by some foreigner--usually an American--until their patience has been
exhausted, or when there comes to Paris a visitor to whom, for one
reason or another, they wish to show attention, they send him to
Rheims. Artists, architects, ex-ambassadors, ex-congressmen, lady
journalists, manufacturers in quest of war orders, bankers engaged in
floating loans, millionaires who have given or are likely to give
money to war-charities, editors of obscure newspapers and monthly
magazines, are packed off weekly, in personally conducted parties of a
dozen or more, on a day's excursion to the City of the Desecrated
Cathedral. They grow properly indignant over the cathedral's shattered
beauties, they visit the famous wine-cellars, they hear the
occasional crack of a rifle or the crash of a field-gun,[B] and, upon
their return, they write articles for the magazines, and give
lectures, and to their friends at home send long letters--usually
copied in the local papers--describing their experiences "on the
firing-line." "Visiting the front" has, indeed, become as popular a
pastime among Americans in Paris as was racing at Longchamps and
Auteuil before the war. Hence, no place in the entire theatre of war
has had so much advertising as Rheims. No sector of the front has been
visited by so many civilians. That is why I am not going to say
anything about Rheims--at least about its cathedral. For there is
nothing left to say.
Five minutes of brisk walking from the cathedral brings one to the
entrance of the famous wine-cellars of Pommery et Cie, the property of
the ancient family of de Polignac. The space in this underground city
is about equally divided between champagne and civilians, for several
hundred of the townspeople, who sought refuge here in the opening
weeks of the war, still make these gloomy passages their home. As the
_caves_ have a mean temperature of fifty degrees Fahrenheit they are
comfortable enough, and, as they are fifty feet below the surface of
the earth, they are safe. So there the more timid citizens live,
rent-free, and will continue to live, no doubt, until the end of the
war. In normal times, there are shipped from these cellars each day
thirty thousand bottles of champagne, and even now, despite the
proximity of the Germans--their trenches are only a few hundred yards
away--the work of packing and shipping goes on much as usual, though,
of course, on a greatly reduced scale, averaging, so I was told, eight
thousand bottles daily. By far the greater part of this goes to
America, for nowadays Europeans do not buy champagne.
To the red-faced, white-waistcoated, prosperous-looking gentlemen who
scan so carefully the hotel wine-lists, I feel sure that it will come
as a relief to learn that, though there was no 1916 crop of champagne,
the vintages of 1914 and 1915 were exceptionally fine--_grands vins_
they will probably be labelled. (And they ought to be, for the vines
were watered with the bravest blood of France.) I don't suppose it
would particularly interest those same complacent gentlemen, though,
were I to add that the price of one of those gilt-topped bottles would
keep a French child from cold and hunger for a month.
A few hours before I visited the cellars, a workman, loading cases of
champagne in front of the company's offices for export to the United
States, was blown to pieces by a German shell. They showed me the
shattered columns of the office-building, and on the cobbles of the
little square pointed out an ugly stain. So, when I returned to
America, and in a famous restaurant, where I was dining, saw
white-shirted men and white-shouldered women sipping glasses abrim
with the sparkling wine of Rheims, the picture of those blood-stained
cobbles in that French city flashed before me, and I experienced a
momentary sensation of disgust, for it seemed to me that in the amber
depths I caught a stain of crimson. But of course it was only my
imagination. Still, I was glad when it came time to leave, for the
scene was too suggestive in its contrast to be pleasant: we, in
America, eating and drinking and laughing; they, over there in Europe,
fighting and suffering and hungering.
* * * * *
Leaving Rheims, we took a great gray car and drove south, ever south,
until, as darkness was falling, we reached the headquarters of General
Jilinsky, commanding the Russian forces fighting in Champagne. Here
the Russians have two infantry brigades, with a total of 16,000 men;
there is a third brigade at Salonika. The last time the Russians were
in France was in 1814, and then they were there for a different
purpose. Little could Napoleon have dreamed that they, who helped to
dethrone him, would come back, a century later, as France's allies.
