In The German Trenches At La Bassée
We had come down from Berlin on-one of those excursions which the German
General Staff arranges for the military observers and correspondents of
neutral countries. You go out, a sort of zoo--our party included four
or five Americans, a Greek, an Italian, a diminutive Spaniard, and a
tall, preoccupied Swede--under the direction of some hapless officer of
the General Staff. For a week, perhaps, you go hurtling through a
closely articulated programme almost as personally helpless as a package
in a pneumatic tube--night expresses, racing military motors, snap-shots
at this and that, down a bewildering vista of long gray capes, heel
clickings, stiff bows from the waist, and military salutes. You are
under fire one minute, the next shooting through some captured palace or
barracks or museum of antiques. At noon the guard is turned out in your
honor; at four you are watching distant shell-fire from the Belgian
dunes; at eleven, crawling under a down quilt in some French hotel,
where the prices of food and wines are fixed by the local German
commandant. Everything is done for you--more, of course, than one would
wish--the gifted young captain-conductor speaks English one minute,
French or Italian the next, gets you up in the morning, to bed at night,
past countless sentries and thick-headed guards demanding an Ausweis,
contrives never to cease looking as if he had stepped from a band-box,
and presently pops you into your hotel in Berlin with the curious
feeling of never having been away at all.
It isn't, of course, an ideal way of working--not like putting on a hat
and strolling out to war, as one sometimes could do in the early weeks
in Belgium and France. The front is a big and rather accidental place,
however--you can scarcely touch it anywhere without bringing back
something to help complete the civilian's puzzle picture of the war.
Our moment came in the German trenches before La Bassée, when, with the
English so near that you could have thrown a baseball into their
trenches, both sides began to toss dynamite bombs at each other.
We had come across to Cologne on the regular night express, shifted to a
military train, and so on through Aix, Louvain, Brussels, and by the
next morning's train down to Lille. Armentieres was only eight miles
away, Ypres fifteen, and a little way to the south Neuve Chapelle, where
the English offensive had first succeeded, then been thrown back only a
few days before.
Spring had come over night, the country was green, sparkling with canals
and little streams, and the few Belgian peasants left were trying to put
it in shape for summer. A few were ploughing with horses, others
laboriously going over their fields, foot by foot, with a spade; once we
passed half a dozen men dragging a harrow. Every tree in this country,
where wood is grown like any other crop, was speckled with white spots
where branches had been trimmed away, and below the timber was piled--
heavy logs for lumber, smaller ones cut into firewood--the very twigs
piled as carefully as so many stacks of celery.
So fresh and neat and clean-swept did it seem .in that soft sunshine
that one forgot how empty it was--so empty and repressed that one awoke
startled to see three shaggy farm horses galloping off as the train
rolled by, kicking up their heels as if they never had heard of war. It
seemed frivolous, almost impertinent, and the landsturm officer, leaning
in the open window beside me in the passageway, thinking perhaps of his
own home across the Rhine, laughed and breathed a deep-chested
"Kolossal!" We passed Enghien, Leuze, Tournai, all with that curious
look of a run-down clock. On the outskirts of one town, half a dozen
little children stopped spinning tops in the road to demand tribute from
the train. They were pinched little children, with the worried,
prematurely old faces of factory children, and they begged insistently,
almost irritably, as if payment was long overdue. Good-natured soldiers
tossed them chocolate and sausage and slices of buttered Kriegsbrod,
which they took without thanks, still repeating in a curious jumble of
German and French, "Pfennig venir! Pfennig--Pfennig--Pfennig venir!"'
Two officers from division headquarters were waiting for us in the
station at Lille--one, a tall, easy-going young fellow in black
motor-gauntlets, who looked as if he might, a few years before, have
rowed on some American college crew; the other, in the officers'
gray-blue frock overcoat with fur collar, a softer type, with quick,
dark eyes and smile, and the pleasant, slightly languid manners of a
young legation secretary.
