"WIPERS"
FROM MY JOURNAL:
An aëroplane man at the next table starts to-night on a dangerous
scouting expedition over the German lines. In case he does not return
he has given a letter for his mother to Captain T----.
It now appears quite certain that I am to be sent along the French and
English lines. I shall be the first correspondent, I am told, to see
the British front, as "Eyewitness," who writes for the English papers,
is supposed to be a British officer.
I have had word also that I am to see Mr. Winston Churchill, the First
Lord of the British Admiralty. But to-day I am going to Ypres. The
Tommies call it "Wipers."
* * * * *
Before I went abroad I had two ambitions among others: One was to be
able to pronounce Ypres; the other was to bring home and exhibit to my
admiring friends the pronunciation of Przemysl. To a moderate extent I
have succeeded with the first. I have discovered that the second one
must be born to.
Two or three towns have stood out as conspicuous points of activity in
the western field. Ypres is one of these towns. Day by day it figures
in the reports from the front. The French are there, and just to the
east the English line commences.[D] The line of trenches lies beyond
the town, forming a semicircle round it.
[Footnote D: Written in May, 1915.]
A few days later I saw this semicircle, the flat and muddy battlefield
of Ypres. But on this visit I was to see only the town, which,
although completely destroyed, was still being shelled.
The curve round the town gave the invading army a great advantage in
its destruction. It enabled them to shell it from three directions, so
that it was raked by cross fire. For that reason the town of Ypres
presents one of the most hideous pictures of desolation of the present
war.
General M---- had agreed to take me to Ypres. But as he was a Belgian
general, and the town of Ypres is held by the French, it was a part of
the etiquette of war that we should secure the escort of a French
officer at the town of Poperinghe.
For war has its etiquette, and of a most exacting kind. And yet in the
end it simplifies things. It is to war what rules are to
bridge--something to lead by! Frequently I was armed with passes to
visit, for instance, certain batteries. My escort was generally a
member of the Headquarters' Staff of that particular army. But it was
always necessary to visit first the officer in command of that
battery, who in his turn either accompanied us to the battlefield or
deputised one of his own staff. The result was an imposing number of
uniforms of various sorts, and the conviction, as I learned, among the
gunners that some visiting royalty was on an excursion to the front!
It was a cold winter day in February, a grey day with a fine snow that
melted as soon as it touched the ground. Inside the car we were
swathed in rugs. The chauffeur slapped his hands at every break in the
journey, and sentries along the road hugged such shelter as they could
find.
As we left Poperinghe the French officer, Commandant D----, pointed to
a file of men plodding wearily through the mud.
"The heroes of last night's attack," he said. "They are very tired, as
you see."
We stopped the car and let the men file past. They did not look like
heroes; they looked tired and dirty and depressed. Although our
automobile generally attracted much attention, scarcely a man lifted
his head to glance at us. They went on drearily through the mud under
the pelting sleet, drooping from fatigue and evidently suffering from
keen reaction after the excitement of the night before.
I have heard the French soldier criticised for this reaction. It may
certainly be forgiven him, in view of his splendid bravery. But part
of the criticism is doubtless justified. The English Tommy fights as
he does everything else. There is a certain sporting element in what
he does. He puts into his fighting the same fairness he puts into
sport, and it is a point of honour with him to keep cool. The English
gunner will admire the enemy's marksmanship while he is ducking a
shell.
The French soldier, on the other hand, fights under keen excitement.
He is temperamental, imaginative; as he fights he remembers all the
bitterness of the past, its wrongs, its cruelties. He sees blood.
There is nothing that will hold him back. The result has made history,
is making history to-day.
But he has the reaction of his temperament. Who shall say he is not
entitled to it?
Something of this I mentioned to Monsieur le Commandant as the line
filed past.
"It is because it is fighting that gets nowhere," he replied. "If our
men, after such an attack, could advance, could do anything but crawl
back into holes full of water and mud, you would see them gay and
smiling to-day."
