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Title: Vive la France!
Author: E. Alexander Powell
Release date: November 24, 2025 [eBook #77321]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1915
Credits: Richard Tonsing, Peter Becker, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VIVE LA FRANCE! ***
VIVE LA FRANCE!
[Illustration:
_From a photograph copyright by M. Rol._
“High-explosive!”
“A geyser of earth and smoke shot high into the air. Then an explosion
which was brother to an earthquake.”
]
VIVE LA FRANCE!
BY
E. ALEXANDER POWELL
WAR CORRESPONDENT OF _THE NEW YORK WORLD_, _THE LONDON DAILY MAIL_, AND
_SCRIBNER’S MAGAZINE_, WITH THE ALLIED ARMIES
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1915
COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Published December, 1915
[Illustration: [Logo]]
TO
FRANCE
WHOSE COURAGE, SERENITY, AND
SACRIFICES, IN A CONFLICT WHICH SHE
DID NOTHING TO PROVOKE, HAVE WON HER
THE SYMPATHY, RESPECT AND ADMIRATION
OF THE WORLD
AN ACKNOWLEDGMENT
For the assistance they have given me, and for the innumerable
kindnesses they have shown me, I welcome this opportunity of expressing
my thanks and appreciation to his Excellency Jean Adrien Antoine Jules
Jusserand, French ambassador to the United States; to Lord Northcliffe,
owner of _The Times_ and _The Daily Mail_; to Ralph Pulitzer, Esq.,
president, and C. M. Lincoln, Esq., managing editor, of _The New York
World_; to Major-General Ryerson, of the Canadian Overseas Contingent;
to Captain Count Gérard de Ganay, who was my companion from end to end
of the western battle-line; to Messrs. Ponsot, Alexis Leger, and Henri
Hoppenot, of the Bureau de la Presse; to Lieutenant-Colonel Spencer
Cosby, military attaché of the American embassy in Paris; to Captain
John W. Barker, of the American Military Mission in France; to Honorable
Walter V. R. Berry; to Charles Prince, Esq., Herbert Corey, Esq.,
Lincoln Eyre, Esq., and William Philip Simms, Esq., who on a score of
occasions have proved themselves my friends; and finally to James Hazen
Hyde, Esq., whose kindness I can never fully repay. To each of these
gentlemen I owe a debt of gratitude which I shall not forget.
E. ALEXANDER POWELL.
HÔTEL DE CRILLON, PARIS,
November, 1915.
CONTENTS
PAGE
ACKNOWLEDGMENT vii
CHAPTER
I. IN THE FIELD WITH THE FRENCH 1
II. ON THE BRITISH BATTLE-LINE 56
III. CAMPAIGNING IN THE VOSGES 97
IV. THE RETAKING OF ALSACE 120
V. THE FIGHTING IN CHAMPAGNE 154
VI. THE CONFLICT IN THE CLOUDS 190
VII. THE RED BADGE OF MERCY 215
ILLUSTRATIONS
“High-explosive!” │ _Frontispiece_
│ FACING PAGE
French trenches in the sand-dunes of the Belgian littoral 4
The watch on the Aisne 5
The taking of Neuville St. Vaast 12
French infantry going into action 13
Dragoons going into action 14
The effect of shrapnel from a French “seventy-five” on a German
battery 15
French 155-millimetre gun shelling the German trenches on the Aisne 18
French artillery officers, in an observatory on the Aisne, watching
the effect of shell-fire on the German trenches 19
In an underground first-aid station 30
Zouaves carrying a German position in the Belgian sand-dunes by
storm 31
In the Argonne 38
An observing officer directing the fire of a French battery three
miles behind him 39
The mass before the battle 54
What a 38-centimetre shell, fired from a gun twenty-three miles
away, did in Dunkirk 55
London buses at the front 64
British field-kitchens on the march in Flanders 65
Machine-gun squad wearing masks as a protection against the
asphyxiating gas with which the Germans precede their attacks 84
A British battery in action 85
───────────────────────────────────────────────────────┬───────────────
“Bodies, long months dead, rotting amid the wire │_Group_
entanglements” │ 86
“Imagine what it must be like to sleep in a hole in the│
earth, into which you have to crawl on all fours, │ „
like an animal into its lair” │ „
───────────────────────────────────────────────────────┴───────────────
French high-explosive shells bursting on the German trenches 87
In a bomb-proof gun-pit 98
French trenches on the Somme 99
In the French trenches on the Yser 100
Campaigning in the Vosges 101
What the Germans did to the church at Ribécourt 106
On the summit of the Vosges 107
On the Lac Noir 114
The penalty for treason 115
Troglodyte dwellings in Alsace 124
The straggling columns of unkempt, unshaven men were in striking
contrast to the helmeted giants on gigantic horses who guarded
them 125
In the trenches in Alsace 136
Convoy of German prisoners guarded by Moroccan Spahis 137
A French smoke bomb 140
With hand-grenades in the trenches 141
Chevaux-de-frise and movable entanglements 150
Taking precautions against a gas attack 151
The battle-field of Champagne 154
Bringing in the wounded during the battle of Champagne 155
The battle of Champagne 166
The battle-field of Champagne, showing the French high-explosive
shells bursting on the German trenches 167
Fighting in a quarrel that is not his own 172
The first-line German trenches captured by the French in Champagne 173
This crater, seventy feet deep and twice that in diameter, was
caused by the explosion of a mine. In the terrific blast five
hundred Germans perished 174
German officers captured during the battle of Champagne 175
The price of victory 176
Instruction against gas attacks 177
“Men were at work rolling up the barbed wire in the captured German
entanglements” 180
The thousands upon thousands of empty brass shell-cases with which
the battle-fields are strewn are collected and sent back to the
factory for reloading 181
Mounted on the German trench walls were revolving steel turrets
containing quick-firing guns 182
“Brown-skinned men from North Africa in turbans and burnooses” 183
Motor-buses with wire-netting tops filled with carrier pigeons 184
German prisoners came by, carrying on their shoulders stretchers on
which lay the stiff, stark forms of dead men 185
Lunéville from an aeroplane 200
French antiaircraft gun in action against a German aeroplane 201
When the chickens come home to roost 206
Antiaircraft guns, posted outside the towns, are ready to give a
warm reception to an aerial intruder 207
“Two soldiers lifted him onto a stretcher and carried him between
interminable walls of brown earth to the dressing-station” 236
Unloading wounded at a hospital in northern France 237
Red Cross men getting wounded out of a bombarded town in Flanders 244
Bringing in the harvest of the guns 245
“Every house and farmyard for miles around was filled with wounded
and still they came streaming in” 250
“The paths of glory lead——” 251
_All illustrations but those specifically acknowledged were taken by the
Photographic Service of the French Armies and are here reproduced by
special permission._
VIVE LA FRANCE!
I
IN THE FIELD WITH THE FRENCH
Before going to France I was told that the French were very stingy with
their war. I was told that the only fighting I would be permitted to see
would be on moving-picture screens. I was assured that war
correspondents were about as welcome as the small-pox. But I found that
I had been misinformed. So far as I am concerned they have been as
generous with their war as a Kentucky colonel is with mint-juleps. They
have, in fact, been so willing to let me get close up to where things
were happening that, on one or two occasions, it looked as though I
would never see the Statue of Liberty again. I do not wish to give the
impression, however, that these facilities for flirting with sudden
death are handed out promiscuously to all who apply for them. To obtain
me permission to see the French fighting machine in action required the
united influence of three Cabinet Ministers, a British peer, two
ambassadors, a score of newspapers—and the patience of Job.
Unless you have attempted to pierce it, it is impossible to comprehend
the marvellous veil of secrecy which the Allied Governments have cast
over their military operations. I wonder if you, who will read this,
realize that, though the German trenches can be reached by motor-car in
ninety minutes from the Rue de la Paix, it is as impossible for an
unauthorized person to get within sound, much less within sight, of them
as it would be for a tourist to stroll into Buckingham Palace and have a
friendly chat with King George. The good old days in Belgium, when the
correspondents went flitting light-heartedly about the zone of
operations on bicycles and in taxicabs and motor-cars, have passed,
never to return. Imagine a battle in which more men were engaged and the
results of which were more momentous than Waterloo, Gettysburg, and
Sedan combined—a battle in which Europe lost more men than the North
lost in the whole of the Civil War—being fought at, let us say, New
Haven, Conn., in December, and the people of New York and Boston not
knowing the details of that battle, the names of the regiments engaged,
the losses, or, indeed, the actual result, until the following March. It
is, in fact, not the slightest exaggeration to say that the people of
Europe knew more about the wars that were fought on the South African
veldt and on the Manchurian steppes than they do about this, the
greatest of all wars, which is being fought literally at their front
doors. So that when a correspondent does succeed in penetrating the veil
of mystery, when he obtains permission to see with his own eyes
something of what is happening on that five-hundred-mile-long
slaughter-house and cesspool combined which is called “the front,” he
has every excuse for self-congratulation.
When the Ministry of War had reluctantly issued me the little yellow
card, with my photograph pasted on it, which, so far as this war is
concerned, is the equivalent of Aladdin’s lamp and the magic carpet put
together, and I had become for the time being the guest of the nation,
my path was everywhere made smooth before me. I was ciceroned by a
staff-officer in a beautiful sky-blue uniform, and other officers were
waiting to explain things to me in the various divisions through which
we passed. We travelled by motor-car, with a pilot-car ahead and a
baggage-car behind, and we went so fast that it took two people to tell
about it, one to shout, “Here they come!” and another, “There they go!”
[Illustration:
French trenches in the sand-dunes of the Belgian littoral.
Here begins that four-hundred-mile-long line of trenches which
stretches across Europe like a monstrous and deadly snake.
]
Leaving Paris, white and beautiful in the spring sunshine, behind us, we
tore down the historic highway which still bears the title of the Route
de Flandre, down which countless thousands of other men had hastened, in
bygone centuries, to the fighting in the north. The houses of the city
thinned and disappeared, and we came to open fields across which
writhed, like monstrous yellow serpents, the zigzag lines of trenches.
The whole countryside from the Aisne straightaway to the walls of Paris
is one vast network of trenches and barbed-wire entanglements, and, even
in the improbable event of the enemy breaking through the present line,
he would be little better off than he was before. The fields between the
trenches were being ploughed by women, driving sleek white oxen, but the
furrows were scarcely ever straight, for every few yards they would turn
aside to avoid a turf-covered mound surmounted by a rude cross and a
scarlet kepi. For half a hundred miles this portion of France is one
vast cemetery, for it was here that von Kluck made his desperate attempt
to break through to Paris, and it was here that Joffre, in the greatest
battle of all time, drove the German legions back across the Marne and
ended their dream of entering the French capital. We whirled through
villages whose main streets are lined with the broken, blackened shells
of what had once been shops and dwellings. At once I felt at home, for
with this sort of thing I had grown only too familiar in Belgium during
the earlier days of the war. But here the Germans were either careless
or in a hurry, for they had left many buildings standing. In Belgium
they made a more finished job of it. Nothing better illustrates the
implicit confidence which the French people have in their army, and in
its ultimate success, than the fact that in all these towns through
which we passed the people were hard at work rebuilding their shattered
homes, though the strokes of their hammers were echoed by the sullen
boom of German cannon. To me there was something approaching the sublime
in these impoverished peasants turning with stout hearts and smiling
faces to the rebuilding of their homes and the retilling of their
fields. To these patient, toil-worn men and women I lift my hat in
respect and admiration. They, no less than their sons and husbands and
brothers in the trenches, are fighting the battles of France.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph copyright by M. Rol._
The watch on the Aisne.
“On that four-hundred-mile-long slaughter-house which is called ‘the
front.’”
]
As we approached the front the traditional brick-red trousers and kepis
still worn by the second-line men gave way to the new uniform of
silvery-blue—the color of early morning. There were soldiers everywhere.
Every town and hamlet through which we passed was alive with them. The
highways were choked with troops of all arms; cuirassiers, with their
mediæval steel helmets and breastplates linen-covered; dragoons, riding
under thickets of gleaming lances; zouaves in short blue jackets and
baggy red breeches; spahis in turbans and Senegalese in tarbooshes and
Moroccans in burnooses; _chasseurs d’Afrique_ in sky-blue and scarlet;
infantry of the line in all the shades of blue that can be produced by
dyes and by the weather; mile-long strings of motor transports;
field-batteries; pontoon trains; balloon corps; ambulances with staring
scarlet crosses painted on their canvas covers—all the nuts and bolts
and springs and screws which go to compose what has become, after months
of testing and improvements, as efficient a killing machine as the world
has ever seen. And it is, I am convinced, eventually going to do the
business. It struck me as having all, or nearly all, of the merits of
the German organization _with the human element added_.
When only a short distance in the rear of the firing-line we left the
car and proceeded on foot down a winding country road which debouched
quite suddenly into a great, saucer-shaped valley. Its gentle slopes
were checkered with the brown squares of fresh-ploughed fields and the
green ones of sprouting grain. From beyond a near-by ridge came the
mutter of artillery, and every now and then there appeared against the
turquoise sky what looked like a patch of cotton-wool but was in reality
bursting shrapnel. The far end of the valley was filled with what
appeared at first glance to be a low-hanging cloud of gray-blue mist,
but which, as we drew nearer, resolved itself into dense masses of
troops drawn up in review formation—infantry at the right, cavalry at
the left, and guns in the centre. I had heard much of the invisible
qualities of the new field uniform of the French Army, but I had
heretofore believed it to be greatly inferior to the German greenish
gray. But I have changed my mind. At three hundred yards twenty thousand
men could scarcely be distinguished from the landscape. The only
colorful note was struck by the dragoons, who still retain their
suicidal uniform of scarlet breeches, blue tunic, and the helmet with
its horse-tail plume, though a concession has been made to practicality
by covering the latter with tan linen. The majority of the French
woollen mills being in the region held by the Germans, it has been
possible to provide only a portion of the army with the new uniform. As
a result of this shortage of cloth, thousands of soldiers have had
recourse to the loose corduroy trousers common among the peasantry,
while for the territorials almost any sort of a jacket will pass muster
provided it is of a neutral color and has the regimental numerals on the
collar. Those soldiers who can afford to provide their own uniforms
almost invariably have them made of khaki, cut after the more practical
British pattern, with cap-covers of the same material. Owing to this
latitude in the matter of clothing, the French army during the first
year of the war presented an extraordinarily variegated and nondescript
appearance, though this lack of uniformity is gradually being remedied.
At three o’clock a rolling cloud of dust suddenly appeared on the road
from Compiègne, and out of it tore a long line of military cars,
travelling at express-train speed. All save one were in war coats of
elephant gray. The exception was a low-slung racer painted a
canary-yellow. Tearing at top speed up the valley, it came to a sudden
stop before the centre of the mile-long line of soldiery. A mile of
fighting men stiffened to attention; a mile of rifle barrels formed a
hedge of burnished steel; the drums gave the long roll and the thirteen
ruffles; the colors swept the ground; the massed bands burst into the
splendid strains of the _Marseillaise_, and a little man,
gray-mustached, gray-bearded, inclined to stoutness, but with the
unmistakable carriage of a soldier, descended from the yellow car and,
followed by a staff in uniforms of light blue, of dark blue, of tan, of
green, of scarlet, walked briskly down the motionless lines. I was
having the unique privilege of seeing a President of France reviewing a
French army almost within sight of the invader and actually within sound
of his guns. It was under almost parallel circumstances that, upward of
half a century ago, on the banks of the Rappahannock, another President
of another mighty republic reviewed another army, which was likewise
fighting the battles of civilization.
Raymond Poincaré is by no means an easy man to describe. He is the only
French President within my memory who looks the part of ruler. In his
person are centred, as it were, the aspirations of France, for he is a
native of Lorraine. He was a captain of Alpine Chasseurs in his younger
days and shows the result of his military training in his erect and
vigorous bearing. Were you to see him apart from his official
surroundings you might well take him, with his air of energy and
authority, for a great employer or a captain of industry. Take twenty
years from the age of Andrew Carnegie, trim his beard to a point, throw
his shoulders back and his chest out, and you will have as good an idea
as I can give you of the war-time President of France.
At the President’s right walked a thickset, black mustached man whose
rather shabby blue serge suit and broad-brimmed black slouch hat were in
strange contrast to the brilliant uniforms about him. Yet this man in
the wrinkled clothes, with the unmilitary bearing, exercised more power
than the President and all the officers who followed him; a word from
him could make or break generals, could move armies; he was Millerand,
War Minister of France.
After passing down the lines and making a minute inspection of the
soldiers and their equipment, the President took his stand in front of
the grouped standards, and the officers and men who were to be decorated
for gallantry ranged themselves before him, some with bandaged heads,
some with their arms in slings, one hobbling painfully along on
crutches. Stepping forward, as the Minister of War read off their names
from a list, the President pinned to the tunic of each man the coveted
bit of ribbon and enamel and kissed him on either cheek, while the
troops presented arms and the massed bands played the anthem. On general
principles I should think that the President would rebel at having to
kiss so many men, even though they are heroes and have been freshly
shaved for the occasion.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph by Meurasse._
The taking of Neuville St. Vaast.
French infantry engaged in house-to-house fighting.
]
I might mention in passing that the decoration most highly prized by the
French soldier is not, as is popularly supposed, the Legion of Honor,
which, like the Iron Cross, has greatly depreciated because of its
wholesale distribution (it is the policy of the German military
authorities, I believe, to give the Iron Cross to one in every twenty
men), but the Médaille Militaire, which, like the Victoria Cross and the
Prussian decoration, Pour le Mérite, is awarded only for deeds of the
most conspicuous bravery. The Médaille Militaire, moreover, can be won
only by privates and non-commissioned officers or by generals, though
the Croix de Guerre, the little bronze cross which signifies that the
wearer has been mentioned in despatches, is awarded to all ranks and
occasionally to women, among the _décorées_ being Madame Alexis Carrel,
the wife of the famous surgeon.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph copyright by M. Rol._
French infantry going into action.
“These were the famous _poilus_, the bearded ones, ... a moving cloud
of grayish blue under shifting, shimmering, slanting lines of
steel.”
]
The picturesque business of recognizing the brave being concluded, the
review of the troops began. Topping a rise, they swept down upon us in
line of column—a moving cloud of grayish blue under shifting,
shimmering, slanting lines of steel. Company after company, regiment
after regiment, brigade after brigade, swept past, businesslike as a
locomotive, implacable as a trip-hammer, irresistible as a steam-roller,
moving with mechanical precision to the exultant strains of the march of
the _Sambre et Meuse_. These were the famous _poilus_, the bearded ones,
the men with hair on their chests. Their uniforms were not immaculate.
They were faded by wind and rain and sometimes stained with blood. On
their boots was the mud of the battle-fields along the Aisne. Fresh from
the trenches though they were, they were as pink-cheeked as athletes,
and they marched with the buoyancy of men in high spirits and in perfect
health. Here before me was a section of that wall of steel which stands
unbroken between Western Europe and the Teutonic hordes. Hard on the
heels of the infantry came the guns—the famous “75’s”—a score of
batteries, well horsed and well equipped, at a spanking trot. A little
space to let the foot and guns get out of the way, and then we heard the
wild, shrill clangor of the cavalry trumpets pealing the charge. Over
the rise they came, helmeted giants on gigantic horses. The earth shook
beneath their gallop. The scarlet breeches of the riders gleamed fiery
in the sunlight; the horsehair plumes of the helmets floated out behind;
the upraised sword-blades formed a forest of glistening steel. As they
went thundering past us in a whirlwind of dust and color they rose in
their stirrups, and high above the clank of steel and the trample of
hoofs came the deep-mouthed Gallic battle-cry: “_Vive la France! Vive la
France!_”.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph by Captain John W. Barker, U. S. A._
Dragoons going into action.
“We heard the wild, shrill clangor of the cavalry trumpets pealing the
charge.... Over the rise they came, helmeted giants on gigantic
horses.”
]
To have had a battery of French artillery go into action and pour a
torrent of steel-cased death upon the enemy’s trenches for one’s special
benefit is, so far as I am aware, a courtesy which the General Staff has
seen fit to extend to no other correspondent. That the guns were of the
new 105-millimetre model, which are claimed to be as much superior to
the “75’s” as the latter are to all other field artillery, made the
exhibition all the more interesting. The road which we had to take in
order to reach this particular battery leads for several miles across an
open plateau within full view of the German positions. As we approached
this danger zone the staff-officer who accompanied me spoke to our
driver, who opened up the throttle, and we took that stretch of exposed
highway as a frightened cat takes the top of a backyard fence. “Merely a
matter of precaution,” explained my companion. “Sometimes when the
Germans see a car travelling along this road they send a few shells
across in the hope of getting a general. There’s no use in taking
unnecessary chances.” Though I didn’t say so, it struck me that I was in
considerably more danger from the driving than I was from a German
shell.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph copyright by M. Rol._
The effect of shrapnel from a French “seventy-five” on a German
battery.
]
Leaving the car in the shelter of the ridge on which the battery was
posted, we ascended the steep hillside on foot. I noticed that the slope
we were traversing was pitted with miniature craters, any one of which
was large enough to hold a barrel. “It might be as well to hurry across
here,” the artillery officer who was acting as our guide casually
remarked. “Last evening the Germans dropped eight hundred shells on this
field that we are crossing, and one never knows, of course, when they
will do it again.”
Part way up the slope we entered what appeared to be a considerable
grove of young trees. Upon closer inspection, however, I discovered that
it was not a natural grove but an artificial one, hundreds of saplings
having been brought from elsewhere and set upright in the ground. Soon I
saw the reason, for in a little cleared space in the heart of this
imitation wood, mounted on what looked not unlike gigantic step-ladders,
were two field-guns with their muzzles pointing skyward. “These guns are
for use against aircraft,” explained the officer in charge. “The German
airmen are constantly trying to locate our batteries, and in order to
discourage their inquisitiveness we’ve put these guns in position.” The
guns were of the regulation _soixante-quinze_ pattern, but so elevated
that the wheels were at the height of a man’s head from the ground, the
barrels thus being inclined at such an acute angle that, by means of a
sort of turntable on which the platforms were mounted, the gunners were
able to sweep the sky. “This,” said the artillery officer, calling my
attention to a curious-looking instrument, “is the telemeter. By means
of it we are able to obtain the exact altitude of the aircraft at which
we are firing, and thus know at what elevation to set our guns. It is as
simple as it is ingenious. There are two apertures, one for each eye. In
one the aircraft is seen right side up; in the other it is inverted. By
turning this thumbscrew the images are brought together. When one is
superimposed exactly over the other the altitude is shown in metres on
this dial below. Then we open on the airman with shrapnel.” Since these
guns were placed in position the German air-scouts have found it
extremely hazardous to play peek-a-boo from the clouds.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph copyright by M. Rol._
French 155-millimetre gun shelling the German trenches on the Aisne.
“The guns were so ingeniously masked that fifty feet away one could
detect nothing about that apparently innocent clump of tangled
vegetation to suggest that it concealed an amazing quantity of
potential death.”
]
A few minutes’ walk along the ridge brought us to the battery of 105’s,
which was the real object of our visit. The guns were not posted on the
summit of the ridge, as a layman might suppose, but a quarter of a mile
behind it, so that the ridge itself, a dense forest, and the river Aisne
intervened between the battery and the German position. The guns were
sunk in pits so ingeniously masked with shrubs and branches that the
keenest-eyed airman, flying low overhead, would have seen nothing to
arouse his suspicions. Fifty feet away one could detect nothing about
that apparently innocent clump of tangled vegetation to suggest that it
concealed an amazing quantity of potential death. This battery had been
here through the winter, and the gunners had utilized the time, which
hung heavy on their hands, in making themselves comfortable and in
beautifying their surroundings. With the taste and ingenuity so
characteristic of the French, they had transformed their battery into a
sylvan grotto. The earthen walls of the gun-pits were kept in place by
deftly woven wattles, and the paths leading to them had borders of white
sand, on which were patriotic mottoes in colored pebbles. Scattered
about were ingeniously constructed rustic seats and tables. Within ten
feet of one of the great gray guns a bed of hyacinths made the air heavy
with their fragrance. The next gun-pit was banked about with yellow
crocus. Hanging from the arbor which shielded another of the steel
monsters were baskets made of moss and bark, in which were growing
violets. At a rustic table, under a sort of pergola, a soldier was
painting a picture in water-colors. It was a good picture. I saw it
afterward on exhibition in the Salon des Humoristes in Paris. A few
yards back of each gun-emplacement were cave-like shelters, dug in the
hillside, in which the men sleep, and in which they take refuge during
the periodic shell-storms which visit them. Those into which I went were
warm and dry and not at all uncomfortable. Over the entrance to one of
these troglodyte dwellings was a sign announcing that it was the Villa
des Roses.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph copyright by M. Rol._
French artillery officers, in an observatory on the Aisne, watching
the effect of shell-fire on the German trenches.
“From these secret _observatoires_ the French observers keep an
unceasing watch on the movements of the enemy and, by means of
telephones, direct and control the fire of their own batteries with
incredible accuracy.”
]
“Do the Germans know the position of these guns?” I asked the battery
commander.
“Not exactly, though they have, of course, a pretty general idea.”
“Then you are not troubled by German shells,” I remarked.
“Indeed we are,” was the answer. “Though they have not been able to
locate us exactly, they know that we are somewhere at the back of this
ridge, so every now and then they attempt to clear us out by means of
progressive fire. That is, they start in at the summit, and by gradually
increasing the elevation of their guns, systematically sweep the entire
reverse slope of the ridge, so that some of their shells are almost
certain to drop in on us. Do you appreciate, however, that, though we
have now been in this same position for nearly six months, though not a
day goes by that we are not under fire, and though a number of my men
have been killed and wounded, we have never seen the target at which we
are firing and we have never seen a German soldier?”
A ten-minute walk across the open tableland which lay in front of the
battery, and which forms the summit of the ridge, then through a dense
bit of forest, and we found ourselves at the entrance to one of those
secret _observatoires_ from which the French observers keep an unceasing
watch on the movements of the enemy, and by means of telephones, control
the fire of their own batteries with incredible accuracy. This
particular _observatoire_ occupied the mouth of a cave on the
precipitous hillside above the Aisne, being rendered invisible by a
cleverly arranged screen of bushes. Pinned to the earthen walls were
contour maps and fire-control charts; powerful telescopes mounted on
tripods brought the German trenches across the river so close to us
that, had a German soldier been incautious enough to show himself, we
could almost have seen the spike upon his helmet; and a military
telephonist with receivers clamped to his ears sat at a switchboard and
pushed buttons or pulled out pegs just as the telephone girls do in New
York hotels. The chief difference was that this operator, instead of
ordering a bellhop to take ice-water and writing-paper to Room 511,
would tell the commander of a battery, four or five or six miles away,
to send over to a German trench, which he would designate by number, a
few rounds of shrapnel or high explosive.
An officer in a smart uniform of dark blue with the scarlet facings of
the artillery beckoned to me to come forward, and indicated a small
opening in the screen of branches.
“Look through there,” he said, “but please be extremely careful not to
show yourself or to shake the branches. That hillside opposite us is
dotted with the enemy’s _observatoires_, just as this hillside is dotted
with ours, and they are constantly sweeping this ridge with powerful
glasses in the hope of spotting us and shelling us out. Thus far they’ve
not been able to locate us. We’ve had better luck, however. We’ve
located two of their fire-control stations, and put them out of
business.”
As I was by no means anxious to have a storm of shrapnel bursting about
my head, I was careful not to do anything which might attract the
attention of a German with a telescope glued to his eye. Peering
cautiously through the opening in the screen of bushes, I found myself
looking down upon the winding course of the Aisne; to the southwest I
could catch a glimpse of the pottery roofs of Soissons, while from the
farther bank of the river rose the gentle slopes which formed the
opposite side of the river valley. These slopes were everywhere slashed
and scarred by zigzag lines of yellow which I knew to be the German
trenches. But, though I knew that those trenches sheltered an invading
army, not a sign of life was to be seen. Barring a few cows grazing
contentedly in a pasture, the landscape was absolutely deserted. There
was something strangely oppressive and uncanny about this great stretch
of fertile countryside, dotted here and there with white-walled cottages
and clumps of farm buildings, but with not a single human being to be
seen. On the other side of the opposite ridge I knew that the German
batteries were posted, just as the French guns were stationed out of
sight at the back of the ridge on which I stood. This artillery warfare
is, after all, only a gigantic edition of the old-fashioned game of
hide-and-seek. The chief difference being that when you catch sight of
your opponent, instead of saying politely, “I see you!” you try to kill
him with a three-inch shell.
A soldier set a tripod in position and on it carefully adjusted a
powerful telescope. The colonel motioned me to look through it, and
suddenly the things that had looked like sinuous yellow lines became
recognizable as marvellously constructed earthworks.
“Now,” said the colonel, “focus your glass on that trench just above the
ruined farmhouse and I will show you what our gunners can do.” After
consulting a chart with innumerable radiating blue and scarlet lines
which was pinned to a drafting-table, and making some hasty calculations
with a pencil, he gave a few curt orders to a junior officer who sat at
a telephone switchboard with receivers clamped to his ears. The young
officer spoke some cabalistic figures into the transmitter and concluded
with the order: “_Tir rapide._”
“Now, Monsieur Powell,” called the colonel, “watch the trenches.” A
moment later, from somewhere behind the ridge at the back of us, came in
rapid succession six splitting crashes—_bang! bang! bang! bang! bang!
bang!_ A fraction of a second later I saw six puffs of black smoke
suddenly appear against one of the yellow lines on the distant hillside;
six fountains of earth shot high into the air.
“Right into the trenches!” exclaimed the colonel, who was kneeling
beside me with his glasses glued to his eyes. “Watch once more.” Again
six splitting crashes, six distant puffs of smoke, and, floating back to
us a moment later, six muffled detonations.
“The battery that has just fired is four miles from those trenches,”
remarked the colonel casually. “Not so bad, eh?”
“It’s marvellous,” I answered, but all the time I was wondering how many
lives had been snuffed out for my benefit that morning on the distant
hillside, how many men with whom I have no quarrel had been maimed for
life, how many women had been left husbandless, how many children
fatherless.
“I do not wish to hasten your departure, Monsieur Powell,” apologized
the colonel, “but if you wish to get back to your car without annoyance,
I think that you had better be starting. We’ve stirred up the Boches,
and at any moment now their guns may begin to answer.”
He knew what he was talking about, did that colonel. In fact, we had
delayed our departure too long, for just as we reached the edge of the
wood, and started across the open plateau which crowns the summit,
something hurtled through the air above the tree-tops with a sound
between a moan and a snarl and exploded with a crash like a thousand
cannon crackers set off together a few yards in front of us. Before the
echoes of the first had time to die away came another and yet another.
