THE RUT OF BIG GUNS IN FRANCE
Let me say at the outset of this chapter that I do not setup as one
professing to have any knowledge whatsoever of so-called military
science. The more I have seen of the carrying-on of the actual business
of war, the less able do I seem to be to understand the meanings of
the business. For me strategy remains a closed book. Even the simplest
primary lessons of it, the A B C's of it, continue to impress me as
being stupid, but none the less unplumbable mysteries.
The physical aspects of campaigning I can in a way grasp. At least I
flatter myself that I can. A man would have to be deaf and dumb and
blind not to grasp them, did they reveal themselves before him as
they have revealed themselves before me. Indeed, if he preserved only
the faculty of scent unimpaired he might still be able to comprehend
the thing, since, as I have said before, war in its commoner phases
is not so much a sight as a great bad smell. As for the rudiments of
the system which dictates the movements of troops in large masses or
in small, which sacrifices thousands of men to take a town or hold a
river when that town and that river, physically considered, appear to
be of no consequence whatsoever, those elements I have not been able
to sense, even though I studied the matter most diligently. So after
sundry months of first-hand observation in one of the theaters of
hostilities, I tell myself that the trade of fighting is a trade to be
learned by slow and laborious degrees, and even then may be learned
with thoroughness only by one who has a natural aptitude for it. Either
that, or else I am most extraordinarily thick-headed, for I own that I
am still as complete a greenhorn now as I was at the beginning.
Having made the confession which is said to be good for the soul, and
which in any event has the merit of blunting in advance the critical
judgments of the expert, since he must pity my ignorance and my
innocence even though he quarrel with my conclusions, I now assume
the rôle of prophet long enough to venture to say that the day of the
modern walled fort is over and done with. I do not presume to speak
regarding coast defenses maintained for the purposes of repelling
attacks or invasions from the sea. I am speaking with regard to land
defenses which are assailable by land forces. I believe in the future
great wars--if indeed there are to be any more great wars following
after this one--that the nations involved, instead of buttoning their
frontiers down with great fortresses and ringing their principal
cities about with circles of protecting works, will put their trust
more and more in transportable cannon of a caliber and a projecting
force greater than any yet built or planned. I make this assertion
after viewing the visible results of the operations of the German
42-centimeter guns in Belgium and France, notably at Liège in the
former country and at Maubeuge in the latter.
Except for purposes of frightening noncombatants the Zeppelins
apparently have proved of most dubious value; nor, barring its value
as a scout--a field in which it is of marvelous efficiency--does the
aëroplane appear to have been of much consequence in inflicting loss
upon the enemy. Of the comparatively new devices for waging war, the
submarine and the great gun alone seem to have justified in any great
degree the hopes of their sponsors.
Since I came back out of the war zone I have met persons who questioned
the existence of a 42-centimeter gun, they holding it to be a nightmare
created out of the German imagination with intent to break the
confidence of the enemies of Germany. I did not see a 42-centimeter gun
with my own eyes, and personally I doubt whether the Germans had as
many of them as they claimed to have; but I talked with one entirely
reliable witness, an American consular officer, who saw a 42-centimeter
gun as it was being transported to the front in the opening week of
the war, and with another American, a diplomat of high rank, who
interviewed a man who saw one of these guns, and who in detailing the
conversation to me said the spectator had been literally stunned by the
size and length and the whole terrific contour of the monster. Finally,
I know from personal experience that these guns have been employed,
and employed with a result that goes past adequate description; but
if I hadn't seen the effect of their fire I wouldn't have believed it
were true. I wouldn't have believed anything evolved out of the brains
of men and put together by the fingers of men could operate with such
devilish accuracy to compass such utter destruction. I would have said
it was some planetic force, some convulsion of natural forces, and not
an agency of human devisement, that turned Fort Loncin inside out, and
transformed it within a space of hours from a supposedly impregnable
stronghold into a hodgepodge of complete and hideous ruination. And
what befell Fort Loncin on the hills behind Liège befell Fort Des Sarts
outside of Maubeuge, as I have reason to know.
When the first of the 42-centimeters emerged from Essen it took a team
of thirty horses to haul it; and with it out of that nest of the
Prussian war eagle came also a force of mechanics and engineers to
set it up and aim it and fire it. Here, too, is an interesting fact
that I have not seen printed anywhere, though I heard it often enough
in Germany: by reason of its bulk the 42-centimeter must be mounted
upon a concrete base before it can be used. Heretofore the concrete
which was available for this purpose required at least a fortnight
of exposure before it was sufficiently firm and hardened; but when
Fräulein Bertha Krupp's engineers escorted the Fräulein's newest and
most impressive steel masterpiece to the war, they brought along with
them the ingredients for a new kind of concrete; and those who claim to
have been present on the occasion declare that within forty-eight hours
after they had mixed and molded it, it was ready to bear the weight of
the guns and withstand the shock of their recoil.
