Anyone who saw the tenderfoot pilgrimage_My Year of the War Including an Account of Experiences with the Troops in France and the Record of a Visit to the Grand Fleet Which is Here Given for the First Time in its Complete Form

'97-8 and the same crowd six months later will understand what had

happened to these men. The puny had put on muscle; the city

dweller had blown his lungs; the fat man had lost some adipose;

social differences of habit had disappeared. The gentleman used to

his bath and linen sheets and the hard-living farmer or labourer--both

had had to eat the same kind of food, do the same work, run the

same risks in battle, and sleep side by side in the houses where they

were lodged and in the dug-outs of the trenches when it was their turn

to occupy them through the winter. Any "snob" had his edges

trimmed by the banter of his comrades. Their beards accentuated the

likeness of type. A cheery lot of faces and intelligent, these, which

greeted us with curious interest.

"Perhaps President Wilson will make peace," one said.

"When?"

A shrug of the shoulder, a gesture to the East, and the answer was:

"When we have Alsace-Lorraine back."

Under a shed their déjeuner was cooking. This meal at noon is the

meal of the day to the average Frenchman who has only bread and

coffee in the morning. They say that he objects to fighting at luncheon

time. That is the hour when he wants to sit down and forget his work

and laugh and talk and enjoy his eating. The Germans found this out

and tried to take his trenches at the noon hour. Interference with his

gastronomic habits made him so angry that he dropped the knife and

fork for the bayonet and took back any lost ground in a ferocious

counter-attack. He would teach those "Boches" to leave him to eat

his déjeuner in peace.

That appetizing stew in the kettles in the shed once more proved that

Frenchmen know how to cook. I didn't blame them for objecting to

being shot at by the Germans when they were about to eat it. The

average French soldier is better fed than at home; he gets more

meat, for a hungry soldier is usually a poor soldier. It is a very simple

problem with France's fine roads to feed that long line when it is

stationary. It is like feeding a city stretched out over a distance of four

hundred and fifty miles; a stated number of ounces each day for each

man and a known number of men to feed. From the railway head

trucks and motor-buses take the supplies up to the distributing points.

At one place I saw ten Paris motor-buses, their signs painted over in

a steel-grey to hide them from aeroplanes, and not one of them had

broken down through the war. The French take good care of their

equipment and their clothes; they waste no food. As a people is so is

their army, and the French are thrifty by nature.

Father Joffre, as the soldiers call him, is running the next largest

boarding establishment in Europe after the Kaiser and the Tsar. And

he has a happy family. It seemed to me that life ought to have been

utterly dull for this characteristic group of poilus, living crowded

together all winter in a remote village. Civilians sequestered in this

fashion away from home are inclined to get grouchy on one another.

One of the officers in speaking of this said that early in the autumn

the reserves were pretty homesick. They wanted to get back to their

wives and children. Nostalgia, next to hunger, is the worst thing for a

soldier. Commanders were worried. But as winter wore on the spirit

changed. The soldiers began to feel the spell of their democratic

comradeship. The fact that they had fought together and survived

together played its part; and individualism was sunk in the one

thought that they were there for France. The fellowship of a cause

taught them patience, brought them cheer. Another thing was the

increasing sense of team play, of confidence in victory, which holds a

ball team, a business enterprise, or an army together. Every day the

organization of the army was improving; every day that indescribable

and subtle element of satisfaction that the Germans were securely

held was growing.

Every Frenchman saves something of his income; madame sees to it

that he does. He knows that if he dies he will not leave wife and

children penniless. His son, not yet old enough to fight, will come on

to take his place. Men at home of twenty-two or three years and

unmarried, men of twenty-eight or thirty years and not long married,

and men of forty with some money put by, will, in turn, understand

how their own class feels.

In ten minutes you had entered into the hearts of this single company

in a way that made you feel that you had got into the heart of the

whole French army. When you asked them if they would like to go

home they didn't say "No!" all in a chorus, as if that were what the

colonel had told them to say. They obey the colonel, but their

thoughts are their own. Otherwise, these ruddy, healthy men,

representing the people of France and not the cafés of Paris, would

not keep France a republic.

Yes, they did want to go home. They did want to go home. They

wanted their wives and babies; they wanted to sit down to morning

coffee at their own tables. Lumps rose in their throats at the

suggestion. But they were not going until the German peril was over

for ever. Why stop now, only to have another terrible war in thirty or

forty years? A peace that would endure must be won. They had

thought that out for themselves. They would not stick to their

determination if they had not. This is the way of democracies. Thus,

everyone was conscious that he was fighting not merely to win, but

for future generations.

"It happened that this great struggle which we had long feared came

in our day, and to us is the duty," said one. You caught the spirit of

comradeship passing the time with jests at one another's expense.

One of the men who was not a full thirty-third-degree poilu had

compromised with the razor on a moustache as blazing red as his

shock of hair.

"I think that the colonel gave him the tip that he would light the way for

Zeppelins!" said a comrade.

"Envy! Sheer envy!" was the retort. "Look at him!" and he pointed at

some scraggly bunches on chin and cheeks which resembled a

young grass plat that had come up badly.

"I don't believe in air-tight beards," was the response. When I

produced a camera, the effect was the same as it always is with

soldiers at the front. They all wanted to be in the photograph, on the

chance that the folks at home might see how the absent son or father

looked. Would I send them one? And the address was like this:

"Monsieur Benevent, Corporal of Infantry 18th Company, 5th

Battalion, 299th Regiment of Infantry, Postal Sector No. 121." by

which you will know the rural free delivery methods along the French

front. This address is the one rift in the blank wall of anonymity which

hides the individuality of the millions under Joffre. Only the army

knows the sector and the numbers of the regiment in that sector. By

the same kind of a card-index system Joffre might lay his hand on

any one of his millions, each a human being with all a human being's

individual emotions, who, to be a good soldier, must be only one of

the vast multitude of obedient chessmen.

"We are ready to go after them when Father Joffre says the word," all

agreed. Joffre has proved himself to the democracy, which means

the enthusiastic loyalty of a democracy's intelligence.

"If there are any homesick ones we should find them among the lot

here," said mon capitaine.

These were the men who had not been long married. They were not

yet past the honeymoon period; they had young children at home;

perhaps they had become fathers since they went to war. The

younger men of the first line had the irresponsibility and the ardour of

youth which makes comradeship easy.

But the older men, the Territorials as they are called, in the late

thirties and early forties, have settled down in life. Their families are

established; their careers settled; some of them, perhaps, may enjoy

a vacation from the wife; for you know madame, in France, with all

her thrift, can be a little bossy, which is not saying that this is not a

proper tonic for her lord. So the old boys seem the most content in

the fellowship of winter quarters. What they cannot stand are

repeated, long, hard marches; their legs give out under the load of

rifle and pack. But their hearts are in the war, and right there is one

very practical reason why they will fight well--and they have fought

better as they hardened with time and the old French spirit revived in

their blood. "Allons, messieurs!" said the tall major, who wanted us to

see battlefields. It required no escort to tell us where the battlefield

was. We knew it when we came to it, as you know the point reached

by high tide on the sands--this field where many Gettysburgs were

fought in one through that terrible fortnight in late August and early

September, when the future of France and the whole world hung in

the balance--as the Germans sought to reach Paris and win a

decisive victory over the French army. Where destruction ended

there the German invasion reached its limit.

Forests and streams and ditches and railway culverts played their

part in tactical surprises, as they did at Gettysburg; and cemetery

walls, too. In all my battlefield visits in Europe I have not seen a single

cemetery wall that was not loopholed. But the fences, which

throughout the Civil War offered impediment to charges and screen

to the troops which could reach them first, were missing. The fields

lay in bold stretches, because it is the business of young boys and

girls in Lorraine to watch the cows and keep them out of the corn.

We stopped at a cross-roads where charges met and wrestled back

and forth in and out of the ditches. Fragments of shells appeared as

steps scuffed away the thin coating of snow. I picked up an old

French cap, with a slash in the top that told how its owner came to his

end, and near by a German helmet. For there are souvenirs in plenty

lying in the young wheat which was sown after the battle was over.

Millions of little nickel bullets are ploughed in with the blood of those

who died to take the Kaiser to Paris and those who died to keep him

out in this fighting across the fields and through the forests, in a tug-

of-war of give-and-take, of men exhausted after nights and days

under fire, men with bloodshot eyes sunk deep in the sockets, dust-

laden, blood-spattered, with forty years of latent human powder

breaking forth into hell when the war was only a month old and

passion was at a white heat.

Hasty shelter-trenches gridiron the land; such trenches as breathless

men, dropping after a charge, threw up hurriedly with the spades that

they carry on their backs to give them a little cover. And there is the

trench that stopped the Germans--the trench which they charged but

could not take. It lies among shell-holes so thick that you can step

from one to another. In places its crest is torn away, which means

that half a dozen men were killed in a group. But reserves filled their

places. They kept pouring out their stream of lead which German

courage could not endure. Thus far and no farther the invasion came

in that wheat-field which will be ever memorable.

We went up a hill once crowned by one of those clusters of farm-

buildings of stone and mortar, where house and stables and

granaries are close together. All around were bare fields. Those farm-

buildings stood up like a mountain peak. The French had the hill and

lost it and recovered it. Whichever side had it, the other was bound to

bathe it in shells because it commanded the country around. The

value of property meant nothing. All that counted was military

advantage. Because churches are often on hill-tops, because they

are bound to be used for lookouts, is why they get torn to pieces.

When two men are fighting for life they don't bother about upsetting a

table with a vase, or notice any "Keep off the grass" signs; no, not

even if the family Bible be underfoot.

None of the roof, none of the superstructure of these farm-buildings

was left; only the lower walls, which were eighteen inches thick and in

places penetrated by the shells. For when a Frenchman builds a

farmhouse he builds it to last a few hundred years. The farm windmill

was as twisted as a birdcage that has been rolled under a trolley car,

but a large hayrake was unharmed. Such is the luck of war. I made

up my mind that if I ever got under shell-fire I would make for the

hayrake and avoid the windmill.

Our tall major pointed out all the fluctuating positions during the battle.

It was like hearing a chess match explained from memory by an

expert. Words to him were something precious. He made each one

count as he would the shots from his cannon. His narrative had the

lucidity of a terse judge reviewing evidence. The battlefield was

etched on his mind in every important phase of its action.