They burst to the right of us, to the left of us, seemingly all around
us. We certainly had stirred up the Germans. For a few minutes we were
in a very warm corner, and I am no stranger to shell-fire, either. At
first we decided to make a dash for it across the plateau, but a shell
which burst in the undergrowth not thirty feet ahead induced us to
change our minds, and we precipitately retreated to the nearest
bomb-proof. The next half-hour we spent snugly and securely several feet
below the surface of the earth, while shrapnel whined overhead like
bloodhounds seeking their prey. Have you ever heard shrapnel by any
chance? No? Well, it sounds as much as anything else like a winter gale
howling through the branches of a pine-tree. It is a moan, a groan, a
shriek, and a wail rolled into one, and when the explosion comes it
sounds as though some one had touched off a stick of dynamite under a
grand piano. And it is not particularly cheering to know that the ones
you hear do not harm you, and that it is the ones you do not have time
to hear that send you to the cemetery. The French artillery officers
tell me that the German ammunition has noticeably deteriorated of late.
Well, perhaps. Still, I hadn’t noticed it. It was thirty minutes before
the storm of shrapnel slackened and it was safe to start for the car. We
had a mile of open field to cross with shells still occasionally
falling. I felt like a man wearing a silk hat who has just passed a gang
of boys engaged in making snowballs. In a lifetime largely made up of
interesting experiences, that exhibition of French gunnery will always
stand out as one of the most interesting things I have ever seen. But
all the way back to headquarters I kept wondering about those men in the
trenches where the shells had fallen, and about the women and children
who are waiting and watching and praying for them over there across the
Rhine.
I had expressed a wish to visit Soissons, and, upon communicating with
division headquarters, permission was granted and the necessary orders
issued. Before we started, however, I was told quite frankly that the
military authorities accepted no responsibility for the consequences of
the proposed excursion, for, though the town was in the possession of
the French, it was under almost constant bombardment by the Germans. In
order to get the setting of the picture clearly in your mind, you must
picture two parallel ranges of hills, separated by a wonderfully fertile
valley, perhaps three miles in width, down which meanders, with many
twists and hairpin turns, the silver ribbon which is the Aisne. On its
north bank, at a gentle bend in the river, stands the quaint old town of
Soissons, so hoary with antiquity that its earlier history is lost in
the mists of tradition. Of its normal population of fifteen thousand,
when I was there only a few score remained, and those only because they
had no other place to go.
A sandstone ridge which rises abruptly from the south bank of the river
directly opposite Soissons was held by the French, and from its shelter
their batteries spat unceasing defiance at the Germans, under General
von Heeringen, whose trenches lined the heights on the other side of the
river and immediately back of the town. From dawn to dark and often
throughout the night, the screaming messengers of death crisscrossed
above the red-tiled roofs of Soissons and served to make things
interesting for the handful of inhabitants who remained. Every now and
then the German gunners, apparently for no reason save pure deviltry,
would drop a few shells into the middle of the town. They argued, no
doubt, that it would keep the townsfolk from becoming ennuied and give
them something to occupy their minds.
The ridge on the French side of the river is literally honeycombed with
quarries, tunnels, and caverns, many of these subterranean chambers
being as large and as curiously formed as the grottoes in the Mammoth
Cave. Being weather-proof as well as shell-proof, the French had turned
them to excellent account, utilizing them for barracks, ammunition
stores, fire-control stations, hospitals, and even stables. In fact, I
can recall few stranger sights than that of a long line of helmeted
horsemen, comprising a whole squadron of dragoons, disappearing into the
mouth of one of these caverns like a gigantic snake crawling into its
lair.
Leaving the car three miles from the outskirts of Soissons, we made our
way through dense undergrowth up a hillside until we came quite
unexpectedly upon the yawning mouth of a tunnel, which, I surmised,
passed completely under the backbone of the ridge. Groping our way for
perhaps an eighth of a mile through inky blackness, we suddenly emerged,
amid a blinding glare of sunlight, into just such another observing
station as we had visited that morning farther up the Aisne. This
_observatoire_, being in the mouth of the tunnel, could not be seen from
above, while a screen of branches and foliage concealed it from the
German observers across the river. The officer in command at this point
was anxious to give us a demonstration of the accuracy with which his
gunners could land on the German solar plexus, but when he learned that
we were going into the town he changed his mind.
“They’ve been quiet all day,” he explained, “and if you are going across
the river it’s just as well not to stir them up. You’ll probably get a
little excitement in any event, for the Boches usually shell the town
for an hour or so at sunset before knocking off for supper. We call it
‘The Evening Prayer.’”
[Illustration:
In an underground first-aid station.
The caves and grottoes in the cliffs along the Aisne are utilized for
first-aid dressing-stations.
]
Slipping through an opening in the screen of foliage which masked the
_observatoire_, we found ourselves at the beginning of a _boyau_, or
communication trench, which led diagonally down the face of the hillside
to the river. Down this we went, sometimes on hands and knees and always
stooping, for as long as we were on the side of the hill we were within
sight of the German positions, and to have shown our heads above the
trench would have attracted the bullets of the German sharpshooters. And
a second is long enough for a bullet to do its business. Emerging from
the _boyau_ at the foot of the hill, we crossed the river by an ancient
stone bridge and for a mile or more followed a cobble-paved highroad
which ran between rows of workmen’s cottages which had been wrecked by
shell-fire. Some had shattered roofs and the plastered walls of others
were pockmarked with bullets, for here the fighting had been desperate
and bloody. But over the garden walls strayed blossom-laden branches of
cherry, peach, and apple trees. The air was heavy with their fragrance.
Black-and-white cattle grazed contentedly knee-deep in lush green grass.
Pigeons cooed and chattered on the housetops. By an open window an old
woman with a large white cat in her lap sat knitting. As she knitted she
looked out across the blossoming hillsides to the sky-line where the
invaders lay intrenched and waiting. I wondered what she was thinking
about. She must have remembered quite distinctly when the Germans came
to Soissons for the first time, five and forty years before, and how
they shot the townsmen in the public square. A few years ago the people
of Soissons unveiled a monument to those murdered citizens. When this
war is over they will have more names to add to those already carved on
its base.
[Illustration:
Zouaves carrying a German position in the Belgian sand-dunes by storm.
]
It is not a cheerful business strolling through a shell-shattered and
deserted town. You feel depressed and speak in hushed tones, as though
you were in a house that had been visited by death as, indeed, you are.
In the Place de la République we found a score or so of infantrymen on
duty, these being the only soldiers that we saw in the town. Along the
main thoroughfares nearly every shop was closed and its windows
shuttered. Some tobacconists and two or three cafés remained bravely
open, but little business was being done. I do not think that I am
exaggerating when I say that every fourth or fifth house we passed
showed evidences of the German bombardment. One shell, I remember, had
exploded in the show-window of a furniture store and had demolished a
gilt-and-red-plush parlor suite. The only thing unharmed was a sign
which read “Cheap and a bargain.”
In the very heart of Soissons stands the huge bulk of the magnificent
twelfth-century cathedral, its massive tower rising skyward like a
finger pointing toward heaven. There are few nobler piles in France.
Repeated rappings at a door in the churchyard wall brought the _curé_, a
white-haired, kindly faced giant of a man. Under his guidance we entered
the cathedral, or rather what remains of it, for its famous Gothic
windows are now but heaps of shattered glass, the splendid nave is open
to the sky, half the roof has been torn away, the pulpit with its
exquisite carvings has been splintered by a shell, and the massive
columns have been chipped and scarred. Carvings which were the pride of
master craftsmen long centuries dead have been damaged past repair. In
the floor of the nave yawns a hole large enough to hold a horse. Around
the statues which flank the altar, and which are too large to move, have
been raised barricades of sand-bags. And this, mind you, in the house of
Him who was the Apostle of Peace!
While the _curé_ was pointing out to us the ruined beauties of his
celebrated windows, something passed overhead with a wail like a lost
soul. A moment later came an explosion which made the walls of the
cathedral tremble. “Ah,” remarked the _curé_ unconcernedly, “they’ve
begun again. I thought it must be nearly time. They bombard the
cathedral every evening between five and seven.”
As he finished speaking, another shell came whining over the housetops
and burst with a prodigious racket in the street outside.
“How far away was that one?” I asked one of the officers.
“Only about a hundred metres,” was the careless reply.
As unmoved as though at a church supper, the _curé_ placidly continued
his recital of the cathedral’s departed glories, reeling off the names
of the saints and martyrs who lie buried beneath the floor of its nave,
his recital being punctuated at thirty-second intervals by explosions,
each a little louder than the one preceding. Finally a shell came so low
that I thought that it was going through the roof. It came so near, in
fact, that I suggested that it was getting on toward dinner time and
that we really ought to be on our way. But the _curé_ was not to be
hurried. He had had no visitors for nearly a year and he was determined
to make the most of us. He insisted on showing us that cathedral from
sacristy to belfry, and if he thought that we were missing anything he
carefully explained it all over again.
“Why do you stay on here, father?” I asked him. “A shell is likely to
drop in on you at any moment.”
“That is as God wills, monsieur,” was the quiet answer. “A captain does
not leave his ship in a storm. I have my people to look after, for they
are as helpless as children and look to me for advice. And the wounded
also. We have turned the sacristy, as you saw, into a dressing-station.
Yes, there is much to do. If a shell comes it will find me at my post of
duty doing what I may to serve God and France.”
So we went away and left him standing there alone in the doorway of his
shattered cathedral, a picturesque and gallant figure, with his white
hair coming down upon his shoulders and his tall figure wrapped in the
black soutane. To such men as these the people of France owe a debt that
they can never repay. Though they wear cassocks instead of cuirasses,
though they carry Bibles instead of bayonets, they are none the less
real soldiers—soldiers of the Lord.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph by Meurisse._
In the Argonne.
“Cave-like shelters in which the men take refuge during the periodic
shell-storms that visit them.”
]
It must be borne in mind that the task of the artillery is far easier in
hilly or mountainous country, such as is found along the Aisne and in
the Vosges and Alsace, where the movements of the enemy can be observed
with comparative facility and where both observers and gunners can
usually find a certain degree of shelter, than in Artois and Flanders,
where the country is as flat as the top of a table, with nothing even
remotely resembling a hill on which the observers can be stationed or
behind which can be concealed the guns. In the flat country the guns,
which in all cases are carefully masked with branches from detection by
hostile aircraft, take position at distances varying from two thousand
to five thousand yards from the enemy’s trenches. Immediately in the
rear of each gun is a subterranean shelter, in which the gunners can
take refuge in case a German battery locates them and attempts to shell
them out. An artillery subaltern, known in the British service as the
“forward observing officer,” goes up to the infantry trenches and
chooses a position, sometimes in a tree, sometimes in a shattered
church-tower, sometimes in a sort of dug-out, from which he can obtain
an unobstructed view of his battery’s zone of fire. He is to his battery
very much what a coach is to a football team, giving his men directions
by telephone instead of through a megaphone, but, unlike the coach, he
is stationed not on the side-line but on the firing-line. Laid on the
surface of the ground, connecting him with the battery, is the
field-telephone. As wires are easily cut by bursting shells, they are
now being laid in a sort of ladder formation so that a dozen wires may
be cut without interrupting communication. When the noise is so
deafening that the voice of the observing officer cannot be heard on the
field-telephone communication is carried on in the Morse code by means
of a giant buzzer. Amid all the uproar of battle the observing officer
has to keep careful track, through his glasses, of every shell his
battery fires, and to inform his battery commander by telephone of the
effect of his fire. He can make no mistakes, for on those portions of
the battle-line where the trenches are frequently less than a hundred
yards apart the slightest miscalculation in giving the range might land
the shells among his own men. The critical moment for the observing
officer is, however, when the enemy makes a sudden rush and swarms of
helmeted, gray-clad figures, climbing out of their trenches, come
rolling forward in a steel-tipped wave, tripping in the barbed wire and
falling in ones and twos and dozens. Instantly the French trenches
crackle and roar into the full blast of magazine fire. The rattle of the
machine-guns sounds like a boy drawing a stick along the palings of a
picket fence. The air quivers to the incessant crash of bursting
shrapnel. “Infantry attack!” calls the observation officer into the
telephone receiver which is clamped to his head. “Commence firing!” and
his battery, two or three miles in the rear, begins pouring shrapnel on
the advancing Germans. But still the gray figures come on, hoarsely
cheering. “Drop twenty-five!” he orders. “Careful with your
fuse-setting ... very close to our trenches.” The French shrapnel sprays
the ground immediately in front of the French trenches as a street
cleaner sprays the pavement with a hose. The gray line checks, falters,
sways uncertainly before the blast of steel. Men begin to fall by dozens
and scores, others turn and run for their lives. With a shrill cheer the
French infantry spring from their trenches in a counter-attack. “Raise
twenty-five! ... raise fifty!” telephones the observing officer as the
blue figures of his countrymen sweep forward in the charge. And so it
goes, the guns backing up the French attacks and breaking the German
ones, shelling a house or a haystack for snipers, putting a machine-gun
out of business, dropping death into the enemy’s trenches or sending its
steel calling-cards across to a German battery whose position has been
discovered and reported by wireless by a scouting French aeroplane. And
all the time the youngster out in front, flattened to the ground, with
glasses at his eyes and a telephone at his lips, acts the part of
prompter and tells the guns when to speak their parts.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph copyright by M. Rol._
An observing officer directing the fire of a French battery three
miles behind him.
“Flattened to the ground, with glasses at his eyes and a telephone at
his lips, he acts the part of prompter and tells the guns when to
speak their parts.”
]
In reading accounts of artillery fire it should be remembered that there
are two types of shell in common use to-day—shrapnel and high
explosive—and that they are used for entirely different purposes and
produce entirely different results. Shrapnel, which is intended only for
use against infantry in the open, or when lightly intrenched, is a shell
with a very thin steel body and a small bursting charge, generally of
low-power explosive, in the base. By means of a time-fuse the projectile
is made to burst at any given moment after leaving the gun, the
explosion of the weak charge breaking the thin steel case and liberating
the bullets, which fly forward with the velocity of the shrapnel,
scattering much as do the pellets from a shot-gun. At a range of 3500
yards the bullets of a British 18-pound shrapnel, 375 in number, cover a
space of 250 yards long and 30 yards wide—an area of more than one and a
half acres. Though terribly effective against infantry attacks or
unprotected batteries, shrapnel are wholly useless against fortified
positions, strongly built houses, or deep and well-planned
intrenchments. The difference between shrapnel and high explosive is the
difference between a shot-gun and an elephant rifle. The high-explosive
shell, which is considerably stronger than the shrapnel, contains no
bullets but a charge of high explosive—in the French service melinite,
in the British usually lyddite (which is picric acid melted with a
little vaseline), and in the German army trinitrotoluene. The effect of
the high explosive is far more concentrated than that of shrapnel,
covering only one-fifteenth of the area affected by the latter. Though
shrapnel has practically no effect on barbed-wire entanglements or on
concrete, and very little on earthworks, high-explosive shells of the
same caliber destroy everything in the vicinity, concrete, wire
entanglements, steel shields, guns, and even the trenches themselves
disappearing like a dynamited stump before the terrific blast. The men
holding the trenches are driven into their dug-outs, and may be reached
even there by high-explosive shells fired from high-angle howitzers.
The commanding importance of the high-explosive shell in this war is due
to the peculiar nature of the conflict. Instead of fighting in the open
field, the struggle has developed into what is, to all intents and
purposes, a fortress warfare on the most gigantic scale. In this warfare
all strategic manœuvres are absent, because manœuvres are impossible on
ground where every square yard is marked and swept by artillery fire.
The opposing armies are not simply intrenched. They have protected
themselves with masses of concrete and steel armor, so that the
so-called trenches are in reality concrete forts, shielded and casemated
with armor-plate, flanked with rapid-firers and mortars, linked to one
another by marvellously concealed communicating trenches which are
protected in turn by the fire of heavy batteries, guarded by the most
ingenious entanglements, pitfalls, and other obstructions that the mind
of man has been able to devise, and defended by machine-guns, in the
enormous proportion of one to every fifty men, mounted behind steel
plates and capable of firing six hundred shots a minute. In these
subterranean works dwell the infantry, abundantly provided with
hand-grenades and appliances for throwing bombs and flaming oil, their
rifles trained, day and night, on the space over which an enemy must
advance. That is the sort of wall which one side or the other will have
to break through in order to win in this war. The only way to take such
a position is by frontal attack, and the only way to make a frontal
attack possible is by paving the way with such a torrent of high
explosive that both entanglements and earthworks are literally torn to
pieces and the infantry defending them demoralized or annihilated. No
one before the war could have imagined the vast quantity of shells
required for such an operation. In order to prepare the way for an
infantry attack on a German position near Arras, the French fired two
hundred thousand rounds of high explosive in a single day—and the scouts
came back to report that not a barbed-wire entanglement, a trench, or a
living human being remained. During the same battle the British, owing
to a shortage of high-explosive ammunition, were able to precede their
attack by only forty minutes of shell-fire. This was wholly insufficient
to clear away the entanglements and other obstructions, and, as a
result, the men were literally mowed down by the German machine-guns.
Even when the storming-parties succeed in reaching the first line of the
enemy’s trenches and bayonet or drive out the defenders, the opposing
artillery, with a literal wall of fire, effectively prevents any
reinforcements from advancing to their support. Shattered and exhausted
though they are, the attackers must instantly set to work to fortify and
consolidate the captured trenches, being subjected, meanwhile, to a much
more accurate bombardment, as the enemy knows, of course, the exact
range of his former positions and is able to drop his shells into them
with unerring accuracy. It is obvious that such offensive movements
cannot be multiplied or prolonged indefinitely, both on account of the
severe mental and physical strain on the men and the appalling losses
which they involve. Neither can such offensives be improvised. A
commanding officer cannot smash home a frontal attack on an enemy’s
position at any moment that he deems auspicious any more than a surgeon
can perform a major operation without first preparing his patient
physically. Before launching an attack the ground must be minutely
studied; the position to be attacked must be reconnoitred and
photographed by aviators; advanced trenches must be dug; reserve troops
must be moved forward and batteries brought into position without
arousing the suspicions of the enemy; and, most important of all,
enormous quantities of projectiles and other material must be gathered
in one place designated by the officer in charge of the operations. The
greatest problem presented by an offensive movement is that of
delivering to the artillery the vast supplies of shells necessary to
pave the way for a successful attack. To give some idea of what this
means, I might mention that the Germans, during the crossing of the San,
_fired seven hundred thousand shells in four hours_.
There are no words between the covers of the dictionary which can convey
any adequate idea of what one of these great artillery actions is like.
One has to see—and hear—it. Buildings of brick and stone collapse as
though they were built of cards. Whole towns are razed to the ground as
a city of tents would be levelled by a cyclone. Trees are snapped off
like carrots. Gaping holes as large as cottage cellars suddenly appear
in the fields and in the stone-paved roads. Geysers of smoke and earth
shoot high into the air. The fields are strewn with the shocking remains
of what had once been men: bodies without heads or arms or legs; legs
and arms and heads without bodies. Dead horses, broken wagons, bent and
shattered equipment are everywhere. The noise is beyond all
description—yes, beyond all conception. It is like a close-by clap of
thunder which, instead of lasting for a fraction of a second, lasts for
hours. There is no break, no pause in the hell of sound, not even a
momentary diminution. The ground heaves and shudders beneath your feet.
You find it difficult to breathe. Your head throbs until you think that
it is about to burst. Your eyeballs ache and burn. Giant fingers seem to
be steadily pressing your ear-drums inward. The very atmosphere
palpitates to the tremendous detonations. The howl of the shell-storm
passing overhead gives you the feeling that the skies are falling.
Compared with it, the roar of the cannon at Gettysburg must have sounded
like the popping of fire-crackers.
Inconceivably awe-inspiring and terrifying as is a modern artillery
action, one eventually becomes accustomed to it, but I have yet to meet
the person who would say with perfect truthfulness that he was
indifferent to the fire of the great German siege-cannon. I have three
times been under the fire of the German siege-guns—during the
bombardments of Antwerp, of Soissons, and of Dunkirk—and I hope with all
my heart that I shall never have the experience again. Let me put it to
you, my friends. How would _you_ feel if you were sleeping quite
peacefully in—let us say—the Waldorf-Astoria, and along about six
o’clock in the morning something dropped from the clouds, and in the
pavement of Fifth Avenue blew a hole large enough to bury a horse in?
And what would be your sensations if, still bewildered by the suddenness
of your awakening, you ran to the window to see what had happened, and
something that sounded like an express-train came hurtling through the
air from somewhere over in New Jersey, and with the crash of an
exploding powder-mill transformed Altman’s store into a heap of
pulverized stone and concrete? Well, that is precisely what happened to
me one beautiful spring morning in Dunkirk.
To be quite frank, I didn’t like Dunkirk from the first. Its empty
streets, the shuttered windows of its shops, and the inky blackness into
which the city was plunged at night from fear of aeroplanes, combined to
give me a feeling of uneasiness and depression. The place was about as
cheerful as a country cemetery on a rainy evening. From the time I set
foot in it I had the feeling that something was going to happen. I found
that a room had been reserved for me on the upper floor of the local
hostelry, known as the Hôtel des Arcades—presumably because there are
none. I did not particularly relish the idea of sleeping on the upper
floor, with nothing save the roof to ward off a bomb from a marauding
aeroplane, for, ever since I was under the fire of Zeppelins in Antwerp,
I have made it a point to put as many floors as possible between me and
the sky.
It must have been about six o’clock in the morning when I was awakened
by a splitting crash which made my bedroom windows rattle. A moment
later came another and then another, each louder and therefore nearer
than the one preceding. All down the corridor doors began to open, and I
heard voices excitedly inquiring what was happening. I didn’t have to
inquire. I knew from previous experience. A German _Taube_ was raining
death upon the city. Throwing open my shutters, I could see the machine
quite plainly, its armor-plated body gleaming in the morning sun like
polished silver as it swept in ever-widening circles across the sky.
Somewhere to the east a pompom began its infernal triphammer-like
clatter. An armored car, evidently British from the “R. N.” painted on
its turret, tore into the square in front of the hotel, the lean barrel
of its quick-firing gun sweeping the sky, and began to send shell after
shell at the aerial intruder. From down near the water-front came the
raucous wail of a steam-siren warning the people to get under cover. A
church-bell began to clang hastily, insistently, imperatively. It seemed
to say: “To your cellars! To your cellars! Hurry!... _Hurry!_... HURRY!”
From the belfry of the church of St. Eloi a flag with blue and white
stripes was run up as a warning to the townspeople that death was
abroad. Suddenly, above the tumult of the bells and horns and hurrying
footsteps, came a new and inconceivably terrifying sound: a low,
deep-toned roar rapidly rising into a thunderous crescendo like an
express-train approaching from far down the subway. As it passed above
our heads it sounded as though a giant in the sky were tearing mighty
strips of linen. Then an explosion which was brother to an earthquake.
The housetops seemed to rock and sway. The hotel shook to its
foundations. The pictures on the wall threatened to come down. The glass
in the windows rattled until I thought that it would break. From beyond
the housetops in the direction of the receiving hospital and the
railway-station a mushroom-shaped cloud of green-brown smoke shot
suddenly high into the air. Out in the corridor a woman screamed
hysterically: “My God! My God! They’ve begun again with the big cannon!”
I heard the clatter of footsteps on the stairs as the guests rushed for
the cellar. I began to dress. No fireman responding to a third alarm
ever dressed quicker. Just as I was struggling with my boots there came
another whistling roar and another terrific detonation. High in the air
above the quivering city still circled the German aeroplane, informing
by wireless the German gunners, more than a score of miles away across
the Belgian border, where their shells were hitting. Think of it! _Think
of bombarding a city at a range of twenty-three miles and every shot a
hit!_ That is the marvel of this modern warfare. Imagine the Grand
Central Station in New York, the Presbyterian Hospital, the Metropolitan
Life Building, and the City Hall being blown to smithereens by shells
fired from Rahway, N. J. And it was not a 42-centimetre siege-gun
either, but a 15-inch naval gun which the Germans had brought from Kiel
and mounted behind their lines in Flanders. Though French and British
aviators made repeated flights over the German lines for the purpose of
locating the gun and putting it out of business, their efforts met with
no success, as the ingenious Teutons, it seems, had dug a sort of tunnel
into which the gun was run back after each shot and there it stayed, in
perfect security, until it was fired again. Is it any wonder that the
Germans are so desperately anxious to reach Calais, with the
fort-crowned cliffs of Dover rising across the channel less than twenty
miles away?
Descending to the cellars of the hotel, I found that there was
standing-room only. Guests, porters, cooks, waiters, chambermaids,
English Red Cross nurses, and a French colonel wearing the Legion of
Honor were shivering in the dampness amid the cobwebs and the
wine-bottles. Every time a shell exploded the wine-bottles in their bins
shook and quivered as though they, too, were alive and frightened. I lay
no claim to bravery, but in other bombarded cities I have seen what
happens to the people in the cellar when a shell strikes that particular
building, and I had no desire to end my career like a rat in a trap.
Should you ever, by any chance, find yourself in a city which is being
bombarded, take my advice, I beg of you, and go out into the middle of
the nearest open square and stay there until the bombardment is over. I
believe that far more people are killed during bombardment by falling
masonry and timbers than by the shells themselves. As I went upstairs I
heard a Frenchwoman angrily demanding of the chambermaid why she had not
brought her hot water. “But, madame,” pleaded the terrified girl, “the
city is being bombarded.” “Is that any reason why I should not wash?”
cried the irate lady. “Bring my hot water instantly.”
At eight o’clock the general commanding the garrison hurried in. He had
invited me to lunch with him. “I am desolated that I cannot have the
pleasure of your company at _déjeuner_, Monsieur Powell,” said he, “but
it is not wise for you to remain in the city. I am responsible to the
Government for your safety, and it would make things easier for me if
you would go. I have taken the liberty of sending for your car.” You can
call it cowardice or timidity or anything you please, but I am not at
all ashamed to admit that I was never so glad to have an invitation
cancelled. I have had a somewhat extensive acquaintance with
bombardments, and I have always found that those who speak lightly of
them are those who have never seen one.
In order to get out of range of the German shells my driver, acting
under the orders of the commandant, turned the bonnet of the car toward
Bergues, five miles to the southward. But we found that Bergues had not
been overlooked by the German gunners, having, indeed, suffered more
severely than Dunkirk. When we arrived the bombardment was just over and
the dust was still rising from the shattered houses. Twelve
38-centimetre shells had landed in the very heart of the little town,
sending a score or more of its inhabitants, men, women, and children, to
the hospital and a like number to the cemetery.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph by Meurisse._
The mass before the battle.
There are said to be upward of twenty thousand priests fighting in the
armies of France.
]
A few hours before Bergues had been as quaint and peaceful and contented
a town of five thousand people as you could have found in France.
Because of its quaint and simple charm touring motorists used to go out
of their way to see it. It is fortified in theory but not in fact, for
its moss-grown ramparts, which date from the Crusades, have about as
much military significance as the Battery in New York. But the
guide-books describe it as a fortified town, and that was all the excuse
the Germans needed to turn loose upon it sudden death. To-day that
little town is an empty, broken shell, its streets piled high with the
brick and plaster of its ruined homes. One has to see the ruin produced
by a 38-centimetre shell to believe it. If one hits a building that
building simply ceases to exist. It crumbles, disintegrates, disappears.
I do not mean to say that its roof is ripped off or that one of its
walls is blown away. I mean to say that the whole building crashes to
the ground as though flattened by the hand of God. The Germans sent only
twelve of their shells into Bergues, but the central part of the town
looked like Market Street in San Francisco after the earthquake. One of
the shells struck a hospital and exploded in a ward filled with wounded
soldiers. They are not wounded any longer. Another shell completely
demolished a three-story brick house. In the cellar of that house a man,
his wife, and their three children had taken refuge. There was no need
to dig graves for them in the local cemetery. Throughout the bombardment
a _Taube_ hung over the doomed town to observe the effect of the shots,
and to direct by wireless the distant gunners. I wonder what the German
observer, peering down through his glasses upon the wrecked hospital and
the shell-torn houses and the mangled bodies of the women and children,
thought about it all. It would be interesting to know, wouldn’t it?
[Illustration:
_From a photograph copyright by M. Rol._
What a 38-centimetre shell, fired from a gun twenty-three miles away,
did in Dunkirk.
“When one of these shells hits a building, that building simply ceases
to exist.”
]
II
ON THE BRITISH BATTLE-LINE
Along a road in the outskirts of that French town which is the British
headquarters a youth was running. He was of considerably less than
medium height, and fair-haired and very slender. One would have
described him as a nice-looking boy. He wore a jersey and white
running-shorts which left his knees bare, and he was bareheaded.
Shoulders back and chest well out, he jogged along at the steady
dog-trot adopted by athletes and prize-fighters who are in training.
Now, in ordinary times there is not anything particularly remarkable in
seeing a scantily clad youth dog-trotting along a country road. You
assume that he is training for a cross-country event, or for a seat in a
’varsity shell, or for the feather-weight championship, and you let it
go at that. But these are not ordinary times in France, and ordinary
young men in running-shorts are not permitted to trot along the roads as
they list in the immediate vicinity of British Headquarters. Even if you
travel, as I did, in a large gray car, with an officer of the French
General Staff for companion, you are halted every few minutes by a
sentry who turns the business end of a rifle in your direction and
demands to see your papers. But no one challenged the young man in the
running-shorts or asked to see _his_ papers. Instead, whenever a soldier
caught sight of him that soldier clicked his heels together and stood
rigidly at attention. After you had observed the curious effect which
the appearance of this young man produced on the military of all ranks
it suddenly struck you that his face was strangely familiar. Then you
all at once remembered that you had seen it hundreds of times in the
magazines and the illustrated papers. Under it was the caption, “His
Royal Highness the Prince of Wales.” That young man will some day, if he
lives, sit in an ancient chair in Westminster Abbey, and the Archbishop
of Canterbury will place a crown upon his head, and his picture will
appear on coins and postage-stamps in use over half the globe.
Now, the future King of England—Edward VIII they will doubtless call
him—is not getting up at daybreak and reeling off half a dozen miles or
so because he particularly enjoys it. He is doing it with an end in
view. He is doing it for precisely the same reason that the
prize-fighter does it—he is training for a battle. To me there was
something wonderfully suggestive and characteristic in the sight of that
young man plugging doggedly along the country road. He seemed to
epitomize the spirit which I found to exist along the whole length of
the British battle-line. Every British soldier in France has come to
appreciate that he is engaged in a struggle without parallel in
history—a struggle in which he is confronted by formidable, ferocious,
resourceful, and utterly unscrupulous opponents, and from which he is by
no means certain to emerge a victor—and he is, therefore, methodically
and systematically preparing to win that struggle just as a pugilist
prepares himself for a battle in a prize-ring.