This having been done, I conceive of the operators as hoisting their
guns into position, and posting up a set of rules--even in time of war
it is impossible to imagine the Germans doing anything of importance
without a set of rules to go by--and working out the distance by
mathematics, and then turning loose their potential cataclysms upon the
stubborn forts which opposed their further progress. From the viewpoint
of the Germans the consequences to the foe must amply have justified
the trouble and the cost. For where a 42-centimeter shell falls it
does more than merely alter landscape; almost you might say it alters
geography.
In the open field, where he must aim his gun with his own eye and
discharge it with his own finger, I take it the Kaiser's private
soldier is no great shakes as a marksman. The Germans themselves
begrudgingly admitted the French excelled them in the use of light
artillery. There was wonderment as well as reluctance in this
concession. To them it seemed well-nigh incredible that any nation
should be their superiors in any department pertaining to the practice
of war. They could not bring themselves fully to understand it. It
remained as much a puzzle to them as the unaccountable obstinacy of
the English in refusing to be budged out of their position by displays
of cold steel, or to be shaken by the volleying, bull-like roar of the
German charging cry, which at first the Germans counted upon as being
almost as efficacious as the bayonet for instilling a wholesome fear of
the German war god into the souls of their foes.
While giving the Frenchmen credit for knowing how to handle and serve
small field-pieces, the Germans nevertheless insisted that their
infantry fire or their skirmish fire was as deadly as that of the
Allies, or even deadlier. This I was not prepared to believe. I do not
think the German is a good rifle shot by instinct, as the American
often is, and in a lesser degree, perhaps, the Englishman is, too.
But where he can work the range out on paper, where he has to do with
mechanics instead of a shifting mark, where he can apply to the details
of gun firing the exact principles of arithmetic, I am pretty sure the
German is as good a gunner as may be found on the Continent of Europe
to-day. This may not apply to him at sea, for he has neither the sailor
traditions nor the inherited naval craftsmanship of the English; but
judging by what I have seen I am quite certain that with the solid
earth beneath him and a set of figures before him and an enemy out of
sight of him to be damaged he is in a class all by himself.
A German staff officer, who professed to have been present, told me
that at Manonvilla--so he spelled the name--a 42-centimeter gun was
fired one hundred and forty-seven times from a distance of 14,000
meters at a fort measuring 600 meters in length by 400 meters in
breadth--a very small target, indeed, considering the range--and that
investigation after the capture of the fort showed not a single one of
the one hundred and forty-seven shots had been an outright miss. Some
few, he said, hit the walls or at the bases of the walls, but all the
others, he claimed, had bull's-eyed into the fort itself.
Subsequently, on subjecting this tale to the acid test of second
thought I was compelled to doubt what the staff officer had said. To
begin with, I didn't understand how a 42-centimeter gun could be fired
one hundred and forty-seven times without its wearing out, for I have
often heard that the larger the bore of your gun and the heavier the
charge of explosives which it carries, the shorter is its period of
efficiency. In the second place, it didn't seem possible after being
hit one hundred and forty-seven times with 42-centimeter bombs that
enough of any fort of whatsoever size would be left to permit of a
tallying-up of separate shots. Ten shots properly placed should have
razed it; twenty more should have blown its leveled remainder to powder
and scattered the powder.
Be the facts what they may with regard to this case of the fort of
Manonvilla--if that be its proper name--I am prepared to speak with the
assurance of an eyewitness concerning the effect of the German fire
upon the defenses of Maubeuge. What I saw at Liège I have described
in a previous chapter of this volume. What I saw at Maubeuge was even
more convincing testimony, had I needed it, that the Germans had a
42-centimeter gun, and that, given certain favored conditions, they
knew how to handle it effectively.
We spent the better part of a day in two of the forts which were fondly
presumed to guard Maubeuge toward the north--Fort Des Sarts and Fort
Boussois; but Fort Des Sarts was the one where the 42-centimeter gun
gave the first exhibition of its powers upon French soil in this war,
so we went there first. To reach it we ran a matter of seven kilometers
through a succession of villages, each with its mutely eloquent tale
of devastation and general smash to tell; each with its group of
contemptuously tolerant German soldiers on guard and its handful of
natives, striving feebly to piece together the broken and bankrupt
fragments of their worldly affairs.