Yet this war has produced stranger coincidences than that. The British
armies, disembarking at Rouen, tramp through that very square where
their ancestors burned the Maid of Orleans. And at Pont des Briques,
outside Boulogne, where Napoleon waited impatiently for weeks in the
hope of being able to invade England, is now situated the greatest of
the British base camps.
General Jilinsky reminded me of a fighting-cock. He is a little man,
much the height and build of the late General Funston, with hair
cropped close to the skull, after the Russian fashion; through a
buttonhole of his green service tunic was drawn the orange-and-black
ribbon of the Order of St. George. He can best be described as "a live
wire." His staff-officers impressed me as being as efficient and
razor-keen as their chief. The general asked me if I would like to
visit his trenches, and I assured him that it was the hope of being
permitted to do so which had brought me there. Whereupon a
staff-officer disappeared into the hall to return a moment later with
a gas-mask in a tin case and a steel helmet covered with tan linen.
"You had better take these with you," he said. "There is nearly always
something happening on our front, and there is no sense in taking
unnecessary risks."
I soon found that the precaution was not an idle one, for, as our car
drew up at the entrance to the _boyau_ which led by devious windings
into the first-line trenches, the group of officers and men assembled
in front of brigade headquarters were hastily donning their masks:
grotesque-looking contrivances of metal, cloth, and rubber, which in
shape resembled a pig's snout.
"Gas," said my Russian companion briefly. "We will stay here until it
is over."
Though we must have been nearly a mile behind the firing-line, the air
was filled with a sweetish, sickish smell which suggested both the
operating-room and the laboratory. So faint and elusive was the odor
that I hesitated to follow the example of the others and don my mask,
until I remembered having been told at Souchez, on the British front,
that a horse had been killed by gas when seven miles behind the lines.
It is a logical development of this use of chemicals as weapons that
the horses in use on the French front are now provided with gas-masks
in precisely the same manner as the soldiers. These masks, which are
kept attached to the harness, ready for instant use, do not cover the
entire face, as do those worn by the men, but only the mouth and
nostrils. In fact they resemble the feeding-bags which cartmen and
cab-drivers put on their horses for the midday meal. Generally
speaking, the masks are provided only for artillery horses and those
employed in hauling ammunition, though it now seems likely that if the
cavalry gets a chance to go into action, masks will be worn by the
troopers and their horses alike. After a large gas attack the fumes
sometimes settle down in the valleys far behind the lines, and hours
may elapse before they are dissipated by the wind. As it not
infrequently happens that one of these gas banks settles over a road
on which it is imperative that the traffic be not interrupted, large
signs are posted notifying all drivers to put the masks on their
horses before entering the danger zone.
There are now three different kinds of gases in general use on the
Western Front. The best known of these is a form of chlorine gas,
which is liberated from cylinders or flasks, to be carried by the wind
over the enemy's lines. Contrary to the popular impression, its use is
not as general as the newspaper accounts have led the public to
believe, for it requires elaborate preparation, can only be employed
over comparatively flat ground, and then only when the wind is of
exactly the right velocity, neither too light nor too strong. Another
form of asphyxiating gas is held in shells in liquid form, usually in
lead containers. Upon the bursting of the shell, which is fired from
an ordinary field-gun, the liquid rapidly evaporates and liberates the
gas, a few inhalations of which are sufficient to cause death. The
third type consists of lachrymal, or tear-producing, gas, which is
used in the same way as the asphyxiating, but its effects are not
fatal, merely putting a man out of action for a few hours. It is
really, however, the most efficacious of the three types, as it does
not evaporate as readily as the asphyxiating gas. As a well
distributed fire of lachrymal shells will form a screen of gas which
will last for several hours, they are often used during an attack to
prevent the enemy from bringing up reinforcements. Another use is
against artillery positions, the clouds of gas from the lachrymal
shells making it almost impossible for the men to serve the guns. I
was also told of these shells having been used with great success to
surround the headquarters of a divisional commander, disabling him
and his entire staff during an attack.
