when orders come to cross the border and clean things up over there in
Mexico.”
“Mistah,” he answered earnestly, “we ain’t nevah gwine tuh _cross_ dat
bodah, but one of these yere days wese a gwine tuh pick dat bodah up an’
carry it right down to Panama.”
And that is what the French are doing in Alsace. They have not crossed
the border, but they have picked the border up, and are carrying it
right down to the banks of the Rhine.
IV
THE RETAKING OF ALSACE
When I asked the general commanding the armies operating in Alsace for
permission to visit the fire-trenches, I did it merely as a matter of
form. I was quite prepared to be met with a polite but firm refusal, for
it is as difficult to get into the French trenches as it is to get
behind the scenes of a Broadway theatre on the first night of a big
production. This, understand, is not from any solicitude for your
safety, but because a fire-trench is usually a very busy place indeed,
and a visitor is apt to get in the way and make himself a nuisance
generally. Imagine my astonishment, then, when the general said,
“Certainly, if you wish,” just as though he were giving me permission to
visit his stables or his gardens. I might add that almost every
correspondent who has succeeded in getting to the French front has been
taken, with a vast deal of ceremony and precaution, into a trench of
some sort, thus giving him an experience to tell about all the rest of
his life, but those who have been permitted to visit the actual
fire-trenches might almost be numbered on one’s fingers. In this respect
the French have been much less accommodating than the Belgians or the
Germans. The fire, or first-line, trench, is the one nearest the enemy,
and both from it and against it there is almost constant firing. The
difference between a second-line, or reserve, trench, and a fire-trench
is the difference between sitting in a comfortable orchestra stall and
in being on the stage and a part of the show.
Before they took me out to the trenches we lunched in Dannemarie, or, as
it used to be known under German rule, Dammerkirch. Though the town was
within easy range of the German guns, and was shelled by them on
occasion, the motto of the townsfolk seemed to be “business as usual,”
for the shops were busy and the schools were open. We had lunch at the
local inn: it began with fresh lobster, followed by _omelette au
fromage_, spring lamb, and asparagus, and ended with strawberries, and
it cost me sixty cents, wine included. From which you will gather that
the people behind the French lines are not suffering for food.
Just outside Dannemarie the railway crosses the River Ill by three
tremendous viaducts eighty feet in height. When, early in the war, the
Germans fell back before the impetuous French advance, they effectually
stopped railway traffic by blowing up one of these viaducts behind them.
Urged by the railway company, which preferred to have the government
foot the bill, the viaduct was rebuilt by the French military
authorities, and a picture of the ceremony which marked its inauguration
by the Minister of War was published in one of the Paris illustrated
papers. The jubilation of the French was a trifle premature, however,
for a few days later the Germans moved one of their monster siege-guns
into position and, at a range of eighteen miles, sent over a shell which
again put the viaduct out of commission. That explains, perhaps, why the
censorship is so strict on pictures taken in the zone of operations.
Dannemarie is barely ten miles from that point where the French
and German trenches, after zigzagging across more than four
hundred miles of European soil, come to an abrupt end against the
frontier of Switzerland. The Swiss, who are taking no chances of
having the violation of Belgium repeated with their own country
for the victim, have at this point massed a heavy force of
extremely businesslike-looking troops, the frontier is marked by a
line of wire entanglements, and a military zone has been
established, civilians not being permitted to approach within a
mile or more of the border. When I was in that region the French
officers gave a dinner to the officers in command of the Swiss
frontier force opposite them. That there might be no embarrassing
breaches of neutrality the table was set exactly on the
international boundary, so that the Swiss officers sat in
Switzerland, and the French officers sat in France. One of the
amusing incidents of the war was when the French “put one over” on
the Germans at the beginning of hostilities in this region. Taking
advantage of a sharp angle in the contour of the Swiss frontier,
the French posted one of their batteries in such a position, that
though it could sweep the German trenches, it was so close to the
border that whenever the German guns replied their shells fell on
Swiss soil, and an international incident was created.
[Illustration:
Troglodyte dwellings in Alsace.
