The Trenches In The "Wood Of Death"
So great has been the interest in the purely military side of the
struggle that one is apt to forget that the war is worth study as the
supreme occupation of many great nations, whose every energy, physical,
moral, and economic, has been put to its service, and relentlessly
tested in its fiery furnace. A future historian may find the war more
interesting, when considered as the supreme achievement of the
industrial civilization of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, than
as a mere vortex in the age-old ocean of European political strife.
There is something awe-inspiring in the spectacle of all the continuous
and multitudinous activity of a great nation feeding, by a thousand
channels, a thousand rills, to the embattled furrows of the zone of
violence.
By a strange decree of fate, a new warfare has come into being,
admirably adapted to the use and the testing of all our faculties,
organizations, and inventions--trench warfare. The principal element of
this modern warfare is lack of mobility.
The lines advance, the lines retreat, but never once, since the
establishment of the present trench swathe, have the lines of either
combatant been pushed clear out of the normal zone of hostilities. The
fierce, invisible combats are limited to the first-line positions,
averaging a mile each way behind No Man's Land. This stationary
character has made the war a daily battle; it has robbed war of all its
ancient panoply, its cavalry, its uniforms brilliant as the sun, and has
turned it into the national business. I dislike to use the word
"business," with its usual atmosphere of orderly bargaining; I intend
rather to call up an idea more familiar to American minds--the idea of a
great intricate organization with a corporate volition. The war of
to-day is a business, the people are the stockholders, and the object of
the organization is the wisest application of violence to the enemy.
To this end, in numberless secteurs along the front, special
narrow-gauge railroad lines have been built directly from the railroad
station at the edge of the shell zone to the artillery positions. To
this end the trenches have been gathered into a special telephone system
so that General Joffre at Chantilly can talk to any officers or soldiers
anywhere along the great swathe. The food, supplies, clothing, and
ammunition are delivered every day at the gate of the swathe, and calmly
redistributed to the trenches by a sort of military express system.
Only one thing ever disturbs the vast, orderly system. The bony fingers
of Death will persist in getting into the cogs of the machine.
The front is divided, according to military exigencies, into a number of
roughly equal lengths called secteurs. Each secteur is an administrative
unit with its own government and its own system adapted to the local
situation. The heart of this unit is the railroad station at which the
supplies arrive for the shell zone; in a normal secteur, one military
train arrives every day bringing the needed supplies, and one hospital
train departs, carrying the sick and wounded to the hospitals. The
station at the front is always a scene of considerable activity,
especially when the train arrives; there are pictures of old poilus in
red trousers pitching out yellow hay for the horses, commissary officers
getting their rations, and artilleurs stacking shells.
The train not being able to continue into the shell zone, the supplies
are carried to the distributing station at the trenches in a convoy of
wagons, called the ravitaillement. Every single night, somewhere along
the road, each side tries to smash up the other's ravitaillement. To
avoid this, the ravitaillement wagons start at different hours after
dark, now at dusk, now at midnight. Sometimes, close by the trenches on
a clear, still night, the plashing and creaking of the enemy's wagons
can be heard through the massacred trees. I remember being shelled along
one bleak stretch of moorland road just after a drenching December rain.
The trench lights rising over The Wood, three miles away, made the wet
road glow with a tarnished glimmer, and burnished the muddy pools into
mirrors of pale light. The ravitaillement creaked along in the darkness.
Suddenly a shell fell about a hundred yards away, and the wagons brought
up jerkily, the harnesses rattling. For ten minutes the Germans shelled
the length of road just ahead of us, but no shell came closer to us than
the first one. About thirty "seventy-seven" shells burst, some on the
road, some on the edges of the fields; we saw them as flashes of
reddish-violet light close to the ground. In the middle of the mêlée a
trench light rose, showing the line of halted gray wagons, the
motionless horses, and the helmeted drivers. The whole affair passed in
silence. When it was judged that the last shell had fallen, whips
cracked like pistol shots, and the line lumbered on again.
The food came to us fresh every day in a freight car fitted up like a
butcher's shop, in charge of a poilu who was a butcher in civilian life.
