Winning a Cause: World War Stories
by John G. Thompson · English · Gutenberg #19906 · 534,873 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Winning a Cause: World War Stories
Author: John G. Thompson
Inez Bigwood
Release date: November 23, 2006 [eBook #19906]
Most recently updated: January 1, 2021
Language: English
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WINNING A CAUSE
by
JOHN GILBERT THOMPSON
* * * * * *
In Flanders Now
(An Answer to Lt.-Col. McCrae)
We have kept faith, ye Flanders' dead,
Sleep well beneath those poppies red,
That mark your place.
The torch your dying hands did throw
We 've held it high before the foe,
And answered bitter blow for blow,
In Flanders' fields.
And where your heroes' blood was spilled
The guns are now forever stilled
And silent grown.
There is no moaning of the slain,
There is no cry of tortured pain,
And blood will never flow again
In Flanders' fields.
Forever holy in our sight
Shall be those crosses gleaming white,
That guard your sleep.
Rest you in peace, the task is done,
The fight you left us we have won,
And "Peace on Earth" has just begun
In Flanders now.
EDNA JACQUES
in the _Calgary Herald_
* * * * * *
[Frontispiece: Edwin Rowland Blashfield's poster, "Carry On," used in
the Fourth Liberty Loan.
This striking lithograph in the movement of its design expresses the
compelling force of the American spirit as it entered the World War.
The original oil painting has been purchased by The Metropolitan Museum
of Art, New York City.]
WINNING A CAUSE
World War Stories
by
JOHN GILBERT THOMPSON
Principal of the State Normal School, Fitchburg, Mass.
and
INEZ BIGWOOD
Instructor in Children's Literature, State Normal School,
Fitchburg, Mass.
Authors of
Lest We Forget
Silver, Burdett and Company
Boston ---- New York ---- Chicago
Copyright, 1919, by
Silver, Burdett and Company.
PREFACE
_Lest We Forget_, the first volume of World War stories, gave an
outline of the struggle up to the time of the signing of the armistice,
November 11, 1918, and contained in general chronological order most of
the stories that to children from ten to sixteen years of age would be
of greatest interest, and give the clearest understanding of the
titanic contest.
This; the second volume of the same series, contains the stories of the
war of the character described, that were not included in _Lest We
Forget_,--stories of the United States naval heroes, of the Americans
landed in France, of the concluding events of the war, of the visit of
President Wilson to Europe, and of the Peace Conference. In a word,
emphasis is placed upon America's part in the struggle.
This volume should be of even greater interest to American children
than the first, for it tells the story of America's greatest
achievement, of a nation undertaking a tremendous and terrible task not
for material gain, but for an ideal.
No more inspiring story has ever been told to the children of men than
the story of America's part in winning the greatest cause for which men
have ever contended. President Wilson said in Europe, "The American
soldiers came not merely to win a war, but to win a cause." Every
child in every home and in every school should be made familiar with
how it was won, and with the separate stories which go to make up the
glorious epic.
The two volumes of the series give for children, in a way that they
will comprehend and enjoy, through stories so selected and so connected
as to build up an understanding of the whole, the causes, the conduct,
and the results of the World War.
The thanks of the authors and publishers are hereby expressed to Mr.
Edwin Rowland Blashfield for the permission to reproduce his poster,
"Carry On"; to Mrs. Ella Wheeler Wilcox for "Song of the Aviator"; to
George H. Doran Company, Publishers, for "Pershing at the Tomb of
Lafayette" from "The Silver Trumpet," by Amelia Josephine Burr,
copyright 1918; for "Where Are You Going, Great-Heart?" from "The
Vision Splendid" by John Oxenham, copyright 1918; for "Trees" from
"Trees and Other Poems" by Joyce Kilmer, copyright 1914; to _Collier's_
for Lieutenant McKeogh's story of "The Lost Battalion"; to Mr. Roger
William Riis for his article "The Secret Service"; and to Mr. John
Mackenzie, Chief Boatswain's Mate, U. S. S. _Remlik_, for the facts in
the story, "Fighting a Depth Bomb."
CONTENTS
1. WHY THE UNITED STATES ENTERED THE WAR
2. AMERICA COMES IN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ._Klaxton_
3. PERSHING AT THE TOMB OF LAFAYETTE . . . . _Amelia Josephine Burr_
4. AMERICA ENTERS THE WAR . . . . . . . . . . . _David Lloyd George_
5. THE FIRST TO FALL IN BATTLE
6. FOUR SOLDIERS
7. WHERE THE FOUR WINDS MEET . . . . . . . _Geoffrey Dalrymple Nash_
8. THE SOLDIERS WHO GO TO SEA
9. WHEN THE TIDE TURNED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . _Otto H. Kahn_
10. A BOY OF PERUGIA
11. REDEEMED ITALY
12. SONG OF THE AVIATOR . . . . . . . . . . . . _Ella Wheeler Wilcox_
13. NATIONS BORN AND REBORN
14. "TO VILLINGEN--AND BACK"
15. ALSACE-LORRAINE
16. THE CALL TO ARMS IN OUR STREET . . . . . . . . . . _W. M. Letts_
17. THE KAISER'S CROWN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . _Charles Mackay_
18. THE QUALITY OF MERCY
19. THE REALLY INVINCIBLE ARMADA
20. "I KNEW YOU WOULD COME" . . . . . . _Rev. Ernest M. Stires, D.D._
21. THE SEARCHLIGHTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . _Alfred Noyes_
22. FIGHTING A DEPTH BOMB
23. THE SECOND LINE OF DEFENSE
24. U. S. DESTROYER OSMOND C. INGRAM
25. JOYCE KILMER
26. BLOCKING THE CHANNEL
27. THE FLEET THAT LOST ITS SOUL
28. THE LITTLE OLD ROAD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . _Gertrude Vaughan_
29. HARRY LAUDER SINGS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . _Dr. George Adams_
30. THE THIRTEENTH REGIMENT
31. WHERE ARE YOU GOING, GREAT-HEART? . . . . . . . . . _John Oxenham_
32. THIS CAPTURE OF DUN
33. BOMBING METZ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . _Raoul Lufbery_
34. THE UNSPEAKABLE TURK
35. THE SECRET SERVICE . . . . . . . . . . . . . _Roger William Riis_
36. AT THE FRONT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . _G. B. Manwaring_
37. A CAROL FROM FLANDERS . . . . . . . . . . . . . _Frederick Niven_
38. THE MINER AND THE TIGER
39. THE LOST BATTALION
40. UNITED STATES DAY
41. NOVEMBER 11, 1918
42. IN MEMORIAM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . _Alfred Tennyson_
43. THE UNITED STATES AT WAR--IN FRANCE . . _General John J. Pershing_
44. THE UNITED STATES AT WAR--AT HOME
45. A CONGRESSIONAL MESSAGE . . . . . . . . . . . . . _Woodrow Wilson_
46. PRESIDENT WILSON IN FRANCE
47. SERGEANT YORK OF TENNESSEE
ILLUSTRATIONS
Edwin Rowland Blashfield's poster, "Carry On," used in the Fourth
Liberty Loan . . . . _Frontispiece_
The standard bearers and color guard leading a column of the Fifth
Artillery of the First American Division through Hetzerath, Germany, on
their way to the Rhine.
"Lafayette, We Are Here!" The immortal tribute of General John J.
Pershing at the grave of the great Frenchman.
The religious and military tribute paid to the first Americans to fall
in battle, at Bathelmont, November 4, 1917.
Saint George and the Dragon, painted by V. Carpaccio in 1516, Venice;
S. Giorgio Maggiore.
Jeanne d'Arc, rising in her stirrups, holds on high her sword, as if to
consecrate it for a war of Right.
Memorial Day, 1918, was celebrated abroad as well as at home.
This memorial to the memory of Edith Cavell was unveiled by Queen
Alexandra in Norwich, England, at the opening of the Nurse Cavell
Memorial Home.
Somewhere in France these Salvation Army "lassies" are baking pies and
"doughnuts for the doughboys."
The U.S. Destroyer _Fanning_ with depth bombs stored in run-ways on the
after deck.
One of the camouflaged guns of the German shore batteries which raked
with fire the _Vindictive_, the _Daffodil_, and the _Iris_ when they
grappled with the mole, during the night raid.
The British Cruiser _Curacao_, Admiral Tyrwhitt's flagship, leading out
one column of British cruisers at the surrender of the German navy.
From left to right, Admiral Sir David Beatty, Admiral Rodman, King
George, the Prince of Wales, and Admiral Sims on the deck of the U.S.
Battleship _New York_.
The heroic American ace, Raoul Lufbery, wearing his well-earned
decorations just after an official presentation.
A two-passenger tractor biplane flying near the seashore.
The official entry of General Allenby into Jerusalem, December 11, 1917.
David Lloyd George.
Georges Clemenceau.
Major General Clarence R. Edwards pinning the congressional Medal of
Honor on the breast of Lieutenant Colonel Charles W. Whittlesey.
Messages from Colonel Whittlesey and Lieutenant McKeogh.
This picture shows the standardized style of building used in every
army in the United States.
A 10-inch caliber naval gun on a railroad mount.
A photograph from an airplane at 7900 feet, showing Love Field, Dallas,
Texas, and a parachute jumper.
The Red Cross War Fund and Membership poster.
A photograph of the United States Transport _George Washington_ taken
from an airplane.
President Wilson driving from the railroad station in Paris with
President Poincaré of France.
Sergeant York wearing the French Croix de Guerre and the Congressional
Medal of Honor.
Pronouncing Vocabulary (four images).
WINNING A CAUSE
WHY THE UNITED STATES ENTERED THE WAR
The United States was slow to enter the war, because her people
believed war an evil to be avoided at almost any cost except honor. In
fact, "Peace at any price" seemed to be the motto of many Americans
even after two years of the World War.
[Illustration: The standard bearers and color guard leading a column of
the Fifth Artillery of the First American Division through Hetzerath,
Germany, on their way to the Rhine.]
President Wilson declared in a speech at Philadelphia on May 10, 1915,
that there is such a thing as being too proud to fight. He was
severely criticized for his statement, and yet it is very true, and for
more than a generation it had been taught to American boys and girls.
Peace societies had sent lecturers to the public schools to point out
the wickedness of war and the blessings of peace. Prizes had been
offered to high school, normal school, and college students for the
best essays on _Peace_, _How to Maintain the Peace of the World_, and
other similar subjects. To get ready for war by enlarging the army and
navy was declared to be the very best way to bring on war. School
reading books made a feature of peace selections, and school histories
were making as little of our national wars as possible. These
teachings and the very air of the land of freedom made people too proud
to fight, if there were any honorable way of avoiding it.
It is said that "People judge others by themselves." So Americans,
being peaceful, contented, and not possessed with envy of their
neighbors, supposed all other civilized people were like themselves.
Therefore they could not at first believe that the Germans were
different and looked upon war as a glorious thing, because through it
they might get possession of the wealth and property of others.