After a time I discovered that the same situation holds to a certain
extent in all the armies. If his fighting gets him anywhere the
soldier is content. The line has made a gain. What matter wet
trenches, discomfort, freezing cold? The line has made a gain. It is
lack of movement that sends their spirits down, the fearful boredom of
the trenches, varied only by the dropping shells, so that they term
themselves, ironically, "Cannon food."
We left the victorious company behind, making their way toward
whatever church bedded down with straw, or coach-house or drafty barn
was to house them for their rest period.
"They have been fighting waist-deep in water," said the Commandant,
"and last night was cold. The British soldier rubs his body with oil
and grease before he dresses for the trenches. I hope that before long
our men may do this also. It is a great protection."
I have in front of me now a German soldier's fatigue cap, taken by one
of those men from a dead soldier who lay in front of the trench.
It is a pathetic cap, still bearing the crease which showed how he
folded it to thrust it into his pocket. When his helmet irked him in
the trenches he was allowed to take it <off and put this on. He
belonged to Bavarian Regiment Number Fifteen, and the cap was given
him in October, 1914. There is a blood-stain on one side of it. Also
it is spotted with mud inside and out. It is a pathetic little cap,
because when its owner died, that night before, a thousand other
Germans died with him, died to gain a trench two hundred yards from
their own line, a trench to capture which would have gained them
little but glory, and which, since they failed, lost them everything,
even life itself.
We were out of the town by this time, and started on the road to
Ypres. Between Poperinghe and Ypres were numerous small villages with
narrow, twisting streets. They were filled with soldiers at rest, with
tethered horses being re-shod by army blacksmiths, with small fires in
sheltered corners on which an anxious cook had balanced a kettle.
In each town a proclamation had been nailed to a wall and the
townspeople stood about it, gaping.
"An inoculation proclamation," explained the Commandant. "There is
typhoid here, so the civilians are to be inoculated. They are very
much excited about it. It appears to them worse than a bombardment."
We passed a file of Spahis, native Algerians who speak Arabic. They
come from Tunis and Algeria, and, as may be imagined, they were
suffering bitterly from the cold.
They peered at us with bright, black eyes from the encircling folds of
the great cloaks with pointed hoods which they had drawn closely about
them. They have French officers and interpreters, and during the
spring fighting they probably proved very valuable. During the winter
they gave me the impression of being out of place and rather forlorn.
Like the Indian troops with the British, they were fighting a new
warfare. For gallant charges over dry desert sands had been
substituted mud and mist and bitter cold, and the stagnation of
armies.
Terrible tales have been told of the ferocity of these Arabs, and of
the Turcos also. I am inclined to think they are exaggerated. But
certainly, met with on a lonely road, these long files of men in their
quaint costumes moving silently along with heads lowered against the
wind were sombre, impressive and rather alarming.
The car, going furiously, skidded, was pulled sharply round and
righted itself. The conversation went on. No one appeared to notice
that we had been on the edge of eternity, and it was not for me to
mention it. But I made a jerky entry in my notebook:
"Very casual here about human life. Enlarge on this."
The general, who was a Belgian, continued his complaint. It was about
the Belgian absentee tax.
The Germans now in control in Belgium had imposed an absentee tax of
ten times the normal on all Belgians who had left the country and did
not return by the fifteenth of March. The general snorted his rage and
disgust.
"But," I said innocently, "I should think it would make very little
difference to you. You are not there, so of course you cannot pay it."
"Not there!" he said. "Of course I am not there. But everything I own
in the world is there, except this uniform that I have on my back."
"They would confiscate it?" I asked. "Not the uniform, of course; I
mean your property."
He broke into a torrent of rapid French. I felt quite sure that he was
saying that they would confiscate it; that they would annihilate it,
reduce it to its atomic constituents; take it, acres and buildings and
shade trees and vegetable garden, back to Germany. But as his French
was of the ninety horse-power variety and mine travels afoot, like
Bayard Taylor, and limps at that, I never caught up with him.
