A perfect, cool, clear August night, as still as death: the moon, full tomorrow night, high in heaven amid the stars of a cloudless firmament. I had just been with a small flask of cognac to try and lull to some hours of slumber my Company Cook, one Palmer, a stoutheart from the South of England, wearied with long and raging toothache. A Company Cook, once surrendered to the labyrinths of R.A.M.C. organization, seldom returns to the fold: Palmer was an excellent cook, and had, to my surprise and deep admiration, but for a 76lb of sugar, successfully weathered the sudden inquisition that had recently dropped like a bolt from the blue upon our unsuspecting Train, in quest, by no means unrewarded, of Surplus Rations.
Coming up the pave from the Mignot Farm, I looked in at our H.Q. to thank the O.C. for sending round a bottle of Bovril during my recent convalescence. It was a minute before he saw me and looked up. “Would you like to see the very latest?” he asked. “The very latest is cheering”.
We wanted cheering: no papers had arrived that day, but we had learned from the last day’s news that we were a submarine and eleven merchant ships to the bad: and the ARABIC and ROYAL EDWARD were scarcely settled in their watery graves. I took the orders from him: the last one which was headed “Very Latest” ran “It has been received from G.H.Q. that the Germans, in attempting to land troops in the Gulf of Riga, were repulsed with the loss of one Super-Dreadnought, two cruisers, and seven destroyers, with all their boats”. We drank a toast to the Navy responsible, and I went Palmerwards again.
I found Palmer, as he should be, by his fire, which, while the Company remained in that spot, was never allowed to die completely out. He was fully dressed, and was the object of much commiseration from the two line orderlies and another soldier who had business out of bed. His face was puffed out after the manner of a Christmas pig’s head, which grins, or used to, years ago, from every grocer’s window, orange in mouth, a horrible paradox of sweet and savoury. He explained, with more fluency than I had credited him with, the source and nature of his affliction, and professed himself already relieved by the administration of pills, which I was confidentially informed by his ministering angel, the C.Q.M.S. contained opium.
A fire was soon raised from the glowing embers, and in a few minutes Palmer produced a cupful of a brownish liquor, in which a wrack of ashes and wood splinters eddied. The brandy which I had brought him formed by far the larger ratio of the mixture, but Palmer wanted sleep, and I am sure got it that night. I left him reminiscent and on the borderland between good nature and affectation, professing without reserve his belief, submitted to me for corroboration, in the actual appearance of the Angels of Mons: and my denial of this phenomenon, though rebounding easily off his too rapidly transforming self, cast the little group of quid-nuncs who were watching with envy his licenced intoxication into an unwilling reverie which permitted me to escape to bed.
AUG. 23. 1915.
(BATTLE NOTES) June 2. 1917.
I had joined the 9th Corps fresh from a very peaceful leave in Devon, during which the only area that concerned me was the limit of my father-in-law’s trout fishing on the Tamar, and my only standing duty the reading of the lessons in Lifton church. I had been told to rejoin my unit, the 19th Train, after my leave, but heard from Campbell, the D.A.A.G., that Corps had asked for me to be sent to them for duty as Liaison Officer during the forthcoming operations.
My thoughtful Colonel retaliated by asking that I should be struck off the list of Adjutants, which I was only too ready should take place: as being the first step towards the severance of the only link which bound us to our chief, viz., the official one.
I had seen, while with the 19th Division, a little of the gigantic preparation for the advance upon the WYTSCHAETE heights. During my absence in England new camps had sprung up as if by magic, BAILLEUL was crammed with troops, and the square at night was three parts full of parked lorries. The Germans had been shelling the town with an 8 inch high velocity gun, but had only reached the outskirts, to the no small apprehension of the inhabitants. It is evident, though I could not ask about it point-blank, that the day of battle was drawing near.
June 3.
