that the world had ever known. On that morning the French commander
issued his famous general order: “I want the artillery so to bend the
trench parapets, so to plough up the dug-outs and subterranean defenses
of the enemy’s line, as to make it almost possible for my men to march
to the assault with their rifles at the shoulder.” It will be seen that
the French artillerymen had their work laid out for them. But they went
about it knowing exactly what they were doing. During the long months of
waiting the French airmen had photographed and mapped every turn and
twist in the enemy’s trenches, every entanglement, every path, every
tree, so that when all was in readiness the French were almost as
familiar with the German position as were the Germans themselves. The
first task of the French gunners was to destroy the wire entanglements,
and when they finished few entanglements remained. The next thing was to
bury the Germans in their dug-outs, and so terrific was the torrent of
high explosive that whole companies which had taken refuge in their
underground shelters were annihilated. The parapets and trenches had
also to be levelled so that the infantry could advance, and so
thoroughly was this done that the French cavalry actually charged over
the ground thus cleared. Then, while the big guns were shelling the
German cantonments, the staff headquarters, and the railways by which
reinforcements might be brought up, the field-batteries turned their
attention to the communication trenches, dropping such a hail of
projectiles that all telephone communication between the first and
second lines was interrupted, so that the second line did not know what
was happening in the first. There are no words between the covers of the
dictionary to describe what it must have been like within the German
lines under that rain of death. The air was crowded with the French
shells. No wonder that scores of the German prisoners were found to be
insane. A curtain of shell-fire made it impossible for food or water to
be brought to the men in the bombarded trenches, and made it equally
impossible for these men to retreat. Hundreds of them who had taken
refuge in their underground shelters were buried alive when the
explosion of the great French _marmites_ sent the earthen walls crashing
in upon them. Whole forests of trees were mown down by the blast of
steel from the French guns as a harvester mows down a field of grain.
The wire entanglements before the German trenches were swept away as
though by the hand of God. The steel _chevaux-de-frise_ and the shields
of armor-plate were riddled like a sheet of paper into which has been
emptied a charge of buckshot. Trenches which it had taken months of
painstaking toil to build were utterly demolished in an hour. The
sand-bags which lined the parapets were set on fire by the French high
explosive and the soldiers behind them were suffocated by the fumes. The
bursts of the big shells were like volcanoes above the German lines,
vomiting skyward huge geysers of earth and smoke which hung for a time
against the horizon and were then gradually dissipated by the wind. For
three days and two nights the bombardment never ceased nor slackened.
The French gunners, streaming with sweat and grimed with powder, worked
like the stokers on a record-breaking liner. The metallic _tang_ of the
“_soixante-quinze_” and the deep-mouthed roar of the 120’s, the 155’s,
and the 370’s, and the screech and moan of the shells passing overhead
combined to form a hurricane of sound. Conversation was impossible. To
speak to a man beside him a soldier had to shout. Though the ears of the
men were stuffed with cotton they ached and throbbed to the unending
detonation. An American aviator who flew over the lines when the
bombardment was at its height told me that the German trenches could not
be seen at all because of the shells bursting upon them. “The noise,” he
said, “was like a machine-gun made of cannon.” Imagine, then, what must
have been the terror of the Germans cowering in the trenches which they
had confidently believed were proof against anything and which they
suddenly found were no protection at all against that rain of death
which seemed to come from no human agency, but to be hellish in the
frightfulness of its effect. When the bombardment was at its height the
shells burst at the rate of twenty a second, forming one wave of black
smoke, one unbroken line of exploding shells, as far as the horizon.
Graphic glimpses of what it must have been like in the German trenches
during that three days’ bombardment are given by the letters and diaries
found on the bodies of German soldiers—written, remember, in the very
shadow of death, some of them rendered illegible because spattered with
the blood of the men who wrote them.
“The railway has been shelled so heavily that all trains are stopped. We
have been in the first line for three days, and during that time the
French have kept up such a fire that our trenches cannot be seen at
all.”
“The artillery are firing almost as fast as the infantry. The whole
front is covered with smoke and we can see nothing. Men are dying like
flies.”
“A hail of shells is falling upon us. No food can be brought to us. When
will the end come? ‘Peace!’ is what every one is saying. Little is left
of the trench. It will soon be on a level with the ground.”
“The noise is awful. It is like a collapse of the world. Sixty men out
of a company of two hundred and fifty were killed last night. The force
of the French shells is frightful. A dug-out fifteen feet deep, with
seven feet of earth and two layers of timber on top, was smashed up like
so much matchwood.”
[Illustration:
The battle of Champagne.
“When the order to fall in was given, there formed up in the advance
trenches long rows of strange fighting figures wearing steel casques
and the ‘invisible’ pale-blue uniforms.”