Later on, in a calmer moment, I had the thing explained to me.
It appears that the Germans have instituted a tax on all the Belgian
refugees of ten times the normal tax; the purpose being to bring back
into Belgium such refugees as wish to save the remnants of their
property. This will mean bringing back people of the better class who
have property to save. It will mean to the far-seeing German mind a
return of the better class of Belgians to reorganise things, to put
that prostrate country on its feet again, to get the poorer classes to
work, to make it self-supporting.
"The real purpose, of course," said my informant, "is so that American
sympathy, now so potent, will cease for both refugees and interned
Belgians. If the factories start, and there is work for them, and the
refugees still refuse to return, you can see what it means."
He may be right; I do not think so. I believe that at this moment
Germany regards Belgium as a new but integral part of the German
Empire, and that she wishes to see this new waste land of hers
productive. Assuredly Germany has made a serious effort to reorganise
and open again some of the great Belgian factories that are now idle.
In one instance that I know of a manufacturer was offered a large
guarantee to come back and put his factory into operation again. He
refused, although he knew that it spelled ruin. The Germans, unable
themselves at this time to put skilled labour in his mill, sent its
great machines by railroad back into Germany. I have been told that
this has happened in a number of instances. Certainly it sounds
entirely probable.
The factory owner in question is in America at the time I am writing
this, obtaining credit and new machines against the time of the
retirement of the German Army.
From the tax the conversation went on to the finances of Belgium. I
learned that the British Government, through the Bank of England, is
guaranteeing the payment of the Belgian war indemnity to Germany! The
war indemnity is over nineteen million pounds, or approximately
ninety-six millions of dollars. Of this the Belgian authorities are
instructed to pay over nine million dollars each month.
The Société Générale de Belgique has been obliged by the German
Government to accept the power of issuing notes, on a strict
understanding that it must guarantee the note issue on the gold
reserve and foreign bill book, which is at present deposited in the
Bank of England at London. If the Société Générale de Belgique had not
done so, all notes of the Bank of Belgium would have been declared
valueless by Germany.
A very prominent Englishman, married to a Belgian lady, told me a
story about this gold reserve which is amusing enough to repeat, and
which has a certain appearance of truth.
When the Germans took possession of Brussels, he said, their first
move was to send certain officers to the great Brussels Bank, in whose
vaults the gold reserve was kept. The word had been sent ahead that
they were coming, and demanding that certain high officials of the
bank were to be present.
The officials went to the bank, and the German officers presented
themselves promptly.
The conversation was brief.
"Take us to the vaults," said one of the German officers.
"To the vaults?" said the principal official of the bank.
"To the vaults," was the curt reply.
"I am not the vault keeper. We shall have to send for him."
The bank official was most courteous, quite bland, indeed. The officer
scowled, but there was nothing to do but wait.
The vault keeper was sent for. It took some time to find him.
The bank official commented on the weather, which was, he considered,
extremely warm.
At last the vault keeper came. He was quite breathless. But it seemed
that, not knowing why he came, he had neglected to bring his keys. The
bank official regretted the delay. The officers stamped about.
"It looks like a shower," said the bank official. "Later in the day it
may be cooler."
The officers muttered among themselves.
It took the vault keeper a long time to get his keys and return, but
at last he arrived. They went down and down, through innumerable doors
that must be unlocked before them, through gratings and more steel
doors. And at last they stood in the vaults.
The German officers stared about and then turned to the Belgian
official.
"The gold!" they said furiously. "Where is the gold?"
"The gold!" said the official, much surprised. "You wished to see the
gold? I am sorry. You asked for the vaults and I have shown you the
vaults. The gold, of course, is in England."
We sped on, the same flat country, the same grey fields, the same
files of soldiers moving across those fields toward distant billets,
the same transports and ambulances, and over all the same colourless
sky.
