THE RED GLUTTON
As we went along next day through the town of Maubeuge we heard
singing; and singing was a most rare thing to be hearing in this town.
In a country where no one smiles any more who belongs in that country,
singing is not a thing which you would naturally expect to hear. So we
turned off of our appointed route.
There was a small wine shop at the prow of a triangle of narrow
streets. It had been a wine shop. It was now a beer shop. There had
been a French proprietor; he had a German partner now. It had been
only a few weeks--you could not as yet measure the interval of time
in terms of months--since the Germans came and sat themselves down
before Maubeuge and blew its defenses flat with their 42-centimeter
earthquakes and marched in and took it. It had been only these few
weeks; but already the Germanizing brand of the conqueror was seared
deep in the galled flanks of this typically French community. The
town-hall clock was made to tick German time, which varied by an
even hour from French time. Tacked upon the door of the little café
where we ate our meals was a card setting forth, with painful German
particularity, the tariff which might properly be charged for food and
for lodging and drink and what not; and it was done in German-Gothic
script, all very angular and precise; and it was signed by His
Excellency, the German commandant; and its prices were predicated on
German logic and the estimated depth of a German wallet. You might
read a newspaper printed in German characters, if so minded; but none
printed in French, whether so minded or not.
So when we entered in at the door of the little French wine shop where
the three streets met, to find out who within had heart of grace to
sing _O Strassburg, O Strassburg_, so lustily, lo and behold, it
had been magically transformed into a German beer shop. It was, as
we presently learned, the only beer shop in all of Maubeuge, and
the reason for that was this: No sooner had the Germans cleared and
opened the roads back across Belgium to their own frontiers than an
enterprising tradesman of the Rhein country, who somehow had escaped
military service, loaded many kegs of good German beer upon trucks
and brought his precious cargoes overland a hundred miles and more
southward. Certainly he could not have moved the lager caravan
without the consent and aid of the Berlin war office. For all I know
to the contrary he may have been financed in that competent quarter.
That same morning I had seen a field weather station, mounted on
an automobile, standing in front of our lodging place just off the
square. It was going to the front to make and compile meteorological
reports. A general staff who provided weather offices on wheels and
printing offices on wheels--this last for the setting up and striking
off of small proclamations and orders--might very well have bethought
themselves that the soldier in the field would be all the fitter
for the job before him if stayed with the familiar malts of the
_Vaterland_. Believe me, I wouldn't put it past them.
Anyway, having safely reached Maubeuge, the far-seeing Rheinishman
effected a working understanding with a native publican, which was
probably a good thing for both, seeing that one had a stock of goods
and a ready-made trade but no place to set up business, and that the
other owned a shop, but had lost his trade and his stock-in-trade
likewise. These two, the little, affable German and the tall, grave
Frenchman, stood now behind their counter drawing off mugs of Pilsener
as fast as their four hands could move. Their patrons, their most vocal
and boisterous patrons, were a company of musketeers who had marched
in from the north that afternoon. As a rule the new levies went down
into France on troop trains, but this company was part of a draft which
for some reason came afoot. Without exception they were young men,
husky and hearty and inspired with a beefish joviality at having found
a place where they could ease their feet, and rest their legs, and
slake their week-old thirst upon their own soothing brews. Being German
they expressed their gratefulness in song.
We had difficulty getting into the place, so completely was it
filled. Men sat in the window ledges, and in the few chairs that were
available, and even in the fireplace, and on the ends of the bar,
clunking their heels against the wooden baseboards. The others stood
in such close order they could hardly clear their elbows to lift their
glasses. The air was choky with a blended smell derived from dust and
worn boot leather and spilt essences of hops and healthy, unwashed,
sweaty bodies. On a chair in a corner stood a tall, tired and happy
youth who beat time for the singing with an empty mug and between beats
nourished himself on drafts from a filled mug which he held in his
other hand. With us was a German officer. He was a captain of reserves
and a person of considerable wealth. He shoved his way to the bar and
laid down upon its sloppy surface two gold coins and said something to
a petty officer who was directing the distribution of the refreshments.
The noncom. hammered for silence and, when he got it, announced that
the Herr Hauptmann had donated twenty marks' worth of beer, all present
being invited to coöperate in drinking it up, which they did, but first
gave three cheers for the captain and three more for his American
friends and afterward, while the replenished mugs radiated in crockery
waves from the bar to the back walls, sang for us a song which, so far
as the air was concerned, sounded amazingly like unto _Every Little
Movement Has a Meaning All Its Own_. Their weariness was quite fallen
away from them; they were like schoolboys on a frolic. Indeed, I think
a good many of them were schoolboys.
As we came out a private who stood in the doorway spoke to us in fair
English. He had never been in America, but he had a brother living in
East St. Louis and he wanted to know if any of us knew his brother.