Blazing sunshine: there has been no rain for a fortnight, and the water supply, not generous in this area, has fallen to one-half of its normal volume. My tent was ideally pitched in the grounds of the Mont Noir Chateau, at the back of a small coppice under a conifer of the Scotch fir type, which protects it admirably from all but a 4 p.m. sun. the Mess is close. It is known as B Mess, and consists of full-blooded Regular Majors of the Late Decorated style. It is, I should say, a very nearly perfect specimen of a Regular Army pre-war Mess, less the comforts and caparizons of peace-time. The food is literally damnable, and the motley handful of navvies freshly impressed into service as waiters serve to gloze over this drawback not a whit. Yet I must confess to a great admiration for the air of dignified professionalism of the members of B Mass, a quite distinct air to any before encountered. Quiet, well-groomed, and cheery, without the raw boisterousness of Kitchener’s officers, they are to the eye and ear soldiers and gentlemen, and their professional conversation, though tending a little to harp upon the absorbing topic of promotion and decoration, is as interesting as their badinage is good-humoured and restrained.
The walls of B Mess are sparsely decorated with the apparently ubiquitous indecencies of KIRCHNER. The Majors never look at them or refer to them. I suppose they just like to have them there as a matter of convention, as it has become practically a convention in the Armies in the field to plaster Messes, billets, and even dug-outs with his studies. RUDOLF, the Corps A.P.M., confessed, one night to a passion for one of them, but was gently snubbed by the whole table. RUDOLF’s unhappy statement that he had kept the girl at the adjacent farm for half-an-hour, gave the Majors undisguised pleasure – he, by nature and profession being a professed champion of virtue, military and civilian, and having omitted to state that the lady was kept waiting for a pass which it was his privilege to issue.
There was a bombardment at 3, which I saw on my way to LOCRE, the flashes and explosions, and great spurts of brown smoke being plainly seen. There was no advance yet, of course, but sixteen prisoners were captured and were brought to the Chateau grounds for interrogation. Six German aeroplanes were destroyed on our front to-day.
June 4.
Thirty prisoners were brought in today, including one officer, who gave some interesting information. He said that the Germans were expecting our attack on the 10th, and are not alarmed at the prospect of it, as they consider our here the page ends. There are no further pages.
(WAR)
March 13th. Today, the first summer day of the year, riding into country unpolluted by this War, a mighty desire smote me for the return of peace and the old order of things. The sun was hot: the song of birds and the first splash of green on the hedgerows proclaimed the regeneration of Spring. It brought back to my mind the first full days of summer, when we rode through the fair village of Saint Venant, marshalled by its rows of poplars, and drank, from the hands of ALYS BOURDON the unsatisfying French ale in the dusty glow of a July evening. Little jaded were we in those days- now almost far off -days. Hopes were high, our chivalry was keen. Now we were obsessed by the importance of a purposeless routine; the glamour had fled; and we had dully subsided into the most placid occupation of the lower side of the trench line, with one or two insignificant townships and a handful of tottering hamlets in the floods for our choice of winter quarters. Rancour and irritation were engendered. I felt an intense desire to ride at a tangent, away from the well-worn area of our Army, into the unknown and remote. Yet where? – there is no escape. The infection of War is, by now, national.
‘When we picked ‘im up’ said by Sergeant Major, ‘is ‘ead was all jammed up close to the rail of the driving screen, an’ ‘is two eyes was swollen big – standing right out of ‘is ‘ead, like two walnuts. Funny thing was, ’e was quite conscious all the time; when we picked ‘im out ‘e says ‘Is my eyes allright?’ I says ‘Yer eyes is allright, but yer got a nasty cut on yer cheek – like that an’ ‘e says ‘I don’t give a damn about my cheek, so long as my sight’s all right.’
‘Will he keep his sight?’ I asked. I had seen no more of the little tragedy than the ‘plane standing on its head in a ploughed field, the body of the machine streaked with the blood of the observer, who, seated in front, gets the full shock of catastrophe.
They’ve sent ‘im down to the Base, Sir, said my W.O., standing smartly at the attention – for an R.F.C. sergeant had just joined our little group – One of ‘is eyes is gone completely, and they think ‘e’ll lose the sight of the other. One of the best men they ‘ad, Sir, on this station. The pilot isn’t coming back, nor ‘ere, anyhow; it’s the third machine ‘e’s smashed up, they say.