Not once did he speak in abuse of the enemy. The staff officer who

directs steel ringing on steel is too busy thrusting and keeping guard

to indulge in diatribes. To him the enemy is a powerful impersonal

devil, who must be beaten. When I asked about the conduct of the

Germans in the towns they occupied, his lip tightened and his eyes

grew hard.

"I'm afraid it was pretty bad!" he said; as if he felt, besides the wrong

to his own people, the shame that men who had fought so bravely

should act so ill. I think his attitude toward war was this: "We will die

for France, but calling the Germans names will not help us to win. It

only takes breath."

"Allons, messieurs!"

As our car ran up a gentle hill we noticed two soldiers driving a load of

manure. This seemed a pretty prosaic, even humiliating, business, in

a poetic sense, for the brave poilus, veterans of Lorraine's great

battle. But Father Joffre is a true Frenchman of his time. Why should

not the soldiers help the farmers whose sons are away at the front

and perhaps helping farmers back of some Other point of the line?

Over the crest of the hill we came on long lines of soldiers bearing

timbers and fascines for trench-building, which explained why some

of the villages were empty. A fascine is something usually made of

woven branches which will hold dirt in position. The woven wicker

cases for shells which the German artillery uses and leaves behind

when it has to quit the field in a hurry, make excellent fascines, and a

number that I saw were of this ready-made kind. After carrying shell

for killing Frenchmen they were to protect the lives of Frenchmen.

Near by other soldiers were turning up a strip of fresh earth against

the snow, which looked like a rip in the frosting of a chocolate cake.

"How do you like this kind of war?" we asked. It is the kind that

irrigationists and subway excavators make.

"We've grown to be very fond of it," was the answer. "It is a cultivated

taste, which becomes a passion with experience. After you have

been shot at in the open you want all the earth you can get between

you and the bullets."

Now we alighted from the motor-car and went forward on foot. We

passed some eight lines of trenches before we came to the one

where we were to stop. A practised military eye had gone over all that

ground; a practised military hand had laid out each trench. After the

work was done the civilian's eye could grasp the principle. If one

trench were taken, the men knew exactly how to fall back on the next,

which commanded the ground they had left. The trenches were not

continuous. There were open spaces left purposely. All that front was

literally locked, and double and triple locked, with trenches. Break

through one barred door and there is another and another

confronting you. Considering the millions of burrowing and digging

and watching soldiers, it occurred to one that if a marmite (saucepan)

came along and buried our little party, our loss would not be as much

noticed as if a piece of coping from a high building had fallen and

extinguished us on Broadway, which would be a relatively novel way

of dying. Being killed in war had long ceased to be a novelty on the

continent of Europe.

We seemed in a dead world, except for the leisurely, hoarse, muffled

reports of a French gun in the woods on either side of the open space

where we stood. Through our glasses we could see quite clearly the

line of the German front trench, which was in the outskirts of a village

on higher ground than the French. Not a human being was visible.

Both sides were watching for any move of the other, meanwhile lying

tight under cover. By day they were marooned. All supplies and all

reliefs of men who are to take their turn in front go out by night.

There were no men in the trench where we stood; those who would

man it in case of danger were in the adjoining woods, where they had

only to cut down saplings and make shelters to be as comfortable as

in a winter resort camp in the Adirondacks. Any minute they might

receive a call--which meant death for many. But they were used to

that, and their card games went on none the less merrily.

"No farther?" we asked our major.

"No farther!" he said. "This is risk enough for you. It looks very

peaceful, but the enemy could toss in some marmites if it pleased

him." Perhaps he was exaggerating the risk for the sake of a realistic

effect on the sightseers. No matter! In time one was to have risks

enough in trenches. It was on such an occasion as this, on another

part of the French line, that two correspondents slipped away from

the officers conducting them, though their word of honour was given

not to do so--which adds another reason for military suspicion of the

Press. The officers rang up the nearest telephone which connected

with the front trenches, the batteries, and regimental and brigade

headquarters, to apprehend two men of such-and-such description.

They were taken as easily as a one-eyed, one-eared man, with a

wooden leg and red hair would be in trying to get out of police

headquarters when the doormen had his Bertillon photograph and

measurements to go by.

That battery hidden from aerial observation in the thick forest kept up

its slow firing at intervals. It was "bothering" one of the German

trenches. Fiendish the consistent regularity with which it kept on, and

so easy for the gunners. They had only to slip in a shell, swing a

breech-lock home, and pull a lanyard. The German guns did not

respond because they could not locate the French battery. They may

have known that it was somewhere in the forest, but firing at two or

three hundred acres of wood on the chance of reaching some guns

heavily protected by earth and timbering was about like tossing a pea

from the top of the Washington Monument on the chance of hitting a

four-leafed clover on the lawn below.

Our little group remained, not standing in the trench but back of it, in

full relief for some time; for the German gunners refused to play for

realism by sending us a marmite. Probably they had seen us through

the telescope at the start and concluded we weren't worth a shot. In

the first months of the war such a target would have received a burst

of shells, for the fun of seeing us scatter, if nothing else. Then

ammunition was plentiful and the sport of shooting had not lost its

zest; but in these winter days orders were not to waste ammunition.

The factories must manufacture a supply ahead for the summer

campaign. There must be fifteen dollars' worth of target in sight, say,

for the smallest shell costs that; and the shorter you are of shells the

more valuable the target must be. Besides, firing a cannon had

become as commonplace a function to both French and German

gunners as getting up to put another stick of wood in the stove or

going to open the door to take a letter from the postman.

We had glimpses of other trenches; but this is not the place in this

book to write of trenches. We shall see trenches till we are weary of

them later. We are going direct to Gerbéviller which was--emphasis

on the past tense--a typical little Lorraine town of fifteen hundred

inhabitants. Look where you would now, as we drove along the road,

and you saw churches without steeples, houses with roofs standing

on sections of walls, houses smashed into bits.

"I saw no such widespread destruction as this in Belgium!" I

exclaimed.

"There was no such fighting in Belgium," was the answer.

Of course not, except in the south-western corner, where the armies

still face each other.

"Not all the damage was done by the Germans," the major explained.

"Naturally, when they were pouring in death from the cover of a

house, our guns let drive at that house," he went on. "The owners of

the houses that were hit by our shells are rather proud--proud of our

marksmanship, proud that we gave the unwelcome guest a hot pill to

swallow."

For ten days the Bavarians had Gerbéviller. They tore it to pieces

before they got it, then burned the remains because they said the

population sniped at them. All the orgy of Louvain was repeated here,

unchronicled to our people at home. The church looks like a Swiss

cheese from shell-holes. Its steeple was bound to be an observation

post, reasoned the Germans; so they poured shells into it. But the

brewery had a tall chimney which was an even better lookout, and the

brewery is the one building unharmed in the town. The Bavarians

knew that they would need that for their commissariat. For a Bavarian

will not fight without his beer. The land was littered with barrels after

they had gone. I saw some in trenches occupied by Bavarian

reserves not far back of where their firing-line had been.

"However, the fact that the brewery is intact and the church in ruins

does not prove that a brewery is better than a church. It only proves

which is the Lord's side in this war," said Sister Julie. But I get ahead

of my story.

In the middle of the main street were half a dozen smoke-blackened

houses which remained standing, an oasis in the sea of destruction,

with doors and windows intact facing gaps where doors and windows

had been. We entered with a sense of awe of the chance which had

spared these buildings.

"Sister Julie!" the major called.

A short, sturdy nun of about sixty years answered cheerily and

appeared in the dark hall. She led us into the sitting-room, where she

spryly placed chairs for our little party. She was smiling; her eyes

were sparkling with a hospitable and kindly interest in us, while I felt,

on my part, that thrill of curiosity that one always has when he meets

some celebrated person for the first time--curiosity no less keen than

if I were to meet Barbara Frietchie.

Through all that battle of ten days, with the cannon never silent day or

night, with shells screaming overhead and crashing into houses;

through ten days of thunder and lightning and earthquake, she and

her four sister associates remained in Gerbéviller. When the town

was fired they moved from one building to another. They nursed both

wounded French and Germans; also wounded townspeople who

could not flee with the others.

"You were not frightened? You did not think of going away?" she was

asked.

"Frightened?" she answered. "I had not time to think of that. Go

away? How could I when the Lord's work had come to me?"

President Poincaré went in person to give her the Legion of Honour,

the first given to a woman in this war; so rarely given to a woman, and

here bestowed with the love of a nation. Sister Marie was in the

kitchen at the time, cooking the meal for the sick for whom the sisters

are still caring. So Sister Julie took the President of France into the

kitchen to meet Sister Marie, quite as she would take you or me. A

human being is simply a human being to Sister Julie, to be treated

courteously; and great men may not cause a meal for the sick to

burn. After the complexity of French politics, President Poincaré was

anything but unfavourably impressed by the incident.

"He was such a little man, I could not believe at first that he could be

President," she said. "I thought that the President of France would be

a big man. But he was very agreeable and, I am sure, very wise.

Then there were other men with him, a Monsieur de-de-Deschanel,

who was president of something or other in Paris, and Monsieur du-

du--yes, that was it, Du Bag. He also is president of something in

Paris. They were very agreeable, too."

"And your Legion of Honour?"

"Oh, my medal that M. le Président gave me! I keep that in a drawer.

I do not wear it every day when I am in my working-clothes."

"Have you ever been to Paris?"

"No, monsieur."

"They will make a great ado over you when you go."

"I must stay in Gerbéviller. If I stayed during the fighting and when the

Germans were here, why should I leave now? Gerbéviller is my

home. There is much to do here and there will be more to do when

the people who were driven away return."

These nuns saw their townspeople stood up against a wall and shot;

they saw their townspeople killed by shells. The cornucopia of war's

horrors was emptied at their door. And women of a provincial town,

who had led peaceful, cloistered lives, they did not blench or falter in

the presence of ghastliness which only men are supposed to have

the stoicism to witness.

What feature of the nightmare had held most vividly in Sister Julie's

mind? It is hard to say; but the one which she dwelt on was about the

boy and the cow. The invaders, when they came in, ordered that no

inhabitant leave his house, on pain of death. A boy of ten took his

cow to pasture in the morning as usual. He did not see anything

wrong in that. The cow ought to go to pasture. And he was shot, for

he broke a military regulation. He might have been a spy using the

cow as a blind. War does not bother to discriminate. It kills.