This was a common experience with us. Every third German soldier we met
had a brother or a sister or somebody in America. This soldier could
not have been more than eighteen years; the down on his cheeks was like
corn silk. He told us he and his comrades were very glad to be going
forward where there would be fighting. They had had no luck yet. There
had been no fighting where they had been. I remembered afterward that
luck was the word he used.
We went back to the main street and for a distance the roar of their
volleying chorus followed us. Men and women stood at the doors of the
houses along the way. They were silent and idle. Idleness and silence
seemed always to have fallen as grim legacies upon the civilian
populace of these captured towns; but the look upon their faces as they
listened to the soldiers' voices was not hard to read. Their town was
pierced by cannonballs where it was not scarified with fire; there was
sorrow and the abundant cause for sorrow in every house; commerce was
dead and credit was killed; and round the next turning their enemy sang
his drinking song. I judge that the thrifty Frenchman who went partner
with the German stranger in the beer traffic lost popularity that day
among his fellow townsmen.
We were bound for the railway station, which the Germans already had
rechristened _Bahnhof_. Word had been brought to us that trains of
wounded men and prisoners were due in the course of the afternoon
from the front, and more especially from the right wing; and in this
prospect we scented a story to be written. To reach the station we
crossed the river Sambre, over a damaged bridge, and passed beneath the
arched passageway of the citadel which the great Vauban built for the
still greater Louis XIV, thinking, no doubt, when he built it, that
it would always be potent to keep out any foe, however strong. Next
to its stupid massiveness what most impressed us this day was its
utter uselessness as a protection. The station stood just beyond the
walls, with a park at one side of it, but the park had become a timber
deadfall. At the approach of the enemy hundreds of splendid trees
had been felled to clear the way for gunfire from the inner defenses
in the event that the Germans got by the outer circle of fortresses.
After the Germans took the forts, though, the town surrendered, so all
this destruction had been futile. There were acres of ragged stumps
and, between the stumps, jungles of overlapping trunks and interlacing
boughs from which the dead and dying leaves shook off in showers. One
of our party, who knew something of forestry, estimated that these
trees were about forty years old.
"I suppose," he added speculatively, "that when this war ends these
people will replant their trees. Then in another forty years or so
another war will come and they will chop them all down again. On the
whole I'm rather glad I don't live on this continent."
The trains which were expected had not begun to arrive yet, so with
two companions I sat on a bench at the back of the station, waiting.
Facing us was a line of houses. One, the corner house, was a big black
char. It had caught fire during the shelling and burned quite down. Its
neighbors were intact, except for shattered chimneys and smashed doors
and riddled windows. The concussion of a big gunfire had shivered
every window in this quarter of town. There being no sufficient stock
of glass with which to replace the broken panes, and no way of bringing
in fresh supplies, the owners of the damaged buildings had patched
the holes with bits of planking filched from more complete ruins near
by. Of course there were other reasons, too, if one stopped to sum
them up: Few would have the money to buy fresh glass, even if there
was any fresh glass to buy, and the local glaziers--such of them as
survived--would be serving the colors. All France had gone to war and
at this time of writing had not come back, except in dribbling streams
of wounded and prisoners.
These ragged boards, sparingly nailed across the window sockets, gave
the houses the air of wearing masks and of squinting at us through
narrow eye slits. The railroad station was windowless, too, like all
the buildings round about, but nobody had dosed the openings here, and
it gaped emptily in fifty places, and the raw, gusty winds of a North
European fall searched through it.
In this immediate neighborhood few of the citizens were to be seen.
Even those houses which still were humanly habitable appeared to be
untenanted; only soldiers were about, and not so very many of them. A
hundred yards up the tracks, on a siding, a squad of men with a derrick
and crane were hoisting captured French field guns upon flat can to be
taken to Berlin and exhibited as spoils of conquest for the benefit of
the stay-at-homes. A row of these cannons, perhaps fifty in all, were
ranked alongside awaiting loading and transportation. Except for the
agonized whine of the tackle-blocks and the buzzing of the flies the
place where we sat was pretty quiet. There were a million flies, and
there seemed to be a billion. You wouldn't have thought, unless you had
been there to see for yourself, that there were so many flies in the
world. By the time this was printed the cold weather had cured Europe
of its fly plague, but during the first three months I know that the
track of war was absolutely sown with these vermin. Even after a night
of hard frost they would be as thick as ever at midday--as thick and as
clinging and as nasty. Go into any close, ill-aired place and no matter
what else you might smell, you smelled flies too.
As I sit and look back on what I myself have seen of it, this war seems
to me to have been not so much a sight as a stench. Everything which
makes for human happiness and human usefulness it has destroyed. What
it has bred, along with misery and pain and fatted burying grounds, is
a vast and loathsome stench and a universe of flies.
