A Visit to Three Fronts, June 1916 | Page 5

have risen with the need of them.
The expansion of the Navy has been a miracle, the management of the
transport a greater one, the formation of the new Army the greatest of
all time. To get the men was the least of the difficulties. To put them
here, with everything down to the lid of the last field saucepan in its
place, that is the marvel. The tools of the gunners, and of the sappers, to
say nothing of the knowledge of how to use them, are in themselves a
huge problem. But it has all been met and mastered, and will be to the
end. But don't let us talk any more about the muddling of the War
Office. It has become just a little ridiculous.
* * * * *
I have told of my first day, when I visited the front trenches, saw the
work of 'Mother,' and finally that marvellous spectacle, the Ypres
Salient at night. I have passed the night at the headquarters of a
divisional-general, Capper, who might truly be called one of the two
fathers of the British flying force, for it was he, with Templer, who laid
the first foundations from which so great an organisation has arisen.
My morning was spent in visiting two fighting brigadiers, cheery
weather-beaten soldiers, respectful, as all our soldiers are, of the
prowess of the Hun, but serenely confident that we can beat him. In
company with one of them I ascended a hill, the reverse slope of which

was swarming with cheerful infantry in every stage of dishabille, for
they were cleaning up after the trenches. Once over the slope we
advanced with some care, and finally reached a certain spot from which
we looked down upon the German line. It was the advanced
observation post, about a thousand yards from the German trenches,
with our own trenches between us. We could see the two lines,
sometimes only a few yards, as it seemed, apart, extending for miles on
either side. The sinister silence and solitude were strangely dramatic.
Such vast crowds of men, such intensity of feeling, and yet only that
open rolling countryside, with never a movement in its whole expanse.
The afternoon saw us in the Square at Ypres. It is the city of a dream,
this modern Pompeii, destroyed, deserted and desecrated, but with a
sad, proud dignity which made you involuntarily lower your voice as
you passed through the ruined streets. It is a more considerable place
than I had imagined, with many traces of ancient grandeur. No words
can describe the absolute splintered wreck that the Huns have made of
it. The effect of some of the shells has been grotesque. One
boiler-plated water-tower, a thing forty or fifty feet high, was actually
standing on its head like a great metal top. There is not a living soul in
the place save a few pickets of soldiers, and a number of cats which
become fierce and dangerous. Now and then a shell still falls, but the
Huns probably know that the devastation is already complete.
We stood in the lonely grass-grown Square, once the busy centre of the
town, and we marvelled at the beauty of the smashed cathedral and the
tottering Cloth Hall beside it. Surely at their best they could not have
looked more wonderful than now. If they were preserved even so, and
if a heaven-inspired artist were to model a statue of Belgium in front,
Belgium with one hand pointing to the treaty by which Prussia
guaranteed her safety and the other to the sacrilege behind her, it would
make the most impressive group in the world. It was an evil day for
Belgium when her frontier was violated, but it was a worse one for
Germany. I venture to prophesy that it will be regarded by history as
the greatest military as well as political error that has ever been made.
Had the great guns that destroyed Liége made their first breach at
Verdun, what chance was there for Paris? Those few weeks of warning

and preparation saved France, and left Germany as she now is, like a
weary and furious bull, tethered fast in the place of trespass and waiting
for the inevitable pole-axe.
We were glad to get out of the place, for the gloom of it lay as heavy
upon our hearts as the shrapnel helmets did upon our heads. Both were
lightened as we sped back past empty and shattered villas to where, just
behind the danger line, the normal life of rural Flanders was carrying
on as usual. A merry sight helped to cheer us, for scudding down wind
above our heads came a Boche aeroplane, with two British at her tail
barking away with their machine guns, like two