in a low-ceilinged, high-casemented room such as you sometimes see on
the stage in a romantic play. I remember hearing a rapping on the door,
almost as soon, it seemed, as I had closed my eyes.
Five o'clock! And I heard the portier shuffling down the hall and then
the hollow, rapping sound of another early morning call on the
Ober-Lieutenant's door. Below in the alley panted one of the gray-green
army motors waiting to bring us to the station. Cold sprouts, coffee,
and a roll, and we had climbed into a compartment of the train for
Lille. From now on, soldiers with fixed bayonets composed the train
crew. We crossed a wooden trestle built by German pioneers high above a
green swirl of water between pretty trees, and on the left we saw the
ruins of a stone bridge dynamited by the French. We rushed out at St.
Vincennes to eat at an officers' mess, and as the train moved on I saw
at a siding a long line of cars, their sides and roofs marked with the
Red Cross; and even as we passed I saw two stretchers being borne along
the track and lifted with their wounded through the open windows of one
of the cars. I saw a white bandaged leg as the stretcher tilted and then
the attendants inside the car covered it from sight. Hourly the front
drew nearer.
Trenches appeared. The train suddenly slid into a station and stopped.
We were in Lille. While two soldiers were loading the luggage,
photograph apparatus and all, upon a small truck, Herrmann suddenly
plucked my arm. "Look," he exclaimed, pointing up at the huge
glass-domed roof. I saw there a big hole, edged with splintered glass,
and a fragment of blue sky beyond. "That's the hole made by a French
aeroplane bomb. The Staff told me to look for it when we came to Lille.
The bomb never exploded and was picked up on the tracks over there."
Not the most reassuring thought in the world, that French fliers had
marked this place for destruction. In the waiting-rooms I saw nothing
but soldiers--fresh troops with clean uniforms, unshaven men whose
clothes were brownish with the mud of the trenches. By that time I had
become used to being saluted, and to enjoy the click of a sentry's
heels. While Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann was telephoning for a military
automobile I noticed one of the _Landwehr_ guards begin to eye
suspiciously the photographers and their formidable luggage. I saw him
call another of the dark-coated _Landwehr_, and they were obviously on
the point of making a possible arrest when the Ober-Lieutenant returned,
averting the situation.
We were, the Ober-Lieutenant informed us, to wait in the Café de
Paris,--which was just across the square from the station,--until he
returned.
"The telephones have all been cut," he explained with a smile. "I shall
have to walk to Headquarters and bring back a motor for us. I may be
gone half an hour, or an hour, but please remain in the café. Remember
Lille is a captured city."
So we crossed the square, Dawson, Theyer and I, while the wind brought
us the grumbling of heavy cannon from the West where, not fifteen miles
away, the Germans were making their terrific drive on that segment of
the Allies' line, extending out from the Channel shore. Boo-omm,
Boo-omm, Boo-omm, with the last syllable prolonged like a low note on
the piano. Army transports rattled over the cobbled square; one of the
gray motors with its muffler cut out, snorted past; and then the eye
began to take in its surroundings.
There on my left, as I went away from the station, I saw a place of
destruction, an entire block of ruined buildings, their shattered sides
rearing with hideous ugliness against the perspective of untouched
houses beyond. Blackened walls, gaping holes, roofless skeletons of
houses; and within, a chaos of plaster and falling floors, one house
after another, some almost razed to the ground, others with only their
tops shot off, but all desolation and ruin. It was not the destruction
that made me stop in the square and stare about me, for I had become
sated with shelled houses, all the way from Charleville to Lille; it was
amazement at the artillery fire that could lay low an entire block and
not even drop a shell. The undisturbed cobbles in the square confirmed
this conclusion. What deadly accuracy! How, if something be marked for
destruction in this war, can it escape? I stood in the square for
several minutes and counted thirty-eight soldiers and sixty civilians
walk past the ruins and no one so much as turned his head to glance even
indifferently upon them.
"How long," I asked the fatherly, white-haired Frenchman who brought us
our coffee in the Café de Paris, "is it, since those buildings over
there were destroyed?"
