Rudyard Kipling - "France at War" - 1915 - Classic Short Stories - AI Narrator

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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Rudyard Kipling France at War on the Frontier of Civilization,
published in nineteen fifteen. France broke to every known mischance,
lifted over all by the light, sane joy of life,
the buckler of the gall, furious in luxury, merciless in toil,

(00:21):
terrible with strength that draws from her tireless soil, strictest
judge of her own worth, gentlest of men's mind, first
to follow truth, and last to leave old truths behind.
France beloved of every soul that loves its fellow kind.
Ere our birth rememberest thou. Side by side we lay
fretting in the womb of Rome. To begin the fray.

(00:43):
Ere men knew our tongues apart, our one taste was known.
Each must mold the other's fate as he wrought his own.
To this end, we stirred mankind till all earth was ours,
till our world end. Strifes began wayside, thrones and powers,
puppets that we made or broke to bar they the
other's path necessary outpost folk, hirelings of our wrath. To

(01:05):
this end we stormed the seas, tack for tack, and
burst through the doorways of new worlds doubtful, which was
first hand on hilt rememberest thou ready for the blow? Sure,
whatever else we met, we should meet our foe. Spurred
or balked at every stride by the other's strength. So
we rode the ages down in every ocean's length. Where

(01:28):
did you refrain from us? Or we refrain from you?
Ask the wave that has not watched war between us?
Two others held us for a while, But with weaker charms,
these we quitted at the call for each other's arms,
eager toward the known delight. Equally we strove each the
other's mystery, terror, need, and love to each other's open court.

(01:51):
With our proofs we came where could we find honor
else or men? To test the claim from each other's throat.
We wrenched valor's last reward, that extorted word of praise,
gasped TwixT lunge and guard in each other's cup. We poured,
mingled blood and tears, brutal joys, unmeasured hopes, intolerable fears,

(02:11):
All that soiled or salted life for a thousand years
proved beyond the need of proof, matched in every climb,
O companion, we have lived greatly through all time, yoked
in knowledge and remorse. Now we come to rest, laughing
at old villanies, that time has turned to jest, pardoning
old necessity. No pardon can efface that undying sin we

(02:32):
shared in ruan market place. Now we watch the new
year's shape, wondering if they hold fiercer lighting in their
hearts than we launched of old. Now we hear new
voices rise, question, boast, or gird. As we raged, rememberest
thou when our crowds were stirred. Now we count new

(02:52):
keels afloat and new hosts on land mast liked ours,
rememberest thou when our strokes were planned. We were schooled
for dear life's sake to know each other's blade. What
can blood and iron make more than we have made?
We have learned by keenest use, to know each other's mind.
What shall blood and iron loose that we cannot bind?

(03:14):
We who swept each other's coast, sacked each other's home.
Since the sword of Brennus clashed on the scales at Rome,
listen court and close again, wheeling girth to girth in
the strained and bloodless guard set for peace on earth
broke to every known mischance, lifted over all by the light,
sane joy of life. The buckler of the gall, furious

(03:35):
in luxury, merciless in toil, terrible with strength renewed from
a tireless soil, strictest judge of her own worth, gentlest
of men's mind, first to follow truth, and last to
leave old truths behind. France, beloved of every soul that
loves or serves its kind, one on the frontier of civilization.

(03:57):
It's a pretty park, said the French artillery officer. We've
done a lot for it since the owner left. I
hope he'll appreciate it when he comes back. The car
traversed a winding drive through woods between banks, embellished with
little chalets of a rustic nature. At first, the chalets
stood their full height above ground, suggesting tea gardens in England.

(04:21):
Further on, they sank into the earth till at the
top of the ascent only their solid brown roofs showed
torn branches drooping across the driveway, with here and there
a scorched patch of undergrowth, explained the reason of their modesty.
The chateau that commanded these glories of forest and park
sat boldly on a terrace. There was nothing wrong with it,

(04:44):
except if one looked closely a few scratches or dints
on its white stone walls, or a neatly drilled hole
under a flight of steps. One such hole ended in
an unexploded shell. Yes, said the officer, they arrive here.
Occasionally something bellowed across the folds of the wooded hills.

(05:06):
Something grunted in reply. Something passed overhead querulously, but not
without dignity. Two clear, fresh barks joined the chorus, and
a man moved lazily in the direction of the guns. Well,
suppose we come and look at things a little, said
the commanding officer. An observation post, there was a specimen tree,

(05:31):
a tree worthy of such a park, the sort of
tree visitors are always taken to admire. A ladder ran
up it to a platform. What little wind there was
swayed the tall top, and the ladder creaked like a
ship's gangway. A telephone bell tinkled fifty foot overhead. Two
invisible guns spoke fervently for half a minute, and broke off,

(05:53):
like terriers choked on a leash. We climbed till the
topmost platform swayed sickily beneath us. Here one found a
rustic shelter, always of the tea garden pattern, a table,
a map, and a little window wreathed with living branches
that gave one the first view of the devil and
all his works. It was a stretch of open country

(06:14):
with a few sticks, like old tooth brushes, which had
once been trees round a farm. The rest was yellow grass,
barren to all appearance as the velt. The grass is
yellow because they have used gas. Here set an officer.
Their trenches are you can see for yourself. The guns

(06:35):
in the woods began again. They seemed to have no
relation to the regularly spaced bursts of smoke along a
little smear in the desert earth two thousand yards away,
no connection at all with the strong voices overhead, coming
and going. It was as impersonal as the drive of
the sea along a breakwater. Thus it went a pause,

(06:57):
a gathering of sound, like the race of an incoming wave.
Then the high flung heads of breakers spouting white up
the face of a groin. Suddenly a seventh wave broke
and spread the shape of its foam like a plume,
overtopping all the others. That's one of our torpolurs, what
you call trench sweepers, said the observer. Among the whispering leaves.

(07:20):
Some one crossed the platform to consult the map with
its ranges. A blistering outbreak of white smokes rose a
little beyond the large plume. It was as though the
tide had struck a reef out yonder. Then a new
voice of tremendous volume lifted itself out of a lull
that followed. Somebody laughed. Evidently the voice was known. That

(07:43):
is not for us, a gunner said, they are being
waked up from he named a distant French position. So
and so is attending to them. There we go on
with our usual work. Look another torpolur, the barbarian. Again

(08:03):
a big plume rose, and again the lighter shells broke
at their appointed distance beyond it. The smoke died away
on that stretch of trench, as the foam of a
swell dies in the angle of a harbor wall, and
broke out afresh half a mile lower down. In its
apparent laziness, in its awful deliberation, and its quick spasms
of wrath, it was more like the work of waves

(08:25):
than of men, and our high platforms, gentle sway and
glide was exactly the motion of a ship drifting with
us toward that shore. The usual work, only the usual work,
the officer explained. Sometimes it is here, sometimes above or
below us. I have been here since May. A little

(08:48):
sunshine flooded the stricken landscape and made its chemical yellow
look more foul. A detachment of men moved out on
a road which ran toward the French trenches, and then
vanished at the foot of a little rise. Other men
appeared moving toward us, with that concentration of purpose and
bearing shown in both armies when dinner is at hand.

(09:09):
They looked like people who had been digging hard. The
same work, always the same work, the officer said. And
you could walk from here to the sea or to
Switzerland in that ditch, and you'll find the same work
going on everywhere. It isn't war. It's better than that,

(09:31):
said another. It's the eating up of a people. They
come and they fill the trenches, and they die, and
they die, and they send more and those die. We
do the same, of course. But look, he pointed to
the large, deliberate smoke heads renewing themselves along that yellowed beach.

(09:51):
That is the frontier of civilization. They have all civilization
against them, those brutes yonder. It's not the local victories
of the old wars that were after. It's the barbarian,
all the barbarian. Now you've seen the whole thing in
little Come and look at our children soldiers in caves.

