_The Red Glutton
With the German Army
at the Front_
BY
IRVIN S. COBB
[Illustration]
HODDER AND STOUGHTON
LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. A Little Village Called Montignies St. Christophe 13
II. To War in a Taxicab 27
III. Sherman Said It 52
IV. "Marsch, Marsch, Marsch, So Geh'n Wir Weiter" 82
V. Being a Guest of the Kaiser 109
VI. With the German Wrecking Crew 140
VII. The Grapes of Wrath 164
VIII. Three Generals and a Cook 198
IX. Viewing a Battle from a Balloon 226
X. In the Trenches Before Rheims 251
XI. War de Luxe 262
XII. The Rut of Big Guns in France 294
XIII. Those Yellow Pine Boxes 315
XIV. The Red Glutton 334
XV. Belgium--The Rag Doll of Europe 369
XVI. Louvain the Forsaken 406
CHAPTER I
A LITTLE VILLAGE CALLED MONTIGNIES ST. CHRISTOPHE
We passed through it late in the afternoon--this little Belgian town
called Montignies St. Christophe--just twenty-four hours behind a
dust-colored German column. I am going to try now to tell how it looked
to us.
I am inclined to think I passed this way a year before, or a little
less, though I cannot be quite certain as to that. Traveling 'cross
country, the country is likely to look different from the way it looked
when you viewed it from the window of a railroad carriage.
Of this much, though, I am sure: If I did not pass through this little
town of Montignies St. Christophe then, at least I passed through
fifty like it--each a single line of gray houses strung, like beads
on a cord, along a white, straight road, with fields behind and
elms in front; each with its small, ugly church, its wine shop, its
drinking trough, its priest in black, and its one lone gendarme in his
preposterous housings of saber and belt and shoulder straps.
I rather imagine I tried to think up something funny to say about the
shabby grandeur of the gendarme or the acid flavor of the cooking
vinegar sold at the drinking place under the name of wine; for that
time I was supposed to be writing humorous articles on European travel.
But now something had happened to Montignies St. Christophe to lift
it out of the dun, dull sameness that made it as one with so many
other unimportant villages in this upper lefthand corner of the map
of Europe. The war had come this way; and, coming so, had dealt it a
side-slap.
We came to it just before dusk. All day we had been hurrying along,
trying to catch up with the German rear guard; but the Germans moved
faster than we did, even though they fought as they went. They had gone
round the southern part of Belgium like coopers round a cask, hooping
it in with tight bands of steel. Belgium--or this part of it--was all
barreled up now: chines, staves and bung; and the Germans were already
across the line, beating down the sod of France with their pelting feet.
Besides we had stopped often, for there was so much to see and to hear.
There was the hour we spent at Merbes-le-Château, where the English
had been; and the hour we spent at La Bussière, on the river Sambre,
where a fight had been fought two days earlier; but Merbes-le-Château
is another story and so is la Bussière. Just after La Bussière we
came to a tiny village named Neuville and halted while the local
Jack-of-all-trades mended for us an invalided tire on a bicycle.
As we grouped in the narrow street before his shop, with a hiving swarm
of curious villagers buzzing about us, an improvised ambulance, with a
red cross painted on its side over the letters of a baker's sign, went
up the steep hill at the head of the cobbled street. At that the women
in the doorways of the small cottages twisted their gnarled red hands
in their aprons, and whispered fearsomely among themselves, so that the
sibilant sound of their voices ran up and down the line of houses in a
long, quavering hiss.
The wagon, it seemed, was bringing in a wounded French soldier who had
been found in the woods beyond the river. He was one of the last to be
found alive, which was another way of saying that for two days and two
nights he had been lying helpless in the thicket, his stomach empty and
his wounds raw. On each of those two nights it had rained, and rained
hard.
Just as we started on our way the big guns began booming somewhere
ahead of us toward the southwest; so we turned in that direction. We
had heard the guns distinctly in the early forenoon, and again, less
distinctly, about noontime. Thereafter, for a while, there had been
a lull in the firing; but now it was constant--a steady, sustained
boom-boom-boom, so far away that it fell on the eardrums as a gentle
concussion; as a throb of air, rather than as a real sound. For three
days now we had been following that distant voice of the cannon, trying
to catch up with it as it advanced, always southward, toward the French
frontier. Therefore we flogged the belly of our tired horse with the
lash of a long whip, and hurried along.
There were five of us, all Americans. The two who rode on bicycles
pedaled ahead as outriders, and the remaining three followed on behind
with the horse and the dogcart. We had bought the outfit that morning
and we were to lose it that night. The horse was an aged mare, with
high withers, and galls on her shoulders and fetlocks unshorn, after
the fashion of Belgian horses; and the dogcart was a venerable ruin,
which creaked a great protest at every turn of the warped wheels on
the axle. We had been able to buy the two--the mare and the cart--only
because the German soldiers had not thought them worth the taking.
In this order, then, we proceeded. Pretty soon the mare grew so weary
she could hardly lift her shaggy old legs; so, footsore as we were,
we who rode dismounted and trudged on, taking turns at dragging her
forward by the bit. I presume we went ahead thus for an hour or more,
along an interminable straight road and past miles of the checkered
light and dark green fields which in harvest time make a great
backgammon board of this whole country of Belgium.