]
When the reveille rang out along the French lines at five-thirty on the
morning of September 25 the whole world seemed gray; lead-colored clouds
hung low overhead, and a drizzling rain was falling. But the men refused
to be depressed. They drank their morning coffee and then, the roar of
the artillery making conversation out of the question, they sat down to
smoke and wait. Through the loopholes they could watch the effect of the
fire of the French batteries, could see the fountains of earth and smoke
thrown up by the bursting shells, could even see arms and legs flying in
the air. Each man wore between his shoulders, pinned to his coat, a
patch of white calico, in order to avoid the possibility of the French
gunners firing into their own men. Several men in each company carried
small, colored signal-flags for the same purpose. The watches of the
officers had been carefully synchronized, and at nine o’clock the order
to fall in was given, and there formed up in the advance trenches long
rows of strange fighting figures in their “invisible” pale-blue
uniforms, their grim, set faces peering from beneath steel helmets
plastered with chalk and mud. The company rolls were called. The
drummers and buglers took up their positions, for orders had been issued
that the troops were to be played into action. _Nine-five!_ The
regimental battle-flags were brought from the dug-outs, the water-proof
covers were slipped off, and the sacred colors, on whose faded silk were
embroidered “Les Pyramides,” “Wagram,” “Jena,” “Austerlitz,” “Marengo,”
were reverently unrolled. For the first time in this war French troops
were to go into action with their colors flying. _Nine-ten!_ The
officers, endeavoring to make their voices heard above the din of
cannon, told the men in a few shouted sentences what France and the
regiment expected of them. _Nine-fourteen!_ The officers, having jerked
loose their automatics, stood with their watches in their hands. The men
were like sprinters on their marks, waiting with tense nerves and
muscles for the starter’s pistol. _Nine-fifteen!_ Above the roar of the
artillery the whistles of the officers shrilled loud and clear. The
bugles pealed the charge. “_En avant, mes enfants!_” screamed the
officers, “_En avant! Vaincre ou_ _mourir!_” and over the tops of the
trenches, with a roar like an angry sea breaking on a rock-bound coast,
surged a fifteen-mile-long human wave tipped with glistening steel. As
the blue billows of men burst into the open, hoarsely cheering, the
French batteries which had been shelling the German first-line trenches
ceased firing with an abruptness that was startling. In the comparative
quiet thus suddenly created could be plainly heard the orders of the
officers and the cheering of the men, some of whom shouted “_Vive la
France!_” while others sang snatches of the _Marseillaise_ and the
_Carmagnole_. Though every foot of ground over which they were advancing
had for three days been systematically flooded with shell, though the
German trenches had been pounded until they were little more than heaps
of dirt and débris, the German artillery was still on the job, and the
ranks of the advancing French were swept by a hurricane of fire. General
Marchand, the hero of the famous incident at Fashoda, who was in command
of the Colonials, led his men to the assault, but fell wounded at the
very beginning of the engagement as, surrounded by his staff, he stood
on the crest of a trench, cane in hand, smoking his pipe and encouraging
the succeeding waves of men racing forward into battle. His two
brigade-commanders fell close beside him. Three minutes after the first
of the Colonials had scrambled over the top of their trenches they had
reached the German first line. After them came the First and Second
Regiments of the Foreign Legion and the Moroccan division. As they ran
they broke out from columns of two (advancing in twos with fifty paces
between each pair) into columns of squad (each man alone, twenty-five
paces from his neighbor) as prettily and perfectly as though on a
parade-ground.
[Illustration:
The battle-field of Champagne, showing the French high-explosive
shells bursting on the German trenches.
]
Great as was the destruction wrought by the bombardment, the French
infantry had no easy task before them, for stretches of wire
entanglements still remained in front of portions of the German
trenches, while at frequent intervals the Germans had left behind them
machine-gun sections, who from their sunken positions poured in a deadly
fire, until the oncoming wave overwhelmed and blotted them out. It was
these death-traps that brought out in the French soldier those same
heroic qualities which had enabled him, under the leadership of
Napoleon, to enter as a conqueror every capital in Europe. A man who was
shot while cutting a way for his company through the wire entanglements,
turned and gave the cutters to a comrade before he fell. A wounded
soldier lying on the ground called out to an officer who was stepping
aside to avoid him: “Go on. Don’t mind stepping on me. I’m wounded. It’s
only you who are whole who matter now.” A man with his abdomen ripped
open by a shell appealed to an officer to be moved to a
dressing-station. “The first thing to move are the guns to advanced
positions, my friend,” was the answer. “That’s right,” said the man; “I
can wait.” Said a wounded soldier afterward in describing the onslaught:
“When the bugles sounded the charge and the trumpets played the
_Marseillaise_, we were no longer mere men marching to the assault. We
were a living torrent which drives all before it. The colors were flying
at our side. It was splendid. Ay, my friend, when one has seen that one
is proud to be alive.”
