LAND AND WATER 
August 21, 1915. 
BEHIND THE FIRING LINE. 
that 
of 
remain 
those 
after 
lontbs' jouriieyiii? again and affain the roads that run 
Dunkirk to'Furnea, from l-^irne^ to Ypres. from 
THERE was a reproduction in some daily new-paper 
of a drawing— or a painting, it may havo been— 
bv Neviiisoii. Tliis rude sketch clinched for me 
oiie of my impressions of the war— one 
few dominating impressions 
five mon 
from Dv _ _ . 
LUmkirk to Nieuport, to Popennghe. to Steenwoordo 
so-iibrc journevs through rain and wind, under leaden 
bv sodden flowerless fields, and monotonous banks of canals. 
It represents French soldiers on the march. With square 
shoulders bent under a load of accoutrements, they trudge 
slowlv, i" gri'" silence, their individualities suppressed, 
moviti^ forward with the steady, stupid movement of a 
machine, or of a sluggish riv?r. They are on their way to 
the trenches. All day long tlicy plod, with heavy sluilIIniK 
feet, from the scattered hamlets where they have been quar- 
tered overnight, where they have .slunibered on damp .^traw in 
outhouses and farms, towards the front and the trenches. 
Numbed and drenched bv the rain, their square backs aching 
under a load of kit, without speech, with dulled senses, these 
ranks of tired men drift onwards with the fatality of a 
machine, with the inevitableness of a river. Thus they move 
eternally morning after morning, day and dusk, over the lU- 
or tvre-bitten roads of Northern France and Bel- 
By Lionel Holland. 
sheds that serve for temporary ho.spitals. 
surgeons rapidly examine the cases for distribution, outside 
in the station yard, motor ambulances wait patiently 
English drivers lounge restle.ssly about, smoking cigarettes 
While inside the 
tside, 
Their 
skies. 
paved 
gium. 
They leave with me an impression of grandeur. 
Soms Impressions. 
The first casual impression was one of untidiness, of 
something desultory, even cynical, half-hearted, with no 
decisive meaning. But this superficial vision soon is super- 
seded by an abiding impression — how the eternal progress of 
forlorn, foot-weary men has a finality, a grandiose import- 
ance, a very splendour of meaning. I am a spectator of the 
supreme vindication of liumanity — human sacrifice for the 
sake of an idea. Tlie.se bowed shoulders uphold a nation's 
life — the ideals and hopes that are hor life's breath. With 
bloody sacrifice and terror, more than a century past, France 
wrung from the womb of history an equal dignity for men. 
And now, against a monstrous force that she herself nursed 
into being when clouding her ideal.s by conquest and a craving 
for glory, France once more has summoned her citizens, 
sobered by experience and misfortune, to suffer for their faith 
and for the idea which is her life. 
The small towns and villages are filled with soldiers; 
seldom are the long straight roads without them. They 
crowd the streets of Dunkirk, yet they bring with them 
no life nor animation. There is no ripple of laughter in 
the air — (when will mankind recover the gift of laughtor?). 
Over tov/n and village and highway brood the same suspeu.se, 
like the oppression and stillness in the land and sad silence 
that precede and follow an eclip-ie of the sun — the loss 
of the joy of living, humanity crouching under a sense of the 
liideous and abnormal. And everywhere the war — not on 
men's lips only, but burnt into their brains, dulling their 
sight, feeding on their souls, cut into their bodies — on the 
roads, in the towns, never to be escai>ed. At night the dull 
menace of the distant guns, telling how the lust of murder 
never sleeps. Even the cities liold their breath. Even in the 
city of Dunkirk — over twenty miles from the fighting line — 
men s])eak low, their hearing strained to catch the beat of 
the wings of the angel of death. Nor even here is tho 
beating of that angel's wings ever quite stilled. The siren 
shrieks warning, and there sail into the sky, high above the 
city, a flight of Taube aircraft, graceful as birds. Birds of 
prey, they hover above their helples.s victims as these scurry 
to cover or gaze anxiously upwards. while>, at short intervals, 
louder, more sustained exjjlosions than those produced by tlie 
attacking aircraft guns tell of homes torn ruthlessly to the 
ground, of terror and death agony. 