The road was empty of natives--empty, too, of German wagon trains; and
these seemed to us curious things, because there had until then been
hardly a minute of the day when we were not passing soldiers or meeting
refugees.
Almost without warning we came on this little village called Montignies
St. Christophe. A six-armed signboard at a crossroads told us its
name--a rather impressive name ordinarily for a place of perhaps twenty
houses, all told. But now tragedy had given it distinction; had painted
that straggling frontier hamlet over with such colors that the picture
of it is going to live in my memory as long as I do live. At the upper
end of the single street, like an outpost, stood an old château, the
seat, no doubt, of the local gentry, with a small park of beeches and
elms round it; and here, right at the park entrance, we had our first
intimation that there had been a fight. The gate stood ajar between
its chipped stone pillars, and just inside the blue coat of a French
cavalry officer, jaunty and new and much braided with gold lace on
the collar and cuffs, hung from the limb of a small tree. Beneath
the tree were a sheaf of straw in the shape of a bed and the ashes
of a dead camp fire; and on the grass, plain to the eye, a plump,
well-picked pullet, all ready for the pot or the pan. Looking on past
these things we saw much scattered dunnage: Frenchmen's knapsacks,
flannel shirts, playing cards, fagots of firewood mixed together like
jackstraws, canteens covered with slate-blue cloth and having queer
little hornlike protuberances on their tops--which proved them to be
French canteens--tumbled straw, odd shoes with their lacings undone, a
toptilted service shelter of canvas; all the riffle of a camp that had
been suddenly and violently disturbed.
As I think back it seems to me that not until that moment had it
occurred to us to regard closely the cottages and shops beyond the
clumped trees of the château grounds. We were desperately weary, to
begin with, and our eyes, those past three days, had grown used to the
signs of misery and waste and ruin, abundant and multiplying in the
wake of the hard-pounding hoofs of the conqueror.
Now, all of a sudden, I became aware that this town had been literally
shot to bits. From our side--that is to say, from the north and
likewise from the west--the Germans had shelled it. From the south,
plainly, the French had answered. The village, in between, had
caught the full force and fury of the contending fires. Probably
the inhabitants had warning; probably they fled when the German
skirmishers surprised that outpost of Frenchmen camping in the park.
One imagined them scurrying like rabbits across the fields and through
the cabbage patches. But they had left their belongings behind, all
their small petty gearings and garnishings, to be wrecked in the
wrenching and racking apart of their homes.
A railroad track emerged from the fields and ran along the one street.
Shells had fallen on it and exploded, ripping the steel rails from the
crossties, so that they stood up all along in a jagged formation, like
rows of snaggled teeth. Other shells, dropping in the road, had so
wrought with the stone blocks that they were piled here in heaps, and
there were depressed into caverns and crevasses four or five or six
feet deep.
Every house in sight had been hit again and again and again. One house
would have its whole front blown in, so that we could look right back
to the rear walls and see the pans on the kitchen shelves. Another
house would lack a roof to it, and the tidy tiles that had made the
roof were now red and yellow rubbish, piled like broken shards outside
a potter's door. The doors stood open, and the windows, with the
windowpanes all gone and in some instances the sashes as well, leered
emptily like eye-sockets without eyes.
So it went. Two of the houses had caught fire and the interiors were
quite burned away. A sodden smell of burned things came from the still
smoking ruins; but the walls, being of thick stone, stood.
Our poor tired old nag halted and sniffed and snorted. If she had had
energy enough I reckon she would have shied about and run back the way
she had come, for now, just ahead, lay two dead horses--a big gray
and a roan--with their stark legs sticking out across the road. The
gray was shot through and through in three places. The right fore hoof
of the roan had been cut smack off, as smoothly as though done with
an ax; and the stiffened leg had a curiously unfinished look about
it, suggesting a natural malformation. Dead only a few hours, their
carcasses already had begun to swell. The skin on their bellies was as
tight as a drumhead.
We forced the quivering mare past the two dead horses. Beyond them the
road was a litter. Knapsacks, coats, canteens, handkerchiefs, pots,
pans, household utensils, bottles, jugs and caps were everywhere. The
deep ditches on either side of the road were clogged with such things.
The dropped caps and the abandoned knapsacks were always French caps
and French knapsacks, cast aside, no doubt, for a quick flight after
the mêlée.
The Germans had charged after shelling the town, and then the French
had fallen back--or at least so we deduced from the looks of things.
In the débris was no object that bespoke German workmanship or
German ownership. This rather puzzled us until we learned that the
Germans, as tidy in this game of war as in the game of life, made it
a hard-and-fast rule to gather up their own belongings after every
engagement, great or small, leaving behind nothing that might serve to
give the enemy an idea of their losses.
We went by the church. Its spire was gone; but, strange to say, a small
flag--the Tricolor of France--still fluttered from a window where some
one had stuck it. We went by the _taverne_, or wine shop, which had a
sign over its door--a creature remotely resembling a blue lynx. And
through the door we saw half a loaf of bread and several bottles on a
table. We went by a rather pretentious house, with pear trees in front
of it and a big barn alongside it; and right under the eaves of the
barn I picked up the short jacket of a French trooper, so new and fresh
from the workshop that the white cambric lining was hardly soiled.