The British soldier has at last come to a realization of the terrible
gravity of the situation which faces him. You don’t hear him singing
“Tipperary” any more or boasting about what he is going to do when he
gets to Berlin. He has come to have a most profound respect for the
fighting qualities of the men in the spiked helmets. He knows that he,
an amateur boxer as it were, is up against the world’s heavyweight
professional champion, and he perfectly appreciates that he has, to use
his own expression, “a hell of a job” in front of him. He has already
found out, to his cost and to his very great disgust, that his opponent
has no intention of being hampered by the rules laid down by the late
Marquis of Queensberry, having missed no opportunity to gouge or kick or
hit below the belt. But the British soldier has now become familiar with
his opponent’s tactics, and one of these days, when he gets quite ready,
he is going to give that opponent the surprise of his life by landing on
him with both feet, spikes on his shoes, and brass knuckles on his
fingers. Meanwhile, like the young Prince in the running-shorts, he has
buckled down with grim determination to the task of getting himself into
condition.
I suppose that if I were really politic and far-sighted I would cuddle
up to the War Office and make myself solid with the General Staff by
confidently asserting that the British Army is the most efficient
killing machine in existence, and that its complete and early triumph is
as certain as that the sparks fly upward; neither of which assertions
would be true. It should be kept in mind, however, that the British did
not begin the building of their war-machine until after the outbreak of
hostilities, while the German organization is the result of upward of
half a century of unceasing thought, experiment, and endeavor. But what
the British have accomplished since the war began is one of the marvels
of military history. Lord Kitchener came to a War Office which had long
been in the hands of lawyers and politicians. Not only was he expected
to remodel an institution which had become a national joke, but at the
same time to raise a huge volunteer army. In order to raise this army he
had to have recourse to American business methods. He employed a clever
advertising specialist to cover the walls and newspapers of the United
Kingdom with all manner of striking advertisements, some pleading, some
bullying, some caustic in tone, by which he has proved that, given
patriotic impulse, advertising for people to go to war is just like
advertising for people to buy automobiles or shaving-soap or
smoking-tobacco. It was not soothing to British pride—but it got the
men. Late in the spring of 1915, after half a year or more of training,
during which they were worked as a negro teamster works a mule, those
men were marched aboard transports and sent across the Channel. So
admirably executed were the plans of the War Office and so complete the
precautions taken by the Admiralty, that this great force was landed on
the Continent without the loss of a single life from German mines or
submarines. That, in itself, is one of the greatest accomplishments of
the war. England now (December, 1915) has in France an army of
approximately a million men. But it is a new army. The bulk of it is
without experience and without experienced regiments to stiffen it and
give it confidence, for the army of British regulars which landed in
France at the outbreak of the war has ceased to exist. The old
regimental names remain, but the officers and men who composed those
regiments are, to-day, in the hospitals or the cemeteries. The losses
suffered by the British Army in Flanders are appalling. The West Kent
Regiment, for example, has been three times wiped out and three times
reconstituted. Of the Black Watch, the Rifle Brigade, the Infantry of
the Household, scarcely a vestige of the original establishments
remains. Hardly less terrible are the losses which have been suffered by
the Canadian Contingent. The Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry
landed in France 1400 strong. To-day only 140 remain. The present
colonel was a private in the ranks when the regiment sailed from Quebec.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph by Meurisse._
London buses at the front.
“Far as the eye can see stretch long lines of London motor-buses in
war coats of elephant gray, crowded with sun-tanned men in khaki
hurrying toward the trenches.”
]
The machine that the British have knocked together, though still a
trifle wabbly and somewhat creaky in its joints, is, I am convinced,
eventually going to do the business. But you cannot appreciate what it
is like or what it is accomplishing by reading about it; you have to see
it for yourself as I did. That corner of France lying between the fifty
miles of British front and the sea is, to-day, I suppose, the busiest
region in the world. It reminded me of the Canal Zone during the rush
period of the Canal’s construction. It is as busy as the lot where the
Greatest Show on Earth is getting ready for the afternoon performance.
Down the roads, far as the eye can see, stretch long lines of London
motor-buses, sombre war coats of elephant gray replacing the staring
advertisements of teas, tobaccos, whiskeys, and theatrical attractions,
crowded no longer with pale-faced clerks hurrying toward the city, but
with sun-tanned men in khaki hurrying toward the trenches. Interminable
processions of motor-lorries go lumbering past, piled high with the
supplies required to feed and clothe the army, practically all of which
are moved from the coast to the front by road, the railways being
reserved for the transport of men and ammunition; and the ambulances,
hundreds and hundreds of them, hurrying their blood-soaked cargoes to
the hospitals so that they may go back to the front for more. So crowded
are the highways behind the British front that at the cross-roads in the
country and at the street crossings in the towns are posted military
policemen with little scarlet flags who control the traffic just as do
the policemen on Fifth Avenue and Broadway. The roads are never
permitted to fall into disrepair, for on their condition depends the
rapidity with which the army can be supplied with food and ammunition.
Hence road gangs and steam-rollers and sprinkling-carts are at work
constantly. When the war is over, France will have better roads and more
of them than she ever had before. There are speed-limit signs
everywhere—heretofore practically unknown in France, where any one who
was careless enough to get run over was liable to arrest for obstructing
the traffic. At frequent intervals along the roads are blacksmith shops
and motor-car repair stations, to say nothing of the repair cars,
veritable garages on wheels, which, when news of an accident or
breakdown is received, go tearing toward the scene of trouble as a
fire-engine responds to an alarm of fire. At night all cars must run
without lights, as a result of which many camions and motor-buses have
met with disaster by running off the roads in the darkness and tipping
over in the deep ditches. To provide for this particular form of mishap
the Army Service Corps has designed a most ingenious contrivance which
yanks the huge machines out of the ditch and sets them on the road again
as easily as though they were stubborn mules. Upon the door of every
house we passed, whether château or cottage, was marked the number of
men who could be billeted upon it. There are signs indicating where
water can be obtained and fodder and pasturage and petrol. In every town
and village are to be found military interpreters, known by a
distinctive cap and _brassard_, who are always ready to straighten out a
misunderstanding between a Highlander from the north of the Tweed and a
_tirailleur_ from Tunisia, who will assist a Ghurka from the Indian hill
country in bargaining for poultry with a Flemish-speaking peasant, or
instruct a lost Senegalese how to get back to his command. An officers’
training-school has been established at St.-Omer, which is the British
Headquarters, where those men in the ranks who possess the necessary
education are fitted to receive commissions. After this war is over the
British Army will no longer be officered by the British aristocracy. The
wholesale promotions of enlisted men made necessary by the appalling
losses among the officers will result in completely changing the
complexion of the British military establishment. Provided he has the
necessary educational qualifications, the son of a day-laborer will
hereafter stand as much chance as the son of a duke. Did you know, by
the way, that the present Chief of the Imperial General Staff began life
as a footman and entered the army as a private in the ranks?
[Illustration:
_From a photograph by Meurisse._
British field-kitchens on the march in Flanders.
“Napoleon said: ‘An army marches on its belly,’ and the Army Service
Corps is seeing to it that the belly of the British soldier is never
empty.”
]
The wonderful thoroughness of the British is exemplified by the
bulletins which are issued every morning by the Intelligence Department
for the information of the brigade and regimental commanders. They
resemble ordinary hand-bills and contain a summary of all the
information which the Intelligence Department has been able to collect
during the preceding twenty-four hours as to what is going on behind the
German lines—movements of troops, construction of new trenches, changes
in the location of batteries, shortage of ammunition, condition of the
roads; everything, in short, which might be of any conceivable value to
the British to know. For example, the report might contain a sentence
something like this: “At five o’clock to-morrow morning the Prussian
Guard, which has been holding position No. —, to the south of Ypres,
will be relieved by the 47th Bavarian Landsturm”—which, by the way,
would probably result in the British attacking the position mentioned.
The information contained in these bulletins comes from many
sources—from spies in the pay of the Intelligence Department, from
aviators who make reconnoissance flights over the German lines, and
particularly from the inhabitants of the invaded regions, who, by
various ingenious expedients, succeed in communicating to the Allies
much important information—often at the cost of their lives.
The great base camps which the British have established at Calais and
Havre and Boulogne and Rouen are marvels of organization, efficiency,
and cleanliness. Cities whose macadamized streets are lined with
portable houses of wood or metal which have been brought to the
Continent in sections, and which have sewers and telephone systems and
electric lights, and accommodations for a hundred thousand men apiece,
have sprung up on the sand-dunes of the French coast as though by the
wave of a magician’s wand. Here, where the fresh, healing wind blows in
from the sea, have been established hospitals, each with a thousand
beds. Huge warehouses have been built of concrete to hold the vast
quantity of stores which are being rushed across the Channel by an
endless procession of transports and cargo steamers. So efficient is the
British field-post system, which is operated by the Army Post-Office
Division of the Royal Engineers, that within forty-eight hours after a
wife or mother or sweetheart drops a letter into a post-box in England
that letter has been delivered in the trenches to the man to whom it was
addressed.
In order to prevent military information leaking out through the letters
which are written by the soldiers to the folks at home, one in every
five is opened by the regimental censor, it being obviously out of the
question to peruse them all. If, however, the writer is able to get hold
of one of the precious green envelopes, whose color is a guarantee of
private and family matters only, he is reasonably certain that his
letter will not be read by other eyes than those for which it is
intended. Nor does the field-post confine itself to the transmission of
letters, but transmits delicacies and comforts of every sort to the boys
in the trenches, and the boys in the trenches use the same medium to
send shell fragments, German helmets, and other souvenirs to their
friends at home. I know a lady who sent her son in Flanders a box of
fresh asparagus from their Devonshire garden on a Friday, and he had it
for his Sunday dinner. And this reminds me of an interesting little
incident which is worth the telling and might as well be told here as
elsewhere. A well-known American business man, the president of one of
New York’s street-railway systems, has a son who is a second lieutenant
in the Royal Artillery. The father was called back to America at a time
when his son’s battery was stationed in a particularly hot corner to the
south of Ypres. The father was desperately anxious to see his son before
he sailed, but he knew that the chances of his being permitted to do so
were almost infinitesimal. Nevertheless, he wrote a note to Lord
Kitchener explaining the circumstances and adding that he realized that
it was probably quite impossible to grant such a request. He left the
note himself at York House. Before he had been back in his hotel an hour
he was called to the telephone. “This is the secretary of Lord Kitchener
speaking,” said a voice. “He desires me to say that you shall certainly
see your son before returning to America, and that you are to hold
yourself in readiness to go to the Continent at a moment’s notice.” A
few days later he received another message from the War Office: “Take
to-morrow morning’s boat from Folkestone to Boulogne. Your son will be
waiting for you on the quay.” The long arm of the great War Minister had
reached out across the English Channel and had picked that obscure
second lieutenant out from that little Flemish village, and had brought
him by motor-car to the coast, with a twenty-four hours’ leave of
absence in his pocket, that he might say good-by to his father.
The maxim that “an army marches on its belly” is as true to-day as when
Napoleon uttered it, and the Army Service Corps is seeing to it that the
belly of the British soldier is never empty. Of all the fighting men in
the field, the British soldier is far and away the best fed. He is,
indeed, almost overfed, particularly as regards jams, marmalades,
puddings, and other articles containing large quantities of sugar,
which, so the army surgeons assert, is the greatest restorer of the
muscular tissues. Though the sale of spirits is strictly prohibited in
the military zone, a ration of rum is served out at daybreak each
morning to the men in the trenches.
To Miss Jane Addams has been attributed the following assertion: “We
heard in all countries similar statements in regard to the necessity for
the use of stimulants before men would engage in bayonet charges, that
they have a regular formula in Germany, that they give them rum in
England and absinthe in France; that they all have to give them the
‘dope’ before the bayonet charge is possible.” Now, Miss Addams has
never, so far as I am aware, been in the trenches. Of the conditions
which exist there she knows only by hearsay. Miss Addams says that rum
is given to the British soldier. That is perfectly true. In pursuance of
orders issued by the Army Medical Corps, every man who has spent the
night in the trenches is given a ration (about a gill) of rum at
daybreak, not to render him reckless, as Miss Addams would have us
believe, but to counteract the effects of the mud and water in which he
has been standing for many hours. But when Miss Addams asserts that the
French soldiers are given absinthe she makes an assertion that is
without foundation of fact. Not only have I never seen a glass of
absinthe served in France since the law was passed which made its sale
illegal, but I have never seen spirits of any kind in use in the zone of
operations. More than once, coming back, chilled and weary, from the
trenches, I have attempted to obtain either whiskey or brandy only to be
told that its sale is rigidly prohibited in the zone of the armies. The
regular ration of the French soldier includes now, just as in time of
peace, a pint of _vin ordinaire_—the cheap wine of the country—this
being, I might add, considerably less than the man would drink with his
meals were he in civil life. As regards the conditions which exist in
the German armies I cannot speak with the same assurance, because I have
not been with them since the autumn of 1914. During the march across
Belgium there was, I am perfectly willing to admit, considerable
drunkenness among the German soldiers, but this was due to the men
looting the wine-cellars in the towns through which they passed and not,
as Miss Addams would have us believe, to their officers having
systematically “doped” them. I have heard it stated, on various
occasions, that German troops are given a mixture of rum and ether
before going into action. Whether this is true I cannot say. Personally,
I doubt it. If a man’s life ever depends upon a clear brain and a cool
head it is when he is going into battle. Everything considered,
therefore, I am convinced that intemperance virtually does not exist
among the armies in the field. I feel that Miss Addams has done a grave
injustice to brave and sober men and that she owes them an apology.
The British troops are not permitted to drink unboiled or unfiltered
water, each regiment having two steel water-carts fitted with
Birkenfeldt filters from which the men fill their water-bottles. As a
result of this precaution, dysentery and diarrhœa, the curse of armies
in previous wars, have practically disappeared, while, thanks to
compulsory inoculation, typhoid is unknown. Perhaps the most important
of all the sanitary devices which have been brought into existence by
this war, and without which it would not be possible for the men to
remain in the trenches at all, is the great force-pump that is operated
at night and which throws lime and carbolic acid on the unburied dead.
It is, indeed, impossible to overpraise the work being done by the Royal
Army Medical Corps, which has, among its many other activities, so
improved and speeded up the system of getting the wounded from the
firing-line to the hospitals that, as one Tommy remarked, “You ’ears a
’ell of a noise, and then the nurse says: ‘Sit hup and tike this
broth.’”
Though in this war the work of the cavalry is almost negligible; though
cartridges and marmalade are hurried to the front on motor-trucks and
the wounded are hurried from the front back to the hospital in
motor-ambulances; though despatch riders bestride panting motor-cycles
instead of panting steeds; though scouting is done by airmen instead of
horsemen, the day of the horse in warfare has by no means passed.
Without the horse, indeed, the guns could not go into action, for no
form of tractor has yet been devised for hauling batteries over broken
country. In fact, all of the belligerent nations are experiencing great
difficulty in providing a sufficient supply of horses, for the average
life of a war-horse is very short—ten days, assert some authorities;
sixteen, say others. For the first time in the history of warfare,
therefore, the horse is treated as a creature which must be cared for
when sick or wounded as well as when in health, and this not merely from
motives of sentiment or humanity but as a detail of military efficiency.
“For want of a nail,” runs the old ditty, “the shoe was lost; for want
of a shoe the horse was lost; for want of a horse the rider was lost;
for want of a rider the battle was lost”—and the Royal Army Veterinary
Corps is seeing to it that no battles are lost for lack of either horses
or horseshoes. The Army Veterinary Corps now has on the British sector
700 officers and 8,000 men, whose business it is to conserve the lives
of the horses. The last report that I have seen places the total number
of horses treated in the various hospital units (each of which
accommodates 1,000 animals) as approximately 81,000, of which some
47,000 had been returned to the Remount Department as again fit for
active service; 30,000 were still under treatment; the balance having
died, been destroyed, or sold.
The horses in use by the British Army in France are the very pick of
England, the Colonies, and foreign countries; thoroughbred and
three-quarter bred hunters from the hunting counties and from Ireland;
hackneys, draft, and farm animals; Walers from Australia; wire-jumpers
from New Zealand; hardy stock from Alberta and Saskatchewan; sturdy
ponies from the hill country of India; thousands upon thousands of
animals from the American Southwest, and from the Argentine; to say
nothing of the great sixteen-hand mules from Missouri and Spain.
Animals suffering from wounds or sickness are shipped back to the
hospital bases on the coast in herds, each being provided with a
separate covered stall, or, in case of pneumonia, with a box-stall. The
spotless buildings, with their exercise tracks and acres of green
paddocks, suggest a race-course rather than a hospital for horses
injured in war. Each hospital has its operating-sheds, its X-ray
department, its wards for special ailments, its laboratories for
preventive research work, a pharmacy, a museum which affords opportunity
for the study of the effects of sabre, shell, and bullet wounds, and a
staff of three hundred trained veterinarians. Schools have also been
established in connection with the hospitals in which the grooms and
attendants are taught the elements of anatomy, dentistry, farriery,
stabling, feeding, sanitation, and, most important of all, the care of
hoofs. All the methods and equipment employed are the best that science
can suggest and money can obtain, everything having passed the
inspection of the Duke of Portland and the Earl of Lonsdale, the two
greatest horse-breeders in England. Attached to each division of troops
in the field is a mobile veterinary section, consisting of an officer
and twenty-two men, who are equipped to render first-aid service to
wounded horses and whose duty it is to decide which animals shall be
sent to the hospitals for treatment, which are fit to return to the
front for further service, and which cases are hopeless and must be
destroyed. The enormous economic value of this system is conclusively
proved by the fact that it has reduced sickness among horses in the
British Army 50 per cent, and mortality 47 per cent.
The question that has been asked me more frequently than any other is
why the British, with upward of a million men in the field, are holding
only about fifty miles of battle-front, as compared with seventeen miles
held by the Belgians and nearly four hundred by the French. There are
several reasons for this. It should be remembered, in the first place,
that the British Army is composed of green troops, while the French
ranks, thanks to the universal service law, are filled with men all of
whom have spent at least three years with the colors. In the second
place, the British sector is by far the most difficult portion of the
western battle-front to hold, not only because of the configuration of
the country, which offers little natural protection, but because it lies
squarely athwart the road to the Channel ports—and it is to the Channel
ports that the Germans are going if men and shells can get them there.
The fighting along the British sector is, moreover, of a more desperate
and relentless nature than elsewhere on the Allied line, because the
Germans nourish a deeper hatred for the English than for all their other
enemies put together.
It was against the British, remember, that the Germans first used their
poison-gas. The first engagement of importance in which gas played a
part was the Second Battle of Ypres, lasting from April 22 until May 13,
which will probably take rank in history as one of the greatest battles
of all time. In it the Germans, owing to the surprise and confusion
created by their introduction of poison-gas, came within a hair’s
breadth of breaking through the Allied line, and would certainly have
done so had it not been for the gallantry and self-sacrifice of the
Canadian Division, which, at the cost of appalling losses, won
imperishable fame. The German bombardment of Ypres began on April 20 and
in forty-eight hours, so terrible was the rain of heavy projectiles
which poured down upon it, the quaint old city, with its exquisite Cloth
Hall, was but a heap of blackened, smoking ruins. That portion of the
Allied line to the north of the city was held, along a front of some
four miles, by a French division composed of Colonials, Algerians, and
Senegalese, stiffened by several line regiments. Late in the afternoon
of the 22d, peering above their trenches, they saw, rolling toward them
across the Flemish plain, an impalpable cloud of yellowish-green, which,
fanned by a brisk wind, moved forward at the speed of a trotting-horse.
It came on with the remorselessness of Fate. It blotted out what was
happening behind it as the smoke screen from a destroyer masks the
manœuvres of a Dreadnaught. The spring vegetation shrivelled up before
it as papers shrivel when thrown into a fire. It blasted everything it
touched as with a hand of death. No one knew what it was or whence it
came. Nearer it surged and nearer. It was within a hundred metres of the
French position ... fifty ... thirty ... ten ... and then the silent
horror was upon them. Men began to cough and hack and strangle. Their
eyes smarted and burned with the pungent, acrid fumes. Soldiers
staggered and fell before it in twos and fours and dozens as miners
succumb to fire-damp. Men, strained and twisted into grotesque, horrid
attitudes, were sobbing their lives out on the floors of the trenches.
The fire of rifles and machine-guns weakened, died down, ceased. The
whole line swayed, wavered, trembled on the verge of panic. Just then a
giant Algerian shouted: “The Boches have turned loose evil spirits upon
us! We can fight men, but we cannot fight _afrits_! Run, brothers! Run
for your lives!” That was all that was needed to precipitate the
disaster. The superstitious Africans, men from the West Coast where
voodooism still holds sway, men of the desert steeped in the traditions
and mysteries of Islam, broke and ran. The French white troops, carried
off their feet by the sudden rush, were swept along in the mad debacle.
And as they ran the yellow cloud pursued them remorselessly, like a
great hand reaching out for their throats.
An eye-witness of the rout that followed told me that he never expects
to see its like this side of the gates of hell. The fields were dotted
with blue-clad figures wearing kepis, and brown-clad ones wearing
turbans and tarbooshes, who stumbled and fell and rose again and
staggered along a few paces and fell to rise no more. The highways
leading from the trenches were choked with maddened, fear-crazed white
and black and brown men who had thrown away their rifles, their
cartridge-pouches, their knapsacks, in some cases even their coats and
shirts. Some were calling on Christ and some on Allah and some on their
strange pagan gods. Their eyes were starting from their sockets, on
their foreheads stood glistening beads of sweat, they slavered at the
mouth like dogs, their cheeks and breasts were flecked with foam. “We’re
not afraid of the Boches!” screamed a giant sergeant of zouaves, on
whose breast were the ribbons of a dozen wars. “We can fight _them_
until hell turns cold. But this we cannot fight. _Le Bon Dieu_ does not
expect us to stay and die like rats in a sewer.” Guns and gun-caissons
passed at a gallop, Turcos and _tirailleurs_ clinging to them, the
fear-crazed gunners flogging their reeking horses frantically. The
ditches bordering the roads were filled with overturned wagons and
abandoned equipment. Giant negroes, naked to the waist, tore by
shrieking that the spirits had been loosed upon them and slashing with
their bayonets at all who got in their path. Mounted officers, frantic
with anger and mortification, using their swords and pistols
indiscriminately, vainly tried to check the human stream. And through
the four-mile breach which the poison-gas had made the Germans were
pouring in their thousands. The roar of their artillery sounded like
unceasing thunder. The scarlet rays of the setting sun lighted up such a
scene as Flanders had never before beheld in all its bloody history.
Then darkness came and the sky was streaked across with the fiery trails
of rockets and the sudden splotches of bursting shrapnel. The tumult was
beyond all imagination—the crackle of musketry, the rattle of
machine-guns, the crash of high explosive, the thunder of falling walls,
the clank of harness and the rumble of wheels, the screams of the
wounded and the groans of the dying, the harsh commands of the officers,
the murmur of many voices, and the shuffle, shuffle, shuffle of
countless hurrying feet.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph copyright by M. Rol._
Machine-gun squad wearing masks as a protection against the
asphyxiating gas with which the Germans precede their attacks.
]
And through the breach still poured the helmeted legions like water
bursting through a broken dam. Into that breach were thrown the
Canadians. The story of how, overwhelmed by superior numbers of both men
and guns, choked by poison-fumes, reeling from exhaustion, sometimes
without food, for it was impossible to get it to them, under such a rain
of shells as the world had never before seen, the brawny men from the
oversea Dominion fought on for a solid week, and thereby saved the army
from annihilation, needs no re-telling here. Brigade after brigade of
fresh troops, division after division, was hurled against them but still
they battled on. So closely were they pressed at times that they fought
in little groups; men from Ontario and Quebec shoulder to shoulder with
blood-stained heroes from Alberta and Saskatchewan. At last, when it
seemed as though human endurance could stand the strain no longer, up
went the cry, “Here come the guns!” and the Canadian batteries, splashed
with sweat and mud, tore into action on the run. “Action front!”
screamed the officers, and the guns whirled like polo ponies so that
their muzzles faced the oncoming wave of gray. “With shrapnel!... Load!”
The lean and polished projectiles slipped in and the breech-blocks
snapped home. “Fire at will!” and the blast of steel tore bloody avenues
in the German ranks. But fresh battalions filled the gaps—the German
reserves seemed inexhaustible—and they still came on. At one period of
the battle the Germans were so close to the guns that the order was
given, “Set your fuses at zero!” which means that a shell bursts almost
the moment it leaves the muzzle of the gun. It was not until early on
Friday morning that reinforcements reached the shattered Canadians and
enabled them to hold their ground. Later the Northumbrian
Division—Territorials arrived only three days before from the English
training-camps—were sent to aid them and proved themselves as good
soldiers as the veterans beside whom they fought. For days the fate of
the army hung in the balance, for there seemed no end to the German
reserves, who were wiped out by whole divisions only to be replaced by
more, but against the stone wall of the Canadian resistance the men in
the spiked helmets threw themselves in vain. On May 13, 1915, after
three weeks of continuous fighting, may be said to have ended the Second
Battle of Ypres, not in a terrific and decisive climax, but slowly,
sullenly, like two prize-fighters who have fought to the very limit of
their strength.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph copyright by “The Daily Mirror.”_
A British battery in action.
]
[Illustration:
“Bodies, long months dead, rotting amid the wire entanglements.”
]
[Illustration:
_From photographs by Meurisse._
“Imagine what it must be like to sleep in a hole in the earth, into
which you have to crawl on all fours, like an animal into its lair.”
]
According to the present British system, the soldiers spend three weeks
at the front and one week in the rear—if possible, out of sound of the
guns. The entire three weeks at the front is, to all intents and
purposes, spent in the trenches, though every third day the men are
given a breathing spell. _Three weeks in the trenches!_ I wonder if you
of the sheltered life have any but the haziest notion of what that
means. I wonder if _you_, Mr. Lawyer; _you_, Mr. Doctor; _you_, Mr.
Business Man, can conceive of spending your summer vacation in a ditch 4
feet wide and 8 feet deep, sometimes with mud and water to your knees,
sometimes faint from heat and lack of air, in your nostrils the stench
of bodies long months dead, rotting amid the wire entanglements a few
yards in front of you, and over your head steel death whining angrily,
ceaselessly. I wonder if you can imagine what it must be like to
sleep—when the roar of the guns dies down sufficiently to make sleep
possible—on foul straw in a hole hollowed in the earth, into which you
have to crawl on all fours, like an animal into its lair. I wonder if
you can picture yourself as wearing a uniform so stiff with sweat and
dirt that it would stand alone, and underclothes so rotten with filth
that they would fall apart were you to take them off, your body so
crawling with vermin and so long unwashed that you are an offense to all
whom you approach—yet with no chance to bathe or to change your clothes
or sometimes even to wash your hands and face for weeks on end. I wonder
how your nerves would stand the strain if you knew that at any moment a
favorable wind might bring a gas cloud rolling down upon you to kill you
by slow strangulation, or that a shell might drop into the trench in
which you were standing in water to your knees and leave you floating
about in a bloody mess which turned that water red, or that a _Taube_
might let loose upon you a shower of steel arrows which would pass
through you as a needle passes through a piece of cloth, or that a mine
might be exploded beneath your feet and distribute you over the
landscape in fragments too small to be worth burying, or, worse still,
to leave you alive amid a litter of heads and arms and legs which a
moment before had belonged to your comrades, the horror of it all
turning you into a maniac who alternately shrieks and gibbers and rocks
with insane mirth at the horror of it all. I am perfectly aware that
this makes anything but pleasant reading, my friends, but if men of
gentle birth, men with university educations, men who are accustomed to
the same refinements and luxuries that you are, can endure these things,
why, it seems to me that you ought to be able to endure reading about
them.
[Illustration:
French high-explosive shells bursting on the German trenches.
]
The effect of some of the newer types of high-explosive shells is almost
beyond belief. For sheer horror and destruction those from the
Austrian-made Skoda howitzer, known as “Pilseners,” make the famous
42-centimetre shells seem almost kind. The Skoda shells weigh 2,800
lbs., and their usual curve is 4½ miles high. In soft ground they
penetrate 20 feet before exploding. The explosion, which occurs two
seconds after impact, kills every living thing within 150 yards, while
scores of men who escape the flying metal are killed, lacerated, or
blinded by the mere pressure of the gas. This gas pressure is so
terrific that it breaks in the roofs and partitions of bomb-proof
shelters. Of men close by not a fragment remains. The gas gets into the
body cavities and expands, literally tearing them to pieces.
Occasionally the clothes are stripped off leaving only the boots.
Rifle-barrels near by are melted as though struck by lightning. These
mammoth shells travel comparatively slowly, however, usually giving
enough warning of their approach so that the men have time to dodge
them. Their progress is so slow, indeed, that sometimes they can be
seen. Far more terrifying is the smaller shell which, because of its
shrill, plaintive whine, has been nicknamed “Weary Willie,” or those
from the new “noiseless” field-gun recently introduced by the Germans,
which gives no intimation of its approach until it explodes with a
shattering crash above the trenches. Is it any wonder that hundreds of
officers and men are going insane from the strain that they are under,
and that hundreds more are in the hospitals suffering from neuritis and
nervous breakdown? Is it any wonder that, when their term in the
trenches is over, they have to be taken out of sight and sound of battle
and their shattered nerves restored by means of a carefully planned
routine of sports and games, as though they were children in a
kindergarten?
The breweries, mills, and factories immediately behind the British lines
have, wherever practicable, been converted into bath-houses to which the
men are marched as soon as they leave the trenches. The soldiers strip
and, retaining nothing but their boots, which they deposit beside the
bathtub, they go in, soap in one hand and scrubbing-brush in the other,
the hot bath being followed by a cold shower. The underclothes which
they have taken off are promptly burned and fresh sets given to them, as
are also clean uniforms, the discarded ones, after passing through a
fumigating machine, being washed, pressed, and repaired by the numerous
Frenchwomen who are employed for the purpose, so as to be ready for
their owners the next time they return from the trenches. At one of
these improvised bath-houses thirteen hundred men pass through each day.
“What do the French think of the English?”
To every one I put that question. Summing up all opinions, I should say
that the French thoroughly appreciate the value of Britain’s sea power
and what it has meant to them for her to have control of the seas, but
they regard her lack of military preparedness and the deficiency of
technic among the British officers as inexcusable; they consider the
deep-seated opposition to conscription in England as incomprehensible;
they view the bickerings between British capital and labor as little
short of criminal; they regard the British officers who needlessly
expose themselves as being not heroic but insane. The attitude of the
British press was, in the earlier days of the war at least, calculated
to put a slight strain on the entente cordiale. Anxious, naturally
enough, to throw into high relief the exploits of the British troops in
France, the British newspapers vastly exaggerated the importance of the
British expedition, thus throwing the whole picture of the war out of
perspective. The behavior of the British officers, moreover, though
punctiliously correct, was not such as to mend matters, for they assumed
an attitude of haughty condescension which, as I happen to know, was
extremely galling to their French colleagues, most of whom had forgotten
more about the science of war than the patronizing youngsters who
officered the new armies had ever known. “To listen to you English and
to read your newspapers,” I heard a Frenchman say to an Englishman in
the Traveller’s Club in Paris not long ago, “one would think that there
was no one in France except the British Army and a few Germans.”
