hospital bases on the coast in herds, each being provided with a
separate covered stall, or, in case of pneumonia, with a box-stall. The
spotless buildings, with their exercise tracks and acres of green
paddocks, suggest a race-course rather than a hospital for horses
injured in war. Each hospital has its operating-sheds, its X-ray
department, its wards for special ailments, its laboratories for
preventive research work, a pharmacy, a museum which affords opportunity
for the study of the effects of sabre, shell, and bullet wounds, and a
staff of three hundred trained veterinarians. Schools have also been
established in connection with the hospitals in which the grooms and
attendants are taught the elements of anatomy, dentistry, farriery,
stabling, feeding, sanitation, and, most important of all, the care of
hoofs. All the methods and equipment employed are the best that science
can suggest and money can obtain, everything having passed the
inspection of the Duke of Portland and the Earl of Lonsdale, the two
greatest horse-breeders in England. Attached to each division of troops
in the field is a mobile veterinary section, consisting of an officer
and twenty-two men, who are equipped to render first-aid service to
wounded horses and whose duty it is to decide which animals shall be
sent to the hospitals for treatment, which are fit to return to the
front for further service, and which cases are hopeless and must be
destroyed. The enormous economic value of this system is conclusively
proved by the fact that it has reduced sickness among horses in the
British Army 50 per cent, and mortality 47 per cent.
The question that has been asked me more frequently than any other is
why the British, with upward of a million men in the field, are holding
only about fifty miles of battle-front, as compared with seventeen miles
held by the Belgians and nearly four hundred by the French. There are
several reasons for this. It should be remembered, in the first place,
that the British Army is composed of green troops, while the French
ranks, thanks to the universal service law, are filled with men all of
whom have spent at least three years with the colors. In the second
place, the British sector is by far the most difficult portion of the
western battle-front to hold, not only because of the configuration of
the country, which offers little natural protection, but because it lies
squarely athwart the road to the Channel ports—and it is to the Channel
ports that the Germans are going if men and shells can get them there.
The fighting along the British sector is, moreover, of a more desperate
and relentless nature than elsewhere on the Allied line, because the
Germans nourish a deeper hatred for the English than for all their other
enemies put together.
It was against the British, remember, that the Germans first used their
poison-gas. The first engagement of importance in which gas played a
part was the Second Battle of Ypres, lasting from April 22 until May 13,
which will probably take rank in history as one of the greatest battles
of all time. In it the Germans, owing to the surprise and confusion
created by their introduction of poison-gas, came within a hair’s
breadth of breaking through the Allied line, and would certainly have
done so had it not been for the gallantry and self-sacrifice of the
Canadian Division, which, at the cost of appalling losses, won
imperishable fame. The German bombardment of Ypres began on April 20 and
in forty-eight hours, so terrible was the rain of heavy projectiles
which poured down upon it, the quaint old city, with its exquisite Cloth
Hall, was but a heap of blackened, smoking ruins. That portion of the
Allied line to the north of the city was held, along a front of some
four miles, by a French division composed of Colonials, Algerians, and
Senegalese, stiffened by several line regiments. Late in the afternoon
of the 22d, peering above their trenches, they saw, rolling toward them
across the Flemish plain, an impalpable cloud of yellowish-green, which,
fanned by a brisk wind, moved forward at the speed of a trotting-horse.
It came on with the remorselessness of Fate. It blotted out what was
happening behind it as the smoke screen from a destroyer masks the
manœuvres of a Dreadnaught. The spring vegetation shrivelled up before
it as papers shrivel when thrown into a fire. It blasted everything it
touched as with a hand of death. No one knew what it was or whence it
came. Nearer it surged and nearer. It was within a hundred metres of the
French position ... fifty ... thirty ... ten ... and then the silent
horror was upon them. Men began to cough and hack and strangle. Their
eyes smarted and burned with the pungent, acrid fumes. Soldiers
staggered and fell before it in twos and fours and dozens as miners
succumb to fire-damp. Men, strained and twisted into grotesque, horrid
attitudes, were sobbing their lives out on the floors of the trenches.
