the glass between my feet objects were becoming clearer. From the
thinnest thread the black lines had thickened perceptibly and now as it
grew darker, I began to see innumerable, tiny, yellow-red tongues that
had a way of darting out from the black lines and as suddenly
withdrawing, and I began to think I heard a faint sound like the broken
rolling of a drum, and somewhere very far off some one seemed to be
beating a bass drum with less frequent but perfectly timed strokes, and
there came up to me the booming of the battle--or did I imagine it?
Observers tell me it is next to impossible to hear.
Even clearer became the battlefield, clearer though it was ever
darkening, and it dawned upon me that we were descending; approaching
that patch of black-lined land where the pygmies played with death. It
was with a weird trembling fascination that you saw the picture in the
glass become more and more distinct. It looked like a relief map now,
with objects coming out of the purplish gray haze, and you wondered at
the geometrical precision of it all. By staring steadily at the black
scarred lines you slowly discerned another color and there at intervals,
which gave that same impression of mathematical exactness, you made out
darker colored dots. "The soldiers!" Involuntarily the words escaped me.
And then the black lines seemed to march across the glass and were gone
and you saw now only the parallels of the approach trenches, one at one
extreme of the lines, the other but half visible on the outer edge.
You knew then that you were flying away from the battle firing line, but
even as you looked, what seemed to be a row of broken boxes, moved
across the glass, hesitated and paused there as the aeroplane hovered
above them; and in that moment a yellowish box which seemed to stand
apart from the others, and which you guessed to be the great house of
the village, was blotted out by the spewing gray white smoke of a
_grenat_ and when the glass cleared you saw that the yellow box had
changed to a jagged shape, red with flames. Fascinated, you watched the
burning house, and then you realized that the celluloid shield behind
you was rattling from violent rapping. Hals was shouting something;
finally I guessed what it was--"Want to go down?" I shook my head no. As
he bent to the levers, I think he chuckled.
I wondered if what immediately followed had anything to do with that
mirth. My muscles were cramped from bending over the glass. I tried now
the naked eye, but the gray dusk was blackening and the fringe of flame
on the trenches becoming redder and more vivid. But this flame, which
should have been even more lurid, began to grow dim and to wane away,
like a thousand guttering candles, and I knew then that we were climbing
once more; why, only the man behind me knew.
The flickering trenches slid by and away; below us the earth had become
calm, luminous blue, pricked here and there with yellow pin points of
light; but still I thought I heard that measured, muffled beating as of
a great drum, only presently it became harsher as though the drummer was
wielding his stick with sudden fury, an insanely growing fury; and you
felt a wind on your face, then it was gone, and you felt it again, for
the aeroplane had begun to swing round in a slow circle, a nightbird you
thought, seeking something below. And then again came the roars, two,
one almost upon the other; they seemed ahead on our right somewhere; and
again I felt the wind on my cheek, but not again; we were flying
straight now.
By this time I thought I knew what Hals had planned. Those pausing,
slow, swinging circles had been made in order to get the exact source
of the sound, and now Hals was flying towards it--his object the
location of one of the enemy's batteries, a new battery, I judged as yet
unknown to the Germans, possibly the one that had dropped the shell on
the yellow house. Now, had Hals known that the shell was from a battery
just getting into action? Because they are men of air as well as of
earth, have these soldier-fliers strange powers?
I noticed that the tiny lights from what must be a farmhouse down there,
had a way of increasing and as suddenly decreasing from two to four to
two; and always the vanishing lights would be patches, not pinpricks,
more vivid, too, as though they were not shone through glass, but came
from doors that opened into illuminated rooms. And I was wondering why
these doors always kept opening and closing. The place must be a brigade
headquarters or something equally important. That was it! Soldiers were
constantly coming and going. And as regularly appearing, these patches
of light grew more lurid, and the guns raged on, I thought with a smile
that the firing might well be the slamming of those farmhouse doors, for
just then the two had perfectly synchronized--the sudden flaring lights,
the faint sound of guns. And then it happened again, one upon the other,
and I must have risen to my feet for it dawned upon me--There's the
battery over there! Those lights that I thought were part of the
farmhouse! Our motor seemed to thunder unnaturally loud then, again they
flashed down there, again the faint boom tore up to us. "_Kollosal!_"
Hals had spotted the French guns.