(10:16):
We left that tall tree whose fruits are death ripened
and distributed. At the tingle of small bells, the observer
returned to his maps and calculations. The telephone boy stiffened
up beside his exchange as the amateurs went out of
his life. Some one called down through the branches to
ask who was attending to Blial. Let us say, for

(10:36):
I could not catch the gun's name. It seemed to
belong to that terrific new voice which had lifted itself
for the second or third time. It appeared from the
reply that if Blial talked too long, he would be
dealt with from another point miles away. The troops we
came down to see were at rest in a chain
of caves which had begun life as quarries and had

(10:58):
been fitted up by the army for its own uses.
There were underground corridors, ante chambers, rotundas and ventilating shafts,
with a bewildering play of cross lights, so that wherever
you looked you saw Goya's pictures of men at arms.
Every soldier has some of the old maid in him,
and rejoices in all the gadgets and devices of his

(11:19):
own invention. Death and wounding come by nature. But to
lie dry, sleep soft, and keep yourself clean by forethought
and contrivance is art. And in all things the frenchman
is gloriously an artist. Moreover, the French officers seem as
mother keen on their men, as their men are brother
fond of them. Maybe the possessive form of address, mon general,

(11:43):
mon capitain helps the idea which our men cloak in
other and curder phrases. And those soldiers like ours had
been welded for months in one furnace. As an officer said,
half our orders now need not be given. Experience make
us think together. I believe too, that if a French

(12:04):
private has an idea, and they are full of ideas,
it reaches his sea zero quicker than it does with
us the sentinel hounds. The overwhelming impression was the brilliant
health and vitality of these men, and the quality of
their breeding. They bore themselves with swing and rampant delight

(12:25):
in life. While their voices as they talked in the
side caverns among the stands of arms, were the controlled
voices of civilization. Yet as the lights pierced the gloom,
they looked like bandits dividing the spoil. One picture, though
far from war, stays with me. A perfectly built, dark skinned,
young giant had peeled himself out of his blue coat

(12:47):
and had brought it down with a swish, upon the
shoulder of a half stripped comrade, who was kneeling at
his feet with some footgear. They stood against a background
of semi luminous blue haze, through which glimmered a pile
of copper straw, half covered by a red blanket by
divine accident of light and pose at Saint Martin giving
his cloak to the beggar. There were scores of pictures

(13:10):
in these galleries, notably a rock hewn chapel, where the
red of the cross on the rough canvas altar cloth
glowed like a ruby. Further inside the caves we found
a row of little rock cut kennels, each inhabited by
one wise, silent dog. Their duties begin in at night
with the sentinels and listening posts. And believe me a

(13:32):
proud instructor, my fellow here knows the difference between the
noise of our shells and the boss shells. When we
came out into the open again, there were good opportunities
for this study. Voices and wings met and passed in
the air, and perhaps one strong young tree had not
been bending quite so far across the picturesque park drive

(13:54):
when we first went that way. Oh, yes, set an officer,
shells have to fall somewhere, And he added, with fine toleration,
it is after all against us that the Boshe directs them.
But come you and look at my dug out. It's
the most superior of all possible dug outs. No, come

(14:17):
and look at our mess. It's the ritz of these parts.
And they joyously told how they had got or procured
the various fittings and elegancies, while hands stretched out of
the gloom to shake, and men nodded welcome and greeting.
All through that cheery brotherhood in the woods work in
the fields, the voices and the wings were still busy

(14:40):
after lunch when the car slipped past the tea houses
in the drive and came into a country where women
and children worked among the crops. There were large raw
shell holes by the wayside or in the midst of fields,
and often a cottage or a villa had been smashed,
as a bonnet box is smashed by an umbrella. That
m mus be part of Belial's work when he bellows

(15:02):
so truculently among the hills to the north. We were
looking for a town that lives under shell fire. The
regular road to it was reported unhealthy, not that the
women and children seemed to care. We took byways of
which certain exposed heights and corners were lightly blinded by
wind breaks of dried tree tops. Here the shell holes

(15:25):
were rather thick on the ground, but the women and
the children and the old men went on with their
work with the cattle and the crops. And where a
house had been broken by shells, the rubbish was collected
in a neat pile, And where a room or two
still remained usable, it was inhabited, and the tattered window
curtains fluttered as proudly as any flag. And time was

(15:45):
when I used to denounce young France because it tried
to kill itself beneath my car wheels. And the fat
old women who crossed roads without warning, and the specially
deaf old men who slept in carts on the wrong
side of the road. Now I could take off my
hat to every single soul of them, but that one
cannot traverse a whole land bare headed. The nearer we

(16:08):
came to our town, the fewer were the people, Till
at last we halted in a well built suburb of
paved streets where there was no life at all, a
wrecked town. The stillness was as terrible as the spread
of the quick, busy weeds between the paving stones. The
air smelt of pounded mortar and crushed stone. The sound

(16:28):
of a footfall echoed like the drop of a pebble
in a well. At first, the horror of wrecked apartment
houses and big shops laid open makes one waste energy
in anger. It is not seemly that rooms should be
torn out of the sides of buildings as one tears
the soft heart out of English bread, that villa roofs
should lie across iron gates of private garages, or that

(16:49):
drawing room doors should flap alone and disconnected between two
emptinesses of twisted girders. The eye wearies of the repeated
pattern that burst shells make on stone walls, as the
mouth sickens of the taste of mortar and charred timber.
One quarter of the place had been shelled nearly level.
The facades of the houses stood doorless, roofless, and windowless,

(17:12):
like stage scenery. This was near the cathedral, which is
always a favorite mark for the heathen. They had gashed
and ripped the sides of the cathedral itself so that
the birds flew in and out at will. They had
smashed holes in the roof, knocked huge cantles out of
the buttresses, and pitted and starred the paved square outside.

(17:32):
They were at work too that very afternoon, though I
do not think the cathedral was their objective. For the moment,
we walked to and fro in the silence of the streets,
and beneath the whirring wings overhead. Presently a young woman
keeping to the wall, crossed a corner. An old woman
opened a shutter, how it jarred, and spoke to her.

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The silence closed again, But it seemed to me that
I heard a sound of singing, the sort of chant
one hears in nightmare cities, of voices crying from underground
in the cathedral. Nonsense, said an officer, who should be
singing here. We circled the cathedral again and saw what

(18:17):
pavement stones can do against their own city when the
shell jerks them upward. But there was singing after all.
On the other side of a little door in the
flank of the cathedral. We looked in doubting and saw
at least one hundred folk, mostly women, who knelt before
the altar of an unwrecked chapel. We withdrew quietly from

(18:38):
that holy ground, and it was not only the eyes
of the French officers that filled with tears. Then there
came an old, old thing with a prayer book in
her hand, pattering across the square, evidently late for service.
And who are those women, I asked. Some are caretakers,
people who have still little shops here. There is one

(19:01):
quarter where you can buy things. There are many old people,
two who will not go away. They are of the
place you see. And this bombardment happens often, I said,
it happens always. Would you like to look at the
railway station. Of course, it has not been so bombarded

(19:24):
as the cathedral. We went through the gross nakedness of
streets without people till we reached the railway station, which
was very fairly knocked about, but as my friend said,
nothing like as much as the cathedral. Then we had
to cross the end of a long street down which
the Bosche could see clearly. As one glanced up it,

(19:44):
one perceived how the weeds to whom men's war is
the truce of God, had come back and were well
established the whole length of it, watched by the long
perspective of open empty windows. Two the nation's spirit and
a new inheritance. We left that stricken but undefeated town,
dodged a few miles down the roads beside which the

(20:06):
women tended their cows, and dropped into a place on
a hill where a Moroccan regiment of many experiences was
in billets. They were Mohammedans, bafflingly like half a dozen
of our Indian frontier types, though they spoke no accessible tongue.
They had, of course turned the farm buildings where they
lay into a little bit of Africa in color and smell.

(20:29):
They had been gassed in the North shot over and
shot down and set up to be shelled again, and
their officers talked of North African wars that we had
never heard of, sultry days against long odds in the
desert years ago. Afterward, is it not so with you? Also?
We get our best recruits from the tribes we have fought.

(20:49):
These men are children. They make no trouble. They only
want to go where cartridges are burnt. They are of
the few races to whom fighting is a pleasure. And
how long have you dealt with them? A long time?
A long time I helped to organize the core. I

(21:10):
am one of those whose heart is in Africa. He
spoke slowly, almost feeling for his French words, and gave
some order. I shall not forget his eyes as he
turned to a huge brown a free d like Mussulman,
hunkering down beside his accouterments. He had two sides to
his head that bearded, burned. Slow spoken officer met and

(21:33):
parted within an hour. The day closed after an amazing
interlude in the Chateau of a Dream, which was all
glassy ponds, stately trees, and vistas of white and gold saloons.
The proprietor was somebody's chauffeur at the front, and we
drank to his excellent health at a little village in
a twilight, full of the petrol of many cars and

(21:55):
the wholesome flavor of healthy troops. There is no better
guide to camp than in one's own thoughtful nose. And
though I poked mine everywhere, in no place then or
later did it strike that vile, betraying taint of underfed
on clean men, And the same with the horses. The
line that never sleeps. It is difficult to keep an

(22:18):
edge after hours of fresh air and experiences, so one
does not get the most from the most interesting part
of the day, the dinner with the local headquarters. Here
the professionals meet the line, the gunners, the intelligence with
stupefying photo plans of the enemy's trenches, the supply, the staff,
who collect and note all things, and are very properly chaffed,

(22:40):
and be sure, the interpreter, who, by force of questioning
prisoners naturally develops into a sadducey. It is their little
asides to each other, the slang and the half words, which,
if one understood, instead of blinking drowsily at one's plate
would give the day's history in little but tire, and
the difficulties of a sister. Not a foreign tongue cloud everything.

