a month ago. They came in columns of fours, and you can see them now,
lying out there between the trenches in columns of fours. They were
mowed down, and for a month the fighting has been so heavy that they
can't get out to bury their dead. You can see them afterwards when the
rockets go up. They make it quite bright."
"How many rockets, Colonel, do you send up in a night?"
"About a hundred generally."
"And how many men on an average are in the trenches?"
The Colonel considers long. "That varies greatly," he says finally. "At
some points only 400 men of a regiment are in the trenches, at a time;
at others, 800. I have used as high as 1200 for repelling a hard
attack."
"Strange things happen, fighting the French," he muses. "The night after
they were cut up so, they were ordered to attack again. As soon as it
came dark, one of our soldiers heard a Frenchman calling across to him
in German. The Frenchman had crawled across from his own trench on his
belly. 'Don't shoot,' he told my man. 'Two hundred soldiers and an
officer want to surrender.' The soldier kept him covered, and sent for
an under officer. They telephoned me from the trenches and I told them
to let the Frenchmen come over if they threw down their arms. And two
hundred Frenchmen with their officers, did come over. I asked their
officer why they had surrendered, and he told me that the order had
come to storm our trenches again that night, and that all day his men
had been looking out and seeing their comrades lying in the mud in
columns of fours, and that they nearly went mad." And the Colonel slowly
shakes his head. "I saw them lying there, too. I can understand how it
affected them."
As Hauptmann Koller pushes back his chair and goes to the fireplace, I
notice that his shoulder straps are covered with meaningless cloth; no
sharpshooter will pick him for choice game. And from beside the old
wooden clock Koller takes down a box of cigars, piling on it a tin of
cigarettes, while with the other hand he picks up a bottle of Anisette.
"They're Austrian cigars," he says, "but they're all right." While we
are lighting up, he pours out the Anisette. This time we drink Koller's
health and then the officers insist upon drinking ours; we return with a
toast to Bavaria. Colonel comes back with a standing health to the
United States.
"Tell them," he begs, "that we are not barbarians. I have a sister who
lives in Wyckoff, New York, and I'm afraid that by reading your
newspapers, she thinks that I've become a terrible ogre." Again the
Colonel is the easy smiling host.
The door opens; a private comes in and sits by the telephone. He moves
it down the mixing table quite close to us. "Is it time for the
concert?" asks the Colonel.
Hauptmann Koller nods. "At eight thirty. It's that now."
"_Gut!_" and the Colonel indicates us with a wave of his hand,
"Gentlemen, be my guests at our regular evening concert."
We look at each other blankly. The Colonel seems to have a huge joke up
his sleeve. He is bustling about the telephone like a man dressing a
Christmas tree. He takes up the instrument and holds it to his ear.
"Come," he says, beckoning me. I pick up the receiver and almost drop it
in my amazement. Somewhere an excellent pianist is playing the
_Valkerie_. In a spell, I listen to the music, each note retaining its
sweetness over the wire. The music stops; I hear a flutter of
handclapping.
"Where is it?" I gasp, coming over to the table.
"That comes from the headquarters in Houthem," explains Koller, while
the Colonel nods, smiling, as with a surprise well planned. "That was
General Major Clauss at the piano. He was playing under great
difficulties."
"The man with the wounded hand!" I exclaim. Poole takes up the 'phone.
"He is playing Tristam," whispers Poole, and outside I hear the growing
fury of the shells and the crash of the German field piece close by. The
Colonel is telling me how on Christmas Eve they played "_Heilige Nacht_"
for them, down in Houthem, and that while he was listening to the music
a heavy shell burst down in the trenches, killing eight of his men. But
I am not following half of what he says. Everything seems to be in a
daze. It is all too incredible. We have finished what seemed to be one
of the best savory dinners I have ever eaten. The supply of
golden-brown Münchener beer seems to be limitless. We are finishing with
coffee, cigarettes, cigars, and a cordial; and now a concert. And
outside the sky is hideous with war, and eight hundred meters away are
the French. And this is war.