Perhaps the Germans, judging other people by themselves, believed that
the French and Russians and English, like the Germans, stood ready to
go to war whenever through it they might gain wealth and territory; but
the Germans did not think this of the people of the United States.
They thought that they were a nation of traders and money-getters in
love with the Almighty Dollar. As events proved, this idea was a fatal
mistake on the part of the Germans.
In entirely different ways, both Americans and Germans were taught that
they were the people above all other peoples in the world. The German
insolently sang "Germany above All" while the American good-naturedly
boasted his land as the freest, the noblest and best, leading all the
other countries and showing them the way to become greater and better.
The American people, however, did not intend to force their beliefs
upon other nations. But the Germans were led by the idea that German
Kultur would be a blessing for all mankind and that it was their
destiny to conquer and improve all other nations.
Thor stood at the northernmost point of the world.
His hammer flew from his hand.
"So far as my hammer this arm has hurled,
All mine are the sea and the land."
And forward flew the giant tool
Over the whole broad earth, to fall
At last in the southernmost pool
To prove that Thor's was all.
Since then 'tis the pleasant German way
By the hammer, lands to win,
And to claim for themselves world-wide sway,
As the Hammer-god's nearest kin.
But the American does not go this far. While he is inclined to believe
himself and his country better than any other people or nation, yet he
is content to let others live in their own way as long as they are
honest and do not interfere with him and his business. He is, to be
sure, desirous of improving them, but by peaceful means, by building
dams and railroads for them, and by giving them schools and sending
them missionaries.
It was difficult therefore for Americans to realize that the Germans
really planned and desired the war in order that they might rule the
world. It took months and even years of war for the majority of
Americans to come to a full realization of this truth. This should be
remembered when the question is asked, not why the United States
entered the war, but why she did not enter it earlier.
Americans are honorable and look upon the breaking of a pledge or an
agreement as a shameful thing. It was almost impossible for them to
believe that a nation, far advanced in science and learning of all
kinds, could look upon a treaty as a scrap of paper and consider its
most solemn promises as not binding when it was to its advantage to
break them. Americans in their homes, their churches, and their
schools had been taught that "an honest man is the noblest work of
God." They had heard the old saying that "All is fair in love and
war"; but they could not think for a moment that a whole nation of men
and women had been taught that lies and treachery and broken promises
were fair because they helped the Fatherland work out its destiny and
rule the world.
They knew that Chancellor Bismarck falsified a telegram to bring on the
war with France in 1870, and they learned to their dismay that
Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg in 1914 declared the treaty with Belgium
only "a scrap of paper" when Germany wished to cross that country to
strike France. Americans kept learning that Germany's promises to
respect hospitals and hospital ships, stretcher-bearers and the Red
Cross, not to interfere with non-combatants, not to use poison gas, not
to bombard defenseless cities and towns were all "scraps of paper."
They discovered even the naturalization papers which Germans in America
took out in order to become American citizens were lies sworn to, for
the German who declared his loyalty to his new mother country was still
held by Germany as owing his first fealty and duty to her. It must be
said, however, that many Germans who became naturalized in the United
States did not agree with these secret orders of their Fatherland; but
many others did, and the rulers of Germany encouraged such deception.
It was many months after the beginning of the World War before the
large body of American citizens would believe that the German nation
and the German people made a business of lies and deception, and
considered such a business just and proper when in the service of the
Fatherland. But when Germany--after having promised the United States
on May 4, 1916, that merchant ships would not be sunk without warning
or without giving the crews and passengers an opportunity for
safety--on January 31, 1917, informed Washington that she was not going
to keep her promise and told the German people that she had only made
it in order to get time to build a great submarine fleet which would
bring England to her knees in three months--then the American people
saw Germany as she was and in her shame.
Of all the peoples of the earth, the Americans are probably the most
sympathetic and helpful to the weak and the afflicted. They are the
most merciful, striving to be kind not only to people but even to
animals. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children,
another for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and the numberless
Bands of Mercy show the feeling of the people of America toward the
helpless. Americans supposed that other people were like them in this
respect. They knew of the German pensions to the widows and to the
aged, and they supposed that the efficient and enlightened Germans were
among the merciful and sympathetic to the weak and dependent. The
people of the United States knew, of course, of the Zabern incident
where two German soldiers held a crippled Alsatian cobbler while a
German officer slashed his face with his sword for laughing at
him,--they knew that the German army officers were haughty and
overbearing, but they thought this came from their training and was not
a part of the German character. Americans had read the Kaiser's
directions to the German soldiers going to China during the Boxer
uprising to "Show no mercy! Take no prisoners! Use such frightfulness
that a Chinaman will never dare look at a German again. Make a name
for yourselves as the Hun did long ago." But the Americans, or most of
them, did not believe that in the twentieth century a nation classified
among the civilized nations could or would adopt _Frightfulness_ as a
policy. But when they read of the devastation of Belgium and northern
France; of the destruction of Louvain; of whole villages of innocent
men, women, and children being wiped out; of the horrible crimes of the
sinking of the _Lusitania_, the _Falaba_, and the _Laconia_; of the
execution of Edith Cavell; of the carrying off into slavery, or worse
than slavery, of the able-bodied women and men from the conquered
territory--when Americans learned these horrors one after another, they
at last were forced to acknowledge that, like the brutal Assyrian kings
who sought to terrify their enemies into submission by standing as
conquerors upon pyramids of the slain, the modern Huns sought mastery
by _Frightfulness_.
When most Americans came to realize that Germany was fighting a war to
conquer the world, first Russia and France, then England, and then the
United States--for she had written Mexico that if she would attack the
United States, Germany and Mexico would make war and peace
together--when they came to know the German nature and the idea of the
Germans, that Might makes Right and that truth, honesty, and square
dealing like mercy, pity, and love are only words of weaklings; that
they were a nation of liars and falsifiers and the most brutal of all
people of recorded history; when, added to this, the Americans realized
that for over two years France and England had really been fighting for
everything for which the United States stood and which her people held
dear, for her very life and liberty, then America almost as one man
declared for war.
Meanwhile Germany had declined to recognize the laws of nations which
allowed America to sell munitions to the Allies. She had scattered
spies through the United States to destroy property and create labor
troubles. She had challenged the right of peaceful Americans to travel
on the high seas. She had sunk the _Lusitania_ with a loss of one
hundred twenty-four American lives; the _Sussex_, the _Laconia_ with a
loss of eight Americans, the _Vigilancia_ with five, the _City of
Memphis_, the _Illinois_, the _Healdton_, and others. She had tried to
unite Mexico and Japan against us.
Not until then, after the American people had become fully aware of the
German character and purposes, did Congress on April 6, 1917, declare a
state of war existed between Germany and the United States. On that
day the outcome of the war was decided. Through her hideous
selfishness, her stupidity, and her brutality, Germany, after having
spent nearly fifty years in preparation, lost her opportunity for world
dominion. The resources and the fighting power of what she looked upon
as a nation of cowardly, money-loving merchants decided the conflict.
AMERICA COMES IN
We are coming from the ranch, from the city and the mine,
And the word has gone before us to the towns upon the Rhine;
As the rising of the tide
On the Old-World side,
We are coming to the battle, to the Line.
From the Valleys of Virginia, from the Rockies in the North,
We are coming by battalions, for the word was carried forth:
"We have put the pen away
And the sword is out today,
For the Lord has loosed the Vintages of Wrath."
We are singing in the ships as they carry us to fight,
As our fathers sang before us by the camp-fires' light;
In the wharf-light glare,
They can hear us Over There
When the ships come steaming through the night.
Right across the deep Atlantic where the Lusitania passed,
With the battle-flag of Yankee-land a-floating at the mast
We are coming all the while,
Over twenty hundred mile,
And we're staying to the finish, to the last.
We are many--we are one--and we're in it overhead,
We are coming as an Army that has seen its women dead,
And the old Rebel Yell
Will be loud above the shell
When we cross the top together, seeing red.
KLAXTON.
PERSHING AT THE TOMB OF LAFAYETTE
They knew they were fighting our war.
As the months grew to years
Their men and their women had watched
through their blood and their tears
For a sign that we knew, we who could not
have come to be free
Without France, long ago. And at last
from the threatening sea
The stars of our strength on the eyes
of their weariness rose;
And he stood among them,
the sorrow strong hero we chose
To carry our flag to the tomb
of that Frenchman whose name
A man of our country could once more
pronounce without shame.
What crown of rich words would he set
for all time on this day?
The past and the future were listening
what he would say--
Only this, from the white-flaming heart
of a passion austere,
Only this--ah, but France understood!
"Lafayette, we are here."
AMELIA JOSEPHINE BURR.
[Illustration: "Lafayette, We Are Here!" The immortal tribute of
General John J. Pershing at the grave of the great Frenchman. Notice
the difference between the American and French salutes.]
AMERICA ENTERS THE WAR
SPEECH BY LLOYD GEORGE, BRITISH PREMIER,
APRIL 12, 1917
I am in the happy position of being, I think, the first British
Minister of the Crown who, speaking on behalf of the people of this
country, can salute the American Nation as comrades in arms. I am
glad; I am proud. I am glad not merely because of the stupendous
resources which this great nation will bring to the succor of the
alliance, but I rejoice as a democrat that the advent of the United
States into this war gives the final stamp and seal to the character of
the conflict as a struggle against military autocracy throughout the
world.
That was the note that ran through the great deliverance of President
Wilson. The United States of America have the noble tradition, never
broken, of having never engaged in war except for liberty. And this is
the greatest struggle for liberty that they have ever embarked upon. I
am not at all surprised, when one recalls the wars of the past, that
America took its time to make up its mind about the character of this
struggle. In Europe most of the great wars of the past were waged for
dynastic aggrandizement and conquest. No wonder when this great war
started that there were some elements of suspicion still lurking in the
minds of the people of the United States of America. There were those
who thought perhaps that kings were at their old tricks--and although
they saw the gallant Republic of France fighting, they some of them
perhaps regarded it as the poor victim of a conspiracy of monarchical
swash-bucklers. The fact that the United States of America has made up
its mind finally makes it abundantly clear to the world that this is no
struggle of that character, but a great fight for human liberty.
They naturally did not know at first what we had endured in Europe for
years from this military caste in Prussia. It never has reached the
United States of America. Prussia was not a democracy. The Kaiser
promises that it will be a democracy after the war. I think he is
right. But Prussia not merely was not a democracy. Prussia was not a
state; Prussia was an army. It had great industries that had been
highly developed; a great educational system; it had its universities;
it had developed its science.
All these were subordinate to the one great predominant purpose of
all--a conquering army which was to intimidate the world. The army was
the spearpoint of Prussia; the rest was merely the haft. That was what
we had to deal with in these old countries. It got on the nerves of
Europe. They knew what it all meant. It was an army that in recent
times had waged three wars, all of conquest, and the unceasing tramp of
its legions through the streets of Prussia, on the parade grounds of
Prussia, had got into the Prussian head. The Kaiser, when he witnessed
on a grand scale his reviews, got drunk with the sound of it. He
delivered the law to the world as if Potsdam was another Sinai, and he
was uttering the law from the thunder clouds.
