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Arthur Douglas Crease Letters, Diaries and Scrapbooks

Letters from Arthur Douglas Crease of Victoria to his brother Lindley Crease and his mother Sarah Crease; instructions for the offensive of July 26, 1917; a regimental notebook, diaries and scrapbook. Learn more.

*All transcriptions are provided by volunteers, and the accuracy of the transcriptions is not guaranteed. Please be sure to verify the information by viewing the image record, or visiting the BC Archives in person. 

BC Archives MS-0055BC Archives MS-2879

 

 

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THE OBSERVER, SUNDAY, JULY 22, 1917.

THINGS SEEN: FROM FLANDERS TO ALSACE

With even more simplicity than Shakespeare a Spaniard said life is a dream. It is but a deeper dream in this strange time of destroying tumult and calm hearts, when the world, as never before, is under the stilling power of danger. It is all like the biggest, clearest, most convincing, yet inexplicable dream to have been some twenty days on the skirts of Armageddon. Northward I have seen at a few miles distance the small dwindling wraith of Ypres, pale as Ophelia drowned. I have walked over the chaotic earth of Messines and Vimy, wandered over old battlefields of the Somme, and mused amongst innumerable graves. Midway I have been in Rheims and Verdun. Northward I have been on the riven and bleached top of death's own mountain, within an easy stone's throw of the enemy's outposts in the boulders and brushwood just below. And in the reconquered corner of Alsace, within little more than twenty miles of the Rhine, one talked war and poetry with exiled officers, who see in the plain beneath, still in German hands, the very villages or towns where they were born.

If The Observer were a daily journal, I might tell about the twenty days in as many articles, and the rough note-books would furnish matter enough. But it would take us nigh to Christmas, and might seem too much like that celebrated work, "Twenty-one Days in India," by Sir Ali Baba. And there is a dearth of paper, unlike the time when the Empress Catherine told Monsieur Diderot that paper suffers all things; and other questions will not wait. So away with all middle courses. If we cannot have twenty articles, let us do it in one. It is difficult. Though touching great sights and and meanings all the way from Flanders to southernmost Alsace, I must confine myself to miniature impressions like an album of postage stamps.

I.

Once back in London, everything, as in Paris, seems so much more real than the war. Reality seems to end gradually between the sea and the No Man's Land, winding and and zig-zagging for five hundred miles between the rival ditches, sacks, and peep-holes. You burrow dimly through a bank of earth and peer through wooden-framed slits. Or, bent double, yet bumping your iron helmet against against the rugged roof, you wriggle through hewn passages in the living hills, lift a blanket and gaze through window-chinks knocked out of the face of the high rock. Persuaded that you have returned to a state of infancy, you feel like a child a in a camera obscura. You think how the children would enjoy it all if it were a game and not war. You cannot quite believe it. As a rational being you know that everything about you is of prodigious import. Overheard for most part of the time the shells so soar, whistle, rip out their curve, and crash, except when an anti-climax of silence betrays a "dud." Between the two lines this regular unhurried commerce of weight noises is like the organisation of a great business. Experienced anticipation, familiar with the methodical habits of the Boche artillery, remarks that we shall now take refuge in a dug out because the next shell will burst near where we are standing. It does. While waiting until it is safer to to move on, Moet-Chandon appears as abruptly as if it came up out of the rat-hole in the floor-boards which support two beds in the other corner. While you drink - this is Alcace - to the two provinces, to France, to all the Allies, and one more for American intervention - you must - the buzz-zumming of the craft goes on overhead to a racketing obbligato by the Archies. Amongst the woods down there in a secure clean cave where at broad noon a lamp swings above the operating tables but is a wonderful day of summer, the wild flowers as high as your waist in a thick jungle of purple and gold spires and bells and sprays, the bees are as cheery as Pippa, and the chaffinches never stop doing their little song and dance. On another radiant morning, while you are at open-air dejeuner on a historic knoll which is also a heavenly place for a picnic, you see through a screen of branches, and you hear, when you are not looking, the German shells plunging, plunging sullenly into Rheims. It is only twenty minutes' stroll away across corn and vines; and the cathedral amidst the smoke-bursts is a plain as my hand. Every journey on the British and French fronts brings a thousand incredible things like this.

Everybody engaged in Armageddon wear the most natural and best-humoured air in the world. The terror of human faculty and the greatness of the human soul are masked by an affectation of commonplace. There are on all sides bulky and fantastic shapes of war - miles of ponderous motor-lorries, street omnibuses top-heavy with troops, ranges of big guns disguised by leaves and matting and every amusing device of camouflage like fancy wigwams at a fair. Never was such sport to cheat the devil. Hippopotamus-herds of tanks are at graze in the open air or stand side by side nosing in the hedges. The creatures always seem alive. I swear they are secretly handsome, like those fortunate ugly men whom women are said to cherish. And on each side of No Man's Land the armies are invisible except to the single spies and flocks of aviators who now fly just as naturally as though man were born a bird. Hosts of troops like perdu in their furrows and holes. Unlike the sluggard, they have gone to the and, and have lived with that industrious exemplar for three years

You and I, when we have got to the outer edge of the front at last, can by no means succeed in seeing a Boche. Even when we are quite near to him we have to take it on faith that he is there. Myriads in uniform lie doggo

BC Archives, MS-0055 Box 15 File 2 / CREASE FAMILY / Letters from Arthur Douglas Crease to his brother, Lindley Crease, 1917.

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