button. _Rrr-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-rrrip_ went the
mitrailleuse, with the noise of a million mowing-machines. Flame spurted
from its muzzle as water spurts from the nozzle of a fire-hose. The
racket in the log-roofed gun-pit was ear-shattering. The blast of
bullets spattered the German trenches, they _pinged_ metallically
against the steel plates set in the embrasures, they kicked up countless
spurts of yellow earth. The sergeant stood up, grinning, and with a
grimy handkerchief wiped from his face the powder stains and
perspiration.
[Illustration:
French trenches on the Somme.
“This is the sort of wall which one side or the other will have to
break through in order to win this war.”
]
“If you should happen to be in Schenectady you might drop in at the
General Electric plant and tell the boys—” he began, but the sentence
was never finished, for just then a shell whined low above our heads and
burst somewhere behind the trenches with the roar of an exploding
powder-mill. We had disturbed the Germans’ afternoon siesta, and their
batteries were showing their resentment.
“I think that perhaps I’d better be moving along,” said I hastily. “It’s
getting on toward dinner time.”
“Well, s’long,” said he regretfully. “And say,” he called after me,
“when you get back to little old New York would you mind dropping into
the Knickerbocker and having a drink for me? And be sure and give my
regards to Broadway.”
“I certainly will,” said I.
And that is how a Franco-American whose name I do not know, sergeant in
a French line regiment whose number I may not mention, and I held an Old
Home Week celebration of our own in the French trenches in Alsace. For
all I know there may have been some other residents of central New York
over in the German trenches. If so, they made no attempt to join our
little reunion. Had they done so they would have received a _very_ warm
reception.
[Illustration:
In the French trenches on the Yser.
To put one’s head a fraction of an inch above the parapet is to become
a corpse, so a watch is kept on the enemy through periscopes.
]
There were several reasons why I welcomed the opportunity offered me by
the French General Staff to see the fighting in Alsace. In the first
place a veil of secrecy had been thrown over the operations in that
region, and the mysterious is always alluring. Secondly, most of the
fighting that I have seen has been either in flat or only moderately
hilly countries, and I was curious to see how warfare is conducted in a
region as mountainous and as heavily forested as the Adirondacks or
Oregon. Again, the Alsace sector is at the extreme southern end of that
great battle-line, more than four hundred miles long, which stretches
its unlovely length across Europe from the North Sea to the Alps, like
some monstrous and deadly snake. And lastly, I wanted to see the
retaking of that narrow strip of territory lying between the summit of
the Vosges and the Rhine which for more than forty years has been
mourned by France as one of her “lost provinces.”
[Illustration:
_From a photograph by E. A. Powell._
In the Vosges the French have built veritable underground cities.
]
[Illustration:
_From a photograph by Meurisse._
A 155-millimetre gun firing at a German position eight miles away.
]
Campaigning in the Vosges.
This land of Alsace is, in many respects, the most beautiful that I have
ever seen. Strung along the horizon, like sentinels wrapped in mantles
of green, the peaks of the Vosges loom against the sky. On the slopes of
the ridges, massed in their black battalions, stand forests of spruce
and pine. Through peaceful valleys silver streams meander leisurely, and
in the meadows which border them cattle stand knee-deep amid the lush
green grass. The villages, their tortuous, cobble-paved streets lined on
either side by dim arcades, and the old, old houses, with their turrets
and balconies and steep-pitched pottery roofs, give you the feeling that
they are not real, but that they are scenery on a stage, and this
illusion is heightened by the men in their jaunty _bérets_ and wooden
_sabots_, and the women, whose huge black silk head-dresses accentuate
the freshness of their complexions. It is at once a region of ruggedness
and majesty and grandeur, of quaintness and simplicity and charm. As I
motored through it, it was hard to make myself believe that death was
abroad in so fair a land, and that over there, on the other side of
those near-by hills, men were engaged in the business of wholesale
slaughter. I was brought to an abrupt realization of it, however, as we
were passing through the old gray town of Gérardmer. I heard a sudden
outcry, and the streets, which a moment before had been a-bustle with
the usual market-day crowd, were all at once deserted. The people dived
into their houses as a woodchuck dives into its hole. The sentries on
duty in front of the _État-Major_ were staring upward. High in the sky,
approaching with the speed of an express-train, was what looked like a
great white seagull, but which, from the silver sheen of its
armor-plated body, I knew to be a German _Taube_. “We’re in for another
bombardment,” remarked an officer. “The German airmen have been visiting
us every day of late.” As the aircraft swooped lower and nearer, a
field-gun concealed on the wooded hillside above the town spoke sharply,
and a moment later there appeared just below the _Taube_ a sudden
splotch of white, like one of those powder-puffs that women carry. From
the opposite side of the town another antiaircraft gun began to bark
defiance, until soon the aerial intruder was ringed about by wisps of
fleecy smoke. At one time I counted as many as forty of them, looking
like white tufts on a coverlet of turquoise blue. Things were getting
too hot for the German, and with a beautiful sweep he swung about, and
went sailing down the wind, content to wait until a more favorable
opportunity should offer.