Of the race back through the night, I have only the most feverish
recollections. I knew we were flying faster than ever before, for the
fuselage was throbbing madly and you had a feeling that to escape an
awful strain put upon it, the engine was trying to tear itself loose.
And then you thought of the need for this speed. Had I been careless
with the electric torch? Had we been seen? Might not even now the enemy
be after us? Perhaps a telephone call from the battery down to the
trenches where the muzzle of an aeroplane gun was tilted to the sky. Or
had they telephoned their own aeroplanes to put up after us? Why the
speed that Hals evidently deemed necessary?
You knew, too, that somewhere down there, shells from the German
batteries were whining towards the enemy's positions. You knew, too,
that to reach the earth, you would have to bolt down through this
battle-filled sky. The chances were one in five thousand that we would
be in the line of our own shell fire. You did not like to think of that
one chance. The machine had ceased to shake. I imagined that Hals was
looking down on all sides. The wind, certain signal of a turn, struck my
cheek. The slow swinging circles began as before. And then, just upon
sighting the French battery, Hals suddenly drove the machine forward.
Off to the left, what had seemed an unnaturally bright point of light
grew incredibly fast into a circle of light and beside it a smaller
circle, and their circumferences seemed to be restlessly moving,
intersecting here and there with exasperating frequency, although
gradually becoming steadier and finally becoming almost concentric,
intersecting not at all, the smaller though seeming to have moved in
front of the larger, shifting from side to side, although never touching
the outer fiery rim. And suddenly I remembered the two circular
frameworks, fitted with the electric bulbs, in the field by the
shrapnel-scarred willows and I recalled the explanation of them, that
they were guide posts for an aviator at night, and that once he had them
concentric, he knew that he was flying true to his landing field.
So we were almost home now--home!--the thought made you grimace--miles
away! And in a moment now we must drop, begin that bolt down through
that zone, through which the shells of our own batteries were flying.
And I heard that most disconcerting of all sounds that you hear in the
air, the shutting off of the motor--an instant, and as we slid forward,
I felt for the brass handles to brace myself, and no longer sped round
by the motor's power, the propeller blades became as the strings of a
monstrous harp through which the rushing wind wailed a weird song; and
we bolted down.... If a shell passed I did not hear it. Gaining in
violence, the wind shrieked through the slowly spinning blades, shrieked
as though the very air had gone mad; and just when you had begun to
doubt that it was beyond human skill to bring an aeroplane to earth
through the night like this, you felt a sudden forward horizontal
glide, and the next moment the rubber tired wheels were bouncing over
the hardened field, and the shadowy forms of soldiers seemed to spring
out of the earth, laying hold of the wings as though to make it captive,
and the concentric lights were gleaming just in front; and a voice you
knew to be Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann's was calling, with a trace of
relief, you thought: "Well, how was it?"
Laboriously climbing down from the fuselage, I looked for the aviator,
Hals.
"He ran off to telephone," a soldier said.
"The French battery," I said aloud.
As we motored back to Lille, I heard a German howitzer open fire.
V
BEHIND THE BATTLELINE
The service was as good as you get at the Waldorf. Moving with deft
skill round the long table, as if their training in the array had
consisted of passing platters of food, the soldiers in field gray
silently importuned you to have at least another helping of cheese. In a
detached way I was gazing at the big canvas hanging on the brocaded
wall, the lower part of the picture half hidden by the smart jackets and
shaven heads of the Prussian officers, sitting opposite; then I saw a
soldier opening one of the stained glass windows, and muttering along
the wet wind, I heard the muffled grumbling of the guns.
"An excellent canvas, is it not?" the staff officer at my right was
saying, a slender man with one of those young mustaches; he wore a
monocle, and the Iron Cross. "The Marquis, you know, has one of the best
collections in France. He has several Rubens, I believe, but I have
never seen them," he added hastily. "The gallery is on the second floor,
and the Marchioness has a perfect terror of our going in there--we
barbarians," he laughed.