We had just time to glance at the broken windows in the station roof,
the two or three smashed blocks around it, and be hurried to that most
empty of places--a modern city hotel without any guests--when three gray
military motor-cars, with the imperial double eagle in black on their
sides, whirled up. The officers took the lead, our happy family
distributed itself in the others, and with cut-outs drumming, a soldier
beside each chauffeur blowing a warning, and an occasional gay "Ta-ta
ta-ta!" on a silver horn, we whirled out into the open country.
We passed a church with a roof smashed by an aeroplane a few days
before--and caught at the same time the first "B-r-r-rurm!" from the
cannonading to the west--a supply-train, an overturned motor-van, and
here and there packed ammunition wagons and guns. Presently, in the lee
of a little brick farmhouse a short distance from the village of Aubers,
we alighted, and, with warnings that it was better not to keep too close
together, walked a little farther down the road. Not a man was in
sight, nor a house, nor gun, not even a trench, yet we were, as a matter
of fact, in the middle of a battle-field. From where we stood it was
not more than a mile to the English trenches and only two miles to Neuve
Chapelle; and even as we stood there, from behind us, from a battery we
had passed without seeing, came a crash and then the long spinning roar
of something milling down aisles of air, and a far-off detonation from
the direction of Neuve Chapelle.
Tssee-ee-rr... Bong! over our heads from the British lines came an
answering wail, and in the field, a quarter of a mile beyond us, there
was a geyser of earth, and slowly floating away a greenish-yellow cloud
of smoke. From all over the horizon came the wail and crash of shells--
an "artillery duel," as the official reports call it, the sort of thing
that goes on day after day.
Somebody wanted to walk on to the desolate village which raised its
smashed walls a few hundred yards down the road. The tall young officer
said that this might not be done--it would draw the enemy's fire, and as
if to accent this advice there was a sudden Bang! and the corner of one
of the houses we were looking at collapsed in a cloud of dust.
Under these wailing parabolas, swinging invisibly across from horizon to
horizon, we withdrew behind the farmhouse for lunch--sandwiches,
frankfurters kept hot in a fireless cooker, and red wine--when far
overhead a double-decker English aeroplane suddenly sailed over us. It
seemed to be about six thousand feet above us, so high that the sound of
its motors was lost, and its speed seemed but a lazy, level drifting
across the blue. Did it take those three motor-cars and those little
dots for some reconnoitring division commander and his staff? Aeroplanes
not only drop bombs, but signal to their friends; there was an
uncomfortable amount of artillery scattered about the country, and we
watched with peculiar interest the movements of this tiny hawk.
But already other guns, as hidden as those that might be threatening us,
had come, as it were, to the rescue. A little ball of black smoke
suddenly puffed out behind that sailing bird, and presently a sharp
crack of a bursting shrapnel shell came down to our ears. Another puff
of smoke, closer, one in front, above, below. They chased round him
like swallows. In all the drab hideousness of modern warfare there is
nothing so airy, so piquant, so pretty as this.
Our bird and his pursuers disappeared in the north; over the level
country to the south floated a German observation balloon, and presently
we rumbled over a canal and through the shattered village of La Bassée.
La Bassée had been in the war despatches for months, and looked it. Its
church, used as a range-finder, apparently, was a gray honeycomb from
which each day a few shells took another bite. Roofs were torn off,
streets strewn with broken glass and brick; yet it is in such houses and
their cellars that soldiers fighting in the trenches in a neighborhood
like this come back for a rest, dismal little islands which mask the
armies one does not see at the front.
