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War and the Future

by H. G. Wells

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Etext prepared by Morgan L. Owens, packrat@nznet.gen.nz

WAR AND THE FUTURE

Italy, France and Britain at War

by H. G. Wells

Contents

The Passing of the Effigy

The War in Italy (August, 1916)

I. The Isonzo Front

II. The Mountain War

III. Behind the Front

The Western War (September, 1916)

I. Ruins

II. The Grades of War

III. The War Landscape

IV. New Arms for Old Ones

V. Tanks

How People Think About the War

I. Do they Really Think at all?

II. The Yielding Pacifist and the Conscientious Objector

III. The Religious Revival

IV. The Riddle of the British

V. The Social Changes in Progress

VI. The Ending of the War

THE PASSING OF THE EFFIGY

One of the minor peculiarities of this unprecedented war is the

Tour of the Front. After some months of suppressed information--

in which even the war correspondent was discouraged to the point

of elimination--it was discovered on both sides that this was a

struggle in which Opinion was playing a larger and more important

part than it had ever done before. This wild spreading weed was

perhaps of decisive importance; the Germans at any rate were

attempting to make it a cultivated flower. There was Opinion

flowering away at home, feeding rankly on rumour; Opinion in

neutral countries; Opinion getting into great tangles of

misunderstanding and incorrect valuation between the Allies. The

confidence and courage of the enemy; the amiability and

assistance of the neutral; the zeal, sacrifice, and serenity of

the home population; all were affected. The German cultivation

of opinion began long before the war; it is still the most

systematic and, because of the psychological ineptitude of the

Germans, it is probably the clumsiest. The French /Maison de

la Presse/ is certainly the best organisation in existence for

making things clear, counteracting hostile suggestion, the

British official organisations are comparatively ineffective; but

what is lacking officially is very largely made up for by the

good will and generous efforts of the English and American press.

An interesting monograph might be written upon these various

attempts of the belligerents to get themselves and their

proceedings explained.

Because there is perceptible in these developments, quite over

and above the desire to influence opinion, a very real effort to

get things explained. It is the most interesting and curious--

one might almost write touching--feature of these organisations

that they do not constitute a positive and defined propaganda

such as the Germans maintain. The German propaganda is simple,

because its ends are simple; assertions of the moral elevation

and loveliness of Germany; of the insuperable excellences of

German Kultur, the Kaiser, and Crown Prince, and so forth; abuse

of the "treacherous" English who allied themselves with the

"degenerate" French and the "barbaric" Russians; nonsense about

"the freedom of the seas"--the emptiest phrase in history--

childish attempts to sow suspicion between the Allies, and still

more childish attempts to induce neutrals and simple-minded

pacifists of allied nationality to save the face of Germany by

initiating peace negotiations. But apart from their steady

record and reminder of German brutalities and German aggression,

the press organisations of the Allies have none of this

definiteness in their task. The aim of the national intelligence

in each of the allied countries is not to exalt one's own nation

and confuse and divide the enemy, but to get a real understanding

with the peoples and spirits of a number of different nations, an

understanding that will increase and become a fruitful and

permanent understanding between the allied peoples. Neither the

English, the Russians, the Italians, nor the French, to name only

the bigger European allies, are concerned in setting up a legend,

as the Germans are concerned in setting up a legend of themselves

to impose upon mankind. They are reality dealers in this war,

and the Germans are effigy mongers. Practically the Allies are

saying each to one another, "Pray come to me and see for yourself

that I am very much the human stuff that you are. Come and see

that I am doing my best--and I think that is not so very bad a

best...." And with that is something else still more subtle,

something rather in the form of, "And please tell me what you

think of me--and all this."

So we have this curious byplay of the war, and one day I find Mr.

Nabokoff, the editor of the /Retch/, and Count Alexy

Tolstoy, that writer of delicate short stories, and Mr.

Chukovsky, the subtle critic, calling in upon me after braving

the wintry seas to see the British fleet; M. Joseph Reinach

follows them presently upon the same errand; and then appear

photographs of Mr. Arnold Bennett wading in the trenches of

Flanders, Mr. Noyes becomes discreetly indiscreet about what he

has seen among the submarines, and Mr. Hugh Walpole catches

things from Mr. Stephen Graham in the Dark Forest of Russia. All

this is quite over and above such writing of facts at first hand

as Mr. Patrick McGill and a dozen other real experiencing

soldiers--not to mention the soldiers' letters Mr. James Milne

has collected, or the unforgettable and immortal /Prisoner of

War/ of Mr. Arthur Green--or such admirable war

correspondents' work as Mr. Philip Gibbs or Mr. Washburne has

done. Some of us writers--I can answer for one--have made our

Tour of the Fronts with a very understandable diffidence. For my

own part I did not want to go. I evaded a suggestion that I

should go in 1915. I travel badly, I speak French and Italian

with incredible atrocity, and am an extreme Pacifist. I hate

soldiering. And also I did not want to write anything "under

instruction". It is largely owing to a certain stiffness in the

composition of General Delme-Radcliffe is resolved that

Italy shall not feel neglected by the refusal of the invitation

from the Comando Supremo by anyone who from the perspective of

Italy may seem to be a representative of British opinion. If

Herbert Spencer had been alive General Radcliffe would have

certainly made him come, travelling-hammock, ear clips and all--

and I am not above confessing that I wish that Herbert Spencer

was alive--for this purpose. I found Udine warm and gay with

memories of Mr. Belloc, Lord Northcliffe, Mr. Sidney Low, Colonel

Repington and Dr. Conan Doyle, and anticipating the arrival of

Mr. Harold Cox. So we pass, mostly in automobiles that bump

tremendously over war roads, a cloud of witnesses each testifying

after his manner. Whatever else has happened, we have all been

photographed with invincible patience and resolution under the

direction of Colonel Barberich in a sunny little court in Udine.

My own manner of testifying must be to tell what I have seen and

what I have thought during this extraordinary experience. It has

been my natural disposition to see this war as something

purposeful and epic, as it is great, as an epoch, as "the War

that will end War"--but of that last, more anon. I do not think

I am alone in this inclination to a dramatic and logical

interpretation. The caricatures in the French shops show

civilisation (and particularly Marianne) in conflict with a huge

and hugely wicked Hindenburg Ogre. Well, I come back from this

tour with something not so simple as that. If I were to be tied

down to one word for my impression of this war, I should say that

this war is /Queer./ It is not like anything in a really

waking world, but like something in a dream. It hasn't exactly

that clearness of light against darkness or of good against ill.

But it has the quality of wholesome instinct struggling under a

nightmare. The world is not really awake. This vague appeal for

explanations to all sorts of people, this desire to exhibit the

business, to get something in the way of elucidation at present

missing, is extraordinarily suggestive of the efforts of the mind

to wake up that will sometimes occur at a deep crisis. My memory

of this tour I have just made is full of puzzled-looking men. I

have seen thousands of /poilus/ sitting about in

cafes, by the roadside, in tents, in trenches, thoughtful.

I have seen Alpini sitting restfully and staring with speculative

eyes across the mountain gulfs towards unseen and unaccountable

enemies. I have seen trainloads of wounded staring out of the

ambulance train windows as we passed. I have seen these dim

intimations of questioning reflection in the strangest

juxtapositions; in Malagasy soldiers resting for a spell among

the big shells they were hoisting into trucks for the front, in a

couple of khaki-clad Maoris sitting upon the step of a horse-van

in Amiens station. It is always the same expression one catches,

rather weary, rather sullen, inturned. The shoulders droop. The

very outline is a note of interrogation. They look up as the

privileged tourist of the front, in the big automobile or the

reserved compartment, with his officer or so in charge, passes--

importantly. One meets a pair of eyes that seems to say:

"Perhaps /you/ understand....

"In which case---...?"

It is a part, I think, of this disposition to investigate what

makes everyone collect "specimens" of the war. Everywhere the

souvenir forces itself upon the attention. The homecoming

permissionaire brings with him invariably a considerable weight

of broken objects, bits of shell, cartridge clips, helmets; it is

a peripatetic museum. It is as if he hoped for a clue. It is

almost impossible, I have found, to escape these pieces in

evidence. I am the least collecting of men, but I have brought

home Italian cartridges, Austrian cartridges, the fuse of an

Austrian shell, a broken Italian bayonet, and a note that is

worth half a franc within the confines of Amiens. But a large

heavy piece of exploded shell that had been thrust very urgently

upon my attention upon the Carso I contrived to lose during the

temporary confusion of our party by the arrival and explosion of

another prospective souvenir in our close proximity. And two

really very large and almost complete specimens of some species

of /Ammonites/ unknown to me, from the hills to the east of

the Adige, partially wrapped in a back number of the /Corriere

della Sera/, that were pressed upon me by a friendly officer,

were unfortunately lost on the line between Verona and Milan

through the gross negligence of a railway porter. But I doubt if

they would have thrown any very conclusive light upon the war.

I avow myself an extreme Pacifist. I am against the man who

first takes up the weapon. I carry my pacifism far beyond the

ambiguous little group of British and foreign sentimentalists who

pretend so amusingly to be socialists in the /Labour

Leader/, whose conception of foreign policy is to give Germany

now a peace that would be no more than a breathing time for a

fresh outrage upon civilisation, and who would even make heroes

of the crazy young assassins of the Dublin crime. I do not

understand those people. I do not merely want to stop this war.

I want to nail down war in its coffin. Modern war is an

intolerable thing. It is not a thing to trifle with in this

Urban District Council way, it is a thing to end forever. I have

always hated it, so far that is as my imagination enabled me to

realise it; and now that I have been seeing it, sometimes quite

closely for a full month, I hate it more than ever. I never

imagined a quarter of its waste, its boredom, its futility, its

desolation. It is merely a destructive and dispersive instead of

a constructive and accumulative industrialism. It is a gigantic,

dusty, muddy, weedy, bloodstained silliness. It is the plain

duty of every man to give his life and all that he has if by so

doing he may help to end it. I hate Germany, which has thrust

this experience upon mankind, as I hate some horrible infectious

disease. The new war, the war on the modern level, is her

invention and her crime. I perceive that on our side and in its

broad outlines, this war is nothing more than a gigantic and

heroic effort in sanitary engineering; an effort to remove German

militarism from the life and regions it has invaded, and to bank

it in and discredit and enfeeble it so that never more will it

repeat its present preposterous and horrible efforts. All human

affairs and all great affairs have their reservations and their

complications, but that is the broad outline of the business as

it has impressed itself on my mind and as I find it conceived in

the mind of the average man of the reading class among the allied

peoples, and as I find it understood in the judgement of honest

and intelligent neutral observers.

