Where Wars Go to Die

by W. D. Wetherell

  Today the whole hill is shell-shot. The trees hang dead, dried and broken. The ground looks as though verdure could never clothe it again. Everywhere else Nature has already laid her soothing hands, but she has yet to touch that tragic wood. On the gray, rainwashed walls of the little hamlets, green things already trail and wild flowers are beginning to grow. Even the shell-holes in the fields are gay with dandelions and field primroses, paquerettes and boutons d’or. But Belleau Wood, as seen from the ruined hamlet, is an open grief on the face of Nature.

  The roads are absolutely deserted—except for Americans. Across the broken fields toward the dark forests, groups of boys in khaki or women in the uniforms of the various relief units, were constantly passing as we sat in the road between the ruins and the woods. At every corner stood an American camion or a camionette, and we passed no other sort of automobile on the road, and no other pedestrians, as we slowly ran over the sacred ground into Chateau-Thierry. Along the quiet roadsides lie buried the American lads who fell here in the long battle which ended the war.

  All the little cemeteries are alike—rectangular spaces, enclosed in a wire fence. Usually there are three or four guns stacked in the centre, often surmounted by a “tin hat,” as the boys call their helmets. There are always several lines of graves, each with a wooden cross at the head with a small American flag set in a round disk under isinglass, surrounded by a green metal frame representing a wreath to which is attached a small card-shaped plaque with the name and number.

  None of these cemeteries about Chateau-Thierry is large. They are all on the banks on the side of the road, and I can’t tell you how I felt as we approached our first, and stopped the car beside it, and crawled out into the mud. Just now the well-ordered graves are not sodded. I suppose it was the idea of seeing so many graves—we saw at least a dozen of these little cemeteries—and remembering how young they were who slept there that impressed me. Later, I imagine, when the graves are all properly tended, the scene would lose its look of sadness.

  An American woman who has been going back and forward over that devastated country said to me the other day, as she stopped at my gate: “Terrible as it all is it gets less terrible every day.”

  From When Johnny Comes Marching Home, by Mildred Aldrich; Small, Maynard and Company; Boston, 1919.

  Turn Right at Cemetery Gate

  —American Battle Monuments Commission

  The Oise-Aisne American Cemetery contains 5,962 graves. The majority of the battle dead who sleep here are from the divisions that fought in the vicinity of the Ourcq River and in the territory from there to the north as far as the Oise River. In 1922, the American soldiers then buried in France in the general area west of the line Tours-Romorantin-Paris-LeHavre were removed to this cemetery.

  The Cemetery is under direct charge of the American Graves Registration Service, Quartermaster Corps, United States Army, whose offices at this time are at 20 rue Molitor, Paris. An information bureau is maintained at that office, which can be consulted by those who wish to known in which cemetery a particular grave is located.

  It is about 18 miles by road from Chateau-Thierry, and slightly more from Reims. Good train service is available to each of these places, where hotel accommodations can be obtained and automobiles hired.

  After the cemetery chapel is built, a good view of the surrounding battle fields may be had from its tower.

  This point is the most advanced line reached by the 2d Division. The series of attacks which carried that division forward to this line were invariably accompanied by fighting of the most desperate character. BELLEAU WOOD, at the edge of which the observer is standing, in particular lent itself admirably to defensive fighting on account of its rocky character and tangled undergrowth. The wood was the scene of bitter fighting, extending over 21 days, and in honor of its capture by the Marine Brigade of the 2d Division the French changed its official name to the Bois de la Brigade de Marine.

  The splendid conduct of the 2d Division in taking Belleau Wood and other difficult positions along its front in spite of a casualty list of approximately 8,000 officers and men, was enthusiastically proclaimed by the French Army and people.

  Turn right at cemetery gate. At road fork just beyond, take road to left. This road, from the point where it crosses the railroad to the top of the next hill, was in “no-man’s-land” during the afternoon and evening of July 20. At kilometer post 21.9, by looking back, a good view is obtained of the cemetery and Belleau Wood.