The custom of billeting soldiers in houses--possible in territory so
closely built up--adds to the vagueness of modern warfare. Americans
associate armies with tents. When we mobilized ten thousand men at San
Antonio, you were in a city of soldiers. Ten thousand men in this war
disappear like water in sand. Some of them are in the trenches, some in
villages like this, out of the zone of heavier fire, but within a few
minutes' walk of their work, so to speak. Others are distributed
farther back, over a zone perhaps ten miles deep, crisscrossed with
telephone-wires, and so arranged with assembling stations, reserves, and
sub-reserves that the whole is a closely knit organism all the way up to
the front. There is continual movement in this body--the men in the
trenches go back after forty-eight hours to the near-by village, after
days or weeks of this service, back clear out of the zone of fire; fresh
men come up to take their places, and so on. All you see as you whirl
through is a sentry here, a soldier's head there at a second-story
window, a company shuffling along a country road.
Women watched us from the doors of La Bassée--still going on living
here, somehow, as human beings will on the volcano's very edge--and
children were playing in the street. Husbands gone, food gone, the
country swept bare--why did they not go, too? But where? Here, at any
rate, there was a roof overhead--until a shell smashed it--and food
soldiers were glad to share. There must be strange stories to tell of
these little islands on the edge of the battle, where the soldiers who
are going out to be killed, and the women whose husbands, perhaps, are
going to help kill them, huddle together for a time, victims of a common
storm.
We whirled past them down the road a bit, then walked up a gentle slope
to the right. Over this low ridge, from the English trenches,
rifle-bullets whistled above our heads. In the shelter of a brick
farmhouse a dozen or so German soldiers were waiting, after trench
service, to go back to La Bassée. They were smallish, mild-looking men,
dusted with the yellow clay in which they had burrowed--clothes, boots,
faces, and hands---until they looked like millers.
"How are the English?" some one asked. "Do they know how to shoot?"
A weary sort of hoot chorused out from the dust-covered men.
"Gut genug!" they said. The house was strewn with rusty cartridge clips
and smashed brick. We waited while our chaperon brought the battalion
commander--a mild-faced little man, more like a school-teacher than a
soldier--and it was decided that, as the trenches were not under fire at
the moment, we might go into them. He led the way into the
communication trench--a straight-sided winding ditch, shoulder-deep, and
just wide enough to walk in comfortably. Yellow clay was piled up
overhead on either side, and there was a wooden sidewalk. The ditch
twisted constantly as the trenches themselves do, so as not to be swept
by enfilading fire, and after some hundreds of yards of this twisting,
we came to the: first-line trench and the men's dugouts.
It was really a series of little caves, with walls of solid earth and
roofs of timber and sand-bags, proof against almost anything but the
plunging flight of heavy high-explosive shells. The floors of these
caves were higher than the bottom of the trench, so that an ordinary
rain would not flood them, and covered with straw. And they were full
of men, asleep, working over this and that--from one came the smell of
frying ham. The trench twisted snakelike in a general north and south
direction, and was fitted every few feet with metal firing-shields,
loopholed for rifles and machine guns. In each outer curve facing the
enemy a firing platform, about waist-high, had been cut in the earth,
with similar armored port-holes.
The Germans had been holding this trench for three months, and its whole
outer surface was frosted a sulphurous yellow from the smoke of exploded
shells. Shrapnel-casings and rusted shell-noses were sticking
everywhere in the clay, and each curve exposing a bit of surface to
the enemy was honeycombed with bullet holes. In one or two places
sand-bags, caves, and all had been torn out.
Except for an occasional far-off detonation and the more or less
constant and, so to speak, absent-minded cracking of rifles, a mere
keeping awake, apparently, and letting the men in the opposite trenches
know you are awake, the afternoon was peaceful. Pink-cheeked youngsters
in dusty Feldgrau, stiffened and clapped their hands to their sides as
officers came in sight, heard English with an amazement not difficult to
imagine, and doubtless were as anxious to talk to these strange beings
from a world they'd said good-by to, as we were to talk to them.
At one of the salient angles, where a platform had been cut, we stopped
to look through a periscope: one cannot show head or hand above the
trench, of course, without drawing fire, and looks out of this curious
shut-in world as men do in a submarine--just as the lady in the
old-fashioned house across from us in New York sits at her front window
and sees in a slanting mirror everything that happens between her and
the Avenue.