“Twenty feet below the surface of the earth are rooms with
sleeping-quarters for many men.”
]
The trenches in front of Altkirch, and indeed throughout Alsace, are
flanked by patches of dense woods, and it is in these woods that the
cantonments for the men are built, and amid their leafy recesses that
the soldiers spend their time when off duty in sleeping, smoking, and
card-playing. Though the German batteries periodically rake the woods
with shell-fire, it is an almost total waste of ammunition, for the men
simply retreat to the remarkable underground cities which they have
constructed, and stay there until the shell-storm is over. The
troglodyte habitations which have come into existence along the entire
length of the western battle-front are perhaps the most curious products
of this siege warfare. In these dwellings burrowed out of the earth the
soldiers of France live as the cavemen lived before the dawn of
civilization. A dozen to twenty feet below the surface of the ground,
and so strongly roofed over with logs and earth as to render their
occupants safe from the most torrential rain of high explosive, I was
shown rooms with sleeping-quarters for a hundred men apiece, blacksmith
and carpenter shops, a recreation room where the men lounged and smoked
and read the papers and wrote to the folks at home, a telegraph station,
a telephone exchange from which one could talk with any section of the
trenches, with division headquarters, or with Paris; a bathing
establishment with hot and cold water and shower-baths; a barber
shop—all with board floors, free from dampness, and surprisingly clean.
The trenches and passageways connecting these underground dwellings were
named and marked like city streets—the Avenue Joffre, the Avenue Foch,
the Rue des Victoires—and many of them were electric-lighted. The
bedroom of an artillery officer, twenty feet underground, had its walls
and ceiling covered with flowered cretonne—heaven knows where he got
it!—and the tiny windows of the division commander’s headquarters,
though they gave only on a wall of yellow mud, were hung with dainty
muslin curtains—evidently the work of a woman’s loving fingers. In one
place a score of steps led down to a passageway whose mud walls were so
close together that I brushed one with either elbow as I passed. On this
subterranean corridor doors—real doors—opened. One of these doors led
into an officer’s sitting-room. The floor and walls were covered with
planed wood and there was even an attempt at polish. The rustic
furniture was excellently made. Beside the bed was a telephone and an
electric light, and on a rude table was a brass shell-case filled with
wild flowers. On the walls the occupant had tacked pictures of his wife
and children in a pitiful attempt to make this hole in the ground look
“homelike.”
[Illustration:
_From a photograph by Meurisse._
The straggling columns of unkempt, unshaven men were in striking
contrast to the helmeted giants on gigantic horses who guarded them.
]
But don’t get the idea, from anything that I have said, that life in the
trenches is anything more than endurable. Two words describe it: misery
and muck. War is not only fighting, as many people seem to think.
Bronchitis is more deadly than bullets. Pneumonia does more harm than
poison-gas. Shells are less dangerous than lack of sanitation. To be
attacked by strange and terrible diseases; to stand day after day, week
after week, between walls of oozy mud and amid seas of slime; to be
eaten alive by vermin; to suffer the intolerable irritation of the itch;
to be caked with mud and filth; to go for weeks and perhaps for months
with no opportunity to bathe; to be so foul of person that you are an
offense to all who come near—such are the real horrors of the trench.
Yet, when the circumstances are taken into consideration, the French
soldier is admirably cared for. His health is carefully looked after. He
is well fed, well clothed, and, following the policy of conserving by
every possible means the lives of the men, he is afforded every
protection that human ingenuity can devise. The _képi_ has been replaced
by the trench-helmet, a light casque of blued steel, which will protect
a man’s brain-pan from shell-splinter, shrapnel, or grenade, and which
has saved many a man’s life. Rather a remarkable thing, is it not, that
the French soldier of to-day should adopt a head-dress almost identical
with the casque worn by his ancestor, the French man-at-arms of the
Middle Ages? I am convinced that it is this policy of conserving the
lives of her fighting men which is going to win the war for France. If
necessity demands that a position be taken with the bayonet, no soldiers
in the world sacrifice themselves more freely than the French, but the
military authorities have realized that men, unlike shells, cannot be
replaced. “The duration and the outcome of the war,” General de Maud’huy
remarked to me, “depends upon how fast we can kill off the Germans.
