muddy walls about you there had come a thrill; as you floundered on up
through the approaches hearing the burst of shrapnel and the spatter of
the balls on the soaked field, you were uneasy; but now as you gazed up
and down the trench, which you have thought of not in so commonplace a
way as to call it "trench," rather "firing line," as slowly its
impressions came upon you, they left you amazed. This goal that you had
been striving for during a whole month was a place where men looked
bored!
And how can any one be uneasy or frightened when every one else seems as
though the very safety of their existence is torturing them to death?
But that was before I went into the advance trenches, for out posts make
a difference in the soldiers, as I was presently to see.
"This position," explained the Captain, as we walked in single file,
"was a French trench. We did some work on it. Made bombproofs out of
some of their old rifle pits and dug new ones along what was the back of
their trenches. Now the French see our guns sticking out where their
stove pipes used to be."
I noticed one little square doorway after another cut in the back wall
of the trench, curtained with burlap bags, and as we passed, the
curtains were pushed aside and I saw the soldiers sitting inside playing
cards by candlelight or smoking and talking, and all looking so
comfortably bored; just as you would imagine them sitting in a
Friedrichstrasse café and watching the crowds go by. "There's no
attacking now," explained the Captain, "so only half the men are on duty
in the rifle pits. The others lounge in their dugouts."
And as we went further along I saw signs of idle time when soldiers
revert to childhood and remember that they used to dig things in the
dirt and sand. Here in the trench wall four nitches had been dug, three
in a line and the other below. And in the upper nitches, tiled in
various attitudes suggestive of destruction, were three toy battleships,
flying tiny Union Jacks and below them a toy submarine with U 9 painted
on his gray hull. And I was positive that I knew the store in
Leipzigerstrasse from which they had been sent by _Feld Post_.
To the right I saw the short wide passages leading up to the rifle pits
where two soldiers stood on a platform cut in the dirt. One was cleaning
his gun while the other squinted along a rifle barrel that protruded
through a narrow port reenforced with bags of sand, and watched. His
manner, the stiffened pose of the gray-green shoulders, the boot braced
in the ground, set him off in increasing alertness and vigilance. In one
of the dugouts I heard the whine of a harmonica; it was the waltz from
"The Dollar Princess." And as I came along the line the impression grew
on me, the men in the rifle pits, crouching statues of war; and the men
in the dugouts behind, wondering what to do with their time.
The trench sloped upwards and we were crossing the road to Arras, but I
could not see the village, for there loomed a barrier of sandbags six
feet high; and thrust through this gray wall, I saw a machine gun, with
a soldier dabbing it with oil, while another peered through a slit
towards Arras. It was obvious that the gun was trained on the road. A
Lieutenant came to meet us.
"The Lieutenant," said the Captain, after he had introduced us, "is in
command of this section of the trench."
As we followed up along the line, I began to think of the French as
being only two hundred meters away and that it was uncanny not to see
them. Every now and then the whistle of a bullet told you that they too
were watching this trench just as the Germans were watching theirs, and
in an empty field, a quarter of a mile away, _grenaten_ were bursting
with terrific din. Yet perversely you half doubted that the French were
there at all. Subconsciously the thing didn't seem possible, a line of
armed men just across the field; and you had been walking opposite them
for more than a quarter mile without any more of a realization of their
presence than that caused by the suck of a rifle ball. Where were they?
What did they look like?
At the next rifle pit, with a nod to the Captain, I turned in. The
soldier who sat with his gun on his knee, smiled in a friendly way. I
said something in German and his comrade at the oblong porthole, relaxed
his vigilance long enough to look around and grin. Carefully I listened
for bullets. On this point there was apparently no firing. With absurd
stealth--I imagine they must have both grinned--I stuck my head up over
the top of the trenches. I saw about a quarter of a mile away a fringe
of trees with white and yellow houses showing through, and further
forward, just off the macadam road, a house of grayish stone. The sky
was blue and in the bright sunlight the furrowed rain-soaked field was a
golden brown. I could see a black wisp of smoke curling from a red
brick chimney, but where were the French?... Something slapped against
the mud in front of me, and a shower of dirt flew over the trench. Down
I ducked. Yes, the French were there.
