Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann and the photographers, I was supposed to go to
a battery already in action. Hauptmann Kliewer's party were going to see
their battery later. Telling myself that this early start--the heavy
artillery firing never begins around Commines until four in the
afternoon--was being made so that the photographers could photograph the
battery, and that at this time of day there would be little doing there,
I explained the situation to Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann. With the utmost
good nature--I knew from his smile that I had guessed right--he spoke to
Hauptmann Kliewer, who courteously granted my request. So, with Poole,
Reed and Dunn, I rode away from Commines, Hauptmann Kliewer following
with an officer in another car. Poole was telling us that the Major who
sat beside him at luncheon said that last night the English had dropped
four shells into Commines, evidently taking a long chance on hitting
headquarters; and Reed came back with another officer's story of how the
enemy's observers had seen a motor leaving Commines and had put three
_grenaten_ in the field beside the road not forty yards away. And as the
gray-green army auto car soughed down the heavy roads and you saw the
puddled fields beginning to mirror a suddenly sunlit sky, you wondered
if the enemy's observers could see your car too, and you caught
yourself, every now and then, watching the sky, as though to spy the
shell they had picked out for you. Nothing happened in that ride, but
from the moment of leaving Commines we thrilled to innumerable
paradoxical motions too laboriously complex to describe, that always
come when you are approaching the firing line and the novelty has not
worn off. Growing heavier with the sound, until it became almost the
slow roll of huge drums, the sky filled itself with the echoes of the
guns, crashing and crashing as though the heavens were a vault of blue
steel. And always, out of that growing grumble towards which we rode, we
heard more distinctly the explosions of the shells, each in a separate
disconcerting violence, and always louder, nearer.
Two Uhlans, their mortar board helmets covered with cloth, galloped by;
we overtook a transport train, the light, springy wagons moving easily
through the mud, the drivers posting in their stirrups, which somehow
seemed like an exhibition of beautiful riding that should have been done
in a park. We turned out, our wheels spinning in mud up to the hubs, to
let one of the big gray motor ambulances painted with huge red crosses,
rumble by, with its red load for the field hospital in Commines. We
passed two rosy-cheeked peasant girls, who carried food in baskets, and
then the clank and jangle of a string of caissons, going at a canter, as
though a battery needed shells. Perhaps the very battery we sought.
Somewhere on that road we must have crossed the Belgian frontier, for
after passing through silent, shelled Maraid we drove into Houthem,
Commando of the Second Bavarian Corps. We had been following a road that
ran parallel to the firing line only a mile on our left. Shells from the
German batteries had been flying overhead, but the muffler cut-out had
drowned their wicked whine. We were in Houthem, and across the muddy
fields there was that row of trenches where the German line seems to
come to a point, and where there was a colonel of whom we had heard in
Commines, Oberst Meyer of the Seventeenth Bavarians, who had pushed
forward as far as he dared go, lest he be enfiladed, was waiting now for
his supports to come up--hence the point that you may have seen on your
newspaper maps of January of the lines near Ypres.
I looked out from under the dirt-colored top of our motor to find that
we had stopped before a little yellow-brown building over the door of
which was nailed a black and white letter shingle, saying that here were
the headquarters of an artillery regiment. Seeing Hauptmann Kliewer and
the Corps Staff officer from Commines get out of their car and enter the
house, I concluded they were arranging for our visit to the battery, and
climbed out with the others to look around. We stood at the intersection
of one narrow, muddy road with another that seemed to lead off at right
angles towards the trenches. I looked up the village street, at the end
of which a red brick church laid its high white steeple against the blue
sky. I could see the shell holes in the church walls, but the steeple
appeared untouched. Poor marksmanship! I saw what had been a row of
houses. All that was standing now was their walls, and in the ruins of
one I saw soldiers picking up the heavy roof tiles; they would use them
to floor their dugouts in the trenches.
A group of soldiers, evidently off duty, had been watching us, and one
of them came over. "I'm a German-American," he said, introducing
himself. "I lived in Brooklyn. I worked in an exporting house on Hanover
Square."
"You're not a German-American," I replied. "There's no such thing.
