their 'minenwerfer,'" exclaimed the Lieutenant.
The report of the explosion from where we stood, not more than 250
metres away, was not loud.
The artillery was hard at it. Big clouds of black smoke rose sluggishly
by the German trench where the Belgian high-explosive shells were
bursting. Livelier clouds of white indicated the shrapnel explosions.
I was craning my neck to see what damage was being done the German
trench when a whole swarm of bullets struck very close indeed to my
head. The Lieutenant pulled me down into the trench.
"They shot at you that time, all right!" he laughed.
"Impossible!" I answered. "I can only barely see their trench over the
top of your first-line trench, so how could they possibly see me from
there?"
"Ah, but they were not shooting at you from there. They are up in the
tops of some of those trees," he explained, pointing to the row of
tall, innocent-looking trees. "Their sharpshooters climb up at night
and snipe from there all day, and those of them whom we do not locate
and kill climb down again the next night. They have telescopic sights
on their rifles, and these rifles are mounted on little tripods so that
they can fix their aim immovably on some spot where they think they
have seen a movement; and the next time the movement comes, ping! Only
I don't think they can use the tripods up in the trees."
At the Lieutenant's suggestion we scattered down along the trench in
case our little crowd might have been observed from a tree and an
artilleryman might try his luck on us.
Further down the trench where I took my new stand I went on watching
the shells burst, and listening to the projectiles from the opposing
sides go rattling along their invisible rails high overhead.
A little off to our right the French 75's were firing so quickly that
I hoped it would develop into the famous "trommelfeuer" ("drum-roll
fire," as the Germans call it), but it did not. We had received word
that they were going to fire 400 rounds at some objective whose nature
I did not learn. They certainly were firing them, and losing no time
about it, either.
I could not see their shells burst, as the lines took a turn just to
our right and disappeared behind some trees.
At the points where the armies of different nationalities connect they
are always scrupulously careful to inform each other what artillery
work they have in preparation, so that a sudden violent cannonade on
the part of one army will not alarm the next with the idea that a
German assault is being resisted.
It was particularly interesting to watch the Belgian soldiers, who
every few yards squatted placidly in the trench, short spades and
trowels in hand, busily engaged in digging little pits about two
feet deep in the bottom of the trench, and then scooping out little
channels running to these pits. These channels would drain the
surrounding yard or two of trench bottom into the pits, leaving muddy
patches where a moment before three or four inches of water had stood.
There the Belgian soldiers squatted like children making mud pies at
the seashore, and chatted complacently in Flemish while they fought
the enemy, who was only less hateful to them than the Germans. A
splendid, cool, nerveless lot of men, doing their work unostentatiously
but efficiently, neither dashing on the one hand nor dogged on the
other, but gifted with the admirable _morale_ of the imperturbably
matter-of-fact.
[Illustration: Page 135
UNDER HEAVY FIRE IN A BELGIAN COMMUNICATING-TRENCH. (THE FIGURE
STANDING UPRIGHT JUST BEHIND THE AUTHOR IS THE LIEUTENANT, WHO
STRAIGHTENED UP DURING THE MOMENT THE SNAPSHOT WAS BEING TAKEN
BUT WAS NOT HIT)]
Suddenly I heard an exclamation from one of the soldiers. Looking where
he pointed, I saw, just beyond the Belgian front trench, a huge column
of muddy water standing bolt upright against the horizon. It stood
there motionless until I began to think it would remain a permanent
fixture in the landscape. Then it suddenly collapsed. A Belgian shell
falling short had soused down into the Y---- Canal and exploded,
sending up this five-story waterspout.
It seemed a shame not to go forward into the front trench, but with the
Germans lobbing six-inch bombs in there with their "mine throwers" and
the artillery getting busier all the time, the Commandant thought it
would be taking too great risks. So we turned and crouched along back.
As we did so, it is worthy of comment, three German shells struck not
far to our left at not more than half-a-minute intervals and not one of
the three exploded. It was a striking example of faulty explosives.
