French regiment put a stream with a single bridge at their back--
which requires some nerve--and charged a German trench on rising
ground. They took it. Then they tried to take the woods beyond. Before
they were checked twenty-two officers out of a total of thirty fell.
But they did not give up the ground they had won. They burrowed into
the earth in a trench of their own, and when help came they put the
Germans out of the woods.
The men of this regiment were not first line, but the older fellows--
men of the type we stopped to chat with in the village--hastening to
the front when the war began. Their officers were mostly reserves,
too, who left their civil occupations at the call of arms. One of the
eight survivors of the thirty was with us, a stocky little man, hardly
looking the hero or the soldier. I expressed my admiration, and he
answered quietly: “It was for France!” How often I have heard that as
a reason for courage or sacrifice! The brave enemies of France have
learned to respect it, though they had a poor opinion of the French
army before the war began. “That railroad bridge yonder the Germans
left intact when they occupied it because they were certain that
they would need it to supply their troops when they took the Gap of
Mirecourt and surrounded the French army,” I was told. “However, they
had to go in such a hurry that they failed to mine it. They must have
fired five hundred shells afterward to destroy it, in vain.”
It was dusk when we entered the city of Lunéville for the second time.
Whole blocks lay in ruins; others only showed where shells had crashed
into walls. It is hard to estimate just how much damage shell-fire has
done to a town, for you see the effects only where they have struck on
the street sides and not when they strike in the centre of the block.
But Lunéville has certainly suffered as much as Louvain, only we did
not hear about it. Grim, sad Louvain, with its sentries among the
ruins! Happy, triumphant Lunéville, with its _poilus_ instead of German
sentries!
“We are going to meet the mayor,” said the major.
First we went to his office. But that was a mistake. We were invited
to his house, which was a fine, old eighteenth-century building.
If you could transport it to New York some arms-and-ammunition
millionaire would give half a million dollars for it. The hallway was
smoke-blackened and a burnt spot showed where the enemy had tried to
set it on fire before evacuating the town. An ascent of a handsome
old staircase and we were in rooms with gilded mirrors and carved old
mantels, where we were introduced to His Honour, a lively man of forty.
“I have been in Amerique two months. So much English do I speak.
No more!” said the mayor merrily, and introduced us in turn to his
wife, who spoke not even “so much” English, but French as fast and as
piquantly as only a Frenchwoman can. Her only son, who was seventeen,
was going up with the 1916 class of recruits very soon. He was a sturdy
youngster; a type of Young France who will make the France of the
future.
“You hate to see him go?” I asked.
“It is for France!” she answered.
We had cakes and tea and a merrier--at least, a more heartfelt--party
than at any mayor’s reception in time of peace. Everybody talked. For
the French do know how to talk, when they have not turned grim, silent
soldiers. Foreigners say we do. Maybe it is a democratic weakness. I
heard story on story of the German occupation, and how the mayor was
put in jail and held as hostage, and what a German general said to him
when he was brought in as a prisoner to be interrogated in his own
house, which the general occupied as headquarters.
Among the guests was the wife of a French general in her Red Cross
cap. She might see her husband once a week by meeting him on the road
between the city and the front. He could not afford to be any farther
from his post, lest the Germans spring a surprise. The extent of the
information which he gave her was that all went well for France. Father
Joffre plays no favourites in his discipline.
Happy, happy Lorraine in the midst of its ruins! Happy because her
adored tricolour floats over those ruins.
XIV
A ROAD OF WAR I KNOW
Victoria Station--The “tenth man”--Leavetaking--Roar of London--
British habits--Everywhere khaki--System at the French port--
The correspondents’ home--Strict censorship--The one link
with the reading public--Necessity for censorship--Freedom
of the press--“Jig-saw” intelligence experts--The run of
the trenches--Exchange of slang--Organisation of General
Headquarters--A business institution--A colossal dynamo.
