of Tannenberg began--that battle of which historians will write as one
of the great conflicts of the world. Back into the lakes and swamps that
he knew so well, that he had fought so hard to save from the Reichstag,
Von Hindenburg drove the Russians. Whole regiments slowly sank in the
ooze and disappeared from sight. By regiments the soldiers of the Czar
were driven into the soft bottomed lakes and shifting sands of
Masurenland. And behind the line, Hindenburg, who knew every square mile
of that country and knowing the topography almost to every tree, could
tell the German troops exactly what to do. And from his headquarters the
command would go by telephone to the General in the field.
I think it will not be until after this war is over that the world will
know in detail what happened at Tannenberg. Von Hindenburg's strategy
has jealously been hidden by the German General Staff. Not a single
military attaché of a neutral country has been able to learn it. All one
knows is that the Old Man of the Swamps drove the Russians into the
swamps and that they perished by the thousands.
All I know of the battle of Tannenberg is this. I learned it while at
dinner with an officer of Von Eichorn's staff.
"Oh, yes," he said quickly, "I was in the battle of Tannenberg. Some of
our officers went insane. You see we drove the Russians back into the
swamps and as they felt themselves sinking they threw away their guns
and put up their hands, clutching at the air in their death throes. We
were coming up to make them prisoners when some of them fired on us. So
we turned the machine guns on them," he paused. "I guess it is better
that we did. For they were in the swamps and slowly sinking to their
death. All night you could hear their cries and the horses made worse
screams than the men. It was terrible. Four of my brother officers went
out of their minds simply from hearing the shrieks."
An intolerant old warrior who cares not what the newspapers say in his
praise, who is bored with the thousands of letters and presents that are
being sent him from all parts of Germany, who when this war is over has
not the slightest desire to become Minister of War--Field Marshal von
Hindenburg is a military genius with a kind German heart in spite of his
grim exterior, fond of a glass of good wine and a good story, but
accomplishing both work and play in the fascination of strategical
study.
But what amazed me more than anything else about Von Hindenburg is the
way he is regarded by official military circles in Germany. I knew that
to the mass of people and soldiers he is a hero; they think him a
military genius of almost divine inspiration. I mentioned this fact one
night to a captain in the Great General Staff.
"Oh, yes," he said, "Von Hindenburg is a great general. He has had his
opportunity. If he were killed to-morrow there is another general ready
to step in and carry on the same work. And if that general were to be
killed there is still another. I could mention five or six. You see Von
Hindenburg, great man that he is, is simply a cog in a machine. A very
great cog, to be sure, but then, don't you see, it is not a single
individual that counts but the whole machine. If we lose a part of the
machine it is replaced. It is very simple. I know General von Hindenburg
and I know that all this talk about him, all this fuss, this idea of
asking him, a super man, is very distasteful to him."
Von Hindenburg, only the part of a system! The real hero of Germany then
must be the composite of a myriad of remarkably efficient units of which
Von Hindenburg is a single element in the war machine of such consummate
ability that he seems to stand alone.
XIV
WITH THE AMERICAN RED CROSS ON THE RUSSIAN FRONTIER
A gray morning crept up somewhere beyond the Russian plains and in the
half light, the church tower and housetops of Gleiwitz loomed
forbiddingly against the dreary sky. A butcher was opening his store as
our droschky clattered down the cobbled streets of the old Silesian
town. The horses' hoofs echoed loudly; only a few stragglers were on the
streets. Coming to a square, massive building of yellowish brick--you
instantly had the impression that Gleiwitz had grown up around it. We
saw a blue coated soldier standing on the steps.
"Where is the American Hospital?" we asked him.
He stared at us in a puzzled way and, using that German expression which
seems to fit any situation: "_Ein Augenblick_" (in a minute), he
proceeded to give our driver elaborate instructions. Off we rattled,
down another vista of gray cobbles and squat gray houses, and presently
we stopped before a clean-looking house of stucco, before which paced a
soldier in the long dark gray coat of the _Landsturm_.
"Where is the American Hospital?" we asked.
It was too much for the soldier; he called for help. Help came in the
person of a stout, florid-faced officer with flowing gray mustache. To
him we put the same question, and his face lighted.