Koller is at the 'phone now. "When General Clauss is through," I tell
him, "ask him to play something from Chopin." In a moment Koller nods
for me to come over. And I am listening to the opening bars--perhaps my
nerves are overstrained--but I hear a noise that sounds like a bullet
hitting a wire fence, and the music is still. Snatching up the 'phone
the orderly tries in vain for a connection and finally transfers it to
another wire. Perhaps, after all, I heard only a normal snapping of the
wire. Imagination plays strange tricks in this world of uncanny and
violent impressions.
The door opens and an orderly comes in with the mail. There are two
letters for the Colonel, and while he is reading them Koller opens a
bottle of cognac. The Colonel is stuffing one of the letters inside his
coat. His eyes are wet and, not to embarrass him, I watch Hauptmann
Koller measuring out the cognac. Probably a letter from the Colonel's
wife. The door opens again; the room fills with officers, who click
their heels and bow to us. "The relief," whispers Koller.
A thin, gray-mustached man, whose precise speech makes you think of a
university professor, comes forward; the Colonel remains on his feet.
The room seems to stiffen with military etiquette. The Major is making
his report to the Colonel. I catch the words: "They put heavy shells on
us, beginning with eleven o'clock last night and lasting until one."
What time is it now? Ten thirty-three. Soon the shelling starts. It is a
very detailed report and, unfolding his map, the Colonel spreads it on
the table and indicates a position. The Major studies it and offers some
thoughtful comment. How like those Civil War plays played in New York
years ago, in fact identical in situation. The Colonel gives some
orders, asks if there are any questions, and to the clicking of heels
and polite adieus, the relief officers file out. They are going to the
trenches.
The good looking private with the Iron Cross salutes. "Sir, the concert
is ready."
What! do they keep it up all night? But the Colonel is getting up,
leading us out of the room. We follow him out into the night--and the
sky seems faintly luminous with weird light--going along the farmhouse
wall until we come to a short flight of steps into the ground.
Descending, we are seated in an extremely low-roofed bombproof, in which
five soldiers, half in uniform, are sitting around a wooden table. They
look like the comic band of the music halls. One has a harmonica,
another a flute, another sits before an inverted glass bowl, which he is
ready to tap with a bayonet tip and beside him is the guitar man--a
wonderfully made guitar, its wires, telephone strings, its box, a case
for canned goods, planed thin; and there is a serious-faced drummer. But
facing them, blasé and autocratic, is a man with sensitive features and
pince nez. He has discarded his uniform for an old black coat, and with
a dirty hat pulled down over his eyes, he suggests the Jewish comedian
of burlesque. Evidently he is the leader for, raising a bayonet
scabbard, counting, "_Ein, zwei, drei_," he brings it down and the
concert begins.
You recognize _Puppchen_. Leisurely beating time, sipping a glass of
coffee that our orderly with the Iron Cross has filled for him from a
pot that simmers on the squat coal stove, the leader is having the time
of his life. They play some old German Folk songs, and once the
harmonica man is late in starting and receives a boisterous reprimand
from the leader. They are singing now, "_Röslein auf der Heide ...
Morgen Rot_," and you think how sinister the words are, "leads me to an
early death." Red morning! Will it ever be for them? Even here under the
earth I can hear the hungry growling of the shells.
Modestly the leader is telling us that the Bavarian musicians are the
best in Germany, "therefore our band is the best in the trenches," and
the Colonel is beaming on them all. The orderly with the Iron Cross,
who, unable to speak a word of English, has been smiling at me all
night, urges us to take some more coffee; and it's "Good-by, boys! Good
Luck," and we're out into the battle-shaken night.
"Want to have a look at it?" Hauptmann Koller asks me. I nod, yes.
Hugging the wall, Koller and I turn the corner of the barn and slowly go
down the open space between the buildings, that we had rushed past
earlier in the evening, plastering ourselves against the walls. As if
that would do us any good! We can hear the French bullets whistling by,
and the air is shaking with heavy guns.
"After eleven," remarks Koller, "I fancy the French are at it with big
_grenaten_," and as he speaks I see a flash in the trees not two hundred
meters away and a field piece discharges with a crash. "Our seven
answering them," Koller is pointing towards where a greenish light seems
to flash in the sky. "Over there about a mile," he says, "is the Ypres
Canal. The Thirty-sixth Division is on the other bank, and as soon as
they push back the French, we'll go ahead again," he speaks with a quiet
confidence that makes you feel that the advance of his regiment is a
matter of course.
