 Part 1 Chapter 12 of Canada's Hundred Days with Canadian Core from Amiens-Tumon, August 8th to November 11th, 1918. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Canada's Hundred Days by John Livesey. Part 1 Chapter 12. French Scenes On the morning of August 8th, the first echelon of Canadian Core headquarters moved to Gentile, but already this was too far behind the lines and almost at once another move was made to Damoun, on the loose. In a ravine about a thousand yards south of the village, as had been plotted out by our intelligence long before the battle opened, was an enemy regimental headquarters, and here the core stayed a full week. As usual there were some elaborate dugouts, but not enough to accommodate all the staff, most of whom slept under canvass. This ravine winds among the folds of Chalk Hills, trending south to the Roy Road. A little further on lies a broken tank, hit by an enemy gun that still stands a couple of hundred yards away. The tank had been working its way along the ravine when its career was stopped. Beside it are three graves. Artificers are busy repairing its shattered treads, and in an incredibly brief time it will trundle on its way again. From the upland is a wonderful sunset, painting the heavens the colour of blood. Upon the crest of the western slope, black against the glow, is the scarred outline of Hammond Wood, where a few days before our third division had a tough fight. Once it was gay with flowers, but there lie now in the stained pools of shell-holes only corpses rotting in their field-gray. Our burial-parties are overtaxed. Descending the hill we come upon a lonely pit where a gunner stands silent beside his archie, for these moonlight nights high knee has a regular schedule of bombing visitations. He is glad to talk and confesses himself something of a poet. He produces a copy of verses, scribbled on the back of an envelope. Happy soldier, spinning rhymes beneath the stars, themselves his theme, and love of country and hate of the destroyer. We are dozing off in our tents, sunk three feet beneath the ground for safety from the flying shrapnel of these bombing raids, when on the silence a bugle rings out, a note weird as that of the coyote under a prairie moon. Lights out, lights out, passes the word, high knees coming. Sure enough, he is. But before we hear his angry insect hum, miles it seems above us, there comes the quick rattle of the archies, the anti-aircraft guns. As heads poke out, shafts of light, long beams of widest light, shoot up from a dozen unexpected quarters, searching the sky methodically for the bold intruder. They sweep the sky into fatagably. Some one with night-glasses cries they are below him, now they are nearer. They've got him. They focus on one spot and he stands out clear enough, a flitting, iridescent glowworm. The archies redouble their fire. We see the flashes bursting round him. His machine gun rattles back down the avenues of white light. They lose him and catch him again. Suddenly a series of dull explosions crump, crump, crump as quick as you can count. He is getting rid of his bombs. It is too hot for him. Soon his drone dies away in the east, but not before there have been more dull, thudding reports, distinguishable from all kinds of shell fire. It is seldom they get him. In the air the vertical plane is added to the gunner's problem, whereas on the surface his equations are confined to the lateral and horizontal. But the defence, especially the search lights, captured by us from the bosh, keep him high up, whereas bombing becomes a thing of chance, hit or miss. But on another occasion he gets a bunch of our horses, picketed round the corner. He is going back to his base to tell his story of destruction. On a bare hillside and in a couple of hours he'll be back reloaded. But the air is chill and blankets warm. Not content with their brilliant capture of Zed Wood, recorded above, the French First Army are pushing on south of us, now well up to our right flank. They are putting on a little show of their own this afternoon in front of Roy. They have taken Caesar's camp west of the town and now seek to exploit their success from the south. Armed with a pass from General Demitz, commander of their fifty-sixth division, one has the privilege of seeing something of it under guidance of a charming French officer of intelligence. Roy lies low down in the valley and from the plateau on which we stand nothing can be seen but the smoke of bursting shells in its northern quarter, where already the French have established themselves in the railway station. The battle itself is in progress at our feet in the marshy tree-studded valley of the Arre, being directed against the strongly fortified village of Saint Mar-le-Trio. We can see nothing of it, save for an occasional rocket marking the progress of the infantry, signal for the barrage to lift, and for the angry explosions of enemy shells along the trench lines in the opposing plateau, where presumably are massed the French reserves. It does not matter. In these bright weeks villages such as this so recently impregnable strongholds are stormed every day. Of greater interest is the spirit of the French soldier, the poilou, from whose soul speaks the ardent voice of France. Our guide is explaining the difficulties of the attack up the valley, past concrete machine-gun emplacements hidden in the marshes. We hardly hope to succeed here, he says, but it is a demonstration innate of our advance further south. If we are wrong, soon a rocket goes up from the village itself. Yes, they have given us a tight corner, but what would you do? Someone has to have it. We have called him, Captain. No, he is only lieutenant. A simple soldier, monsieur, who at the outbreak of war was a wine-merchant in Burgundy. I had served my three years of course, and joined as a sergeant. Now I have charge of the intelligence of the regiment. You have very gallant men, he goes on. You are fresh and full of go. We have been at it so long we are tired. Our hearts are sad, but now before us is the end and we will see it through. Alas! For the poor people of this country. In March I was in Mont-D-D-A, and the women of the town