The Old Front Line | Page 5

too, on the two roads to the east of the
Ancre River, the troops for the battle moved up to the line. The

battalions were played by their bands through Albert, and up the slope
of Usna Hill to Pozières and beyond, or past Fricourt and the wreck of
Mametz to Montauban and the bloody woodland near it. Those roads
then were indeed paths of glory leading to the grave.
During the months which preceded the Battle of the Somme, other
roads behind our front lines were more used than these. Little villages,
out of shell fire, some miles from the lines, were then of more use to us
than Albert. Long after we are gone, perhaps, stray English tourists,
wandering in Picardy, will see names scratched in a barn, some mark or
notice on a door, some sign-post, some little line of graves, or hear, on
the lips of a native, some slang phrase of English, learned long before
in the wartime, in childhood, when the English were there. All the
villages behind our front were thronged with our people. There they
rested after being in the line and there they established their hospitals
and magazines. It may be said, that men of our race died in our cause in
every village within five miles of the front. Wherever the traveller
comes upon a little company of our graves, he will know that he is near
the site of some old hospital or clearing station, where our men were
brought in from the line.
* * * * *
So much for the roads by which our men marched to this battlefield.
Near the lines they had to leave the roads for the shelter of some
communication trench or deep cut in the mud, revetted at the sides with
wire to hinder it from collapsing inwards. By these deep narrow roads,
only broad enough for marching in single file, our men passed to "the
front," to the line itself. Here and there, in recesses in the trench, under
roofs of corrugated iron covered with sandbags, they passed the offices
and the stores of war, telephonists, battalion headquarters, dumps of
bombs, barbed wire, rockets, lights, machine-gun ammunition, tins, jars,
and cases. Many men, passing these things as they went "in" for the
first time, felt with a sinking of the heart, that they were leaving all
ordered and arranged things, perhaps forever, and that the men in
charge of these stores enjoyed, by comparison, a life like a life at home.
Much of the relief and munitioning of the fighting lines was done at

night. Men going into the lines saw little of where they were going.
They entered the gash of the communication trench, following the load
on the back of the man in front, but seeing perhaps nothing but the
shape in front, the black walls of the trench, and now and then some
gleam of a star in the water under foot. Sometimes as they marched
they would see the starshells, going up and bursting like rockets, and
coming down With a wavering slow settling motion, as white and
bright as burning magnesium wire, shedding a kind of dust of light
upon the trench and making the blackness intense when they went out.
These lights, the glimmer in the sky from the enemy's guns, and now
and then the flash of a shell, were the things seen by most of our men
on their first going in.
In the fire trench they saw little more than the parapet. If work were
being done in the No Man's Land, they still saw little save by these
lights that floated and fell from the enemy and from ourselves. They
could see only an array of stakes tangled with wire, and something
distant and dark which might be similar stakes, or bushes, or men, in
front of what could only be the enemy line. When the night passed, and
those working outside the trench had to take shelter, they could see
nothing, even at a loophole or periscope, but the greenish strip of
ground, pitted with shell-holes and fenced with wire, running up to the
enemy line. There was little else for them to see, looking to the front,
for miles and miles, up hill and down dale.
The soldiers who held this old front line of ours saw this grass and wire
day after day, perhaps, for many months. It was the limit of their world,
the horizon of their landscape, the boundary. What interest there was in
their life was the speculation, what lay beyond that wire, and what the
enemy was doing there. They seldom saw an enemy. They heard his
songs and they were stricken by his missiles, but seldom saw more than,
perhaps, a swiftly moving cap