THERE was mingled comedy and woe in the scenes at Paris on the memorable
day when the great long-distance gun--which the Parisians promptly
christened “Big Bertha” in tribute to the titular mistress the Krupp
works where it was produced--first opened upon the city from seventy-odd
miles away and thereby established, among other records, a precedent for
distance and scope in artillery bombardments. Paris was in a fit mood
for emotion. The people were on edge; their nerves tensed, for there
had been an alarm the evening before. The raiding planes had been turned
back at the suburbs and driven off by the barrage fire, but the populace
mainly had flocked into the _abris_ and the underground stations of the
Métropolitain.
At ten o'clock that night, after the danger was over, a funny thing
occurred: The crew of a motor-drawn fire engine had fuddled themselves
with wine, and for upward of half an hour the driver drove his red wagon
at top speed up and down the Rue de Rivoli, past the Tuileries Gardens.
With him he had four of his _confrères_ in blue uniforms and brass
helmets. These rode two on a side behind him, their helmets shining in
the bright moonlight like pots of gold turned upside down; and as they
rode the two on one side sounded the _alerte_ signal on sirens, and the
two on the other side sounded the “all clear” on bugles; and between
blasts all four rocked in their places with joy over their little joke.
In London the thing would have constituted a public scandal; in New York
there would have been a newspaper hullabaloo over it. It was typical of
Paris, I think, that the street crowds became infected with the spirit
which filled the roistering firemen and cheered them as they went
merrily racketing back and forth. Nor, so far as I could ascertain, were
the firemen disciplined; at least there was no mention in print of the
incident, though a great many persons, the writer included, witnessed
it.
At seven o'clock the following morning I was standing at the window of
my bedchamber when something of a very violent and a highly startling
nature went off just beyond the line of housetops and tree tops which
hedged my horizon view to the northward. Another booming detonation,
and yet another, followed in close succession. I figured to my own
satisfaction that one of the enemy planes which were chased away the
night before had taken advantage of the cloaking mists of the new day
to slip back and pay his outrageous compliments to an unsuspecting
municipality. Anyhow a fellow becomes accustomed to the sounds of loud
noises in wartimes, and after a while ceases to concern himself greatly
about their causes or even their effects unless the disturbances
transpire in his immediate proximity. Life in wartime in a country where
the war is consists largely in getting used to things that are abnormal
and unusual. One takes as a matter of course occurrences that in peace
would throw his entire scheme of existence out of gear. He is living, so
to speak, in a world that is turned upside down, amid a jumble of acute
and violent contradictions, both physical and metaphysical.
With two companions I set out for a certain large hotel which had the
reputation of being able to produce genuine North American breakfasts
for North American appetites. In the main grillroom we had just finished
compiling an order, which included fried whiting, ham and eggs, country
style, and fried potatoes, when a fire-department truck went shrieking
through the street outside, its whistle blasting away as though it had a
scared banshee locked up in its brazen throat.
There were not many persons in the room--to your average Frenchman his
dinner is a holy rite, but his breakfast is a trifling incident--but
most of these persons rose from their tables and straightway departed.
The woman cashier hurried off with her hat on sidewise, which among
women the world over is a thing betokening agitation.
The head waiter approached us with our bill in his tremulous hand, and
bowing, wished to know whether messieurs would be so good as to settle
the account now. By his manner lie sought to indicate that such was the
custom of the house. We told him firmly that we would pay after we
had eaten and not a minute sooner. He gave a despairing gesture and
vanished, leaving the slip upon the tablecloth. Somebody hastily
deposited within our reach the food we had ordered and withdrew.
Before we were half through eating a very short, very frightened-looking
boy in buttons appeared at our elbows, pleading to know whether we were
ready for our hats and canes. Since he appeared to be in some haste
about it and since he was so small a small boy and so uneasy, we
told him to bring them along. He did bring them along, practically
instantaneously, in fact, and promptly was begone without waiting for
a tip--an omission which up until this time had never marred the
traditional ethics of hat-check boys either in France or anywhere else.