Sister Julie can enjoy a joke, particularly on the Germans, and her

cheerful smile and genuine laugh are a lesson to all people who draw

long faces in time of trouble and weep over spilt milk. A buoyant

temperament and unshaken faith carried her through her ordeal.

Though her hair is white, youth's optimism and confidence in the

future and the joy of victory for France overshadowed the present.

The town and church would be rebuilt; children would play in the

streets again; there was a lot of the Lord's work to do yet.

In every word and thought she is French--French in her liveliness of

spirit and quickness of comprehension; wholly French there on the

borderland of Germany. If we only went to the outskirts of the town,

she reminded us, we could see how the soldiers of her beloved

France fought and why she was happy to have remained in

Gerbéviller to welcome them back.

In sight of that intact brewery and that wreck of a church is a gentle

slope of open field, cut by a road. Along the crest were many mounds

as thick as the graves of a cemetery, and by the side of the road was

a temporary monument above a big mound, surrounded by a sanded

walk and a fence. The dead had been thickest at this point, and here

they had been laid in a vast grave. The surviving comrades had

made that monument; and, in memory of what the dead had fought

for, the living said that they were not yet ready to quit fighting.

Standing on this crest, you were a thousand yards away from the

edge of a woods. German aeroplanes had seen the French massing

for a charge under the cover of that crest; but French aeroplanes

could not see what was in the woods. Rifles and machine-guns

poured a spray of lead across the crest when the French appeared.

But the French, who were righting for Sister Julie's town, would not

stop their rush at first. They kept on, as Pickett's men did when the

Federal guns riddled their ranks with grapeshot. This accounts for

many of the mounds being well beyond the crest. The Germans

made a mistake in firing too soon. They would have made a heavier

killing if they had allowed the charge to go farther. After the French fell

back, for two days and nights their wounded lay out on that field

without water or food, between the two forces, and if their comrades

approached to give succour the machine-guns blazed more death,

because the Germans did not want to let the French dig a trench on

the crest. After two days the French forced the Germans out of the

woods by hitting them from another point.

We went over the field of another charge half a mile away. There a

French regiment put a stream with a single bridge at their back--which

requires some nerve--and charged a German trench on rising

ground. They took it. Then they tried to take the woods beyond.

Before they were checked twenty-two officers out of a total of thirty

fell. But they did not give up the ground they had won. They burrowed

into the earth in a trench of their own, and when help came they put

the Germans out of the woods.

The men of this regiment were not first line, but the older fellows--men

of the type we stopped to chat with in the village--hastening to the

front when the war began. Their officers were mostly reserves, too,

who left civil occupations at the call to arms. One of the eight

survivors of the thirty was with us, a stocky little man, hardly looking

the hero or the soldier. I expressed my admiration, and he answered

quietly: "It was for France!" How often I have heard that as a reason

for courage or sacrifice! The enemies of France have learned to

respect it, though they had a poor opinion of the French army before

the war began.

"That railroad bridge yonder the Germans left intact when they

occupied it because they were certain that they would need it to

supply their troops when they took the Gap of Mirecourt and

surrounded the French army," I was told. "However, they had to go in

such a hurry that they failed to mine it. They must have fired five

hundred shells afterwards to destroy it, in vain."

It was dusk when we entered the city of Lunéville for the second time.

Whole blocks lay in ruins; others only showed where shells had

crashed into walls. It is hard to estimate just how much damage shell-

fire has done to a town, for you see the effects only where they have

struck on the street sides and not when they strike in the centre of the

block. But Lunéville has certainly suffered as much as Louvain, only

we did not hear about it. Grim, sad Louvain, with its German sentries

among the ruins! Happy, triumphant Lunéville, with its poilus instead

of German sentries!

"We are going to meet the mayor," said the major.

First we went to his office. But that was a mistake. We were invited to

his house, which was a fine, old, eighteenth-century building. If you

could transport it to New York some arms-and-ammunition millionaire

would give half a million dollars for it. The hallway was smoke-

blackened and a burnt spot showed where the enemy had tried to set

it on fire before evacuating the town. Ascending a handsome old

staircase, we were in rooms with gilded mirrors and carved mantels,

where we were introduced to His Honour, a lively man of some forty

years.

"I have been in Amérique two months. So much English do I speak.

No more!" said the mayor merrily, and introduced us in turn to his

wife, who spoke not even "so much" English, but French as fast and

as piquantly as none but a Frenchwoman can. Her only son, who was

seventeen, was going up with the 1916 class of recruits very soon.

He was a sturdy youngster; a type of Young France who will make

the France of the future.

"You hate to see him go?" I asked.

"It is for France!" she answered.

We had cakes and tea and a merrier--at least, a more heartfelt--party

than at any mayor's reception in time of peace. Everybody talked. For

the French do know how to talk, when they have not turned grim,

silent soldiers. I heard story on story of the German occupation; and

how the mayor was put in jail and held as a hostage; and what a

German general said to him when he was brought in as a prisoner to

be interrogated in his own house, which the general occupied as

headquarters.

Among the guests was the wife of a French general in her Red Cross

cap. She might see her husband once a week by meeting him on the

road between the city and the front. He could not afford to be any

farther from his post, lest the Germans spring a surprise. The extent

of the information which he gave her was that all went well for France.

Father Joffre plays no favourites in his discipline.

Happy, happy Lorraine in the midst of its ruins! Happy because her

adored tricolour floats over those ruins.

XIII

A Road Of War I Know

Other armies go to war across the land, but the British go across the

sea. They take the Channel ferry in order to reach the front. Theirs is

the home road of war to me; the road of my affections, where men

speak my mother tongue. It begins on the platform at Victoria Station,

with the khaki of officers and men, returning from leave, relieved by

the warmer colours of women who have come to say good-bye to

those they love. In five hours from the time of starting one may be

across that ribbon of salt water, which means much in isolation and

little in distance, and in the trenches.

That veteran regular--let us separate him from the crowd--is a type I

have often seen, a type that has become as familiar as one's

neighbours in one's own town. We will call him the tenth man. That is,

of every ten men who went to the front a year ago in his battalion,

nine are gone. All of the hardships and all of the terrors of war he has

witnessed: men dropped neatly by a bullet; men mangled by shells.

His khaki is spotless, thanks to his wife, who has dressed in her best

for the occasion. Terrible as war itself, but new, that hat of hers, which

probably represented a good deal of looking into windows and

pricing; and her gown of the cheapest material, drooping from her

round shoulders, is the product of the poor dress-making skill of

hands which show only too well who does all the housework at home.

The children, a boy of four and a girl of seven, are in their best, too,

with faces scrubbed till they shine.

You will see like scenes in stations at home when the father has

found work in a distant city and is going on ahead to get established

before the family follow him. Such incidents are common in civil life;

they became common at Victoria Station. What is common has no

significance, editors say.

When the time came to go through the gate, the veteran picked the

boy up in his arms and pressed him very close and the little girl

looked on wonderingly, while the mother was not going to make it any

harder for the father by tears. "Good-bye, Tom!" she said. So his

name was Tom, this tenth man.

I spoke with him. His battalion was full with recruits. It had been kept

full. But, considering the law of chance, what about the surviving one

out of an original ten?

"Yes, I've had my luck with me," he said. "Probably my turn will come.

Maybe I'll never see the wife and kids again."

The morning roar of London had begun. That station was a small

spot in the city. There were not enough officers and men taking the

train to make up a day's casualty list; for ours was only a small party

returning from leave. The transports, unseen, carried the multitudes.

Wherever one had gone in England he had seen soldiers and

wherever he went in France he was to see still more soldiers.

England had become an armed camp; and England plodded on,

"muddled" on, preparing, ever preparing, to forge in time of war the

thunderbolt for war which was undreamed of in time of peace when

other nations were forging their thunderbolts.

Still the recruiting posters called for more soldiers and the casualty

lists appeared day after day with the regularity of want

advertisements. Imagine eight million men under arms in the United

States and you have the equivalent to what England did by the

volunteer system. The more there were the more pessimistic became

the British Press. Pessimism brought in recruits. Bad news made

England take another deep breath of energizing determination. It was

the last battle which was decisive. She had always won that. She

would win it again.

They talk of war aboard the Pullman, after officers have waved their

hands out of the windows to their wives, quite as if they were going to

Scotland for a weekend instead of back to the firing-line. British

phlegm this is called. No, British habit, I should say, the race-bred,

individualistic quality of never parading emotions in public; the instinct

of keeping things which are one's own to one's self. Personally, I like

this way. In one form or another, as the hedges fly by the train

windows, the subject is always war. War creeps into golf, or shooting,

or investments, or politics. Only one suggestion quite frees the mind

from the omnipresent theme: Will the Channel be smooth? The

Germans have nothing to do with that. It is purely a matter of weather.

Bad sailors are more worried about the crossing than about the shell-

fire they are going to face.

With bad sailors or good sailors, the significant thing which had

become a commonplace was that the Channel was a safely-guarded

British sea lane. In all my crossings I was never delayed. For England

had one thunderbolt ready forged when the war began. The only

submarines, or destroyers, or dirigibles that one saw were hers.

Antennae these of the great fleet waiting with the threat of stored

lightning ready to be flashed from gun-mouths; a threat as efficacious

as action, in nowise mysterious or subtle, but definite as steel and

powder, speaking the will of a people in their chosen field of power,

felt over all the seas of the world, coast of Maine and the Carolinas no

less than Labrador. Thousands of transports had come and gone,

carrying hundreds of thousands of soldiers and food for men and

guns to India; and on the high road to India, to Australia, to San

Francisco, shipping went its way undisturbed by anything that dives

or flies.

The same white hospital ships lying in that French harbour; the same

line of grey, dusty-looking ambulances parked on the quay!

Everybody in the one-time sleepy, week-end tourist resort seems to

be in uniform; to have something to do with war. All surroundings

become those of war long before you reach the front. That knot of

civilians, waiting their turn for another examination of the same kind

as that on the other side of the Channel, have shown good reasons

for going to Paris to the French Consul in London, or they might not

proceed even this far on the road of war. They seem outcasts--a

humble lot in the variegated costumes of the civil world--outcasts

from the disciplined world in its pattern garb of khaki. Their excuse for

not being in the game is that they are too old or that they are women.