"Come down here," he suggests, "and you can see the battle. Don't scorn
the shelter of those trees. Keep them between you and the trenches. Go
from one tree to the other."
I hear him splash through the mud; he is waving from behind a tree. I
plow after him, going so fast that I almost slip and fall. The whistle
of a bullet will make you move faster than you ever thought possible.
Out of breath we come to the edge of the little grove and look out on
the battlefield.
It is all color and noise--unearthly colors, unearthly noises. I stand
at the edge of an Inferno. The heavens streak with a sulphurous green,
and the earth is scarred with flame. I see the rockets swishing up from
the trenches, breaking with the weird light that would reveal any enemy
creeping up, and falling in a shower of sparks, like shooting stars. It
gives a strange confirmation of an old saying that when a star falls
some one dies.
I see the steady, streaming, reddish line of rifle fire and the yellow
flash of shells. I hear their fierce, harsh croaking and their deafening
boom. I see, in the burst of a rocket, the wet fields glistening with
mud; and the night crashes and rolls with awful clamor.
Koller is handing me his binoculars. Through them I can see the Ypres
Canal, a monstrous glistening water snake, sleepily drinking the blood
of men. It is a green night, a green land, a universe gone mad, for the
sky was never meant to shine with those hideous lights. And the rockets
spread their fiery trail and spill their hideous glare; and the line of
fire brightens and grows dim and brightens again; perhaps as men are
falling and others are springing to their places, and I turn my glasses
on the glistening fields, and think I can see the columns of fours, the
mounds of the dirt, the color of the mud, and I can hear the bullets
panging in the mud at our feet. How they must be riddling the bodies of
the dead!
"I've had enough," I tell Hauptmann Koller.
We say good night and cross the farmyard. The din of the battle seems to
have died down, although the bullets still whistle and rattle among the
dried trees. We lie down on the benches in the bombproof, with our
clothes on, with the dirty blankets over us. Our night of nights is
done.
12 P. M. to 6 A. M. Bits of dirt from the ceiling fall on my face.
Hauptmann Koller is snoring.... The guns are rumbling again. Koller
snores blissfully on. The cannonading is terrific. Those poor devils
down in the trenches.... The cannonading sounds fainter and fainter....
The handsome orderly with the Iron Cross is flashing a lamp on Koller's
blanket. "All right," calls Koller, but in a moment he's snoring. Only
stray rifles are crackling now. The glowing phosphorescent face of the
watch on my wrist shows six o'clock. Morning! Hauptmann Koller is
already out of bed.
"Good morning," he says, with a yawn. "The orderly was in a minute ago.
Breakfast will be served at six-thirty."
In the trenches it's the hour when they pick up the dead.
VII
IN THE TRENCHES
By the first of October, 1914, every European war map had become a bore.
After Von Kluck had conducted what a United States military attaché in
Berlin told me was the most masterly retreat in the history of the
world, the black fishhook line stopped moving across northern France and
fastening its barb in Belgium, it ceased to move. Day after day, as we
read the newspapers we saw that the line was the same; perhaps near
Dixmude or Mulhausen it changed from time to time, but by November first
it was evident that it was there to stay--for a time at least--and war
maps became a bore. The reality of that line of ink is not, I assure
you.
The next time you read your newspaper, glance again at the map of the
West front. Follow the line that begins on the Channel above Calais,
turning southeast above Ypres and ending in the passes of the Vosges in
Alcasse; and then think of it in this way. On the dunes you can enter a
ditch that has been dug across Europe from the English Channel to
Mulhausen. You can walk about three hundred miles under ground, eat
three meals a day, and sleep on officers' cots without once having to
expose yourself in the open. You will realize as you see second, third,
and fourth trenches parallel and connecting by labyrinthine passages
that the amount of excavating required would dig a subway. The labor
involved in the New York Aqueduct, the Chicago Subway, the irrigation
works of our West seem trivial when you consider this work was done
under fire.