  Cross highway (at kilometer post 25.8), taking road straight ahead. STOP at end of road at site selected for American monument on Hill 204.

  Information concerning this monument is given in Chapter XI.

  The large town, a mile away, lying on both sides of the Marne River, is Chateau-Thierry. On the left, just before reaching the bridge, there is a building of a Methodist institution, established by Americans as a war memorial, and a monument erected by the 3d American Division. The building contains a small museum of war relics ….

  From A Guide to the American Battle Fields of Europe, prepared by the American Battle Monuments Commission; United States Government Printing Office; Washington, 1927.

  Peasants Go There to Dig

  —Henry Williamson

  Hill 60 is one of the show places of the Ypres Salient to-day. Every morning about a dozen peasants go there to dig. You see the “souvenirs” they have dug up lying on sacks or lengths of cloth at the edge of the pits in which they are working. There are wooden pipes, both British and German shapes, well preserved in the light sandy soil, fragments of rifles, bayonets, picklehaube eagle-badges, English county and London regimental badges, buttons, straps, bully-beef tins, pistols, bombs, revolvers, boots. Imagine an ant-hill, fifty yards across its base, thrown up a few dozen times by subterranean heavings, and dropping again after each mine-explosion more or less in the same place; always being pocked and repocked with shells; and now set with a small memorial to the 9th London Regiment, and dug over, and strolled over by 10,000 people every week.

  All day long charabancs stop in the road opposite Hill 60, and tourists file past the melancholy little group of men and children standing, collecting-box in hand, by the footpath entrance, and hoping to take half a franc off each visitor. By their sad faces they do not own the heap of earth, originally piled there when the railway cutting was made; yet by the occasional gleams of hate in those eyes we deduce that they have stood there with their boxes long enough to believe that they ought to own it.

  Along the footpath the pitches of the souvenir-sellers begin. Prices range from 50 centimes for a brass button to 20 francs for a Smith and Wesson revolver.

  From The Wet Flanders Plain, by Henry Williamson; E. P. Dutton & Co.; New York, 1929.

  Visit to the Battlefield

  —Michelin & Cie.

  A visit to Ypres Town and Salient requires two days, and may be made most conveniently by taking Lille as the starting point.

  Starting point: The Grand Place, Lille.

  Take Rue Nationale to the end, go round Place Tourcoing, take Rue de La Basse on the left, then the first turning on the right. At Canteleu follow the tram-lines leading to Lomme. At the end of the village, cross the railway. Go through Lomme by Rue Thiers, leaving the church on the right (transept greatly damaged).

  On the left are the burnt ruins of a large spinning mill. In the fields: numerous small forts of reinforced concrete, which commanded all the roads into Lille. The road passes through a small wood, in the right-hand part of which are the ruins of Premesques Chateau, of which only the facade remains. Further on, to the left, is Wez Macquart, whose church was badly damaged. Trenches lead to the road, while in the fields traces of violent shelling are still visible.

  Pass through Chapelle d’Armentieres (completely destroyed). After crossing the railway, a British cemetery is seen on the right. ARMENTIERES lies on the other side of the next level crossing.

  Belfry, churches and houses are all in ruins.

 
; In everything connected with the spinning and weaving of linen Armentieres was considerably in advance of Germany. Consequently, the Germans destroyed all the mills, factories and metallurgical works, and what machinery could not be taken to pieces and sent to Germany they ruthlessly smashed.

  Cross the Cloth Market, then follow the tram-lines along Rue de Flandre and Rue Bizet. Go through Bizet Village (badly damaged houses). Leaving the ruins of the church on the right, turn first to the right, then to the left. Cross the frontier into Belgium a few yards further off. Leaving on the right the road to the gasworks (of which nothing is left but a wrecked gasometer) the first hours of Ploegsteert are reached. The village lay west of the first lines in May, 1918, and was captured by the Germans on April 12.

  British cemetery No. 53 lies at the entrance to the village. Go straight through the village (in ruins). On leaving it, Cemetery No. 54 is seen on the right, then beyond a large concrete shelter, Cemetery No. 55. Cemetery No. 56 is on the left, beyond the level-crossing.