The figure 18 was on the collar; we decided that its wearer must have
belonged to the Eighteenth Cavalry Regiment. Behind the barn we found a
whole pile of new knapsacks--the flimsy play-soldier knapsacks of the
French infantrymen, not half so heavy or a third so substantial as the
heavy sacks of the Germans, which are all bound with straps and covered
on the back side with undressed red bullock's hide.
Until now we had seen, in all the silent, ruined village, no human
being. The place fairly ached with emptiness. Cats sat on the doorsteps
or in the windows, and presently from a barn we heard imprisoned beasts
lowing dismally. Cows were there, with agonized udders and, penned away
from them, famishing calves; but there were no dogs. We already had
remarked this fact--that in every desolated village cats were thick
enough; but invariably the sharp-nosed, wolfish-looking Belgian dogs
had disappeared along with their masters. And it was so in Montignies
St. Christophe.
On a roadside barricade of stones, chinked with sods of turf--a
breastwork the French probably had erected before the fight and which
the Germans had kicked half down--I counted three cats, seated side by
side, washing their faces sedately and soberly.
It was just after we had gone by the barricade that, in a shed behind
the riddled shell of a house, which was almost the last house of the
town, one of our party saw an old, a very old, woman, who peered out at
us through a break in the wall. He called out to her in French, but she
never answered--only continued to watch him from behind her shelter.
He started toward her and she disappeared noiselessly, without having
spoken a word. She was the only living person we saw in that town.
Just beyond the town, though, we met a wagon--a furniture dealer's
wagon--from some larger community, which had been impressed by the
Belgian authorities, military or civil, for ambulance service. A jaded
team of horses drew it, and white flags with red crosses in their
centers drooped over the wheels, fore and aft. One man led the near
horse by the bit and two other men walked behind the wagon. All three
of them had Red Cross brassards on the sleeves of their coats.
The wagon had a hood on it, but was open at both ends. Overhauling it
we saw that it contained two dead soldiers--French foot-soldiers. The
bodies rested side by side on the wagon bed. Their feet somehow were
caught up on the wagon seat so that their stiff legs, in the baggy red
pants, slanted upward, and the two dead men had the look of being about
to glide backward and out of the wagon.
The blue-clad arms of one of them were twisted upward in a half-arc,
encircling nothing; and as the wheels jolted over the rutted cobbles
these two bent arms joggled and swayed drunkenly. The other's head was
canted back so that, as we passed, we looked right into his face. It
was a young face--we could tell that much, even through the mask of
caked mud on the drab-white skin--and it might once have been a comely
face. It was not comely now.
Peering into the wagon we saw that the dead man's face had been partly
shot or shorn away--the lower jaw was gone; so that it had become an
abominable thing to look on. These two had been men the day before. Now
they were carrion and would be treated as such; for as we looked back
we saw the wagon turn off the high road into a field where the wild red
poppies, like blobs of red blood, grew thick between rows of neglected
sugar beets.
We stopped and watched. The wagon bumped through the beet patch to
where, at the edge of a thicket, a trench had been dug. The diggers
were two peasants in blouses, who stood alongside the ridge of raw
upturned earth at the edge of the hole, in the attitude of figures in a
painting by Millet. Their spades were speared upright into the mound of
fresh earth. Behind them a stenciling of poplars rose against the sky
line.
We saw the bodies lifted out of the wagon. We saw them slide into the
shallow grave, and saw the two diggers start at their task of filling
in the hole.
Not until then did it occur to any one of us that we had not spoken to
the men in charge of the wagon, or they to us. There was one detached
house, not badly battered, alongside the road at the lower edge of the
field where the burial took place. It had a shield on its front wall
bearing the Belgian arms and words to denote that it was a customs
house. A glance at our map showed us that at this point the French
boundary came up in a V-shaped point almost to the road. Had the
gravediggers picked a spot fifty yards farther on for digging their
trench, those two dead Frenchmen would have rested in the soil of their
own country.
The sun was almost down by now, and its slanting rays slid lengthwise
through the elm-tree aisles along our route. Just as it disappeared
we met a string of refugees--men, women and children--all afoot,
all bearing pitiably small bundles. They limped along silently in
a straggling procession. None of them was weeping; none of them
apparently had been weeping. During the past ten days I had seen
thousands of such refugees, and I had yet to hear one of them cry out
or complain or protest.
These who passed us now were like that. Their heavy peasant faces
expressed dumb bewilderment--nothing else. They went on up the road
into the gathering dusk as we went down, and almost at once the sound
of their clunking tread died out behind us. Without knowing certainly,
we nevertheless imagined they were the dwellers of Montignies St.
Christophe going back to the sorry shells that had been their homes.
An hour later we passed through the back lines of the German camp and
entered the town of Beaumont, to find that the General Staff of a
German army corps was quartered there for the night, and that the main
force of the column, after sharp fighting, had already advanced well
beyond the frontier. France was invaded.