disappearing into dark woods, reappearing at the other end, I saw two
tiny lines of white like the aimless tracing of a child's slate-pencil
on a slate. They ran on across the landscape, now drawn boldly forward,
now swerving with indecision, now zigzagging with perplexity. Sometimes
the child's pencil had slipped and made short little lines at right
angles. Sometimes the pencil had made three or four short starts
parallel with each other before it finally got under way. Sometimes
it had made a regular little maze of lines. But always the two white
scratchings on the slate were drawn on and on till, wavering but always
close abreast, the trenches of the two armies disappeared into the far
distance.
Through powerful glasses the officer showed me little puffs of smoke
floating up from the sunny, silent, peaceful landscape. They were from
the exploding shells. To the right I saw a high cloud of smoke rising
lazily into the air out of some woods. It was a house in the German
lines fired by French shells. And, though the little puffs of smoke
were only here and there on the landscape, everywhere I could see
through the glasses the microscopic figures of peasants working busily
in their fields, bringing in the harvest. Many were soldiers helping
out, but very many were old men, boys and women. Again the scene seemed
symbolical.
Behind the soldier watching in the bomb-proof were the innumerable tiny
plodding figures, undaunted by the abrupt little puffs of smoke, doing
their patient share toward bringing in the harvest.
In the château itself as I went down-stairs I passed a bedroom door
with "Seine Koenigliche Hoheit" written across it in white chalk.
The Duke of Brunswick had slept there at the high tide of the German
advance. His staff had had their names chalked across various other
doors, but few of them remained.
One by one they were being gradually scrubbed off. It was explained to
me that these chalk marks were particularly hard to remove from wooden
doors. But with patience it is being done.
The trip which I was taking to the French front had been most kindly
arranged for me by the French Government as a special trip for my
particular benefit. It had the advantage of enabling us to go into
portions of the advanced trenches, where the larger parties could not
go for fear of precipitating shelling by the Germans.
Our party consisted of a staff-officer from Paris, a staff-officer from
army headquarters, Lincoln Eyre, whom the authorities had allowed me to
ask along--and myself.
After leaving the château we got into two elephant-gray army motors
with Remington carbines swung on their dashboards. The military
chauffeurs tore along the road, which was in easy range of the German
artillery, but which for some reason never was shelled.
As we whirled along we passed a variegated procession of vehicles.
Now a high peasant cart carrying home the harvest; now a military
motor-cyclist; now a motor-ambulance, with a pair of white feet showing
through the back, and the wounded man lying on a stretcher slung from
the roof by four straps to reduce jolts to a minimum; now a motor
full of officers smoking cigarettes; now a cavalryman exercising an
officer's mount.
Finally we stopped about a kilometre from a little village, which must
be nameless. On leaving our motors we walked a little further along
the road and then climbed down into a trench. This was about six feet
deep and three feet wide, the bottom and sides of white, chalky soil.
We pursued a serpentine course, but there was method in its meandering,
for a straight vista of trench leading toward the enemy would be a
splendid hunting-ground for bullets.
We had not gone far when I heard a sound like a boy cracking a toy
whip. "A bullet striking near us," explained an officer ahead of me.
I found it almost impossible to tell the difference between the report
of the French guns and the explosions of German shells. An officer told
me that their time-table nickname for French gun reports was "départs"
(departures), while that for the German shell explosions was "arrivées"
(arrivals).
Of course if either gun or shell explosion or both is very near to you
you can easily tell the difference, if there is enough of you left to
tell anything.
We walked on with the toy whip cracking at every other step and
"départs" and "arrivées" inviting guesswork as to which was which.
We passed soldiers in shirt-sleeves, deepening and widening a
communication trench. It was rather difficult to squeeze past them, but
this very definitely emphasized the wonderful terms of discipline, yet
the democratic friendliness, existing between the French officers and
the men. The officers talked to the men intimately and placed their
hands on the men's shoulders affectionately in squeezing by. The men
answered the officers easily, without restraint, but all stood at
attention and smartly gave the salute, which they regarded as a dignity
and not a degradation--a marvellous combination of discipline and
democracy.
