John Masefield’s Great War: Collected Works

by Philip Errington

  A few minutes ago, I said that the greatest minds among men looked upon war as nearly (but not quite) the last, greatest and completest evil that can come into human life. Nearly, but not quite. There is one completer evil, that of letting proud, bloody and devilish men to rule this world. While proud, bloody and devilish men strike for power here, free men, who had rather die than serve them, will strike against them. And evil as war is, that resolve of the free soul is beautiful. It is in that resolve that we free peoples are banded, and it is in that resolve that we shall fight, till the proud, bloody and devilish idea is gone.

  All of you here have read about this war daily for more than three years. All of you know someone who is taking part in it, and all of you have in your minds some picture of what it is like. The population of these States is said to be nearly a hundred millions. Not less than twenty-five millions of men, or the equivalent of the entire adult male population of these States are or have been engaged in the fighting of this war, and not less than another forty millions are engaged in the making the fighting possible, by the making of arms, equipment and munitions. Then besides those millions there are ten million dead, and twenty million maimed, disabled, blinded or lunatic soldiers who will never fight again.

  You begin to meet the war many miles from any part of the fighting. You come upon a village of little huts near a railway siding. A month later you find that the village has become a town. A month later you find that the town has become a city. In that city the picked intellect of your country uses the picked knowledge of the universe to make the picked devilry of this war, some gas that will be deadlier than the other man’s, some shell that will kill over a bigger area, some bomb that will go off with a louder bang and blast a bigger hole in a town.

  You go elsewhere, and you see miles of chimneys spouting fire, where every known force is pressing every known metal into every known kind of engine of death.

  You see the nimblest brains and hands and all the finest courage perfecting our control of the air. You see men gathering and packing food, breaking stones for roads and shaping sleepers for railways. You see men by the million about whom nobody cared, in the old days, in peace, suddenly taken up, and fed and clad and taught, and made much of. You see horses and cars by the hundred thousand, and everything that is swift and strong and clever and destructive, suddenly important and desired and of great account. You see the toil of a nation suddenly intensified sevenfold, and made acute, and better paid than it ever was, and intellect, the searching intellect, that light of the mind which brings us out of the mud, suddenly sought for in the street. And you think, “Is man awakening suddenly to his heritage, and to the knowledge of what life may be here?” Then you say to yourself, “No, this is all due to the war.”

  You see young men giving up their hopes, and mature men their attainments, and women losing their sons, their husbands and their chance of husbands, and children losing their fathers and their chances of life, and you ask, what earthly endeavour can cause all this sacrifice, into what kind of a hopper is it all being fed? It is being fed into the war.

  The war is spread over a tract as big as these States. In many places the tide of war has passed and repassed several times, till the dwellers in those places have died of starvation, or been carried away into slavery. In the East, you can walk for miles along roads peopled with mad, starving and dying men and women; there are heaps of little bones all along the roads. They are all little bones. They are the little bones of little children who have died of starvation there. All the bigger bones have been taken by the enemy to make artificial manure.

  In the West, there is a strip of land about four hundred and fifty miles long, by from ten to twenty broad. It is called the Army Zone. With the exception of a few poor people who sell little things, such as fruit and tobacco, to the soldiers, all the inhabitants of that zone are gone. The place is inhabited by the armies. The business there is destruction, and rest, after destruction, so that the destroyers may destroy again.

  All that strip of France and Flanders was once happily at peace. All of it was rich and prosperous, with corn and wine and industry. Even the mountains were covered with timber. Today, after the manhood of four nations has fought over it for three and a half years it is a sight which no man can describe.

  If one could look down upon that strip from above, it would look like a broad ribbon laid across France. The normal colour of a countryside is green, and green country would appear on both sides of the strip. At the edges however the green would lose its brightness, it would look dull and rather mottled; further from the edges it would look still duller, and in the centre of the strip no trace of green would show, it would all be dark except that the darkness would glitter in many places with little flashes of fire.

