Fields of Victory | Page 9

and south of the
Arras-Bapaume road; dinner with General Gouraud in the great
building at Strasbourg, which was formerly the headquarters of the
German Army Corps holding Alsace, and is now the French Préfecture;
the eastern battle-field at Verdun, and that small famous room under
the citadel, through which all the leaders of the war have passed;
Rheims Cathedral emerging ghostly from the fog, with, in front of it, a
group of motor-cars and two men shaking hands, the British Premier
and the Cardinal-Archbishop; that desolate heart of the Champagne

battle-field, where General Gouraud, with the American Army on his
right, made his September push towards Vouziers and Mézières;
General Pershing in his office, and General Pershing en petit comité in
a friend's drawing-room, in both settings the same attractive figure,
with the same sudden half-mischievous smile and the same observant
eyes; and, finally, that rabbit-warren of small, barely furnished rooms
in the old Ecole Militaire at Montreuil, where the British General Staff
worked during the war, when it was not moving in its staff train up and
down behind the front.
But I do not intend to make these letters a mere omnium gatherum of
recollections. All through, my object has been to lay hold of the main
outline of what has happened on the Western front during the past
eleven months, and if I could, to make them clear to other civilians,
men and women, as clearly and rapidly as possible, in this interval
between the régime of communiqués and war-correspondence under
which we have lived so long, and those detailed and scientific histories
which every Army, and probably every corps and division, is now
either writing, or preparing to write, about its own doings in the war.
Meanwhile the official reports drawn up by each Army under the
British Command are "secret documents." The artillery dispositions of
the great battles which brought the war to an end cannot yet be
disclosed. There can, therefore, be no proper maps of these battles for
some time to come, while some of the latest developments in offensive
warfare which were to have been launched upon the enemy had the war
continued, are naturally not for the public for a good while ahead. And
considering that, year by year, we are still discussing and investigating
the battles of a hundred years ago--(look for instance at the lists of
recent books on the Napoleonic campaigns in the Cambridge Moddern
History!)--we may guess at the time mankind will take hereafter in
writing about and elucidating a war, where in many of the great actions,
as a Staff Officer remarked to me, a Waterloo might have been lost
without being missed, or won without being more than a favourable
incident in an otherwise perhaps unfavourable whole.
At the same time, this generation has got somehow--as an ingredient in
its daily life--to form as clear a mental picture as it can of the war as a

whole, and especially just now of its closing months in France. For the
history of those last months is at the present moment an active agent in
the European situation. What one may call the war-consciousness of
France, with the first battle of the Marne, glorious Verdun, the
Champagne battle-field, the victorious leadership of Marshal Foch, on
the one hand--her hideous losses in men, her incalculable loss in
material and stored-up wealth, and her stern claim for adequate
protection in future, on the other, as its main elements; the
war-consciousness of Great Britain and the Empire, turning essentially
on the immortal defence of the Ypres salient and the Channel ports, the
huge sacrifices of the Somme, the successes and disappointments of
1917, the great defensive battle of last March, and the immediate and
brilliant reaction, leading in less than five months to the beginning of
that series of great actions on the British front which finished the
war--all interpenetrated with the sense of perpetual growth in efficiency
and power; and finally, the American war-consciousness, as it emerged
from the war, with its crusading impulse intact, its sense of boundless
resources, and its ever-fresh astonishment at the irrevocable part
America was now called on to play in European affairs:--amid these
three great and sometimes clashing currents, the visitor to France lived
and moved in the early weeks of the year. And then, of course, there
was the Belgian war-consciousness--a new thing for Belgium and for
Europe. But with that I was not concerned.
Let me try to show by an illustration or two drawn from my own recent
experience what the British war-consciousness means.
It was a beautiful January day when we started from the little inn at
Cassel for Ypres, Menin, Lille, Lens, and Vimy. From the wonderful
window at the back of the inn, high perched as Cassel is above