PATHS OF GLORY
Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front
BY IRVIN S. COBB
AUTHOR OF "BACK HOME," "EUROPE REVISED,' ETC., ETC.
"The paths of glory lead but to the grave."
--Thomas Gray
To the Memory of
MAJOR ROBERT COBB
(Cobb's Kentucky Battery, C. S. A.)
NOTE
What is enclosed between these covers was written as a series of
first-hand impressions during the fall and early winter of 1914 while the
writer was on staff service for The Saturday Evening Post in the western
theatre of the European War. I tried to write of war as I saw it at the
time that I saw it, or immediately afterward, when the memory of what I
had seen was fresh and vivid in my mind.
In this volume, as here presented, no attempt has been made to follow
either logically or chronologically the progress of events in the
campaigning operations of which I was a witness. The chapters are
interrelated insofar as they purport to be a sequence of pictures
describing some of my experiences and setting forth a few of my
observations in Belgium, in Germany, in France and in England during the
first three months of hostilities.
At the outset I had no intention of undertaking to write a book on the
war. If in the kindly judgment of the reader what I have written
constitutes a book I shall be gratified.
I. S. C.
January, 1915.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. A Little Village Called Montignies St. Christophe.
II. To War in a Taxicab.
III. Sherman Said It.
IV. "Marsch, Marsch, Marsch, So Geh'n Wir Weiter".
V. Being a Guest of the Kaiser.
VI. With the German Wrecking Crew
VII. The Grapes of Wrath..
VIII. Three Generals and a Cook
IX. Viewing a Battle prom a Balloon
X. In the Trenches Before Rheims..
XI. War de Luxe...
XII. The Rut of Big Guns in France..
XIII. Those Yellow Pine Boxes..
XIV. The Red Glutton..
XV. Belgium--The Rag Doll of Europe .
XVI. Louvain the Forsaken.
Chapter 1
A Little Village Called Montignies St. Christophe
We passed through it late in the afternoon--this little Belgian town
called Montignies St. Christophe--just twenty-four hours behind a dust-
colored German column. I am going to try now to tell how it looked to
us.
I am inclined to think I passed this way a year before, or a little
less, though I cannot be quite certain as to that. Traveling 'cross
country, the country is likely to look different from the way it looked
when you viewed it from the window of a railroad carriage.
Of this much, though, I am sure: If I did not pass, through this little
town of Montignies St. Christophe then, at least I passed through fifty
like it--each a single line of gray houses strung, like beads on a cord,
along a white, straight road, with fields behind and elms in front; each
with its small, ugly church, its wine shop, its drinking trough, its
priest in black, and its one lone gendarme in his preposterous housings
of saber and belt and shoulder straps.
I rather imagine I tried to think up something funny to say about the
shabby grandeur of the gendarme or the acid flavor of the cooking
vinegar sold at the drinking place under the name of wine; for that time
I was supposed to be writing humorous articles on European travel.
But now something had happened to Montignies St. Christophe to lift it
out of the dun, dull sameness that made it as one with so many other
unimportant villages in this upper left-hand corner of the map of
Europe. The war had come this way; and, coming so, had dealt it a
side-slap.
We came to it just before dusk. All day we had been hurrying along,
trying to catch up with the German rear guard; but the Germans moved
faster than we did, even though they fought as they went. They had gone
round the southern part of Belgium like coopers round a cask, hooping it
in with tight bands of steel. Belgium--or this part of it--was all
barreled up now: chines, staves and bung; and the Germans were already
across the line, beating down the sod of France with their pelting feet.
Besides we had stopped often, for there was so much to see and to hear.
There was the hour we spent at Merbes-le-Chateau, where the English had
been; and the hour we spent at La Buissière, on the river Sambre, where
a fight had been fought two days earlier; but Merbes-le-Chateau is
another story and so is La Buissière. Just after La Buissière we came
to a tiny village named Neuville and halted while the local Jack-of-all-
trades mended for us an invalided tire on a bicycle.