I have never heard any one in France suggest that the British officer is
lacking in bravery, but I have often heard it intimated that he is
lacking in brains. The view is held that he regards the war as a
sporting affair, much as he would regard polo or big-game hunting,
rather than as a deadly serious business. When the British officers in
Flanders brought over several packs of hounds and thus attempted to
combine war and hunting, it created a more unfavorable impression among
the French than if the British had lost a battle. “The British Army,” a
distinguished Italian general remarked to me shortly before Italy joined
the Allies, “is composed of magnificent material; it is well fed and
admirably equipped—but the men look on war as sport and go into battle
as they would into a game of football.” To the Frenchman, whose soil is
under the heel of the invader, whose women have been violated by a
ruthless and brutal soldiery, whose historic monuments have been
destroyed, and whose towns have been sacked and burned, this attitude of
mind is absolutely incomprehensible, and in his heart he resents it. The
above, mind you, is written in no spirit of criticism; I am merely
attempting to show you the Englishman through French eyes.
I have heard it said, in criticism, that the new British Army is
composed of youngsters. So it is, but for the life of me I fail to see
why this should be any objection. The ranks of both armies during our
Civil War were filled with boys still in their teens. It was one of
Wellington’s generals, if I remember rightly, who used to say that, for
really desperate work, he would always take lads in preference to
seasoned veterans because the latter were apt to be “too cunning.”
“These children,” exclaimed Marshal Ney, reviewing the beardless
conscripts of 1813, “are wonderful! I can do anything with them; they
will go anywhere!”
But the thing that really counts, when all is said and done, is the
_spirit_ of the men. The British soldier of this new army has none of
the rollicking, devil-may-care recklessness of the traditional Tommy
Atkins. He has not joined the army from any spirit of adventure or
because he wanted to see the world. He is not an adventurer; he is a
crusader. With him it is a deadly serious business. He has not enlisted
because he wanted to, or because he had to, but because he felt he ought
to. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred he has left a family, a
comfortable home, and a good job behind him. And, unlike the
stay-at-homes in England, he doesn’t make the mistake of underrating his
enemy. He knows that the headlines which appear regularly in the English
papers exultantly announcing “another British advance” are generally
buncombe. He knows that it isn’t a question of advancing but of hanging
on. He knows that he will have to fight with every ounce of fight there
is in him if he is to remain where he is now. He knows that before the
Germans can be driven out of France and Belgium, much less across the
Rhine, all England will be wearing crape. He knows that there is no
truth in the reports that the enemy is weakening. He knows it because
hasn’t he vainly thrown himself in successive waves against that
unyielding wall of steel? He knows that it is going to be a long
war—probably a very long war indeed. Every British officer or soldier
with whom I have talked has said that he expects that the spring of 1916
will find them in virtually the same positions that they have occupied
for the past year. They will gain ground in some places, of course, and
lose ground in others, but the winter, so the men in the trenches
believe, will see no radical alteration in the present western
battle-line. All this, of course, will not make pleasant reading in
England, where the Government and certain sections of the Press have
given the people the impression that Germany is already beaten to her
knees and that it is all over bar the shouting. Out along the
battle-front, however, in the trenches, and around the camp-fires, you
do not hear the men discussing “the terms of peace we will grant
Germany,” or “What shall we do with the Kaiser?” They are not talking
much, they are not singing much, they are not boasting at all, but they
have settled down to the herculean task that lies before them with a
grim determination, a bulldog tenacity of purpose, which is eventually,
I believe, going to prove the deciding factor in the war. Nothing better
illustrates this spirit than the inscription which I saw on a cross over
a newly made grave in Flanders:
TELL ENGLAND, YE THAT PASS THIS MONUMENT,
THAT WE WHO REST HERE DIED CONTENT.
III
CAMPAIGNING IN THE VOSGES
The sergeant in charge of the machine-gun, taking advantage of a lull in
the rifle-fire which had crackled and roared along the trenches since
dawn, was sprawled on his back in the gun-pit, reading a magazine. What
attracted my attention was its being an American magazine.
“Where did you learn to read English?” I asked him curiously.
“In America,” said he.
“What part?” said I.
“Schenectady,” he answered. “Was with the General Electric until the war
began.”
“I’m from up-State myself,” I remarked. “My people live in Syracuse.”
“The hell you say!” he exclaimed, scrambling to his feet and grasping my
hand cordially. “I took you for an Englishman. From Syracuse, eh? Why,
that makes us sort of neighbors, doesn’t it? We ought to have a drink on
it. I suppose the Boches have plenty of beer over there,” waving his
hand in the direction of the German trenches, of which I could catch a
glimpse through a loophole, “but we haven’t anything here but water.
I’ve got an idea, though! Back in the States, when they have those Old
Home Week reunions, they always fire off an anvil or the town cannon. So
what’s the matter with celebrating this reunion by letting the Boches
have a few rounds from the machine-gun?”
Seating himself astride the bicycle saddle on the trail of the
machine-gun, he swung the lean barrel of the wicked little weapon until
it rested on the German trenches a hundred yards away. Then he slipped
the end of a cartridge-carrier into the breech.
[Illustration:
In a bomb-proof gun-pit.
“_Rrr-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-rrrip_ went the mitrailleuse, with the noise
of a million mowing-machines. The racket in the log-roofed gun-pit
was deafening.”
]
“Three rousing cheers for the U. S. A.!” he shouted, and pressed a
button. _Rrr-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-rrrip_ went the
mitrailleuse, with the noise of a million mowing-machines. Flame spurted
from its muzzle as water spurts from the nozzle of a fire-hose. The
racket in the log-roofed gun-pit was ear-shattering. The blast of
bullets spattered the German trenches, they _pinged_ metallically
against the steel plates set in the embrasures, they kicked up countless
spurts of yellow earth. The sergeant stood up, grinning, and with a
grimy handkerchief wiped from his face the powder stains and
perspiration.
[Illustration:
French trenches on the Somme.
“This is the sort of wall which one side or the other will have to
break through in order to win this war.”
]
“If you should happen to be in Schenectady you might drop in at the
General Electric plant and tell the boys—” he began, but the sentence
was never finished, for just then a shell whined low above our heads and
burst somewhere behind the trenches with the roar of an exploding
powder-mill. We had disturbed the Germans’ afternoon siesta, and their
batteries were showing their resentment.
“I think that perhaps I’d better be moving along,” said I hastily. “It’s
getting on toward dinner time.”
“Well, s’long,” said he regretfully. “And say,” he called after me,
“when you get back to little old New York would you mind dropping into
the Knickerbocker and having a drink for me? And be sure and give my
regards to Broadway.”
“I certainly will,” said I.
And that is how a Franco-American whose name I do not know, sergeant in
a French line regiment whose number I may not mention, and I held an Old
Home Week celebration of our own in the French trenches in Alsace. For
all I know there may have been some other residents of central New York
over in the German trenches. If so, they made no attempt to join our
little reunion. Had they done so they would have received a _very_ warm
reception.
[Illustration:
In the French trenches on the Yser.
To put one’s head a fraction of an inch above the parapet is to become
a corpse, so a watch is kept on the enemy through periscopes.
]
There were several reasons why I welcomed the opportunity offered me by
the French General Staff to see the fighting in Alsace. In the first
place a veil of secrecy had been thrown over the operations in that
region, and the mysterious is always alluring. Secondly, most of the
fighting that I have seen has been either in flat or only moderately
hilly countries, and I was curious to see how warfare is conducted in a
region as mountainous and as heavily forested as the Adirondacks or
Oregon. Again, the Alsace sector is at the extreme southern end of that
great battle-line, more than four hundred miles long, which stretches
its unlovely length across Europe from the North Sea to the Alps, like
some monstrous and deadly snake. And lastly, I wanted to see the
retaking of that narrow strip of territory lying between the summit of
the Vosges and the Rhine which for more than forty years has been
mourned by France as one of her “lost provinces.”
[Illustration:
_From a photograph by E. A. Powell._
In the Vosges the French have built veritable underground cities.
]
[Illustration:
_From a photograph by Meurisse._
A 155-millimetre gun firing at a German position eight miles away.
]
Campaigning in the Vosges.
This land of Alsace is, in many respects, the most beautiful that I have
ever seen. Strung along the horizon, like sentinels wrapped in mantles
of green, the peaks of the Vosges loom against the sky. On the slopes of
the ridges, massed in their black battalions, stand forests of spruce
and pine. Through peaceful valleys silver streams meander leisurely, and
in the meadows which border them cattle stand knee-deep amid the lush
green grass. The villages, their tortuous, cobble-paved streets lined on
either side by dim arcades, and the old, old houses, with their turrets
and balconies and steep-pitched pottery roofs, give you the feeling that
they are not real, but that they are scenery on a stage, and this
illusion is heightened by the men in their jaunty _bérets_ and wooden
_sabots_, and the women, whose huge black silk head-dresses accentuate
the freshness of their complexions. It is at once a region of ruggedness
and majesty and grandeur, of quaintness and simplicity and charm. As I
motored through it, it was hard to make myself believe that death was
abroad in so fair a land, and that over there, on the other side of
those near-by hills, men were engaged in the business of wholesale
slaughter. I was brought to an abrupt realization of it, however, as we
were passing through the old gray town of Gérardmer. I heard a sudden
outcry, and the streets, which a moment before had been a-bustle with
the usual market-day crowd, were all at once deserted. The people dived
into their houses as a woodchuck dives into its hole. The sentries on
duty in front of the _État-Major_ were staring upward. High in the sky,
approaching with the speed of an express-train, was what looked like a
great white seagull, but which, from the silver sheen of its
armor-plated body, I knew to be a German _Taube_. “We’re in for another
bombardment,” remarked an officer. “The German airmen have been visiting
us every day of late.” As the aircraft swooped lower and nearer, a
field-gun concealed on the wooded hillside above the town spoke sharply,
and a moment later there appeared just below the _Taube_ a sudden
splotch of white, like one of those powder-puffs that women carry. From
the opposite side of the town another antiaircraft gun began to bark
defiance, until soon the aerial intruder was ringed about by wisps of
fleecy smoke. At one time I counted as many as forty of them, looking
like white tufts on a coverlet of turquoise blue. Things were getting
too hot for the German, and with a beautiful sweep he swung about, and
went sailing down the wind, content to wait until a more favorable
opportunity should offer.
The inhabitants of these Alsatian towns have become so accustomed to
visits from German airmen that they pay scarcely more attention to them
than they do to thunderstorms, going indoors to avoid the bombs just as
they go indoors to avoid the rain. I remarked, indeed, as I motored
through the country, that nearly every town through which we passed
showed evidences, either by shattered roofs or shrapnel-spattered walls,
of aeroplane bombardment. Thus is the war brought home to those who,
dwelling many miles from the line of battle, might naturally suppose
themselves safe from harm. In those towns which are within range of the
German guns the inhabitants are in double danger, yet the shops and
schools are open, and the townspeople go about their business apparently
wholly unmindful of the possibility that a shell may drop in on them at
any moment. In St. Dié we stopped for lunch at the Hôtel Terminus, which
is just opposite the railway-station. St. Dié is within easy range of
the German guns—or was when I was there—and when the Germans had nothing
better to do they shelled it, centring their fire, as is their custom,
upon the railway-station, so as to interfere as much as possible with
traffic and the movement of troops. The station and the adjacent
buildings looked like cardboard boxes in which with a lead-pencil
somebody had jabbed many ragged holes. The hotel, despite its upper
floor having been wrecked by shell-fire only a few days previously, was
open and doing business. Ranged upon the mantel of the dining-room was a
row of German 77-millimetre shells, polished until you could see your
face in them. “Where did you get those?” I asked the woman who kept the
hotel. “Those are some German shells that fell in the garden during the
last bombardment, and didn’t explode,” she answered carelessly. “I had
them unloaded—the man who did it made an awful fuss about it, too—and I
use them for hot-water bottles. Sometimes it gets pretty cold here at
night, and it’s very comforting to have a nice hot shell in your bed.”
From St. Dié to Le Rudlin, where the road ends, is in the neighborhood
of thirty miles, and we did it in not much over thirty minutes. We went
so fast that the telegraph-poles looked like the palings in a picket
fence, and we took the corners on two wheels—doubtless to save rubber.
Of one thing I am quite certain: if I am killed in this war, it is not
going to be by a shell or a bullet; it is going to be in a military
motor-car. No cars save military ones are permitted on the roads in the
zone of operations, and for the military cars no speed limits exist. As
a result, the drivers tear through the country as though they were in
the Vanderbilt Cup Race. Sometimes, of course, a wheel comes off, or
they meet another vehicle when going round a corner at full speed—and
the next morning there is a military funeral. To be the driver of a
military car in the zone of operations is the joy-rider’s dream come
true. The soldier who drove my car steered with one hand because he had
to use the other to illustrate the stories of his exploits in the
trenches. Despite the fact that we were on a mountain road, one side of
which dropped away into nothingness, when he related the story of how he
captured six Germans single-handed he took both hands off the wheel to
tell about it. It would have made Barney Oldfield’s hair permanently
pompadour.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph by Meurisse._
What the Germans did to the church at Ribécourt.
]
At Le Rudlin, where there is an outpost of Alpine chasseurs, we left the
car, and mounted mules for the ascent of the _Hautes Chaumes_, or High
Moors, which crown the summit of the Vosges. Along this ridge ran the
imaginary line which Bismarck made the boundary between Germany and
France. Each mule was led by a soldier, whose short blue tunic, scarlet
breeches, blue puttees, rakish blue _béret_, and rifle slung
hunter-fashion across his back, made him look uncommonly like a Spanish
brigand, while another soldier hung to the mule’s tail to keep him on
the path, which is as narrow and slippery as the path of virtue. Have
you ever ridden the trail which leads from the rim of the Grand Canyon
down to the Colorado? Yes? Well, the trail which we took up to the
_Hautes Chaumes_ was in places like that, only more so. Yet over that
and similar trails has passed an army of invasion, carrying with it,
either on the backs of mules or on the backs of men, its guns, food, and
ammunition, and sending back in like fashion its wounded. Reaching the
summit, the trail debouched from the dense pine forest onto an open,
wind-swept moor. Dotting the backbone of the ridge, far as the eye could
see, ran a line of low stone boundary posts. On one side of each post
was carved the letter F. On the other, the eastern face, was the letter
D. Is it necessary to say that F stood for France and D for Deutschland?
Squatting beside one of the posts was a French soldier busily engaged
with hammer and chisel in cutting away the D. “It will not be needed
again,” he explained, grinning.
[Illustration:
On the summit of the Vosges.
Mr. Powell standing beside one of the stone posts which formerly
marked the frontier of Germany and France.
]
Leaving the mules in the shelter of the wood, we proceeded across the
open tableland which crowns the summit of the ridge on foot, for, being
now within both sight and range of the German batteries, there seemed no
object in attracting more attention to ourselves than was absolutely
necessary. Half a mile or so beyond the boundary posts the plateau
suddenly fell away in a sheer precipice, a thin screen of bushes
bordering its brink. The topographical officer who had assumed the
direction of the expedition at Le Rudlin motioned me to come forward.
“Have a look,” said he, “but be careful not to show yourself or to shake
the bushes, or the Boches may send us a shell.” Cautiously I peered
through an opening in the branches. The mountain slope below me, almost
at the foot of the cliff on which I stood, was scarred across by two
great undulating yellow ridges. In places they were as much as a
thousand yards apart, in others barely ten. I did not need to be told
what they were. I knew. The ridge higher up the slope marked the line of
the French trenches; the lower that of the German. From them came an
incessant crackle and splutter which sounded like a forest fire.
Sometimes it would die down until only an occasional shot would
punctuate the mountain silence, and then, apparently without cause, it
would rise into a clatter which sounded like an army of carpenters
shingling a roof. In the forests on either side of us batteries were at
work steadily, methodically, and, though we could not see the guns, the
frequent fountains of earth thrown up along both lines of trenches by
bursting shells showed how heavy was the bombardment that was in
progress, and how accurate was both the French and German fire. We were
watching what the official _communiqué_ described the next day as the
fighting on the Fecht very much as one would watch a football game from
the upper row of seats in the Harvard stadium. Above the forest at our
right swayed a French observation balloon, tugging impatiently at its
rope, while the observer, glasses glued to his eyes, telephoned to the
commander of the battery in the wood below him where his shells were
hitting. Suddenly, from the French position just below me, there rose,
high above the duotone of rifle and artillery fire, the shrill clatter
of a quick-firer. _Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat_ it went, for all the world
like one of those machines which they use for riveting steel girders.
And, when you come to think about it, that is what it _was_ doing:
riveting the bonds which bind Alsace to France.
I have heard it said that the French army has been opposed, and in many
instances betrayed, by the people whom they thought they were liberating
from the German yoke, and that consequently the feeling of the French
soldiers for the Alsatians is very bitter. This assertion is not true. I
talked with a great many people during my stay in Alsace—with the
_maires_ of towns, with shopkeepers, with peasant farmers, and with
village priests—and I found that they welcomed the French as
wholeheartedly as a citizen who hears a burglar in his house welcomes a
policeman. I saw old men and women who had dwelt in Alsace before the
Germans came, and who had given up all hope of seeing the beloved
tricolor flying again above Alsatian soil, standing at the doors of
their cottages, with tears coursing down their cheeks, while the endless
columns of soldiery in the familiar uniform tramped by. In the
schoolhouses of Alsace I saw French soldiers patiently teaching children
of French blood, who have been born under German rule and educated under
German schoolmasters, the meaning of “_Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité_,”
and that _p-a-t-r-i-e_ spells France.
The change from Teutonic to Gallic rule is, however, by no means
welcomed by all Alsatians. The Alsatians of to-day, remember, are not
the Alsatians of 1870. It has been the consistent policy of the German
Government to encourage and, where necessary, to assist German farmers
to settle in Alsace, and as the years passed and the old hatred died
down, these newcomers intermarried with the old French stock, so that
to-day there are thousands of the younger generation in whose veins flow
both French and German blood, and who scarcely know themselves to whom
their allegiance belongs. As a result of this peculiar condition, both
the French and German military authorities have to be constantly on
their guard against treachery, for a woman bearing a French name may
well be of German birth, while a man who speaks nothing but German may,
nevertheless, be of pure French extraction. Hence spies, both French and
German, abound. If the French Intelligence Department is well served, so
is that of Germany. Peasants working in the fields, petty tradesmen in
the towns, women of social position, and other women whose virtue is as
easy as an old shoe, Germans dressed as priests, as hospital attendants,
as Red Cross nurses, sometimes in French uniforms and travelling in
motor-cars with all the necessary papers—all help to keep the German
military authorities informed of what is going on behind the French
lines. Sometimes they signal by means of lamps, or by raising and
lowering the shade of a lighted room of some lonely farmhouse; sometimes
by means of cunningly concealed telephone wires; occasionally by the
fashion in which the family washing is arranged upon a line within range
of German telescopes, innocent-looking red-flannel petticoats,
blue-linen blouses, and white undergarments being used instead of
signal-flags to spell out messages in code. A plough with a white or
gray horse has more than once indicated the position of a French battery
to the German airmen. The movements of a flock of sheep, driven by a spy
disguised as a peasant, has sometimes given similar information. On one
occasion three German officers in a motor-car managed to get right
through the British lines in Flanders. Two of them were disguised as
French officers, who were supposed to be bringing back the third as a
prisoner, he being, of course, in German uniform. So clever and daring
was their scheme that they succeeded in getting close to British
headquarters before they were detected and captured. They are no cowards
who do this sort of work. They know perfectly well what it means if they
are caught: sunrise, a wall, and a firing-party.
[Illustration:
The German shells drop into the lake and stun hundreds of fish,
whereupon the soldiers paddle out and gather them in.
]
[Illustration:
The first shot is the signal for the band to take position on the
shore of the lake and play the _Marseillaise_.
]
On the Lac Noir.
From the _Hautes Chaumes_ we descended by a very steep and perilous path
to the Lac Noir, where a battalion of Alpine chasseurs had built a
cantonment at which we spent the night. The Lac Noir, or Black Lake,
occupies the crater of an extinct volcano, whose rocky sides are so
smooth and steep that it looks like a gigantic washtub, in which a weary
Hercules might wash the clothing of the world. There were in the
neighborhood of a thousand chasseurs in camp on the shores of the Lac
Noir when I was there, the _chef de brigade_ having been, until the
beginning of the war, military adviser to the President of China. The
amazing democracy of the French army was illustrated by the fact that
his second in command, Lieutenant-Colonel Messimy, was, until the change
of cabinet which took place after the battle of the Marne, minister of
war. The cantonment—“Black Lake City” Colonel Messimy jokingly called
it—looked far more like a summer camp in the Adirondacks than a
soldiers’ camp in Alsace. All the buildings were of logs, their roofs
being covered with masses of green boughs to conceal them from
inquisitive aeroplanes, and at the back of each hut, hollowed from the
mountainside, was an underground shelter in which the men could take
refuge in case of bombardment. Gravelled paths, sometimes bordered with
flowers, wound amid the pine-trees; the officers’ quarters had broad
verandas, with ingeniously made rustic furniture upon them; the
mess-tables were set under leafy arbors; there was a swimming-raft and a
diving-board, and a sort of rustic pavilion known as the “Casino,” where
the men passed their spare hours in playing cards or danced to the music
of a really excellent band. Over the doorway was a sign which read: “The
music of the tambourine has been replaced by the music of the cannon.”
Though the Lac Noir was, when I was there, within the French lines, it
was within range of the German batteries, which shelled it almost daily.
The slopes of the crater on which the cantonment was built are so steep,
however, that the shells would miss the barracks altogether, dropping
harmlessly in the middle of the little lake. The ensuing explosion would
stun hundreds of fish, which would float upon the surface of the water,
whereupon the soldiers would paddle out in a rickety flatboat and gather
them in. In fact, a German bombardment came to mean that the chasseurs
would have fish for dinner. This daily bombardment, which usually began
just before sunset, the French called the “Evening Prayer.” The first
shot was the signal for the band to take position on that shore of the
lake which could not be reached by the German shells, and play the
_Marseillaise_, a bit of irony which afforded huge amusement to the
French and excessive irritation to the Germans.
[Illustration:
The penalty for treason.
]
When the history of the campaign in the Vosges comes to be written, a
great many pages will have to be devoted to recounting the exploits of
the _chasseurs alpins_. The “Blue Devils,” as the Germans have dubbed
them, are the Highlanders of the French army, being recruited from the
French slopes of the Alps and the Pyrenees. Tough as rawhide, keen as
razors, hard as nails, they are the ideal troops for mountain warfare.
They wear a distinctive dark-blue uniform, and the _béret_, or cap, of
the French Alps, a flat-topped, jaunty head-dress which is brother to
the tam-o’-shanter. The frontier of Alsace, from a point opposite
Strasbourg to a point opposite Mülhausen, follows the summit of the
Vosges, and over this range, which in places is upward of four thousand
feet in height, have poured the French armies of invasion. In the van of
those armies have marched the _chasseurs alpins_, dragging their guns by
hand up the almost sheer precipices, and dragging the gun-mules after
them; advancing through forests so dense that they had to chop paths for
the line regiments which followed them; carrying by storm the apparently
impregnable positions held by the Germans; sleeping often without
blankets and with the mercury hovering near zero on the heights which
they had captured; taking their batteries into positions where it was
believed no batteries could go; raining shells from those batteries upon
the wooded slopes ahead, and, under cover of that fire, advancing,
always advancing. Think of what it meant to get a great army over such a
mountain range in the face of desperate opposition; think of the labor
involved in transporting the enormous supplies of food, clothing, and
ammunition required by that army; think of the sufferings of the wounded
who had to be taken back across those mountains, many of them in the
depths of winter, sometimes in litters, sometimes lashed to the backs of
mules. The mule, whether from the Alps, the Pyrenees, or from Missouri,
is playing a brave part in this mountain warfare, and whenever I saw one
I felt like the motorist who, after his automobile had been hauled out
of an apparently bottomless Southern bog by a negro who happened to be
passing with a mule team, said to his son: “My boy, from now on always
raise your hat to a mule.”
Just as the crimson disk of the sun peered cautiously over the crater’s
rim, we bade good-by to our friends the _chasseurs alpins_, and turned
the noses of our mules up the mountains. As we reached the summit of the
range, the little French captain who was acting as our guide halted us
with a gesture. “Look over there,” he said, pointing to where, far
beyond the trench-scarred hillsides, a great, broad valley was swimming
in the morning mists. There were green squares which I knew for
meadow-lands, and yellow squares which were fields of ripening grain;
here and there were clusters of white-walled, red-roofed houses, with
ancient church-spires rising above them; and winding down the middle of
the plain was a broad gray ribbon which turned to silver when the sun
struck upon it.
“Look,” said the little captain again, and there was a break in his
voice. “That is what we are fighting for. That is Alsace.”
Then I knew that I was looking upon what is, to every man of Gallic
birth, the Promised Land; I knew that the great, dim bulk which loomed
against the distant sky-line was the Black Forest; I knew that somewhere
up that mysterious, alluring valley, Strasbourg sat on her hilltop, like
an Andromeda waiting to be freed; and that the broad, silent-flowing
river which I saw below me was none other than the Rhine.
And as I looked I recalled another scene, on another continent and
beside another river, two years before. I was standing with a colored
cavalry sergeant of the border patrol on the banks of the Rio Grande,
and we were looking southward to where the mountains of Chihuahua rose,
purple, mysterious, forbidding, grim, against the evening sky. On the
Mexican side of the river a battle was in progress.
“I suppose,” I remarked to my companion, “that you’ll be mighty glad
when orders come to cross the border and clean things up over there in
Mexico.”
“Mistah,” he answered earnestly, “we ain’t nevah gwine tuh _cross_ dat
bodah, but one of these yere days wese a gwine tuh pick dat bodah up an’
carry it right down to Panama.”
And that is what the French are doing in Alsace. They have not crossed
the border, but they have picked the border up, and are carrying it
right down to the banks of the Rhine.
IV
THE RETAKING OF ALSACE
When I asked the general commanding the armies operating in Alsace for
permission to visit the fire-trenches, I did it merely as a matter of
form. I was quite prepared to be met with a polite but firm refusal, for
it is as difficult to get into the French trenches as it is to get
behind the scenes of a Broadway theatre on the first night of a big
production. This, understand, is not from any solicitude for your
safety, but because a fire-trench is usually a very busy place indeed,
and a visitor is apt to get in the way and make himself a nuisance
generally. Imagine my astonishment, then, when the general said,
“Certainly, if you wish,” just as though he were giving me permission to
visit his stables or his gardens. I might add that almost every
correspondent who has succeeded in getting to the French front has been
taken, with a vast deal of ceremony and precaution, into a trench of
some sort, thus giving him an experience to tell about all the rest of
his life, but those who have been permitted to visit the actual
fire-trenches might almost be numbered on one’s fingers. In this respect
the French have been much less accommodating than the Belgians or the
Germans. The fire, or first-line, trench, is the one nearest the enemy,
and both from it and against it there is almost constant firing. The
difference between a second-line, or reserve, trench, and a fire-trench
is the difference between sitting in a comfortable orchestra stall and
in being on the stage and a part of the show.
Before they took me out to the trenches we lunched in Dannemarie, or, as
it used to be known under German rule, Dammerkirch. Though the town was
within easy range of the German guns, and was shelled by them on
occasion, the motto of the townsfolk seemed to be “business as usual,”
for the shops were busy and the schools were open. We had lunch at the
local inn: it began with fresh lobster, followed by _omelette au
fromage_, spring lamb, and asparagus, and ended with strawberries, and
it cost me sixty cents, wine included. From which you will gather that
the people behind the French lines are not suffering for food.
Just outside Dannemarie the railway crosses the River Ill by three
tremendous viaducts eighty feet in height. When, early in the war, the
Germans fell back before the impetuous French advance, they effectually
stopped railway traffic by blowing up one of these viaducts behind them.
Urged by the railway company, which preferred to have the government
foot the bill, the viaduct was rebuilt by the French military
authorities, and a picture of the ceremony which marked its inauguration
by the Minister of War was published in one of the Paris illustrated
papers. The jubilation of the French was a trifle premature, however,
for a few days later the Germans moved one of their monster siege-guns
into position and, at a range of eighteen miles, sent over a shell which
again put the viaduct out of commission. That explains, perhaps, why the
censorship is so strict on pictures taken in the zone of operations.
Dannemarie is barely ten miles from that point where the French
and German trenches, after zigzagging across more than four
hundred miles of European soil, come to an abrupt end against the
frontier of Switzerland. The Swiss, who are taking no chances of
having the violation of Belgium repeated with their own country
for the victim, have at this point massed a heavy force of
extremely businesslike-looking troops, the frontier is marked by a
line of wire entanglements, and a military zone has been
established, civilians not being permitted to approach within a
mile or more of the border. When I was in that region the French
officers gave a dinner to the officers in command of the Swiss
frontier force opposite them. That there might be no embarrassing
breaches of neutrality the table was set exactly on the
international boundary, so that the Swiss officers sat in
Switzerland, and the French officers sat in France. One of the
amusing incidents of the war was when the French “put one over” on
the Germans at the beginning of hostilities in this region. Taking
advantage of a sharp angle in the contour of the Swiss frontier,
the French posted one of their batteries in such a position, that
though it could sweep the German trenches, it was so close to the
border that whenever the German guns replied their shells fell on
Swiss soil, and an international incident was created.
[Illustration:
Troglodyte dwellings in Alsace.
“Twenty feet below the surface of the earth are rooms with
sleeping-quarters for many men.”
]
The trenches in front of Altkirch, and indeed throughout Alsace, are
flanked by patches of dense woods, and it is in these woods that the
cantonments for the men are built, and amid their leafy recesses that
the soldiers spend their time when off duty in sleeping, smoking, and
card-playing. Though the German batteries periodically rake the woods
with shell-fire, it is an almost total waste of ammunition, for the men
simply retreat to the remarkable underground cities which they have
constructed, and stay there until the shell-storm is over. The
troglodyte habitations which have come into existence along the entire
length of the western battle-front are perhaps the most curious products
of this siege warfare. In these dwellings burrowed out of the earth the
soldiers of France live as the cavemen lived before the dawn of
civilization. A dozen to twenty feet below the surface of the ground,
and so strongly roofed over with logs and earth as to render their
occupants safe from the most torrential rain of high explosive, I was
shown rooms with sleeping-quarters for a hundred men apiece, blacksmith
and carpenter shops, a recreation room where the men lounged and smoked
and read the papers and wrote to the folks at home, a telegraph station,
a telephone exchange from which one could talk with any section of the
trenches, with division headquarters, or with Paris; a bathing
establishment with hot and cold water and shower-baths; a barber
shop—all with board floors, free from dampness, and surprisingly clean.
