himself yellow by cheating his partner out of a mine. He appeared one
day hungry at a cabin occupied by half a dozen men who knew him. They
gave him food and a bunk that night; they gave him breakfast; they
even carried his blanket roll out to his sled and harnessed his dogs
as a hint, and saw him go without one man having spoken to him. No
matter if that man believed he had done no wrong, he would have needed
a rhinoceros’ hide not to have felt this silence. Such treatment the
Belgians have given to the Germans, except that they furnished the
shelter and harnessed the team under duress, as they so specifically
indicate by every act. No wonder, then, that the old Landsturm guards,
used at home to saying “_Wie gehts?_” and getting a cheery answer from
the people they passed in the streets, were lonely.
Not only stubborn, but shrewd, these Belgians. Both qualities were
brought out in the officials who had to deal with the Germans,
particularly in the small towns and where destruction had been worst.
Take, for example, M. Nerincx, of Louvain, who has energy enough to
carry him buoyantly through an American political campaign, speaking
from morning to midnight. He had been in America. I insisted that he
ought to give up his professorship, get naturalised, and run for office
at home. I know that he would soon be mayor of a town, or in Congress.
When the war began he was professor of international law at the
ancient university whose walls alone stand, surrounding the ashes of
its priceless volumes, across from the ruined cathedral. With the
burgomaster a refugee from the horrors of that orgy, he turned man of
action on behalf of the demoralised people of the town with a thousand
homes in ruins. Very lucky the client in its lawyer. He is the kind of
man who makes the best of the situation; picks up the fragments of the
pitcher, cements them together with the first material at hand, and
goes for more milk. It was he who got a German commander to sign an
agreement not to “kill, burn, or plunder” any more, and the signs were
still up on some houses saying that “This house is not to be burned
except by official order.”
There in the Hôtel de Ville, which is quite unharmed, he had his office
within reach of the German commander. He yielded to Cæsar and protected
his own people day in and day out, diplomatic, watchful, Belgian. And
he was cheerful. What other people could have preserved any vestige of
it! Sometimes one wondered if it were not partly due to an absence of
keen nerve-sensibilities, or to some other of the traits which are a
product of the Belgian hothouse and Belgian inheritance.
I might tell you about M. Nerincx’s currency system; how he issued
paper promises to pay when he gave employment to the idle in repairing
those houses which permitted of being repaired and cleaned the streets
of _débris_, till ruined Louvain looked as shipshape as ruined Pompeii;
and how he got a little real money from Brussels to stop depreciation
when the storekeepers came to him and said that they had stacks of his
notes which no mercantile concern would cash.
M. Nerincx was practising in the life about all that he ever learned
and taught at the university, “which we shall rebuild!” he declared,
with cheery confidence. “You will help us in America,” he said. “I’m
going to America to lecture one of these days about Louvain!”
“You have the most famous ruins, unless it is Rheims,” I assured him.
“You will get flocks of tourists”--particularly if he fenced in the
ruins of the library and burned leaves of ancient books were on sale.
“Then you will not only have fed, but have helped to rebuild Belgium,”
he added.
A shadow of apprehension overhung his anticipation of the day of
Belgium’s delivery. Many a Belgian had arms hidden from the alert eye
of German espionage, and his bitterness was solaced by the thought:
“I’ll have a shot at the Germans when they go!” The lot of the last
German soldiers to leave a town, unless the garrison slips away
overnight, would hardly make him a good life insurance risk.
My last look at a Belgian bread line was at Liége, that town which had
had a blaze of fame in August, 1914, and was now almost forgotten. An
industrial town, its mines and works were idle. The Germans had removed
the machinery for rifle-making, which has become the most valuable kind
of machinery in the world next to that for making guns and shells.
If skilled Belgians here or elsewhere were called upon to serve the
Germans at their craft, they suddenly became butter-fingered. So that
bread line at Liége was long, its queue stretching the breadth of the
cathedral square.
