hill, is Fort de la Chaume. Like the other fortifications built to
defend the city, it no longer has any military value save for purposes
of observation. Peering through a narrow slit in one of its armored
_observatoires_, I was able to view the whole field of the world's
greatest battle--a battle which lasted a year and cost a million
men--as from the gallery of a theatre one might look down upon the
stage, the boxes, and the orchestra-stalls. Below me, rising from the
meadows beside the Meuse, were the shattered roofs and fire-blackened
walls of Verdun, dominated by the stately tower of the cathedral and
by the great bulk of the citadel. The environs of the town and the
hill slopes beyond the river were constantly pricked by sudden scarlet
jets as the flame leaped from the mouths of the carefully concealed
French guns, which seemed to be literally everywhere, while countless
geyser-like irruptions of the earth, succeeded by drifting patches of
white vapor, showed where the German shells were bursting. Sweeping
the landscape with my field-glasses, a long column of motor-trucks
laden with ammunition came within my field of vision. As I looked
there suddenly appeared, squarely in the path of the foremost vehicle,
a splotch of yellow smoke shot through with red. When the smoke and
dust had cleared away, the motor-truck had disappeared. The artillery
officer who accompanied me directed my gaze across the level valley to
where, beyond the river, rose the great brown ridge known as the
Heights of the Meuse.
"Do you appreciate," he asked, "that on three miles of that ridge a
million men--400,000 French and 600,000 Germans--have already fallen?"
Beyond the ridge, but hidden by it, were Hill 304 and Le Mort Homme of
bloody memory, while on the horizon, looking like low, round-topped
hillocks, were Forts Douaumont and de Vaux (what a thrill those names
must give to every Frenchman!) and farther down the slope and a
little nearer me were Fleury and Tavannes. The fountains of earth and
smoke which leaped upward from each of them at the rate of half a
dozen to the minute, showed us that they were enduring a particularly
vicious hammering by the Germans.
There are no words between the covers of the dictionary which can
bring home to one who has not witnessed them the awful violence of the
shell-storms which have desolated these hills about Verdun. In one
week's attack to the north of the city the Germans threw five million
shells, the total weight of which was forty-seven thousand tons.
Eighty thousand shells rained upon one shallow sector of a thousand
yards, and these were so marvellously placed that the crater of one
cut into that of its neighbor, pulverizing everything that lived and
turning the man-filled trenches into tombs. Hence there is no longer
any such thing as a continuous line of trenches. Indeed, there are no
longer any trenches at all, nor entanglements either, but only a
series of craters. It is these craters which the French infantry has
held with such unparalleled heroism. The men holding the craters are
kept supplied with food and ammunition from the chain of little
forts--Vaux, Douaumont, and the others--and the forts, themselves
battered almost to pieces by the torrents of steel which have been
poured upon them, have relied in turn on the citadel back in Verdun
for their reinforcements, their ammunition, and their provisions, all
of which have had to be sent out at night, the latter on the backs of
men.
So violent and long-continued have been the hurricanes of steel which
have swept these slopes, that the surface of the earth has been
literally blasted away, leaving a treacherous and incredibly tenacious
quagmire in which horses and even soldiers have lost their lives.
General Dubois told me that, only a few days before my visit to
Verdun, one of his staff-officers, returning alone and afoot from an
errand to Vaux, had fallen into a shell-crater and had drowned in the
mud. Indeed, the whole terrain is pitted with shell-holes as is
pitted the face of a man who has had the small-pox. So terrible is the
condition of the country that it often takes a soldier an hour to
cover a mile. What was once a smiling and prosperous countryside has
been rendered, by human agency, as barren and worthless as the slopes
of Vesuvius.
Verdun, I repeat, was held not by gun-power but by man-power. It was
not the monster guns on railway-trucks, or even the great numbers of
quick-firing, hard-hitting 75's, but the magnificent courage and
tenacity of the tired men in the mud-splashed uniforms, which held
Verdun for France. Though their forts were crumbling under the
violence of the German bombardment; though their trenches were pounded
into pudding; though the unceasing barrage made it at times impossible
to bring up food or water or reinforcements, the French hung
stubbornly on, and against the granite wall of their defense the waves
of men in gray flung themselves in vain. And when the fury of the
German assaults had in a measure spent itself, General Nivelle retook
in a few hours, on October 24, 1916, Forts Douaumont and de Vaux,
which had cost the Germans seven months of incessant efforts and a
sacrifice of human lives unparalleled in history.