crowded round us. Are the boge coming? they ask. We do not know, but it is better you should move out. Then comes the question. What shall we take? What can they take? Their men and their horses are all in the army. There remains only the push cart and the wheel-barrow. They take next to nothing, and in a few days the boge have destroyed everything, everything, wantonly, where their shelling has not completed the ruin. On your way back go and see the ribs of Mont-D-D-A. We are standing on top of an oak-hip, observation post, built up by the Germans amid the trees on the valley slope. Below lies a shattered village and ruined church sent our in. It is horrible to see all this, one says, and to think that we in Canada have escaped scot-free only the lies of our men. Ah! he says, but is not sorrow a strength to the character, a completion of experience, shall we not emerge a stronger people for it all? We are in a trench examining a bayonet, a beautiful rapier-like piece of polished steel. How you bring your sense of art and beauty into everything, one cannot help remarking. Look at your camouflage, what art it is, suiting itself perfectly to the changing aspects of soil and landscape, while ours too often is a matter of rule of thumb. That may be so, he replies, but you have your admirable perseverance, to each nation its own qualities, to the hun that of the beast. Of a saddened countenance is a French soldier. The tragedy of war has transmuted the once merry fellow. They lack, too, the outward smartness of our infantry. But the spirit is there. On to the Rhine, we cry to one of them. He lights up at once. That is the perfect word, monsieur, he says with a grin. One takes away a sense of what the French army has suffered and endured. Compared with ourselves they lack deplorably all manner of material and equipment. Their guns worn out, ammunition depleted, their horses emaciated, and with few lorries for transport, the poilou himself a pack mule on the march. But after all these long years, when they have borne the brunt in defeat and in victory, their men are incomparable, their spirit unquenched. It is August 19th and we are back again in Dury, just twelve days since we left this sad and dreary village. Nothing but dust and troops and lorries. Occasionally through a tall gateway is the glimpse of an old woman, doubled under a load of straw. Much more rarely a child. One little estimate is open where they sell red and white wine of the sourest vintage. All the villages of this part of France are ugly. Built right out to the street are the stables and outhouses, blank walls pierced by inhospitable double gates. You enter your billet through what is essentially the backyard, a manure pile in its center and cart shed on either end. Back is the decent little house, two-storied, very old, weather-stained, sadly lacking a coat of paint and a rambler rose. You walk across through the inevitable tiled floor to the back. Hey, presto! What a change is here? A charming garden, stocked with good things to eat, fruit trees and flowers, and behind a hedge and a field rolling down into a green valley. Nevertheless the cobbled streets are ugly beyond compare. High gray blank walls, shuttered windows, smokeless chimneys and clouds of dust shrouding the passing transport. Beyond the village the landscape is bare, for not here are the nestling, red-roofed farmhouses of Old England. It is a communal life, dear to the French peasant heart. Madame may chat over the wall to her neighbor, knitting the wile and keeping an eye on the simmering pot. The French peasant likes company, and he sits of an evening in the village park, sipping his glass and swapping news with his cronies. Thus is explained the utter ruin the invader has ricked upon the countryside. His target is not isolated farms but densely populated villages, containing within their scant area all the rural population. Better for the French peasants if they had lived in scattered homesteads. We have been away a bare fortnight. When we return all is changed. Gossips and laughing children enliven the street. Dury has little to show of scars. Here and there the boge has left his mark, screaming bombs from out the night, or the devastation of a long-distance gun. But it has suffered in foreboding. Last spring the tide of battle lapped very close to its thresholds. At any hour the enemy might select its humble area for bombardment. All the bigger houses, the chateaux, are long-closed, their owners in happier climes. Only the village folk have clung to their village. They had nowhere else to go to their village and their poor chattels, their cow and their waddling geese. The good curer remains to watch over his flock and deplore the ruined tower of his grey old church. But now the foe is many miles away, and the village saved, saved with the wrecked city of Amiens. In those days we saw many villages in far worse plight. There was Domart, a ruin swaddled in dust, dust, dust everywhere, red dust from the brick of broken homes, bathing the passing lorries along the Roy Road. There was Marcel Cove, a cemetery of houses. Only the skeletons, instead of decent burial, loom white and gaunt against the sky. Constructed of century-old timber framing, these still stand after the tiles and plaster have melted into dust. Such stricken villages do not present the munificent ruin of the priests, et cetera. Nor are they a flat and disregarded desert like Nuvia St. Basque at foot of Vimy Ridge. But they are very horrible. There is something indecent about their stark ribs. At midnight of August twenty-one to twenty-second comes the moving order. Secret and confidential lorry, number so-and-so, will be at the door of your billet at five forty-five. No breakfast served in messes after six a.m. Destination unstated. On such occasion the Camp Commandant is the best hated man in the corps, for there seems a certain malignity in these midnight allurems. At last one was going to put in a good night's sleep to catch up needed arrears, but no, there will be little sleep this night, with the problem of squeezing a gallon of gear into a quart-pot. Treasured souvenirs must go into the discard. Once again on the