For now the war has sucked into its vortex the great majority of those

who are strong enough to fight or work.

A traveller might be a spy; hence, all this red tape for the many to

catch the one. Even red tape seems now to have become normal.

War is normal. It would seem strange to cross the Channel in time of

peace; the harbour would not look like itself with civilians not having

to show passports, and without the white hospital ships, and the

white-bearded landing-officer at the foot of the gangway, and the

board held up with lists of names of officers who have telegrams

waiting for them.

For the civilians a yellow card of disembarkation and for the military a

white card. The officers and soldiers walk off at once and the queue

of civilians waits. One civilian with a white card, who belongs to no

regiment, who is not even a chaplain or a nurse, puzzles the landing-

officer for a moment. But there is something to go with it--a

correspondent's licence and a letter from a general who looks after

such things. They show that you "belong"; and if you don't belong on

the road of war you will not get far. As well try to walk past the

doorman and take a seat in the United States Senate chamber during

a session.

Most precious that magical piece of paper. I happen to be the only

American with one, unless he is in the fighting line--which is one sure

way to get to the front. The price of all the opera boxes at the

Metropolitan will not buy it; and it is the passport to the welcoming

smile from an army chauffeur, whom I almost regard as my own. But

its real value appears at the outskirts of the city. There the dead line

is drawn; there the sheep are finally separated from the goats by a

French sentry guarding the winding passageway between some

carts, which have been in the same place in the road for months.

The car spins over the broad, hard French road, in a land where for

many miles you see no signs of war, until it turns into the grounds of a

small château opposite a village church. The proprietor of a drygoods

store in a neighbouring city spends his summers here; but this

summer he is in town, because the Press wanted a place to live and

he was good enough to rent us his country place. So this is home,

where the five British and one American correspondents live and

mess. The expense of our cars costs us treble all the rest of our

expenses. They take us where we want to go. We go where we

please, but we may not write what we please. We see something like

a thousand times more than we can tell. The conditions are such as

to make a news reporter throw up his hands and faint. But if he had

his unbridled way, one day he might feel the responsibility for the loss

of hundreds of British soldiers' lives.

"It may be all right for war correspondents, but it is a devil of a poor

place for a newspaper man," as one editor said. Yet it is the only

place where you can really know anything about the war.

We become part of the machinery of the great organization that

encloses us in its regular processes. No one in his heart envies the

press officer who holds the blue pencil over us. He has to "take it both

going and coming." He labours on our behalf and sometimes we

labour with him. The staff are willing enough to let us watch the army

at work, but they do not care whether or not we write about their war;

he wants us both to see it and to write about it. He tells us some big

piece of news, and then says: "That is for yourselves; you may not

write it."

People do not want to read about the correspondents, of course.

They want to read what the correspondents have to tell about the

war; but the conditions of our work are interesting because we are the

link between the army and the reading public. All that it learns from

actual observation of what the army is doing comes through us.

We may not give the names of regiments and brigades until weeks

after a fight, because that will tell the enemy what troops are

engaged; we may not give the names of officers, for that is glorifying

one when possibly another did his duty equally well. It is the

anonymity of the struggle that makes it all seem distant and unreal--till

the telegram comes from the War Office to say that the one among

the millions who is dear to you is dead or wounded. Otherwise, it is a

torment of unidentified elements behind a curtain, which is parted for

an announcement of gain or loss, or to give out a list of the fallen.

The world wants to read that Peter Smith led the King's Own

Particular Fusiliers in a charge. It may not know Peter Smith, but his

name and that of his regiment make the information seem definite.

The statement that a well-known millionaire yesterday gave a million

dollars to charity, or that a man in a checked suit swam from the

Battery to Coney Island, is not convincing; nor is the fact that one

private unnamed held back the Germans with bombs in the traverse

of a trench for hours until help came. We at the front, however, do

know the names; we meet the officers and men. Ours is the intimacy

which we may not interpret except in general terms.

Every article, every dispatch, every letter, passes through the

censor's hand. But we are never told what to write. The liberty of the

Press is too old an institution in England for that. Always we may

learn why an excision is made. The purpose is to keep information

from the enemy. It is not like fighting Boers or Filipinos, this war of

walls of men who can turn the smallest bit of information to

advantage.

Intelligence officers speak of their work as piecing together the parts

of a jig-saw puzzle. What seems a most innocent fact by itself may

furnish the bit which gives the figure in the picture its face. It does not

follow because you are an officer that you know what may and what

may not be of service to the enemy.

A former British officer who had become a well-known military critic, in

an account of a visit to the front mentioned having seen a battle from

a certain church tower. Publication of the account was followed by a

tornado of shell-fire that killed and wounded many British soldiers.

Only a staff specialist, trained in intelligence work and in constant

touch with the intelligence department, can be a safe censor. At the

same time, he is the best friend of the correspondent. He knows what

is harmless and what may not be allowed. He wants the Press to

have as much as possible. For the more the public knows about its

soldiers, the better the morale of the people, which reflects itself in the

morale of the army.

The published casualty lists giving the names of officers and men and

their battalions is a means of causing casualties. From a prisoner

taken the enemy learns what battalions were present at a given fight;

he adds up the numbers reported killed and wounded and ascertains

what the fight cost the enemy and, in turn, the effect of the fire from

his side. But the British public demanded to see the casualty lists and

the British Press were allowed to gratify the desire. They appeared in

the newspapers, of course, days after the nearest relative of the dead

or wounded man had received official notification from the War Office.

Officers' letters from the front, so freely published earlier in the

war, amazed experienced correspondents by their unconscious

indiscretions. The line officer who had been in a fight told all that he

saw. Twenty officers doing the same along a stretch of front and the

jig-saw experts, plus what information they had from spies, were in

clover. Editors said: "But these men are officers. They ought to know

when they are imparting military secrets."

Alas, they do not know! It is not to be expected that they should. Their

business is to fight; the business of other experts is to safeguard

information. For a long time the British army kept correspondents

from the front on the principle that the business of a correspondent

must be to tell what ought not to be told. Yet they were to learn that

the accredited correspondent, an expert at his profession, working in

harmony with the experts of the staff, let no military secrets pass.

At our mess we get the Berlin dailies promptly. Soon after the

Germans are reading the war correspondence from their own front

we are reading it, and laughing at jokes in their comic papers and at

cartoons which exhibit John Bull as a stricken old ogre and Britannia

who Rules the Waves with the corners of her mouth drawn down to

the bottom of her chin, as she sees the havoc that von Tirpitz is

making with submarines which do not stop us from receiving our

German jokes regularly across the Channel.

Doubtless the German messes get their Punch and the London

illustrated weeklies regularly. In the time that it took the English daily

with the account of the action seen from the church tower to reach

Berlin and the news to be wired to the front, the German guns made

use of the information. Neutral little Holland is the telltale of both

sides; the ally and the enemy of all intelligence corps. Scores of

experts in jig-saw puzzles on both sides seize every scrap of

information and piece them together. Each time that one gets a bit

from a newspaper he is for a sharper Press censorship on his side

and a more liberal one on the other.

We six correspondents have our insignia, as must everyone who is

free to move along the lines. By a glance you may tell everybody's

branch and rank in that complicated and disciplined world, where no

man acts for himself, but always on someone else's orders.

"Don't you know who they are? They are the correspondents," I heard

a soldier say. "D. Chron., that's the Daily Chronicle; M. Post, that's the

Morning Post; D. Mail, that's the Daily Mail. There's one with U.S.A.

What paper is that?"

"It ain't a paper," said another. "It's the States--he's a Yank!"

The War Office put it on the American cousin's arm, and wherever it

goes it seems welcome. It may puzzle the gunners when the

American says, "That was a peach of a shot, right across the pan!" or

the infantry when he says, "It cuts no ice!" and there is no ice visible

in Flanders; he speaks about typhoid to the medical corps which calls

it enteric; and "fly-swatting" is a new word to the sanitarians, who are

none the less busily engaged in that noble art. Lessons for the British

in the "American language" while you wait! In return, the American is

learning what a "stout-hearted thruster" and other phrases mean in

the Simon-pure English.

The correspondents are the spoiled spectators of the army's work;

the itinerants of the road of war. Nobody sees so much as we,

because we have nothing to do but to see. An officer looking at the

towers of Ypres Cathedral a mile away from the trench where he was,

said: "No, I've never been in Ypres. Our regiment has not been

stationed in that part of the line."

We have sampled all the trenches; we have studied the ruins of

Ypres with an archaeologist's eye; we know the names of the

estaminets of the villages, from "The Good Farmer" to "The

Harvester's Rest" and "The Good Cousin," not to mention "The

Omnibus Stop" on the Cassel Hill. Madame who keeps the hotel in

the G.H.Q. town knows me so well that we wave hands to each other

as I pass the door; and the clerks in a certain shop have learned that

the American likes his fruit raw, instead of stewed in the English

fashion, and plenty of it, especially if it comes from the South out of

season, as it does from Florida or California to pampered human

beings at home, who, if they could see as much of this war as I have

seen, would appreciate what a fortunate lot they are to have not a

ribbon of saltwater but a broad sea full of it, and the British navy, too,

between them and the thing on the other side of the zone of death.

G.H.Q. means General Headquarters and B.E.F., which shows the

way for your letters from England, means British Expeditionary Force.

The high leading, the brains of the army, are theoretically at G.H.Q.

That word theoretically is used advisedly in view of opinion at other

points. An officer sent from G.H.Q. to command a brigade had not

been long out before he began to talk about those confounded one-

thing-and-another fellows at G.H.Q. When he was at G.H.Q. he used

to talk about those confounded one-thing-and-another fellows who

commanded corps, divisions, and brigades at the front. The

philosophers of G.H.Q. smiled and the philosophers of the army

smiled--it was the old story of the staff and the line; of the main office

and the branches. But the line did the most smiling to see the new

brigadier getting a taste of his own medicine.

G.H.Q. directs the whole; here every department of all that vast

concern which supplies the hundreds of thousands of men and

prepares for the other hundreds of thousands is focussed. The

symbol of its authority is a red band round the cap, which means that

you are a staff officer. No war at G.H.Q., only the driving force of war.

