winter quickly transform the ground, already churned up by months of
shell-fire, into a slimy, glutinous swamp, incredibly tenacious and
unbelievably deep. Through this vast stretch of mud, pitted everywhere
with shell-holes filled with stagnant water, the infantry has to make
its way and the guns have to be moved forward to support the infantry.
On one stretch of road, only a quarter of a mile long, on the Somme,
twelve horses sank so deeply in the mud that it was impossible to
extricate them and they had to be shot. No wonder that the soldiers,
going up to the trenches, prefer to leave their overcoats and blankets
behind and face the misery of wet and cold rather than be burdened
with the additional weight while struggling through the molasses-like
mire. The only thing that they take up to the trenches which could by
any stretch of the imagination be described as a comfort is whale-oil,
carried in great jars, with which they rub their feet several times
daily in order to prevent "trench feet." If you want to get a real
idea of what the British infantryman has to endure during at least six
months of the year, I would suggest that you strap on a pack-basket
with a load of forty-two pounds, which is the weight of the British
field equipment, tramp for ten hours through a ploughed field after a
heavy rain, jump in a canal, and, without removing your clothes or
boots, spend the night on a manure-pile in a barnyard. Then you will
understand why soldiers become so heedless of gas, bullets, and
shells. But with it all the British soldier remains incorrigibly
cheerful. He is a born optimist and he shows it in his songs. Away
back in the early months of the war he went into action to the lilt of
"_Tipperary_." The gloom and depression of that first terrible winter
induced in him a more serious mood, to which he gave vent in "_Onward,
Christian Soldiers_." But now he feels that victory, though still far
off, is certain, and he puts his confidence into words: "_Pack Up Your
Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag and Smile, Smile, Smile_," "_Keep the
Home Fires Burning_," "_When Irish Eyes Are Smiling_," and
"_Hallelujah! I'm a Hobo!_" The latter very popular. Then there was
another, adapted by the Salvation Army from an old music-hall tune,
which I heard a battalion chanting lustily as it went slush-slushing
up to the firing-line. It ran something like this:
"The Bells of Hell go ting-a-ling-a-ling
For you but not for me.
For me the angels sing-a-ling-a-ling,
They've got the goods for me.
O Death, where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling,
O Grave thy victoree?
The Bells of Hell go ting-a-ling-a-ling
For you but not for me!"
It is almost impossible to make oneself believe that, less than two
years ago, these iron-hard, sun-bronzed, determined-looking men were
keeping books, tending shop, waiting on table, driving wagons, and
doing all the other humdrum things which make up the working lives of
most of us. Yet this citizen army is winning sensational successes
against the best trained troops in the world, occupying positions of
their own choosing, fortified and defended with every device that
human ingenuity and years of experience have been able to suggest.
These ex-shopkeepers, ex-tailors, ex-lawyers, ex-farmers, ex-cabmen
are accomplishing what most military authorities asserted was
impossible: they are driving German veterans out of trenches amply
supported by artillery--and they are doing the job cheerfully and
extremely well.
I believe that one of the reasons why the morale of the British is so
high is because, instead of adopting the dugout life of the Germans,
they have in the main kept to the open. Trench life is anything but
pleasant, yet it is infinitely more conducive to confidence, courage,
and enthusiasm than the rat-like existence of the Germans in
foul-smelling, ill-lighted, unsanitary burrows far beneath the surface
of the ground. Few men can remain for month after month in such a
place and retain their optimism and their self-respect. One of the
German dugouts which I saw on the Somme was so deep in the earth that
it had two hundred steps. The Germans who were found in it admitted
quite frankly that after enjoying for several weeks or months the
safety which it afforded, they had no stomach for going back to the
trenches. They were only too glad to crawl into their hole when the
British barrage began and there they were trapped and surrendered.
[Illustration: A British "Heavy" Mounted on a Railway-Truck
Shelling the German Lines.
During a big offensive the guns frequently fire a round a minute
for days on end, the gunners working in shifts, two hours on and
two hours off.]
[Illustration: Buried on the Field of Honor.
"Dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return."]
Germany largely based her confidence of victory on the belief that,
under the strain of war, the far-flung British Empire, with its
heterogeneous elements and racial jealousies, would promptly crumble.