Before a change in the wind dissipated the last odors of gas, darkness
had fallen. "Now," said my cicerone, "we will resume our trip to the
trenches." The last time that I had seen these trenches, which the
Russians are now holding, was in October, 1915, during the great
French offensive in Champagne, when I had visited them within a few
hours after their capture by the French. On that occasion they had
been so pounded by the French artillery that they were little more
than giant furrows in the chalky soil, and thickly strewn along those
furrows was all the horrid garbage of a battlefield: twisted and
tangled barbed wire, splintered planks, shattered rifles, broken
machine-guns, unexploded hand-grenades, knapsacks, water-bottles,
pieces of uniforms, bits of leather, and, most horrible of all, the
remains of what had once been human beings. But all this débris had
long since been cleared away. Under the skilful hands of the Russians
the rebuilt trenches had taken on a neat and orderly appearance. The
earthen walls had been revetted with wire chicken-netting, and instead
of tramping through ankle-deep mud, we had beneath our feet neat walks
of corduroy. We tramped for what seemed interminable miles in the
darkness, always zig-zagging. Now and then we would come upon little
fires, discreetly screened, built at the entrances to dugouts burrowed
from the trench-walls. Over these fires soldiers in flat caps and
belted greatcoats were cooking their evening meal. I had expected to
see unkempt men wearing sheepskin caps, men with flat noses and matted
beards, but instead I found clean-shaven, splendidly set-up giants,
with the pink skins that come from perfect cleanliness and perfect
health. Following the direction of the arrows on signs printed in both
French and Russian, we at last reached the fire-trench, where dim
figures looking strangely mediæval in their steel helmets, crouched
motionless, peering out along their rifle-barrels into the eerie
darkness of No Man's Land. Here there was a sporadic illumination, for
from the German trenches in front of us lights were rising and
falling. They were very beautiful: slender stems of fire arching
skyward to burst into blossoms of brilliant sparks, which illuminated
the band of shell-pocked soil between the trenches as though it were
day. Occasionally there would be a dozen of these star-shells in the
air at the same time: they reminded me of the Fourth of July fireworks
at Manhattan Beach. In the fire-trenches there is no talking save in
whispers, but every now and then the almost uncanny silence would be
punctuated by the sharp crack of a rifle, the _tut-tut-tut_ of a
mitrailleuse, or, from somewhere in the distance, the angry bark of a
field-gun.
There was a whispered conversation between the officer in command of
the trench and my guide. The latter turned to me.
"We have driven a sap to within thirty metres of the enemy," he said,
"and have established a listening-post out there. Would you care to
go out to it?"
I would, and said so.
"No talking, then, if you please," he warned me, "and as little noise
as possible."
This time the _boyau_ was very narrow, and writhed between its earthen
walls like a dying snake. We advanced on tiptoe, as cautiously as
though stalking big game--as, indeed, we were. Ten minutes of this
slow and tortuous progress brought us to the _poste d'écoute_. In a
space the size of a hall bedroom half a score of men stood in
attitudes of strained expectancy, staring into the blackness through
the loopholes in their steel shields. There being no loophole vacant,
I took a chance and, standing on the firing step, raised my head above
the level of the parapet and made a hurried survey of the few yards of
No Man's Land which separated us from the enemy--a space so narrow
that I could have thrown a stone across, yet more impassable than the
deepest chasm. I was rewarded for the risk by getting a glimpse of a
dim maze of wire entanglements, and, just beyond, a darker bulk which
I knew for the German trench. And I knew that from that trench sharp
eyes were peering out into the darkness toward us just as we were
trying to discern them. As I stepped down from my somewhat exposed
position a soldier standing a few feet farther along the line raised
_his_ head above the parapet, as though to relieve his cramped
muscles. Just then a star-shell burst above us, turning the trench
into day. _Ping!!!_ There was a ringing metallic sound, as when a
22-caliber bullet strikes the target in a shooting-gallery, and the
big soldier who had incautiously exposed himself crumpled up in the
bottom of the trench with a bullet through his helmet and through his
brain. The young officer in command of the listening-post cursed
softly. "I'm forever warning the men not to expose themselves," he
said irritatedly, "but they forget it the next minute. They're nothing
but stupid children." He spoke in much the same tone of annoyance he
might have used if the man had been a clumsy servant who had broken a
valuable dish. Then he went into the tiny dugout where the telephone
was, and rang up the trench commander, and asked him to send out a
bearer, for the _boyau_ communicating with the listening-post was too
narrow to admit the passage of a stretcher. The bearer arrived just as
we started to return. He was a regular dray-horse of a man, with
shoulders as massive and competent as those of a Constantinople
_hamel_. Strapped to his back by a sort of harness was a contrivance
which looked like a rude armchair with the legs cut off. His comrades
hoisted the dead man onto the back of the live man, and with a rope
took a few turns about the bodies of both. As we made our slow way
back to the fire-trench, and so to the rear, there stumbled at our
heels the grunting porter with his ghastly burden. Now and then I
would glance over my shoulder and, in the fleeting glare of the
star-shells, would glimpse, above the porter's straining shoulders,
the head of the dead soldier lolling inertly from side to side, as
though very, very tired.... And I wondered if in some lonely cabin by
the Volga a woman was praying for her boy.
