TWO BOYS AGAINST AN ARMY
SALONIKA, December, 1915.
On the day the retreat began from Krivolak, General Sarrail, commanding
the Allies in Serbia, gave us permission to visit the French and English
front. The French advanced position, and a large amount of ammunition,
six hundred shells to each gun, were then at Krivolak, and the English
base at Doiran. We left the train at Doiran, but our French "guide" had
not informed the English a "mission militaire" was descending upon them,
and in consequence at Doiran there were no conveyances to meet us. So,
a charming English captain commandeered for us a vast motor-truck.
Stretched above it were ribs to support a canvas top, and by clinging
to these, as at home on the Elevated we hang to a strap, we managed to
avoid being bumped out into the road.
The English captain, who seemed to have nothing else on his hands,
volunteered to act as our escort, and on a splendid hunter galloped
ahead of and at the side of the lorry, and, much like a conductor on
a sight-seeing car, pointed out the objects of interest. When not
explaining he was absent-mindedly jumping his horse over swollen
streams, ravines, and fallen walls. We found him much more interesting
to watch than the scenery.
The scenery was desolate and bleak. It consisted of hills that opened
into other hills, from the summit of which more hills stretched to a
horizon entirely of mountains. They did not form ridges but, like men
in a crowd, shouldered into one another. They were of a soft rock and
covered with snow, above which to the height of your waist rose scrub
pine-trees and bushes of holly. The rain and snow that ran down their
slopes had turned the land into a sea of mud, and had swamped the stone
roads. In walking, for each step you took forward you skidded and slid
several yards back. If you had an hour to spare you had time for a
ten-minute walk.
In our motor-truck we circled Lake Doiran, and a mile from the station
came to a stone obelisk. When we passed it our guide on horseback
shouted to us that we had crossed the boundary from Greece, and were now
in Serbia. The lake is five miles wide and landlocked, and the road kept
close to the water's edge. It led us through little mud villages with
houses of mud and wattle, and some of stone with tiled roofs and
rafters, and beams showing through the cement. The second story
projected like those of the Spanish blockhouses in Cuba, and the log
forts from which, in the days when there were no hyphenated Americans,
our forefathers fought the Indians.
[Illustration: _From a photograph copyright by Medem Photo Service._
"Hills bare of trees, from which the snow that ran down their slopes
had turned the road into a sea of mud."]
Except for some fishermen, the Serbians had abandoned these villages,
and they were occupied by English army service men and infantry. The
"front," which was hidden away among the jumble of hills, seemed, when
we reached it, to consist entirely of artillery. All along the road the
Tommies were waging a hopeless war against the mud, shovelling it off
the stone road to keep the many motor-trucks from skidding over a
precipice, or against the cold making shelters of it, or washing it out
of their uniforms and off their persons.
Shivering from ears to heels and with teeth rattling, for they had come
from the Dardanelles, they stood stripped to the waist scrubbing their
sun-tanned chests and shoulders with ice-water. It was a spectacle that
inspired confidence. When a man is so keen after water to wash in that
he will kick the top off a frozen lake to get it, a little thing like a
barb-wire entanglement will not halt him.
The cold of those hills was like no cold I had ever felt. Officers who
had hunted in northern Russia, in the Himalayas, in Alaska, assured us
that never had they so suffered. The men we passed, who were in the
ambulances, were down either with pneumonia or frost-bite. Many had lost
toes and fingers. And it was not because they were not warmly clad.[B]
[Footnote B: It has been charged that the British troops in the Balkans
wore the same tropic uniforms they wore in the Dardanelles. This was
necessarily true, when first they landed, but almost at once the winter
uniform was issued to all of them. I saw no British or French soldier
who was not properly and warmly clad, with overcoat, muffler, extra
waistcoat, and gloves. And while all, both officers and men, cursed the
cold, none complained that he had not been appropriately clothed to meet
it. R. H. D.]
Last winter in France had taught the war office how to dress the part;
but nothing had prepared them for the cold of the Balkans. And to add
to their distress, for it was all of that, there was no fire-wood. The
hills were bare of trees, and such cold as they endured could not be
fought with green twigs.
It was not the brisk, invigorating cold that invites you out of doors.
It had no cheery, healthful appeal to skates, toboggans, and the
jangling bells of a cutter. It was the damp, clammy, penetrating cold
of a dungeon, of an unventilated ice-chest, of a morgue. Your clothes
did not warm you, the heat of your body had to warm your clothes. And
warm, also, all of the surrounding hills.
Between the road and the margin of the lake were bamboo reeds as tall
as lances, and at the edge of these were gathered myriads of ducks. The
fishermen were engaged in bombarding the ducks with rocks. They went
about this in a methodical fashion. All around the lake, concealed in
the reeds and lifted a few feet above the water they had raised huts on
piles. In front of these huts was a ledge or balcony. They looked like
overgrown bird-houses on stilts.
