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If I had to present some particular scene as typical of the peculiar vileness and mischief wrought by this modern warfare that Germany has elaborated and thrust upon the world, I do not think I should choose as my instance any of those great architectural wrecks that seem most to impress contemporary writers.I have seen the injuries and ruins of the cathedrals at Arras and Soissons and the wreckage of the great church at Saint Eloi, I have visited the Hotel de Ville at Arras and seen photographs of the present state of the Cloth Hall at Ypres--a building I knew very well indeed in its days of pride--and I have not been very deeply moved.I suppose that one is a little accustomed to Gothic ruins, and that there is always something monumental about old buildings; it is only a question of degree whether they are more or less tumble-down.I was far more desolated by the obliteration of such villages as Fricourt and Dompierre, and by the horrible state of the fields and gardens round about them, and my visit to Arras railway station gave me all the sensations of coming suddenly on a newly murdered body.
Before I visited the recaptured villages in the zone of the actual fighting, I had an idea that their evacuation was only temporary, that as soon as the war line moved towards Germany the people of the devastated villages would return to build their houses and till their fields again.But I see now that not only are homes and villages destroyed almost beyond recognition, but the very fields are destroyed.They are wildernesses of shell craters; the old worked soil is buried and great slabs of crude earth have been flung up over it.No ordinary plough will travel over this frozen sea, let along that everywhere chunks of timber, horrible tangles of rusting wire, jagged fragments of big shells, and a great number of unexploded shells are entangled in the mess.Often this chaos is stained bright yellow by high explosives, and across it run the twisting trenches and communication trenches eight, ten, or twelve feet deep.These will become water pits and mud pits into which beasts will fall.
It is incredible that there should be crops from any of this region of the push for many years to come.There is no shade left; the roadside trees are splintered stumps with scarcely the spirit to put forth a leaf; a few stunted thistles and weeds are the sole proofs that life may still go on.
The villages of this wide battle region are not ruined; they are obliterated.It is just possible to trace the roads in them, because the roads have been cleared and repaired for the passing of the guns and ammunition.Fricourt is a tangle of German dug-outs.One dug-out in particular there promises to become a show place.It must be the masterpiece of some genius for dug-outs;it is made as if its makers enjoyed the job; it is like the work of some horrible badger among the vestiges of what were pleasant human homes.You are taken down a timbered staircase into its warren of rooms and passages; you are shown the places under the craters of the great British shells, where the wood splintered but did not come in.(But the arrival of those shells must have been a stunning moment.) There are a series of ingenious bolting shafts set with iron climbing bars.In this place German officers and soldiers have lived continually for nearly two years.This war is, indeed, a troglodytic propaganda.You come up at last at the far end into what was once a cellar of a decent Frechman's home.
But there are stranger subterranean refuges than that at Fricourt.At Dompierre the German trenches skirted the cemetery, and they turned the dead out of their vaults and made lurking places of the tombs.I walked with M.Joseph Reinach about this place, picking our way carefully amidst the mud holes and the wire, and watched the shells bursting away over the receding battle line to the west.The wreckage of the graves was Durereqsue.And here would be a fragment of marble angle and here a split stone with an inscription.Splinters of coffins, rusty iron crosses and the petals of tin flowers were trampled into the mud, amidst the universal barbed wire.A little distance down the slope is a brand new cemetery, with new metal wreaths and even a few flowers; it is a disciplined array of uniform wooden crosses, each with its list of soldiers' names.
Unless I am wholly mistaken in France no Germans will ever get a chance for ever more to desecrate that second cemetery as they have done its predecessor.
We walked over the mud heaps and litter that had once been houses towards the centre of Dompierre village, and tried to picture to ourselves what the place had been.Many things are recognisable in Dompierre that have altogether vanished at Fricourt; for instance, there are quire large triangular pieces of the church wall upstanding at Dompierre.And a mile away perhaps down the hill on the road towards Amiens, the ruins of the sugar refinery are very distinct.A sugar refinery is an affair of big iron receptacles and great flues and pipes and so forth, and iron does not go down under gun fire as stone or brick does.The whole fabric wars rust, bent and twisted, gaping with shell holes, that raggedest display of old iron, but it still kept its general shape, as a smashed, battered, and sunken ironclad might do at the bottom of the sea.
There wasn't a dog left of the former life of Dompierre.There was not even much war traffic that morning on the worn and muddy road.The guns muttered some miles away to the west, and a lark sang.But a little way farther on up the road was an intermediate dressing station, rigged up with wood and tarpaulins, and orderlies were packing two wounded men into an ambulance.The men on the stretchers were grey faced, as though they had been trodden on by some gigantic dirty boot.
As we came back towards where our car waited by the cemetery Iheard the jingle of a horseman coming across the space behind us.