The trenches and passageways connecting these underground dwellings were
named and marked like city streets—the Avenue Joffre, the Avenue Foch,
the Rue des Victoires—and many of them were electric-lighted. The
bedroom of an artillery officer, twenty feet underground, had its walls
and ceiling covered with flowered cretonne—heaven knows where he got
it!—and the tiny windows of the division commander’s headquarters,
though they gave only on a wall of yellow mud, were hung with dainty
muslin curtains—evidently the work of a woman’s loving fingers. In one
place a score of steps led down to a passageway whose mud walls were so
close together that I brushed one with either elbow as I passed. On this
subterranean corridor doors—real doors—opened. One of these doors led
into an officer’s sitting-room. The floor and walls were covered with
planed wood and there was even an attempt at polish. The rustic
furniture was excellently made. Beside the bed was a telephone and an
electric light, and on a rude table was a brass shell-case filled with
wild flowers. On the walls the occupant had tacked pictures of his wife
and children in a pitiful attempt to make this hole in the ground look
“homelike.”
[Illustration:
_From a photograph by Meurisse._
The straggling columns of unkempt, unshaven men were in striking
contrast to the helmeted giants on gigantic horses who guarded them.
]
But don’t get the idea, from anything that I have said, that life in the
trenches is anything more than endurable. Two words describe it: misery
and muck. War is not only fighting, as many people seem to think.
Bronchitis is more deadly than bullets. Pneumonia does more harm than
poison-gas. Shells are less dangerous than lack of sanitation. To be
attacked by strange and terrible diseases; to stand day after day, week
after week, between walls of oozy mud and amid seas of slime; to be
eaten alive by vermin; to suffer the intolerable irritation of the itch;
to be caked with mud and filth; to go for weeks and perhaps for months
with no opportunity to bathe; to be so foul of person that you are an
offense to all who come near—such are the real horrors of the trench.
Yet, when the circumstances are taken into consideration, the French
soldier is admirably cared for. His health is carefully looked after. He
is well fed, well clothed, and, following the policy of conserving by
every possible means the lives of the men, he is afforded every
protection that human ingenuity can devise. The _képi_ has been replaced
by the trench-helmet, a light casque of blued steel, which will protect
a man’s brain-pan from shell-splinter, shrapnel, or grenade, and which
has saved many a man’s life. Rather a remarkable thing, is it not, that
the French soldier of to-day should adopt a head-dress almost identical
with the casque worn by his ancestor, the French man-at-arms of the
Middle Ages? I am convinced that it is this policy of conserving the
lives of her fighting men which is going to win the war for France. If
necessity demands that a position be taken with the bayonet, no soldiers
in the world sacrifice themselves more freely than the French, but the
military authorities have realized that men, unlike shells, cannot be
replaced. “The duration and the outcome of the war,” General de Maud’huy
remarked to me, “depends upon how fast we can kill off the Germans.
Their army has reached its maximum strength, and every day sees it
slowly but surely weakening. Our game, therefore, is to kill as many as
possible of the enemy while at the same time saving our own men. It is,
after all, a purely mathematical proposition.”
I believe that the losses incidental to trench warfare, as it is being
conducted in Alsace, have been considerably exaggerated. The officer in
command of the French positions in front of Altkirch told me that,
during the construction of some of the trenches, the Germans rained
twelve thousand shells upon the working parties, yet not a man was
killed and only ten were wounded. The modern trench is so ingeniously
constructed that, even in the comparatively rare event of a shell
dropping squarely into it, only the soldiers in the immediate vicinity,
seldom more than half a dozen at the most, are injured, the others being
protected from the flying steel by the traverses, earthen walls which
partially intersect the trench at intervals of a few yards. In the
trench one has only to keep one’s head down, and he is nearly as safe as
though he were at home. To crouch, to move bowed, to keep always the
parapet between your head and the German riflemen, becomes an instinct,
like the lock-step which used to be the rule for the convicts at Sing
Sing.
So cleverly have the French engineers taken advantage of the
configuration of the country in front of Altkirch, that we were able to
enter the _boyaux_, or communication trenches, without leaving the
shelter of the wood. Half an hour’s brisk walking through what would, in
times of peace, be called a ditch, perhaps three feet wide and seven
deep, its earthen walls kept in place by wattles of woven willows, and
with as many twists and turns as the maze at Hampton Court, brought us
at last into the fire-trenches. These were considerably roomier than the
_boyaux_, being in places six feet wide and having a sort of raised step
or platform of earth, on which the men stood to fire, running along the
side nearest the enemy. Each soldier was protected by a steel shield
about the size of a newspaper, and painted a lead-gray, set in the earth
of the parapet. In the centre of the shield is cut an opening slightly
larger than a playing-card, through which the soldier pokes his rifle
when he wishes to fire, and which, when not in use, is screened by a
steel shutter or a cloth curtain, so that the riflemen in the German
trench cannot see any one who may happen to pass behind it. At intervals
of five or six yards men were on watch, with their rifles laid. Their
instructions are never to take their eyes off the enemy’s trenches, a
shout from them bringing their comrades tumbling out of their dug-outs
just as firemen respond to the clang of the fire-gong. When the men come
rushing out of the shelters they have, in the earthen platform, a good
steady footing which will bring their heads level with the parapet,
where their rifles, leaning against the steel shields, await them. It is
planned to always keep a sufficient force in the fire-trenches, so that,
roughly speaking, there will be a man to every yard, which is about as
close as they can fight to advantage. Every thirty yards or so, in a
log-roofed shelter known as a gun-pit, is a machine-gun, though in the
German trenches it is not at all uncommon to find a machine-gun to every
fifteen men.
As we passed through the trenches I noticed at intervals of a hundred
yards or so men, standing motionless as statues, who seemed to be
intently listening. And that, I found, was precisely what they were
doing. In this trench warfare men are specially told off to listen, both
above and beneath the ground, for any sapping or mining operations on
the part of the enemy. Without this precaution there would be the
constant danger of the Germans driving a tunnel under the French
trenches (or vice versa) and, by means of a mine, blowing those trenches
and the men in them into the air. Indeed, scarcely a night passes that
soldiers, armed with knives and pistols, do not crawl out on hands and
knees between the trenches in order to find out, by holding the ear to
the ground, whether the enemy is sapping. Should the listener hear the
muffled sounds which would suggest that the enemy was driving a mine, he
tells it in a whisper to his companion, who crawls back to his own
trenches with the message, whereupon the engineers immediately take
steps to start a counter-mine.
“Look through here,” said the intelligence officer who was acting as my
guide, indicating the port-hole in one of the steel shields, “but don’t
stay too long or a German sharpshooter may spot you. A second is long
enough to get a bullet through the brain.” Cautiously applying my eye to
the opening, I saw, perhaps a hundred yards away, a long, low mound of
earth, such as would be thrown up from a sewer excavation, and dotting
it at three-foot intervals darker patches which I knew to be just such
steel shields as the one behind which I was sheltered. And I knew that
behind each one of those steel shields was standing a keen-eyed rifleman
searching for something suspicious at which to fire. Immediately in
front of the German trench, just as in front of the trench in which I
stood, a forest of stout stakes had been driven deep into the ground,
and draped between these stakes were countless strands of barbed wire,
so snarled and tangled, and interlaced and woven that a cat could not
have gotten through unscratched. Between the two lines of entanglements
stretched a field of ripening wheat, streaked here and there with
patches of scarlet poppies. There were doubtless other things besides
poppies amid that wheat, but, thank God, it was high enough to hide
them. Rising from the wheatfield, almost midway between the French and
German lines, was a solitary apple-tree. “Behind that tree,” whispered
the officer standing beside me—for some reason they always speak in
hushed tones in the trenches—“is a German outpost. He crawls out every
morning before sunrise and is relieved at dark. Though some of our men
keep their rifles constantly laid on the tree, we’ve never been able to
get him. Still, he’s not a very good life-insurance risk, eh?” And I
agreed that he certainly was not.
I must have remained at my loophole a little too long or possibly some
movement of mine attracted the attention of a German sniper, for _pang_
came a bullet against the shield behind which I was standing, with the
same ringing, metallic sound which a bullet makes when it hits the iron
target in a shooting-gallery. In this case, however, _I_ was the
bull’s-eye. Had that bullet been two inches nearer the centre there
would have been, in the words of the poet, “more work for the
undertaker, another little job for the casket-maker.”
“Lucky for you that wasn’t one of the new armor-piercing bullets,”
remarked the officer as I hastily stepped down. “After the Germans
introduced the steel shields we went them one better by introducing a
jacketed bullet which will go through a sheet of armor-plate as though
it were made of cheese. We get lots of amusement from them. Sometimes
one of our men will fire a dozen rounds of ordinary ammunition at a
shield behind which he hears some Boches talking, and as the bullets
glance off harmlessly they laugh and jeer at him. Then he slips in one
of the jacketed bullets and—_whang!!!_—we hear a wounded Boche yelping
like a dog that has been run over by a motor-car. Funny thing about the
Germans. They’re brave enough—no one questions that—but they scream like
animals when they’re wounded.”
From all that I could gather, the French did not have a particularly
high opinion of the quality of the troops opposed to them in Alsace,
most of whom, at the time I was there, were Bavarians and Saxons. An
officer in the trenches on the Hartmannswillerkopf, where the French and
German positions were in places very close together, told me that
whenever the Germans attempted an attack the French trenches burst into
so fierce a blast of rifle and machine-gun fire that the men in the
spiked helmets refused to face it. “Vorwärts! Vorwärts!” the German
officers would scream, exposing themselves recklessly. “Nein! Nein!” the
fear-maddened men would answer as they broke and ran for the shelter of
their trenches. Then the French would hear the angry bark of automatics
as the officers pistoled their men.
When the French, in one of the bloodiest and most desperate assaults of
the war, carried the summit of the Hartmannswillerkopf by storm, they
claim to have found the German machine-gun crews chained to their guns
as galley-slaves were chained to their oars. French artillery officers
have repeatedly told me that when German infantry advances to take a
position by assault, the men are frequently urged forward by their own
batteries raking them from the rear. As the German gunners gradually
advance their fire as the infantry moves forward, it is as dangerous for
the men to retreat as to go on. Hence it is by no means uncommon, so the
French officers assert, for the German troops to arrive pell-mell at the
French trenches, breathless, terrified, hands above their heads, seeking
not a fight but a chance to surrender.
One of the assertions that you hear repeated everywhere along the French
lines, by officers and men alike, is that the German does not fight
fair, that you cannot trust him, that he is not bound by any of the
recognized rules of the game. Innumerable instances have been related to
me of wounded Germans attempting to shoot or stab the French surgeons
and nurses who were caring for them. An American serving in the Foreign
Legion told me that on one occasion, when his regiment carried a German
position by assault, the wounded Germans lying on the ground waited
until the legionaries had passed, and then shot them in the back. Now,
when the Foreign Legion goes into action, each company is followed by
men with axes, whose business it is to see that such incidents do not
happen again.
The reason for the French soldier’s deep-seated distrust of the German
is illustrated by a grim comedy of which I heard when I was in Alsace.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph by E. A. Powell._
Each soldier is protected by a steel shield, in the centre of which is
cut an opening slightly larger than a playing-card.
]
[Illustration:
_Photo by Meurisse._
A “poilu” in the Vosges.
]
[Illustration:
_Photo by E. A. Powell._
A French soldier wearing a mask as a protection against gas.
]
In the trenches in Alsace.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph by Meurisse._
Convoy of German prisoners guarded by Moroccan Spahis.
]
A company of German infantry was defending a stone-walled farmstead on
the Fecht. So murderous was the fire of the French batteries that soon a
white sheet was seen waving from one of the farmhouse windows. The
French fire ceased, and through the gateway came a group of Germans,
holding their hands above their heads and shouting: “Kamerad! Kamerad!”
which has become the euphemism for “I surrender.” But when a detachment
of chasseurs went forward to take them prisoners the Germans suddenly
dropped to the ground, while from an upper window in the farmhouse a
hidden machine-gun poured a stream of lead into the unsuspecting
Frenchmen. Thereupon the French batteries proceeded to transform that
farmhouse into a sieve. In a quarter of an hour the tablecloth was again
seen waving, the French guns again ceased firing, and again the Germans
came crowding out, with their hands above their heads. But this time
they were stark naked! To prove that they had no concealed weapons they
had stripped to the skin. It is scarcely necessary to add that those
Germans were _not_ taken prisoners.
Though the incidents I have above related were told me by officers who
claimed to have witnessed them, and whose reliability I have no reason
to doubt, I do not vouch for them, mind you; I merely repeat them for
what they are worth.
I had, of course, heard many stories of the German ranks being filled
with boys and old men, but the large convoys of prisoners which I saw in
Alsace and in Champagne convinced me that there is but little truth in
the assertion. Some of the prisoners, it is true, looked as though they
should have been in high school, and others as though they had been
called from old soldiers’ homes, but these formed only a sprinkling of
the whole. By far the greater part of the prisoners that I saw were men
between eighteen and forty, and they all impressed me as being in the
very pink of physical condition and this despite the fact that they were
dirty and hungry and very, very tired. But they struck me as being not
at all averse to being captured. They seemed exhausted and dispirited
and crushed, as though all the fight had gone out of them. In those long
columns of weary, dirty men were represented all the Teutonic types:
arrogant, supercilious Prussians; strapping young peasants from the
Silesian farm lands; tradesmen and mechanics from the great industrial
centres; men from the mines of Würtemberg and the forests of Baden;
scowling Bavarians and smiling Saxons. Among them were some brutish
faces, accentuated, no doubt, by the close-cropped hair which makes any
man look like a convict, but the countenances of most of them were frank
and honest and open. Two things aroused my curiosity. The first was that
I did not see a helmet—a _pickelhaube_—among them. When I asked the
reason they explained that they had been captured in the fire-trenches,
and that they seldom wear their helmets there, as the little round gray
caps with the scarlet band are less conspicuous and more comfortable.
The other thing that aroused my curiosity was when I saw French
soldiers, each with a pair of scissors, going from prisoner to prisoner.
“What on earth are you doing?” I asked.
“We are cutting the suspenders of the Boches,” was the answer. “Their
trousers are made very large around the waist so that if their
suspenders are cut they have to hold them up with their hands, thus
making it difficult for them to run away.”
As I looked at these unshaven, unkempt men in their soiled and tattered
uniforms, it was hard to make myself believe that they had been a part
of that immaculate, confident, and triumphant army which I had seen roll
across Belgium like a tidal wave in the late summer of 1914.
[Illustration:
A French smoke bomb.
The French are using these smoke bombs to screen the movements of
troops just as the smoke from a destroyer screens the movements of a
battleship.
]
Though the French and German positions in Alsace are rarely less than a
hundred yards apart and usually considerably more, there is one point on
the line, known as La Fontenelle, where, owing to a peculiar rocky
formation, _the French and German trenches are within six yards of each
other_. The only reason one side does not blow up the other by means of
mines is because the vein of rock which separates them is too hard to
tunnel through. In cases where the trenches are exceptionally close
together, the men have the comfort of knowing that they are at least
safe from shell-fire, for, as the battery commanders are perfectly aware
that the slightest error in calculating the range, or the least
deterioration in the rifling of the guns, would result in their shells
landing among their own men, they generally play safe and concentrate
their fire on the enemy’s second-line trenches instead of on the
first-line. The fighting in these close-up positions has consequently
degenerated into a warfare of bombs, hand-grenades, poison-gas, burning
oil, and other methods reminiscent of the Middle Ages. As a protection
against bombs and hand-grenades, some of the trenches which I visited
had erected along their parapets ten-foot-high screens of wire netting,
like the back nets of tennis-courts.
[Illustration:
With hand-grenades in the trenches.
“In this war the hand-grenade is king. Beside it the high-power rifle
is a joke.”
]
In this war the hand-grenade is king. Compared with it the high-power
rifle is a joke. The grenadier regiments again deserve the name. For
cleaning out a trench or stopping a massed charge there is nothing like
a well-aimed volley of hand-grenades. I believe that the total failure
of the repeated German attempts to break through on the western front is
due to three causes: the overwhelming superiority of the French
artillery; the French addiction to the use of the bayonet—for the
Germans do not like cold steel; and to the remarkable proficiency of the
French in the use of hand-grenades. The grenade commonly used by the
French is of the “bracelet” type, consisting of a cast-iron ball filled
with explosive. The thrower wears on his wrist a leather loop or
bracelet which is prolonged by a piece of cord about a foot in length
with an iron hook at the end. Just before the grenade is thrown, the
hook is passed through the ring of a friction-pin inside the firing-plug
which closes the iron ball. By a sharp backward turn of the wrist when
the grenade is thrown, the ring, with the friction-pin, held back by the
hook, is torn off, the grenade itself continuing on its brief journey of
destruction. The French also use a primed grenade attached to a sort of
wooden racket, which can be quickly improvised on the spot, and which,
from its form, is popularly known as the “hair-brush.” To acquire
proficiency in the use of grenades requires considerable practise, for
the novice who attempts to throw one of these waspish-tempered missiles
is as likely to blow up his comrades as he is the enemy. So at various
points along the front the French have established bomb-throwing
schools, under competent instructors, where the soldiers are taught the
proper method of throwing grenades, just as, at the winter
training-camps, candidates for the big leagues are taught the proper
method of throwing a baseball.
Some of the grenades are too large to be thrown by hand and so they are
hurled into the enemy’s trenches by various ingenious machines designed
for the purpose. There is, for example, the _sauterelle_, a modern
adaptation of the ancient arbalist, which can toss a bomb the size of a
nail-keg into a trench ninety feet away. Mortars which did good service
in the days of Bertrand du Guesclin have been unearthed from ancient
citadels, and in the trenches are again barking defiance at the enemies
of France. Because of their frog-like appearance, the soldiers have
dubbed them _crapouillots_, and they are used for throwing bombs of the
horned variety, which look more than anything else like snails pushing
their heads out of their shells. Still another type, known as the
_taupia_, consists merely of a German 77-millimetre shell-case with a
touch-hole bored in the base so that it can be fired by a match. This
little improvised mortar, whose name was no doubt coined from the French
word for “mole” (_taupe_) as appropriate to underground warfare, throws
a tin containing two and a quarter pounds of high explosive for a short
distance with considerable accuracy. Still another type of bomb is
hurled from a catapult, which does not differ materially from those
which were used at the siege of Troy. Doubtless the most accurate and
effective of all the bombs used in this trench warfare is the so-called
air-torpedo, a cigar-shaped shell about thirty inches long and weighing
thirty-three pounds, which is fitted with steel fins, like the feathers
on an arrow and for the same purpose. This projectile, which is fired
from a specially designed mortar, has an effective range of five hundred
yards and carries a charge of high explosive sufficient to demolish
everything within a radius of twenty feet. Tens of thousands of these
torpedoes of the air were used during the French offensive in Champagne
and created terrible havoc in the German trenches. But by far the most
imposing of these trench projectiles is the great air-mine, weighing two
hundred and thirty-six pounds and as large as a barrel, which is fired
from an 80-millimetre mountain gun with the wheels removed and mounted
on an oak platform. In the case of both the air-torpedo and the air-mine
the projectile does not enter the barrel of the gun from which it is
fired, but is attached to a tube which alone receives the propulsive
force. At first the various forms of trench mortars—_minenwerfer_, the
Germans call them—were unsatisfactory because they were not accurate and
could not be depended upon, no one being quite sure whether the
resulting explosion was going to occur in the French trenches or in the
German. They have been greatly improved, however, and though no attempt
has been made to give them velocity, they drop their bombs with
reasonable accuracy. You can see them plainly as they end-over-end
toward you, like beer-bottles or beer-kegs coming through the air.
Nor does this by any means exhaust the list of killing devices which
have been produced by this war. There is, for example, the little,
insignificant-looking bomb with wire triggers sticking out from it in
all directions, like the prickers on a horse-chestnut burr. These bombs
are thickly strewn over the ground between the trenches. If the enemy
attempts to charge across that ground some soldier is almost certain to
step on one of those little trigger-wires. To collect that soldier’s
remains it would be necessary to use a pail and shovel. The Germans are
said to dig shallow pools outside their trenches and cement the bottoms
of those pools and fill them with acid, which is masked by boughs or
straw. Any soldiers who stumbled into those pools of acid would have
their feet burned off. This I have not seen, but I have been assured
that it is so. Along certain portions of the front the orthodox
barbed-wire entanglements are giving way to great spirals of heavy
telegraph wire, which, lying loose upon the ground, envelop and hamper
an advancing force like the tentacles of a giant cuttlefish. This wire
comes in coils about three feet in diameter, but instead of unwinding it
the coils are opened out into a sort of spiral cage, which can be rolled
over the tops of the trenches without exposing a man. A bombardment
which would wipe the ordinary barbed-wire entanglement out of existence,
does this new form of obstruction comparatively little harm, while the
wire is so tough and heavy that the soldiers with nippers who precede a
storming-party cannot cut it. Another novel contrivance is the hinged
entanglement, a sort of barbed-wire fence which, when not in use, lies
flat upon the ground, where it is but little exposed to shell-fire, but
which, by means of wires running back to the trenches, can be pulled
upright in case of an attack, so that the advancing troops suddenly find
themselves confronted by a formidable and unexpected barrier. In cases
where the lines are so close together that for men to expose themselves
would mean almost certain death, _chevaux-de-frise_ of steel and wire
are constructed in the shelter of the trenches and pushed over the
parapet with poles. The French troops now frequently advance to the
assault, carrying huge rolls of thick linoleum, which is unrolled and
thrown across the entanglements, thus forming a sort of bridge, by means
of which the attacking force is enabled to cross the river of barbed
wire in front of the German trenches.
It is not safe to assert that anything relating to this war is untrue
merely because it is incredible. I have with my own eyes seen things
which, had I been told about them before the war began, I would have set
down as the imaginings of a disordered mind. Some one asked me if I knew
that the scene-painters of the French theatres had been mobilized and
formed into a battalion for the purpose of painting scenery to mask
gun-positions—and I laughed at the story. Since then I have seen
gun-positions so hidden. Suppose that it is found necessary to post a
battery in the open, where no cover is available. In the ordinary course
of events the German airmen would discover those guns before they had
fired a dozen rounds, and the German batteries would promptly proceed to
put them out of action. So they erect over them a sort of tent, and the
scene-painters are set to work so to paint that tent that, from a little
distance, it cannot be distinguished from the surrounding scenery. If it
is on the Belgian littoral they will paint it to look like a sand-dune.
If it is in the wooded country of Alsace or the Argonne they will so
paint it that, seen from an aeroplane, it will look like a clump of
trees. I have seen a whole row of aeroplane hangars, each of them the
size of a church, so cleverly painted that, from a thousand feet above,
they could not be seen at all. A road over which there is heavy traffic
lies within both range and sight of the enemy’s guns. Anything seen
moving along that road instantly becomes the target for a rain of
shells. So along the side of the road nearest the enemy is raised a
screen of canvas, like those which surround the side-shows at the
circus, but, instead of being decorated with lurid representations of
the Living Skeleton and the Wild Man from Borneo and the Fattest Woman
on Earth, and the Siamese Twins, it is painted to represent a row of
trees such as commonly border French highways. Behind that canvas screen
horse, foot, and guns can then be moved in safety, though the road must
be kept constantly sprinkled so that the suspicions of the German
observers shall not be aroused by a telltale cloud of dust. The
stalking-screen is a device used for approaching big game by sportsmen
the world over. Now the idea has been applied by the French to warfare,
the big game being in this case Germans. The screens are of steel plates
covered with canvas so painted that it looks like a length of trench,
the deception being heightened by sticking to the canvas tufts of grass.
Thus screened from the enemy, two or three men may secretly keep watch
at points considerably in advance of the real trenches, creeping forward
as opportunity offers, pushing their scenery before them. Both sides
have long been daubing field-guns and caissons and other bulky equipment
with all the colors of the rainbow, like a futurist landscape, so that
they assume the properties of a chameleon and become indistinguishable
from the landscape. Now they are painting the faces of the snipers, and
splashing their uniforms and rifle barrels with many colors and tying to
their heads wisps of grass and foliage. But the crowning touch was when
the French began systematically to paint their white horses with
permanganate so as to turn them into less obtrusive browns and sorrels.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph by Meurisse._
Chevaux-de-frise and movable entanglements.
“Movable entanglements are constructed in the shelter of the trenches
and pushed over the parapet with poles so that the men do not have
to expose themselves.”
]
Hollowed at frequent intervals from the earthen back walls of the
trenches are niches, in each of which is kept a bottle of hyposulphate
of soda and a pail of water. When the yellow cloud which denotes that
the Germans have turned loose their poison-gas comes rolling down upon
them, the soldiers hastily empty the hyposulphate into the water,
saturate in the solution thus formed a pad of gauze which they always
carry with them, fasten it over the mouth and nostrils by means of an
elastic, and, as an additional precaution, draw over the head a bag of
blue linen with a piece of mica set in the front and a draw-string to
pull it tight about the neck. Thus protected and looking strangely like
the hooded familiars of the Inquisition, they are able to remain at
their posts without fear of asphyxiation. But no protection has as yet
been devised against the terrible flame projector which has been
introduced on several portions of the western front by the Germans. It
is a living sheet of flame, caused by a gas believed to be oxyacetylene,
and is probably directed through a powerful air-jet. The pressure of the
air must be enormous, for the flame, which springs from the ground level
and expands into a roaring wave of fire, chars and burns everything
within thirty yards. The flame is, indeed, very like that of the common
blowpipe used by plumbers, but instead of being used upon lead pipe it
is used upon human flesh and bone.
[Illustration:
Taking precautions against a gas attack.
“When the poison-gas comes rolling down upon the trenches the soldiers
fasten over the mouth and nostrils a pad of gauze saturated in a
hyposulphate solution.”
]
But poison-gas and flame projectors are by no means the most devilish of
the devices introduced by the Germans. The soldiers of the Kaiser have
now adopted the weapon of the jealous prostitute and are throwing
vitriol. The acid is contained in fragile globes or phials which break
upon contact, scattering the liquid fire upon everything in the
immediate vicinity. I might add that I do not make this assertion except
after the fullest investigation and confirmation. I have not only talked
with officers and men who were in the trenches into which these vitriol
bombs were thrown, but American ambulance drivers both in the Vosges and
the Argonne told me that they had carried to the hospitals French
soldiers whose faces had been burned almost beyond recognition.
“But we captured one of the vitriol-throwers,” said an officer who was
telling me about the hellish business. “He was pretty badly burned
himself.”
“I suppose you shot him then and there,” said I.
“Oh, no,” was the answer, “we sent him along with the other prisoners.”
“You don’t mean to say,” I exclaimed, indignation in my voice, “that you
captured a man who had been throwing vitriol at your soldiers and let
him live?”
“Naturally,” said the officer quietly. “There was nothing else to do.
You see, monsieur, we French are civilized.”
V
THE FIGHTING IN CHAMPAGNE
When the history of this war comes to be written, the great French
offensive which began on the 25th of September, 1915, midway between
Rheims and Verdun, will doubtless be known as the Battle of Champagne.
Hell holds no horrors for one who has seen that battle-field. Could
Dante have walked beside me across that dreadful place, which had been
transformed by human agency from a peaceful countryside to a garbage
heap, a cesspool, and a charnel-house combined, he would never have
written his “Inferno,” because the hell of his imagination would have
seemed colorless and tame. The difficulty in writing about it is that
people will not believe me. I shall be accused of imagination and
exaggeration, whereas the truth is that no one could imagine, much less
exaggerate, the horrors that I saw upon those rolling, chalky plains.
[Illustration:
The battle-field of Champagne.
“A peaceful countryside transformed by human agency to a garbage heap,
a cesspool, and a charnel-house combined.”
]
[Illustration:
Bringing in the wounded during the battle of Champagne.
This battle cost Europe more men in killed and wounded than fought at
Gettysburg.
]
In order that you may get clearly in your mind the setting of this
titanic conflict, in which nearly a million and a half Frenchmen and
Germans were engaged and in which Europe lost more men in killed and
wounded than fought at Gettysburg, get out your atlas, and on the map of
eastern France draw a more or less irregular line from Rheims to Verdun.
This line roughly corresponds to the battle-front in Champagne. On the
south side of it were the French, on the north the Germans. About midway
between Rheims and Verdun mark off on that line a sector of some fifteen
miles. If you have a sufficiently large scale map, the hamlet of
Auberive may be taken as one end of the sector and Massiges as the
other. This, then, was the spot chosen by the French for their
sledge-hammer blow against the German wall of steel.
There is scarcely a region in all France where a battle could have been
fought with less injury to property. Imagine, if you please, an immense
undulating plain, its surface broken by occasional low hills and ridges,
none of them much over six hundred feet in height, and wandering in and
out between those ridges the narrow stream which is the Marne. The
country hereabouts is very sparsely settled; the few villages that dot
the plain are wretchedly poor; the trees on the slopes of the ridges are
stunted and scraggly; the soil is of chalky marl, which you have only to
scratch to leave a staring scar, and the grass which tries to grow upon
it seems to wither and die of a broken heart. This was the great
manœuvre ground of Chalons, and it was good for little else, yet only a
few miles to the westward begin the vineyards which are France’s chief
source of wealth, and an hour’s journey to the eastward is the beautiful
forest of the Argonne.
Virtually, the entire summer of 1915 was spent by the French in making
their preparations for the great offensive. These preparations were
assisted by the extension of the British front as far as the Somme, thus
releasing a large number of French troops for the operations in
Champagne; by the formation of new French units; and by the
extraordinary quantity of ammunition made available by hard and
continuous work in the factories. The volume of preparatory work was
stupendous. Artillery of every pattern and caliber, from the light
mountain guns to the monster weapons which the workers of Le Creusot and
Bourges had prophetically christened “_Les Vainqueurs_,” was gradually
assembled until nearly three thousand guns had been concentrated on a
front of only fifteen miles. Had the guns been placed side by side they
would have extended far beyond the fifteen-mile battle-front. There were
cannon everywhere. Each battery had a designated spot to fire at and a
score of captive balloons with telephonic connections directed the fire.
