THE FRENCH ON THE SOMME1

"ODYSSEUS "

["Odysseus" is the pseudonym of a writer in Blackwood's Magazine who has, in a series of pen pictures called "The Scene of War," which appeared during 1916 and 1917, given perhaps the most artistic descriptions of the various battle fields and points of interest from the North Sea to Suez. From the present selection a few paragraphs relating to aviation have been omitted.]

I had seen the mighty effort of our people on the Somme, and had witnessed the battle for Morval and Lesbœufs from a point very near the left wing of our gallant allies; but I had not yet seen the French in action. I was therefore glad to know that an opportunity was now to be given me of doing so.

Our headquarters were in an old Cathedral town, in whose streets and squares there were almost as many Englishmen as Frenchmen; while at our hotel the khaki and the gray blue were closely intermingled. It was the meeting point here, a little in the rear, of the two armies.

The early morning found us on one of those straight, logical roads unlike our own that run with their French directness and singleness of purpose from one considered point to another. It was a road animated by all the stir and preparation of organized war; which, as it is developed by the patient and strenuous industry of her people throughout France, comes slowly, like the shaft of a lance to its bladepoint, to its final conclusion here upon the Front. So overwhelming is the interest of the Fighting Line that strange, shifting, and tragic area, where the thoughts and ideals of men are brought to the anvil of war that one is prone to neglect 1 From Blackwood's Magazine, February, 1917. Reprinted by permission.

these mighty preparations, this patient and faithful toil that is the prelude to victory.

As we swept along the straight white road, it was thronged with these symbols of the will and tenacity of France.

“Under the light, sparkling surface of this people," said my companion, "there resides a core of indestructible granite, and the Boche is up against it now."

So he is; and the granite is legible upon the faces of all those men who toil upon these long white roads that are the arteries of war.

Gone for the moment are the vivacity and the joy; but the infinite patience, the undying valor, these remain; and let us bow to them when we meet them on the road.

Here are the menders restoring to the road its traditional perfection; reclaiming it foot by foot from the indignity that has been put upon it. Here are the drivers of the wagons, carrying to their brethren the provender of battle; the food and the fuel they need for their sustenance, the shells and cartridges they claim for the intruder upon their ancient soil. White with the dust, seamed with the sweat and the stress of their traffic, hard and enduring, these men have but one purpose at heart, one end in view; and to this their strength is uncomplainingly directed.

Beside them, along the Light Railway that cleaves the fields, there move the great guns, the armored cars, and gallant engines, the steel wagons full of shells.

The Light Railways converge at the temporary terminus a little behind the battle line, and a great activity is concentrated here at the base of supply.

It is a busy scene, interrupted from time to time by the thrust of war. The German aëroplane, when it can get so far, drops its bombs, under cover of the night, upon the little colony, killing friend and foe alike; and Fritz and François lie beside each other stricken by the same missile. The sound of the battle is heard in the distance, and the shadows of evening are lit with the summer lightning of the guns.

Farther upon the road are the great guns that travel by rail, and heave their shells a distance of twenty kilometers. You can see them in the autumn mists like mammoths pointing their trunks towards the invader, and from time to time you can see the flame as it issues from their lips; you can hear the thunder of their voices as the gros obus go hurtling through the sky. If you go up to them, you will find them like Leviathan at home in a field, and behind each gun the wagon of steel in which his provender is laid.

When the door of the wagon is opened, one of the sleeping creatures is nipped by the claws of a traveling crane and deposited like a puppy in a cradle that moves along an aërial line of rail, until it is arrived at the mighty breach, its last resting place before it fulfills its destiny.

The slow twisting of a screw behind it sends it forth with a persuasive impulse into the open breach; the door is closed upon its mystery; and then with a mighty music it sweeps upon the world, a living thing.

Beside this portent the quiet cattle pasture, indifferent even to its voice; the women toil with bent shoulders in the fields they love, and the life of the hamlet moves upon its ancient

course.

When evening comes, the people of the gun gather together like factory workers after the day's toil, and you can see them in a dark silhouette against the reddening sky, as a truck carries them away to their billets. One of the last to leave is the Battery Commander, a man who is the human equivalent of his charge; solid and direct; a hard and determined hitter.

Beyond the great guns and the Aviation Camp, the road now carries us into the dread Land of War. You cannot mistake it if you have once seen it here in France; for it is the negation of all that you have held most dear upon this earth. In this land Ruin walks hand in hand with Death. The green meadows and the russet orchards, the lovely woods that should be turning to gold and amber and cinnabar;

the creepers that should be climbing in crimson upon the cottage walls; the old people at their doors, the children at the gate, the rose-cheeked maidens blushing with the sap and flow of life; the blue smoke of each homestead curling into the quiet sky; the lights at the windows; the stir and music of the street, all these have gone. Aceldama, it has

· a place of skulls.

become a place of woe; and Golgotha,

One cannot convey to another, who has not seen it, the desolation and horror of the scene. The fields are of a melancholy brown, where dying weeds hang their dejected and tattered heads; the woods are ghostly remnants of what once were trees, but are now misshapen and tortured forms that grieve the open sky; the houses where they retain any form at all are ruined beyond the semblance of human habitations, with roofs that grin at one like the teeth of a skull, and walls that look as if a leprosy had fastened upon their tottering remains. The white highway, that was once so superb and finished a thing, the lineal heir of Rome, is now as weary and as broken as if it led to Hell.

A side-road from it one of those familiar and domestic things we love leads to the hamlet and Château of

and it is the most pitiful semblance of a road upon which human footsteps ever echoed since man began to call himself civilized.

As we emerged into the daylight, a French plane came flying low over the ruins of the Château, ringed about with black puffs of shrapnel, which pursued her like hounds.

All about us lay the remnants of the Château. That rubbish-heap there was its farm, and that blistered spot. upon which no blade of grass was visible was its lawn. Those withered trees were its sheltering wood, and here and there we could trace the fragments of its encircling wall. The whole of its area was seamed with the German trenches.

An officer who was with me looked at it with a cool and deliberate air.

"Quite done for," he said, "and I happen to know that De K spent three hundred thousand francs on it just before the war broke out."

It is thus that you realize what France has endured.

We were now obliged to enter the shelter of the long communication trench; and from time to time as we stopped to look over its walls we could see the Artillery battle progressing with an increasing fury, the flight of the German aëroplanes, and the falling ever nearer and nearer of the shells. Here and there in the general waste there survived the fragment of a wall, a solitary tree which helped to mark the direction we were taking. All else was a void, blistered beyond all earthly semblance.

The black face of a nigger peeping out from this Inferno was a startling apparition.

We found him presently, one of a party, clearing the ruined trenches. Pipe in mouth, clad in the same blue helmet and uniform, they worked here side by side with their French brethren. Brethren they were, too, in their easy and friendly companionship. In the hospitals, too, you find them so black face and white face near each other, bound by the tie of common sacrifice.

Every here and there a small wooden cross, standing up from the walls of the trench with some simple inscription, "Un brave Français," showed where lay the remnants of one who had died for his country.

And then we came to a point which the diggers had not yet reached; whence the tide of battle had barely ebbed, and the trenches still lay as they had been left by the beaten enemy.

"Here, where we stand now," said one who was with us, "you see the débris of a barrage across which the Boche and our people threw hand grenades at each other, until we broke through and drove them before us.”