We returned by a different trench, so that we did not have to repeat
the acrobatic feat over the telephone wire. But we had a little
excitement to make up for it, for, as I splashed along with a most
intense crick in my bent back, one of the German projectiles, which was
apparently running on perfect schedule along its overhead rails on its
way toward the Belgian artillery, suddenly jumped the track and came
hissing down toward us.
Simultaneously with the crash of the explosion I saw the men ahead of
me passionately hugging the bottom of the trench, and I found myself on
my knees and elbows, not a whit behind them in my devotion.
"That was a close one," said Captain L----.
"What was it--a 75?" I asked.
"Seventy-five nothing," he replied; "that was a 150 millimetre, and it
exploded within thirty metres of your head. There--see for yourself. If
we had not been in the trench that would have caught us nicely!"
I peeped over the edge of the trench and there, sure enough, was a big
cloud of sooty black smoke wallowing up from behind some broken masonry
not more than thirty yards off.
"Filons!" ("Let us beat it!") said the Commandant tersely, and we did.
VIII
LESSONS
The great lesson that a visit to England, France and what remains of
Belgium to-day will teach any one who is willing to be taught by hard
facts and not by wistful visions is that peace in the near future is
quite impossible. For the only peace, in the conviction of the Allies,
that will end this war is a peace neither of conciliation nor of
compromise, but a peace whose terms are arbitrarily imposed by one side
and of necessity submitted to by the other.
That is the end to which the Allies are determined to fight, whether
that end is achieved by the more merciful method of decisive military
victory or must be gained by the more terrible pressure of complete
financial, industrial and economic prostration.
Any attempt to abort this object by mediatory proposals, whether
Pontifical or Presidential, the Allies frankly declare they would
consider an inopportune impertinence.
I have had the privilege of studying the spirit of the English, the
French and the Belgians at a time when that spirit was being severely
tested--when their fortunes were at their lowest ebb since the days
just before the battle of the Marne. Their spring advance had utterly
failed to materialize; throughout the summer they had been held in
almost complete check by the Germans' depleted line. The Dardanelles
had turned out to be a slaughter-house, with success appearing more
and more precarious, and the only alternative to success seeming to be
disaster.
The starvation of Germany had become a conceded impossibility. Her
dearth of rubber, copper, cotton, etc., had assumed more and more the
nature of a superable handicap rather than a decisive crippling. Her
financial situation had already made fools of so many economic seers
that they had become less and less didactic regarding her impending
bankruptcy.
The practical success of allied diplomacy among the Balkan neutrals
had grown to seem more and more dubious.
Finally, Russia had been so manhandled that in the opinion of British
and French military authorities with whom I talked it would take her
from one to two years to reorganize her armies into condition for an
effective offensive.
Yet, in spite of all these admitted disadvantages, I did not meet a
single Frenchman, Englishman or Belgian who was not sincerely confident
of ultimate victory. But only an ultimate peace could, in their
conviction, be victorious. An immediate peace, or a peace in the near
future, no matter what the German concessions, would for the Allies be
the peace of defeat.
From Germany must come, not concessions, but abandonments, or the war,
with all its hideous sacrifices unredeemed, would be a failure. Such an
artificially fabricated peace, such a compromise between irreconcilable
principles, would be but the prelude, more or less dragged out, to a
fresh conflict.
I have talked to men and women of many classes, of many degrees of
education and of many grades of intelligence. I found their views
unanimous and their reasons for these views so constantly the same as
finally to seem almost hackneyed.
I am aware of the existence in England of such a body of peace
propagandists as the Union of Democratic Control, and in Holland
of some French pacifists, and scattered here and there of
Internationalists. But of all the men and women with whom I casually
talked there was not one who shared these gentlemen's views.
Of all the French statements of reasons why the war must go on, which
were iterated and reiterated to me, the best came from a prince, a
retired naval captain and a little dressmaker. Unfortunately, they may
not be quoted by name.
