enemy's, the guns keep vigil. Every night the flashes on the horizon are
a reminder to those in the distance that the battle never ends. Their
voices are like none other except guns; the flash from their muzzles is
as suggestive as the spark from a dynamo, which says that death is there
for reaching out your hand. Something docile is in their might, like the
answering of the elephant's bulk to the mahout's command, in their
noiseless elevation and depression, and the bigger they are the smoother
appears their recoil as they settle back into place ready for another
shot. The valleys where the guns hide play tricks with acoustics. I
have sat on a hill with a dozen batteries firing under the brow and
their crashes were hardly audible.
"Only an artillery preparation, sir!" said an artilleryman as we started
up a slope stiff with guns, as the English say, all firing. You waited
your chance to run by after a battery had fired and were on the way
toward the next one before the one behind sent another round hurtling
overhead.
The deep-throated roar of the big calibers is not so hard on the ears as
the crack of the smaller calibers. Returning, you go in face of the
blasts and then, though it rarely happens, you have in mind, if you have
ever been in front of one, the awkward possibility of a premature burst
of a shell in your face. Signs tell you where those black mouths which
you might not see are hidden, lest you walk straight into one as it
belches flame. When you have seen guns firing by thousands as far as the
eye can reach from a hill; when you have seen every caliber at work and
your head aches from the noise, the thing becomes overpowering and
monotonous. Yet you return again, drawn by the uncanny fascination of
artillery power.
Riding home one day after hours with the guns in an attack, I saw for
the first time one of the monster railroad guns firing as I passed by on
the road. Would I get out to watch it? I hesitated. Yes, of course. But
it was only another gun, a giant tube of steel painted in frog patches
to hide it from aerial observation; only another gun, though it sent a
two-thousand-pound projectile to a target ten miles away, which a man
from a sausage balloon said was "on."
XXI
BY THE WAY
The River Somme--Amiens cathedral--Sunday afternoon
promenaders--Women, old men and boys--A prosperous old town--Madame
of the little Restaurant des Huîtres--The old waiter at the
hotel--The stork and the sea-gull--Distinguished visitors--Horses and
dogs--Water carts--Gossips of battle--The donkeys.
What contrasts! There was none so pleasant as that when you took the
river road homeward after an action. Leaving behind the Ridge and the
scarred slope and the crowding motor trucks in their cloud of dust, you
were in a green world soothing to eyes which were painful from watching
shell-blasts. Along the banks of the Somme on a hot day you might see
white figures of muscle-armored youth washed clean of the grime of the
firing-line in the exhilaration of minutes, seconds, glowingly lived
without regard to the morrow, shaking drops of water free from white
skins, under the shade of trees untouched by shell fire, after a plunge
in cool waters. Then from a hill where a panorama was flung free to the
eye, the Somme at your feet held islands of peace in its shining net as
it broke away from confining green walls and wound across the plain
toward Amiens.
The Somme is kindly by nature with a desire to embrace all the country
around, and Amiens has trained its natural bent to man's service.
It gave softer springs than those of any ambulance for big motor scows
that brought the badly wounded down from the front past the rich market
gardens that sent their produce in other boats to market. Under bridges
its current was divided and subdivided until no one could tell which was
Somme and which canal, busy itself as the peasants and the shopkeepers
doing a good turn to humankind, grinding wheat in one place and in
another farther on turning a loom to weave the rich velvets for which
Amiens is famous, and between its stages of usefulness supplying a
Venetian effect where balconies leaned across one of its subdivisions,
an area of old houses on crooked, short streets at their back huddled
with a kind of ancient reverence near the great cathedral.