The soldier at the porthole was talking excited German. "He says,"
smiled the man with the gun across the knee, speaking English now for
the first time, "that you kept your head up too long. It's all right to
look quickly and get down, but the other way they see you."
His growing beard did not conceal his smiling mouth. I wondered at his
easy dialect, spoken without the London accent noticeable in so many
Prussian officers. I asked him where he had learned to speak American.
He told me he had worked in the Bronx--which those who are not New
Yorkers may or may not know--and that he was a joiner in a piano
factory. Every Sunday afternoon he played baseball in Claremont Park;
his team had won a Church League championship. Bullets began to whistle
overhead. Doubtless thinking that a reckless officer had exposed
himself, the French were covering the pit. "Do you hear them?" grinned
the Bronx piano joiner, as the whistle of the bullets kept up. "Fine,
isn't it?"
"You like to hear bullets?" I asked. He nodded. Well, I suppose it's a
cultivated taste, like German hors d'oeuvres. I began to think of him as
of the Saxonians whom I saw drilling in the courtyard in Vis en Artois.
Of course he liked this better than piecing together colorless bits of
wood in a factory. Not a day passed, probably, but that he got his
little thrill, and when the war was over he could go back to the
Bronx--if he lived--and be a hero among his friends for the rest of his
days. And as I wished him good luck and turned to overtake the others I
wondered if this war is going to change the workingman in this way; if
he is going to become so accustomed to a spicy existence that he never
tasted before, that he will not follow to the humdrum of shops and mills
as inevitably as before; rather demanding something more?
Beside the door to a dugout I saw on the wall a page torn from a French
periodical _L'Illustration_. It was a lay-out of actresses and bicycle
riders and it struck you as incongruous until you remembered that the
trench had been captured from the French. I saw a profusion of mottoes
lettered by the soldiers on their writing paper--_Gott mit uns_. You
could not pass a rifle pit--and they are about ten yards apart--without
seeing those words of the Emperor that have become the slogan of the
German army; and you thought as you saw them, not printed under some
official orders and sent to the soldiers so that they would ever have
them before them, but written by the men themselves out of the feeling
in their hearts, you thought that it is going to be a tremendous job to
hold at bay an army, that thinks the Divine is on its side.
I noticed that the soldiers try to outdo each other in the individuality
of their dugouts. There was one that had a little sign over the door
"_Gasthaus zur Kron_" and the soldier inside told me that it was the
name of the hotel he owned in his home town. I saw another with three
inches of stove pipe protruding from the roof that billed itself as the
_Schmaltz Kuchen Bäckerie_, under which was modestly written in pencil
"Here is the best kitchen in the world." Delightful these signs, for
presently I came upon an exceedingly frank one, the tenant of a dugout
having stuck over the door, a shingle upon which was written "_Gasthaus
der Wilde Wanze_," which means "The Inn of the Wild Bed Bug."
I went down into one of the dugouts. I saw a square hole in the earth
where one had to move about stooped. A candle flickered on an empty box
and in the corner I saw two piles of mud-caked blankets. A pair of wet
socks hung from a string that had been fastened in some miraculous way
from wall to wall and a soldier was straining his eyes in the
candlelight, reading the tiny Bible which is part of the equipment of
every German private. Perhaps I do the man an injustice but I imagined
he was reading because he was bored; and that by the time this war is
over, more Germans will know their Bible from cover to cover because of
hours in the trenches when they had nothing else to do. I saw no
crucifix in that room in the ground--and I have seen crucifixes in
bombproofs--but I saw another cross, the Maltese outlines of the Iron
Cross dug in the dirt wall, and I thought of it as that soldier's dream.
At the next passage to a rifle pit, the officers stopped and I saw that
here were no soldiers on watch and that a narrow passageway opened up
into the field.
"That is the way we advance our trenches," explained the Captain. "At
different points we dig out like this and then after we have gone out
awhile, we dig sideways in both directions, parallel to this trench.
Soon the different little trenches that are being dug that way, meet.