It was a vital error. Instead of crumbling it hardened into a unity
which is adamantine. Canada has already contributed half a million men
to the British armies, Australia three hundred thousand. South Africa,
by undertaking her own defense, released the imperial regiments
stationed there. She not only suppressed the German-fomented
rebellion, but she conquered German Southwest Africa and German East
Africa, thus adding nearly a sixth of the Dark Continent to the
Empire, and has sent ten thousand men to the battle-fields of Europe.
Indian troops are fighting in France, in Macedonia, in Mesopotamia, in
Palestine, and in Egypt. From the West Indies have come twelve
thousand men. The Malay States gave to the Empire a battleship and a
battalion. A little island in the Mediterranean raised the King's Own
Malta Regiment. Uganda and Nyassaland raised and supported the King's
African Rifles--five thousand strong. The British colonies on the
other seaboard of the continent increased the West African Field Force
to seven thousand men. The fishermen and lumbermen from Newfoundland
won imperishable glory on the Somme. From the coral atolls of the
Fijis hastened six score volunteers. The Falkland Islands, south of
South America, raised 140 men. From the Yukon, Sarawak, Wei-hai-wei,
the Seychelles, Hong-Kong, Belize, Saskatchewan, Aden, Tasmania,
British Guiana, Sierra Leone, St. Helena, the Gold Coast, poured
Europeward, at the summons of the Motherland, an endless stream of
fighting men.
Scattered in trenches and tents, in barracks and billets over the
whole of Northern France are men hailing from the uttermost parts of
the earth. Some there are who have spent their lives searching for
gold by the light of the Aurora Borealis and others who have delved
for diamonds on the South African veldt. Some have ridden range on the
plains of Texas and others on the plains of Queensland. When, in the
recreation huts, the phonograph plays "_Home, Sweet Home_" the
thoughts of some drift to nipa-thatched huts on flaming tropic
islands, some think of tin-roofed wooden cottages in the environs of
Sydney or Melbourne, others of staid, old-fashioned, red-brick houses
in Halifax or Quebec.
Serving as a connecting-link between the British and the French and
Belgian armies is a corps of interpreters known as the _liaison_. As
there are well over two million Englishmen in France, a very small
percentage of whom have any knowledge of French, the _liaison_ enjoys
no sinecure. To assist in the billeting of British battalions in
French villages, to conduct negotiations with the canny countryfolk
for food and fodder, to mollify angry housewives whose ménages have
been upset by boisterous Tommies billeted upon them, to translate
messages of every description, to interrogate peasants suspected of
espionage--these are only a few of the duties which the _liaison_
officers are called upon to perform. The corps is recruited from
Englishmen who have been engaged in business in Paris, habitués of the
Riviera, students of the Latin Quarter, French hairdressers, head
waiters, and ladies' tailors who have learned English "as she is
spoke" in London's West End. The officers of the _liaison_ can be
readily distinguished by their caps, which resemble those worn by
railroad brakemen, and by the gilt sphinx on the collars of their drab
uniforms. This emblem was chosen by Napoleon as a badge for the corps
of interpreters he organized during his Egyptian campaign, but the
British unkindly assert it was selected for the _liaison_ officers
because nobody can understand them.
The more I see of the war the more I am impressed with its utter
impersonality. It is a highly organized business, conducted by
specialists, and into it personalities and picturesqueness seldom
enter. One hears the noise and the clamor, of course; one sees the
virility, the intense activity, the feverish haste, yet at the same
time one realizes how little the human element counts; all is
machinery and mathematics. I remember that one day I was lunching in
his dugout with an officer commanding a battery of heavy howitzers.
Just as my host was serving the tinned peaches the telephone-bell
jangled. It was an observation officer, up near the firing-line,
reporting that through his telescope he had spotted a German
ammunition column passing through a certain ruined hamlet three or
four miles away. On his map the battery commander showed me a small
square, probably not more than three or four acres in extent, on
which, in order to "get" that ammunition column, his shells must fall.
Some rapid calculations on a pad of paper, and, calling in his
subordinate, he handed him the "arithmetic." A minute or two later,
from a clump of trees close by, there came in rapid succession four
splitting crashes and four invisible express-trains went screeching
toward the German lines to explode, with the roar that scatters death,
on a spot as far away and as invisible from me as Washington Square is
from Grant's Tomb. Before the echo of the guns had died away my host
was back to his tinned peaches again. Neither he, nor any of his
gunners, knew, or ever would know, or, indeed, very greatly cared,
what destruction those shells had wrought. That's what I mean by the
impersonality of modern war.