The fire of rifles and machine-guns weakened, died down, ceased. The
whole line swayed, wavered, trembled on the verge of panic. Just then a
giant Algerian shouted: “The Boches have turned loose evil spirits upon
us! We can fight men, but we cannot fight _afrits_! Run, brothers! Run
for your lives!” That was all that was needed to precipitate the
disaster. The superstitious Africans, men from the West Coast where
voodooism still holds sway, men of the desert steeped in the traditions
and mysteries of Islam, broke and ran. The French white troops, carried
off their feet by the sudden rush, were swept along in the mad debacle.
And as they ran the yellow cloud pursued them remorselessly, like a
great hand reaching out for their throats.
An eye-witness of the rout that followed told me that he never expects
to see its like this side of the gates of hell. The fields were dotted
with blue-clad figures wearing kepis, and brown-clad ones wearing
turbans and tarbooshes, who stumbled and fell and rose again and
staggered along a few paces and fell to rise no more. The highways
leading from the trenches were choked with maddened, fear-crazed white
and black and brown men who had thrown away their rifles, their
cartridge-pouches, their knapsacks, in some cases even their coats and
shirts. Some were calling on Christ and some on Allah and some on their
strange pagan gods. Their eyes were starting from their sockets, on
their foreheads stood glistening beads of sweat, they slavered at the
mouth like dogs, their cheeks and breasts were flecked with foam. “We’re
not afraid of the Boches!” screamed a giant sergeant of zouaves, on
whose breast were the ribbons of a dozen wars. “We can fight _them_
until hell turns cold. But this we cannot fight. _Le Bon Dieu_ does not
expect us to stay and die like rats in a sewer.” Guns and gun-caissons
passed at a gallop, Turcos and _tirailleurs_ clinging to them, the
fear-crazed gunners flogging their reeking horses frantically. The
ditches bordering the roads were filled with overturned wagons and
abandoned equipment. Giant negroes, naked to the waist, tore by
shrieking that the spirits had been loosed upon them and slashing with
their bayonets at all who got in their path. Mounted officers, frantic
with anger and mortification, using their swords and pistols
indiscriminately, vainly tried to check the human stream. And through
the four-mile breach which the poison-gas had made the Germans were
pouring in their thousands. The roar of their artillery sounded like
unceasing thunder. The scarlet rays of the setting sun lighted up such a
scene as Flanders had never before beheld in all its bloody history.
Then darkness came and the sky was streaked across with the fiery trails
of rockets and the sudden splotches of bursting shrapnel. The tumult was
beyond all imagination—the crackle of musketry, the rattle of
machine-guns, the crash of high explosive, the thunder of falling walls,
the clank of harness and the rumble of wheels, the screams of the
wounded and the groans of the dying, the harsh commands of the officers,
the murmur of many voices, and the shuffle, shuffle, shuffle of
countless hurrying feet.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph copyright by M. Rol._
Machine-gun squad wearing masks as a protection against the
asphyxiating gas with which the Germans precede their attacks.
]
And through the breach still poured the helmeted legions like water
bursting through a broken dam. Into that breach were thrown the
Canadians. The story of how, overwhelmed by superior numbers of both men
and guns, choked by poison-fumes, reeling from exhaustion, sometimes
without food, for it was impossible to get it to them, under such a rain
of shells as the world had never before seen, the brawny men from the
oversea Dominion fought on for a solid week, and thereby saved the army
from annihilation, needs no re-telling here. Brigade after brigade of
fresh troops, division after division, was hurled against them but still
they battled on. So closely were they pressed at times that they fought
in little groups; men from Ontario and Quebec shoulder to shoulder with
blood-stained heroes from Alberta and Saskatchewan. At last, when it
seemed as though human endurance could stand the strain no longer, up
went the cry, “Here come the guns!” and the Canadian batteries, splashed
with sweat and mud, tore into action on the run. “Action front!”
screamed the officers, and the guns whirled like polo ponies so that
their muzzles faced the oncoming wave of gray. “With shrapnel!... Load!”