You're a German. That's why you came over to fight, isn't it?"
"Sure," he grinned; and then he put to me that everlasting question:
"What do Americans think now? Are they more friendly than when I left?"
(That was in August, and he had stowed away on an Italian steamer.)
I told him that I thought they were; whereupon, apparently greatly
relieved, he told me something about the street upon which we stood.
"You see those houses over there?" and he pointed to the row of ruins.
"Well, when we first came here, Artillery Headquarters were in the last
house. Then a shell hit it when the officers were out--_Gott sei
Dank!_--so they moved next door. A shell bursting on the street
here"--and he indicated where the road was filled in--"smashed up that
house so that it caught fire. Then the Colonel moved down to the yellow
house there. I wonder when he'll have to move again."
I wondered too, and began to feel uncomfortable. Over in front of the
yellow house--the first floor had evidently been a store--I saw a group
of soldiers looking in the window. They were closely inspecting and
talking about the photographic reproductions that have evidently been
hung there by orders, there where all the soldiers, back from the
trenches on their relief, might see. For I noticed that there were
pictures of captured Russian guns, of General Hindenburg, of the
victorious German troops entering Lódz. And I thought that here was but
another instance of the marvelous system which is carrying on this war
against nearly all Europe. Pictures of triumph from the Eastern lines
posted where the soldiers in the West can see and be thrilled with
national pride.
I began to notice these soldiers who, back from the trenches and cleaned
up, were strolling around Houthem as on holiday, shaved, their uniforms
made as clean as possible, smoking cigars, they reminded me of the
workmen you see stopping before the windows of the cheap shop in a
factory town on pay-envelope afternoon. In a field close by I saw a
swarm of them, gathered round one of the yellow and black _Liebesgaben_
wagons that bring gifts from home to the soldiers free of charge.
Presently, his back bending under the weight of a bulky white bag, I saw
one of the soldiers come away from the wagon and slowly shuffle down the
street. You guessed he had been the one chosen to get the gifts sent to
the men of his company, and as he plodded on past the shelled houses, I
heard him whistling. There came, a few minutes later, from behind a gray
shed where a transport had been delivering lumber, two other soldiers,
and on their shoulders they carried a long box made of new wood--a
coffin. And in confusion I thought it must be for some officer, and I
thought of the man with the _Liebesgaben_ pack and of the homes that had
sent the gifts it contained, and that when he would read off the names,
that there would be names of the dead....
The yard in front of the white-steepled church of the Annunciation of
Mary the Virgin was filled with the familiar little wooden crosses,
fitted in, it seemed, between the old tombstones of the Belgian
inhabitants. As Hauptmann Kliewer swung back the heavy door, I was
amazed to see that the church swarmed with soldiers. A confusing clash
between the instincts of religion and military necessity, and I walked
among the soldiers. They were recruits receiving a last drill in the use
of arms, stiffening them before they went down into the trenches. You
told yourself that you were glad all the benches had been torn from this
church so that these men might be drilled here without being exposed to
the shelling that their detected massed presence anywhere around Houthem
would of a certainty bring on. I know had it not been war, instincts of
my upbringing would have revolted against this, that the thoughtless
like to speak of as desecration. But the more you see of war, the more
you come to measure the things of war time solely in terms of life and
death. It is not the spilling of Holy Water that matters, only blood.
Almost in a daze, I stared up at the gaping holes that the shells had
made in the roof. Broken slates stuck down from out the smashed plaster
ceiling, and you thought of them as of bones, and the brown tatters of
hanging plaster as wounded flesh, for you came to think of this place as
being a stricken personality, call it a stricken religion, if you like.
But was it not written that He suffered so that a world might be saved?
Surely, then, what could mean a few shell holes in one of His houses, if
most of those who hid there might still be spared.
