underground observation-post to be used in case of a bombardment.
A flight of steps led down into it. It had a good many feet of solid
earth above it, and consisted of two rooms with two bunks covered with
pine boughs in one, and two camp cots in the other for the General
himself and his artillery aide. It was well stored with water and
provisions, and here the General, in case of a sustained bombardment,
could remain in relative security for days on end, observing the
effect of his own artillery fire or of any infantry attacks he might
direct, and sending his orders out by telephone. It will probably be
asked how he could do much observing from a cellar several metres under
ground. The answer is that the second of the two rooms had a sort of
window about a foot high and running the whole length of the wall,
which opened out through the side of the hill. It was covered by a
heavy steel shutter which could be partly or entirely swung up by a
pulley arrangement, and through this crack in the hillside the whole
sector lay in perfect view.
Climbing out again, we ventured a hint or two as to how interested we
were in batteries. But the General himself was intensely interested
in an intricate system of subterranean passages which his Chief of
Engineers was building to connect up the observation-post with other
points, and he took the very human view that the technical explanations
of the Engineer which were so absorbing to him must necessarily be
equally enthralling to us.
Finally we started back across the hilltop toward where my imagination
conjured up serried arrays of great guns frowning at the enemy.
On the way we stopped to inspect the telephone central which connected
up the observation-posts with all the batteries behind and the trenches
in front, and for that matter, with Paris or any other part of France.
In a low log hut, its roof and walls protected by several feet of
sand-bags, a soldier sat at a large switchboard with a telephone
receiver strapped to his head. As we stood for a moment watching him
a bell tinkled. He stuck the small peg into one of the multitudinous
little holes.
"Allo! This is Number 15," he said in a low voice, then listened
intently to some message.
"All right," he said at its conclusion. Then turning half round on his
stool he saluted and reported:
"Mon General, Number 19 reports that a Boche aeroplane has passed them
and is coming over us."
"Telephone our guns to fire at him, and warn Numbers 11 and 12 to
prepare for his coming," ordered the General, and as the soldier stuck
his pegs in and gave his telephone messages we hustled out to see the
excitement. Sure enough, we had hardly got out when we heard a distant
whirring, and high up in the air saw an aeroplane floating our way.
[Illustration: Page 70
"WE WERE COMPLETELY ABSORBED IN WATCHING THE SOFT LITTLE CLOUDS
PLAYFULLY DANCING ALONG AHEAD OF THE LAZILY DRIFTING AEROPLANE"]
"Keep under the tree! Keep under the tree!" warned the General sharply.
"If he sees us all standing here, and gets away, he will report this as
an important point and it will rain 'marmites' for days to come."
So he, his staff-officers, Eyre and I grouped ourselves under a big
tree and stared up at the approaching aeroplane through the gaps in its
branches.
"Whang!" A "soixante-quinze" exploded violently in the woods close by,
and I jumped equally violently.
"Whang! Whang! Whang!" came three more shots in extremely close
succession.
"You've got a whole battery shooting, haven't you?" I remarked.
"Oh, no! There is only one gun located just there. It does not waste
time in firing, does it?" smiled the General. "Our 'soixante-quinze'
field-guns can shoot twenty-five shots a minute."
Other guns in the immediate neighborhood took up the chorus, and,
looking through our glasses, we could see little soft white cloudlets
puff into being all around the aeroplane.
But he kept sailing calmly on.
A little further off in the woods came a staccato rat! tat! tat! tat!
tat! like a boy drawing a stick along a picket fence.
"There goes one of our mitrailleuses at work on him."
We were completely absorbed in watching the soft little clouds
playfully dancing along ahead of the lazily drifting aeroplane, when
the General's voice brought us back to earth.
"Come! Come! We must hurry or we shall be late for lunch. I did not
realize how late it was."
I looked at him in horror. What! Forsake the sensations of this moment
for such a thing as a lunch! Any one of those gentle little white puffs
might transform the aeroplane into a hurtling mass of flame. Lunch!
But the General was entirely sincere and very positive. From his point
of view Boche aeroplanes could be shot at any hour of the day, but
lunch was an event which took place only once in the twenty-four hours.