(23:04):
And one goes to billets amid a murmur of voices,
the rush of single cars through the night, the passage
of battalions, and behind it all the echo of the
deep voices calling one to the other along the line
that never sleeps. The ridge with the scattered pines might
have hidden children at play. Certainly a horse would have

(23:24):
been quite visible, but there was no hint of guns,
except a semaphore which announced it was forbidden to pass
that way as the battery was firing. The botches must
have looked for that battery too. The ground was pitted
with shell holes of all calibers, some of them as
fresh as mole casts in the misty, damp morning. Others
where the poppies had grown from seed to flower all

(23:47):
through the summer. And where are the guns? I demanded?
At last they were almost under one's hand, their ammunition
in cellars and dug outs beside them. As far as
one can make out, the seventy five gun has no
pet name. The bayonet is Rosalie, the Virgin of Bayonne.

(24:07):
But the seventy five, the watchful nurse of the trenches
and little sister of the line, seems to be always
souissant Quinns. Even those who love her best do not
insist that she is beautiful. Her merits are French logic, directness, simplicity,
and the supreme gift of occasionality. She is equal to

(24:29):
everything on the spur of the moment. One sees and
studies the few appliances which make her do what she does,
and one feels that any one could have invented her
famous French seventy fives. As a matter of fact, says
a commandant, anybody, or rather everybody did. The general idea

(24:51):
is after such and such system, the patent of which
had expired, and we improved it the breech action with
slight modification somebody else's. The sighting is perhaps a little special,
and so is the traversing. But at bottom it is
only an assembly of variations and arrangements. That, of course,

(25:12):
is all that Shakespeare ever got out of the alphabet.
The French artillery make their own guns, as he made
his plays. It is just as simple as that. There
is nothing going on for the moment, it's too misty,
said the commandant. I fancy that the bosch, being as
a rule methodical, amateurs are introduced to batteries in the

(25:33):
Bosch's intervals. At least there are hours healthy and unhealthy,
which vary with each position. But the commandant reflected, a moment,
there is a place and a distance. Let us say
he gave arrange. The gun servers stood back, with the
bored contempt of the professional for the layman who intrudes

(25:56):
on his mysteries. Other civilians had come that way before,
had seen and grinned, and complimented, and gone their way,
leaving the gunners high up on the bleak hill side
to grill or mildew or freeze for weeks and months.
Then she spoke. Her voice was higher pitched, it seemed,
than ours, with a more shrewish tang to the speeding shell.

(26:19):
Her recoil was as swift and as graceful as the
shrug of a French woman's shoulders. The empty case leaped
forth and clanged against the trail. The tops of two
or three pines fifty yards away nodded knowingly to each other,
though there was no wind. They'll be bothered down below
to know the meaning of our single shot. We don't

(26:40):
give them one dose at a time as a rule.
Somebody laughed. We waited in the fragrant silence. Nothing came
back from the mist that clogged the lower grounds, though
no shell of this war was ever launched with more
earnest prayers that it might do hurt. Then they talked
about the lives of guns, what number of rounds some
will stand and others will not, how soon one can

(27:02):
make two good guns out of three spoilt ones, and
what crazy luck sometimes goes with a single shot or
a blind salvo lessen from the bosche. A shell must
fall somewhere, and by the law of averages, occasionally light
straight as a homing pigeon on the one spot where
it can wreck most. Then earth opens for yards around,

(27:25):
and men must be dug out, some merely breathless, who
shake their ears, swear and carry on, and others whose
souls have gone loose among terrors. These have to be
dealt with as their psychology demands, and the French officer
is a good psychologist. One of them said, our national
psychology has changed. I do not recognize it myself. What

(27:50):
made the change? The bosh. If he had been quiet
for another twenty years, the world must have been his rotten,
but all his Now He is saving the world, how
because he has shown us what evil is. We, you
and I, England and the rest had begun to doubt

(28:13):
the existence of evil. The Bausch is saving us. Then
we had another look at the animal in its trench,
a little nearer this time than before, and quieter on
account of the mist. Pick up the chain anywhere you please,
you shall find the same observation post, table, map, observer
and telephonist, the same always hidden, always ready guns, and

(28:36):
same vexed foreshore of trenches, smoking and shaking from Switzerland
to the sea. The handling of the war varies with
the nature of the country, but the tools are unaltered.
One looks upon them at last with the same weariness
of wonder as the eye receives from endless repetitions of
Egyptian hieroglyphics. A long, low profile with a lump to

(28:58):
one side means the field gun and its attendant ammunition case.
A circle and slot stand for an observation post. The
trench is a bent line studded with vertical plumes of explosion,
the great guns of position, coming and going on their motors,
repeat themselves as scarabs, And man himself is a small
blue smudge, no larger than a foresight, crawling and creeping,

(29:22):
or watching and running. Among all these terrific symbols tragedy
of Rems. But there is no hieroglyphic for Rems, no
blunting of the mind. At the abominations committed on the cathedral.
There the thing peers upward, maimed and blinded from out
of the utter wreckage of the archbishop's palace on the

(29:43):
one side, and dust heaps of crumbled houses on the other.
They shelled, as they still shell it with high explosives
and with incendiary shells, so that the statues and the
stonework in places are burned the color of raw flesh.
The gargoyles are smashed, stature hues, crockets and spires, tumbled,
walls split and torn, windows thrust out, and tracery obliterated.

(30:07):
Wherever one looks at the tortured pile, there is mutilation
and defilement. And yet it had never more of a
soul than it has to day. Inside. Cover yourselves, gentlemen,
said the sacristan. This place is no longer consecrated. Everything
is swept clear or burned out from end to end
except two candlesticks in front of the niche where Joan

(30:29):
of ARC's image used to stand. There is a French
flag there now. And the last time I saw Rheim's
Cathedral was in a spring twilight, when the great west
window glowed and the only lights within were those of
candles which some penitent English had lit in Joan's honor
on those same candlesticks. The high altar was covered with

(30:49):
floor carpets. The pavement tiles were cracked and jarred out
by the rubbish that had fallen from above. The floor
was gritty with dust of glass and powdered stone, little
twists of leading from the windows, and iron fragments. Two
great doors had been blown inwards by the blast of
a shell in the archbishop's garden, till they had bent

(31:09):
grotesquely to the curve of a cask. There they had
jammed the windows. But the record has been made, and
will be kept by better hands than mine. It will
last through the generation in which the Teuton is cut
off from the fellowship of mankind. All the long still
years when this war of the body is at an end,
and the real war begins. Reems is but one of

(31:33):
the altars which the Heathen have put up to commemorate
their own death. Throughout all the world it will serve.
There is a mark well known by now, which they
have left for a visible seal of their doom. When
they first set the place alight, some hundreds of their
wounded were being tended in the cathedral. The French saved

(31:53):
as many as they could, but some had to be left.
Among them was a major who lay with his back
against pillar. It has been ordained that the signs of
his torments should remain an outline of both legs and
half a body printed in greasy black upon the stones.
There are very many people who hope and pray that
the sign will be respected at least by our children's children.

(32:18):
Iron nerve and faith, and in the meantime Reams goes
about what business it may have with that iron nerve
and endurance and faith, which is the new inheritance of France.
There is agony enough when the big shells come in.
There is pain and terror among the people, and always
fresh desecration to watch and suffer the old men and

(32:40):
the women and the children drink of that cup daily,
and yet the bitterness does not enter into their souls.
Mere words of admiration are impertinent, But the exquisite quality
of the French soul has been the marvel to me throughout.
They say themselves when they talk, we did not know
what our nation want was. Frankly, we did not expect

(33:03):
it ourselves. But the thing came, and you see, we
go on. Or, as a woman put it more logically,
what else can we do? Remember, we knew the bowsh
in seventy when you did not. We know what he
has done in the last year. This is not war.
It is against wild beasts that we fight. There is

(33:25):
no arrangement possible with wild beasts. This is the one
vital point which we in England must realize. We are
dealing with animals who have scientifically and philosophically removed themselves
inconceivably outside civilization. When you have heard a few, only
a few tales of their doings, you begin to understand

(33:46):
a little. When you have seen reams, you understand a
little more. When you have looked long enough at the
faces of the women, you are inclined to think that
the women will have a large say in the final
judgment they have earned at a thousand times three battle
spectacle and a review. Traveling with two chauffeurs is not

(34:09):
the luxury it looks, since there is only one of you,
and there is always another of those iron men to
relieve the wheel. Nor can I decide whether an ex
professor of the German tongue, or an ex road racer
who has lived six years abroad, or a Marichal de
logis or a brigadier makes the most thrusting driver through
three mile stretches of military traffic repeated at half hour intervals.