The lean and polished projectiles slipped in and the breech-blocks
snapped home. “Fire at will!” and the blast of steel tore bloody avenues
in the German ranks. But fresh battalions filled the gaps—the German
reserves seemed inexhaustible—and they still came on. At one period of
the battle the Germans were so close to the guns that the order was
given, “Set your fuses at zero!” which means that a shell bursts almost
the moment it leaves the muzzle of the gun. It was not until early on
Friday morning that reinforcements reached the shattered Canadians and
enabled them to hold their ground. Later the Northumbrian
Division—Territorials arrived only three days before from the English
training-camps—were sent to aid them and proved themselves as good
soldiers as the veterans beside whom they fought. For days the fate of
the army hung in the balance, for there seemed no end to the German
reserves, who were wiped out by whole divisions only to be replaced by
more, but against the stone wall of the Canadian resistance the men in
the spiked helmets threw themselves in vain. On May 13, 1915, after
three weeks of continuous fighting, may be said to have ended the Second
Battle of Ypres, not in a terrific and decisive climax, but slowly,
sullenly, like two prize-fighters who have fought to the very limit of
their strength.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph copyright by “The Daily Mirror.”_
A British battery in action.
]
[Illustration:
“Bodies, long months dead, rotting amid the wire entanglements.”
]
[Illustration:
_From photographs by Meurisse._
“Imagine what it must be like to sleep in a hole in the earth, into
which you have to crawl on all fours, like an animal into its lair.”
]
According to the present British system, the soldiers spend three weeks
at the front and one week in the rear—if possible, out of sound of the
guns. The entire three weeks at the front is, to all intents and
purposes, spent in the trenches, though every third day the men are
given a breathing spell. _Three weeks in the trenches!_ I wonder if you
of the sheltered life have any but the haziest notion of what that
means. I wonder if _you_, Mr. Lawyer; _you_, Mr. Doctor; _you_, Mr.
Business Man, can conceive of spending your summer vacation in a ditch 4
feet wide and 8 feet deep, sometimes with mud and water to your knees,
sometimes faint from heat and lack of air, in your nostrils the stench
of bodies long months dead, rotting amid the wire entanglements a few
yards in front of you, and over your head steel death whining angrily,
ceaselessly. I wonder if you can imagine what it must be like to
sleep—when the roar of the guns dies down sufficiently to make sleep
possible—on foul straw in a hole hollowed in the earth, into which you
have to crawl on all fours, like an animal into its lair. I wonder if
you can picture yourself as wearing a uniform so stiff with sweat and
dirt that it would stand alone, and underclothes so rotten with filth
that they would fall apart were you to take them off, your body so
crawling with vermin and so long unwashed that you are an offense to all
whom you approach—yet with no chance to bathe or to change your clothes
or sometimes even to wash your hands and face for weeks on end. I wonder
how your nerves would stand the strain if you knew that at any moment a
favorable wind might bring a gas cloud rolling down upon you to kill you
by slow strangulation, or that a shell might drop into the trench in
which you were standing in water to your knees and leave you floating
about in a bloody mess which turned that water red, or that a _Taube_
might let loose upon you a shower of steel arrows which would pass
through you as a needle passes through a piece of cloth, or that a mine
might be exploded beneath your feet and distribute you over the
landscape in fragments too small to be worth burying, or, worse still,
to leave you alive amid a litter of heads and arms and legs which a
moment before had belonged to your comrades, the horror of it all
turning you into a maniac who alternately shrieks and gibbers and rocks
with insane mirth at the horror of it all. I am perfectly aware that
this makes anything but pleasant reading, my friends, but if men of
gentle birth, men with university educations, men who are accustomed to
the same refinements and luxuries that you are, can endure these things,
why, it seems to me that you ought to be able to endure reading about
them.
[Illustration:
French high-explosive shells bursting on the German trenches.
]
The effect of some of the newer types of high-explosive shells is almost
beyond belief. For sheer horror and destruction those from the
Austrian-made Skoda howitzer, known as “Pilseners,” make the famous
42-centimetre shells seem almost kind. The Skoda shells weigh 2,800
lbs., and their usual curve is 4½ miles high. In soft ground they
penetrate 20 feet before exploding. The explosion, which occurs two
seconds after impact, kills every living thing within 150 yards, while
scores of men who escape the flying metal are killed, lacerated, or
blinded by the mere pressure of the gas. This gas pressure is so
terrific that it breaks in the roofs and partitions of bomb-proof
shelters. Of men close by not a fragment remains. The gas gets into the
body cavities and expands, literally tearing them to pieces.