"So many men--so many grammes," and he would cut you off a slice. There
was a daily potato ration, and a daily extra, this last from a list ten
articles long which began again every ten days, and included beans,
macaroni, lentils, rice, and cheese. The French army is very well and
plenteously fed. Coffee, sugar, wine, and even tea are ungrudgingly
furnished. These foods are taken directly to the rear of the trenches
where the regimental cooks have their traveling kitchens. Once the food
is prepared, the cooks--the beloved cuistots--take it to the trenches in
great, steaming kettles and distribute it to the men individually. As
for clothing, every regiment has a regimental tailor shop and supply of
uniforms in the village where they go to repos. I have often seen the
soldier tailor of one of the regiments, a little Alsatian Jew, sewing up
the shell rents in a comrade's greatcoat. He had his shop in a pleasant
kitchen, and used to sit beside the fire sewing as calmly as an old
woman.
The sanitary arrangements of the trenches are the usual army latrines,
and very severe punishments are inflicted for any fouling.
If a man is wounded, the medical service man of his squad (infirmier),
or one of the stretcher-bearers (brancardiers), takes him as quickly as
possible to the regimental medical post in the rear lines. If the trench
is getting heavily shelled, and the wound is slight, the attendant takes
the man to a shelter and applies first aid until a time comes when he
and his patient can proceed to the rear with reasonable safety. At this
rear post the regimental surgeon cleans the wound, stops the bleeding,
and sends for the ambulance, which, at the Bois-le-Prêtre, came right
into the heart of the trenches by sunken roads that were in reality
broad trenches. The man is then taken to the hospital that his condition
requires, the slightly wounded to one hospital, and those requiring an
operation to another. The French surgical hospitals all along the front
are marvels of cleanliness and order. The heart of each hospital is the
power plant, which sterilizes the water, runs the electric lights, and
works the X-ray generator. Mounted on an automobile body, it is always
ready to decamp in case the locality gets too dangerous. You find these
great, lumbering affairs, half steamroller, half donkey-engine, in the
courtyards of old castles, schools, and great private houses close by
the front.
The first-line trenches, in a position at all contested, are very apt
still to preserve the hurried arrangement of their first plan, which is
sometimes hardly any plan at all. It must be admitted that the Germans
have the advantage in the great majority of places, for theirs was the
first choice, and they entrenched themselves, as far as possible, along
the crests of the eastern hills of France, in a line long prepared for
just such an exigency. It has been the frightfully difficult task of the
Allies, these two years, not only to hold the positions at the foot of
these hills, in which they were at a tactical disadvantage, all their
movements being visible to the Boches on the crests above them, but also
to attack an enemy entrenched in a strong position of his own choosing.
To-day at one point along the line, the French and Germans may share the
dominating crest of a position, at another point, they may be equally
matched, and at another, such as Les Eparges, the French, after fearful
losses, have carried the coveted eminence. One phase of the business of
violence is the work of the military undertaker attached to each
secteur, who writes down in his little red book the names of the day's
dead, and arranges for the wooden cross at the head of each fresh grave.
Every day along the front is a battle in which thousands of men die.
The eastern hills of France, those pleasant rolling heights above
Rheims, Verdun, and old, provincial Pont-à-Mousson, have been literally
gorged with blood. It being out of the question to strengthen or rectify
very much the front-line trenches close to the enemy, the effort has
taken place in the rear lines. Wherever there is a certain security, the
rear lines of all the important strategic points have been converted
into veritable subterranean fortresses. The floor plan of these trenches
is an adaptation of the military theory of fortification--with its
angles, salients, and bastions--to the topography of the region. The
gigantic concrete walls of the bomb-proof shelters, the little forts to
shelter the machine guns, and the concrete passages in the rear-line
trenches will appear as heavy and massive to future generations as Roman
masonry appears to us. There are, of course, many unimportant little
links of the trench system, upon whose holding nothing depends and for
whose domination neither side cares to spend the life of a single
soldier, that have only an apology for a second position. The war needs
the money for the preparation of important places. At vital points there
may be the tremendously powerful second line, a third line, and even a
fourth line. The region between Verdun and the lines, for instance, is
the most fearful snarl of barbed wire, pits, and buried explosives that
could be imagined. The distance would have to be contested inch by inch.
