionaries of ’93.

“Socialists of the allied armies, we have not to weep, but to avenge the death of the martyr of the Idea, our great friend Jaurès, our guide and our light in difficult moments. Humanity loses in him a great defender, the indirect victim of the unmitigated Teuton aggression.

“The most competent among us are giving a manly example by entering the Governments of the Allies, thus taking, in the eyes of their countries, a position of responsibility for the Party which they represent. More than others we socialists must prove the error of this monstrous accusation of anti-patriotism. Let us prove, in defending ourselves, that we are firmly resolved to fight to the end for our national independence.

“Forward, comrades! Take heart, take courage, and the bar of red, which mingles with the two other colours, forming a trinity symbolic of liberty, peace, and labour, will not be defiled by the bloody hands of the bandits who would make us slaves! May the furrows, sprinkled with our blood, bring forth the ear of corn beneath the branch of olive, symbolizing fruitful labour in eternal peace.”

“Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings hast Thou ordained strength, because of Thine enemies, that Thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.” Out of the mouth of a French simple soldat the Englishmen who are still holding back as I write from the supreme sacrifice or privilege of national service, the Britons who never, never, never will be slaves, are condemned. A year of the war has passed, and hundreds of thousands of their fellow subjects of all classes have given up their professions and their positions, their pleasures and their ease, their wives and their families, and have freely offered themselves on the field of battle as part of the strength by which the enemy can be stilled. But they themselves have done none of the things for which their French socialist comrade unhesitatingly gave them credit. They have not—up to October, 1915—realized that we are at the parting of the ways, they have not with one voice answered “Present” to the call of their native land, they have not flown to arms at the cry of liberty, they have not proved by defending themselves that they mean to fight to the end for their national independence. Instead, they sit at home and strike—not for freedom, but for higher wages and less work—and prate of Conscripts and a Capitalists’ War and a Capitalists’ Press, and all the other labour shibboleths which have lost whatever sense they had before the war and become mere nonsense, because the war is different from all other wars and has changed everything in the world. It is a Capitalists’ War, of course. It was made by the Prussian Junkers and the business men of Germany with no other object than that of increasing their capital and destroying that of the Allies and particularly of England. It is a war fought by “conscripts” (though I should like to hear Mr. J. H. Thomas, M.P., use that term to Private Jouanard) in the case of every country engaged in it except England. And it is also, because of these two undeniable premises, the greatest strike against selfishness in high places that has ever taken place, and the conscript brothers who are fighting or working for it are the champions of freedom, and the men who refuse to stand by their side are, without knowing it, the blackest blacklegs in the history of the world. And no one knows better than they and the newspapers and politicians who support them what blacklegs are. They are the men who in the wars of labour refuse to submit to the Compulsory Service of trade-unionism, which is sometimes the most servile service and the most autocratic and deadening compulsion that ever was enforced in a free country, and the badge and livery and alpha and omega of the god with the feet of clay before which they bow down and worship.

Though it was a clear starlight night when we walked up to General Thévenet’s quarters, the moon had not risen and the town was wrapped in silence and dense darkness. Not a lamp was lit in the streets, not a chink of light escaped through the closely shuttered windows, not a sound was to be heard but the steady tramp of a distant patrol and the clatter of our feet on the cobbles. Afterwards, in Toul, and Epinal, and Commercy, and Nancy, and Lunéville, and other towns near the front, we got used to the conditions of a state of siege after couvre feu, when people go to bed at eight or nine o’clock—the deathly night stillness, broken only by the barking of dogs, the shrill despairing shrieks peculiar to French engine whistles, and the dull boom of cannon, and, in the empty streets, walled in by tall houses teeming with unseen human life, the solid blackness of the grave. In time you get used to it and forget to wonder whether the Germans too can hear the howling of that far-off dog that is baying the moon. You even crack jokes with the heavy-footed sentries and stealthy police “agents” who loom up uncannily out of the darkness and may or may not request you to follow them to the “poste.” But that first night in Belfort, before I had seen the miles and miles of solid entrenchments that lie between it and the frontier, the effect of it all, and the thought of the long line of millions of men, stretching almost from our feet far away for five hundred miles across France and Belgium to the Channel, thousands of them watching and waiting and fighting and suffering under the wide canopy of the quiet night, was curiously eerie. You seemed to hear Europe sighing and groaning in her sleep.

Suddenly, out of the unseen came a sharp challenge—“Qui vive? Halte là! Avancez à l’ordre! Le mot!”—and we stopped dead, as it is wise to do when you meet a night patrol in a town in état de siège if you are anxious to go on living. Then, one by one, we walked forward, gave the word, handed our papers to the corporal to be examined by the light of his lantern, and finally, after a few more challenges, half blinded by the dazzling glare of the lamps of a motor-car standing in the courtyard in front, were ushered into General Thévenet’s business-like office. Our reception was as different from what had gone before as the abrupt change from darkness to light. At last we had struck a man of real authority and decision. After a word or two of explanation—who we were and what we had come for—we were welcomed as warmly as if we had been the whole British army, horse, foot, guns, and aeroplanes, instead of two troublesome journalists. We had come at a happy moment. England and The Times would in any case have been passports enough for the General and his staff. But we shone also with the reflected glory of the common endurance of the retreat from Mons and the common triumph of the Battle of the Marne, which had brought our two countries closer together than they had been since Balaclava and Inkermann. And when we had explained the immediate purpose of our mission—to publish the truth and to contradict the lying reports spread by the enemy about Belfort and Verdun and Nancy—the General at once promised us all the help in his power.