Outside the window where I am writing this, Fifth
Avenue, New York, has just left its churches and is
flaunting its spring finery in the sun. Across
the sea, such a little way as measured by time, people
are in the churches also. The light comes through
the ancient, stained-glass windows and falls, not
on spring finery, not on orchids and gardenias, but
on thousands of tiny candles burning before the shrine
of the Mother of Pity.
It is so near. And it is so terrible. How
can we play? How can we think of anything else?
But for the grace of God, your son and mine lying
there in the spring sunlight on the muddy battlefield
of Ypres!
IN THE LINE OF THE “MITRAILLEUSE”
I was taken to see the battlefield of Ypres by Captain
Boisseau, of the French War Academy, and Lieutenant
Rene Puaux, of the staff of General Foch. It
was a bright and sunny day, with a cold wind, however,
that set the water in the wayside ditches to rippling.
All the night before I had wakened at intervals to
heavy cannonading and the sharp cracking of mitrailleuse.
We were well behind the line, but the wind was coming
from the direction of the battlefield.
The start was made from in front of General Foch’s
headquarters. He himself put me in the car, and
bowed an au revoir.
“You will see,” he said, “the French
soldier in the field, and you will see him cheerful
and well. You will find him full also of invincible
courage and resolution.”
And all that he had said, I found. I found the
French soldiers smiling and cheerful and ruddy in
the most wretched of billets. I found them firing
at the enemy, still cheerful, but with a coolness of
courage that made my own shaking nerves steady themselves.
Today, when that very part of the line I visited is,
as was expected when I was there, bearing the brunt
of the German attack in the most furious fighting
of the war, I wonder, of those French soldiers who
crowded round to see the first woman they had beheld
for months, how many are lying on that muddy battlefield?
What has happened on that road, guarded by buried
quick-firers, that stretched to the German trenches
beyond the poplar trees? Did the “rabbit
trap” do its work? Only for a time, I think,
for was it not there that the Germans broke through?
Did the Germans find and silence that concealed battery
of seventy-five-millimetre guns under its imitation
hedge? Who was in the tree lookout as the enemy
swarmed across, and did he get away?
Except for the constant road repairing there was little
to see during the first part of the journey.
Here in a flat field, well beyond the danger zone,
some of the new British Army was digging practice
trenches in the mud. Their tidy uniforms were
caked with dirt, their faces earnest and flushed.
At last the long training at Salisbury Plain was over,
and here they were, if not at the front, within hearing
distance of the guns. Any day now a bit of luck
would move them forward, and there would be something
doing.