Presently it dawned upon us that as far as appearances went we were
entirely alone in the heart of a great city. So when we were through
eating we left the amount of the breakfast bill upon a plate and
ourselves departed from there. The lobby of the hotel and the office and
the main hallway were entirely deserted, there being neither guests nor
functionaries in sight. But through a grating in the floor came up a
gush of hot air, licking our legs as we passed. This may have been the
flow from a unit of the heating plant, or then again it may have been
the hot and feverish breathing of the habitués of that hotel, 'scaping
upward through a vent in the subcellar's roof.
Outside, in the streets, the shopkeepers had put up their iron shutters.
At intervals the plug-plug-blooie! of fresh explosions punctuated the
hooting of fire engines racing with the alarm in adjacent quarters.
Overhead, ranging and quartering the upper reaches of the sky, like
pointer dogs in a sedge field, were scores of French aëroplanes
searching, and searching vainly, for the unseen foeman.
The thing was uncanny; it was daunting and smacked of witchcraft. Here
were the projectiles dropping down, apparently from directly above,
and they were bursting in various sections, to the accompaniments of
clattering débris and shattering glass; and yet there was neither sight
nor sound of the agencies responsible for the attack. All sorts of
rumours spread, each to find hundreds of earnest advocates and as many
more vociferous purveyors.
One theory, often advanced and generally retailed, was that the Germans
had produced a new type of aëroplane, with a noiseless motor, and
capable of soaring at a height where it was invisible to the naked eye.
Another possible solution for the enigma was that with the aid of spies
and traitors the Germans had set up a gun fired by air compression upon
a housetop in the environs and were bombarding the city from beneath the
protection of a false roof. In the doorway of every _abri_ the credulous
and the incredulous held heated arguments, dodging back under shelter,
like prairie dogs into their holes, at each recurring crash.
Presently it dawned upon the hearkening groups that the missiles
were falling at stated and ordained periods. Twenty minutes regularly
intervened between smashes. Appreciation of this circumstance injected
a new element of surmise into a terrific and most profoundly puzzling
affair. This was a mystery that grew momentarily more mysterious.
Business for the time being was pretty much suspended; anyhow nearly
everybody appeared to be taking part in the debates. However, the
taxicabs were still plying. A Parisian cabby may be trusted to take a
chance on his life if there is a fare in sight and the prospect of a
_pourboire_ to follow. Two of us engaged a weather-beaten individual who
apparently had no interest in the controversies raging about him or in
the shelling either; and in his rig we drove to the scene of the first
explosion, arriving there within a few minutes after the devilish
cylinder fell.
There had been loss of life here--no great amount as loss of life is
measured these times in this country, but attended by conditions that
made the disaster hideous and distressing. The blood of victims still
trickled in runlets between the paving stones where we walked, and
there were mangled bodies stretched on the floor of an improvised morgue
across the way--mainly bodies of poor working women, and one, I heard,
the body of a widow with half a dozen children, who now would be doubly
orphaned, since their father was dead at the Front.
Back again at my hotel after a forenoon packed with curious experiences,
I found in my quarters a very badly scared chambermaid, trying to tidy
a room with fingers that shook. In my best French, which I may state
is the worst possible French, I was trying to explain to her that
the bombardment had probably ended--and for a fact there had been a
forty-minute lull in the new frightfulness--when one of the shells
struck and went off among the trees and flowerbeds of a public breathing
place not a hundred and fifty yards away. With a shriek the maid fell
on her knees and buried her head, ostrich fashion, in a nest of sofa
pillows.
I stepped through my bedroom window upon a little balcony in time to see
the dust cloud rise in a column and to follow with my eyes the frenzied
whirlings of a great flock of wood pigeons flighting high into the air
from their roosting perches in the park plot. The next instant I felt a
violent tugging at the back breadth of the leather harness that I wore.