We had not been told just where we were going (in that shut-in ditch one
had no idea), and there in the mirror, beyond some straggling barbed
wire and perhaps seventy-five yards of ordinary grass, was another clay
bank--the trenches of the enemy! Highlanders, Gurkhas, Heaven knows
what--you could see nothing--but--over there was England!
So this was what these young soldiers had come to--here was the real
thing. Drums beat, trumpets blare, the Klingelspiel jingles at the
regiment's head, and with flowers in your helmet, and your wife or
sweetheart shouldering your rifle as far as the station--and you should
see these German women marching out with their men!--you go marching out
to war. You look out of the windows of various railway trains, then
they lead you through a ditch into another ditch, and there, across a
stretch of mud which might be your own back yard, is a clay bank, which
is your enemy. And one morning at dawn you climb over your ditch and
run forward until you are cut down. And when you have, so to speak,
been thrown in the stream for the others to cross over, and the trench
is taken, and you are put out of the way under a few inches of French
earth, then, perhaps, inasmuch as experience shows that it isn't worth
while to try to keep a trench unless you have captured more than three
hundred yards of it, the battalion retires and starts all over again.
We had walked on down the trenches, turned a bend where two trees had
been blown up and flung across it, when there was a dull report near by,
followed a moment later by a tremendous explosion out toward the enemy's
trench. "Unsere Minen!" ("One of our bombs!") laughed a young soldier
beside me, and a crackle of excitement ran along the trench. These
bombs were cylinders, about the size of two baking-powder tins joined
together, filled with dynamite and exploded by a fuse. They were thrown
from a small mortar with a light charge of powder, just sufficient to
toss them over into the opposite trench. The Germans knew what was
coming, and they were laughing and watching in the direction of the
English trenches.
"Vorsicht! Vorsicht!"
There was a dull report and at the same moment something shot up from
the English trenches and, very clear against the western sky, came
flopping over and over toward us like a bottle thrown over a barn.
"Vorsicht! Vorsicht!" It sailed over our heads behind the trench, there
was an instant's silence, and then "Whong!" and a pile of dirt and black
smoke was flung in the air. Again there was a dull report, and we sent
a second back--this time behind their trench--and again--"Vorsicht!
Vorsicht!"--they sent an answer back. Four times this was repeated. A
quainter way of making war it would be hard to imagine. They might have
been boys playing "anty-over" over the old house at home.
Bombs of this sort have little penetrating power. If thrown in the open
they go off on the surface much like a gigantic firecracker. They are
easy to dodge by daylight, when you can see them coming, but thrown at
night as part of a general bombardment, including shrapnel and heavy
explosive shells, or exploding directly in the trench, they must be
decidedly unpleasant.
The bomb episode had divided us, two officers and myself waiting on one
side of the bend in the trench toward which the bombs were thrown, the
others going ahead. It was several minutes before I rejoined them, and
I did not learn until we were outside that they had been taken to
another periscope through which they saw a space covered with English
dead. There were, perhaps, two hundred men in khaki lying there, they
said, some hanging across the barbed-wire entanglements at the very foot
of the German trench, just as they had been thrown back in the attack
which had succeeded at Neuve Chapelle. Several Englishmen had got clear
into the German trench before they were killed. Here was another
example of the curious localness of this dug-in warfare, that one could
pass within a yard or two of such a battle-field and not know even that
it was there.
By another communication trench we returned to the little house. The
sun was low by this time and the line of figures walking down the-road
toward the automobiles in its full light. Perhaps the glasses of some
British lookout picked us up--at any rate the whisper of bullets became
uncomfortably frequent and near, and we had just got to the motors when
--Tssee--ee--rr... BONG! a shell crashed into the church of La Bassée,
only three hundred yards in front of us.
