Letters from France | Page 6

you hear that that house was levelled to the
ground next morning--a shrapnel shell on each side of it to get the
range--a high explosive into it to burst it up--and an incendiary shell to
burn the rubbish; and one more French family is homeless.
It takes you some time to realise that it was you who burnt that
house--you and that working party which moved past the cross-roads so
often. Somebody must have seen you when the shell burst alongside
that hedge. Somebody must have been watching you all the time when
you were loitering with your map at that corner. Somebody, at any rate,
must have been marking down from the distance everything that
happened at those cross-roads. Somebody in the landscape is clearly
watching you all the while. And then for the first time you recall that
those grey trees in the distance must be behind the German lines; that
distant roof and chimney notched against a background of scrub is in
German ground; the pretty blue hill against which the willows in the
plain show out like a row of railway sleepers is cut off from you by a
barrier deeper than the Atlantic--the German trenches; and that from all
yonder landscape, which moves behind the screen of nearer trees as
you walk, eyes are watching for you all day long; telescopes are glaring
at you; brains behind the telescopes are patiently reconstructing, from
every movement in our roads or on our fields, the method of our life,
studying us as a naturalist watches his ants under a glass case.
Long before you get near the lines, away over the horizon before you,
there is floating what looks most like a flat white garden grub--small
because of its distance. Look to the south and to the north and you will
see at wide intervals others, one after the other until they fade into the
distance. Every fine day brings them out as regularly as the worms rise
after rain; they sit there all day long in the sky, each one apparently
drowsing over his own stretch of country. But they are anything but
drowsy. Each one contains his own quick eyes, keen brain, his
telescope, his telephone, and heaven knows what instruments. And out
on every beautiful fresh morning of spring come the butterflies of
modern warfare--two or three of our own planes, low down; and then a
white insect very, very high--now hidden behind a cloud, now
appearing again across the rift. It is delightful to stand there and watch

it all like a play. The bombs, if they drop 'em, are worth risking any
day.
But it isn't the bombs that matter, and it isn't you who run the risk. The
observer is not there to drop bombs, in most cases, but to watch, watch,
watch. A motor standing by the roadside, a body of men about some
work, extra traffic along a road--and a red tick goes down on a map;
that is all. You go away. But next day, or sometimes much sooner, that
red tick comes up for shelling as part of the normal day's routine of
some German battery.
So if these letters from France ever seem thin, remember that the war
correspondent does not wish to give to the enemy for a penny what he
would gladly give a regiment to get. On our way back is a field
pock-marked by a hundred ancient shell-holes around a few deserted
earthworks. On some bygone afternoon it must have been wild, raging,
reeking hell there for half an hour or so. Somebody in this landscape
put a red tick once against that long-forgotten corner.
CHAPTER IV
THE ROAD TO LILLE
France, April.
There is a house at a certain corner I passed of late. On it, in big white
letters on a blue ground, is written "To Lille." Every township for a
hundred miles has that same signpost, showing you the way to the great
city of Northern France. But Rockefeller himself with all his
motor-cars could not follow its direction to-day. For the city to which it
points is six miles behind the German lines. You can get from our lines
the edge of some outlying suburb overlapping a distant hill-top.
And that is all that the French people can see of the second city of their
State. The distant roofs, the smoke rising from some great centre of
human activity nestled in a depression into which you cannot look; you
can peer at them all day long through a telescope and wonder why it is
they are stoking their chimneys, or what it is that causes the haze to

hang deeply on such and such a day over this or that corner--you can
study the place as an astronomer studies the