I walked between the lines of young recruits, some loading, others
learning the sights, others emptying their magazines, and I came at
last to a shrine of the Virgin built in a recess in the wall. Above it I
could see a patch of the blue sky, framed in the hole of a shell; but it
was not the shrine that held me; it was the soldiers before it. They
were down on one knee, and I wondered if they were Catholics worshiping
there while the others drilled. "_Feuer!_" And each man whom I had
thought on reverent knee, snapped a gun to his shoulder; I heard the
hammers click. They had been learning to shoot kneeling. I wondered if
any of them thought of the Virgin.... "Damn dumbheads!" cried an
officer. "Faster!"
Explaining that the enemy had left an observation post in the steeple
and that the Germans were using it for the same purpose now, Hauptmann
Kliewer led us into a circular staircase of wood that coiled away into
the darkness of the narrow tower. Did we wish to climb up to it? The
Hauptmann explained that it was dangerous, for "knowing we had observers
in the steeple, the French artillery would, sooner or later, open fire."
But arguing with yourself that the French had evidently tried to hit the
steeple before but had only succeeded in putting a few shell holes in
the church roof, you became convinced of the comparative safety of it,
and began to climb the spiral stairs. The higher you got, the more
rotten the boards became, and I was wondering if there wasn't more
danger from my two hundred odd pounds being brought down on a rotten
step than there was of a shell crashing through the brick cylinder.
After climbing up a series of shaky vertical ladders we stepped out on
the observing platform. To put us at our ease, Hauptmann Kliewer warned
us all about not gathering around the observing window, a hole, a foot
square, cut in the wall, adding that the platform was not strong. So,
two at a time, we stood at the window and looked out.
I saw the country laid out as it is from a low-flying aeroplane, the
soggy fields exaggerating the squareness that the gray fences gave;
beyond the flat red-roofed houses I saw a dark green fringe of trees,
and then above that a tiny puff of white smoke appeared, then another,
until I counted four, all billowing out in the thinnest of fleecy
clouds, until thinning all in a white blur, they vanished.
"That's shrapnel," Hauptmann Kliewer was saying. "Our trenches are right
by the woods there."
And it came to me, the wondrous glory of the little white clouds; if
that was so the soldiers might look upon beauty before death. The wind
was blowing towards us, and we heard the shrapnel's peculiar whistling
burst and then the heavy shaking roar of _grenaten_ and over to the
right, just at the edge of the wood, I saw rising the blackish smoke of
heavy shells. About a mile away, exactly opposite, I saw a brown tower
between the trees.
"Our artillery observers are in there," explained Hauptmann Kliewer,
"and the French must know it, for they've had a cross fire on it from
right and left all day."
I watched the steeple with a new fascination. Shrapnel framed it in a
soft billow of clouds, and lower, where _grenaten_ struck the ground, I
saw the dissolving blackish smoke. Would they hit it?
"They have fired a hundred shells at the tower since morning," laughed
the Hauptmann. "They're not shooting very well to-day."
I forgot everything but the brown tower. I felt that any moment it must
sway and topple over, but when we were told to leave, it was still
standing. I wonder if it is there now. As we left the church and plowed
through the mud to our motors, I saw a battalion of artillerymen drawn
up before the little yellow headquarters, receiving their instructions.
I caught one admonition not to be careless with ammunition, and then we
were told that we were going to a battery. Down a road, where we saw
five abandoned French caissons mired in a field, we had another
experience with a most disconcerting sign. Hauptmann Kliewer's
automobile stopped and seeing him get out, we followed, joining line in
mud that came above our shoe tops.
"It is unsafe," he explained, "to take these motors any further. Knowing
we were officers, the French would surely spray the road with shrapnel."
"Then the French observer can see us?"
The Hauptmann laughed.
"They've probably seen us from the moment we entered Houthem, and if our
artillery hadn't been keeping them busy, they probably would have thrown
some shells at our automobiles. But here we haven't even that chance. We
walk to the battery. Separate yourselves at intervals of fifty paces so
that if a shell drops on the road we won't all get it."
Too business-like a tone had come into his voice to let you think he was
fooling. At once his manner became that of the officer in action, terse
and taking instant obedience as a matter of course. We spread out. I
found myself walking with Poole. We were approaching a high-banked
railroad track, the road disappearing under a trestle. I suppose the
field must have been strewn with the objects of war. I did not see them.
