AS I GO to and fro in the land I some-times wonder why the Germans keep
a-picking on me. As heaven is my judge I tried to tell the truth about
them and their armies when I was with them; but then, maybe that's the
reason. At any rate I am here to testify that whenever I stop at a place
in England or France either a battery of long-range guns shells it or
else a hostile aëroplane happens along and bombs the town. The thing is
more than a coincidence. It is getting to be a habit, an unhealthy habit
at that. There must be method in it. And yet I have tried to bear myself
in a modest and unostentatious way during this present trip. If in the
reader's judgment the personal pronoun has occurred and recurred with
considerable frequency in my writings I would say: Under the seemingly
quaint but necessary rules of the censorship as conducted in these parts
the only individual of American extraction at present connected in any
way with war activities over here whom I may mention in my writings
other than General Pershing is myself. Since the general to date has not
figured to any extent in my personal experiences I am perforce driven to
doing pieces largely about what I have seen and heard and felt.
Particularly is this true of these bombings and shellings. I repeat
that I cannot imagine why the boche should single out a quiet, simple,
private citizen for such attentions. It does not seem fair that I should
ever be their target while shining marks move about the landscape with
the utmost impunity. The German has a name for being efficient too.
More than once in my readings I have seen his name coupled with the word
efficiency. Take brigadier generals for example. Almost any colonel of
our Expeditionary Forces in France, and particularly a senior colonel
whose name is well up in the list, will tell you in confidence there
are a number of brigadiers over here who could easily be spared and who
would never be missed. Yet a brigadier general may move about from place
to place in his automobile in comparative safety. But just let me go to
the railroad station to buy a ticket for somewhere and immediately the
news is transmitted by a mysterious occult influence to the Kaiser and
he tells the Crown Prince and the Crown Prince calls up von Hindenburg
or somebody, and inside of fifteen minutes the hands, August and Heinie,
are either loading up the long-rangers or getting the most dependable
bombing Gotha out of the sheds.
For nearly four weeks the raiders stayed away from London. I arrived in
London sick with bronchitis and went to bed in a hotel. That night
the Huns flew over the Channel and spattered down inflammables and
explosives to their heart's content. One chunk of a shell fell in the
street within a few yards of my bedroom window, gouging a hole in the
roadway. A bomb made a mighty noise and did some superficial damage in a
park close by. It was my first experience at being bombed from on
high, and any other time I should have taken a lively interest in the
proceedings; but I was too sick to get up and dress and too dopy from
the potions I had taken to awaken thoroughly.
But the next night, when I was convalescent, and the following night,
when I was well along the road toward recovery and able, in fact, to sit
up in bed and dodge, back came Mister Boche and repeated the original
performance with variations.
In order to get away from the London fogs, which weren't doing my still
tender throat any good, I ran down to a certain peaceful little seaside
resort on the east coast of England, reaching there in the gloaming.
What did the enemy do but sprinkle bombs all about the neighbourhood
within an hour after I got there? He went away at ten the same night, I
the following morning at six-forty-five.
A delayed train was all that kept me from reaching Paris coincidentally
with the first raiders who had attacked Paris in a period of months.
The raiders covered up their disappointment by murdering a few helpless
non-belligerents and departed, to return the next evening when I was
present. I was domiciled in Paris on that memorable Saturday when the
great long-distance gun began its bombardment of the city from the
forest of Saint-Gobain nearly seventy miles distant. The first shell
descended within two hundred yards of where I stood at a window and I
saw the smoke of its explosion and saw the cloud of dust and pulverized
débris that rose; the jar of the crash shook the building. Throughout
the following day, which was Palm Sunday--only we called it Bomb
Sunday--the shelling continued. I was there, naturally.
On Monday morning I started for Soissons. So the gunners of the
long-distance gun playing on Paris took a vacation, which lasted until
the day after my party returned from the north. We got into the Gare du
Nord late one night; the big gun opened up again early the next morning.
I am not exaggerating; merely reciting a sequence of facts.