We finally climbed out of the trench at the first house of the little
village, or rather of what had been a little village, for it was, on
close view, nothing more than the aftermath of an earthquake. In actual
fact it reminded me vividly of the walk I had taken through the remains
of Messina after the last great earthquake.
Before entering the village I stood in the road looking through my
field-glasses at a German war-balloon to my left. "Come along, come
along," shouted one of the officers. "If you stand there you'll start
the Germans shelling. You're in plain sight of them." Needless to say I
came along.
We walked through the shattered village, which the Germans shelled
religiously every day, until we came to the remains of a church.
Climbing in over the ruins we saw that there was one corner where
miraculously enough a few yards of floor and a few yards of roof had
escaped being shelled to pieces. There the altar had been set with
about ten chairs crowded in front of it. There mass is still held every
Sunday for the benefit of the sixteen inhabitants who still persisted
in staying in the village.
[Illustration: Page 49
"THERE MASS IS STILL HELD EVERY SUNDAY FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE SIXTEEN
INHABITANTS WHO STILL PERSISTED IN STAYING IN THE VILLAGE"]
These must indeed be solemn little services, for the Germans are far
from being Sabbatarians when it comes to shelling this particular
church.
Going on, we stopped in front of what was a house for one story and a
skeleton from there up. It looked as if nothing less than a squirrel
could get up to its rooftree, and nothing larger than a cat could
conceal itself behind any of the shreds and tatters of its roof.
Nevertheless, up there was the observation-post which I was about to
visit. We entered and found some soldiers cooking meat and potatoes on
a smokeless stove. One of them was amusing himself prancing around the
place on a pair of child's stilts.
Following instructions, I climbed up a long ladder, which led to two
rafters--the sole survivors of the second floor. A few planks had been
stretched between these. From them another ladder ran up to a small
patch of attic floor which, marvellously intact, nestled around three
sides of a brick chimney under the fragment of the roof. Arrived there,
I carefully lifted a little leather curtain, hung over a hole in the
roof, and squinted cautiously down upon the German lines.
The French trenches were practically hidden by the houses of the little
village, so that the first thing I saw was a belt of barbed wire, and
an unostentatious little white line, which marked the advanced German
position. Look as closely as one could, it was impossible to detect the
slightest movement, yet it was from this innocent-looking little line
that the bullets were imitating toy whips. I wedged myself into the
chimney to get a view of another side and then climbed down.
We now left the village and walked into the open advanced trenches.
The most remarkable thing was their utter desolation. We walked for a
hundred yards at a time, past scores and scores of rifle-slits, without
seeing a man. An officer explained that troops are not permitted in the
open trenches during the daytime, to save them needless loss from the
shells, which each side all day long, in a desultory way, threw into
the open trenches of the other.
The men stayed down in the shell-proof shelters all the day and manned
the trenches at night, when attacks are most feared.
It seemed as if the Germans could easily rush these trenches before
the men could be called out to meet them, but along the sides of every
trench ran one or two telephone wires. Apparently one quick order
would have these front trenches lined with men. We came to one of the
points nearest the German lines, from where the German trenches seemed
a mere stone's-throw. From there French soldiers used to crawl out
and fraternize with the Germans, between the lines, but that is now
forbidden.
We next came through a covered trench to a covered grenade section.
Here a table stood against the outer wall. It had three lines of
sockets in it, one ahead of the other. The soldiers fastened grenades
to the muzzles of their rifles, shoved the muzzles up through the
protected slit in the roof, rested the butts in one of the three
sockets, which gave three different ranges, and pulled the trigger. If
there is a premature explosion they are saved from its effects by the
muzzle being above the roof.
We continued on into a long section of the covered front trench, where
the rifle-slits have wires stretched across them about three inches
from the bottom. The soldiers must stick their rifles out under the
wire, which prevents their overshooting in the night. These covered
trenches are roofed with logs and covered with two or three feet of
earth. They are proof against ordinary shells, but not against heavy
artillery.