It seems as far removed from the front as the New York office of a

string of manufacturing plants.

If one follows a red-banded cap into a door he sees other officers and

clerks and typewriters, and a sign which says that a department chief

has his desk in the drawing-room of a private house--where he has

had it for months. Go to one mess and you will hear talk about

garbage pails and how to kill flies; to another, about hospitals and

clearing stations for the wounded; to another, about barbed wire,

sandbags, spades, timber, and galvanized iron--the engineers; to

another, about guns, shells, rifles, bullets, mortars, bombs, bayonets,

and high explosives--the ordnance; to another, about jam, bread,

bacon, uniforms, iron rations, socks, underclothes, tinned goods,

fresh beef, and motor-trucks--the Army Service Corps; to another,

about attacks, counter-attacks, and salients, and about what the

others are doing and will have to do--the operations.

The Chief of Staff drives the eight-horse team. He works sixteen

hours a day. So do most of the others. This is how you prove to the

line that you have a right to be at G.H.Q. When you get to know

G.H.Q. it seems like any other business institution. Many are there

who do not want to be there; but they have been found out. They are

specialists, who know how to do one thing particularly well and are

kept doing it. No use of growling that you would like a "fighting job."

G.H.Q. is the main station on the road of war, which hears the sound

of the guns faintly. Beyond is the region of all the activities that it

commands, up to the trenches, where all roads end and all efforts

consummate. One has seen dreary flat lands of mud and leafless

trees become fair with the spring, the growing harvest reaped, and

the leaves begin to fall. Always the factory of war was in the same

place; the soldiers billeted in the same towns; the puffs of shrapnel

smoke over the same belt of landscape; the ruins of the same

villages being pounded by high explosives. Always the sound of

guns; always the wastage of life, as passing ambulances, the curtains

drawn, speed by, their part swiftly and covertly done. The enormity of

the thing holds the imagination; its sure and orderly processes of an

organized civilization working at destruction win the admiration. There

is a thrill in the courage and sacrifice and the drilled readiness of

response to orders.

The spectator is under varying spells. To-day he seems in a fantastic

world, whose horror makes it impossible of realization. To-morrow, as

his car takes him along a pleasant by-road among wheat-fields where

peasants are working and no soldier is in sight, it is a world of peace

and one thinks that he has mistaken the roar of a train for the distant

roar of gun-fire. Again, it seems the most real of worlds, an exclusive

man's world, where nothing counts but organized material force, and

all those cleanly, well-behaved men in khaki are a part of the

permanent population.

One sees the war as a colossal dynamo, where force is perpetual like

the energy of the sun. The war is going on for ever. The reaper cuts

the harvest, but another harvest comes. War feeds on itself, renews

itself. Live men replace the dead. There seems no end to supplies of

men. The pounding of the guns, like the roar of Niagara, becomes

eternal. Nothing can stop it.

XIV

Trenches In Winter

The difference between trench warfare in winter and in summer is

that between sleeping on the lawn in March and in July. It was in the

mud and winds of March that I first saw the British front. The winds

were much like the seasonal winds at home; but the Flanders mud is

like no other mud, in the judgment of the British soldier. It is mixed

with glue. When I returned to the front in June for a longer stay, the

mud had become clouds of dust that trailed behind the motor-car.

In March my eagerness to see a trench was that of one from the

Western prairies to get his first glimpse of the ocean. Once I might go

into a trench as often as I pleased I became "fed up" with trenches,

as the British say. They did not mean much more than an alley or a

railway cutting. One came to think of the average peaceful trench as

a ditch where some men were eating marmalade and bully beef and

looking across a field at some more men who were eating sausage

and "K.K." bread, each party taking care that the other did not see

him.

Writers have served us trenches in every possible literary style that

censorship will permit. Whoever "tours" them is convinced that none

of the descriptions published heretofore has been adequate and

writes one of his own which will be final. All agree that it is not like

what they thought it was. But, despite all the descriptions, the public

still fails to visualize a trench. You do not see a trench with your eyes

so much as with your mind and imagination. That long line where all

the powers of destruction within man's command are in deadlock has

become a symbol for something which cannot be expressed by

words. No one has yet really described a shell-burst, or a flash of

lightning, or Niagara Falls; and no one will ever describe a trench. He

cannot put anyone else there. He can only be there himself.

The first time that I looked over a British parapet was in the edge of a

wood. Board walks ran across the spongy earth here and there; the

doors of little shanties with earth roofs opened on to those streets,

which were called Piccadilly and the Strand. I was reminded of a

pleasant prospector's camp in Alaska. Only, everybody was in

uniform and occasionally something whished through the branches of

the trees. One looked up to see what it was and where it was going,

this stray bullet, without being any wiser.

We passed along one of the walks until we came to a wall of

sandbags--simply white bags about three-quarters of the size of an

ordinary pillowslip, filled with earth and laid one on top of another like

bags of grain. You stood beside a man who had a rifle laid across the

top of the pile. Of course, you did not wear a white hat or wave a

handkerchief. One does not do that when he plays hide-and-seek.

Or, if you preferred, you might look into a chip of glass, with your

head wholly screened by the wall of sandbags, which got a reflection

from another chip of glass above the parapet. This is the trench

periscope; the principle of all of them is the same. They have no more

variety than the fashion in knives, forks and spoons on the dinner

table.

One hundred and fifty yards away across a dead field was another

wall of sandbags. The distance is important. It is always stated in all

descriptions. One hundred and fifty yards is not much. Only when you

get within forty or fifty yards have you something to brag about. Yet

three hundred yards may be more dangerous than fifteen, if an

artillery "hate" is on.

Look for an hour, and all you see is the wall of sandbags. Not even a

rabbit runs across that dead space. The situation gets its power of

suggestion from the fact that there are Germans behind the other

wall--real, live Germans. They are trying to kill the British on our side

and we are trying to kill them; and they are as coyly unaccommodating

about putting up their heads as we are. The emotion of the situation

is in the fact that a sharpshooter might send a shot at your cap; he

might smash a periscope; a shell might come. A rifle cracks--that is

all. Nearly everyone has heard the sound, which is no different at the

front than elsewhere. And the sound is the only information you get.

It is not so interesting as shooting at a deer, for you can tell whether

you hit him or not. The man who fires from a trench is not even certain

whether he saw a German or not. He shot at some shadow or object

along the crest which might have been a German head.

Thus, one must take the word of those present that there is any more

life behind than in front of the sandbags. However, if you are sceptical

you may have conviction by starting to crawl over the top of the

British parapet. After dark the soldiers will slip over and bring back

your body. It is this something you do not see, this something

visualized by the imagination, which convinces you that you ought to

be considerate enough of posterity to write the real description of a

trench. Look for an hour at that wall of sandbags and your

imagination sees more and more, while your eye sees only

sandbags. What does this war mean to you? There it is: only you can

describe what this war means to you.

Many a soldier who has spent months in trenches has not seen a

German. I boast that I have seen real Germans through my glasses.

They were walking along a road back of their trenches. It was most

fascinating. All the Germans I had ever seen in Germany were not

half so interesting. I strained my eyes watching those wonderful

beings as I might strain them at the first visiting party from Mars to

earth. There must have been at least ten out of the Kaiser's millions.

In summer that wood had become a sylvan bower, or a pastoral

paradise, or a leafy nook, as you please. The sun played through the

branches in a patchwork; flowers bloomed on the dirt roofs of the

shanties, and a swallow had a nest--famous swallow!--on one of the

parapets. True, it was not on the front parapet; it was on the reserve.

The swallow knew what he was about. He was taking a reasonable

amount of risk and playing reasonably secure to get a front seat,

according to the ethics of the war correspondent. The two walls of

sandbags were in the same place that they had been six months

previously. A little patching had been done after some shells had hit

the mark, though not many had come.

For this was a quiet corner. Neither side was interested in stirring up

the hornets' nest. If a member of Parliament wished to see what

trench life was like he was brought here, because it was one of the

safest places for a few minutes' look at the sandbags which Mr.

Atkins stared at week in and week out. Some Conservatives,

however, in the case of Radical members, would have chosen a

different kind of trench to show; for example, that one which was

suggested to me by the staff officer with the twinkle in his eye on my

best day at the front.

In want of an army pass to the front in order to write your own

description, then, put up a wall of sandbags in a vacant lot and

another one hundred and fifty yards away and fire a rifle occasionally

from your wall at the head of a man on the opposite side, who will

shoot at yours--and there you are. If you prefer the realistic to the

romantic school and wish to appreciate the nature of trench life in

winter, find a piece of wet, flat country, dig a ditch seven or eight feet

deep, stand in icy water looking across at another ditch, and sleep in

a cellar that you have dug in the wall, and you are near

understanding what Mr. Atkins has been doing for his country. The

ditch should be cut zigzag in and out, like the lines dividing the

squares of a checker-board; that makes more work and localizes the

burst of shells.

Of course, the moist walls will be continually falling in and require

mending in a drenching, freezing rain of the kind that the Lord visits

on all who wage war underground in Flanders. Incidentally, you must

look after the pumps, lest the water rise to your neck. For all the while

you are fighting Flanders mud as well as the Germans.

To carry realism to the limit of the Grand Guignol school, then,

arrange some bags of bullets with dynamite charges on a wire, which

will do for shrapnel; plant some dynamite in the parapet, which will do

for high explosive shells that burst on contact; sink heavier charges of

dynamite under your feet, which will do for mines, and set them off,

while you engage someone to toss grenades and bombs at you.

Though scores of officers' letters had given their account of trench life

with the vividness of personal experience, I must mention my first

trench in Flanders in winter when, with other correspondents, I saw

the real thing under the guidance of the commanding officer of that

particular section, a slight, wiry man who wore the ribbon of the

Victoria Cross won in another war for helping to "save the guns." He

made seeing trenches in the mud seem a pleasure trip. He was the

kind who would walk up to his ball as if he knew how to play golf,

send out a clean, fair, long drive, and then use his iron as if he knew

how to use an iron, without talking about his game on the way around

or when he returned to the club-house. Men could go into danger

behind him without realizing that they were in danger; they could

share hardship without realizing that there were any hardships. Such

as he put faith and backbone into a soldier by their very manner; and

if their professional training equal their talents, when war comes they

win victories.