As we grouped in the narrow street before his shop, with a hiving swarm
of curious villagers buzzing about us, an improvised ambulance, with a
red cross painted on its side over the letters of a baker's sign, went
up the steep hill at the head of the cobbled street. At that the women
in the doorways of the small cottages twisted their gnarled red hands in
their aprons, and whispered fearsomely among themselves, so that the
sibilant sound of their voices ran up and down the line of houses in a
long, quavering hiss.
The wagon, it seemed, was bringing in a wounded French soldier who had
been found in the woods beyond the river. He was one of the last to be
found alive, which was another way of saying that for two days and two
nights he had been lying helpless in the thicket, his stomach empty and
his wounds raw. On each of those two nights it had rained, and rained
hard.
Just as we started on our way the big guns began booming somewhere ahead
of us toward the southwest; so we turned in that direction.
We had heard the guns distinctly in the early forenoon, and again, less
distinctly, about noontime. Thereafter, for a while, there had been a
lull in the firing; but now it was constant--a steady, sustained boom-
boom-boom, so far away that it fell on the eardrums as a gentle
concussion; as a throb of air, rather than as a real sound. For three
days now we had been following that distant voice of the cannon, trying
to catch up with it as it advanced, always southward, toward the French
frontier. Therefore we flogged the belly of our tired horse with the
lash of a long whip, and hurried along. There were five of us, all
Americans. The two who rode on bicycles pedaled ahead as outriders, and
the remaining three followed on behind with the horse and the dogcart.
We had bought the outfit that morning and we were to lose it that night.
The horse was an aged mare, with high withers, and galls on her
shoulders and fetlocks unshorn, after the fashion of Belgian horses; and
the dogcart was a venerable ruin, which creaked a great protest at every
turn of the warped wheels on the axle. We had been able to buy the two--
the mare and the cart--only because the German soldiers had not thought
them worth the taking.
In this order, then, we proceeded. Pretty soon the mare grew so weary
she could hardly lift her shaggy old legs; so, footsore as we were, we
who rode dismounted and trudged on, taking turns at dragging her forward
by the bit. I presume we went ahead thus for an hour or more, along an
interminable straight road and past miles of the checkered light and
dark green fields which in harvest time make a great backgammon board of
this whole country of Belgium.
The road was empty of natives--empty, too, of German wagon trains; and
these seemed to us curious things, because there had until then been
hardly a minute of the day when we were not passing soldiers or meeting
refugees.
Almost without warning we came on this little village called Montignies
St. Christophe. A six-armed signboard at a crossroads told us its name
--a rather impressive name ordinarily for a place of perhaps twenty
houses, all told. But now tragedy had given it distinction; had painted
that straggling frontier hamlet over with such colors that the picture
of it is going to live in my memory as long as I do live. At the upper
end of the single street, like an outpost, stood an old chateau, the
seat, no doubt, of the local gentry, with a small park of beeches and
elms round it; and here, right at the park entrance, we had our first
intimation that there had been a fight. The gate stood ajar between its
chipped stone pillars, and just inside the blue coat of a French cavalry
officer, jaunty and new and much braided with gold lace on the collar
and cuffs, hung from the limb of a small tree. Beneath the tree were a
sheaf of straw in the shape of a bed and the ashes of a dead camp fire;
and on the grass, plain to the eye, a plump, well-picked pullet, all
ready for the pot or the pan. Looking on past these things we saw much
scattered dunnage: Frenchmen's knapsacks, flannel shirts, playing cards,
fagots of firewood mixed together like jackstraws, canteens covered with
slate-blue cloth and having queer little hornlike protuberances on their
tops--which proved them to be French canteens--tumbled straw, odd shoes
with their lacings undone, a toptilted service shelter of canvas; all
the riffle of a camp that had been suddenly and violently disturbed.
As I think back it seems to me that not until that moment had it
occurred to us to regard closely the cottages and shops beyond the
clumped trees of the chateau grounds. We were desperately weary, to
begin with, and our eyes, those past three days, had grown used to the
signs of misery and waste and ruin, abundant and multiplying in the wake
of the hard-pounding hoofs of the conqueror.
