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Transcriber’s Notes


The original book did not have a Table of Contents or a List of
Illustrations. Those have been added by Transcriber, using the
content of the original book, and placed in the Public Domain.

Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not
changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; ambiguous hyphens at the
ends of lines were retained.




CONTENTS


  THE WESTERN FRONT
  THE SOMME BATTLEFIELD
  TRENCH SCENERY
  THE UPPER HAND
  THE BRITISH NAVY AND THE WESTERN FRONT




ILLUSTRATIONS


         I  GENERAL SIR DOUGLAS HAIG
        II  GRAND’PLACE AND RUINS OF THE CLOTH HALL, YPRES
       III  A STREET IN YPRES
        IV  DISTANT VIEW OF YPRES
         V  A VILLAGE CHURCH IN FLANDERS
        VI  THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
       VII  “TANKS”
      VIII  RUINED GERMAN TRENCHES, NEAR CONTALMAISON
        IX  THE NIGHT PICKET
         X  DUG-OUTS
        XI  GORDON HIGHLANDERS: OFFICERS’ MESS
       XII  WAITING FOR THE WOUNDED
      XIII  THE HAPPY WARRIOR
        XV  AT A BASE STATION
       XVI  ON A HOSPITAL SHIP
      XVII  DISEMBARKED TROOPS WAITING TO MARCH OFF
     XVIII  SOLDIERS’ BILLETS--MOONLIGHT
       XIX  A GUN HOSPITAL
        XX  AN OBSERVATION POST

  THE SOMME BATTLEFIELD

       XXI  AMIENS CATHEDRAL
      XXII  THE VIRGIN OF MONTAUBAN
     XXIII  A SKETCH IN ALBERT
      XXIV  TAKING THE WOUNDED ON BOARD
       XXV  “WALKING WOUNDED” SLEEPING ON DECK
      XXVI  (a and b)
            “WALKING WOUNDED” ON A HOSPITAL SHIP
            “WALKING WOUNDED” ON A HOSPITAL SHIP
     XXVII  (a and b)
            A MAIN APPROACH TO THE BRITISH FRONT
            “ROAD LIABLE TO BE SHELLED”
    XXVIII  TROUBLE ON THE ROAD
      XXIX  BRITISH TROOPS ON THE MARCH TO THE SOMME
       XXX  A SKETCH AT CONTALMAISON
      XXXI  ON THE SOMME: SAUSAGE BALLOONS
     XXXII  A WRECKED AEROPLANE NEAR ALBERT
    XXXIII  A MESS OF THE ROYAL FLYING CORPS
     XXXIV  WATCHING OUR ARTILLERY FIRE ON TRONES WOOD FROM MONTAUBAN
      XXXV  (a and b)
            IN THE REGAINED TERRITORY
     XXXVI  A V.A.D. REST STATION
    XXXVII  A GATEWAY AT ARRAS
   XXXVIII  OUTSIDE ARRAS, NEAR THE GERMAN LINES
     XXXIX  WATCHING GERMAN PRISONERS
        XL  ON THE SOMME: “MUD”

  TRENCH SCENERY

       XLI  CASSEL
      XLII  A LINE OF TANKS
     XLIII  A KITCHEN IN THE FIELD
      XLIV  THE GUN PIT: HARDENING THE STEEL
       XLV  THE GUN PIT: A GUN JACKET ENTERING THE OIL TANK
      XLVI  THE GUN PIT: THE GREAT CLUTCHES OF THE CRANE
     XLVII  MOUNTING A GREAT GUN
    XLVIII  “THE HALL OF THE MILLION SHELLS”
      XLIX  THE RUINED TOWER OF BÉCORDEL-BÉCOURT
         L  EMBARKING THE WOUNDED
        LI  (a and b)
            MONT ST. ELOI
            RUINS OF MAMETZ
       LII  RUINED TRENCHES IN MAMETZ WOOD
      LIII  “THAWING OUT”
       LIV  DISEMBARKING
        LV  SLEEPING WOUNDED FROM THE SOMME
       LVI  DISTANT AMIENS
      LVII  SCOTTISH SOLDIERS IN A FRENCH BARN
     LVIII  WELSH SOLDIERS
       LIX  A BRITISH RED CROSS DEPOT AT BOULOGNE
        LX  INDIAN CAVALRY

  THE UPPER HAND

       LXI  MOUNTING A GREAT GUN
      LXII  ERECTING AEROPLANES
     LXIII  AN AEROPLANE ON THE STOCKS
      LXIV  THE GIANT SLOTTERS
       LXV  NIGHT WORK ON THE BREECH OF A GREAT GUN
      LXVI  THE HOWITZER SHOP
     LXVII  THE NIGHT SHIFT WORKING ON A BIG GUN
    LXVIII  SOME GREAT GUNS
      LXIX  MOVING HEAVY GUN TUBES
       LXX  A CORING MACHINE AT WORK ON A BIG GUN TUBE
      LXXI  RUINS NEAR ARRAS
     LXXII  ON THE SOMME: IN THE OLD NO MAN’S LAND
    LXXIII  (a and b)
            A ROAD NEAR THE FRONT
            A TRAIN OF LORRIES
     LXXIV  ON THE SOMME. R.F.C. MEN BUILDING THEIR WINTER HUT
      LXXV  MARICOURT: THE RUINS OF THE VILLAGE
     LXXVI  ON THE SOMME, NEAR MAMETZ
    LXXVII  A MARKET PLACE. TRANSPORT RESTING
   LXXVIII  (a and b)
            THE “BLIGHTY BOAT” AND A HOSPITAL SHIP
            SCOTTISH TROOPS ON A TROOPSHIP
     LXXIX  TROOPS RETURNING FROM THE ANCRE
      LXXX  A HOSPITAL SHIP AT A BASE

  THE BRITISH NAVY AND THE WESTERN FRONT

     LXXXI  “OILING”: A BATTLESHIP TAKING IN OIL FUEL AT SEA
    LXXXII  ON A BATTLE-CRUISER (H.M.S. “LION”)
   LXXXIII  H.M.S. “LION” IN DRY DOCK
    LXXXIV  ON A BATTLESHIP: LOWERING A BOAT FROM THE MAIN DERRICK
     LXXXV  APPROACHING A BATTLESHIP AT NIGHT
    LXXXVI  A LINE OF DESTROYERS
   LXXXVII  ON A BATTLESHIP: A GUN TURRET
  LXXXVIII  ON A BATTLESHIP IN THE FORTH
     XXXIX  (a and b)
            A FLEET SEASCAPE
            THE CREW AT A SMALL GUN ON A BATTLESHIP
        XC  THE FO’C’SLE OF A BATTLESHIP
       XCI  ON A BATTLESHIP: THE AFTER DECK
      XCII  INSIDE THE TURRET
     XCIII  A BOILER ROOM ON A BATTLESHIP
      XCIV  (a and b)
            PRACTICE FIRING: BIG GUNS ON A BATTLESHIP
            ON A BATTLESHIP: SUNSET AFTER A WET DAY
       XCV  ON A BATTLESHIP: AIRING BLANKETS
      XCVI  CAPTAIN CYRIL FULLER
     XCVII  THE FLEET’S POST OFFICE
    XCVIII  IN THE SUBMERGED TORPEDO FLAT OF A BATTLESHIP
      XCIX  SAILORS ON A BATTLESHIP MAKING MUNITIONS FOR THE ARMY
         C  THE CINEMA ON A BATTLESHIP




  THE WESTERN FRONT

  DRAWINGS BY
  MUIRHEAD BONE

  [Illustration]

  WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
  GENERAL SIR DOUGLAS HAIG
  G.C.B., G.C.V.O., K.C.I.E., A.D.C.

  PUBLISHED BY AUTHORITY OF THE WAR OFFICE
  FROM THE OFFICES OF “COUNTRY LIFE,” LTD.,
  20, TAVISTOCK STREET, COVENT GARDEN, LONDON

  MCMXVII




I have been asked to write a foreword to Mr. Muirhead Bone’s drawings.
This I am glad to do, as they illustrate admirably the daily life of
the troops under my command.

The conditions under which we live in France are so different from
those to which people at home are accustomed, that no pen, however
skilful, can explain them without the aid of the pencil.

The destruction caused by war, the wide areas of devastation, the
vast mechanical agencies essential in war, both for transport and
the offensive, the masses of supplies required, and the wonderful
cheerfulness and indomitable courage of the soldiers under varying
climatic conditions, are worthy subjects for the artist who aims at
recording for all time the spirit of the age in which he has lived.

It has been said that the portrait and the picture are invaluable aids
to the right reading of history. From this point of view I welcome,
on behalf of the Army that I have the honour to command, this series
of drawings, as a permanent record in pencil of the duties which our
soldiers have been called upon to perform, and the quality and manner
of its performance.

[Illustration: D. Haig, Genl. (Signature)]

  GENERAL HEADQUARTERS,

    _November, 1916_




THE WESTERN FRONT


The British line in France and Belgium runs through country of three
kinds, and each kind is like a part of England. Between the Somme
and Arras a British soldier often feels that he has not quite left
the place of his training on Salisbury Plain. The main roads may be
different, with their endless rows of sentinel trees, and the farms
are mostly clustered into villages, where they turn their backs to the
streets. More of the land, too, is tilled. But the ground has the same
large and gentle undulation; and these great rollers are made, as in
Wiltshire, of pure chalk coated with only a little brown clay. There
are the same wide prospects, the same lack of streams and ponds, the
same ledges and curious carvings of the soil; and journeys on foot seem
long, as they do on our downs, because so much of the road before you
is visible while you march.