Other armies go to war across the land, but the British go across the
sea. They take the Channel ferry in order to reach the front. Theirs
is the home road of war to me; the road of my affections, where men
speak my mother tongue. It begins on the platform at Victoria Station,
with the khaki of officers and men returning from leave, relieved by
the warmer colours of women who have come to say good-bye to those
they love. In five hours from the time of starting one may be across
that ribbon of salt water, which means much in isolation and little in
distance, and in the trenches.
That veteran regular--let us separate him from the crowd,--is a
type I have often seen, a type that has become as familiar as one’s
neighbours in one’s own town. We will call him the tenth man. That is,
of every ten men who went to the front a year ago in his battalion,
nine are gone. All of the hardships and all of the terrors of war he
has witnessed: men dropped neatly by a bullet; men mangled by shells.
His khaki is spotless, thanks to his wife, who has dressed in her best
for the occasion. Terrible as war itself, but new, that hat of hers,
which probably represented a good deal of looking into windows and
pricing; and her gown of the cheapest material, drooping from her round
shoulders, is the product of the poor dressmaking skill of hands which
show only too well who does all the housework at home. The children,
a boy of four and a girl of seven, are in their best, too, with faces
scrubbed till they shine.
You will see like scenes in stations at home when the father has found
work in a distant city and is going on ahead to get established before
the family follow him. Such incidents are common in civil life; they
became common at Victoria Station. What is common has no significance,
editors say.
When the time came to go through the gate, the veteran picked the boy
up in his arms and pressed him very close and the little girl looked on
wonderingly, while the mother was not going to make it any harder for
the father by tears. “Good-bye, Tom!” she said. So his name was Tom,
this tenth man.
I spoke with him. His battalion was full with recruits. It had been
kept full. But, considering the law of chance, what about the surviving
one out of an original ten?
“Yes, I’ve had my luck with me,” he said. “Probably my turn will come.
Maybe I’ll never see the wife and kids again.”
The morning roar of London had begun. That station was a small spot
in the city. There were not enough officers and men taking the train
to make up a day’s casualty list; for ours was only a small party
returning from leave. The transports, unseen, carried the multitudes.
Wherever one had gone in England he had seen soldiers and wherever he
went in France he was to see still more soldiers. England had become
an armed camp; and England plodded on, “muddled” on, preparing, ever
preparing, to forge in time of war the thunderbolt for war which was
undreamed of in time of peace when other nations were forging their
thunderbolts.
Still the recruiting posters called for more soldiers and the
casualty lists appeared day after day with the regularity of want
advertisements. Imagine eight million men under arms in the United
States and you have the equivalent to what England did by the volunteer
system. The more there were the more pessimistic became the British
press. Pessimism brought in recruits. Bad news made England take
another deep breath of energising determination. It was the last battle
which was decisive. She had always won that. She would win it again.
They talk of war aboard the Pullman, after officers have waved their
hands out of the windows to their wives, quite as if they were going
to Scotland for a week-end instead of back to the firing-line. British
phlegm that is called. No, British habit, I should say, the race-bred,
individualistic quality of never parading emotions in public, the
instinct of keeping things which are one’s own to one’s self.
Personally, I like this way. In one form or another, as the hedges fly
by the train windows, the subject is always war. War creeps into golf,
or shooting, or investments, or politics. Only one suggestion quite
frees the mind from the omnipresent theme: Will the Channel be smooth?
The Germans have nothing to do with that. It is purely a matter of
weather. Bad sailors are more worried about the crossing than about
the shell-fire they are going to face.
With bad sailors or good sailors, the significant thing which had
become a commonplace was that the Channel was a safely-guarded British
sea lane. In all my crossings I was never delayed. For England had
one thunderbolt ready forged when the war began. The only submarines,
or destroyers, or dirigibles that one saw were hers. Antennæ these
of the great fleet waiting with the threat of stored lightning ready
to be flashed from gun-mouths; a threat as efficacious as action, in
nowise mysterious or subtle, but definite as steel and powder, speaking
the will of a people in their chosen field of power, felt over all
the seas of the world, coast of Maine and the Carolinas no less than
Labrador. Thousands of transports had come and gone, carrying hundreds
of thousands of soldiers and food for men and guns to India; and on the
highroad to India, to Australia, to San Francisco, shipping went its
way undisturbed by anything that dives or flies.