The trench theory is built about the soldier. It must preserve him as
far as possible from artillery and from an infantry attack. The defenses
begin with barbed wire; then come the rifles and the machine guns; and
behind them the light artillery, the "seventy-fives," and the heavy
artillery, the "one hundred and twenties," "two hundred and twenties,"
and, now, an immense howitzer whose real caliber has been carefully
concealed. To take a trench position means the crossing of the
entanglements of No Man's Land under fire from artillery, rifles, and
machine guns, an almost impossible proceeding. An advance is possible
only after the opposing trenches have been made untenable by the
concentration of artillery fire. The great offensives begin by blowing
the first lines absolutely to pieces; this accomplished, the attacking
infantry advances to the vacated trenches under the rifle fire of those
few whom the terrible deluge of shells has not killed or crazed, works
toward the strong second position under a concentrated artillery fire of
the retreating enemy as terrible as its own, fights its way heroically
into the second position, and stops there. The great line has been bent,
has been dented, but never broken. An offensive must cover at least
twenty miles of front, for if the break is too narrow the attacking
troops will be massacred by the enemy artillery at both ends of the
broken first lines. If the front lines are one mile deep, the artillery
must put twenty-five square miles of trenches hors de combat, a task
that takes millions of shells. By the time that the first line has been
destroyed and the troops have reached the second line, the shells and
the men are pretty well used up. A great successful offensive on the
western front is theoretically possible, given millions of men, but
practically impossible. Outside of important local gains, the great
western offensives have been failures. Champagne was a failure, the
Calais drive was a failure, Verdun was a failure, and the drive on the
Somme has only bent the lines. The Germans may shorten their lines
because of a lack of men, but I firmly believe that neither their line
nor the Allies' line will ever be broken. What will be the end if the
Allies cannot wrest from Germany, Belgium and that part of northern
France she is holding for ransom--to obtain good terms at the peace
congress? Is Germany slowly, very slowly going under, or are we going to
witness complete European exhaustion? Whatever happens, poor, mourning,
desolated France will hold to the end.
In localities where no great offensive is contemplated, and the business
of violence has become a routine, the object of the commander is to keep
the enemy on the qui-vive, demoralize him by killing and wounding his
soldiers, and prevent him from strengthening his first lines. Relations
take on the character of an exchange; one day the French throw a
thousand mines (high-explosive trench shells) into the German lines, and
the next day the Germans throw a thousand back. The French smash up a
village where German troops are en repos; while it is being done, the
Germans begin to blow a French village to pieces. In the trenches the
individual soldiers throw grenades at each other, and wish that the
whole tiresome business was done with. They have two weeks in the
trenches and two weeks out of them in a cantonment behind the lines. The
period in the trenches is divided between the first lines and the rear
lines of the first position. Often on my way to the trenches at night I
would pass a regiment coming to repos. Silent, vaguely seen, in broken
step the regiment passed. Sometimes a shell would come whistling in.
There was one part of the Bois-le-Prêtre region upon which nothing
depended, and the war had there settled into the casual exchange of
powder and old iron that obtains upon two thirds of the front. At the
entrance to this position, in the shadow of a beautiful clump of ash
trees, stood the rustic shelters of the regimental cooks. From behind
the wall of trees came a terrifying crash. The war-gray, iron field
kitchen, which the army slang calls a contre-torpilleur (torpedo-boat
destroyer), stood in a little clearing of the wood; there was nothing
beautiful to the machine, which was simply an iron box, two feet high
and four feet square, mounted on big wheels, and fitted with a high oval
chimney. A halo of kitcheny smell floated about it, and the open door of
its fire-box, in which brands were burning furiously, and a jet of vapor
from somewhere, gave it quite the appearance of an odd steam engine.