A little north of Arras there begins, almost at a turn of the road,
a black country, where men of the South Lancashires feel at home and
grant that the landscape has some of the points of Wigan. It is the
region of Loos and Vermelles and Bully Grenay, most of it level ground
on which the only eminences are the refuse-heaps of coal mines. Across
this level the eye feels its way from one well-known stack of pit-head
buildings and winding machinery to another. They are, to an English
eye, strangely lofty and stand out like lighthouses over a sea. The
villages near their feet are commonly “model” or “garden,” with all
the houses built well, as parts of one plan. As in Lancashire, farming
and mining go on side by side, and in August the corn is grey with a
mixture of blown dusts from collieries and from the road.

The next change is not abrupt, like the first; but it is as great. Near
Ypres you are on the sands, though yet twenty miles from the sea. Here
you have a sense of being in a place still alive but pensioned off by
nature after its work was done. You feel it at Rye and Winchelsea, at
Ravenna, and at any place which the sea has once made great and then
abandoned. The wide Ypres landscape drawn by Mr. Bone was all mellow on
sunny days at the end of July with the warm brown and yellow of many
good crops. Almost up to the British front it was farmed minutely and
intensely; in spring I had seen a man ploughing a field where a German
shell, on the average, dropped every day. But all this countryside has
the brooding quietude of a sort of honourable old age, dignity and
pensiveness and comfort behind its natural rampart of sand dunes, but
not the stir of life at full pressure.

Into this vari- belt of landscape, some ninety miles long, and
into its cities and villages, the war has brought strange violences of
effort and several different degrees of desolation. Some villages are
dead and buried, like Pozières, where you must dig to find where a
house stood. There are cities dead, but with their bones still above
ground: Ypres is one--many walls stand where they did, but grass is
growing among the broken stones and bits of stained glass on the floor
of the Cloth Hall, and at noon a visitor’s footsteps ring and echo in
the empty streets like those of a belated wayfarer in midnight Oxford.
“How doth the city sit desolate that once was full of people!” Again,
there are towns like Arras, whose flesh, though torn, has life in it
still, and seems to feel a new wound from each shell, though there
be no man there to be hit. These are the broader differences between
one part of the front and another. In any one place there are minor
caprices of destruction or survival. Mr. Bone has drawn the top of
the Albert Church tower, a building that was ugly when it was whole,
but now is famous for its impending figure of the Virgin, knocked by
artillery fire into a singular diving attitude, with the Child in her
outstretched hands. Of the two or three buildings unharmed in Arras
one is the oldest house in the town and another was Robespierre’s
birthplace.

In the fields, as you near the front line, you note an ascending scale
of desolation. It is most clear on the battlefield of the Somme. First
you pass across two or three miles of land on which so many shells
fall, or used to fall, that it has not been tilled for two years. It
is a waste, but a green waste, where not trodden brown by horses and
men. It is gay in summer with poppies, convolvolus and cornflowers.
Among the thistles and coarse grass you see self-sown shoots of the
old crops, of beet, mustard and corn. Beyond this zone of land merely
thrown idle you reach the ultimate desert where nothing but men and
rats can live. Here even the weeds have been rooted up and buried by
shells, the houses are ground down to brick-dust and lime and mixed
with the earth, which is constantly turned up and turned up again
by more shells and kept loose and soft. The trees, broken half-way
up their trunks and stripped of leaves and branches, look curiously
haggard and sinister.

It is hoped that Mr. Bone’s drawings will give a new insight into the
spirit in which the battle of freedom is being fought. An artist does
not merely draw ruined churches and houses, guards and lorries, doctors
and wounded men. It is for him to make us see something more than we do
even when we see all these with our own eyes--to make visible by his
art the staunchness and patience, the faithful absorption in the next
duty, the humour and human decency and good nature--all the strains of
character and emotion that go to make up the temper of Britain at war.

  G.H.Q., FRANCE,

    _November, 1916_


I

GENERAL SIR DOUGLAS HAIG

G.C.B., G.C.V.O., K.C.I.E., A.D.C.

[Illustration]


II

GRAND’PLACE AND RUINS OF THE CLOTH HALL, YPRES

The gaunt emptiness of Ypres is expressed in this drawing, done from
the doorway of a ruined church in a neighbouring square. The grass has
grown long this summer on the Grand’Place and is creeping up over the
heaps of ruins. The only continuous sound in Ypres is that of birds,
which sing in it as if it were country.

[Illustration]


III

A STREET IN YPRES

In the distance is seen what remains of the Cloth Hall. On the right a
wall long left unsupported is bending to its fall. The crash of such
a fall is one of the few sounds that now break the silence of Ypres,
where the visitor starts at the noise of a distant footfall in the
grass-grown streets.

[Illustration]


IV

DISTANT VIEW OF YPRES

The Ypres salient is here seen from a knoll some six miles south-west
of the city, which is marked, near the centre of the drawing, by the
dominant ruin of the cathedral. The German front line is on the heights
beyond, Hooge being a little to the spectator’s right of the city and
Zillebeke slightly more to the right again. Dickebusch lies about half
way between the eye and Ypres. The fields in sight are covered with
crops, varied by good woodland. To a visitor coming from the Somme
battlefield the landscape looks rich and almost peaceful.

[Illustration]


V

A VILLAGE CHURCH IN FLANDERS

All round this church there is the quiet of a desert. The drawing
was made from within a house opposite; the fall of its entire front
provided an extensive window view.

[Illustration]


VI

THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME

An exciting moment in the fighting for the summit ridge of the
battlefield in August, 1916. All the British guns have just burst into
action and our infantry are advancing unseen in the cloud of smoke on
the sky-line. The puffs of smoke high in the air are from bursting
shrapnel. The battle is seen from King George’s Hill, near the old
German front line, taken on July 1st, 1916. Below, among the ravaged
trees, are the ruins of Mametz; beyond them, Mametz Wood; beyond it,
again, the wood of Bazentin-le-Petit.

[Illustration]


VII

“TANKS”

In this fine drawing Mr. Bone has seen the “Tank” in its major aspect,
as a grim and daunting engine of war.

[Illustration]


VIII

RUINED GERMAN TRENCHES, NEAR CONTALMAISON

The drawing shows a former German front-line trench reduced by our
artillery fire, before an advance, to a mass of capricious looking
irregularities in the ground. The German barbed wire entanglements are
seen destroyed by our shell fire to open the way for our attacking
troops.

[Illustration]


IX

THE NIGHT PICKET

The hour is Retreat and a Sergeant-Major is inspecting the three men
for duty at a one-man post during the coming night. Each man in turn
will do two hours’ duty, followed by four hours’ rest. The fine austere
drawing of the sunset, the wide waste spaces, the intent men mounting
picket and the men off duty strolling at ease, is imbued with the
spirit of the region just behind our front.

[Illustration]


X

DUG-OUTS

A small hamlet of sand-bagged dug-outs a little behind the front line,
seen during a passing lift of the clouds at the end of a wet day.
Many dug-outs, like the one on the left, bear such names as “The Rat
Hole,” “It,” “Some Dug-out, believe ma,” “The Old Curiosity Shop” and
“The Ritz.” On the right, a shelf in the outer wall of sand-bags is
decorated with flowers in pots.

[Illustration]


XI

GORDON HIGHLANDERS: OFFICERS’ MESS

In the bare dancing hall of a village inn behind the Somme Front. The
artist has found means to interpret with the utmost sympathy and power
the extraordinary romantic quality that there often is about a Highland
mess in France, created by the rude setting, the primitive half light
amidst cavernous gloom, and the spectator’s sense of an enveloping
world of strange dangers and adventures.

[Illustration]


XII

WAITING FOR THE WOUNDED

A British advance has just begun, and the surgeons of a Divisional
Collecting Station near the Somme are awaiting the arrival of the first
laden stretcher-bearers. In a few minutes the three officers will be at
work, perhaps for twenty-four hours on end. At one Casualty Clearing
Station a distinguished surgeon performed, without resting, nineteen
difficult operations, each lasting more than an hour, in cases of
severe abdominal wounds, where delay would have meant the loss of life.
In almost every case the man was saved. Another surgeon operated for
thirty-six hours without relief. Such devotion is not exceptional in
the R.A.M.C.

[Illustration]


XIII

THE HAPPY WARRIOR

The place is a field dressing station. The wounded Grenadier Guardsman
in the foreground on the left, wearing a German helmet and eating bread
and jam, had brought in as prisoner the German who is sitting on the
right with his hand to his face. The Guardsman indicated the German to
the artist, and said, “Won’t you draw my pal here, too, Sir? He and me
had a turn-up this morning when we took their trench, and he jabbed me
in the arm and I jabbed him in the eye, and we’re the best of friends.”
Other Germans are sitting in attitudes characteristic of newly-made
prisoners.