  Cross Ploegsteert Wood, leaving the road to Petit-Pont Farm on the left. Here the road rises. To the left, on the slopes of Hill 63, are seen the ruins of La Hutte Chateau. On the crest opposite stand the ruins of Messines. In June, 1919, it was not possible to go direct to Messines, the road being cut at the Petite Douve stream.

  Stop the car at Rossignol terre-plain and walk a few yards into the little wood on the right; numerous concrete shelters, from the top of which there is a very fine view over the Hills Kemmel, Rouge, Noir and Cats. The last-named can be recognized by its abby, which stands out against the sky.

  Return to the car. The road now descends past the “tank cemetery” containing fourteen broke-down tanks. Passing by a few ruined houses—all that remain of the hamlet of Habourdin—a fork is reached, where take the Neuve-Eglise-Messines road on the right. British cemetery on the right. Turn to the right at the first ruins of Wulverghem, then go through the village, passing in front of the cemetery. Next cross the Steenbeck, by the St. Quentin Bridge. The road now rises sharply to the crest on which Messines used to stand. Numerous small forts are seen to the right and left. These machine-gun nests are all that now mark the site of the village.

  At the entrance to the village leave the car at the junction of the Ypres-Armentieres road and visit these pathetic ruins on foot.

  From Ypres and the Battles of Ypres, by Michelin & Cie; Clermont-Ferrand, 1920.

  Cemeteries Become Unremarkable

  —Stephen Graham

  You make for what was once a wood; it afforded cover. What is it now—thrice thrashed and riven, the abode of rats, lizards, weasels, a calamitous and precipitous abyss covered with wreckage. Unexploded stick-bombs, rusty grog-bottles, helmets, lie there in plenty. Weather-beaten ammunition baskets with shells intact where they fell off the ammunition wagons or where men dropped them. There are broken rifles, there are graves. There is all but the blood.

  On the vast waste you come upon houses built of salvage. Duck-boards have been gathered in, old bits of rusty corrugated iron which sheltered trenches and kept out rain have been collected by the returned Flemish—what a return!—and they have made shacks of shreds and patches. Fierce dogs on chains bark from them; no children venture forth—there are no children there. Heaps of the jetsam of the battlefields are in the yards. The uncouth workers are not too pleased to see any stranger, and look suspiciously at you. They have pistols ready at need. For these oases in the wilderness are not unvisited by robbers, and thieves lurk in old holes in the ground. One comes to a road, and there is what was Zonnebeke resurrected in a tail of diminutive cabins each roofed with corrugated iron, each numbered as a claim for reparation. Not a few of the houses are named thus:—“In den Niewen wereld.” Half of them seem to be estaminets. It is the same at Becelaere. The people earn a living drinking beer in one another’s estaminets.

  Cemeteries soon become all too frequent and unremarkable. At Klein Zillebeke there is an Englishwoman going from grave to grave diligently examining the aluminum ribbons on which the names are fixed to the wooden crosses—looking perhaps for her husband’s grave.

  Death and the ruins completely outweigh the living. One is tilted out of time by the huge weight on the other end of the plank, and it would be easy to imagine someone who had no insoluble ties killing himself here, drawn by the lodestone of death.

  From The Challenge of the Dead, by Stephen Graham; Cassel and Co.; New York, 1921.

  Back to the Somme

  —John Masefield

  All the way up the hill the road is steep, rather deep and bad. It is worn into the chalk and shows up very white in sunny weather. Before the battle it lay about midway between the lines, but it was always patrolled at night by our men. The ground on both sides of it is almost more killed and awful than anywhere in the field. On the English or south side of it, distant from one hundred to two hundred yards, is the shattered wood, burnt, dead, and desolate. On the enemy side, at about the same distance, is the usual black enemy wire, much tossed and bunched by our shells, covering a tossed and tumbled chalky and filthy parapet. Our own old line is an array of rotted sandbags, filled with chalkflint, covering the burnt wood. One need only look at the ground to know that the fighting here was very grim, and to the death. Near the road and up the slope to the enemy ground is littered with relics of our charges, mouldy packs, old shattered scabbards, rifles, bayonets, helmets curled, torn, rolled, and starred, clips of cartridges, and very many graves. Many of the graves are marked with strips of wood torn from packing cases, with penciled inscriptions, “An unknown British Hero;” “In loving memory of Pte.—;” “Two unknown British heroes;” “An unknown British soldier;” “A dead Fritz.” That gentle slope to the Schwaben Redoubt is covered with such things.