"You want Doctor Sanders, _Gut, Gut!_"
And climbing into our droschky, his sword hanging over the side, close
to the wheel, he told us all about the part Gleiwitz was playing in this
war, while the cobbled streets rang to the beat of the horses' hoofs. We
learned that we were way down in the southeastern corner of Germany, not
far from that frontier point where three empires touch; we learned that
every night if the wind was good they could hear in Gleiwitz the distant
rumble of cannon.
And he was telling us those things when we saw coming down the sidewalk,
a familiar color. It was the olive drab of the United States army, and
under a brown, broad-brimmed campaign hat, we saw a round, serious face.
"That looks like our man," Poole said to me. A few nights ago Dr.
Sanders had been described to Poole and me, and we had come here to see
what he and his American outfit were doing down close to the Russian
frontier. It was indeed our man, and when he saw us, the serious face
broke into a broad grin.
"They telegraphed me you were coming--mighty glad to see you." And
Charles Haddon Sanders, whom, if you went to Georgetown University, you
knew as "Sandy," climbed into the droschky.
"Gosh, it's good to see an American. What news have you got?" And Dr.
Sanders' merry eyes twinkled. "How about it--come on, loosen up! You
must have left the States a month after I did." A look of concern
clouded his chubby face, and I wondered what worrisome thing was on his
mind. "Say," he said, "you're a baseball fan, aren't you?" When I told
him I was, he seemed relieved. "Tell me," he begged then, "Walter
Johnson didn't sign up with the Feds, did he? I have a hospital in
Washington, you know, and whenever Griff's boys are home, I am out there
at the park, pulling hard."
And this was the first thing one heard in a city of war! The puffy,
mustached sanitation officer bid us good day; the droschky moved on. All
the way down the old cobbled streets of dreary Gleiwitz, Dr. Sanders
kept talking baseball; not once did the subject of the war come up. I
wondered if he were avoiding it as long as possible; later when you
learned what he had seen, you could not blame him. Presently our
droschky drew up in front of a rather shady-looking café. It had all the
appearance of being the Maxim's of Gleiwitz, a sordid place, reflecting
all the sordid dreariness of the town. Wondering why the doctor was
getting out here--he had not seemed that sort--he said that this was as
far as we went. I looked again at the place. It was a gray-stoned
building, on the corner of a café, then a hotel entrance, then a
gateway. I followed him through this gateway and we came into a cobbled
inner court facing a wing of the building that appeared to be a theater;
at least the sign over the door read, "Victoria Theater." By now I had
begun to guess it, and when a blue-coated German _Landwehr_ opened the
theater door, I was quite sure.
"Doctor, I suppose you have your office here," I remarked.
He laughed outright. "Office," he said, "this is my hospital."
And I thought of the place, the café, the hotel, the entire building of
which this was a part. He must have known what was passing through my
mind.
"I know," he remarked, "I felt the same way when I first saw it. It
seemed funny, putting a hospital next to a rough house like that. But it
was the only place they had left. By the time we got here, every school
and public building in the town was filled with the wounded."
As we entered the lobby of the theater I saw that it had been
transformed into a corridor for convalescents. The stench of iodoform
assailed you. Four German soldiers, their arms or legs bandaged, were
sitting at a rough board table drinking beer, which you perceived, as a
waiter appeared with a tray full of steins, came by way of a connecting
passageway from the café next door.
"Better that they drink the beer here than water," remarked the doctor.
"We've had some typhoid and cholera cases in Gleiwitz." Now the
utterance of that word cholera has a magical effect. In the war zone it
can completely spoil your day; no doubt Dr. Sanders must have noticed my
uneasiness, for he hastened to add: "There's no danger; we've got all
those patients isolated outside this building, and if you haven't had an
injection of cholera toxin, I'll give you one."
Reassured, I ventured further into the building, and pushing back a
swinging door, I saw opened up before me a strange picture. Imagine a
theater, its walls washed white, its orchestra stripped of chairs and in
their places row after row of hospital cots; a curtain of fireproofed
steel, hid the stage, from it hanging the white flag with the red cross,
and beside it the stars and stripes and the red, white and black;
imagine the boxes filled with rough, hastily made wooden tables where
nurses sat making out their reports, a theater where instead of an
overture, you heard groans and sometimes a shriek from one of the white
cots.