It is my unshakeable belief that essentially the Allies fight for

a permanent world peace, that primarily they do not make war but

resist war, that has reconciled me to this not very congenial

experience of touring as a spectator all agog to see, through the

war zones. At any rate there was never any risk of my playing

Balaam and blessing the enemy. This war is tragedy and sacrifice

for most of the world, for the Germans it is simply the

catastrophic outcome of fifty years of elaborate intellectual

foolery. Militarism, Welt Politik, and here we are! What else

/could/ have happened, with Michael and his infernal War

Machine in the very centre of Europe, but this tremendous

disaster?

It is a disaster. It may be a necessary disaster; it may teach a

lesson that could be learnt in no other way; but for all that, I

insist, it remains waste, disorder, disaster.

There is a disposition, I know, in myself as well as in others,

to wriggle away from this verity, to find so much good in the

collapse that has come to the mad direction of Europe for the

past half-century as to make it on the whole almost a beneficial

thing. But at most I can find it in no greater good than the

good of a nightmare that awakens the sleeper in a dangerous place

to a realisation of the extreme danger of his sleep. Better had

he been awake--or never there. In Venetia Captain Pirelli, whose

task it was to keep me out of mischief in the war zone, was

insistent upon the way in which all Venetia was being opened up

by the new military roads; there has been scarcely a new road

made in Venetia since Napoleon drove his straight, poplar-

bordered highways through the land. M. Joseph Reinach, who was

my companion upon the French front, was equally impressed by the

stirring up and exchange of ideas in the villages due to the

movement of the war. Charles Lamb's story of the discovery of

roast pork comes into one's head with an effect of repartee.

More than ideas are exchanged in the war zone, and it is doubtful

how far the sanitary precautions of the military authorities

avails against a considerable propaganda of disease. A more

serious argument for the good of war is that it evokes heroic

qualities that it has brought out almost incredible quantities of

courage, devotion, and individual romance that did not show in

the suffocating peace time that preceded the war. The reckless

and beautiful zeal of the women in the British and French

munition factories, for example, the gaiety and fearlessness of

the common soldiers everywhere; these things have always been

there--like champagne sleeping in bottles in a cellar. But was

there any need to throw a bomb into the cellar?

I am reminded of a story, or rather of the idea for a story that

I think I must have read in that curious collection of fantasies

and observations, Hawthorne's /Note Book./ It was to be the

story of a man who found life dull and his circumstances

altogether mediocre. He had loved his wife, but now after all

she seemed to be a very ordinary human being. He had begun life

with high hopes--and life was commonplace. He was to grow

fretful and restless. His discontent was to lead to some action,

some irrevocable action; but upon the nature of that action I do

not think the /Note Book/ was very clear. It was to carry

him in such a manner that he was to forget his wife. Then, when

it was too late, he was to see her at an upper window, stripped

and firelit, a glorious thing of light and loveliness and tragic

intensity....

The elementary tales of the world are very few, and Hawthorne's

story and Lamb's story are, after all, only variations upon the

same theme. But can we poor human beings never realise our

quality without destruction?

One of the larger singularities of the great war is its failure

to produce great and imposing personalities, mighty leaders,

Napoleons, Caesars. I would indeed make that the essential

thing in my reckoning of the war. It is a drama without a hero;

without countless incidental heroes no doubt, but no star part.

Even the Germans, with a national predisposition for hero-cults

and living still in an atmosphere of Victorian humbug, can

produce nothing better than that timber image, Hindenburg.

It is not that the war has failed to produce heroes so much as

that it has produced heroism in a torrent. The great man of this

war is the common man. It becomes ridiculous to pick out

particular names. There are too many true stories of splendid

acts in the past two years ever to be properly set down. The

V.C.'s and the palms do but indicate samples. One would need an

encyclopaedia, a row of volumes, of the gloriousness of

human impulses. The acts of the small men in this war dwarf all

the pretensions of the Great Man. Imperatively these

multitudinous heroes forbid the setting up of effigies. When I

was a young man I imitated Swift and posed for cynicism; I will

confess that now at fifty and greatly helped by this war, I have

fallen in love with mankind.

But if I had to pick out a single figure to stand for the finest

quality of the Allies' war, I should I think choose the figure of

General Joffre. He is something new in history. He is

leadership without vulgar ambition. He is the extreme antithesis

to the Imperial boomster of Berlin. He is as it were the

ordinary common sense of men, incarnate. He is the antithesis of

the effigy.

By great good luck I was able to see him. I was delayed in Paris

on my way to Italy, and my friend Captain Millet arranged for a

visit to the French front at Soissons and put me in charge of

Lieutenant de Tessin, whom I had met in England studying British

social questions long before this war. Afterwards Lieutenant de

Tessin took me to the great hotel--it still proclaims

"/Restaurant/" in big black letters on the garden wall--

which shelters the General Headquarters of France, and here I was

able to see and talk to Generals Pelle and Castelnau as

well as to General Joffre. They are three very remarkable and

very different men. They have at least one thing in common; it

is clear that not one of them has spent ten minutes in all his

life in thinking of himself as a Personage or Great Man. They

all have the effect of being active and able men doing an

extremely complicated and difficult but extremely interesting job

to the very best of their ability. With me they had all one

quality in common. They thought I was interested in what they

were doing, and they were quite prepared to treat me as an

intelligent man of a different sort, and to show me as much as I

could understand....

Let me confess that de Tessin had had to persuade me to go to

Headquarters. Partly that was because I didn't want to use up

even ten minutes of the time of the French commanders, but much

more was it because I have a dread of Personages.

There is something about these encounters with personages--as if

one was dealing with an effigy, with something tremendous put up

to be seen. As one approaches they become remoter; great

unsuspected crevasses are discovered. Across these gulfs one

makes ineffective gestures. They do not meet you, they pose at

you enormously. Sometimes there is something more terrible than

dignity; there is condescension. They are affable. I had but

recently had an encounter with an imported Colonial statesman,

who was being advertised like a soap as the coming saviour of

England. I was curious to meet him. I wanted to talk to him

about all sorts of things that would have been profoundly

interesting, as for example his impressions of the Anglican

bishops. But I met a hoarding. I met a thing like a mask,

something surrounded by touts, that was dully trying--as we say

in London--to "come it" over me. He said he had heard of me. He

had read /Kipps./ I intimated that though I had written

/Kipps/ I had continued to exist--but he did not see the

point of that. I said certain things to him about the difference

in complexity between political life in Great Britain and the

colonies, that he was manifestly totally capable of

understanding. But one could as soon have talked with one of the

statesmen at Madame Tussaud's. An antiquated figure.

The effect of these French commanders upon me was quite different

from my encounter with that last belated adventurer in the effigy

line. I felt indeed that I was a rather idle and flimsy person

coming into the presence of a tremendously compact and busy

person, but I had none of that unpleasant sensation of a

conventional role, of being expected to play the minute

worshipper in the presence of the Great Image. I was so moved by

the common humanity of them all that in each case I broke away

from the discreet interpretations of de Tessin and talked to them

directly in the strange dialect which I have inadvertently made

for myself out of French, a disemvowelled speech of epicene

substantives and verbs of incalculable moods and temperaments,

"/Entente Cordiale./" The talked back as if we had met in a

club. General Pelle pulled my leg very gaily with some

quotations from an article I had written upon the conclusion of

the war. I think he found my accent and my idioms very

refreshing. I had committed myself to a statement that Bloch has

been justified in his theory that under modern conditions the

defensive wins. There were excellent reasons, and General

Pelle pointed them out, for doubting the applicability of

this to the present war.

Both he and General Castelnau were anxious that I should see a

French offensive sector as well as Soissons. Then I should

understand. And since then I have returned from Italy and I have

seen and I do understand. The Allied offensive was winning; that

is to say, it was inflicting far greater losses than it

experienced; it was steadily beating the spirit out of the German

army and shoving it back towards Germany. Only peace can, I

believe, prevent the western war ending in Germany. And it is

the Frenchmen mainly who have worked out how to do it.

But of that I will write later. My present concern is with

General Joffre as the antithesis of the Effigy. The effigy,

"Thou Prince of Peace,

Thou God of War,"

as Mr. Sylvester Viereck called him, prances on a great horse,

wears a Wagnerian cloak, sits on thrones and talks of shining

armour and "unser Gott." All Germany gloats over his Jovian

domesticities; when I was last in Berlin the postcard shops were

full of photographs of a sort of procession of himself and his

sons, all with long straight noses and sidelong eyes. It is all

dreadfully old-fashioned. General Joffre sits in a pleasant

little sitting-room in a very ordinary little villa conveniently

close to Headquarters. He sits among furniture that has no

quality of pose at all, that is neither magnificent nor

ostentatiously simple and hardy. He has dark, rather sleepy eyes

under light eyelashes, eyes that glance shyly and a little

askance at his interlocutor and then, as he talks, away--as if he

did not want to be preoccupied by your attention. He has a

broad, rather broadly modelled face, a soft voice, the sort of

persuasive reasoning voice that many Scotchmen have. I had a

feeling that if he were to talk English he would do so with a

Scotch accent. Perhaps somewhere I have met a Scotchman of his

type. He sat sideways to his table as a man might sit for a

gossip in a cafe.

He is physically a big man, and in my memory he grows bigger and

bigger. He sits now in my memory in a room like the rooms that

any decent people might occupy, like that vague room that is the

background of so many good portraits, a great blue-coated figure

with a soft voice and rather tired eyes, explaining very simply

and clearly the difficulties that this vulgar imperialism of

Germany, seizing upon modern science and modern appliances, has

created for France and the spirit of mankind.

He talked chiefly of the strangeness of this confounded war. It

was exactly like a sanitary engineer speaking of the unexpected

difficulties of some particularly nasty inundation. He made

little stiff horizontal gestures with his hands. First one had

to build a dam and stop the rush of it, so; then one had to

organise the push that would send it back. He explained the

organisation of the push. They had got an organisation now that

was working out most satisfactorily. Had I seen a sector? I had

seen the sector of Soissons. Yes, but that was not now an

offensive sector. I must see an offensive sector; see the whole

method. Lieutenant de Tessin must see that that was arranged....

Neither he nor his two colleagues spoke of the Germans with

either hostility or humanity. Germany for them is manifestly

merely an objectionable Thing. It is not a nation, not a people,

but a nuisance. One has to build up this great counter-thrust

bigger and stronger until they go back. The war must end in

Germany. The French generals have no such delusions about German

science or foresight or capacity as dominates the smart dinner

chatter of England. One knows so well that detestable type of

English folly, and its voice of despair: "They /plan/

everything. They foresee everything." This paralysing

Germanophobia is not common among the French. The war, the

French generals said, might take--well, it certainly looked like

taking longer than the winter. Next summer perhaps. Probably,

if nothing unforeseen occurred, before a full year has passed the

job might be done. Were any surprises in store? They didn't

seem to think it was probable that the Germans had any surprises

in store.... The Germans are not an inventive people; they are

merely a thorough people. One never knew for certain.