The same white hospital ships lying in that French harbour; the same
line of grey, dusty-looking ambulances parked on the quay! Everybody in
that one-time sleepy, week-end tourist resort seems to be in uniform;
to have something to do with war. All surroundings become those of war
long before you reach the front. That knot of civilians, waiting their
turn for another examination of the same kind as that on the other
side of the Channel, have shown good reasons for going to Paris to the
French consul in London, or they might not proceed even this far on
the road of war. They seem outcasts--a humble lot in the variegated
costumes of the civil world--outcasts from the disciplined world
in its pattern garb of khaki. Their excuse for not being in the game
is that they are too old or that they are women. For now the war has
sucked into its vortex all who are strong enough to fight.
A traveller might be a spy; hence all this red tape for the many to
catch the one in its mesh. Even this red tape seems now to have become
normal. War is normal. It would seem strange to cross the Channel in a
time of peace; the harbour would not look like itself with civilians
not having to show their passports, and without the white hospital
ships, and the white-bearded landing-officer at the foot of the
gangway, and the board held up with lists of names of officers who have
telegrams waiting for them.
For the civilians a yellow card of disembarkation and for the military
a white card. The officers and soldiers walk off at once and the
queue of civilians waits. One civilian with a white card, who belongs
to no regiment, who is not even a chaplain or a nurse, puzzles the
landing-officer for a moment. But there is something to go with it--
a correspondent’s licence and a letter from a general who looks after
such things. They show that you “belong”; and if you don’t belong on
the road of war you will not get far. As well try to walk past the
doorman and take a seat in the United States Senate chamber during a
session.
Most precious that magical piece of paper. I happen to be the only
American with one, unless he is in the fighting line--which is one
sure way to get to the front. The price of all the opera boxes at the
Metropolitan will not buy it; and it is the passport to the welcoming
smile from an army chauffeur whom I almost regard as my own. But its
real value appears at the outskirts of the city. There the dead line is
drawn; there the sheep are finally separated from the goats by a French
sentry guarding the winding passageway between some carts, which have
been in the same place in the road for months.
The car spins over the broad, hard French road, in a land where for
many miles you see no signs of war, until it turns into the grounds
of a small château opposite a village church. The proprietor of a
dry-goods store in a neighbouring city spends his summers here; but
this summer he is in town, because the press wanted a place to live
and he was good enough to rent us his country place. So this is home,
where the five British and one American correspondents live and mess.
The expense of our cars costs us treble all the rest of our expenses.
They take us where we want to go. We go where we please, but we may not
write what we please. We see something like a thousand times more than
we can tell. The conditions are such as to make a news reporter throw
up his hands and faint. But if he had his unbridled way, one day he
might feel the responsibility for the loss of some hundreds of British
soldiers’ lives.
“It may be all right for war correspondents, but it is a devil of a
poor place for a newspaper man,” as one editor said. Yet it is the only
place where you can really know anything about the war.
We become a part of the machinery of the great organisation that
encloses us in its regular processes. No one in his heart envies the
press officer, who holds the blue pencil over us. He has to “take it
both going and coming.” He labours on our behalf and sometimes we
labour with him. The staff are willing enough to let us watch the army
at work, but they do not care whether or not we write about their war;
he wants us both to see it and to write about it. He tells us some big
piece of news, and then says: “That is for yourselves; you may not
write it.”
People do not want to read about the correspondents, of course. They
want to read what the correspondents have to tell about the war; but
the conditions of our work are interesting because we are the link
between the army and the reading public. All that it learns from actual
observation of what the army is doing comes through us.
We may not give the names of regiments and brigades until weeks after
a fight, because that will tell the enemy what troops were engaged; we
may not give the names of officers, for that is glorifying one when
possibly another did his duty equally well. It is the anonymity of the
struggle that makes it all seem distant and unreal--till the telegram
comes from the War Office to say that the one among the millions
who is dear to you is dead or wounded. Otherwise, it is a torment
of unidentified elements behind a curtain, which is parted for an
announcement of a gain or a loss, or to give out a list of the fallen.