The inhabitants of these Alsatian towns have become so accustomed to
visits from German airmen that they pay scarcely more attention to them
than they do to thunderstorms, going indoors to avoid the bombs just as
they go indoors to avoid the rain. I remarked, indeed, as I motored
through the country, that nearly every town through which we passed
showed evidences, either by shattered roofs or shrapnel-spattered walls,
of aeroplane bombardment. Thus is the war brought home to those who,
dwelling many miles from the line of battle, might naturally suppose
themselves safe from harm. In those towns which are within range of the
German guns the inhabitants are in double danger, yet the shops and
schools are open, and the townspeople go about their business apparently
wholly unmindful of the possibility that a shell may drop in on them at
any moment. In St. Dié we stopped for lunch at the Hôtel Terminus, which
is just opposite the railway-station. St. Dié is within easy range of
the German guns—or was when I was there—and when the Germans had nothing
better to do they shelled it, centring their fire, as is their custom,
upon the railway-station, so as to interfere as much as possible with
traffic and the movement of troops. The station and the adjacent
buildings looked like cardboard boxes in which with a lead-pencil
somebody had jabbed many ragged holes. The hotel, despite its upper
floor having been wrecked by shell-fire only a few days previously, was
open and doing business. Ranged upon the mantel of the dining-room was a
row of German 77-millimetre shells, polished until you could see your
face in them. “Where did you get those?” I asked the woman who kept the
hotel. “Those are some German shells that fell in the garden during the
last bombardment, and didn’t explode,” she answered carelessly. “I had
them unloaded—the man who did it made an awful fuss about it, too—and I
use them for hot-water bottles. Sometimes it gets pretty cold here at
night, and it’s very comforting to have a nice hot shell in your bed.”
From St. Dié to Le Rudlin, where the road ends, is in the neighborhood
of thirty miles, and we did it in not much over thirty minutes. We went
so fast that the telegraph-poles looked like the palings in a picket
fence, and we took the corners on two wheels—doubtless to save rubber.
Of one thing I am quite certain: if I am killed in this war, it is not
going to be by a shell or a bullet; it is going to be in a military
motor-car. No cars save military ones are permitted on the roads in the
zone of operations, and for the military cars no speed limits exist. As
a result, the drivers tear through the country as though they were in
the Vanderbilt Cup Race. Sometimes, of course, a wheel comes off, or
they meet another vehicle when going round a corner at full speed—and
the next morning there is a military funeral. To be the driver of a
military car in the zone of operations is the joy-rider’s dream come
true. The soldier who drove my car steered with one hand because he had
to use the other to illustrate the stories of his exploits in the
trenches. Despite the fact that we were on a mountain road, one side of
which dropped away into nothingness, when he related the story of how he
captured six Germans single-handed he took both hands off the wheel to
tell about it. It would have made Barney Oldfield’s hair permanently
pompadour.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph by Meurisse._
What the Germans did to the church at Ribécourt.