Through the opened window I could see the green tops of the winter
trees, enveloping each in a separate silvery haze, as the unceasing
rains that have turned these Western battle lines into quagmires
drizzled down. The sullen monotone of the guns made you glance around at
Commander von Arnim, the rather frail, reserved, iron-grayed aristocrat
who leads the Fourth Army Corps. Finding no trace of emotion there, you
scanned the line of his staff, whose faces, thoughtful, mature, or as
young and dapper as musical comedy ever staged its "Lieutenant of the
Huzzars," all seemed as unconcerned as though they were lunching in a
Berlin café. And, when the noise of the guns obsessed you, your ear
caught the incongruity of the tinkle of coffee cups and you wanted to
laugh, although you did not know why.
The Lieutenant who had spoken of the Marquis's paintings was saying that
he had been in New York last winter--and asked where one went there
after the restaurants closed at one o'clock? Just then I saw that
Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann, who had been talking with Commander von Arnim,
wanted to speak to me. I had learned that the Ober-Lieutenant generally
had something keenly interesting to say, especially after conversing
with a Corps Commander.
"We must go now," said Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann.
"Back to Lille?" I asked in dismay.
"Not until the evening when we go to the Second Bavarian Corps Staff for
dinner. Meanwhile we see something behind the battle line."
Assured that they were not hurrying me away because at three o'clock--so
they all had said--the French artillery invariably began heavy firing, I
said good-by to the officers and climbed into one of the fast army
motors, painted the same gray green as the uniforms, unable to shake off
the feeling that it was not war at all, but that this buff-walled
château in the beautiful iron-fenced park, had not been commandeered as
an army headquarters, but that it was simply the home of one of these
young men who had invited all his brother officers from a nearby
garrison to a luncheon; and that now we were leaving to catch a train.
But as the motor lurched soggily from the soaked driveway I took a last
glance at the château; a wisp of blackish smoke beaten low by the rain,
was creeping along the brick chimney, and an old servant was sweeping
away the mud that our boots had left on the stoop; but as the motor
swung past the little square-paned library windows I saw that they were
pierced with tiny holes, through which passed the thin tendrils of six
wires, caught against a great tree and leading off through the park; and
in the window I saw a soldier telephoning, while another at a table
seemed to be writing down what the man in the window was calling off.
Ahead a tranquil driveway tunneled through the trees....
The army chauffeur, ignoring the insane skidding of the car, was racing
through a desolated country. It is the contrast that always catches you
in this war, and in the sugar beet fields that came up to the road I
began to see an increasing number of mounds, some four, some thirty feet
long, incongruously protruding from the flat ground. And I began to see
little wooden crosses, turned the deeper yellow that new wood turns in
the rain, and some of the crosses loosened by the downpours, leaned
over, their arms resting in the mud, and on one a helmet hung. On either
side the unharvested fields of sugar beets had become the harvested
fields of the dead....
Where I saw the white sides of a farmhouse, no smoke mounted from the
gaunt, gray chimney; and in the yard beyond, no human thing moved, for
we were passing through a countryside where the armies had passed. We
drove on, but we could not leave the long, sinister mounds behind, and I
began to think: What an awful thing it is not to be able to go a hundred
yards without seeing a grave. I noticed that Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann no
longer sat hunched with the blue collar of his cape turned up to his
ears and staring straight ahead; restlessly he seemed ever glancing from
left to right. I wondered what he, a soldier, who had been decorated for
bravery in German Southwest Africa, thought of these things that he so
restlessly saw.
"A great battle was fought here early in October," he said, after a
time. "Sixty thousand men were engaged." He paused. "There were six
thousand dead. Every day for five days a hundred were wounded for each
mile of a forty-mile line."
That was all, but his eyes roved from grave to grave. For two miles we
followed the avenue of wooden crosses and then, still in the open
country, the car stopped. I saw that the car ahead with the staff
officers had stopped too, and that they were getting out.
"Over to the right there," said a captain, pointing towards a clump of
trees through which the ruins of cottages loomed dismally in the rain,
"is a village which we had to shell because the French had a position
there. Then they took up positions in the cemetery," and, with a wave of
his hand, the Captain indicated an ancient brick wall that had seemed to
enclose a grove of tall cassia at the end of the sugar beet field. "It
took us three days of hard fighting to capture the cemetery," he
continued, as we waded through the mud.
