Confidences of a
War Correspondent
By Lacey Amy
From The Canadian Magazine, November, 1920.
Digitized by
Doug Frizzle, November 2015.
THE hectic flush
that once bathed the work of the war correspondent passed into memory with the
outbreak of the Great War. Like a change in the colour of the stage calcium
light departed much of the nerve-breaking strain of news gathering in battle,
all the endless conflict and uncanny ingenuity of news despatching. The
correspondent became a part of the military machine—with unique privileges and
freedom, of course—and the process of getting his “stuff” to his newspapers was
as formally prescribed as the provision of food to the armies.
Nerve strain did
not cease to be a daily diet. More ground than ever had to be covered by the
man who sent out the news—the reading world demanded it—but he had his own car
to do it with; or rather, General Headquarters rented him a car at sixty
dollars a week if he were a Canadian correspondent, or part of that price was
included in the weekly bill for keep at the Press Chateau, where the British
correspondents resided. The strain was the result more of competition where
“scoops” were practically impossible, of irritating censorship, of possible
break-down of car or chauffeur, of greater physical danger within sight or
sound of battle, and of that overhanging control which agitates the soul of
every natural news-gatherer.
War
correspondents in this Great War traduced all the traditions of the profession,
even of newspaper reporting. They became gregarious even in their gathering of
news. They exchanged items of interest as a matter of policy, not for mere
friendship’s sake. Every correspondent at the Press Chateau, the headquarters
of the men who reported the operations of the British Army, saw precisely what
his fellows did and he heard almost precisely the same stories. He couldn’t
help it. Lord Kitchener started the idea. The particular kind of war this was
did the rest. So that, if Philip Gibbs, or Beach Thomas, or Phillips, or
Nevinson, or any of the rest of them pleased the reader better than his mates
it was only because of a more vivid imagination or a more fluent pen.
The Canadian war
correspondent was a very different cog in the war machinery from the British
correspondent, that prolific and hard-working writer who supplied the news to
the world under difficult conditions.
In privileges,
in authority, in location at the Front, in experiences, the Canadian
news-gatherer was unique.
The two Canadian
war correspondents during the fighting of the Canadian Corps in 1918 were Mr.
J. F. B. Livesay—than whom there never was a more indefatigable and unselfish
news-gatherer at the front—and myself. Mr. Stewart Lyon had preceded us. Our
sleeping quarters were never more than seven or eight miles from the front
lines. We were eye-witnesses of every “kick-off” in which the Canadian Corps
was concerned. Every day, rain or shine, we looked on the actual battle from
points of vantage, usually in front of the guns. We talked to the wounded as
they staggered back, while they waited to be dressed, as they lay patiently
awaiting their turns for the ambulances. We went unattended where we liked when
we liked.
Our writing was
done by night to the light of a candle stuck in its own grease. Often as I
pulled the slim coverings over me during those vile weeks near Wancourt,
Livesay’s typewriter was clicking from his tent; and sundry officers with red
tabs were wont to make violent remarks about both our machines.
British correspondents
were less—and more—fortunate. Owing to the necessity of being with the censors
at the centre where the wires from the whole British Army converged, they slept and ate at
what we called the Press Chateau, which was located for years before the 1918
fighting at Hesdin, and later moved to different points as the successes
developed. At no time, however, was it less than thirty-five miles from the
front lines. Their messages had to be filed in mid-forenoon or mid-afternoon,
and their car capacity was limited. They could not visit the Front without an
attending officer. That they did so well under these handicaps is one of the
brilliant features of the war.
The Canadian war correspondents of 1918 probably saw more real
fighting in two months than their British confreres did throughout the war.
Yet only at one period to my knowledge did the men at the Press Chateau make
errors in fact that were worth correcting. And that period was interwoven with
brainstorms of the censorship that make another story.
My experiences commenced long before reaching France—seven months
before. Having undertaken the assignment for a group of important Canadian
papers, the first wall I had to scale was precedent. Never before had there
been with the British Army a war correspondent whose duties were confined to the
writing of descriptive articles instead of news, and who sent them by mail
instead of by wire. “Colour” writers were a new genus to the War Office,
demanding as much ponderous rumination as a new type of machine gun or a new
national policy. Besides, the Australians had no equivalent attached to them.
And it was a recognized condition of internal harmony that when a ray of
sunlight was permitted to shine on the Canadians a consignment of moonlight or
rainbows had to be despatched by special messenger to the Aussies—and vice
versa.
At first it seemed fairly clear sailing. The fact that the group
of papers I represented covered Canada and included both parties earned me
official backing. But five months passed before I even learned the reason why I
was refused the white pass which is the open-sesame of the war correspondent.