* * * * *
Our car stopped with startling abruptness in response to the upraised
hand of a giant in khaki whose high-crowned sombrero and the brass
letters on his shoulder-straps showed that he was a trooper of the
Alberta Horse. On his arm was a red brassard bearing the magic letters
M. P.--Military Police.
"Better not go any farther, sir," he said, addressing the
staff-officer who was my companion. "The Boches are shelling the road
just ahead pretty heavily this morning. They got a lorry a few minutes
ago and I've had orders to stop traffic until things quiet down a
bit."
"I'm afraid we'll have to take to the mud," said my cicerone
resignedly. "And after last night's rain it will be beastly going.
"And don't forget your helmet and gas-mask," he called, as I stepped
from the car into a foot of oozy mire.
"Will we need them?" I asked, for the inverted wash-basin which the
British dignify by the name of helmet is the most uncomfortable form
of headgear ever devised by man.
"It's orders," he answered. "No one is supposed to go into the
trenches without mask and helmet. And there's never any telling when
we may need them. No use in taking chances."
Taking off my leather coat, which was too heavy for walking, I
attempted to toss it into the car, but the wind caught it and carried
it into the mud, in which it disappeared as quickly and completely as
though I had dropped it in a lake. Leaving the comparative hardness of
the road, we started to make our way to the mouth of a communication
trench through what had evidently once been a field of sugar-beets--and
instantly sank to our knees in mire that seemed to be a mixture of
molasses, glue, and porridge. It seemed as though some subterranean
monster had seized my feet with its tentacles and was trying to drag me
down. It was perhaps half a mile to the communication trench and it
took us half an hour of the hardest walking I have ever had to reach
it. It had walls of slippery clay and a corduroyed bottom, but the
corduroy was hidden beneath the mud left by thousands of feet.
Telephone-wires, differentiated by tags of colored tape, ran down the
sides. Shortly we came upon a working party of Highlanders who were
repairing the trench-wall. The wars of the Middle Ages could have seen
no more strangely costumed fighting men. Above their half-puttees
showed the brilliantly plaided tops of their stockings. Their kilts of
green and blue tartan were protected by khaki aprons. Each man wore one
of the recently issued jerkins, a sleeveless and shapeless coat of
rough-tanned sheepskin such as was probably worn, in centuries past, by
the English bowmen. On their heads were the "tin pot" helmets such as
we were wearing, and in leather cases at their belts they carried
broad-bladed and extremely vicious-looking knives.
For nearly an hour we slipped and stumbled through the endless
cutting. At one spot the parapet, soaked by water, had caved in. In
the breach thus made had been planted a neatly lettered sign. It was
terse and to the point: "The Hun sees you here. Go away." And we did.
The trench had gradually been growing narrower and shallower and more
tortuous until we were walking half doubled over so as not to show our
heads above the top. At last it came to an end in a sort of cellar,
perhaps six feet square, which had been burrowed from the ridge of a
hill. The entrance to the observatory, for that is what it was, had
been carefully screened by a burlap curtain; within, a telescope,
mounted on a tripod, applied its large and inquisitive eye to a small
aperture, likewise curtained, cut in the opposite wall. We were in the
advanced observation post on the slopes of Notre Dame de Lorette, less
than a thousand yards from the enemy. At the foot of the spur on which
we stood ran the British trenches and, a few hundred yards beyond
them, the German. From our vantage-point we could see the two lines,
looking like monstrous brown snakes, extending for miles across the
plain. Perhaps a mile behind the German trenches was a patch of
red-brown roofs. It was the town of Lieven, a straggling suburb of
Lens, famous as the centre of the mine-fields of Northern France.
The only occupants of the observation post were a youthful Canadian
lieutenant and a sergeant of the "Buzzers," as they call the Signal
Corps. The officer was from Montreal and he instantly became my friend
when I spoke of golf at Dixie and rides in the woods back of Mount
Royal and a certain cocktail which they make with great perfection in
a certain club that we both knew. He adjusted the telescope and I put
my eye to it, whereupon the streets of the distant town sprang into
life before me. In front of a cottage a woman was hanging out
washing--I could even make out the colors of the garments; a gray
motor whirled into a square, stopped, a man alighted, and it went on
again; a group of men--German soldiers doubtless--strolled across my
field of vision and one of them paused for a moment as though to light
a pipe; along a street straggled a line of children, evidently coming
from school, for it must be remembered that in most of these French
towns occupied by the Germans, even those close behind the lines, the
civilian life goes on much as usual. Though the Allies could blow
these towns off the map if they wished, they do not bombard them save
for some specific object, as to do so would be to kill many of their
own people. Nor does it pay to waste ammunition on individual enemies.