But make no mistake. Europe was uneasy. Europe was half intimidated.
Europe was anxious. Europe was apprehensive. We knew the whole time
what it meant. What we did not know was the moment it would come.
This is the menace, this is the apprehension from which Europe has
suffered for over fifty years. It paralyzed the beneficent activity of
all states, which ought to be devoted to concentrating on the
well-being of their peoples. They had to think about this menace,
which was there constantly as a cloud ready to burst over the land. No
one can tell except Frenchmen what they endured from this tyranny,
patiently, gallantly, with dignity, till the hour of deliverance came.
The best energies of military science had been devoted to defending
itself against the impending blow. France was like a nation which put
up its right arm to ward off a blow, and could not give the whole of
her strength to the great things which she was capable of. That great,
bold, imaginative, fertile mind, which would otherwise have been
clearing new paths for progress, was paralyzed.
That is the state of things we had to encounter. The most
characteristic of Prussian institutions is the Hindenburg line. What
is the Hindenburg line? The Hindenburg line is a line drawn in the
territories of other people, with a warning that the inhabitants of
those territories shall not cross it at the peril of their lives. That
line has been drawn in Europe for fifty years.
You recollect what happened some years ago in France, when the French
Foreign Minister was practically driven out of office by Prussian
interference. Why? What had he done? He had done nothing which a
minister of an independent state had not the most absolute right to do.
He had crossed the imaginary line drawn in French territory by Prussian
despotism, and he had to leave. Europe, after enduring this for
generations, made up its mind at last that the Hindenburg line must be
drawn along the legitimate frontiers of Germany herself. There could
be no other attitude than that for the emancipation of Europe and the
world.
It was hard at first for the people of America quite to appreciate that
Germany had not interfered to the same extent with their freedom, if at
all. But at last they endured the same experience as Europe had been
subjected to. Americans were told that they were not to be allowed to
cross and recross the Atlantic except at their peril. American ships
were sunk without warning. American citizens were drowned, hardly with
an apology--in fact, as a matter of German right. At first America
could hardly believe it. They could not think it possible that any
sane people should behave in that manner. And they tolerated it once,
and they tolerated it twice, until it became clear that the Germans
really meant it. Then America acted, and acted promptly.
The Hindenburg line was drawn along the shores of America, and the
Americans were told they must not cross it. America said, "What is
this?" Germany said, "This is our line, beyond which you must not go,"
and America said, "The place for that line is not the Atlantic, but on
the Rhine--and we mean to help you roll it up."
There are two great facts which clinch the argument that this is a
great struggle for freedom. The first is the fact that America has
come in. She would not have come in otherwise. When France in the
eighteenth century sent her soldiers to America to fight for the
freedom and independence of that land, France also was an autocracy in
those days. But Frenchmen in America, once they were there, their aim
was freedom, their atmosphere was freedom, their inspiration was
freedom. They acquired a taste for freedom, and they took it home, and
France became free. That is the story of Russia. Russia engaged in
this great war for the freedom of Serbia, of Montenegro, of Bulgaria,
and has fought for the freedom of Europe. They wanted to make their
own country free, and they have done it. The Russian revolution is not
merely the outcome of the struggle for freedom. It is a proof of the
character of the struggle for liberty, and if the Russian people
realize, as there is every evidence they are doing, that national
discipline is not incompatible with national freedom--nay, that
national discipline is essential to the security of national
freedom--they will, indeed, become a free people.
I have been asking myself the question, Why did Germany, deliberately,
in the third year of the war, provoke America to this declaration and
to this action--deliberately, resolutely? It has been suggested that
the reason was that there were certain elements in American life, and
the Hohenzollerns were under the impression that they would make it
impossible for the United States to declare war. That I can hardly
believe. But the answer has been afforded by Marshal von Hindenburg
himself, in the very remarkable interview which appeared in the press,
I think, only this morning.
He depended clearly on one of two things. First, that the submarine
campaign would have destroyed international shipping to such an extent
that England would have been put out of business before America was
ready. According to his computation, America cannot be ready for
twelve months. He does not know America. Second, that when America is
ready, at the end of twelve months, with her army, she will have no
ships to transport that army to the field of battle. In von
Hindenburg's words, "America carries no weight." I suppose he means
she has no ships to carry weight. On that, undoubtedly, they are
reckoning.
Well, it is not wise always to assume that even when the German General
Staff, which has miscalculated so often, makes a calculation it has no
ground for it. It therefore behooves the whole of the Allies, Great
Britain and America in particular, to see that that reckoning of von
Hindenburg is as false as the one he made about his famous line, which
we have broken already.
The road to victory, the guarantee of victory, the absolute assurance
of victory is to be found in one word--ships; and a second word--ships.
And with that quickness of apprehension which characterizes your
nation, I see that they fully realize that, and today I observe that
they have already made arrangements to build one thousand 3000-tonners
for the Atlantic. I think that the German military advisers must
already begin to realize that this is another of the tragic
miscalculations which are going to lead them to disaster and to ruin.
But you will pardon me for emphasizing that. We are a slow people in
these islands--slow and blundering--but we get there. You get there
sooner, and that is why I am glad to see you in.
But may I say that we have been in this business for three years? We
have, as we generally do, tried every blunder. In golfing phraseology,
we have got into every bunker. But we have got a good niblick. We are
right out on the course. But may I respectfully suggest that it is
worth America's while to study our blunders, so as to begin just where
we are now and not where we were three years ago? That is an
advantage. In war, time has as tragic a significance as it has in
sickness. A step which, taken today, may lead to assured victory,
taken tomorrow may barely avert disaster. All the Allies have
discovered that. It was a new country for us all. It was trackless,
mapless. We had to go by instinct. But we found the way, and I am so
glad that you are sending your great naval and military experts here
just to exchange experiences with men who have been through all the
dreary, anxious crises of the last three years.
America has helped us even to win the battle of Arras. The guns which
destroyed the German trenches, shattered the barbed wire--I remember,
with some friends of mine whom I see here, arranging to order the
machines to make those guns from America. Not all of them--you got
your share, but only a share, a glorious share. So that America has
also had her training. She has been making guns, making ammunition,
giving us machinery to prepare both; she has supplied us with steel,
and she has all that organization, and all that wonderful facility,
adaptability, and resourcefulness of the great people which inhabits
that great continent. Ah! It was a bad day for military autocracy in
Prussia when it challenged the great republic of the west. We know
what America can do, and we also know that now she is in it she will do
it. She will wage an effective and successful war.
There is something more important. She will insure a beneficent peace.
To this I attach great importance. I am the last man to say that the
succor which is given to us from America is not something in itself to
rejoice in, and to rejoice in greatly. But I do not mind saying that I
rejoice even more in the knowledge that America is going to win the
right to be at the conference table when the terms of peace are being
discussed. That conference will settle the destiny of nations--the
course of human life--for God knows how many ages. It would have been
tragic for mankind if America had not been there, and there with all
the influence, all the power, and the right which she has now won by
flinging herself into this great struggle.
I can see peace coming now--not a peace which will be the beginning of
war, not a peace which will be an endless preparation for strife and
bloodshed, but a real peace. The world is an old world. It has never
had peace. It has been rocking and swaying like an ocean, and
Europe--poor Europe!--has always lived under the menace of the sword.
When this war began two-thirds of Europe were under autocratic rule.
It is the other way about now, and democracy means peace. The
democracy of France did not want war; the democracy of Italy hesitated
long before they entered the war; the democracy of this country shrank
from it--shrank and shuddered--and never would have entered the caldron
had it not been for the invasion of Belgium. The democracies sought
peace; strove for peace. If Prussia had been a democracy there would
have been no war. Strange things have happened in this war. There are
stranger things to come, and they are coming rapidly.
There are times in history when this world spins so leisurely along its
destined course that it seems for centuries to be at a standstill; but
there are also times when it rushes along at a giddy pace, covering the
track of centuries in a year. Those are the times we are living in
now. Today we are waging the most devastating war that the world has
ever seen; tomorrow--perhaps not a distant tomorrow--war may be
abolished forever from the category of human crimes. This may be
something like the fierce outburst of winter, which we are now
witnessing, before the complete triumph of the sun. It is written of
those gallant men who won that victory on Monday--men from Canada, from
Australia, and from this old country, which has proved that in spite of
its age it is not decrepit--it is written of those gallant men that
they attacked with the dawn--fit work for the dawn!--to drive out of
forty miles of French soil those miscreants who had defiled it for
three years. "They attacked with the dawn." Significant phrase!
The breaking up of the dark rule of the Turk, which for centuries has
clouded the sunniest land in the world, the freeing of Russia from an
oppression which has covered it like a shroud for so long, the great
declaration of President Wilson coming with the might of the great
nation which he represents into the struggle for liberty, are heralds
of the dawn. "They attacked with the dawn," and these men are marching
forward in the full radiance of that dawn, and soon Frenchmen and
Americans, British, Italians, Russians, yea, and Serbians, Belgians,
Montenegrins, will march into the full light of a perfect day.
THE FIRST TO FALL IN BATTLE
During the trench warfare, it was customary to raid the enemy trenches
at unexpected hours, sometimes during the night, often during "the
sleepiest hour," just before the dawn. In such a raid made by the
Germans in the early dawn of November 3, 1917, fell the first American
soldiers to die in the World War.
The Germans began by shelling the barbed-wire barrier in front of the
trenches where the Americans were stationed for a few days, taking
their first lessons in trench warfare. A heavy artillery fire was then
directed so as to cover the trenches and the country immediately back
of them. This prevented reinforcements coming into the trenches.
Following the barrage a large number of Huns broke through the barbed
wire and jumped into the trenches.
The Americans did not fully understand the situation, for it was their
first experience with a trench raid. A wounded private said, "I was
standing in a communicating trench waiting for orders. I heard a noise
back of me and looked around in time to see a German fire in my
direction. I felt a bullet hit my arm."
Three Americans were killed. They were the first fighting under the
American flag to fall in battle on the soil of Europe. They were--
Corporal James B. Gresham, Evansville, Indiana.
Private Merle D. Hay, Glidden, Iowa.
Private Thomas F. Enright, Pittsburg, Pennsylvania.
On November 6, three graves were dug. On one side of them stood a line
of poilus in their uniforms of horizon blue and red, and on the other a
line of American soldiers in khaki. The flag-covered caskets were
lowered, as the bugler sounded "taps," and the batteries fired minute
guns.
Then the French officer in command of the division, amid the broken
roar of the minute guns and the whistle of shells, paid a tribute to
the dead.
"In the name of this division, in the name of the French army, and in
the name of France, I bid farewell to Corporal Gresham, Private Hay,
and Private Enright of the American army.
"Of their own free will they left a happy, prosperous country to come
over here. They knew war was here. They knew that the forces battling
for honor, for justice, and for civilization were still being checked
by the forces serving the powers of frightfulness, brute force, and
barbarity. They knew that fighting was still necessary. Not
forgetting historical memories, they wished to give us their brave
hearts.