The prince said: "After this taste of blood the world can never remain
long at peace while any powerful nation dedicates itself to the ideals
and instincts of militarism. Germany, under the guidance of Prussia, is
to-day such a nation. These aims and instincts have been so thoroughly
absorbed by her people that, even if they sincerely wished to, these
people could not eliminate them inside of two or three generations. It
is ludicrous to imagine that these characteristics, which have become
nearly if not quite hereditary, could be negotiated out of them. They
must be subjugated out of the German people."
The naval captain said: "It is a mere matter of arithmetic. It can
be easily demonstrated that at the end of this war, with its cost on
her shoulders, if France does not immediately reduce her armaments to
a minimum she is absolutely bound to go bankrupt. Now, as we cannot
conceivably trust any mere promises of disarmament which Germany might
make, it is obvious that we must go on with this war until we have
reduced her to such a condition that we can enforce disarmament upon
her, and thus safely enjoy its benefits ourselves."
The little dressmaker said: "My husband has been fighting at the
front for months. It would be natural for me to wish the war to end
to-morrow, no matter on what terms, if I could get my husband back
before he is killed. But I want the war to go on until the 'Boches' are
crushed; otherwise in another ten years or so there will be a new war,
and then they will come and take away not only my husband, but my son
as well."
In England the same line of reasoning prevailed. And the fact cannot
be too strongly emphasized that this reasoning did not take the shape
of stock arguments devised by politicians to bolster up some expedient
course and drilled into the people for parrot-like repetition. The
arguments were the spontaneous expression of the heartfelt convictions
of all these people.
Intelligent opinion in England ranges between the two statements made
to me, respectively, by a very famous Tory statesman and administrator,
and by one of the best-known Liberal statesmen in English public life
to-day.
The first of these was terse and to the point:
"It is the greatest mistake for your Government to feel that the United
States can, by remaining neutral, help to bring the war to a close.
This war will be fought to a point where no mediation will be possible
or needed. No peace with Germany, signed with a Hohenzollern in power,
would be worth more than twenty years' peace to the world. To make
Germany's promises binding on her, her people have got to have a share
in her foreign policy, and that they cannot have under the present
dynasty or system."
The second statement was:
"The best information that I can obtain from Germany is that, if she
wins, the advanced party, which is in the ascendancy, plans to erect
Poland into a semi-independent kingdom, contributing to it that portion
of Poland which Germany herself now possesses. She will annex Belgium,
probably a strip of Northern France, and possibly enough of Holland to
give her command of the mouths of the Scheldt and Rhine.
"Personally I cannot feel it to be unreasonable from her point of view
that she should plan to correct a situation where her great water
artery, the Rhine, is bottled up at its outlet. She will also take all
Courland, and this, too, is not so unreasonable, since the population
is far more German than Russian. Nevertheless, if such geographical and
ethnological changes as these were accomplished and to be maintained,
who can conceivably imagine that Germany can afford to modify her
militarism?
"My own views as to what the general terms of peace should be if the
Allies win are shared by men in both England and France whose opinions
will have weight in the peace negotiations. They are:
"To erect an independent Polish kingdom or state; to reconstitute
Belgium with indemnity; to hold a plebiscite in Alsace-Lorraine, taken
by a neutral, preferably the United States, in order to determine to
whom they should belong, and in what proportions; to dismember Turkey,
excepting Anatolia, which, being strictly Turkish, should be left to
the Turks; to enforce a very large degree of disarmament upon Germany
and Europe; to leave the German-speaking German Empire intact. (This
talk about the deposition of the Hohenzollerns as one of the peace
terms is sheer impertinence.)
"Now, you must readily perceive that any peace made in the near future
must conform or approximate to the German plans which I have outlined
and must involve a continuance of militarism and a standing incitement
to fresh wars. While a peace on the terms which we favor, a peace
that will perpetuate peace, must be wrung from a decisively beaten
Germany, and is therefore a long way off. That is why we shall have to
go through a very bad time of it for some period to come, and why our
ultimate victory will be at least one year, and possibly two or three
years off."