[Illustration]


XIV (a and b)

RED CROSS BARGES ON THE SOMME

Many wounded or sick soldiers, British and French, are brought by
river or canal from near the front to near a base hospital or the sea.
The motion is easy, the men have good air and quiet; any who are well
enough to be on deck have pleasant and changeful surroundings to look
at. The English have fitted up for this purpose many of the large,
square-built and bluff-bowed--almost box-like--French canal boats. They
are towed, in pairs, by small tugs. The French Red Cross uses barges
driven by engines placed aft.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]


XV

AT A BASE STATION

A midnight scene at a base railway station. Train-loads of “walking
wounded” on their way to England are met at any hour of the day or
night by V.A.D. workers who offer the men hot tea or cocoa, and bread
and butter. The quality of the food, and the manner of the gift, give
extraordinary pleasure to the tired men.

[Illustration]


XVI

ON A HOSPITAL SHIP

The boat here is an old one; in newer boats the accommodation is
finer, but the drawing shows the ordinary mode of bedding the patients
in double tiers of continuous bunks. At some point in the passage
an R.A.M.C. orderly asks every patient to what part of “Blighty” he
belongs, and an effort is made to send him to a hospital near his home.
The orderly’s approach, as he makes his rounds, is always eagerly
awaited throughout the ship by the wounded men.

[Illustration]


XVII

DISEMBARKED TROOPS WAITING TO MARCH OFF

An every-day scene at the French ports where our men land. Whatever
may come after, there are few moments so thrilling to an untravelled
soldier of the New Army as those in which he awaits the order to march
off into the unknown, with all the strange events of war before him.

[Illustration]


XVIII

SOLDIERS’ BILLETS--MOONLIGHT

The unusually comfortable quarters of a Company in reserve while other
Companies of its Battalion are in the firing and support trenches, two
or three miles further up. Reserve billets are more often under ground,
sometimes in the cellars of ruined houses. A thick covering of ruins
above gives complete security against shell fire.

[Illustration]


XIX

A GUN HOSPITAL

Many wounded or worn guns, of all calibres, are brought back for
treatment to “hospitals” which do not fly the Red Cross. Here are a
few invalided “heavies.” The gun on the extreme right is the first
British 9.2 that came to France. Like most of our heavy guns she has
been christened by her crew and bears the punning inscription, “Lizzie,
Somme Strafer.”

[Illustration]


XX

AN OBSERVATION POST

The lower part of the first of the ladders leading up to an artillery
observation post in the top of a tall tree. It commanded a large part
of the Somme battlefield until the summit ridge was won; every detail
of several successful British advances could be watched from the
tree-top. The battle has now left it far in the rear, and it is disused.

[Illustration]




[Illustration]

THE SOMME BATTLEFIELD.


The main Anglo-German battlefield of 1916 is a little range of chalk
down or blunt hill. It is ten miles long and seven miles wide, and
its watershed runs from north-west to south-east--from near Thiepval,
above the small river Ancre, to Combles, four miles to the north of the
canalised Somme. This summit ridge is not quite 500 feet high--about as
high as the Hog’s Back in Surrey. The south-western <DW72> of the range
is rather steeper and more broken up into terraces and lateral ridges
and defiles than the north-eastern <DW72>. There is no real escarpment,
but enough difference to make the south-western <DW72> the harder to
attack.

Small as this ridge is, it is the highest ground, in these parts,
between the Belgian plain and the main plain of Northern France. It
is crossed at right angles by one great road, the famous French Route
Nationale that runs nearly dead straight from Rouen, through Amiens, to
Valenciennes, and so leads on to Brussels by Mons. On the battlefield,
between Albert and Bapaume, it reaches the highest point above the
sea in all its long course, at a spot where a heap of powdered brick
and masonry, forty yards off to the north, marks the site of the
Windmill of Pozières, one of those solitary buildings to which, like
Falfemont Farm and the Abbey at Eaucourt, the war has brought death and
immortality.

From this road, at one point or another, you can see most of the places
that were made famous in 1916. A mile and a half from Albert, as you go
out north-eastward, you spy in a hollow below you a whitish sprinkling
of mixed mud, brick-dust and lime, the remains of La Boisselle, on
the right of the road. On its left a second grey patch is the site
of Ovillers. Beyond La Boisselle Contalmaison is just out of sight
behind a shoulder of hill. Nearly all the most hard-fought woods are
in sight--High Wood on the sky-line, and Delville Wood larger on its
right, and then in succession, with sharp intervals of bareness between
them, the woods of Bazentin, Mametz and Fricourt. Above them and more
distant are the dense trees that have Maricourt and the French troops
at their feet, and, high on their right, the thin file of trees shading
the road that runs from Albert, past Carnoy and Cléry, to Peronne.
You walk on for three miles and may not observe that you have passed
through Pozières, so similar are raw chalk and builder’s lime, raw clay
and powdered brick, when weeds grow thick over both. But the great
road--strangely declined into a rough field track--begins to fall away
before you, and new prospects to open--Courcelette and Martinpuich
almost at your feet, and straight beyond them the church and town hall
of Bapaume at the end of the long avenue of roadside trees. Looking
left you see, two miles away, the western end of the summit ridge,
the last point upon it from which the Germans were driven; so that,
even after the fall of Thiepval, a shell would sometimes come from the
Schwaben Redoubt to remind unwary walkers at Pozières Windmill that
enemy eyes still watched the lost ground.

Among the wreckage of the countryside you can detect the traces of old
standing comfort and rustic wealth. The many wayside windmills show
you how much corn was grown. In size and plan they are curiously like
the mighty stone dovecotes of Fifeshire. Almost as frequent as ruined
windmills are ruined sugar refineries, standing a little detached in
the fields, like the one at Courcelette, for which armies fought as
they fought for the neighbouring windmill. Beet was the next crop to
grain. There were little industries, too, like the making of buttons
for shirts at Fricourt, where you see by the road small refuse heaps
of old oyster shells with many round holes where the little discs have
been cut cleanly out of the mother-of-pearl, though all other trace of
the factories has vanished. Each village commune had its wood, with
certain rights for the members of the commune to take timber; Fricourt
Wood at the doors of Fricourt, Mametz Wood rather far from Mametz, as
there was no good wood nearer. All these woods were well fenced and
kept up, like patches of hedged cover dotted over a park. It was a good
country to live in, and good men came from it. The French Army Corps
that drew on these villages for recruits has won honour beyond all
other French Corps in the battle of the Somme.

Many skilled writers have tried to describe the aghast look of these
fields where the battle had passed over them. But every new visitor
says the same thing--that they had not succeeded; no eloquence has yet
conveyed the disquieting strangeness of the portent. You can enumerate
many ugly and queer freaks of the destroying powers--the villages not
only planed off the face of the earth but rooted out of it, house by
house, like bits of old teeth; the thin brakes of black stumps that
used to be woods, the old graveyards wrecked like kicked ant-heaps,
the tilth so disembowelled by shells that most of the good upper mould
created by centuries of the work of worms and men is buried out of
sight and the unwrought primeval subsoil lies on the top; the sowing of
the whole ground with a new kind of dragon’s teeth--unexploded shells
that the plough may yet detonate, and bombs that may let themselves off
if their safety pins rust away sooner than the springs within. But no
piling up of sinister detail can express the sombre and malign quality
of the battlefield landscape as a whole. “It makes a goblin of the
sun”--or it might if it were not peopled in every part with beings so
reassuringly and engagingly human, sane and reconstructive as British
soldiers.

  G. H. Q., France.

    _January, 1917._


XXI

AMIENS CATHEDRAL

The “Parthenon of Gothic Architecture” is seen in this exquisitely
delicate and sensitive drawing from the south-east, with the lovely
rose window of the south transept partly in view on the left. The
wooden spire, which Ruskin called “the pretty caprice of a village
carpenter,” looks finer in the drawing than in the original, the
relative flimsiness of the material being less apparent. Nothing is
lost by the intervention of the foreground houses, as the façade of
the south transept, like the famous west front and the choir stalls,
is sheathed with sand-bags to a height of thirty or forty feet for
protection against German bombs. Patrolling French aeroplanes are seen
in the sky.

[Illustration]


XXII

THE VIRGIN OF MONTAUBAN

An image which strangely escaped destruction during the time when
the village of Montauban, now utterly erased, was being shelled
successively by British and German guns. By a similar caprice of fate
the Virgin of Carency, now enshrined in a little chapel in the French
military cemetery at Villers-aux-Bois, received only some shot wounds
when the village was destroyed during the French advance towards Lens
in 1915.

[Illustration]


XXIII

A SKETCH IN ALBERT

Albert, as a whole, is wrecked to the degree shown in this drawing.
The building in the middle distance, on the right of the road, with
its roof timbers exposed, is a wrecked factory, and many hundreds
of bicycles and sewing machines now make an extraordinary tangle of
twisted and broken metal in its basement.

[Illustration]


XXIV

TAKING THE WOUNDED ON BOARD

Wounded men from the Somme, ordered to England by the Medical Officer
commanding the General or Stationary Hospital in which each man has
been a patient, are being put on board a hospital ship at the base. In
the centre of the foreground is seen the timber framework of the ship’s
large red cross of electric lights. With this, and a tier of some sixty
green lights running from stem to stern, a hospital ship at night is a
beautiful as well as unmistakeable object at sea.

[Illustration]


XXV

“WALKING WOUNDED” SLEEPING ON DECK

The best place to sleep, on a summer night in a full hospital ship,
for a man whose wound is not grave enough to cause serious “shock” and
consequent need of much artificial warming.