"They knew all the conditions, nothing had been hidden from them, not
the length and hardship of the war, not the violence of battle, not the
terrible destruction of the new weapons, not the falseness of the
enemy. Nothing stopped them. They accepted the hard life, they
crossed the ocean at great peril, they took their places at the front
beside us; and now they have fallen in a desperate hand-to-hand fight.
All honor to them.
"Men! These American graves, the first to be dug in the soil of
France, and but a short distance from the enemy, are a symbol of the
mighty land that has come to aid the Allies, ready to sacrifice as long
as may be necessary until the final victory for the most noble of
causes, the liberty of peoples and of nations, of the weak as well as
the strong. For this reason the deaths of these humble soldiers take
on an extraordinary grandeur.
"We shall ask that the mortal remains of these young men be left here,
left with us forever. We will inscribe on the tombs, 'Here lie the
first soldiers of the Republic of the United States to fall on the soil
of France for liberty and justice.' The passer-by will stop and
uncover his head. Travelers and men of feeling will go out of their
way to come here to pay tribute.
"Corporal Gresham, Private Hay, Private Enright, in the name of France,
I thank you. God receive your souls. Farewell."
As the French officer wished, there they remain. Soon a worthy
monument will be erected upon the ground where they fought and now lie
asleep in death. Americans of this generation and of generations to
come will stand in future days with bared heads before that monument
and pay tribute.
[Illustration: The religious and military tribute paid to the first
Americans to fall in battle, at Bathelmont, November 4, 1917. General
Bordeaux, in the name of the French army, bade "farewell to all that
was mortal of the three heroes." At this point in the funeral, notice
that the American soldiers in the background are standing at "parade
rest."]
FOUR SOLDIERS
THE BOCHE
The _boche_ was chiefly what his masters made him.
He was planned and turned out according to specifications. His leaders
and his enemies always knew just what he would do under any given
circumstances, and he himself always knew just what he would do. He
would do what he was ordered to do, if he understood the order and had
been taught how to execute it; otherwise he would do nothing but stare
helplessly. He was a machine built to order, according to plans and
specifications.
"In critical moments the boche waited for direction instead of relying
on himself. He could not vary a hairbreadth from an order given, even
when the variation would have brought success. He was part of a
machine army, a cog in a mechanism which needed a push to make it move;
his actions must be dictated or he could not act; his very thoughts
were disciplined and uniformed."
To the _boche_ there was no chivalry in war. He fought as the
barbarians would have fought, if they had had all his knowledge and
equipment, but were still uncivilized. Women and children never called
forth his pity or his mercy. He would defile and destroy a church or a
cathedral with greater pleasure than he would a peasant's hut.
To him there were no laws of war. War meant to fight, to conquer, to
kill, to gain the end by any means whatever. Dropping bombs on
defenseless women and children and on Red Cross hospitals; torpedoing
merchant ships without warning and sending all the passengers, even
neutrals or friends, to death, or worse, in open boats far from land;
firing on stretcher-bearers and nurses; using poison gas and liquid
fire; poisoning wells and spreading disease germs; all are forbidden to
civilized races by the laws of war. The _boche_ regularly perpetrated
them all and committed other atrocities much worse. He hoped to
frighten the world by his cruelty and brutality, by making every man,
woman, and child among his enemies believe that each _boche_ was an
unconquerable giant possessed of a devil.
To the _boche_ war was simply a robbery, and he was one of a robber
band. On the land, he was a brigand, on the sea, a pirate. He went
about his business with no more mercy and chivalry than a New York
gunman or a Paris apache. To him war was a business, an unlawful
business to be sure, but, he believed, a profitable one. He went at
it, therefore, as he had at manufacturing and commerce in the days of
peace. He sought to do bigger things than any one else and to gain an
advantage by any means, fair or foul. Why should he think about being
fair or humane? He was a thief, not a judge.
And yet let it be recorded that while nearly all _boches_ acted like
brutes instead of men, there were some who were different and who
showed the highest type of courage and died bravely as soldiers may die.
THE POILU
The soldier of France, the _poilu_, is a crusader. He is fighting to
defend France, his great mother, in whose defense, centuries ago, the
invisible powers called and sustained Jeanne d'Arc. In his love of
country there is something almost religious, like that of the
Mohammedan for Mecca and Medina. To serve France, to fight for her, to
die for her--and every French soldier expects to die in battle--is a
privilege as well as a duty. He fights for his country as an
Englishman fights for his home. With the Englishman, his home comes
first and is nearest and dearest; with the Frenchman, his country.
Philip Gibbs, who has written from day to day, from the trenches and
the battlefields, letters that will never be forgotten because of their
beauty and truth, says of the French _poilu_:--
"Yet if the English reader imagines that because this thread of
sentiment runs through the character of France there is a softness in
the qualities of French soldiers, he does not know the truth. Those
men whom I saw at the front and behind the fighting lines were as hard
in moral and spiritual strength as in physical endurance. It was this
very hardness which impressed me even in the beginning of the war, when
I did not know the soldiers of France as well as I do now. After a few
weeks in the field these men, who had been laborers and mechanics,
clerks and journalists, artists and poets, shop assistants and railway
porters, hotel waiters, and young aristocrats of Paris, were toned down
to the quality of tempered steel. With not a spare ounce of flesh on
them--the rations of the French army are not as rich as ours--and
tested by long marches down dusty roads, by incessant fighting in
retreat against overwhelming odds, by the moral torture of those
rearguard actions, and by their first experience of indescribable
horrors, among dead and dying comrades, they had a beauty of manhood
which I found sublime. They were bronzed and dirty and hairy, but they
had the look of knighthood, with a calm light shining in their eyes and
with resolute lips. They had no gayety in those days, when France was
in gravest peril, and they did not find any kind of fun in this war.
Out of their baptism of fire they had come with scorched souls, knowing
the murderous quality of the business to which they were apprenticed,
but though they did not hide their loathing of it, nor the fears which
had assailed them, nor their passionate anger against the people who
had thrust this thing upon them, they showed no sign of weakness. They
were willing to die for France, though they hated death, and in spite
of the first great rush of the German legions, they had a fine
intellectual contempt of that army, which seemed to me then
unjustified, though they were right, as history now shows. Man against
man, in courage and cunning they were better than the Germans, gun
against gun they were better, in cavalry charge and in bayonet charge
they were better, and in equal number irresistible."
THE TOMMY
John Masefield, the English writer, says, "St. George did not go out
against the dragon like that divine calm youth in Carpaccio's picture,
nor like that divine calm man in Donatello's statue. He went out, I
think, after some taste of defeat knowing that it was going to be bad,
and that the dragon would breathe fire, and that very likely his spear
would break, and that he wouldn't see his children again, and people
would call him a fool. He went out, I think, as the battalions of our
men went out, a little trembling and a little sick and not knowing much
about it, except that it had to be done, and then stood up to the
dragon in the mud of that far land and waited for him to come on."
[Illustration: Saint George and the Dragon, painted by V. Carpaccio in
1516, Venice; S. Giorgio Maggiore. The background, as in most medieval
paintings, gives scenes that explain further the legend depicted.]
But as soon as the British Tommy had reached the dragon's lair, he
became the British player in a great championship game of the nations.
He was the British sportsman, hunting big game; for in matters of life
or death, he is always the player or the sportsman. That it was a
hideous dragon breathing out poison gas and fire and destroying
Christian maidens, made the sport all the more interesting and worth
while. Philip Gibbs says of the English Tommy:--
"They take great risks sometimes as a kind of sport, as Arctic
explorers or big game hunters will face danger and endure great bodily
suffering for their own sake. Those men are natural soldiers. There
are some even who like war, though very few. But most of them would
jeer at any kind of pity for them, because they do not pity themselves,
except in most dreadful moments which they put away from their minds if
they escape. They scorn pity, yet they hate worse still, with a most
deadly hatred, all the talk about 'our cheerful men.' For they know
that, however cheerful they may be, it is not because of a jolly life
or lack of fear. They loathe shell-fire and machine-gun fire. They
know what it is 'to have the wind up.' They have seen what a
battlefield looks like before it has been cleared of its dead. It is
not for non-combatants to call them 'cheerful'; because non-combatants
do not understand and never will, not from now until the ending of the
world. 'Not so much of your cheerfulness,' they say, and 'Cut it out
about the brave boys in the trenches.' So it is difficult to describe
them, or to give any idea of what goes on in their minds, for they
belong to another world than the world of peace that we knew, and there
is no code which can decipher their secret, nor any means of
self-expression on their lips."
The Tommy dislikes to show emotion or to brag or to be praised when he
is present. To outsiders and to soldiers of other nations sent to help
him, he likes to make the duties and the dangers seem as disagreeable,
as horrible, and as inevitable as he possibly can, but when he has
discharged a particularly tiresome and obnoxious duty himself or has
met without flinching a terrible danger, he declares his act was
"nothing."
"The _poilu_ and the Tommy are vastly different. The Frenchman works
himself up into a fanatical state of enthusiasm, and in a wild burst of
excitement dashes into the fray. The Englishman finishes his
cigarette, exchanges a joke with his 'bunkie' and coolly goes 'over the
top.' Both are wonderful fighters with the profoundest admiration for
each other."
The Tommy wants his tea and the officers like to carry their canes and
swagger sticks with them "over the top" into battle. A brave,
unpretending man, who likes his own ways and wishes to be allowed to
follow them and who is willing to fight and die that others also may be
free--such is the English Tommy. With him it is all a part of the
game, the game of war, and the greatest game of all, the game of life.
He must play his part and play it well.
THE YANK
The _boche_ went into the war as a robber, the _poilu_ as a crusader
determined to save the sacred and holy things of the world from
desecration and destruction, the _Tommy_ as a player in a great game,
and the _Yank_ as a policeman whose job it was to "clean up" the affair.
To the American soldiers, the _Yanks_, and to the American people, the
war was a job, a most disagreeable one, but one that must be done. No
one else was ready and able to do it; so they went at it smilingly and
"jollied" every one with whom they came in contact.
French children were asked to write descriptions of the "Yanks" for a
New York paper. They nearly all said that they were big and handsome
and quick, that they always smiled and were always hungry, especially
for chocolate and candy. The French noticed the everlasting smile of
the _Yank_, for after three years of war and suffering the French, even
the children, had ceased to smile. It is said the children had even
forgotten how to play, but they responded to the love in the hearts of
the _Yanks_, as did the German children when the American soldiers
crossed the Rhine. To the _Yanks_ there were no enemies among the
children; they loved them, French or German.
The _Yank_ did not smile because he failed to realize the seriousness
of his job, but because with him the harder, the more dangerous, and
the dirtier the job, the more must he smile and "jolly" about it.