The keenest realization that victory will be slow, the completest
confidence that its certainty is axiomatic, is to be found in the
allied armies. There, ungrudgingly, they give the Germans fullest
credit for their preparedness, for their foresight, for their powers of
systematic and sustained labor, for their inventiveness. And they do
not waste their time trying to devise discrediting substitutes for such
words as "ability" in talking of their Generals, "courageousness" in
talking of their soldiers, and "patriotism" in talking of their people.
It is only when you get far behind the firing line that manliness
merges into meanness in estimating the enemy.
Yet these very officers who paid such soldierly tributes to their
antagonists were so wholly assured of eventual victory that any
scepticism on my part did not irritate them, but merely moved them to
good-natured smiles.
"So far," an English staff-officer remarked to me, "we English have
been bungling amateurs in the art of war contending against trained
professional specialists. But with a couple of years' more experience
I believe we shall know as much about it as they do, and then we shall
win."
"In the last analysis, talking from the military standpoint, this war,
like every war, will be won by men," said a French staff-officer.
"The Germans will not be beaten through lack of guns or ammunition or
machinery or supplies, but through lack of men. How long by the aid of
mechanics they can postpone the hour when the lack of men becomes fatal
to them I do not know--one year, two years. But in the end, with the
allied man-power steadily growing, and the German man-power steadily
lessening, their military collapse is inevitable."
These are typical of a score of similar views advanced by officers,
from Generals down to subalterns.
In the French army, as they show you their elaborate machine-shops
mounted on motor-lorries for the repair of all the vehicles in the
transport service, they will say with the most complete conviction:
"This mobility is not of much importance now, but when we begin the
pursuit of the 'Boches' then they will come in handy!"
When they show you their great parks of supply-trains, each carrying
three days' complete provisions for one army corps, they will tell you
earnestly:
"Not much use now when the railroads do most of the carrying of
supplies to the armies, but wait till the advance begins and then we
shall be useful!"
When they let you examine their wonderful 75's, mounted on an
automobile capable of doing over thirty miles an hour over the road,
and of starting a stream of twenty-five shells a minute one minute
after coming to a standstill, they will shrug their shoulders and say:
"Something of a waste just now, perhaps, but when the advance is on
they will do wonderful work!"
The advance! The advance! is in all their minds.
"But when will the advance begin?" you ask a chalk-powdered infantryman
sweating in the sun-soaked trenches.
"Ah!" he will answer with complete unconcern. "Not yet, Monsieur. They
say next spring or next summer. But then 'On les aura!'" ("We'll get
them!")
And that unconcern means far more than appears on the surface. It means
that the "poilu" knows he will have another winter in the trenches,
with all the terrible discomforts that soldiers dread so much more than
they dread danger. He knows it, and is completely reconciled to it.
"That was the one thing we feared"--a French General admitted to
me--"the effect on the men's _morale_ of the certainty that they would
have another winter in the trenches. But they know it now, and 'ils
s'en fichent!'" (to which the nearest American slang equivalent would
be "they should worry!")
In the amazing New France (which the French prefer to consider a
reincarnated rather than a transformed France) the people are as
determined as the army. A short time ago, when the authorities first
began to give the soldiers at the front their "permissions" to go home
for three days, they did so with considerable apprehension that the
home influence on the soldier might be a disheartening one.
But, on the contrary, the reunion seemed to give mutual encouragement.
The soldier braced up the "home folks'" confidence and pride in the
army, and the home folks stimulated the soldier's confidence and pride
in himself. Thus the experiment has turned out a great success.
The politicians and their fermentations are, in France, the bugbears
of the army officers. This feeling of aversion and contempt extends,
so far as I could make out, down through the rank and file. They feel
that when a nation is at death-grips with its enemy even the most
beautiful of democratic theories should be safely locked away with
other luxuries; that the politicians should confine their activities to
voting the funds necessary for the successful prosecution of the war,
and should leave the conduct of the war severely alone.