"The soldier is only having a nightmare," Dr. Sanders explained. "They
come in here sometimes not having slept for three days and they go off
asleep for hours and hours--you wonder how long you can put off dressing
their wounds to let them sleep--getting these nightmares every once in a
while, and yelling out that the Russians are after them. Nearly every
soldier who has a nightmare yells that same thing, queer, because none
of them fear the Russians at all."
Suggesting that we would come back to see the ward more thoroughly, Dr.
Sanders led us through the lobby and into what appeared to be a
cloakroom. Only now the coat racks were half concealed by huge packing
cases marked "American Red Cross," and leaning against the wall you saw
two brown stretchers of the United States army; and on the floor army
sterilizer chests, while all around shelves had been built holding
supplies and medical books. You noticed an operating table in the center
of the room and in a corner a little stand for anesthetics.
"This is our operating room," smiled the doctor; "you never saw one like
it before, did you? Neither did I. But for our purposes it fills the
bill."
In the lobby we met two boyish surgeons, one, Spearmin, tall, angular
and competent-looking; the other, Stem, a University of Maryland man who
was preparing for a surgeonship in the United States army when he got
the chance to go to the war zone, and, boy-like, went. Spearmin and Stem
handle the wounded. Sanders does the executive work.
"We get plenty of work to do," Doctor Spearmin told me, "and you want to
do everything for those fellows that you can. They are the pluckiest lot
of men I ever saw. They stand pain better than most of the average
hospital cases that I had in Baltimore."
Later we were to learn more of those men stretched their length on the
white cots, and the way they stood pain, but Dr. Sanders had a dressing
to make upstairs, in a cloakroom once used for the patrons of the
balcony. Now it was Antechamber of Death. As we climbed the stairs, the
doctor explained: "We keep our most serious cases up here. Whenever we
feel we have to put a man in this room, he generally dies. We've only
lost six men, though, and we've had five hundred cases, some of them
shockingly wounded."
You caught the undernote of pride in the doctor's voice, a sensing of
which you had felt at the hospital's very door. Pride seemed to be in
the air; you read it in the faces of the nurses; the younger doctors,
Stem and Spearmin, showed it, pride because they had turned the one
notorious resort of Gleiwitz into an American hospital. And, it is
significant--and it was a German officer who told me this--into a
hospital of such efficiency that the German Sanitary Authorities always
ordered that the worst cases be sent to Dr. Sanders and his assistants;
this with thirteen other military hospitals in Gleiwitz.
But I was wondering if the other patients, the men in the orchestra, had
come to know what the little room upstairs meant, and if they had heard
the cry from that Austrian's bed, and if so, what their thoughts were,
if they had all thanked the Almighty for their lesser plights. You felt
they had.
"Come on, now," suggested the doctor, "we'll go and talk to some of the
patients. Sister Anna can speak German."
Sister Anna you discovered to be a resourceful-looking woman of middle
age, dressed in Red Cross gray. She was sitting at a table reading
"Alice in Wonderland," and she said that she had spent the last ten
years in New York at the Lying-in-hospital. Her capable manner impressed
you, and when Dr. Sanders whispered: "She was the best supervisor on the
Red Cross boat that brought us all over, and I was mighty lucky to get
her," you agreed with him. She was walking on ahead between the rows of
blue gingham-covered cots and presently she stopped before one at the
end of the line. It is a part of the German hospital system to have a
metal sign-board on a post behind each hospital bed, and upon this we
saw printed the soldier's name, a private, Kaiser, of the 148th
Infantry. His wife was sitting beside his bed, a rosy-cheeked woman who
recalled one of our middle Western farm girls. Quiet and calm, satisfied
that her husband was in the best of hands, she smiled thankfully at
Sister Anna and the doctor. Her husband was wounded in both the arm and
leg and oddly enough by the same bullet, which, with a little smile, he
picked up from a bed table to show us.
"It entered his arm above the elbow," explained the doctor, "went clean
through, hit an electric torch in his pocket, glanced off that and went
into his thigh. It was an interesting case. On the other side of his
thigh, I found the wound of exit. Imagine my surprise when in a few days
I discovered that the bullet was still in his leg, and that the exit
wound had been made by a piece of bone breaking through."
