red wavering lines of fire, which had a way of rushing at you and
vanishing to appear again further back, was slower now in appearing
after it lost itself somewhere in the mud, and then it became even
slower in showing itself and finally when it came, you saw that it had
disintegrated into segments, that it was no longer a steady oncoming
line, rather a slowly squirming thing like the curling parts of some
monstrous fiery worm that had been chopped to bits and was squirming its
life away out there on the mud. And it dawned upon you in horror that
the fiery red lines had been lines of men, shooting as they had come;
and that, when one line had been mowed down, another had rushed up from
behind, so on almost endlessly it had seemed until they came broken and
squirmed like the others had done, into the mud, and came no more. And
the spell that you had been held in was broken; and you remembered that
there was a God, and you thanked Him that your hands had found nothing
with which to kill....
And coming across that stretch of mud--only one hundred and fifty meters
were their trenches--broke forth the rattle of the English machine guns
and the fever of it over, you could reason out what that meant. The
English attack had failed and now they were sweeping the field with
machine gun fire so that the Germans could not form and storm in turn.
Their shells, too, no longer exploded behind our trenches, but in front,
and you knew that the English had telephoned back to their artillery to
shorten the range about fifty meters, making that field a muddy Golgotha
in which nothing could live and upon which their own wounded must be
being slain by the score.
We had almost ceased firing. In the pits I heard the straggling shots
that mean "at will," but our machine guns were silent. The rockets still
swished upward, making their parabola of sparks and keeping the night
hideous with their bursting green. The Lieutenant was running down the
trench towards me. "You're not hurt?" he asked. I told him no, and he
seemed immeasurably relieved. What a futile outsider you felt!
"I think our losses were, by comparison, slight," he said, leading the
way towards the passage that turned back into his bombproof. "I shall
have an exact report on them in a few minutes." From out of the pits, as
we passed, I heard a groan. Thinking the man might be alone, I paused
and turned on my lamp. Its white light found a circle of brown mud and
then moving down, it shone upon the grotesquely hunched up form of a man
in soiled gray green, and wavering across the pit it rested then upon a
pair of boots, their soles turned towards me.
"Probably shrapnel," remarked the Lieutenant, as he looked over my
shoulder. "Both dead."
You caught a professional lack of emotion in his voice and you
experienced a moment's unpleasantness before you realized that a kind
providence makes the spectacle of death seem as commonplace to the
soldier as it does to the surgeon; otherwise he should go mad. There was
a business-like air about the Lieutenant now, rather different, you
thought, from that rush through the mud when first the alarm sounded. By
the way, how long ago was that; not more than twenty minutes? But when
you looked at your watch, the hands shaped more. Two hours!
I followed the Lieutenant into his bombproof.
"We're safe here," he said in a dutiful way, "unless a shell should
strike the roof. But I think they'll soon cease their artillery fire
altogether."
He twirled the spark wheel of one of those patent lighters that the
German soldiers carry and the glowing coal at the end of the chemically
treated cord began to seek the wick of a candle. I flashed on my lamp to
help him, and in a moment the little dirt walled room was faintly
luminous with yellow light. It was possible to stand without bumping
your head against the logged roof, and while he picked up the field
telephone, whose slender tendrils crept up through the roof like a vine,
I glanced around me. Over there in the corner one saw a red rubber wash
basin, evidently folding, for it was creased in many places; it rested
upon an empty ammunition box, and above it a tiny mirror gave out the
reflection of the candle. I heard him call for regimental headquarters
and then in a very calm voice he proceeded to give the details of the
engagement insofar as he had been able to collect them in such a brief
time. He begged me to excuse him while he wrote out a report.
"This must be delivered at once by a soldier to my Colonel," he
explained. "I shall leave blanks for the number of our killed and
wounded and telephone it to headquarters to be filled in as soon as the
under officer brings me the figures."
I told him that I would go out and take a look around while he was
writing his report. "I'll only be a minute," he begged.
