come; no Belgian wanted them; and this was the fact decisive in the
scales of justice. She said, as the officer had said, that the Germans
were “out there.” Across the fields one saw nothing on that still
August day; no sign of war unless a Taube overhead, the first enemy
aeroplane I had seen in war. For the last two days the German patrols
had ceased to come. Liége, we knew, had fallen. Looking at the map, we
prayed that Namur would hold.
“Out there” beyond the quiet fields that mighty force which was to
swing through Belgium in flank was massed and ready to move when
the German staff opened the throttle. A mile or so away a patrol of
Belgian cyclists stopped us as we turned toward Brussels. They were
dust-covered and weary; the voice of their captain was faint with
fatigue. For over two weeks he had been on the hunt of Uhlan patrols.
Another _shipperke_ he, who could not only hate but fight as best he
knew how.
“We had an alarm,” he said. “Have you heard anything?”
When we told him no, he pedalled on more slowly, and oh, how wearily!
to the front. Rather pitiful that, too, when you thought of what was
“out there.”
One had learned enough to know, without the confidential information
that he received, that the Germans could take Brussels if they chose.
But the people of Brussels still thronged the streets under the
blankets of bunting. If bunting could save Brussels, it was in no
danger.
There was a mockery about my dinner that night. The waiter who laid the
white cloth on a marble table was unctuously suggestive as to menu.
Luscious grapes and crisp salad, which Belgian gardeners grow with
meticulous care, I remember of it. One might linger over his coffee,
knowing the truth, and look out at the people who did not know it.
When they were not buying more buttons with the allied colours, or
more flags, or dropping nickel pieces in Red Cross boxes, they were
thronging to the kiosks for the latest edition of the evening papers,
which told them nothing.
And one had to make up his mind. Clearly, he had only to keep in his
room in his hotel in order to have a great experience. He might see the
German troops enter Belgium. His American passport would protect him
as a neutral; Minister Brand Whitlock and Secretary of Legation Hugh
Gibson would get him out of trouble.
“Stick to the army you are with!” an eminent American had told me.
“Yes, but I prefer to choose my army,” I had replied.
The army I chose was not about to enter Brussels. It was on the side
of the _shipperke_ dog mitrailleuse battery which I had seen in the
streets of Haelen, and the peasant woman who shook her fist at the
invader, and all who had the _shipperke_ spirit.
My empty appointment as the representative of the American press with
the British army was, at least, taken seriously by the policeman at
the War Office in London when I returned from trips to France. The day
came when it was good for British trenches and gun positions; when it
was worth all the waiting, if one wished to see the drama of modern war
intimately.
III
MONS AND PARIS
The English base--Stories of the wounded--The cataclysm a reality--
London after Mons--The call to Englishmen--The “Fog of war”--
From Dieppe to Paris--The red trousers of the French--Empty
Paris--Can the German machine be held?--“The French have not
had their battle yet!”
Back from Belgium to England; then across the Channel again to
Boulogne, where I saw the last of the French garrison march away,
their red trousers a throbbing target along the road. From Boulogne
the British had advanced into Belgium. Now their base was moved on to
Havre. Boulogne, which two weeks before had been cheering the advent of
“Tommee Atkeens” singing “Why should we be downhearted?” was ominously
lifeless. It was a town without soldiers, a town of brick and mortar
and pavements whose very defencelessness was its security should the
Germans come.
The only British there were a few stray wounded officers and men
who had found their way back from Mons. They had no idea where the
British army was. All they realised were sleepless nights, the shock
of combat, overpowering artillery fire, and resisting the onslaught of
outnumbering masses.
An officer of Lancers, who had ridden through the German cavalry with
his squadron, dwelt on the glory of that moment. What did his wound
matter? It had come with the burst of a shell in a village street which
killed his horse after the charge. He had hobbled away, reached a
railroad train, and got on board. That was all he knew.