At first you might be discriminative about the exterior of Amiens
cathedral, having in mind only the interior as being worth while. I went
inside frequently and the call to go was strongest after seeing an
action. Standing on that stone floor where princes and warriors had
stood through eight hundred years of the history of France, I have seen
looking up at the incomparable nave with its majestic symmetry, French
_poilus_ in their faded blue, helmets in hand and perhaps the white of
a bandage showing, spruce generals who had a few hours away from their
commands, dust-laden dispatch riders, boyish officers with the bit of
blue ribbon that they had won for bravery on their breasts and knots of
privates in worn khaki. The man who had been a laborer before he put on
uniform was possessed by the same awe as the one who had been favored by
birth and education. A black-robed priest passing with his soft tread
could not have differed much to the eye from one who was there when the
Black Prince was fighting in France or the soldiers of Joan or of Condé
came to look at the nave.
The cathedral and the Somme helped to make you whole with the world and
with time. After weeks you ceased to be discriminative about the
exterior. The cathedral was simply the cathedral. Returning from the
field, I knew where on every road I should have the first glimpse of its
serene, assertive mass above the sea of roofs--always there, always the
same, immortal; while the Ridge rocked with the Allied gun-blasts that
formed the police line of fire for its protection.
I liked to walk up the canal tow-path where the townspeople went on
Sunday afternoons for their promenade, the blue of French soldiers on
leave mingling with civilian black--soldiers with wives or mothers on
their arms, safe for the time being. One scene reappears to memory as I
write: A young fellow back from the trenches bearing his sturdy boy of
two on his shoulder and the black-eyed young mother walking beside him,
both having eyes for nothing in the world except the boy.
The old fishermen would tell you as they waited for a bite that the
German was _fichu_, their faith in the credit of France unimpaired as
they lived on the income of the savings of their industry before they
retired. You asked gardeners about business, which you knew was good
with that ever-hungry and spendthrift British Army "bulling" the market.
One day while taking a walk, Beach Thomas and I saw a diver preparing to
go down to examine the abutment of a bridge and we sat down to look on
with a lively interest, when we might have seen hundreds of guns firing.
It was a change. Nights, after dispatches were written, Gibbs and I,
anything but gory-minded, would walk in the silence, having the tow-path
to ourselves, and after a mutual agreement to talk of anything but the
war would revert to the same old subject.
On other days when only "nibbling" was proceeding on the Ridge you might
strike across country over the stubble, flushing partridges from the
clover. And the women, the old men and the boys got in all the crops.
How I do not know, except by rising early and keeping at it until dark,
which is the way that most things worth while are accomplished in this
world. Those boys from ten to sixteen who were driving the plow for next
year's sowing had become men in their steadiness.
Amiens was happy in the memory of the frustration of what might have
happened when her citizens looked at the posters, already valuable
relics, that had been put up by von Kluck's army as it passed through on
the way to its about-face on the Marne. The old town, out of the battle
area, out of the reach of shells, had prospered exceedingly.
Shopkeepers, particularly those who sold oysters, fresh fish, fruits,
cheese, all delicacies whatsoever to victims of iron rations in the
trenches, could retire on their profits unless they died from exhaustion
in accumulating more. They took your money so politely that parting with
it was a pleasure, no matter what the prices, though they were always
lower for fresh eggs than in New York.
We came to know all with the intimacy that war develops, but for sheer
character and energy the blue ribbon goes to Madame of the little
Restaurant des Huîtres. She needed no gallant husband to make her a
marshal's wife, as in the case of Sans-Gêne, for she was a marshal
herself. She should have the _croix de guerre_ with all the stars and a
palm, too, for knowing how to cook. A small stove which was as busy
with its sizzling pans as a bombing party stood at the foot of a cramped
stairway, whose ascent revealed a few tables, with none for two and
everybody sitting elbow to elbow, as it were, in the small dining-room.
There were dishes enough and clean, too, and spotless serviettes, but no
display of porcelain and silver was necessary, for the food was a
sufficient attraction. Madame was all for action. If you did not order
quickly she did so for you, taking it for granted that a wavering mind
indicated a palate that called for arbitrary treatment.