Is any greater contrast possible than between so implacable,

patient, reasonable--and above all things /capable/--a being

as General Joffre and the rhetorician of Potsdam, with his talk

of German Might, of Hammer Blows and Hacking Through? Can there

be any doubt of the ultimate issue between them?

There are stories that sound pleasantly true to me about General

Joffre's ambitions after the war. He is tired; then he will be

very tired. He will, he declares, spend his first free summer in

making a tour of the waterways of France in a barge. So I hope

it may be. One imagines him as sitting quietly on the crumpled

remains of the last and tawdriest of Imperial traditions, with a

fishing line in the placid water and a large buff umbrella

overhead, the good ordinary man who does whatever is given to him

to do--as well as he can. The power that has taken the great

effigy of German imperialism by the throat is something very

composite and complex, but if we personify it at all it is

something more like General Joffre than any other single human

figure I can think of or imagine.

If I were to set a frontispiece to a book about this War I would

make General Joffre the frontispiece.

As we swung back along the dusty road to Paris at a pace of fifty

miles an hour and upwards, driven by a helmeted driver with an

aquiline profile fit to go upon a coin, whose merits were a

little flawed by a childish and dangerous ambition to run over

every cat he saw upon the road, I talked to de Tessin about this

big blue-coated figure of Joffre, which is not so much a figure

as a great generalisation of certain hitherto rather obscured

French qualities, and of the impression he had made upon me. And

from that I went on to talk about the Super Man, for this

encounter had suddenly crystallised out a set of realisations

that had been for some time latent in my mind.

How much of what follows I said to de Tessin at the time I do not

clearly remember, but this is what I had in mind.

The idea of the superman is an idea that has been developed by

various people ignorant of biology and unaccustomed to biological

ways of thinking. It is an obvious idea that follows in the

course of half an hour or so upon one's realisation of the

significance of Darwinism. If man has evolved from something

different, he must now be evolving onward into something sur-

human. The species in the future will be different from the

species of the past. So far at least our Nietzsches and Shaws

and so on went right.

But being ignorant of the elementary biological proposition that

modification of a species means really a secular change in its

average, they jumped to a conclusion--to which the late Lord

Salisbury also jumped years ago at a very memorable British

Association meeting--that a species is modified by the sudden

appearance of eccentric individuals here and there in the general

mass who interbreed--preferentially. Helped by a streak of antic

egotism in themselves, they conceived of the superman as a

posturing personage, misunderstood by the vulgar, fantastic,

wonderful. But the antic Personage, the thing I have called the

Effigy, is not new but old, the oldest thing in history, the

departing thing. It depends not upon the advance of the species

but upon the uncritical hero-worship of the crowd. You may see

the monster drawn twenty times the size of common men upon the

oldest monuments of Egypt and Assyria. The true superman comes

not as the tremendous personal entry of a star, but in the less

dramatic form of a general increase of goodwill and skill and

common sense. A species rises not by thrusting up peaks but by

the brimming up as a flood does. The coming of the superman

means not an epidemic of personages but the disappearance of the

Personage in the universal ascent. That is the point overlooked

by the megalomaniac school of Nietzsche and Shaw.

And it is the peculiarity of this war, it is the most reassuring

evidence that a great increase in general ability and critical

ability has been going on throughout the last century, that no

isolated great personages have emerged. Never has there been so

much ability, invention, inspiration, leadership; but the very

abundance of good qualities has prevented our focusing upon those

of any one individual. We all play our part in the realisation

of God's sanity in the world, but, as the strange, dramatic end

of Lord Kitchener has served to remind us, there is no single

individual of all the allied nations whose death can materially

affect the great destinies of this war.

In the last few years I have developed a religious belief that

has become now to me as real as any commonplace fact. I think

that mankind is still as it were collectively dreaming and hardly

more awakened to reality than a very young child. It has these

dreams that we express by the flags of nationalities and by

strange loyalties and by irrational creeds and ceremonies, and

its dreams at times become such nightmares as this war. But the

time draws near when mankind will awake and the dreams will fade

away, and then there will be no nationality in all the world but

humanity, and no kind, no emperor, nor leader but the one God of

mankind. This is my faith. I am as certain of this as I was in

1900 that men would presently fly. To me it is as if it must be

so.

So that to me this extraordinary refusal of the allied nations

under conditions that have always hitherto produced a Great Man

to produce anything of the sort, anything that can be used as an

effigy and carried about for the crowd to follow, is a fact of

extreme significance and encouragement. It seems to me that the

twilight of the half gods must have come, that we have reached

the end of the age when men needed a Personal Figure about which

they could rally. The Kaiser is perhaps the last of that long

series of crowned and cloaked and semi-divine personages which

has included Caesar and Alexander and Napoleon the First--

and Third. In the light of the new time we see the emperor-god

for the guy he is. In the August of 1914 he set himself up to be

the paramount Lord of the World, and it will seem to the

historian to come, who will know our dates so well and our

feelings, our fatigues and efforts so little, it will seem a

short period from that day to this, when the great figure already

sways and staggers towards the bonfire.

I had the experience of meeting a contemporary king upon this

journey. He was the first king I had ever met. The Potsdam

figure--with perhaps some local exceptions behind the Gold Coast--

is, with its collection of uniforms and its pomps and splendours,

the purest survival of the old tradition of divine monarchy now

that the Emperor at Pekin has followed the Shogun into the

shadows. The modern type of king shows a disposition to intimate

at the outset that he cannot help it, and to justify or at any

rate utilise his exceptional position by sound hard work. It is

an age of working kings, with the manners of private gentlemen.

The King of Italy for example is far more accessible than was the

late Pierpont Morgan or the late Cecil Rhodes, and he seems to

keep a smaller court.

I went to see him from Udine. He occupied a moderate-sized

country villa about half an hour by automobile from headquarters.

I went over with General Radcliffe; we drove through the gates of

the villa past a single sentinel in an ordinary infantry uniform,

up to the door of the house, and the number of guards, servants,

attendants, officials, secretaries, ministers and the like that I

saw in that house were--I counted very carefully--four.

Downstairs were three people, a tall soldier of the bodyguard in

grey; an A.D.C., Captain Moreno, and Col. Matteoli, the minister

of the household. I went upstairs to a drawing-room of much the

same easy and generalised character as the one in which I had met

General Joffre a few days before. I gave my hat to a second

bodyguard, and as I did so a pleasantly smiling man appeared at

the door of the study whom I thought at first must be some

minister in attendance. I did not recognise him instantly

because on the stamps and coins he is always in profile. He

began to talk in excellent English about my journey, and I

replied, and so talking we went into the study from which he had

emerged. Then I realised I was talking to the king.

Addicted as I am to the cinematograph, in which the standard of

study furniture is particularly rich and high, I found something

very cooling and simple and refreshing in the sight of the king's

study furniture. He sat down with me at a little useful writing

table, and after asking me what I had seen in Italy and hearing

what I had seen and what I was to see, he went on talking, very

good talk indeed.

I suppose I did a little exceed the established tradition of

courts by asking several questions and trying to get him to talk

upon certain points as to which I was curious, but I perceived

that he had had to carry on at least so much of the regal

tradition as to control the conversation. He was, however,

entirely un-posed. His talk reminded me somehow of Maurice

Baring's books; it had just the same quick, positive

understanding. And he had just the same detachment from the war

as the French generals. He spoke of it--as one might speak of an

inundation. And of its difficulties and perplexities.

Here on the Adriatic side there were political entanglements that

by comparison made our western after-the-war problems plain

sailing. He talked of the game of spellicans among the Balkan

nationalities. How was that difficulty to be met? In Macedonia

there were Turkish villages that were Christian and Bulgarians

that were Moslem. There were families that changed the

termination of their names from /ski/ to /off/ as

Serbian or Bulgarian prevailed. I remarked that that showed a

certain passion for peace, and that much of the mischief might be

due to the propaganda of the great Powers. I have a prejudice

against that blessed Whig "principle of nationality," but the

King of Italy was not to be drawn into any statement about that.

He left the question with his admission of its extreme complexity.

He went on to talk of the strange contrasts of war, of such

things as the indifference of the birds to gunfire and

desolation. One day on the Carso he had been near the newly

captured Austrian trenches, and suddenly from amidst a scattered

mass of Austrian bodies a quail had risen. that had struck him

as odd, and so too had the sight of a pack of cards and a wine

flask on some newly-made graves. The ordinary life was a very

/obstinate/ thing....

He talked of the courage of modern men. He was astonished at the

quickness with which they came to disregard shrapnel. And they

were so quietly enduring when they were wounded. He had seen a

lot of the wounded, and he had expected much groaning and crying

out. But unless a man is hit in the head and goes mad he does

not groan or scream! They are just brave. If you ask them how

they feel it is always one of two things: either they say quietly

that they are very bad or else they say there is nothing the

matter....

He spoke as if these were mere chance observations, but everyone

tells me that nearly every day the king is at the front and often

under fire. He has taken more risks in a week than the Potsdam

War Lord has taken since the war began. He keeps himself acutely

informed upon every aspect of the war. He was a little inclined

to fatalism, he confessed. There were two stories current of two

families of four sons, in each three had been killed and in each

there was an attempt to put the fourth in a place of comparative

safety. In one case a general took the fourth son in as an

attendant and embarked upon a ship that was immediately

torpedoed; in the other the fourth son was killed by accident

while he was helping to carry dinner in a rest camp. From those

stories we came to the question whether the uneducated Italians

were more superstitious than the uneducated English; the king

thought they were much less so. That struck me as a novel idea.

But then he thought that English rural people believe in witches

and fairies.

I have given enough of this talk to show the quality of this king

of the new dispensation. It was, you see, the sort of easy talk

one might hear from fine-minded people anywhere. When we had

done talking he came to the door of the study with me and shook

hands and went back to his desk--with that gesture of return to

work which is very familiar and sympathetic to a writer, and with

no gesture of regality at all.

Just to complete this impression let me repeat a pleasant story

about this king and our Prince of Wales, who recently visited the

Italian front. The Prince is a source of anxiety on these

visits; he has a very strong and very creditable desire to share

the ordinary risks of war. He is keenly interested, and

unobtrusively bent upon getting as near the fighting as line as

possible. But the King of Italy was firm upon keeping him out of

anything more than the most incidental danger. "We don't want

any historical incidents here," he said. I think that might well

become an historical phrase. For the life of the Effigy is a

series of historical incidents.

