Over There | Page 7

me. All
details of the excursions were elaborately organised; never once did the
organisation break down. No pre- Lusitania American correspondent
could have been more spoiled by Germans desperately anxious for his
goodwill than I was spoiled by these French who could not gain my
goodwill because they had the whole of it already. After the rites of
greeting, we walked up to the high terrace of a considerable chateau
close by, and France lay before us in a shimmering vast semicircle. In
the distance, a low range of hills, irregularly wooded; then a river; then
woods and spinneys; then vineyards--boundless vineyards which
climbed in varying slopes out of the valley almost to our feet. Far to the

left was a town with lofty factory chimneys, smokeless.
Peasant women were stooping in the vineyards; the whole of the earth
seemed to be cultivated and to be yielding bounteously. It was a
magnificent summer afternoon. The sun was high and a few huge
purple shadows moved with august deliberation across the brilliant
greens. An impression of peace, majesty, grandeur; and of the mild,
splendid richness of the soil of France.
"You see that white line on the hills opposite," said an officer, opening
a large-scale map.
I guessed it was a level road.
"That is the German trenches," said he. "They are five miles away.
Their gun-positions are in the woods. Our own trenches are invisible
from here."
It constituted a great moment, this first vision of the German trenches.
With the thrill came the lancinating thought: "All of France that lies
beyond that line, land just like the land on which I am standing,
inhabited by people just like the people who are talking to me, is under
the insulting tyranny of the invader." And I also thought, as the sense of
distance quickened my imagination to realise that these trenches
stretched from Ostend to Switzerland, and that the creators of them
were prosecuting similar enterprises as far north- east as Riga, and as
far southeast as the confines of Roumania: "The brigands are mad, but
they are mad in the grand manner."
We were at the front.
We had driven for twenty miles along a very busy road which was
closed to civilians, and along which even Staff officers could not travel
without murmuring the password to placate the hostile vigilance of
sentries. The civil life of the district was in abeyance, proceeding
precariously from meal to meal. Aeroplanes woke the sleep. No letter
could leave a post office without a precautionary delay of three days.

Telegrams were suspect. To get into a railway station was almost as
difficult as to get into paradise. A passport or a safe-conduct was the
sine qua non of even the restricted liberty which had survived. And yet
nowhere did I see a frown nor hear a complaint. Everybody
comprehended that the exigencies of the terrific military machine were
necessary exigencies. Everybody waited, waited, in confidence and
with tranquil smiles. Also it is misleading to say that civil life was in
abeyance. For the elemental basis of its prosperity and its amenities
continued just as though the lunatic bullies of Potsdam had never
dictated to Vienna the ultimatum for Serbia. The earth was yielding,
fabulously. It was yielding up to within a mile and a half of the German
wire entanglements. The peasants would not neglect the earth. Officers
remonstrated with them upon their perilous rashness. They replied:
"The land must be tilled."
When the German artillery begins to fire, the blue-clad women sink out
of sight amid the foliage. Half an hour after it has ceased they
cautiously emerge, and resume. One peasant put up an umbrella, but he
was a man.
We were veritably at the front. There was, however, not a whisper of
war, nor anything visible except the thin, pale line like a striation on the
distant hills. Then a far-off sound of thunder is heard. It is a gun. A
faint puff of smoke is pointed out to us. Neither the rumble nor the
transient cloudlet makes any apparent impression on the placid and
wide dignity of the scene. Nevertheless, this is war. And war seems a
very vague, casual, and negligible thing. We are led about fifty feet to
the left, where in a previous phase a shell has indented a huge hole in
the earth. The sight of this hole renders war rather less vague and rather
less negligible.
"There are eighty thousand men in front of us," says an officer,
indicating the benign shimmering, empty landscape.
"But where?"
"Interred--in the trenches."

It is incredible.
"And the other interred--the dead?"
I ask.
"We never speak of them. But we think of them a good deal."
Still a little closer to war. The parc du genie--engineers park. BEHIND
We inspected