She had a machine gun tongue on occasion. If you did not like her
restaurant it was clear that other customers were waiting for your
place, and generals capitulated as promptly as lieutenants. A
camaraderie developed at table under the spur of her dynamic presence
and her occasional artillery concentrations, which were brief and
decisive, for she had no time to waste. Broiled lobster and sole,
oysters, filets and chops, sizzling fried potatoes, crisp salads,
mountains of forest strawberries with pots of thick cream and delectable
coffee descended from her hands, with no mistake in any orders or delay
in the prompt succession of courses, on the cloth before you by some
legerdemain of manipulation in the narrow quarters to the accompaniment
of her repartee. It was past understanding how she accomplished such
results in quantity and quality on that single stove with the help of
one assistant whom, apparently, she found in the way at times; for the
assistant would draw back in the manner of one who had put her finger
into an electric fan as her mistress began a manipulation of pots and
pans.
If Madame des Huîtres should come to New York, I wonder--yes, she would
be overwhelmed by people who had anything like a trench appetite. Soon
she would be capitalized, with branches des Huîtres up and down the
land, while she would no longer touch a skillet, but would ride in a
limousine and grow fat, and I should not like her any more.
People who could not get into des Huîtres or were not in the secret
which, I fear, was selfishly kept by those who were, had to dine at the
hotel, where a certain old waiter--all young ones being at the
front--though called mad could be made the object of method if he had
not method in madness. When he seemed about to collapse with fatigue,
tell him that there had been a big haul of German prisoners on the Ridge
and the blaze of delight in his dark eyes would galvanize him. If he
should falter again, a shout of, "_Vive l'Entente cordiale! En avant!_"
would send him off with coat-tails at right angles to his body as he
sprang into the midst of the riot of waiters outside the kitchen door,
from which he would emerge triumphantly bearing the course that was
next in order. Nor would he allow you to skip one. You must take them
all or, as the penalty of breaking up the system, you went hungry.
Outside in the court where you went for coffee and might sometimes get
it if you gave the head waiter good news from the front, a stork and a
sea-gull with clipped wings posed at the fountain. What tales of battle
were told in sight of this incongruous pair whose antics relieved the
strain of war! When the stork took a step or two the gull plodded along
after him and when the gull moved the stork also moved, the two never
being more than three or four feet apart. Yet each maintained an
attitude of detachment as if loath to admit the slightest affection for
each other. Foolish birds, as many said and laughed at them; and again,
heroes out of the hell on the Ridge and wholly unconscious of their
heroism said that the two had the wisdom of the ages, particularly the
stork, though expert artillery opinion was that the practical gull
thought that only his own watchfulness kept the wisdom of the ages from
being drowned in the fountain in an absent-minded moment, though the
water was not up to a stork's ankle-joint. More nonsense, when the call
was for reaction from the mighty drama, was woven around these
entertainers by men who could not go to plays than would be credible to
people reading official bulletins; woven by dining parties of officers
who when dusk fell went indoors and gathered around the piano before
going into a charge on the morrow.
At intervals men in civilian clothes, soft hats, gaiters over everyday
trousers, golf suits, hunting suits, appeared at the hotel or were seen
stalking about captured German trenches, their garb as odd in that
ordered world of khaki as powdered wig, knee-breeches and silver buckles
strolling up Piccadilly or Fifth Avenue. Prime ministers, Cabinet
members, great financiers, potentates, journalists, poets, artists of
many nationalities came to do the town. They saw the Ridge under its
blanket of shell-smoke, the mighty columns of transport, all the
complex, enormous organization of that secret world, peeked into German
dugouts, and in common with all observers estimated the distance of the
nearest shell-burst from their own persons.
Many were amazed to find that generals worked in chateaux over maps,
directing by telephone, instead of standing on hilltops to give their
commands, and that war was a systematic business, which made those who
had been at the front writing and writing to prove that it was wonder if
nobody read what they wrote. An American who said that he did not see
why all the trucks and horses and wagons and men did not lose their way
was suggestive of the first vivid impressions which the "new eye"
brought to the scene. Another praised my first book for the way it had
made life at the front clear and then proceeded to state his surprise at
finding that trenches did not run straight, but in traverses, and that
soldiers lived in houses instead of tents and gunners did not see their
targets. Now he had seen this mighty army at work for himself. It is the
only way. I give up hope of making others see it.