Beside the contre-torpilleur stood the two cooks, both unusually small
in stature. One was about thirty-two or three years old, chunky, and
gifted with short, strong, hairy arms; the other was much slighter,
younger, and so juvenile of face that his downy mustache was almost
invisible. I knew these men very well; one, the older, was a farmhand in
a village of Touraine, and the other, an errand boy in a bookbinding
works at Saint-Denis. The war had turned them into regimental cooks,
though it was the older man who did most of the cooking, while the boy
occupied himself with gathering wood and distributing the food. The
latter once confessed to me that when he heard that Americans were
coming to the Bois-le-Prêtre, he had expected to see Indians, and that
he and his comrades had joked, half in jest, half in earnest, about the
Boches going to lose their scalps. The other was famous for an episode
of the July attacks: cornered in the trench by a Boche, he had emptied
his kettle of hot soup over the man's head and finished him off with a
knife. They waved friendlily at me. The farmhand, in particular, was one
of the pleasantest fellows who ever breathed; and still fond, like a
true good man of Touraine, of a Rabelaisian jest.
The road now entered the wood, and continued straight ahead down a
pleasant vista of young ash trees. Suddenly a trench, bearing its name
in little black, dauby letters on a piece of yellow board the size of a
shingle, began by the side of the forest road, and I went down into it
as I might have gone down cellar. The Boyau Poincaré--such was its
title--began to curve and twist in the manner of trenches, and I came
upon a corner in the first line known as "Three Dead Men," because after
the capture of the wood, three dead Germans were found there in
mysterious, lifelike attitudes. The names of trenches on the French
front often reflect that deep, native instinct to poetry possessed by
simple peoples--the instinct that created the English ballads and the
exquisite mediaeval French legends of the saints. Other trench names
were symbolic, or patriotic, or political; we had the "Trench of the
Great Revenge," the "Trench of France," the "Trench of Aristide"
(meaning Briand), and the "Boulevard Joffre."
Beyond "Les Trois Morts," began the real lines of the position, and as I
wound my way through them to the first lines, the pleasant forest of
autumnal branches thinned to a wood of trees bare as telegraph poles. It
had taken me half an hour to get from the cook's shelters to the first
lines, and during that time I had not heard one single explosion. In the
first trench the men stood casually by their posts at the parapet, their
bluish coats in an interesting contrast to the brown wall of the trench.
Behind the sentries, who peered through the rifle slits every once in a
while, flowed the usual populace of the first-line trench, passing as
casually as if they were on a Parisian sidewalk, officers as miry as
their men, poilus of the Engineer Corps with an eye to the state of the
rifle boxes, and an old, unshaven soldier in light-brown corduroy
trousers and blue jacket, who volunteered the information that the
Boches had thrown a grenade at him as he turned the corner "down
there"--"It didn't go off." So calm an atmosphere pervaded the cold,
sunny, autumnal afternoon that the idea "the trenches" took on the
proportions of a gigantic hoax; we might have been masqueraders in the
trenches after the war was over. And the Germans were only seventy-five
feet away, across those bare poles, stumps, and matted dead brown
leaves!
"Attention!"
The atmosphere of the trench changed in a second. Every head in sight
looked up searchingly at the sky. Just over the trees, distinctly seen,
was a little, black, cylindrical package somersaulting through the air.
In another second everybody had calculated the spot in which it was
about to land, and those whom it threatened had swiftly found shelter,
either by continuing down the trench to a sharp turn, running into the
door of an abri (shelter), or simply snuggling into a hole dug in the
side of the trench. There was a moment of full, complete silence between
the time when everybody had taken refuge and the explosion of the trench
shell. The missile burst with that loud hammer pound made by a
thick-walled iron shell, and lay smoking in the withered leaves.
"It begins--it begins," said an old poilu, tossing his head. "Now we
shall have those pellets all afternoon."