But if an observation officer sees enough Germans in a group to make
the expenditure of ammunition worth while, he will telephone to one of
the batteries and a well-placed shell tells the Germans that street
gatherings are strictly _verboten_.
"Sorry that you weren't here yesterday," the lieutenant remarked. "We
had a little entertainment of our own. Do you see that square?" and he
swung the barrel of the telescope so that it commanded a cobble-paved
_place_, with a small fountain in the centre, flanked on three sides
by rows of red-brick dwellings.
"I see it plainly," I told him.
"The Boches are evidently billeting their men in those houses," he
continued. "Yesterday morning an army baker's cart drove into the
square and the soldiers came piling out of the houses to get their
bread ration. There was quite a crowd of them around the cart, so I
phoned back to the gunners and they dropped a shell bang into the
square. The soldiers scattered, of course, and the horse hitched to
the cart took fright and ran away. The cart tipped over and the bread
spilled out. After a few minutes the men came out of their cellars and
began to gather up the bread, so we shelled 'em again. The next time
they sent out the women to pick up the loaves. We let them
alone--French women, you understand--until I saw the Huns beating the
women and taking the bread away from them. That made me mad and for
ten minutes we strafed that section of the town good and plenty. It
was very amusing while it lasted. And," he added wistfully, "we don't
get much amusement here."
* * * * *
Darkness had fallen, when cold and tired, we climbed stiffly into the
waiting car. As we tore down the long, straight road which led to
General Headquarters the purple velvet of the eastern sky was stabbed
by fiery flashes, many of them, and, borne on the night wind, came the
sullen growling of the guns. As I stared out into the flame-pricked
darkness there passed before me in imaginary review that endless
stream of dauntless and determined men--mud-caked infantrymen,
gunners, despatch riders, sappers, pioneers, motor-drivers,
road-menders, mechanics, railway-builders--who form that wall of steel
which Britain has thrown between Western Europe and the Hunnish
hordes. Unyielding and undiscouraged they have stood, for close on
three years, in winter and in summer, in heat and in cold, in snow and
in rain, holding the frontier of civilization. And I knew that it was
safe in their care.
VIII
WITH THE BELGIANS ON THE YSER
I had left the Belgian army late in the autumn of 1914, just at the
close of that series of heroic actions which began at Liége and ended
on the Yser, so that my return, two years later, was in the nature of
a home-coming. But it was a home-coming deeply tinged with sadness,
for many, oh, so many of the gallant fellows with whom I had
campaigned in those stirring days before the trench robbed war of its
picturesqueness, were in German prisons or lay in unmarked and
forgotten graves before Namur and Antwerp and Termonde. The Belgians
that I had left were dirty, dog-tired, and disheartened. They were
short of food, short of ammunition, short of everything save valor.
The picturesque but impractical uniforms they wore--the green tunics
and cherry-colored breeches of the Guides, the towering bearskins of
the gendarmes, the shiny leather hats of the Carabinieri--were foul
with blood and dirt.
As my car rolled across a canal bridge into that tiny triangle which
is all that remains of free Belgium, a trim-looking trooper in khaki
stepped from a sentry-box and, holding up an imperative hand,
demanded to see my papers. Had it not been for the rosette of
red-yellow-and-black enamel on his cap, and the colored regimental
facings on his collar, I should have taken him for a British soldier.
"To what regiment do you belong?" I asked him.
"The First Guides, monsieur," he replied, returning my papers and
saluting.
The First Guides! What memories the name brought back. How well I
remembered the last time that I had seen those gallant riders, the
pick and flower of the Belgian army, their comic-opera uniforms yellow
with dust, crouching behind the hedgerows on the road to Alost, a
pitifully thin screen of them, holding off the Germans while their
weary comrades tramped northward into Flanders on the great retreat.