We had rubber boots, electric torches, and wore British warms, those

short, thick coats which collect a modicum of mud for you to carry

besides what you are carrying on your boots. We walked along a

hard road in the dark toward an aurora borealis of German flares,

which popped into the sky like Roman candles and burst in circles of

light. They seemed to be saying: "Come on! Try to crawl up on us

and play us a trick and our eyes will find you and our marksmen will

stop you. Come on! We make the night into day, and watching never

ceases from our parapet."

Occasional rifle-shots and a machine-gun's ter-rut were audible from

the direction of the jumping red glare, which stretched right and left as

far as the eye could see. We broke off the road into a morass of mud,

as one might cross fields when he had lost his way, and plunged on

till the commanding officer said, "We go in here!" and we descended

into a black chasm in the earth. The wonder was that any ditch could

be cut in soil which the rains had turned into syrup. Mud oozed from

the sandbags, through the wire netting, and between the wooden

supports which held the walls in place. It was just as bad over in the

German trenches. General Mud laid siege to both armies. The field of

battle where he gathered his gay knights was a slough. His tug of war

was strife against landslides, rheumatism, pneumonia, and frozen

feet.

The soldier tries to kill his adversary; he tries to prevent his adversary

from killing him. He is as busy in safeguarding as in taking life. While

he breathes, thinks, fights mud, he blesses as well as curses mud.

Mother Earth is still unconquerable. In her bosom man still finds

security; such security that "dug in" he can defy at a hundred yards'

distance rifles that carry death three thousand yards. She it is that

has made the deadlock in the trenches and plastered their occupants

with her miry hands.

The C.O. lifted a curtain of bagging as you might lift a hanging over

an alcove bookcase, and a young officer, rising from his blankets in

his house in the trench wall to a stooping posture, said that all was

quiet. His uniform seemed fleckless. Was it possible that he wore

some kind of cloth which shed mud spatters? He was another of the

type of Captain Q------, my host at Neuve Chapelle; a type formed on

the type of seniors such as his C.O. Unanalysable this quality, but

there is something distinguished about it and delightfully appealing. A

man who can be the same in a trench in Flanders in mid-winter as in

a drawing-room has my admiration. They never lose their manner,

these English officers. They carry it into the charge and back in the

ambulance with them to England, where they wish nothing so much

as that their friends will "cut out the hero stuff," as our own officers

say.

In other dank cellars soldiers who were off guard were lying or sitting.

The radiance of the flares lighted the profiles of those on guard,

whose faces were half-hidden by coat-collars or ear-flaps--

imperturbable, silent, marooned and marooning, watchful and

fearless. The thing had to be done and they were doing it; and they

were going to keep on doing it.

There was nothing dry in that trench, unless it was the bowl of a

man's pipe. There were not even any braziers. In your nostrils was

the odour of the soil of Flanders cultivated by many generations

through many wars. As night wore on the sky was brightened by cold,

winter stars and their soft light became noticeable between the

disagreeable flashes of the flares.

We walked on and on. It was like walking in a winding ditch; that was

all. The same kind of walls at every turn; the same kind of dim figures

in saturated, heavy army overcoats. Slipping off the board walk into

the ooze, one was thrown against the mud wall as his foot sank. Then

he held fast to his boot-straps lest the boot remain in the mud while

his foot came out. Only the CO. never slipped. He knew how to tour

trenches. Beside him the others were as clumsy as if they were trying

to walk a tight-rope.

"Good-night!" he said to each group of men as he passed, with the

cheer of one who brings a confident spirit to vigils in the mud and with

that note of affection of the commander who has learned to love his

men by the token of ordeals when he saw them hold fast against

odds.

"Good-night, sir!" they answered; and in their tone was something

which you liked to hear--a finer tribute to the CO. than medals which

kings can bestow. It was affection and trust. They were ready to

follow him, for they knew that he knew how to lead. I was not

surprised when I heard of his promotion, later. I shall not be surprised

when I hear of it again. For he had brain and heart and the gift of

command.

"Shall we go on or shall we go back?" he asked when we had gone

about a mile. "Have you had enough?"

We had, without a dissenting voice. A ditch in the mud, that was all,

no matter how much farther we went. So we passed out of the trench

into a soapy, slippery mud which had been ploughed ground in the

autumn, now become lathery with the beat of men's steps. Our party

became separated when some foundered and tried to hoist

themselves with both boot-straps at once. The CO. called out in order

to locate us in the darkness, and the voice of an officer in the

trenches cut in, "Keep still! The Germans are only a hundred yards

away!"

"Sorry!" whispered the CO. "I ought to have known better."

Then one of the German searchlights that had been swinging its

stream of light across the paths of the flares lay its fierce, comet eye

on us, glistening on the froth-streaked mud and showing each mud-

splashed figure in heavy coat in weird silhouette.

"Standstill!"

That is the order whenever the searchlights come spying in your

direction. So we stood still in the mud, looking at one another and

wondering. It was the one tense second of the night, which lifted our

thoughts out of the mud with the elation of risk. That searchlight was

the eye of death looking for a target. With the first crack of a bullet we

should have known that we were discovered and that it was no longer

good tactics to stand still. We should have dropped on all fours into

the porridge. The searchlight swept on. Perhaps Hans at the

machine-gun was nodding or perhaps he did not think us worth while.

Either supposition was equally agreeable to us.

We kept moving our mud-poulticed feet forward, with the flares at our

backs, till we came to a road where we saw dimly a silent company of

soldiers drawn up and behind them the supplies for the trench.

Through the mud and under cover of darkness every bit of barbed

wire, every board, every ounce of food, must go up to the moles in

the ditch. The searchlights and the flares and the machine-guns

waited for the relief. They must be fooled. But in this operation most

of the casualties in the average trenches, both British and German,

occurred. Without a chance to strike back, the soldier was shot at by

an assassin in the night.

When the men who had been serving their turn of duty in the

trenches came out, a magnet drew their weary steps--cleanliness.

They thought of nothing except soap and water. For a week they

need not fight mud or Germans or parasites, which, like General Mud,

waged war against both British and Germans. Standing on the slats

of the concrete floor of a factory, they peeled off the filthy, saturated

outer skin of clothing with its hideous, crawling inhabitants and,

naked, leapt into great steaming vats, where they scrubbed and

gurgled and gurgled and scrubbed. When they sprang out to apply

the towels, they were men with the feel of new bodies in another

world.

Waiting for them were clean clothes, which had been boiled and

disinfected; and waiting, too, was the shelter of their billets in the

houses of French towns and villages, and rest and food and food and

rest, and newspapers and tobacco and gossip--but chiefly rest and

the joy of lethargy as tissue was rebuilt after the first long sleep, often

twelve hours at a stretch. They knew all the sensations of physical

man, man battling with nature, in contrasts of exhaustion and danger

and recuperation and security, as the pendulum swung slowly back

from fatigue to the glow of strength.

Those who came out of the trenches quite "done up," Colonel Bate,

Irish and genial, fatherly and not lean, claimed for his own. After the

washing they lay on cots under a glass roof, and they might play

dominoes and read the papers when they were well enough to sit up.

They had the food which Colonel Bate knew was good for them, just

as he knew what was deadly for the inhabitants whom they brought

into that isolated room which every man must pass through before he

was admitted to the full radiance of the colonel's curative smile. When

they were able to return to the trenches, each was written down as

one unit more in the colonel's weekly statistical reports. In summer he

entertained al fresco in an open-air camp.

In Neuve Chapelle

Typical of many others, this quiet village in a flat country of rich

farming land, with a church, a school, a post-office, and stores where

the farmer could buy a pound of sugar or a spool of thread, employ a

notary, or get a pair of shoes cobbled or a horse shod, without having

to go to the neighbouring town of Bethune, Neuve Chapelle became

famous only after it had ceased to exist--unless a village remains a

village after it has been reduced to its original elements by shell-fire.

It was the scene of one of those actions in the long siege line which

have the dignity of a battle; the losses on either side, about sixteen

thousand, were two-thirds of those at Waterloo or Gettysburg. Here

the British after the long winter's stalemate in the mud, where they

stuck when the exhausted Germans could press no farther, took the

offensive, with the sap of spring rising in their veins.

The guns blazed the way and the infantry charged in the path of the

guns' destruction; and they kept on while the shield of shell-fire held.

When it left an opening for the German machine-guns through its

curtain and the German guns visited on the British what their guns

had been visiting on the Germans, the British stopped. A lesson was

learned; a principle established. A gain was made, if no goal were

reached.

The human stone wall had moved. It had broken some barriers and

come to rest before others, again to become a stone wall. But it knew

that the thing could be done with guns and shells enough--and only

with enough. This means a good deal when you have been under

dog for a long time. Months were to pass waiting for enough shells

and guns, with many little actions and their steady drain of life, while

everyone looked back to Neuve Chapelle as a landmark. It was

something definite for a man to say that he had been wounded at

Neuve Chapelle and quite indefinite to say that he had been

wounded in the course of the day's work in the trenches.

No one might see the battle in that sea of mud. He might as well have

looked at the smoke of Vesuvius with an idea of learning what was

going on inside of the crater. I make no further attempt at describing

it. My view came after the battle was over and the cauldron was still

steaming.

Though in March, 1914, one would hardly have given Neuve

Chapelle, intact and peaceful, a passing glance from a motor-car, in

March, 1915, Neuve Chapelle in ruins was the one town in Europe

which I most wanted to see. Correspondents had not then

established themselves. The staff officer whom I asked if I might

spend a night in the new British line was a cautious man. He bade me

sign a paper freeing the British army from any responsibility. Judging

by the general attitude of the Staff, one could hardly take the request

seriously. One correspondent less ought to please any Staff; but he

said that he had an affection for the regulars and knew that there

were always plenty of recruits to take their places without resorting to

conscription. The real responsibility was with the Germans. He

suggested that I might go out to the German trenches and see if I

could obtain a paper from them. He thought if I were quick about it I

might get at least a yard in front of the British parapet in daylight. His

sense of humour I had recognized when we had met in Bulgaria.