The R.F.C. sergeant had been silently investigating the cause of the disaster. Suddenly he turned round ‘Forgot to turn ‘is petrol off’ he said tersely. One of those ‘good fellows’, but — And so Flying Sub-Lieut. Wilson, Observer, walks henceforth in outer darkness. Alas, the folly of it.
(WAR)
Midsummer at a bound! From wet, snow, and steely wind. All Merville was out this April Sunday, endimanche: standing at its cottage doors, walking and chatting in little groups. Sunshine and fair wind, colour in heaven and earth were irresistible: and so, at 3 p.m. MARIE D’OR, chafing at the prospect of the open road, stood saddled at the Orderly room door, no less ready than her master for a journey at random into the green fields and intoxicating air.
We struck for Vieux Berquin, correlative village of Neuf Berquin, held by the advancing Germans for six days. At a corner near the Forest of Nieppe, which dominates the neighbourhood, there is a wiped-out farm and a Chasseur’s grave in the adjacent cornfield. “Il était brule, Monsieur” says the French garçon who appears, as usual, from nowhere, at my approach. The French drove the Germans from it, apparently by fire from the wood, in which there are also graves.
Vieux Berquin is rightly called: there are houses in its long, prim street dating from 1662, the date of the old ornamental iron stays that brace these ancient abodes. The wood-work, from a glimpse of the interior, is mainly coeval. The church, a more imposing edifice than that of its sister village, is distressingly new, though it has suffered less from the hand of the invader.
The outstanding personality of Vieux Berquin is undoubtedly its Cure. I met this good man by chance in his little vicarage, every corner of which held some treasure of the crafts of old: and could tell at once that he was Christian and a connoisseur combined. The village was proud of him as a “tres bon prédicateur”: he had built his church: and had shewn a stiff upper lip to the enemy when they at last swarmed into the little place, answering no questions, baffling them with shrewd evasion and subterfuge. He had a voice like a ring of bells: I was anxious to hear him preach, even in his own tongue: but ere the next Sabbath the tide of war had swept us away, and I had to be content with this passing savour of a good and courtly priest.
At Vieux Berquin, in 1914, in the centre of the village, German outpost first met French guard. You may perhaps still hear from eyewitnesses the story of the grim duel fought at the cross-roads in the Rue Nationale as the Chasseurs, drinking at the little estaminet at the corner, sprang on horseback to meet the Uhlans creeping watchfully in the October sunlight up the long straight pave from Estaires. Two picked champions, Uhlan and Chasseur, on their horses, fought to the death in this now peaceful corner-way, whilst the comrades of each, breathless, watched the thrilling drama of the two horsemen as they wheeled and thrust for life and flag. The Chasseur at length fell, pierced through and through: a carbine shot rang out before he touched the ground, sending his victor also to his account: the truce was broken: the melee became general. The villagers say the Germans were beaten back.
Victor and vanquished lie in the second field from the corner of the road: a score or more of graves are there, in a patch of low ground, even now slowly flooding with the pitiless autumn rain: a French Brigadier’s helmet, with flowing horsehair crest, marks his grave in the midst of his Chasseurs.
Epernay in Wartime.
The champagne vineyards of Epernay are world-known, and though the town itself does not compare in historical association with its martyred neighbour, Rheims, few more favoured spots can be found in all the stately windings of the Marne through the wooded hills and fertile valleys of the Champagne country.
In the burning summer of 1918 my Division was sent from Flanders to form part of a British Corps lent to the French generalissimo to ward off the furious efforts of the Germans to recross the Marne, and penetrate to Paris. Epernay had been favoured in the open warfare days of 1914 by a three weeks visit from the advancing enemy, who not unnaturally found in it an eminently suitable headquarters; German officers settled down in droves in the palatial villas of the champagne magnates in the Rue de Chalons; military band concerts in the market square were the order of the day. But all good things come to an end, and the end of the public concert season in Epernay came unexpectedly soon. Pere Joffre, after sleeping for one night in the little village of Pleurs, advanced, and the Germans, who, in the flush of their all-conquering advance, had not troubled to systematically despoil the treasures that sparkled in the cellars of Rheims and Epernay, retired without having done more than sample its priceless stock of wines.