For months I had been running a series of magazine articles on
different phases of war effort in England. Naturally there was criticism as
well as acclamation. It happened that in a treatment of the alien question
there was more of the former, though the article presented every possible
mitigation. And in the light of the revelations of a committee of investigation
in 1919 that there were still 835 employees in Government Departments both of
whose parents were enemy subjects; that a Lieut.-Col. Beichwald, whose father
was for many years Krupp’s adviser in England, had been recently appointed to a
liaison position in British affairs in Turkey; and that a naturalized British
subject, Austrian born, who fought against the Allies in the Austrian Army,
had been permitted to return to England and resume his business—my position in
the article requires no defence. Indeed, the worst I said was as a mere acid
drop to calomel compared with what the press of London was handing almost daily
to the Government for its persistent kindness to enemy aliens. However it is
much easier to exercise restraint over a mere Canadian in London than over the
London press; and for months I was so busy in a war of my own, defensive and
offensive, that the one over there in France seemed to have lost its nip.
Every wire within reach I began to pull. And finally I discovered
that which has entirely altered my conception of English Government—that its
faults are not in the men at the top but in the system that robs them of real
authority and places it in the hands of bloodless and cut-by-measure assistants
and departmental officials who bring to the consideration of every problem a
mechanical device invented probably to relieve the real heads of the worry of
government. The full significance of this came to light not long ago when it
was admitted officially in the British House of Commons that a civil service
employee cannot be dismissed for incompetence. England is “governed” by
gentlemen of the first water. It is ruled by underlings who protect their
authority more zealously than most men do their honour, who can work more
destruction in a week than their nominal superiors can rebuild in a lifetime.
A wire invited me to a certain Government office. There occurred
an interview with a general and colonel that was a pleasure from greeting to
farewell.
“When do you want to go?” suddenly inquired one.
“Saturday,” I replied, and I said it as if I hadn’t to take a firm
hold of my chair to keep me from falling off.
“Saturday, then.”
But I was not in France yet. On the morning before I was to leave
the War Office called me up to read me a cable just received from G.H.Q.:
“Canadian Corps now say that Mr. Lacey Amy must be regarded as an officially
attached journalist and must have his own car. Corps cannot supply car.
Canadian representative consulted says under these circumstances Mr. Amy cannot
be received.”
Phew! Without divulging what steps were taken, I can say that that
parley was cut so short that several of us had time only to get mad. But new
papers had to be made out; and on Tuesday, June 25th, I almost sneaked to
Victoria Station, climbed inconspicuously aboard the Staff train for
Folkestone, unobtrusively handed my papers over at the boat, stumbled through
the formalities at Boulogne—and after seven months of brain-racking uncertainty
and worry struck across France towards Canadian Corps Headquarters in a high-
powered car.
I was there.
The Corps was then in rest camp about Pernes, fifteen miles
north-west of Arras and about twelve from the nearest point in the front lines.
My first impression of war correspondence as a permanency—I had been across
before on those Cook’s-Tour trips for newspapermen—came from the sight of several
large fresh shell-holes close to my first billet. In part of my billet itself
were sundry conspicuous chips. And that night the raiders came over and bumped
me about disturbingly—though I had already experienced twenty-eight such raids
in London. But then one is such a speck in London—and there were six women in
the house there to lord it over. I began to wonder if war was really a proper
place for a war correspondent.
Trouble visited me early owing to my ignorance of army
regulations. The first exhibition might have earned me a bullet, the second a
court-martial. With characteristic ignorance I failed to appreciate either
escape.
North of Pernes was a hill from
which was obtainable one of the finest distant views of the spectacle of war I
ever saw. Every evening after dinner a Montreal artist friend, a Belgian artist
then working with the Corps, and I used to climb to the practice trenches of
the hilltop and thrill with it far into the night. In time I came to consider
that hill my personal property. So that when I wandered up alone one night and
came on a British battalion at night practice I simply looked on without a
thought of the outward similarity between a spectator and a spy—until the
whining of an occasional bullet about my ears warned me of the unreliability of
blank cartridges and drove me to the edge of the hill where I lay in the grass
overlooking distant Bethune and its strafing. Behind me the mimic warfare
continued.
About midnight I rose to return to
my billet, passed carelessly about the end of the first trench—and was suddenly
halted by a shadowy figure. A company that knew me not had the trenches now.
After explanations I continued my way. At the other end the silence was eerie,
especially as I could see heads moving cautiously against the sky and long
things protruding towards me. Once I heard the. click of a trigger. Then a stentorian
voice—must have been a sergeant-major—roared: “Stop that officer. Don’t let
even your own commanding officer pass in front of you without challenging him.”
Naturally I didn’t wait for the order.
Once more I gave my pedigree and was permitted to pass. And just when safety
was in sight, a voice called to me from the top of the hill. Looking up, two
tremendous soldiers, capped by two tremendous rifles, were visible against the
sky running for me. They took me back to the officer, a mere chit of a child
who pretended to examine my papers in the darkness. “Do you know you are in
great danger?” he inquired solemnly, but with an indifference that appealed to
me as unnecessarily hard-hearted. And with apparent disappointment that there
would be no execution at dawn, he let me go.
I still contend that two smaller men
and two ordinary rifles could have effected my arrest and sustained the dignity
of the Army.