Their army has reached its maximum strength, and every day sees it
slowly but surely weakening. Our game, therefore, is to kill as many as
possible of the enemy while at the same time saving our own men. It is,
after all, a purely mathematical proposition.”
I believe that the losses incidental to trench warfare, as it is being
conducted in Alsace, have been considerably exaggerated. The officer in
command of the French positions in front of Altkirch told me that,
during the construction of some of the trenches, the Germans rained
twelve thousand shells upon the working parties, yet not a man was
killed and only ten were wounded. The modern trench is so ingeniously
constructed that, even in the comparatively rare event of a shell
dropping squarely into it, only the soldiers in the immediate vicinity,
seldom more than half a dozen at the most, are injured, the others being
protected from the flying steel by the traverses, earthen walls which
partially intersect the trench at intervals of a few yards. In the
trench one has only to keep one’s head down, and he is nearly as safe as
though he were at home. To crouch, to move bowed, to keep always the
parapet between your head and the German riflemen, becomes an instinct,
like the lock-step which used to be the rule for the convicts at Sing
Sing.
So cleverly have the French engineers taken advantage of the
configuration of the country in front of Altkirch, that we were able to
enter the _boyaux_, or communication trenches, without leaving the
shelter of the wood. Half an hour’s brisk walking through what would, in
times of peace, be called a ditch, perhaps three feet wide and seven
deep, its earthen walls kept in place by wattles of woven willows, and
with as many twists and turns as the maze at Hampton Court, brought us
at last into the fire-trenches. These were considerably roomier than the
_boyaux_, being in places six feet wide and having a sort of raised step
or platform of earth, on which the men stood to fire, running along the
side nearest the enemy. Each soldier was protected by a steel shield
about the size of a newspaper, and painted a lead-gray, set in the earth
of the parapet. In the centre of the shield is cut an opening slightly
larger than a playing-card, through which the soldier pokes his rifle
when he wishes to fire, and which, when not in use, is screened by a
steel shutter or a cloth curtain, so that the riflemen in the German
trench cannot see any one who may happen to pass behind it. At intervals
of five or six yards men were on watch, with their rifles laid. Their
instructions are never to take their eyes off the enemy’s trenches, a
shout from them bringing their comrades tumbling out of their dug-outs
just as firemen respond to the clang of the fire-gong. When the men come
rushing out of the shelters they have, in the earthen platform, a good
steady footing which will bring their heads level with the parapet,
where their rifles, leaning against the steel shields, await them. It is
planned to always keep a sufficient force in the fire-trenches, so that,
roughly speaking, there will be a man to every yard, which is about as
close as they can fight to advantage. Every thirty yards or so, in a
log-roofed shelter known as a gun-pit, is a machine-gun, though in the
German trenches it is not at all uncommon to find a machine-gun to every
fifteen men.
As we passed through the trenches I noticed at intervals of a hundred
yards or so men, standing motionless as statues, who seemed to be
intently listening. And that, I found, was precisely what they were
doing. In this trench warfare men are specially told off to listen, both
above and beneath the ground, for any sapping or mining operations on
the part of the enemy. Without this precaution there would be the
constant danger of the Germans driving a tunnel under the French
trenches (or vice versa) and, by means of a mine, blowing those trenches
and the men in them into the air. Indeed, scarcely a night passes that
soldiers, armed with knives and pistols, do not crawl out on hands and
knees between the trenches in order to find out, by holding the ear to
the ground, whether the enemy is sapping. Should the listener hear the
muffled sounds which would suggest that the enemy was driving a mine, he
tells it in a whisper to his companion, who crawls back to his own
trenches with the message, whereupon the engineers immediately take
steps to start a counter-mine.