(34:32):
Sometimes it was motor ambulances strung all along a level
or supply, or those eternal big guns coming round corners
with trees chained on their long backs to puzzle aeroplanes
and their leafy, big shell limbers snorting behind them in
the rare breathing space's men with rollers and road metal
attacked the road in piece. The roads of France, thanks

(34:55):
to the motor, were none too good in war. They
stand the incessant traffic far better than they did with
the tourist. My impression after some seven hundred miles printed
off on me at between sixty and seventy kilometers was
of uniform excellence. Nor did I come upon any smashes
or breakdowns in that distance, and they were certainly trying

(35:18):
them hard. Nor which is the greater marvel, did we
kill anybody, though we did miracles down the streets to
avoid babes, kittens and chickens. The land is used to
every detail of war, and to its grime and horror
and make shifts, but also to war's unbounded courtesy, kindness
and long suffering, and the gaiety that comes, thank God,

(35:40):
to balance overwhelming material loss farm life. Amidst war. There
was a village that had been stamped flat till it
looked older than Pompeii. There were not three roofs left,
nor one whole house. In most places you saw straight
into the cellar. The hops were ripe in the grave

(36:02):
dotted fields round about. They had been brought in and
piled in the nearest outline of a dwelling. Women sat
on chairs on the pavement picking the good smelling bundles.
When they had finished one, they reached back and pulled
out another through the window hole behind them, talking and laughing.
The while a cart had to be maneuvered out of

(36:23):
what had been a farmyard to take the hops to market.
A thick, broad, fair haired wench of the sort that
Millet drew, flung all her weight on a spoke and
brought the cart forward into the street. Then she shook
herself and hands on hips, danced a little defiant jig
in her sabbos. As she went back to get the horse,

(36:45):
another girl came across a bridge. She was precisely of
the opposite type, slender, creamy skinned, and delicate featured. She
carried a brand new broom over her shoulder through that
desolation and bore her herself with the pride and grace
of queen assault. The farm girl came out leading the horse,

(37:06):
and as the two young things passed, they nodded and
smiled at each other, with the delicate tangle of the
hop vines at their feet. The gun spoke earnestly in
the north. That was the Argonne, where the Crown Prince
was busily getting rid of a few thousands of his
father's faithful subjects in order to secure himself the reversion
of his father's throne. No man likes losing his job,

(37:30):
and when at long lasts the inner history of this
war comes to be written, we may find that the
people we mistook for principles and prime agents were only
average incompetence, moving all hell to avoid dismissal. For it
is absolutely true that when a man sells his soul
to the devil, he does it for the price of
half nothing. Watching the gun fire, it must have been

(37:53):
a hot fight. A village wrecked, as is usual along
this line, opened on it from a hillside that overlooked
an Italian landscape of carefully drawn hills studded with small villages,
a plain with a road and a river in the foreground,
and an all revealing afternoon light upon everything. The hill
smoked and shook and bellowed. An observation balloon climbed up

(38:16):
to sea, while an aeroplane which had nothing to do
with the strife but was merely training a beginner, ducked
and swooped on the edge of the plain. Two rows
pink pillars of crumbled masonry guarding some carefully trimmed evergreens
on a lawn half buried in rubbish represented an hotel
where the Crown Prince had once stayed. All up the

(38:38):
hill side to our right, the foundations of houses lay
out like a bit of tripe, with the sunshine in
their square hollows. Suddenly a band began to play up
the hill among some trees, and an officer of local
guards in the new steel anti shrapnel helmet, which is
like the seventeenth century Salat, suggested that we should climb
and get a better view. He was a kindly man,

(38:59):
and in speaking England, Bush had discovered, as I do
when speaking French, that it is simpler to stick to
one gender. His choice was the feminine, and the bosh,
described as sheek throughout made me think better of myself,
which is the essence of friendship. We climbed a flight
of old stone steps for generations the playground of little children,

(39:20):
and found a ruined church and a battalion in billets
recreating themselves with excellent music and a little horseplay on
the outer edge of the crowd. The trouble in the
hills was none of their business for that day. Still,
higher up on a narrow path among the trees stood
a priest and three or four officers. They watched the

(39:40):
battle and claimed the great bursts of smoke for one
side or the other. At the same time as they
kept an eye on the flickering aeroplane. Ours, they said,
half under their breath. Theirs, no, not ours, that one, theirs.
That fool is banking two ston deep. That's boss shrapnel.

(40:03):
They always burst it high. That's our big gun. Behind
that outer hill. He'll drop his machine in the street
if he doesn't take care. There goes a trench sweeper.
Those last two were theirs, but that it was a
full roar was ours. Behind the German lines. The valley

(40:25):
held and increased the sounds till they seemed to hit
our hillside like a sea. A change of light showed
a village exquisitely penciled atop of a hill, with reddish
haze at its feet. What is that place, I asked?
The priest, replied, in a voice as deep as an organ.

(40:45):
That is saint. It is in the Bosch lines. Its
condition is pitiable. The thunders and the smokes rolled up
and diminished and renewed themselves, but the small children romped
up and down the old stone steps. The beginner's airplane
unsteadily chased its own shadow over the fields, and the
soldiers in billet asked the band for their favorite tunes,

(41:08):
said the lieutenant of local guards. As the cars went on,
she play Tipperary, and she did to an accompaniment of
heavy pieces in the hills, which followed us into a town,
all ringed with enormous searchlights. French and boshed together, scowling
at each other beneath the stars. It happened about that

(41:29):
time that Lord Kitchener with General Joffrey, reviewed a French
army corps. We came on it in a vast dip
of ground, under gray clouds, as one comes suddenly on water.
For it lay out in misty blue lakes of men,
mixed with darker patches like osures, and undergrowth of guns,
horses and wagons. A straight road cut the landscape in

(41:51):
two along its murmuring front. Veterans of the war, it
was as though Cadmus had sown the dragon teeth, not
in orderly furrows, but broadcast till horrified by what arose,
he had emptied out the whole bag and fled. But
these were no new warriors. The record of their mere

(42:12):
pitched battles would have satiated a Napoleon. Their regiments and
batteries had learnt to achieve the impossible as a matter
of routine, and in twelve months they had scarcely for
a week lost direct contact with death. We went down
the line and looked into the eyes of those men
with the used bayonets and rifles, the packs that could
almost stow themselves on the shoulders that would be strange

(42:34):
without them, at the splashed guns on their repaired wheels,
and the easy working limbers. One could feel the strength
and power of the mass as one feels the flush
of heat from off a sun baked wall. When the
general's cars arrived there there was no loud word or
galloping about the lakes of men gathered into straight edged battalions.

(42:56):
The batteries aligned a little, a squadron reined back or
bird up, but it was all as swiftly smooth as
the certainty with which a man used to the pistol
draws and levels it at the required moment. A few
peasant women saw the generals alight the aeroplanes, which had
been skimming low as swallows along the front of the line.

(43:17):
Theres must have been a superb view, ascended leisurely and
waited on like hawks. Then followed the inspection, and one
saw the two figures, tall and short, growing smaller side
by side along the white road till far off among
the cavalry. They entered their cars again and moved along
the horizon to another rise of gray green plain. The

(43:39):
army will move across where you are standing. Get to
a flank, some one said, an army in motion. We
were no more than well clear of that immobile host
when it all surged forward, headed by massed bands, playing
a tune that sounded like the very pulse of France.
The two generals, with their staff, and the French Minister

(44:02):
for War were on foot near a patch of very
green lucerne. They made about twenty figures in all. The
cars were little gray blocks against the gray skyline. There
was nothing else in all that great plane except the army.
No sound but the changing notes of the aeroplanes and
the blunted impression, rather than noise of feet of men

(44:23):
on soft ground. They came over a slight ridge, so
that one saw the curve of its first furred then
grasped with the tips of bayonets, which immediately grew to
full height, and then beneath them poured the wonderful infantry.
The speed, the thrust, the drive of that broad blue
mass was like a tide race up an arm of

(44:44):
the sea, and how such speed could go with such weight,
and how such weight could be in itself so absolutely
under control, filled one with terror. All the while the
band on a far headland was telling them, and telling
them as if they did not know of the passion
and gaiety and high heart of their own land, in
the speech that only they could fully understand. To hear

(45:07):
the music of a country is like hearing a woman
think aloud? What is the tune? I asked of an
officer beside me, my faith, I can't recall for the moment.
I've marched to it often enough, though, sambra idemuse. Perhaps
look there goes my battalion, those chasseurs yonder he knew,

(45:33):
of course, But what could a stranger identify in that
earth shaking passage of thirty thousand artillery and cavalry. The
note behind the ridge changed to something deeper. Ah our guns,
set an artillery officer, and smiled tolerantly on the last
blue waves of the line. Already beating toward the horizon.