Epernay nestles snugly amid a profusion of little hills, which constitute her wealth; for on these slopes her vineyards are set. As in the Rhine wine districts of Germany, the vineyards are of the nature of hill-terraces, and the soil, which shews small sign of fertility to the eye, is divided into little enclosures which appear to hang upon the slope of the hillside, and are supported by retaining walls of unmortared rockwork. The life of a vine is not of many years duration, and one notices them in all stages of maturity in the vineyards. They require constant vigilance, both in weeding and in spraying; nor they are very subject, especially in wet years, to an epidemic disease, which has more than once threatened the entire vintage.
In June, 1918, Epernay was a very lonely place; the landmarks of an evident luxury, big hotels, Opera house, and the stately mansions of her merchant princes, had long been closed. With the exception of the vineyard workers and that handful of obstinate patriots which refused to leave the ruins of even the most battered towns of France, the town was deserted. It is true there was a quite formidable population of English, French and Italian troops, of whose exact location the Goths were most remarkably aware; and in the half-dark evenings the suburbs of Epernay saw much military traffic – a French battalion swinging out with little noise and their sharp, quick step, an Italian Brigade coming in for rest, as happy as a lot of schoolboys, singing little snatches of melody with a natural art that compelled the attention, or a British battery, strangers to the town, halted in long array while their officer struggled with the vernacular and his moonlit map.
The interests of the great champagne firms are about equally divided between Epernay and Rheims. Mercier, Pol Roger Moet & Chandon are of Epernay; Pommery and Veuve Cliquot belong to Rheims. Pommery’s manager in Rheims, an Englishman with a ***** French wife stayed in the town during the whole period of its investment. He had been badly gassed, and told me that one of our communication trenches to the defences of Rheims was cut right through his cellars, which fact, though an unavoidable exigency of war, was the cause of periodical shrinkage of stock. Whenever a lull in operations permitted, and transport was available, champagne was transferred from Rheims to the villages around Epernay, every house in which contained abnormal cellarage. The best Veuve Cliquot was for sale at five francs a bottle, and became in consequence, our standard beverage.
Avenues, fountains, convents and churches in Epernay alike bore testimony to the public generosity of M. Chandon; the exquisitely laid-out rose garden of whose estate in the outskirts of the town was still watched over by an old Frenchwoman, who used to allow me, as a regular customer of her daily stock of fresh eggs to wander through the wealth of blooms of every conceivable variety; All roses of German stock, however, had been uprooted by their owner, under, no doubt, an impulse of the same emotion which inspired a certain noble lord to wreak vengeance upon the crockery of the Savoy Hotel.
Only one vrai Epernois did I become really acquainted with – through the regrettable occasion of his complete and overwhelming intoxication – which caused me to remove him from his slumbers on one of the most popular ammunition lorry routes. He was the proprietor of a most gorgeous restaurant in Epernay; and, like all other Frenchmen, was serving; being a restraunteur, he had not unnaturally been cast for the agreeable privilege of cooking for his officer’s mess, and was, through the caprice of war, quartered next line of typescript missing he was a charming fellow; his restraint was a marvel of taste and luxury, though the live-game aviary upon the roof had been tenantless for years. He shewed me every mystery that lies within the outward pomp and grandeur of the average bottle of champagne, and has by now, I am sure, forgotten my promise to dine in his restaurant upon the cessation of hostilities.