"Three days and how many lives?" I thought, as we approached the brick
wall, "and now it is not considered of enough importance to have a
single soldier on guard"; which is one of the false impressions that
always comes to you after hearing that a certain point was taken at such
sacrifice, and then to find that point abandoned. For the moment you
seem to think of it as being typically futile of war; and then its place
in the vast strategical contemplation of a battle line three hundred
miles long emerges from your temporarily befogged vision. It is the
military point of view to think that too much peace makes a nation soft,
and you become angry at the feeling that has whispered that war is
futile and forthwith you place war where the idealists forget that it
belongs, not beside barbarism, but with civilization.
We entered by the rusted iron gate and stood among the place of
desecrated graves. But as I walked among them, their white monuments
chipped with rifle balls, the leafless boughs of the great trees
overspreading above splintered with shrapnel, the red wall torn open
here and there to admit the shells that must have burst in that
rain-filled crater by the iron-railed shaft; as I saw a clutter of rifle
butts, smashed off against a tombstone, perhaps, so that the metal parts
could be taken back to an ordnance factory to be molded again, I was
thinking of the men who had fought here, and whether they had lived. I
was wondering how many of those thick, white, bullet-chipped tombstones
had shielded men from death. I was wondering how many more of them would
have been killed had they fought in the open field; and as I examined
the shattered granite slabs, I thought of the protection they had given.
One of the staff officers was speaking to me. "Will you return to
headquarters with us for tea?" he was saying, and he gave a slight
shudder. Perhaps it was from the cold rain.
As we motored into Vis en Artois, the sun broke through the gray-ringed
dreariness of sky. Up a narrow hill street with the powerful car waking
the echoes among the low white stone houses, two or three peasants in
wooden shoes flattening themselves against the walls to escape the muddy
spray from our tires, and we stopped in what seemed to be the village
center. Down the street I could see the last hooped roof of a transport
caravan, and from a stealthy creaking in the house across the street, I
had an idea that shutters were being slowly pushed open and that there
were frightened, bewildered eyes behind.
With Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann, whose French is better than mine, I
crossed the street to read the proclamation--_Avis!_--pasted to the wall
of a church. Worded by the Germans and signed by the French Burgomaster
of Vis en Artois, it told the inhabitants what to do if they would keep
out of trouble.
From the church we walked to a tall, gray stone, square-turreted
building that loomed above everything in the village and passing through
a wide archway we came into a court filled with drilling soldiers. I
wondered what it could have been before the war, for the stacks of hay
and the manure piles were wholly incongruous. Clearly, it now was being
utilized as a transport station, for at the end of the court I saw four
empty, gray, canvas-covered wagons. Turning to the soldiers, you were
instantly struck by the fact that they were smaller than any you had
ever seen in uniforms. All of the same size divided into squads, each in
the hands of a drill sergeant. I watched them doing the "goose steps,"
to the proud clapping of their boots on the cobbled court, while others
marched by briskly in twos, saluting. It was the barest rudimentary
training that they were being put through--but it was stiffening them
for the firing line--and as they drilled these raw troops, I could hear
in the distance the drumming of the guns. It seemed to electrify these
stocky little fellows in the new uniforms, for their feet stamped the
louder, and their saluting hands snapped up like automatons; and I
wondered if it were hard to content yourself with harmless drilling in
a manure-strewn yard, with the music of war playing for you to march; or
if behind any of those stupid, utterly peasant faces there lurked a
craven thought that they were glad to be there and not where those
shells were bursting. But as I watched them and felt the eagerness with
which they went about the drill, I found myself thinking of the craving
I had seen the Jews of New York's Ghetto show for education and that
these stolid peasants were just as eager to learn that they might go to
war. And I wondered if after all it might not be a lark for the youth in
them, better than giving themselves day after day to an industrialism
that made them old before their time. Was it not better than trudging
off in the morning to the blowing of a whistle? I asked Ober-Lieutenant
Herrmann where they came from.