A Scotch private had been lying with his battalion in a trench when a
German aeroplane was sighted. It had hardly passed by when showers of
shrapnel descended and the Germans, in that grey-green so hard to see,
were coming on as thick as locusts. Then the orders came to fall back,
and he was hit as his battalion made another stand. He had crawled a
mile across the fields in the night with a bullet in his arm. A medical
corps officer told him to find any transportation he could; and he,
too, was able to get aboard a train. That was all he knew.
These wounded had been tossed aside into eddies by the maelstrom of
action. They were interesting because they were the first British
wounded that I had seen; because the war was young.
Back to London again to catch the mail with an article. One was to
“commute” to the war from London as home. It was a base whence one
sallied forth to get peeps through the curtain of military secrecy at
the mighty spectacle. One soaked in England at intervals and the war at
intervals. Whenever one stepped on the pier at Folkestone it was with
a breath of relief, born of a sense of freedom long associated with
fields and hedges on the other side of the chalk cliffs which seemed to
make the sequestering barrier of the sea complete.
Those days of late August and early September, 1914, were gripping
days to the memory. Eager armies were pressing forward to a cataclysm
no longer of dread imagination but of reality. That ever deepening and
spreading stain from Switzerland to the North Sea was as yet only a
splash of fresh blood. One still wondered if one might not wake up in
the morning and find the war a nightmare. Pictures that grow clearer
with time, which the personal memory chooses for its own, dissociate
themselves from a background of detail.
They were very quiet, this pair that sat at the next table in the
dining-room of a London hotel. I never spoke to them, but only stole
discreet glances as we all will in irresistible temptation at any
newly-wedded couple. Neither was of the worldly type. One knew that to
this young girl London was strange; one knew the type of country home
which had given her that simple charm which cities cannot breed; one
knew, too, that this young officer, her husband, waited for word to go
to the front.
Unconsciously she would play with her wedding-ring. She stole covert
glances at it and at him, of the kind that bring a catch in the
throat, when he was not looking at her--which he was most of the
time, for reasons which were good and sufficient to others than
himself. Apprehended in “wool-gathering,” she mustered a smile which
was so exclusively for him that the neighbour felt that he ought to be
forgiven his peeps from the tail of his eye at it because it was so
precious.
They would attempt little flights of talk about everything except the
war. He was most solicitous that she should have something which she
liked to eat, while she was equally solicitous about him. Wasn’t he
going “out there”? And out there he would have to live on army fare.
It was all appealing to the old traveller. And then the next morning--
she was alone, after she had given him that precious smile in parting.
The incident was one of the thousands before the war had become an
institution, death a matter of routine, and it was a commonplace for
young wives to see young husbands away to the front with a smile.
One such incident does for all, whether the war is young or old. There
is nothing else to tell, even when you know wife and husband. I was
rather glad that I did not know this pair. Then I should be looking at
the casualty list in the newspaper each morning and I might not enjoy
my faith that he will return alive. These two seemed to me the best of
England. I used to think of them when gossip sought the latest turn of
intrigue under the mantle of censorship, when Parliament poured out its
oral floods and the newspapers their volumes of words. The man went off
to fight; the woman returned to her country home. It was the hour of
war, not of talk.
On that Sunday in London when the truth about Mons appeared stark to
all England, another young man happened to buy a special edition at a
street corner at the same time as myself. By all criteria, the world
and his tailor had treated him well and he deserved well of the world.
We spoke together about the news. Already the new democracy which the
war had developed was in evidence. Everybody had common thoughts and a
common thing at stake, with values reckoned in lives, and this makes
for equality.
“It’s clear that we have had a bad knock. Why deny it?” he said. Then
he added quietly, after a pause: “This is a personal call for me. I’m
going to enlist.”
England’s answer to that “bad knock” was out of her experience. She had
never won at first, but she had always won in the end; she had won the
last battle. The next day’s news was worse and the next day’s still
worse. The Germans seemed to be approaching Paris by forced marches.
Paris might fall--no matter! Though the French army were shattered,
one heard Englishmen say that the British would create an army to wrest
victory from defeat. The spirit of this was fine, but one realised the
enormity of the task; should the mighty German machine crush the French
machine, the Allies had lost. To say so then was heresy, when the world
was inclined to think poorly of the French army and saw Russian numbers
as irresistible.