]
At Le Rudlin, where there is an outpost of Alpine chasseurs, we left the
car, and mounted mules for the ascent of the _Hautes Chaumes_, or High
Moors, which crown the summit of the Vosges. Along this ridge ran the
imaginary line which Bismarck made the boundary between Germany and
France. Each mule was led by a soldier, whose short blue tunic, scarlet
breeches, blue puttees, rakish blue _béret_, and rifle slung
hunter-fashion across his back, made him look uncommonly like a Spanish
brigand, while another soldier hung to the mule’s tail to keep him on
the path, which is as narrow and slippery as the path of virtue. Have
you ever ridden the trail which leads from the rim of the Grand Canyon
down to the Colorado? Yes? Well, the trail which we took up to the
_Hautes Chaumes_ was in places like that, only more so. Yet over that
and similar trails has passed an army of invasion, carrying with it,
either on the backs of mules or on the backs of men, its guns, food, and
ammunition, and sending back in like fashion its wounded. Reaching the
summit, the trail debouched from the dense pine forest onto an open,
wind-swept moor. Dotting the backbone of the ridge, far as the eye could
see, ran a line of low stone boundary posts. On one side of each post
was carved the letter F. On the other, the eastern face, was the letter
D. Is it necessary to say that F stood for France and D for Deutschland?
Squatting beside one of the posts was a French soldier busily engaged
with hammer and chisel in cutting away the D. “It will not be needed
again,” he explained, grinning.
[Illustration:
On the summit of the Vosges.
Mr. Powell standing beside one of the stone posts which formerly
marked the frontier of Germany and France.
]
Leaving the mules in the shelter of the wood, we proceeded across the
open tableland which crowns the summit of the ridge on foot, for, being
now within both sight and range of the German batteries, there seemed no
object in attracting more attention to ourselves than was absolutely
necessary. Half a mile or so beyond the boundary posts the plateau
suddenly fell away in a sheer precipice, a thin screen of bushes
bordering its brink. The topographical officer who had assumed the
direction of the expedition at Le Rudlin motioned me to come forward.
“Have a look,” said he, “but be careful not to show yourself or to shake
the bushes, or the Boches may send us a shell.” Cautiously I peered
through an opening in the branches. The mountain slope below me, almost
at the foot of the cliff on which I stood, was scarred across by two
great undulating yellow ridges. In places they were as much as a
thousand yards apart, in others barely ten. I did not need to be told
what they were. I knew. The ridge higher up the slope marked the line of
the French trenches; the lower that of the German. From them came an
incessant crackle and splutter which sounded like a forest fire.
Sometimes it would die down until only an occasional shot would
punctuate the mountain silence, and then, apparently without cause, it
would rise into a clatter which sounded like an army of carpenters
shingling a roof. In the forests on either side of us batteries were at
work steadily, methodically, and, though we could not see the guns, the
frequent fountains of earth thrown up along both lines of trenches by
bursting shells showed how heavy was the bombardment that was in
progress, and how accurate was both the French and German fire. We were
watching what the official _communiqué_ described the next day as the
fighting on the Fecht very much as one would watch a football game from
the upper row of seats in the Harvard stadium. Above the forest at our
right swayed a French observation balloon, tugging impatiently at its
rope, while the observer, glasses glued to his eyes, telephoned to the
commander of the battery in the wood below him where his shells were
hitting. Suddenly, from the French position just below me, there rose,
high above the duotone of rifle and artillery fire, the shrill clatter
of a quick-firer. _Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat_ it went, for all the world
like one of those machines which they use for riveting steel girders.
And, when you come to think about it, that is what it _was_ doing:
riveting the bonds which bind Alsace to France.
I have heard it said that the French army has been opposed, and in many
instances betrayed, by the people whom they thought they were liberating
from the German yoke, and that consequently the feeling of the French
soldiers for the Alsatians is very bitter. This assertion is not true. I
talked with a great many people during my stay in Alsace—with the
_maires_ of towns, with shopkeepers, with peasant farmers, and with
village priests—and I found that they welcomed the French as
wholeheartedly as a citizen who hears a burglar in his house welcomes a
policeman. I saw old men and women who had dwelt in Alsace before the
Germans came, and who had given up all hope of seeing the beloved
tricolor flying again above Alsatian soil, standing at the doors of
their cottages, with tears coursing down their cheeks, while the endless
columns of soldiery in the familiar uniform tramped by. In the
schoolhouses of Alsace I saw French soldiers patiently teaching children
of French blood, who have been born under German rule and educated under
German schoolmasters, the meaning of “_Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité_,”
and that _p-a-t-r-i-e_ spells France.