Manifestly one might continue to multiply portraits of fine

people working upon this great task of breaking and ending the

German aggression, the German legend, the German effigy, and the

effigy business generally; the thesis being that the Allies have

no effigy. One might fill a thick volume with pictures of men up

the scale and down working loyally and devotedly upon the war, to

make this point clear that the essential king and the essential

loyalty of our side is the commonsense of mankind.

There comes into my head as a picture at the other extreme of

this series, a memory of certain trenches I visited on my last

day in France. They were trenches on an offensive front; they

were not those architectural triumphs, those homes from home,

that grow to perfection upon the less active sections of the

great line. They had been first made by men who had run rapidly

forward with spade and rifle, stooping as they ran, who had

dropped into the craters of big shells, who had organised these

chiefly at night and dug the steep ditches sideways to join up

into continuous trenches. Now they were pushing forward saps

into No Man's Land, linking them across, and so continually

creeping nearer to the enemy and a practicable jumping-off place

for an attack. (It has been made since; the village at which I

peeped was in our hands a week later.) These trenches were dug

into a sort of yellowish sandy clay; the dug-outs were mere holes

in the earth that fell in upon the clumsy; hardly any timber had

been got up the line; a storm might flood them at any time a

couple of feet deep and begin to wash the sides. Overnight they

had been "strafed" and there had been a number of casualties;

there were smashed rifles about and a smashed-up machine gun

emplacement, and the men were dog-tired and many of them sleeping

like logs, half buried in -clay. Some slept on the firing steps.

As one went along one became aware ever and again of two or three

pairs of clay-yellow feet sticking out of a clay hole, and

peering down one saw the shapes of men like rudely modelled

earthen images of soldiers, motionless in the cave.

I came round the corner upon a youngster with an intelligent face

and steady eyes sitting up on the firing step, awake and

thinking. We looked at one another. There are moments when mind

leaps to mind. It is natural for the man in the trenches

suddenly confronted by so rare a beast as a middle-aged civilian

with an enquiring expression, to feel oneself something of a

spectacle and something generalised. It is natural for the

civilian to look rather in the vein of saying, "Well, how do you

take it?" As I pushed past him we nodded slightly with an effect

of mutual understanding. And we said with our nods just exactly

what General Joffre had said with his horizontal gestures of the

hand and what the King of Italy conveyed by his friendly manner;

we said to each other that here was the trouble those Germans had

brought upon us and here was the task that had to be done.

Our guide to these trenches was a short, stocky young man, a cob;

with a rifle and a tight belt and projecting skirts and a helmet,

a queer little figure that, had you seen it in a picture a year

or so before the war, you would most certainly have pronounced

Chinese. He belonged to a Northumbrian battalion; it does not

matter exactly which. As we returned from this front line,

trudging along the winding path through the barbed wire tangles

before the smashed and captured German trench that had been taken

a fortnight before, I fell behind my guardian captain and had a

brief conversation wit this individual. He was a lad in the

early twenties, weather-bit and with bloodshot eyes. He was, he

told me, a miner. I asked my stock question in such cases,

whether he would go back to the old work after the war. He said

he would, and then added--with the events of overnight on his

mind: "If A'hm looky."

Followed a little silence. Then I tried my second stock remark

for such cases. One does not talk to soldiers at the front in

this war of Glory or the "Empire on which the sun never sets" or

"the meteor flag of England" or of King and Country or any of

those fine old headline things. On the desolate path that winds

about amidst the shell craters and the fragments and the red-

rusted wire, with the silken shiver of passing shells in the air

and the blue of the lower sky continually breaking out into

eddying white puffs, it is wonderful how tawdry such panoplies of

the effigy appear. We knew that we and our allies are upon a

greater, graver, more fundamental business than that sort of

thing now. We are very near the waking point.

"Well," I said, "it's got to be done."

"Aye," he said, easing the strap of his rifle a little; "it's got

to be done."

THE WAR IN ITALY (AUGUST, 1916)

I. THE ISONZO FRONT

My first impressions of the Italian war centre upon Udine. So

far I had had only a visit to Soissons on an exceptionally quiet

day and the sound of a Zeppelin one night in Essex for all my

experience of actual warfare. But my bedroom at the British

mission in Udine roused perhaps extravagant expectations. There

were holes in the plaster ceiling and wall, betraying splintered

laths, holes, that had been caused by a bomb that had burst and

killed several people in the little square outside. Such

excitements seem to be things of the past now in Udine. Udine

keeps itself dark nowadays, and the Austrian sea-planes, which

come raiding the Italian coast country at night very much in the

same aimless, casually malignant way in which the Zeppelins raid

England, apparently because there is nothing else for them to do,

find it easier to locate Venice.

My earlier rides in Venetia began always with the level roads of

the plain, roads frequently edged by watercourses, with plentiful

willows beside the road, vines and fields of Indian corn and

suchlike lush crops. Always quite soon one came to some old

Austrian boundary posts; almost everywhere the Italians are

fighting upon what is technically enemy territory, but nowhere

does it seem a whit less Italian than the plain of Lombardy.

When at last I motored away from Udine to the northern mountain

front I passed through Campo-Formio and saw the white-faced inn

at which Napoleon dismembered the ancient republic of Venice and

bartered away this essential part of Italy into foreign control.

It just gravitates back now--as though there had been no

Napoleon.

And upon the roads and beside them was the enormous equipment of

a modern army advancing. Everywhere I saw new roads being made,

railways pushed up, vast store dumps, hospitals; everywhere the

villages swarmed with grey soldiers; everywhere our automobile

was threading its way and taking astonishing risks among

interminable processions of motor lorries, strings of ambulances

or of mule carts, waggons with timber, waggons with wire, waggons

with men's gear, waggons with casks, waggons discreetly veiled,

columns of infantry, cavalry, batteries /en route./ Every

waggon that goes up full comes back empty, and many wounded were

coming down and prisoners and troops returning to rest. Goritzia

had been taken a week or so before my arrival; the Isonzo had

been crossed and the Austrians driven back across the Carso for

several miles; all the resources of Italy seemed to be crowding

up to make good these gains and gather strength for the next

thrust. The roads under all this traffic remained wonderful;

gangs of men were everywhere repairing the first onset of wear,

and Italy is the most fortunate land in the world for road metal;

her mountains are solid road metal, and in this Venetian plain

you need but to scrape through a yard of soil to find gravel.

One travelled through a choking dust under the blue sky, and

above the steady incessant dusty succession of lorry, lorry,

lorry, lorry that passed one by, one saw, looking up, the tree

tops, house roofs, or the solid Venetian campanile of this or

that wayside village. Once as we were coming out of the great

grey portals of that beautiful old relic of a former school of

fortification, Palmanova, the traffic became suddenly bright

yellow, and for a kilometre or so we were passing nothing but

Sicilian mule carts loaded with hay. These carts seem as strange

among the grey shapes of modern war transport as a Chinese

mandarin in painted silk would be. They are the most individual

of things, all two-wheeled, all bright yellow and the same size

it is true, but upon each there are they gayest of little

paintings, such paintings as one sees in England at times upon an

ice-cream barrow. Sometimes the picture will present a

scriptural subject, sometimes a scene of opera, sometimes a dream

landscape or a trophy of fruits or flowers, and the harness--now

much out of repair--is studded with brass. Again and again I

have passed strings of these gay carts; all Sicily must be swept

of them.

Through the dust I came to Aquileia, which is now an old

cathedral, built upon the remains of a very early basilica,

standing in a space in a scattered village. But across this

dusty space there was carried the head of the upstart Maximinus

who murdered Alexander Severus, and later Aquileia brought Attila

near to despair. Our party alighted; we inspected a very old

mosaic floor which has been uncovered since the Austrian retreat.

The Austrian priests have gone too, and their Italian successors

are already tracing out a score of Roman traces that it was the

Austrian custom to minimise. Captain Pirelli refreshed my

historical memories; it was rather like leaving a card on Gibbon

/en route/ for contemporary history.

By devious routes I went on to certain batteries of big guns

which had played their part in hammering the Austrian left above

Monfalcone across an arm of the Adriatic, and which were now

under orders to shift and move up closer. The battery was the

most unobtrusive of batteries; its one desire seemed to be to

appear a simple piece of woodland in the eye of God and the

aeroplane. I went about the network of railways and paths under

the trees that a modern battery requires, and came presently upon

a great gun that even at the first glance seemed a little less

carefully hidden than its fellows. Then I saw that it was a most

ingenious dummy made of a tree and logs and so forth. It was in

the emplacement of a real gun that had been located; it had its

painted sandbags about it just the same, and it felt itself so

entirely a part of the battery that whenever its companions fired

t burnt a flash and kicked up a dust. It was an excellent

example of the great art of camouflage which this war has

developed.

I went on through the wood to a shady observation post high in a

tree, into which I clambered with my guide. I was able from this

position to get a very good idea of the lie of the Italian

eastern front. I was in the delta of the Isonzo. Directly in

front of me were some marshes and the extreme tip of the Adriatic

Sea, at the head of which was Monfalcone, now in Italian hands.

Behind Monfalcone ran the red ridge of the Carso, of which the

Italians had just captured the eastern half. Behind this again

rose the mountains to the east of the Isonzo which the Austrians

still held. The Isonzo came towards me from out of the

mountains, in a great westward curve. Fifteen or sixteen miles

away where it emerged from the mountains lay the pleasant and

prosperous town of Goritzia, and at the westward point of the

great curve was Sagrado with its broken bridge. The battle of

Goritzia was really not fought at Goritzia at all. What happened

was the brilliant and bloody storming of Mounts Podgora and

Sabotino on the western side of the river above Goritzia, and

simultaneously a crossing at Sagrado below Goritzia and a

magnificent rush up the plateau and across the plateau of the

Carso. Goritzia itself was not organised for defence, and the

Austrians were so surprised by the rapid storm of the mountains

to the north-west of it and of the Carso to the south-east, that

they made no fight in the town itself.

As a consequence when I visited it I found it very little injured--

compared, that is, with such other towns as have been fought

through. Here and there the front of a house has been knocked in

by an Austrian shell, or a lamp-post prostrated. But the road

bridge had suffered a good deal; its iron parapet was twisted

about by shell bursts and interwoven with young trees and big

boughs designed to screen the passer-by from the observation of

the Austrian gunners upon Monte Santo. Here and there were huge

holes through which one could look down upon the blue trickles of

water in the stony river bed far below. The driver of our

automobile displayed what seemed to me an extreme confidence in

the margins of these gaps, but his confidence was justified. At

Sagrado the bridge had been much more completely demolished; no

effort had been made to restore the horizontal roadway, but one

crossed by a sort of timber switchback that followed the ups and

downs of the ruins.