Not very long ago some inquiring British scientist discovered that on
foggy days in London the efficiency of the average clerk was cut down
about fifty per cent. One begins to wonder how much of this winter
_impasse_ is due to the weather, and what the bright and active days
of early spring will bring. Certainly the weather that day weighed on
me. It was easier to look out through the window of the car than to
get out and investigate. The penetrating cold dulled our spirits.
A great lorry had gone into the mud at the side of the road and was
being dug out. A horse neatly disembowelled lay on its back in the
road, its four stark legs pointed upward.
"They have been firing at a German _Taube_," said the Commandant, "and
naturally what goes up must come down."
On the way back we saw the same horse. It was dark by that time, and
some peasants had gathered round the carcass with a lantern. The hide
had been cut away and lay at one side, and the peasants were carving
the animal into steaks and roasts. For once fate had been good to
them. They would dine that night.
Everywhere here and there along the road we had passed the small sheds
that sentries built to protect themselves against the wind, little
huts the size of an American patrol box, built of the branches of
trees and thatched all about with straw.
Now we passed one larger than the others, a shed with the roof
thatched and the sides plastered with mud to keep out the cold.
The Commandant halted the car. There was one bare little room with a
wooden bench and a door. The bench and the door had just played their
part in a tragedy.
I have been asked again and again whether it is true that on both
sides of the line disheartened soldiers have committed suicide during
this long winter of waiting. I have always replied that I do not know.
On the Allied side it is thought that many Germans have done so; I
daresay the Germans make the same contention. This one instance is
perfectly true. But it was the result of an accident, not of
discouragement.
The sentry was alone in his hut, and he was cleaning his gun. For a
certain length of time he would be alone. In some way the gun exploded
and blew off his right hand. There was no one to call on for help. He
waited quite a while. It was night. Nobody came; he was suffering
frightfully.
Perhaps, sitting there alone, he tried to think out what life would be
without a right hand. In the end he decided that it was not worth
while. But he could not pull the trigger of his gun with his left
hand. He tried it and failed. So at last he tied a stout cord to the
trigger, fastened the end of it to the door, and sitting on the bench
kicked the door to. They had just taken him away.
Just back of Ypres there is a group of buildings that had been a great
lunatic asylum. It is now a hospital for civilians, although it is
partially destroyed.
"During the evacuation of the town," said the Commandant, "it was
decided that the inmates must be taken out. The asylum had been hit
once and shells were falling in every direction. So the nuns dressed
their patients and started to march them back along the route to the
nearest town. Shells were falling all about them; the nuns tried to
hurry them, but as each shell fell or exploded close at hand the
lunatics cheered and clapped their hands. They could hardly get them
away at all; they wanted to stay and see the excitement."
That is a picture, if you like. It was a very large asylum, containing
hundreds of patients. The nuns could not hurry them. They stood in the
roads, faces upturned to the sky, where death was whining its shrill
cry overhead. When a shell dropped into the road, or into the familiar
fields about them, tearing great holes, flinging earth and rocks in
every direction, they cheered. They blocked the roads, so that gunners
with badly needed guns could not get by. And behind and all round them
the nuns urged them on in vain. Some of them were killed, I believe.
All about great holes in fields and road tell the story of the hell
that beat about them.
Here behind the town one sees fields of graves marked each with a
simple wooden cross. Here and there a soldier's cap has been nailed to
the cross.
The officers told me that in various places the French peasants had
placed the dead soldier's number and identifying data in a bottle and
placed it on the grave. But I did not see this myself.
Unlike American towns, there is no gradual approach to these cities of
Northern France; no straggling line of suburbs. Many of them were laid
out at a time when walled cities rose from the plain, and although the
walls are gone the tradition of compactness for protection still holds
good. So one moment we were riding through the shell-holed fields of
Northern France and the next we were in the city of Ypres.