Then they are deepened and the soldiers leave pits here and take the new
position."
It was the method, as old as fortifications that the Japanese gave
perfected, to the military world at Port Arthur and that the Bulgarians
copied around Adrianople, and it is the way by which the --th Infantry
finally closed in Arras, the way the whole German line, meter by meter,
is moving France, creeping this time, not running wild over the country
side, as during those wild August days, but gaining slowly here, losing
slowly there, instead of being driven back across their own frontier, as
the English newspapers promised they would be long before this writing.
I went up into one of the little outpost trenches. The approach was
shallow and you had to walk doubled over. I passed a door of solid iron
that slid into a groove dug in the mud, and through another gate, this
one of wood and tangled with barbed wire.
"In case anything should happen during the night," offered the Captain
with a smile; and then we came to the new trench where soldiers were
digging, while a squad of eight stood guard with leveled rifles and a
machine gun lest the French attack by surprise. It was not yet a trench
in the military sense; only a ditch in which you dared not stand erect
for even your chest would be exposed above the bags of sand that lined
the top. Crouched beside a soldier I peered through an opening between
the bags. I felt that the gray stone house that I had seen before, was
approaching nearer. Where were the French? I stared across the plowed
field. Finally I made out a furrow that was different from the others.
It seemed higher and more gray than the color of dirt and I saw that it
extended as far as the eye could see, and as I watched it I suddenly saw
a speck of blue. It was the hat I had seen by the thousands in the
prison camps. I had seen the French.
The soldier beside me seemed engrossed in the gray stone house. He
muttered something to the next man--there were not separate rifle pits
here--just a line of men. I too watched the gray house. I saw on the
roof the rack of a wireless, and in the middle of the wall where the
garret must be, a circular open window looked almost as if it had been
made as a shell. I became conscious that there was somebody in that room
and the next moment I saw a figure slowly approach the big gaping
window, and a head cautiously appeared. I had a glimpse of a pallid
blank face and then a rifle roared in my ear, and three more went off in
a salvo. "French officers in that room," remarked the soldier wisely.
"We get them."
As I turned to go back to the main trench, I saw that already in this
little ditch the irrepressible German soldier had been at work. There in
the mud wall was a heart, outlined with the ends of exploded
cartridges, and as I looked at it, a boyish man smiled sheepishly and
turned away. On the battleline, less--here in the outermost ditch--than
two hundred meters from the French, they draw pictures and trace hearts,
these sentimental people; and yet they have been accused of wantonly
burning houses, these Germans, to whom the home is the biggest thing in
all existence. Were every American who believes those Belgian stories,
to live with the German soldiers as I have, and to know them off duty,
and to watch them in the trenches, he would be utterly at sea. The
stories of Belgium do not agree with the men of the German army.
Back in the main trench, I turned off with the Lieutenant, going down
what seemed to be a retreating trench until he stopped before a wooden
sign that read _Kamp Fuhrer_. The sign marked his bombproof, and
descending a flight of dirt steps, I entered his quarters, different
naturally from the private soldiers. He lived in a warren of straw and
mud-caked bags and the walls of his ten by ten room in the ground were
covered with genuine Afghanistan rugs. The carved desk, strewn with
personal belongings, also had the château look, although the rickety
washstand seemed to have come from a farmhouse. There was even a tiny
window looking out away from the French, a mirror, a hatrack and a
stone, and when upon coming out I saw that the door to this strange
abode could be locked and that a little weather vane fluttered from the
roof, I gave him up. He was too wonderful. He had been watching me with
the quiet smile with which all these German officers regard you when
they show you the marvels of their army front, and he said: "Would you
like to telephone anybody in Berlin? I shall have my orderly get the
connection."
I began to catch on and when he said that I could stand at the field
telephone which lay in a niche in the trench wall, near his bombproof
and get a series of connections that would terminate in Germany and that
I actually could carry on a conversation from the firing line with
somebody in the Hotel Adlon at Berlin--well, you come to expect anything
possible of achievement by these people. I thanked the Lieutenant, but
told him I knew of no one to telephone and he said with a laugh that he
felt sorry for me, that one always knew a Charlottenburg telephone
number in Berlin.