An instant after the burst the trench relaxed; some of the sentries
looked back to see where the shell had fallen, others paid no attention
to it whatsoever. Once again the quiet was disturbed by a muffled boom
somewhere ahead of us, and everybody calculated and took refuge exactly
as before. The shells began to come, one on the heels of the other with
alarming frequency; hardly had one burst when another was discovered in
the air. The poilus, who had taken the first shells as a matter of
course, good-naturedly even, began to get as cross as peevish
schoolboys. It was decidedly too much of a good thing. Finally the order
was given for every one except the sentinels, who were standing under
the occasional shelters of beams and earth bridged across the trench, to
retire to the abris. I saw one of the exposed sentinels as I withdrew, a
big, heavily built, young fellow with a face as placid as that of a farm
animal; his rifle leaned against the earth of the trench, and the shadow
of the shelter fell on his expressionless features. The next sentinel
was a man in the late thirties, a tall, nervous soldier with a fierce,
aggressive face.
The abri to which we retired was about twenty-five feet long and eight
feet wide, and had a door at either end. The hut had been dug right in
the crude, calcareous rock of Lorraine, and the beams of the roof were
deeply set into these natural walls. Along the front wall ran a corridor
about a foot wide, and between this corridor and the rear wall was a
raised platform about seven feet wide piled with hay. Sprawled in this
hay, in various attitudes, were about fifteen men, the squad that had
just completed its sentry service. Two candles hung from the massive
roof and flickered in the draughts between the two doors, revealing, in
rare periods of radiance, a shelf along the wall over the sleepers'
heads piled with canteens, knapsacks, and helmets. In the middle of the
rock wall by the corridor a semicircular funnel had been carved out to
serve as a fireplace, and at its base a flameless fire of beautiful,
crumbling red brands was glowing. This hearth cut in the living rock was
very wonderful and beautiful. Suddenly a trench shell landed right on
the roof of the abri, shaking little fragments of stone down into the
fire on the hearth. The soldiers, who sat hunched up on the edge of the
platform, their feet in the corridor, gave vent to a burst of anger that
had its source in exasperation.
"This is going too far."--"Why don't they answer?"--"Are those dirty
cows (the classic sales vaches) going to keep this up all afternoon?"
"Really, now, this is getting to be a real nuisance." Suddenly two forms
loomed large in the left doorway, and the stolid sentry of whom I have
spoken limped in on the arm of an infirmier. Voices murmured in the
obscurity, "Who is wounded?"--"Somebody wounded?" And dreamy-eyed ones
sat up in the straw. The stolid one--he could not have been much over
twenty-one or two--sat down on the edge of the straw near the fireplace,
his face showing no emotion, only a pallor. He had a painful but not
serious wound; a small fragment of iron, from a shell that had fallen
directly into the trench, had lodged in the bones of his foot. He took
off his big, ugly shoe and rested the blood-stained sock on the straw.
Voices like echoes traveled the length of the shelter--"Is it thou,
Jarnac?"--"Art thou wounded, Jarnac?" "Yes," answered the big fellow in
a bass whisper. He was a peasant of the Woevre, one of a stolid,
laborious race.
"The lieutenant has gone to the telephone shelter to ring up the
batteries," said the infirmier. "Good," said a vibrant, masculine voice
somewhere in the straw.
A shell coming toward you from the enemy makes a good deal of noise, but
it is not to be compared to the noise made by one's own shells rushing
on a slant just over one's head to break in the enemy's trenches
seventy-five feet away. A swift rafale of some fifty "seventy-five"
shells passed whistling like the great wind of the Apocalypse, which is
to blow when the firmament collapses. Looking through the rifle slit,
after the rafale was over, I could see puffs of smoke apparently rising
out of the carpet of dead leaves. The nervous man, the other sentry,
held up his finger for us not to make the slightest noise and
whispered,--
"I heard somebody yell."
"Where?"
"Over there by that stump."
We strained our ears to catch a sound, but heard nothing.
"I heard the yell plainly," replied the sentry.
The news seemed to give some satisfaction. At any rate, the Germans
stopped their trench shells. The quiet hush of late afternoon was at
hand. Soon the cook came down the trench with kettles of hot soup.
