NOW IT CAN BE TOLD

CONTENTS


PREFACE

Part One OBSERVERS AND COMMANDERS

Part Two THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE

Part Three THE NATURE OF A BATTLE

Part Four A WINTER OF DISCONTENT

Part Five THE HEART OF A CITY

Part Six PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME

Part Seven THE FIELDS OF ARMAGEDDON

Part Eight FOR WHAT MEN DIED




PREFACE


In this book I have written about some aspects of the war which, I
believe, the world must know and remember, not only as a memorial of
men's courage in tragic years, but as a warning of what will happen
again--surely--if a heritage of evil and of folly is not cut out of the
hearts of peoples. Here it is the reality of modern warfare not only as
it appears to British soldiers, of whom I can tell, but to soldiers on
all the fronts where conditions were the same.

What I have written here does not cancel, nor alter, nor deny anything
in my daily narratives of events on the western front as they are now
published in book form. They stand, I may claim sincerely and humbly,
as a truthful, accurate, and tragic record of the battles in France and
Belgium during the years of war, broadly pictured out as far as I could
see and know. My duty, then, was that of a chronicler, not arguing why
things should have happened so nor giving reasons why they should not
happen so, but describing faithfully many of the things I saw, and
narrating the facts as I found them, as far as the censorship would
allow. After early, hostile days it allowed nearly all but criticism,
protest, and of the figures of loss.

The purpose of this book is to get deeper into the truth of this war and
of all war--not by a more detailed narrative of events, but rather as
the truth was revealed to the minds of men, in many aspects, out
of their experience; and by a plain statement of realities, however
painful, to add something to the world's knowledge out of which men of
good-will may try to shape some new system of relationship between one
people and another, some new code of international morality, preventing
or at least postponing another massacre of youth like that five years'
sacrifice of boys of which I was a witness.





PART ONE. OBSERVERS AND COMMANDERS




I


When Germany threw down her challenge to Russia and France, and England
knew that her Imperial power would be one of the prizes of German
victory (the common people did not think this, at first, but saw only
the outrage to Belgium, a brutal attack on civilization, and a glorious
adventure), some newspaper correspondents were sent out from London to
report the proceedings, and I was one of them.

We went in civilian clothes without military passports--the War Office
was not giving any--with bags of money which might be necessary for the
hire of motor-cars, hotel life, and the bribery of doorkeepers in the
antechambers of war, as some of us had gone to the Balkan War, and
others. The Old Guard of war correspondents besieged the War Office
for official recognition and were insulted day after day by junior
staff-officers who knew that "K" hated these men and thought the press
ought to be throttled in time of war; or they were beguiled into false
hopes by officials who hoped to go in charge of them and were told to
buy horses and sleeping-bags and be ready to start at a moment's notice
for the front.

The moment's notice was postponed for months....

The younger ones did not wait for it. They took their chance of "seeing
something," without authority, and made wild, desperate efforts to break
through the barrier that had been put up against them by French and
British staffs in the zone of war. Many of them were arrested, put
into prison, let out, caught again in forbidden places, rearrested, and
expelled from France. That was after fantastic adventures in which they
saw what war meant in civilized countries where vast populations were
made fugitives of fear, where millions of women and children and old
people became wanderers along the roads in a tide of human misery, with
the red flame of war behind them and following them, and where the first
battalions of youth, so gay in their approach to war, so confident of
victory, so careless of the dangers (which they did not know), came back
maimed and mangled and blinded and wrecked, in the backwash of retreat,
which presently became a spate through Belgium and the north of France,
swamping over many cities and thousands of villages and many fields.