The personal call was to Paris before the fate of Paris was to be
decided. My first crossing of the Channel had been to Ostend; the
second, farther south to Boulogne; the third was still farther south,
to Dieppe. Where next? To Havre! Events were moving with the speed
which had been foreseen with myriads of soldiers ready to be thrown
into battle by the quick march of the railroad trains.
Every event was hidden under the “fog of war,” then a current
expression--meagre official bulletins which read like hope in their
brief lines, while the imagination might read as it chose between the
lines. The marvel was that any but troop trains should run. All night
in that third-class coach from Dieppe to Paris! Tired and preoccupied
passengers; every one’s heart heavy; every one’s soul wrenched; every
one prepared for the worst! You cared for no other man’s views; the one
thing you wanted was no bad news. France had known that when the war
came it would be to the death. From the first no Frenchman could have
had any illusions. England had not realised yet that her fate was with
the soldiers of France, or France that her fate and all the world’s
was with the British fleet.
An Italian in our compartment would talk, however, and he would keep
the topic down to red trousers, and to the red trousers of a French
Territorial opposite with an index finger when his gesticulatory
knowledge of the French language, which was excellent, came to the
rescue of his verbal knowledge, which was poor. The Frenchman agreed
that red trousers were a mistake, but pointed to the blue covering
which he had for his cap--which made it all right. The Italian
insisted on keeping to the trousers. He talked red trousers till the
Frenchman got out at his station and then turned to me to confirm his
views on this fatal strategic and tactical error of the French. After
all, he was more pertinent than most of the military experts trying to
write on the basis of the military bulletins. It was droll to listen
to this sartorial discourse, when at least two hundred thousand men
lay dead and wounded from that day’s fight on the soil of France. Red
trousers were responsible for the death of a lot of them.
Dawn, early September dawn, on dew-moist fields, where the harvests lay
unfinished as the workers, hastening to the call of war, had left the
work. Across Paris, which seemed as silent as the fields, to a hotel
with empty rooms! Five hundred empty rooms, with a clock ticking busily
in every room! War or no war, that old man who wound the clocks was
making his rounds softly through the halls from door to door. He was a
good soldier, who had heeded Joffre’s request that every one should go
on with his day’s work.
“They’re done!” said an American in the foyer. “The French could not
stand up against the Germans--anybody anybody could see that! It’s
too bad, but the French are licked. The Germans will be here to-morrow
or the next day.”
I could not and would not believe it. Such a disaster was against all
one’s belief in the French army and in the real character of the French
people. It meant that autocracy was making sport of democracy; it meant
disaster to all one’s precepts; a personal disaster.
“Look at that interior line which the French now hold. Think of the
power of the defensive with modern arms. No! The French have not had
their battle yet!” I said.
And the British Expeditionary Force was still intact; still an army,
with lots of fight left in it.
IV
PARIS WAITS
The Paris of the boulevards a dead city--How Marianne goes to war--
The Germans are coming!--Silence and darkness--Moonlight on
the Arc de Triomphe--Trust in Joffre and in the army--Turn
of the tide--Joffre’s _communiqués_ more definite--Positions
regained--The French in pursuit--Paris breathes again--A
Sunday of relief--Religious rejoicing at Nôtre Dame--Groups in
the cafés--The American Embassy “mobilised for war”--“In spite
of ’70, France still lived.”
It was then that people were speaking of Paris as a dead city--a
Paris without theatres, without young men, without omnibuses, with the
shutters of its shops down and its cafés and restaurants in gloomy
emptiness.
The Paris the host of the idler and the traveller, the Paris of the
boulevards and the night life provided for the tourist, the Paris
that sparkled and smiled in entertainment, the Paris exploited to the
average American through Sunday supplements and the reminiscences of
smoking-rooms of transatlantic liners, was dead. Those who knew no
other Paris and conjectured no other Paris departed as from the tomb of
the pleasures which had been the passing extravaganza of relief from
dull lives elsewhere. The Parisienne of that Paris spent a thousand
francs to get her pet dog safely away to Marseilles. Politicians of a
craven type, who are the curse of all democracies, had gone to keep her
company, leaving Paris cleaner than ever she was after the streets had
had their morning bath on a spring day when the horse chestnuts were
in bloom and Madame was arranging her early editions on the table of
her kiosk--a spiritually clean Paris.
