Fields of Victory

h, 1

rps holding Alsace, and is now the French Préfecture; the eastern battle-field at Verdun, and that small famous room under the citadel, through which all the leaders of the war have passed; Rheims Cathedral emerging ghostly from the fog, with, in front of it, a group of motor-cars and two men shaking hands, the British Premier and the Cardinal-Archbishop; that desolate heart of the Champagne battle-field, where General Gouraud, with the American Army on his right, made his Septembe

either writing, or preparing to write, about its own doings in the war. Meanwhile the official reports drawn up by each Army under the British Command are "secret documents." The artillery dispositions of the great battles which brought the war to an end cannot yet be disclosed. There can, therefore, be no proper maps of these battles for some time to come, while some of the latest developments in offensive warfare which were to have been launched upon the enemy had the war continued, are naturally not for the public for a good while a

nd stored-up wealth, and her stern claim for adequate protection in future, on the other, as its main elements; the war-consciousness of Great Britain and the Empire, turning essentially on the immortal defence of the Ypres salient and the Channel ports, the huge sacrifices of the Somme, the successes and disappointments of 1917, the great defensive battle of last March, and the immediate and brilliant reaction, leading in less than five months to the beginning of that series of great actions on the British front which finished the war-all interpenetrated with

two drawn from my own recent experience

r of the line at Richebourg St. Vaast. But our way lay north, not south, through a district that seemed strangely familiar to me, though in fact I had only passed forty-eight hours in it, in 1916. Forty-eight hours, however, in the war-zone, at a time of active fighting, and that long before any other person of my sex had been allowed to approach the actual firing-line on the British front, were not like other hours; and, perhaps, from much thinking of them, the Salie

of barbed wire and trip wire, and all the other débris of battle that still lie thick upon the ground. In a few months perhaps there will be official guides conducting parties through the ruins, and in a year or two, the ruins of Ypres themselves may have given place to the rising streets of a new city. As they now are, a strange and sinister majesty surrounds them. At the entrance to the town there still hangs the notice: "Troops are not to enter Ypres except on special duty"; and the grass-grown heaps of masonry are labelled: "It is dangerous to dig among these ruins." But there was no one digging when we were there-no one moving, except ourselves. Ypres seemed to me beyond recovery as a town, just as Lens is; but whereas Lens is just a shapeless ugl

imburg to their own land. Beside us, the innumerable, water-logged shell-holes, in which, at one time or another in the swaying forward and backward of the fight, the lives of brave men have been so piteously lost, strangled in mud and ooze; here a mere sign-post which tells you where Hooge stood; there the stumps that mark Sanctuary Wood and Polygon Wood, and another sign-po

circle of those who know, there are many figures given. They are alike only in this that they seem to grow perpetually. Heroic, heart-breaking wrestle with the old hostile forces of earth and water-black earth and creeping water and strangling mud! We won the ridge and we held it till the German advance in April

tual scene in which they happened. There, at those cross roads, broke the charge of the Worcesters, on that most critical day of all in the First Battle of Ypres, when the fate of the Allies hung on a thread, and this "homely English regiment," with its famous record in the Peninsula and elsewhere, drove back the German advance and saved the line. I turn a little to the south and I am looking towards Klein Zillebeke where the Household Cavalry charged, and Major Hugh Dawnay at their head "saved the British position," and lost his own gallant life. Straight ahead of us, down the Menin road towards Gheluvelt, came the Prussian Guards, the Emperor's own troops with their master's eye o

miliar names of the old Army are likend with this great story. It was an English and Scotch victory, the victory of these Island

nadians on their right held on through two days and nights, gassed and shelled, suffering frightful casualties, but never yielding, till the line was safe, and fresh troops had come up. It was not six weeks since at Neuve Chapelle the Canadians h

f this dim horizon from north-west to south-east have their imperishable meaning for Great Britain and the Domini

lar mind of America a truer knowledge of what the British Armies had done in the war. "I see here," says the writer, "hundreds of the finest remaining white men on earth every week. They are wonderful military material, and very attractive and lovable boys. But it discourages all one's hope for the future unity and friendship between us all to realise as I have done the last

Verdun, who speaks of the tragic ignorance-for tragic it is when one thinks of all that depends on Anglo-American understan

d in my small efforts to meet the state of things described in the letters I have quoted, some of the warmest and most practical sympathy shown has come from Americans. But in the vast population of the United States with

ican divisions, representing both the older and the newer levies, and drawn from different local areas-should be given the opportunity of seeing and studying the older scenes of the war on the British front?-and that our own men, also, should be able to see for thems

s not done

and Vimy?-about Bourlon Wood and Cambrai?-or in the final track of our victorious Armies breaking through the Hindenburg line on their way to Mons? Gloriously indeed have the Dominions played their part in this war; but of all the casualties suffered by the Armie

e members, whether by bullet, shell-fire or bomb, or must witness the return to them of husbands, brothers, and sons, more or less injured for life. The total American casualties are 264,000. The total British casualties-among them from 700,000 to 800,000 dead-are 2,228,000 out

