The Great Sight

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Title:     The Great Sight
Author: Hilaire Belloc [More Titles by Belloc]

All night we had slept on straw in a high barn. The wood of its beams was very old, and the tiles upon the roof were green with age; but there hung from beam to beam, fantastically, a wire caught by nails, and here and there from this wire hung an electric-light bulb. It was a symbol of the time, and the place, and the people. There was no local by-law to forbid such a thing, or if there was, no one dreamt of obeying it.

Just in the first dawn of that September day we went out, my companion and I, at guesswork to hunt in the most amusing kind of hunting, which is the hunting of an army. The lane led through one of those lovely ravines of Picardy which travellers never know (for they only see the plains), and in a little while we thought it wise to strike up the steep bank from the valley on to the bare plateau above, but it was all at random and all guesswork, only we wisely thought that we were nearing the beginning of things, and that on the bare fields of the high flat we should have a greater horizon and a better chance of catching any indications of men or arms.

When we had reached the height the sun had long risen, but it as yet gave no shining and there were no shadows, for a delicate mist hung all about the landscape, though immediately above us the sky was faintly blue.

It was the weirdest of sensations to go for mile after mile over that vast plain, to know that it was cut in regular series by parallel ravines which in all that extended view we could not guess at; to see up to the limits of the plateau the spires of villages and the groups of trees about them, and to know that somewhere in all this there lay concealed a _corps d'armee_--and not to see or hear a soul. The only human being that we saw was a man driving a heavy farm cart very slowly up a side-way just as we came into the great road which has shot dead across this country in one line ever since the Romans built it. As we went along that road, leaving the fields, we passed by many men indeed, and many houses, all in movement with the early morning; and the chalked numbers on the doors, and here and there an empty tin of polishing-paste or an order scrawled on paper and tacked to a wall betrayed the passage of soldiers. But of the army there was nothing at all. Scouting on foot (for that was what it was) is a desperate business, and that especially if you have nothing to tell you whether you will get in touch in five, or ten, or twenty miles.

It was nine o'clock before a clatter of horse-hoofs came up the road behind us. At first my companion and I wondered whether it were the first riders of the Dragoons or Cuirassiers. In that case the advance was from behind us. But very soon, as the sound grew clearer, we heard how few they were, and then there came into view, trotting rapidly, a small escort and two officers with the umpires' badges, so there was nothing doing; but when, half a mile ahead of us on the road, they turned off to the left over plough, we knew that that was the way we must follow too. Before we came to the turning-place, before we left the road to take the fields on the left, there came from far off and on our right the sound of a gun.

It was my companion who heard it first. We strained to hear it again; twice we thought we had caught it, and then again twice we doubted. It is not so easily recognizable a sound as you might think in those great plains cut by islands of high trees and steading walls. The little "75" gun lying low makes a different sound altogether at a distance from the old piece of "90." At any rate there was here no doubt that there were guns to the right and in front of us, and the umpire had gone to the left. We were getting towards the thick, and we had only to go straight on to find out where the front was.

Just as we had so decided and were still pursuing the high road, there came, not half a mile away and again to our right, in a valley below us, that curious sound which is like nothing at all unless it be dumping of flints out of a cart: rifle fire. It cracked and tore in stretches. Then there were little gaps of silence like the gaps in signalling, and then it cracked and tore in stretches again; and then, fitfully, one individual shot and then another would be heard; and, much further off, with little sounds like snaps, the replies began from the hillside beyond the stream. So far so good. Here was contact in the valley below us, and the guns, some way behind and far off northwards, had opened. So we got the hang of it instantly--the front was a sort of a crescent lying roughly north and south, and roughly parallel to the great road, and the real or feigned mass of the advance was on the extreme left of that front. We were in it now, and that anxious and wearing business in all hunting, finding, was over; but we had been on foot six mortal hours before coming across our luck, and more than half the soldiers' day was over. These men had been afoot since three, and certain units on the left had already marched over twenty miles.

After that coming in touch with our business, not only did everything become plain, but the numbers we met, and what I have called "the thick of things," fed us with interest. We passed half the 38th, going down the road singing, to extend the line, and in a large village we came to the other half, slouching about in the traditional fashion of the Service; they had been waiting for an hour. With them, and lined up all along the village street, was one battery, with the drivers dismounted, and all that body were at ease. There were men sitting on the doorsteps of the houses and men trotting to the canteen-wagon or to the village shops to buy food; and there were men reading papers which a pedlar had brought round. Mud and dust had splashed them all; upon some there was a look of great fatigue; they were of all shapes and sizes, and altogether it was the sort of sight you would not see in any other service in the world. It was the sort of sight which so disgusted the Emperor Joseph when he made his little tour to spy out the land before the Revolutionary Wars. It was the sort of sight which made Massenbach before Grandpre marvel whether the French forces were soldiers at all, and the sort of sight which made Valmy inexplicable to the King of Prussia and his staff. It was the sort of sight which eighteen months later still convinced Mack in Tournai that the Duke of York's plan was a plan "of annihilation." It is a trap for judgment is the French service.

