Читать книгу The Diggers: The Australians in France - Patrick MacGill - Страница 4

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In the afternoon of October 11, 1918, I found myself with a party travelling out from Amiens and taking the straight road that runs eastwards towards St. Quentin across the war harried fields of the Somme. We had just passed through a country where the harvest was gathered in, where the hay ricks and cornstacks stood high round the ancient farmhouses, and we were now in a country where Death had reaped its sad harvest for over four years, where all was ruin and decay—a spread of demolition and destruction. This was the battleground of the Somme.

This department is level, very fertile and was at one time amongst the best cultivated districts of France. Cider was made there, poultry reared, and the locality was rich in all manner of farm produce. And it stood high in textile industries—wool, cotton, hemp, silk-spinning, and the weaving of velvet and carpets. In addition to these industries there were also large iron foundries, beetroot sugar factories, distilleries, breweries, employing prior to the war close on seventy thousand hands. But now, at the present moment, all these industries are obliterated, the rich pastures of the Somme are barren wastes, the factories and distilleries huddles of charred wood, twisted iron, and broken bricks. All homes and hamlets are destroyed, and for miles and miles ruin succeeds ruin, until the eye wearies and the heart is heavy at the sight of the horror which has been heaped on the once fair land of France.

The land of the Somme is not alone deserted and ravaged. It is dead, utterly laid waste as if the lava of war had not alone fallen on it, but blotted it out as a sand storm smothers the landmarks of a desert. Of the great trees which lined the roadways nothing remains save the peeled stumps, that stretch mile after mile as far as the eye can see, passive relics of the hate which swept over them and broke them down. Never again will they bear a leaf or call to the dead earth for the food which gave green to their foliage.

The green which spreads out from the roadways is the green of rank weeds, thistle, nettle and dock, the rank undergrowth which rises through the tortured strands of rusty wire that were once the outer ramparts of the Hindenburg line. Up from these nettles, docks, and thistles, rises here and there a cumbrous tank which at one time fell into a shell-hole and was unable to hiccough itself out again.

By the roadside lie shells which failed to explode, shells in their cases which were never despatched on their mission of death, shells sticking nose deep in the clay with their bases showing through the weeds. Near these are gun emplacements with the guns still in their original positions pointing back towards the locality where the British troops are at present billeted in their many rest areas.

Here is a mill, its walls down, a brewery silent and deserted, a sugar refinery with its girders twisted and bent, its framework stripped of all covering, its iron bowels naked to the sky.

It is hard to picture this spread of world being other at any time than a wild desolate waste, covered with broken homes, rusty limbers and waggons, with ghastly spiked contraptions of war, chevaux de frise, distorted entanglements, trip wires hidden in the weeds, snares for unwary feet, and grotesque ill-proportioned dug-outs, with doors askew and roofs falling in.

Elbows of trench suddenly gape by the roadside and as suddenly cease. At one time these were parts of a well-proportioned alley, set with fire-bay and traverse, boarded floor and well-built parapet, running for mile after mile in one continuous crooked line from the steep Vosges of the South to the sand dunes of the North. Here was a sap that once stretched across No Man's Land, there was a front line, and further back, crawling through holt and hamlet, all that remained of a communication trench could be dimly discerned. The hamlet was now a medley of tortured beams and fallen bricks, the holt a congregation of peeled stumps that in the distance looked like an assemblage of lepers, and sap, fire-bay and communication trench were defaced, disfigured, their shapeless ruin adding to the ravage which had deformed the face of the country.

In imagination I could picture the country in days of peace with its rich pastures and fields of corn, its long roads lined with rows of magnificent trees, its hedgerows, dykes and canals, its populous villages where the bells of eventide called the faithful to prayer. This and much more could be pictured, the snug farmhouses, with their ricks of hay, the red-tiled cottages, the merry cafés, the shrines by the roadside, the windmills circling to the breeze, the old men smoking their long-shanked pipes, the women, bravely arrayed in mutch caps and white aprons, carrying on the work of their household, the children playing.... Where were the children now?

Even as I thought of this I could picture a date not so very far back, the winter of 1916-17, the most trying winter of the war. Here in this battle-wracked region the Australians were up against it. And "up against it" means everything, from the shattering on the parados of the mail bag with a letter from home, to the horrible death as men were sucked inch by inch into the rising mud of a slushy trench, sinking down into a grave where every effort to get clear was futile and where the tomb, cold, clammy and slimy, rose up to engulf the helpless victim.