[Illustration]


XXVI (a and b)

“WALKING WOUNDED” ON A HOSPITAL SHIP

This drawing was done in the warm early autumn of 1916. All “walking
wounded” wear lifebelts, if their injuries permit, during the Channel
crossing, and each “stretcher case” has a lifebelt under his pillow, if
not on. The necessity for this, in a war with Germany, has been proved
by the fate of too many of our hospital ships.

[Illustration]

“WALKING WOUNDED” ON A HOSPITAL SHIP

The deck of a British hospital ship is one of the most cheerful places
in the world. Every man is at rest after toil, is about to see friends
after separation, can smoke when he likes, and has in every other man
on board a companion with whom endless reminiscences can be exchanged,
and perhaps the merits and demerits of the Ypres salient, or the most
advantageous use of “tanks,” warmly debated, as is the custom of
privates of the New Army. Silent or vocal, a great beatitude fills the
vessel.

[Illustration]


XXVII (a and b)

A MAIN APPROACH TO THE BRITISH FRONT

The canvas screen on the left marks a place where the road had been
under enemy observation. A “sausage,” or stationary observation
balloon, is seen above the road. “Sausages” are not pretty. They
exhibit, at various stages of inflation, the various shapes taken by
a maggot partly uncurled. But the work done from them, besides being
always disagreeable and often risky, is extremely valuable.

[Illustration]

“ROAD LIABLE TO BE SHELLED”

A stretch of high-road which was under enemy observation when drawn.
Such roads are, of course, only used with due caution. The whole
drawing is remarkably instinct with the artist’s sense of a malign
invisible presence--a “terror that walketh by noonday”--infesting the
sunny vacant length of the forbidden road.

[Illustration]


XXVIII

TROUBLE ON THE ROAD

War has its tyre troubles, as peace has. In this case the lack of a
spare wheel, and the consequent necessity for changing an inner tube,
had the compensation of giving the artist time to make the drawing.

[Illustration]


XXIX

BRITISH TROOPS ON THE MARCH TO THE SOMME

A typical Picardy landscape behind the frontal zone of destruction. The
crescent-shaped line of troops and transport on the road is a small
fraction of a Division moving up to take its place in the front line.

[Illustration]


XXX

A SKETCH AT CONTALMAISON

The place is Contalmaison, but the drawing has caught the spirit of the
whole of the shattered country-side recaptured this year.

[Illustration]


XXXI

ON THE SOMME: SAUSAGE BALLOONS

A typical winter scene on the Somme battlefield. The nearer “sausage,”
or captive observation balloon, is being run out to its proper height
for work, by unwinding its cable from a reel on the ground. The further
balloon is already moored high enough and its observer, alone in the
small hanging cage, is at work with his map, telescope and telephone.

[Illustration]


XXXII

A WRECKED AEROPLANE NEAR ALBERT

A casualty in the R.F.C. The smashed biplane and the retreating
stretcher party on the right explain themselves. On the left, Albert
church, to the right of a tall factory chimney, is seen in the distance.

[Illustration]


XXXIII

A MESS OF THE ROYAL FLYING CORPS

The Officers’ mess at the most advanced station of the Royal Flying
Corps on the Somme front. The great tent was designed as an aeroplane
hangar. An R.F.C. mess usually has an atmosphere of its own. There is
more variety of apparel than at other messes; there are more dogs;
personal mascots abound, and in many ways there is more expression
of individual choice or peculiarity than elsewhere--corresponding,
perhaps, to the more individual character of a flying officer’s work
and responsibilities and to the temperament which leads to success in
flying. The officers are drawn from all sorts of regiments, and each
continues to wear his regimental badge. It is winter, and the second
figure from the left is wearing a fur jacket.

[Illustration]


XXXIV

WATCHING OUR ARTILLERY FIRE ON TRONES WOOD FROM MONTAUBAN

The drawing expresses well the singular aspect of the parts of the
battlefield where artillery fire was heavy and where the conical holes
made in the ground by high explosive shells were consequently close
together. At a later stage these separate pock-marks overlap, like
the pits in confluent small-pox, and the whole of the shelled ground
becomes soft and loose, as though raked deeply but unevenly. In the
distance the detached higher puffs of smoke from bursting shrapnel are
distinguishable from the rising clouds of smoke from high-explosive
shells.

[Illustration]


XXXV (a and b)

IN THE REGAINED TERRITORY

Both the places drawn were in German hands until July. The first
drawing is of a cemetery found behind the old German front line near
Fricourt. There were many imperfectly marked German graves near these.
They have since been marked, as many thousands of hurriedly made
British graves have been, with wooden crosses and metal inscriptions by
our Graves’ Registration and Inquiries Units.

The second drawing, with a helmeted sentry at the sand-bagged entrance
to a dug-out, conveys the sinister air of a village destroyed, but not
quite effaced, by shell-fire.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]


XXXVI

A V.A.D. REST STATION

At a base railway station in France. Between the arrivals of hospital
trains from the front the V.A.D. workers occupy themselves in the
“dispensary” in rolling bandages or preparing hot cocoa and other food
for the wounded or sick men who will pass through the station.

[Illustration]


XXXVII

A GATEWAY AT ARRAS

A few hundred yards from this gate the Anglo-French treaty of peace was
signed after Agincourt. Part of the city’s later history is written in
the curious and beautiful Spanish architecture of its chief squares.
It is now in the middle stage of destruction: almost every building is
shattered or injured, but enough is standing to make the empty city
seem still sensitive, in its very stones, under the enemy’s random
shellfire.

[Illustration]


XXXVIII

OUTSIDE ARRAS, NEAR THE GERMAN LINES

At Arras the Germans always seem very near you. In fact they are. No
other famous town in the Allies’ hands has a German front trench in its
suburbs; nowhere do the two front trenches come so close to each other.
The result is a subtle quality of apprehensiveness in the atmosphere
of the silent empty city. It seems like someone standing on tiptoe,
peering and listening, in a solitary place, for some vague unseen
danger, or like a horse nervously pricking its ears, you cannot tell
why. This tingle of uncanny dread has been conveyed with remarkable
success in this figureless but haunted landscape.

[Illustration]


XXXIX

WATCHING GERMAN PRISONERS

British soldiers watching recently captured Germans on their way down
from the front to an Army Corps “cage.” Until removed to the base our
prisoners are well housed in huts or tents in a kind of compound fenced
with barbed wire and placed well outside the range of their friends’
artillery. There are no attempts at escape. Our men, behind the front
line, always watch the arrival of new prisoners with silent curiosity.
Those of our soldiers who have themselves fought with the Germans, and
captured them, usually befriend them with cigarettes and drinks from
water-bottles.

[Illustration]


XL

ON THE SOMME: “MUD”

At a camp, near Albert, whose Church, with the image knocked awry, is
seen to the right. With the permission of the officer on the left some
soldiers are fishing in the mud for such fragments of old timber, boxes
and tins as may be of use to them in their field housekeeping, though
they are not worth collecting for deposit at the official Salvage Dumps.

[Illustration]




[Illustration]

TRENCH SCENERY.


In one of these drawings Mr. Bone gives a rousing glimpse of trench
life at a moment of action. These are its moments of transfiguration,
when all the glow of courage, that has been banked down and husbanded
through months of waiting and guarding, bursts, at a word of
command, into flame. The rest of trench life is work, contrivance
and observation. It has been called monotonous. But, for any man who
has not lost the heart of a boy, it has the relish of an endlessly
changeful outdoor adventure, a game with the earth and the weather, as
well as with the more official enemy.

No two points in an Allied front trench are wholly alike. Certain
general patterns there are, but no facsimiles. Each traverse or bay
has a look of its own; it is personal and expresses, as Robinson
Crusoe’s stockade might have done, the nature of some man or men making
shift, each after his kind, to put up what they could, in the shortest
time, between their bodies and danger. A German firing trench is less
various. In it you seem to see the minds of a few large and able
contractors; in ours the minds of thousands of good campers-out. To put
it in another way, the German trench has, in some measure, the quality
of a long street built, well enough, to a single design; ours possesses
the charm of a strip of coast or a long country lane, where nature or
man has made every indentation and turn a surprise, and each farmer has
made gates and hedges to his own mind.

The line goes through wonderful places and charges them with singular
thrills of romance. It has made windmills famous as forts, and brought
herons into the suburbs of cities. In one place it runs across water
and land so intermixed that the sentries of both armies are upon little
islands crowned with breast-works like grouse butts; you see them,
when the winter evening falls, standing immobile, waist-deep in mist,
each man about forty yards from his enemy. Men have stood there, turn
by turn, for two years and a half, moving softly and whispering as
if in a church, till the shyest of wildfowl have learnt to treat the
surrounding marsh as their own, and the only sound is of wild duck and
snipe astir between the muzzles of two nations’ loaded rifles, snipe
safe among the snipers. At more than one place the two front lines
converge until each sentry knows that he is within a gentle bomb’s
throw of the enemy. Out of the firing trench, at one of these places,
you walk on tiptoe along a short sap that halves this short distance,
and from its end you look up at a small heap of rubble--a couple of
cart-loads--and know that some German is cautiously listening, like
you, on its further side.