  Where the crown of the work once reared itself aloft over the hill, the heaps of mud are all blurred and pounded together, so that there is no design, no trace, no visible plan of any fortress, only a mess of mud bedevilled and bewildered. All this mess of heaps and hillocks is strung and filthied over with broken bodies and ruined gear.

  Once in a lull of the firing a woman appeared upon the enemy parapet and started to walk along it. Our men held their fire and watched her. She walked steadily along the whole front of the Schwaben and then jumped down into her trench. Many thought at the time that she was a man masquerading for a bet, but long afterwards, when our men took the Schwaben, they found her lying in the ruins dead. They buried her there, up on the top of the hill. God alone knows who she was and what she was doing there.

  From The Old Front Line, by John Masefield; The Macmillan Company; New York, 1918.

  Whose Credulous Hearts the Maggots Were Now Eating

  —C. E. Montague

  The senior generals need not have feared. The generous youth of the war was pretty well gone. The authentic flame might still flicker on in the minds of a few tired soldiers and disregarded civilians. Otherwise it was as dead as the half-million of good fellows who it had fired four years ago, whose credulous hearts the maggots were now eating under so many shining and streaming square miles of wet Flanders and Picardy. They gone, their war had lived into a kind of dotage ruled by mean fears and desires. At home our places of honour were brown with shirkers masquerading in the dead men’s clothes and licensed by careless authorities to shelter themselves from all danger under the titles of Colonel, Major, and Captain. Nimble politicians were rushing already to coin into votes for themselves—“the men who won the war”—the golden memory of the dead before the living could come home and make themselves heard.

  “This way, gents, for the right sort of whip to give Germans!” “Rats, gentlemen, rats! Don’t listen to him. Leave it to me and I’ll chastise ’em with scorpions.” “I’ll devise brave punishments for them.” “Ah, but I’ll sweat you more money out of the swine.” Each little demagogue got his little pots of pitch and sulphur on sale for the proper giving of hell to the enemy whom he had not faced.

  “The freedom
of Europe,” “The war to end war,” “The overthrow of militarism,” “The cause of civilization”—most people believe so little now in anything or anyone that they would find it hard to understand the simplicity and intensity of faith with which these phrases were once taken among our troops, or the certitude felt by hundreds of thousands of men who are now dead that if they were killed their monument would be a new Europe now soured or soiled with the hates and greeds of the old. That the old spirit of Prussia might not infest our world any more; that they, or, if not they, their sons might breathe a new, cleaner air they had willingly hung themselves up to rot on the uncut wire at Loos or wriggled to death, slow hour by hour, in the cold filth at Broodseinde. Now all was done that man could do, and all was done in vain.

  So we had failed—had won the fight and lost the prize; the garland of the war was withered before it was gained. The lost years, the broken youth, the dead friends, the women’s overshadowed lives at home, the agony and bloody sweat—all had gone to darken the stains which most of us had thought to scour out of the world that our children would live in. Many men felt, and said to each other, that they had been fooled. So we come home draggle-tailed, sick of the mess that we were unwittingly helping to make when we tried to do so well.

  From Disenchantment, by C. E. Montague; Chatto and Windus; London, 1922.

  The Most Tragic and Dreadful Thing that Has Ever Happened to Mankind

  —H. G. Wells

  It was now the middle of November, and Mr. Britling, very warmly wrapped in his thick dressing-gown and his thick llama wool pyjamas, was sitting at his night desk and working ever and again at an essay, an essay of preposterous ambitions, for the title of it was “The Better Government of the World.”