"They had come to France to do a certain piece of work. It was a
bloody, dusty, sweaty, unclean, disagreeable one, and they proposed to
finish it. . . . We are a people given to discounting futures, and the
average American soldier, to put it bluntly, discounted being killed in
action. If our Allies, whose fortitude was sustained in a dark hour by
the way that our men fought, could have probed what was in the mind of
these Americans, they would have found still further reason for faith
in our military strength." So declares Major Palmer of General
Pershing's staff.
Raymond Fosdick says the character of the American soldier was shown
when a Y.M.C.A. secretary asked a large body of _Yanks_ to write on
little slips of paper distributed to them what they thought were the
three greatest sins in a soldier. When the papers were passed back and
examined, it was found that they agreed unanimously upon the first sin.
It was cowardice. And almost unanimously upon the second. It was
selfishness. And the third was big-headedness.
The _Yank_ is wonderfully free from the sins he hates. Dashing,
fearless, willing to die rather than to surrender, unable, as General
Bundy said, to understand an order to retreat, he is always a
"jollier." It is said one platoon of _Yanks_ went "over the top"
wearing tall silk hats with grenades in one hand and carrying pink
parasols in the other. This may be only a story of what the _Yanks_
would have done if permitted, but it is true to their nature.
The _Yanks_ have written the noblest chapter of American history. They
have honored their fathers and mothers, their churches, the American
public school, and the land of Washington and Lincoln. Those who sleep
beneath foreign soil have not died in vain.
*******************
DUTY
So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
So near is God to man,
When Duty whispers low, "_Thou must_,"
The youth replies, "I _can_."
WHERE THE FOUR WINDS MEET
There are songs of the north and songs of the south,
And songs of the east and west;
But the songs of the place where the four winds meet
Are the ones that we love the best.
"And where do the four winds meet?" you ask.
The answer is ready at hand--
"Wherever our dear ones chance to be
By air, or by sea, or land."
So the sailor, keeping his midnight watch
'Mid icicles, snow, and sleet,
Can think of a village near Portsmouth town
As the place where the four winds meet.
And mother, perhaps, and sweetheart true
Pray hard for the North Sea Fleet,
And harder still for the boy who's gone
To his place, where the four winds meet.
And the man on guard at the "firing-step,"
'Mid star-shells shimmering down,
Can think of his home--where the four winds meet
In some sheltered English town.
And thoughts may fly to the distant trench,
Whatever its name or "street,"
For "Somewhere in France" seems far less vague
If we add, "where the four winds meet."
And the pilot steers thro' the trackless waste
While the engines throb and beat,
Flouting surprise, with the army's eyes
High up where the four winds meet.
And to those who mourn comes a cheering cry,
Which the angels in heaven repeat,
"Grieve not, brave hearts; we await you here--
_Here_, where the four winds meet."
There are songs of the north and songs of the south,
The east and the west complete;
But here is a song of the place we love,
Which is called, "Where the four winds meet."
GEOFFREY DALRYMPLE NASH.
*******************
THE UNITED STATES MARINES
Our flag's unfurled to every breeze
From dawn to setting sun,
We have fought in every clime or place
Where we could take a gun--
In the snow of far-off northern lands
And in sunny tropic scenes,
You will find us always on the job--
The United States Marines.
THE SOLDIERS WHO GO TO SEA
"If the army or the navy ever gaze on Heaven's scenes,
They will find the streets are guarded by United States marines."
So sing the soldiers who go to sea, commonly called the marines. The
Germans after the battles of Belleau Wood and Bouresches called them
"devil hounds," and the French named them the "green devils."
An English rhymester wrote to his home paper,
"You must not call them Sammies,
You should not call them Yanks.
And if you call them 'doughboys'
Loud laughter splits their flanks.
You will not call them Buddies,
And when on Kultur's track,
You need not call them forward,
You cannot call them back."
They know too that whenever trouble arises in any part of the world,
they are the first to be sent to protect American interests. It is
said that many of them believe the chief reason why the United States
has a navy is for the purpose of carrying the marines to the points
where they are needed. They are aware of the fact that marines may be
landed and such landing not be considered an act of war. Therefore
they look upon their service as much more important than that of the
soldier.
The marine has been everywhere man has gone by land or sea or air, as
one of their poets wrote:
"From the hills of Montezuma
To the gates of old Peking
He has heard the shrapnel bursting,
He has heard the Mauser's ping.
He has known Alaskan waters
And the coral roads of Guam,
He has bowed to templed idols
And to sultans made salaam."
"I am more than a sailor, for although I belong to the navy I fight on
the land. I am more than a soldier, for I do all that the soldier does
and at the same time I belong to the navy and go to sea." Thus the
marine proves to himself that he is "it," as the soldiers and sailors
would say.
"The marines get aviation, searchlight, wireless telegraph, heliograph,
and other drill. They plant mines, put up telegraph and telephone
lines in the field, tear down or build up bridges, sling from a ship
and set up or land guns as big as 5-inch for their advance base work.
"It is a belief with marines that the corps can do anything. Right in
New York City is a marine printing plant with a battery of linotypes
and a row of presses. They set their own type, write their own stuff
(even to the poetry), draw their own sketches, do their own
photography, their own color work--everything. Every man in that plant
is a marine, enlisted or commissioned. Every one has seen service
somewhere outside his country."
Such a feeling of superiority, however, would soon be laughed down if
it were not based upon something more than talk. The marines know this
and try in every way to show that they excel the other branches. They
are extremely careful of their dress, and their personal appearance,
and of their conduct whether on duty or off. They try to sustain the
reputation of their branch in every little way as well as in every
great one.
As an illustration of this, they are not satisfied with a commonplace
mascot. Soldiers and sailors, and marines too, must have a mascot. A
cat, a dog, a goat, a parrot, a monkey, a pig, a lion cub, or a bear
are among the commonest and most popular of mascots. Therefore the
marines would usually disdain any one of these. If any of them should
happen to be accepted as a mascot, there would be some wonderful story
to explain why it was the most remarkable monkey, goat, or lion cub
that ever lived.
A large and hideous snake, a young kangaroo, or an anteater are mascots
more to the liking of the marines. They must have something like
themselves, exclusive and distinguished. The anteater that one body of
marines adopted when they were landed at Vera Cruz proved a very
interesting and original mascot, and also that anteaters were not
always exactly as they are described in school textbooks, for this
anteater disdained to eat ants and greedily devoured anything from the
food of the marines that they would give him, or that he could
steal--bread, meat, pie, doughnuts, or eggs.
A writer telling about this anteater mascot says he was taught several
tricks, one of which was to put out with his forepaws every lighted
cigarette dropped near him and then to tear it into little pieces.
Heywood Broun, the writer, goes on to say, "The marine who dropped a
hundred franc note by mistake just in front of Jimmy says that teaching
tricks to anteaters is all foolishness."
And how do they sustain the reputation of their branch in the great
things? Here is where soldier, sailor, or marine must prove his
superiority, for excelling here means greater service to his country.
It would be difficult indeed to give the palm to any branch of the
service. They have all endured hardship and met wounds and death with
equal gallantry, each striving to outdo the other in devotion and
sacrifice.
Secretary Daniels has told the inspiring heroic story of the fighting
of the eight thousand marines who in June, 1918, were thrown into the
open gap between the advancing Germans and Paris.
Although they were without proper artillery support and too small in
numbers for the task, General Pershing in those dark days offered their
services to Marshal Foch, saying, "If you have no other troops to use
and the gap must be closed and the Germans stopped, they will do it."
And they did! But out of the eight thousand, four thousand were
missing, wounded, or killed. Read Secretary Daniels' story of this
fight, called the battle of Belleau Wood, and be proud that you are an
American.
This efficient fighting, building, and landing force of the navy has
won imperishable glory in the fulfillment of its latest duties upon the
battlefields of France, where the marines, fighting for the time under
General Pershing as a part of the victorious American army, have
written a story of valor and sacrifice that will live in the brightest
annals of the war. With heroism that nothing could daunt, the Marine
Corps played a vital rôle in stemming the German rush on Paris, and in
later days aided in the beginning of the great offensive, the freeing
of Rheims, and participated in the hard fighting in Champagne, which
had as its object the throwing back of the Prussian armies in the
vicinity of Cambrai and St. Quentin.
With only 8000 men engaged in the fiercest battles, the Marine Corps
casualties numbered 69 officers and 1531 enlisted men dead and 78
officers and 2435 enlisted men wounded seriously enough to be
officially reported by cablegram, to which number should be added not a
few whose wounds did not incapacitate them for further fighting.
However, with a casualty list that numbers nearly half the original
8000 men who entered battle, the official reports account for only 57
United States marines who have been captured by the enemy. This
includes those who were wounded far in advance of their lines and who
fell into the hands of Germans while unable to resist.
Memorial Day shall henceforth have a greater, deeper significance for
America, for it was on that day, May 30, 1918, that our country really
received its first call to battle--the battle in which American troops
had the honor of stopping the German drive on Paris, throwing back the
Prussian hordes in attack after attack, and beginning the retreat which
lasted until Imperial Germany was beaten to its knees and its
emissaries appealing for an armistice under the flag of truce. And to
the United States marines, fighting side by side with equally brave and
equally courageous men in the American army, to that faithful sea and
land force of the navy, fell the honor of taking over the lines where
the blow of the Prussian would strike the hardest, the line that was
nearest Paris, and where, should a breach occur, all would be lost.
The world knows today that the United States marines held that line;
that they blocked the advance that was rolling on toward Paris at a
rate of six or seven miles a day; that they met the attack in American
fashion and with American heroism; that marines and soldiers of the
American army threw back the crack guard divisions of Germany, broke
their advance, and then, attacking, drove them back in the beginning of
a retreat that was not to end until the "cease firing" signal sounded
for the end of the world's greatest war.
It was on the evening of May 30, after a day dedicated to the memory of
their comrades who had fallen in the training days and in the Verdun
sector, that the 5th and 6th Regiments and the 6th Machine Gun
Battalion, United States marines, each received the following orders:--
Advance information official received that this regiment will move at
10 P.M. 30 May by bus to new area. All trains shall be loaded at once
and arrangements hastened. Wagons, when loaded, will move to Serans to
form train.
All through the night there was fevered activity among the marines.
Then, the next morning, the long trains of camions, busses, and trucks,
each carrying its full complement of United States marines, went
forward on a road which at one place wound within less than ten miles
of Paris, toward Meaux and the fighting line.
Through the town of Meaux went the long line of camions and to the
village of Montriel-aux-Lions, less than four miles from the rapidly
advancing German line. On this trip the camions containing the
Americans were the only traffic traveling in the direction of the
Germans; everything else was going the other way--refugees, old men and
women, small children, riding on every conceivable conveyance, many
trudging along the side of the road driving a cow or calf before them,
all of them covered with the white dust which the camion caravan was
whirling up as it rolled along; along that road only one organization
was advancing, the United States marines.
At last, their destination reached early on the morning of June 2, they
disembarked, stiff and tired after a journey of more than seventy-two
miles, but as they formed their lines and marched onward in the
direction of the line they were to hold they were determined and
cheerful. That evening the first field message from the Fourth Brigade
to Major General Omar Bundy, commanding the 2d Division, went forward:--
Second Battalion, 6th Marines, in line from Le Thiolet through
Clarembauts Woods to Triangle to Lucy. Instructed to hold line. First
Battalion, 6th marines, going into line from Lucy through Hill 142.