Lunch was the recognized symbol of hospitality; aeroplane shellings
decidedly were not.
As we reluctantly followed him through the woods he may have noticed my
disappointment, for he remarked:
"It is highly improbable that you would see anything more than you
already have seen. They are very difficult things to hit, you know. As
a matter of fact, we were doing most of our shooting in front of him
rather than at him, so as to head him back. But he evidently has his
nerve with him, for he has kept right on and got away from us. Listen!
Our guns have stopped, and there are the guns I telephoned to at Number
12 taking a shy at him."
As we hiked along at the General's favorite pace Captain F----
diffidently suggested:
"And the batteries, mon General, in which this gentleman was much
interested. I suppose there will be no opportunity to see them?"
"Oh, there is really nothing interesting about them, as they are not
firing to-day. The pieces are scattered all over the hillside in the
woods, and the crews are having their lunch. But as a matter of fact
our route home takes us right by one 120-millimetre gun and we can
have a look at that."
Walking down the rear slope of the hill, we came upon a party of
soldiers, apparently out for a picnic, eating their lunch on a rustic
table, with pine branches over their heads and fragrant pine needles
under their feet.
They jumped to attention.
"Show us the piece," said the General to their non-commissioned officer.
The groups of soldiers hustled over to a big object bundled up in
tarpaulins, which stood a few yards off. Stripping off the coverings,
they showed us a heavy field-piece standing on treadled wheels with its
muzzle pointed apparently aimlessly up the green-wooded hillside at
some clouds which floated in the blue sky just above the hill-crest.
"That gun," explained the General, "is aimed at the village of ----,
about eight kilometres distant, behind the German lines. Their reserves
have to pass through the village to reach the front; so whenever
we hear that they are bringing up their reserves we start this gun
shelling that little village. Usually an important village is shared by
several guns, but that village is the particular property of this gun.
[Illustration: Page 71
"AS WE HIKED ALONG AT THE GENERAL'S FAVORITE PACE"]
[Illustration: Page 72
"A HEAVY FIELD-PIECE STANDING ON TREADLED WHEELS"]
"Show the gentlemen how it works," he ordered. The artillerymen leaped
into position, swung open the breach, lifted a heavy shell, and thrust
it into the chamber.
"Careful there; don't shoot it off!" exclaimed the General, and added
to me, "There's no use damaging our own French villages more than is
indispensable."
As tenderly as a thoroughbred is blanketed after a race the big gun
was bundled up again by its crew, and, leaving them to resume their
picnicking under the pine-tree, we strode away to the shooting-box and
the lunch.
And a very excellent lunch it was to which the General, some eight of
his staff-officers and our party of four sat down in the dingy old
dining-room of the shooting-box.
"You certainly mobilized an excellent chef," laughed Captain d'A---- as
we reached the entrée.
With white wine mixed with water to drink during the lunch, champagne
served in the French fashion with the dessert, and cigars, coffee and
liqueurs to follow, the commissariat department undoubtedly deserved
congratulations.
------------------------------------
MENU
du 1º Août 1915
------------------------------------
DÉJEUNER
------------------------------------
Hors-d'oeuvres
Oeufs pochés à la Rossini
Tournedos grillés à la Bouchère
Pommes frites
Pigeons rotis
Haricots verts à l'anglaise
Crème au chocolat
Compote de pèches
Dessert
------------------------------------
The conversation was of course not for publication, but one passage I
think I can repeat without fear of violating confidence.
"Why did not Von Kluck march on Paris when he had the chance?" I asked
the officer who was sitting on one side of me.