As most of the regular German officers in Belgium were cavalrymen--
there was nothing for cavalry to do on the Aisne line of trenches--
it was quite in keeping that the aide to the commandant of Liége, who
looked after my pass to leave the country, should be a young officer of
Hussars. He spoke English well; he was amiable and intelligent. While I
waited for the commandant to sign the pass he chatted of his adventures
on the pursuit of the British to the Marne. The British fought like
devils, he said. It was a question if their new army would be so good.
He showed me a photograph of himself in a British Tommy’s overcoat.
“When we took some prisoners I was interested in their overcoats,” he
explained. “I asked one of the Tommies to let me try on his. It fitted
me perfectly, so I kept it as a souvenir and had this photograph made
to show my friends.”
Perhaps a shade of surprise passed over my face.
“You don’t understand,” he said. “That Tommy had to give me his coat!
He was a prisoner.”
On my way out from Liége I was to see Visé--the town of the gateway--
the first town of the war to suffer from frightfulness. I had thought
of it as entirely destroyed. A part of it had survived.
A delightful old Bavarian Landsturm man searched me for contraband
letters when our cart stopped on the Belgian side of a barricade at
Maastricht, with Dutch soldiers on the other side. His examination
was a little perfunctory, almost apologetic, and he did want to be
friendly. You guessed that he was thinking he would like to go around
the corner and have “_ein Glas Bier_” rather than search me. What a
hearty “_Auf wiedersehen!_” he gave me when he saw that I was inclined
to be friendly, too!
I was glad to be across that frontier, with a last stamp on my
_Passierschein_; glad to be out of the land of those ghostly Belgian
millions in their living death; glad not to have to answer again their
ravenously whispered “When?” When would the Allies come?
The next time that I was in Belgium it was in the British lines of the
Ypres salient, two months later. When should I be next in Brussels?
With a victorious British army, I hoped. A long wait it was to be for a
conquered people, listening each day and trying to think that the sound
of gun-fire was nearer.
The stubborn, passive resistance and self-sacrifice that I have
pictured was that of a moral leadership of a majority shaming the
minority; or an ostracism of all who had relations with the enemy. Of
course, it was not the spirit of the whole. The American Commission,
as charity usually must, had to overcome obstacles set in its path
by those whom it would aid. Belgian politicians, in keeping with the
weakness of their craft, could no more forego playing politics in time
of distress than some that we had in San Francisco and some we have
heard of only across the British Channel from Belgium.
Zealous leaders exaggerated the famine of their districts in order
to get larger supplies; communities in great need without spokesmen
must be reached; powerful towns found excuses for not forwarding
food to small villages which were without influence. Natural greed
got the better of men used to turning a penny anyway they could.
Rascally bakers who sifted the brown flour to get the white to sell to
_patisseries_ and the well-to-do, while the bread line got the bran,
required shrewd handling when the only means of punishment was through
German authority.
“The local burgomaster yesterday offered to sell me some of your
Commission’s flour,” wrote a German commandant. “I bought it and have
the receipt, in order to prove to you that these Belgians are what
we say they are--a vile people. I am turning the flour over to your
Commission. We said that we would not take any of it and the German
Government keeps its word.”
How that commandant enjoyed making that score! As for the
burgomaster, he was proscribed in a way that will brand him among his
fellow-citizens for life. When German soldiers took bread from families
where they were billeted, the German Government turned over an amount
of flour equivalent to the bread consumed.
A certain percentage of Belgians saw the invasion only as a visitation
of disaster, like an earthquake. A flat country of gardens limits
one’s horizon. They fell in line with the sentiment of the mass. But
as time wore on into the summer and autumn of the second year, some of
them began to think, What was the use? German propaganda was active.
All that the Allies had cared for Belgium was to use her to check the
German tide to Paris and the Channel ports! Perfidious England had
betrayed Belgium! German business and banking influences, which had
been considerable in Belgium before the war, and the numerous German
residents who had returned, formed a busy circle of appeal to Belgian
business men, who were told that the British navy stood between them
and a return to prosperity. Germany was only too willing that they
should resume their trade with the rest of the world.