It is not in these places that one must look for the real

destruction of modern war. The real fight on the left of

Goritzia went through the village of Lucinico up the hill of

Podgora. Lucinico is nothing more than a heap of grey stones;

except for a bit of the church wall and the gable end of a house

one cannot even speak of it as ruins. But in one place among the

rubble I saw the splintered top and a leg of a grand piano.

Podgora hill, which was no doubt once neatly terraced and

cultivated, is like a scrap of landscape from some airless,

treeless planet. Still more desolate was the scene upon the

Carso to the right (south) of Goritzia. Both San Martino and

Doberdo are destroyed beyond the limits of ruination. The Carso

itself is a waterless upland with but a few bushy trees; it must

always have been a desolate region, but now it is an

indescribable wilderness of shell craters, smashed-up Austrian

trenches, splintered timber, old iron, rags, and that rusty

thorny vileness of man's invention, worse than all the thorns and

thickets of nature, barbed wire. There are no dead visible; the

wounded have been cleared away; but about the trenches and

particularly near some of the dug-outs there was a faint

repulsive smell....

Yet into this wilderness the Italians are now thrusting a sort of

order. The German is a wonderful worker, they say on the Anglo-

French front that he makes his trenches by way of resting, but I

doubt if he can touch the Italian at certain forms of toil. All

the way up to San Martino and beyond, swarms of workmen were

making one of those carefully graded roads that the Italians make

better than any other people. Other swarms were laying water-

pipes. For upon the Carso there are neither roads nor water, and

before the Italians can thrust farther both must be brought up to

the front.

As we approached San Martino an Austrian aeroplane made its

presence felt overhead by dropping a bomb among the tents of some

workmen, in a little scrubby wood on the hillside near at hand.

One heard the report and turned to see the fragments flying and

the dust. Probably they got someone. And then, after a little

pause, the encampment began to spew out men; here, there and

everywhere they appeared among the tents, running like rabbits at

evening-time, down the hill. Soon after and probably in

connection with this signal, Austrian shells began to come over.

They do not use shrapnel because the rocky soil of Italy makes

that unnecessary. They fire a sort of shell that goes bang and

releases a cloud of smoke overhead, and then drops a parcel of

high explosive that bursts on the ground. The ground leaps into

red dust and smoke. But these things are now to be seen on the

cinema. Forthwith the men working on the road about us begin to

down tools and make for the shelter trenches, a long procession

going at a steady but resolute walk. Then like a blow in the

chest came the bang of a big Italian gun somewhere close at

hand....

Along about four thousand miles of the various fronts this sort

of thing was going on that morning....

This Carso front is the practicable offensive front of Italy.

From the left wing on the Isonzo along the Alpine boundary round

to the Swiss boundary there is mountain warfare like nothing else

in the world; it is warfare that pushes the boundary backward,

but it is mountain warfare that will not, for so long a period

that the war will be over first, hold out any hopeful prospects

of offensive movements on a large scale against Austria or

Germany. It is a short distance as the crow flies from Rovereto

to Munich, but not as the big gun travels. The Italians,

therefore, as their contribution to the common effort, are

thrusting rather eastwardly towards the line of the Julian Alps

through Carinthia and Carniola. From my observation post in the

tree near Monfalcone I saw Trieste away along the coast to my

right. It looked scarcely as distant as Folkestone from

Dungeness. The Italian advanced line is indeed scarcely ten

miles from Trieste. But the Italians are not, I think, going to

Trieste just yet. That is not the real game now. They are

playing loyally with the Allies for the complete defeat of the

Central Powers, and that is to be achieved striking home into

Austria. Meanwhile there is no sense in knocking Trieste to

pieces, or using Italians instead of Austrian soldiers to

garrison it.

II. THE MOUNTAIN WAR

The mountain warfare of Italy is extraordinarily unlike that upon

any other front. From the Isonzo to the Swiss frontier we are

dealing with high mountains, cut by deep valleys between which

there is usually no practicable lateral communication. Each

advance must have the nature of an unsupported shove along a

narrow channel, until the whole mountain system, that is, is won,

and the attack can begin to deploy in front of the passes.

Geographically Austria has the advantage. She had the gentler

slope of the mountain chains while Italy has the steep side, and

the foresight of old treaties has given her deep bites into what

is naturally Italian territory; she is far nearer the Italian

plain than Italy is near any practicable fighting ground for

large forces; particularly is this the case in the region of the

Adige valley and Lake Garda.

The legitimate war, so to speak, in this region is a

mountaineering war. The typical position is roughly as follows.

The Austrians occupy valley A which opens northward; the Italians

occupy valley B which opens southward. The fight is for the

crest between A and B. The side that wins that crest gains the

power of looking down into, firing into and outflanking the

positions of the enemy valley. In most cases it is the Italians

now who are pressing, and if the reader will examine a map of the

front and compare it with the official reports he will soon

realise that almost everywhere the Italians are up to the head of

the southward valleys and working over the crests so as to press

down upon the Austrian valleys. But in the Trentino the

Austrians are still well over the crest on the southward slopes.

When I was in Italy they still held Rovereto.

Now it cannot be said that under modern conditions mountains

favour either the offensive or the defensive. But they certainly

make operations far more deliberate than upon a level. An

engineered road or railway in an Alpine valley is the most

vulnerable of things; its curves and viaducts may be practically

demolished by shell fire or swept by shrapnel, although you hold

the entire valley except for one vantage point. All the

mountains round about a valley must be won before that valley is

safe for the transport of an advance. But on the other hand a

surprise capture of some single mountain crest and the hoisting

of one gun into position there may block the retreat of guns and

material from a great series of positions. Mountain surfaces are

extraordinarily various and subtle. You may understand Picardy

on a map, but mountain warfare is three-dimensional. A struggle

may go on for weeks or months consisting of apparently separate

and incidental skirmishes, and then suddenly a whole valley

organisation may crumble away in retreat or disaster. Italy is

gnawing into the Trentino day by day, and particularly around by

her right wing. At no time I shall be surprised to see a sudden

lunge forward on that front, and hear a tale of guns and

prisoners. This will not mean that she has made a sudden attack,

but that some system of Austrian positions has collapsed under

her continual pressure.

Such briefly is the /idea/ of mountain struggle. Its

realities, I should imagine, are among the strangest and most

picturesque in all this tremendous world conflict. I know

nothing of the war in the east, of course, but there are things

here that must be hard to beat. Happily they will soon get

justice done to them by an abler pen than mine. I hear that

Kipling is to follow me upon this ground; nothing can be imagined

more congenial to his extraordinary power of vivid rendering than

this struggle against cliffs, avalanches, frost and the

Austrian.

To go the Italian round needs, among other things, a good head.

Everywhere it has been necessary to make roads where hitherto

there have been only mule tracks or no tracks at all; the roads

are often still in the making, and the automobile of the war

tourist skirts precipices and takes hairpin bends upon tracks of

loose metal not an inch too broad for the operation, or it floats

for a moment over the dizzy edge while a train of mule transport

blunders by. The unruly imagination of man's heart (which is

"only evil continually") speculates upon what would be the

consequences of one good bump from the wheel of a mule cart.

Down below, the trees that one sees through a wisp of cloud look

far too small and spiky and scattered to hold out much hope for a

fallen man of letters. And at the high positions they are too

used to the vertical life to understand the secret feelings of

the visitor from the horizontal. General Bompiani, whose

writings are well known to all English students of military

matters, showed me the Gibraltar he is making of a great mountain

system east of the Adige.

"Let me show you," he said, and flung himself on to the edge of

the precipice into exactly the position of a lady riding side-

saddle. "You will find it more comfortable to sit down."

But anxious as I am abroad not to discredit my country by

unseemly exhibitions I felt unequal to such gymnastics without a

proper rehearsal at a lower level. I seated myself carefully at

a yard (perhaps it was a couple of yards) from the edge, advanced

on my trousers without dignity to the verge, and so with an

effort thrust my legs over to dangle in the crystalline

air.

"That," proceeded General Bompiani, pointing with a giddy

flourish of his riding whip, "is Monte Tomba."

I swayed and half-extended my hand towards him. But he was still

there--sitting, so to speak, on the half of himself.... I was

astonished that he did not disappear abruptly during his

exposition....

The fighting man in the Dolomites has been perhaps the most

wonderful of all these separate campaigns. I went up by

automobile as far as the clambering new road goes up the flanks

of Tofana No. 2; thence for a time by mule along the flank of

Tofana No. 1, and thence on foot to the vestiges of the famous

Castelletto.

The aspect of these mountains is particularly grim and wicked;

they are worn old mountains, they tower overhead in enormous

vertical cliffs of sallow grey, with the square jointings and

occasional clefts and gullies, their summits are toothed and

jagged; the path ascends and passes round the side of the

mountain upon loose screes, which descend steeply to a lower wall

of precipices. In the distance rise other harsh and desolate-

looking mountain masses, with shining occasional scars of old

snow. Far below is a bleak valley of stunted pine trees through

which passes the road of the Dolomites.

As I ascended the upper track two bandages men were coming down

on led mules. It was mid-August, and they were suffering from

frostbite. Across the great gap between the summits a minute

traveller with some provisions was going up by wire to some post

upon the crest. For everywhere upon the icy pinnacles are

observation posts directing the fire of the big guns on the

slopes below, or machine-gun stations, or little garrisons that

sit and wait through the bleak days. Often they have no link

with the world below but a precipitous climb or a "teleferic"

wire. Snow and frost may cut them off absolutely for weeks from

the rest of mankind. The sick and wounded must begin their

journey down to help and comfort in a giddy basket that swings

down to the head of the mule track below.

Originally all these crests were in Austrian hands; they were

stormed by the Alpini under almost incredible conditions. For

fifteen days, for example, they fought their way up these screes

on the flanks of Tofana No. 2 to the ultimate crags, making

perhaps a hundred metres of ascent each day, hiding under rocks

and in holes in the daylight and receiving fresh provisions and

ammunition and advancing by night. They were subjected to rifle

fire, machine-gun fire and bombs of a peculiar sort, big iron

balls of the size of a football filled with explosive that were

just flung down the steep. They dodged flares and star shells.

At one place they went up a chimney that would be far beyond the

climbing powers of any but a very active man. It must have been

like storming the skies. The dead and wounded rolled away often

into inaccessible ravines. Stray skeletons, rags of uniform,

fragments of weapons, will add to the climbing interest of these

gaunt masses for many years to come. In this manner it was that

Tofana No. 2 was taken.

Now the Italians are organising this prize, and I saw winding up

far above me on the steep grey slope a multitudinous string of

little things that looked like black ants, each carrying a small

bright yellow egg. They were mules bringing back balks of

timber....