To get back to our motors, we used other approach trenches, and we had
not gone a hundred and fifty meters from the trenches, when Bob Dunn and
I--we had lingered so long to talk to a German soldier who spoke
American that our party had gone ahead--discovered that the water in the
pits was rising above our knees. The only thing then that occurred to us
when the trench ran close to a road was to climb up out of it. Dunn was
hungry and took some bread and cheese from his pocket; munching it we
walked along. The sky was white with tiny clouds hanging over the trees
ahead. For January it was too warm; we unbuttoned our coats.
"Amazing people," Dunn was saying. I happened to look behind me. The
gray stone house! "Do you know," I said feeling cold, "that we're
exposed to the French trenches?"
"What of it, they're not firing now," remarked Dunn, who would no more
have said that two hours before than I would. And we walked along the
road, eating our bread and cheese with the French to look at our backs
if they cared to, a quarter of a mile away. There was no danger; the
only danger was potential. We had let ourselves feel comfortable in the
lulling security of the trenches, which paradoxically kills men....
You have read that trenches have changed war, that the life of a soldier
is regarded as so precious by those who devise the war machines, that
everything is done to protect him. "Digging in" and "trench-work,"
reassuring phrases for those who do not know, or for those who do not
think. By statistics I tried to show how safe the trenches are. Yes,
everything is done to safeguard the soldier; he is valuable to the
State, which is not a cynicism, for feeling the tremendous national
spirit of Germany, you come to think that there is only one thing worth
while in these years, and that is the State; and you feel that such a
thing as national pride is more worth while than dollar pride; which is
something which would come shamefacedly to most Americans were they to
walk through the German trenches from the Channel to the Vosges. But if
trenches were devised to save the soldier, modern artillery and
explosives were devised to kill him; and the only thing that makes you
wonder about the trenches and their relative value to life, is how a
man can go into them and be alive at the end of the war. At Labasse one
night I talked to a captain who told me something of these things.
"Yesterday," he said, "the English fired a hundred and fifty shells over
our trench. One hundred and forty-eight burst harmlessly. The other two
dropped into the trench and killed fifteen men. It took one hundred and
fifty shells to do it, but fifteen men," and the Captain shook his head.
I asked him what the effects of shell fire were on the men and he told
me: "The moral influence of shells in breaking courage is terrific.
That's why a heavy cannonading always precedes the storming of a trench.
Especially is this so at night when you have to keep sending up rockets
that light the ground between the trenches so the enemy cannot creep up.
You see, during the day, the soldiers sight their rifles on different
points and at night they simply sweep those points with fire. We only
use machine guns to repel air attack, but further down the line where
the French are, officers have told me that the French will waste
ammunition firing a machine gun for hours, apparently satisfied if they
kill only one man."
And in conversations that I had with officers at the different brigade
and corps headquarters where I dined while in the West, and from things
I heard in Berlin, I formed an opinion about the trenches. They are
tremendously important to Germany. I would go so far as to say that
everything depends upon that three hundred mile ditch in the West. If
the Germans hold it, it means this: the war is going to end with Germany
in possession of Belgium and a big section of industrial France; and
somebody has to pay Germany's bill for this war; and German troops may
not leave captured soil until the bill is paid; whereupon billions of
dollars depend on a six-foot hole in the ground that twists and burrows
across Europe....
I had seen the trenches by day; later I saw them by night. A tedious,
slipping walk through half a mile of muddy, unroofed tunnels and I was
in the front German line near Labasse.
When I had accustomed myself to the steady cracking of rifles in the
firing pits which I could not see, but which I knew must be close by;
when I had nervously counted the bursting of twenty shells, all in an
appalling few minutes, yet had heard no plop of fragments burying
themselves into the mud above, I began to be able to look about me. By
turning my indispensable electric torch this way and that, I could see
in the rear wall of the trench a series of caves dug in the earth, their
entrances so low that a man would have to enter them on hands and knees,
and in some I saw the yellowish gutter of candles and others were pitch
dark. At Unter Officer Ochsler's suggestion I went down into one of the
caves.