Unwittingly, in her panic the maid had struck upon the only possible use
to which a Sam Browne belt may be put--other than the ornamental, and
that is a moot point among fanciers of the purely decorative in the
matter of military gearing for the human form. By accident she had
divined its one utilitarian purpose. She had risen and with both hands
had laid hold upon the crosspiece of my main surcingle and was
striving to drag me inside. I rather gathered from the tenor of her
contemporaneous remarks, which she uttered at the top of her voice and
into which she interjected the names of several saints, that she feared
the sight of me in plain view on that stone ledge might incite the
invisible marauder to added excesses.
But I was the larger and stronger of the two, and my buckles held, and I
had the advantage of an iron railing to cling to. After a short struggle
my would-be rescuer lost. She turned loose of my kicking straps and
breech bands, and making hurried reference to various names in the
calendar of the canonised she fled from my presence. I heard her
falling down the stairs to the floor below. The next day I had a new
chambermaid; this one had tendered her resignation.
Not until the middle of the afternoon was the proper explanation for the
phenomenon forthcoming. It came then from the Ministry of War, in the
bald and unembroidered laconics of a formal communiqué. At the first
time of hearing it the announcement seemed so inconceivable, so
manifestly impossible that official sanction was needed to make men
believe Teuton ingenuity had found a way to upset all the previously
accepted principles touching on gravity and friction; on arcs and
orbits; on aims and directions; on projectiles and projectives; on the
resisting tensility of steel bores and on the carrying power of gun
charges--by producing a cannon with a ranging scope of somewhere between
sixty and ninety miles.
Days of bombardment followed--days which culminated on that
never-to-be-forgotten Good Friday when malignant chance sped a shell to
wreck one of the oldest churches in Paris and to kill seventy-five and
wound ninety worshippers gathered beneath its roof.
After the first flurry of uncertainty the populace for the most part
grew tranquil; now that they knew the origin of the far-flung punishment
there was measurably less dread of the consequences among the masses of
the people. On days when the shells exploded futilely the daily press
and the comedians in the music halls made jokes at the expense of
Big Bertha; as, for example, on a day when a fragment of shell took the
razor out of the hand of a man who was shaving himself, without doing
him the slightest injury; and again when a whole shell wrecked a butcher
shop and strewed the neighbourhood with kidneys and livers and rib
ends of beef, but spared the butcher and his family. On days when the
colossal piece scored a murderous coup for its masters and took innocent
life, the papers printed the true death lists without attempt at
concealment of the ravages of the monster. And on all the bombardment
days, women went shopping in the Rue de la Paix; children played in the
parks; the flower women of the Madeleine sold their wares to customers
with the reverberations of the explosions booming in their ears; the
crowds that sat sipping coloured drinks at small tables in front of the
boulevard cafés on fair afternoons were almost as numerous as they had
been before the persistent thing started; and unless the sound was very
loud indeed the average promenader barely lifted his or her head at each
recurring report. In America we look upon the French as an excitable
race, but here they offered to the world a pattern for the practice of
fortitude.
A good many people departed from Paris to the southward. However, there
was calmness under constant danger. Our own people, who were in Paris in
numbers mounting up into the thousands, likewise set a fine example of
sang-froid. On the evening of the opening day of the bombarding, when
any one might have been pardoned for being a bit jumpy, an audience of
enlisted men which packed the American Soldiers and Sailors' Club in
the Rue Royale was gathered to hear a jazz band play Yankee tunes and
afterward to hear an amateur speaker make an address. The cannon had
suspended its annoying performances with the going down of the sun,
but just as the speaker stood up by the piano the _alerte_ for an air
attack--which, by the way, proved to be a false alarm, after all--was
heard outside.
There was a little pause, and a rustling of bodies.
Then the man, who was on his feet, spoke up. “I'll stay as long as any
one else does,” he said. “Anyhow, I don't know which is likely to be the
worse of two evils--my poor attempts at entertaining you inside or the
boche's threatened performances outside.”
A great yell of approval went up and not a single person left the
building until after the chairman announced that the programme for the
evening had reached its conclusion. I know this to be a fact because I
was among those present.