Third Battalion in support at La Voie du Châtel, which is also the post
command of the 6th Marines. Sixth Machine Gun Battalion distributed at
line.
Meanwhile the 5th Regiment was moving into line, machine guns were
advancing, and the artillery taking its position. That night the men
and officers of the marines slept in the open, many of them in a field
that was green with unharvested wheat, awaiting the time when they
should be summoned to battle. The next day at 5 o'clock, the afternoon
of June 2, began the battle of Château-Thierry, with the Americans
holding the line against the most vicious wedge of the German advance.
The advance of the Germans was across a wheat field, driving at Hill
165 and advancing in smooth columns. The United States marines,
trained to keen observation upon the rifle range, nearly every one of
them wearing a marksman's medal or better, that of the sharpshooter or
expert rifleman, did not wait for those gray-clad hordes to advance
nearer.
Calmly they set their sights and aimed with the same precision that
they had shown upon the rifle ranges at Paris Island, Mare Island, and
Quantico. Incessantly their rifles cracked, and with their fire came
the support of the artillery. The machine-gun fire, incessant also,
began to make its inroads upon the advancing forces. Closer and closer
the shrapnel burst to its targets. Caught in a seething wave of
machine-gun fire, of scattering shrapnel, of accurate rifle fire, the
Germans found themselves in a position in which further advance could
only mean absolute suicide. The lines hesitated. They stopped. They
broke for cover, while the marines raked the woods and ravines in which
they had taken refuge with machine gun and rifle to prevent them making
another attempt to advance by infiltrating through.
Above, a French airplane was checking up on the artillery fire.
Surprised by the fact that men should deliberately set their sights,
adjust their range, and then fire deliberately at an advancing foe,
each man picking his target, instead of firing merely in the direction
of the enemy, the aviator signaled below "Bravo!" In the rear that
word was echoed again and again. The German drive on Paris had been
stopped.
For the next few days the fighting took on the character of pushing
forth outposts and determining the strength of the enemy. Now, the
fighting had changed. The Germans, mystified that they should have run
against a stone wall of defense just when they believed that their
advance would be easiest, had halted, amazed; then prepared to defend
the positions they had won with all the stubbornness possible. In the
black recesses of Belleau Wood the Germans had established nest after
nest of machine guns. There in the jungle of matted underbrush, of
vines, of heavy foliage, they had placed themselves in positions they
believed impregnable. And this meant that unless they could be routed,
unless they could be thrown back, the breaking of the attack of June 2
would mean nothing. There would come another drive and another. The
battle of Château-Thierry was therefore not won and could not be won
until Belleau Wood had been cleared of the enemy.
It was June 6 that the attack of the American troops began against that
wood and its adjacent surroundings, with the wood itself and the towns
of Torcy and Bouresches forming the objectives. At 5 o'clock the
attack came, and there began the tremendous sacrifices which the Marine
Corps gladly suffered that the German fighters might be thrown back.
The marines fought strictly according to American methods--a rush, a
halt, a rush again, in four-wave formation, the rear waves taking over
the work of those who had fallen before them, passing over the bodies
of their dead comrades and plunging ahead, until they, too, should be
torn to bits. But behind those waves were more waves and the attack
went on.
"Men fell like flies"; the expression is that of an officer writing
from the field. Companies that had entered the battle 250 strong
dwindled to fifty and sixty, with a sergeant in command; but the attack
did not falter. At 9:45 o'clock that night Bouresches was taken by
Lieutenant James F. Robertson and twenty odd men of his platoon; these
soon were joined by two reënforcing platoons. Then came the enemy
counter-attacks, but the marines held.
In Belleau Wood the fighting had been literally from trees to tree,
stronghold to stronghold; and it was a fight which must last for weeks
before its accomplishment in victory. Belleau Wood was a jungle, its
every rocky formation forming a German machine-gun nest, almost
impossible to reach by artillery or grenade fire. There was only one
way to wipe out these nests--by the bayonet. And by this method they
were wiped out, for United States marines, bare chested, shouted their
battle cry of "E-e-e-e-e y-a-a-h-h-h-yip!" charged straight into the
murderous fire from those guns, and won!
Out of the number that charged, in more than one instance, only one
would reach the stronghold. There, with his bayonet as his only
weapon, he would either kill or capture the defenders of the nest, and
then swinging the gun about in its position, turn it against the
remaining German positions in the forest. Such was the character of
the fighting in Belleau Wood, fighting which continued until July 6,
when after a short relief the invincible Americans finally were taken
back to the rest billet for recuperation.
In all the history of the Marine Corps there is no such battle as that
one in Belleau Wood. Fighting day and night without relief, without
sleep, often without water, and for days without hot rations, the
marines met and defeated the best divisions that Germany could throw
into the line.
The heroism and doggedness of that battle are unparalleled. Time after
time officers seeing their lines cut to pieces, seeing their men so dog
tired that they even fell asleep under shell fire, hearing their
wounded calling for the water that they were unable to supply, seeing
men fight on after they had been wounded and until they dropped
unconscious; time after time officers seeing these things, believing
that the very limit of human endurance had been reached, would send
back messages to their post command that their men were exhausted. But
in answer to this would come the word that the lines must hold, and, if
possible, those lines must attack. And the lines obeyed. Without
water, without food, without rest, they went forward--and forward every
time to victory. Companies had been so torn and lacerated by losses
that they were hardly platoons, but they held their lines and advanced
them. In more than one case companies lost every officer, leaving a
sergeant and sometimes a corporal to command, and the advance continued.
After thirteen days in this inferno of fire a captured German officer
told with his dying breath of a fresh division of Germans that was
about to be thrown into the battle to attempt to wrest from the marines
that part of the wood they had gained. The marines, who for days had
been fighting only on their sheer nerve, who had been worn out from
nights of sleeplessness, from lack of rations, from terrific shell and
machine-gun fire, straightened their lines and prepared for the attack.
It came--as the dying German officer had predicted.
At 2 o'clock on the morning of June 13 it was launched by the Germans
along the whole front. Without regard for men, the enemy hurled his
forces against Bouresches and the Bois de Belleau, and sought to win
back what had been taken from Germany by the Americans. The orders
were that these positions must be taken at all costs; that the utmost
losses in men must be endured that the Bois de Belleau and Bouresches
might fall again into German hands. But the depleted lines of the
marines held; the men who had fought on their nerve alone for days once
more showed the mettle of which they were made. With their backs to
the trees and bowlders of the Bois de Belleau, with their sole shelter
the scattered ruins of Bouresches, the thinning lines of the marines
repelled the attack and crashed back the new division which had sought
to wrest the position from them.
And so it went. Day after day, night after night, while time after
time messages like the following traveled to the post command:--
Losses heavy. Difficult to get runners through. Some have never
returned. Morale excellent, but troops about all in. Men exhausted.
Exhausted, but holding on. And they continued to hold on in spite of
every difficulty. Advancing their lines slowly day by day, the marines
finally prepared their positions to such an extent that the last rush
for the possession of the wood could be made. Then, on June 24,
following a tremendous barrage, the struggle began.
The barrage literally tore the woods to pieces, but even its immensity
could not wipe out all the nests that remained, the emplacements that
were behind almost every clump of bushes, every jagged, rough group of
bowlders. But those that remained were wiped out by the American
method of the rush and the bayonet, and in the days that followed
every foot of Belleau Wood was cleared of the enemy and held by the
frayed lines of the Americans.
It was, therefore, with the feeling of work well done that the depleted
lines of the marines were relieved in July, that they might be filled
with replacements and made ready for the grand offensive in the
vicinity of Soissons, July 18. And in recognition of their sacrifice
and bravery this praise was forthcoming from the French:--
Army Headquarters, June 30, 1918.
In view of the brilliant conduct of the Fourth Brigade of the Second
United States Division, which in a spirited fight took Bouresches and
the important strong point of Bois de Belleau, stubbornly defended by a
large enemy force, the General commanding the Sixth Army orders that
henceforth, in all official papers, the Bois de Belleau shall be named
"Bois de la Brigade de Marine."
DIVISION GENERAL DEGOUTTE,
Commanding Sixth Army.
On July 18 the marines were again called into action in the vicinity of
Soissons, near Tigny and Vierzy. In the face of a murderous fire from
concentrated machine guns, which contested every foot of their advance,
the United States marines moved forward until the severity of their
casualties necessitated that they dig in and hold the positions they
had gained. Here, again, their valor called forth official praise.
Then came the battle for the St. Mihiel salient. On the night of Sept.
11 the 2d Division took over a line running from Remenauville to Limey,
and on the night of Sept. 14 and the morning of Sept. 15 attacked, with
two days' objectives ahead of them. Overcoming the enemy resistance,
they romped through to the Rupt de Mad, a small river, crossed it on
stone bridges, occupied Thiacourt, the first day's objective, scaled
the heights just beyond it, pushed on to a line running from the
Zammes-Joulney Ridges to the Binvaux Forest, and there rested, with the
second day's objectives occupied by 2:50 o'clock of the first day. The
casualties of the division were about 1000, of which 134 were killed.
Of these, about half were marines. The captures in which the marines
participated were 80 German officers, 3200 men, ninety-odd cannon, and
vast stores.
But even further honors were to befall the fighting, landing, and
building force, of which the navy is justly proud. In the early part
of October it became necessary for the Allies to capture the bald,
jagged ridge twenty miles due east of Rheims, known as Blanc Mont
Ridge. Here the armies of Germany and the Allies had clashed more than
once, and attempt after attempt had been made to wrest it from German
hands. It was a keystone of the German defense, the fall of which
would have a far-reaching effect upon the enemy armies. To the glory
of the United States marines, let it be said, that they were again a
part of that splendid 2d Division which swept forward in the attack
which freed Blanc Mont Ridge from German hands, pushed its way down the
slopes, and occupied the level ground just beyond, thus assuring a
victory, the full import of which can best be judged by the order of
General Lejeune, following the battle:--
France, Oct. 11, 1918.
Officers and Men of the 2d Division:--
It is beyond my power of expression to describe fitly my admiration for
your heroism. You attacked magnificently and you seized Blanc Mont
Ridge, the keystone of the arch constituting the enemy's main position.
You advanced beyond the ridge, breaking the enemy's lines, and you held
the ground gained with a tenacity which is unsurpassed in the annals of
war.
As a direct result of your victory, the German armies east and west of
Rheims are in full retreat, and by drawing on yourselves several German
divisions from other parts of the front you greatly assisted the
victorious advance of the Allied armies between Cambrai and St. Quentin.
Your heroism and the heroism of our comrades who died on the
battlefield will live in history forever, and will be emulated by the
young men of our country for generations to come.
To be able to say when this war is finished, "I belonged to the 2d
Division; I fought with it at the battle of Blanc Mont Ridge," will be
the highest honor that can come to any man.