Occasionally the clothes are stripped off leaving only the boots.
Rifle-barrels near by are melted as though struck by lightning. These
mammoth shells travel comparatively slowly, however, usually giving
enough warning of their approach so that the men have time to dodge
them. Their progress is so slow, indeed, that sometimes they can be
seen. Far more terrifying is the smaller shell which, because of its
shrill, plaintive whine, has been nicknamed “Weary Willie,” or those
from the new “noiseless” field-gun recently introduced by the Germans,
which gives no intimation of its approach until it explodes with a
shattering crash above the trenches. Is it any wonder that hundreds of
officers and men are going insane from the strain that they are under,
and that hundreds more are in the hospitals suffering from neuritis and
nervous breakdown? Is it any wonder that, when their term in the
trenches is over, they have to be taken out of sight and sound of battle
and their shattered nerves restored by means of a carefully planned
routine of sports and games, as though they were children in a
kindergarten?
The breweries, mills, and factories immediately behind the British lines
have, wherever practicable, been converted into bath-houses to which the
men are marched as soon as they leave the trenches. The soldiers strip
and, retaining nothing but their boots, which they deposit beside the
bathtub, they go in, soap in one hand and scrubbing-brush in the other,
the hot bath being followed by a cold shower. The underclothes which
they have taken off are promptly burned and fresh sets given to them, as
are also clean uniforms, the discarded ones, after passing through a
fumigating machine, being washed, pressed, and repaired by the numerous
Frenchwomen who are employed for the purpose, so as to be ready for
their owners the next time they return from the trenches. At one of
these improvised bath-houses thirteen hundred men pass through each day.
“What do the French think of the English?”
To every one I put that question. Summing up all opinions, I should say
that the French thoroughly appreciate the value of Britain’s sea power
and what it has meant to them for her to have control of the seas, but
they regard her lack of military preparedness and the deficiency of
technic among the British officers as inexcusable; they consider the
deep-seated opposition to conscription in England as incomprehensible;
they view the bickerings between British capital and labor as little
short of criminal; they regard the British officers who needlessly
expose themselves as being not heroic but insane. The attitude of the
British press was, in the earlier days of the war at least, calculated
to put a slight strain on the entente cordiale. Anxious, naturally
enough, to throw into high relief the exploits of the British troops in
France, the British newspapers vastly exaggerated the importance of the
British expedition, thus throwing the whole picture of the war out of
perspective. The behavior of the British officers, moreover, though
punctiliously correct, was not such as to mend matters, for they assumed
an attitude of haughty condescension which, as I happen to know, was
extremely galling to their French colleagues, most of whom had forgotten
more about the science of war than the patronizing youngsters who
officered the new armies had ever known. “To listen to you English and
to read your newspapers,” I heard a Frenchman say to an Englishman in
the Traveller’s Club in Paris not long ago, “one would think that there
was no one in France except the British Army and a few Germans.”
I have never heard any one in France suggest that the British officer is
lacking in bravery, but I have often heard it intimated that he is
lacking in brains. The view is held that he regards the war as a
sporting affair, much as he would regard polo or big-game hunting,
rather than as a deadly serious business. When the British officers in
Flanders brought over several packs of hounds and thus attempted to
combine war and hunting, it created a more unfavorable impression among
the French than if the British had lost a battle. “The British Army,” a
distinguished Italian general remarked to me shortly before Italy joined
the Allies, “is composed of magnificent material; it is well fed and
admirably equipped—but the men look on war as sport and go into battle
as they would into a game of football.” To the Frenchman, whose soil is
under the heel of the invader, whose women have been violated by a
ruthless and brutal soldiery, whose historic monuments have been
destroyed, and whose towns have been sacked and burned, this attitude of
mind is absolutely incomprehensible, and in his heart he resents it. The
above, mind you, is written in no spirit of criticism; I am merely
attempting to show you the Englishman through French eyes.