But one position held out invincibly; this was the Castelletto, a

great natural fortress of rock standing out at an angle of the

mountain in such a position that it commanded the Italian

communications (the Dolomite road) in the valley below, and

rendered all their positions uncomfortable and insecure. This

obnoxious post was practically inaccessible either from above or

below, and it barred the Italians even from looking into the Val

Travenanzes which it defended. It was, in fact, an impregnable

position, and against it was pitted the invincible 5th Group of

the Alpini. It was the old problem of the irresistible force in

conflict with the immovable object. And the outcome has been the

biggest military mine in all history.

The business began in January, 1916, with surveys of the rock in

question. The work of surveying for excavations, never a very

simple one, becomes much more difficult when the site is occupied

by hostile persons with machine guns. In March, as the winter's

snows abated, the boring machinery began to arrive, by mule as

far as possible and then by hand. Altogether about half a

kilometre of gallery had to be made to the mine chamber, and

meanwhile the explosive was coming up load by load and resting

first here, then there, in discreetly chosen positions. There

were at the last thirty-five tons of it in the inner chamber.

And while the boring machines bored and the work went on,

Lieutenant Malvezzi was carefully working out the problem of "il

[Our Webmaster, who is Italian, says, "il massimo effetto dirompente"]

massimo effetto dirompimento" and deciding exactly how to pack

and explode his little hoard. On the eleventh of July, at 3.30,

as he rejoices to state in his official report, "the mine

responded perfectly both in respect of the calculations made and

of the practical effects," that is to say, the Austrians were

largely missing and the Italians were in possession of the crater

of the Castelletto and looking down the Val Travenanzes from

which they had been barred for so long. Within a month things

had been so tidied up, and secured by further excavations and

sandbags against hostile fire, that even a middle-aged English

writer, extremely fagged and hot and breathless, could enjoy the

same privilege. All this, you must understand, had gone on at a

level to which the ordinary tourist rarely climbs, in a rarefied,

chest-tightening atmosphere, with wisps of clouds floating in the

clear air below and club-huts close at hand....

Among these mountains avalanches are frequent; and they come down

regardless of human strategy. In many cases the trenches cross

avalanche tracks; they and the men in them are periodically swept

away and periodically replaced. They are positions that must be

held; if the Italians will not face such sacrifices, the

Austrians will. Avalanches and frostbite have slain and disabled

their thousands; they have accounted perhaps for as many Italians

in this austere and giddy campaign as the Austrians....

It seems to be part of the stern resolve of Fate that this, the

greatest of wars, shall be the least glorious; it is manifestly

being decided not by victories but by blunders. It is indeed a

history of colossal stupidities. Among the most decisive of

these blunders, second only perhaps of the blunder of the Verdun

attack and far outshining the wild raid of the British towards

Bagdad, was the blunder of the Trentino offensive. It does not

need the equipment of a military expert, it demands only quite

ordinary knowledge and average intelligence, to realise the folly

of that Austrian adventure. There is some justification for a

claim that the decisive battle of the war was fought upon the

soil of Italy. There is still more justification for saying that

it might have been.

There was only one good point about the Austrian thrust. No one

could have foretold it. And it did so completely surprise the

Italians as to catch them without any prepared line of positions

in the rear. On the very eve of the big Russian offensive, the

Austrians thrust eighteen divisions hard at the Trentino

frontier. The Italian posts were then in Austrian territory;

they held on the left wing and the right, but they were driven by

the sheer weight of men and guns in the centre; they lost guns

and prisoners because of the difficulty of mountain retreats to

which I have alluded, and the Austrians pouring through reached

not indeed the plain of Venetia, but to the upland valleys

immediately above it, to Asiago and Arsiero. They probably saw

the Venetian plain through gaps in the hills, but they were still

separated from it even at Arsiero by what are mountains to an

English eye, mountains as high as Snowdon. But the Italians of

such beautiful old places and Vicenza, Marostica, and Bassano

could watch the Austrian shells bursting on the last line of

hills above the plain, and I have no doubt they felt extremely

uneasy.

As one motors through these ripe and beautiful towns and through

the rich valleys that link them--it is a smiling land abounding

in old castles and villas, Vicenza is a rich museum of Palladio's

architecture and Bassano is full of irreplaceable painted

buildings--one feels that the things was a narrow escape, but

from the military point of view it was merely an insane escapade.

The Austrians had behind them--and some way behind them--one

little strangulated railway and no good pass road; their right

was held at Pasubio, their left was similarly bent back. In

front of them was between twice and three times their number of

first class troops, with an unlimited equipment. If they had

surmounted that last mountain crest they would have come down to

almost certain destruction in the plain. They could never have

got back. For a time it was said that General Cadorna considered

that possibility. From the point of view of purely military

considerations, the Trentino offensive should perhaps have ended

in the capitulation of Vicenza.

I will confess I am glad it did not do so. This tour of the

fronts has made me very sad and weary with a succession of ruins.

I can bear no more ruins unless they are the ruins of Dusseldorf,

Cologne, Berlin, or suchlike modern German city. Anxious as I am

to be a systematic Philistine, to express my preference for

Marinetti over the Florentine British and generally to antagonise

aesthetic prigs, I rejoiced over that sunlit land as one

might rejoice over a child saved from beasts.

On the hills beyond Schio I walked out through the embrasure of a

big gun in a rock gallery, and saw the highest points upon the

hillside to which the Austrian infantry clambered in their futile

last attacks. Below me were the ruins of Arsiero and Velo

d'Astico recovered, and across the broad valley rose Monte Cimone

with the Italian trenches upon its crest and the Austrians a

little below to the north. A very considerable bombardment was

going on and it reverberated finely. (It is only among mountains

that one hears anything that one can call the thunder of guns.

The heaviest bombardments I heard in France sounded merely like

Brock's benefit on a much large scale, and disappointed me

extremely.) As I sat and listened to the uproar and watched the

shells burst on Cimone and far away up the valley over

Castelletto above Pedescala, Captain Pirelli pointed out the

position of the Austrian frontier. I doubt if the English people

realise that the utmost depth to which this great Trentino

offensive, which exhausted Austria, wasted the flower of the

Hungarian army and led directly to the Galician disasters and the

intervention of Rumania, penetrated into Italian territory was

about six miles.

III. BEHIND THE FRONT

I have a peculiar affection for Verona and certain things in

Verona. Italians must forgive us English this little streak of

impertinent proprietorship in the beautiful things of their

abundant land. It is quite open to them to revenge themselves by

professing a tenderness for Liverpool or Leeds. It was, for

instance, with a peculiar and personal indignation that I saw

where an Austrian air bomb had killed five-and-thirty people in

the Piazza Erbe. Somehow in that jolly old place, a place that

have very much of the quality of a very pretty and cheerful old

woman, it seemed exceptionally an outrage. And I made a special

pilgrimage to see how it was with that monument of Can Grande,

the equestrian Scaliger with the sidelong grin, for whom I

confess a ridiculous admiration. Can Grande, I rejoice to say,

has retired into a case of brickwork, surmounted by a steep roof

of thick iron plates; no aeroplane exists to carry bombs enough

to smash that covering; there he will smile securely in the

darkness until peace comes again.

All over Venetia the Austrian seaplanes are making the same sort

of idiot raid on lighted places that the Zeppelins have been

making over England. These raids do no effective military work.

What conceivable military advantage can there be in dropping

bombs into a marketing crowd? It is a sort of anti-Teutonic

propaganda by the Central Powers to which they seem to have been

incited by their own evil genius. It is as if they could

convince us that there is an essential malignity in Germans, that

until the German powers are stamped down into the mud they will

continue to do evil things. All of the Allies have borne the

thrusting and boasting of Germany with exemplary patience for

half a century; England gave her Heligoland and stood out of the

way of her colonial expansion, Italy was a happy hunting ground

for her business enterprise, France had come near resignation on

the score of Alsace-Lorraine. And then over and above the great

outrage of the war come these incessant mean-spirited atrocities.

A great and simple wickedness it is possible to forgive; the war

itself, had it been fought greatly by Austria and Germany, would

have made no such deep and enduring breach as these silly, futile

assassinations have down between the Austro-Germans and the rest

of the civilised world. One great misdeed is a thing

understandable and forgivable; what grows upon the consciousness

of the world is the persuasion that here we fight not a national

sin but a national insanity; that we dare not leave the German

the power to attack other nations any more for ever....

Venice has suffered particularly from this ape-like impulse to

hurt and terrorise enemy non-combatants. Venice has indeed

suffered from this war far more than any other town in Italy.

Her trade has largely ceased; she has no visitors. I woke up on

my way to Udine and found my train at Venice with an hour to

spare; after much examining and stamping of my passport I was

allowed outside the station wicket to get coffee in the

refreshment room and a glimpse of a very sad and silent Grand

Canal. There was nothing doing; a black despondent remnant of

the old crowd of gondolas browsed dreamily among against the quay

to stare at me the better. The empty palaces seemed to be

sleeping in the morning sunshine because it was not worth while

to wake up....

Except in the case of Venice, the war does not seem as yet to

have made nearly such a mark upon life in Italy as it has in

England or provincial France. People speak of Italy as a poor

country, but that is from a banker's point of view. In some

respects she is the richest country on earth, and in the matter

of staying power I should think she is better off than any other

belligerent. She produces food in abundance everywhere; her

women are agricultural workers, so that the interruption of food

production by the war has been less serious in Italy than in any

other part of Europe. In peace time, she has constantly exported

labour; the Italian worker has been a seasonal emigrant to

America, north and south, to Switzerland, Germany and the south

of France. The cessation of this emigration has given her great

reserves of man power, so that she has carried on her admirable

campaign with less interference with her normal economic life

than any other power. The first person I spoke to upon the

platform at Modane was a British officer engaged in forwarding

Italian potatoes to the British front in France. Afterwards, on

my return, when a little passport irregularity kept me for half a

day in Modane, I went for a walk with him along the winding pass

road that goes down into France. "You see hundreds and hundreds

of new Fiat cars," he remarked, "along here--going up to the

French front."

But there is a return trade. Near Paris I saw scores of

thousands of shells piled high to go to Italy....