One battery was placed just opposite a German redoubt which, the Germans
boasted, could be held against the whole French army by two washerwomen
with machine-guns. Behind each of the French guns were stacked two
thousand shells. A network of light railways was built in order to get
this enormous supply of ammunition up to the guns. From the end of the
railway they built a macadamized highway, forty feet wide and nine miles
long, straight as a ruler across the rolling plain. Underground shelters
for the men were dug and underground stores for the arms and ammunition.
The field was dotted with subterranean first-aid stations, their
locations indicated by sign-boards with scarlet arrows and by the Red
Cross flags flying over them. That the huge masses of infantry to be
used in the attack might reach their stations without being annihilated
by German shell-fire, the French dug forty miles of reserve and
communication trenches, ten miles of which were wide enough for four men
to walk abreast. Hospitals all over France were emptied and put in
readiness for the river of wounded which would soon come flowing in. In
addition to all this, moral preparation was also necessary, for it was a
question whether the preceding months of trench warfare and the
individual character it gives to actions had not affected the control of
the officers over their men. Everything was foreseen and provided for;
nothing was left to chance. The French had undertaken the biggest job in
the world, and they set about accomplishing it as systematically, as
methodically as though they had taken a contract to build a Simplon
Tunnel or to dig a Panama Canal.
The Germans had held the line from Auberive to the Forest of the Argonne
since the battle of the Marne. For more than a year they had been
constructing fortifications and defenses of so formidable a nature that
it is scarcely to be wondered at that they considered their position as
being virtually impregnable. Their trenches, which were topped with
sand-bags and in many cases had walls of concrete, were protected by
wire entanglements, some of which were as much as sixty yards deep. The
ground in front of the entanglements was strewn with sharpened stakes
and _chevaux-de-frise_ and land mines and bombs which exploded upon
contact. The men manning the trenches fought from behind shields of
armor-plate and every fifteen yards was a machine-gun. Mounted on the
trench walls were revolving steel turrets, miniature editions of those
on battleships, all save the top of the turret and the muzzle of the
quick-firing gun within it being embedded in the ground. The trenches
formed a veritable maze, with traps and blind passageways and
cul-de-sacs down which attackers would swarm only to be wiped out by
skilfully concealed machine-guns. At some points there were five lines
of trenches, one behind the other, the ground behind them being divided
into sections and supplied with an extraordinary number of communication
trenches, protected by wire entanglements on both sides, so that, in
case the first line was compelled to give way, the assailants would find
themselves confronted by what were to all intents a series of small
forts, heavily armed and communicating one with the other, thus enabling
the defenders to rally and organize flank attacks without the slightest
delay. This elaborate system of trenches formed only the first German
line of defense, remember; behind it there was a second line, the
artillery being stationed between the two. There was, moreover, an
elaborate system of light railways, some of which came right up to the
front line, connecting with the line from Challerange to Bazancourt,
that there might be no delay in getting up ammunition and fresh troops
from the bases in the rear. No wonder that the Germans regarded their
position as an inland Gibraltar and listened with amused complacence to
the reports brought in by their aviators of the great preparations being
made behind the French lines. Not yet had they heard the roar of
France’s massed artillery or seen the heavens open and rain down death.
On the morning of September 22 began the great bombardment—the greatest
that the world had ever known. On that morning the French commander
issued his famous general order: “I want the artillery so to bend the
trench parapets, so to plough up the dug-outs and subterranean defenses
of the enemy’s line, as to make it almost possible for my men to march
to the assault with their rifles at the shoulder.” It will be seen that
the French artillerymen had their work laid out for them. But they went
about it knowing exactly what they were doing. During the long months of
waiting the French airmen had photographed and mapped every turn and
twist in the enemy’s trenches, every entanglement, every path, every
tree, so that when all was in readiness the French were almost as
familiar with the German position as were the Germans themselves. The
first task of the French gunners was to destroy the wire entanglements,
and when they finished few entanglements remained. The next thing was to
bury the Germans in their dug-outs, and so terrific was the torrent of
high explosive that whole companies which had taken refuge in their
underground shelters were annihilated. The parapets and trenches had
also to be levelled so that the infantry could advance, and so
thoroughly was this done that the French cavalry actually charged over
the ground thus cleared. Then, while the big guns were shelling the
German cantonments, the staff headquarters, and the railways by which
reinforcements might be brought up, the field-batteries turned their
attention to the communication trenches, dropping such a hail of
projectiles that all telephone communication between the first and
second lines was interrupted, so that the second line did not know what
was happening in the first. There are no words between the covers of the
dictionary to describe what it must have been like within the German
lines under that rain of death. The air was crowded with the French
shells. No wonder that scores of the German prisoners were found to be
insane. A curtain of shell-fire made it impossible for food or water to
be brought to the men in the bombarded trenches, and made it equally
impossible for these men to retreat. Hundreds of them who had taken
refuge in their underground shelters were buried alive when the
explosion of the great French _marmites_ sent the earthen walls crashing
in upon them. Whole forests of trees were mown down by the blast of
steel from the French guns as a harvester mows down a field of grain.
The wire entanglements before the German trenches were swept away as
though by the hand of God. The steel _chevaux-de-frise_ and the shields
of armor-plate were riddled like a sheet of paper into which has been
emptied a charge of buckshot. Trenches which it had taken months of
painstaking toil to build were utterly demolished in an hour. The
sand-bags which lined the parapets were set on fire by the French high
explosive and the soldiers behind them were suffocated by the fumes. The
bursts of the big shells were like volcanoes above the German lines,
vomiting skyward huge geysers of earth and smoke which hung for a time
against the horizon and were then gradually dissipated by the wind. For
three days and two nights the bombardment never ceased nor slackened.
The French gunners, streaming with sweat and grimed with powder, worked
like the stokers on a record-breaking liner. The metallic _tang_ of the
“_soixante-quinze_” and the deep-mouthed roar of the 120’s, the 155’s,
and the 370’s, and the screech and moan of the shells passing overhead
combined to form a hurricane of sound. Conversation was impossible. To
speak to a man beside him a soldier had to shout. Though the ears of the
men were stuffed with cotton they ached and throbbed to the unending
detonation. An American aviator who flew over the lines when the
bombardment was at its height told me that the German trenches could not
be seen at all because of the shells bursting upon them. “The noise,” he
said, “was like a machine-gun made of cannon.” Imagine, then, what must
have been the terror of the Germans cowering in the trenches which they
had confidently believed were proof against anything and which they
suddenly found were no protection at all against that rain of death
which seemed to come from no human agency, but to be hellish in the
frightfulness of its effect. When the bombardment was at its height the
shells burst at the rate of twenty a second, forming one wave of black
smoke, one unbroken line of exploding shells, as far as the horizon.
Graphic glimpses of what it must have been like in the German trenches
during that three days’ bombardment are given by the letters and diaries
found on the bodies of German soldiers—written, remember, in the very
shadow of death, some of them rendered illegible because spattered with
the blood of the men who wrote them.
“The railway has been shelled so heavily that all trains are stopped. We
have been in the first line for three days, and during that time the
French have kept up such a fire that our trenches cannot be seen at
all.”
“The artillery are firing almost as fast as the infantry. The whole
front is covered with smoke and we can see nothing. Men are dying like
flies.”
“A hail of shells is falling upon us. No food can be brought to us. When
will the end come? ‘Peace!’ is what every one is saying. Little is left
of the trench. It will soon be on a level with the ground.”
“The noise is awful. It is like a collapse of the world. Sixty men out
of a company of two hundred and fifty were killed last night. The force
of the French shells is frightful. A dug-out fifteen feet deep, with
seven feet of earth and two layers of timber on top, was smashed up like
so much matchwood.”
[Illustration:
The battle of Champagne.
“When the order to fall in was given, there formed up in the advance
trenches long rows of strange fighting figures wearing steel casques
and the ‘invisible’ pale-blue uniforms.”
]
When the reveille rang out along the French lines at five-thirty on the
morning of September 25 the whole world seemed gray; lead-colored clouds
hung low overhead, and a drizzling rain was falling. But the men refused
to be depressed. They drank their morning coffee and then, the roar of
the artillery making conversation out of the question, they sat down to
smoke and wait. Through the loopholes they could watch the effect of the
fire of the French batteries, could see the fountains of earth and smoke
thrown up by the bursting shells, could even see arms and legs flying in
the air. Each man wore between his shoulders, pinned to his coat, a
patch of white calico, in order to avoid the possibility of the French
gunners firing into their own men. Several men in each company carried
small, colored signal-flags for the same purpose. The watches of the
officers had been carefully synchronized, and at nine o’clock the order
to fall in was given, and there formed up in the advance trenches long
rows of strange fighting figures in their “invisible” pale-blue
uniforms, their grim, set faces peering from beneath steel helmets
plastered with chalk and mud. The company rolls were called. The
drummers and buglers took up their positions, for orders had been issued
that the troops were to be played into action. _Nine-five!_ The
regimental battle-flags were brought from the dug-outs, the water-proof
covers were slipped off, and the sacred colors, on whose faded silk were
embroidered “Les Pyramides,” “Wagram,” “Jena,” “Austerlitz,” “Marengo,”
were reverently unrolled. For the first time in this war French troops
were to go into action with their colors flying. _Nine-ten!_ The
officers, endeavoring to make their voices heard above the din of
cannon, told the men in a few shouted sentences what France and the
regiment expected of them. _Nine-fourteen!_ The officers, having jerked
loose their automatics, stood with their watches in their hands. The men
were like sprinters on their marks, waiting with tense nerves and
muscles for the starter’s pistol. _Nine-fifteen!_ Above the roar of the
artillery the whistles of the officers shrilled loud and clear. The
bugles pealed the charge. “_En avant, mes enfants!_” screamed the
officers, “_En avant! Vaincre ou_ _mourir!_” and over the tops of the
trenches, with a roar like an angry sea breaking on a rock-bound coast,
surged a fifteen-mile-long human wave tipped with glistening steel. As
the blue billows of men burst into the open, hoarsely cheering, the
French batteries which had been shelling the German first-line trenches
ceased firing with an abruptness that was startling. In the comparative
quiet thus suddenly created could be plainly heard the orders of the
officers and the cheering of the men, some of whom shouted “_Vive la
France!_” while others sang snatches of the _Marseillaise_ and the
_Carmagnole_. Though every foot of ground over which they were advancing
had for three days been systematically flooded with shell, though the
German trenches had been pounded until they were little more than heaps
of dirt and débris, the German artillery was still on the job, and the
ranks of the advancing French were swept by a hurricane of fire. General
Marchand, the hero of the famous incident at Fashoda, who was in command
of the Colonials, led his men to the assault, but fell wounded at the
very beginning of the engagement as, surrounded by his staff, he stood
on the crest of a trench, cane in hand, smoking his pipe and encouraging
the succeeding waves of men racing forward into battle. His two
brigade-commanders fell close beside him. Three minutes after the first
of the Colonials had scrambled over the top of their trenches they had
reached the German first line. After them came the First and Second
Regiments of the Foreign Legion and the Moroccan division. As they ran
they broke out from columns of two (advancing in twos with fifty paces
between each pair) into columns of squad (each man alone, twenty-five
paces from his neighbor) as prettily and perfectly as though on a
parade-ground.
[Illustration:
The battle-field of Champagne, showing the French high-explosive
shells bursting on the German trenches.
]
Great as was the destruction wrought by the bombardment, the French
infantry had no easy task before them, for stretches of wire
entanglements still remained in front of portions of the German
trenches, while at frequent intervals the Germans had left behind them
machine-gun sections, who from their sunken positions poured in a deadly
fire, until the oncoming wave overwhelmed and blotted them out. It was
these death-traps that brought out in the French soldier those same
heroic qualities which had enabled him, under the leadership of
Napoleon, to enter as a conqueror every capital in Europe. A man who was
shot while cutting a way for his company through the wire entanglements,
turned and gave the cutters to a comrade before he fell. A wounded
soldier lying on the ground called out to an officer who was stepping
aside to avoid him: “Go on. Don’t mind stepping on me. I’m wounded. It’s
only you who are whole who matter now.” A man with his abdomen ripped
open by a shell appealed to an officer to be moved to a
dressing-station. “The first thing to move are the guns to advanced
positions, my friend,” was the answer. “That’s right,” said the man; “I
can wait.” Said a wounded soldier afterward in describing the onslaught:
“When the bugles sounded the charge and the trumpets played the
_Marseillaise_, we were no longer mere men marching to the assault. We
were a living torrent which drives all before it. The colors were flying
at our side. It was splendid. Ay, my friend, when one has seen that one
is proud to be alive.”
In many places the attacking columns found themselves abruptly halted by
steel _chevaux-de-frise_, with German machine-guns spitting death from
behind them. The men would pelt them with hand-grenades until the
sappers came up and blew the obstructions away. Then they would sweep
forward again with the bayonet, yelling madly. The great craters caused
by the explosion of the French land mines were occupied as soon as
possible and immediately turned into defensible positions, thus
affording advanced footholds within the enemy’s line of trenches. At a
few points in the first line the Germans held out, but at others they
surrendered in large numbers, while many were shot down as they were
running back to the second line. As a matter of fact, the Germans had no
conception of what the French had in store for them, and it was not
until their trenches began to give way under the terrible hammering of
the French artillery that they realized how desperate was their
situation. It was then too late to strengthen their front, however, as
it would have been almost certain death to send men forward through the
curtain of shell-fire which the French batteries were dropping between
the first and second lines. Nor were the Germans prepared when the
infantry attack began, as was shown by the fact that a number of
officers were captured in their beds. The number of prisoners
taken—twenty-one thousand was the figure announced by the French General
Staff—showed clearly that they had had enough of it. They surrendered by
sections and by companies, hundreds at a time. Most of them had had no
food for several days, and were suffering acutely from thirst, and all
of them seemed completely unstrung and depressed by the terrible nature
of the French bombardment.
[Illustration:
Fighting in a quarrel that is not his own.
A trooper from France’s African possessions on duty in the trenches.
]
Choosing the psychological moment, when the retirement of the Germans
showed signs of turning into panic, the African troops were ordered to
go in and finish up the business with cold steel. Before these
dark-skinned, fierce-faced men from the desert, who came on brandishing
their weapons and shouting “Allah! Allah! Allah!” the Germans, already
demoralized, incontinently broke and ran. Hard on the heels of the
Africans trotted the dragoons and the _chasseurs à cheval_—the first
time since the trench warfare began that cavalry have had a chance to
fight from the saddle—sabring the fleeing Germans or driving them out of
their dug-outs with their long lances. But in the vast maze of
communication trenches and in the underground shelters Germans still
swarmed thickly, so the “trench cleaners,” as the Algerian and
Senegalese tirailleurs are called, were ordered to clear them out, a
task which they performed with neatness and despatch, revolver in one
hand and cutlass in the other. Even five days after the trenches were
taken occasional Germans were found in hiding in the labyrinth of
underground shelters.
[Illustration:
The first-line German trenches captured by the French in Champagne.
The battle-field of Champagne looked as though all the garbage cans in
Europe and America had been emptied upon it.
]
The thing of which the Champagne battle-field most reminded me was a
garbage-dump. It looked and smelled as though all the garbage cans in
Europe and America had been emptied upon it. This region, as I have
remarked before, is of a chalk formation, and wherever a trench had been
dug, or a shell had burst, or a mine had been exploded, it left on the
face of the earth a livid scar. The destruction wrought by the French
artillery fire is almost beyond imagining. Over an area as long as from
the Battery to Harlem and as wide as from the East River to the Hudson
the earth is pitted with the craters caused by bursting shells as is
pitted the face of a man who has had the small-pox. Any of these
shell-holes was large enough to hold a barrel; many of them would have
held a horse; I saw one, caused by the explosion of a mine, which we
estimated to be seventy feet deep and twice that in diameter. In the
terrific blast that caused it five hundred German soldiers perished. At
another point on what had been the German first line I saw a yawning
hole as large as the cellar of a good-sized apartment-house. It marked
the site of a German blockhouse, but the blockhouse and the men who
composed its garrison had been blown out of existence by a torrent of
370-millimetre high-explosive shells.
[Illustration:
This crater, seventy feet deep and twice that in diameter, was caused
by the explosion of a mine. In the terrific blast five hundred
Germans perished.
]
The captured German trenches presented the most horrible sight that I
have ever seen or ever expect to see. This is not rhetoric; this is
fact. Along the whole front of fifteen miles the earth was littered with
torn steel shields and twisted wire, with broken wagons, bits of
harness, cartridge-pouches, dented helmets, belts, bayonets—some of them
bent double—broken rifles, field-gun shells and rifle cartridges,
hand-grenades, aerial torpedoes, knapsacks, bottles, splintered planks,
sheets of corrugated iron which had been turned into sieves by bursting
shrapnel, trench mortars, blood-soaked bandages, fatigue-caps,
intrenching tools, stoves, iron rails, furniture, pots of jam and
marmalade, note-books, water-bottles, mattresses, blankets, shreds of
clothing, and, most horrible of all, portions of what had once been
human bodies. Passing through an abandoned German trench, I stumbled
over a mass of gray rags, and they dropped apart to disclose a headless,
armless, legless torso already partially devoured by insects. I kicked a
hobnailed German boot out of my path and from it fell a rotting foot. A
hand with awful, outspread fingers thrust itself from the earth as
though appealing to the passerby to give decent burial to its dead
owner. I peered inquisitively into a dug-out only to be driven back by
an overpowering stench. A French soldier, more hardened to the business
than I, went in with a candle, and found the shell-blackened bodies of
three Germans. Clasped in the dead fingers of one of them was a
post-card dated from a little town in Bavaria. It began: “My dearest
Heinrich: You went away from us just a year ago to-day. I miss you
terribly, as do the children, and we all pray hourly for your safe
return—” The rest we could not decipher; it had been blotted out by a
horrid crimson stain. Without the war that man might have been
returning, after a day’s work in field or factory, to a neat Bavarian
cottage, with geraniums growing in the dooryard, and a wife and children
waiting for him at the gate.
[Illustration:
German officers captured during the battle of Champagne.
]
Though when I visited the battle-field of Champagne the guns were still
roaring—for the Germans were attempting to retake their lost trenches in
a desperate series of counter-attacks—the field was already dotted with
thousands upon thousands of little wooden crosses planted upon new-made
mounds. Above many of the graves there had been no time to erect crosses
or headboards, so into the soft soil was thrust, neck downward, a
bottle, and in the bottle was a slip of paper giving the name and the
regiment of the soldier who lay beneath. In one place the graves had
been dug so as to form a vast rectangle, and a priest, his cassock
tucked up so that it showed his military boots and trousers, was at work
with saw and hammer building in the centre of that field of graves a
little shrine.
[Illustration]
[Illustration:
The price of victory.
The battle-field was dotted with thousands upon thousands of new-made
mounds and little wooden crosses.
]
[Illustration:
Instruction against gas attacks.
At various points behind the lines are schools where the men are
instructed in the use of the anti-gas respirators.
]
Scrawled in pencil on one of the pitiful little crosses I read: “Un
brave—Emile Petit—Mort aux Champ d’Honneur—Priez pour lui.” Six feet
away was another cross which marks the spot where sleeps Gottlieb
Zimmerman, of the Würtemberg Pioneers, and underneath, in German script,
that line from the Bible which reads: “He fought the good fight.” Close
by was still another little mound under which rested, so the headboard
told me, Mohammed ben Hassen Bazazou of the Fourth Algerian Tirailleurs.
In life those men had never so much as heard of one another. Doubtless
they must often have wondered why they were fighting and what the war
was all about. Now they rest there quietly, side by side, Frenchman and
German and African, under the soil of Champagne, while somewhere in
France and in Würtemberg and in Algeria women are praying for the safety
of Emile and of Gottlieb and of Mohammed.
During the three days that I spent upon the battle-field of Champagne
the roar of the guns never ceased and rarely slackened, yet not a sign
of any human being could I see as I gazed out over that desolate plain
on which was being fought one of the greatest battles of all time. There
were no moving troops, no belching batteries, no flaunting colors—only a
vast slag heap on which moved no living thing. Yet I knew that hidden
beneath the ground all around me, as well as over there where the German
trenches ran, men were waiting to kill or to be killed, and that behind
the trench-scarred ridges at my back, and behind the low-lying crests in
front of me, sweating men were at work loading and firing the great guns
whose screaming missiles crisscrossed like invisible express trains
overhead to burst miles away, perhaps, with the crash which scatters
death. The French guns seemed to be literally everywhere. One could not
walk a hundred yards without stumbling on a skilfully concealed battery.
In the shelter of a ridge was posted a battery of 155-millimetre
monsters painted with the markings of a giraffe in order to escape the
searching eyes of the German aviators and named respectively Alice,
Fernande, Charlotte, and Maria. From a square opening, which yawned like
a cellar window in the earth, there protruded the long, lean muzzle of
an eight-inch naval gun, the breech of which was twenty feet below the
level of the ground in a gun-pit which was capable of resisting any high
explosive that might chance to fall upon it. This marine monster was in
charge of a crew of sailors who boasted that their pet could drop two
hundred pounds of melinite on any given object thirteen miles away. But
the guns to which the French owe their success in Champagne, the guns
which may well prove the deciding factor in this war, are not the
cumbersome siege pieces or the mammoth naval cannon, but the mobile,
quick-firing, never-tiring, hard-hitting, “seventy-fives,” whose fire,
the Germans resentfully exclaim, is not deadly but murderous.
[Illustration:
“Men were at work rolling up the barbed wire in the captured German
entanglements.”
]
The battle-field was almost as thickly strewn with unexploded shells,
hand-grenades, bombs, and aerial torpedoes as the ground under a
pine-tree is with cones. One was, in fact, compelled to walk with the
utmost care in order to avoid stepping upon these tubes filled with
sudden death and being blown to kingdom come. I had picked up and was
casually examining what looked like a piece of broom-handle with a tin
tomato-can on the end, when the intelligence officer who was
accompanying me noticed what I was doing. “Don’t drop that!” he
exclaimed, “put it down gently. It’s a German hand-grenade that has
failed to explode and the least jar may set it off. They’re as dangerous
to tamper with as nitroglycerine.” I put it down as carefully as though
it were a sleeping baby that I did not wish to waken. As the French
Government has no desire to lose any of its soldiers unnecessarily, men
had been set to work building around the unexploded shells and torpedoes
little fences of barbed wire, just as a gardener fences in a
particularly rare shrub or tree. Other men were at work carefully
rolling up the barbed wire in the captured German entanglements, in
collecting and sorting out the arms and equipment with which the field
was strewn, in stacking up the thousands upon thousands of empty brass
shell-cases to be shipped back to the factories for reloading, and even
in emptying the bags filled with sand which had lined the German
parapets and tying them in bundles ready to be used over again. They are
a thrifty people, are the French. There was enough junk of one sort and
another scattered over the battle-field to have stocked all the
curio-shops in Europe and America for years to come, but as everything
on a field of battle is claimed by the government nothing can be carried
away. This explains why the brass shells that are smuggled back to Paris
readily sell for ten dollars apiece, while for German helmets the curio
dealers can get almost any price that they care to ask. As a matter of
fact, it is against the law to offer any war trophies for sale or,
indeed, to have any in one’s possession. What the French intend to do
with the vast quantity of junk which they have taken from the
battle-fields, heaven only knows. It is said that they have great
storehouses filled with German helmets and similar trophies which they
are going to sell after the war to souvenir collectors, thus adding to
the national revenues. If this is so there will certainly be a glut in
the curio market and it will be a poor household indeed that will not
have on the sitting-room mantel a German _pickelhaube_. After the war is
over hordes of tourists will no doubt make excursions to these
battle-fields, just as they used to make excursions to Waterloo and
Gettysburg, and the farmers who own the fields will make their fortunes
showing the visitors through the trenches and dug-outs at five francs a
head.
[Illustration:
The thousands upon thousands of empty brass shell-cases with which the
battle-fields are strewn are collected and sent back to the factory
for reloading.
]
[Illustration:
Mounted on the German trench walls were revolving steel turrets
containing quick-firing guns.
When the French captured the turret shown above they found inside it
three dead Germans, who, they assert, had been locked in by their
officers and left to die.
]
The French officers who accompanied me over the battle-field
particularly called my attention to a steel turret, some six feet high
and eight or nine feet in diameter, which had been mounted on one of the
German trench walls. The turret, which had a revolving top, contained a
50-millimetre gun served by three men. The French troops who stormed the
German position found that the small steel door giving access to the
interior of the turret was fastened on the outside by a chain and
padlock. When they broke it open they found, so they told me, the bodies
of three Germans who had apparently been locked in by their officers,
and left there to fight and die with no chance of escape. I have no
reason in the world to doubt the good faith of the officers who showed
me the turret and told me the story, and yet—well, it is one of those
things which seems too improbable to be true. When I was in Alsace the
French officers told me of having found in certain of the captured
positions German soldiers chained to their machine-guns. There again the
inherent improbability of the incident leads one to question its truth.
From what I have seen of the German soldier, I should say that he was
the last man in the world who had to be chained to his gun in order to
make him fight. Yet in this war so many wildly improbable, wholly
incredible things have actually occurred that one is not justified in
denying the truth of an assertion merely because it sounds unlikely.
[Illustration:
“Brown-skinned men from North Africa in turbans and burnooses.”
]
[Illustration:
Motor-buses with wire-netting tops filled with carrier pigeons.
]
One of the things that particularly impressed me during my visit to
Champagne was the feverish activity that prevailed behind the
firing-line. It was the busiest place that I have ever seen; busier than
Wall Street at the noon-hour; busier than the Canal Zone at the rush
period of the Canal’s construction. The roads behind the front for
twenty miles were filled with moving troops and transport-trains; long
columns of sturdy infantrymen in mud-stained coats of faded blue and
wearing steel casques which gave them a startling resemblance to their
ancestors, the men-at-arms of the Middle Ages; brown-skinned men from
North Africa in snowy turbans and voluminous burnooses, and
black-skinned men from West Africa, whose khaki uniforms were brightened
by broad red sashes and rakish red tarbooshes; sun-tanned Colonial
soldiery from Annam and Tonquin, from Somaliland and Madagascar, wearing
on their tunics the ribbons of wars fought in lands of which most people
have never so much as heard; Spahis from Morocco and the Sahara, mounted
on horses as wiry and hardy as themselves; Zouaves in jaunty fezzes and
braided jackets and enormous trousers; sailors from the fleet, brought
to handle the big naval guns, swaggering along with the roll of the sea
in their gait; cuirassiers, their steel breastplates and horse-tailed
helmets making them look astonishingly like Roman horsemen; dragoons so
picturesque that they seemed to be posing for a Detaille or a
Meissonier; field-batteries, pale blue like everything else in the
French army, rocking and swaying over the stones; cyclists with their
rifles slung across their backs hunter-fashion; leather-jacketed
despatch riders on panting motor-cycles; post-offices on wheels;
telegraph offices on wheels; butcher-shops on wheels; bake-shops on
wheels; garages on wheels; motor-busses, their tops covered with
wire-netting and filled with carrier pigeons; giant search-lights;
water-carts drawn by patient Moorish donkeys whose turbaned drivers
cursed them in shrill, harsh Arabic; troop transport cars like miniature
railway-coaches, each carrying fifty men; field-kitchens with the smoke
pouring from their stovepipes and steam rising from the soup caldrons;
long lines of drinking-water wagons, the gift of the Touring Club de
France; great herds of cattle and woolly waves of sheep, soon to be
converted into beef and mutton, for the fighting man needs meat, and
plenty of it; pontoon trains; balloon outfits; machine-guns;
pack-trains; mountain batteries; ambulances; world without end, amen.
Though the roads were jammed from ditch to ditch, there was no
confusion, no congestion. Everything was as well regulated as the
traffic on Fifth Avenue or the Strand. If the roads were crowded, so
were the fields. Here a battalion of Zouaves at bayonet practise was
being instructed in the “haymaker’s lift,” that terrible upward thrust
in which a soldier trained in the use of the bayonet can, in a single
stroke, rip his adversary open from waist to neck, and toss him over his
shoulder as he would a forkful of hay. Over there a brigade of
_chasseurs d’Afrique_ was encamped, the long lines of horses, the hooded
wagons, and the fires with the cooking-pots steaming over them,
suggesting a mammoth encampment of gypsies. In the next field a regiment
of Moroccan tirailleurs had halted for the night, and the men, kneeling
on their blankets, were praying with their faces turned toward Mecca.
Down by the horse-lines a Moorish barber was at work shaving the heads
of the soldiers, but taking care always to leave the little top-knot by
means of which the faithful, when they die, may be jerked to Paradise. A
little farther on the huge yellow bulk of an observation balloon—“_les
saucisses_,” the French call them—was slowly filling preparatory to
taking its place aloft with its fellows, which, at intervals of half a
mile, hung above the French lines, straining at their tethers like
horses that were frightened and wished to break away. In whichever
direction I looked, men were drilling or marching. Where all these
hordes of men had come from, where they were bound for, what they were
going to do, no one seemed to know or, indeed, to particularly care.
They were merely pawns which were being moved here and there upon a
mighty chess-board by a stout old man in a general’s uniform, sitting at
a map-covered table in a farmhouse many miles away.
[Illustration:
German prisoners came by, carrying on their shoulders stretchers on
which lay the stiff, stark forms of dead men.
]
As we made our way slowly and laboriously toward the front across a
region so littered with scraps of metal and broken iron and twisted wire
that it looked like the ruins of a burned hardware store, we began to
meet the caravans of wounded. Lying with white, drawn faces on the
dripping stretchers were men whose bodies had been ripped open like the
carcasses that hang in front of butcher-shops; men who had been blinded
and will spend the rest of their days groping in darkness; men smashed
out of all resemblance to anything human, yet still alive; and other men
who, with no wound upon them, raved and laughed and cackled in insane
mirth at the frightful humor of the things that they had seen. Every
house and farmyard for miles around was filled with wounded, and still
they came streaming in, some hobbling, some on stretchers, some assisted
by comrades, some bareheaded, with the dried blood clotted on their
heads and faces, others with their gasmasks and their mud-plastered
helmets still on. Two soldiers came by pushing wheeled stretchers, on
which lay the stiff, stark forms of dead men. The soldiers were
whistling and singing, like men returning from a day’s work well done,
and occasionally one of them in sheer exuberance of spirits would send
his helmet spinning into the air. Coming to a little declivity, they
raced down it with their grisly burdens, like delivery boys racing with
their carts. The light vehicles bumped and jounced over the uneven
ground until one of the corpses threatened to fall off, whereupon the
soldiers stopped and, still laughing, tied the dead thing on again. Such
is the callousness begotten by war.