The other display was a terrible
breach of Army—especially of First Division—discipline. Calling on General
Macdonnell, whom I had met only once eight months before, I found him closeted
with General Currie. To my credit let it stand that I waited. Leaning wearily
on an urn at the front door—mentally polishing the introductory paragraph of an
article in plan—someone passed me from behind. I was conscious of the officer
beside me springing to the salute. Lazily, more by instinct than by
consciousness, I waved a negligent hand towards my cap as the back of a
gray-haired head moved out before me.
But General Macdonnell has eyes in
the back of his head—he demonstrated it to me later; it was the reflection in
his glasses. And I returned to Etrun and the Canadian Corps with a start when
the gray head whirled and a pair of fiery eyes and fierce mustachios made the
air crackle. I was ignorant of the orthodox line to pursue under the
circumstances—but I noticed from the corner of my eye a wobble in the knees of
the staff officers about.
General Macdonnell speaks fast. In
moments of excitement he might be said to hurry. But he never trips.
“Who are
you? . . . What’s your name? . . . Where do you come from? . . . What Division
do you belong to? . . . Don’t you know how to salute . . .?”
That is all I recall—but there was
more like it in Macdonell’s eyes. Once or twice I managed to ejaculate the
first letter of a word, but gave up helplessly while he was pausing for breath.
Then I shot at him in a dash of
words who I was, for I didn’t like the thoughts of a second spasm.
“No, General,” I
added, “I’m afraid I don’t know how to salute.”
It was a trying
moment for a general whose reputation in matters of discipline can’t be added
to by any—with a very sensitive body and a vivid thing I can say—to say nothing
of how trying it was to a correspondent without much reputation to lose but
imagination. But General Macdonell was equal to the occasion. Swiftly but easily
he did the only thing possible without embarrassment. Throwing back his head he
laughed—and even with those eyes and that ruddy face and that moustache no
smile is pleasanter; at least, that’s my opinion.
“Oh, it’s you,
is it? I thought I had to knock someone’s head off.” And the knees about began
to stiffen; circulation resumed its duty in blanched faces.
After lunch the
General and I retired to a quiet place where I practised a salute that might
pass me over the initial meetings with strange generals who had not yet learned
that I knew no better.
The path of the
war correspondent was beset by other trials. Thrown into the discomforts of the
front without the hardening process of training, I was unprepared for tent
life. By advice in London
I neglected to provide myself with a sleeping bag, being assured that I would
always be in billets. Fortunately for my adviser, his name has slipped my
memory.
Tent life
started for me at Molliens Vidame (or, as even the G.O.C. must have called it,
Mollyann be damned). It was there we stopped for the first week after our
unexpected flit to the Amiens
front. The heat during the day was almost unbearable; at night there would have
been frost in Western Canada . Thus the dark
stained tents in the orchard were furnaces by day and refrigerators by night;
and even the early morning sun was denied us by the trees in which we had
pitched to escape detection by Hun planes.
By dint of the
most pathetic begging I managed to borrow two blankets from the quartermaster.
But there was not another to beg, borrow, or steal. I proved the hopelessness
of begging and borrowing, myself; my batman experimented fruitlessly in the
other. And when he failed to wangle anything I needed it was because it was
chained down and guarded night and day. I recall his return to the incomplete
tent “home” one day after a round of the town and tents, such a look of disgust
on his Scotch face that I feared his category had been raised. “Everybody’s
sitting on their kits!” he growled. Then, with that look of guileless indifference
which served him—and me—so well, he sauntered into the yard of the engineers’
chateau and “picked up” sufficient material to make me a cot and wire mattress.
A great find was that batman; especially fortunate was the officer who had him,
in that he was protected from anyone else having him.
And so my first
few nights in a tent were spent on the damp ground; and during that first week
two blankets had to do duty under as well as over. The margin between freezing
and the limit of human endurance was filled by trench coats and papers my
friends contributing to the supply. I grew almost accustomed to awaiting the
morning sun to thaw me out—but the other tents never grew fond of the rustle of
paper when I moved or shivered.
But never was
there a camp in all the last year of the war the equal, in dreariness and discomfort,
of advanced headquarters out there between Neuville Vitasse and Wancourt, where
we existed during the three weeks and more preceding the Bourlon Wood attack.
The utter desolation of the waste that stretched to the horizon was appalling.
When it blew, our tent pegs worked loose in the sand. When it rained most of
the tents were flooded out and the batmen were busy for days rebuilding the
walls and refilling the floors. One night’s storm tore down a half dozen tents
and landed the occupants in a couple of feet of water.
By this time,
thanks to my assiduous collection, my bed coverings, under and over, consisted
of three blankets (my batman gave me his own and slept in his clothes), two
British warms, a sweater coat, a trench coat and lining, heavy socks, a woollen
cap, several layers of cheesecloth-backed maps—That is all I remember, but in
late September and early October no heterogeneous assortment of makeshifts can
take the place of a pair of good wool blankets when the frost is whitening the
ground and the wind persists in filtering under the tent wall.