I doubt if English people fully realise either the economic

sturdiness or the political courage of their Italian ally. Italy

is not merely fighting a first-class war in first-class fashion

but she is doing a big, dangerous, generous and far-sighted thing

in fighting at all. France and England were obliged to fight;

the necessity was as plain as daylight. The participation of

Italy demanded a remoter wisdom. In the long run she would have

been swallowed up economically and politically by Germany if she

had not fought; but that was not a thing staring her plainly in

the face as the danger, insult and challenge stared France and

England in the face. What did stare her in the face was not

merely a considerable military and political risk, but the

rupture of very close financial and commercial ties. I found

thoughtful men talking everywhere I have been in Italy of two

things, of the Jugo-Slav riddle and of the question of post war

finance. So far as the former matter goes, I think the Italians

are set upon the righteous solution of all such riddles, they are

possessed by an intelligent generosity. They are clearly set

upon deserving Jugo-Slav friendship; they understand the plain

necessity of open and friendly routes towards Roumania. It was

an Italian who set out to explain to me that Fiume must be at

least a free port; it would be wrong and foolish to cut the trade

of Hungary off from the Mediterranean. But the banking puzzle is

a more intricate and puzzling matter altogether than the

possibility of trouble between Italian and Jugo-Slav.

I write of these things with the simplicity of an angel, but

without an angelic detachment. Here are questions into which one

does not so much rush as get reluctantly pushed. Currency and

banking are dry distasteful questions, but it is clear that they

are too much in the hands of mystery-mongers; it is as much the

duty of anyone who talks and writes of affairs, it is as much the

duty of every sane adult, to bring his possibly poor and

unsuitable wits to bear upon these things, as it is for him to

vote or enlist or pay his taxes. Behind the simple ostensible

spectacle of Italy recovering the unredeemed Italy of the

Trentino and East Venetia, goes on another drama. Has Italy been

sinking into something rather hard to define called "economic

slavery"? Is she or is she not escaping from that magical

servitude? Before this question has been under discussion for a

minute comes a name--for a time I was really quite unable to

decide whether it is the name of the villain in the piece or of

the maligned heroine, or a secret society or a gold mine, or a

pestilence or a delusion--the name of the /Banca Commerciale

Italiana./

Banking in a country undergoing so rapid and vigorous an economic

development as Italy is very different from the banking we simple

English know of at home. Banking in England, like land-owning,

has hitherto been a sort of hold up. There were always

borrowers, there were always tenants, and all that had to be done

was to refuse, obstruct, delay and worry the helpless borrower or

would-be tenant until the maximum of security and profit was

obtained. I have never borrowed but I have built, and I know

something of the extreme hauteur of property of England towards a

man who wants to do anything with land, and with money I gather

the case is just the same. But in Italy, which already possessed

a sunny prosperity of its own upon mediaeval lines, the

banker has had to be suggestive and persuasive, sympathetic and

helpful. These are unaccustomed attitudes for British capital.

The field has been far more attractive to the German banker, who

is less of a proudly impassive usurer and more of a partner, who

demands less than absolute security because he investigates more

industriously and intelligently. This great bank, the Banca

Commerciale Italiana, is a bank of the German type: to begin

with, it was certainly dominated by German directors; it was a

bank of stimulation, and its activities interweave now into the

whole fabric of Italian commercial life. But it has already

liberated itself from German influence, and the bulk of its

capital is Italian. Nevertheless I found discussion ranging

about firstly what the Banca Commerciale essentially /was/,

secondly what it might /become/, thirdly what it might

/do/, and fourthly what, if anything, had to be done to it.

It is a novelty to an English mind to find banking thus mixed up

with politics, but it is not a novelty in Italy. All over

Venetia there are agricultural banks which are said to be

"clerical." I grappled with this mystery. "How are they

clerical?" I asked Captain Pirelli. "Do they lend money on bad

security to clerical voters, and on no terms whatever to anti-

clericals?" He was quite of my way of thinking. "/Pecunia non

olet/," he said; "I have never yet smelt a clerical fifty lira

note."... But on the other hand Italy is very close to Germany;

she wants easy money for development, cheap coal, a market for

various products. The case against the Germans--this case in

which the Banca Commerciale Italiana appears, I am convinced

unjustly, as a suspect--is that they have turned this natural and

proper interchange with Italy into the acquisition of German

power. That they have not been merely easy traders, but

patriotic agents. It is alleged that they used their early

"pull" in Italian banking to favour German enterprises and German

political influence against the development of native Italian

business; that their merchants are not bona-fide individuals, but

members of a nationalist conspiracy to gain economic controls.

The German is a patriotic monomaniac. He is not a man but a

limb, the worshipper of a national effigy, the digit of an

insanely proud and greedy Germania, and here are the natural

consequences.

The case of the individual Italian compactly is this: "We do not

like the Austrians and Germans. These Imperialisms look always

over the Alps. Whatever increases German influence here

threatens Italian life. The German is a German first and a human

being afterwards.... But on the other hand England seems

commercially indifferent to us and France has been economically

hostile..."

"After all," I said presently, after reflection, "in that matter

of /Pecunia non olet/; there used to be fusses about

European loans in China. And one of the favourite themes of

British fiction and drama before the war was the unfortunate

position of the girl who accepted a loan from the wicked man to

pay her debts at bridge."

"Italy," said Captain Pirelli, "isn't a girl. And she hasn't

been playing bridge."

I incline on the whole to his point of view. Money is facile

cosmopolitan stuff. I think that any bank that settles down in

Italy is going to be slowly and steadily naturalised Italian, it

will become more and more Italian until it is wholly Italian. I

would trust Italy to make and keep the Banca Commerciale Italiana

Italian. I believe the Italian brain is a better brain than the

German article. But still I heard people talking of the

implicated organisation as if it were engaged in the most

insidious duplicities. "Wait for only a year or so after the

war," said one English authority to me, "and the mask will be off

and it will be frankly a 'Deutsche Bank' once more." They assure

me that then German enterprises will be favoured again, Italian

and Allied enterprises blockaded and embarrassed, the good

understanding of Italians and English poisoned, entirely through

this organisation....

The reasonable uncommercial man would like to reject all this

last sort of talk as "suspicion mania." So far as the Banca

Commerciale Italiana goes, I at least find that easy enough; I

quote that instance simply because it is a case where suspicion

has been dispelled, but in regard to a score of other business

veins it is not so easy to dispel suspicion. This war has been a

shock to reasonable men the whole world over. They have been

forced to realise that after all a great number of Germans have

been engaged in a crack-brained conspiracy against the non-German

world; that in a great number of cases when one does business

with a German the business does not end with the individual

German. We hated to believe that a business could be tainted by

German partners or German associations. If now we err on the

side of over-suspicion, it is the German's little weakness for

patriotic disingenuousness that is most to blame....

But anyhow I do not think there is much good in a kind of witch-

smelling among Italian enterprises to find the hidden German.

Certain things are necessary for Italian prosperity and Italy

must get them. The Italians want intelligent and helpful

capital. They want a helpful France. They want bituminous coal

for metallurgical purposes. They want cheap shipping. The

French too want metallurgical coal. It is more important for

civilisation, for the general goodwill of the Allies and for

Great Britain that these needs should be supplied than that

individual British money-owners or ship-owners should remain

sluggishly rich by insisting upon high security or high freights.

The control of British coal-mining and shipping is in the

national interests--for international interests--rather than for

the creation of that particularly passive, obstructive, and

wasteful type of wealth, the wealth of the mere profiteer, is as

urgent a necessity for the commercial welfare of France and Italy

and the endurance of the Great Alliance as it is for the well-

being of the common man in Britain.

I left my military guide at Verona on Saturday afternoon and

reached Milan in time to dine outside Salvini's in the Galleria

Vittorio Emanuele, with an Italian fellow story-writer. The

place was as full as ever; we had to wait for a table. It is

notable that there were still great numbers of young men not in

uniform in Milan and Turin and Vicenza and Verona; there was no

effect anywhere of a depletion of men. The whole crowded place

was smouldering with excitement. The diners looked about them as

they talked, some talked loudly and seemed to be expressing

sentiments. Newspaper vendors appeared at the intersection of

the arcades, uttering ambiguous cries, and did a brisk business

of flitting white sheets among the little tables.

"To-night," said my companion, "I think we shall declare war upon

Germany. The decision is being made."

I asked intelligently why this had not been done before. I

forget the precise explanation he gave. A young soldier in

uniform, who had been dining at an adjacent table and whom I had

not recognised before as a writer I had met some years previously

in London, suddenly joined in our conversation, with a slightly

different explanation. I had been carrying on a conversation in

slightly ungainly French, but now I relapsed into English.

But indeed the matter of that declaration of war is as plain as

daylight; the Italian national consciousness has not at first

that direct sense of the German danger that exists in the minds

of the three northern Allies. To the Italian the traditional

enemy is Austria, and this war is not primarily a war for any

other end than the emancipation of Italy. Moreover we have to

remember that for years there has been serious commercial

friction between France and Italy, and considerable mutual

elbowing in North Africa. Both Frenchmen and Italians are

resolute to remedy this now, but the restoration of really

friendly and trustful relations is not to be done in a day. It

has been an extraordinary misfortune for Great Britain that

instead of boldly taking over her shipping from its private

owners and using it all, regardless of their profit, in the

interests of herself and her allies, her government has permitted

so much of it as military and naval needs have not requisitioned

to continue to ply for gain, which the government itself has

shared by a tax on war profits. The Anglophobe elements in

Italian public life have made the utmost of this folly or laxity

in relation more particularly to the consequent dearness of coal

in Italy. They have carried on an amazingly effective campaign

in which this British slackness with the individual profiteer, is

represented as if it were the deliberate greed of the British

state. This certainly contributed very much to fortify Italy's

disinclination to slam the door on the German connection.

I did my best to make it clear to my two friends that so far from

England exploiting Italy, I myself suffered in exactly the same

way as any Italian, through the extraordinary liberties of our

shipping interest. "I pay as well as you do," I said; "the

shippers' blockade of Great Britain is more effective than the

submarines'. My food, my coal, my petrol are all restricted in

the sacred name of private property. You see, capital in England

has hitherto been not an exploitation but a hold-up. We are

learning differently now.... And anyhow, Mr. Runciman has been

here and given Italy assurances...."

In the train to Modane this old story recurred again. It is

imperative that English readers should understand clearly how

thoroughly these little matters have been /worked/ by the

enemy.

Some slight civilities led to a conversation that revealed the

Italian lady in the corner as an Irishwoman married to an

Italian, and also brought out the latent English of a very

charming elderly lady opposite to her. She had heard a speech, a

wonderful speech from a railway train, by "the Lord Runciman." He

had said the most beautiful things about Italy.

I did my best to echo these beautiful things.

Then the Irishwoman remarked that Mr. Runciman had not satisfied

everybody. She and her husband had met a minister--I found

afterwards he was one of the members of the late Giolotti

government--who had been talking very loudly and scornfully of

the bargain Italy was making with England. I assured her that

the desire of England was simply to give Italy all that she

needed.

"But," said the husband casually, "Mr. Runciman is a shipowner."