The smells and the flies; they were here in this railroad station in
sickening profusion. I call it a railroad station, although it had lost
its functions as such weeks before. The only trains which ran now were
run by the Germans for strictly German purposes, and so the station had
become a victualing point for troops going south to the fighting and a
way hospital for sick and wounded coming back from the fighting. What,
in better days than these, had been the lunch room was a place for the
redressing of hurts. Its high counters, which once held sandwiches and
tarts and wine bottles, were piled with snowdrifts of medicated cotton
and rolls of lint and buckets of antiseptic washes and drug vials. The
ticket booth was an improvised pharmacy. Spare medical supplies filled
the room where formerly fussy customs officers examined the luggage of
travelers coming out of Belgium into France. Just beyond the platform
a wooden booth, with no front to it, had been knocked together out of
rough planking, and relays of cooks, with greasy aprons over their
soiled gray uniforms, made vast caldrons of stews--always stews--and
brewed so-called coffee by the gallon against the coming of those who
would need it. The stuff was sure to be needed, all of it and more too.
So they cooked and cooked unceasingly and never stopped to wipe a pan
or clean a spoon.
At our backs was the waiting room for first-class passengers, but no
passengers of any class came to it any more, and so by common consent
it was a sort of rest room for the Red Cross men, who mostly were
Germans, but with a few captured Frenchmen among them, still wearing
their French uniforms. There were three or four French military
surgeons--prisoners, to be sure, but going and coming pretty much
as they pleased. The tacit arrangement was that the Germans should
succor Germans and that the Frenchmen should minister to their own
disabled countrymen among the prisoners going north, but in a time of
stress--and that meant every time a train came in from the south or
west--both nationalities mingled together and served, without regard
for the color of the coat worn by those whom they served.
Probably from the day it was put up this station had never been really
and entirely clean. Judged by American standards Continental railway
stations are rarely ever clean, even when conditions are normal. Now
that conditions were anything but normal, this Maubeuge station was
incredibly and incurably filthy. No doubt the German nursing sisters
who were brought here tried at first, with their German love for
orderliness, to keep the interior reasonably tidy; but they had been
swamped by more important tasks. For two weeks now the wounded had been
passing through by the thousands and the tens of thousands daily. So
between trains the women dropped into chairs or down upon cots and took
their rest in snatches. But their fingers didn't rest. Always their
hands were busy with the making of bandages and the fluffing of lint.
By bits I learned something about three of the women who served on
the so-called day shift, which meant that they worked from early
morning until long after midnight. One was a titled woman who had
volunteered for this duty. She was beyond middle age, plainly in
poor health herself and everlastingly on the verge of collapse from
weakness and exhaustion. Her will kept her on her feet. The second was
a professional nurse from one of the university towns--from Bonn, I
think. She called herself Sister Bartholomew, for the German nurses
who go to war take other names than their own, just as nuns do. She
was a beautiful woman, tall and strong and round-faced, with big, fine
gray eyes. Her energy had no limits. She ran rather than walked. She
had a smile for every maimed man who was brought to her, but when the
man had been treated, and had limped away or had been carried away,
I saw her often wringing her hands and sobbing over the utter horror
of it all. Then another sufferer would appear and she would wipe the
tears off her cheeks and get to work again. The third--so an assistant
surgeon confided to us--was the mistress of an officer at the front,
a prostitute of the Berlin sidewalks, who enrolled for hospital work
when her lover went to the front. She was a tall, dark, handsome girl,
who looked to be more Spaniard than German, and she was graceful and
lithe even in the exceedingly shapeless costume of blue print that
she ware. She was less deft than either of her associates but very
willing and eager. As between the three--the noblewoman, the working
woman and the woman of the street--the medical officials in charge
made no distinction whatsoever. Why should they? In this sisterhood of
mercy they all three stood upon the same common ground. I never knew
that slop jars were noble things until I saw women in these military
lazarets bearing them in their arms; then to me they became as altar
vessels.
Lacking women to do it, the head surgeon had intrusted the task of
clearing away the dirt to certain men. A sorry job they made of it. For
accumulated nastiness that waiting room was an Augean stable and the
two soldiers who dawdled about in it with brooms lacked woefully in the
qualities of Hercules. Putting a broom in a man's hands is the best
argument in favor of woman's suffrage that I know of, anyhow. A third
man who helped at chores in the transformed lunch room had gathered up
and piled together in a heap upon the ground near us a bushel or so of
used bandages--grim reminders left behind after the last train went
by--and he had touched a match to the heap in an effort to get rid of
it by fire. By reason of what was upon them the clothes burned slowly,
sending up a smudge of acrid smoke to mingle with smells of carbolic
acid and iodoform, and the scent of boiling food, and of things
infinitely less pleasant than these.