I was staring straight ahead at the sky, looking for shells, and getting
ready to throw myself on my face--as I had been told to--if one came.
And then, from behind the railroad embankment, came a terrific explosion
and I was watching a whisk of grayish smoke trailing away. I stood for a
moment unable to talk. The embankment was only a hundred yards away.
"Poole," I remember saying. "That was close."
"The French must be trying to destroy the railroad," he returned.
He was saying something else when another explosion shook the air,
almost in the same place. Badly rattled, for I could see Hauptmann
Kliewer and the Second Bavarian Army Corps Staff Officer calmly walking
on, where every stride was bringing us nearer the track, I tried to say
unconcernedly: "That's wonderful marksmanship. Two in the same place,"
thinking, "suppose another battery not so accurate, should open up, and
missing the tracks, drop one where we stood." "Wonderful shooting," I
repeated, adding to myself, "and we're walking right into it."
Whereupon Poole and I decided that if two German officers wanted to
commit suicide, good enough, but as for us, we were not going another
step further unless there was some other way than by this road that ran
under the tracks not thirty feet from the bursting shells. Yet I found
myself walking on, although my blood had long ago turned cold; and I
wonder now if that is the way some men go into action, ashamed to hold
back. But we weren't going into action and there was no hot, nervous
frenzy of battle and patriotism to urge us on. Walking towards those
explosions was a case of "going in cold."
Disobeying orders, we hurried forward, overtaking the officers, and to
our amazement we learned that the explosions were not of bursting
shells; but the firing of our own battery hidden behind the tracks!
Sheepishly, we trudged under the trestle. We had had all the sensations
of being under heavy shell fire, dangerously close, and there had been
no shells at all!
Coming out from under the trestle, I saw, sleeping under the high
embankment of the railway, a greenish canal. Dug in the side of the
opposite bank, that slanted upward forty feet from the water, I saw a
hole shaped like a door, and as I looked, an officer darted forth and,
scrambling up over the slippery clay, disappeared in a scraggle of
bushes. I saw the mud-spattered carriages of two German field pieces,
their dull barrels lying back between the wheels and serenely pointing
into the blue and gray mottled sky.
Leaving the road, we sank shin deep into a yellow ooze, and standing on
some planks about the yards behind the guns, we waited. The
boyish-looking artillerymen, rigid gray-green figures, so statuesque
that something in the mud must have turned them to stone, they seemed
waiting too. And then, from the direction of the hole in the bank, I
heard:
"_Links! Ein viertal tiefer!_"
And the statues by the guns became alive; they darted this way and that.
They reminded me of sprinters leaving the mark. One leaped to the
sights. "_Links! Ein viertal tiefer!_" And as the man on the bank
bellowed again, the soldiers at the sights began tugging madly on
something I could not see; and I knew that the range receiving
telephones must be in that cave in the bank, for it dawned upon me now
what that shouting meant: "Left! A quarter deeper." Sight the gun to the
left, advancing the range a quarter--some scale on the gun
obviously--and they would get the French! I glanced towards the shouter;
he was disappearing into the hole in the bank.
I saw another of the boyish artillerymen bend down over one of the brown
straw baskets that stood in neat little piles and lift from it a shell,
evidently heavy, for while stripping off a waterproofed cover, he rested
the projectile on his knee. As he darted towards the opened muzzle, the
waterproof cover fell in the mud, but instantly the soldier who had just
lain the brown shell basket upon a pile of empties, picked up the cover
and, neatly folding it, saved that too. And I saw a pile of discharged
shell cases; copper was too valuable these days to leave in the mud. And
as I saw them load and prepare to fire, each man doing his task with the
speed and deftness of a whirling gear, I thought of it as one part of
the war machine in which individuality was utterly lost in the gun; but
that was before I went into the hole in the canal bank.
And then I saw that all the soldiers were holding their hands on their
ears; and I was quick to put mine there too. But even then, as the gun
discharged, I could feel my ear drums trembling as though they would
break--the long red flash, the roar, the frightened recoil of the
barrel, the dark puff of quick dispelling smoke, the air flying with
black specks, and then a sound like a gigantic coil of wire being
whirled through the air and a 7.7 centimeter shell was whistling towards
the French line.