(45:58):
They came twelve abreast, one hundred fifty guns free for
the moment to take the air in company behind their
teams and next week would see them hidden singly, or
in lurking confederacies by mountain and Martian forest, or the
wrecked habitations of men, where the big guns followed them

(46:18):
with that long nosed air of detachment peculiar to the breed.
The gunner at my side made no comment. He was
content to let his arms speak for itself. But when
one big gun in a sticky place fell out of
alignment for an instant, I saw his eyebrows contract. The
artillery passed on with the same in human speed and
silence as the line, and the cavalry's shattering trumpets closed

(46:42):
it all. They are like our cavalry in that their
horses are in high condition, and they talk hopefully of
getting past the barbed wire one of these days and
coming into their own meantime, they are employed on various
work as requisite, and they all sympathize with our rough
rider of dragoons, who flatly refused to take off his

(47:02):
spurs in the trenches. If he had to die as
a damned infantryman, he wasn't going to be buried as such.
A troop horse of a flanking squadron decided that he
had had enough of war and jibbed like Lot's wife
his rider. We all watched him ranged about till he
found a stick, which he used but without effect. Then

(47:24):
he got off and led the horse, which was evidently
what the brute wanted for. When the man remounted, the
jibbing began again. The last we saw of him was
one immensely lonely figure leading one bad but happy horse
across an absolutely empty world. Think of his reception the
sole man of forty thousand, who had fallen out the

(47:45):
bosch as mister Smith, the commander of that army corps,
came up to salute. The cars went away with the
generals and the Minister for War. The army passed out
of sight over the ridges to the north. The peasant
women stooped again to their work in the fields, and
wet mist shut down on all the plane, but one
tingled with the electricity that had passed. Now one knows

(48:09):
what the solidarity of civilization means. Later on the civilized
nations will know more, and will wonder and laugh together
at their old blindness. When Lord Kitchener went down the
line before the march passed, they say that he stopped
to speak to a general who had been Marshan's chief
of staff at the time of Fashoda, and Fashoda was

(48:31):
one of several cases when civilization was very nearly maneuvered
into fighting with itself for the King of Prussia. As
the saying goes, the all embracing vileness of the Bosche
is best realized from French soil, where they have had
large experience of it. And Yet, as some one observed,
we ought to have known that a race who have
brought anonymous letter writing to its highest pitch in their

(48:54):
own dirty court affairs would certainly use the same methods
in their foreign politics. Why didn't we realize for the
same reason, Another responded that society did not realize that
the late mister Smith of your England, who married three wives,
bought baths in advance for each of them, and when
they had left him all their money, drowned them one

(49:16):
by one. And were the baths, by any chance, called Denmark,
Austria and France. In eighteen seventy a third asked, no,
they were respectable British tubs. But until mister Smith had
drowned his third wife, people didn't get suspicious. They argued
that men don't do such things. That sentiment is the

(49:40):
criminal's best protection for the spirit of the people. We
passed into the zone of another army, in a hillier country,
where the border villages lay more sheltered. Here and there
a town and the fields round it gave us a
glimpse of the furious industry with which France makes and
handles matter TiAl and troops with her as with us.

(50:03):
The wounded officer of experience goes back to the drill
ground to train the new levies. But it was always
the little, crowded, defiant villages and the civil population waiting
unweariedly and cheerfully on the unwearied, cheerful army that went
closest to the heart. Take these pictures, caught almost anywhere
during a journey. A knot of little children in difficulties

(50:27):
with the village water tap or high handled pump. A
soldier bearded and fatherly, or young and slim and therefore
rather shy of the big girl's chaff, comes forward and
lifts the pail or swings the handle. His reward from
the smallest babe swung high in air, or if he
is an older man pressed against his knees, is a kiss.

(50:50):
Then nobody laughs, or a fat old lady making oration
against some wicked young soldiers, who, she says, know what
has happened to a certain bottle of wine? And I
meant it for all, Yes, for all of you this evening,
instead of the thieves who stole it. Yes, I tell
you stole it. The whole street hears her, so does

(51:13):
the officer who pretends not to, and the amused half
battalion up the road. The young men express penitence. She
growls like a thunderstorm, but softening at last, cuffs and
drives them affectionately before her. They are all one family.
Or a girl at work with horses in a plowed

(51:33):
field that is dotted with graves. The machine must avoid
each sacred plot, so hands on the plow stilts, her
hair flying forward, she shouts and wrenches till her little
brother runs up and swings the team out of the furrow.
Every aspect and detail of life in France seems overlaid
with a smooth patina of long continued war. Everything except

(51:57):
the spirit of the people, and that is as fresh
and glory woreas as the site of their own land
in sunshine. A city and woman we found a city
among hills, which knew itself to be a prize greatly
coveted by the Kaiser. For truly it was a pleasant,
a desirable, and an insolent city. Its streets were full

(52:19):
of life. It boasted an establishment almost as big as herods,
and full of buyers, and its women dressed and shod
themselves with care and grace as befits ladies who at
any time may be ripped into rags by bombs from aeroplanes.
And there was another city whose population seemed to be
all soldiers in training, and yet another given up to

(52:40):
big guns and ammunition. An extraordinary sight. After that, we
came to a little town of pale Stone, which an
army had made its headquarters. It looked like a plain
woman who had fainted in public. It had rejoiced in
many public institutions that were turned into hospitals and offices.
The wo and had limpt its wide, dusty streets. Detachments

(53:03):
of infantry went through it swiftly and utterly. Bored motor
lorries cruised up and down, roaring. I suppose for something
to look at or to talk to. In the center
of it, I found one janny, or rather his marble bust,
brooding over a minute iron railed garden of half dried asters,
opposite a shot up school, which, it appeared from the
inscription Janny had founded somewhere in the arid thirties. It

(53:26):
was precisely the sort of school that Janny, by the
look of him, would have invented. Not even French adaptability
could make anything of it. So Janny had his school
with a faint perfume of varnish, all to himself, in
a hot stillness of used up air and little whirls
of dust. And because that town seemed so barren, I

(53:48):
met there a French general whom I would have gone
very far to have encountered. He, like the others, had
created and tempered an army for certain work in a
certain place, and its hand had been heavy on the
bu We talked of what the French woman was and
had done and was doing, and extalled her for her
goodness and her faith and her splendid courage. When we parted,

(54:12):
I went back and made my profoundest apologies to Janny,
who must have had a mother. The pale, overwhelmed town
did not now any longer resemble a woman who had
fainted but one who must endure in public all manner
of private woe, and still with hands that never cease working,
keeps her soul and is cleanly strong for herself and
for her men French officers. The guns began to speak

(54:38):
again among the hills that we dived into. The air
grew chillier as we climbed forest, and wet rocks closed
round us in the mist, to the sound of waters
trickling alongside. There was a tang of wet fern cut pine,
and the first breath of autumn when the road entered
a tunnel and a new world. Alsas said the governor
of those parts thoughtfully, the main thing was to get

(55:01):
those factory chimneys smoking again. They were doing so in
little flats and villages all along. You won't see any
girls because they're at work in the textile factories. Yes,
it isn't a bad country for summer hotels, but I'm
afraid it won't do for winter sports. We've only a
meter of snow, and it doesn't lie except when you

(55:23):
are hauling guns up mountains. Then, of course it drifts
and freezes like Davos. That's our new railway below there.
Pity it's too misty to see the view. But for
his medals, there was nothing in the governor to show
that he was not English. He might have come straight
from an Indian frontier command. One notices this approximation of

(55:47):
type in the higher ranks, and many of the juniors
are cut out of the very same cloth as ours.
They get whatever fun may be going. Their performances are
as incredible and outrageous as the language in which they
described them afterward, as bald but convincing. And I overheard
the tale end of a yarn told by a child
of twenty to some other babes. It was veiled in

(56:10):
the obscurity of the French tongue, and the points were
lost in shouts of laughter. But I imagine the subaltern
among his equals, displays just as much reverence for his
elders and betters as our own boys do. The epilogue,
at least, was as old as both armies. And what
did he say then, Oh, the usual thing. He held

(56:31):
his breath till I thought he'd burst. Then he damned
me in heaps, and I took good care to keep
out of his sight till next day. But officially and
in the high social atmosphere of headquarters. Their manners and
their meekness are of the most admirable. There they attend
devoutly on the wisdom of their seniors, who treat them so,
it seemed, with affectionate confidence. Front that never sleeps. When

(56:58):
the day's reports are in, all along the front there
is a man expert in the meaning of things, who
boils them down for that cold official digest which tells
us that there was the usual grenade fighting at we
made appreciable advance at, et cetera. The original material comes
in sheaves and sheaves where individual character and temperament have

(57:19):
full and amusing play. It is reduced for domestic consumption,
like an overwhelming electric current. Otherwise we could not take
it in. But at closer range one realizes that the
front never sleeps, never ceases from trying new ideas and weapons, which,
so soon as the bosch thinks he has mastered them,
are discarded for newer annoyances and bewilderments. The bousche is,

(57:44):
above all things observant and imitative, said one who counted
quite a few botches dead on the front of his sector.
When you present him with a new idea, he thinks
it over for a day or two. Then he presents
his repost. Yes, my general, that was exactly what he
did to me when I did so, and so he

(58:06):
was quite silent for a day. Then he stole my patent,
and you, I had a notion that he do that.
So I had changed the specification. Thus spoke the staff.
And so it is among the junior commands, down to
the semi isolated posts, where boy Napoleons live on their

(58:26):
own through unbelievable adventures. They are inventive, young devils, these
veterans of twenty one, possessed of the single ideal to kill,
which they follow with men as single minded as themselves.
Battlefield tactics do not exist. When a whole nation goes
to ground. There can be none of the victories of
the old bookish days. But there is always the killing,

(58:49):
the well schemed smashing of a full trench, the rushing
out and the mowing down of its occupants. The unsuspicious
battalion far in the rear, located after two nights extreme risk,
alone among rubbish of masonry, and wiped out as it
eats or washes itself, and more rarely, the body to
body encounter with animals removed from the protection of their machinery.