"I'll be careful," I replied, and he smiled in a way that showed he
understood. I then went down the line of the trench for perhaps fifty
meters, stopping here and there to go into the firing pits, where by now
most of the rifles were silent, one man in each pit watching through the
oblong hole between the sand bags, lest the enemy creep up, for their
cannonading had ceased and shells no longer fell upon that narrow zone
between the trenches. They appeared to take turns watching, the two men
in each pit, the one on relief sitting on the ground, his back against
the dirt wall, as though fatigued.
It was in one of these pits that I stuck up my head--for the enemy's
bullets no longer whizzed by--and looked out upon the little battle
field. The rain had ceased; the stars were coming out. It was quiet out
there now, but in the distance, north and south, you heard muffled
uproars as though what had begun and ended here was happening there now.
It was quiet out there, too quiet, not even the wounded groaned; there
were no wounded; the artillery had turned them into dead. In the feeble
starlight nothing was visible, only vague outlines as of a rise of
ground, just at a distance, you imagined, for the English trenches to
crest; only that and close by the short, shadowy posts across which the
German barbed entanglements were strung. Slowly the silence grew upon
you.
And then I heard the hiss of a rocket. I watched its arc of yellow
sparks. I watched its burst, and in its light I saw that which I pray my
eyes may never behold again. I saw in that eerie radiance the
glistening, puddled field and across it, on the upward sloping ground
what you might have thought were innumerable graves, but which you knew
to be the bodies of men, fallen as they had come at the charge; in
twos--threes--I counted ten in a perfect row; and behind them were more
of these lumps which seemed to be of the earth, for they were the color
of that blackish field; and there the mounds seemed higher, as though a
pile of them lay there; and you heard the hissing rockets, and their
greenish fires seemed to be now of that green which sometimes burns on
an altar's rail. And then the rockets stopped, and the field of the dead
was shut from your eyes.... If only a sound would come from out
there....
I found the Lieutenant in his bombproof.
"I have been waiting for you," he called in a cheery way, and he reached
down under the empty cartridge box. "Cognac," he exclaimed, producing a
flask. "It will taste good now."
"I suppose," I nodded.
I admired his unshaking hand as he poured out the liquid. "There's only
one glass," he smiled. "Go ahead, I insist."
I gulped down the stuff and hoped he had not noticed my manner. I
watched him pour out his own drink, holding it like the connoisseur you
felt him to be, before the candle flame. He must have been admiring the
amber color when footfalls came from without. The under-officer saluted
and handed him a bit of paper. Putting down the cognac and returning the
salute, the Lieutenant picked up the telephone. I heard him call
regimental headquarters, and then reading from the paper, he reported in
German: "Fifteen dead--thirty-eight wounded." And laying aside the
'phone he picked up his cognac, slowly sipping it down....
I had seen the men in the trenches and it was at Commines that I saw
them out. With a tall young Prussian officer, who told me in entire
sincerity that before this war was done Germany was going to invade
England and that the plans had all been perfected, but what they were he
naturally could not say--I walked along the cobbled street of the old
French town until I came to a gray stone factory. Through the paling of
a picket fence I saw soldiers moving about in the yard, and going in we
walked along a narrow cobbled driveway between dingy workshops until the
officer opened a door, and we went into what had been a storeroom. I saw
rows of pens, each as wide as a cot and filled with straw, and in the
straw lay men. You thought of them as being too exhausted upon coming
back from the trenches to take off their uniforms and wash before lying
down. I saw their cartridge belts, knapsacks and guns strewn in the
straw beside them, and I became conscious of a faint sickening odor that
minute by minute became stronger in that stuffy room, the stench of men
who had not been able to as much as unloosen their clothing for days at
a time.