When that starts bombarding, the men climb down into excavations,
fifteen feet below the level of the trenches, and wait there until the
storm is over.
Soon we came to a black little underground chamber. An officer gave
an order and a brilliant ray of light shot in through an aperture in
the wall, near the low roof. This aperture was some three feet from
one side to the other, and only about six or eight inches from top to
bottom. It had been opened by dropping a hinged steel shutter which
was worked by a wire running over a pulley. The aperture was just
above the surface of the ground outside. In the little room stood a
machine-gun with its wicked-looking muzzle just flush with the opening.
The gunner showed us how, by swinging the gun from side to side, he
could play a stream of bullets through the wire entanglements, a foot
or two from the ground.
[Illustration: Page 51
THE AUTHOR IN A FRONT TRENCH NEAR RHEIMS. (THE GERMANS ARE ABOUT
THREE HUNDRED YARDS BEYOND THE WIRE ENTANGLEMENTS)]
At regular intervals we passed watchers, some standing in the covered
trenches gazing through the slits, some lying out above the open
trenches behind steel shields, and some using periscopes--all depending
on the location of the trench.
Looking into such a periscope one would swear that he was looking
straight out through a loophole. There is not the slightest sign of
looking at a reflection in a mirror. We walked bent double through an
extremely long pitch-black tunnel in an advanced position where some of
the officers themselves had never been, and then started back through
the open trenches.
At one point a lot of Germans had been buried. Sometimes a shell
explosion does a ghastly bit of disinterment, but I saw nothing
unpleasant on this occasion. At another point above the heads of each
side of the trench stood two shattered ammunition-carts. The Germans
shelled this place pertinaciously, believing that the carts were guns.
At another point we walked under a framework of wood, covered with barb
wire resting on two transverse timbers stretching across the top of
the trench. A rope hung down from one of the transverses. If the enemy
broke into the trench the defenders, by pulling this rope, could drop
the barb-wire contrivance into the trench, thus blocking it.
Finally we got back to the village. I had asked how the sixteen
inhabitants made a living. An officer replied that they sold eggs and
milk to the troops. I asked out of what they produced the milk and
he replied, "Very certainly out of a cow." As an answer to my polite
scepticism I was taken to see the cow. We walked down a little street
where I was told that the Germans were directing most of their shells.
They fortunately were napping while we walked through. We suddenly
turned into a gateway, and there in the middle of this wreck of a
village was a barnyard with chickens clucking, a horse tied to the
wall, and three cows.
And on a stool by one of the cows sat an aged woman making the milk
hiss down into a tin pail. There she sat, shells sailing to and fro
over her head, with the "départs" starting and the "arrivées" bursting.
There she sat and rocked with hearty laughter at the story of my
scepticism, and went on effectively proving her existence by her cow
by the extraction of that very milk which was sold to the soldiers.
We left the old lady surrounded by what seemed to her to be all the
comforts of home, and a few steps further were introduced to the Mayor
of X----.
It was a smiling, bland old man who greeted us most genially.
Apparently he had not a care in the world as he stood courteously
making conversation. It seemed to me that the humble old woman milking
her cow, and the Mayor entertaining visitors to what was no longer
his village, were further symbols of the spirit of a nation which was
not easily destined to decadence and downfall. Leaving the Mayor, we
entered the cemetery. There we were looking at the graves of two German
officers, two French officers and seventy French soldiers when an
"arrivée" burst with a louder report than we had as yet heard, followed
by a deep noise.
"What's that?" I asked.
An officer replied, "That's the metal fuse which at the moment of
explosion flies off through the air. You can only hear that when the
explosion is pretty close. You can certainly say now that you have been
under shell fire."
We went back to the end of the village furthest from the Germans
and entered the headquarters in one of the few houses still in fair
preservation. There the officers in command of the village opened a
bottle of champagne in our honor and we stood around drinking each
other's health. At that precise moment an unusually loud salvo of
French artillery went off by way of a salute to the toast.