Now, all of a sudden, I became aware that this town had been literally
shot to bits. From our side--that is to say, from the north and
likewise from the west--the Germans had shelled it. From the south,
plainly, the French had answered. The village, in between, had caught
the full force and fury of the contending fires. Probably the
inhabitants had warning; probably they fled when the German skirmishers
surprised that outpost of Frenchmen camping in the park. One imagined
them scurrying like rabbits across the fields and through the cabbage
patches. But they had left their belongings behind, all their small
petty gearings and garnishings, to be wrecked in the wrenching and
racking apart of their homes.
A railroad track emerged from the fields and ran along the one street.
Shells had fallen on it and exploded, ripping the steel rails from the
cross-ties, so that they stood up all along in a jagged formation, like
rows of snaggled teeth. Other shells, dropping in the road, had so
wrought with the stone blocks that they were piled here in heaps, and
there were depressed into caverns and crevasses four or five or six feet
deep.
Every house in sight had been hit again and again and again. One house
would have its whole front blown in, so that we could look right back to
the rear walls and see the pans on the kitchen shelves. Another house
would lack a roof to it, and the tidy tiles that had made the roof were
now red and yellow rubbish, piled like broken shards outside a potter's
door. The doors stood open, and the windows, with the windowpanes all
gone and in some instances the sashes as well, leered emptily, like
eye-sockets without eyes.
So it went. Two of the houses had caught fire and the interiors were
quite burned away. A sodden smell of burned things came from the still
smoking ruins; but the walls, being of thick stone, stood.
Our poor tired old nag halted and sniffed and snorted. If she had had
energy enough I reckon she would have shied about and run back the way
she had come, for now, just ahead, lay two dead horses--a big gray and a
roan--with their stark legs sticking out across the road. The gray was
shot through and through in three places. The right fore hoof of the
roan had been cut smack off, as smoothly as though done with an ax; and
the stiffened leg had a curiously unfinished look about it, suggesting a
natural malformation. Dead only a few hours, their carcasses already
had begun to swell. The skin on their bellies was as tight as a
drumhead.
We forced the quivering mare past the two dead horses. Beyond them the
road was a litter. Knapsacks, coats, canteens, handkerchiefs, pots,
pans, household utensils, bottles, jugs and caps were everywhere. The
deep ditches on either side of the road were clogged with such things.
The dropped caps and the abandoned knapsacks were always French caps and
French knapsacks, cast aside, no doubt, for a quick flight after the
melee.
The Germans had charged after shelling the town, and then the French had
fallen back--or at least so we deduced from the looks of things. In
the debris was no object that bespoke German workmanship or German
ownership. This rather puzzled us until we learned that the Germans, as
tidy in this game of war as in the game of life, made it a hard-and-fast
rule to gather up their own belongings after every engagement, great or
small, leaving behind nothing that might serve to give the enemy an idea
of their losses.
We went by the church. Its spire was gone; but, strange to say, a small
flag--the Tricolor of France--still fluttered from a window where some
one had stuck it. We went by the taverne, or wine shop, which had a
sign over its door--a creature remotely resembling a blue lynx. And
through the door we saw half a loaf of bread and several bottles on a
table. We went by a rather pretentious house, with pear trees in front
of it and a big barn alongside it; and right under the eaves of the barn
I picked up the short jacket of a French trooper, so new and fresh from
the workshop that the white cambric lining was hardly soiled. The
figure 18 was on the collar; we decided that its wearer must have
belonged to the Eighteenth Cavalry Regiment. Behind the barn we found a
whole pile of new knapsacks--the flimsy play-soldier knapsacks of the
French infantrymen, not half so heavy or a third so substantial as the
heavy sacks of the Germans, which are all bound with straps and covered
on the back side with undressed red bullock's hide.
Until now we had seen, in all the silent, ruined village, no human
being. The place fairly ached with emptiness. Cats sat on the
doorsteps or in the windows, and presently from a barn we heard
imprisoned beasts lowing dismally. Cows were there, with agonized
udders and, penned away from them, famishing calves; but there were no
dogs. We already had remarked this fact--that in every desolated
village cats were thick enough; but invariably the sharp-nosed, wolfish-
looking Belgian dogs had disappeared along with their masters. And it
was so in Montignies St. Christophe.