To be sure, the strain of the harassment got upon the nerves of some;
that would be inevitable, human nature being what it is. Attendance at
the theatres, especially for the matinées, fell off appreciably; this,
though, being attributable, I think, more to fear of panic inside the
buildings than to fear of what the missiles might do to the buildings
themselves. And there was no record of any individual, whether man or
woman, quitting a post of responsibility because of the personal peril
to which all alike were exposed.
Likewise on those days when the great gun functioned promptly at
twenty-minute intervals one would see men sitting in drinking places
with their eyes glued to the faces of their wrist watches while they
waited for the next crash. For those whose nerves lay close to their
skins this damnable regularity of it was the worst phase of the thing.
There was something so characteristically and atrociously German,
something so hellishly methodical in the tormenting certainty that each
hour would be divided into three equal parts by three descending steel
tubes of potential destruction.
Big Bertha operated on a perfect schedule. She opened up daily at seven
a. m. sharp; she quit at six-twenty p. m. It was as though the crew that
tended her carried union cards. They were never tardy. Neither did they
work overtime. But if the Prussians counted upon bedeviling the people
into panic and distracting the industrial and social economies of Paris
they missed their guess. They made some people desperately unhappy, no
doubt, and they frightened some; but the true organism of the community
remained serene and unimpaired.
Some share of this, I figure might be attributed to the facts that in
a city as great as Paris the chances of any one individual being killed
were so greatly reduced that the very size of the town served to envelop
its inhabitants with a sense of comparative immunity; the number of
buildings, and their massiveness inspired a feeling of partial security.
I know I felt safer than I have felt out in the open when the enemy's
playful batteries were searching out the terrain round about. In a
smaller city this condition probably would not have been manifest to the
same degree. There almost everybody would be likely to know personally
the latest victim or to be familiar with the latest scene of damage
and this would serve doubtlessly to bring the apprehensive home to all
households. Howsoever, be the underlying cause what it might, Paris
weathered the brunt of the ordeal with splendid fortitude and an
admirable coolness.
Being frequently in Paris between visits to one or another sector of the
front, I was able to keep a fairly accurate score in the ravages of the
bombardment and to get a fairly average appraisal of the effects upon
the Parisian temper. Likewise by reading translated extracts out of
German newspapers I got impressions of another phase of the tragedy
which almost was as vivid as though I had been an eye witness to events
which I knew of only at second-hand from the published descriptions of
them.
I had the small advantage though on my side of being able to vizualise
the setting in the Forest of St. Gobain, to the west of Laon for I was
there once in German company. I could conjure up a presentiment of the
scene there enacted on the day when Big Bertha's makers and masters
sprang their well-guarded surprise, which so carefully and so secretly
had been evolved during months of planning and constructing and
experimentations. Behold then the vision: It is a fine spring morning.
There is dew on the grass and there is song in the throats of the birds
and young foliage is upon the trees. The great grey gun--it is nearly
ninety feet long and according to inspired Teutonic chronicles resembles
a vast metal crone--squats its misshapen mass upon a prepared concrete
base in the edge of the woods, just on the timbered shoulder of a hill.
Its long muzzle protrudes at an angle from the interlacing boughs of the
thicket where it hides; at a very steep angle, too, since the charge it
will fire must ascend twenty miles into the air in order to reach
its objective. Behind it is a stenciling of white birdies and slender
poplars flung up against the sky line; in front of it is a
disused meadow where the newly minted coinage of a prodigal
springtime--dandelions that are like gold coins and wild marguerites
that are like silver ones--spangle the grass as though the profligate
season had strewn its treasures broadcast there. The gunners make ready
the monster for its dedication. They open its great navel and slide into
its belly a steel shell nine inches thick and three feet long nearly and
girthed with beltings of spun brass. The supreme moment is at hand.
From a group of staff officers advances a small man, grown old beyond
his time; this man wears the field uniform of a Prussian field marshal.
