“The most competent among us are giving a manly example by entering the Governments of the Allies, thus taking, in the eyes of their countries, a position of responsibility for the Party which they represent. More than others we socialists must prove the error of this monstrous accusation of anti-patriotism. Let us prove, in defending ourselves, that we are firmly resolved to fight to the end for our national independence.
“Forward, comrades! Take heart, take courage, and the bar of red, which mingles with the two other colours, forming a trinity symbolic of liberty, peace, and labour, will not be defiled by the bloody hands of the bandits who would make us slaves! May the furrows, sprinkled with our blood, bring forth the ear of corn beneath the branch of olive, symbolizing fruitful labour in eternal peace.”
“Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings hast Thou ordained strength, because of Thine enemies, that Thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.” Out of the mouth of a French simple soldat the Englishmen who are still holding back as I write from the supreme sacrifice or privilege of national service, the Britons who never, never, never will be slaves, are condemned. A year of the war has passed, and hundreds of thousands of their fellow subjects of all classes have given up their professions and their positions, their pleasures and their ease, their wives and their families, and have freely offered themselves on the field of battle as part of the strength by which the enemy can be stilled. But they themselves have done none of the things for which their French socialist comrade unhesitatingly gave them credit. They have not—up to October, 1915—realized that we are at the parting of the ways, they have not with one voice answered “Present” to the call of their native land, they have not flown to arms at the cry of liberty, they have not proved by defending themselves that they mean to fight to the end for their national independence. Instead, they sit at home and strike—not for freedom, but for higher wages and less work—and prate of Conscripts and a Capitalists’ War and a Capitalists’ Press, and all the other labour shibboleths which have lost whatever sense they had before the war and become mere nonsense, because the war is different from all other wars and has changed everything in the world. It is a Capitalists’ War, of course. It was made by the Prussian Junkers and the business men of Germany with no other object than that of increasing their capital and destroying that of the Allies and particularly of England. It is a war fought by “conscripts” (though I should like to hear Mr. J. H. Thomas, M.P., use that term to Private Jouanard) in the case of every country engaged in it except England. And it is also, because of these two undeniable premises, the greatest strike against selfishness in high places that has ever taken place, and the conscript brothers who are fighting or working for it are the champions of freedom, and the men who refuse to stand by their side are, without knowing it, the blackest blacklegs in the history of the world. And no one knows better than they and the newspapers and politicians who support them what blacklegs are. They are the men who in the wars of labour refuse to submit to the Compulsory Service of trade-unionism, which is sometimes the most servile service and the most autocratic and deadening compulsion that ever was enforced in a free country, and the badge and livery and alpha and omega of the god with the feet of clay before which they bow down and worship.
Though it was a clear starlight night when we walked up to General Thévenet’s quarters, the moon had not risen and the town was wrapped in silence and dense darkness. Not a lamp was lit in the streets, not a chink of light escaped through the closely shuttered windows, not a sound was to be heard but the steady tramp of a distant patrol and the clatter of our feet on the cobbles. Afterwards, in Toul, and Epinal, and Commercy, and Nancy, and Lunéville, and other towns near the front, we got used to the conditions of a state of siege after couvre feu, when people go to bed at eight or nine o’clock—the deathly night stillness, broken only by the barking of dogs, the shrill despairing shrieks peculiar to French engine whistles, and the dull boom of cannon, and, in the empty streets, walled in by tall houses teeming with unseen human life, the solid blackness of the grave. In time you get used to it and forget to wonder whether the Germans too can hear the howling of that far-off dog that is baying the moon. You even crack jokes with the heavy-footed sentries and stealthy police “agents” who loom up uncannily out of the darkness and may or may not request you to follow them to the “poste.” But that first night in Belfort, before I had seen the miles and miles of solid entrenchments that lie between it and the frontier, the effect of it all, and the thought of the long line of millions of men, stretching almost from our feet far away for five hundred miles across France and Belgium to the Channel, thousands of them watching and waiting and fighting and suffering under the wide canopy of the quiet night, was curiously eerie. You seemed to hear Europe sighing and groaning in her sleep.
Suddenly, out of the unseen came a sharp challenge—“Qui vive? Halte là! Avancez à l’ordre! Le mot!”—and we stopped dead, as it is wise to do when you meet a night patrol in a town in état de siège if you are anxious to go on living. Then, one by one, we walked forward, gave the word, handed our papers to the corporal to be examined by the light of his lantern, and finally, after a few more challenges, half blinded by the dazzling glare of the lamps of a motor-car standing in the courtyard in front, were ushered into General Thévenet’s business-like office. Our reception was as different from what had gone before as the abrupt change from darkness to light. At last we had struck a man of real authority and decision. After a word or two of explanation—who we were and what we had come for—we were welcomed as warmly as if we had been the whole British army, horse, foot, guns, and aeroplanes, instead of two troublesome journalists. We had come at a happy moment. England and The Times would in any case have been passports enough for the General and his staff. But we shone also with the reflected glory of the common endurance of the retreat from Mons and the common triumph of the Battle of the Marne, which had brought our two countries closer together than they had been since Balaclava and Inkermann. And when we had explained the immediate purpose of our mission—to publish the truth and to contradict the lying reports spread by the enemy about Belfort and Verdun and Nancy—the General at once promised us all the help in his power.
CHAPTER III
IN ALSACE
Next morning the General was as good as his word. A note was brought to our hotel by an orderly to say that if we would be round at his quarters after lunch we should be able to see des choses intéressantes, and by half-past one, in a motor-car driven by an Alsatian sergeant (who, like many others in the same position, had preferred service in the French army to his pre-war occupation as a German private), we were driving between the outlying forts on our way to the frontier,frontier, with Captain de Borieux of the Headquarters Staff as our guide and friend. Lie number one was soon disposed of. It was quite evident that the German claim that they were investing Belfort, and had even taken two of its forts, was false. Till we reached the frontier, after passing for eight miles over a wide, rolling plain, which even then was scarred in all directions with line upon line of French entrenchments and other formidable defences, there was not a sign of them, and even then it was only the negative sign that the boundary post erected by the Germans after 1870 was now rebaptized with the colours of France. A yard further, and I was in Alsace, the first of the very few Englishmen who since the beginning of the war have crossed into the part of the annexed provinces which had been won back from the enemy.
Photograph by Libert-Fernand, Nancy.
Les Halles, Raon l’Etape—Vosges.
We stopped first at Montreux Vieux, the German name for which was Alt Munster—a little town a mile or so beyond the frontier on the Rhine-Rhone Canal, just before it takes a turn to Dannemarie and Altkirch—in which a month before there had been some brisk fighting. In their attack on the town, which suffered pretty severely from their guns, the Germans pushed forward their infantry as far as the canal, about two hundred yards across the fields from the French sandbag defences in front of the station. That was the nearest point to Belfort which they reached. Before they got to the movable bridge over