As I walked between the pens I saw further on that some of the men were
awake. I saw their faces; the others seemed all to sleep with their
faces buried in the straw; and they were wild, unshaven faces, yellowish
with mud, and bleary with sleepless eyes that somehow could not sleep
now. There was one munching on a big chunk of black bread, and another
who had been leaning on his elbow, writing a letter, jumped up as I
passed.
"You're an American, aren't you?" he called after me.
I saw from the blue and white button on his cap that he belonged to one
of the Bavarian regiments.
"I lived in the United States," he told me, "until the war came. Then I
joined my regiment. I was the cashier of a bank in Juarez, and I lived
across the river. I used to make my money in Mexico and live in
America."
He went on telling me of his experiences and obligingly answering
certain questions that must have sounded foolish to him.
"We work here in the army," he said, "seven day shifts. We're in the
trenches forty-eight hours and then out for twenty-four hours' rest; in
again for twenty-four and then out for three days."
I asked him what the men did during the last three days and he told me.
"To-day, for instance, we get paid. Then we wash up and go out and buy
cigars and cheese and things, though I'm afraid some of the boys will be
laid up this time with the typhoid vaccine. We're fresh troops, you
know, and haven't had it yet. I suppose when spring comes on, they'll
have us working as farmers when we're not on duty."
I asked him what he meant, and he told me that all the captured farmland
of Belgium and France that could be planted during the fall had been
sown by German soldiers, and that when the crops were ready that the
soldiers would harvest them. And again the marvelous details of this
German machine amazed me.
I said good-by to the Bavarian who had made his money in Mexico, spent
it in America, and did his fighting with Germany in France, and went
down the damp cobbled alley where you thought the wagons used to drive
into these mills with their supplies; the officer told me a thousand
soldiers rested, bathed and were fed every day in the factory. We saw
the room where they bathed, one tub running the entire length of the
machine room--overhead the motionless belt wheels looked
self-conscious--this tub for the legs, another for the feet, while in
the middle of the stone floor the army barbers, daubed white with
lather, were shaving the soldiers and clipping their hair to the scalp.
"These are three companies of the --th Bavarian Infantry who have the
room for this hour. They must be bathed and shaved within that time."
Outside I saw three soldiers picking mud off their uniforms; and when we
returned to the street, waiting for our car, three of them passed with
shiny shaven faces and puffing on long cigars. We saw three girls and
the soldiers smiled. It was their day off....
When I think of the trenches again I think of the bombproof, near
Labasse. The English have attacked, to be beaten back. The young German
officer has just telephoned his report to his Colonel, and is pouring
himself a second glass of cognac. They are the same at night as they are
in the day, these trenches; they have the same bored men lounging in the
dugouts, waiting for an attack; the same tensely watchful men in the
rifle pits, scanning the enemy's line. I heard a harmonica. The dead
still lay where they fell, the wounded were getting first aid, and you
could hear the whining harmonica above the scattering spatter of the
shrapnel. Yes, in the trenches it was the same; they had settled down
once more into the lulling secure feeling of the protection of a dirt
wall, six feet high, which paradoxically ends by killing them. Only the
night was different.
Hideous night, pierced with flame, serried with a rocket's gleaming
train, weird with bursting bombs that light the glistening fields a
grayish green; awful night, shaking to the booming of heavy guns,
blotched with the red of splitting shells, quivering insanely to a
machine gun's steady beat; night of death, with the wounded turning
white, waiting for the hours just before the dawn when the firing stops
and their comrades may be spared to carry them back; with the field of
the soaked dead, a nightmare of lumpy things, seen hellishly in the
rocket's glow.
But in the trenches--all along the big ditch from the dunes of Flanders
to the foothills of the Vosges--it is the same night and day; and
bullets are whistling and harmonicas are playing. I heard them both at
Arras and Labasse.
VIII
CAPTURED BELGIUM AND ITS GOVERNOR GENERAL
"The Governor General will receive you at four," said Ober-Lieutenant
Herrmann, explaining things; "I shall accompany you."