FOOTNOTES:
[B] Since this was written the Germans have bombarded Rheims so
heavily, with the evident intention of completing its destruction,
that the French military authorities have ordered the evacuation of
the civil population.
VI
"THEY SHALL NOT PASS!"
General Gouraud, the one-armed hero of Gallipoli, who commands the
forces in Champagne, is the most picturesque and gallant figure in all
the armies of France. On my way south I stopped for a night in
Chalons-sur-Marne to dine with him. He was living in a comfortable but
modest house, evidently the residence of a prosperous tradesman. When
I arrived I found the small and rather barely furnished salon filled
with officers of the staff, in uniforms of the beautiful horizon blue
which is the universal dress of the French army. They were clustered
about the marble-topped centre-table, on which, I imagine, the family
Bible used to rest, but which now held the steel base of a
380-centimetre shell, which had fallen in a near-by village that
afternoon. This monster projectile, as large as the largest of those
fired by our coast-defense guns, must have weighed considerably more
than a thousand pounds and doubtless cost the Germans at least a
thousand dollars, yet all the damage it had done was to destroy a
tumble-down and uninhabited cottage, which proves that, save against
permanent fortifications, there is a point where the usefulness of
these abnormally large guns ceases. While we were discussing this
specimen of Bertha Krupp's handicraft, the door opened and General
Gouraud entered the room. Seldom have I seen a more striking figure: a
tall, slender, graceful man, with a long, brown, spade-shaped beard
which did not entirely conceal a mouth both sensitive and firm. But it
was the eyes which attracted and held one's attention: great, lustrous
eyes, as large and tender as a woman's, but which could on occasion, I
fancy, become cold as steel, or angry as lightning. One sleeve of his
tunic hung empty, and he leaned heavily on a cane, for during the
landing at Gallipoli he was terribly wounded by a Turkish shell.
Covering his breast were glittering stars and crosses, which showed
how brilliant had been his services in this and other wars. He is a
remarkable man, this soldier with the beard of a _poilu_ and the eyes
of a poet, and, unless I am greatly mistaken, he is destined to go a
long, long way.
It was the sort of dinner that one marks with a white milestone on the
road of memory. The soldier-servants wore white-cotton gloves and
there were flowers on the table and menus with quaint little military
sketches in the corners. General Gouraud talked in his deep, melodious
voice of other wars in which he had fought, in Annam and Morocco and
Madagascar, and the white-mustached old general of artillery at my
left illustrated, with the aid of the knives and forks, a new system
of artillery fire, which, he assured me very earnestly, would make
pudding of the German trenches. While the salad was being served one
of the staff-officers was called to the telephone. When he returned
the general raised inquiring eyebrows. "_N'importe, mon général_," he
answered. "Colonel ---- telephoned that the Boches attacked in force
south of ----" and he named a certain sector, "but that we have driven
them back with heavy losses." Then he resumed his interrupted dinner
as unconcernedly as though he had been called to the telephone to be
told that the Braves had defeated the Pirates in the ninth inning.
While we were at breakfast the next morning the windows of the hotel
dining-room suddenly began to reverberate to the _bang-bang-bang_ of
guns. Going to the door, we saw, high overhead, a great white bird,
which turned to silver when touched by the rays of the morning sun.