But in France even those politicians who hanker after a finger in the
military pie are unanimous for seeing the war through to a decisive
victory. They may play politics about whether the Government should or
should not have been removed from Paris to Bordeaux last September;
they may squabble over whether General Sarrail is the persecuted
military genius of the war or an incompetent officer whose removal
from Verdun should never have been sugar-coated by his appointment to
Gallipoli; they may intrigue to oust Millerand from the War Ministry
and try to get together on Briand for his place; they may stick loyally
to Joffre because an old man who is fond of fishing is not likely to
become an old man on horseback.
But, whether tirading against the evils of a bureaucracy or perorating
against the iniquities of the censorship, you will find the politicians
of France, Royalists, Clericals, Conservatives, Radicals and Socialists
with all their subtle subdivisions, having proved their patriotism
by the greatest sacrifice of which a politician is capable--having
for nigh on ten months kept silent!--earnestly and honestly working
for their country. They are striving, not for the quick peace of
compromise which would relegate the silent, efficient soldiers to their
subordinate powers and would restore to themselves all the prestige of
full-throated eloquence, but for the deferred and definitive peace of
victory, with all the continuance of second-fiddling to which such a
postponement subjects them.
It is indeed fortunate for the alliance that France--Army, Government
and People--is united in the determination to fight this war through to
its logical conclusion. For France is apt to be the nation which pays
the piper. England is physically safe behind her fleets, Russia proper
is physically safe behind her distances, for the German invasion is not
apt to go far beyond her alien provinces of Courland and Poland.
But France is not at sword's length, but at dagger's point, with her
enemy--one little slip by any one, from an absent-minded General down
to a sleeping sentinel, and she may become not a defeated, but a
conquered nation.
And this you can see in the faces of the French to-day. Not anger,
not bitterness, not sadness; neither excitement nor despondency is in
their faces, but a look of hushed and solemn suspense. It is a nation
with straining ears, with straining eyes, with bated breath, waiting,
waiting.
After leaving the hush of France, England appears at a disadvantage
largely undeserved. Compared with the atmosphere of strain in Paris,
the atmosphere of London seems one of relaxation. Contrasted with
the breathless struggle for self-preservation in France, the British
attitude toward the war seems almost dilettante.
This is unquestionably due in part to the fact that in England a
very literal-minded race is shipping its soldiers to fight in merely
geographical localities for seemingly abstract principles. The trouble
is that England has the Channel and France has the imagination. It is
obvious how markedly stronger the combination would be if Britain were
fighting an invader and France were fighting for a sentiment.
The superficial impression of holiday soldiering that one gets in
England is emphasized by the British hatred of the dramatic and
the British worship of sport. The British go on laughing, dining,
play-going, dancing, supping; in fact, frivolling, because they think
it would be melodramatic to forswear these pursuits because of the war.
They go on cricketing, racing, fishing, shooting, hunting, because they
go on eating, drinking, sleeping and bathing. These are part of the
bodily functions of the Briton.
To any other nation, sport, no matter how intimate a part of the
national life, in certain emergencies becomes trivial. To say that
to an Englishman would be equivalent to saying that under any
circumstances childbirth or prayer could be trivial. It is a national
characteristic which must simply be accepted.
The impression made on superficial observers by these manners and
habits of casual unconcern does England a certain injustice. For as far
as her duties to her allies are concerned she has undoubtedly gone far
beyond her obligations.
As one of her Cabinet members (a man who may well be her next Prime
Minister) put it to me:
"The best two ways that I know of to prove one's devotion to a cause
are to pay for it and to die for it. England is voluntarily doing both
in far greater measure than her commitments call for. When the war
started she agreed to help France on land with an army of 150,000 men.
She has now raised an army of 3,000,000 men.