Why should not Belgium come into the German customs union? Why should
not Belgium make the best of her unfortunate situation, as became a
practical and thrifty people? But be it a customs union or annexation
that Germany plans, the steel had entered the hearts of all Belgians
with red corpuscles; and King Albert and his _shipperkes_ were still
fighting the Germans at Dixmude. A British army appearing before
Brussels would end casuistry; and pessimism would pass, and the German
residents, too, with the huzzas of all Belgium as the gallant King once
more ascended the steps of his palace.
Worthy of England at her best was her consent to allow the Commission’s
food to pass, which she accompanied by generous giving. She might be
slow in making ready her army, but give she could and give she did. It
was a grave question if her consent was in keeping with the military
policy which believes that any concession to sentiment in the grim
business of war is unwise. Certainly, the _Krieg ist Krieg_ of Germany
would not have permitted it.
There is the very point of the war that makes a neutral take sides.
If the Belgians had not received bread from the outside world, then
Germany would either have had to spare enough to keep them from
starving or faced the desperation of a people who fight for food with
such weapons as they had. This must have meant a holocaust of reprisals
that would have made the orgy of Louvain comparatively unimportant.
However much the Germans hampered the Commission with red tape and
worse than red tape through the activities of German residents in
Belgium, Germany did not want the Commission to withdraw. It was
helping her to economise her food supplies. And England answered a
human appeal at the cost of hard and fast military policy. She was
still true to the ideals which have set their stamp on half the world.
XII
WINTER IN LORRAINE
Paris resuming normality--Regular train service--Nancy under fire--
By automobile to the front--Panorama of the contested lines--
View of the German wedge--French veterans--Ancient Lorraine--
A vision of battle--Résumé of the struggle--The first German
advance--“The face of the earth sown with shells”--The Kaiser
silenced--The German Lorraine campaign lost--Visit to a French
heavy battery--Underground quarters--A policed army--Military
simplicity.
Only a winding black streak, that four hundred and fifty miles of
trenches on a flat map. It is difficult to visualise the whole as you
see it in your morning paper, or to realise the labour it represents in
its course through the mire and over mountain slopes, through villages
and thick forests and across open fields.
Every mile of it was located by the struggle of guns and rifles and
men coming to a stalemate of effort, when both dug into the earth and
neither could budge the other. It is a line of countless battles and
broken hopes; of as brave charges as men ever made; a symbol of skill
and dogged patience and eternal vigilance of striving foe against
striving foe.
From the first, the sector from Rheims to Flanders was most familiar
to the public. The world still thinks of the battle of the Marne as
an affair at the door of Paris, though the heaviest fighting was from
Vitry le François eastward and the fate of Paris was no less decided on
the fields of Lorraine than on the fields of Champagne. The storming
of Rheims cathedral became the theme of thousands of words of print
to one word for the defence of the Plateau d’Amance or the struggle
around Lunéville. Our knowledge of the war is from glimpses through the
curtain of military secrecy which was drawn tight over Lorraine and the
Vosges, shrouded in mountain mists. This is about Lorraine in winter,
when the war was six months old.
But first, on our way, a word about Paris, which I had not seen since
September. At the outset of the war, Parisians who had not gone to the
front were in a trance of suspense; they were magnetised by the tragic
possibilities of the hour. The fear of disaster was in their hearts,
though they might deny it to themselves. They could think of nothing
but France. Now they realised that the best way to help France was by
going on with their work at home. Paris was trying to be normal, but
no Parisian was making the bluff that Paris was normal. The Gallic
lucidity of mind prevented such self-deception.
Is it normal to have your sons, brothers, and husbands up to their
knees in icy water in the trenches, in danger of death every minute?
This attitude seems human; it seems logical. One liked the French
for it. He liked them for boasting so little. In their effort at
normality they had accomplished more than they realised. After all,
only one-thirtieth of the area of France was in German hands. A line
of steel made the rest safe for those not at the front to pursue the
routine of peace.