Any traveller is bound to meet men whom he has met before in the

travelled British army. At the brigade headquarters town, which, as

one of the officers said, proved that bricks and mortar can float in

mud, the face of the brigadier seemed familiar to me. I found that I

had met him in Shanghai in the Boxer campaign, when he had come

across a riotous China from India on one of those journeys in remote

Asia which British officers are fond of making. He was "all there,"

whether dealing with a mob of Orientals or with Germans in the

trenches. I made myself at home in the parlour of the private house

occupied by himself and staff, while he went on with his work. No flag

outside the house; no sign that it was headquarters. Motor-cars

stopped only long enough for an officer to enter or alight. Brigade

headquarters is precisely the target that German aeroplanes or spies

like to locate for their guns.

"Are you ready? Have you your rubber boots?" the brigadier asked a

few minutes later, as he put his head in at the parlour door. It would

not do to approach the trenches until after dark. Of course, I had

rubber boots. One might as well try to go to sea without a boat as to

trenches without rubber boots in winter. "I'll take my constitutional," he

added; "the trouble with this kind of war is that you get no exercise."

He was a small man, but how he could walk! I began to understand

why the Boxers could not catch him. He turned back after we had

gone a mile or more and one of his staff went on with me to a point

where, just at dusk, I was turned over to another pilot, an aide from

battalion headquarters, and we set out across sodden fields that had

yielded beetroot in the last harvest, taking care not to step in shell-

holes. Dusk settled into darkness. No human being was in sight

except ourselves.

"There's the first line of German trenches before the attack," said my

companion. "Our guns got fairly on them." Dimly I saw what seemed

like a huge, long, irregular furrow of earth which had been torn almost

out of the shape of a trench by British shells. "There was no living in it

when the guns began all together. The only thing to do was to get

out."

Around us was utter silence, where the hell of thunders and

destruction by the artillery had raged during the battle. Then a spent

or ricochet bullet swept overhead, with the whistle of complaint of

spent bullets at having travelled far without hitting any object. It had

gone high over the British trenches; it had carried the full range, and

the chance of its hitting anyone was ridiculously small. But the nearer

you get to the trenches, the more likely these strays are to find a

victim. "Hit by a stray bullet!" is a very common saying at the front.

At last we felt the solidity of a paved road under our feet, and

following this we came to a peasant's cottage. Inside, two soldiers

were sitting beside telephone and telegraph instruments, behind a

window stuffed with sandbags. On our way across the fields we had

stepped on wires laid on the ground; we had stooped to avoid wires

stretched on poles--the wires that form the web of the army's

intelligence.

Of course, no two units of communication are dependent on one wire.

There is always a duplicate. If one is broken it is immediately

repaired. The factories spin out wire to talk over and barbed wire for

entanglements in front of trenches and weave millions of bags to be

filled with sand for breastworks to protect men from bullets. If Sir John

French wished, he could talk with Lord Kitchener in London and this

battalion headquarters at Neuve Chapelle within the same space of

time that a railroad president may speak over the Long Distance from

Chicago to New York and order dinner out in the suburbs.

These two men at the table, their faces tanned by exposure, men in

the thirties, had the British regular of long service stamped all over

them. War was an old story to them; and an old story, too, laying

signal wires under fire.

"We're very comfortable," said one. "No danger from stray bullets or

from shrapnel; but if one of the Jack Johnsons come in, why, there's

no more cottage and no more argument between you and me. We're

dead and maybe buried, or maybe scattered over the landscape,

along with the broken pieces of the roof."

A soldier was on guard with bayonet fixed inside that little room, which

had passageway to the cellar past the table, among straw beds. This

seemed rather peculiar. The reason lay on one of the beds in a

private's khaki. He had come into the battalion's trenches from our

front and said that he belonged to the D------regiment and had been

out on patrol and lost his way.

It was two miles to that regiment and two miles is a long distance to

stray between two lines of trenches so close together, when at any

point in your own line you will find friends. It was possible that this

fellow's real name was Hans Schmidt, who had learned cockney

English in childhood in London, and in a dead British private's uniform

had come into the British trenches to get information to which he was

anything but welcome.

He was to be sent under guard to the D------regiment

for identification; and if he were found to be a Hans and not a

Tommy--well, though he had tried a very stupid dodge he must have

known what to expect when he was found out, if his officers had

properly trained him in German rules of war.

I had a glimpse of him in the candlelight before stooping to feel my

way down three or four narrow steps to the cellar, where the farmer

ordinarily kept potatoes and vegetables. There were straw beds

around the walls here, too. The major commanding the battalion rose

from his seat at a table on which were some cutlery, a jam pot,

tobacco, pipes, a newspaper or two, and army telegraph forms and

maps.

If the hosts of mansions could only make their hospitality as simple as

the major's, there would be less affectation in the world. He

introduced me to an officer sitting on the other side of the table and to

one lying in his blankets against the wall, who lifted his head and

blinked and said that he was very glad to see me.

It is a small world, for China cropped up here, as it had at brigade

headquarters. The major had been in garrison at Peking when the

war began. If my shipmate on a long battleship cruise, Lt.-Col. Dion

Williams, U.S.M.C, reads this out in Peking let it tell him that the major

is just as urbane in the cellar of a second-rate farmhouse on the

outskirts of Neuve Chapelle as he would be in a corner of the Peking

Club.

"How is it? Painful now?" asked the major of Captain P-----, on the

other side of the table.

"Oh, no! It's quite all right," said the captain.

"Using the sling?"

"Part of the time. Hardly need it, though."

Captain P-----was one of those men whose eyes are always smiling;

who seems, wherever he is, to be glad that he is not in a worse place;

who goes right on smiling at the mud in the trenches and bullets and

shells and death. They are not emotional, the British, perhaps, but

they are given to cheeriness, if not to laughter, and they have a way

of smiling at times when smiles are much needed. The smile is more

often found at the front than back at headquarters; or perhaps it is

more noticeable there.

"You see, he got a bullet through the arm yesterday," the major

explained. "He was reported wounded, but remained on duty in the

trench." I saw that the captain would rather not have publicity given to

such an ordinary incident. He did not see why people should talk

about his arm. "You are to go with him into the trench for the night,"

the major added; and I thought myself very lucky in my companion.

"Aren't you going to have dinner with us?" the major asked him.

"Why, I had something to eat not very long ago," said Captain P-----.

One was not sure whether he had or not.

"There's plenty," said the major.

"In that event, I don't see why I shouldn't eat when I have a chance,"

the captain returned; which I found was a characteristic trench habit,

particularly in winter when exposure to the raw, cold air calls for plenty

of body-furnace heat.

We had a ration soup and ration ham and ration prunes and cheese;

what Tommy Atkins gets. When we were outside the house and

starting for the trench this captain, with his wounded arm, wanted to

carry my knapsack. He seemed to think that refusal was breaking the

Hague conventions.

Where we turned off the road, broken finger-points of brick walls in

the faint moonlight indicated the site of Neuve Chapelle; other

fragments of walls in front of us were the remains of a house; and

that broken tree-trunk showed what a big shell can do. The trunk, a

good eighteen inches in diameter, had not only been cut in two by

one of the monsters of the new British artillery, but had been carried

on for ten feet and left lying solidly in the bed of splinters of the top

of the stump. All this had been in the field of that battle of a day,

which was as fierce as the fiercest day at Gettysburg, and fought

within about the same space. Every tree, every square rod of ground,

had been paid for by shells, bullets, and human life.

But now we were near the trenches; or, rather, the breastworks. We

are always speaking of the trenches, while not all parts of the line are

held by trenches. A trench is dug in the ground; a breastwork is

raised from the level of the ground. At some points a trench becomes

practically a breastwork, as its wall is raised to get free of the mud

and water.

We came into the open and heard the sound of voices and saw a

spotty white wall; for some of the sandbags of the new British

breastworks still retained their original colour. On the reverse side of

this wall lines were leaning in readiness, their fixed bayonets faintly

gleaming in the moonlight. I felt of the edge of one and it was sharp,

quite prepared for business. In the surroundings of damp earth and

mud-bespattered men, this rifle seemed the cleanest thing of all,

meticulously clean, that ready weapon whose well-aimed and telling

fire, in obedient and cool hands, was the object of all the drill of the

new infantry in England; of all the drill of all infantry. Where pickets

watched in the open in the old days before armies met in pitched

battle, an occasional soldier now stands with rifle laid on the parapet,

watching.

Across a reach of field faintly were made out the white spots of

another wall of breastworks, the German, at the edge of a stretch of

woods, the Bois du Bies. The British reached these woods in their

advance; but, their aeroplanes being unable to spot the fall of shells

in the mist, they had to fall back for want of artillery support. Along

this line where we stood outside the village they stopped; and to stop

is to set the spades going to begin the defences which, later, had

risen to a man's height, and with rifles and machine-guns had riddled

the German counter-attack.

And the Germans had to go back to the edge of the woods, where

they, too, began digging and building their new line. So the enemies

were fixed again behind their walls of earth, facing each other across

the open, where it was death for any man to expose himself by day.

"Will you have a shot, sir?" one of the sentries asked me.

"At what?"

"Why, at the top of the trench over there, or at anything you see

moving," he said.

But I did not think that it was an invitation for a non-combatant to

accept. If the bullet went over the top of the trench it had still two

thousand yards and more to go, and it might find a target before it

died. So, in view of the law of probabilities, no bullet is quite waste.

"Now, which is my house?" asked Captain P------.

"I really can't find my own home in the dark."

Behind the breastwork were many little houses three or four feet in

height, all of the same pattern, and made of boards and mud. The

mud is put on top to keep out shrapnel bullets.

"Here you are, sir!" said a soldier.

Asking me to wait until he made a light, the captain bent over as if

about to crawl under the top rail of a fence and his head disappeared.

After he had put a match to a candle and stuck it on a stick thrust into

the wall, I could see the interior of his habitation. A rubber sheet

spread on the moist earth served as floor, carpet, mattress, and bed.

At a squeeze there was room for two others besides himself. They

did not need any doormat, for when they lay down their feet would be

at the door.

"Quite cosy, don't you think?" remarked the captain. He seemed to

feel that he had a royal chamber. But, then, he was the kind of man

who might sleep in a muddy field under a wagon and regard the

shelter of the wagon body as a luxury. "Leave your knapsack here,"

he continued, "and we'll see what is doing along the line."