(59:11):
When the Bayonets get their chance, the Bosche does not
at all like meeting men whose womenfolk he has dishonored
or mutilated, or used as a protection against bullets. It
is not that these men are angry or violent. They
do not waste time in that way. They kill him

(59:32):
the business of war. The French are less reticent than
we about atrocities committed by the Bosh because those atrocities
form part of their lives. They are not tucked away
in reports of commissions and vaguely referred to as too awful.
Later on, perhaps we shall be unreserved in our turn.

(59:53):
But they do not talk of them with any babbling
heat or bleat, or make funny little appeals to a
public opinion that, like the Bosche has gone underground. It
occurs to me that this must be because every frenchman
has his place and his chance, direct or indirect to
diminish the number of Botches still alive, whether he lies

(01:00:15):
out in a sandwich of damp earth, or sweats the
big guns up the crests behind the trees, or brings
the fat loaded barges into the very heart of the city,
where the shell wagons weight or spends his last crippled
years at the harvest. He is doing his work to
that end. If he is a civilian, he may, as
he does, say things about his government, which after all,

(01:00:37):
is very like other popular governments. A lifetime spent in
watching how the cat jumps does not make lion tamers.
But there is very little human rubbish in knocking about
France to hinder work or darken council. Above all, there
is a thing called the honour of civilization to which
France is attached. The meanest man feels that he, in

(01:00:59):
his place, is permitted to help uphold it, and I
think bears himself therefore with new dignity. A contrast in types,
this is ridden in a garden of smooth turf under
a copper beach, beside a glassy mill stream, where soldiers
of Alpine regiments are writing letters home, while the guns

(01:01:21):
shout up and down the narrow valleys. A great wolf hound,
who considers himself in charge of the old fashioned farm house,
cannot understand why his master, aged six, should be sitting
on the knees of the Marichel de logis the iron
man who drives the big car. But you are French,
little one, says the giant, with a yearning arm round.

(01:01:44):
The child, yes, very slowly, mouthing the French words. I
can't speak French, but I am French. The small face
disappears in the big beard. Somehow. I I can't imagine
the maritual de logious killing babies, even if his superior officer,

(01:02:05):
now sketching the scene, were to order him. The great
building must once have been a monastery. Twilight softened its
gaunt wings in an angle, of which were collected fifty prisoners,
picked up among the hills behind the mists. They stood
in some sort of military formation, preparatory to being marched off.

(01:02:26):
They were dressed in khaki, the color of gas grass
that might have belonged to any army. Two wore spectacles,
and I counted eight faces of the fifty, which were
asymmetrical out of drawing on one side. Some of their
later drafts give us that type, said the interpreter. One
of them had been wounded in the head and roughly bandaged.

(01:02:48):
The others seemed all sound. Most of them looked at nothing,
but several were vividly alive, with terror that cannot keep
the eyelid still, and a few wavered on the gray
edge of collapse. They were the breed which, at the
word of command, had stolen out to drown women and children,
had raped women in the streets at the word of command,

(01:03:09):
and always at the word of command, had sprayed petrol,
or squirted flame, or defiled the property in persons of
their captives. They stood there outside all humanity, yet they
were made in the likeness of humanity. One realized it
with a shock when the bandaged creature began to shiver,
and they shuffled off in response to the orders of

(01:03:30):
civilized men. Five life in trenches on the mountain side.
Very early in the morning, I met Alan Breck with
a half healed bullet scrape across the bridge of his
nose and an alpine cap over one year. His people,
a few hundred years ago had been Scotch. He bore

(01:03:51):
a Scotch name and still recognized the head of his clan,
but his French occasionally ran into German words, for he
was an Alsatian. On one side, this, he explained, is
the very best country in the world to fight in.
It's picturesque and full of cover. I'm a gunner. I've
been here for months. It's lovely. It might have been

(01:04:15):
the hills under Massuri, and what our cars expected to
do in it I could not understand. But the demon driver,
who had been a road racer, took the seventy h
p Mercedes and threaded the narrow valleys as well as
occasional half Swiss villages full of Alpine troops. At a
restrain thirty miles an hour. He shot up anew made

(01:04:35):
road more like Mussuri than ever, and did not fall
down the hillside even once an ammunition. A mule of
a mountain battery met him at a tight corner and
began to climb a tree. See there isn't another place
in France where that could happen, said Allan. I tell you,
this is a magnificent country. The mule was hauled down

(01:04:59):
by his tail before he had reached the lower branches,
and went on through the woods, his ammunition boxes jinking
on his back for all the world, as though he
were rejoining his battery. At Judo, one expected to meet
the little hill people bent under their loads under the
forest gloom, the light, the color, the smell of wood smoke, pine, needles,

(01:05:20):
wet earth, and warm mule were all Himalayan only. The
Mercedes was violently and loudly a stranger halt, said Alan
at last, when she had done everything except imitate the mule.
The road continues, said the demon driver seductively. Yes, but

(01:05:40):
they will hear you if you go on. Stop and wait.
We've a mountain battery to look at. They were not
at work for the moment, and the commandant, a grim
and forceful man, showed me some details of their construction.
When we left them in their bower, it looked like
a hill priest wayside shrine. We heard them singing through

(01:06:02):
the steep descending pines. They, too, like the seventy fives,
seemed to have no pet name. In the service. It
was a poisonously blind country. The woods blocked all sense
of direction above and around the ground was at any
angle you please, and all sounds were split up and

(01:06:23):
muddled by the tree trunks, which acted as silencers. High
above us. The respectable all concealing forest had turned into sparse,
ghastly blue sticks of timber, an assembly of lepper trees
round a bald mountain top. That's where we're going, said allan,
isn't it an adorable country? Trenches? A machine gun loosed

(01:06:47):
a few shots in the fumbling style of her kind.
When they feel for an opening, A couple of rifle
shots answered they might have been half a mile away
or one hundred yards below, and adorable country. We climbed
up till we found once again a complete tea garden
of little sunk houses, almost invisible in the brown pink

(01:07:08):
recesses of the thick forest. Here the trenches began, and
with them for the next few hours life in two
dimensions length and breadth. You could have eaten your dinner
almost anywhere off the swept dry ground. For the steep
slopes favored draining. There was no lack of timber, and
there was unlimited labor. It had made neat double length

(01:07:30):
dug outs where the wounded could be laid in during
their passage down the mountain side, while tended occasional latrines,
properly limed dug outs for sleeping and eating. Overhead protections
and tool sheds were kneaded, and as one came nearer
the working face, very clever cellars against trench sweepers. Men
passed on their business a squad with a captured machine gun,

(01:07:53):
which they tested in a sheltered dip. Armorers at their benches,
busy with sick rifles, fatigue parties for straw rations and ammunition.
Long processions of single blue figures turned sideways between the brown,
sunless walls. One understood after a while the nightmare that
lays hold of trench stale men, when the dreamer wanders

(01:08:13):
forever in those blind mazes, till after centuries of agonizing flight,
he finds himself stumbling out again into the white blaze
and horror of the mind front. He who thought he
had almost reached home. In the front line, there were
no trees above us. Now. Their trunks lay along the

(01:08:34):
edge of the trench, built in with stones where necessary,
or sometimes overhanging it in ragged splinters or bushy tops.
Bits of cloth not French showed two in the uneven
lines of debris at the trench lip, and some thoughtful
soul had marked an unexploded Bosh trench sweeper as not
to be touched. It was a young lawyer from Paris

(01:08:56):
who pointed that out to me. The colonel at the
head of an indescribable pit of ruin full of sunshine,
whose steps ran down a very steep hillside under the
lee of an almost vertically plunging parapet. To the left
of that parapet, the whole hillside was one gruel of
smashed trees, split stones, and powdered soil. It might have

(01:09:19):
been a rag pickers dump heap on a colossal scale.
Alan looked at it critically. I think he had helped
to make it. Not long before. We're on the top
of the hill now, and the botches are below us,
said he. We gave them a very fair sickener lately,
this said the colonel is the front line. There were

(01:09:42):
overhead guards against hand bombs, which disposed me to believe him.
But what convinced me most was a corporal urging us
in whispers not to talk so loud. The men were
at dinner, and a good smell of food filled the trench.
This was the first smell I had encountered in my
long travels up pill, a mixed, entirely wholesome flavor of stew, leather,

(01:10:04):
earth and rifle oil. Front line professionals. A proportion of
men were standing to arms while others ate. But dinner
time is slack time. Even among animals, and it was
close on noon the batches got their soup. A few
days ago, some one whispered, I thought of the pulverized hillside,

(01:10:26):
and hoped it had been hot enough. We edged along
the still trench, where the soldiers stared with justified contempt.
I thought upon the civilian who scuttled through their life
for a few emotional minutes in order to make words
out of their blood. Somehow it reminded me of coming
in late to a play, and incommoding a long line

(01:10:47):
of packed stalls. The whispered dialog was much the same. Pardon,
I beg your pardon, monsieur, to the right, monsieur. If
monsieur will lower his head, one sees best from here, monsieur.
And so on. It was their day and night long
business carried through without display or heat, or doubt or indecision.