For nearly two years the Germans had left poor battered Soissons
pretty much alone, though it was within easy reach of their howitzers;
moreover, one of their speedy flying machines could reach Soissons from
the German lines south of Laon within five minutes. But, as I say, they
rather left it alone. Perhaps in their kindly sentimental way they were
satisfied with their previous handiwork there. They had pretty well
destroyed the magnificent old cathedral. It was not quite so utter a
ruin as the cathedral at Arras is, or the cathedral at Rheims, or the
Cloth Hall at Ypres, or the University at Louvain; nevertheless,
I assume that from the Prussian point of view the job was a fairly
complete one.
The wonderful, venerable glass windows, which can never be replaced, had
been shattered to the last one, and the lines of the splendid dome might
now only be traced like the curves of tottering arches, swinging up
and out like the ribs of a cadaver, and by a lacework of roofage where
thousands of bickering ravens, those black devil birds of desolation,
now fluttered and cawed, and befouled with their droppings the profaned
sanctuary below. Altogether it was one of the most satisfactory
monuments to Kultur to be found anywhere in Europe to-day.
Nor had the community at large been slighted. Everybody knows how
thorough are the armies of the anointed War Lord. Relics which dated
back to the days of Clovis had been battered out of all hope of
restoration; things of antiquity and of inestimable historic value lay
shattered in wreckage. Furthermore, from time to time, in 1914 and 1915
and even in 1916, when no military advantage was to be derived from
visiting renewed affliction upon the vicinity and when no victims, save
old men and women and innocent children, were likely to be added to the
grand total of the grander tally which Satan, as chief bookkeeper, is
keeping for the Kaiser, the guns had blasted away at the ancient city,
leveling a homestead here and decimating a family there.
However, since the early part of 1916 they had somehow rather spared
Soissons. But the train bearing us was halted within three miles of the
station because, after keeping the peace for nearly two years, the enemy
had picked upon that particular hour of that particular afternoon to
renew his most insalubrious attentions per nine-inch mortars. Therefore
we entered afoot, bearing our luggage, to the accompaniment of whistling
projectiles and clattering chimney-pots and smashing walls.
In Soissons we spent two nights. Both nights the Germans shelled the
town and on the second night, in addition, bombed it from aëroplanes. It
may have been fancy, but as we came away in a car borrowed from a kindly
French staff officer it seemed to us that the firing behind us was
lessening.
From press headquarters near G. H. Q. of the Amex Forces we motored one
day to Nancy for a good dinner at a locally famous café. Simultaneously
with our advent the foe's airmen showed up and the _alerte_ was sounded
for a gas attack. As between the prospect of spending the evening in
an _abri_ and staying out in the open air upon the road we chose the
latter, and so we turned tail and ran back to the comparative quiet of
the front lines. A little later a cross-country journey necessitated our
changing cars at Bar-le-Duc. The connecting train was hours behind its
appointed minute, as is usual in these days of disordered time cards,
and while we waited hostile airships appeared flying so high they looked
like bright iridescent midges flitting in the sunshine. As they swung
lower, to sow bombs about the place, antiaircraft guns opened on them
and they departed.
That same night our train, travelling with darkened carriages, was held
up outside of Châlons, while enemy aircraft spewed bombs at the tracks
ahead of us and at a troop convoy passing through. The wreckage was
afire when we crawled by on a snail's schedule an hour or so later.
Two of us went to pay a visit to a regimental mess in a sector held by
our troops. The colonel's headquarters were in a small wrecked village
close up to the frontier. This village had been pretty well smashed up
in 1914 and in 1915, but during the trench warfare that succeeded
in this district no German shells had scored a direct hit within the
communal confines. Yet the enemy that night, without prior warning and
without known provocation, elected to break the tacit agreement for
localised immunity. The bombardment began with a shock and a jar of
impact shortly after we had retired to bed on pallets upon the floor in
the top story of what once, upon a happier time, had been the home of a
prominent citizen. It continued for three hours, and I will state that
our rest was more or less interrupted. It slackened and ceased, though,
as we departed in the morning after breakfast, and thereafter for a
period of weeks during which we remained away all was tranquil and
unconcussive there in that cluster of shattered stone cottages.