"I will tell you," he replied. "In the 1913 'Kriegsspiel' [great
manoeuvres] in Germany the theoretical invasion of France by the
attacking armies was precisely the same advance as in actual fact they
made the following year. In the maneuvers Von Kluck commanded the right
wing precisely as he did in the actual invasion. In these maneuvers he
came to a point in his advance where he had to choose between attacking
Paris and swinging past Paris in pursuit of the enemy. He decided to
attack Paris. The verdict of the board of generals who were judging the
maneuvers contained the severest kind of arraignment of Von Kluck for
having violated the cardinal principal of German military strategy by
allowing a mere geographical point to divert him from the one paramount
object of German generalship--the enemy's army. We actually possess a
copy of this official reprimand, for 'tout s'achête' (there is nothing
that money will not buy), you know. Now when little over one year
later Von Kluck in actual warfare came face to face with precisely the
same choice of alternatives, with the previous year's censure still
stingingly fresh in mind, he ignored Paris and followed the enemy army."
Luncheon over, we bade the splendid young General and his staff
good-bye, and motored quite a distance to visit one of the French
field hospitals. The wounded, after having first aid applied in the
trenches, were brought here in ambulances, where their wounds were
thoroughly dressed or operations performed. When there was a great rush
of wounded those capable of standing the journey were shipped on to
base hospitals as quickly as possible to make room for the new cases.
During the last few months, however, there had been so little hard
fighting on the section of the front which this hospital served, that
many of the wounded had been kept there for weeks and some for months.
The big rooms on the ground floor of the large country house in which
the hospital had been located, had been converted into wards for the
wounded privates, while the bedrooms on the upper floor were reserved
principally for officers.
It was curious to hear the deprecatory tone in which the Chief Surgeon
regretted that he had no freshly wounded to bandage or operate on
for our benefit. In fact from the front hospitals to the great base
hospitals of Paris the surgeons are all alike. They cannot keep a
professional note of regret out of their voices when explaining that
very few wounded have come in of late, nor a professional note of
encouragement when they understand an important action is soon to be
fought which will again fill their cots with "cases." It would be an
outrage to hold this attitude against these splendid men. If they had
not become impregnated by their professional point of view toward the
horrors of their work, they would all long ago have been in madhouses.
Our whole progress through the hospital was a strange conglomeration of
pathos and farce. For the Surgeon in Command, on our being introduced
to him, stated that he was the proud possessor of an orderly who
spoke the English tongue "à merveille." Our staff-officers politely
indicated to him that our own French, though not perhaps up to
Comédie Française standards, was no mean thing, and would render his
explanations entirely comprehensible to us. But these hints were of
no avail. The accomplishments of his linguistic prodigy must not be
wasted. So the orderly was produced and turned out to be master of the
most grotesquely unintelligible English that I have ever listened to.
As we passed between the lines of cots, each with its still figure
huddled under its gray blanket, as we were followed about by the
wondering gaze of the many eyes which look so incredibly large in the
wasted faces of the wounded, we had to listen to the explanations of
the Chief Surgeon, and then lend our ears to the burblings of the
orderly exterpreting them for our benefit. Even when we stood in the
modest little graveyard where those who had died of their wounds were
buried we were torn between tears and grins by the attentions of the
excellent man whom, I am ashamed to say, Eyre and I had christened
"the pest," and by the embarrassed writhings of our staff-officers
who spoke such excellent English that they thoroughly realized the
situation.
Having spent perhaps three-quarters of an hour in the hospital, which,
judged by the somewhat unexacting French standards, seemed efficiently
run, we departed for the first impromptu engagement of the day--the
studies of a class in grenade-throwing, which met not very far from the
hospital, and which I have elsewhere described in detail.
After an hour devoted to this exceedingly interesting experience, we
were whirled away to a distant appointment with another General of an
Army Corps. He led us to the flat roof of his headquarters, from which
at some distance he pointed out a third installment of the trenches
continuing from about the point where they had that morning run out of
sight, and from that point stretching along the Craonne plateau, nearly
to Soissons.
Having terminated a fifteen-minute meeting with this extremely
courteous General, the next number on our programme was the inspection
of an aviation "esquadrille" or squadron.
On our way, however, we stopped unexpectedly to look at a most
beautiful new anti-aircraft "seventy-five," a gun numbers of which the
French had just completed and were bringing to the front. As I was not
allowed to photograph the gun even from a distance and was enjoined to
regard its details as absolutely confidential, I can only say that,
mounted on its own motor, it could travel along the roads at forty
kilometres an hour; that it could be in action within one minute and a
half after coming to a stop, and that the way the turning of a couple
of little cranks which a child could whirl made the heavy muzzle swing,
and mount, and cut figure eights in the air, was something wholly
incredible.