At the time of my visit few civilians had seen the city of Ypres since
its destruction. I am not sure that any had been there. I have seen no
description of it, and I have been asked frequently if it is really
true that the beautiful Cloth Hall is gone--that most famous of all
the famous buildings of Flanders.
Ypres!
What a tragedy! Not a city now; hardly a skeleton of a city. Rumour is
correct, for the wonderful Cloth Hall is gone. There is a fragment
left of the façade, but no repairing can ever restore it. It must all
come down. Indeed, any storm may finish its destruction. The massive
square belfry, two hundred and thirty feet high and topped by its four
turrets, is a shell swaying in every gust of wind.
The inimitable arcade at the end is quite gone. Nothing indeed is left
of either the Cloth Hall, which, built in the year 1200, was the most
remarkable edifice of Belgium, or of the Cathedral behind it, erected
in 1300 to succeed an earlier edifice. General M---- stood by me as I
stared at the ruins of these two great buildings. Something of the
tragedy of Belgium was in his face.
"We were very proud of it," he said. "If we started now to build
another it would take more than seven hundred years to give it
history."
There were shells overhead. But they passed harmlessly, falling either
into the open country or into distant parts of the town. We paid no
attention to them, but my curiosity was roused.
"It seems absurd to continue shelling the town," I said. "There is
nothing left."
Then and there I had a lesson in the new warfare. Bombardment of the
country behind the enemy's trenches is not necessarily to destroy
towns. Its strategical purpose, I was told, is to cut off
communications, to prevent, if possible, the bringing up of reserve
troops and transport wagons, to destroy ammunition trains. I was new
to war, with everything to learn. This perfectly practical explanation
had not occurred to me.
"But how do they know when an ammunition train is coming?" I asked.
"There are different methods. Spies, of course, always. And aëroplanes
also."
"But an ammunition train moves."
It was necessary then to explain the various methods by which
aëroplanes signal, giving ranges and locations. I have seen since that
time the charts carried by aviators and airship crews, in which every
hedge, every ditch, every small detail of the landscape is carefully
marked. In the maps I have seen the region is divided into lettered
squares, each square made up of four small squares, numbered. Thus B 3
means the third block of the B division, and so on. By wireless or in
other ways the message is sent to the batteries, and B 3, along which
an ammunition train is moving, suddenly finds itself under fire. Thus
ended the second lesson!
An ammunition train, having safely escaped B 3 and all the other
terrors that are spread for such as it, rumbled by, going through the
Square. The very vibration of its wheels as they rattled along the
street set parts of the old building to shaking. Stones fell. It was
not safe to stand near the belfry.
Up to this time I had found a certain philosophy among the French and
Belgian officers as to the destruction of their towns. Not of Louvain,
of course, or those earlier towns destroyed during the German
invasion, but of the bombardment which is taking place now along the
battle line. But here I encountered furious resentment.
There is nothing whatever left of the city for several blocks in each
direction round the Cloth Hall. At the time it was destroyed the army
of the Allies was five miles in advance of the town. The shells went
over their heads for days, weeks.
So accurate is modern gunnery that given a chart of a city the gunner
can drop a shell within a few yards of any desired spot. The Germans
had a chart of Ypres. They might have saved the Cloth Hall, as they
did save the Cathedral at Antwerp. But they were furious with thwarted
ambition--the onward drive had been checked. Instead of attempting to
save the Cloth Hall they focussed all their fire on it. There was
nothing to gain by this wanton destruction.
It is a little difficult in America, where great structures are a
matter of steel and stone erected in a year or so, to understand what
its wonderful old buildings meant to Flanders. In a way they typified
its history, certainly its art. The American likes to have his art in
his home; he buys great paintings and puts them on the walls. He
covers his floors with the entire art of a nomadic people. But on the
Continent the method is different. They have built their art into
their buildings; their great paintings are in churches or in
structures like the Cloth Hall. Their homes are comparatively
unadorned, purely places for living. All that they prize they have
stored, open to the world, in their historic buildings. It is for that
reason that the destruction of the Cloth Hall of Ypres is a matter of
personal resentment to each individual of the nation to which it
belonged. So I watched the faces of the two officers with me. There
could be no question as to their attitude. It was a personal loss they
had suffered. The loss of their homes they had accepted stoically. But
this was much more. It was the loss of their art, their history, their
tradition. And it could not be replaced.