He has a sword at his side and spurs on his booted feet and a spiked
helmet upon his head. He has a withered arm which dangles abortively,
foreshortened out of its proper length. His hair is almost snow-white
and his moustache with its fiercely upturned and tufted ends is white.
From between slitted lids imbedded in his skull behind unhealthy
dropical pouches of flesh his brooding, morbid eyes show as two blue
dots, like touches of pale light glinting on twin disks of shallow
polished agate. He bears himself with a mien that either is imperial or
imperious, depending upon one's point of view.
While all about him bow almost in the manner of priests making obeisance
before a shrine, he touches with one sacred finger the button of an
electrical controller. The air is blasted and the earth rocks then to
the loudest crash that ever issued from the mouth of a gun; for all its
bulk and weight the cannon recoils on its carriage and shakes itself;
the tree tops quiver in a palsy. The young grass is flattened as though
by a sudden high wind blowing along the ground; the frightened birds
flutter about and are mute.
The bellowing echoes die away in a fainter and yet fainter cadence.
The-Anointed-of-God turns up his good wrist to consider the face of the
watch strapped thereon; his staff follow his royal example. One minute
passes in a sort of sacerdotal silence. There is drama in the pause; a
fine theatricalism in the interlude. Two minutes, two minutes and a half
pass. This is one part of the picture; there is another part of it:
Seventy miles away in a spot where a busy street opens out into a paved
plaza all manner of common, ordinary work-a-day persons are busied about
their puny affairs. In addition to being common and ordinary these folks
do not believe in the divine right of kings; truly a high crime and
misdemeanour. Moreover, they persist in the heretical practice of
republicanism; they believe actually that all men were born free and
equal; that all men have the grace and the authority within them to
choose their own rulers; that all men have the right to live their
own lives free from foreign dictation and alien despotism. But at this
particular moment they are not concerned in the least with politics or
policies. Their simple day is starting. A woman in a sidewalk kiosk is
ranging morning papers on her narrow shelf. A half-grown girl in a small
booth set in the middle of the square where the tracks of the tramway
end, is selling street car tickets to working men in blouses and baggy
corduroy trousers. Hucksters and barrow-men have established a small
market along the curbing of the pavement. A waiter is mopping the metal
tops of a row of little round tables under the glass markee of a café.
Wains and wagons are passing with a rumble of wheels. Here there is no
drama except the simple homely drama of applied industry.
Three minutes pass: Far away to the north, where the woods are quiet
again and the birds have mustered up courage to sing once more, The
Regal One drops his arm and looks about him at his officers, nodding and
smiling. Smiling, they nod back in chorus, like well-trained automatons.
There is a murmur of interchanged congratulations. The effort upon
which so much invaluable time and so much scientific thought have been
expended, stands unique and accomplished. Unless all calculations have
failed the nine-inch shell has reached its mark, has scored its bull's
eye, has done its predestined job.
It has; those calculations could not go wrong. Out of the kindly and
smiling heavens, with no warning except the shriek of its clearing
passage through the skies, the bolt descends in the busy square. The
glass awning over the café front becomes a darting rain of sharp-edged
javelins; the paving stones rise and spread in hurtling fragments from
a smoking crater in the roadway. There are a few minutes of mad frenzy
among those people assembled there. Then a measure of quiet succeeds to
the tumult. The work of rescue starts. The woman who vended papers is
a crushed mass under the wreckage of her kiosk; the girl who sold car
tickets is dead and mangled beneath her flattened booth; the waiter who
wiped the table-tops off lies among his tables now, the whole crown of
his head sliced away by slivers of glass; here and there in the square
are scattered small motionless clumps that resemble heaps of bloodied
and torn rags. Wounded men and women are being carried away, groaning
and screaming as they go. But in the edge of the woods at St. Gobain the
Kaiser is climbing into his car to ride to his headquarters. It is his
breakfast-time and past it and he has a fine appetite this morning. The
picture is complete. The campaign for Kultur in the world has scored
another triumph, the said score standing: Seven dead; fifteen injured.