And the ugly
lonesomeness of it! Out across the slopes the evenings settled to absolute
lifelessness, though we knew that thousands lay there within bugle call. The
drab spirit of it came up through the darkness in sad part-song from a hundred
desolate funkholes. Someone broke out, night after night, on a cornet, and the
rest of us shuddered. “If I could get hands on that fellow,” exploded an
officer in the mess one night, after we had struggled in vain to ignore it,
“I’d knife him. Makes me feel like the night before going over.”
After the move
to the outskirts of Queant, following the successful Bourlon Wood battle, the
two correspondents developed a fed-up feeling. We had reached our limit. The
grind of typing by night in leaky tents, with our hands so cold we could not
feel the keys, of living conditions that drove us to bitterness and overpowered
our mental capacity by physical sensitiveness, impelled us to appeal to General
Currie. Only the previous night I had spent hours dodging the trickling streams
in my tent—and then failed. In the morning my underclothing was wet, a toad
jumped on my face as I slept, and my typewriter case and paper were soggy. It
was presented to a sympathetic Commander-in-Chief that the product of such
conditions would be good neither for the Corps nor for the people of Canada .
We flatter
ourselves that Canada
owes General Currie an additional debt for responding immediately. Next morning
an Armstrong hut was erected for us—and all our worries ended. Thereafter lots
of table space, dry beds and typewriters and paper, an oil stove that made
night work a comfort, canvas cots, ample transport, dignity. The Canadian war
correspondents ranked now as Staff Officers.
It was the happy
conclusion of a personal struggle which, during the six weeks when 1 was the
only Canadian correspondent, the Camp
Commandant and I had waged in a friendly, but none the less persistent, way to
establish the position of the news gatherer of the Corps. To the Camp Commandant Camp
Commandant Amiens .
When
Headquarters was again split into two echelons for the battle, my name was down
to remain at Molliens Vidame, fifteen miles from the front lines. Again an
appeal to the Camp
Commandant Camp Commandant village
of Dury
That very day,
the day preceding the Second Battle of Amiens, came my introduction to the
sleepless nights and midnight strain of keeping in touch with the Canadian
fighting. All day we had been struggling at settlement in new quarters.
Livesay, just arrived, had to be found billet, mess, and batman. At 11.40 we
threw ourselves on our beds. At midnight we were tiptoeing through the streets
to the car to start for the Front—for no one left in the village but three or
four of us knew the exact hour of the attack—even the day of it. In disturbing
darkness we rolled towards Boves, my eyes substituting for the chauffeur’s, who
was night-blind from years of ambulance driving. We had never seen a foot of
the way before. No lights were permitted, of course, The road was cluttered in
almost endless stream with the traffic of battle. In a clear spot we lost our
way.
Through the
nights preceding every attack thereafter we were the sole “joy-riders” on the
roads. Often it was raining. Now and then—as on the way to the Bourlon Wood
battle— the burning of a distant dump was our only light. Once we drew up
intuitively, to find the car within a foot of the end of the arm of a temporary
bridge. Once the leg of a dead horse caught in a wheel. Often we were forced to
back up in search of a wider spot for passing.
Our aim in the
attacks was to choose the best points for observation. Sometimes, as at Amiens , we looked on from
in front of all the guns; always we
were ahead of most of them. At the fight of August 26th, before Arras, we
narrowly escaped being blown over to the Germans from the muzzles of a battery
of field guns which suddenly shattered the heavens in the darkness close above
our heads. The flames seemed to sear my cheek. We ran—just plain ran. Only the
barbwire about a deep overgrown trench prevented our outstripping the attacking
party and perhaps winning Y.C.’s. On such slender threads, so to speak, do
great achievements hang.
Our approach in
the early morning to the kick-off that broke the Hindenburg Line was marked by
a German plane bombing the slope behind us as we climbed towards the height overlooking
Cherisy. For one attack we were awakened at midnight, following a dinnerless
conclusion to a weary 150-mile motor ride; and hungry and weary we turned out
into the rain. At Bourlon Wood we sat on the parados of the trench filled with
one of the waves of the attack, until the barrage opened; and we accompanied
the soldiers moving up, until depressions in the ground cut off the spectacle
and induced us to return to the heights.
Of course it was
fatiguing—those sleepless nights and hungry exciting days. The messes were
rationed so closely that there never was sufficient for proper lunches to be
made up for us. Had it not been for the chocolate, coffee, and biscuits of the
Y.M.C.A. at the advanced dressing stations the post-war physical condition of two
Canadian war correspondents would have entitled them to pensions. As it was, we
ate bully beef sandwiches two inches thick, and great hunks of cheese, until we
hated the sight of them and hunted round for the welcome Y.
Spectators were
we of every daylight hour of the fighting around Cambrai. For hours we lay on
the crest overlooking the city that we were not permitted to shell as a
preliminary to attack, or dodged in and out of the villages that preface it on
the road from Arras .
The gas that soaked the region gave us colds in the head and prophesied certain
influenza until we understood. A Brigadier and I removed from a dead German
pilot the first aeroplane parachute taken intact—at least, he removed it; I
never reached the point where I could handle dead bodies.