Presently a train rolled in and we crossed through the building to the
trackside to watch what would follow. Already we had seen a sufficiency
of such trains; we knew before it came what it would be like: In front
the dumpy locomotive, with a soldier engineer in the cab; then two or
three box cars of prisoners, with the doors locked and armed guards
riding upon the roofs; then two or three shabby, misused passenger
coaches, containing injured officers and sometimes injured common
soldiers, too; and then, stretching off down the rails, a long string
of box cars, each of which would be bedded with straw and would contain
for furniture a few rough wooden benches ranging from side to side.
And each car would contain ten or fifteen or twenty, or even a greater
number, of sick and crippled men.
Those who could sit were upon the hard benches, elbow to elbow, packed
snugly in. Those who were too weak to sit sprawled upon the straw and
often had barely room in which to turn over, so closely were they
bestowed. It had been days since they had started back from the field
hospitals where they had had their first-aid treatment. They had moved
by sluggish stages with long halts in between. Always the wounded must
wait upon the sidings while the troop trains from home sped down the
cleared main line to the smoking front; that was the merciless but
necessary rule. The man who got himself crippled became an obstacle to
further progress, a drag upon the wheels of the machine; whereas the
man who was yet whole and fit was the man whom the generals wanted.
So the fresh grist for the mill, the raw material, if you will, was
expedited upon its way to the hoppers; that which already had been
ground up was relatively of the smallest consequence.
Because of this law, which might not be broken or amended, these
wounded men would, perforce, spend several days aboard train before
they could expect to reach the base hospitals upon German soil,
Maubeuge being at considerably less than midway of the distance between
starting point and probable destination. Altogether the trip might last
a week or even two weeks--a trip that ordinarily would have lasted less
than twelve hours. Through it these men, who were messed and mangled
in every imaginable fashion, would wallow in the dirty matted straw,
with nothing except that thin layer of covering between them and the
car floors that jolted and jerked beneath them. We knew it and they
knew it, and there was nothing to be done. Their wounds would fester
and be hot with fever. Their clotted bandages would clot still more
and grow stiffer and harder with each dragging hour. Those who lacked
overcoats and blankets--and some there were who lacked both--would half
freeze at night. For food they would have slops dished up for them at
such stopping places as this present one, and they would slake their
thirst on water drawn from contaminated wayside wells and be glad of
the chance. Gangrene would come, and blood poison, and all manner of
corruption. Tetanus would assuredly claim its toll. Indeed, these
horrors were already at work among them. I do not tell it to sicken my
reader, but because I think I should tell it that he may have a fuller
conception of what this fashionable institution of war means--we could
smell this train as we could smell all the trains which followed after
it, when it was yet fifty yards away from us.
Be it remembered, furthermore, that no surgeon accompanied this
afflicted living freightage, that not even a qualified nurse traveled
with it. According to the classifying processes of those in authority
on the battle lines these men were lightly wounded men, and it was
presumed that while en route they would be competent to minister to
themselves and to one another. Under the grading system employed by
the chief surgeons a man, who was still all in one piece and who
probably would not break apart in transit, was designated as being
lightly wounded. This statement is no attempt upon my part to indulge
in levity concerning the most frightful situation I have encountered
in nearly twenty years of active newspaper work; it is the sober,
unexaggerated truth.
And so these lightly wounded men--men with their jaws shot away, men
with holes in their breasts and their abdomens, men with their spine
tips splintered, men with their arms and legs broken, men with their
hands and feet shredded by shrapnel, men with their scalps ripped open,
men with their noses and their ears and their fingers and toes gone,
men jarred to the very marrow of their bones by explosives--these men,
for whom ordinarily soft beds would have been provided and expert care
and special food, came trundling up alongside that noisome station;
and, through the door openings from where they were housed like dumb
beasts, they looked out at us with the glazed eyes of dumb suffering
beasts.
As the little toylike European cars halted, bumping together hard,
orderlies went running down the train bearing buckets of soup, and of
coffee and of drinking water, and loaves of the heavy, dark German
bread. Behind them went other men--bull-necked strong men picked for
this job because of their strength. Their task was to bring back in
their arms or upon their shoulders such men as were past walking. There
were no stretchers. There was no time for stretchers. Behind this
train would be another one just like it and behind that one, another,
and so on down an eighty-mile stretch of dolorous way. And this, mind
you, was but one of three lines carrying out of France and Belgium into
Germany victims of the war to be made well again in order that they
might return and once more be fed as tidbits into the maw of that war;
it was but one of a dozen or more such streams, threading back from
as many battle zones to the countries engaged in this wide and ardent
scheme of mutual extermination.
Half a minute after the train stopped a procession was moving toward
us, made up of men who had wriggled down or who had been eased down out
of the cars, and who were coming to the converted buffet room for help.