The birds of prey depart, but never for pity can death's 
angel let fall her tired eyelids. In the long close wards of 
e crowded hospitals some spirit in agony is crying to be 
released from its shattered frame. Side by side the beds are 
ranged in long still avenues, where figures numbed by shock 
, P'"*"' *>"<! injury lie week upon week, through the slow 
Clays and weary sleepless nights. Crippled forms>rope their 
way along the wards, or sit crouched by the windows dumbly 
gazing into vacancy until darkne.ss shrouds the leaden sea and 
t le rain. Each e'veuiug at the central station trains unload 
tueir freight of wounded and fever-stricken soldiers into great 
Ambulanres at Work. 
Soon, very soon, the rush of work Ijegins. The stretcher- 
bearsrs come out; one after another they rai.se the stretchers, 
each one with its corpse-like burden, sliding them into their 
places in the ambulances. They are quickly strapped safe, and 
the curtains over the end of their cars fastened down by the 
drivers. The jaded bearers turn back to fetch other wounded, 
while the ambulance cars, like great shadows, swe«p into the 
gloom. They pick their way cautiously over jolting rails to 
the wharves where the hospital ships lie lierthed— their hulls 
scarcely visible in the darkness, except where a gash of light 
at the top of a gangway shows the opening through which the 
stretchers have to be passed. They steal ghost-like through 
the unlighted streets to the hospitals in Dunkirk or Malo-le,s- 
Bains; or out beyond the city they speed, along the road 
towards Furnes. rushing like great cloud shadows past a few 
st.-irtled wayfarers, mile after mile, until they strike across 
the canal towards the gates of the immense military hospital 
that spreads itself out acre upon acre from the village of 
Zuydeote to the sea. 
In those surroundings a wounded soldier counts a* 
little a.s a punctured tyre, his life no mora than a bolt or 
screw. Mankind is merged in a machine, the individual 
in a vast instrument of destruction. Humanity is voiceless, 
soulless, without conscience. His identity moulded into the 
mass, each soldier marches towards his destiny — to kill or 
be killed— dumbly obedient to the will of some remote, un- 
seen agent. There is no elbow-room for civilians east of 
Dunkirk: their wants and claims have ceased to count. A 
few peasants remain with anxious, timid eyes, wandering 
about in this strange world like dogs that have lost their 
master. Empires and policies are at death's grip; they 
wage war with all their resources, human and inanimate, 
forged into one weapon. 
Men and Things. 
Only the relations of men and things have utterly 
changed. Men for the time being have sacrificed their iden- 
tities, they have become inauimat?. Their handiwork has 
almost achieved life. On the roads tlie motor traffic is in- 
C3ssant. Huge Paris omnibu.ses filled with men cr munitions, 
vans loaded with food, armoured cars spiked with guns, 
luxurious touring cars, now dent?d and soibd, ambulance.) 
blazed with a red cross — mctcr.5 of every description and 
power — pass panting with diflTicuUv, cr sweep by with a 
scream, stand by the wayside damaged and crippled, or lie 
there deserted and despoiled. They seem to throb and 
strive and suffer lika human beings, to usurp the vitality of 
their makers, to be animated by a like purpose with them. 
Long accspted values have been swept away by the merciless 
irony of destroying shells, that have brought to derision the 
shrines rai.sed by mankind to honour or to nourish their 
ideals and desires. They have tumbled to the ground the 
splendid buildings at Ypres that for five centuries have stood 
a.T monuments to the faith and industry of men, and dig 
huge graves in her once prosperous streets. They have 
cracked and spattered and defaced the spacious square where 
the architects of Imperial Spain, of the Renaissance, and 
Flanders vied with each other to adorn the town of Furnes. 
With even malice they have spared neither the great hotcb 
at Nieuport Plage, where the rich come of a summer to seeic 
pleasure, nor the modest dwellings of the inhabitants of Nieu- 
port, nor the glorious church that ennobled their town. 
While all else seems death-like, and men move in a tranoe, 
shells alone are alive — the devils of hell let loose. They have 
rushed struggling up through the opened gates of hell to 
riot in a fiends' holiday on earth. The dull glow of hell-firo 
lights the horizon as they start on their flight. Shrieking 
hate they come through the air, exulting with a fiendish 
whistle of triumph. They burst in a spasm of lustful cruelty, 
dealing out poison and destruction and death, and wounds 
worse than death, and terror and sorrow and mourning. . . . 
Strolling through the quiet woods of England, touched 
by the August sun, full of the contentment of the song 
of birds, the merciless whistle of the shells and that grim 
traffic on shrapnel-scarred, motor torn roads, not much nioro 
18 