The endless, ghastly horror of that winter will never be forgotten by those who lived through it. Two things are impossible: one, the forgetting of that Somme winter by those who knew it; and the other, the inability to picture the life of the trenches by those who have never fought in them.

Take the case of the young soldier suddenly dumped into the trench of war. Let the man be a sundowner from far back, where life is hard, in the Australian scrubs, or let him be a clerk from some shop or office in Sydney or Melbourne. For both, the life that they had formerly known was comparatively comfortable when placed in contrast to the life which Europe offered them when they came there as soldiers. One came from the parched Paroo, the other from the Sydney shop; both donned the habiliments of war and after a certain period of training found themselves stuck in a stinking drain on the Continent of Europe. This drain was the trench, with a fire-bay that was a miniature lagoon, the fire-step covered with slush, the parapet and parados falling in as if they were ditches built of wet sand. Water was there, water mixed with litter and clay. It was impossible to lie down, for the slush rose over the body, finding its way into eyes, mouth and ear. When the men slept they slept standing, to find when they awoke that it was almost impossible to move hand or foot. They simply stuck there and had to be hauled out by their mates. No fires were allowed to be lit, for the position had to be kept hidden from the enemy. Even if fires were allowed, there was no fuel, no coke, no wood and no matches.

And it was constantly raining or snowing, filling the alleys of war with slush and slime. In addition to the rain which winter brought, there was the eternal rain of scrap-iron sent across from the enemy gun emplacements. If a man was wounded he had to lie in the trench all day, for the sniper was always on the wait for the men engaged in the task of helping their stricken brothers. To move through the trench with a weighty stretcher was impossible.

At night, when the darkness covered the battle-area, the stretcher-bearers crossed the parados and carried the wounded back to the dressing station, their way beset with danger, bursting shells, hidden holes, and the trip wire that littered the terrible fields. And the mud rose to the men's knees, threatening to drag them down into its clammy depths. But despite this, the great work of war, the deeds of mercy and endurance, were carried on by the brave soldiery who had come so far to fight, not for the glory of their Empire so much as for the freedom of the world.

The dangers which beset the men going out also beset the men coming in. Ration parties were sent to bring in food to the trench garrison, but dangers being many and the way difficult, all food was cold when it arrived. Often it never came to hand at all, and those sent for it never returned to report themselves to the battalion. They left, the men of the ration party, with steaming dixies of tea, so the head-cook in some broken-down house at the rear, reported. "But they never reached here," said the battalion orderly sergeant in the front line. And somewhere in the semi-liquid mud that stretched from the field kitchen to the trench, the ration party disappeared from the sight of their mates for ever.

Then, after long days of hardship and nights of waiting (how many days and nights had passed they knew not), the men who garrisoned the front line were relieved and went back to support trenches for a rest. Here they would sit in a trench as wet as the trench which they had left, sleep in a shelter which hid the sky from their eyes but never kept the rain away from their sodden clothes. But despite this the trench had some advantages denied to the men nearer No Man's Land. They could light a fire and cook meals, make tea and fry a rasher of bacon. But the wood to make the fire was seldom to be obtained, and when it came to hand it was too wet to burn. Still, their own efforts to make their stay in support comfortable, helped a little to relieve the tedium of the time. The rest came to an end at the close of three or four days, and back again they went to the front line trenches.

Away home in England or in the Colonies of that Kingdom live men and women who, despite reading, report and record, cannot picture the life which was lived by these men. The limit of suffering overpassed, nothing but their imperturbable endurance nerved them to the work which was theirs. For those who live so far away, the sight of these trenches even at a distance would raise a feeling of discomfort, to walk through these lines of mud would cause them no end of torture, mental and physical, to stay there for a day would be horrible, but to fight there in rain and snow and shell fire would be superlative in its ghastliness. Yet far away from these scenes, removed from all the agony war entails, it has been reported of some that they calmly sit down in their comfortable rooms and with smug pens and righteous speech protest against the little tot of rum which is issued now and again to the gallant soldiers who stand against the enemy, guarding the Empire which that enemy has set out to assail. Heaven send that this war waged against the foe without may help a little to cripple the smug intolerance that dwells within!