Mostly they came afoot, sometimes holding on to one another for mutual
support. Perhaps one in five was borne bodily by an orderly. He might
be hunched in the orderly's arms like a weary child, or he might be
traveling upon the orderly's back, pack-fashion, with his arms gripped
about the bearer's neck; and then, in such a case, the pair of them,
with the white hollow face of the wounded man nodding above the sweated
red face of the other, became a monstrosity with two heads and one pair
of legs.
Here, advancing toward us with the gait of a doddering grandsire,
would be a boy in his teens, bent double and clutching his middle
with both hands. Here would be a man whose hand had been smashed,
and from beyond the rude swathings of cotton his fingers protruded
stiffly and were so congested and swollen they looked like fat red
plantains. Here was a man whose feet were damaged. He had a crutch made
of a spade handle. Next would be a man with a hole in his neck, and
the bandages had pulled away from about his throat, showing the raw
inflamed hole. In this parade I saw a French infantryman aided along by
a captured Zouave on one side and on the other by a German sentry who
swung his loaded carbine in his free hand. Behind them I saw an awful
nightmare of a man--a man whose face and bare cropped head and hands
and shoes were all of a livid, poisonous, green cast. A shell of some
new and particularly devilish variety had burst near him and the fumes
which it generated in bursting had dyed him green. Every man would
have, tied about his neck or to one of his buttonholes, the German
field-doctor's card telling of the nature of his hurt and the place
where he had sustained it; and the uniform of nearly every one would be
discolored with dried blood, and where the coat gaped open you marked
that the harsh, white cambric lining was made harsher still by stiff,
brownish-red streakings.
In at the door of the improvised hospital filed the parade, and the
wounded men dropped on the floor or else were lowered upon chairs and
tables and cots--anywhere that there was space for them to huddle up
or stretch out. And then the overworked surgeons, French and German,
and the German nursing sisters and certain of the orderlies would fall
to. There was no time for the finer, daintier proceedings that might
have spared the sufferers some measure of their agony. It was cut away
the old bandage, pull off the filthy cotton, dab with antiseptics what
was beneath, pour iodine or diluted acid upon the bare and shrinking
tissues, perhaps do that with the knife or probe which must be done
where incipient mortification had set in, clap on fresh cotton, wind a
strip of cloth over it, pin it in place and send this man away to be
fed--providing he could eat; then turn to the next poor wretch. The
first man was out of that place almost before the last man was in; that
was how fast the work went forward.
One special horror was spared: The patients made no outcry. They
gritted their teeth and writhed where they lay, but none shrieked
out. Indeed, neither here nor at any of the other places where I saw
wounded men did we hear that chorus of moans and shrieks with which
fiction always has invested such scenes. Those newly struck seemed
stunned into silence; those who had had time to recover from the first
shock of being struck appeared buoyed and sustained by a stoic quality
which lifted them, mute and calm, above the call of tortured nerves
and torn flesh. Those who were delirious might call out; those who were
conscious locked their lips and were steadfast In all our experience
I came upon just two men in their senses who gave way at all. One was
a boy of nineteen or twenty, in a field hospital near Rheims, whose
kneecap had been smashed. He sat up on his bed, rocking his body and
whimpering fretfully like an infant He had been doing that for days,
a nurse told us, but whether he whimpered because of his suffering
or at the thought of going through life with a stiffened leg she did
not know. The other was here at Maubeuge. I helped hold his right
arm steady while a surgeon took the bandages off his hand. When the
wrapping came away a shattered finger came with it--it had rotted off,
if you care to know that detail--and at the sight the victim uttered
growling, rasping, animal-like sounds. Even so, I think it was the
thing he saw more than the pain of it that overcame him; the pain he
could have borne. He had been bearing it for days.
I particularly remember one other man who was brought in off this first
train. He was a young giant. For certain the old father of Frederick
the Great would have had him in his regiment of Grenadier Guards. Well,
for that matter, he was a grenadier in the employ of the same family
now. He hobbled in under his own motive power and leaned against
the wall until the first flurry was over. Then, at a nod from one of
the shirt-sleeved surgeons, he stretched himself upon a bare wooden
table which had just been vacated and indicated that he wanted relief
for his leg--which leg, I recall, was incased in a rude, splintlike
arrangement of plaited straw. The surgeon took off the straw and the
packing beneath it. The giant had a hole right through his knee, from
side to side, and the flesh all about it was horribly swollen and
purplish-black. So the surgeon soused the joint, wound and all, with
iodine; the youth meanwhile staring blandly up at the ceiling with
his arms crossed on his wide breast. I stood right by him, looking
into his face, and he didn't so much as bat an eyelid. But he didn't
offer to get up when the surgeon was done with treating him. He turned
laboriously over on his face, pulling his shirt free from his body as
he did so, and then we saw that he had a long, infected gash from a
glancing bullet across the small of his back. He had been lying on one
angry wound while the other was redressed. You marveled, not that he
had endured it without blenching, but that he had endured it at all.