"A month, sir," he said, and in a moment he added wearily, "Our city has
been captured and recaptured three times."
And it was easy then to know why they had all walked by without the
slightest interest in the ruins beside them; think of people becoming
bored with destruction! A typical French café with its big window, the
Paris gave a view of the sidewalk. I saw a beautiful, dark-eyed French
boy, dirtily clad, selling post cards of Lille to a good natured German
infantryman. The soldier went away and then, what appeared to be the
other members of the firm, a bigger and a smaller boy, darted from a
doorway to divide the spoils with the dark-eyed youngster who had closed
the deal. I saw five different parties of German soldiers come into the
Café de Paris, and I heard not even a loud word or jest against the
French; and three black-bearded Frenchmen played dominoes nearby. The
soldiers ordered their coffee, or wine, paid for it, and minded their
own business, just as they would at home, perhaps even more scrupulously
so.
Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann was an hour longer than he expected, but he had
good news for me.
"I have a car outside," he said hurriedly. "We shall bring Mr. Dawson
and Mr. Theyer to the Staff and then I shall take you to an aeroplane
base not far from here. It has been arranged for you to go up--if you
wish."
Hmm! The battle line could not be more than forty kilometers away, and a
French flyer had almost wrecked the Lille station.
"A fine day for flying," observed the Ober-Lieutenant. "You can see
much," and he smiled. "A fine day also for the French fliers."
"_Schön_," I said, but refused to believe that a German aeroplane was
ever hit. "Let's go."
IV
ON THE BACK OF THE BIRD OF WAR
Two hours after the crawling military train had set us down in what used
to be the Gare du Nord in Lille, but which is now the Nord Bahnhof, I
was hurriedly getting into a fur-lined military undercoat in the Hotel
d'Europe. About to go up in one of Germany's war planes, I was
determined to be comfortable, if not mentally, physically.
Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann laughed when he saw me appear, as bulky with
clothing as a polar explorer, and said: "We shall have to hurry if we
are to reach the aviation base before dark." We hurried.
I have ridden with Robertson, Strang, and other race drivers. I have had
my blood turned to ice when they skidded their cars around hairpin
turns. But I never rode before with a chauffeur of the German army who
was in a hurry; nor shall I again--if I can help it. Bound for a place
near Lens, so small that it appears only on the wonderful
_Automobilkartes_ that the Germans have made of all Europe, the brown
leather-coated soldier-chauffeur began to distance everything on the
road. It was one of those long, rakish motors, painted field gray green,
that the Benz Company manufactures only for the army, cabalistic black
letters and numerals marking its hood. As, with the muffler cut out, we
roared through the streets of Lille, I saw the civilians pause to watch
us pass with sullen eyes. Poor Herrmann had his arm working like a
restless semaphore, returning salutes, and as we thundered through the
silenced business streets at mile a minute speed, military trumpetings
warned the poor bewildered citizens of Lille of our approach. The car
began its mad dance through the outskirts of the city and down between
the sentinel poplars toward Lens. Not two months before I had been
riding down Fifth Avenue on the roof of a slumbering bus; to-day I was
speeding in a German car through captured France.
Ahead we saw the gray canvas tops of a transport train. The trumpet
blared, but those mud-splashed, creaking wagons had the right of way.
What if the two lancers who rode as a rear guard did recognize the
officer in our car? After all, he was only an officer, and they were
bringing ammunition for the entrenched battle line. So our
soldier-chauffeur swore, but indifferent to his "_Donnerwetters_," the
drivers astride the transport horses stolidly held their course as, with
an angry rasping of the tires, we skidded over to the side of the road,
and rushed on in a splatter of mud. I looked at Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann
and shouted: "They knew their business, those fellows back there."
"Certainly," he replied, "their work is most important. They were
entirely right in not turning off the road for an officer's automobile.
Everything depends on the transports, you know."
Whereupon I began to have a greater respect for the light, rattling
supply wagons that we passed by the dozen on the road to Lens, and found
myself thinking how unjustly those men might be regarded. "What did you
do in the war?" ... "I drove a supply cart." ... How unheroic it sounds.