The change from Teutonic to Gallic rule is, however, by no means
welcomed by all Alsatians. The Alsatians of to-day, remember, are not
the Alsatians of 1870. It has been the consistent policy of the German
Government to encourage and, where necessary, to assist German farmers
to settle in Alsace, and as the years passed and the old hatred died
down, these newcomers intermarried with the old French stock, so that
to-day there are thousands of the younger generation in whose veins flow
both French and German blood, and who scarcely know themselves to whom
their allegiance belongs. As a result of this peculiar condition, both
the French and German military authorities have to be constantly on
their guard against treachery, for a woman bearing a French name may
well be of German birth, while a man who speaks nothing but German may,
nevertheless, be of pure French extraction. Hence spies, both French and
German, abound. If the French Intelligence Department is well served, so
is that of Germany. Peasants working in the fields, petty tradesmen in
the towns, women of social position, and other women whose virtue is as
easy as an old shoe, Germans dressed as priests, as hospital attendants,
as Red Cross nurses, sometimes in French uniforms and travelling in
motor-cars with all the necessary papers—all help to keep the German
military authorities informed of what is going on behind the French
lines. Sometimes they signal by means of lamps, or by raising and
lowering the shade of a lighted room of some lonely farmhouse; sometimes
by means of cunningly concealed telephone wires; occasionally by the
fashion in which the family washing is arranged upon a line within range
of German telescopes, innocent-looking red-flannel petticoats,
blue-linen blouses, and white undergarments being used instead of
signal-flags to spell out messages in code. A plough with a white or
gray horse has more than once indicated the position of a French battery
to the German airmen. The movements of a flock of sheep, driven by a spy
disguised as a peasant, has sometimes given similar information. On one
occasion three German officers in a motor-car managed to get right
through the British lines in Flanders. Two of them were disguised as
French officers, who were supposed to be bringing back the third as a
prisoner, he being, of course, in German uniform. So clever and daring
was their scheme that they succeeded in getting close to British
headquarters before they were detected and captured. They are no cowards
who do this sort of work. They know perfectly well what it means if they
are caught: sunrise, a wall, and a firing-party.
[Illustration:
The German shells drop into the lake and stun hundreds of fish,
whereupon the soldiers paddle out and gather them in.
]
[Illustration:
The first shot is the signal for the band to take position on the
shore of the lake and play the _Marseillaise_.
]
On the Lac Noir.
From the _Hautes Chaumes_ we descended by a very steep and perilous path
to the Lac Noir, where a battalion of Alpine chasseurs had built a
cantonment at which we spent the night. The Lac Noir, or Black Lake,
occupies the crater of an extinct volcano, whose rocky sides are so
smooth and steep that it looks like a gigantic washtub, in which a weary
Hercules might wash the clothing of the world. There were in the
neighborhood of a thousand chasseurs in camp on the shores of the Lac
Noir when I was there, the _chef de brigade_ having been, until the
beginning of the war, military adviser to the President of China. The
amazing democracy of the French army was illustrated by the fact that
his second in command, Lieutenant-Colonel Messimy, was, until the change
of cabinet which took place after the battle of the Marne, minister of
war. The cantonment—“Black Lake City” Colonel Messimy jokingly called
it—looked far more like a summer camp in the Adirondacks than a
soldiers’ camp in Alsace. All the buildings were of logs, their roofs
being covered with masses of green boughs to conceal them from
inquisitive aeroplanes, and at the back of each hut, hollowed from the
mountainside, was an underground shelter in which the men could take
refuge in case of bombardment. Gravelled paths, sometimes bordered with
flowers, wound amid the pine-trees; the officers’ quarters had broad
verandas, with ingeniously made rustic furniture upon them; the
mess-tables were set under leafy arbors; there was a swimming-raft and a
diving-board, and a sort of rustic pavilion known as the “Casino,” where
the men passed their spare hours in playing cards or danced to the music
of a really excellent band. Over the doorway was a sign which read: “The
music of the tambourine has been replaced by the music of the cannon.”
Though the Lac Noir was, when I was there, within the French lines, it
was within range of the German batteries, which shelled it almost daily.