  And if one comes to that strip by any of the roads which lead to it, one sees, at first, simply the normal French landscape, which is tidy, well-cultivated land, on a big scale, with little neat woods and little, compact villages. One notices that many houses are closed, and that very few men are about. Presently one comes to a village, where one or two of the houses are roofless, and perhaps the church tower has a hole in it. And if you ask, you hear, “No, the enemy never got so far as here, but they shelled it.” A little further on, you come to a village where every other house is a burnt-out shell, all down the street. And if you ask how this came about, that every other house should be destroyed, you hear, “O, the enemy occupied this place and burnt every other house for punishment.” And if you ask, punishment for what? You hear, “O, some of the enemy got drunk here and fired at each other, and they said we did it, so they shot the Maire and burnt every other house.”

  Then a little further on, you come to a village where there are no roofs nor any big part of a house, but heaps of brick and stone much blackened with fire, and on both sides of the road you see gashes and heapings of the earth and a great many stakes supporting barbed wire, and a general mess and litter as though there had been a fair there in rather rainy weather. And if you ask about this, they say, “Ah, this is where our old support line ran, just along here, and just under the church in what used to be the charnel-house, we had the snuggest little dugout that ever was.”

  Then if you go on, you come to a landscape where there is no visible living thing; nothing but a blasted bedevilled sea of mud, gouged into great holes and gashed into great trenches, and blown into immense pits, and all littered and heaped with broken iron, and broken leather, and rags and boots and jars and tins, and old barbed wire by the ton and unexploded shells and bombs by the hundred ton, and where there is no building and no road, and no tree and no grass, nothing but desolation and mud and death.

  And if you ask, “Is this Hell?” They say, “No, this is the market-place where we are standing. The church is that lump to the right.” Then if you look down you see that the ground, though full of holes, is littered with little bits of brick, and you realize that you are standing in a town.

  If you go on a little further, you notice that the mud is a little fresher. You come to a deafening noise, which bursts in a succession of shattering crashes, followed by long wailing shrieks, partly like gigantic cats making love, and partly as though the sky were linen being ripped across. The noise makes you sick and dizzy.

  If you go on a little further you come to a place where the ground is being whirled aloft in clods and shards, amid clouds of dust and smoke and powdered brick. Screaming shells pass over you or crash beside you, and you realize then that you are at the front. Like Voltaire, you say, “I am among men, because they are fighting. I am among civilized men because they are doing it so savagely.” And when the smoke and dust of the shells clear away, you see no men, civilized or savage, nothing but a vast expanse of mud, with a dead mule or two, and great black and white devils of smoke where shells are bursting.

  In parts of that strip of France, especially in the broadest part, you come upon places where the ground is almost unmarked with shellfire. There are no traces
of fighting, no graves, no litter of broken men or broken equipment, the fields are green and there is no noise of war. Yet all the houses are ruined; they have been gutted, their roofs have been blown off or their fronts pulled out, and in their streets you will sometimes see vast collections of pots, pans, desks, tables, chairs, pictures, all smashed, evidently wantonly smashed; men have evidently defaced them, cut, burnt, and banged them. And you notice that for miles of that country all the best of the trees, especially the fruit trees, have been cut down, not for firewood, for they are all there, with their heads in the mud, but for wanton devilry.

  And if you ask about this, you will hear – “O, no; there was no fighting here, but this is the ground the enemy couldn’t hold. When he lost the ground to the north, he had to retreat from here in a hurry, but he showed his spite first. First he took away the few remaining boys and girls to work for him at making shells or digging trenches. Then they went from house to house and collected all the furniture and property into the central place of the town; then all that was good or valuable or not too bulky was taken by enemy soldiers, officers as well as men, as prize of war, and sent home to their homes. But all the rest, the things too bulky to pack, were deliberately smashed, defiled and broken, and the fruit trees were systematically killed.”

  I was in one such town in France last March the day after the enemy left it, and I went into one poor man’s garden no bigger than this platform. Five or six little flowering plants had been pulled up by the roots. One little plum tree and two currant bushes had been cut through, and the wall parting this garden from its neighbour had been thrown down. All the wells in this district were poisoned by the enemy before he left. He referred to this in his Orders as being “according to modern theories of war.”