On a roadside barricade of stones, chinked with sods of turf--a
breastwork the French probably had erected before the fight and which
the Germans had kicked half down--I counted three cats, seated side by
side, washing their faces sedately and soberly.
It was just after we had gone by the barricade that, in a shed behind
the riddled shell of a house, which was almost the last house of the
town, one of our party saw an old, a very old, woman, who peered out at
us through a break in the wall. He called out to her in French, but she
never answered--only continued to watch him from behind her shelter. He
started toward her and she disappeared noiselessly, without having
spoken a word. She was the only living person we saw in that town.
Just beyond the town, though, we met a wagon--a furniture dealer's
wagon--from some larger community, which had been impressed by the
Belgian authorities, military or civil, for ambulance service. A jaded
team of horses drew it, and white flags with red crosses in their
centers drooped over the wheels, fore and aft. One man led the near
horse by the bit and two other men walked behind the wagon. All three
of them had Red Cross brassards on the sleeves of their coats.
The wagon had a hood on it, but was open at both ends. Overhauling it
we saw that it contained two dead soldiers--French foot-soldiers. The
bodies rested side by side on the wagon bed. Their feet somehow were
caught up on the wagon seat so that their stiff legs, in the baggy red
pants, slanted upward, and the two dead men had the look of being about
to glide backward and out of the wagon.
The blue-clad arms of one of them were twisted upward in a half-arc,
encircling nothing; and as the wheels jolted over the rutted cobbles
these two bent arms joggled and swayed drunkenly. The other's head was
canted back so that, as we passed, we looked right into his face. It
was a young face--we could tell that much, even through the mask of
caked mud on the drab-white skin--and it might once have been a comely
face. It was not comely now.
Peering into the wagon we saw that the dead man's face had been partly
shot or shorn away--the lower jaw was gone; so that it had become an
abominable thing to look on. These two had been men the day before. Now
they were carrion and would be treated as such; for as we looked back we
saw the wagon turn off the high road into a field where the wild red
poppies, like blobs of red blood, grew thick between rows of neglected
sugar beets.
We stopped and watched. The wagon bumped through the beet patch to
where, at the edge of a thicket, a trench had been dug. The diggers
were two peasants in blouses, who stood alongside the ridge of raw
upturned earth at the edge of the hole, in the attitude of figures in a
painting by Millet. Their spades were speared upright into the mound of
fresh earth. Behind them a stenciling of poplars rose against the sky
line.
We saw the bodies lifted out of the wagon. We saw them slide into the
shallow grave, and saw the two diggers start at their task of filling in
the hole.
Not until then did it occur to any one of us that we had not spoken to
the men in charge of the wagon, or they to us. There was one detached
house, not badly battered, alongside the road at the lower edge of the
field where the burial took place. It had a shield on its front wall
bearing the Belgian arms and words to denote that it was a customs
house.
A glance at our map showed us that at this point the French boundary
came up in a V-shaped point almost to the road. Had the gravediggers
picked a spot fifty yards farther on for digging their trench, those two
dead Frenchmen would have rested in the soil of their own country.
The sun was almost down by now, and its slanting rays slid lengthwise
through the elm-tree aisles along our route. Just as it disappeared we
met a string of refugees--men, women and children--all afoot, all
bearing pitiably small bundles. They limped along silently in a
straggling procession. None of them was weeping; none of them
apparently had been weeping. During the past ten days I had seen
thousands of such refugees, and I had yet to hear one of them cry out or
complain or protest.
These who passed us now were like that. Their heavy peasant faces
expressed dumb bewilderment--nothing else. They went on up the road
into the gathering dusk as we went down, and almost at once the sound of
their clunking tread died out behind us. Without knowing certainly, we
nevertheless imagined they were the dwellers of Montignies St.
Christophe going back to the sorry shells that had been their homes.
An hour later we passed through the back lines of the German camp and
entered the town of Beaumont, to find that the General Staff of a German
army corps was quartered there for the night, and that the main force of
the column, after sharp fighting, had already advanced well beyond the
frontier. France was invaded.