In many places the attacking columns found themselves abruptly halted by
steel _chevaux-de-frise_, with German machine-guns spitting death from
behind them. The men would pelt them with hand-grenades until the
sappers came up and blew the obstructions away. Then they would sweep
forward again with the bayonet, yelling madly. The great craters caused
by the explosion of the French land mines were occupied as soon as
possible and immediately turned into defensible positions, thus
affording advanced footholds within the enemy’s line of trenches. At a
few points in the first line the Germans held out, but at others they
surrendered in large numbers, while many were shot down as they were
running back to the second line. As a matter of fact, the Germans had no
conception of what the French had in store for them, and it was not
until their trenches began to give way under the terrible hammering of
the French artillery that they realized how desperate was their
situation. It was then too late to strengthen their front, however, as
it would have been almost certain death to send men forward through the
curtain of shell-fire which the French batteries were dropping between
the first and second lines. Nor were the Germans prepared when the
infantry attack began, as was shown by the fact that a number of
officers were captured in their beds. The number of prisoners
taken—twenty-one thousand was the figure announced by the French General
Staff—showed clearly that they had had enough of it. They surrendered by
sections and by companies, hundreds at a time. Most of them had had no
food for several days, and were suffering acutely from thirst, and all
of them seemed completely unstrung and depressed by the terrible nature
of the French bombardment.
[Illustration:
Fighting in a quarrel that is not his own.
A trooper from France’s African possessions on duty in the trenches.
]
Choosing the psychological moment, when the retirement of the Germans
showed signs of turning into panic, the African troops were ordered to
go in and finish up the business with cold steel. Before these
dark-skinned, fierce-faced men from the desert, who came on brandishing
their weapons and shouting “Allah! Allah! Allah!” the Germans, already
demoralized, incontinently broke and ran. Hard on the heels of the
Africans trotted the dragoons and the _chasseurs à cheval_—the first
time since the trench warfare began that cavalry have had a chance to
fight from the saddle—sabring the fleeing Germans or driving them out of
their dug-outs with their long lances. But in the vast maze of
communication trenches and in the underground shelters Germans still
swarmed thickly, so the “trench cleaners,” as the Algerian and
Senegalese tirailleurs are called, were ordered to clear them out, a
task which they performed with neatness and despatch, revolver in one
hand and cutlass in the other. Even five days after the trenches were
taken occasional Germans were found in hiding in the labyrinth of
underground shelters.
[Illustration:
The first-line German trenches captured by the French in Champagne.
The battle-field of Champagne looked as though all the garbage cans in
Europe and America had been emptied upon it.
]
The thing of which the Champagne battle-field most reminded me was a
garbage-dump. It looked and smelled as though all the garbage cans in
Europe and America had been emptied upon it. This region, as I have
remarked before, is of a chalk formation, and wherever a trench had been
dug, or a shell had burst, or a mine had been exploded, it left on the
face of the earth a livid scar. The destruction wrought by the French
artillery fire is almost beyond imagining. Over an area as long as from
the Battery to Harlem and as wide as from the East River to the Hudson
the earth is pitted with the craters caused by bursting shells as is
pitted the face of a man who has had the small-pox. Any of these
shell-holes was large enough to hold a barrel; many of them would have
held a horse; I saw one, caused by the explosion of a mine, which we
estimated to be seventy feet deep and twice that in diameter. In the
terrific blast that caused it five hundred German soldiers perished. At
another point on what had been the German first line I saw a yawning
hole as large as the cellar of a good-sized apartment-house. It marked
the site of a German blockhouse, but the blockhouse and the men who
composed its garrison had been blown out of existence by a torrent of
370-millimetre high-explosive shells.
[Illustration:
This crater, seventy feet deep and twice that in diameter, was caused
by the explosion of a mine. In the terrific blast five hundred
Germans perished.