Before I came to Germany I was told: "There is not much doing in the
West. Both armies are marking time." Since then the battle line has
become about three hundred miles long. A surgeon in the _Feld
Lazarette_, in Vis-en-Artois, told me that they had on the average ten
wounded a day and that their hospital was fed by a segment of the front
about two miles long. When you recall the terrific fighting near the
Channel ports, this average is not high for the whole line. So when you
glance at the little map in your newspaper think of it as meaning three
thousand wounded men a day, ninety thousand a month, and a tenth as many
dead. Remember also the Ypres Canal, where soldiers have gone mad and
thrown themselves into red water, and at the same time the field of
Soissons, strewn twice with the dead; of men in the trenches of the
Argonne, undermined, dynamited, their bodies blown as high as leafless
forest trees.
Again, when any one says to you, "There is not much doing in the West,"
imagine a three hundred mile line with three quarters of a million
soldiers standing in muddy brown water, and three quarters of a million
more, too, whom they have just relieved, lying on beds of straw, too
exhausted to remove their uniforms until it is time to wash; think of
that line in which for every five minutes of every day a German is
being killed--and God knows how many English, French and Belgians.
For two days I had been in the vicinity of Lille with Ober-Lieutenant
Herrmann of the Great General Staff. Near Labasse I had seen the
trenches at night, but I wanted to see them by day; for at night the
soldiers are all keyed high; it is then that the hard fighting is done.
What did they do with themselves during the day? It was at Lille, the
fifth night after I had left Berlin, that I met five other American
correspondents, a Hollander and a Norwegian, who were in Hauptmann
Kliewer's party. After dinner in the Hotel de Europe, Ober-Lieutenant
Herrmann, who had gone with Hauptmann Kliewer to the Staff of the Second
Bavarian Army Corps, told me that from now on the two parties would
travel together until we reached Brussels. "In the morning," he said,
"we go to the trenches in front of Arras. You must be here in the lobby
ready to take the motor not later than six."
In the inky darkness of a clear, cold morning three army automobiles
left the Hotel de Europe and roared away through the streets of Lille. A
Second Army Corps officer whom Bob Dunn, the New York _Post's_
correspondent, was apologetically explaining as being a cousin of his,
rode in the first car. This officer, who had never traveled the road to
Arras before, was acting as our guide; soon we understood Dunn's
apologetic way, for after one challenge upon another came ringing out of
the night, and we had stopped to have our papers read in the lantern
light of sentries and patrols, Dunn's cousin lost the way. "I knew he
would," remarked Dunn. "No one related to me could go straight."
The officer tried again. He took us along the crumbling path of war,
along a road where under a dark centered half moon we saw in the silvery
graying light the lanes of abandoned trenches and rows of gaping shell
torn houses, while one by one the stars turned to tiny icicle tips, and
day slowly came on. I think after crossing the Ypres Canal at Douai,
that we followed every blind alley between there and Vitry, for turning
one corner after another, with each new row of poplars coloring clearer
against a brightening sky, we seemed to come no nearer to the boom of
the guns.
As we plowed through a heavy cross road to Mouchy le Preux and came out
on the highway to Arras, we saw a German battery. The last stars had
withdrawn, and in the grayish morning light the clanking field pieces
lumbered by, a ghostly company with vague gray ghostly men on ghostly
horses. I imagined they were moving parallel to the firing line,
changing position. How close were we now? Probably six kilometers. Two
miles riding up the road to Arras with the battlefield of October 1st,
the muddy, desolated fields on either side. It was up this road that the
French artillery made its retreat, across those fields that their
infantry poured with the Duke of Altenburg's Saxonians in hot pursuit.
Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann had told me that the French had given way all
along the line here before the German second drive, retreating to
Arras, which they now held. I remember that he had spoken of Arras as an
objective and that the Germans were constantly drawing nearer. How close
were they now? How far from the French would we be in the trench? One
began to feel a tremulous excitement.
Hauptmann Kliewer and Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann told us that this was as
far as they dared go with the motors. To approach closer than two
kilometers to Arras with automobiles, and we easily would be discerned
by the French artillery observers. Evidently having been telephoned that
we were coming, two gray cloaked officers were waiting for us outside a
little brown shack that I guessed was regimental headquarters. The
Captain, an intelligent looking Prussian--and, by the way, I've yet to
see one of the upturned mustached bullies of whom our cartoonists are so
fond--spoke perfect English.