When I had been in Paris in September there was no certainty about
railroad connections anywhere. You went to the station and took your
chances, governed by the movement of troops, not to mention other
conditions. This time I took the regular noon express to Nancy, as I
might have done to Marseilles, or Rome, or Madrid, had I chosen. The
sprinkling of quiet army officers on the train were in the new uniform
of peculiar steely grey, in place of the target blue and red. But for
them and the number of women in mourning and one other circumstance,
the train might have been bound for Berlin, with Nancy only a stop on
the way.
The other circumstance was the presence of a soldier in the vestibule
who said: “_Votre laisser-passer, monsieur, s’il vous plaît!_” If you
had a _laisser-passer_, he was most polite; but if you lacked one,
he would also have been most polite and so would the guard that took
you in charge at the next station. In other words, monsieur, you must
have something besides a railroad ticket if you are on a train that
runs past the fortress of Toul and your destination is Nancy. You must
have a military pass, which was never given to foreigners if they were
travelling alone in the zone of military operations. The pulse of the
Frenchman beats high, his imagination bounds, when he looks eastward.
To the east are the lost provinces and the frontier drawn by the war of
’70 between French Lorraine and German Lorraine. This gave our journey
interest.
Nancy, capital of French Lorraine, is so near Metz, the great German
fortress town of German Lorraine, that excursion trains used to run to
Nancy in the opera season. “They are not running this winter,” say the
wits of Nancy. “For one reason, we have no opera--and there are other
reasons.”
An aeroplane from the German lines has only to toss a bomb in the
course of an average reconnaissance on Nancy if it chooses; Zeppelins
are within easy commuting distance. But here was Nancy as brilliantly
lighted at nine in the evening as any city of its size at home. Our
train, too, had run with the windows unshaded. After the darkness of
London, and after English trains with every window shade closely drawn,
this was a surprise.
It was a threat, an anticipation, that has darkened London, while Nancy
knew fulfilment. Bombardment and bomb dropping were nothing new to
Nancy. The spice of danger gives a fillip to business in the town whose
population heard the din of the most thunderously spectacular action of
the war echoing among the surrounding hills. Nancy saw the enemy beaten
back. Now she was so close to the front that she felt the throb of the
army’s life.
“Don’t you ever worry about aerial raids?” I asked madame behind the
counter at the hotel.
“Do the men in the trenches worry about them?” she answered. “We have
a much easier time than they. Why shouldn’t we share some of their
dangers? And when a Zeppelin appears and our guns begin firing, we all
feel like soldiers under fire.”
“Are all the population here as usual?”
“Certainly, monsieur!” she said. “The Germans can never take Nancy. The
French are going to take Metz!”
The meal which that hotel restaurant served was as good as in peace
times. Who deserves a good meal if not the officer who comes in from
the front? And madame sees that he gets it. She is as proud of her
_poulet en casserole_ as any commander of a _soixante-quinze_ battery
of its practice. There was steam heat, too, in the hotel, which gave
an American a homelike feeling.
In a score of places in the Eastern States you see landscapes with high
hills like the spurs of the Vosges around Nancy sprinkled with snow
and under a blue mist. And the air was dry; it had the life of our
air. Old Civil War men who had been in the Tennessee Mountains or the
Shenandoah Valley would feel perfectly at home in such surroundings;
only the foreground of farm land which merges into the crests covered
with trees in the distance is more finished. The people were tilling it
hundreds of years before we began tilling ours. They till well; they
make Lorraine a rich province of France.
With guns pounding in the distance, boys in their capes were skipping
and frolicking on their way to school; housewives were going to
market, and the streets were spotlessly clean. All the men of Nancy
not in the army pursued their regular routine while the army went
about its business of throwing shells at the Germans. On the dead
walls of the buildings were M. Deschanel’s speech in the Chamber of
Deputies, breathing endurance till victory, and the call for the class
of recruits of 1915, which you will find on the walls of the towns
of all France beside that of the order of mobilisation in August,
now weather-stained. Nancy seemed, if anything, more French than any
interior French town. Though near the border, there is no touch of
German influence. When you walked through the old Place Stanislaus, so
expressive of the architectural taste bred for centuries in the French,
you understand the glow in the hearts of this very French population
which made them unconscious of danger while their flag was flying over
this very French city.