The fighting before Verdun illustrated and emphasized the revolution
in methods of attack and defense which has taken place in the French
army. At the beginning of the war the French believed in depending
largely on their light artillery both to prepare and to support an
attack, and for this purpose their 75's were admirably adapted. This
method worked well when carried out properly, and before the Germans
had time to bring up their heavy guns; it was by resorting to it that
the French won the victory of the Marne. But the Marne taught the
Germans that the surest way to break up the French system of attack
was to interpose obstacles, such as woods, wire entanglements, and
particularly trenches. To destroy these obstacles the French then had
to resort to heavy-calibered pieces, with which, as I have already
remarked, they were at first very inadequately supplied. In the spring
of 1915 in Artois, and in the autumn of the same year in Champagne,
they attempted to break through the German lines, but these attacks
were not supported by sufficient artillery and were each conducted in
a single locality over a limited front. Then, at Verdun, the Germans
tried opposite tactics, attempting to break through on a wide front
extending on both sides of the Meuse. So appalling were their losses,
however, that, as the attack progressed, they were compelled by lack
of sufficient effectives to constantly narrow their front until
finally the action was taking place along a line of only a few
kilometres. This permitted the French to concentrate both their
infantry and their artillery into dense formations, and before this
concentrated and intensive fire the German attacking columns withered
and were swept away like leaves before an autumn wind.
The French infantry--and the same is, I believe, true of the
German--is now to all intents and purposes divided into two classes:
holding troops and attacking, or "shock" troops, as the French call
them. The latter consist of such picked elements as the Chasseur
battalions, the Zouaves, the Colonials, the First, Twentieth, and
Twenty-first Army Corps, and, of course, the Foreign Legion. All these
are recruited from the youngest and most vigorous men, due regard
being also paid to selecting recruits from those parts of France which
have always produced the best fighting stock--and among these are the
invaded districts. Shock troops are rarely sent into the trenches, but
when not actively engaged in conducting or resisting an attack, are
kept in cantonments well to the rear. Here they can get undisturbed
rest at night, but by day they are worked as a negro teamster works
his mule. As a result, they are always "on their toes," and in perfect
fighting trim. In this way mobility, cohesion, and enthusiasm, all
qualities which are seriously impaired by a long stay in the trenches,
are preserved in the attacking troops, who, when they go into battle,
are as keen and hard and well-trained as a prize-fighter who steps
into the ring to battle for the championship belt.
The most striking feature of the new French system of attack is the
team-work of the infantry, artillery, and airplanes. The former
advance to the assault in successive waves, each made up of several
lines, the men being deployed at five-yard intervals. The first wave
advances at a slow walk behind a curtain of artillery fire, which
moves forward at the rate of fifty yards a minute, the first line of
the wave keeping a hundred to a hundred and fifty yards, or, in other
words, at a safe distance, behind this protecting fire-curtain. The
men in this first line carry no rifles, but consist exclusively of
grenadiers, automatic riflemen, and their ammunition carriers, every
eighth man being armed with the new Chauchat automatic rifle, a
recently adopted weapon which weighs only nineteen pounds, and fires
at the rate of five shots a second. Three men, carrying between them
one thousand cartridges, are assigned to each of these guns, of which
there are now more than fifty thousand in use on the French front. The
automatic riflemen fire from the hip as they advance, keeping streams
of bullets playing on the enemy just as firemen keep streams of water
playing on a fire. In the second line the men are armed with rifles,
some having bayonets and others rifle grenades, the latter being
specially designed to break up counter-attacks against captured
trenches. A third line follows, consisting of "trench cleaners,"
though it must not be inferred from their name that they use mops and
brooms. The native African troops are generally used for this
trench-cleaning business, and they do it very handily with grenades,
pistols and knives.