Those are the cramped and contorted parts of the front. A few miles
away it will straighten and loose itself out; you see it run free, in
great, easy curves, up the <DW72>s of wide moorlands, the two front
lines drawn apart almost three hundred yards. Each is a double band of
colour; the white ribbon of its dug chalk and the broader rust-brown
ribbon of its tangled wire stand out clear against the shabby velveteen
grey of the heath. Here there is less of thrill and more of ease in
trench life; by day the sentries peer, hour by hour, into the baffling
mist that is woven across their sight by our own and the enemy’s
wire; it is like trying to see through low and leafless, but thick,
undergrowth. By night the wire makes, to the sentry’s eye, a middle
stratum of opaque dark grey, between the full blackness of the earth
below it and the more penetrable obscurity of the night air above.
But the darkness is never trusted for long. All night each army is
sending up rocket-like lights to burst and hang like arc lamps in
the air over the firing trench of the other. From a commanding point
you can see, at any moment of any night, scores of these ascending
rockets, each like a line drawn on the dark with a pencil of flame,
arching over to intersect each other near the zenith of their flight,
incessantly tracing and re-tracing the lines of a Gothic nave over all
No Man’s Land, from the Alps to the sea. All night, too, there is a
kind of pulse of light in the sky, along the whole front, from the
flash of guns. From the trenches the flash itself can seldom be seen,
but the sky winks and winks from moment to moment with the spread and
contraction of a trembling radiance like summer lightning.

At most parts of the line a man in the front trench is cut off from
landscape. To look at a tree behind the enemy’s lines may be to give a
mark to a sniper hidden in its boughs. By day you see the upper half of
the dome of the sky, and, through loopholes, a few yards of rough earth
or chalk, then the nebulous wire and, through its thin places, perhaps
a few uniforms, blue, grey or brown, lying beyond, among the coarse
grass and weeds. At night you see all the stars well, and on moonlight
nights, if you walk the trench softly, you can watch strange friezes
sharply silhouetted on the sky line of the parapet, the wars and loves
of capering rats, “flouting the ivory moon.” Whole choirs of larks may
be heard: neither cannon nor small arms seem to alarm them; and most of
the ground has its own hawk to quarter it daily.

To men put on this short allowance of natural sights and sounds it
is an extraordinary pleasure to find in the rear of their trench a
clean rivulet, such as often occurs in chalk land, where the surface
water filters rapidly in and comes out at the bases of <DW72>s like so
many crystal springs. But the greatest of all trench delights is the
re-discovery, every year, of the sun. Some day in March it is suddenly
found to have a miraculous warmth, and everybody off duty comes out
like the bees and stands about in the trench, sunning his head and
shoulders in the tepid rays and adoring--quite inarticulately--and
feeling that all’s well with the world. A winter in trenches revives,
in us children of civilisation, a pre-Promethean rapture of love for
the sun; and the dark nights, in which not a match must be struck,
makes us, at any rate, think more highly than ever we did of the moon,
which halves the strain of the soldier on guard, and of the stars
which guide him back overland to his billet, at a relief, to sleep in
Elysium. So, for a man who has all his senses alive and unjaded, the
hard and bare life has its compensations. It makes him do without many
things; but it also quickens delight in the things which are at the
base of all the rest, and without which there could not have been the
incomparable adventure and spectacle of life on the earth.

  G. H. Q., France.

    _February, 1917._


XLI

CASSEL

Cassel has no great part in this war. But it has endured ancient
sieges; three notable battles have taken its name since 1070; the last
of them led to the annexation of Cassel to France in 1678 and gave
her a town finely set on a hill amidst lowlands, and equally good to
look at and look from. The many windmills about it give Cassel an air
of liveliness as you approach, and this cheerful effect is maintained
on reaching the main square, drawn by Mr. Bone, with its lightsome
spaciousness and comfortable, well-proportioned houses. The eyes of
passing Scottish soldiers find a familiar look in the “step” gables of
many of Cassel’s roofs. One is seen on the right.

[Illustration]


XLII

A LINE OF TANKS

Thanks to the imaginative power of the artist, the “Tank” is here seen
not as the British soldier sees it--a friendly giant with lovably droll
tricks of gait and gesture--but as it must look to a threatened enemy,
the very embodiment of momentum irresistibly grinding its way towards
its prey. In the presence of “tanks” as here drawn--though there is no
trace of exaggeration in the drawing--the spectator is as a crushed
worm and, in fact, finds there is more force in that phrase than he
knew.

[Illustration]


XLIII

A KITCHEN IN THE FIELD

One of the improvements in our field organisation since the early part
of the war is the more general provision of hot meals for the men in
the front trenches. From cookhouses like the one shown in the drawing,
or from travelling field kitchens, the hot stew and tea are brought up
the communication trench in dixies, two to a platoon, each dixie being
slung from a pole carried on two men’s shoulders. The cooks work under
shell fire and many have been killed.

[Illustration]


XLIV

THE GUN PIT: HARDENING THE STEEL

The drawing shows one of the most thrilling moments in the making of a
great gun. The doors of the furnace have just been thrown back and the
heated gun tube is about to be lifted by the giant pincers of the crane.

[Illustration]


XLV

THE GUN PIT: A GUN JACKET ENTERING THE OIL TANK

The gun jacket shown here has just been heated in the furnace and is
about to plunge into its oil bath. The spectacle is always striking,
especially at dusk, when the fierce glow of the huge mass of metal
seems more brilliant than ever. The passage is made in a few seconds.

[Illustration]


XLVI

THE GUN PIT: THE GREAT CLUTCHES OF THE CRANE

The figures in the foreground give a scale by which to judge the size
and power of the crane that handles the heavier guns in the gun pit.
The tube has now been lifted from the oil tank and waits to be carried
back to the gun shop lathes.

[Illustration]


XLVII

MOUNTING A GREAT GUN

This is one of the largest guns. At such a scene as its mounting one is
always struck by the contrast between the restless stir of the minute
figures busy about it and the massive impassivity--for the present--of
the thing they have created. “A great gun,” it has been said, “is so
_sheer_.” In a gun shop it dwarfs everything round it and seems the
embodiment, at the same time, of immobility and of menace.

[Illustration]


XLVIII

“THE HALL OF THE MILLION SHELLS”

A store containing loaded shells of every calibre. All the plant has
been made since 1914, in answer to the challenge of German militarism.
The railway trucks in the foreground are incessantly filled and
refilled from the supplies pouring into the store for dispatch to the
front. Women drive the cranes that gather up bunches of shells from any
part of the building and lower them, with absolute precision, to their
appointed places in the trucks. All handling of shells must be cautious
and deliberate, but the work proceeds, without haste and without rest,
at a remarkable speed.

[Illustration]


XLIX

THE RUINED TOWER OF BÉCORDEL-BÉCOURT

The village of Bécordel-Bécourt is just on the Allies’ side of the
front line as it was before the Battle of the Somme. It has, therefore,
sustained only the German artillery fire, not that of both armies in
turn. Hence the survival of this comparatively large fragment of the
village church.

[Illustration]


L

EMBARKING THE WOUNDED

_Sketched at night at a Port of embarkation of the wounded._

Owing to the low tide the “stretcher cases” or “lying wounded” had all
to be carried underneath the pier to the level of the hospital ship.
This meant very hard work for the stretcher bearers, and one is here
seen resting a moment while the previous stretcher is being carefully
taken aboard to be lowered by the lift from the deck to the large wards
below.

[Illustration]


LI (a and b)

MONT ST. ELOI

In the left centre are the tall ruins of the large church of the
monastery at Mont St. Eloi, a little hill about five miles north-west
of Arras. The hill is a splendid viewpoint, commanding the Vimy Ridge,
the German lines between Neuville St. Vaast and Thelus, the city of
Arras itself, the wood of Souchez and the <DW72>s of Notre Dame de
Lorette. On the ground for many miles north and north-east of it the
French fought with heroic determination in the advances which gained
them Carency, Souchez and Notre Dame de Lorette in 1915.

[Illustration]

RUINS OF MAMETZ

Mametz must have been one of the pleasantest of the villages on the
Somme battlefield. It was built on a gentle <DW72>, facing south, a
little way off the dusty main road from Albert to Peronne, and large,
shady trees were intermingled with the houses. The drawing shows what
was left of the village after its capture in the beginning of July. The
tall fragment of the parish church stands in the centre of the drawing.

[Illustration]


LII

RUINED TRENCHES IN MAMETZ WOOD

In this one drawing may be seen the face of all the hard-fought woods
of the Somme battlefield--Mametz, Fricourt, Bazentin, Delville,
Thiepval, Foureaux and St. Pierre Vaast. Everywhere in them all there
is the same close network of half-filled trenches, the same bristle
of ruined tree trunks, the same litter of the leavings of prolonged
fighting at close quarters--bits of broken rifles and bayonets,
perforated helmets, unexploded hand grenades, fragments of shell,
displaced sand-bags, broken stretchers, boots not quite empty, and
shreds of uniform and equipment.

[Illustration]


LIII

“THAWING OUT”

It is always cold in an aeroplane in flight, but in winter the cold
endured by airmen is often atrocious, however perfect their equipment.
A pilot, who has just come down from his three hours of duty in the
air, is here seen “thawing out” over a spirit stove in his tent. Like
the thawing of meat taken from cold storage, the process requires some
patience.