"Later," he said, "you won't want to be moving around much. It'll get
hotter then and you'll want to remain in one place where you're sure the
shelter is good."
From one of the candle-lighted dugouts, I heard part singing, a lively
air, doubtless from some German operetta, and above us shells whined and
burst roaring in the fields. It was while we were walking thus, peering
to right and left into the life of the catacombs of mud, that a
stentorian cry behind us seemed to spin the Lieutenant round on his
heels and I followed him thumping heavily back down the slippery pit.
"It's an attack," he shouted over his shoulder. "Get into one of the
dugouts and stay there. And, if they get us, wave your passport if they
find you, and yell you're an American."
Indicating one of the little passages towards the firing pits, he gave
me a shove and spattered away to take command. Down on all fours I went.
I wondered if the two soldiers in the pit saw me. Apparently not. Their
shoulders were hunched to their guns. I hesitated. Of course the dugout
would be the safest place, but shells had been flying over the trench
for an hour now and nothing had happened; and their shriek and heavy
boom no longer seemed so terrifying. But then the Lieutenant had
strongly hinted about my being in the way. He had told me to get into
that dugout and remain there. Was I not really under his orders? Strange
things to be reasoning out with yourself, points of military etiquette,
with the skies raining death and the whole line of the trenches blazing
with a red, repelling flame. But war is strange, and now I wonder if in
the firing line, cowardice and bravery do really exist; if it is not
rather one man's nervous system responding to reckless hysteria quicker
than another's?
You forgot the Lieutenant's request; you forgot that perhaps you owed it
to some one to remain where it was safe--and dull. You forgot that these
were not American soldiers leveling their guns not a stride from you,
and that they were Englishmen who were pouring up over the trenches
across that muddy field and storming towards you; you never thought of
nationality, that was a creation of man's. You thought of nothing; you
only felt things. You felt something chaotic going on, an inchoate
impulse possessed you. It was to fire a gun. If only there was something
to shoot, something to throw you into the surge of this fight so you
could be thrilled the more. The men in front of you were fighting away;
but it was not your fight.
And then came the quick banging beat of the machine guns and you ran to
where they were, your pulse beating with them. As you ran, stumbling
down the slippery trench, there seemed to jump out of the ground a
soldier with black belts of cartridges slung over his shoulder. Then
another darted up from another pit and you knew they were bringing
ammunition for the gun. In an ecstasy you followed them. At the second
little passageway they turned and you turned too and found yourself
crouching behind an armored wall of mud, above which the machine gun lay
between heavy bags, and you saw a man's elbow jerking round in a circle
and you knew he was firing the gun. If only your arm could move like
that!
And above even that incessant hellish clamor you heard the crackling
report of rifles, one report seeming to run upon the other, as though
trays of dishes were constantly being dropped downstairs, and then the
heavy booming of shells would deafen all, to the fierce spurting of
shrapnel and the slapping impact of fragments of _grenaten_ in the mud.
Then a swift rush of air, as of a mighty exhalation, and rockets from
our trenches began to swish, one after the other, in short flaming arcs
that terminated in a burst of greenish light, turning the night into a
mad radiance so that we might better see to kill. I crowded forward,
wanting to peer through a slit between the bags, but a soldier pushed me
back. I was in the way. I cannot convey how that makes you feel, a
realization that you are indeed in the way with these men fighting for
their lives and you just there watching them.
I ran from the machine gun, ducking in at the first pit I came to, and
here I saw men who without a word, their movements as regular as
machines, were loading, firing ... loading, firing. They were shorter
than I, and by raising a trifle on my toes, I could squint along their
gun barrels and see the patch of the open field that their loop hole
framed. I saw a confusion of color--the green, unearthly haze of the
rockets; a wavering red hue of fire that had a way of rushing at you,
vanishing and then appearing further back, rushing at you again; and I
saw a patch of mud, glistening like mottled tarnished silver in the
rain, and once when a whitish rocket burst, the air seemed to be
sparkling with myriad drops of silver and diamonds. And the rain poured
down; and the guns shook the sky; and the rifles rattled on.