Yet the Ober-Lieutenant told me that those men astride the bulky,
unpicturesque dray horses were often put to the severest tests of
courage.
"During our drive on Paris," he said, "the French would often succeed in
covering a segment of road with their long range artillery, and
continually drop shells upon it. They knew, of course, that our
infantry, by making a detour through the fields, could avoid this death
zone, but they shelled on, knowing that our transport trains would have
to go by the road. So the transports would make a rush for it, and of
course many were killed."
Another mile passed without our seeing any more of the gray wagon
trains, and now the distant artillery grumbled louder. Two Uhlans
cantered by, scanning us, and further on we passed another patrol. A
corral of the familiar gray-topped wagons beside red brick farm
buildings showed the location of a base of supplies, and in front of the
house we saw a naked soldier unconcernedly scrubbing himself in a tub of
water. And always the sullen roaring guns grew steadier and more
disconcertingly clear.
"On this section of the line," Ober-Lieutenant explained, "the Staff
told me that the French generally begin their heaviest firing every day
at half past three."
I asked him why that was--it was like the curtain going up in a theater
at a certain time. But he did not know, and could not even guess. I was
wondering how much further we were going to rush towards that unearthly
booming when at a muddy crossroad, patrolled by a Uhlan, as motionless
as Remington might have painted him, we made a quick turn and plowed
away. Apparently we were bound for a weather-beaten house and barn, half
hidden by a leafless clump of willows, apparently shorn by shrapnel, for
the broken branches hung down dead in a perfect arc as though the
projectile had burst, perhaps right there above the tiny moss-banked
stream, and sprayed its leaden shower.
As our motor, which had been heavily crawling along the farmhouse lane,
finally sogged in the mud, refusing to go further, I followed
Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann out of the machine, across the yard to where a
sentry stood before the barn door. They exchanged words and then the
barn door slid back a trifle, a youngish man, wearing the black leather
helmet and coat of the aviation corps, appearing in the aperture.
Excusing himself, Herrmann drew him aside and now and then I heard their
voices raised in assent; they were evidently discussing my proposed
flight. I guessed that Herrmann wanted to know exactly how much danger
there would be. Conjecturing that he was apparently satisfied that the
risk was a minimum, and that the aviator had been instructed to bring
me nowhere near the firing line, I waited for their conference to break
up.
Their talk evidently finished to the satisfaction of both, introductions
were in order. Then the aviator, Hals, shouted a command into the barn
and instantly there issued from the gloom within, four soldiers. I
watched them roll back the creaking door and then, as though it were a
fragile thing, they began slowly to push out the aeroplane--a monoplane
I judged, as its long, tapering fuselage protruded into the farm yard,
and then I saw with a start that the wings were a biplane's--a strange
craft.
Events passed with bewildering rapidity. Half in a daze I saw the tall,
solemn-looking aviator survey my warm clothing with an approving nod.
The next instant I was buckling on a steel head protector, and when I
noticed the machine again, it had been wheeled out into the flat,
neighboring field. A level place I observed, packed hard with shale and
dirt, made into a landing place for the planes. I caught a glimpse, at
the extreme end of the field near the house, of two soldiers, fitting
two wooden objects, painted the drab green of the field, into two pairs
of prepared holes, one thirty feet behind the other. They were stout
hoops, supported by posts, and rimmed with electric light bulbs. I
noticed that the rear was perhaps two feet less in diameter than the
other, and that when you stood directly in front of them, they gave the
effect of concentric circles, their circumference but a foot apart.
"What is that for?" I asked Hals, and he explained that if it grew
dark, the lights were lit, and if from above the aviator saw two fiery
circles concentric, he knew that he could fly straight for them and
alight in safety.
"But I hope," he added, "that nothing will prevent us from landing in
daylight."
I did not like that "nothing will prevent us." I found myself wondering
what could prevent us, deciding finally that it was only the usual
jocular way of the aviator to frighten his passenger unduly before the
flight begins. Had I but known!