As we had just come up from the front around Lille, the only clothes we
had were those on our backs; and to Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann's officer's
boots and my puttees, the mud of the trenches still clung in yellow
cakes. Hardly the most proper clothes in which to meet King Albert's
successor; but in field gray we had to go. Through the busy streets, up
the long hill, to the Government buildings, we skirted the edge of that
rectangle of stone buildings where Belgian officials used to conduct
Belgian affairs. At the corner we turned, passing up the Rue de la Loi,
where King Albert's palace frowns down upon two black and white striped
Prussian sentry boxes, and then entered the Belgian War Ministry
building. A German private ushered us up a flight of marble stairs to an
antechamber, where we waited, while an adjutant disappeared through a
pretentious white double door, to tell His Excellency that we had come.
I noticed two marble busts in that antechamber, white busts on
pedestals in opposite corners--the King and Queen of Belgium, and I
wondered if they ever visited this city again, would it be an official
visit, the guests of another nation, or a home-coming.
The Governor General received me in a dainty, Louis Quinze room, done in
rose and French gray, and filled incongruously with delicate chairs and
heavy brocaded curtains, a background which you felt precisely suited
His Excellency. In the English newspapers, which by the way, the Germans
do not childishly bar from the Berlin cafés, I had read of His
Excellency as the "Iron Fist," or the "Heavy Heel," and I rather
expected to see a heavy, domineering man. Instead, a slender, stealthy
man in the uniform of a general, rose from behind a tapestry-topped
table, revealing as he did, a slight stoop in his back, and held out a
long-fingered hand. As I looked at Governor General von Bissing I saw
that he wore the second class of the Iron Cross and no other
decorations; at the same time I imagined he had been awarded about ten
orders which he could have strung across his narrow chest. His black,
glistening, almost artificial-looking hair, was brushed back tight over
his head, and when I noticed his eyes, I saw that they were of bluish
gray, heavy and unrelenting, pouched and lined, glowing in a way that
either made you want to turn away, or else stare, fascinated by their
powers. He struck me as being rather longer headed than most Germans,
and his straggly grayish mustache only half hid the thin, straight,
ruthless lines of his mouth; but when you tried to study his face, you
could discern only two things, features thin, but intensely strong,
pierced with two points of fire, sunken, glowering eyes. And I knew then
what they meant by the Iron Fist.
General von Bissing spoke no English. Somehow I imagined him to be one
of those old patriots who would never learn the language simply because
it was English. Through Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann I asked the Governor
General what Germany was doing towards the reconstruction of Belgium. I
asked Herrmann to explain to him--for I dreaded attempting my
ungrammatical German--that America, when I had left it, was under the
impression that Belgium was a land utterly laid waste by the German
armies; in America the common belief was that the German military
Government meant tyranny; what was Germany doing for Belgium?
"I think," replied Governor General von Bissing, "that we are doing
everything that can be done under the circumstances. Those farmlands
which Lieutenant Herrmann tells me you saw, coming up from Lille to
Brussels, were planted by German soldiers and in the spring they will be
harvested by our soldiers. Belgium has not been devastated, and its
condition has been grievously misstated, as you have seen. You must
remember that the armies have passed back and forth across it--German,
Belgian, English, and French, but I think you have seen that only in the
paths of these armies has the countryside suffered. Where engagements
were not fought or shots fired, Belgium is as it was. There has been no
systematic devastation for the purpose of intimidating the people. You
will learn this if you go all over Belgium. As for the cities, we are
doing the best we can to encourage business. Of course, with things the
way they are now, it is difficult. I can only ask you to go down one of
the principal business streets here, the Rue de la Neuve for instance,
and price the articles that you find in the shops, and compare them with
the Berlin prices. The merchants of Brussels are not having to sacrifice
their stock by cutting prices, and equally important, there are people
buying. I can unhesitatingly say that things are progressing favorably
in Belgium."
And although I felt General von Bissing could be a hard master, he
impressed me like a good many hard masters, as being thoroughly sincere.