[Illustration]


LIV

DISEMBARKING

At a base port in France. Officers are disembarking from the upper
deck. Many officers arrive under orders simply to “proceed overseas.”
At the “A. M. L. O. Office” they receive, through the Assistant
Military Landing Officer, exact orders where to go and what to do. The
men on the lower deck disembark by a second gangway and the boat is
cleared in a few minutes.

[Illustration]


LV

SLEEPING WOUNDED FROM THE SOMME

Every soldier on active service has more or less of deferred sleep, as
well as deferred pay, due to him. If he be wounded he usually recovers
a large instalment of both--the former during his first nights and days
in hospital, the latter when he leaves the convalescent hospital for
the ten days’ sick leave given to all wounded or sick men who have been
sent to England for treatment.

[Illustration]


LVI

DISTANT AMIENS

As you walk southward from Amiens, across meadows and cornfields, the
ground rises more gently than the immediate south bank of the Somme, on
which the Cathedral and the City stand. Thus the city sinks gradually
out of sight until nothing is left but the thin Cathedral spire,
looking like the mast of a sunken ship. Mr. Bone’s drawing was done
from a point, about a mile south of the city, at which the Cathedral
roof, the tower of Saint Martin’s Church, and one or two factory
chimneys are still unsubmerged.

[Illustration]


LVII

SCOTTISH SOLDIERS IN A FRENCH BARN

A typical billet for troops on the march or enjoying a “Divisional
rest” between two turns of duty in the trenches. An average-sized barn
at a French farm will house about thirty men. If the straw be deep
and the roof sound it makes better quarters than anything but a good
bedroom. Its chief drawback in the men’s eyes is that smoking has to be
forbidden because of the straw. In the winter evenings the men usually
cross the farmyard to the kitchen, where they smoke and make friends
with the farmer, and buy coffee, at a penny a bowl, from his wife.

[Illustration]


LVIII

WELSH SOLDIERS

Characteristic trench attitudes, two of the men with their heads well
down, the cheek cuddling the small of the butt, while the N.C.O. beyond
directs their fire, with his head a little free. There is just the same
soldierly combination of “much care and valour” in the typical Welshman
in France to-day as there was in Shakespeare’s Fluellen.

[Illustration]


LIX

A BRITISH RED CROSS DEPOT AT BOULOGNE

Dead low water in Boulogne Harbour, and a slack time for the motor
ambulances parked on the quay above. The work of the R.A.M.C.
inevitably comes in rushes, with lulls in between. The great thing
is, when a rush comes, to treat every case with a rapidity exactly
proportioned to its urgency, removing instantly to the base hospitals
or to England every serious case which will be the better, or none the
worse, for a slight delay in operation. To work this system perfectly
there must always be in readiness, at every point where wounded are
entrained or transhipped, a supply of ambulances equal to the maximum
call.

[Illustration]


LX

INDIAN CAVALRY

Our Indian Cavalry on the Somme were given a chance of showing their
quality at the Bois de Foureaux on July 17th, 1916. They used it. Apart
from other soldierly qualities, the grave dignity of their bearing
impresses all foreign visitors to the battlefield. They always salute a
passing officer as if they were Kings and he an Emperor.

[Illustration]




[Illustration]

THE UPPER HAND


In these better days it is no harm to speak of the time when the Marne
had been won and yet our Army in France was within an inch of its life.
The thread of its fate had frayed very thin; only one strand remained;
at last, not even that--what had taken its place was a gallant sham, a
last forlorn bluff, scarcely a hope. And then came the ancient reward
of those who fight on without hope. Like a storm that had blown itself
out, the strain was suddenly gone. The strong had not known all their
strength, the weak had steadfastly hidden their weakness, and they had
worn out the strong.

That extreme peril has never recurred. But there were months in 1915
when men in our trenches still felt that the upper hand was not theirs.
What would happen was this. Once or twice in the day the Germans, after
their meals, would spray a piece of our trench with trench-mortar
bombs and rifle-grenades. As a rule they did not mean to attack, in
the fuller sense. The piece was not an overture; it was complete in
itself; a sort of isolated _pas d’intimidation_. Not many men on our
side would be killed. But, while the shower went on, everyone on duty
in our firing trench felt with crystal clearness that he was on the
defensive. At each fresh discharge he would plaster himself upon the
front wall of the trench and gaze upwards for the coming evil. If he
saw the approaching waddle of a trench-mortar bomb, wagging its tail
through the air, he would judge it like a catch in the long field, only
with an ardent desire to miss it; and to this end he would jump round
corners of trench and put solid angles of earth between him and the
large muted sound like “pfloonk” that was to ensue. If what he heard
was the thin hiss or spit of a rifle grenade, then he knew that it
could not be seen, and he kept his head down and wondered how near the
venomous little metallic smash of the burst would be. In any case he
was bespattered, throughout the bombardment, with little falling bits
of earth, warm metals and products of combustion; the tinkling of this
hail on his helmet deepened his rueful sense of resemblance to a hen
crouching under the lee of a hedge in bad weather. And, all this time,
our own mortars and guns would be silent or--almost worse than silence
itself--would reply with the mildness of Sterne’s patient ass. “Please
do not shell our front trench. But, if you want to, you may,” so they
seemed to be saying.

From these mortifications the men in the firing trench, and the gunners
who had endured the sharper torment of not being able to help them,
were saved by the women, whom Mr. Bone shows us working at home,
arming their knights for battle in a sense more valid than any known
to Froissart or Malory. There came a time, most moving and memorable
to all who were then in our trenches, when any German attempt to gall
them began to evoke new, heart-warming sounds. All the upper air, over
the place where the pelted sentries were crouching, seemed to have come
to life on our side. At last our own trench mortars were answering,
not in a few grudged monosyllables, but volubly, out of the fulness of
the dump. Higher up also, there rose arch over arch, as it were, of
audible, reassuring protection--first the low-pitched bridges of sound
traced by the whizz of our field guns, and then the vast rainbow curve
of our heavier shells making wing, high over head, with a more august,
leisurely waft that sounded divinely. It was a changed and cheered
world to be living in. We had the upper hand now, and every woman
turning a shell or driving a crane in England had helped us to have it.

We have it now still more securely. Since that time we have learnt the
technique of attack--how to keep what we take and how to take what we
want at no more than it need cost in lives. We have won, in hard fight,
the best of all posts of observation--the sky, so that during the great
engagements last year on the Somme there was not a German aeroplane
to be seen in the air while ours were ranging everywhere over the
battlefield, each with its eyes on the enemy’s lines and its voice at
the ear of our guns. Our men and the gunners have now crossed bayonets
so often that all the old awe in which Europe held the men of Sedan and
Sadowa is gone; boys from Wiltshire and Worcestershire farms, recruits
of a few months before, have chased Prussian guardsmen uphill out of
their trenches and then held these ruined defences against all that
those picked products of intensive military culture could do to regain
them.

All this turning of tables has been brought about by one cause, in the
sense that if that cause had been absent, the care and skill of the
finest leaders, the daring of all our airmen, the staunchness of all
our infantry would have been strength to no purpose. Munition workers
have woven the curtain of smoke that our gunners now draw between our
advancing troops and the eyes of their enemy. It is munitions that,
thrown from our howitzers, make level roads through the tangles of wire
on which, in the old days, the corpses of whole platoons of our men
were hung up to rot and look, from far off, like washing put out to
dry on thorned hedges. It is munitions that, when we attack, hold back
the hostile supports behind a wall of falling bullets as hard to pass
as Adam found the flaming sword at the gate. It is, then, not without
reason that in this sheaf of drawings of the war on the Western front
are included some drawings of guns and shells in the making. They are
drawings of victory in the making, and of the saving of hundreds of
thousands of British lives.

  G.H.Q., FRANCE,

    _March, 1917_


LXI

MOUNTING A GREAT GUN

One of the largest guns viewed from the breech. However many large guns
may have been turned out by the same men before, a glow of pride is
always felt in a gun shop when one more masterpiece like this is ready
at last to go out to its work in the field.

[Illustration]


LXII

ERECTING AEROPLANES

A great contrast to the scenes in the gun shop. Here everything is
light and delicate, the bright, varnished wood curved to delicate
shapes like violins, the women flitting with their needlecraft around
the wide, dazzling planes and the brilliant pigmy engines shining like
jewels--all seem gay and exhilarating after the sombre company of the
guns. There is even a lightsome airiness about the thought that these
delicate creations _fly_ away from their makers’ hands when completed
and do not burden any railway with their transit.

[Illustration]


LXIII

AN AEROPLANE ON THE STOCKS

Another view of the same shop. Close to, the propeller seems a great
thing, wonderfully subtle in its graceful curves.

[Illustration]


LXIV

THE GIANT SLOTTERS

These machines are among the largest of their kind. A row of them,
jutting colossally forward like the heads of Egyptian sculptured lions,
make an impressive feature in the spacious avenues of a great machine
shop. The nearer machine is at work on part of a big gun mounting.

[Illustration]


LXV

NIGHT WORK ON THE BREECH OF A GREAT GUN

The breech is open: underneath it, hidden from sight, the mechanics
are at work. Such a scene has a special appeal to those who loved the
stories of Jules Verne in their youth. These largest of all guns seem
as if they could fulfil the hopes of Verne’s sanguine President of
the Gun Club and justify his fervid belief in ballistics as your only
science.