So they lounged about and bought bread, and shifted their packs, and so the drivers stood by their horses, and so they all waited and slouched; until there came, not a man with a bugle nor anything with the slightest savour of drama but a little fellow running along thumping in his loose leather leggings, who went up to a Major of Artillery and saluted, and immediately afterwards the Major put his hand up, and then down a village street, from a point which we could not see came a whistle, and the whole of that mass of men began to swarm. The grey-blue coats of the line swung round the corner of the village street; they had yet a few miles before them. Anything more rapid or less in step it would be difficult to conceive. The guns were off at a right angle down the main road, making a prodigious clatter, and at the same time appeared two parties, one of which it was easy to understand, the other not. They were both parties of sappers. The one party had a great roll of wire on a drum, and as quick as you could think they were unreeling it, and as they unreeled it fastening it to eaves, overhanging branches, and to corners of walls, stretching it out forward. It was the field-telephone. The other party came along carrying great beams upon their shoulders, but what they were to do with these beams we did not know.

We followed the tail of the line down into the valley, and all that morning long and past the food time at midday, and so till the sun declined in the afternoon, we went with the 38th in its gradual success from crest to crest. And still the 38th slouched by companies, and mile after mile with checks and halts, and it never seemed to get either less or more tired. The men had had twelve hours of it when they came at last, and we after them, on to the critical position. They had carried (together with all the line to left and to the right of them) a string of villages which crowned the crest of a further plateau, and over this further plateau they were advancing against the main body of the resistance--the other army corps which was set up against ours, to simulate an enemy.

A railway line ran here across the rolling hedgeless fields, and just at the point where my companion and I struck it there was a dip in the land and a high embankment which hid the plain beyond; but from that plain beyond one heard the separate fire of the advancing line in its scattered order. We climbed the embankment, and from its ridge we saw over two miles or more of stubble, the little creeping bunches of the attack. What was resisting, or where it lay, one could only guess. Some hundreds of yards before us to the east, with the sloping sun full on it, a line of thicket, one scattered wood and then another, an imperceptible lifting of the earth here and there marked the opposing firing line. Two pompoms could be spotted exactly, for the flashes were clear through the underwood. And still the tide of the advance continued to flow, and the little groups came up and fed it, one after another and another, in the centre where we were, and far away to the north and right away to the south the countryside was alive with it. The action was beginning to take on something of that final movement and decision which makes the climax of manoeuvres look so great a game. But in a little while that general creeping forward was checked: there were orders coming from the umpires, and a sort of lull fell over each position held. My companion said to me:

"Let us go forward now over the intervening zone and in among Picquart's men, and get well behind their line, and see whether there is a rally or whether before the end of this day they begin to fall back again."

So we did, walking a mile or so until we had long passed their outposts and were behind their forward lines. And standing there, upon a little eminence near a wood, we turned and looked over what we had come, westward towards the sun which was now not far from its setting. Then it was that we saw the last of the Great Sight.

The level light, mellow and already reddening, illumined all that plain strangely, and with the absolute stillness of the air contrasted the opening of the guns which had been brought up to support the renewal of the attack. We saw the isolated woods standing up like islands with low steep cliffs, dotted in a sea of stubble for miles and miles, and first from the cover of one and then from another the advance perpetually, piercing and deploying. As we so watched there buzzed high above us, like a great hornet, a biplane, circling well within our lines, beyond attack from the advance, but overlooking all they concealed behind it. In a few minutes a great Bleriot monoplane like a hawk followed, yet further inwards. The two great birds shot round in an arc, parallel to the firing line, and well behind it, and in a few minutes, that seemed seconds, they were dots to the south and then lost in the air. And perpetually, as the sun declined, Picquart's men were falling back north and south of us and before us, and the advance continued. Group by group we saw it piercing this hedge, that woodland, now occupying a nearer and a nearer roll of land. It was the greatest thing imaginable: this enormous sweep of men, the dead silence of the air, and the comparatively slight contrast of the ceaseless pattering rifle fire and the slight intermittent accompaniment of the advancing batteries; until the sun set and all this human business slackened. Then for the first time one heard bugles, which were a command to cease the game.

I would not have missed that day nor lose the memories of it for anything in the world.

[The end]
Hilaire Belloc's essay: The Great Sight

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