The train stayed with us perhaps half an hour, and in that half hour at
least a hundred men must have had treatment of sorts. A signal sounded
and the orderlies lifted up the few wasted specters who still remained
and toted them out. Almost the last man to be borne away was injured
in both legs; an orderly carried him in his arms. Seeing the need of
haste the orderly sought to heave his burden aboard the nearest car.
The men in that car protested; already their space was overcrowded.
So the patient orderly staggered down the train until he found the
crippled soldier's rightful place and thrust him into the straw just as
the wheels began to turn. As the cars, gathering speed, rolled by us we
could see that nearly all the travelers were feeding themselves from
pannikins of the bull-meat stew. Wrappings on their hands and sometimes
about their faces made them doubly awkward, and the hot tallowy mess
spilt in spattering streams upon them and upon the straw under them.
They were on their way. At the end of another twenty-four hour stretch
they might have traveled fifty or sixty or even seventy miles. The
place they left behind them was in worse case than before. Grease
spattered the earth; the floor of the buffet room was ankle deep,
literally, in discarded bandages and blood-stiffened cotton; and the
nurses and the doctors and the helpers dropped down in the midst of it
all to snatch a few precious minutes of rest before the next creaking
caravan of misery arrived. There was no need to tell them of its
coming; they knew. All through that afternoon and night, and through
the next day and night, and through the half of the third day that we
stayed on in Maubeuge, the trains came back. They came ten minutes
apart, twenty minutes apart, an hour apart, but rarely more than an
hour would elapse between trains. And this traffic in marred and
mutilated humanity had been going on for four weeks and would go on for
nobody knew how many weeks more.
When the train had gone out of sight beyond the first turn to the
eastward I spoke to the head surgeon of the German contingent--a broad,
bearded, middle-aged man who sat on a baggage truck while an orderly
poured a mixture of water and antiseptics over his soiled hands.
"A lot of those poor devils will die?" I suggested.
"Less than three per cent of those who get back to the base hospitals
will die," he said with a snap of his jaw, as though challenging me
to doubt the statement. "That is the wonder of this war--that so many
are killed in the fighting and that so few die who get back out of it
alive. These modern scientific bullets, these civilized bullets"--he
laughed in self-derision at the use of the word--"they are cruel and
yet they are merciful too. If they do not kill you outright they have a
little way, somehow, of not killing you at all."
"But the bayonet wounds and the saber wounds?" I said. "How about them?"
"I have been here since the very first," he said; "since the day after
our troops took this town, and God knows how many thousands of wounded
men--Germans, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Turcos, some Belgians--have passed
through my hands; but as yet I have to see a man who has been wounded
by a saber or a lance. I saw one bayonet wound yesterday or the day
before. The man had fallen on his own bayonet and driven it into his
side. Shrapnel wounds? Yes. Wounds from fragments of bombs? Again,
yes. Bullet wounds? I can't tell you how many of those I have seen,
but surely many thousands. But no bayonet wounds. This is a war of hot
lead, not of cold steel. I read of these bayonet charges, but I do not
believe that many such stories are true."
I didn't believe it either.
The train which followed after the first, coming up out of France,
furnished for us much the same sights the first one had furnished, and
so, with some slight variations, did the third train and the fourth and
all the rest of them. The station became a sty where before it had been
a kennel; the flies multiplied; the stenches increased in volume and
strength, if such were possible; the windows of the littered waiting
room, with their cracked half panes, were like ribald eyes winking at
the living afflictions which continually trailed past them; the floors
looked as though there had been a snowstorm.
A train came, whose occupants were nearly all wounded by shrapnel.
Wounds of the head, the face and the neck abounded among these men--for
the shells, exploding in the air above where they crouched in their
trenches, had bespattered them with iron pebbles. Each individual
picture of suffering recurred with such monotonous and regular
frequency that after an hour or so it took something out of the common
run--an especially vivid splash of daubed and crimson horror--to
quicken our imaginations and make us fetch out our note books. I recall
a young lieutenant of Uhlans who had been wounded in the breast by
fragments of a grenade, which likewise had smashed in several of his
ribs. He proudly fingered his newly acquired Iron Cross while the
surgeon relaced his battered torso with strips of gauze. Afterward
he asked me for a cigar, providing I had one to spare, saying he had
not tasted tobacco for a week and was perishing for a smoke. We began
to take note then how the wounded men watched us as we puffed at our
cigars, and we realized they were dumbly envying us each mouthful of
smoke. So we sent our chauffeur to the public market with orders to buy
all the cigars he could find on sale there. He presently returned with
the front and rear seats of the automobile piled high with bundled
sheaves of the brown weed--you can get an astonishingly vast number of
those domestic French cigars for the equivalent of thirty dollars in
American money--and we turned the whole cargo over to the head nurse
on condition that, until the supply was exhausted, she give a cigar to
every hurt soldier who might crave one, regardless of his nationality.