The slopes of the crater on which the cantonment was built are so steep,
however, that the shells would miss the barracks altogether, dropping
harmlessly in the middle of the little lake. The ensuing explosion would
stun hundreds of fish, which would float upon the surface of the water,
whereupon the soldiers would paddle out in a rickety flatboat and gather
them in. In fact, a German bombardment came to mean that the chasseurs
would have fish for dinner. This daily bombardment, which usually began
just before sunset, the French called the “Evening Prayer.” The first
shot was the signal for the band to take position on that shore of the
lake which could not be reached by the German shells, and play the
_Marseillaise_, a bit of irony which afforded huge amusement to the
French and excessive irritation to the Germans.
[Illustration:
The penalty for treason.
]
When the history of the campaign in the Vosges comes to be written, a
great many pages will have to be devoted to recounting the exploits of
the _chasseurs alpins_. The “Blue Devils,” as the Germans have dubbed
them, are the Highlanders of the French army, being recruited from the
French slopes of the Alps and the Pyrenees. Tough as rawhide, keen as
razors, hard as nails, they are the ideal troops for mountain warfare.
They wear a distinctive dark-blue uniform, and the _béret_, or cap, of
the French Alps, a flat-topped, jaunty head-dress which is brother to
the tam-o’-shanter. The frontier of Alsace, from a point opposite
Strasbourg to a point opposite Mülhausen, follows the summit of the
Vosges, and over this range, which in places is upward of four thousand
feet in height, have poured the French armies of invasion. In the van of
those armies have marched the _chasseurs alpins_, dragging their guns by
hand up the almost sheer precipices, and dragging the gun-mules after
them; advancing through forests so dense that they had to chop paths for
the line regiments which followed them; carrying by storm the apparently
impregnable positions held by the Germans; sleeping often without
blankets and with the mercury hovering near zero on the heights which
they had captured; taking their batteries into positions where it was
believed no batteries could go; raining shells from those batteries upon
the wooded slopes ahead, and, under cover of that fire, advancing,
always advancing. Think of what it meant to get a great army over such a
mountain range in the face of desperate opposition; think of the labor
involved in transporting the enormous supplies of food, clothing, and
ammunition required by that army; think of the sufferings of the wounded
who had to be taken back across those mountains, many of them in the
depths of winter, sometimes in litters, sometimes lashed to the backs of
mules. The mule, whether from the Alps, the Pyrenees, or from Missouri,
is playing a brave part in this mountain warfare, and whenever I saw one
I felt like the motorist who, after his automobile had been hauled out
of an apparently bottomless Southern bog by a negro who happened to be
passing with a mule team, said to his son: “My boy, from now on always
raise your hat to a mule.”
Just as the crimson disk of the sun peered cautiously over the crater’s
rim, we bade good-by to our friends the _chasseurs alpins_, and turned
the noses of our mules up the mountains. As we reached the summit of the
range, the little French captain who was acting as our guide halted us
with a gesture. “Look over there,” he said, pointing to where, far
beyond the trench-scarred hillsides, a great, broad valley was swimming
in the morning mists. There were green squares which I knew for
meadow-lands, and yellow squares which were fields of ripening grain;
here and there were clusters of white-walled, red-roofed houses, with
ancient church-spires rising above them; and winding down the middle of
the plain was a broad gray ribbon which turned to silver when the sun
struck upon it.
“Look,” said the little captain again, and there was a break in his
voice. “That is what we are fighting for. That is Alsace.”
Then I knew that I was looking upon what is, to every man of Gallic
birth, the Promised Land; I knew that the great, dim bulk which loomed
against the distant sky-line was the Black Forest; I knew that somewhere
up that mysterious, alluring valley, Strasbourg sat on her hilltop, like
an Andromeda waiting to be freed; and that the broad, silent-flowing
river which I saw below me was none other than the Rhine.
And as I looked I recalled another scene, on another continent and
beside another river, two years before. I was standing with a colored
cavalry sergeant of the border patrol on the banks of the Rio Grande,
and we were looking southward to where the mountains of Chihuahua rose,
purple, mysterious, forbidding, grim, against the evening sky. On the
Mexican side of the river a battle was in progress.