Monsieur, would you have America judged by the White Way? What has the
White Way to do with the New York of Seventy-second Street or Harlem?
It serves the same purpose as the boulevards of furnishing scandalous
little paragraphs for foreign newspapers. Foreigners visit it and think
that they understand how Americans live in Stockbridge, Mass., or
Springfield, Ill. Empty its hotels and nobody but sightseers and people
interested in the White Way would know the difference.
The other Paris, making ready to stand siege, with the Government gone
to Bordeaux with all the gold of the Bank of France, with the enemy’s
guns audible in the suburbs and old men cutting down trees and tearing
up paving-stones to barricade the streets--never had that Paris been
more alive. It was after the death of the old and the birth of the new
Paris that an elderly man, seeing a group of women at tea in one of the
few fashionable refreshment places which were open, stopped and said:
“Can you find nothing better than that to do, ladies, in a time like
this?”
And the Latin temperament gave the world a surprise. Those who judged
France by her playful Paris thought that if a Frenchman gesticulated
so emotionally in the course of every-day existence, he would get
overwhelmingly excited in a great emergency. One evening, after the
repulse of the Germans on the Marne, I saw two French reserves dining
in a famous restaurant where, at this time of the year, four out of
five diners ordinarily would be foreigners surveying one another in
a study of Parisian life. They were big, rosy-cheeked men, country
born and bred, belonging to the new France of sports, of action, of
temperate habits, and they were joking about dining there just as
two sturdy Westerners might about dining in a deserted Broadway. The
foreigners and _demi-mondaines_ were noticeably absent; a pair of
Frenchmen were in the place of the absentees; and after their dinner
they smoked their black briar-root pipes in that fashionable restaurant.
Among the picture post-cards then on sale was one of Marianne, who is
France, bound for the front in an aeroplane with a crowing French cock
sitting on the brace above her. Marianne looked as happy as if she were
going to the races; the cock as triumphant as if he had a spur through
the German eagle’s throat. However, there was little sale for picture
post-cards or other trifles, while Paris waited for the siege. They did
not help to win victories. News and not _jeux d’esprit_, victory and
not wit, was wanted.
For Marianne went to war with her liberty cap drawn tight over her
brow, a beat in her temples, and her heart in her throat; and the
cock had his head down and pointed at the enemy. She was relieved in
a way, as all Europe was, that the thing had come; at last an end of
the straining of competitive taxation and preparation; at last the
test. She had no channel, as England had, between her and the foe.
Defeat meant the heel of the enemy on her soil, German sentries in her
streets, submission. Long and hard she had trained; while the outside
world, thinking of the Paris of the boulevards, thought that she could
not resist the Kaiser’s legions. She was effeminate, effete. She was
all right to run cafés and make artificial flowers, but she lacked
beef. All the prestige was with her enemy. In ’70 all the prestige had
been with her. For there is no prestige like military prestige. It is
all with those who won the last war.
“But if we must succumb, let it be now,” said the French.
On, on--the German corps were coming like some machine-controlled
avalanche of armed men. Every report brought them a little nearer
Paris. Ah, monsieur, they had numbers, those Germans! Every German
mother has many sons; a French mother only one or two.
How could one believe those official _communiqués_ which kept saying
that the position of the French armies was favourable and then admitted
that von Kluck had advanced another twenty miles? The heart of Paris
stopped beating. Paris held its breath. Perhaps the reason there was no
panic was that Parisians had been prepared for the worst.