JOHN A. LEJEUNE,
Major General, United States Marine Corps, Commanding.
Thus it is that the United States marines have fulfilled the glorious
traditions of their corps in this their latest duty as the "soldiers
who go to sea." Their sharpshooting--and in one regiment 93 per cent
of the men wear the medal of a marksman, a sharpshooter, or an expert
rifleman--has amazed soldiers of European armies, accustomed merely to
shooting in the general direction of the enemy. Under the fiercest
fire they have calmly adjusted their sights, aimed for their man, and
killed him, and in bayonet attacks their advance on machine-gun nests
has been irresistible.
In the official citation lists more than one American marine is
credited with taking an enemy machine gun single handed, bayoneting its
crew and then turning the gun against the foe. In one battle alone,
that of Belleau Wood, the citation lists bear the names of fully 500
United States marines who so distinguished themselves in battle as to
call forth the official commendation of their superior officers.
More than faithful in every emergency, accepting hardships with
admirable morale, proud of the honor of taking their place as shock
troops for the American legions, they have fulfilled every glorious
tradition of their corps, and they have given to the world a list of
heroes whose names will go down to all history.
WHEN THE TIDE TURNED
THE AMERICAN ATTACK AT CHÂTEAU-THIERRY AND BELLEAU WOOD IN THE FIRST
WEEK OF JUNE, 1918
BY OTTO H. KAHN
AN ADDRESS AT THE UNITED WAR WORK CAMPAIGN MEETING OF THE BOSTON
ATHLETIC ASSOCIATION, NOVEMBER 12, 1918
WHY THE TIDE WAS FATED TO TURN
These are soul-stirring days. To live through them is a glory and a
solemn joy. The words of the poet resound in our hearts: "God's in His
heaven, all's right with the world."
Events have shaped themselves in accordance with the eternal law. Once
again the fundamental lesson of all history is borne in upon the world,
that evil--though it may seem to triumph for a while--carries within it
the seed of its own dissolution. Once again it is revealed to us that
the God-inspired soul of man is unconquerable and that the power,
however formidable, which challenges it is doomed to go down in defeat.
A righteous cause will not only stand unshaken through trials and
discomfiture, but it will draw strength from the very setbacks which it
may suffer. A wrongful cause can only stand as long as it is buoyed up
by success.
The German people were sustained by a sheer obsession akin to the
old-time belief in the potent spell of "the black arts" that their
military masters were invulnerable and invincible, that by some
power--good or evil, they did not care which--they had been made so,
and that the world was bound to fall before them.
The nation was immensely strong only as long as that obsession remained
unshaken. With its destruction by a series of defeats which were
incapable of being explained as "strategic retreats," their morale
crumbled and finally collapsed, because it was not sustained, as that
of the Allies was sustained in the darkest days of the war, by the
faith that they were fighting for all that men hold most sacred.
To those who were acquainted with German mentality and psychology, it
had been manifest all along that when the end foreordained did come, it
would come with catastrophic suddenness.
WHERE THE TIDE TURNED
It is the general impression that the tide of victory set in with
Marshal Foch's splendid movement against the German flank on July 18th.
That movement, it is true, started the irresistible sweep of the wave
which was destined to engulf and destroy the hideous power of
Prussianism. But the tide which gathered and drove forward the waters
out of which that wave arose, had turned before. It turned with and
through the supreme valor of our marines and other American troops in
the _first_ battle at Château-Thierry and at Belleau Wood, _in the
first week of June_.
The American force engaged was small, measured by the standard of
numbers to which we have become accustomed in this war, but the story
of their fighting will remain immortal and in its psychological and
strategic consequences the action will take rank, I believe, among the
decisive battles of the war.
I am not speaking from hearsay. I was in France during the week
preceding that battle, the most anxious and gloomy period, probably, of
the entire war. What I am about to relate is based either on
authoritative information gathered on the spot, or on my own
observations. In telling it, nothing is farther from my thoughts than
to wish to take away one tittle from the immortal glory which belongs
to the Allied armies, nor from the undying gratitude which we owe to
the nations who for four heart-breaking years, with superb heroism,
fought the battle of civilization--our battle from the very beginning,
no less than theirs--and bore untold sacrifices with never faltering
spirit.
JUST BEFORE THE TIDE TURNED
On the 27th of last May the Germans broke through the French position
at the Chemin des Dames, a position which had been considered by the
Allies as almost impregnable. They overthrew the French as they had
overthrown the British two months earlier. Day by day they came nearer
to Paris, until only thirty-nine miles separated them from their goal.
A few days more at the same rate of advance, and Paris was within range
of the German guns of terrific destructive power. Paris, the nerve
center of the French railroad system and the seat of many French war
industries, not only, but the very heart of France, far more to the
French people in its meaning and traditions than merely the capital of
the country; Paris in imminent danger of ruthless bombardment like
Rheims, in possible danger even of conquest by the brutal invader,
drunk with lust and with victory! As one Frenchman expressed it to me:
"We felt in our faces the very breath of the approaching beast."
And whilst the Hunnish hordes came nearer and nearer, and the very roar
of the battle could be dimly and ominously heard from time to time in
Paris, there were air raids over the city practically every night, and
the shells from the long-range monster guns installed some sixty or
seventy miles distant fell on its houses, places, and streets almost
every day.
They were not afraid, these superb men and women of France. They do
not know the meaning of fear in defense of their beloved soil and their
sacred ideals. There was no outward manifestation even of excitement
or apprehension. Calmly and resolutely they faced what destiny might
bring. But there was deep gloom in their hearts and dire forebodings.
They had fought and dared and suffered and sacrificed for well-nigh
four years. They had buried a million of their sons, brothers, and
fathers. They were bleeding from a million wounds and more. They
said: "We will fight on to our last drop of blood, but alas! our
physical strength is ebbing. The enemy is more numerous by far than
we. Where can we look for aid? The British have just suffered grave
defeat. The Italians have their own soil to defend after the disaster
of last autumn. Our troops are in retreat. The Americans are not
ready and they are untried as yet in the fierce ordeal of modern
warfare. The Germans know well that in three months or six months the
Americans will be ready and strong in numbers. That is why they are
throwing every ounce of their formidable power against us _now_. The
Hun is at the gate _now_. Immeasurable consequences are at stake
_now_. It is a question of days, not of weeks or months. Where can we
look for aid _now_?"
And out of their nooks and corners and hiding places crawled forth the
slimy brood of the Bolshevik-Socialists, of the Boloists, Caillauxists,
and pacifists, and they hissed into the ears of the people, "Make
peace! Victory has become impossible. Why go on shedding rivers of
blood uselessly? The Germans will give you an honorable, even a
generous peace. Save Paris! Make peace!"
The holy wrath of France crushed those serpents whenever their heads
became visible. Clemenceau, the embodiment of the dauntless spirit of
France, stood forth the very soul of patriotic ardor and indomitable
courage. But the serpents were there, crawling hidden in the grass,
ever hissing, "Make peace!"
And then, suddenly out of the gloom flashed the lightning of a new
sword, sharp and mighty, a sword which had never been drawn except for
freedom, a sword which had never known defeat--the sword of America!
THE TURNING OF THE TIDE
A division of marines and other American troops were rushed to the
front as a desperate measure to try and stop a gap where flesh and
blood, even when animated by French heroism, seemed incapable of
further resistance. They came in trucks, in cattle cars, by any
conceivable kind of conveyance, crowded together like sardines. They
had had little food, and less sleep, for days.
When they arrived, the situation had become such that the French
command advised, indeed ordered, them to retire. But they and their
brave general would not hear of it. They disembarked almost upon the
field of battle and rushed forward, with little care for orthodox
battle order, without awaiting the arrival of their artillery, which
had been unable to keep up with their rapid passage to that front.
They stormed ahead, right through the midst of a retreating French
division, yelling like wild Indians, ardent, young, irresistible in
their fury of battle. Some of the Frenchmen called out a well-meant
warning: "Don't go in this direction. There are the boches with
machine guns." They shouted back:
"That's where we want to go. That's where we have come three thousand
miles to go." And they did go, into the very teeth of the deadly
machine guns. In defiance of all precedent they stormed, with rifle
and bayonet in frontal attack, against massed machine guns.
They threw themselves upon the victory-flushed Huns to whom this
unconventional kind of fierce onset came as a complete and
disconcerting surprise. They fought like demons, with utterly reckless
bravery. They paid the price, alas! in heavy losses, but for what they
paid they took compensation in over-full measure.
They formed of themselves a spearhead at the point nearest Paris,
against which the enemy's onslaught shattered itself and broke. They
stopped the Hun, they beat him back, they broke the spell of his
advance. They started victory on its march.
A new and unspent and mighty force had come into the fray. And the Hun
knew it to his cost and the French knew it to their unbounded joy. The
French turned. Side by side the Americans and the French stood, and on
that part of the front the Germans never advanced another inch from
that day. They held for a while, and then set in the beginning of the
great defeat.
I was in Paris when the news of the American achievement reached the
population. They knew full well what it meant. The danger was still
present, but the crisis was over. The boche could not break through.
He could and would be stopped and ultimately thrown back, out of
France, out of Belgium, across the Rhine and beyond!
The aid for which the sorely beset people of France had been praying,
had arrived. The Americans had come, young, strong, daring, eager to
fight, capable of standing up against and stopping and beating back
German shock troops specially selected and trained, and spurred on by
the belief in their own irresistibility and the exhaustion of their
opponents. The full wave of the hideous instruments of warfare which
the devilish ingenuity of the Germans had invented, liquid fire,
monstrous shells, various kinds of gases including the horrible mustard
gas, had struck the Americans squarely and fully, and they had stood
and fought on and won.
The French, so calm in their trials, so restrained in their own
victories, gave full vent to their joy and enthusiasm at the splendid
fighting and success of the Americans. The talk of them was everywhere
in Paris. Hundreds of thousands of American soldiers already in
France, thousands coming upon every steamer, millions more to come if
needed--and they had shown the great stuff they were made of! All
gloom vanished, overnight. The full magnificence of the French
fighting morale shone out again--both behind the lines and at the
front. "Ils ne passeront pas!" "On les aura." [1]
And the Bolshevik-Socialists, Boloists, weak-kneed pacifists, and that
whole noisome tribe slunk back into their holes and corners and hiding
places, and never emerged again.
And, as the people of Paris and the poilus at the front correctly
interpreted the meaning of that battle in those early days of June, so
did the supreme military genius of Marshal Foch interpret it. He knew
what the new great fighting force could do which had come under his
orders, and he knew what he meant to do and could do with it. It is an
eloquent fact that when six weeks later he struck his great master
stroke which was to lead ultimately to the utter defeat and collapse of
the enemy, American troops formed the larger portion of an attacking
force which, being thrown against a particularly vital position, was
meant to deal and did deal the most staggering blow to the enemy; and
other American troops were allotted the place which from the paramount
responsibility attaching to it, may be termed the place of honor, in
the center of the line, in immediate defense of the approaches to Paris.