]
The captured German trenches presented the most horrible sight that I
have ever seen or ever expect to see. This is not rhetoric; this is
fact. Along the whole front of fifteen miles the earth was littered with
torn steel shields and twisted wire, with broken wagons, bits of
harness, cartridge-pouches, dented helmets, belts, bayonets—some of them
bent double—broken rifles, field-gun shells and rifle cartridges,
hand-grenades, aerial torpedoes, knapsacks, bottles, splintered planks,
sheets of corrugated iron which had been turned into sieves by bursting
shrapnel, trench mortars, blood-soaked bandages, fatigue-caps,
intrenching tools, stoves, iron rails, furniture, pots of jam and
marmalade, note-books, water-bottles, mattresses, blankets, shreds of
clothing, and, most horrible of all, portions of what had once been
human bodies. Passing through an abandoned German trench, I stumbled
over a mass of gray rags, and they dropped apart to disclose a headless,
armless, legless torso already partially devoured by insects. I kicked a
hobnailed German boot out of my path and from it fell a rotting foot. A
hand with awful, outspread fingers thrust itself from the earth as
though appealing to the passerby to give decent burial to its dead
owner. I peered inquisitively into a dug-out only to be driven back by
an overpowering stench. A French soldier, more hardened to the business
than I, went in with a candle, and found the shell-blackened bodies of
three Germans. Clasped in the dead fingers of one of them was a
post-card dated from a little town in Bavaria. It began: “My dearest
Heinrich: You went away from us just a year ago to-day. I miss you
terribly, as do the children, and we all pray hourly for your safe
return—” The rest we could not decipher; it had been blotted out by a
horrid crimson stain. Without the war that man might have been
returning, after a day’s work in field or factory, to a neat Bavarian
cottage, with geraniums growing in the dooryard, and a wife and children
waiting for him at the gate.
[Illustration:
German officers captured during the battle of Champagne.
]
Though when I visited the battle-field of Champagne the guns were still
roaring—for the Germans were attempting to retake their lost trenches in
a desperate series of counter-attacks—the field was already dotted with
thousands upon thousands of little wooden crosses planted upon new-made
mounds. Above many of the graves there had been no time to erect crosses
or headboards, so into the soft soil was thrust, neck downward, a
bottle, and in the bottle was a slip of paper giving the name and the
regiment of the soldier who lay beneath. In one place the graves had
been dug so as to form a vast rectangle, and a priest, his cassock
tucked up so that it showed his military boots and trousers, was at work
with saw and hammer building in the centre of that field of graves a
little shrine.
[Illustration]
[Illustration:
The price of victory.
The battle-field was dotted with thousands upon thousands of new-made
mounds and little wooden crosses.
]
[Illustration:
Instruction against gas attacks.
At various points behind the lines are schools where the men are
instructed in the use of the anti-gas respirators.
]
Scrawled in pencil on one of the pitiful little crosses I read: “Un
brave—Emile Petit—Mort aux Champ d’Honneur—Priez pour lui.” Six feet
away was another cross which marks the spot where sleeps Gottlieb
Zimmerman, of the Würtemberg Pioneers, and underneath, in German script,
that line from the Bible which reads: “He fought the good fight.” Close
by was still another little mound under which rested, so the headboard
told me, Mohammed ben Hassen Bazazou of the Fourth Algerian Tirailleurs.
In life those men had never so much as heard of one another. Doubtless
they must often have wondered why they were fighting and what the war
was all about. Now they rest there quietly, side by side, Frenchman and
German and African, under the soil of Champagne, while somewhere in
France and in Würtemberg and in Algeria women are praying for the safety
of Emile and of Gottlieb and of Mohammed.
During the three days that I spent upon the battle-field of Champagne
the roar of the guns never ceased and rarely slackened, yet not a sign
of any human being could I see as I gazed out over that desolate plain
on which was being fought one of the greatest battles of all time. There
were no moving troops, no belching batteries, no flaunting colors—only a
vast slag heap on which moved no living thing. Yet I knew that hidden
beneath the ground all around me, as well as over there where the German
trenches ran, men were waiting to kill or to be killed, and that behind
the trench-scarred ridges at my back, and behind the low-lying crests in
front of me, sweating men were at work loading and firing the great guns
whose screaming missiles crisscrossed like invisible express trains
overhead to burst miles away, perhaps, with the crash which scatters
death. The French guns seemed to be literally everywhere. One could not
walk a hundred yards without stumbling on a skilfully concealed battery.
In the shelter of a ridge was posted a battery of 155-millimetre
monsters painted with the markings of a giraffe in order to escape the
searching eyes of the German aviators and named respectively Alice,
Fernande, Charlotte, and Maria. From a square opening, which yawned like
a cellar window in the earth, there protruded the long, lean muzzle of
an eight-inch naval gun, the breech of which was twenty feet below the
level of the ground in a gun-pit which was capable of resisting any high
explosive that might chance to fall upon it. This marine monster was in
charge of a crew of sailors who boasted that their pet could drop two
hundred pounds of melinite on any given object thirteen miles away. But
the guns to which the French owe their success in Champagne, the guns
which may well prove the deciding factor in this war, are not the
cumbersome siege pieces or the mammoth naval cannon, but the mobile,
quick-firing, never-tiring, hard-hitting, “seventy-fives,” whose fire,
the Germans resentfully exclaim, is not deadly but murderous.
[Illustration:
“Men were at work rolling up the barbed wire in the captured German
entanglements.”
]