In other words, after you had left your bag in the host's hall, he

suggested a stroll in the village or across the fields. But only to see

war would he have asked you to walk in such mud.

"Not quite so loud!" he warned a soldier who was bringing up boards

from the rear under cover of darkness. "If the Germans hear they

may start firing."

Two other men were piling mud on top of a section of breastwork at

an angle to the main line.

"What is that for?" the captain asked.

"They get an enfilade on us here, sir, and Mr.------ (the lieutenant) told

me to make this higher."

"That's no good. A bullet will go right through," said the captain. "We'll

have to wait until we get more sandbags."

A little farther on we came to an open space, with no protection

between us and the Germans. Half a dozen men were piling earth

against a staked chicken wire to extend the breastworks. Rather, they

were piling mud, and they were besmirched from head to foot. They

looked like reeking Neptunes rising from a slough. In the same

position in daylight, standing full height before German rifles at three

hundred yards, they would have been shot dead before they could

leap to cover.

"How does it go?" asked the captain.

"Very well, sir; though what we need is sandbags."

"We'll have some up to-morrow."

At the moment there was no firing in the vicinity. Faintly I heard the

Germans pounding stakes, at work improving their own breastworks.

A British soldier appeared out of the darkness in front.

"We've found two of our men out there with their heads blown off by

shells," he said. "Have we permission to go out and bury them, sir?"

"Yes."

They would be as safe as the fellows piling mud against the chicken

wire, unless the Germans opened fire. If they did, we could fire on

their working-party, or in the direction of the sound. For that matter,

we knew through our glasses by day the location of any weak places

in their breastworks, and they knew where ours were. A sort of "after-

you-gentlemen-if-you-fire-we-shall" understanding sometimes exists

between the foes up to a certain point. Each side understands

instinctively the limitation of that point. Too much noise in working, a

number of men going out to bury dead or making enough noise to be

heard, and the ball begins. A deep, broad ditch filled with water made

a break in our line. No doubt a German machine-gun was trained on

it.

"A little bridging is required here," said the captain. "We'll have it done

to-morrow night. The break is no disadvantage if they attack; in fact,

we'd rather like to have them try for it. But it makes movement along

the line difficult by day."

When we were across and once more behind the breastworks, he

called my attention to some high ground in the rear.

"One of our officers took a short cut across there in daylight," he said.

"He was quite exposed, and they drew a bead on him from the

German trench and got him through the arm. Not a serious hit. It

wasn't cricket for anyone to go out to bring him in. He realized this,

and called out to leave him to himself, and crawled to cover."

I was getting the commonplaces of trench life. Thus far it had been a

quiet night and was to remain so. Reddish, flickering swaths of light

were thrown across the fields between the trenches by the enemy's

Roman candle flares. One tried to estimate how many flares the

Germans must use every night from Switzerland to the North Sea.

On our side, the only light was from our braziers. Thomas Atkins has

become a patron of braziers made by punching holes in buckets; and

so have the Germans. Punch holes in a bucket, start a fire inside,

and you have cheer and warmth and light through the long night

vigils. Two or three days before we had located a sniper between the

lines by seeing him swing his fire-pot to make a draught against the

embers.

If you have ever sat around a camp-fire in the forest or on the plains

you need be told nothing further. One of the old, glamorous features

of war survives in these glowing braziers, spreading their genial rays

among the little houses and lighting the faces of the men who stand

or squat in encircling groups around the coals, which dry wet clothes,

slake the moisture of a section of earth, make the bayonets against

the walls glisten, and reveal the position of a machine-gun with its

tape ready for firing.

Values are relative, and a brazier in the trenches makes the

satisfaction of a steam-heated room in winter very superficial and

artificial. You are at home there with Tommy Atkins, regular of an old

line English regiment, in his heavy khaki overcoat and solid boots and

wool puttees, a sturdy, hardened man of a terrific war. He, the

regular, the shilling-a-day policeman of the empire, was still doing the

fighting at the front. The new army, which embraces all classes, was

not yet in action.

This man and that one were at Mons. This one and that one had

been through the whole campaign without once seeing Mother

England for whom they were fighting. The affection in which Captain

P------was held extended through his regiment, for we had left his own

company behind. At every turn he was asked about his arm.

"You've made a mistake, sir. This isn't a hospital," as one man

expressed it. Oh, but the captain was bored with hearing about that

arm! If he is wounded again I am sure that he will try to keep the fact

a secret.

These veterans could "grouse," as the British call it. Grousing is one

of Tommy's privileges. When they got to grousing worst on the retreat

from Mons, their officers knew that what they really wanted was to

make another stand. They were tired of falling back; they meant to

take a rest and fight a while. Their language was yours, the language

in which our own laws and schoolbooks are written. They made the

old blood call. For months they had been taking bitter medicine; very

bitter for a British soldier. The way they took it will, perhaps, remain a

greater tribute than any part they play in future victories.

"How do they feel in the States?" I was asked. "Against us?"

"No. By no means."

"I don't see how they could be!" Tommy exclaimed.

Tommy may not be much on argument as it is developed by the

controversial spirit of college professors, but he had said about all

there was to say. How can we be? Hardly, after you come to know T.

Atkins and his officers and talk English with them around their camp-

fires.

"The Germans are always sending up flares," I remarked. "You send

up none. How about it?"

"It cheers them. They're downhearted!" said one of the group. "You

wouldn't deny them their fireworks, would you, sir?"

"That shows who is top dog," said another. "They're the ones that are

worried."

I had heard of trench exhaustion, trench despair, but there was no

sign of it in a regiment that had been through all the hell and mire that

the British army had known since the war began. To no one had

Neuve Chapelle meant so much as to these common soldiers. It was

their first real victory. They were standing on soil won from the

Germans.

"We're going to Berlin!" said a big fellow who was standing, palms

downward to the fire. "It's settled. We're going to Berlin."

A smaller man with his back against the sandbags disagreed. There

was a trench argument.

"No, we're going to the Rhine," he said. "The Russians are going to

Berlin." (This was in March, 1915, remember.)

"How can they when they ain't over the Balkans yet?"

"The Carpathians, you mean."

"Well, they're both mountains and the Russians have got to cross

them. And there's a place called Cracow in that region. What's the

matter of a pair of mountain ranges between you and me, Bill? You're

strong on geography, but you fail to follow the campaign."

"The Rhine, I say!"

"It's the Rhine first, but Berlin is what you want to keep your mind on."

Then I asked if they had ever had any doubt that they would reach

the Rhine.

"How could we, sir?"

"And how about the Germans. Do you hate them?"

"Hate!" exclaimed the big man. "What good would it do to hate them?

No, we don't hate. We get our blood up when we're fighting and when

they don't play the game. But hate! Don't you think that's kind of

ridiculous, sir?"

"How do they fight?"

"They take a bit of beating, do the Boches!"

"So you call them Boches!"

"Yes. They don't like that. But sometimes we call them Allemands,

which is Germans in French. Oh, we're getting quite French

scholars!"

"They're good soldiers. Not many tricks they're not up to. But in my

opinion they're overdoing the hate. You can't keep up to your work on

hate, sir. I should think it would be weakening to the mind, too."

"Still, you would like the war over? You'd like to go home?"

They certainly would. Back to the barracks, out of the trenches! They

certainly would.

"And call it a draw?"

"Call it a draw, now! Call it a draw, after all we've been through------"

"Spring is coming. The ground will dry up and it will be warm."

"And the going will be good to Berlin, as it was back from Paris in

August, we tell the Boches."

"Good for the Russians going over the Carpathians, or the Pyrenees,

or whatever those mountains are, too. I read they're all covered with

snow in winter."

It was good, regular soldier talk, very "homey" to me. As you will

observe, I have not elided the h's. Indeed, Tommy has a way of

prefixing his h's to the right vowels more frequently than a generation

ago. The Soldiers Three type has passed. Popular education will

have its way and induce better habits. Believing in the old remedy for

exhaustion and exposure to cold, the army served out a tot of rum

every day to the men. But many of them are teetotalers, these hardy

regulars, and not even Mulvaney will think them effeminate when they

have seen fighting which makes anything Mulvaney ever saw child's

play. So they asked for candy and chocolate, instead of rum.

Some people have said that Tommy has no patriotism. He fights

because he is paid and it is his business. That is an insinuation.

Tommy doesn't care for the "hero stuff," or for waving flags and

speechmaking. Possibly he knows how few Germans that sort of

thing kills. His weapons are bullets. To put it cogently, he is fighting

because he doesn't want any Kaiser "in his."

Is not that what all the speeches in Parliament are about and all the

editorials and the recruiting campaign? Is not that what England and

France are fighting for? It seems to me that Tommy's is a very

practical patriotism, free from cant; and the way that he refuses to

hate or to get excited, but sticks to it, must be very irritating to the

Germans.

"Would you like a Boche helmet for a souvenir, sir?" asked a soldier

who appeared on the outer edge of the group. He was the small,

active type, a British soldier with the élan of the Frenchman. "There

are lots of them out among the German dead "--the unburied German

dead who fell like grass before the mower in a desperate and futile

counter-attack to recover Neuve Chapelle. "I'll have one for you on

your way back."

There was no stopping him; he had gone.

"Matty's a devil!" said the big man. "He'll get it, all right. He's equal

to reaching over the Boches' parapet and picking one off a Boche's

head!"

As we proceeded on our way, officers came out of the little houses to

meet Captain P------and the stranger civilian. They had to come out,

as there was no room to take us inside; and sometimes they talked

shop together after I had answered the usual question, "Is America

against us?" There seemed to be an idea that we were, possibly

because of the prodigious advertising tactics of a minority. But any

feeling that we might be did not interfere with their simple courtesy, or

lead them to express any bitterness or break into argument.

"How are things going on over your side?"

"Nicely."

"Any shelling?"

"A little this morning. No harm done."

"We cleaned out one bad sniper to-day."

"Ought to have some sandbags up to-night."

"It's a bad place there. They've got a machine-gun trained which has

quite a sweep. I asked if the artillery shouldn't put in a word, but the

general didn't think it worth while."

My Year of the War Including an Account of Experiences with the Troops in France and the Record of a Visit to the Grand Fleet Which is Here Given for the First Time in its Complete Form · 第 7 / 11 题

Anyone who saw the tenderfoot pilgrimage to the Alaskan goldfield in