Approaching Des Sarts more nearly we came to a longish stretch of
highway, which the French had cleared of visual obstructions in
anticipation of resistance by infantry in the event that the outer ring
of defenses gave way before the German bombardment. It had all been
labor in vain, for the town capitulated after the outposts fell; but it
must have been very great labor. Any number of fine elm trees had been
felled and their boughs, stripped now of leaves, stuck up like bare
bones. There were holes in the metaled road where misaimed shells had
descended, and in any one of these holes you might have buried a horse.
A little gray church stood off by itself upon the plain. It had been
homely enough to start with. Now with its steeple shorn away and one of
its two belfry windows obliterated by a straying shot it had a rakish,
cock-eyed look to it.
Just beyond where the church was our chauffeur halted the car in
obedience to an order from the staff officer who had been detailed by
Major von Abercron, commandant of Maubeuge, to accompany us on this
particular excursion. Our guide pointed off to the right. "There,"
he said, "is where we dropped the first of our big ones when we were
trying to get the range of the fort. You see our guns were posted at
a point between eight and nine kilometers away and at the start we
over-shot a trifle. Still to the garrison yonder it must have been an
unhappy foretaste of what they might shortly expect, when they saw the
forty-twos striking here in this field and saw what execution they did
among the cabbage and the beet patches."
We left the car and, following our guide, went to look. Spaced very
neatly at intervals apart of perhaps a hundred and fifty yards a series
of craters broke the surface of the earth. Considering the tools which
dug them they were rather symmetrical craters, not jagged and gouged,
but with smooth walls and each in shape a perfect funnel. We measured
roughly a typical specimen. Across the top it was between fifty and
sixty feet in diameter, and it sloped down evenly for a depth of
eighteen feet in the chalky soil to a pointed bottom, where two men
would have difficulty standing together without treading upon each
other's toes. Its sides were lined with loose pellets of earth of the
average size of a tennis ball, and when we slid down into the hole
these rounded clods accompanied us in small avalanches.
We were filled with astonishment, first, that an explosive grenade,
weighing upward of a ton, could be so constructed that it would
penetrate thus far into firm and solid earth before it exploded; and,
second, that it could make such a neat saucer of a hole when it did
explode. But there was a still more amazing thing to be pondered. Of
the earth which had been dispossessed from the crevasse, amounting
to a great many wagonloads, no sign remained. It was not heaped up
about the lips of the funnel; it was not visibly scattered over the
nearermost furrows of that truck field. So far as we might tell it was
utterly gone; and from that we deduced that the force of the explosion
had been sufficient to pulverize the clay so finely and cast it so far
and so wide that it fell upon the surface in a fine shower, leaving no
traces unless one made a minute search for it. Noting the wonder upon
our faces, the officer was moved to speak further in a tone of sincere
admiration, touching on the capabilities of the crowning achievement of
the Krupp works:
"Pretty strong medicine, eh? Well, wait until I have shown you American
gentlemen what remains of the fort; then you will better understand.
Even here, out in the open, for a radius of a hundred and fifty
meters, any man, conceding he wasn't killed outright, would be knocked
senseless and after that for hours, even for days, perhaps, he would
be entirely unnerved. The force of the concussion appears to have that
effect upon persons who are at a considerable distance--it rips their
nerves to tatters. Some seem numbed and dazed; others develop an acute
hysteria.
"Highly interesting, is it not? Listen then; here is something even
more interesting: Within an inclosed space, where there is a roof
to hold in the gas generated by the explosion or where there are
reasonably high walls, the man who escapes being torn apart in the
instant of impact, or who escapes being crushed to death by collapsing
masonry, or killed by flying fragments, is exceedingly likely to choke
to death as he lies temporarily paralyzed and helpless from the shock.
I was at Liège and again here, and I know from my own observations
that this is true. At Liège particularly many of the garrison were
caught and penned up in underground casements, and there we found them
afterward dead, but with no marks of wounds upon them--they had been
asphyxiated."
I suppose in times of peace the speaker was a reasonably kind man and
reasonably regardful of the rights of his fellowmen. Certainly he
was most courteous to us and most considerate; but he described this
slaughter-pit scene with the enthusiasm of one who was a partner in a
most creditable and worthy enterprise.
Immediately about Des Sarts stood many telegraph poles in a row, for
here the road, which was the main road from Paris to Brussels, curved
close up under the grass-covered bastions. All the telegraph wires had
been cut, and they dangled about the bases of the poles in snarled
tangles like love vines. The ditches paralleling the road were choked
with felled trees, and, what with the naked limbs, were as spiky as
shad spines. Of the small cottages which once had stood in the vicinity
of the fort not one remained standing. Their sites were marked by
flattened heaps of brick and plaster from which charred ends of rafters
protruded. It was as though a giant had sat himself down upon each
little house in turn and squashed it to the foundation stones.