Incidentally I
sent to the world the first despatch announcing the use of parachutes by German
aviators. Within a few minutes of the fall in flames of a German raider one
night I was in connection by telephone with a battery near the spot. And the
news of the escape by parachutes of two of the crew of nine was sent out within
a few hours. Unfortunately the Air Oificials seemed to take umbrage at the
innocent suggestion that if parachutes were found serviceable the British would
quickly adopt them, for I understand an official contradiction of their use by
the Germans was issued. Within the next week thousands had seen them in use,
and I had one in my hands.
The world does
not appreciate the severity of the fighting in which the Canadian forces were
concerned north of Cambrai on the last day of September and the first of
October. But from my own experience there is a complete reply to Sir Sam
Hughes’s charge against General Currie of “bull-head” recklessness and
heartlessness. In the first place, Cambrai was not taken “by suburbs or street
fighting,” as the former Minister of Militia asserted, but by the very means he
advocated: “Agoing round the darn thing.” And far from General Currie’s
attitude being marked by recklessness, there was on his face at that time the
first shadow of faltering confidence. One incident—which General Currie will
not mind coming to the light now for the first time—dispels any doubt of that.
On the evening
of the first of October, while Livesay and I were seated at our typewriters in
our hut writing up with heavy hearts the incidents of the day, General Currie
opened the door and entered. It startled us for a moment. Accessible as he had
always been to the war correspondents, he had never visited us. His eagerness
that all the news should get back to Canada had been satisfied by our
frequent conversations in his own office or billet. Now he entered slowly and
thoughtfully, sank wearily into my chair, and leaned his arm on the table.
Sober as is his ordinary expression, we had never seen him so grave, never so
mentally and bodily fatigued. For once he had thrown aside every breath of the
dignity of the Commander. A new dignity was there—the Canadian, responsible for
the lives of a hundred thousand men and anxious that Canada should have the full story
of their sacrifice. For twenty minutes he talked—and two mere correspondents
were weighted with the responsibility that was their’s of giving Canada
the proper perspective of the hardest days of fighting in the career of the
Corps. When he had gone we looked at each other and in silence turned to our
typewriters.
It is little use
attempting to hide the fact that certain Imperial units on our flanks often
held us up, either through unexpected obstacles in their path or through a
leadership not quite up to the demands of the occasion. I could give several
inside stories of this. But only once did I come on a case of what looked like
sheer funk.
In the attack of
August 26th a famous Imperial regiment was attacking on our right. An hour and
a half after the capture of the outskirts of Neuville Vitasse I was creeping
along the sunken road in the ruined village when a member of this regiment
dashed down to me from over the bank, inquiring where his battalion was. I did
not know; nor did the innocent query convey anything more to me. A few minutes
later two more made the same inquiry. But when, twenty minutes later, after
ducking shells along a knee-deep trench on the eastern edge of the village, in
company with a Canadian officer friend whose duties kept him there until his
time came, a group of this same battalion came into view seated on the parapet
of the trench watching a rapid succession of shells falling about our
ambulances—when at sight of us they ran towards us with the same question, I
began to wonder.
Not long
afterwards we passed along the sunken road farther east still and came on a
cross-trench in which an entire company of this battalion was madly digging
itself into funk holes.
In a burst of
anger my companion demanded to see the guilty officer. We found him peering out
carefully over the parapet at the Canadians attacking in a semi-circle before
him. What was exchanged between them was not conducive to Imperial fraternity.
The Imperial officer admitted that he was supposed to be attacking on our
right, but insisted that he thought he was holding the front line at the
moment; he explained that he had lost his way. The Canadian officer pointed in
disgust to the ruins of the village all about him, to the Canadians going over
in attack, to the map carried by the shirking officer. And the company slunk
off southward to the flank of the Canadians exposed by their cowardice.
The bad taste of
the thing was partially forgotten in the record event that occurred a few
minutes later. I took a prisoner. It wasn’t exactly the sort of thing that wins
the V.C. Indeed, the Censor thought so little of it that he forbade my using
the story to lighten the tragedy of battle description. But it was a record for
a war correspondent, at least in this war. As I stood on the parapet trying to
pierce the secrets of the valley before me, marvelling that so much
machine-gunning could continue without a visible German, a gray figure suddenly
leaped from an angle of a partially shattered trench before me and rushed up
the slope.
I was the only
human being in sight this side of the attack, and in my trench coat I probably
seemed to present the opportunity of capitulating to a Brigadier or a
Major-General. For a moment I hesitated as to whether I could beat him running
or not.
But when I saw
his upraised hands and streaming white face, and heard his whining “don’,
don’!” I decided to carry through my part. Never have I seen such terrible fear
in a human face. It was inhuman in its abjection. I should have searched him as
a primary fulfilment of a captor’s obligations. Instead I swanked back with him
along the road until I met two Tommies. To them I presented the German and the
duty of search. To do them justice, they accepted both with avidity. So now Canada
knows for the first time that only the ineligibility of war correspondents
precluded the addition of at least one to the list of decorations.