“Look through here,” said the intelligence officer who was acting as my
guide, indicating the port-hole in one of the steel shields, “but don’t
stay too long or a German sharpshooter may spot you. A second is long
enough to get a bullet through the brain.” Cautiously applying my eye to
the opening, I saw, perhaps a hundred yards away, a long, low mound of
earth, such as would be thrown up from a sewer excavation, and dotting
it at three-foot intervals darker patches which I knew to be just such
steel shields as the one behind which I was sheltered. And I knew that
behind each one of those steel shields was standing a keen-eyed rifleman
searching for something suspicious at which to fire. Immediately in
front of the German trench, just as in front of the trench in which I
stood, a forest of stout stakes had been driven deep into the ground,
and draped between these stakes were countless strands of barbed wire,
so snarled and tangled, and interlaced and woven that a cat could not
have gotten through unscratched. Between the two lines of entanglements
stretched a field of ripening wheat, streaked here and there with
patches of scarlet poppies. There were doubtless other things besides
poppies amid that wheat, but, thank God, it was high enough to hide
them. Rising from the wheatfield, almost midway between the French and
German lines, was a solitary apple-tree. “Behind that tree,” whispered
the officer standing beside me—for some reason they always speak in
hushed tones in the trenches—“is a German outpost. He crawls out every
morning before sunrise and is relieved at dark. Though some of our men
keep their rifles constantly laid on the tree, we’ve never been able to
get him. Still, he’s not a very good life-insurance risk, eh?” And I
agreed that he certainly was not.
I must have remained at my loophole a little too long or possibly some
movement of mine attracted the attention of a German sniper, for _pang_
came a bullet against the shield behind which I was standing, with the
same ringing, metallic sound which a bullet makes when it hits the iron
target in a shooting-gallery. In this case, however, _I_ was the
bull’s-eye. Had that bullet been two inches nearer the centre there
would have been, in the words of the poet, “more work for the
undertaker, another little job for the casket-maker.”
“Lucky for you that wasn’t one of the new armor-piercing bullets,”
remarked the officer as I hastily stepped down. “After the Germans
introduced the steel shields we went them one better by introducing a
jacketed bullet which will go through a sheet of armor-plate as though
it were made of cheese. We get lots of amusement from them. Sometimes
one of our men will fire a dozen rounds of ordinary ammunition at a
shield behind which he hears some Boches talking, and as the bullets
glance off harmlessly they laugh and jeer at him. Then he slips in one
of the jacketed bullets and—_whang!!!_—we hear a wounded Boche yelping
like a dog that has been run over by a motor-car. Funny thing about the
Germans. They’re brave enough—no one questions that—but they scream like
animals when they’re wounded.”
From all that I could gather, the French did not have a particularly
high opinion of the quality of the troops opposed to them in Alsace,
most of whom, at the time I was there, were Bavarians and Saxons. An
officer in the trenches on the Hartmannswillerkopf, where the French and
German positions were in places very close together, told me that
whenever the Germans attempted an attack the French trenches burst into
so fierce a blast of rifle and machine-gun fire that the men in the
spiked helmets refused to face it. “Vorwärts! Vorwärts!” the German
officers would scream, exposing themselves recklessly. “Nein! Nein!” the
fear-maddened men would answer as they broke and ran for the shelter of
their trenches. Then the French would hear the angry bark of automatics
as the officers pistoled their men.
When the French, in one of the bloodiest and most desperate assaults of
the war, carried the summit of the Hartmannswillerkopf by storm, they
claim to have found the German machine-gun crews chained to their guns
as galley-slaves were chained to their oars. French artillery officers
have repeatedly told me that when German infantry advances to take a
position by assault, the men are frequently urged forward by their own
batteries raking them from the rear. As the German gunners gradually
advance their fire as the infantry moves forward, it is as dangerous for
the men to retreat as to go on. Hence it is by no means uncommon, so the
French officers assert, for the German troops to arrive pell-mell at the
French trenches, breathless, terrified, hands above their heads, seeking
not a fight but a chance to surrender.
