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