move we discover we have a full day for the relatively short jaunt to Haute Cloak, south of St. Paul, and can spend some hours in Amiens. A year ago the joyous congregation of young officers on leave, but now deserted, empty streets echoing to the passing hoofbeat. A truly pious nation the French, a people of reverence for the fine things of life. Their piety today takes other direction than that of yesterday. It kneels at the shrine of an idea of France. In all their churches is to be seen the shining figure of Jeanne d'Arc. Their national heroine broods over them an idea that has triumphed in this war over material fact over four hundred and fifty centimeter guns. Every crossroad has its shrine, and in every little hamlet the village church stands a monument of ancient art and piety, the treasured storehouse of the community from generation to generation, enriched by free fancy. However dull the village street, there lifts out of its folia just slender, fretted spire, or maybe a hoary tower, sign manual of the spiritual life below. War has quickened that life. Not in vain calls the church bell to mountains and rivers. In no land is the beauty of sacrifice as well understood as in France. Thousands of these humble altars lie in ruin, more ruinous than the ruined villages singled out malignantly. It was not by his design that the great cathedral of Amiens escaped almost unscathed. Its topmost pinnacles are far below the level of the immediate hills, and yet for four months it has been the target of long-range guns and bombing planes. Draw a circle of a hundred yards around it and everywhere is destruction. The glorious Gothic West Front, still sandbag many feet up, is pitted with shrapnel. Good saints in their niches have lost arms and legs. It is a miracle that it has so escaped to be for generations to come a shrine for pious pilgrims who may see in its scarred but stately lines the symbol of the indomitable nation that kept alight through storm and ravage and woe the torch of civilization. Only an ecclesiastical architect can write of such things at every turn the layman exposes himself. But it is impossible to pass by Amiens' cathedral without catching something of its spirit and its meaning. The popular, the picture postcard, view is the West Front, with its irregular twin towers, its great rose window and all the lavish ornament of decorated Gothic. It is a fine example of that kind of thing such an impression is here deliberately cultivated, as might be that of a woman attired for the chief event in her life. But this ornate richness and luxury of treatment is not what appeals in the particular connection. Curiously enough, it is restricted entirely to the West façade, for the rest is art reduced to the finest simplicity of free-springing perpendicular columns and arches, delicate tracery, flying buttresses, and high-shouldering roots. Here and there this austere and chaste expression breaks out into rebellious fantasies of gargoyle and quaint grotesque, roughly carved from the solid block. The aspect one loves is the intimate view of the basilica from the foot of Rue Victor Hugo, a vista of grey stone and purple slate, an impression of devout, aspiring feeling that deliberately carries the eye unchecked and unencumbered by superfluous ornament up and up and up to the pinnacle of wonderful little Gothic spire superimposed upon the cross of the building, that from any other view it is not visible from the West front seems unmeaning and even absurd. From earth to the high Elysium is its message, and to pass thence into the square and thus confront the floored elegance of the West façade is to fall from heaven to earth again. The same pure and simple beauty is to be found within. Most of the old glass has been removed, and gone to is much of the guilt and tinsel that too often obscure and distract the noble lines of these buildings. The interior is reduced to its simplest values, without ornament, such as it was conceived and executed by its monk-builders. It is a house cleansed by war, like unto the people of France. There is little but the bare beauty of form and light, but the impression is of an immensity. The nave is subdivided by lofty shafts and bold arches, simple variations of the trefoil prevailing. Its surpassing beauty is due to these gracious lines and their high uplift to the vaulting of the ceiling. Wide untrammeled spaces and the clear sunlight streaming through the tracery of great unglazed windows give the impression of open skies and the wind upon the heath. Not here the mystery of stained glass, dim perspectives and glorious shrines, but the flinging wide of doors, the sweeping down of cobwebs. Back of the high altar, and facing the rich frescoes of the Lady Chapel, is a simple relief dated 1628, to the worthy memory of Johannes de la Grange, one-time Episcopal ambassador and cardinal. He lies there in stone effigy and his cardinals hat at his feet. Another slab perpetuates the charity he established for the poor children of the diocese, a worthy man, this Archbishop of Amiens, and a proud, without doubt. In and about this great temple, Canadian and Australian soldiers reverently wander. They see in it something mystic, the pledge of their victory, its vast, echoing spaces peopled by their comrades who have laid down their lives. Against this pile of grey stone wherein lies enshrined the feeling of all the ages, the Hun hurled his implacable hate. In its drive of August 8th and 9th the Canadian Corps captured half a dozen 5.9 inch naval guns with a range of 25,000 yards, and there is reason to suspect some of these were the very long-distance rifles that sought to destroy the cathedral of Amiens. Of direct hits possible to identify, two at least are of this caliber. One destroyed the northeast chapel of the ambulatory, another the organ platform under the rose window, but the organ, a famous piece, had been removed to the crypt. Amiens Cathedral is now safe. Yet another bond was thus knit between the peoples of France and of Canada. Over the great altar hang the flags of French regiments, and among them the stars and stripes. The ensign of Canada might here well find a worthy resting place.