I have heard it said, in criticism, that the new British Army is
composed of youngsters. So it is, but for the life of me I fail to see
why this should be any objection. The ranks of both armies during our
Civil War were filled with boys still in their teens. It was one of
Wellington’s generals, if I remember rightly, who used to say that, for
really desperate work, he would always take lads in preference to
seasoned veterans because the latter were apt to be “too cunning.”
“These children,” exclaimed Marshal Ney, reviewing the beardless
conscripts of 1813, “are wonderful! I can do anything with them; they
will go anywhere!”
But the thing that really counts, when all is said and done, is the
_spirit_ of the men. The British soldier of this new army has none of
the rollicking, devil-may-care recklessness of the traditional Tommy
Atkins. He has not joined the army from any spirit of adventure or
because he wanted to see the world. He is not an adventurer; he is a
crusader. With him it is a deadly serious business. He has not enlisted
because he wanted to, or because he had to, but because he felt he ought
to. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred he has left a family, a
comfortable home, and a good job behind him. And, unlike the
stay-at-homes in England, he doesn’t make the mistake of underrating his
enemy. He knows that the headlines which appear regularly in the English
papers exultantly announcing “another British advance” are generally
buncombe. He knows that it isn’t a question of advancing but of hanging
on. He knows that he will have to fight with every ounce of fight there
is in him if he is to remain where he is now. He knows that before the
Germans can be driven out of France and Belgium, much less across the
Rhine, all England will be wearing crape. He knows that there is no
truth in the reports that the enemy is weakening. He knows it because
hasn’t he vainly thrown himself in successive waves against that
unyielding wall of steel? He knows that it is going to be a long
war—probably a very long war indeed. Every British officer or soldier
with whom I have talked has said that he expects that the spring of 1916
will find them in virtually the same positions that they have occupied
for the past year. They will gain ground in some places, of course, and
lose ground in others, but the winter, so the men in the trenches
believe, will see no radical alteration in the present western
battle-line. All this, of course, will not make pleasant reading in
England, where the Government and certain sections of the Press have
given the people the impression that Germany is already beaten to her
knees and that it is all over bar the shouting. Out along the
battle-front, however, in the trenches, and around the camp-fires, you
do not hear the men discussing “the terms of peace we will grant
Germany,” or “What shall we do with the Kaiser?” They are not talking
much, they are not singing much, they are not boasting at all, but they
have settled down to the herculean task that lies before them with a
grim determination, a bulldog tenacity of purpose, which is eventually,
I believe, going to prove the deciding factor in the war. Nothing better
illustrates this spirit than the inscription which I saw on a cross over
a newly made grave in Flanders:
TELL ENGLAND, YE THAT PASS THIS MONUMENT,
THAT WE WHO REST HERE DIED CONTENT.
III
CAMPAIGNING IN THE VOSGES
The sergeant in charge of the machine-gun, taking advantage of a lull in
the rifle-fire which had crackled and roared along the trenches since
dawn, was sprawled on his back in the gun-pit, reading a magazine. What
attracted my attention was its being an American magazine.
“Where did you learn to read English?” I asked him curiously.
“In America,” said he.
“What part?” said I.
“Schenectady,” he answered. “Was with the General Electric until the war
began.”
“I’m from up-State myself,” I remarked. “My people live in Syracuse.”
“The hell you say!” he exclaimed, scrambling to his feet and grasping my
hand cordially. “I took you for an Englishman. From Syracuse, eh? Why,
that makes us sort of neighbors, doesn’t it? We ought to have a drink on
it. I suppose the Boches have plenty of beer over there,” waving his
hand in the direction of the German trenches, of which I could catch a
glimpse through a loophole, “but we haven’t anything here but water.
I’ve got an idea, though! Back in the States, when they have those Old
Home Week reunions, they always fire off an anvil or the town cannon. So
what’s the matter with celebrating this reunion by letting the Boches
have a few rounds from the machine-gun?”
Seating himself astride the bicycle saddle on the trail of the
machine-gun, he swung the lean barrel of the wicked little weapon until
it rested on the German trenches a hundred yards away. Then he slipped
the end of a cartridge-carrier into the breech.
[Illustration:
In a bomb-proof gun-pit.
“_Rrr-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-rrrip_ went the mitrailleuse, with the noise
of a million mowing-machines. The racket in the log-roofed gun-pit
was deafening.”
]