MIDST THE FLYING SHRAPNEL

Dominion, Volume 9, Issue 2618, 13 November 1915, Page 9

MIDST THE FLYING SHRAPNEL

VILLAGES IN THE FIRING LINE

A VIVID IMPRESSION

BY PRIVATE PATRICK MACGILL,

Author of "Children of the Dead End." (From tho "Daily Mail").

Mr. Mac Gill, who began lifo as a laoourcr at twelve and knows all tho hardships of the navvy and the potato-picker, is known for tho realism of his writings on such subjects. After publishing poems he became librarian at. Windsor Oastle. In his last book, "The Rat 1 it," he gave a vivid picture, full of grim and living detail, of the 'underworld" of Glasgow. Ho enlisted for the war and i 6 now at the front, and tho following is his realistic impression.

From Souchez to Ypres the firing line runs through a laud of stinking drains, level fields, and shattered villages. _ Wo know those villages, we've lived m them, we've been 6niped at in w > r 6 V ee^s al, d Fuelled in the houses, u© ve had men killed in them, blown *i° if 01 ! 15 or buried in masonry, done to death by some damnable instrument of war.

In_ the village of Philosophe, near you can see the eternal artillery fighting on the hills of Lovette; up ™ ere men. are flicked nut of existence like_ lues in a hailstorm. The big, straight road out of Philosophe runs through our lines into the German •Tu beyond. Tho road is lined with poplars and green wtih grass; by day you can see the German sandbags from Philosophe, by'night you can hear the wind in tho trees that bend towards one another as if in conversation. There is 110 whole houso iii Philosophe; chimneys have been blown down and roofs are battered by shrapnel. But few of the people have gone away;. they liave bccome schooled in the process of accommodation and accommodate themselves to a woeful change. They live with one foot on the top step of tho cellar stairs; a shell sends them scampering down; they sleep there, they eat there; ill their underground home they wait for ( the war to end. Tlio men who are too old to fight labour in a neighbouring mine, which still does some work, although its chimney is shattered and its coal wagons scraps of wood and iron. There aro many graves by Philosophe, graves of our boys, civilian graves, children's graves, all victims of war. Children ar j v' lcro merry little irids with red lips and laughing eyes. A . Little . Child Killed. Ono day when staying in'the,village I met one, a dainty Tittle dot, with golden hair and laughing eyes, a pink ribbon round a tress that hung roguishly over her left cheek. She smiled' at me as she passed whore I sat on the roadside undor tho poplars; her face was; like an angel's set in a disarray of gold. In her hand she carried an empty, jug, almost as big a.4 herself, and sho was going to her home, one of tho inhabited houses nearest the fighting line. The day had been a very quiet one, and tho village took ;n opportunity to ba-slc in tno:sun. I watched hjy go up tho road tripping lightly on tho grass, swinging her big jug; life was a garland of flowers for her, 'twas good- to -ivatch her, to see her trip along; the sight of her mado.me happy; what caused tho German gunner, a simple woodman and a father himself, perhaps, to fire at that moment? What demon guided the shell? Who can say? Tlio shell dropped 011 tho roadway just where tho child had been. I saw tho explosion and dropped flat to avoid tho splinters. When I looked .gain thero was 110 child nor,jug; where she had been was a heap of stones on tho grass and dark curls of smoko rising up from it. I hastened indoors; the enemy'were shelling' tho villago again.