That wine has its uses in warfare is clearly proved by the historical instance of a German army, which, in some vintage year of the early Middle Ages, positively declined to budge beyond a certain famous wine district on the banks of the Moselle. Wine is an item in the daily ration of the French soldier, and it is worthy of record that, towards the end of the last fierce struggle for possession of the Rheims salient – the loss of which to either side meant a comparative disaster – a French general was inspired to send lorries into Rheims for five thousand bottles of champagne, in which his victorious poilus had the extreme satisfaction of celebrating the final deliverance of its export towns.
(BATTLE NOTES)
November 1.1918 HISTORIC NEWS
With the definite official news of the Austrian secession today appears the first bold entry written by the hand of a sinister Fate upon the debit side of Germany’s balance sheet. From now they are, beyond all dispute, playing a losing game. Like all bad losers, she will endeavour to cry “quits”, and it remains to be seen whether the capitulation of the military mass in the field, or the pressure of the civilian element who feed the guns and pay the soldiers of the Fatherland, will bring her arrogant soul to the exceeding bitterness of an unconditional surrender, – the terms of which are bound to cripple her activities in the future more than any destruction done to her own cities and villages by actual invasion and bombardment.
I do not think the Hun will fight to the end. Their commercial shrewdness as a nation will outweigh the willingness of no doubt many of their professional Army officers to fight their way back to the Rhine, or even farther still. The secession of Austria will be a violently disturbing shock to every German citizen, and a blow of perhaps fatal consequence to the morale of the German armies in the field. In the case of the former, there must be some equally violent antidote, a drastic and momentous change, to balance the disastrous effect, to restore faith. We withstood the Russian default with curses and a stiffened upper lip, but our psychology bears such catastrophes better than any known national character that is not trained to fatalism.
Germany’s present dangers are – the collapse of her dynasty, and the acceptance of unconditional terms by a hastily formed Government of Republican mould: or, the gradual secession, through war-weariness and conviction of defeat of her armies in the field. Unless the old German gods rise up and perform a miracle, to one of these courses her path is most surely set.
SOMMAING-SUR-ECAILLON. Nov. 3-5.
The village is picturesque – the Ecaillon, a decent-sized trout stream, runs through it, criss-crossed with barbed wire on each side with strands athwart the current, which brawls over the stones of the destroyed bridge in true Dartmoor fashion. The church is a quaint structure, with a sort of machicolation at the base of the spire, which gives it a mediaeval air. Hard by its wall there is, sorely wrecked, a noble old homestead, with the date 1630 carved on its stone portal: added to in each successive centaury, sadly diminished in this.
There was stiffish fighting in SOMMAING, as the machine-gun nests, carpeted with empty cases, testify. A German 77mm gun stands at the village crossroads, with a tricolour floating from it still, denoting French possession. Opposite our billet door sprawls a wrecked German ambulance, a good advertisement of the destructive qualities of our H.E.
I have never seen a billet in so foul a condition as our farmhouse. All the rooms, in which the Boche had lived for months, were filled with straw, into which scraps of all sorts of food had been thrown. The corners of the rooms were literally matted with tea-leaves, porridge, and other appalling residue: the stables had been used as latrines, and the mangers as w.cs. I followed up the Boche resistance trench on the hill-top, which contained an extraordinary amount of kit of all kinds, overcoats, rifles, helmets and haversacks by the score.
MARESCHES. Nov 5-6.
We occupied the Brasserie at the turning of the PRESEAU road. The Boche had been gone three days, and in the beetroot fields around there were many dead. In the orchard behind the Brewery farm lay a German officer and two men, just where they fell, their stiffened hands and faces paling in the cold rain. The officer had good boots and a white collar: his face was evil and ill-bred. He was buried in the nearest shell-hole with his men, who were lying with him – one, shot through the heart, with pink, discoloured face and throat, the other on his back, with one arm over his face.
There were other groups. Where a rifle was stuck upright in the ground with a helmet or some rag of clothing on it, was found an English body. There were two officers still lying out upon those sodden beetfields, second Lieutenants both: one Nicholson, of the 2/5 Royal Warwicks, a recently gazetted officer, I should judge a Wesleyan by faith, of ungentle feature. The other, late of the 1st Somerset Light Infantry, a nice-looking lad with an oval, freckled countenance, and a good forehead. His boots had been taken off – it being by now a well-established principle in the British Army that a corpse relinquishes automatically all proprietary rights.