The firing was steady, unemotional.
As the wind died down we ventured into the ruins of the Cloth Hall
itself. The roof is gone, of course. The building took fire from the
bombardment, and what the shells did not destroy the fire did. Melted
lead from ancient gutters hung in stalactites. In one place a wall was
still standing, with a bit of its mural decoration. I picked up a bit
of fallen gargoyle from under the fallen tower and brought it away. It
is before me now.
It is seven hundred and fifteen years since that gargoyle was lifted
into its place. The Crusades were going on about that time; the robber
barons were sallying out onto the plains on their raiding excursions.
The Norman Conquest had taken place. From this very town of Ypres had
gone across the Channel "workmen and artisans to build churches and
feudal castles, weavers and workers of many crafts."
In those days the Yperlée, a small river, ran open through the town.
But for many generations it has been roofed over and run under the
public square.
It was curious to stand on the edge of a great shell hole and look
down at the little river, now uncovered to the light of day for the
first time in who knows how long.
In all that chaos, with hardly a wall intact, at the corner of what
was once the cathedral, stood a heroic marble figure of Burgomaster
Vandenpeereboom. It was quite untouched and as placid as the little
river, a benevolent figure rising from the ruins of war.
"They have come like a pestilence," said the General. "When they go
they will leave nothing. What they will do is written in what they
have done."
Monsieur le Commandant had disappeared. Now he returned triumphant,
carrying a great bundle in both arms.
"I have been to what was the house of a relative," he explained. "He
has told me that in the cellar I would find these. They will interest
you."
"These" proved to be five framed photographs of the great paintings
that had decorated the walls of the great Cloth Hall. Although they
had been hidden in a cellar, fragments of shell had broken and torn
them. But it was still possible to gain from them a faint idea of the
interior beauty of the old building before its destruction.
I examined them there in the public square, with a shell every now and
then screeching above but falling harmlessly far away.
A priest joined us. He told pathetically of watching the destruction
of the Arcade, of seeing one arch after another go down until there
was nothing left.
"They ate it," said the priest graphically. "A bite at a time."
We walked through the town. One street after another opened up its
perspective of destruction. The strange antics that shell fire plays
had left doors and lintels standing without buildings, had left intact
here and there pieces of furniture. There was an occasional picture on
an exposed wall; iron street lamps had been twisted into travesties;
whole panes of glass remained in façades behind which the buildings
were gone. A part of the wooden scaffolding by which repairs were
being made to the old tower of the Cloth Hall hung there uninjured by
either flame or shell.
On one street all the trees had been cut off as if by one shell, about
ten feet above the ground, but in another, where nothing whatever
remained but piles of stone and mortar, a great elm had apparently not
lost a single branch.
Much has been written about the desolation of these towns. To get a
picture of it one must realise the solidity with which even the
private houses are built. They are stone, or if not, the walls are of
massive brick coated with plaster. There are no frame buildings; wood
is too expensive for that purpose. It is only in prodigal America that
we can use wood.
So the destruction of a town there means the destruction of buildings
that have stood for centuries, and would in the normal course of
events have stood for centuries more.
A few civilians had crept back into the town. As in other places, they
had come back because they had no place else to go. At any time a
shell might destroy the fragment of the building in which they were
trying to reëstablish themselves. There were no shops open, because
there were no shops to open. Supplies had to be brought from long
distances. As all the horses and automobiles had been commandeered by
the government, they had no way to get anything. Their situation was
pitiable, tragic. And over them was the daily, hourly fear that the
German Army would concentrate for its onward drive at some near-by
point.