One fisherman waited in a boat to pick up the dead ducks, and the other
hurled stones from a sling. It was the same kind of a sling as the one
with which David slew Goliath. In Athens I saw small boys using it to
throw stones at an electric-light pole. The one the fisherman used was
about eight feet long. To get the momentum he whirled it swiftly above
his head as a cowboy swings a lariat, and then let one end fly loose,
and the stone, escaping, smashed into the mass of ducks. If it stunned
or killed a duck the human water-spaniel in the boat would row out and
retrieve it. To duck hunters at home the sport would chiefly recommend
itself through the cheapness of the ammunition.
On the road we met relays of water-carts and wagons that had been up the
hills with food for the gunners at the front; and engineers were at work
repairing the stone bridges or digging detours to avoid those that had
disappeared. They had been built to support no greater burden than a
flock of sheep, an ox-cart, or what a donkey can carry on his back, and
the assault of the British motor-trucks and French six-inch guns had
driven them deep into the mud.
After ten miles we came to what a staff officer would call an "advanced
base," but which was locally designated the "Dump." At the side of the
road, much of it uncovered to the snow, were stores of ammunition,
"bully beef," and barb-wire. The camp bore all the signs of a temporary
halting place. It was just what the Tommies called it, a dump. We had
not been told then that the Allies were withdrawing, but one did not
have to be a military expert to see that there was excellent reason why
they should.
They were so few. Whatever the force was against them, the force I saw
was not strong enough to hold the ground, not that it covered, but over
which it was sprinkled. There were outposts without supports, supports
without reserves. A squad was expected to perform the duties of a
company. Where a brigade was needed there was less than a battalion.
Against the white masses of the mountains and the desolate landscape
without trees, houses, huts, without any sign of human habitation, the
scattered groups of khaki only accented the bleak loneliness.
At the dump we had exchanged for the impromptu motor-truck, automobiles
of the French staff, and as "Jimmie" Hare and I were alone in one of
them we could stop where we liked. So we halted where an English battery
was going into action. It had dug itself into the side of a hill and
covered itself with snow and pine branches. Somewhere on one of the
neighboring hills the "spotter" was telephoning the range. The gunners
could not see at what they were firing. They could see only the high
hill of rock and snow, at the base of which they stood shoulder high in
their mud cellars. Ten yards to the rear of them was what looked like a
newly made grave reverently covered with pine boughs. Through these a
rat-faced young man, with the receivers of a telephone clamped to his
ears, pushed his head.
[Illustration: _From a photograph by William G. Shepherd._
John T. McCutcheon. John F. Bass.
Richard Harding Davis. James H. Hare.
American war correspondents at the French front in Serbia.]
"Eight degrees to the left, sir," he barked, "four thousand yards."
The men behind the guns were extremely young, but, like most
artillerymen, alert, sinewy, springing to their appointed tasks with
swift, catlike certainty. The sight of the two strangers seemed to
surprise them as much as the man in the grave had startled us.
There were two boy officers in command, one certainly not yet eighteen,
his superior officer still under twenty.
"I suppose you're all right," said the younger one. "You couldn't have
got this far if you weren't all right."
He tried to scowl upon us, but he was not successful. He was too lonely,
too honestly glad to see any one from beyond the mountains that hemmed
him in. They stretched on either side of him to vast distances, massed
barriers of white against a gray, sombre sky; in front of him, to be
exact, just four thousand yards in front of him, were Bulgarians he had
never seen, but who were always with their shells ordering to "move on,"
and behind him lay a muddy road that led to a rail-head, that led to
transports, that led to France, to the Channel, and England. It was a
long, long way to England. I felt like taking one of the boy officers
under each arm, and smuggling him safely home to his mother.
"You don't seem to have any supports," I ventured.
The child gazed around him. It was growing dark and gloomier, and the
hollows of the white hills were filled with shadows. His men were
listening, so he said bravely, with a vague sweep of the hand at the
encircling darkness, "Oh, they're about--somewhere. You might call
this," he added, with pride, "an independent command."
You well might.
"Report when ready!" chanted his superior officer, aged nineteen.
He reported, and then the guns spoke, making a great flash in the
twilight.
In spite of the light, Jimmie Hare was trying to make a photograph of
the guns.
"Take it on the recoil," advised the child officer. "It's sure to stick.
It always does stick."
The men laughed, not slavishly, because the officer had made a joke, but
as companions in trouble, and because when you are abandoned on a
mountainside with a lame gun that jams, you must not take it lying down,
but make a joke of it.
The French chauffeur was pumping his horn for us to return, and I went,
shamefacedly, as must the robbers who deserted the babes in the wood.
In farewell I offered the boy officer the best cigars for sale in
Greece, which is the worse thing one can say of any cigar. I apologized
for them, but explained he must take them because they were called the
"King of England."
"I would take them," said the infant, "if they were called the 'German
Emperor.'"
At the door of the car we turned and waved, and the two infants waved
back. I felt I had meanly deserted them--that for his life the mother of
each could hold me to account.
But as we drove away from the cellars of mud, the gun that stuck, and
the "independent command," I could see in the twilight the flashes of
the guns and two lonely specks of light.
They were the "King of England" cigars burning bravely.