I was hurrying across the field towards the aeroplane, its fish-like
tail bearing the black inscription "B 604/14," which I later came to
know meant biplane number 604 of the year 1914. Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann
was wishing me luck and in the same breath whispering admonitions to the
grave aviator. I climbed up into the observer's compartment and found
myself staring, first at the brown propeller blades only the length of
the wagon in front of me, then at the brass petrol tank overhead, and
the thick, curving celluloid shield behind, through which I could see
the black sleeved arms of the aviator, moving towards the levers. I
glanced down at Herrmann, who looked a little nervous I thought. Two
soldiers were grasping the brown wings on my left. The brown propeller
began to spin, lazily at first, then faster, while the engine that I
could have reached forward and touched, began its roaring. A quick
comparison between the observer's compartment of this machine, and the
one in which I had sat at the Doeberitz Flugplatz near Berlin came to
me--that one had the tiny, brass, bomb-dropping levers, two on each side
of the rail; these were all in one line and on the left; that one had a
writing shelf that fell out from the front wall of the tiny tonneau, so
had this, and I touched the lever that brought the shelf sloping down
towards my knees; the floor of that machine had seemed solid, though
perhaps not, for this was cut to admit the insertion of an observing
device which, protruding up between my knees, offered a lens on which
the eyes might be cupped by a shield as on a Graflex camera. I was
wondering if four bombs dangled from the four releasing hooks below,
when the engine started, smiting my ears with a mad roaring, and driving
cold air against my face. I remembered to pull down my goggles and the
next moment I felt a shudder run the length of the machine as it lurched
forward, running over the field, to rise slightly, bump gently on its
rubbered wheels, and then gliding upward on a gradual slant, sail
towards the willows, dead sentinels grotesquely standing at the far end
of the field with their shrapnel-torn branches dangling against the
gray-ringed dreariness of sky.
One or two little spasms of fear and, as the aeroplane climbed towards a
wood, I began to want to recognize instantly all the objects on the
earth. They spread out, unrolling as on a huge panorama, a patchwork of
many shaded woods and fields; there the brownish ribbon of a road losing
itself like a thread in the gray distance, here little groups of
absurdly small brick houses, off to the right a church steeple and
beside it the uneven blackened walls of a shell-riddled building. The
motor had settled now into an ever-increasing clamor, in which, if you
caught one false beat, you would have cause for alarm. No longer
visible, the propeller blades had lost their individuality in a grayish
blur out there in front, shadowy scimiters whirling too fast for the eye
to see. You thought of the engine and the blades but a moment, and then
they seemed to become a part of you, and I wonder now if my heart did
not try to synchronize its beat with theirs.
We climbed higher and higher. Although minutes ago, objects had ceased
to seem strange by their magical tininess, you could sense the growing
height now by the development of color; you never knew that the drab
winter earth could have so many hues and wondrous shades of brown, gray,
green, ochre, and purple; they separated each into fantastic tintings,
as though earth's beauties were not for those who dwelt upon it. The
long army transport that we had passed on the road, was just a gray
worm, crawling along in its brown dirt. And over there by the village,
in that field where the thin bluish smoke wraiths were crawling, must be
the field kitchens ... and that multitude of specks, a regiment off
duty, back from the trenches, waiting to be fed.
A gust felt cold on my cheek. The machine was turning. Now faintly,
almost lost in the roaring of our motor, I imagined I heard once more
that other sound, the grumbling of the guns, and now I thought of it as
the hungry growls of some monster, already sated with the puny living
things in that other world beneath us, but which ever grumbled for more.
And then suddenly I saw a white cloud appear in the gray sky, and then
the white cloud was gone and there came a second, a third, a fourth
white cloud, then no more for a minute it seemed, and then four more
again. And you knew that over there the enemy's shrapnel was bursting.
Fascinated, I watched the pure ringing, billowing beauty of the smoke,
celestial, white roses that bloomed out of nothing, dropped death from
their petals, and died themselves in the gray sepulcher of sky. We
banked away; we saw the white clouds no more.