On the way back through the communicating trenches, we saw an attempt
by the German guns to bring down a French aviator, who was flying above
us. The latest development of fire regulation by aviation is that the
Captain of the battery himself goes up in an aeroplane and sends his
corrections on aim down to his battery by wireless. This Captain had
his four "seventy-fives" hidden near our communication trench. Every
time they went off their report was so violent that I could not help
jumping.
The battery Captain was sailing around overhead and the German gunner
was letting drive at him with what looked to us to be pretty bad shots.
I could see the aeroplane wheeling in the air and hear the distant
reports of the "départs," wait an appreciable time and then see the
burst of white flame high up in the sky, followed by little puffs of
smoke.
"That's a wretched shot," said I, as one shell burst over our heads,
far behind the aeroplane.
"Yes, a bad shot for an aeroplane, but a good shot for us," Captain
F---- replied.
I was standing with my head away back, looking straight overhead.
"Come, move on, move on, or you'll catch some of that on your face,"
warned Captain d'A----. I obediently moved on and, sure enough, a
couple of seconds later he picked up a strictly fresh shrapnel ball
which had just fallen into our trench out of the sky. In the mean time
the Captain up in the air had corrected his guns, so that they were
hitting whatever they were shooting at, and he sailed away to the rear,
while his battery became really enthusiastic and went off with a series
of tearing crashes, which kept me jumping all the way to the end of the
communicating trench.
There I climbed out with my ears full of the "seventy-fives'" violent
reports, the distant explosion of their shells, the distant reports of
the enemy's guns, the "crack, crack, crack" of the rifle bullets and
the occasional sharp whistling of one overhead.
But my mind was full of the soldier watching and waiting, of the
peasants harvesting between the smoke puffs, the laughing old woman
milking the cow, of the genial Mayor extending his ruined hospitality,
and of what little things like these should bring to pass in the future
of France.
IV
A TYPICAL DAY'S TOUR
The morning after our trip to the front at Rheims we got up at seven
o'clock after a good night's sleep in the comfortable hotel, and by
shortly after eight were ready to start.
But here came a hitch in the smoothly running mechanism.
The evening before, on our run back to Epernay, Eyre and I had noticed
the exhilarating abandon with which our soldier chauffeur slung his car
along. We supposed that was the traditional method in which military
cars were run. We christened our driver "Barney Oldfield" and commented
jocosely on his various close squeaks. We noticed that Captain d'A----,
who in the front trenches had been absolutely imperturbable, did not
seem wholly at ease, but kept on leaning forward and muttering, "Mais
doucement! doucement!" through the front window. We thought, however,
that this was mere consideration on his part for our inexperienced
nervous systems.
On this following morning he declared to us that our chauffeur was
evidently a veritable maniac besides being an execrable driver, and
that nothing would induce him to ride behind "Barney Oldfield" again.
Shells and bullets were all in the day's work, but he'd be switched if
he would have his neck quite superfluously broken by an imbecile like
that.
He therefore, with our cordial approval, had sent round to the
auto-repair department for a sedater driver. But it was apparently
against the regulations to keep the same car if we changed chauffeurs,
and it was as hard to get another car in this headquarters of cars as
it is to get fresh milk on a cattle-ranch.
So we fretted politely for the best part of an hour before the new
chauffeur drove up. This delay haunted us for the rest of the day.
We motored over the same road we had covered the day before till we
got near Rheims again. There, at about ten o'clock, we met Captain
F----, who had been cooling his heels for an hour. I transferred myself
into his motor and we started off to inspect some batteries.
First, of course, we had to present ourselves to the General in
Command of the next Army Corps which we were to visit. We reached his
headquarters after half an hour's run and found him an interesting and
agreeable man of the world. He was much upset by the death the day
before of a Lieutenant of engineers. It appears that this Lieutenant
had been in command of a sap that was being run under the German
trenches in order to explode a mine. The Germans had counter-sapped,
broken into his tunnel, and exploded a mine there. He had recklessly
crawled down his sap and had not returned. Then his Colonel crawled
down the little tunnel after him, first taking the precaution to have a
rope tied on to himself. The soldiers at the French end of the tunnel
paid out the rope till it suddenly stopped. Then, as there was no more
movement, they became alarmed and, hauling in the rope, dragged the
Colonel back in a senseless condition. The Lieutenant had reached the
neighborhood of the exploded mine and had been overcome and killed by
the unescaped gases of the explosion. The Colonel in his turn had been
overcome, but had been hauled out in time to be revived.