We listened to a technical but most interesting exposition by the
Artillery Captain of the most up-to-date methods of firing at
aeroplanes, including the progressive and retrogressive systems, and
then sped away to the aviation field some ten or fifteen kilometres
distant. We found the aviation squadron on a very large field near
the top of a gradually sloping bare hill, comfortably installed, the
machines in their great hangars, the aviators in their small tents. The
whole organization was especially adapted for mobility. In one hour, at
need, the field would have left on it not a man, a stick or a shred
of the encampment. Hangars and tents would be careering along some
highroad, neatly folded in the big aviation lorries that stood handy,
mechanics would be sitting on the box seats or have their legs dangling
over the tail-boards, while pilots and observers would waft themselves
more comfortably by air to their new camp site.
The Captain of the "esquadrille" showed us, with quite pardonable
pride, his "avions de réglage"--planes carrying no bombs or
machine-guns, but equipped with wireless, which are used to correct
the fire of artillery, and his "avions de chasse" or hunting-planes
equipped with bombs, a machine-gun and a Winchester carbine. Some of
these had the pilot sit behind and the observer in front operating
the machine gun over the bow. Others had the pilot in front and the
observer behind, in which case the observer, standing up, operated the
machine-gun over the head of the pilot. Finally he showed us a splendid
new Caudron biplane having two independent motors and two traction
screws in front, so that if either motor were put out of business the
plane could continue flying on the other.
I was so enthusiastic about this machine that the Aviation Captain
turned to me and asked casually, "Would you perhaps like to go up and
take a 'petite promenade' in the Caudron?"
Would I? It did not take me many fractions of a second to impress on
him that I certainly would. But here Captain d'A---- demurred. It
was, he said, absolutely forbidden that any one should go up in army
aeroplanes except aviators on military duty. Those were the strict army
regulations. He was quite right and entirely justified in his attitude.
But Captain F----, who was a good sport and had become quite a chum of
mine, said, "Oh, let him go up. After all, the Swiss Military Attaché
went up the other day. I'll take the responsibility." And as he was
in immediate authority while we remained with the 5th Army, Captain
d'A---- good-naturedly shrugged his shoulders and let it go at that.
So I hurried down with the Aviation Captain to his tent to put on a
warm aviation suit, while the Caudron was prepared for our flight.
As we approached his tent, a single-motored aeroplane took aboard its
pilot and observer, its propellers whirred and roared, and it rolled
casually away up the gradual slope, through a field of standing grain,
till near the hilltop it took to the air as easily as a bird and
spiralled up toward the low-lying dark clouds.
In the Captain's tent I struggled into a heavy suit of black fur made
like a suit of combination underwear, legs and body all in one piece,
put on a pair of goggles and a heavily padded helmet, and emerged to
meet the disappointment of my life. Down pattered some drops of rain,
down spiralled the aeroplane which had just gone up.
"Too bad," said the Aviation Captain. "I can't send a machine up in the
rain."
I pleaded with my staff-officers to wait here for an hour to see
whether the rain might not stop. In vain. Even that good sport Captain
F---- was adamant. We could not possibly wait, because it would
completely throw out a visit to a horse hospital, and an inspection of
an army corps supply-train which were both unalterably fixed upon our
schedule. We were very late already. We must be off.
Well, then, could we not return early to-morrow morning to get the
flight?
"Malheureusement ça ne peut pas se faire." (French euphemism for "No.")
To-morrow morning I was slated for a visit to a base hospital which,
including motoring there and motoring back, would consume most of the
morning.
But I would infinitely prefer to go for a "petite promenade" in the
Caudron than to inspect the most unique base hospital in the world.
Yes, they could understand that perfectly, but unfortunately the
hospital was among "the arrangements" and the "petite promenade" was
not. Personally they would throw the hospital overboard in a minute,
but the matter was beyond their control.