I

ish war-consciousness. Let me turn to others of a different kind-the intellect

kind appears in the official publication. And we can all remember in England the gnawing anxiety of every day and every hour from March 21st up to the end of April, when the German offensive had beaten itself out, on the B

last March and April. Strictly speaking, my interlocutor suggests, neither word is applicable. The British Army indeed fell back some thirty-five miles on its southern front, till the German attack was finally stayed before Amiens. The British centre stood firm

and had considered carefully weeks beforehand where ground could be given-as in all probability it would have to be given-with the least disadvantage. Some accidents, if one may call them so, indeed there were-the thick white fog, for instance, which "on the morning of March 21st enveloped our outpost line, and made it impossible to see more than fifty yards in any direction, so that the machine guns and forward field-guns which had been disposed so as to cover this zone with their fire were robbed almost entirely of their effect-and the masses of German infantry advanced comparatively unharassed, so closely supporting each other that loss of direction was impossible." Hence the rapidity of the German advance through the front lines on March 21st, and the alarming break-through south of St. Quentin, where our recently extended line was weakest and newest. A second accident was the drying up of the

fficial P

which was crossed by t

s, prisoners, and guns are fully admitted, what was the general result? The Germans had failed to gain either of their real objectives:-either the Channel ports, or the division of the British Armies from the French. They wore themselves out against a line which recoiled indeed but never broke, and was all the time filling up and strengthening from behind. The losses inflicted on their immense reserves reacted on all the subsequent fighting of the year, both on the Aisne and the Marne. And when the British Armies had brought the huge attack to a standstill-which for the centre and south

t impossible and heroic things. Gun detachments held their posts till every man was killed or wounded; infantry who had neither rest nor sleep for days together, fought "back to back in the trenches, shooting both to front and rear." Occasional confusion, even local panic, occasional loss of communication and misunderstanding of orders, occasional incompetence

with the stubborn and tenacious hold of the British Army, last March and April, were the inevitable and heroic prelude to the victorious recoil of August, and the final battles of the war. Inevitable, because no forethought or exertion on the British side could have averted the German onslaught, determined as it was by the breakdown of the whole Eastern front of the war, and the letting loose upon the Western front of immense forces previously held by the Russian armies. These forces, after the Russian débacle, were released against us, week by week,

il," says Sir Douglas Haig, "American and British troops have fought shoulder to shoulder in the same trenches, and have shared together in the satisfaction of beating off German attacks

carried the British Army to Mons, a

court-Quéant line to Douai and Valenciennes, I was in the very heart of that triumphant stand

is ridge that you say you have taken?" seems almost a reasonable tale. But to east and west there is no doubt about it. One climbs up the side overlooking Ablain St. Nazaire through shell-holes and blurred trenches, over snags of wire, and round the edges of craters, till on the top one takes breath on the wide plateau where stands the Canadian monument to t

just before the battle, in 1917. To the north we are looking through the horizon shadows to La Bassée, Bailleul, and the Salient. Immediately below the hill, in th

ng of the scene. Not one short year ago it was in the very centre of the struggle. If Arras and Vimy had not held, things would have been grave indeed. Had they been captured, says the official report of the Third Army, "our main lateral communications-Amiens-Doullens-St. Pol-St. Omer-would have been seriously threatened if not cut." The Germans were determined to have them, and they fought for them with a desperate courage. Three assault divisions were to have carried the Vimy

a mere sign-board, nothing more-"Gavrelle!"-shows us that we are approaching the famous Drocourt-Quéant switch of the Hindenburg line, which the Canadians and the 17th British Corps, under Sir Henry Horne, stormed and took in September of last year. Presently, on either side of the road as we drive slowly eastward, a wilderness of trenches run

scene of ruin, which indeed begins to change as we approach Valenciennes, the Headquarters of the First Army. And at last, a bright fire in an old room pi

ith whom we had made friends in 1917, just before the capture of t

us, and soon we find ourselves at the General's t

rm of the distinguished soldier, as c

en-a natural softness and tenderness of feeling, as though a man who has upon him such stern responsibilities of life and death must needs grasp at their opposites, when and how he can; keen intelligence, bien entend

ago. "Your public at home knows far too little about them individually. But the persona

General Horne led the artillery at Mons; that he has commanded the First Army since September, 1916; that, in conjunction with Sir Julian Byng, he carried the Vimy Ri

aps that lay before us, that I first realised with anything like sufficient sharpness the meaning of th

the Hinde