It was strange to see how this loss was taken to heart by a General who
must in the past months have had to receive reports of deaths by the
thousand.
We motored on and about eleven o'clock were ushered into the
headquarters of the General of Division whose batteries we wanted to
see.
The other Generals had greeted us in the luxurious _salons_ of
châteaus, sitting near writing-desks holding a few papers, but without
any token of the military work on which they were engaged. This General
was housed with his staff in an old shooting-box. The room in which he
welcomed us had large-scale maps on its walls, and engineering plans on
its tables. The General himself was a splendid type of French officer,
remarkably young, wiry, snappy, keen as mustard. When the war began he
had been a Lieutenant-Colonel and had gone up the ladder by leaps and
bounds.
He said he would begin by himself taking us to an observation-point at
the top of a high hill, whence we could follow the whole sweep of front
from about the point where it had yesterday run out of our sight, on
for many miles to the Aisne and well beyond it.
Up the hill we went at about as fast a walk as I have ever used on
a stiff up-grade. Beside me, setting the pace, went the General in
his baggy red riding-breeches, his tight-fitting black tunic, his
well-polished black-leather puttees and shapely boots. As we climbed at
top speed he talked a steady and most interesting stream. I began to
listen for any symptoms of the pace affecting his breath. But not a bit
of it; on he walked and on he talked. It was a hot day and the sweat
began to drip off of me in spite of my cool khaki clothes. But the
General in his black-cloth tunic and red breeches remained as cool as a
cucumber. By the time we legged it over the crest of the hill I would
have been willing to back him in a walking contest against any one of
the twenty thousand men in his division.
Now we walked along a level path through woods till we came to an open
space on the hillside.
The General stopped abruptly. "Don't go further here," he snapped out,
"the Germans might see us through their glasses. They've got them
constantly trained on this hill to try to locate my observation-post.
They have not struck it yet, though the other day they happened to drop
a shell not far from it which killed two of my officers."
So we retraced our steps a short distance and took another path which
avoided the open place on the hillside.
Finally we reached the observation-post, carefully screened by an
artificial bower of pine boughs. Maps were tacked on a rude table,
while a big telescope stuck its muzzle surreptitiously out between the
boughs.
The young General pointed out the two white trench lines pursuing
each other league on league across the face of the summer landscape
below us, now abruptly approaching, now coyly withdrawing from each
other in their deadly courtship. He ran swiftly over the various
features of interest: That white scar on the slope down yonder was
where the French had recently exploded a great mine under the Germans.
Particularly bloody fighting had been going on at that point. Those
roofs in the hollow the other side of that little hill were the
village of Bery-au-Bac, which so frequently appeared in the official
communiques as the scene of desperate attacks. Over there beyond
the canal in that angle between it and the Aisne for perhaps half a
kilometre there was a complete gap in the trench lines which were
popularly supposed to run uninterruptedly from the North Sea to the
Alps. Still further over yonder the hostile trenches approached each
other so closely that one of those houses had one end occupied by the
French and the other by the Germans.
"Over there," said the General with a sweep of his hand and a shake of
his head, "occurred one of the great misfortunes of the battle of the
Marne. Our troops there had hurled the Germans back across the Aisne
and clear back over those hills. But the French troops over here more
to the left had had their advance checked by the retreating Germans.
Now those troops to the right were so far ahead that they had lost
touch with the ones to the left. Had they been veteran troops they
could easily have manoeuvred the backward troops up into line with
themselves, and had they done this, with the Germans forced back beyond
that line of natural defense, the Craonne plateau positions would have
been turned and there is no knowing how far the German retreat might
have been compelled to continue. But alas! they were green troops, and
when they had waited and found that the troops to their left were not
linking up with them they fell back from their precious territory to
form a line with their fellows. And that is why we are here to-day."