[Illustration]


LXVI

THE HOWITZER SHOP

Howitzers of various calibres are in the background; in the foreground,
guns of lighter types. Guns are like ships; each piece seems endowed
with a personality which endears it to its creators. The soldiers to
whose keeping they are sent feel a similar tenderness towards their own
special charge. They express it by giving them fond names like “Saucy
Sue,” “Sweet Seventeen,” “Jill Johnson,” “Our Lizzie,” and “’Ria.”

[Illustration]


LXVII

THE NIGHT SHIFT WORKING ON A BIG GUN

“A scene,” the artist writes, “so romantic in its mingling of grimness
and mystery that one thinks with compunction of the long line of
romantic artists whose lot it was not to have seen it!” The work on
hand seems carried on by noiseless ghosts, so completely is the noise
of their labours drowned by the incessant hum of machines.

[Illustration]


LXVIII

SOME GREAT GUNS

A sketch in the heavy gun bay. The size of these unmounted guns may be
judged by the figures at work near them.

[Illustration]


LXIX

MOVING HEAVY GUN TUBES

This is a corner in the gun shop where heavy gun forgings of all sorts
lie about, awaiting their turn on the machines. The overhead crane is
lifting one of the guns. Many of these cranes are being driven by women.

[Illustration]


LXX

A CORING MACHINE AT WORK ON A BIG GUN TUBE

The big gun tube is rotating slowly while the tool inside scoops out
long shavings of the metal like cheese parings. The mounting heaps of
the metal shavings are constantly cleared away. The iridescent colours
of these shavings (showing the different temperings of the steel)
present surprisingly beautiful effects to the eye, tired with the
bewildering rotations of the immense gun tubes on their machines.

[Illustration]


LXXI

RUINS NEAR ARRAS

Landscape near Arras is like the biblical vine hanging over a
wall--“All the archers have shot at her.” Injured, but not yet
destroyed, the woods seem like creatures scared, as if the trees
themselves were possessed with the disquiet of dryads crouching
somewhere in hiding. Many different parts of the front have their
own almost personal expression, but it is seldom one of fear. At and
around Arras this expression of alarm is so curiously strong that, if
he transgressed prose, the visitor might fancy the taut bulrushes were
nature’s hair standing on end, and a slight stir in the poplars her
shudder. By some means, which a layman cannot mark down, Mr. Bone has
suffused his drawing with his own sense of the tragic queerness of this
vacuous and unnerved landscape.

[Illustration]


LXXII

ON THE SOMME: IN THE OLD NO MAN’S LAND

High ground near “King George’s Hill,” whence the King viewed the
main battlefield of 1916; the drawing shows this in the distance. The
foreground was won last July by the Manchesters. They found in No
Man’s Land the bodies of many Frenchmen killed in earlier fighting,
and buried them beside their own dead. Not all the bodies could
be identified: Some of the crosses shown in the drawing bear such
inscriptions as “In honoured Memory of Two Unknown French Soldiers,
buried here.”

[Illustration]


LXXIII (a and b)

A ROAD NEAR THE FRONT

The canvas screen on the left remains from a time when this stretch of
road was under enemy observation. The battle of the Somme has left it
far behind the front. From a point just beyond the trees indicated upon
the skyline on the right every detail of a part of the fighting on July
1st, 1916, could be seen.

[Illustration]

A TRAIN OF LORRIES

Whether on the road between a rail-head and the front, or during a halt
by the way, or at rest in their own park, the lorries of a Division
keep their proper distance or interval from each other, like men on
parade. If one falls lame it is taken in tow; if disabled past towing,
it falls out and waits for a first-aid mobile workshop to come and
repair it. The scene here is one of the two chief roads to the Somme
front. In July and August, 1916, the procession of lorries along it was
often unbroken for several miles. Field railways have much lightened
its traffic since then.

[Illustration]


LXXIV

ON THE SOMME. R.F.C. MEN BUILDING THEIR WINTER HUT

To most English soldiers it is one of the compensations, and not of the
hardships, of active service that they so often have to do work which
is not their own trade nor a regular part of all soldiering. They find
a flavour of the sport of peace-time camping-out in the work of making
or finding their own shelter from the weather. Sometimes it is done,
as here, with excellent materials, sometimes with hardly any at all,
and the man who has built himself a rain-proof hut, for one, out of a
few old biscuit tins, some sticks and a waste piece of corrugated iron
enjoys a special thrill of triumphant ingenuity.

[Illustration]


LXXV

MARICOURT: THE RUINS OF THE VILLAGE

Near Maricourt the British line ended, and the French began, during
the battle of the Somme. Blue and khaki were equally blended in the
endless lines of traffic passing both ways through Maricourt and
raising a barrage of dust all along the road to Bray-sur-Somme. At
Maricourt crossroads there was a doubled post of military police, one
man British and one French, ready with rebuke or instruction in either
tongue. The place is now several miles behind the British front, and
its old animation is gone. It and the woods near it are less completely
destroyed than most of the neighbouring villages. Many walls are
standing; even a few roofs remain.

[Illustration]


LXXVI

ON THE SOMME, NEAR MAMETZ

The German front line, until July 1st, 1916, run a few yards on the
spectator’s side of the two dismounted figures in the foreground. In
the background are the bare poles of Mametz Wood. The nearest figure
can be known for an Australian, by his hat.

[Illustration]


LXXVII

A MARKET PLACE. TRANSPORT RESTING

After work the divisional motor transport lorries return methodically
to their own parks. During long journeys they rest now and then, tucked
into the right of the road or standing in a market place, while the
men eat their haversack rations. Mixed with the lorries here are their
seniors, the covered vans of French country carriers and, still older,
the long, low, French farm wagons now drawn by horses, but built, as
is shown by the very low pole, for draught oxen. In the market place
there wait also the cars of British staff officers visiting the town.
The handsome building in the background has its red-brick façade set
off with alternating square bosses of white stone, on each side of the
windows, after the custom of 17th and early 18th century builders.

[Illustration]


LXXVIII (a and b)

THE “BLIGHTY BOAT” AND A HOSPITAL SHIP

Leaving a French base port. The artist has contrived to suggest in
his drawing of the homeward hastening leave-boat the happy eagerness
with which the eyes and minds of all on board are turned westward.
The slower hospital ship is just leaving the harbour. There is no
possibility of any honest failure to distinguish, by day or night,
the black painted lightless transport from the hospital ship with its
gleaming white and light-green paint and its festal-looking tiers and
crosses of scores of brilliant green and red lamps.

[Illustration]

SCOTTISH TROOPS ON A TROOPSHIP

There are some Scottish soldiers on all troopships. On this one there
were no others. The Highlanders on the drawing have the good fortune to
be on deck and also not to be crowded. On most troopships the men, if
on deck, look, at a little distance, like a solid brown mass.

[Illustration]


LXXIX

TROOPS RETURNING FROM THE ANCRE

A unit coming back from the trenches to rest is unlike anything ever
seen at home. Everyone is dead tired; everyone, though washed and
shaved, has caked mud on his uniform; most of the men are stooping to
get well under the weight of their packs and so ease the cut of the
straps on their shoulders; cooks and a few footsore men trail behind
the transport wagons and field kitchens, taking a tow with one hand.
Odds and ends of light baggage are carried in little, almost toy-like
hand-carts, the men pulling them by many ropes and pushing them from
behind. Some men, perhaps, are wearing German helmets. Everyone’s face
has a look of contented collapse, the restful reaction of senses and
nerves relaxed after many days of strained attention and short sleep.
The weary and happy procession serpentines slowly across the chalk
downs, carried along by the rhythm of the swing it has learnt from
months of route marching in England.

[Illustration]


LXXX

A HOSPITAL SHIP AT A BASE

The ship’s large wooden Red Cross, to be illuminated at night with
electric lights, is seen near the centre of the drawing.

[Illustration]




[Illustration]

THE BRITISH NAVY AND THE WESTERN FRONT


Our Western front is a line that does not really end at the sea. If
it did, then its left flank might be turned. But its real left flank
is not there. It is somewhere far out on a line that runs north-west
of Nieuport, through and beyond the North Sea. The British soldier in
Belgium or France may not see much of the Navy itself. But every day
brings him some proof that the Navy is holding its part of the line.
His letters never go wrong, and he knows that, but for the Fleet, they
would have to make their way to him like swimmers across a bay full of
sharks. It is faith in the Navy that makes the men going on leave laugh
when obeying the order to put on lifebelts on leaving harbour. In the
soldier’s mind that long left flank of our line is not forgotten but
rather written off, once for all, as unbreakable. He puts much the same
sort of trust in the power of the Fleet as he puts in the affection
of friends at home. To him it is one of the things that need never be
feared for; it cannot fail.

This is not to say that soldiers underrate the hardness of the Navy’s
task. A few sailors visit the front from time to time and hold curious
arguments with the soldiers, each side being deeply convinced that the
other has the harder time of it. The soldier’s imagination is struck by
the large proportion of deaths among the casualties of naval war and
by visions of night duty on vessels at sea in bad winter weather. What
strikes the sailor, in presence of the imperfections of dug-outs, is
the soldier’s hardship of not being able to “go below” into some small
cubic space of warmth and dryness when action is over or a watch is
through. When a naval officer, who visited the Somme front last summer,
and saw a fight near Martinpuich, rejoined the ship that he commanded,
he paraded his whole ship’s company and spent two hours in telling
them what a rough time the soldiers had, and what fine work they
were doing. The generosity of the praise made his soldier guide feel
almost ashamed, remembering the almost instant fate of the “Cressy,”
“Aboukir,” and “Hogue,” and the obedience of the “Theseus” to the
heart-breaking order to abandon her sinking consort.