  Over all that area of the Army Zone, the business of the inhabitants is destruction; they rest not day nor night, not even fog nor snow will stop them. I have watched a raging battle in a snowstorm, and one of our neatest successes was made in a fog. And at night the darkness is lit with starshells, beautiful coloured rockets, flares, searchlights and magnesiums, so that the killing may go on.

  You may wonder what kind of a life is lived under such conditions.

  I can only say that it is a very attractive kind of life, and that many men who leave it want to go back to it, and few men who have lived that kind of life find it easy to settle down to another. And you will see men at their very best under those conditions. You will find them far more thoughtful of each other; far more generous and self-sacrificing than you will ever see them in time of peace. You will be among men who will die for you without a moment’s thought or an instant’s hesitation, and who will share their last food or drink with you. You will see dying men giving up their last breath to comfort some other wounded man who may be suffering more at the moment. And living among those men, sharing their hardships and their dangers, you will realize to the full the sense of brotherhood and the unity of life which are among the deepest feelings which can come to men. You will realize the gaity, the courage and the heroism of the mind of man, and you will realize how deeply you love your fellows.

  A British officer has defined the life at the front as “damned dull, damned dirty and damned dangerous.” It is dull, because you stand in a gash in the earth behind some barbed wire and look through a thing called a periscope at some more barbed wire two hundred yards away, beyond which, somewhere, is the enemy, whom you hardly ever see. Then when you have stood in the trench for a time, you are put to do some digging, and when you have done the digging you are put to dig something else, and when you have done that digging you are put to dig something else. And when you have finished digging for the time, you are put to carrying something heavy and awkward, and when you have carried that, you are given something else to carry, and when you have carried that, you are given something else to carry, and the next morning there will be plenty of other things to carry. The work of soldiers today is not so much fighting, as digging trenches and roads and railways and wells. When they have finished digging, they have to carry up the heavy and awkward things needed at the front lines. Marshal Joffre said that this war is a war of carriers. The Battle of the Marne was won by us because the enemy carriers failed, and Verdun was saved to us because the French carriers did not fail. All the things needed in the front line are heavy and awkward to carry, and all have to be carried up, on the shoulders of men. The image left on the minds of most men by this war is not an image of fighting, nor of men standing in the trenches, nor of attacks, nor even of the gunners at the guns; it is the image of little parties of men plodding along in single file through the mud, carrying up the things needed in the front trenches; barbed wire, trench gratings, trench pumps, machine guns, machine gun ammunition, bombs, Stokes shells, tins of bully beef and tins of water. And by the sides of the gratings which make the roads near the front you will see the graves of hundreds of men who have lost their lives in carrying up these things.

  And when it rains, as it has rained for weeks together on the Western Front during the last three years, that task of carrying becomes infinitely more terrible to the men than standing in the trenches to be killed or wounded. All that shot-up field becomes a vast and waveless sea of mud. That mud has to be seen to be believed, it cannot be described. It is more dangerous than any quicksand. I have seen men and horses stuck in it, being pulled out with ropes. I have seen soldiers standing in it up to the waist, fast asleep, and I dare say you have seen that picture of the two soldiers standing in it up to the chin, one of them saying to the other: “If we stay here much longer we shall be submarined.” There is nothing like this mud for breaking men’s hearts. Any soldier on the Western Front will tell you that the mud is the real enemy. The task of carrying up supplies across that mud, becomes by much the most difficult task which soldiers are called upon to do.