Facing PRESEAU was a strong line of machine-gun positions with their guns still in position, and two German machine-gunners lying dead by each. These men had been armed with rifle as well, and must have fought to the end. Their positions were camouflaged with beetroots and mangolds with extreme skill, and almost defied observation at point-blank range.
There were two English soldiers, crouching in a small half-dug trench, both killed instantaneously, falling over their rifles, hardly as if dead. A German lay in a small path close to them, shot through the leg. He had made a tourniquet of his brace above the knee, and had died, or had been shot again whilst in the act of crawling along the path. Two corporals were on this battlefield, good upstanding young fellows both, one shot clean through the heart: and I also noticed five partridges lying on their backs within the circumference of a dining-table, unwounded, and no doubt killed by the cordite of a chance shell.
MARESCHES had suffered abominably from shell-fire: the brewer’s villa, adjoining his works, in the stable of which we messed was a complete wreck. The piano, sundry pictures, and two grandfather clocks, under a heavy shroud of plaster, gazed stupidly at the forlorn ruin of the three walls of the once pretty little parlour. The roof hung in shreds, and the plaster of the ceilings was already bulging with the rain. We took a heavy carpet from one of the windows, and laid it gratefully upon our garnished stable floor.
I have never seen more vivid effect of heavy shell fire upon a solid object than in the pretty cemetery at MARESCHES, which had suffered abnormally, massive tombs being split and thrown open on all sides. One huge pedestal of black stone, measuring about 3 by 3 by 5 feet had been shivered to gravel by the frightful concussion of high explosive, and still stood upright, a mass of riven and splintered marble.
Nine dead Germans lay in a row outside the cemetery, and before we left, were placed in a long broad trench, with blankets over them. We marched to BRY on the 8th, again through storms of rain. The MORMAL forest is reported clear, and BAVAY taken. The men are most excited about the visit of the plenipotentiaries to our front line: these have, I learn later, been sent back, with orders to apply to FOCH on a basis of unconditional surrender.
BRY. Nov. 8.
BRY has not suffered much from destruction. We were welcomed by the inhabitants, and my billet was one of the only two intact houses. By a brickstack at the end of the lane we found two dead Germans, a dead French sheepdog by their side: all three had no doubt been simultaneously killed by shell-fire. We were ordered to move on just a lunch had been laid and the kits brought in, to LA FLAMENGRIE, three or four miles distant. We passed a corner estaminet just out of BRY – “That’s where the fam’ly was” said my most trusty Corporal, FUDGE, riding at my elbow. “What family?” I asked. “An ‘ole fam’ly, Sir, killed by shellfire, mother and two children and grandfather” I rode round, impelled by the horrid sensationalism which is not entirely atrophied even by a surfeit of horror. It was quite true – there was a mattress, with the bodies of the two women on it, the young mother clasping in death her two babes.
LA FLAMENGRIE had once possessed a cross-road. The enemy had planted in it an 8 inch shell, with a time fuze, which, in due season exploding, had made of the cross-road a crater big enough to hide a 3 ton lorry. So we wound our way around a farmyard which possessed a complete stable of dead horses and mules, and after hunting in vain for a billet in the village, which was possessed by D.H.Q., got somehow into two estaminets upon the road by which we had entered. The inhabitants of one were refugees from CAMBRAI: of the other Belgian Walloons, aborigines, of a fine type, deep-voiced and courteous. There was no doubt about these people’s gratitude for their deliverance from German occupation: they heaped upon us such poor presents as, in their long-stinted condition, they could muster, apples, milk, and honey. The old patron even chopped kindling for our Mess cook, much to that worthy’s amazement.