She cried as she thanked us for the small charity.
"We can feed them--yes," she said, "but we have nothing to give them to
smoke, and it is very hard on them."
A little later a train arrived which brought three carloads of French
prisoners and one carload of English. Among the Frenchmen were many
Alpine Rangers, so called--the first men we had seen of this wing of
the service--and by reason of their dark blue uniforms and their flat
blue caps they looked more like sailors than soldiers. At first we took
them for sailors. There were thirty-four of the Englishmen, being all
that were left of a company of the West Yorkshire Regiment of infantry.
Confinement for days in a bare box car, with not even water to wash
their faces and hands in, had not altogether robbed them of a certain
trim alertness which seems to belong to the British fighting man. Their
puttees were snugly reefed about their shanks and their khaki tunics
buttoned up to their throats.
We talked with them. They wanted to know if they had reached Germany
yet, and when we told them that they were not out of France and had all
of Belgium still to traverse, they groaned their dismay in chorus.
"We've 'ad a very 'ard time of it, sir," said a spokesman, who wore
sergeant's stripes on his sleeves and who told us he came from
Sheffield. "Seventeen 'ours we were in the trench, under fire all the
time, with water up to our middles and nothing to eat. We were 'olding
the center and when the Frenchies fell back they didn't give our chaps
no warning, and pretty soon the Dutchmen they 'ad us flanked both sides
and we 'ad to quit. But we didn't quit until we'd lost all but one of
our officers and a good 'alf of our men."
"Where was this?" one of us asked.
"Don't know, sir," he said. "It's a blooming funny war. You never knows
the name of the place where you're fighting at, unless you 'ears it by
chance."
Then he added:
"Could you tell us, sir, 'ow's the war going? Are we giving the Germans
a proper 'iding all along the line?"
We inquired regarding their treatment. They didn't particularly
fancy the food--narsty slop, the sergeant called it although it was
reasonably plentiful; and, being true Englishmen, they sorely missed
their tea. Then, too, on the night before their overcoats had been
taken from them and no explanations vouchsafed.
"We could 'ave done with them," said the speaker bitterly; "pretty cold
it was in this 'ere car. And what with winter coming on and everything
I call it a bit thick to be taking our overcoats off of us."
We went and asked a German officer who had the convoy in charge the
reason for this, and he said the overcoats of all the uninjured
men, soldiers as well as prisoners, had been confiscated to furnish
coverings for such of the wounded as lacked blankets. Still, I observed
that the guards for the train had their overcoats. So I do not vouch
for the accuracy of his explanation.
It was getting late in the afternoon and the fifth train to pull
in from the south since our advent on the spot--or possibly it was
the sixth--had just halted when, from the opposite direction, a
troop-train, long and heavy, panted into sight and stopped on the far
track while the men aboard it got an early supper of hot victuals. We
crossed over to have a look at the new arrivals.
It was a long train, drawn by one locomotive and shoved by another, and
it included in its length a string of flat cars upon which were lashed
many field pieces, and commandeered automobiles, and even some family
carriages, not to mention baggage wagons and cook wagons and supply
wagons. For a wonder, the coaches in which the troops rode were new,
smart coaches, seemingly just out of the builders' hands. They were
mainly first and second class coaches, varnished outside and equipped
with upholstered compartments where the troopers took their luxurious
ease. Following the German fashion, the soldiers had decorated each car
with field flowers and sheaves of wheat and boughs of trees, and even
with long paper streamers of red and white and black. Also, the artists
and wags of the detachment had been busy with colored chalks. There
was displayed on one car a lively crayon picture of a very fierce,
two-tailed Bavarian lion eating up his enemies--a nation at a bite.
Another car bore a menu:
Russian caviar
Servian rice meat English roast beef
Belgian ragout French pastry
Upon this same car was lettered a bit of crude verse, which, as we
had come to know, was a favorite with the German private. By my poor
translation it ran somewhat as follows:
_For the Slav, a kick we have,
And for the Jap a slap;
The Briton too--we'll beat him blue,
And knock the Frenchman flat._
Altogether the train had quite the holidaying air about it and the men
who traveled on it had the same spirit too. They were Bavarians--all
new troops, and nearly all young fellows. Their accouterments were
bright and their uniforms almost unsoiled, and I saw that each man
carried in his right boot top the long, ugly-looking dirk-knife that
the Bavarian foot-soldier fancies. The Germans always showed heat when
they found a big service clasp-knife hung about a captured Englishman's
neck on a lanyard, calling it a barbarous weapon because of the length
of the blade and long sharp bradawl which folded into a slot at the
back of the handle; but an equally grim bit of cutlery in a Bavarian's
bootleg seemed to them an entirely proper tool for a soldier to be
carrying.