Thinking of Schleswig, I asked him if he thought that Belgium could ever
be Germanized. Suppose after the peace treaty was signed that Germany
decided to keep Belgium, would the Empire ever be able to assimilate the
new people? Before replying, General von Bissing appeared to be thinking
hard; he dropped his eyes and hesitated long, finally saying: "I do not
think that it is the time for me to discuss this point."
The conversation turned upon Belgian and English relations before this
war. The Governor General mentioned the documentary evidence found in
the archives in Brussels, and proving an understanding between these
countries against Germany. He talked briefly about the point that the
subjects of King Albert had been betrayed into the hands of English
financiers, and then laconically said: "The people of Belgium are
politically undisciplined children. You may know of the high percentage
of criminality in Belgium. You may have heard that the slums of Antwerp
are considered the worst in the world. Apparently education was never
designed in Belgium for the mass of the people. They knew nothing, they
could conjecture nothing, about what was going on between their rulers
and the rulers of other countries. Even now they believe that relief is
at any moment at hand. They think the English will deliver them," and
the Governor General sneered. "They are the victims of subtle propaganda
that generally takes the form of articles in French and neutral
newspapers," and General von Bissing looked me straight in the eyes, as
though to emphasize that by neutral, he meant the newspapers of the
United States.
"I can understand the French doing this," he said, "because they always
use the Belgians, and do not care what happens to them. It is beyond my
comprehension, though, how the Government of any neutral country permits
the publication of newspaper articles that can have but one effect, and
that is to encourage revolt in a captured people. A country likes to
call itself humanitarian, and yet it persists in allowing the
publication of articles that only excite an ignorant, undisciplined
people and lead them to acts of violence that must be wiped out by
force," and the Governor General's mouth closed with a click.
"Do you know that the people of Brussels, whenever a strong wind carries
the booming of heavy guns miles in from the front, think that French
and English are going to recapture the city. Any day that we can hear
the guns faintly, we know that there is an undercurrent of nervous
expectancy running through the whole city. It goes down alleys, and
avenues, and fills the cafés. You can see Belgians standing together
whispering. Twice they actually set the date when King Albert would
return.
"This excitement and unrest, and the feeling of the English coming in,
is fostered and encouraged by the articles in French and neutral
newspapers that are smuggled in. I do not anticipate any uprising among
the Belgians, although the thoughtless among them have encouraged it. An
uprising is a topic of worry in our councils. It could do us no harm. We
could crush it out like that," and Von Bissing snapped his thin fingers,
"but if only for the sake of these misled and betrayed people, all
seditious influences should cease."
I asked the Governor General about the attitude of officials of the
Belgian Government, who were being used by the Germans in directing
affairs.
"My predecessor, General von der Gotz," he replied, "informed me that
the municipal officials in Brussels and most Belgian cities, showed a
good cooperative spirit from the start. The higher officials were
divided, some refusing flatly to deal with the German administration. I
do not blame these men, especially the railway officials, for I can see
their viewpoint. In these days, railway roads and troop trains were
inseparable, and if those Belgian railway officials had helped us, they
would have committed treason against their country. There was no need,
though, for the Post Office officials to hold out, and only lately they
have come around. Realizing, however, that without their department, the
country would be in chaos, the officials of the Department of Justice
immediately cooperated with us. To-day the Belgian civil courts try all
ordinary misdemeanors and felonies. Belgium penal law still exists and
is administered by Belgians. However, all other cases are tried by a
military tribunal, the _Feld Gericht_."
I asked Excellence von Bissing if there was much need for this military
tribunal.
"We have a few serious cases," he said; "occasionally there is a little
sedition, but for the most part it is only needle pricks. They are quiet
now. They know why," and slowly shaking his head, Von Bissing, who is
known as the sternest disciplinarian in the entire German army, smiled.
And then I urged the most important question--Belgian neutrality.