It was through the beaten land, on the road that runs from Amiens to Peronne that our car sped. Scarcely a soul was in sight, though now and again we could see refugees returning to the homes which once were theirs. We passed a woman and two children, the former dressed very neatly, with a mutch cap on her head and an umbrella under her arm. A mother and her loved ones, probably going back to the home they had known in days of peace.

A few miles out from Amiens we saw an old man ambling painfully along in front of us, now and again coming to a halt and looking round him, taking stock of the country through which he was passing. Hearing the car following him he turned and looked at us. He was a very old man, his beard white; he carried a stick in his hand and held a bundle under his arm. As the car came close to him it stopped and the driver inquired of the man where he was going.

"To Villars-Carbonnel," said the man, putting his stick under the arm that held the bundle, and rubbing his whiskers with the free hand.

"Your own village?" asked the driver.

"Yes, sir."

"Come inside and I'll drive you there," said the driver.

"No, thank you," said the man. "I prefer to walk. I'm near there. Villars-Carbonnel is round the corner."

The car drove on, and my thoughts dwelt with the man who was going to Villars-Carbonnel and who preferred to walk there. In viewing the countryside from the road he probably wanted to see all that had happened to the place since he was there before. Or perhaps he wanted to prolong the joyful anticipation of the homecoming. With the remembrance common to the old he was no doubt calling to mind the village which he had known all his life, the people whom he had known and loved when he dwelt there. What would the village be like now? Would it be broken down like the other villages which he had passed on the road, Villers-Bretonneux, Warfusse Abancourt, and Lamotte-en-Santerre? These were twisted out of all shape, their cafés in ruins, their streets piled with rubble, the roof beams of their many homes burned, and churches beaten almost to the ground. But no, his native village would not have suffered as these had suffered! He loved it so much that the thought of irreparable ruin hanging over his own birthplace could not certainly have entered his mind. Let him have his dreams of homecoming and he was happy.

I could picture that old man in days before the war sitting in front of his house in the summer evenings with the vines trailing round the front door and the apple blossoms blooming in his garden. In the distance the mists crept up from the Somme, the village girls leading the cattle in from the pastures came down the street; the children played on the pavement, making the night glad with their innocent prattle. Possibly the church bell was then ringing out the Angelus, calling the devotees to worship, while the old man sat there smoking his long-shanked pipe with the tobacco piled high over the bowl and the gleaming threads falling down on the breast of his coat. Then, after a while, he might go into a café, drink his glass of red wine and play a game of draughts or dominoes with his neighbour. And he knew the village, knew every man and woman there. It was his native place, loved as only the French can love the spot of earth on which they were born, and known to him as a painter knows every tint of colour on the picture which he has completed.

We came to a cross-road and here for a moment the driver stopped to look at his map. Round us the country stretched for miles, with here and there a ruined village or farmhouse breaking the landscape. Under us the road was a dun colour, showing that broken bricks had been used in the fashioning of the highway. Thistles grew by the roadside and through these could be seen many strands of rusted wire, with here and there a cross turning green with the rain and topped with a trench helmet or khaki cap. Flowers grew there, late flowers nodding gravely in the breeze. Not a house was to be seen, not even the ruins of a wall. Above this was a board with something written on it, and leaning over the car I could read the message. This was what it told me:

HERE ONCE STOOD THE VILLAGE OF VILLARS-CARBONNEL.

The Fighters

The loaded limbers trenchward wend, the straining horses churning

The slush upon the cobbled road that takes them to the fray,

And far ahead in lurid tints the fires of war are burning

And leprous white the poplar stumps that line the soldiers' way.

The great rage smites the heavy world and tears the sky asunder

(Oh! silent forms that bow and bend beneath the heavy load!)

The East aflame with war's red strife and riot of its thunder

(Poor weary boys that wend their way along the shrapnelled road.)

Oh! hearts that follow, wish them luck and strength in sleep and waking,

These gallant youths that come and go through all the gloomy night

To labour on the mighty job; its stress and toil unshaking

The fire and faith of mighty souls that battle for the right.

Oh! Heaven light their darkest hour and send them safely through it

To reach the goal of their desires and see the struggle through.

The way is rough and hard the fight. God give them strength to do it,

To weather through and finish up the work they've come to do.