When the first wave reaches a point within two hundred to three
hundred yards of the enemy's trenches, a halt of five minutes is made
to re-form for the final charge. In addition to the advancing
curtain-fire immediately preceding the troops, a second screen of fire
is dropped between the enemy's first and second lines, thus preventing
the men in the first line from retreating and making it equally
impossible for the men in the second line to get reinforcements or
supplies to their comrades in the first. Still other batteries are
engaged in keeping down the fire of the hostile artillery while the
big guns, mounted on railway-trucks, shell the enemy's headquarters,
his supports, and his lines of communication.
The attack is accompanied by and largely directed by airplanes,
certain of which are assigned to regulating the artillery fire, while
others devote themselves exclusively to giving information to the
infantry, with whom they communicate by means of dropping from one to
six fire-balls. As the aircraft used for infantry and artillery
regulation are comparatively slow machines, they are protected from
the attacks of enemy aviators by a screen of small, fast
battle-planes--the destroyers of the air--which, in several cases,
have swooped low enough to use their machine-guns on the German
trenches. If it becomes necessary to give to the infantry some special
information not provided for by the prearranged signals, the aviator
will volplane down to within a hundred feet above the infantry and
drop a written message. I was told that in one of the successful
French attacks before Verdun such a message proved extremely useful as
by means of it the troops advancing toward Douaumont, which was then
held by the Germans, were informed that the enemy was in force on
their right, but that there was practically no resistance on their
left. Acting in response to this information from the skies, they
swung forward on this flank, and took the Germans on their right in
the rear. Just as a football team is coached from the side-lines, so a
charge is nowadays directed from the clouds.
[Illustration: Australians on the Way to the Trenches.
Despite gas, bullets, shells, rain, mud, and cold the British
soldier remains incorrigibly cheerful. He is a born optimist.]
[Illustration: The Fire Trench.
"Figures, looking strangely mediæval in their steel helmets,
crouched motionless, peering out into No Man's Land."]
One of the picturesque developments of the war is _camouflage_, as
the French call their system of disguising or concealing batteries,
airplane-sheds, ammunition stores, and the like, from observation and
possible destruction by enemy aviators. This work is done in the main
by a corps specially recruited for the purpose from the artists and
scene painters of France. It is considered prudent, for example, to
conceal the location of a certain "ammunition dump," as the British
term the vast accumulations of shells, cartridges, and other supplies
which are piled up at the railheads awaiting transportation to the
front by motor-lorry. Over the great mound of shells and
cartridge-boxes is spread an enormous piece of canvas, often larger by
far than the "big top" of a four-ring circus. Then the scene painters
get to work with their paints and brushes and transform that expanse
of canvas into what, when viewed from the sky, appears to be, let us
say, a group of innocent farm-buildings. The next day, perhaps, a
German airman, circling high overhead, peers earthward through his
glasses and descries, far beneath him, a cluster of red
rectangles--the tiled roofs of cottages or stables, he supposes; a
patch of green--evidently a bit of lawn; a square of gray--the
cobble-paved barnyard--and pays it no further attention. How can he
know that what he takes to be a farmstead is but a piece of painted
canvas concealing a small mountain of potential death?
At a certain very important point on the French front there long
stood, in an exposed and commanding position, a large and solitary
tree, or rather the trunk of a tree, for it had been shorn of its
branches by shell-fire. A landmark in that flat and devastated region,
every detail of this gaunt sentinel had long since become familiar to
the keen eyed observers in the German trenches, a few hundred yards
away. Were a man to climb to its top--and live--he would be able to
command a comprehensive view of the surrounding terrain. The German
sharpshooters saw to it, however, that no one climbed it. But one day
the resourceful French took the measurements of that tree and
photographed it. These measurements and photographs were sent to
Paris. A few weeks later there arrived at the French front by railway
an imitation tree, made of steel, which was an exact duplicate in
every respect, even to the splintered branches and the bark, of the
original. Under cover of darkness the real tree was cut down and the
fake tree erected in its place, so that, when daylight came, there was
no change in the landscape to arouse the Germans' suspicions. The lone
tree-trunk to which they had grown so accustomed still reared itself
skyward. But the "tree" at which the Germans were now looking was of
hollow steel, and concealed in its interior in a sort of
conning-tower, forty feet above the ground, a French observing
officer, field-glasses at his eyes and a telephone at his lips, was
peering through a cleverly concealed peep-hole, spotting the bursts of
the French shells and regulating the fire of the French batteries.