The troops--there must have been a full battalion of them--piled off
the coaches to exercise their legs. They skylarked about on the earth,
and sang and danced, and were too full of coltish spirits to eat the
rations that had been brought from the kitchen for their consumption.
Seeing our cameras, a lieutenant who spoke English came up to invite
us to make a photograph of him and his men, with their bedecked car
for a background. He had been ill, he said, since the outbreak of
hostilities, which explained why he was just now getting his first
taste of active campaigning service.
"Wait," he said vaingloriously, "just wait until we get at the damned
British. Some one else may have the Frenchmen--we want to get our
hands on the Englishmen. Do you know what my men say? They say they
are glad for once in their lives to enjoy a fight where the policemen
won't interfere and spoil the sport. That's the Bavarian for you--the
Prussian is best at drill, but the Bavarian is the best fighter in the
whole world. Only let us see the enemy--that is all we ask!
"I say, what news have you from the front? All goes well, eh? As for me
I only hope there will be some of the enemy left for us to kill. It is
a glorious thing--this going to war! I think we shall get there very
soon, where the fighting is. I can hardly wait for it." And with that
he hopped up on the steps of the nearest car and posed for his picture.
Having just come from the place whither he was so eagerly repairing I
might have told him a few things. I might for example have told him
what the captain of a German battery in front of La Fère had said, and
that was this:
"I have been on this one spot for nearly three weeks now, serving my
guns by day and by night. I have lost nearly half of my original force
of men and two of my lieutenants. We shoot over those tree tops yonder
in accordance with directions for range and distance which come from
somewhere else over field telephone, but we never see the men at whom
we are firing. They fire back without seeing us, and sometimes their
shells fall short or go beyond us, and sometimes they fall among us
and kill and wound a few of us. Thus it goes on day after day. I have
not with my own eyes seen a Frenchman or an Englishman unless he was a
prisoner. It is not so much pleasure--fighting like this."
I might have told the young Bavarian lieutenant of other places where
I had been--places where the dead lay for days unburied. I might
have told him there was nothing particularly pretty or particularly
edifying about the process of being killed. Death, I take it, is
never a very tidy proceeding; but in battle it acquires an added
unkemptness. Men suddenly and sorely stricken have a way of shrinking
up inside their clothes; unless they die on the instant they have a
way of tearing their coats open and gripping with their hands at their
vitals, as though to hold the life in; they have a way of sprawling
their legs in grotesque postures; they have a way of putting their
arms up before their faces as though at the very last they would shut
out a dreadful vision. Those contorted, twisted arms with the elbows
up, those spraddled stark legs, and, most of all, those white dots
of shirts--those I had learned to associate in my own mind with the
accomplished fact of mortality upon the field.
I might have told him of sundry field hospitals which I had lately
visited. I could recreate in my memory, as I shall be able to recreate
it as long as I live and have my senses, a certain room in a certain
schoolhouse in a French town where seven men wriggled and fought in the
unspeakable torments of lockjaw; and another room filled to capacity
with men who had been borne there because there was nothing humanly to
be done for them, and who now lay very quietly, their suetty-gray faces
laced with tiny red stripes of fever, and their paling eyes staring up
at nothing at all; and still another room given over entirely to stumps
of men, who lacked each a leg or an arm, or a leg and an arm, or both
legs or both arms; and still a fourth room wherein were men--and boys
too--all blinded, all learning to grope about in the everlasting black
night which would be their portion through all their days. Indeed for
an immediate illustration of the products of the business toward which
he was hastening I might have taken him by the arm and led him across
two sets of tracks and shown him men in the prime of life who were
hatcheled like flax, and mauled like blocks, and riddled like sieves,
and macerated out of the living image of their Maker.
But I did none of these things. He had a picture of something uplifting
and splendid before his eyes. He wanted to fight, or he thought he did,
which came to the same thing. So what I did was to take down his name
and promise to send him a completed copy of his picture in the care of
his regiment and brigade; and the last I saw of him he was half out of
a car window waving good-by to us and wishing us _auf wiedersehen_ as
he was borne away to his ordained place.
As we rode back through the town of Maubeuge in the dusk, the company
which had sung _O Strassburg_ in the Franco-German beer shop at the
prow of the corner where the three streets met were just marching away.
I thought I caught, in the weaving gray line that flowed along like
quicksilver, a glimpse of the boy who was so glad because he was about
to have some luck.
In two days fourteen thousand wounded men came back through Maubeuge,
and possibly ten times that many new troops, belonging to the first
October draft of a million, passed down the line. In that week fifty
thousand wounded men returned from the German right wing alone.
He's a busy Red Glutton. There seems to be no satisfying his greed.