It seemed that Private Kaiser could understand a little English, and he
nodded eagerly. We asked him some questions, and it developed he had
been a school teacher in Hamburg.
"I was wounded near Brounsberg in East Prussia," he told us. "It was
towards evening, almost dark, and not thinking the Russians could see
us, we got up to dig a trench. I was alone, way off at the end of the
line when I was shot. It did not hurt me much when the bullet hit me. It
took me off my feet, though I spun around twice before I fell. No one
saw me and I lay on the ground for ten minutes. Then I was able to get
up, and I walked away to the hospital. How I did it I can't tell you,
but all at once my strength seemed to come back."
"Probably nervous shock made him helpless," explained the doctor in an
undertone, "and when that passed he was able to help himself a bit."
We were going down the line of beds, talking to another patient, when
the doctor said it was time for lunch, and that we might visit the
patients again in the afternoon. Two of the nurses--there are fourteen
American girls at Gleiwitz--walked back with us. I asked one of them, a
young Boston girl, why she had come to the war.
"I don't know," she said. "I had made my application for a Red Cross
nurse, and I was ready to go to Mexico. Then I got word that they wanted
nurses in Europe, so I packed up and came along on twenty-four hours'
notice.
"What I've seen of the war here, though," she said, "is not half so
terrible as it was in the English Channel. We were on the coast of
France one morning when I happened to see a big round thing in the
water. I thought it was a mine, and I guess I screamed. Then I thought
it was a dummy, but it wasn't that, it was a body, and there were six
other bodies, all sailors from those English ships that the submarine
blew up. Isn't there some way I could go back home without going through
the English Channel? I can't bear thinking of seeing anything like that
again."
I told her she could probably take a steamer at Naples or Copenhagen,
and she seemed greatly relieved--she who had seen mangled men without a
flicker of her nerves. Presently she left us to cross what was evidently
the aristocratic street of the town.
"They are going over to a little club--the city club," explained the
doctor; "that's where we take our meals. We'll go to my room first,
though, if you like, before dinner."
Modestly the doctor spoke of his room, but to our surprise he stopped in
front of one of the few imposing-looking houses in Gleiwitz. It was one
of those venerable places which makes you think that the man who lives
there must about own the other inhabitants body and soul. Occupying
about four hundred feet, corner frontage, towering amid symmetrical
lawns and flower beds, guarded by a ten-foot iron fence, the
old-fashioned house stood back like a castle.
"Nothing like it," said the doctor with a smile. "It belongs to one of
the richest men in Silesia. He's at the front, in France. He's a
captain, by the way, just won the Iron Cross. His wife is in Berlin for
the winter, so we're here, Spearmin, Stem and myself, with ten servants
to wait on us, and the best of everything for the asking. Not bad, eh?"
While we were listening to a baseball story of the doctor's, we took in
the luxurious appointments of his room. Then you thought of the
makeshift hospital and how topsy-turvy war turns everything. From his
valise, the doctor produced a Russian bayonet, hat and cartridge belt.
"They cost me two marks," he said, "for the whole outfit. I bought them
from the driver of an Austrian ammunition wagon. Have a cartridge?" and
he passed the belt as one might pass a box of candy. They were
ugly-looking bullets, not as pointed as the Germans'. The bayonet also
was uglier, curved like an old-fashioned saber.
"It's no good alongside the German bayonet, though," explained Dr.
Sanders; "that's longer and straighter. You ought to hear how some of
the wounded over at the hospital talk about their bayonets. One fellow
was telling me the other day that he had ripped it through the stomachs
of three Russians." And even the doctor, hardened to such things, made a
grimace.
After a luncheon, where, like the father of a large family, the doctor
sat at the head of a long table with his nurses and assistants around
him, everybody asking if the Christmas mail from the States had come, we
returned to the hospital. We found great excitement. Two officers had
been there, the orderly explaining that one was the sanitation commander
of all hospitals at Gleiwitz, and that the other was Captain Hoffman of
the garrison. What did they want? The orderly didn't know, but it must
have been something very important, for they had told him to say to Dr.
Sanders that they would return in half an hour, and for him please to be
there, whereupon the orderly, to my amazement, looked at me a little
suspiciously; indeed, his eyes followed me into the lobby.
