Now It Can Be Told | Page 6

close. Sir John French had his
headquarters for the night in Creil. English, Irish, Scottish soldiers,
stragglers from units still keeping some kind of order, were coming in,
bronzed, dusty, parched with thirst, with light wounds tied round with
rags, with blistered feet. French soldiers, bearded, dirty, thirsty as dogs,
crowded the station platforms. They, too, had been retreating and
retreating. A company of sappers had blown up forty bridges of France.
Under a gas-lamp in a foul-smelling urinal I copied out the diary of
their officer. Some spiritual faith upheld these men. "Wait," they said.
"In a few days we shall give them a hard knock. They will never get
Paris. Jamais de la vie!" . . .
In Beauvais there was hardly a living soul when three English
correspondents went there, after escape from Amiens, now in German
hands. A tall cuirassier stood by some bags of gunpowder, ready to
blow up the bridge. The streets were strewn with barbed wire and
broken bottles . . . In Paris there was a great fear and solitude, except
where grief-stricken crowds stormed the railway stations for escape and
where French and British soldiers--stragglers all--drank together, and
sang above their broken glasses, and cursed the war and the Germans.
And down all the roads from the front, on every day in every month of
that first six months of war--as afterward--came back the tide of
wounded; wounded everywhere, maimed men at every junction;
hospitals crowded with blind and dying and moaning men . . . .
"Had an interesting time?" asked a man I wanted to kill because of his
smug ignorance, his damnable indifference, his impregnable stupidity
of cheerfulness in this world of agony. I had changed the clothes which
were smeared with blood of French and Belgian soldiers whom I had
helped, in a week of strange adventure, to carry to the surgeons. As an
onlooker of war I hated the people who had not seen, because they
could not understand. All these things I had seen in the first nine
months I put down in a book called The Soul of the War, so that some

might know; but it was only a few who understood. . . .

II
In 1915 the War Office at last moved in the matter of war
correspondents. Lord Kitchener, prejudiced against them, was being
broken down a little by the pressure of public opinion (mentioned from
time to time by members of the government), which demanded more
news of their men in the field than was given by bald
communiqués from General Headquarters and by an
"eye-witness" who, as one paper had the audacity to say, wrote nothing
but "eye-wash." Even the enormous, impregnable stupidity of our High
Command on all matters of psychology was penetrated by a vague
notion that a few "writing fellows" might be sent out with permission to
follow the armies in the field, under the strictest censorship, in order to
silence the popular clamor for more news. Dimly and nervously they
apprehended that in order to stimulate the recruiting of the New Army
now being called to the colors by vulgar appeals to sentiment and
passion, it might be well to "write up" the glorious side of war as it
could be seen at the base and in the organization of transport, without,
of course, any allusion to dead or dying men, to the ghastly failures of
distinguished generals, or to the filth and horror of the battlefields.
They could not understand, nor did they ever understand (these soldiers
of the old school) that a nation which was sending all its sons to the
field of honor desired with a deep and poignant craving to know how
those boys of theirs were living and how they were dying, and what
suffering was theirs, and what chances they had against their enemy,
and how it was going with the war which was absorbing all the energy
and wealth of the people at home.
"Why don't they trust their leaders?" asked the army chiefs. "Why don't
they leave it to us?"
"We do trust you--with some misgivings," thought the people, "and we
do leave it to you--though you seem to be making a mess of things--but
we want to know what we have a right to know, and that is the life and

progress of this war in which our men are engaged. We want to know
more about their heroism, so that it shall be remembered by their
people and known by the world; about their agony, so that we may
share it in our hearts; and about the way of their death, so that our grief
may be softened by the thought of their courage. We will not stand for
this anonymous war; and you are