Another time we made a two-day expedition to the zone round Verdun. The
great spring offensive, off and away to the westward, was then in its
second week and the Verdun area enjoyed comparative peace. Nevertheless,
and to the contrary notwithstanding, seven big vociferous shells came
pelting down upon an obscure hamlet well back behind the main defences
within twenty minutes after we had stopped there. One burst in a
courtyard outside a house where an American general was domiciled with
his staff, and when we came in to pay our respects his aids still were
gathering up fragments of the shell casing for souvenirs. The general
said he couldn't imagine why the Him should have decided all of a sudden
to pay him this compliment; but we knew why, or thought we knew: It was
all a part of the German scheme to give us chronic cold feet.
At least, we so diagnosed the thing privately.
As a result of this sort of experience, continuing through a period
of months, I feel that I have become an adept of sorts at figuring the
sensations of a bombee. I flatter myself also that I have acquired
some slight facility at appraising the psychology of towns and cities
persistently and frequently under shell or aërial attack. In the main
I believe it may be taken as an accepted fact that the inhabitants of
a small place behave after rather a different fashion from the way
in which the inhabitants of a great city may be counted upon to
bear themselves. For example, there is a difference plainly to be
distinguished, I think, between the people of London and the people of
Paris; and a difference likewise between the people of Paris and the
people of Nancy. Certainly I have witnessed a great number of sights
that were humorous with the grim and perilous humour of wartimes, and
by the same token I have witnessed a manifold number of others that were
fraught with the very essence of tragedy.
All France to-day is one vast heart-breaking tragedy that is compounded
of a million lesser tragedies. You note that the door-opener at your
favourite café in Paris uses his left hand only, and then you see that
his right arm, with the hand cased in a tight glove, swings in stiff
uselessness from his shoulder. It is an artificial arm; the real one
was shot away. The barber who shaves you, the waiter who serves you,
the chauffeur who drives you about in his taxicab moves with a limping
awkward gait that betrays the fact of a false leg harnessed to a
mutilated stump.
In a sufficiently wide passage a couple coming toward you--a woman in
nurse's garb and a splendid young boy soldier with decorations on his
breast--bump into you, almost, it would seem, by intent. As mentally you
start to execrate the careless pair for their inexcusable disregard of
the common rights of pedestrians you see there is a deep, newly healed
scar in the youth's temple and that his eyes stare straight ahead of him
with an unwinking emptiness of expression, and that his fine young face
is beginning to wear that look of blank, bleak resignation which is the
mark of one who will walk for all the rest of his days on this earth in
the black and utter void of blindness.
Behind the battle lines you often see long lines of men whose ages are
anywhere between forty and fifty--tired, dirty, bewhiskered men worn
frazzle-thin by what they have undergone; men who should be at home
with their wives and bairns instead of toiling through wet and cold and
misery for endless leagues over sodden roads.
Their backs are bent beneath great unwieldy burdens; their hands where
they grip their rifles are blue from the chill; their sore and weary
feet falter as they drag them, booted in stiff leather and bolstered
with mud, from one cheerless billet to another. But they go on,
uncomplainingly, as they have been going on uncomplainingly since the
second year of this war, doing the thankless and unheroic labour at
the back that the ranks at the front may be kept filled with those whom
France has left of a suitable age for fighting.
You see that the highways are kept in repair by boys of twelve or
thirteen and by grandsires in their seventies and their eighties, and by
crippled soldiers, who work from daylight until dusk upon the rock piles
and the earth heaps; that the fields are being tilled--and how well they
are being tilled!--by young women and old women; that the shops in the
smaller towns are minded by children, whose heads sometimes scarcely
come above the counters.