What silence! The old men and women in the streets moved as under a
spell, which was the sense of their own helplessness. But few people
were abroad, and those going on errands apparently. The absence of
traffic and pedestrians heightened the sepulchral appearance to
superficial observation. At the windows of flats, inside the little
shops, and on by-streets, you saw waiting faces, every one with the
weight of national grief become personal. Was Paris alive? Yes, if
Paris is human and not bricks and stone. Every Parisian was living a
century in a week. So, too, was one who loved France. In the prospect
of its loss he realised the value of all that France stands for, her
genius, her democracy, her spirit.
One recalled how German officers had said that the next war would be
the end of France. An indemnity which would crush out her power of
recovery would be imposed on her. Her northern ports would be taken.
France, the most homogeneous of nations, would be divided into separate
nationalities--even this the Germans had planned. Those who read their
Shakespeare in the language they learned in childhood had no doubt of
England’s coming out of the war secure; but if we thought which foreign
civilisation brought us the most in our lives, it was that of France.
What would the world be without French civilisation? To think of France
dead was to think of cells in your own brain that had gone lifeless; of
something irreparably extinguished to every man to whom civilisation
means more than material power of destruction. The sense of what
might be lost appealed to you at every turn in scenes once merely
characteristic of a whole, each with an appeal of its own now; in the
types of people who, by their conduct in this hour of trial, showed
that Spartan hearts might beat in Paris--the Spartan hearts of the
mass of every-day, work-a-day Parisians.
Those waiting at home calmly with their thoughts, in a France of
apprehension, knew that their fate was out of their hands in the hands
of their youth. The tide of battle wavering from Meaux to Verdun might
engulf them; it might recede; but Paris would resist to the last. That
was something. She would resist in a manner worthy of Paris; and one
could live on very little food. Their fathers had. Every day that
Paris held out would be a day lost to the Germans and a day gained for
Joffre and Sir John French to bring up reserves.
The street lamps should not reveal to Zeppelins or Taubes the location
of precious monuments. You might walk the length of the Champs Élysées
without meeting a vehicle or more than two or three pedestrians. The
avenue was all your own; you might appreciate it as an avenue for
itself; and every building and even the skyline of the streets you
might appreciate, free of any association except the thought of the
results of man’s planning and building. Silent, deserted Paris by
moonlight, without street lamps--few had ever seen that. Millionaire
tourists with retinues of servants following them in automobiles may
never know this effect; nor the Parisienne who paid a thousand francs
to send her pet dog to Marseilles.
The moonlight threw the Arc de Triomphe in exaggerated spectral
relief, sprinkled the leaves of the long rows of trees, glistened on
the upsweep of the broad pavements, gleamed on the Seine. Paris was
majestic, as scornful of Prussian eagles as the Parthenon of Roman
eagles. A column of soldiery marching in triumph under the Arch might
possess as a policeman possesses; but not by arms could they gain the
quality that made Paris, any more than the Roman legionary became a
Greek scholar by doing sentry go in front of the Parthenon. Every
Parisian felt anew how dear Paris was to him; how worthy of some great
sacrifice!
If New York were in danger of falling to an enemy, the splendid length
of Fifth Avenue and the majesty of the sky-scrapers of lower Broadway
and the bay and the rivers would become vivid to you in a way they
never had before; or Washington, or San Francisco, or Boston--or your
own town. The thing that is a commonplace, when you are about to lose
it takes on a cherished value.
To-morrow the German guns might be thundering in front of the
fortifications. The _communiqués_ from Joffre became less frequent and
more laconic. Their wording was like some trembling, fateful needle
of a barometer, pausing, reacting a little, but going down, down,
down, indicator of the heart-pressure of Paris, shrivelling the flesh,
tightening the nerves. Already Paris was in siege, in one sense. Her
exits were guarded against all who were not in uniform and going to
fight; to all who had no purpose except to see what was passing where
two hundred miles resounded with strife. It was enough to see Paris
itself awaiting the siege; fighting one was yet to see to repletion.
The situation must be very bad or the Government would not have gone
to Bordeaux. _Alors_, one must trust the army and the army must trust
Joffre. There is no trust like that of a democracy when it gives its
heart to a cause; the trust of the mass in the strength of the mass
which sweeps away the middleman of intrigue.