So off we went, Captain F---- full of sympathy and I full of sulks, and
at about half past five visited what under other circumstances would
have been an exceedingly interesting big hospital full of hundreds of
sick and wounded horses. But I fear I was in no mood to appreciate the
ingenuity and thoroughness with which the kilometre or more of hospital
sheds had been constructed by the soldiers on a framework of poles,
with wicker-work sides covered with a sort of adobe, and a sloping roof
of thatched straw with little gables built here and there for the mere
love of beautifying which is apparently ever present in the French
race, whether at war or peace.
[Illustration: Page 85
PART OF THE ENORMOUS ENCAMPMENT OF SUPPLY-WAGONS, WHICH CARRY THE
COMPLETE SUPPLIES FOR THREE FULL DAYS FOR ONE ARMY CORPS]
On we went for another long run till we reached the enormous encampment
of supply-wagons, which carry the complete supplies for three full days
for one army corps. They had been there since the armies dug themselves
in.
"We are not useful now," the Colonel in Command regretfully confided
to me; "for almost all the supplies reach our armies by rail. But only
wait till the advance begins. Then we shall show what we can do."
This great encampment which covered some square miles of countryside
had begun as a bivouac and ended as a town. One walked down avenues
and side streets solidly flanked by the huts which this army had
built itself. They were all more or less standardized in building
materials--wattled walls covered with clay, and thatched straw roofs.
But there the uniformity abruptly ended. For these little houses had
not been merely constructed by builders as they would have been in
nearly any other country. This was France and they had been conceived
by architects. And each house expressed the original conception of the
soldier-architect who had designed it.
No one who has not walked through this mushroom town or the many others
like it can imagine the infinite variety of architectural forms which
can be wrought in one-story shacks of wattle, clay and straw. The
pliable wattle and clay lent themselves to effects which could not
have been possible in stone, brick or wood. Extraordinary bays and
alcoves, never before dreamed of by the Ecole des Beaux Arts gave light
and shadow to long walls. Bas-relief and high-relief were done with
spirit and often with fine art in the clay which covered the wattled
walls, the thatched straw of the roofs was erected into strange gables,
dormer windows, turrets and machicolations. Eccentric, grotesque many
of these experiments unquestionably were, but they meant on the part of
the tired soldiers hours and days and weeks of extra and unnecessary
work, lavished, not for their creature comfort, not for their physical
safety, but solely for their artistic satisfaction.
It was twilight when we took our leave and night had fallen long before
we rolled into Château Thiery, whither Captain d'A----'s orderly had
transported our bags, and where a very late dinner and comfortable beds
were awaiting us.
V
A GRENADE-THROWING SCHOOL
WITH THE 5TH FRENCH ARMY, _Aug. 9_.
I have just returned from attending a soldiers' school of
bomb-throwing. The military authorities permitted my presence as an
exceptional favor, informing me that this is the first time such a
privilege has been accorded a foreign civilian.
This particular school holds its classes in a large green field in
a peaceful little valley, within long artillery range of the firing
lines. No German shells, however, have hitherto distracted the pupils
from their rather gruesome lessons, and I will not endanger their
continued studies by giving a more definite description of the locality.
This school is attended by privates from each regiment, who spend four
days at their highly explosive studies. Toward the middle of the
field, about two hundred yards from one end and about three hundred
from the other, was a section of open trench about twenty yards long
and some four feet deep. This trench was about the usual three feet in
width except in its centre, where for about five feet it was recessed
back to a width of some six feet. This was where the French instructor
stood and whirled his arms to throw the bombs. A couple of feet to the
left of this recess was another recess, covered with a bomb-proof roof
of logs and earth.
Into this the instructor and his pupil sought refuge from the effects
of the bomb explosion. As the explosion really is surprisingly violent
and takes place at the longest only five seconds from the time the
mechanism of the bomb is started, and at a maximum distance of thirty
yards, the instructor and any one in the trench with him have got to be
exceedingly spry in running under the bomb-proof in order to beat the
bomb. There is, too, the danger of a premature explosion.