So grim the processes of fighting, so lacking in picturesqueness, that
one welcomed any of the old symbols of war. I regretted yet rejoiced
that the horse was still a factor. It was good to think that the
gasoline engine had saved the sore backs of the pack animals of other
days, removed the horror of dead horses beside the road and horses
driven to exhaustion by the urgency of fierce necessity, and that a
shell in the transport meant a radiator smashed instead of flesh torn
and scattered. Yet the horse was still serving man at the front and the
dog still flattering him. I have seen dogs lying dead on the field where
the mascot of a battalion had run along with the men in a charge; dogs
were found in German dugouts, and one dog adopted by a corps staff had
refused to leave the side of his fallen master, a German officer, until
the body was removed.
The horse brought four-footed life into the dead world of the slope,
patiently drawing his load, mindless of gun-blasts and the shriek of
shell-fragments once he was habituated to them. As he can pass over
rough ground, he goes into areas where no motor vehicle except the tanks
may go. He need not wait on the road-builders before he takes the
eighteen pounders to their new positions or follows them with
ammunition. Far out on the field I have seen groups of artillery horses
waiting in a dip in the ground while their guns were within five hundred
yards of the firing-line, and winding across dead fields toward an
isolated battery the caisson horses trotting along with shells bursting
around them.
Upon August days when the breeze that passed overhead was only
tantalization to men in communication trenches carrying up ammunition
and bombs, when dugouts were ovens, when the sun made the steel helmet a
hot skillet-lid over throbbing temples, the horse-drawn water carts
wound up the slope to assuage burning thirst and back again, between the
gates of hell and the piping station, making no more fuss than a country
postman on his rounds.
Practically all the water that the fighters had, aside from what was in
their canteens, must be brought up in this way, for the village wells
were filled with the remains of shell-crushed houses. Gossips of battle
the water men, they and the stretcher-bearers both non-combatants going
and coming under the shells up to the battle line, but particularly so
the water men, who passed the time of day with every branch, each
working in its own compartment. When the weather was bad the water man's
business became slack and the lot of the stretcher-bearer grew worse in
the mud. What stories the stretcher-bearers brought in of wounded blown
off litters by shells, of the necessity of choosing the man most likely
to survive when only one of two could be carried, of whispered messages
from the dying, and themselves keeping to their work with cheery British
phlegm; and the water men told of new gun positions, of where the shells
were thickest, of how the fight was going.
It irritated the water men, prosaic in their disregard of danger, to
have a tank hit on the way out. If it were hit on the way back when it
was empty this was of less account, for new tanks were waiting in
reserve. Tragedy for them was when a horse was killed and often they
returned with horses wounded. It did not occur to the man that he might
be hit; it was the loss of a horse or a tank that worried him. One had
his cart knocked over by a salvo of shells and set upright by the next,
whereupon, according to the account, he said to his mare: "Come on,
Mary, I always told you the Boches were bad shots!" But there are too
many stories of the water men to repeat without sifting.
We must not forget the little donkeys which the French brought from
Africa to take the place of men in carrying supplies up to the trenches.
Single file they trotted along on their errand and they had their own
hospitals for wounded. It is said that when curtains of fire began ahead
they would throw forward their long ears inquiringly and hug close to
the side of the trench for cover and even edge into a dugout with the
men, who made room for as much donkey as possible, or when in the open
they would seek the shelter of shell-craters. Lest their perspicacity be
underrated, French soldiers even credited the wise elders among them
with the ability to distinguish between different calibers of shells.
XXII
THE MASTERY OF THE AIR
"Nose dives" and "crashers"--The most intense duels in
history--Aviators the pride of nations--Beauchamp--The D'Artagnan of
the air--Mastery of the air--The aristocrat of war, the golden youth
of adventure--Nearer immortality than any other living man can
be--The British are reckless aviators--Aerial influence on the
soldier's psychology--Varieties of aeroplanes--Immense numbers of
aeroplanes in the battles in the air.