(01:11:12):
Those who worked worked. Those off duty not five feet
behind them in the dug outs were deep in their
papers or their meals or their letters, while death stood
ready at every minute to drop down into the narrow
cut from out of the narrow strip of unconcerned sky.
And for the better part of a weak one had
skirted hundreds of miles of such a frieze. The loopholes

(01:11:35):
not in use were plugged, rather like old fashioned hives,
said the colonel, removing a plug. Here are the botches.
Look and you'll see their sand bags. Through the jumble
of riven trees and stones. One saw what might have
been a bit of green sacking. They're about seven meters
distant just here, the colonel went on, that was true too.

(01:11:59):
We enter a little fort alice with a cannon in it,
in an embrasure, which at that moment struck me as
unnecessarily vast, even though it was partly closed by a
frail packing case lid. The colonel sat him down in
front of it and explained the theory of this sort
of redoubt. By the way, he said to the gunner
at last, can't you find something better than that? He

(01:12:21):
twitched the lid aside, I think it's too light. Get
a log of wood or something handy, trench sweepers. I
loved that colonel. He knew his men, and he knew
the botches had them marked down like birds. When he
said they were beside dead trees or behind boulders, sure enough,

(01:12:44):
there they were. But as I have said, the dinner
hour is always slack. And even when we came to
a place where a section of trench had been bashed
open by trench sweepers, and it was recommended to duck
and hurry, nothing much happened. The unny thing was the
absence of movement in the Bosh trenches. Sometimes one imagined

(01:13:05):
that one smelt strange tobacco or heard a rifle bolt
working after a shot. Otherwise they were as still as pig.
At noonday, we held on through the maze, past trench
sweepers of a handy light pattern, with their screw tailed
charge already and a grave or so. And when I
came on men who merely stood within easy reach of

(01:13:27):
their rifles, I knew I was in the second line.
When they lay frankly at ease in their dug outs,
I knew it was the third. A shot gun would
have sprinkled all three. No flat plains, said Allan. No
hunting for gun positions. The hills are full of them,
and the trenches close together in commanding each other. You

(01:13:50):
see what a beautiful country it is. The colonel confirmed this,
but from another point of view, war was his business,
as the still woods could testify. But his hobby was
his trenches. He had tapped the mountain streams and dug
out a laundry where a man could wash his shirt
and go up and be killed in it. All in

(01:14:11):
a morning had drained the trenches till a muddy stretch
in them was an a fence, and at the bottom
of the hill it looked like a hydropathic establishment. On
the stage, he had created baths where half a battalion
at a time could wash. He never told me how
all that country had been fought over as fiercely as
Epra in the west, nor what blood had gone down
the valleys before his trenches pushed over the scalped mountain top. No,

(01:14:36):
he sketched out new endeavors in earth and stones and
trees for the comfort of his men on that populous mountain.
And there came a priest who was a sub lieutenant
out of a wood of snuff, brown shadows, and half
veiled trunks. Would it please me to look at a chapel.
It was all open to the hillside, most tenderly and

(01:14:56):
devoutly done in rustic work, with readings of peeled branches
and panels of moss and thatch Saint Hubert's own shrine.
I saw the hunters who passed before it, going to
the chase on the far side of the mountain where
their game lay. A bombarded town. Alan carried me off
to Tea the same evening, in a town where he

(01:15:18):
seemed to know everybody. He had spent the afternoon on
another mountain top inspecting gun positions, whereby he had been shelled.
A little marmite is the slang for it. There had
been no serious marmidage, and he had spotted a bosh
position which was marmitable. And we may get shelled now,
he added. Hopefully they shell this town whenever they think

(01:15:41):
of it. Perhaps they'll shell us at Tea. It was
a quaintly beautiful little place, with its mixture of French
and German ideas, its old bridge and gentle minded river
between the cultivated hills, the sand bagged cellar doors, the
ruined houses, and the whole in the pavement looked as
unreal as the violences of a cinema Against that soft

(01:16:04):
and simple setting. The people were abroad in the streets,
and the little children were playing. A big shell gives
notice enough for one to get to shelter. If the
shelter is near enough, that appears to be as much
as anyone expects. In the world where one is shelled,
and that world has settled down to it, people's lips

(01:16:25):
are a little firmer, the modeling of the brows is
a little more pronounced, and maybe there is a change
in the expression of the eyes. But nothing that a
casual afternoon caller need particularly notice. Cases for hospital. The
house where we took tea was the big house of
the place, old and massive, a treasure house of ancient furniture.

(01:16:49):
It had everything that the moderate heart of man could desire, gardens, garages, outbuildings,
and the air of peace that goes with beauty in age.
It stood over or a high cellarage, and opposite the
cellar door was a brand new blindage of earth packed
between timbers. The cellar was a hospital, with its beds
and stores, and under the electric light, the orderly weighted,

(01:17:12):
ready for the cases to be carried down out of
the streets. Yes they are all civil cases, said he.
They come without much warning. A woman gashed by falling timber,
a child with its temple crushed by a flying stone,
an urgent amputation case, and so on. One never knows. Bombardment,

(01:17:34):
the Bosch text books say, is designed to terrify the
civil population so that they may put pressure on their
politicians to conclude peace. In real life, men are very
rarely soothed by the sight of their women being tortured.
We took tea in the hall upstairs, with a propriety
and an interchange of compliments that suited the little occasion.

(01:17:56):
There was no attempt to disguise the existence of a bombardment,
but it was not allowed to overweight talk of lighter matters.
I no one guessed who sat through it as near
as might be inarticulate with wonder. But he was English,
and when Allan asked him whether he had enjoyed himself,
he said, oh, yes, thank you very much. Nice people,

(01:18:19):
aren't they. Allan went on, oh, very nice, and and
such good tea. He managed to convey a few of
his sentiments to Allan after dinner. But what else could
the people have done? Said he? They are French six

(01:18:40):
the common task of a great people. This is the
end of the line, said the staff officer, kindest and
most patient of chaperones. It buttressed itself on a fortress
among hills. Beyond that the silence was more awful than
the mixed noise of business to the westward. In the
mileage on the map, the line must be between four

(01:19:02):
and five hundred miles. In actual trench work, many times
that distance. It is too much to see at full length.
The mind does not readily break away from the obsession
of its entirety or the grip of its detail. One
visualizes the thing afterwards as a white hot gash worming
all across France, between intolerable sounds and lights, under ceaseless

(01:19:25):
blasts of world dirt. Nor is it any relief to
lose one's self among wildernesses of piling, stoning, timbering, concreting,
and wire work, or incalculable quantities of soil thrown up
raw to the light and cloaked by the changing seasons,
as the unburied dead are cloaked. Yet there are no

(01:19:45):
words to give the essential simplicity of it. It is
the rampart put up by man against the beast, precisely
as in the Stone Age. If it goes, all that
keeps us from the beast goes with it. One sees
this at the foot as clearly as one sees the
French villages behind the German lines. Sometimes people steal away

(01:20:06):
from them and bring word of what they endure. Where
the rifle and the bayonets serve, men use those tools
along the front, Where the knife gives better results, they
go in behind the hand grenades with the naked twelve
inch knife. Each race is supposed to fight in its
own way, but this war has passed beyond all the

(01:20:27):
known ways. They say that the Belgians in the north
settle accounts with a certain dry passion, which has varied
very little since their agony began. Some sections of the
English line have produced a soft voiced, rather reserved type,
which does its work with its mouth shut. The French
Carriyon edge to their fighting a precision and a dreadful knowledge,

(01:20:48):
coupled with an insensibility to shock, unlike anything one has
imagined of mankind. To be sure, there has never been
like provocation. For never since the Asser went about to
bind the fenerous wolf, as all the world united to
bind the beast. The last I saw of the front
was Alan Breck speeding back to his gun positions among

(01:21:09):
the mountains, and I wondered what delight of what household
the lad must have been in the old days, supports
and reserves. Then we had to work our way, department
by department against the tides of men behind the line,
supports and their supports, reserves and reserves of reserves, as
well as the masses in training. They flooded towns and villages,

(01:21:33):
and when we tried short cuts, we found them in
every by lane. Have you seen mounted men reading their
home letters with the reins thrown on the horses necks
moving in absorbed silence through a street which almost said
hush to its dogs, or met in a forest a
procession of perfectly new big guns, apparently taking themselves from

(01:21:54):
the foundry to the front. In spite of their love
of drama, there is not much window dressing in the
French character. The Bosch, who is the priest of the
higher counter jumpery, would have had half the neutral press
out in cars to advertise these vast spectacles of men
and material. But the same instinct as makes their rich

(01:22:15):
farmers keep to their smocks makes the French keep quiet.
This is our affair, they argue. Everybody concerned is taking
part in it. Like the review you saw the other
day there are no spectators, but it might be of
advantage if the world knew Mine was a foolish remark.

