SOUNDS OF PEACE AFTER THE DIN OF WAR ARMISTICE NIGHT IN MONS RETURN OF DEPORTEES

FROM PHILIP GIBBS. WAR CORRESPONDENTS’ HEADQUARTERS. FRANCE, TUESDAY

Last night, for the first time since August in the first year of the war, there was no light of gunfire in the sky, no sudden stabs of flame through the darkness, no long spreading glow above the black trees, where for four years of nights, human beings were being smashed to death. The fires of hell had been put out. It was the beautiful silence of the nights of peace. We did not listen to the dull rumbling of artillery at work, which has been the undertone of all closer sounds for 1,500 nights, nor have there been sudden heartbeats at explosions shaking the earth and the air, nor have we said in whisper to oneself, “Curse those guns!” At 11 o’clock in the morning, the order had gone to all the batteries to cease fire. No more men were to be killed, no more to be mangled, no more to be blinded. The last of the boyhood of the world was reprieved. On the way back from Mons, I listened to this silence, which followed the going down of the sun and heard the rustling of the russet leaves and the little sounds of night in peace, and it seemed as though God gave a benediction to the wounded soul of the world. Other sounds rose from the towns and fields in the yellowing twilight and in the deepening shadow world of the day of armistice. They were sounds of human joy. Men were singing somewhere on the roads, and their voices rang out gladly. Bands were playing, as all day on the way to Mons I had heard their music ahead of the marching columns. Bugles were blowing. In the villages from which the enemy had gone out that morning round about Mons crowds of figures surged in the narrow streets, and English laughter rose above the silvery chatter of women and children.

The British soldiers were still on the march with their guns, and their transport, and their old field cookers, and all along their lines, I heard these men talking to each other gaily, as though something had loosened their tongues and made them garrulous. Motor-cars streaked through the Belgian streets, dodging the traffic, and now and then when night fell rockets were fired from them, and there were gusts of laughter from young officers shooting off Verey pistols into the darkness to celebrate the end of hostilities by this symbol of rising stars, which did not soar so high as their spirits. From dark towns like Tournai and Lille, these rockets rose and burned a little while with white light. Our aviators flew like bats in the dusk, skimming the treetops and gables, doing Puck-like gambles above the tawny sunset, looping and spiralling and falling in steep dives, which looked like death for them until they flattened out and rose again, and they, too, these boys who have been reprieved from the menace that was close to them on every flight, fired flares and rockets, which dropped down to the crowds of French and Flemish people waving to them from below.

TOASTING VICTORY

Late into the night, there were sounds of singing and laughter from open windows in the towns, which had been all shuttered, with the people hiding in their cellars a week ago or less, and British officers sat down to French pianos and romped about the keys and crashed out chords, and led the chorus of men who wanted to sing any old song. In the officers’ clubs, glasses were raised, and someone called a toast, and no one heard more than the names of England, Scotland and France with “victory” as the loudest word, for men had risen from all the tables, and boys were standing on their chairs, and there was the beginning of cheers that lasted five minutes, 10 minutes, longer than that. And some of those who cheered had moist eyes, and were not ashamed of that because of the memories in their hearts for old pals who had gone missing on the night of the armistice. Perhaps the old pals heard these cheers and joined in the toast, for noise of all this gladness of living men rose into the night sky along the length and breadth of all our armies. And in the midst of all this sound of exultation, men had sudden silences, thinking back to the things that have passed.

Yesterday, coming back from Mons, I had no time to write more than a few words describing the best day, but one when our victory shall be sealed by peace. I had dodged a hundred mine-craters blown up by the enemy along all the roads to Mons, and had become entangled in tides of traffic, and had travelled far through liberated country. But I had been determined to get to Mons, and on the day of “cease fire” to go to that town, which by a happy miracle was taken in the last battle, so that the war ended for us where it began, where the old “Contemptibles” withstood the first shock of the German arms. It was worth going to Mons yesterday with this memory in one’s mind, and anyhow because of the wonderful scenes along the roads.

FLOWERS AND FLAGS

With this news I went on, and saw that everywhere the news had gone ahead of me. Soldiers assembled in the fields for morning parade were flinging their steel helmets up and cheering. As they marched through the villages, they shouted out to the civilians “Guerre fini. Boche napoo” and women and children came running to them with autumn flowers, mostly red and white chrysanthemums, and they put them in their tunics and in the straps of their steel helmets. Thousands of flags appeared suddenly in a village where no French or Belgian flag could be shown without fines and imprisonment until that very morning, and every Tommy had a bit of colour at the end of his rifle or stuck through his belt, and every gunteam had a banner floating above its limbers or its guns, and its horses had flowers in their harness. As the endless tides of British infantry and cavalry and artillery and transport moved one way along the road, with all that flutter of flags above them, with the great banners of Belgium and France like flames above them, another tide moved the opposite way, and that had its flags and its banners. It was a pitiful heroic tide of life made up of thousands of civilians who that morning had come back through the German lines. They were the men who had been taken away from hundreds of towns and villages in the wake of the enemy’s retreat, because to the very end, the German command had conscripted this manhood to forced labour and to prevent them from serving their own armies. Then at last yesterday, seeing that their own doom had come, they said to these people in Brussels and other towns behind their lines: “You can go. We want no more of you.”