One of the assertions that you hear repeated everywhere along the French
lines, by officers and men alike, is that the German does not fight
fair, that you cannot trust him, that he is not bound by any of the
recognized rules of the game. Innumerable instances have been related to
me of wounded Germans attempting to shoot or stab the French surgeons
and nurses who were caring for them. An American serving in the Foreign
Legion told me that on one occasion, when his regiment carried a German
position by assault, the wounded Germans lying on the ground waited
until the legionaries had passed, and then shot them in the back. Now,
when the Foreign Legion goes into action, each company is followed by
men with axes, whose business it is to see that such incidents do not
happen again.
The reason for the French soldier’s deep-seated distrust of the German
is illustrated by a grim comedy of which I heard when I was in Alsace.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph by E. A. Powell._
Each soldier is protected by a steel shield, in the centre of which is
cut an opening slightly larger than a playing-card.
]
[Illustration:
_Photo by Meurisse._
A “poilu” in the Vosges.
]
[Illustration:
_Photo by E. A. Powell._
A French soldier wearing a mask as a protection against gas.
]
In the trenches in Alsace.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph by Meurisse._
Convoy of German prisoners guarded by Moroccan Spahis.
]
A company of German infantry was defending a stone-walled farmstead on
the Fecht. So murderous was the fire of the French batteries that soon a
white sheet was seen waving from one of the farmhouse windows. The
French fire ceased, and through the gateway came a group of Germans,
holding their hands above their heads and shouting: “Kamerad! Kamerad!”
which has become the euphemism for “I surrender.” But when a detachment
of chasseurs went forward to take them prisoners the Germans suddenly
dropped to the ground, while from an upper window in the farmhouse a
hidden machine-gun poured a stream of lead into the unsuspecting
Frenchmen. Thereupon the French batteries proceeded to transform that
farmhouse into a sieve. In a quarter of an hour the tablecloth was again
seen waving, the French guns again ceased firing, and again the Germans
came crowding out, with their hands above their heads. But this time
they were stark naked! To prove that they had no concealed weapons they
had stripped to the skin. It is scarcely necessary to add that those
Germans were _not_ taken prisoners.
Though the incidents I have above related were told me by officers who
claimed to have witnessed them, and whose reliability I have no reason
to doubt, I do not vouch for them, mind you; I merely repeat them for
what they are worth.
I had, of course, heard many stories of the German ranks being filled
with boys and old men, but the large convoys of prisoners which I saw in
Alsace and in Champagne convinced me that there is but little truth in
the assertion. Some of the prisoners, it is true, looked as though they
should have been in high school, and others as though they had been
called from old soldiers’ homes, but these formed only a sprinkling of
the whole. By far the greater part of the prisoners that I saw were men
between eighteen and forty, and they all impressed me as being in the
very pink of physical condition and this despite the fact that they were
dirty and hungry and very, very tired. But they struck me as being not
at all averse to being captured. They seemed exhausted and dispirited
and crushed, as though all the fight had gone out of them. In those long
columns of weary, dirty men were represented all the Teutonic types:
arrogant, supercilious Prussians; strapping young peasants from the
Silesian farm lands; tradesmen and mechanics from the great industrial
centres; men from the mines of Würtemberg and the forests of Baden;
scowling Bavarians and smiling Saxons. Among them were some brutish
faces, accentuated, no doubt, by the close-cropped hair which makes any
man look like a convict, but the countenances of most of them were frank
and honest and open. Two things aroused my curiosity. The first was that
I did not see a helmet—a _pickelhaube_—among them. When I asked the
reason they explained that they had been captured in the fire-trenches,
and that they seldom wear their helmets there, as the little round gray
caps with the scarlet band are less conspicuous and more comfortable.
The other thing that aroused my curiosity was when I saw French
soldiers, each with a pair of scissors, going from prisoner to prisoner.
“What on earth are you doing?” I asked.
“We are cutting the suspenders of the Boches,” was the answer. “Their
trousers are made very large around the waist so that if their
suspenders are cut they have to hold them up with their hands, thus
making it difficult for them to run away.”
As I looked at these unshaven, unkempt men in their soiled and tattered
uniforms, it was hard to make myself believe that they had been a part
of that immaculate, confident, and triumphant army which I had seen roll
across Belgium like a tidal wave in the late summer of 1914.
[Illustration:
A French smoke bomb.