Our desire to
see all there was to see kept us so close to the fighting that our car was not
infrequently the first over some of the roads to the Front. It also brought
sights that made me shudder to recall but meant next to nothing at the time.
Another thing it did for us was to run us into suspicion and arrest.
On the second
morning of the Amiens
attack we reached Marcelcave. According to precedent I should have turned faint
hundreds of times on that trip—a mere drop of blood has made me uncomfortable
in civilian life. Dead Germans and horses lay everywhere, and in the heat were
beginning to notify their presence in other ways than by sight. I do not care
to remember that it was to me nothing more than a great spectacle—except the
odour.
It was when it
came to our own dead that I began to recognize myself. To that I never
hardened. Always there came to me the thought that perhaps I was talking to
these very men only a few hours back perhaps I knew them. Perhaps some of these
living ones before me would lie like that to-morrow. Down the Amiens-Roye road,
where our cavalry had superbly galloped its hopeless attack and the shelling
was still too severe for burial parties, I passed them, lying as they fell,
their arms thrown over their horses. Back behind Rumancourt, where the enemy
looked down on us from across the Canal du Nord, I came on it again; and out
there north-west of Cambrai—in Monchy, too, and a host of other places. Always
I turned away, though I could look on a machine-gun post full of dead Germans
without a twinge. It was all a part of the life.
From an
observation post in the holed church tower in Rosieres we looked out over the
ground that had been in German hands within the hour. And the signallers gaped
at us as a new species. That day we tea-ed with a battery that was inclined to
magnify our interest in the fighting. We swung our car along the road to
Meharieourt, the first since the Germans moved back, twisting about dead horses
and stared at as mental deficients by the soldiers in the trenches by the road,
for the fighting was only a thousand yards away.
The prevailing
idea, especially among the Imperial artillerymen with our Corps, was that the
war correspondent was a swivel-chair gentleman who sat back among seven-course
dinners and wool mattresses, and produced second-hand descriptions to the smoke
of big cigars.
Arrest several
times put a temporary period to our curiosity. In a wood near Demuin a motor
machine gun officer satisfied his suspicions by inviting us to tea, and when he
had us all alone a Major of the 18th received us suspiciously and conducted us
through a long zig-zag trench to the mouth of a dugout, where he proceeded to
shave. Nothing was said of arrest but I knew the symptoms. So excited was he
that he gashed himself badly—but then he had the two spies. A mile walk to
Rouvroy and we were ushered into the presence of Lieut.-Col. “Si” Peck. The
most absorbing feature of the incident was that Col. Peck and his staff were
eating. The most disgusting was that they didn’t ask us to join them. And we
had not eaten for nine hours, had a ten-mile walk ahead of us—the car was away
with despatches—and certain prospect of reaching home too late for dinner. But
perhaps “Si” believed we were spies but didn’t want the bother of arresting us.
Two or three
days later we had an afternoon of arrests. Leaving the car as far towards Z
Wood, on the way to Roye, as we dare take it, we struck along the road to
Damery, passing through a corner of the French front across the muzzles of
several batteries of Imperial guns, and reached the ground held by the 7th
Battalion. At a small wood before the tiny village I struck off to find the
Battalion Headquarters, Livesay keeping on for the village and the sight we had
come to see—the piles of dead Germans mowed down in a fruitless counter-attack.
In a tremendous
dugout I found the staff of the 7th and was led by two of them to the village.
Then, a strafe being due in a few minutes, I returned to the ear. Livesay was
not there. In the warm sun I went to sleep, to the tune of a battery dropping
pip-squeaks about our artillery horses near le Quesnoy, four hundred yards to
the north. Two hours later I wakened—still alone. In something of a panic I
started back on foot to look for my friend. And as I neared the protecting rise
in the road he came wearily over it.
Three arrests
had been his reward for curiosity. Up in Damery the 7th had laid hands on him.
Released the Imperial artillery did not like his looks and invited him to
explain. In the French lines they picked him up again, and as his French was
not fluent enough to satisfy them and they could not read his papers, he was
forced to wait for an interpreter.
Next day we visited
the Tank Corps and the 11th Brigade, near Caix. Selecting a Y.M.C.A. stand as a
good centre for news, I began to ask questions. An unusual coldness met me. A
towsle-headed carrot-top came up.
“I know what I’d
say if you asked me,” he growled “‘Go to hell!’ You seen that slip!” And he
drew from his pocket a little folder, “Keep Your Mouth Shut”, that had been
issued to the troops just before leaving for the surprise attack at Amiens .
“What rank are
you anyway?” he demanded with the confidence of virtue. I humoured him. “And
you wear a Sam Browne! That’s a new one on me.” I tried to get even by
suggesting that he might find many new things before the war was over.
But he had the
last word. A month later I saw General Currie pin the Military Medal to his
tunic near Wancourt. There was more beneath that red hair than impudence to a
war correspondent.