Wing tip touching wing tip two phantoms passed in the mist fifteen
thousand feet above the earth and British plane and German plane which
had grazed each other were lost in the bank of cloud. The dark mass
which an aviator sees approaching when he is over the battlefield proves
to be a fifteen-inch shell at the top of its parabola which passes ten
feet over his head. A German aviator thinking he is near home circles
downward on an overcast day toward a British aerodrome to find out his
mistake too late, and steps out of his machine to be asked by his
captors if he won't come in and have tea. Thus, true accounts that come
to the aviators' mess make it unnecessary to carry your imagination with
you at the front.
They talk of "nose dives" and "crashers," which mean the way an enemy's
plane was brought down, and although they have no pose or theatricalism
the consciousness of belonging to the wonder corps of modern war is not
lacking. One returns from a flight and finds that a three-inch
anti-aircraft gun-shell has gone through the body of his plane.
"So that was it! Hardly felt it!" he said.
If the shell had exploded? Oh, well, that is a habit of shells; and in
that case the pilot would be in the German lines unrecognizable among
the débris of his machine after a "crasher."
Where in the old West gunmen used to put a notch on their revolver
handle for every man killed, now in each aviator's record is the number
of enemy planes which he has brought down. When a Frenchman has ten his
name goes into the official bulletin. Everything contributes to urge on
the fighting aviator to more and more victims till one day he, too, is a
victim. Never were duels so detached or so intense. No clashing of
steel, no flecks of blood, only two men with wings. While the soldier
feels his weapon go home and the bomber sees his bomb in flight, the
aviator watches for his opponent to drop forward in his seat as the
first sign that he has lost control of his plane and of victory, and he
does not hear the passing of the bullets that answer those from his own
machine gun. One hero comes to take the place of another who has been
lost. A smiling English youth was embarrassed when asked how he brought
down the great Immelmann, most famous of German aviators.
Nelson's "Death or Westminster Abbey" has become paraphrased to "Death
or the _communiqué_." At twenty-one, while a general of division is
unknown except in the army an aviator's name may be the boast of a
nation. In him is expressed the national imagination, the sense of
hero-worship which people love to personify. The British aviation corps
stuck to anonymity until the giving of a Victoria Cross one day revealed
that Lieutenant Ball had brought down his twenty-sixth German plane.
Soon after the taking of Fort Douaumont when I was at Verdun, Beauchamp,
blond, blue-eyed and gentle of manner, who had thrilled all France by
bombing Essen, said, "Now they will expect me to go farther and do
something greater;" and I was not surprised to learn a month later that
he had been killed. Something in the way he spoke convinced me that he
foresaw death and accepted it as a matter of course; and he realized,
too, the penalty of being a hero. He had flown over Essen and dropped
his bombs and seen them burst, which was all of his story.
The public thrill over such exploits is the greater because of their
simplicity. An aviator has no experiences on the road; he cannot stop to
talk to anyone. There is flight; there is a lever that releases a bomb;
there is a machine gun. He may not indulge in psychology, which would be
wool-gathering, when every faculty is objectively occupied. He is
strangely helpless, a human being borne through space by a machine, and
when he returns to the mess he really has little to tell except as it
relates to mechanism and technique.
The Royal Flying Corps, which is the official name, never wants for
volunteers. Ever the number of pilots is in excess of the number of
machines. Young men with embroidered wings on their breasts, which prove
that they have qualified, waited on factories to turn out wings for
flying. Flight itself is simple, but the initiative equal to great deeds
is another thing. Here you revert to an innate gift of the individual
who, finding in danger the zest of a glorious, curiosity, the
intoxication of action, clear eye, steady hand answering lightning
quickness of thought, becomes the D'Artagnan of the air. There is no
telling what boyish neophyte will show a steady hand in daring the
supreme hazards with light heart, or what man whom his friends thought
was born for aviation may lack the touch of genius.