Nearly three years have passed since Germany tore up the Scrap of
Paper. In that time the French army has been hammered and tempered and
tested until it has become the most formidable weapon of offense and
defense in existence. I am convinced that in organization and in
efficiency it is now, after close on three years of experiments and
object-lessons, as good, if not better, than the German--and I have
marched with both and have seen both in action. Its light artillery is
admittedly the finest in the world. Though without any heavy artillery
to speak of at the beginning of the war, it has in this respect
already equalled if not surpassed the Germans. It has created an air
service which, in efficiency and in number of machines, is unequalled.
And the men, themselves, in addition to their characteristic _élan_,
possess that invaluable quality which the German soldier
lacks--initiative.
It is worthy of note, in this connection, that the entire
reorganization of the French army has been carried out virtually
without any action on the part of the French Congress, and with merely
the formal approval of the Minister of War. The politicians in Paris
have, save in a few instances, wisely refrained from interference, and
have left military problems to be decided by military men. But, when
all is said and done, it will not be the generals who will decide this
war; it will be the soldiers. And they are truly wonderful men, these
French soldiers. It is their amazing calm, their total freedom from
nervousness or apprehension, that impresses one the most, and the
secret of this calm is confidence. They are as confident of eventual
victory as they are that the sun will rise to-morrow morning. They are
fanatics, and France is their Allah. You can't beat men like that,
because they never know when they are beaten, and keep on fighting.
I like to think that sometimes, in that cold and dismal hour before
the dawn, when hope and courage are at their lowest ebb, there
appears among the worn and homesick soldiers in the trenches the
spirit of the Great Emperor. Cheeringly he claps each man upon the
shoulder.
"Courage, mon brave," he whispers. "On les aura!"
FOOTNOTES:
[C] A nickname for the Hispana-Suiza.
[D] Though great numbers of American-built airplanes have been
shipped to Europe, they are being used only for purposes of
instruction, as they are not considered fast enough for work on the
front.
[E] Commandant Bunau-Varilla was really sent as a compliment to my
companion, Mr. Arthur Page, editor of _The World's Work_.
VII
"THAT CONTEMPTIBLE LITTLE ARMY"
In watching the operations on the British front I have always had the
feeling that I was witnessing a gigantic engineering undertaking. The
amazing network of rails which the British have thrown over Northern
France, the endless strings of lorries, the warehouses bulging with
supplies, the cranes and derricks, the repair depots, the
machine-shops, the tens of thousands of men whose only weapons are the
shovel and the pick, all help to further this impression. And, when
you stop to think about it, it is an engineering undertaking. These
muddy men in khaki are engaged in checking and draining off an unclean
flood which, were it not for them, would soon inundate all Europe. And
so, because I love things that are clean and green and beautiful, I
am very grateful to them for their work of sanitation.
Because most of the despatches from the British front have related to
trenches and tanks and howitzers and flying men and raiding-parties,
the attention of the American people has been diverted from the
remarkable and tremendously important work which is being played by
the army behind the army. Yet one of the most splendid achievements of
the entire war is the creation of the great organization which links
the British trenches with the British Isles. In failing to take into
account the Anglo-Saxon's genius for rapid organization and
improvization in emergencies, Germany made a fatal error. She had
spent upward of forty years in perfecting her war machine; the British
have built a better one in less than three. I said in "_Vive la
France!_" if I remember rightly, that the British machine, though
still somewhat wabbly and creaky in its joints, was, I believed,
eventually going to do the business for which it was designed. That
was a year ago. It has already shown in unmistakable fashion that it
can do the business and do it well, and it is, moreover, just entering
on the period of its greatest efficiency.