Their offensive in Champagne cost the French, I have every reason to
believe, very close to 110,000 men. The German casualties, so the French
General Staff asserts, were about 140,000, of whom 21,000 were
prisoners. In addition the Germans lost 121 guns. Despite this appalling
cost in human lives, the distance gained by the French was so small that
it cannot be seen on the ordinary map. Yet to measure the effect of the
French effort by the ground gained would be a serious mistake. Just as
by the Marne victory the French stopped the invasion and ruined the
original German plan, which was first to shatter France and then turn
against Russia; and just as by the victory of the Yser they effectively
prevented the enemy from reaching the Channel ports or getting a
foothold in the Pas-de-Calais, so the offensive in Champagne, costly as
it was in human lives, fulfilled its double mission of holding large
German forces on the western front and of demoralizing and wearing down
the German army. It proved, moreover, that the Allies _can_ pierce the
Germans provided they are willing to pay the cost.
Darkness was falling rapidly when I turned my back on the great
battle-field, and the guns were roaring with redoubled fury in what is
known on the British front as “the Evening Hate” and on the French lines
as “the Evening Prayer.” As I emerged from the communication trench into
the highroad where my car was waiting I met a long column of infantry,
ghostly figures in the twilight, with huge packs on their backs and
rifles slanting on their shoulders, marching briskly in the direction of
the thundering guns. It was the night-shift going on duty at the
mills—the mills where they turn human beings into carrion.
VI
THE CONFLICT IN THE CLOUDS
Dawn was breaking over the Lorraine hills when the French aircraft were
wheeled from their canvas hangars and ranged in squadrilla formation
upon the level surface of the plain. In the dim light of early morning
the machines, with their silver bodies and snowy wings, bore an amazing
resemblance to a flock of great white birds which, having settled for
the night, were about to resume their flight. All through the night the
mechanicians had been busy about them, testing the motors, tightening
the guy-wires, and adjusting the planes, while the pilots had directed
the loading of the explosives, for a whisper had passed along the line
of sheds that a gigantic air-raid, on a scale not yet attempted, was to
be made on some German town. At a signal from the officer in command of
the aviation field the pilots and observers, unrecognizable in their
goggles and leather helmets and muffled to the ears in leather and fur,
climbed into their seats. In the clips beneath each aeroplane reposed
three long, lean messengers of death, the torpedoes of the sky, ready to
be sent hurtling downward by the pulling of a lever, while smaller
projectiles, to be dropped by hand, filled every square inch in the
bodies of the aeroplanes. From somewhere out on the aviation field a
smoke rocket shot suddenly into the air. It was the signal for
departure. With a deafening roar from their propellers the great
biplanes, in rapid succession, left the ground and, like a flock of wild
fowl, winged their way straight into the rising sun. As they crossed the
German lines at a height of twelve thousand feet the French observers
could see, far below, the decoy aeroplanes which had preceded them
rocking slowly from side to side above the German antiaircraft guns in
such a manner as to divert their attention from the raiders.
On an occasion like this each man is permitted the widest latitude of
action. He is given an itinerary which he is expected to adhere to as
closely as circumstances will permit, and he is given a set point at
which to aim his bombs, but in all other respects he may use his own
discretion. The raiders flew at first almost straight toward the rising
sun, and it was not until they were well within the enemy’s lines that
they altered their course, turning southward only when they were
opposite the town which was their objective. So rapid was the pace at
which they were travelling that it was not yet six o’clock when the
commander of the squadron, peering through his glasses, saw, far below
him, the yellow gridiron which he knew to be the streets, the splotches
of green which he knew to be the parks, and the squares of red and gray
which he knew to be the buildings of Karlsruhe. The first warning that
the townspeople had was when a dynamite shell came plunging out of
nowhere and exploded with a crash that rocked the city to its
foundations. The people of Karlsruhe were being given a dose of the same
medicine which the Zeppelins had given to Antwerp, to Paris, and to
London. As the French airmen reached the town they swooped down in swift
succession out of the gray morning sky until they were close enough to
the ground to clearly distinguish through the fleecy mist the various
objectives which had been given them. For weeks they had studied maps
and bird’s-eye photographs of Karlsruhe until they knew the place as
well as though they had lived in it all their lives. One took the old
gray castle on the hill, another took the Margrave’s palace in the
valley, others headed for the railway-station, the arms factory, and the
barracks. Then hell broke loose in Karlsruhe. For nearly an hour it
rained bombs. Not incendiary bombs or shrapnel, but huge 4-inch and
6-inch shells filled with high explosive which annihilated everything
they hit. Holes as large as cellars suddenly appeared in the stone-paved
streets and squares; buildings of brick and stone and concrete crashed
to the ground as though flattened by the hand of God; fires broke out in
various quarters of the city and raged unchecked; the terrified
inhabitants cowered in their cellars or ran in blind panic for the open
country; the noise was terrific, for bombs were falling at the rate of a
dozen to the minute; beneath that rain of death Karlsruhe rocked and
reeled. The artillery was called out but it was useless; no guns could
hit the great white birds which twisted and turned and swooped and
climbed a mile or more overhead. Each aeroplane, as soon as it had
exhausted its cargo of explosives, turned its nose toward the French
lines and went skimming homeward as fast as its propellers could take it
there, but to the inhabitants of the quivering, shell-torn town it must
have seemed as though the procession of aircraft would never cease. The
return to the French lines was not as free from danger as the outward
trip had been, for the news of the raid had been flashed over the
country by wire and wireless and antiaircraft guns were on the lookout
for the raiders everywhere. The guarding aeroplanes were on the alert,
however, and themselves attracted the fire of the German batteries or
engaged the German _Taubes_ while the returning raiders sped by high
overhead. Of the four squadrillas of aeroplanes which set out for
Karlsruhe only two machines failed to return. These lost their bearings
and were surprised by the sudden rising of hawk-like _Aviatiks_ which
cut them off from home and, after fierce struggles in the air, forced
them to descend into the German lines. But it was not a heavy price to
pay for the destruction that had been wrought and the moral effect that
had been produced, for all that day the roads leading out of Karlsruhe
were choked with frantic fugitives and the stories which they told
spread over all southern Germany a cloud of despondency and gloom. Since
then the news of the Zeppelin raids on London has brought a thrill of
fear to the people of Karlsruhe. They have learned what it means to have
death drop out of the sky.
More progress has been made in the French air service, which has been
placed under the direction of the recently created Subministry of
Aviation, than in any other branch of the Republic’s fighting machine.
Though definite information regarding the French air service is
extremely difficult to obtain, there is no doubt that on December 1,
1915, France had more than three thousand aeroplanes in commission, and
this number is being steadily increased. The French machines, though of
many makes and types, are divided into three classes, according to
whether they are to be used for reconnoissance, for fire control, or for
bombardment. The machines generally used for reconnoissance work are the
Moranes, the Maurice Farmans, and a new type of small machine known as
the “Baby” Nieuport. The last-named, which are but twenty-five feet wide
and can be built in eight days at a cost of only six thousand francs,
might well be termed the Fords of the air. They have an
eighty-horsepower motor, carry only the pilot, who operates the
machine-gun mounted over his head, and can attain the amazing speed of
one hundred and twenty miles an hour. These tiny machines can ascend at
a sharper angle than any other aeroplane made, it being claimed for
them, and with truth, that they can do things which a large bird, such
as an eagle or a hawk, could not do. The machines generally used for
directing artillery fire are either Voisins or Caudron biplanes. The
Voisin, which carries an observer as well as a pilot, is armed with a
Hotchkiss quick-firer throwing three-pound shells, being the only
machine of its size having sufficient stability to stand the recoil from
so heavy a gun. The Caudron, which likewise has a crew of two men, has
two motors, each acting independently of the other. I was shown one of
these machines which, during an observation flight over the German
lines, was struck by a shell which killed the observer and demolished
one of the motors; the other motor was not damaged, however, and with it
the pilot was able to bring the machine and his dead companion back to
the French lines. For making raids and bombardments the Voisin and
Breguet machines have generally been used, but they are now being
replaced by the giant triplane which has fittingly been called “the
Dreadnaught of the skies.” This aerial monster, the last word in
aircraft construction, has a sixty-three-foot spread of wing; its four
motors generate eight hundred horse-power; its armament consists of two
Hotchkiss quick-firing cannon and four machine-guns; it can carry twelve
men—though on a raid the crew consists of four—and twelve hundred pounds
of explosive; its cost is six hundred thousand francs.
As a result of this extraordinary advance in aviation, France has to-day
a veritable aerial navy, formed in squadrons and divisions, with
battle-planes, cruisers, scouts, and destroyers, all heavily armored and
carrying both machine-guns and cannon firing 3-inch shells. Each
squadron, as at present formed, consists of one battle-plane, two
battle-cruisers, and six scout-planes, with a complement of upward of
fifty officers and men, which includes not only the pilots and observers
but the mechanics and the drivers of the lorries and trailers which form
part of each outfit. These raiding squadrons are constantly operating
over the enemy’s lines, bombarding his bases, railway lines, and
cantonments, hindering the transportation of troops and ammunition, and
creating general demoralization behind the firing-line. On such forays
it is the mission of the smaller and swifter machines, such as the
Nieuports, to convoy and protect the larger and slower craft exactly as
destroyers convoy and protect a battleship.
Two types of projectiles are carried on raiding aeroplanes: aerial
torpedoes, two, three, or four in number, fitted with fins, like the
feathers on an arrow, in order to guide their course, which are held by
clips under the body of the machine and can be released when over the
point to be bombarded by merely pulling a lever; and large quantities of
smaller bombs, filled with high explosive and fitted with percussion
fuses, which are dropped by hand. It is extremely difficult to attain
any degree of accuracy in dropping bombs from moving aircraft, for it
must be borne in mind that the projectiles, on being released, do not at
once fall in a perfectly straight line to the earth, like a brick
dropped from the top of a skyscraper. When an aeroplane is travelling
forward at a speed of, let us say, sixty miles an hour, the bombs
carried on the machine are also moving through space at the same rate.
Owing to this forward movement combining with the downward gravitational
drop, the path of the bomb is really a curve, and for this curve the
aviator must learn to make allowance. Should the aircraft hover over one
spot, however, the downward flight of the bomb is, of course,
comparatively vertical.
[Illustration:
Lunéville from an aeroplane.
Through a study of maps and photographs the aviators come to know the
towns they are to bombard as well as the people who live in them.
This photo was taken by an American in the French air service.
]
The most exciting, as well as the most dangerous, work allotted to the
aviators is that of flying over the enemy’s lines and, by means of huge
cameras fitted with telephoto lens and fastened beneath the bodies of
the machines, taking photographs of the German positions. As soon as the
required exposures have been made, the machine speeds back to the French
lines, usually amid a storm of bursting shrapnel, and the plates are
quickly developed in the dark room, which is a part of every aerodrome.
From the picture thus obtained an enlargement is made, and within two or
three hours at the most the staff knows every detail of the German
position, even to the depth of the wire entanglements and the number and
location of the machine-guns. Should weather conditions or the activity
of the enemy’s antiaircraft batteries make it inadvisable to send a
machine on one of these photographic excursions, the camera is attached
to a _cerf-volant_, or war-kite. The entire equipment is carried on
three motor-cars built for the purpose, one carrying the dismounted
kite, the second the cameras and crew, while the third car is a dark
room on wheels. I can recall few more interesting sights along the
battle-front than that of one of these war-kites in operation. Taking
shelter behind a farmhouse or haystack, the staff, in scarcely more time
than it takes to tell about it, have jointed together the bamboo rods
which form the framework of the kite, the linen which forms the planes
is stretched into place, a camera with its shutter controlled by an
electric wire is slung underneath, and the great kite is sent into the
air. When it is over that section of the enemy’s trenches of which a
photograph is wanted, the officer at the end of the wire presses a
button, the shutter of the camera swinging a thousand feet above flashes
open and shut, the kite is immediately hauled down, a photographer takes
the holder containing the exposed plate and disappears with it into the
wheeled dark room to appear, five minutes later, with a picture of the
German trenches.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph copyright by M. Rol._
French antiaircraft gun in action against a German aeroplane.
]
The change that aeroplanes have produced in warfare is strikingly
illustrated by the fact that in the Russo-Japanese war the Japanese
fought for weeks and sacrificed thousands of men in order to capture
203-Metre Hill, not, mind you, because of its strategic importance, but
in order that they might effectively control the fire of their siege
mortars, which were endeavoring to reach the battleships in the harbor
of Port Arthur. To-day that information would be furnished in an hour by
aeroplanes. From dawn to dark aircraft hang over the enemy’s positions,
spotting his batteries, mapping his trenches, noting the movements of
troops and trains, yet with a storm of shrapnel bursting about them
constantly. I remember seeing, in Champagne, a French aeroplane rocking
lazily over the German lines, and counting sixty shrapnel clouds
floating about it at one time. So thick were the patches of fleecy white
that they looked like the white tufts on a sky-blue coverlet. The
shooting of the German verticals (antiaircraft guns) has steadily
improved as a result of the constant practise they have had, so that
half the time there are ragged rents in the French planes caused by
fragments of exploding shells. So deafening is the racket of the motor
and propeller, however, that it is impossible to hear a shell unless it
bursts at very close range, so that the aviators, intent on their work,
are often utterly unconscious of how near they are to death. It is very
curious how close shells can explode to a machine and yet not cripple it
enough to bring it down. A pilot flying over the German lines in
Flanders had his leg smashed by a bursting shell, which, strangely
enough, did no damage to the planes or motor. The wounded man fainted
from the pain and shock and his machine, left uncontrolled, began to
plunge earthward. Recovering consciousness, the aviator, despite the
excruciating pain which he was suffering, retained sufficient strength
and presence of mind to get his machine under control and head it back
for the French lines, though shrapnel was bursting all about him. He
came quietly and gracefully to ground at his home aviation field and
then fell over his steering lever unconscious.
No nervous man is wanted in the air service, and the moment that a flier
shows signs that his nerves are becoming affected he is given a furlough
and ordered to take a rest. So great is the mental strain, the exposure,
and the noise, however, that probably twenty-five per cent of the
aviators lose their nerve completely and have to leave the service
altogether. The great French aviation school at Buc, near Paris, turns
out pilots at the rate of one hundred and sixty a month. The first
lessons are given on a machine with clipped wings, known as “the
penguin,” which cannot rise from the ground, and from this the men are
gradually advanced, stage by stage, from machines as safe and steady and
well-mannered as riding-school horses, until they at last become
qualified pilots, capable of handling the quick-turning,
uncertain-tempered broncos of the air. Provided he has sound nerves, a
strong constitution, and average intelligence, a man who has never been
in a machine before can become a qualified pilot in thirty days. Since
the war began the French air service has attracted the reckless, the
daring, and the adventurous from the four corners of the earth as iron
filings are attracted by a magnet. Wearing on the collars of their
silver-blue uniforms the gold wings of the flying corps are
cow-punchers, polo-players, prize-fighters, professional bicycle riders,
big-game hunters, soldiers of fortune, young men who bear famous names
and other young men whose names are notorious rather than famous. In one
squadrilla on the Champagne front I found a Texan cowboy and adventurer
named Hall; Elliott Cowdin, the Long Island polo-player; and
Charpentier, the heavyweight champion of France. For youngsters who are
seeking excitement and adventure, no sport in the world can offer the
thrills of the _chasse au Taube_. To drive with one hand a machine that
travels through space at a speed double that of the fastest
express-train and with the other hand to operate a mitrailleuse that
spits death at the rate of a thousand shots a minute; to twist and turn
and loop and circle two miles above the earth in an endeavor to overcome
an adversary as quick-witted and quick-acting as yourself, knowing that
if you are victorious the victory is due to your skill and courage
alone—there you have a game which makes all other sports appear ladylike
and tame.
When an aeroplane armed with a mitrailleuse attacks an enemy machine the
pilot immediately manœuvres so as to permit the gunner observer to bring
his gun into action. In order to make the bullets “spread” and insure
that at least some of the many shots get home, the gunner swings his
weapon up and down, with a kind of chopping motion, so that, viewed from
the front of the machine, the stream of bullets, were they visible,
would be shaped like a fan. At the same time the gunner swings his
weapon gently round, covering with a stream of lead the space through
which his enemy will have to pass. Should the enemy machine be below the
other, then to get clear he would possibly dive under his opponent in a
sweeping turn. By this manœuvre the gunner is placed in a position where
he cannot bring his weapon to bear and he will have to turn in pursuit
before his gun can be brought into action again. From this it will be
seen that an aeroplane gunner does not take deliberate aim, as would a
man armed with a rifle, but instead fills the air in the path of his
opponent with showers of bullets in the hope that some of them will find
the mark. Should both machines be armed with machine-guns, as is now
nearly always the case, victory is often a question of quick manœuvring
combined with a considerable element of luck. To win out in this aerial
warfare, a man has to combine the quickness of a fencer with the
coolness of a big-game shot.
[Illustration:
When the chickens come home to roost.
It is always a hazardous performance for an aeroplane to make a
landing after nightfall, even when the ground is illumined by a
search-light.
]
One of the greatest dangers the military aviator has to face is landing
after night has fallen. Though every machine has a small motor, worked
by the wind, which generates enough power for a small search-light, the
light is not sufficiently powerful to be of much assistance in gauging
the distance from the ground. Sunset is, therefore, always an anxious
time on the aviation fields, nor is the anxiety at an end until all the
fliers are accounted for. As the sun begins to sink into the west the
returning aviators one by one appear, black dots against the crimson
sky. One by one they come swooping down from the heavens and come to
rest upon the ground. Twilight merges into dusk and dusk turns into
darkness, but one of the flying men has not yet come. The four corners
of the aviation field are marked with great flares of kerosene, that the
late comer may be guided home, and down the middle of the field lanterns
are laid out in the form of a huge arrow with the head pointing into the
wind, while search-lights, mounted on motor-cars, alternately sweep
field and sky with their white beams. Anxiety is written plainly on the
face of every one. Have the Boches brought him down? Has he lost his
way? Or has he been forced to descend elsewhere from engine trouble or
lack of petrol? “Hark!” exclaims some one suddenly. “He’s coming!” and
in the sudden hush that ensues you hear, from somewhere in the upper
darkness, a motor’s deep, low throb. The vertical beams of the
search-lights fall and flood the level plain with yellow radiance. The
hum of the motor rises into a roar and then, when just overhead,
abruptly stops, and down through the darkness slides a great bird which
is darker than the darkness and settles silently upon the plain. The
last of the chickens has come home to roost.
[Illustration:
Antiaircraft guns, posted outside the towns, are ready to give a warm
reception to an aerial intruder.
]
In addition to the aeroplanes kept upon the front for purposes of
bombardment, photography, artillery control, and scouting, several
squadrillas are kept constantly on duty in the vicinity of Paris and
certain other French cities for the purpose of driving off marauding
_Taubes_ or Zeppelins. Just as the streets of Paris are patrolled by
gendarmes, so the air-lanes above the city are patrolled, both night and
day, by guarding aeroplanes. To me there was something wonderfully
inspiring in the thought that all through the hours of darkness these
aerial watchers were sweeping in great circles above the sleeping city,
guarding it from the death that comes in the night. The people of the
United States do not fully understand the Zeppelin raid problem with
which those intrusted with the defense of Paris and of London are
confronted. The Zeppelins, it must be remembered, never come out unless
it is a very dark night, and then they pass over the lines at a height
of two miles or more, descending only when they are above the city which
they intend to attack. They slowly, silently settle down until their
officers can get a view of their target and then the bombs begin to
drop. This is usually the first warning that the townspeople have that
Zeppelins are abroad, though it occasionally happens that they have been
seen or heard crossing the lines, in which case the city is warned by
telephone, the antiaircraft guns prepare for action, and the lights in
the streets and houses are put out. Should the Zeppelins succeed in
getting above the city, the guarding aeroplanes go up after them and as
soon as the search-lights spot them the guns open fire with shrapnel.
The raiders are rarely fired on by the antiaircraft guns while they are
hovering over the city, however, as experience has shown that more
people are killed by falling shell splinters than by the enemy’s bombs.
Nor do the French aeroplanes dare to make serious attacks until the
Zeppelin is clear of the city, for it is not difficult to imagine the
destruction that would result were one of these monsters, five hundred
feet long and weighing thirty-six thousand pounds, to be destroyed and
its flaming débris to fall upon the city. The problem that faces the
French authorities, therefore, is stopping the Zeppelins before they
reach Paris, and it speaks volumes for the efficiency of the French air
service that there has been no Zeppelin raid on the French capital for
nearly a year.
In order to detect the approach of Zeppelins the French military
authorities have recently adopted the novel expedient of establishing
microphone stations at several points in and about Paris, these
delicately attuned instruments recording with unfailing accuracy the
throb of a Zeppelin’s or an aeroplane’s propellers long before it can be
heard by the human ear.
For the protection of London the British Government has built an aerial
navy consisting of two types of aircraft—scouts and battle-planes.
Practically the only requirement for the scouting planes is that they
must have a speed of not less than one hundred miles an hour and a fuel
capacity for at least a six-hour flight, thus giving them a cruising
radius of three hundred miles. That is, they will be able to raid many
German ports and cities and return with ease to their base in England.
Their small size—they are only thirty feet across the wings—and great
speed will make them almost impossible to hit and it is expected that
antiaircraft guns will be practically useless against them. They will
constantly circle in the higher levels, as near the Zeppelin bases as
they can get, and the minute they see the giants emerging from their
hangars they will be off to England to give the alarm. Their speed being
double that of a Zeppelin, they will have reached England long before
the raider arrives. Then the new “Canada” type, each carrying a ton of
bombs, will go out to meet the Germans. These giant biplanes, one
hundred and two feet across the wings, with two motors developing three
hundred and twenty horse-power, have a speed of more than ninety miles
an hour and can overtake a Zeppelin as a motor-cycle policeman can
overhaul a limousine. They are fitted with the new device for insuring
accuracy in bomb-dropping and, with their superior speed, will hang
above the monster dirigibles, as a hawk hangs above a hen-roost,
plumping shell after shell into the great silk sausage quivering below
them.
Both the French and British Governments now have a considerable number
of hydroaeroplanes in commission. These amphibious craft, which are
driven by two motors of one hundred and sixty horse-power each and have
a speed of about seventy-five miles an hour, are designed primarily for
the hunting of submarines. Though a submarine cannot be seen from the
deck of a vessel, an aviator can see it, even though it is submerged
twenty feet, and a bomb dropped near it will cave its sides in by the
mere force of the explosion, particularly if that bomb is loaded with
two hundred pounds of melinite, as are the ones carried by the French
hydroaeroplanes.
But the most novel of all the uses to which the aircraft have been put
in this war is that of dropping spies in the enemy’s territory. On
numerous occasions French and British aviators have flown across the
German lines, carrying with them an intelligence officer disguised as a
peasant or a farm-hand, and have landed him at some remote spot where
the descent of an aeroplane is scarcely likely to attract the attention
of the military authorities. As soon as the aviator has landed his
passenger he ascends again, with the understanding, however, that he
will return to the same spot a day, or two days, or a week later, to
pick up the spy and carry him back to the French lines. The exploits of
some of these secret agents thus dropped from the sky upon enemy soil
would make the wildest fiction seem probable and tame. One French
officer, thus landed behind the German front in Flanders, succeeded in
slowly working his way right across Belgium, gathering information as he
went as to the resources of the Germans and the disposition of their
troops, only to be caught just as he was crossing the frontier into
Holland. Though the Germans expressed unbounded admiration for his
coolness, courage, and daring, he was none the less a spy. He died
before the rifles of a firing-party.
It has repeatedly been said that in this war the spirit of chivalry does
not exist, and, so far as the land forces are concerned, this is largely
true. But chivalry still exists among the fighters of the air. If, for
example, a French aviator is forced to descend in the German lines,
either because his machine has been damaged by gun fire or from engine
trouble, a German aviator will fly over the French lines, often amid a
storm of shrapnel, and drop a little cloth bag which contains a note
recording the name of the missing man, or if not his name the number of
his machine, whether he survived, and if so whether he is wounded.
Attached to the “message bag” are long pennants of colored cloth, which
flutter out and attract the attention of the men in the neighborhood,
who run out and pick up the bag when it lands. It is at once taken to
the nearest officer, who opens it and telephones the message it contains
to aviation headquarters, so that it not infrequently happens that the
fate of a flier is known to his comrades within a few hours after he has
set out from the aviation field. Perhaps the prettiest exhibition of
chivalry which the war has produced was evoked by the death of the
famous French aviator, Adolphe Pegoud, who was killed by a German
aviator whom he attacked during a reconnoissance near Petite Croix, in
Alsace. The next day a German aeroplane, flying at a great height,
appeared over Chavannes, an Alsatian village on the old frontier, where
Pegoud was buried, and dropped a wreath which bore the inscription: “To
Pegoud, who died like a hero, from his adversary.”
VII
THE RED BADGE OF MERCY
Corporal Emile Dupont, having finished a most unappetizing and
unsatisfying breakfast, consisting of a cup of lukewarm chicory and a
half-loaf of soggy bread, emerged on all fours from the hole in the
ground which for many months had been his home and, standing upright in
the trench, lighted a cigarette. At that instant something came
screaming out of nowhere to burst, in a cloud of acrid smoke and a
shower of steel splinters, directly over the trench in which Emile was
standing. Immediately the sky seemed to fall upon Emile and crush him.
When he returned to consciousness a few seconds later he found himself
crumpled up in an angle of the trench like an empty kit-bag that has
been hurled into a corner of a room. He felt curiously weak and
nauseated; he ached in every bone in his body; his head throbbed and
pounded until he thought that the top of his skull was coming off.
Still, he was alive, and that was something. He fumbled for the
cigarette that he had been lighting, but there was a curious sensation
of numbness in his right hand. He did not seem to be able to move it.
Very slowly, very painfully he turned his head so that his eyes
travelled out along his blue-sleeved arm until they reached the point
where his hand ought to be. But the hand wasn’t there. It had quite
disappeared. His wrist lay in a pool of something crimson and warm and
sticky which widened rapidly as he looked at it. His hand was gone,
there was no doubting that. Still, it didn’t interest him greatly; in
fact, it might have been some other man’s hand for all he cared. His
head throbbed like the devil and he was very, very tired. Rather dimly
he heard voices and, as through a haze, saw figures bending over him. He
felt some one tugging at the little first-aid packet which every soldier
carries in the breast of his tunic, he felt something being tied very
tightly around his arm above the elbow, and finally he had a vague
recollection of being dragged into a dug-out, where he lay for hours
while the shell-storm raged and howled outside. Along toward nightfall,
when the bombardment had died down, two soldiers, wearing on their arms
white _brassards_ with red crosses, lifted him onto a stretcher and
carried him between interminable walls of brown earth to another and a
larger dug-out which he recognized as a _poste de secours_. After an
hour of waiting, because there were other wounded men who had to be
attended to first, the stretcher on which Emile lay was lifted onto a
table over which hung a lantern. A bearded man, wearing the cap of a
medical officer, and with a white apron up to his neck, briskly unwound
the bandages which hid the place where Emile’s right hand should have
been. “It’ll have to be taken off a bit further up, _mon brave_,” said
the surgeon, in much the same tone that a tailor would use in discussing
the shortening of a coat. “You seem to be in pretty fair shape, though,
so we’ll just give you a new dressing, and send you along to the field
ambulance, where they have more facilities for amputating than we have
here.” Despite the pain, which had now become agonizing, Emile watched
with a sort of detached admiration the neatness and despatch with which
the surgeon wound the white bandages around the wound. It reminded him
of a British soldier putting on his puttees. “Just a moment, my friend,”
said the surgeon, when the dressing was completed, “we’ll give you a jab
of this before you go, to frighten away the tetanus,” and in the muscles
of his shoulder Emile felt the prick of a hypodermic needle. An orderly
tied to a button of his coat a pink tag on which something—he could not
see what—had been scrawled by the surgeon, and two _brancardiers_ lifted
the stretcher and carried him out into the darkness. From the swaying of
the stretcher and the muffled imprecations of the bearers, he gathered
that he was being taken across the ploughed field which separated the
trenches from the highway where the ambulances were waiting. “This
cleans ’em up for to-night,” said one of the bearers, as he slipped the
handles of the stretcher into the grooved supports of the ambulance and
pushed it smoothly home. “Thank God for that,” said the ambulance
driver, as he viciously cranked his car. “I thought I was going to be
kept here all night. It’s time we cleared out anyway. The Boches spotted
me with a rocket they sent up a while back, and they’ve been dropping
shells a little too close to be pleasant. Well, s’long. When I get this
bunch delivered I’m going to turn in and get a night’s sleep.”
The road, being paved with cobblestones, was not as smooth as it should
have been for wounded men. Emile, who had been awakened to full
consciousness by the night air and by a drink of brandy one of the
orderlies at the _poste de secours_ had given him, felt something warm
and sticky falling ... drip ... drip ... drip ... upon his face. In the
dim light he was at first unable to discover where it came from. Then he
saw. It was dripping through the brown canvas of the stretcher that hung
above him. He tried to call to the ambulance driver, but his voice was
lost in the noise of the machine. The field-hospital was only three
miles back of the trench in which he had been wounded, but by the time
he arrived there, what with the jolting and the pain and the terrible
thirst which comes from loss of blood and that ghastly drip ... drip ...
drip in his face, Emile was in a state of both mental and physical
collapse. They took him into a large tent, dimly lighted by lanterns
which showed him many other stretchers with silent or groaning forms,
all ticketed like himself, lying upon them. After considerable delay a
young officer came around with a note-book and looked at the tag they
had tied on him at the dressing-station. On it was scrawled the word
“urgent.” That admonition didn’t prevent Emile’s having to wait two
hours before he was taken into a tent so brilliantly illuminated by an
arc-lamp that the glare hurt his eyes. When they laid him on a narrow
white table so that the light fell full upon him he felt as though he
were on the stage of a theatre and the spot-light had been turned upon
him. An orderly with a sharp knife deftly slashed away the sleeve of
Emile’s coat, leaving the arm bare to the shoulder, while another
orderly clapped over his mouth and nose a sort of funnel.
When he returned to consciousness he found himself again in an ambulance
rocking and swaying over those agonizing _pavé_ roads. The throbbing of
his head and the pain in his arm and the pitching of the vehicle made
him nauseated. There were three other wounded men in the ambulance and
they had been nauseated too. It was not a pleasant journey. After what
seemed to Emile and his companions in misery an interminable time, the
ambulance came to a stop in front of a railway-station. At least it had
once been a railway-station, but over the door between the drooping Red
Cross flags, was the sign “Hôpital d’Évacuation No. 31.” Two
_brancardiers_ lifted out Emile’s stretcher—the same one, by the way, on
which he had been carried from the trenches twenty-four hours before—and
set it down in what had been the station waiting-room. It was still a
waiting-room, but all those who were so patiently and uncomplainingly
waiting in it were wounded. Two women, wearing white smocks and caps and
with the ever-present red cross upon their sleeves, came in carrying
trays loaded with cups of steaming soup. While an orderly supported
Emile’s head one of the women held a cup of soup to his lips. He drank
it greedily. It was the best thing he had ever tasted and he said so.