"They are all Saxonians," he explained; and I remembered what a German
Socialist had told me, that the low laboring class of Saxony is
notoriously poor and short-lived, their years taken by work in the
mines. No wonder they had pranced at the roll of the guns! They were
thinking of it as a deliverance.... Into what?
We walked under the gray arch and across the muddy street into a paved
school yard, where evergreen hedges bloomed in pretty red tubs. The sun,
as if to make up to those rain-soaked men who crouched in the trenches
but six kilometers away, streamed down, as in a glory before its
setting, and as the school yard rung to the fall of our heavy boots, it
seemed for a moment as if the brown door must open and children come
pouring forth.
[Illustration: "We came to a court filled with drilling soldiers."]
[Illustration: Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann, detailed by the General Staff
to accompany Mr. Fox along the Western front.]
We entered the school house and turning into the classroom on the left,
I saw twelve cots made of rough boards and twelve wan, unshaven men who
lay there as men dead, although, at the sound of our approach, their
eyes turned in a disinterested stare. I observed a German, who seemed to
tremble under the covers, and as I walked beside his bed, I saw that the
sweat was standing out on his face.
"How high is his fever?" I asked the surgeon.
"He has no fever. He is sweating with pain."
I turned to go out. I think the surgeon was offended that I did not make
the rounds with him, for, with true German consideration and
thoroughness, it was doubtless his plan to show me every detail of his
little hospital.
"Eight weeks ago," he was saying, as I walked back towards the door, "we
had two hundred wounded in here--but now," and his tone was almost
apologetic.
I asked him how far the wounded had to be transported from here before
they could be placed in a hospital train.
"Thirty-five kilometers," he said; "that is to Cambrai," and he was
explaining something about his interesting cases, and doubtless
wondering why I did not write them down in the memorandum that stuck
from my pocket. Two weeks before I would have done so, but as you come
to see the wounded in this war, you feel--rightly or wrongly; I do not
know--that it is the grossest banalism to draw a notebook before the
eyes of the wounded and write of their sufferings. Unthinking, I did it
once in the hospital at Gleiwitz, and I shall never forget the look in a
dying Austrian's eyes.
Close by the door, I noticed a black-bearded Frenchman, his leg heavily
bandaged, and over his head on the schoolroom wall hung a cheap copy of
an etching of Friedland with the victorious French cuirassiers galloping
by. What a world of sadness looked out from that wounded Frenchman's
eyes. As we walked out into the court, you could hear the cannon more
plainly, a steady crashing seeming ever to grow in violence as though
one new battery after another was being unlimbered to make work for the
surgeons in little school houses the countryside round. In great
indignation, the surgeon drew a fragment of metal from his pocket and
explained that two days ago an English aviator had dropped the bomb of
which that was a part, only eighty meters from the hospital. But I
scarcely heard him. From the manure-strewn courtyard across the street
floated a cheer. Had the Saxonians been told they were to be sent to the
trenches? And I wondered if this was to be their deliverance--the beds
of unpainted wood, where I had seen a man sweat with pain.
That evening, after a successful dinner, Herrmann took the edge off our
pleasure by announcing that we must get up at five o'clock next morning.
"You will be taken to the trenches with Captain Kliewer's party (another
group of correspondents had come to Lille). We will all meet in
Commines for luncheon and in the afternoon you may see a field battery
in action. Of course, it is expected that you will not want to go, and
it is understood that those who wish to remain in Lille may do so with
the full approval of the staff."
Rotkohl was approved; so was the Dutch general. Rotkohl said something
about his grandmother, who lived on the Christiania Fjord, and the
general--well, he said there were more pretty girls to be seen in Lille
than along those muddy roads; besides it might rain, and suppose his
patent umbrella did not work. In three motors, one for Ober-Lieutenant
Herrmann and I, and the others for Captain Kliewer's party, we raced
through Lille long before dawn, to get into the trenches before daylight
would reveal our approach to the French. We lunched with the Second
Bavarian Army Corps at Commines as the guests of General von Stettin and
we told every officer in the room that we wanted to see the trenches by
night, and, being Bavarians, they thought it a tremendous joke, and
roared with laughter.