One of the
group, a member of the 75th, volunteered to get me some stories and to show me
a few interesting souvenirs he had collected in the fight. Leading me out of
the woods, he took me to his own little funk hole in the side of the hill. Then
he turned on me.
“Say, who are
you? I don’t like your looks. You look to me like a spy.” It had at least the
virtue of frankness.
But our most
disturbing experience of this description occurred in the dead o’ night, in the
deadness of a deserted village that hung together only as a tangle of beams and
crumbling mud walls. Returning from the front on foot, having sent the car back
with despatches, we were picked up by an officer who would pass within a mile
of Headquarters at Demuin. As the Germans were bombing the Amiens-Roye road
every night, he decided to keep to the side roads. Maps were useless in the
darkness and we kept to the side roads hours longer than we wished. And all the
time the raiders were about, the throb of their propellers, the bursting of the
bombs, the darting searchlights, the roar of anti-aircraft guns, and the
knowledge that out there on the road and in the woods along it thousands of
Canadian soldiers were absolutely without protection, gave a thrill to the
starlit night probably beyond any in my experience. We completely lost
ourselves, even as to direction. Once we were stopped by a rushing soldier who
warned us that the road ahead was blocked by an anti-aircraft gun about to fire
at an aeroplane over our heads being searched for by a cluster of lights.
After two hours
of blind running about we struck the Roye road almost where we had started.
Opposite Demuin Livesay and I alighted to walk to Headquarters. It was a
wonderful night from that hill, clear as crystal, windless, moonless, the black
sky a ceiling of diamonds. All about us was the throb of raiding aeroplanes,
and far to the east the night was slit with a score of searchlights feeling for
more. Two miles to our left, over Domart, the raiders were trying for a great
dump there. And they found it as we looked. Then they sped homewards straight
above our heads, scattering the rest of their bombs indiscriminately.
By the time we
reached the ruins of Demuin we were—at least I was—in the condition that sees
ghosts and imagines strange things. The wild orgy of war by night had put me on
edge. I might even have written poetry then.
In the deserted
streets a French civilian and a French soldier passed us, talking volubly but
low, and I wondered why they were there. Still swayed by the mystery and
immensity of things, we were proceeding silently down a narrow street when a
sudden and terriffic “halt!” brought me up so short it hurt. Never have I heard
so much concentrated emotion in a single word. I could feel bullets puncturing
my most sensitive spots, and I wondered hurriedly if one of us would be left
alive to give the other’s address and the other things usually looked for in
tragedies of that nature.
“Where the
blazes are you?” I called, not feeling a bit as casual as that.
Livesay pulled
us through. “A friend!” he announced. (I had forgotten that this was a real
military war; it seemed to me like a little bit of hades).
“Advance,
friend!” replied the voice—with, oh, so much of its feeling flattened out.
We found a
soldier before a ruin ahead of us, revolver in hand. And if ever I see the
terror of darkness again I will know it. His voice was trembling; so agitated was
he that he almost wept as he talked with us. And yet I doubt if I ever met a
braver man. He had seen the two Frenchmen, suspected them when it was too late
to stop them, and was waiting there alone at midnight to satisfy his
suspicions.
“I haven’t a gun,”
he explained, “but I thought my old pipe would look enough like one in the dark
to fool them.” It certainly fooled me.
I have an
infinite respect for that brave terrified man. I would like to meet him in Canada .
The perils of a
war correspondent were, compared with those of the man in the lines, scarcely
worth considering. Even the Canadian correspondent might have taken no risks
and still have sent back to Canada
stories of real interest and importance. He might have remained with the rear
Echelon. Advanced Headquarters were always within shellfire, though the danger
was negligible.
Four shells
dropped in rapid succession on the ridge above the camp morning after I arrived
at the Wancourt camp. They exploded before my eyes as I shaved in the door of
my tent. I had my doubts about that camp immediately. Every night some big
German gun emitted the bark one came to recognize even in one’s sleep as
sending over a shell worth listening for. Almost every night a long-range gun
dropped a half-dozen or a score shells into Arras , four miles away. The brittle explosion
of a facing gun would be followed quickly by the slow whistle of a big shell,
then a moment of silence, and last of all a long roar broken in the middle by a
violent shatter of sound. It was an atmospheric effect none could explain. At
Queant the enemy developed a nasty habit of sending big shrapnel by night to
explode above the town, perhaps in search of a huge railway gun that was there
when we arrived but much more menacing to our hospitals, over which they burst
without injuring anyone.
The greatest
danger was from bombs. None dropped close enough to Headquarters in my time to
damage things, but that was good fortune. It was the knowledge of that which
made me—I have never confessed this before—funk the raiders one night. Wakened
in my tent after midnight by the disturbing throb of two German planes, I
listened as they came straight towards the camp. My dreams had been unpleasant.
Three bombs crashed, each nearer than the last. And then I made for the sole
dugout in the camp—where the Generals slept. A relic of German occupation, it
was vast and snug. Its snugness appealed to me. But in the mouth of the dugout
I realized that I alone of all the camp was astir. And I slunk back to my tent
and talked to myself like a brigand.