Though shrapnel bursts were all about it--I counted thirty of the
fleecy puffs at one time--it sailed serenely on, a thing of delicate
beauty against the cloudless blue. Though few airplanes are brought
down by artillery fire, the improvement in anti-aircraft guns has
forced the aviators to keep at a height of from 12,000 to 17,000 feet,
instead of 2,000, as they did at the beginning of the war. The French
gunners have now devised a system which, when it is successfully
executed, makes things extremely uncomfortable for the enemy aviator.
This system consists in so gauging the fire of the anti-aircraft guns
that the airman finds himself in a "box" of shrapnel; that is, one
shell is timed to burst directly in front of the machine, another
behind it, one above, one below, and one on either side. The
dimensions of this "box" of bursting shrapnel are gradually made
smaller, so that, unless the aviator recognizes his danger in time,
escape becomes impossible, and he is done for. Occasionally an
aviator, finding himself caught in such a death-trap, pretends that he
has been hit, and lets his machine flutter helplessly earthward, like
a wounded bird, until the gunners, believing themselves certain of
their prey, cease firing, whereupon the airman skilfully "catches"
himself, and, straightening the planes of his machine, goes soaring
off to safety. Navarre, one of the most daring of the French fliers,
so perfected himself in the execution of this hazardous ruse that he
would let go of the controls and permit his machine to literally fall,
sometimes from a height of a mile or more, making no attempt at
recovery until within sixty metres of the ground, when he would save
himself by a hawk-like swoop in which his wheels would actually graze
the earth.
The organization of the French air service, with its system of
airplane and seaplane squadrons, dirigibles and observation balloons,
schools, repair-shops, and manufactories, is entirely an outgrowth of
the war. The airplanes are organized in _escadrilles_, usually
composed of ten machines each, for three distinct purposes. The
bombardment squadrons are made up of slow machines with great carrying
capacity, such as the Voisin; the pursuit or battle squadrons--the
_escadrilles de chasse_--are composed of small and very fast 'planes,
such as the Spad and Nieuport; while the general utility squadrons,
used for reconnoissance, artillery regulation, and photographing,
usually consist of medium-speed, two-passenger machines like the
Farman and the Caudron.
[Illustration: "_Halt!_ Show Your Papers!"
On the roads in the war zone there are sentries at frequent
intervals and they are all suspicious.]
[Illustration: A Nieuport Biplane About to Take the Air.
The pursuit or battle squadrons--the _escadrilles de chasse_--are
composed of small and very fast planes, such as the Spad and
Nieuport.]
Until very recently the Nieuport biplane, which can attain a speed of
one hundred and ten miles an hour, has been considered the fastest and
most efficient, as it is the smallest, of the French battle-planes,
but it is now out-speeded by the new Spad[C] machine, which has
reached a speed of over one hundred and twenty miles an hour, and of
which great hopes are entertained. The Spad, like the Nieuport, is a
one-man apparatus, the machine-gun mounted on its upper plane being
fired by the pilot with one hand, while with the other hand and his
feet he operates his controls. On the "tractors," as the airplanes
having the propellers in front are called, the machine-guns are
synchronized so as to fire between the whirling blades. Garros, the
famous French flier, was the first man to perfect a device for firing
a machine-gun through a propeller. He armored the blades so that if
struck by a bullet they would not be injured. This was greatly
improved upon by the Germans in the Fokker type, the fire of the
machine-guns being automatically regulated so that it is never
discharged when a blade of the propeller is directly in front of the
muzzle. Since then various forms of this device have been adapted by
all the belligerents. Another novel development of aerial warfare is
the miniature wireless-sending apparatus with which most of the
observation and artillery regulation machines are now equipped, thus
enabling the observers to keep in constant touch with the ground. In
addition to developing the fastest possible battle-planes, the French
are making efforts to build more formidable craft for bombing
purposes. The latest of these is a Voisin triplane, which has a total
lifting capacity of two tons, carries a crew of five men, and is
driven by four propellers, each operated by a 210-horse-power
Hispana-Suiza motor. These new motors weigh only about two hundred
kilograms, or a little over two pounds per horse-power.