No two Christian peoples we know are quite so different as the French
and the Germans. To each every national thought and habit incarnates
a patriotism which is in defiance of that on the other side of the
frontier. Over in America you may see the good in both sides, but no
Frenchman and no German can on the Lorraine frontier. If he should, he
would no longer be a Frenchman or a German in time of war.
At our service in front of the hotel were waiting two mortals in
goatskin coats, with scarfs around their ears and French military caps
on top of the scarfs. They were official army chauffeurs. If you have
ridden through the Alleghenies in winter in an open car why explain
that seeing the Vosges front in an automobile may be a joy ride to an
Eskimo, but not to your humble servant? But the roads were perfect;
as good wherever we went in this mountain country as from New York to
Poughkeepsie. I need not tell you this if you have been in France; but
you will be interested to know that Lorraine keeps her roads in perfect
repair even in war time.
Crossing the swollen Moselle on a military bridge, twisting in and out
of valleys and speeding through villages, one saw who were guarding
the army’s secrets, but little of the army itself and few signs of
transportation on a bleak, snowy day. At the outskirts of every
village, at every bridge, and at intervals along the road, Territorial
sentries stopped the car. Having an officer along was not sufficient to
let you whizz by important posts. He must show his pass. Every sentry
was a reminder of the hopelessness of being a correspondent these days
without official sanction.
The sentries were men in the thirties. In Belgium, their German
counterpart, the Landsturm, were the monitors of a journey that I made.
No troops are more military than the first line Germans; but in the
snap and spirit of his salute the French Territorial has an _élan_, a
martial fervour, which the phlegmatic German in the thirties lacks.
Occasionally we passed scattered soldiers in the village streets, or a
door opened to show a soldier figure in the doorway. The reason that we
were not seeing anything of the army was the same that keeps the men
and boys who are on the steps of the country grocery in summer at home
around the stove in winter. All these villages were full of reservists
who were indoors. They could be formed in the street ready for the
march to any part of the line where a concentrated attack was made
almost as soon after the alarm as a fire engine starts to a fire.
Now, imagine your view of a ball game limited to the batter and the
pitcher: and that is all you see in the low country of Flanders. You
have no grasp of what all the noise and struggle means, for you cannot
see over the shoulders of the crowd. But in Lorraine you have only to
ascend a hill and the moves in the chess game of war are clear.
A panorama unfolds as our car takes a rising grade to the village of
Ste. Geneviève. We alight and walk along a bridge, where the sentry
or a lookout is on watch. He seems quite alone, but at our approach a
dozen of his comrades come out of their “home” dug in the hillside.
Wherever you go about the frozen country of Lorraine it is a case of
flushing soldiers from their shelters. A small, semicircular table
is set up before the lookout, like his compass before a mariner.
Here run blue pencil lines of direction pointing to Pont-à-Mousson,
to Château-Salins, and other towns. Before us to the east rose the
tree-clad crests of the famous Grand Couronné of Nancy, and faintly in
the distance we could see Metz, that strong fortress town in German
Lorraine.
“Those guns that I hear, are they firing across the frontier?” I asked.
For some French batteries command one of the outer forts of Metz.
“No, they are near Pont-à-Mousson.”
To the north the little town of Pont-à-Mousson lay in the lap of the
river bottom, and across the valley, to the west, the famous Bois le
Prêtre. More guns were speaking from the forest depths, which showed
great scars where the trees had been cut to give fields of fire. This
was well to the rear of our position--marking the boundaries of the
wedge that the Germans drove into the French lines, with its point
at St. Mihiel--in trying to isolate the forts of Verdun and Toul.
Doubtless you have noticed that wedge on the snake maps and have
wondered about it, as I have. It looks so narrow that the French ought
to be able to shoot across it from both sides. If not, why don’t the
Germans widen it?