Before ours had started, another, flying on a lower trajectory, it
seemed, shrieked over our heads and burst beside the road so close to
the first motor that it threw mud into it. Apparently we were both
observed and sought after, and as the range of these main highways, up
and down which troops and munitions pass, is perfectly known, there was
a rather uncomfortable few minutes ere we had whirled through La Bassée,
with the women watching from their doors--no racing motors for them to
run away in!--and down the tree-arched road to ordinary life again.
No, not exactly ordinary, though we ourselves went back to a comfortable
hotel, for the big city of Lille, which had shown trolley-cars and a
certain amount of animation earlier in the day, was now, at dusk, like a
city of the dead. The chambermaid shrugged her shoulders with something
about a "punition" and, when asked why they were punished, said that
some French prisoners had been brought through Lille a week or two
before, and "naturally, the people shouted 'Vive la France!'"
So the military governor, as we observed next morning in a proclamation
posted on the blank wall across the street, informing the inhabitants
that they "apparently did not, as yet, understand the seriousness of the
situation," ordered the city to pay a 'fine of five hundred thousand
francs, and the citizens for two weeks to go within doors at sundown and
not stir abroad before seven next morning. Another poster warned people
that two English aviators had been obliged to come down within the city,
that they were still at large, and that any one who hid them or helped
them escape would be punished with death, in addition to which the
commune would be punished, too.
It was through black and silent streets, therefore, that our troop was
led from the hotel in which we were lodged to one in which we dined.
Here everything was warm and light and cheerful enough. Boyish
lieutenants, with close-clipped heads after the German fashion, were
telling each other their adventures, and here and there were older
officers, who looked as if war had worn them a bit, and they had come
here to forget for a moment over a bottle of champagne and the talk of
some old friend. The bread was black and hard, but the other food as
usual in France, with wine plenty and cheap, and even some of the
round-shelled, coppery oysters--captured somehow, in spite of blockades
and bombardments--just up from Ostend. It was bedtime when we emerged
into the black streets again, to discover, with something like surprise,
a sky full of stars and a pale new moon.
The rest of that civilian tour was very civil, indeed--a sort of
loop-the-loop of Belgium, with scarce a pause for breath. You can
imagine _that cosmopolitan menagerie trooping next morning up the stone
stairs of the castle of the Counts of Flanders in Ghent; at noon
inspecting old lace in Bruges, and people coming home from church, the
German guard changing, and the German band playing in the central
square; at two o'clock lunching in one of the Ostend summer hotels, now
full of German officers; at four pausing for a tantalizing moment in
Middelkerk, while the German guns we were not allowed to see on the edge
of the town were banging away at the British at Nieuport down the beach.
Next day Brussels--out to Waterloo, in a cloud of dust--the Congo
Museum--the King's palace at Laaken, an old servitor with a beard like
the tall King Leopold's leading these vandals through it, and looking
unutterable things--a word with the civil governor, here--a charming
lunch at a barracks, there--in short, a wild flight behind the man with
the precious "Ausweis."
We saw and sometimes met a good many German officers in a rather
familiar way. Many of the younger men reminded one of our university
men at home; several of the older men resembled their well-set-up
English cousins. This seemed particularly true of the navy, which has
acquired a type--lean, keen, firm-lipped young men, with a sense of
humor--entirely different from the German often seen in cafes, with no
back to his head, and a neck overflowing his collar. Particularly
interesting were those who, called back 'into uniform from responsible
positions in civil life, were attacking, as if building for all time,
the appallingly difficult and delicate task of improvising a government
for a complex modern state, and winning the tolerance, if not the
co-operation, of a conquered people confident that their subjection
was but for the day.