I explained that he was nothing of the sort. It was true that he

came of a shipowning family--and perhaps inherited a slight

tendency to see things from a shipowning point of view--but in

England we did not suspect a man on such a score as that.

"In Italy I think we should," said the husband of the Irish

lady.

This incidental discussion is a necessary part of my impression

of Italy at war. The two western allies and Great Britain in

particular have to remember Italy's economic needs, and to

prepare to rescue them from the blind exploitation of private

profit. They have to remember these needs too, because, if they

are left out of the picture, then it becomes impossible to

understand the full measure of the risk Italy has faced in

undertaking this war for an idea. With a Latin lucidity she has

counted every risk, and with a Latin idealism she has taken her

place by the side of those who fight for a liberal civilisation

against a Byzantine imperialism.

As I came out of the brightly lit Galleria Vittorio Emanuele into

the darkened Piazza del Duomo I stopped under the arcade and

stood looking up at the shadowy darkness of that great pinnacled

barn, that marble bride-cake, which is, I suppose, the last

southward fortress of the Franco-English Gothic.

"It was here," said my host, "that we burnt the German stuff."

"What German stuff?"

"Pianos and all sorts of things. From the shops. It is

possible, you know, to buy things too cheaply--and to give too

much for the cheapness."

THE WESTERN WAR (SEPTEMBER, 1916)

I. RUINS

If I had to present some particular scene as typical of the

peculiar vileness and mischief wrought by this modern warfare

that Germany has elaborated and thrust upon the world, I do not

think I should choose as my instance any of those great

architectural wrecks that seem most to impress contemporary

writers. I have seen the injuries and ruins of the cathedrals at

Arras and Soissons and the wreckage of the great church at Saint

Eloi, I have visited the Hotel de Ville at Arras and seen

photographs of the present state of the Cloth Hall at Ypres--a

building I knew very well indeed in its days of pride--and I have

not been very deeply moved. I suppose that one is a little

accustomed to Gothic ruins, and that there is always something

monumental about old buildings; it is only a question of degree

whether they are more or less tumble-down. I was far more

desolated by the obliteration of such villages as Fricourt and

Dompierre, and by the horrible state of the fields and gardens

round about them, and my visit to Arras railway station gave me

all the sensations of coming suddenly on a newly murdered body.

Before I visited the recaptured villages in the zone of the

actual fighting, I had an idea that their evacuation was only

temporary, that as soon as the war line moved towards Germany the

people of the devastated villages would return to build their

houses and till their fields again. But I see now that not only

are homes and villages destroyed almost beyond recognition, but

the very fields are destroyed. They are wildernesses of shell

craters; the old worked soil is buried and great slabs of crude

earth have been flung up over it. No ordinary plough will travel

over this frozen sea, let along that everywhere chunks of timber,

horrible tangles of rusting wire, jagged fragments of big shells,

and a great number of unexploded shells are entangled in the

mess. Often this chaos is stained bright yellow by high

explosives, and across it run the twisting trenches and

communication trenches eight, ten, or twelve feet deep. These

will become water pits and mud pits into which beasts will fall.

It is incredible that there should be crops from any of this

region of the push for many years to come. There is no shade

left; the roadside trees are splintered stumps with scarcely the

spirit to put forth a leaf; a few stunted thistles and weeds are

the sole proofs that life may still go on.

The villages of this wide battle region are not ruined; they are

obliterated. It is just possible to trace the roads in them,

because the roads have been cleared and repaired for the passing

of the guns and ammunition. Fricourt is a tangle of German dug-

outs. One dug-out in particular there promises to become a show

place. It must be the masterpiece of some genius for dug-outs;

it is made as if its makers enjoyed the job; it is like the work

of some horrible badger among the vestiges of what were pleasant

human homes. You are taken down a timbered staircase into its

warren of rooms and passages; you are shown the places under the

craters of the great British shells, where the wood splintered

but did not come in. (But the arrival of those shells must have

been a stunning moment.) There are a series of ingenious bolting

shafts set with iron climbing bars. In this place German

officers and soldiers have lived continually for nearly two

years. This war is, indeed, a troglodytic propaganda. You come

up at last at the far end into what was once a cellar of a decent

Frechman's home.

But there are stranger subterranean refuges than that at

Fricourt. At Dompierre the German trenches skirted the cemetery,

and they turned the dead out of their vaults and made lurking

places of the tombs. I walked with M. Joseph Reinach about this

place, picking our way carefully amidst the mud holes and the

wire, and watched the shells bursting away over the receding

battle line to the west. The wreckage of the graves was

Durereqsue. And here would be a fragment of marble angle and

here a split stone with an inscription. Splinters of coffins,

rusty iron crosses and the petals of tin flowers were trampled

into the mud, amidst the universal barbed wire. A little

distance down the slope is a brand new cemetery, with new metal

wreaths and even a few flowers; it is a disciplined array of

uniform wooden crosses, each with its list of soldiers' names.

Unless I am wholly mistaken in France no Germans will ever get a

chance for ever more to desecrate that second cemetery as they

have done its predecessor.

We walked over the mud heaps and litter that had once been houses

towards the centre of Dompierre village, and tried to picture to

ourselves what the place had been. Many things are recognisable

in Dompierre that have altogether vanished at Fricourt; for

instance, there are quire large triangular pieces of the church

wall upstanding at Dompierre. And a mile away perhaps down the

hill on the road towards Amiens, the ruins of the sugar refinery

are very distinct. A sugar refinery is an affair of big iron

receptacles and great flues and pipes and so forth, and iron does

not go down under gun fire as stone or brick does. The whole

fabric wars rust, bent and twisted, gaping with shell holes, that

raggedest display of old iron, but it still kept its general

shape, as a smashed, battered, and sunken ironclad might do at

the bottom of the sea.

There wasn't a dog left of the former life of Dompierre. There

was not even much war traffic that morning on the worn and muddy

road. The guns muttered some miles away to the west, and a lark

sang. But a little way farther on up the road was an

intermediate dressing station, rigged up with wood and

tarpaulins, and orderlies were packing two wounded men into an

ambulance. The men on the stretchers were grey faced, as though

they had been trodden on by some gigantic dirty boot.

As we came back towards where our car waited by the cemetery I

heard the jingle of a horseman coming across the space behind us.

I turned and beheld one of the odd contrasts that seem always to

be happening in this incredible war. This man was, I suppose, a

native officer of some cavalry force from French north Africa.

He was a handsome dark brown Arab, wearing a long yellow-white

robe and a tall cap about which ran a band of sheepskin. He was

riding one of those little fine lean horses with long tails that

I think are Barbary horses, his archaic saddle rose fore and aft

of him, and the turned-up toes of his soft leather boots were

stuck into great silver stirrups. He might have ridden straight

out of the Arabian nights. He passed thoughtfully, picking his

way delicately among the wire and the shell craters, and coming

into the road, broke into a canter and vanished in the direction

of the smashed-up refinery.

About such towns as Rheims or Arras or Soissons there is an

effect of waiting stillness like nothing else I have ever

experienced. At Arras the situation is almost incredible to the

civilian mind. The British hold the town, the Germans hold a

northern suburb; at one point near the river the trenches are

just four metres apart. This state of tension has lasted for

long months.

Unless a very big attack is contemplated, I suppose there is no

advantage in an assault; across that narrow interval we should

only get into trenches that might be costly or impossible to

hold, and so it would be for the Germans on our side. But there

is a kind of etiquette observed; loud vulgar talking on either

side of the four-metre gap leads at once to bomb throwing. And

meanwhile on both sides guns of various calibre keep up an

intermittent fire, the German guns register--I think that is the

right term--on the cross of Arras cathedral, the British guns

search lovingly for the German batteries. As one walks about the

silent streets one hears, "/Bang/---Pheeee---woooo" and then far

away "/dump./" One of ours. Then presently back comes

"Pheeee---woooo---/Bang!/" One of theirs.

Amidst these pleasantries, the life of the town goes on. /Le

Lion d'Arras/, an excellent illustrated paper, produces its

valiant sheets, and has done so since the siege began.

The current number of /Le Lion d'Arras/ had to report a

local German success. Overnight they had killed a gendarme.

There is to be a public funeral and much ceremony. It is rare

for anyone now to get killed; everything is so systematised.

You may buy postcards with views of the destruction at various

angles, and send them off with the Arras postmark. The town is

not without a certain business activity. There is, I am told, a

considerable influx of visitors of a special sort; they wear

khaki and lead the troglodytic life. They play cards and gossip

and sleep in the shadows, and may not walk the streets. I had

one glimpse of a dark crowded cellar. Now and then one sees a

British soldier on some special errand; he keeps to the pavement,

mindful of the spying German sausage balloon in the air. The

streets are strangely quite and grass grows between the stones.

The Hotel de Ville and the cathedral are now mostly heaps of

litter, but many streets of the town have suffered very little.

Here and there a house has been crushed and one or two have been

bisected, the front reduced to a heap of splinters and the back

halves of the rooms left so that one sees the bed, the hanging

end of the carpet, the clothes cupboard yawning open, the

pictures still on the wall. In one place a lamp stands on a

chest of drawers, on a shelf of floor cut off completely from the

world below.... Pheeee---woooo---/Bang!/ One would be

irresistibly reminded of a Sunday afternoon in the city of

London, if it were not for those unmeaning explosions.

I went to the station, a dead railway station. A notice-board

requested us to walk around the silent square on the outside

pavement and not across it. The German sausage balloon had not

been up for days; it had probably gone off to the Somme; the

Somme was a terrible vortex just then which was sucking away the

resources of the whole German line; but still discipline is

discipline. The sausage might come peeping up at any moment over

the station roof, and so we skirted the square. Arras was fought

for in the early stages of the war; two lines of sand-bagged

breastworks still run obliquely through the station; one is where

the porters used to put luggage upon cabs and one runs the length

of the platform. The station was a fine one of the modern type,

with a glass roof whose framework still remains, though the glass

powders the floor and is like a fine angular gravel underfoot.

The rails are rails of rust, and cornflowers and mustard and tall

grasses grow amidst the ballast. The waiting-rooms have suffered

from a shell or so, but there are still the sofas of green plush,

askew, a little advertisement hung from the wall, the glass

smashed. The ticket bureau is as if a giant had scattered a

great number of tickets, mostly still done up in bundles, to

Douai, to Valenciennes, to Lens and so on. These tickets are

souvenirs too portable to resist. I gave way to that common

weakness.

I went out and looked up and down the line; two deserted goods

trucks stood as if they sheltered under a footbridge. The grass

poked out through their wheels. The railway signals seemed

uncertain in their intimations; some were up and some were down.

And it was as still and empty as a summer afternoon in Pompeii.

No train has come into Arras for two long years now.

We lunched in a sunny garden with various men who love Arras but