As a fort Des Sarts dated back to 1883. I speak of it in the past
tense, because the Germans had put it in that tense. As a fort, or
as anything resembling a fort, it had ceased to be, absolutely. The
inner works of it--the redan and the underground barracks, and the
magazines, and all--were built after the style followed by military
engineers back in 1883, having revetments faced up with brick and
stone; but only a little while ago--in the summer of 1913, to be
exact--the job of inclosing the original works with a glacis of a newer
type had been completed. So when the Germans came along in the first
week of September it was in most respects made over into a modern
fort. No doubt the reënforcements of reserves that hurried into it to
strengthen the regular garrison counted themselves lucky men to have so
massive and stout a shelter from which to fight an enemy who must work
in the open against them. Poor devils, their hopes crumbled along with
their walls when the Germans brought up the forty-twos.
We entered in through a breach in the first parapet and crossed, one
at a time, on a tottery wooden bridge which was propped across a fosse
half full of rubble, and so came to what had been the heart of the fort
of Des Sarts. Had I not already gathered some notion of the powers for
destruction of those one-ton, four-foot-long shells, I should have
said that the spot where we halted had been battered and crashed at
for hours; that scores and perhaps hundreds of bombs had been plumped
into it. Now, though, I was prepared to believe the German captain when
he said probably not more than five or six of the devil devices had
struck this target. Make it six for good measure. Conceive each of the
six as having been dammed by a hurricane and sired by an earthquake,
and as being related to an active volcano on one side of the family
and to a flaming meteor on the other. Conceive it as falling upon a
man-made, masonry-walled burrow in the earth and being followed in
rapid succession by five of its blood brethren; then you will begin to
get some fashion of mental photograph of the result. I confess myself
as unable to supply any better suggestion for a comparison. Nor shall I
attempt to describe the picture in any considerable detail. I only know
that for the first time in my life I realized the full and adequate
meaning of the word chaos. The proper definition of it was spread
broadcast before my eyes.
Appreciating the impossibility of comprehending the full scope of the
disaster which here had befallen, or of putting it concretely into
words if I did comprehend it, I sought to pick out small individual
details, which was hard to do, too, seeing that all things were jumbled
together so. This had been a series of cunningly buried tunnels and
arcades, with cozy subterranean dormitories opening off of side
passages, and still farther down there had been magazines and storage
spaces. Now it was all a hole in the ground, and the force which
blasted it out had then pulled the hole in behind itself. We stood on
the verge, looking downward into a chasm which seemed to split its way
to infinite depths, although in fact it was probably not nearly so deep
as it appeared. If we looked upward there, forty feet above our heads,
was a wide riven gap in the earth crust.
Near me I discerned a litter of metal fragments. From such of the
scraps as retained any shape at all, I figured that they had been part
of the protective casing of a gun mounted somewhere above. The missile
which wrecked the gun flung its armor down here. I searched my brain
for a simile which might serve to give a notion of the present state
of that steel jacket. I didn't find the one I wanted, but if you will
think of an earthenware pot which has been thrown from a very high
building upon a brick sidewalk you may have some idea of what I saw.
At that, it was no completer a ruin than any of the surrounding débris.
Indeed, in the whole vista of annihilation but two objects remained
recognizably intact, and these, strange to say, were two iron bed
frames bolted to the back wall of what I think must have been a barrack
room for officers. The room itself was no longer there. Brick, mortar,
stone, concrete, steel reënforcements, iron props, the hard-packed
earth, had been ripped out and churned into indistinguishable bits,
but those two iron beds hung fast to a discolored patch of plastering,
though the floor was gone from beneath them. Seemingly they were
hardly damaged. One gathered that a 42-centimeter shell possessed in
some degree the freakishness which we associate with the behavior of
cyclones.
We were told that at the last, when the guns had been silenced and
dismounted and the walls had been pierced and the embrasures blown
bodily away, the garrison, or what was left of it, fled to these
lowermost shelters. But the burrowing bombs found the refugees out and
killed them, nearly all, and those of them who died were still buried
beneath our feet in as hideous a sepulcher as ever was digged. There
was no getting them out from that tomb. The Crack of Doom will find
them still there, I guess.