Our progress everywhere was down a continuous aisle of heel-clickings
and salutes. Sometimes, when we had to pass through three rows of
passport examiners between platform and gate, these formalities seemed
rather excessive. In the grenadier barracks in Brussels we had been
taken through sleeping-rooms, cool storerooms with their beer barrels
and loops of sausages--"all made by the regiment"--and were just
entering the kitchen when a giant of a man, seeing his superior
officers, snapped stiff as a ramrod and, as it is every German
subordinate's duty to do, bellowed out his "Meldung"--who and what the
men in his room were, and that they were going to have meat and noodle
soup for dinner.
No Frenchman, Englishman, or American could be taught, let alone achieve
of his own free will, the utter self-forgetfulness with which this vast
creature, every muscle tense, breathing like a race-horse, roared, or
rather exploded: "Herr Hauptmann! Mannschafts-Kuche-desten-Landwehr-
Regiments! Belegt-mit-einem-Unter-offizier-und-zehn-Mann! Wir essen
heute Suppe mit Nudeln und Fleisch! Zu Befehl!"
He had stepped down a century and a half from the grenadiers of the
Great Frederic, and even our hosts may have smiled. It was different
with the soldiers' salute, or the ordinary coming to attention, which we
saw repeated scores of times a day. Whatever men might be doing,
however awkward or inconvenient it might be, whether any one saw them or
not, they stopped short at the sight of these long, gray-blue coats and
stiffened, chin up, eyes on their superior, hands at their sides. If
they were talking, they became silent; if laughing, their faces smoothed
out, and into their eyes came an expression which, when you have seen it
repeated hundreds of times, you will not forget. It is a look of
seriousness, self-forgetfulness, of almost religious devotion, not to
the individual, but to the idea for which he stands. I saw a soldier
half-dressed, through a barracks window under which we passed, sending
after his officer, who did not even see him, that same look, the look of
a man who has just volunteered to charge the enemy's trench, or who sees
nothing absurd in saying the Germans fear God and nothing else in the
world!
One seemed to see the soul of Germany, at least of this "great time," in
these men's eyes. The Belgian soul we did not see much of, but there
came glimpses of it now and then.
In Antwerp we stopped in a little café for a cup of chocolate. It was a
raw, cheerless morning, with occasional snowflakes whipping by on the
damp north wind, the streets were all but deserted, and in the room that
used to be full of smoke and talk there were only empty tables, and you
could see your breath.
A man was scrubbing behind the bar, and a pale girl in black came out
from behind the cashier's counter to make our chocolate. It was good
chocolate, as Antwerp chocolate is likely to be, and as we were getting
ready to go out again I asked her how things were. She glanced around
the room and answered that they used to have a good business here, but
the good times were gone--"les beaux jours sont partis." Two others
drifted over and asked questions about the bombardment. She answered
politely enough, with the air of one to whom it was an old story now--
she had left on the second day, when the building across the way was
smashed, and walking, catching rides, stumbling along with the other
thousands, had got into Holland. As to why the city fell so quickly--
she pulled her shawl about her shoulders and murmured that there were
things people did not know, if they did they did not talk about them.
And the Germans--how were they? They had no complaints to make, the girl
said; the Germans were well behaved--"tres correct." Possibly, then--it
was our young Italian who put the question--the Belgians would just as
soon... I did not catch the whole sentence, but all at once something
flashed behind that non-committal cafe proprietress's mask. "Moi, je
suis fiere d'etre Belge!" said the girl, and as she spoke you could see
the color slowly burning through her pale face and neck--she was proud
to be a Belgian--they hoped, that one could keep, and there would come a
day, we could be sure of that--"un jour de revanche!"
But business is business, and people who run cafes must, as every one
knows, not long indulge in the luxury of personal feelings. The
officers turned up their fur collars, and we buttoned up our coats, and
she was sitting behind the counter, the usual little woman in black at
the cafe desk, as we filed out. Our captain paused as we passed, gave a
stiff little bow from the waist, touched his cap gallantly, and said:
"Bon jour, mademoiselle!" And the girl nodded politely, as café
proprietresses should, and murmured, blank as the walls in the Antwerp
streets: "Bon jour, monsieur!"