(01:22:37):
There is only one world to day, the world of
the Allies. Each of them knows what the others are doing,
and the rest doesn't matter. This is a curious but
delightful fact to realize at first hand, and think what
it will be later, when we shall all circulate among
each other and open our hearts and talk it over
in a brotherhood more intimate than the ties of blood.

(01:23:01):
I lay that night at a little French town and
was kept awake by a man somewhere in the hot,
still darkness, howling aloud from the pain of his wounds.
I was glad that he was alone, for when one
man gives way, the others sometimes follow. Yet the single
note of misery was worse than the baying and gulping
of a whole ward. I wish that a delegation of

(01:23:24):
strikers could have heard it. That a civilian should be
in the war zone at all is a fair guarantee
of his good faith. It is when he is outside
the zone, unchaperon, that questions begin and the permits are
looked into. If these are irregular, but one doesn't care
to contemplate it. If regular, there are still a few

(01:23:45):
counter checks. As the sergeant at the railway station said
when he helped us out of an impasse, you will
realize that it is the most undesirable persons whose papers
are of the most regular. It is their business, you see.
The Commissary of Police is at the Hotel de Ville,
if you will come along for the little formality. Myself,

(01:24:08):
I used to keep a shop in Paris. My god,
these provincial towns are desolating. Paris and no foreigners he
would have loved his Paris. As we found it, life
was renewing itself in the streets whose drawing and proportion
one could never notice before. People's eyes, and the women's especially,

(01:24:33):
seemed to be set to a longer range, a more
comprehensive gaze. One would have said they came from the
sea or the mountains, where things are few and simple,
rather than from houses. Best of all, there were no foreigners.
The beloved city for the first time was French throughout,
from end to end. It felt like coming back to

(01:24:53):
an old friend's house for a quiet talk after he
had got rid of a house full of visitors, The
functionaries and police had dropped their masks of official politeness
and were just friendly at the hotels. So like school
two days before the term begins, the impersonal valet, the
chambermaid of the set too frank smile, and the unbending

(01:25:15):
head waiter had given place to one's own brothers and sisters,
full of one's own anxieties. My son is an aviator, monsieur.
I could have claimed Italian nationality for him at the beginning,
but he would not have it. Both my brothers, Monsieur,
are at the war. One is dead already, and my

(01:25:37):
fiancee I have not heard from him since March. He
is cook in a battalion. Here is the wine list, monsieur. Yes,
both my sons and a nephew, and I have no
news of them, not a word of news. My god,
we all suffer these days, and so two among the shops,

(01:25:59):
the mere state of the loss, or the grief at
the heart. But never a word of doubt, never a
whimper of despair. Now, why asked a shopkeeper? Does not
our government or your government, or both our governments send
some of the British army to Paris? I assure you
we should make them welcome. Perhaps I began, you might

(01:26:22):
make them too welcome, he laughed. We should make them
as welcome as our own army. They would enjoy themselves.
I had a vision of British officers, each with ninety
days pay to his credit, and a damsel or two
at home, shopping consumedly, And also said the shopkeeper, the

(01:26:43):
moral effect on Paris to see more of your troops
would be very good. But I saw a quite English
provost marshal losing himself in chase of defaulters of the
new army who knew their Paris. Still, there is something
to be said for the idea to the extent of
a virtuous brigade, or so. At present, the English officer

(01:27:05):
in Paris is a scarce bird, and he explains at
once why he is and what he is doing there.
He must have good reasons, I suggested teeth to an acquaintance.
No good, he grumbled. They've thought of that too. Behind
our lines is simply crawling with dentists. Now a people transfigured.

(01:27:31):
If one asked after the people that gave dinners and
dances last year, where everyone talked so brilliantly of such
vital things one got in return the addresses of hospitals.
Those pleasant hostesses and maidens seemed to be in charge
of departments or on duty in wards or kitchens or sculleries.
Some of the hospitals were in Paris. Their staffs might

(01:27:54):
have one hour a day in which to see visitors.
Others were up the line and liable to be sharp
or bombed. I recalled one frenchwoman in particular because she
had once explained to me the necessities of civilized life.
These included a masseuse, a manicurist, and a maid to
look after the lap dogs. She is employed now and

(01:28:17):
has been for months past, on the disinfection and repair
of soldier's clothes. There was no need to ask after
the men one had known. Still, there was no sense
of desolation. They had gone on. The others were getting ready.
All France works outward to the front, precisely as an

(01:28:38):
endless chain of fire buckets works towards the conflagration. Leave
the fire behind you and go back till you reach
the source of supplies. You will find no break, no pause,
no apparent haste, but never any slackening. Everybody has his
or her bucket, little or big, and nobody disputes how
they should be used. It is a people pass zest

(01:29:00):
of the precedent and tradition of war for existence, accustomed
to hard living and hard labor, sanely economical by temperament,
logical by training, and illumined and transfigured by their resolve
and endurance. You know when supreme trial overtakes an acquaintance
whom till then we conceived, we knew how the man's
nature sometimes changes past knowledge or belief. He who was

(01:29:24):
altogether such an one as ourselves, goes forward simply, even lightly,
to heights we thought unattainable, though he is the very
same comrade that lived our small life with us. Yet
in all things he has become great. So it is
with France to day she has discovered the measure of
her soul. The new war. One sees this not alone

(01:29:49):
in the It is more than contempt of death, in
the godlike preoccupation of her people under arms, which makes
them put death out of the account, but in the
equal passion and fervor with which her people throughout God
give themselves to the smallest as well as the greatest,
tasks that may in any way serve their sword. I
might tell you something that I saw of the cleaning
out of certain latrines, of the education and antecedents of

(01:30:12):
the cleaners, what they said in the matter, and how
perfectly the work was done. There was a little Rabelais
in it, naturally, but the rest was pure devotion, rejoicing
to be of use. Similarly with stables, barricades and barbed
wire work, the clearing and piling away of wrecked house rubbish,

(01:30:32):
the serving of meals till the service rocks on its
poor tired feet, but keeps its temper, and all the unlovely,
monotonous details that go with war. The women, as I
have tried to show, work stride for stride with the men,
with hearts as resolute and a spirit that has little
mercy for short comings. A woman takes her place wherever

(01:30:53):
she can relieve a man in the shop, at the posts,
on the tramways, the hotels, and a thousand other businesses.
She is inured to field work, and half the harvest
of France this year lies in her lap. One feels
at every turn how her men trust her. She knows,
for she shares everything with her world. What has befallen

(01:31:14):
her sisters, who are now in German hands, and her
soul is the undying flame behind the men's steel. Neither
men nor women have any illusion as to miracles presently
to be performed, which shall sweep out or drive back
the Bosch. Since the army is the nation, they know much,
though they are officially told little. They all recognize that

(01:31:37):
the old fashioned victory of the past is almost as
obsolete as a rifle in a front line trench. They
all accept the new war, which means grinding down and
wearing out the enemy by every means and plan and
device that can be compassed. It is slow and expensive,
but as deadly sure as the logic that leads them
to make it their one work, their sole thought, their

(01:31:59):
sineingle preoccupation, a nation's confidence. The same logic saves them
a vast amount of energy. They knew Germany in seventy
when the world would not believe in their knowledge. They
knew the German mind before the war. They know what
she has done. They have photographs during this war. They

(01:32:21):
do not fall into spasms of horror and indignation over
atrocities that cannot be mentioned, as the English papers say.
They mention them in full and book them to the account.
They do not discuss, nor consider, nor waste an emotion
over anything that Germany says or boasts, or argues, or
implies or intrigues. After they have the heart's ease that

(01:32:44):
comes from all being at work for their country, the
knowledge that the burden of work is equally distributed among all,
the certainty that the women are working side by side
with the men, the assurance that when one man's task
is at the moment ended, another takes his place. Out
of these things is borne their power of recuperation in
their leisure, their reason calm while at work, and their

(01:33:06):
superb confidence in their arms. Even if France of to
day stood alone against the world's enemy, it would be
almost inconceivable to imagine her defeat now wholly so to
imagine any surrender. The war will go on till the
enemy is finished. The French do not know when that
hour will come. They seldom speak of it. They do

(01:33:28):
not amuse themselves with dreams of triumphs or terms. Their
business is war, and they do their business

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Rudyard Kipling - "France at War" - 1915

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Rudyard Kipling - "France at War" - 1915