  In spite of the danger and the occasional mud, the life at the front is lived with cheerfulness. There is much joking, though many of the jokes are about death and the dead. Very strange and romantic things happen continually, and there are strange escapes. I have not seen any escape quite so wonderful as that escape vouched for during your Civil War. The story goes that a soldier was sitting on the ground eating his supper. Between two mouthfuls he suddenly leaped into the air. While he was in the air, so the story goes, a cannon ball struck the ground where he had been sitting. He could not explain afterwards why it was that he jumped. I dare say that story is true. I have not seen anything quite so wonderful as that, but I know of one very wonderful escape, in Gallipoli. A little party of friends sat together at their dugout door, watching the men swimming on the beach under fire. The beach was continually under fire, but it was no more dangerous than the dry land, and as swimming was the only possible relaxation for the troops, they were allowed to swim. While they watched the swimmers, these friends saw a solitary soldier go into a dugout (some distance down the hill) and draw the sacking which served as a door. Evidently he was settling in for his siesta. About ten minutes later a big Turkish shell came over. There were three big Turkish guns which used to shell the beach. They were known as Beachy Bill, Asiatic Annie, and Lousie Liza. A shell from one of these guns pitched (apparently) right onto the dugout into which this man had gone, and burst. The friends waited for a minute to see if another shell were coming near the same place, but the next shell pitched into the sea. They then went down to see if they could be of any service, though they expected to find the man blown to pieces. As they drew near to the wreck of the dugout, a perfectly naked man emerged, swearing. What had happened was this. He had gone into the dugout, had taken off all his clothes because it was very hot, and had lain down on his bed, which was a raised bank of earth, perhaps three feet above the level of the floor. The shell had come through the roof, had gone into the floor of the dugout, had dug a hole ten feet deep and had then burst. The hole and the raised bank of earth together had protected the man from the concussion and from the chunks of shell. He himself was no
t touched. Everything which he possessed was blown into little flinders, and he was swearing because his afternoon sleep had been disturbed.

  In the same place, in Gallipoli, the day after the landing, the 26th of April, 1915, an Australian Captain was with his platoon of men in a trench up the hill. An Australian Major suddenly appeared to this Captain and said: “Don’t let your men fire to their front during the next half hour. An Indian working party has just gone up to your front, you will be hitting some of them.” The Captain was a little puzzled at this, because he had seen no Indian working party, so he looked at the Major, and noticed that the Major’s shoulder strap bore the number 31. That puzzled him, because he knew that only eighteen Australian battalions had landed on the Peninsula – numbers one to eighteen – and he did not understand what a member of the thirty-first battalion could be doing there. So he looked hard at this Major and said: “Say, are you Fair Dinkum?” That is an Australian slang phrase which means, “Are you the genuine thing? Are you quite all that you pretend to be?” The Major said: “Yes, I’m Major Fair Dinkum.”

  At the inquest on Major Dinkum, they found that he had taken the uniform from a dead Major of the thirteenth battalion, and had been afraid to wear it just as it was, for fear of being challenged, so he had reversed the numbers on the shoulder straps, and made them thirty-one. The inquest found that he died from lead in the head.

  A branch of the service which is very little recognized but exceedingly dangerous is that branch of the messengers who carry messages and carrier pigeons and telephone wires during an attack. One of the most difficult things in modern war is to let your own side know exactly how far an attack has progressed. You send back messengers and the messengers are killed. You run out telephone wires and the wires are cut, as fast as they are laid, by shells or bullets. You send back carrier pigeons and the carrier pigeons are killed. During the Battle of the Somme a friend of mine was up in a tree correcting the fire of his battery. He had a telephone and a telescope. He watched the bursting of the shells and then telephoned back to the guns to correct their fire. While he was doing this, he glanced back at the English lines, and saw a great enemy barrage bursting between himself and his friends, in a kind of wall of explosion. And hopping along through this barrage came one solitary English soldier, who paid no more attention to the shells than if they had been hail. He looked to see this man blown to pieces, but he wasn’t blown to pieces; and then he saw that it was his own servant bringing a letter. He wondered what kind of a letter could be brought under such conditions, and what stirring thing made it necessary, so he climbed down the tree and took the letter and read it. The letter ran: “The Veterinary Surgeon-Major begs to report, that your old mare is suffering from a fit of the strangles.” The servant saluted and said: “Any answer, sir?” And my friend said: “No, no answer. Acknowledge.” The servant saluted and went back with the acknowledgment, hopping through the barrage as though perhaps it were a little wet, but not worth putting on a mackintosh for.