We buried two soldiers of the 2nd Wilts this afternoon, the 10th November, whom we had found in a by-road behind the long orchard of the Reignier farm. Both had been dead about a week: one of them my Transport Sergeant had known. There had been a Frenchwoman dead a few days of influenza, buried in a little orchard-patch behind the largest of the two estaminets: and there, next to her, we laid Pte. HASKETT, J., and CARTER, H., with all reverence, and such crosses as we could make upon their graves.
The D.H.Q. lorry was yesterday struck by a shell, and went up in a sheet of flame, burning the driver and his look-out man to death. Their charred remains when I saw them, were lying in the wreckage like two burnt dolls, sitting as they drove. General JEFFREYS lost all his kit for the second time since he took command of the 19th Division.
The news is, that BAVARIA has revolted, and Hamburg and KIEL are aflame with Socialist unrest. The statue of the Kaiser in Cologne has been dressed in a hat and coat, given a bag and stick, with the placard “Go, and go quickly”. Rumour is strong that the Crown Prince has been shot while attempting to cross the Dutch frontier. One paper is certain of it, and publishes confirmation of the rumour. The Times is silent on the point.
NOVEMBER 11. LA FLAMENGRIE.
At 10.50 a.m., we heard that an Armistice had been signed, and that therefore there was only a period of ten minutes left for war. There was no demonstration in the village, though a service for rapatries was held. Our Belgian hosts discussed the all-absorbing topic with great animation, and with many stories and reminiscences of German rule. The chief difference to our routine was at night – profound stillness, not a gunshot, not an echo of aeroplanes – absolute peace.
We left two or three days later. The REIGNERS would not accept a centime for the Mess, or for their many presents to us. It appeared that we were the first English they had lodged, and the first Allies they had seen since the German occupation of 1914. The figure of old M. Reignier – the grandpere, with his soft, deep voice, a little quavering now, and his fine old countenance, which would have graced an archdeacon, will long remain in my memory. They wrung our hands on parting from us, and true emotion, from what source I know not quite, prevented them from answering my parting thanks to them for their overflowing hospitality.
And so the end has, in all probability, come: and English crowds are possibly celebrating, even as I write, the termination of the greatest and most disastrous War of modern times, the heritage of which we shall reap for many a long and weary year to come. I would have been nowhere else in the world to receive this news, but where our armies stopped: in the last few desperate fields where the bitter and wicked conflict was stayed: where, in the cold November moonlight a mighty silence, strange and profound, fell as an invisible veil over the scene of desolation and sudden death which War had brought into the peaceful Walloon village where first we heard of the signing of the Armistice.
COLOGNE
My first impressions of Cologne, at seven o’clock in the evening of a boisterous day in March 1919, are those of one who wakes suddenly from the weary torpor of an all-day train journey into a sudden babel of guttural tongues, an incessant whirl of traffic across boulevards swept by fitful gusts of rain and wind; above, dominating the hubbub of travel and the turbulence of the passing squall, ponderous, insistent, the roar of a mighty vesper bell, issuing from a giant bulk of architecture which loomed illimitable in the evening dusk; but which the instinct of the newest stranger must needs have recognised as the mighty Dom-Kirche, the Cathedral of Cologne.
Had Cologne no other title to fame, its far-famed “Water” has been for generations a household word; and, in spite of competition – the French started an “Eau de Boulogne” during the war period – remains serenely unique. But Cologne is a city of a thousand interests, and over a thousand legends. Charles II spent the latter portion of his exile from England here; and one of the first congratulatory addresses he received upon his accession was from the burghers of Cologne, of whom His Majesty declared that they “were the best people in the world, the most kind and worthy to him that he ever met with”. But little of the Cologne that sheltered the Merry Monarch remains to-day; though there is one mediaeval quarter, the heart of the ancient city, by the riverside, at which the march of progress has halted since Stuart times. Its quaint gables and tiny windows form a most picturesque contrast to the mighty modern buildings which flank it on either side; and, as is the inevitable lot of ancient tenement, felon and bandit make to-day close sanctuary of its bulging streets and tortuous alleys.
