Fritz Groedenschasser, standing in that unseemly mud, greatly yearned for them to find soon what they were looking for. Eight batteries searching for something they can’t find, along a trench in which you have to be, leaves the elephant hunter’s most desperate tale a little dull and insipid. Not that Fritz Groedenschasser knew anything about elephant hunting: he hated all things sporting, and cordially approved of the execution of Nurse Cavell. And there was thermite too. Flammenwerfer was all very well, a good German weapon: it could burn a man alive at twenty yards. But this accursed flaming English thermite could catch you at four miles. It wasn’t fair.
The three German trench mortars were all still firing. When would the English batteries find what they were looking for, and this awful thing stop? The night was cold and smelly.
Fritz shifted his feet in the foul mud, but no warmth came to him that way.
A gust of shells was coming along the trench. Still they had not found the minnewerfer! Fritz moved from his place altogether to see if he could find some place where the parapet was not broken. And as he moved along the sewerlike trench he came on a wooden cross that marked the grave of a man he once had known, now buried some days in the parapet, old Ritz Handelscheiner.
“Lucky devil,’’ said Fritz.
The Master of No Man’s Land
When the last dynasty has fallen and the last empire passed away, when man himself has gone, there will probably still remain the swede.[The rutabaga or Swedish turnip.]
There grew a swede in No Man’s Land by Croisille near the Somme, and it had grown there for a long while free from man.
It grew as you never saw a swede grow before. It grew tall and strong and weedy. It lifted its green head and gazed round over No Man’s Land. Yes, man was gone, and it was the day of the swede.
The storms were tremendous. Sometimes pieces of iron sang through its leaves. But man was gone and it was the day of the swede.
A man used to come there once, a great French farmer, an oppressor of swedes. Legends were told of him and his herd of cattle, dark traditions that passed down vegetable generations. It was somehow known in those fields that the man ate swedes.
And now his house was gone and he would come no more.
The storms were terrible, but they were better than man. The swede nodded to his companions: the years of freedom had come.
They had always known among them that these years would come. Man had not been there always, but there had always been swedes. He would go some day, suddenly, as he came. That was the faith of the swedes. And when the trees went the swede believed that the day was come. When hundreds of little weeds arrived that were never allowed before, and grew unchecked, he knew it.
After that he grew without any care, in sunlight, moonlight and rain; grew abundantly and luxuriantly in the freedom, and increased in arrogance till he felt himself greater than man. And indeed in those leaden storms that sang often over his foliage all living things seemed equal.
There was little that the Germans left when they retreated from the Somme that was higher than this swede. He grew the tallest thing for miles and miles. He dominated the waste. Two cats slunk by him from a shattered farm: he towered above them contemptuously.
A partridge ran by him once, far, far below his lofty leaves. The night winds mourning in No Man’s Land seemed to sing for him alone.
It was surely the hour of the swede. For him, it seemed, was No Man’s Land. And there I met him one night by the light of a German rocket and brought him back to our company to cook.
Weeds and Wire
Things had been happening. Divisions were moving. There had been, there was going to be, a stunt. A battalion marched over the hill and sat down by the road. They had left the trenches three days march to the north and had come to a new country. The officers pulled their maps out; a mild breeze fluttered them; yesterday had been winter and to-day was spring; but spring in a desolation so complete and far-reaching that you only knew of it by that little wind. It was early March by the calendar, but the wind was blowing out of the gates of April. A platoon commander, feeling that mild wind blowing, forgot his map and began to whistle a tune that suddenly came to him out of the past with the wind. Out of the past it blew and out of the South, a merry vernal tune of a Southern people. Perhaps only one of those that noticed the tune had ever heard it before. An officer sitting near had heard it sung; it reminded him of a holiday long ago in the South.
“Where did you hear that tune?’’ he asked the platoon commander.
“Oh, the hell of a long way from here,’’ the platoon commander said.
He did not remember quite where it was he had heard it, but he remembered a sunny day in France and a hill all dark with pine woods, and a man coming down at evening out of the woods, and down the slope to the village, singing this song. Between the village and the slope there were orchards in blossom. So that he came with his song for hundreds of yards through orchards. “The hell of a way from here,’’ he said.
For a long while then they sat silent.
“It mightn’t have been so very far from here,’’ said the platoon commander. “It was in France, now I come to think of it. But it was a lovely part of France, all woods and orchards. Nothing like this, thank God.’’ And he glanced with a tired look at the unutterable desolation.
“Where was it?’’ said the other.
“In Picardy,’’ he said.
“Aren’t we in Picardy now?’’ said his friend.
“Are we?’’ he said.
“I don’t know. The maps don’t call it Picardy.’’
“It was a fine place, anyway,’’ the platoon commander said. “There seemed always to be a wonderful light on the hills. A kind of short grass grew on them, and it shone in the sun at evening. There were black woods above them. A man used to come out of them singing at evening.’’
He looked wearily round at the brown desolation of weeds. As far as the two officers could see there was nothing but brown weeds and bits of brown barbed wire. He turned from the desolate scene back to his reminiscences.
“He came singing through the orchards into the village,’’ he said. “A quaint old place with queer gables, called Ville-en-Bois.’’
“Do you know where we are?’’ said the other.
“No, said the platoon commander.’’
“I thought not,’’ he said. “Hadn’t you better take a look at the map?’’
“I suppose so,’’ said the platoon commander, and he smoothed out his map and wearily got to the business of finding out where he was.
“Good Lord!’’ he said. “Ville-en-Bois!’’
Spring in England and Flanders
Very soon the earliest primroses will be coming out in woods wherever they have been sheltered from the north. They will grow bolder as the days go by, and spread and come all down the slopes of sunny hills. Then the anemones will come, like a shy pale people, one of the tribes of the elves, who dare not leave the innermost deeps of the wood: in those days all the trees will be in leaf, the bluebells will follow, and certain fortunate woods will shelter such myriads of them that the bright fresh green of the beech trees will flash between two blues, the blue of the sky and the deeper blue of the bluebells. Later the violets come, and such a time as this is the perfect time to see England: when the cuckoo is heard and he surprises his hearers; when evenings are lengthening out and the bat is abroad again; and all the flowers are out and all the birds sing. At such a time not only Nature smiles but our quiet villages and grave old spires wake up from winter in the mellow air and wear their centuries lightly. At such a time you might come just at evening on one of those old villages in a valley and find it in the mood to tell you the secret of the ages that it hid and treasured there before the Normans came. Who knows? For they are very old, very wise, very friendly; they might speak to you one warm evening. If you went to them after great suffering they might speak to you; after nights and nights of shelling over in France, they might speak to you and you might hear them clearly.