It was not easy to make myself believe that this smart, khaki-clad
trooper before me belonged to that homeless band of rear-guard
fighters who had marked with their dead the line of retreat from the
Meuse to the Yser.
It was my first glimpse of the reconstituted Belgian army. In the two
years that it has been holding the line on the Yser it has been
completely reuniformed, re-equipped, reorganized. The result is a
small but complete and highly efficient organism. The Belgian army
consists to-day of six infantry and two cavalry divisions--a total of
about 120,000 men--with perhaps another 80,000 being drilled in the
various training camps at the rear. It has, of course, no great
reserves to fall back upon, for the greater part of the nation is
imprisoned, but the King and his generals, by unremitting energy, have
produced a force which is as well disciplined and as completely
equipped as can be found anywhere on the front. When the day comes,
as it surely will, when Berlin issues the orders for a general
retirement, I shouldn't care to be the Germans who are assigned to the
work of holding off the Belgians, for from the men who wear the
red-yellow-and-black rosettes they need expect no pity.
Though the shortest of the lines held by the Allies, the Belgian front
is, in proportion to the free Belgian population, much the longest.
The northernmost sector of the Western Front, beginning at the sea and
extending through Nieuport, a distance of only three or four miles, is
held by the French; then come the twenty-three miles held by the
Belgians, another two or three miles held by the French, and then the
British. The Belgians occupy a difficult and extremely uncomfortable
position, for these Flemish lowlands were inundated in order to check
the German advance, and as a result they are in the midst of a vast
swamp, which, in the rainy season, becomes a lake. They are, in fact,
fighting under conditions not encountered on any other front save in
the Mazurian marshes. During the rainy season the gunners of certain
batteries frequently work in water up to their waists. So wet is the
soil that dugouts are out of the question, for they instantly become
cisterns, so the Belgian engineers have developed a type of
above-ground shelter which has concrete walls and a roof of steel
rails, on top of which are laid several layers of sand-bags. Though
these shelters afford their occupants protection from the fire of
small-caliber guns, they are not proof against the heavy projectiles
which the Germans periodically rain upon the Belgian trenches. As the
soil is so soft and slimy as to be useless for defensive purposes, the
trench-walls are for the most part built of sand-bags, which are,
however, usually filled with clay, for sand must be brought by
incredible exertions from the seashore. I was shown a single short
sector on the Yser, where six million bags were used. For the floors
of these shelters, as well as for innumerable other purposes,
millions of feet of lumber are required, which is taken up to the
front over the network of light railways, some of which penetrate to
the actual firing-line. If trench-building materials are scarce in
Flanders, fuel is scarcer. Every stick of wood and every piece of coal
burned on the front has to be brought from great distances and at
great expense, so economy in fuel consumption is rigidly enforced. I
remember walking through a trench with a Belgian officer one bitterly
cold and rainy day last winter. In a corner of the trench a soldier in
soaking clothes had piled together a tiny mound of twigs and roots and
over the feeble flame was trying to warm his hands, which were blue
with cold. To my surprise my companion stopped and spoke to the man
quite sharply.
"We can't let one man have a fire all to himself," he explained as he
rejoined me. "Wood is too scarce for that. The fire that fellow had
would have warmed three or four men and I had to reprimand him for
building it." A moment later he added: "The poor devil looked pretty
cold, though, didn't he?"
* * * * *
I had been informed by telephone from the Belgian _État-Major_ that a
staff-officer would meet me at a certain little frontier town whose
name I have forgotten how to spell. After many inquiries and wrong
turnings, for in this corner of Belgium the Flemish peasantry
understand but little French and no English, my driver succeeded in
finding the town, but the officer who was to meet me had not arrived.
It was too cold to sit in the car with comfort, so a lieutenant of
gendarmerie, the chief of the local _Sûrété_, invited me to make
myself comfortable in his little office. After a time the conversation
languished, and, for want of something better to say, I inquired how
far it was to Ostend. I was interested in knowing, because during the
retreat of the Belgian army in October, 1914, I left two kit-bags
filled with perfectly good clothes at the American Consulate in
Ostend. They are there still, I suppose, provided the Consulate has
not been shelled to pieces by the British monitors or the bags stolen
by German soldiers.
"Ostend?" repeated the gendarme. "It isn't over thirty kilometres from
here. From the roof of this building, if the weather was fine, you
could almost see its church-spires."