"What's the matter with that chap?" I asked the doctor.
"Oh, he's spy crazy," replied Dr. Sanders; "you see, they caught two
Russians here the other day, and the captain he speaks of presided at
the trial. They put the spies up against the wall of that old barn over
there. We could hear the shooting."
The doctor's tone was so casual that you concluded spy-killing to be
commonplace at Gleiwitz.
"Come down here a second," continued the doctor. "I want you to take a
look at a couple of patients."
As you walked between the cots you were conscious of the gaze of the
wounded turned hopefully on this business-like American. Of the peasant
class nearly all the soldiers seemed to regain hope at the sight of him.
So it was with the two boys off in a corner by themselves. They were
rather slender fellows, amazingly young, with mischievous faces. "They
live next door to each other," said the doctor, "in a little village in
Schleswig-Holstein. The one on the left had a bullet in his brain, the
other had his arm fractured by a piece of shrapnel."
"How old are they?"
"The boy who had the bullet in his brain," said the doctor, "is not yet
seventeen; the other is a few months older."
They met you with a bold smile, fun darting from their mischievous eyes,
like American boys might smile at a foreigner. You saw that they wore
the clean, light blue jackets that mark every patient of the American
Red Cross, but you thought of the dirty, gray-green uniforms and how
long these boys had lain before they were picked up. And then, like many
youngsters you see in the first classes of a high school, they became
self-conscious, giggling like girls at a first party, and you thought of
them at war; and a shuddery sensation came over you.
"You think it's terrible, don't you?" he said. "Wait a minute."
He beckoned Sister Anna, and she joined us.
"Sister Anna," he said, "ask that boy with the brain wound to tell the
story that he told me the other day."
Sister Anna's manner was reluctant, and you doubt that she wanted to
hear that story again. But she put the request in German, and instantly
the eyes of the little fellow grew bright.
"We were near Iwangorod," he began. "Max and I were on outpost duty and
got cut off from our regiment. Night came and we started back to find
them. We were passing through a little village, just five or six houses,
when somebody shot at us." He paused, turning, as if for confirmation,
to the other bed, where Max, half sitting up, nodded eagerly. "We'll fix
them, Max," I said, "and we ran behind a house, so they couldn't shoot
again. Then all lights in the windows went out--every light in the
village. I was glad there was no moon. We got some wood, a lot of it. We
fixed it in piles beside every house. We broke into a cellar and stole
some oil. We emptied the oil on the wood, then we lit it, and ran to the
next house, and lit it there." His eyes were burning feverishly. "Pretty
soon we had the whole village on fire, didn't we, Max?"
"Ja! Ja!" cried Max, from the other bed.
And you realized that they were suddenly boys no longer, that their
faces had reddened in a hectic way, and that into their young minds had
come the frightful insanity of war. With a sickening feeling you turned
from them, and going away, thought that only last July, back in that
Holstein village, they doubtless had been playing the games that German
boys play; then you heard Max cry out:
"And when we get better, Doctor, we're going back and each kill a
hundred Russians!" And with his white hands you saw the boy lunge as
though already he could hear the ripping steel.... What if you were his
father?
"There are many like that--eager to get out of bed and back to the
front," said the doctor. "Not so young, of course, but they all want
another chance at the game; that is, all but the older men. You ought to
have been here the other day. Count Talleyrand-Perigord was here. He's
the nephew of the great diplomat, French descent of course. The Count
has an estate near here. He's a young chap. He's been simply splendid to
us. I guess he never did very much work before; you can imagine how a
young man of his position spends his time. When the war broke out he
volunteered for the Red Cross, and they made him a sort of a personal
escort for me, to see that everything goes right over here. He spends
his entire time with us. He watches all the operations, is intensely
interested, asks all sorts of questions about them, and goes with me
from bed to bed, asking the men what they want, doing everything he can
for them. I tell you it quite surprised me, a young man of his position,
in the French nobility, bucking right down to things. Count Szechenyi,
you know, who married Gladys Vanderbilt; he's stationed over just across
the Austrian border. He came up the other day to see Count Talleyrand
and they dropped in here in the afternoon to visit the patients. I had
expected something different from Count Szechenyi. You know what that
Austrian count is. But he was just as democratic as if he had been a
private in the ranks."