The world wants to read that Peter Smith led the King’s Own Particular
Fusiliers in a charge. It may not know Peter Smith, but his name and
that of his regiment make the information seem definite. The statement
that a well-known millionaire yesterday gave a million dollars to
charity, or that a man in a checked suit swam from the Battery to Coney
Island, is not convincing; nor is the fact that one private unnamed
held back the Germans with bombs in the traverse of a trench for hours
until help came. We at the front, however, do know the names; we meet
the officers and men. Ours is the intimacy which we may not interpret
except in general terms.
Every article, every despatch, every letter, passes through the
censor’s hand. But we are never told what to write. The liberty of the
press is too old an institution in England for that. Always we may
learn why an excision is made. The purpose is to keep information from
the enemy. It is not like fighting Boers or Filipinos, this war of
walls of men who can turn the smallest bit of information to advantage.
Intelligence officers speak of their work as piecing together the parts
of a jig-saw puzzle. What seems a most innocent fact by itself may
furnish the bit which gives the figure in the picture its face. It does
not follow because you are an officer that you know what may and what
may not be of service to the enemy.
A former British officer who had become a well-known military critic,
in an account of a visit to the front mentioned having seen a battle
from a certain church tower. Publication of the account was followed by
a tornado of shell-fire that killed and wounded many British soldiers.
Only a staff specialist, trained in intelligence work and in constant
touch with the intelligence department, can be a safe censor. At the
same time, he is the best friend of the correspondent. He knows what
is harmless and what may not be allowed. He wants the press to have as
much as possible. For the more the public knows about its soldiers,
the better the _morale_ of the people, which reflects itself in the
_morale_ of the army.
The published casualty lists giving the names of officers and men and
their battalions is a means of causing casualties. From a prisoner
taken the enemy learns what battalions were present at a given fight;
he adds up the numbers reported killed and wounded and ascertains what
the fight cost the enemy and, in turn, the effect of the fire from his
side. But the British public demanded to see the casualty lists and the
British press were allowed to gratify the desire. They appeared in the
newspapers, of course, days after the nearest relative of the dead or
wounded man had received official notification from the War Office.
Officers’ letters from the front, so freely published earlier in
the war, amazed experienced correspondents by their unconscious
indiscretions. The line officer who had been in a fight told all that
he saw. Twenty officers doing the same along a stretch of front and the
jig-saw experts, plus what information they had from spies, were in
clover. Editors said: “But these men are officers. They ought to know
when they are imparting military secrets.”
Alas, they do not know! It is not to be expected that they should.
Their business is to fight; the business of other experts is to
safeguard information. For a long time the British army kept
correspondents from the front on the principle that the business of
a correspondent must be to tell what ought not to be told. Yet they
were to learn that the accredited correspondent, an expert at his
profession, working in harmony with the experts of the staff, let no
military secrets pass.
At our mess we get the Berlin dailies promptly. Soon after the Germans
are reading the war correspondence from their own front we are reading
it, and laughing at jokes in their comic papers and at cartoons which
exhibit John Bull as a stricken old ogre and Britannia who Rules the
Waves with the corners of her mouth drawn down to the bottom of her
chin, as she sees the havoc that von Tirpitz is making with submarines
which do not stop us from receiving our German jokes regularly across
the Channel.
Doubtless the German messes get their _Punch_ and the London
illustrated weeklies regularly. In the time that it took the English
daily with the account of the action seen from the church tower to
reach Berlin and the news to be wired to the front, the German guns
made use of the information. Neutral little Holland is the telltale of
both sides; the ally and the enemy of all intelligence corps. Scores
of experts in jig-saw puzzles on both sides seize every scrap of
information and piece them together. Each time that one gets a bit from
a newspaper he is for a sharper press censorship on his side and a more
liberal one on the other.