In mediaeval days, the number of churches in Cologne was prodigious; even to-day it is remarkable. The vast Cathedral, whose history is a romance in itself, remained for centuries incomplete, the towers unfinished; until in the early ‘forties of the last century, in a wave of fervour in which religious and secular enthusiasm were at one, the mighty spires – the dimensions of which are utterly incomprehensible from the pavement below – were completed in accordance with the still surviving twelfth-century plan; thus forming, if not the finest, the most remarkable Gothic church in Europe. The interior is imposing, but has little of the charm of age or decoration. The bones of the Magi are preserved in it, and a famous Madonna, called the Madonna with the Bean-Flower, by an early Cologne master. It possessed before the war a notable bell, the Kaiser-Glocke, which, during the gun-metal shortage was dismounted and converted by Krupp into howitzers.
The people of Cologne and of the Rhineland have racial distinctions from all other types of Germans; the Prussians they resemble least. It must be remembered that Cologne was occupied by the French for fourteen years, about a century ago; and the French left their mark, not only upon the walls and towers of the stronghold cities of the Rhine, but on the temperament of their inhabitants as well. The average Rhinelander has more than a spice of the mercurial temper of his Latin neighbour. He is quick to take offence, quick to forgive, and has pronounced views upon the autonomy of his own particular Fatherland.
That Cologne has been, in times past, possessed of a progressive and intelligent Municipality is evidenced by the treatment of its ancient city walls, which, up to 1881 cramped and confined the development of the growing city. It was resolved to remove them, but to retain the three chief gates, which, with an original section of the ancient wall, were carefully restored as historic monuments; and in order to perpetuate the city’s former bounds, the semi-circular line of the mediaeval ceinture was preserved in a broad and graceful boulevard, the sections of which were given duly commemorative names.
It is doubtful if many cities can shew a better example of the conflict of modern convenience with mediaeval association than in the city tramway system of Cologne, which by some miracle contrives to thread its way, three cars at a time, through the tiny squares and tortuous thoroughfares of the older districts without more than an average record of fatality. On the Rhine bank, with its half-hour service-de-luxe to Bonn, can be seen what the Rhinelander can really do in the way of tramways, when given a free hand. This electric train system, laid down in 1910, attracted a considerable amount of attention in England with its sixty mile an hour average; and though since then it has become the pioneer among half-a-dozen similar systems running out of Cologne, there can be few faster and safer tracks than that on which the four monster cars, still superbly sprung and fitted, swing out from Cologne plainlands to where Bonn and Godesberg lie in the enchanting shadow of the Severn Mountains – that glorious, ever-changing picture of mountain-peak and forest – which marks the northern portal of the mighty barrier of hills, through which the Rhine, from unrecorded age, has slowly worn its course; at every turn of which stronghold and tower, legend and vineyard bear witness to the eternal cycle of war, faction, and superstition, which to this day enshrines the rich romance of Rhineland and her river.
The German children are admirable, sturdy, clear-eyed, brown-skinned; dressed most hygienically, quick and full of interest yet quiet in public, unlike French children, who fight meanly among one another. I think the German loves his “Kinder” and am sure he should do so.
They are all the more taking because at present they are not influenced by the world-wide shame and hatred of the World War, as are their elders. They are too innocent to disguise their feelings or to turn their looks askance. The only genuine smile of greeting I have received in Germany so far was from a perfect little “HousFrau” of some seven summers, a child of the artisan class, carrying her father’s “MittagEssen” to him at noon. I was positively thankful, being, in my latter age no such international Shylock as most of my fellow-occupationers, for the artless and wholly friendly smile of this little maid.
————————-
The German may be hindered by disadvantageous Peace terms: pile Pelion upon the Ossa of his penalties, he will not be stopped. Prune a rose-tree, it thanks you the next year by its vigorous new shoots and the bounty of its bud. That every nation, even Latin nations, not hitherto suspected of great national esprit-de-corps or heroism in the face of adversity, can rise on account of their troubles, even to the sublime, France has shewn us in the war: even that bruised and battered borrow-pit of European conflict, Belgium.
The Bay Museum & Research Facility 