Few officers or men from the western front can visit the Fleet; but
the winds of chance, which blow casualties and convalescents all about
Great Britain, drop a few of them down in spots where the Fleet, as
Mr. Bone draws it, is under their eyes. Drawings like those of “A
Fleet Seascape” (LXXXIX) and “A Line of Destroyers” (LXXXVI) awake
recollections of guard duty in a small Scotch fishing village; of
the majestic seaward procession through the midsummer night, before
the battle of Jutland; of the return from the fight, the destroyers
streaming tranquilly back to their moorings under the hill, with the
great searchlight wheeling to and fro along the sea outside them, like
a sentry moving alertly on his post; a few wounded ships steaming in
more sedately, or taking a tow, one with a couple of funnels knocked
out of the straight, another with a field-dressing of bedding stuffed
into a hole in her side, and the whole wound, apparently, smeared with
red paint, as the surgeons smear flesh wounds with yellow; and then of
the coming ashore, the men triumphant and happy, the officers learning
with astonishment and indignation that people at home had heard more of
losses than of the victory.

Mr. Bone’s drawings give an insight into the world of the Navy to which
these random glimpses can add nothing. “H.M.S. ‘Lion’ in dry dock”
(LXXXIII) is wonderful, technically--if a layman may judge--and in
spirit. A whole aspect of modern naval life is lit up by “A boiler-room
on a battleship” (XCIII). For, to the astonished landsman visiting a
man-of-war, the sailors of to-day seem to work and eat and sleep in a
variety of engineering laboratories, surrounded by countless wheels,
handles, buttons and bells for the evocation or dismissal of the genies
of steam, petrol and electricity. Nothing could be more unlike the
lower decks of seventeenth and eighteenth century battleships as we
imagine them. The only things which have not changed, from the days of
Drake to those of Hawke, and from Nelson’s time to Beatty’s, are the
hereditary instinct for the sea and the fine fighting temperament of
officers and men.

  G. H. Q., FRANCE,

    _April, 1917_


LXXXI

“OILING”: A BATTLESHIP TAKING IN OIL FUEL AT SEA

Viewed from the bridge. A large oil “tanker” is alongside. Unseen, but
very fast, the oil fuel is running into the battleship. How great a
boon this new fuel is can be understood, at any rate partly, by those
who have endured the coaling of a great ship in the old way. The scene
shown in the drawing was animated by the changeful gleam of the gay
signal flags flapping in the foreground and by the flashing of the
wings of innumerable hungry gulls.

[Illustration]


LXXXII

ON A BATTLE-CRUISER (H.M.S. “LION”)

The ship’s funnel behind and the sailor’s figure on the left help to
give the scale of the great gun.

[Illustration]


LXXXIII

H.M.S. “LION” IN DRY DOCK

The great hull we see here has seen more battling in the present
war than any other of our “capital” ships. Officially “sunk” by the
Germans, she will yet prove a troublesome ghost to them. In the
foreground the dockyard workers are busily surveying the ship’s
Gargantuan cables for weakened or damaged links.

[Illustration]


LXXXIV

ON A BATTLESHIP: LOWERING A BOAT FROM THE MAIN DERRICK

The “Main Derrick” is a great crane and lifts a heavy boat like the one
in the drawing, or an Admiral’s barge, out of the water and stows it on
deck with the greatest ease.

[Illustration]


LXXXV

APPROACHING A BATTLESHIP AT NIGHT

A battleship revealed by the beam of its own searchlight. A big
gun emerges in silhouette, as well as a sentry on duty. One feels
considerable awe when threading one’s way in a small picket boat
between the ships of the Fleet at night.

[Illustration]


LXXXVI

A LINE OF DESTROYERS

A line of destroyers at anchor. Seen from a distance, in this
formation, a long line of destroyers looks curiously like a battalion
drawn up in line of platoons in file, at a wide interval, and standing
on the sea. It will be remembered that the battle of Jutland was as
much a battle of destroyers as of any other type of warship.

[Illustration]


LXXXVII

ON A BATTLESHIP: A GUN TURRET

Part of the deck of one of the most famous of British ships, cleared
for action.

[Illustration]


LXXXVIII

ON A BATTLESHIP IN THE FORTH

Britain has many beautiful estuaries, but the Forth has features like
the distant Highland hills and its enormous Bridge which make it unique
among our waterways. The Bridge makes even the largest warship seem a
pigmy, yet one has a queer sensation when about to pass under it for
the first time; one momentarily expects all the ship’s top hamper to be
carried away--everything about the Bridge being on so big a scale that
what is safely distant seems perilously close.

[Illustration]


LXXXIX (a and b)

A FLEET SEASCAPE

To the left a group of destroyers are gathered round a parent ship. To
the right is the beginning of an imposing line of battleships.

[Illustration]

THE CREW AT A SMALL GUN ON A BATTLESHIP

From this point of view the shield partly hides the muzzle of the gun.
The gun crew are listening to instructions. Note the “Navy Warm” worn
by the figure in the middle: often, when the weather is “fine” from the
landsman’s point of view, it is still bitterly cold on the North Sea.
Two larger guns can be seen protruding from their turret in the deck
below.

[Illustration]


XC

THE FO’C’SLE OF A BATTLESHIP

The crew of a Battleship at “General Drill” on a brisk spring morning
is an exhilarating sight to the spectator posted at a quiet corner
well out of the way. The band of the Marines plays, and the maximum of
everything possible seems to be going on at once. In the sketch the
ship’s boats have been launched and are making their way with steady
stroke out to a neighbouring ship and back.

[Illustration]


XCI

ON A BATTLESHIP: THE AFTER DECK

The delicate but firm precision of the drawing conveys aptly the
general air of a man-of-war’s deck, where everything is intricate
without confusion, and busy without fuss.

[Illustration]


XCII

INSIDE THE TURRET

Interior of a Big Gun Turret on a Battleship, with the crew at their
stations. The breech of the gun is open and looks gigantic in this
confined space where every inch is made to serve some purpose. An
officer is seen in the gangway between the twin guns, but of course the
higher direction of the firing is transmitted from the “Fire control”
station situated elsewhere.

[Illustration]


XCIII

A BOILER ROOM ON A BATTLESHIP

The vessel is oil-driven, so the stoke-hold is robbed of its old
terrors and is remarkably cool. The stokers seem few in proportion to
the size of the place, but they are experts of a higher class than coal
furnaces required.

[Illustration]


XCIV (a and b)

PRACTICE FIRING: BIG GUNS ON A BATTLESHIP

Here the scale of the great guns is only given by the dwarfed rail
beneath and by the long stretch of horizon which the funnels subtend.
But no merely physical ratio can convey the impression of enormousness
that a great naval gun makes on the imagination. By subtler technical
means the artist has managed to transfuse this impression from his own
imagination to that of the spectator of the drawing.

[Illustration]

ON A BATTLESHIP: SUNSET AFTER A WET DAY

The sailor has much to bear from the weather, but at any rate he sees
to extraordinary advantage the glories of sunset and the “incomparable
pomp of dawn,” unsullied by the smoke of the land.

[Illustration]


XCV

ON A BATTLESHIP: AIRING BLANKETS

An unfamiliar aspect of a warship to the public, but, to Jack, it
returns with unfailing regularity once a week. In the cramped space it
requires careful management to keep all the great crew in health and
comfort.

[Illustration]


XCVI

CAPTAIN CYRIL FULLER,

C.M.G., D.S.O., ROYAL NAVY

[Illustration]


XCVII

THE FLEET’S POST OFFICE

To the right is an old hulk which now serves as a sorting office for
the Fleet’s Post. Around it there is at certain hours a busy scene,
picket boats coming from the various ships to deliver or collect their
mails.

[Illustration]


XCVIII

IN THE SUBMERGED TORPEDO FLAT OF A BATTLESHIP

Interior of the Chamber from which the torpedoes are fired. The torpedo
in the foreground is partly engaged in the tube through which it will
be fired. To the right is seen the exterior of another tube. The men
are lowering, for stowage in safety, a trial torpedo which has been
fired for a practice run and then re-captured.

[Illustration]


XCIX

SAILORS ON A BATTLESHIP MAKING MUNITIONS FOR THE ARMY

This is Jack at his handiest, especially from the Army point of view.
The party are using spare time to make “grommets” of rope-work to go
round the bases of 9.2 shells. Not many people, even in the Army, know
that the Army have come to look to the men of the Fleet for a great
supply of these necessaries.

[Illustration]


C

THE CINEMA ON A BATTLESHIP

A relaxation immensely popular and quite easy for the handy men, who
abound in the Navy, to equip and run. Being their own child, each
ship takes a pride in its “pictures.” The operator in this case was
the Chief Mechanician of the ship and the film the “Battle of the
Ancre.” In the centre are a group of midshipmen, to the right a group
of warrant officers. In the foreground will be observed the ever ready
fire hose.

[Illustration]








End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Western Front, by Muirhead Bone

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