To reach a portion of Des Sarts, as yet unvisited, we skirted the gape
of the crater, climbing over craggy accumulations of wreckage, and
traversed a tunnel with an arched roof and mildewed brick walls, like a
wine vault. The floor of it was littered with the knapsacks and water
bottles of dead or captured men, with useless rifles broken at the
stocks and bent in the barrels, and with suchlike riffle. At the far
end of the passage we came out into the open at the back side of the
fort.
"Right here," said the officer who was piloting us, "I witnessed a
sight which made a deeper impression upon me than anything I have
seen in this campaign. After the white flag had been hoisted by the
survivors and we had marched in, I halted my men just here at the
entrance to this arcade. We didn't dare venture into the redan, for
sporadic explosions were still occurring in the ammunition stores. Also
there were fires raging. Smoke was pouring thickly out of the mouth of
the tunnel. It didn't seem possible that there could be anyone alive
back yonder.
"All of a sudden, men began to come out of the tunnel. They came and
came until there were nearly two hundred of them--French reservists
mostly. They were crazy men--crazy for the time being, and still crazy,
I expect, some of them. They came out staggering, choking, falling
down and getting up again. You see, their nerves were gone. The fumes,
the gases, the shock, the fire, what they had endured and what they
had escaped--all these had distracted them. They danced, sang, wept,
laughed, shouted in a sort of maudlin frenzy, spun about deliriously
until they dropped. They were deafened, and some of them could not see
but had to grope their way. I remember one man who sat down and pulled
off his boots and socks and threw them away and then hobbled on in his
bare feet until he cut the bottoms of them to pieces. I don't care to
see anything like that again--even if it is my enemies that suffer it."
He told it so vividly, that standing alongside of him before the tunnel
opening I could see the procession myself--those two hundred men who
had drained horror to its lees and were drunk on it.
We went to Fort Boussois, some four miles away. It was another of
the keys to the town. It was taken on September sixth; on the next
day, September seventh, the citadel surrendered. Here, in lieu of
the 42-centimeter, which was otherwise engaged for the moment, the
attacking forces brought into play an Austrian battery of 30-centimeter
guns. So far as I have been able to ascertain this was the only
Austrian command which had any part in the western campaigns. The
Austrian gunners shelled the fort until the German infantry had been
massed in a forest to the northward. Late in the afternoon the infantry
charged across a succession of cleared fields and captured the outer
slopes. With these in their possession it didn't take them very long to
compel the surrender of Fort Boussois, especially as the defenders had
already been terribly cut up by the artillery fire.
The Austrians must have been first-rate marksmen. One of their shells
fell squarely upon the rounded dome of a big armored turret which was
sunk in the earth and chipped off the top of it as you would chip your
breakfast egg. The men who manned the guns in that revolving turret
must all have died in a flash of time. The impact of the blow was such
that the leaden solder which filled the interstices of the segments of
the turret was squeezed out from between the plates in curly strips,
like icing from between the layers of a misused birthday cake.
Back within the main works we saw where a shell had bored a smooth,
round orifice through eight meters of earth and a meter and a half of
concrete and steel plates. Peering into the shaft we could make out
the floor of a tunnel some thirty feet down. To judge by its effects,
this shell had been of a different type from any others whose work we
had witnessed. Apparently it had been devised to excavate holes rather
than to explode, and when we asked questions about it we speedily
ascertained that our guide did not care to discuss the gun which had
inflicted this particular bit of damage.
"It is not permitted to speak of this matter," he said in explanation
of his attitude. "It is a military secret, this invention. We call it a
mine gun."
Every man to his taste. I should have called it a well-digger.
Erect upon the highest stretch of riddled walls, with his legs
spraddled far apart and his arms jerking in expressive gestures, he
told us how the German infantry had advanced across the open ground. It
had been hard, he said, to hold the men back until the order for the
charge was given, and then they burst from their cover and came on at a
dead run, cheering.
"It was very fine," he added. "Very glorious."
"Did you have any losses in the charge?" asked one of our party.
"Oh, yes," he answered, as though that part of the proceeding was
purely an incidental detail and of no great consequence. "We lost many
men here--very many--several thousands, I think. Most of them are
buried where you see those long ridges in the second field beyond."
In a sheltered corner of a redoubt, close up under a parapet and
sheathed on its inner side with masonry, was a single grave. The
pounding feet of many fighting men had beaten the mound flat, but a
small wooden cross still stood in the soil, and on it in French were
penciled the words:
"Here lies Lieutenant Verner, killed in the charge of battle."
His men must have thought well of the lieutenant to take the time, in
the midst of the defense, to bury him in the place where he fell, for
there were no other graves to be seen within the fort.