We six correspondents have our insignia, as must every one who is free
to move along the lines. By a glance you may tell everybody’s branch
and rank in that complicated and disciplined world, where no man acts
for himself, but always on some one else’s orders.
“Don’t you know who they are? They are the correspondents,” I heard a
soldier say. “D. Chron., that’s the _Daily Chronicle_; M. Post, that’s
the _Morning Post_; D. Mail, that’s the _Daily Mail_. There’s one with
U. S. A. What paper is that?”
“It ain’t a paper,” said another. “It’s the States--he’s a Yank!” The
War Office put it on the American cousin’s arm, and wherever it goes it
seems welcome. It may puzzle the gunners when the American says, “That
was a peach of a shot, right across the pan!” or the infantry when he
says, “It cuts no ice!” and there is no ice visible in Flanders; he
speaks about typhoid to the medical corps which calls it enteric;
and “fly-swatting” is a new word to the sanitarians, who are none the
less busily engaged in that noble art. Lessons for the British in
the “American language” while you wait! In return, the American is
learning what a “stout-hearted thruster” and other phrases mean in the
Simon-pure English.
The correspondents are the spoiled spectators of the army’s work; the
itinerants of the road of war. Nobody sees so much as we, because we
have nothing to do but to see. An officer looking at the towers of
Ypres cathedral, a mile away from the trench where he was, said: “No,
I’ve never been in Ypres. Our regiment has not been stationed in that
part of the line.”
We have sampled all the trenches; we have studied the ruins of Ypres
with an archæologist’s eye; we know the names of the estaminets of
the villages, from “The Good Farmer” to “The Harvester’s Rest” and
“The Good Cousin,” not to mention “The Omnibus Stop” on the Cassell
Hill. Madame who keeps the hotel in the G. H. Q. town knows me so well
that we wave hands to each other as I pass the door; and the clerks
in a certain shop have learned that the American likes his fruit raw,
instead of stewed in the English fashion, and plenty of it, especially
if it comes from the South out of season, as it does from Florida or
California to pampered human beings at home, who, if they could see as
much of this war as I have seen, would appreciate what a fortunate lot
they are to have not a ribbon of salt water but a broad sea full of it,
and the British navy, too, between them and the thing on the other side
of the zone of death.
G. H. Q. means General Headquarters, and B. E. F., which shows
the way for your letters from England, means British Expeditionary
Force. The high leading, the brains, of the army are theoretically at
G. H. Q. That word theoretically is used advisedly in view of opinion
at other points. An officer sent from G. H. Q. to command a brigade
had not been long out before he began to talk about those confounded
one-thing-and-another fellows at G. H. Q. When he was at G. H. Q., he
used to talk about those confounded one-thing-and-another fellows who
commanded corps, divisions, and brigades at the front. The philosophers
of G. H. Q. smiled and the philosophers of the army smiled--it was
the old story of the staff and the line; of the main office and the
branches. But the line did the most smiling to see the new brigadier
getting a taste of his own medicine.
G. H. Q. directs the whole; here every department of all that vast
concern which supplies the hundreds of thousands of men and prepares
for the other hundreds of thousands is focussed. The symbol of its
authority is a red band around the cap, which means that you are a
staff officer. No war at G. H. Q., only the driving force of war. It
seems as far removed from the front as the New York office of a string
of manufacturing plants.
If one follows a red-banded cap into a door he sees other officers and
clerks and typewriters, and a sign which says that a department chief
has his desk in the drawing-room of a private house--where he has had
it for months. Go to one mess and you will hear talk about garbage
pails and how to kill flies; to another, about hospitals and clearing
stations for the wounded; to another, about barbed wire, sandbags,
spades, timber, and galvanised iron--the engineers; to another,
about guns, shells, rifles, bullets, mortars, bombs, bayonets, and
high explosives--the ordnance; to another, about jam, bread, bacon,
uniforms, iron rations, socks, underclothes, canned goods, fresh beef,
and motor trucks--the Army Service Corps; to another, about attacks,
counter-attacks, and salients, and about what the others are doing and
will have to do--the operations.