"Leave your overcoats here," he advised. "It's rather warm going up to
the trenches." Then he glanced at our feet and gave an approving nod.
"No pumps or gaiters, I see. That's good; you'll be up to your knees in
water," and as I walked up the road towards Arras, he told me that two
Italian journalists--any newspaper man is a journalist in Europe--had
visited the trenches at Arras. And the Captain laughed. "One wore a pair
of gray spats and the other had one of those artist ties, those black
fluffy things. One of our soldiers drew a sketch of them." When we had
gone about a hundred yards, we turned to the right, descending by an
abrupt runaway into a trench that dug in a plowed field, led away at
right angles from the road. More than a thousand meters from the French
trench, and with rifle fire yet to begin, and shielded by the very fact
that you walked in a narrow pit seven feet under ground, comparatively
less in danger than you had been in the motor from Mouchy le Preux on,
you nevertheless tingled with a strange exhilaration. Keeping one eye on
the top of the trench, prepared to duck, lest it suddenly became uniform
in height and expose your head to the open field, gazing the rest of the
time at the bottom of the pit, lest you slip in a hole and go sprawling
in the yellow liquid ooze, we followed the officers, slavishly imitating
their movements of progress. Then we came to another trench that made a
right angle with our own, advancing towards the firing line, parallel to
the road we had left as unsafe, exactly as in the approach trenches at
Labasse. But as we trudged on, splashing now and then through water to
our knees, we no longer imitated the officers. They walked as before,
unconcernedly and erect. We were going along ducking our backs, for
shrapnel was beginning to fly in a neighboring field, and I heard it
panging in the mud on all sides.
It was light now, although a fleecy white moon still hung in the sky,
and as it grew brighter, one after another, the batteries began the
forenoon cannonade, and as I heard the bursting shrapnel ever growing
more numerous, I guessed it was the same as at that other point on the
line where I had been two days before, where the French cannonade before
and after luncheon, always beginning at the same time. And then
directly above me I heard the disconcerting burst of shrapnel and I saw
the pretty billowing white clouds that the explosion always makes, and
knowing that to be directly under shrapnel is to be out of danger for
the little balls spray like the stream of a watering cart, I comfortably
watched the smoke until it drifted away, thinning like blown silk.
From the field the trench sloped up into a deserted house. Obviously a
part of the trench, I saw the wall of the house had been pierced to make
a passage the same width of the ditch, and that in the far wall there
loomed a similar passage doubtless leading down into the trench again.
As I walked through the ground floor rooms of the house, it reminded me
of something I had seen from the windows of the military train that had
brought me from Metz to Lille. There the survey of the German pioneers
had hit through the middle of certain villages, and I had seen houses
flush against the track, with their side walls torn off so that the
trains might pass without smashing into them; and I had seen everything
in the disordered rooms of those houses. Here it was the same, only this
time war had invaded homes with a trench instead of a train. First one,
then through a doorway into a second room in utter disorder. I saw
concentric holes that marked the entrance and exit of a shell and the
confusion of turmoil and pillage. A bureau with the drawers emptied out,
clothing strewn on the floor, a baby's high chair overturned, a crucifix
lying broken in a heap of fallen plaster, those rooms seemed to be a
contrast, a chaos, the picture of the illimitable dissolution of war in
one home. Into the trench again, up another slope through another silent
house, through a stableyard, vile with blackish typhus water, and so on
along a path of desolation, if not where the trench led through
farmhouses where it pierced unharvested beet fields, with the panging of
shrapnel and now the sucking whistle of rifle balls until we came to
another and wider trench. This at right angles to our own, crossed the
road to Arras.
"This is the line," the Captain explained. "The French are only two
hundred meters away. Don't expose yourself, and when you hear shrapnel
close, it is best to stoop down a little. Come," and turning into the
pit, he led the way towards the highway. We were walking parallel to the
French, and they were only two hundred meters away. And I thought then
of it being the great ditch, burrowed under Europe for three hundred
miles, and I was soon to feel that I was among the inhabitants of a new
and terrible world.