I was conjecturing in a feverish sort of way how far we had been from
the trenches and if that shrapnel line had been bursting over them, or
if the enemy, spotting a base of some kind, had begun to shell it, when
growing out of the air there approached a sound. Scarcely audible at
first, like the faint whining of the wind, gathering its frenzy, now
whistling, screaming, shrieking, I heard somewhere near in the void, the
song of a shell. And when writing on the observer's table, I was trying
to jot down how it felt, I heard another, nearer it seemed, and the
pencil fell from my fingers, rolling down until it stopped by the ledge
while I sat staring at it and trying not to think what might have
occurred had we been a few seconds faster or the shell a few seconds
slower. And then I felt myself slide forward in the seat and I knew that
the machine was diving down. There was no danger, I felt; of course the
aviator was all right, No shrapnel had burst near us but then, we might
have been within rifle range. No! Absurd! Yet I quickly glanced over my
shoulder and felt centuries younger when I saw the smile on Hals' solemn
face. And then, as unexpectedly as it had begun, the downward bolt
ceased. Hals was rattling the celluloid screen. It dawned on me that he
wanted to tell me something. I leaned back and he leaned forward. I
could hear him but faintly although he shouted. "Those shells were on
the same elevation as we, or we could not have heard them. So I dove."
And there they were screaming their death song overhead now, although I
could no longer hear them.
We flew towards a yellow château and then once more began to climb. Of
course we were out of the path of the shells, but Hals had not then
known that we were in the line of howitzers. The minutes passed, and
slowly I admitted that the danger was over. A stinging pain, moreover,
was settling above my eyes, and what I might have put down to the quick
breathing of excitement, I realized now to be the gasping of the lungs
in a rarified atmosphere. High indeed we were climbing, for the earth
seemed to shrink and its many colors to blend themselves in a vague
tinting suffusion of purple and gold, the veil of a dream.
Heaven only knows what the officers must think who sit in the observing
compartment as did I, though they know that this upward climb has a
purpose, a purpose of war, as I was soon to see. More faint, then
befogged, became the diaphanously veiled earth. Clouds interspersed,
graying the vision, clouds and a drifting, wet mist that settled in
beads on the glass of my goggles so that I was continually rubbing away
with my gloved fingers. We were hidden now, from the earth, and the
earth from us. Marching gray gloom all around, ghostly wet wisps that
straggled past, caressing one's face. In that Nomad's void, in which
even the voice of the engine seemed hesitant and more subdued, I began
to feel as if I was making some awful intrusion--into what I did not
know, but one felt the guilt of an appalling, defying presumption.
And then I realized that we had been slowly descending through the
clouds, for suddenly to the left I saw a patch of the purplish dream
veil, and in a moment we were gliding down through the clouds and
running just beneath them. Hals was shouting and pointing down. And I
saw the battlefield.
At first you thought of a cotton field, of white blown buds and then, as
your vision shook off the spell of the bursting shells, you discerned
down there a purplish, grayish patch of the earth, of which you were no
longer a part, so remote, that only by peering down between your knees
into the graflex-like observing glass set in the bottom of the car,
could you distinguish even vaguely a single object in that colorous haze
of distance. And then gradually there took shape in the glass, as in a
crystal ball, accented lines and dabs of color, and there grew before
you the black, zigzagging scars of the trenches--although you knew them
to be brown with wet clay--and behind them more black lines, only
straighter--and you guessed those to be reserve pits--and behind them,
approaching at right angles, more black lines, only fewer and further
apart--and these you judged the approach trenches. As you stared with
the glass your eye never ranged the whole battle line, always the white
puffing smoke obscured the view in tiny, white, swift-dispelling clouds,
that rose from the area between the zigzagging lines. You wondered which
were the French and which were the German trenches. Now a white spot
suddenly appeared, exactly upon one of the black lines, and in fancy you
heard the explosion of a shell and the groans of men, and you wondered
if observers had seen officers coming up and if that shell had been
particularly well aimed. A patch of earth, purplish gray in that
hastening dusk, and illimitable lines of black stretching away, puffing
white smoke quickly coming, quickly going; that was the battlefield as I
saw it below the clouds.