Our real
exposure came from a desire to see. One day, after a German battery had opened
our day by sniping us with five shells as our car laboriously climbed a hill
near Dury, on the Arras-Cambrai road, another group of three followed us all
the way up the slopes from Rumancourt as we were returning in the evening to
the car. That stretch of rising ground was under direct observation, and there
was only a sunken road to hide it. Thus our only resort was to lie down when a
shell was heard coming.
It filled up two
hours of our valuable lives to get out of view. To be sure there were two
machine-gun posts that might have concealed us, but they were just then crammed
with dead Germans of the vintage of three days before, and we preferred the
shells.
Just as we were
within sight of the sunken road two of the Richtofen Red Squadron decided that
we were important enough for their attentions, so they dived at us. But two of
our 18-pounders broke loose at them when they were about seventy feet up, the
shells bursting somewhere above our heads and showering the ground about us
with metal. At the moment the Red Squadron seemed almost friendly by
comparison.
Twice, in Arras and in Sains les
Marquion, only a brick wall separated me from exploding shells.
Our worst
experience was a mere movement of excitement compared with what, from our
grand-stand seats, we saw thousands of the fighting men face without visible
agitation. It was above Cherisy, that village of ill-repute, near which one of
my best friends in the Corps, Lieut.-Col. McKenzie, of the 26th, was killed a
couple of days before, and every officer of the 22nd in the engagement, except
one, was wounded or killed. A battery of 5.9’s caught us with a half dozen
officers in a sunken road, within direct observation from Hendecourt, and tried
to wipe the road off the map to get at us. Only a minute earlier a soldier had
dropped a few yards ahead of me with a gash in his thigh from “big” shrapnel,
and I was prepared for the worst.
The shells
landed everywhere but in the narrow sunken strip where we huddled tight against
the bank. The explosion of one was so closely followed by the whistle of the
next that I had no opportunity of telling my friends how frightened I was.
Stray pieces were thudding in the bank about our heads; a weak one struck
Livesay on the helmet and another stopped against an officer’s leg without injury.
I knew a real nice dug-out a hundred yards back—and this seemed about the time
to make its acquaintance. But I closed my eyes and left it to the officers to
lead the way. And presently they did, with me well up with the winners.
I have said I
saw only one wound actually received. Another came so fast that I only felt it.
At the base of the little finger of my right hand
I carry the best
memento of the war and a reminder of what might have happened were there not a
special Providence
for certain irresponsibles.
The day
following the capture of Monchy, Livesay and I wandered up to the hill-top to
see what was left of perhaps the most famous and hard-fought village on the
Western front. From behind a huge block of stone I was watching the battle in
the hollow and on the slopes beyond, when an officer crept up the hill to
volunteer the information that the last officer who had looked from behind that
same stone was in the hospital now. One doesn’t argue questions of that kind.
On the way back
to the road I picked up one of those beautifully made and outfitted German
ammunition boxes that make ours look like the efforts of a woman carpenter. Each
of us seized a handle. Just as we reached the main road a gang of German
prisoners carrying back a casualty in plain view of the German observation
balloons brought on us a shower of whizz-bangs. The prisoners, beyond the
shelling but nearer it than we, moved on unperturbed. Their example seemed
worthy of emulation. But the shower came nearer. We turned to skirt the corner.
And something tugged viciously at my hand and I looked down to see blood
gushing. Even at the moment I noted that it was the hand carrying the stolen
box—though the farthest from the explosion—and on the point nearest the box.
But that box is
with me yet. It stayed with me until we found a friendly shellhole where we lay
wondering what the brain of a soldier would advise under the circumstances. I
clung to it when later I was forced to discard more valuable possessions for
lack of space. Nothing the German can do will make me give it up.
Thus I
established, through no effort of mine, another record for a war correspondent.
Besides the unfortunate French newspaperman who was sniped, I believe I was the
only correspondent on the Western front whom the Germans hated enough to
damage.
The incentive of
the old-time war correspondent to attempt the impossible may have been removed
by the formal control under which the modern edition of the fraternity works.
Individuality may have been largely smothered in official red tape—and red
tabs. The war correspondent of to-day will be forgotten when his predecessor of
the petty wars of the past still looms large in public memory and reverence.
But when the next war comes—I hope it never will—I want to be there with
notebook and pencil. For one thing, it’s ever so much more comfortable and
remunerative than holding a rifle. For another it is a grand stand seat at all
the world’s spectacles crowded into a few months of reckless expenditure and
unstinted human ingenuity. And the third reason is that I am of the opinion
that in the next war the war correspondent will be permitted to paint a picture
less sullied by the bloodless hand of the Censor. I have a palette daubed with
paint I was never permitted to use on my pictures. It grieves my heart that,
with the end of the war the colours must lie there to dry and fade. But it was
war—the Great War—and my fellows and I were but the smallest links in a great
chain which was under too great a strain to worry about the eyes of the world.
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