Then they gave him a glass of harsh, red wine. After that he felt much
better. After a time a doctor came in and glanced at the tags which had
been tied on him at the _poste de secours_ and at the field-hospital.
“You’ve a little fever, my lad,” said he, “but I guess you can stand the
trip to Paris. You’ll be better off there than you would be here.” If
Emile lives to be a hundred he will never forget that journey. It was
made in a box-car which had been converted to the use of the wounded by
putting in racks to hold the stretchers and cutting windows in the
sides. In the centre was a small stove on which the orderly in charge
boiled tea. In the car were fifteen other wounded men. On the journey
four of them died. The car, which was without springs, rolled like a
ship in a storm. The jolting was far worse than that in the ambulances
on the _pavé_ roads had been. Emile’s head reeled from weariness and
exhaustion; his arm felt as though it were being held in a white-hot
flame; he was attacked by the intolerable thirst which characterizes
amputation cases, and begged for water, and when it was given him
pleaded desperately for more, more, more. Most of the time he was out of
his head and babbled incoherently of foolish, inconsequential things. It
took twenty hours for the hospital train to reach Paris, for a great
movement of troops was in progress, and when well men are being rushed
to the front the wounded ones who are coming away from it must wait.
When the train finally pulled under the sooty glass roof of the Paris
station, Emile was hovering between life and death. He had a hazy,
indistinct recollection of being taken from the ill-smelling freight-car
to an ambulance—the third in which he had been in less than forty-eight
hours; of skimming pleasantly, silently over smooth pavements; of the
ambulance entering the porte-cochère of a great white building that
looked like a hotel or school. Here he was _not_ kept waiting. Nurses
with skilful fingers drew off his clothes—the filthy, blood-soaked,
mud-stained, vermin-infested, foul-smelling garments that he had not had
off for many weeks. He was lowered, ever so gently, into a tub filled
with warm water. _Bon Dieu_, but it felt good! It was the first warm
bath that he had had in more than a year. It was worth being wounded
for. Then a pair of flannel pajamas, a fresh, soft bed, such as he had
not known since the war began, and pink-cheeked nurses in crisp, white
linen slipping about noiselessly. While Emile lay back on his pillows
and puffed a cigarette a doctor came in and dressed his wound. “Don’t
worry about yourself, my man,” he said cheerily, “you’ll get along
finely. In a week or so we’ll be sending you back to your family.”
Whereupon, Corporal Emile Dupont turned on his pillow with a great sigh
of content. He wondered dimly, as he fell asleep, if it would be hard to
find work which a one-armed man could do.
From the imaginary but wholly typical case just given, in which we have
traced the course of a wounded man from the spot where he fell to the
final hospital, it will be seen that the system of the Service de Santé
Militaire, as the medical service of the French army is known, though
cumbersome and complicated in certain respects, nevertheless works—and
works well. In understanding the French system it is necessary to bear
in mind that the wounded man has to be shifted through two army zones,
front and rear, both of which are under the direct control of the
commander-in-chief, to the interior zone of the country, with its
countless hospitals, which is under the direction of the Ministry of
War.
As soon as a soldier falls he drags himself, if he is able, to some
sheltered spot, or his comrades carry him there, and with the
“first-aid” packet, carried in the breast pocket of the tunic, an
endeavor is made to give the wound temporary treatment. In the British
service this “first-aid” kit consists of a small tin box, not much
larger than a cigarette-case, containing a bottle of iodine crystals and
a bottle of alcohol wrapped up in a roll of aseptic bandage gauze.
Meanwhile word has been passed along the line that the services of the
surgeon are needed, for each regiment has one and sometimes two medical
officers on duty in the trenches. It may so happen that the trench
section has its own _poste de secours_, or first-aid dressing-station,
in which case the man is at once taken there. The medical officer
dresses the man’s wound, perhaps gives him a hypodermic to lessen the
pain, and otherwise makes him as comfortable as possible under the
circumstances. His wounds temporarily dressed, if there is a dug-out at
hand, he is taken into it. If not, he is laid in such shelter as the
trench affords, and there he usually has to lie until night comes and he
can be removed in comparative safety; for, particularly in the flat
country of Artois and Flanders, it is out of the question to remove the
wounded except under the screen of darkness, and even then it is
frequently an extremely hazardous proceeding, for the German gunners
apparently do their best to drop their shells on the ambulances and
stretcher-parties. As soon as night falls a dressing-station is
established at a point as close as possible behind the trenches, the
number of surgeons, dressers, and stretcher-bearers sent out depending
upon the number of casualties as reported by telephone from the trenches
to headquarters. The wounded man is transported on a stretcher or a
wheeled litter to the dressing-station, where his wounds are examined by
the light of electric torches and, if necessary, redressed. If he has
any fractured bones they are made fast in splints or pieces of zinc or
iron wire—anything that will enable him to stand transportation. Though
the dressing-station is, wherever possible, established in a farmhouse,
in a grove, behind a wall, or such other protection as the region may
afford, it is, nevertheless, often in extreme danger. I recall one case,
in Flanders, where the flashing of the torches attracted the attention
of the German gunners, who dropped a shell squarely into a
dressing-station, killing all the surgeons and stretcher-bearers, and
putting half a dozen of the wounded out of their misery. As soon as the
wounded man has passed through the dressing-station, he is carried,
usually over very rough ground, to the point on the road where the
motor-ambulances are waiting and is whirled off to the division
ambulance, which corresponds to the field-hospital of the British and
American armies. These division ambulances (it should be borne in mind
that the term _ambulance_ in French means “_military_ hospital”) do as
complete work as can be expected so near the front. They are usually set
up only four or five miles back of the firing-line, and have a regular
medical and nursing staff, instruments, and, in some cases, X-ray
apparatus for operations. As a rule, only light emergency operations are
performed in these ambulances of the front—light skull trepanning,
removal of splintered bones, disinfection, and immobilizing of the
wounded parts.
At the beginning of the war it was an accepted principle of the French
army surgeons not to operate at the front, but simply to dress the
wounds so as to permit of speedy transportation to the rear, for the
division ambulances, being without heat or light or sterilizing plants
of their own, had no facilities for many urgent operations or for night
work. Hence, though there was no lack of surgical aid at the front,
major operations were not possible, and thousands of men died who, could
they have been operated on immediately, might have been saved. This
grave fault in the French medical service has now been remedied,
however, by the automobile surgical formations created by Doctor
Marcille. Their purpose is to bring within a few miles of the spot where
fighting is in progress and where men are being wounded the equivalent
of a great city emergency hospital, with its own sterilization plant,
and an operating-room heated and lighted powerfully night and day. This
equipment is extremely mobile, ready to begin work even in the open
country within an hour of its arrival, and capable of moving on with the
same rapidity to any point where its services may be required. The
arrangement of these operating-rooms on wheels is as compact and
ingenious as a Pullman sleeping-car. The sterilization plant, which
works by superheated steam, is on an automobile chassis, the surgeons
taking their instruments, compresses, aprons, and blouses immediately
from one of the six iron sheets of the autoclave as they operate. Six
operations can be carried on without stopping—and during the sixth the
iron sheets are resterilized to begin again. The same boiler heats a
smaller autoclave for sterilizing rubber gloves and water, and also, by
means of a powerful radiator, heats the operating-room. This is an
impermeable tent, with a large glass skylight for day and a 200-candle
power electric light for night, the motor generating the electricity.
Another car contains the radiograph plant, while the regular ambulances
provide pharmacy and other supplies and see to the further
transportation of the wounded who have been operated on. Of seventy
operations, which would have all been impossible without these surgical
automobile units, fifty-five were successful. In cases of abdominal
wounds, which have usually been fatal in previous wars, fifty per cent
of the operations thus performed saved the lives of the wounded.
Leaving the zone of actual operations, the wounded man now enters the
army rear zone, where, at the heads of the lines of communication,
hospital trains or hospital canal-boats are waiting for him. The
beginning of the war found France wholly unprepared as regards modernly
equipped hospital trains, of which she possessed only five, while Russia
had thirty-two, Austria thirty-three, and Germany forty. Thanks to the
energy of the great French railway companies, the number has been
somewhat increased, but France still has mainly to rely on improvised
sanitary trains for the transport of her wounded. There are in operation
about one hundred and fifty of these improvised trains, made up, when
possible, of the long baggage-cars of what were before the war the
international express trains. As these cars are well hung, are heated,
have soft Westinghouse brakes, and have corridors which permit of the
doctors going from car to car while the train is in motion, they answer
the purpose to which they have been put tolerably well. But when heavy
fighting is in progress, rolling-stock of every description has to be
utilized for the transport of the wounded. Those who can sit up without
too much discomfort are put in ordinary passenger-cars. But in addition
to these the _Service de Santé_ has been compelled to use thousands of
freight and cattle cars glassed up at the sides and with a stove in the
middle. The stretchers containing the most serious cases are, by means
of loops into which the handles of the stretchers fit, laid in two rows,
one above the other, at the ends of each car, while those who are able
to sit up are gathered in the centre. Each car is in charge of an
orderly who keeps water and soups constantly heated on the stove. Any
one who has travelled for any distance in a freight or cattle car will
readily appreciate, however, how great must be the sufferings of the
wounded men thus transported. Taking advantage of the network of canals
and rivers which covers France, the medical authorities of the army have
also utilized canal-boats for the transport of the _blessés_—a method of
transportation which, though slow, is very easy. Every few hours these
hospital trains or boats come to “infirmary stations,” established by
the Red Cross, where the wounded are given food and drink, and their
dressing is looked after, while at the very end of the army zones there
are “regulator stations,” where the “evacuation hospitals” are placed.
Here is where the sorting system comes in. There are wounded whose
condition has become so aggravated that it is out of the question for
them to stand a longer journey, and these remain. There are lightly
wounded, who, with proper attention, will be as well as ever in a few
days, and these are sent to a _dépôt des éclopés_, or, as the soldiers
term it, a “limper’s halt.” Then there are the others who, if they are
to recover, will require long and careful treatment and difficult
operations. These go on to the final hospitals of the interior zone:
military hospitals, auxiliary hospitals, civil hospitals militarized,
and “benevolent hospitals” such as the great American Ambulance at
Neuilly.
No account of the work of caring for the wounded would be complete
without at least passing mention of the American Ambulance, which,
founded by Americans, with an American staff and an American equipment,
and maintained by American generosity, has come to be recognized as the
highest type of military hospital in existence. At the beginning of the
war, Americans in Paris, inspired by the record of the American
Ambulance in 1870, and foreseeing the needs of the enormous number of
wounded which would soon come pouring in, conceived the idea of
establishing a military hospital for the treatment of the wounded,
irrespective of nationality. The French Government placed at their
disposal a large and nearly completed school-building in the suburb of
Neuilly, just outside the walls of Paris. Before the war had been in
progress a month this building had been transformed into perhaps the
most up-to-the-minute military hospital in Europe, equipped with X-ray
apparatus, ultra violet-ray sterilizing plants, a giant magnet for
removing fragments of shell from wounds, a pathological laboratory, and
the finest department of dental surgery in the world. The feats of
surgical legerdemain performed in this latter department are, indeed,
almost beyond belief. The American dental surgeons assert—and they have
repeatedly made their assertion good—that, even though a man’s entire
face has been blown away, they can construct a new and presentable
countenance, provided the hinges of the jaw remain.
Beginning with 170 beds, by November, 1915, the hospital had 600 beds
and in addition has organized an “advanced hospital,” with 250 beds,
known as Hospital B, at Juilly, which is maintained through the
generosity of Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney; a field-hospital, of the same
pattern as that used by the United States Army, with 108 beds; and two
convalescent hospitals at St. Cloud; the staff of this remarkable
organization comprising doctors, surgeons, graduate and auxiliary
nurses, orderlies, stretcher-bearers, ambulance drivers, cooks, and
other employees to the number of seven hundred. Perhaps the most
picturesque feature of the American hospital is its remarkable
motor-ambulance service, which consists of 130 cars and 160 drivers. The
ambulances, which are for the most part Ford cars with specially
designed bodies, have proved so extremely practical and efficient that
the type has been widely copied by the Allied armies. They serve where
they are most needed, being sent out in units (each unit consisting of a
staff car, a supply car, and five ambulances) upon the requisition of
the military authorities. The young men who drive the ambulances and
who, with a very few exceptions, not only serve without pay but even pay
their own passage from America and provide their own uniforms, represent
all that is best in American life: among them are men from the great
universities both East and West, men from the hunt clubs of Long Island
and Virginia, lawyers, novelists, polo-players, big-game hunters,
cow-punchers, while the inspector of the ambulance service is a former
assistant treasurer of the United States. American Ambulance units are
stationed at many points on the western battle-line—I have seen them at
work in Flanders, in the Argonne, and in Alsace—the risks taken by the
drivers in their work of bringing in the wounded and their coolness
under fire having won for them among the soldiers the admiring title of
“bullet biters.”
The British system of handling the wounded is along the same general
lines as that of the French, the chief difference being in the methods
of sorting, which is the basis of all medical corps work in this war.
The British system, which, as some one has sarcastically remarked,
involves reference to “Burke’s Peerage,” “Who’s Who,” and the “Army
List,” is in itself extremely exhausting and entails much needless
suffering. The method of sorting in the French army is, on the other
hand, simplicity itself, and throughout all its stages is as rigidly
impartial as the customs examination at an American port, a wounded
officer receiving neither more nor less attention than a wounded
soldier.
[Illustration:
“Two soldiers lifted him onto a stretcher and carried him between
interminable walls of brown earth to the dressing-station.”
]
Sorting, as practised by the British, starts at the very first step in
the progress of a wounded man, which is the dressing-station in or
immediately back of the trenches, where only those cases absolutely
demanding it are dressed and where only the most imperative operations
are performed. The second step is the field-hospital, where all but a
few of the slight wounds are dressed, and where operations that must be
done before the men can be passed farther back are performed. The third
step is the clearing hospital, at the head of railway communication.
Here the man receives the minimum of medical attention before being
passed on to the hospital train which conveys him to one of the great
base hospitals on the coast, where every one, whether seriously or
slightly wounded, can at last receive treatment. To the wounded Tommy,
the base hospital is the half-way house to home, where he is cared for
until he is able to stand the journey across the Channel to England.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph by Meurisse._
Unloading wounded at a hospital in northern France.
“The clearing hospitals must always be ready to receive that unceasing
scarlet stream which, day and night, night and day, comes pouring
in, pouring in.”
]
The real barometer of battle is the clearing hospital, for one can
always tell by the number of cases coming in whether there is heavy
fighting in progress. As both field and clearing hospitals move with the
armies, they must not only always get rid of their wounded at the
earliest possible moment, but they must always be prepared for quick
movements backward or forward. Either a retreat or an offensive movement
necessitates quick action on the part of the Army Medical Corps, for it
is a big job to dismantle a great hospital, pack it up, and start the
motor-transport within an hour after the order to move is received. It
would be a big job without the wounded.
In the French lines the _hôpital d’évacuation_ is frequently established
in a freight station or warehouse in the midst of the railway yards, so
as to facilitate the loading of the hospital trains. This arrangement
has its drawbacks, however, for the hospital is liable to be bombarded
by aeroplanes or artillery without warning, as it is a principle
recognized—and practised—by all the belligerent nations that it is
perfectly legitimate to shell a station or railway base in order to
interfere with the troops, supplies, and ammunition going forward to the
armies in the field. That a hospital is quartered in the station is
unfortunate but must be disregarded. At Dunkirk, for example, which is a
fortified town and a base of the very first importance, there was
nothing unethical, from a military view-point, in the Germans shelling
the railway yards, even though a number of wounded in the hospital there
lost their lives. The British avoid this danger by establishing their
clearing hospitals in the outskirts of the rail-head towns, and as far
from the station as possible, which, however, necessitates one more
transfer for the wounded man.
In this war the progress made in the science of healing has kept pace
with, if indeed it has not outdistanced, the progress made in the
science of destruction. There is, for example, the solution of
hypochlorite of soda, introduced by Doctor Dakin and Doctor Alexis
Carrel, which, though not a new invention, is being used with marvellous
results for the irrigation of wounds and the prevention of suppuration.
There is the spinal anæsthesia, used mainly in the difficult abdominal
cases, a minute quantity of which, injected into the spine of the
patient, causes all sensation to disappear up to the arms, so that,
provided he is prevented by a screen from seeing what is going on, an
operation below that level may be performed while the patient, wholly
unconscious of what is happening, is reading a paper or smoking a
cigarette. Owing to failure to disinfect the wounds at the front, many
of the cases reaching the hospitals in the early days of the war were
found to be badly septic, the infection being due, curiously enough, to
the nature of the soil of the country, the region of the Aisne, for
example, apparently being saturated with the tetanus germ. So the
doctors invented an antitetanus serum, with which a soldier can
inoculate himself and, as a result, the cases of tetanus have been
reduced by half. It was found that many wounded men failed to recover
because of the minute pieces of shell remaining in their bodies, so
there was introduced the giant magnet which, when connected with the
probe in the surgeon’s hand, unerringly attracts and draws out any
fragments of metal that may remain in the wound. Still another ingenious
invention produced by the war is the bell, or buzzer, which rings when
the surgeon’s probe approaches a foreign substance.
Though before the war began European army surgeons were thoroughly
conversant with the best methods of treating shell, sabre, and bullet
wounds and the innumerable diseases peculiar to armies, the war has
produced one weapon of which they had never so much as heard before, and
the effects of which they were at first wholly unable to combat. I refer
to the asphyxiating gas. If you fail to understand what “gassing” means,
listen to this description by a British army surgeon:
“In a typical ‘gassed’ case the idea of impending suffocation
predominates. Every muscle of respiration is called upon to do its
utmost to avert the threatened doom. The imperfect aeration of the blood
arising from obstructed respiration causes oftentimes intense blueness
and clamminess of the face, while froth and expectoration blow from the
mouth impelled by a choking cough. The poor fighting man tosses and
turns himself into every position in search of relief. But his efforts
are unavailing; he feels that his power of breathing is failing; that
asphyxiation is gradually becoming complete. The slow strangling of his
respiration, of which he is fully conscious, at last enfeebles his
strength. No longer is it possible for him to expel the profuse
expectoration; the air-tubes of his lungs become distended with it, and
with a few gasps he dies.
“If the ‘gassed’ man survives the first stage of his agony, some sleep
may follow the gradual decline of the urgent symptoms, and after such
sleep he feels refreshed and better. But further trouble is in store for
him, for the intense irritation to which the respiratory passages have
been exposed by the inhalation of the suffocating gas is quickly
followed by the supervention of acute bronchitis. In such attacks death
may come, owing to the severity of the inflammation. In mild cases of
‘gassing,’ on the other hand, the resulting bronchitis develops in a
modified form with the result that recovery now generally follows. Time,
however, can only show to what extent permanent damage to the lungs is
inflicted. Possibly chronic bronchitis may be the lot of such ‘gassed’
men in after life or some pulmonary trouble equally disturbing. It is
difficult to believe that they can wholly escape some evil effects.”
As soon as it was found that the immediate cause of death in the fatal
gas cases was acute congestion of the lungs, the surgeons were able to
treat it upon special and definite lines. Means were devised for
insuring the expulsion of the excessive secretion from the lungs, thus
affording much relief and making it possible to avert asphyxiation. In
some apparently hopeless cases the lives of the men were saved by
artificial respiration. The inhalation of oxygen was also tried with
favorable results, and in cases where the restlessness of the patient
was more mental than physical, opium was successfully used. So that even
the poison-gas, perhaps the most dreadful death-dealing device which the
war has produced, neither dismayed nor defeated the men whose task it is
to save life instead of to take it.
To the surgeons and nurses at the front the people of France and England
owe a debt of gratitude which they can never wholly repay. The soldiers
in the trenches are waging no more desperate or heroic battle than these
quiet, efficient, energetic men and women who wear the red badge of
mercy. Their courage is shown by the enormous losses they have suffered
under fire, the proportion of military doctors and hospital attendants
killed, wounded, or taken prisoner, equalling the proportion of infantry
losses. They have no sleep save such as they can snatch between the
tides of wounded or when they drop on the floor from sheerest
exhaustion. They are working under as trying conditions as doctors and
nurses were ever called upon to face. They treat daily hundreds of
cases, any one of which would cause a city physician to call a
consultation. They are in constant peril from marauding _Taubes_, for
the German airmen seem to take delight in choosing buildings flying the
Red Cross flag as targets for their bombs. In their ears, both day and
night, sounds the din of near-by battle. Their organization is a marvel
of efficiency. That of the Germans may be as good but it can be no
better.
In order that I may bring home to you in America the realities of this
thing called war, I want to tell you what I saw one day in a little town
called Bailleul. Bailleul is only two or three miles on the French side
of the Franco-Belgian frontier, and it is so close to the firing-line
that its windows continually rattle. The noise along that portion of the
battle-front never ceases. It sounds for all the world like the clatter
of a gigantic harvester. And that is precisely what it is—the harvester
of death.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph by Meurisse._
Red Cross men getting wounded out of a bombarded town in Flanders.
“The soldiers in the trenches are waging no more desperate or heroic
battle than these quiet, efficient, energetic men who wear the red
badge of mercy.”
]
As we entered Bailleul they were bringing in the harvest. They were
bringing it in motor-cars, many, many, many of them, stretching in
endless procession down the yellow roads which lead to Lille and Neuve
Chapelle and Poperinghe and Ypres. Over the gray bodies of the
motor-cars were gray canvas hoods, and painted on the hoods were staring
scarlet crosses. The curtain at the back of each car was rolled up, and
protruding from the dim interior were four pairs of feet. Sometimes
those feet were wrapped in bandages, and on the fresh white linen were
bright-red splotches, but more often they were incased in worn and
muddied boots. I shall never forget those poor, broken, mud-incrusted
boots, for they spoke so eloquently of utter weariness and pain. There
was something about them that was the very essence of pathos. The owners
of those boots were lying on stretchers which were made to slide into
the ambulances as drawers slide into a bureau, and most of them were
suffering agony such as only a woman in childbirth knows.
[Illustration:
Bringing in the harvest of the guns.
The dripping stretchers slide into the ambulances as drawers slide
into a bureau.
]
This was the reaping of the grim harvester which was at its work of
mowing down human beings not five miles away. Sometimes, as the
ambulances went rocking by, I would catch a fleeting glimpse of some
poor fellow whose wounds would not permit of his lying down. I remember
one of these in particular—a clean-cut, fair-haired youngster who looked
to be still in his teens. He was sitting on the floor of the ambulance
leaning for support against the rail. He held his arms straight out in
front of him. Both his hands had been blown away at the wrists. The head
of another was so swathed in bandages that my first impression was that
he was wearing a huge red-and-white turban. The jolting of the car had
caused the bandages to slip. If that man lives little children will run
from him in terror, and women will turn aside when they meet him on the
street. And still that caravan of agony kept rolling by, rolling by. The
floors of the cars were sieves leaking blood. The dusty road over which
they had passed no longer needed sprinkling.
Tearing over the rough cobbles of Bailleul, the ambulances came to a
halt before some one of the many doorways over which droop the Red Cross
flags, for every suitable building in the little town has been converted
into a hospital. The one of which I am going to tell you had been a
school until the war began. It is officially known as Clearing Hospital
Number Eight, but I shall always think of it as hell’s antechamber. In
the afternoon that I was there eight hundred wounded were brought into
that building between the hours of two and four, and this, mind you, was
but one of many hospitals in the same little town. As I entered the door
I had to stand aside to let a stretcher carried by two orderlies pass
out. Through the rough brown blanket which covered the stretcher showed
the vague outlines of a human form, but the face was covered, and it was
very still. A week or two weeks or a month later, when the casualty
lists were published, there appeared the name of the still form under
the brown blanket, and there was anguish in some English home. In the
hallway of the hospital a man was sitting upright on a bench, and two
surgeons were working over him. He was sitting there because the
operating-rooms were filled. I hope that that man is unmarried, for he
no longer has a face. What a few hours before had been the honest
countenance of an English lad was now a horrid welter of blood and
splintered bone and mangled flesh.
The surgeon in charge took me upstairs to the ward which contained the
more serious cases. On a cot beside the door was stretched a young
Canadian. His face looked as though a giant in spiked shoes had stepped
upon it. “Look,” said the surgeon, and lifted the woollen blanket. That
man’s body was like a field which has been gone over with a disk harrow.
His feet, his legs, his abdomen, his chest, his arms, his face were
furrowed with gaping, angry wounds. “He was shot through the hand,”
explained the surgeon. “He made his way back to the dressing-station in
the reserve trenches, but just as he reached it a shell exploded at his
feet.” I patted him on the shoulder and told him that I too knew the
land of the great forests and the rolling prairies, and that before long
he was going back to it. And, though he could not speak, he turned that
poor, torn face of his and smiled at me. He must have been suffering the
torments of the damned, but he smiled at me, I tell you—_he smiled at
me_.
In the next bed, not two feet away—for the hospitals in Bailleul are
very crowded—a great, brawny fellow from a Highland regiment was sitting
propped against his pillows. He could not lie down, the surgeon told me,
because he had been shot through the lungs. He held a tin cup in his
hand, and quite regularly, about once a minute, he would hold it to his
lips and spit out blood. Over by the window lay a boy with a face as
white as the pillow-cover. He was quite conscious, and stared at the
ceiling with wide, unseeing eyes. “Another shrapnel case,” remarked a
hospital attendant. “Both legs amputated, but he’ll recover.” I wonder
what he will do for a living when he gets back to England. Perhaps he
will sell pencils or boot-laces on the flags of Piccadilly, and hold out
his cap for coppers. A man with his head all swathed in strips of linen
lay so motionless that I asked if he was living. “A head wound,” was the
answer. “We’ve tried trepanning, and he’ll probably pull through, but
he’ll never recover his reason.” Can’t you see him in the years to come,
this splendid specimen of manhood, his mind a blank, wandering, helpless
as a little child, about some English village?
I doubt if any four walls in all the world contain more human suffering
than those of Hospital Number Eight at Bailleul, yet of all those
shattered, broken, mangled men I heard only one utter a complaint or
groan. He was a fair-haired giant, as are so many of these English
fighting men. A bullet had splintered his spine and, with his hours
numbered, he was suffering the most awful torment that a human being can
endure. The sweat stood in beads upon his forehead. The muscles of his
neck and arms were so corded and knotted that it seemed as though they
were about to burst their way through the sun-tanned skin. His naked
breast rose and fell in great sobs of agony. “Oh God! Oh God!” he
moaned, “be merciful and take me—it hurts, it hurts—_it hurts me so_—my
wife—the kiddies—for the love of Christ, doctor, give me a hypodermic
and stop the pain—say good-by to them for me—tell them—oh, I _can’t_
stand it any longer—I’m not afraid to die, doctor, but I just can’t
stand this pain—oh God, dear God, _won’t you please let me die_?”
When I went out of that room the beads of sweat were standing on _my_
forehead.
[Illustration:
“Every house and farmyard for miles around was filled with wounded and
still they came streaming in.”
]
They took me down-stairs to show me what they call the “evacuation
ward.” It is a big, barn-like room, perhaps a hundred feet long by fifty
wide, and the floor was so thickly covered with blanketed forms on
stretchers that there was no room to walk about among them. These were
the men whose wounds had been treated, and who, it was believed, were
able to survive the journey by hospital train to one of the base
hospitals on the coast. It is a very grave case indeed that is permitted
to remain for even a single night in the hospitals in Bailleul, for
Bailleul is but a clearinghouse for the mangled, and its hospitals must
always be ready to receive that unceasing scarlet stream which, day and
night, night and day, comes pouring in, pouring in, pouring in.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph by Meurisse._
“The paths of glory lead——”
]
Those of the wounded in the evacuation ward who were conscious were for
the most part cheerful—as cheerful, that is, as men can be whose bodies
have been ripped and drilled and torn by shot and shell, who have been
strangled by poisonous gases, who are aflame with fever, who are faint
with loss of blood, and who have before them a railway journey of many
hours. This railway journey to the coast is as comfortable as human
ingenuity can make it, the trains with their white enamelled interiors
and swinging berths being literally hospitals on wheels, but to these
weakened, wearied men it is a terribly trying experience, even though
they know that at the end of it clean beds and cool pillows and
soft-footed, low-voiced nurses await them.
The men awaiting transfer still wore the clothes in which they had been
carried from the trenches, though in many cases they had been slashed
open so that the surgeons might get at the wounds. They were plastered
with mud. Many of them had had no opportunity to bathe for weeks and
were crawling with vermin. Their underclothes were in such loathsome
condition that when they were removed they fell apart. The canvas
stretchers on which they lay so patiently and uncomplainingly were
splotched with what looked like wet brown paint, and on this horrid
sticky substance were swarms of hungry flies. The air was heavy with the
mingled smells of antiseptics, perspiration, and fresh blood. In that
room was to be found every form of wound which can be inflicted by the
most hellish weapons the brain of man has been able to devise. The
wounded were covered with coarse woollen blankets, but some of the men
in their torment had kicked their coverings off, and I saw things which
I have no words to tell about and which I wish with all my heart that I
could forget. There were men whose legs had been amputated up to the
thighs; whose arms had been cut off at the shoulder; there were men who
had lost their eyesight and all their days must grope in darkness; and
there were other men who had been ripped open from waist to neck so that
they looked like the carcasses that hang in front of butcher-shops;
while most horrible of all were those who, without a wound on them,
raved and cackled with insane mirth at the horror of the things that
they had seen.
We went out from that place of unforgettable horrors into the sunlight
and the clean fresh air again. It was late afternoon, the birds were
singing, a gentle breeze was whispering in the tree-tops; but from over
there, on the other side of that green and smiling valley, still came
the unceasing clatter of that grim harvester garnering its crop of
death. On the ground, in the shade of a spreading chestnut-tree, had
been laid a stretcher, and on it was still another of those silent,
bandaged forms. “He is badly wounded,” said the surgeon, following the
direction of my glance, “fairly shot to pieces. But he begged us to
leave him in the open air. We are sending him on by train to Boulogne
to-night, and then by hospital ship to England.” I walked over and
looked down at him. He could not have been more than eighteen—just such
a clean-limbed, open-faced lad as any girl would have been proud to call
sweetheart, any mother son. He was lying very still. About his face
there was a peculiar grayish pallor, and on his half-parted lips had
gathered many flies. I beckoned to the doctor. “He’s not going to
England,” I whispered; “he’s going to sleep in France.” The surgeon,
after a quick glance, gave an order, and two bearers came and lifted the
stretcher, and bore it to a ramshackle outhouse which they call the
mortuary, and gently set it down at the end of a long row of other
silent forms.
As I passed out through the gateway in the wall which surrounds Hospital
Number Eight, I saw a group of children playing in the street. “Come
on,” shrilled one of them, “let’s play soldier!”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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