Vermelles is a village with shellscarrad trees lining its streets,, and grass peeping over its. fallen ■masonry; a few inn signs still swing and. look like corpses hanging; at night they creak as if in agony. Vermelles was taken from tho Germans by tho French, from the French by the Germans, ' anil changed hands several times afterwards. The - streets saw man ydesperate hand-io-liand encounters;. they . at© cl/an lioiv, but the villago stinks: men were buried thero by cannon; they lies in the cellars with the. win.e barrels, bones, skulls, fleshloss hands sticking up over ii.e bricks; the grasp lias boon busy, in its endeavour to cloak up tJie liorror', but it will tako,Nature many years to 'hide the ravages of war in tho village of Vermelles. Someone stopped in the villago—a soldier, no doubt— and by way of a joko hung a ladv's garment from an inn sign and wrote something on it in red-letters.' In the midst of the. desolation the effect was hideous; it made mo ill, and none of us, even though many enjoy Rabelaisian humour, laughed at it. ' Fifteen In a Cellar. In'the village of Magingarle,'two and a half miles from tho firing lino, I havo seen the street, so thick with flies, that it was inipossiolo to see the cobbles underneath. There wo could get English papers t-'ne ; .morning after publication;, for penny papers wo paid threepence, ior half-penny papers twopence. In a restaurant iu the place wo. got a. dinner, consisting of vegetable soup, fried po,tatoes, and egg omelette, salad, bread, beer, a, > and a cup of cafe an lait for lo sous (7id.) per man.. There too <w a. memorable occasion wo wca'o paid the sum ol' 10 francs (Bs. »id.) on pay 'day.

In the village of Les Brebes six of-us soldiers slept- ono night in a cellar with a man, his wile, and seven children, one .1 sucking babe. That night tho roof of the house was blown in by. a- shell. In the samo place-my mate and I went out to a restaurant for dinner, and a young Frenchman, a- gunner, sat at our tabic. Ho eamo' from the south, a shepherd boy from the foot-hills of the Pyrenees. Ho shook hands with us, giving tho loft" and, tho one next the jlieart, as a proof of comradeship when leaving. -A shrapnel bullet caught him inside tho door and he fell dead on the pavement. Every .stono standing or fallen in the village by tho firing" lino has got a history and a tragedy connected with it.

In Festubert the enemy's bullets search tho main street by night and day; 'a journey from Festubert to the trenches is mado across the open, and the eternal German bullet- never leaves off searching for our boys coming into the firing line. You cannot dodge a bullet in Festubert on tho way from the villago to the trenches, you merelv trust your- luck; for tho moment your lifo has gone out' of your keeping.

The Woman Who Went Back.

civilian is allowed to outer Fcstubert,' but I havo 3oon a- wouian there. Wo were coming in, a- working party, from the trendies, when the colour of dawn ivrs in tlio sky. Wo met her on the street opposite tho pile of bricks that once was Festubort Church; tlio spire of tlio church was blown off months_ago, and it sticks point downwards in a grave. Tho woman was taken prisoner. Who was site? Where did slio come from? None of us knew, but'wo concluded she was a spy.. Afterwards, we heard that"

was a native who had returned to have a look at her. home.

Wo wore billeted at tho rear of the villago 011 the ground Hoor of a cottage. Behind our billot was the open country, where Nature, the great Mother, was busy blotting out the ravages of war; the butterflios flitted over the soldiers' graves, the grass grew over unburiod dead mon who seemed to be sinking into .the ground, apple trees throw out a wealth of blossom which tlio breezes flung broadcast to earth like young lives in the whirlwind of war. _ We first came to • the place at midnight; on the morning when wo got up wo found outside our door in tho inidst of a jumble of broken pump handles and biscuit tins, fragments of chairs, holy pictures, crucifixes, and barbed-wire entanglements, a dead dog dwindling to dust, the hair falling from its skin and tho white bones showing. As we looked onthe thing it moved, its belly heaved as if the animal had gulped in a mouthful of air. Wo stared aghast, and our laughter was most hearty when a rat scurried out of the carcass and sought aafoty in a hole of the adjoining wall. The dog was buried by the "scavenger dogs"—the sanitary men. Four simple lines servo us its epitaph:— Here lies a dog as dcod as dwwl, A sntpsr'e bullet through Its head 1 , Untroubled now by shote and shells, It rots and can do nothing else. The village where I write this is shelled daily;-yesterday three men, two women, and two children, all civilians, were killed.- Hie natives have becomealmost indifferent to shell fire. "Whenshells burst tho soldiers run in for their lives and the women run out for their washing," has become a saying ilithe place. In the villages in the line of war between Souchez and Ypres grange tilings happen and. wonderful sights can be seen