In order to understand the workings and the ramifications of this
great machine in France (its work in England is another story) you
must begin your study of it at the base camps which the British have
established at Calais, Havre, Boulogne, and Rouen, and the
training-schools at Etaples and elsewhere. Let us take, for example,
"Cinder City," as the base camp outside Calais is called because the
ground on which it stands was made by dumping ships' cinders into a
marsh. It is in many respects one of the most remarkable cities in the
world. Its population, which fluctuates with the tide of war,
averages, I suppose, about one hundred thousand. It has many miles of
macadamized streets (as sandy locations are chosen for these base
camps, mud is almost unknown) lined with storehouses--one of them the
largest in the world--with stores, with machine-shops, churches,
restaurant, club-rooms, libraries, Y. M. C. A.'s--there are over a
thousand of them in the war zone--Salvation Army barracks, schools,
bathing establishments, theatres, motion-picture houses, hospitals for
men and hospitals for horses, and thousands upon thousands of portable
wooden huts. This city is lighted by electricity, it has highly
efficient police, fire, and street-cleaning departments, and its water
and sewage systems would make jealous many municipalities of twice its
size. Among its novel features is a school for army bakers and another
for army cooks, for good food has almost as much to do with winning
battles as good ammunition. But most significant and important of all
are the "economy shops" where are repaired or manufactured practically
everything required by an army. War, as the British have found, is a
staggeringly expensive business, and, in order that there may be a
minimum of wastage, they have organized a Salvage Corps whose
business it is to sort the litter of the battle-fields and to send
everything that can by any possibility be re-utilized to the "economy
shops" at the rear. In one of these shops I saw upward of a thousand
French and Belgian women renovating clothing that had come back from
the front, uniforms which arrived as bundles of muddy, bloody rags
being fumigated and cleaned and mended and pressed until they were
almost as good as new. Tens of thousands of boots are sent in to be
repaired; those that can stand the operation are soled and heeled by
American machines brought over for the purpose, and even the others
are not wasted, for their tops are converted into boot-laces. In one
shop the worn-out tubes and springs of guns are replaced with new
ones. (Did you know that during an intense bombardment the springs of
the guns will last only two days?) In another fragments of valuable
metal sent in from the battle-field are melted and reused. (Perhaps
you were not aware that a 5-inch shell carries a copper band weighing
a pound and a quarter. The weight of copper shot off in this way
during a single brief bombardment was four hundred tons.) The millions
of empty shells which litter the ground behind the batteries are
cleaned and classified and shipped over to England to be reloaded.
Steel rails which the retreating Germans believed they had made quite
useless are here straightened out and used over again. Shattered
rifles, bits of harness, haversacks, machine-gun belts, trench
helmets, sand-bags, barbed wire--nothing escapes the Salvage Corps.
They even collect and send in old rags, which are sold for two hundred
and fifty dollars a ton. Let us talk less hereafter of _German_
efficiency.
Even more significant than the base camps of the efficiency and
painstaking thoroughness of the British war-machine are the training
camps scattered behind the lines. Typical of these is the great camp
at Etaples, on the French coast, where 150,000 men can be trained at a
time. These are not schools for raw recruits, mind you--that work is
done in England--but "finishing schools," as it were, where men who
are supposed to have already learned the business of war are given
final examinations in the various subjects in which they have received
instruction before being sent up to the front. And the soldier who is
unable to pass these final tests does not go to the front until he
can. The camp at Etaples, which is built on a stretch of rolling sand
beside the sea, is five miles long and a mile wide, and on every acre
of it there are squads of soldiers drilling, drilling, drilling. Here
a gymnastic instructor from Sandhurst, lithe and active as a panther,
is teaching a class of sergeants drawn from many regiments how to
become instructors themselves. His language would have amazed and
delighted Kipling's Ortheris and Mulvaney; I could have listened to
him all day. Over there a platoon of Highlanders are practising the
taking of German trenches. At the blast of a whistle they clamber out
of a length of trench built for the purpose, and, with shrill Gaelic
yells, go swarming across a stretch of broken ground, through a tangle
of twisted wire, and over the top of the German parapet, whereupon a
row of German soldiers, stuffed with straw and automatically
controlled, spring up to meet them. If a man fails to bury his bayonet
in the "German" who opposes him, he is sent back to the awkward squad
and spends a few days lunging at a dummy swung from a beam.