You see where the tall shade trees along the roads and the small trees
in the thickets are being shorn away in order that the furnaces and the
hearthstones may not be altogether fireless, since the enemy holds most
of the coal mines. I have come in one of the fine state forests upon
a squad of American lumberjacks, big huskies from the logging camps of
Northern Michigan, with their portable planing mill whining and their
axes flashing, making the sawdust and the chips fly, in what once not
long ago was a grove of splendid timber, where beeches and chestnuts,
hundreds of years old, stood in close ranks; but which now is being
turned into a wilderness of raw stumps and trodden earth and stacks of
ugly planking.
You see an old woman, as fleshless as a fagot, helping a dog to drag
a heavy cart up a rocky street, the two of them together straining and
panting against the leather breast yokes. For every kilometre that
the foe advances you see the refugees fleeing from their desolated
steadings; indeed, you may very accurately gauge the rate of his
progress by their number.
In one lonely little town in a territory as yet undefiled by
actual hostilities I went one morning not long ago into a quaint
thirteenth-century church. It was one of three churches in the place;
and in point of membership, I think, the smallest of the three. But in
the nave, upon a stone pillar, gnawed by time with furrows and runnels,
I found a little framed placard containing the names, written in fine
script, of those communicants who had died in service for their country
in this war. The list plainly was incomplete. It included only those who
had fallen up to the beginning of last year; the toll for 1917 and for
1918 was yet to be added; and yet of the names of the dead out of this
one small obscure interior parish there were an even one hundred. I dare
say the poll of the whole commune would have shown at least three times
as many. France has shown the world how to fight. Now it shows the world
how to die.
But of all the tragedies that multiply themselves so abundantly here in
this bloodied land it sometimes seems to me there is none greater than
the look of things that is implanted upon an unfortified town that has
been subjected to frequent bombings. It is not so much the shattered,
ragged ruins where bombs have scored direct downward hits that drive
home the lesson of what this mode of reprisal, this type of punishment
means; rather it is the echoing empty street, as yet undamaged, whence
the dwellers all have fled--long stretches of streets, with the
windows shuttered up and the shops locked and barred and the rank
grass sprouting between the cobblestones, and the starveling tabby cats
foraging like the gaunt ghosts of cats among forgotten ash barrels.
And rather more than this it is the expression of those who through
necessity or choice have stayed on.
I am thinking particularly of Nancy--Nancy which for environment,
setting and architecture is one of the most beautiful little cities in
the world; a city whose ancient walls and massy gateways still
stand; whose squares and parks were famous; and whose people once led
prosperous, contented and peaceful lives. Its Place Stanislaus, on a
miniature scale, is, I think, as lovely as any plaza in Europe. Since it
is so lovely one is moved to wonder why the Germans have so far spared
it from the ruination they shower down without abatement upon the
devoted city. It is well-nigh deserted now, along with all the other
parts of the town. Those who could conveniently get away have gone; the
state in the early part of this year transported thousands of women and
children on special trains to safer territory in the south of France.
Those who remain have in their eyes the haunting terror of a persistent
and an unceasing fearsomeness.
To be in Nancy these times is to be in a stilled, half-deserted place of
flinching and of danger, and of the death that comes by night, borne on
whirring motors. I walked through its streets on a day following one
of the frequent air raids and I had a conception of how these Old-World
cities must have looked in the time of the plague. The citizens I passed
were like people who dwelt beneath the shadow of an abiding pestilence,
as indeed they did.
To them a clear still night with the placid stars showing in the heavens
meant a terrible threat. It meant that they would lie quaking in their
houses for the signal that would send them to the cellars and the
dugouts, while high explosives and gas bombs and inflammable bombs came
raining down. They knew full well what it meant to stay above ground
during the dread passover of the Huns' planes, when hospitals had been
turned into shambles and supply depots into craters of raging fire. Yet
there remained traces of the racial temperament that has upbuoyed the
French and helped them to endure what was unendurable.
A little waitress in a café said to three of us, with a smile: “Ah, but
you should be in Nancy on a rainy night, for then the sound of snoring
fills the place. We can sleep then--and how we do sleep!”
In Nancy they pray before the high altars for bad weather and yet more
bad weather. And so do they in many another town in France that is
within easy striking distance of the enemy's batteries and airdromes.