As swiftly as they had loaded and fired, the youthful artillerymen
withdrew the shell and when one of them stood patting the copper jacket
of a new projective and glancing towards the edge of the bank, as if
waiting for the man who cried "_Links, ein viertal tiefer!_" to appear,
I knew that they were firing shrapnel. They must wait for the range
before setting the tiny indicator which travels with the projectile
through the air. And as I waited, marveling at the detailed accuracy for
shooting at an enemy who must be nearly two miles away, the other gun in
the battery went off with a roar, and, while my ears throbbed madly, I
watched the village hidden among the dense trees about a quarter of a
mile away, for an enemy's shrapnel was spreading its white clouds there.
And just above those trees there appeared another white speck, two more
and the sky was ringed with curling smoke; then two heavy booms and
tatters of black smoke whirled from the trees. The French had opened
fire on the village. As I waded through the mud to go down into the
bombproof, it struck me uneasily that our officers glanced at each
other.
I was slipping down the bank as the "Links ein viertal tiefer" man
rushed from the bombproof, bellowing something to the gun crews. Then we
climbed down through the hole of a door into darkness. The first thing I
saw by flashing on an electric lamp was a dirt wall, a little artificial
Christmas tree that stood in a niche in the walls; beside it a half loaf
of black bread, a bottle of wine and a picture of the Emperor. And then
the man who lived there nodded to me.
He was sitting at a rough board table. He looked as absurdly young as
the men under his command. I saw from his shoulder straps that he was an
Unter-Lieutenant, and, even as I looked, his features seemed to grow
grave with something he must be hearing through the telephone, which was
strapped to his head. The stub of a candle guttered on the table and
only his face seemed lighted; everything else faded away into shadowy
silhouetting darkness. I saw him begin to race his pencil across a
little pad and calling the orderly who, standing back in the darkness, I
had not seen, he sent him scurrying away. The telephone buzzed. He
called into it, lighting as he did a cigarette; from the blackened stubs
strewn on the table, it was evident that he smoked constantly. He began
scribbling again. I saw that he was looking at me nervously. I was
thinking how this little room with the bread, wine, and Christmas tree,
and the Emperor's picture, was the very organism of the battery and that
this good-looking, nervous young lieutenant was directing it all, when I
saw the orderly hurrying in. Another officer hurried after him. I
noticed that the Lieutenant at the table looked relieved.
"You gentlemen will have to go now," said the officer, whom I saw was an
artillery captain. "The French have opened the village with heavy
_grenaten_ and two just burst four hundred yards from here."
"What was that lieutenant so excited about?" I asked, as we left the
bombproof.
"Why, his observer just telephoned that the French and their aeroplanes
were ascending."
Even as I climbed up the canal bank, I saw the young artillerymen
reluctantly covering their guns with branches, until, through a distant
field glass, they would seem to be bushes. Their battery was
"strategically silenced." I saw the under officers scampering down into
the bombproof and their guns transformed into big gray leafless bushes,
the boyish soldiers ran into hiding behind the blackened brick wall of a
shelled house. Boo-oom! Boo-oom! Over in the village the smoke was
pouring from a burning house and above the treetops the shrapnel spread
their fleecy clouds.
In the next field I saw a patch of blackened smoke; dirt flew.
"Run!" shouted the Bavarian Captain, who had been in America. "Run like
hell."
And as we tore pell mell past the ruined house, the artillerymen grinned
and waved their hands.
"_Gute Reise!_" one of them yelled.
Pleasant journey!
VI
A NIGHT BEFORE YPRES
The following are expanded pages of the diary that I kept from five
o'clock in the evening of January 10th, 1915, to seven o'clock the next
morning.
5 P. M.: The motor has stopped, but I wonder why. In Houthem the
Bavarian captain told us that we were going to Brigade Headquarters. I
can see though only a dirty brick farmhouse; its door is open and the
light of a lamp falling on the yard seems to float in a yellow watery
pool. But the other gray-green army car has stopped too, and Hauptmann
Kliewer is getting out.