Five months have passed since I last saw the inhabitants of this abri,
the tenants of the "Ritz-Marmite." How many are still alive? What has
happened to this fine, brave crowd of Frenchmen, gentlemen all, bons
camarades? I have seen them on guard in a heavy winter snowstorm, when
the enemy was throwing grenades which, exploding, blew purplish-black
smudges on the snow; I have seen them so bemired in mud and slop that
they looked like effigies of brownish earth; I have watched them wading
through communication trenches that were veritable canals. And this is
the third year of the war.
The most interesting of the lot mentally was a young Socialist named
Hippolyte. He was a sous-lieutenant of the Engineers, and had quarters
of his own in the rear of the trenches, where one was always sure to
find books on social questions lying round in the hay. When the war
began he was just finishing his law course at the University of
Montpellier. A true son of the South, he was dark, short, but well
proportioned, with small hands and feet. The distinguishing features of
his countenance were his eyes and mouth--the eyes, eloquent, alert,
almost Italian; the mouth, full, firm, and dogmatic. The great orators
of the Midi must have resembled him in their youth. He was a Socialist
and a pacifist à outrance, continuing his dream of universal fraternity
in the midst of war. His work lay in building a tunnel under the
Germans, by which he hoped to blow part of the German trenches, Teutons
and all, sky-high.
The tunneï (sape) began in the third line, at a door hi the wall of the
trench strongly framed in wooden beams the size of railroad ties. At
occasional intervals along the passage the roof was reinforced by a
frame of these beams, so that the sape had the businesslike,
professional look of a gallery in a coal mine. Descending steeply to a
point twelve feet beyond the entrance, it then went at a gentle incline
under No Man's Land, and ended beneath the German trenches. It was the
original intention to blow up part of the German first line, but it
being one day discovered that the Germans were building a tunnel
parallel to the French one, it was decided to blow up the French safe so
that the explosion would spend its force underground, and cause the
walls of the German tunnel to cave in on its makers. I happened to see
the tunnel the morning of the day it was blown up. The French had
stopped working for fear of being overheard by the Germans. It was a
ticklish situation. Were the Germans aware of the French tunnel? If so,
they would blow up their own at once. Were they still continuing their
labor? The earth of the French might burst apart anyminute and rain down
again in a dreadful shower of clods, stones, and mangled bodies.
Alone, quiet, at the end of the passage under the German lines sat an
old poilu, the sentinel of the tunnel. He was an old coal miner of the
North. The light of a candle showed his quiet, bearded face, grave as
the countenance of some sculptured saint on the portico of a Gothic
church, and revealed the wrinkles and lines of many years of labor. The
sentinel held a microphone to his ears; the poles of it disappearing
into the wall of damp earth separating us from the Boches.
Hippolyte whispered, "You hear them?"
The old man nodded his head, and gave the microphone to his officer. I
saw Hippolyte listen. Then, without a word, he handed it to me. All that
I could hear was a faint tapping.
"The Boches," whispered Hippolyte.
The French blew up the sape early in the afternoon, at a time when they
felt sure the Germans were at work in their tunnel. I saw the result the
next day. A saucer-shaped depression about twenty-five feet in diameter,
and perhaps two feet deep, had appeared in No Man's Land. Even the
stumps of two trees had sunk and tilted.
It was Hippolyte who had turned on the electricity. I once talked the
matter over with him. He became at once intense, Latin, doctrinaire.
"How do you reconcile your theories of fraternity to what you have to
do?"
"I do not have to reconcile my theories to my office; I am furthering my
theories."
"How so?"
"By combating the Boches. Without them we might have realized our idea
of universal peace and fraternity. Voilà l'ennemi! The race is a
poisonous race, serpents, massacreurs! I wish I could smother as many of
them every day as I did yesterday."
During my service I did not meet another soldier whose hatred of the
Germans was comparable to that of this advocate of universal love.
I left the trenches just at dusk. Above the dreadful depression in No
Man's Land shone a bronzy sky against which the trees raised their
haggard silhouettes. There was hardly a sound in the whole length of The
Wood. A mist came up making haloes round the rising winter stars.