They made good there--officers and men alike. They made good
everywhere, from Cantigny to Sedan. They made good on land, on the
seas, and in the air; worthy comrades of the war-seasoned heroes of
France and Great Britain, worthy defenders of American honor, eager
artisans of American glory. When for the first time the American army
went into action as a separate unit under the direct command of its
great chief, General Pershing, Marshal Foch allotted them ten days for
the accomplishment of the task set for them, i.e., the ejection of the
German army from the strongly fortified St. Mihiel salient, which the
enemy had held for four years. They did it in thirty hours, and made a
complete and perfect job of it.
I have had the privilege of seeing these splendid boys of ours, in all
situations and circumstances, from their camps in America to the front
in France--the boys and their equally splendid leaders. The sacred
inspiration of what I have thus seen will stay with me to my last day.
I confess I find it hard to speak of them without a catch in my throat
and moisture in my eyes. I see them before me now in the fair land of
France--brave, strong, ardent; keen and quick-witted; kindly and clean
and modest and wholly free from boasting; good-humored and
good-natured; willingly submissive to unaccustomed discipline;
uncomplainingly enduring all manner of hardships and discomforts;
utterly contemptuous of danger, daring to a fault, holding life cheap
for the honor and glory of America. What true American can think of
them or picture them without having his heart overflow with grateful
and affectionate pride?
As I observed our army "over there," I felt that in them, in the mass
of them, representing as they do all sections and callings of America,
there had returned the ancient spirit of knighthood. I measure my
words. I am not exaggerating. If I had to find one single word with
which to characterize our boys, I should select the adjective
"knightly."
A French officer who commanded a body of French troops, fighting
fiercely and almost hopelessly in Belleau Wood near Château-Thierry
(since then officially designated by the French Government as the Wood
of the Marine Brigade), told me that when they had arrived almost at
the point of total exhaustion, suddenly the Americans appeared rushing
to the rescue. One of the American officers hurried up to him, saluted
and said in execrably pronounced French just six words:
"Vous--fatigués, vous--partir, notre job." "You--tired, you--get away,
our job." And right nobly did they do their job!
[1] "They shall not pass!" "We will get them."
*******************
Almost every soldier who goes into battle leaves a letter to be read in
the event of his death. Sturgis ("Spud") Pishon, a former famous
college athlete, serving in the American air forces in Italy, before
his fatal flight wrote this letter, so full of the strength and
simplicity of a great soldier:
"What little I have to give to my country I give without reservation.
If there ever was a righteous cause it is ours, and I am proud to have
worked and died for it.
"Pray God this war will be over soon and that it will be the last war.
"I leave you with a smile on my lips and a heart full of love for you
all. God bless you and keep you."
STURGIS.
A BOY OF PERUGIA
In the year 1500, Raphael was a boy of eighteen in Perugia working and
studying with the master painter Perugino. Did the city itself, free
on its hill top, looking afar over undulating mountains and great
valleys, implant in the sensitive soul of Raphael a love of beauty and
a vision that made him become one of the greatest painters of the
world? Perugia can never be forgotten, for the boy Raphael once lived,
worked, and studied there.
In the year 1915 Enzo Valentini was a boy of eighteen in Perugia. He
was a high school boy and his father was mayor of the city. One of his
teachers says he was an unusually brilliant scholar, with remarkable
artistic gifts. Did the city and its beautiful surroundings open his
soul to the vision of love and tenderness for his "little mother" and
of the duty that called him while but a boy in the high school to serve
and, if need be, die for his country?
When Italy entered the war, he gave up his studies, dropped his pen and
his brushes, volunteered as a private, and was soon fighting with his
countrymen in the Alps.
Certainly his soul was responsive to beauty in nature; for in the midst
of war and war's alarms, he found peace of spirit in the wonderful
Alpine country. He writes, "The longer I am here, the more I love the
mountains. The spell they weave does not come so quickly as that of
the sea, but I think it is deeper and more enduring. Every passing
moment, every cloud, every morning mist clothes the mountains in a
beauty so great that even the coarsest of our brave soldiers stop to
admire it. It may be for only an instant but this is enough to prove
that the soul never forgets its heavenly birth even though it be the
soul of an uneducated peasant, imprisoned in the roughest shell. The
days pass one after another calmly, serenely. It seems as if the
autumn ought never to end. The divine and solemn peace of the nights
is beyond the power of words to express, especially now that the moon
is shedding its magic silver over all. There are hours in the day when
everything is so filled and covered with light and when the silence is
so impressive that at moments the light seems to be gone letting the
silence blaze forth in the wonderful harmony of nature."
Enzo Valentini loved nature, loved his native land, and loved his
mother. She understood him and knew that because of his love for her
he was willing to die for Italy and the mothers of Italy. Shortly
before his death he wrote her this beautiful letter:--
"Little mother, in a very few days I am leaving for the front lines.
For your dear sake I am writing this farewell which you will read only
if I am killed. Let it be my good-by to father, to my brothers, and to
all those in the world who cared for me.
"My heart in its love and gratitude to you has always brought its
holiest thoughts to you; and now it is to you that I make known my last
wishes.
"Many have loved me. To each of them give some little thing of mine in
remembrance of me, after you have laid aside all those that you care
for most. I wish that all who have loved me should possess something
of the friend that is gone to rise like a flame above the clouds, above
the flesh, into the sun, into the very soul of the universe.
"Try, if you can, not to weep for me too much. Believe that even
though I do not come back to you, I am not dead. My body, the less
important part of me, suffers and dies; but not I myself--I, the soul,
cannot die, because I come from God and must return to God. I was made
for happiness and through suffering I must return to the everlasting
happiness. If I have been for a short time a prisoner in the body, I
am not the less eternal. My death is freedom, the beginning of the
real life, the return to the Infinite.
"Therefore do not mourn for me. If you consider the immortal beauty of
the ideals for which my soul is willingly sacrificing my body, you will
not mourn. But if your mother heart must weep, let the tears flow; a
mother's tears are forever sacred. God will take account of them; they
will be the stars of a crown.
"Be strong, little mother. From the great beyond, your son says
farewell to you, to father, to brothers, to all who have loved
him--your son, who has given his body in the fight against those who
would put out the light of the world."
So read the "little mother" of Enzo Valentini after the assault upon
Sano di Mezzodi. When his platoon charged he was the first to dash
from the trench giving courage to all who hesitated. Together they
made the mountains ring with the old Italian war cry, "Savoia! Italia!"
Enzo Valentini fell pierced by five pieces of shrapnel. They carried
him back to a grotto where the surgeons dressed his wounds.
A comrade says, "We laid him down on the litter in the grotto, among
the great rocks, under the dark vault of the sky, his face upturned to
the stars. He was exhausted, and asked for a drink, and fainted. Then
they carried him to the hospital and I never saw him again. I have
been told they carried him down Mount Mesola to the side of the little
lake he loved so well, 'his little lake,' and that he sleeps there in
death. But for his comrades he is still living in the glory of his
youth, there on the Alps, waving his cap with an edelweiss in it, and
crying, 'Savoia! Italia!'"
*******************
Wild wind! what do you bear--
A song of the men who fought and fell,
A tale of the strong to do and dare?
--Aye, and a tolling bell!
REDEEMED ITALY
Italy, since 1860 at least, has cherished the dream that sometime all
European territory with Italian-speaking inhabitants would be united
under Italian government. When the World War began Italy was supposed
to be an ally of Germany and Austria. She had agreed to fight with
them in case they were attacked--in a defensive war.
At first she did not enter the World War. She perceived from the very
beginning that Germany and Austria were the attackers and were not the
nations attacked. Her people began to understand what victory for the
Central Powers would mean and clamored for war on the side of the
Allies. Then the cry went up to redeem the lost Italian provinces held
by Austria and called "Italia Irredenta" or "Unredeemed Italy," and
Italy entered the war May 23, 1915.
At first she declared war upon Austria but not upon Germany. She made
no attempt to work in harmony with the Allies. It was a war of her own
upon Austria to regain the lost Italian provinces of the Trentino and
Trieste. Although she fought against tremendous obstacles in the
mountain passes with wonderful courage and success, her entrance into
the war was of assistance to the Allies only as it kept a certain
number of Austrian soldiers from the eastern and western fronts.
In 1916, the Italians captured Gorizia and all Italy went wild and
began to dream of a more wonderful development than had ever seemed
possible before. In 1917, they fought on with seemingly great success
and dreamed wilder dreams than ever, for Russia was out of the war and
would have no claim to Constantinople and the straits. Italy in this
year sent an army across the Adriatic into Albania to assure Italian
control of that country.
And then the "castles in the air" were suddenly shattered. The Italian
army had not been properly supplied and the country was very short of
coal. The army had therefore not been able to follow up its successful
attacks. The enemy had also caused great discontent among the common
soldiers in the Italian forces by spreading lies among them. The
collapse of the Russian armies had also made many of them believe
Germany was unbeatable.
Then, too, it is said the Italian generals were too sure, "too
confident," as athletic trainers would say, and had not properly
protected their armies and their northern provinces against a reverse.
Italy had declared war on Germany on August 27, 1916, and German shock
troops set free by the downfall of Russia were sent against the
incautious Italians and broke through their lines.
No prepared positions were ready back of the lines. The great bases
were close up to the lines. Therefore when the Italian armies were
obliged to retreat to prevent being surrounded and captured, they had
to retreat so far that their army bases with all their supplies were
lost and hundreds of thousands of Italian non-combatants were forced to
leave their homes on scarcely a "moment's notice." 250,000 Italians
and 2000 guns were captured by the enemy.
The greatest humiliation and the worst suffering followed, however, for
the Italian people who were left behind in the provinces overrun by the
victorious Austrians and Germans. The following proclamation by the
Germans in the province of Udine is an excellent example of how the
Huns treated conquered territory and conquered peoples.
PROCLAMATION issued by the Headquarters of the German Military
Government at Udine to the inhabitants of conquered Italy.
A house-to-house search will be made for all concealed arms, weapons,
and ammunition.
All victuals remaining in the houses must be delivered up.
Every citizen must obey our labor regulations.
ALL WORKMEN, WOMEN, AND CHILDREN OVER 15 YEARS OLD ARE obliged to work
in the fields every day, Sundays included, from 4 A.M. to 8 P.M.
Disobedience will be punished in the following manner:--
(1) Lazy workmen will be accompanied to their work and watched by
Germans. After the harvest they will be IMPRISONED for six months, and
every third day will be given NOTHING BUT BREAD AND WATER.
(2) Lazy women will be obliged to work, and after the harvest receive
SIX MONTHS' IMPRISONMENT.
(3) LAZY CHILDREN WILL BE PUNISHED BY BEATING.
The Commandant Reserves the Right to Punish Lazy Workmen with 20 Lashes
Daily.
What a contrast to the proclamation of General Allenby when the English
captured Jerusalem whereby the inhabitants were guaranteed protection
in carrying on their business, and all homes and buildings were to be
safeguarded. When following the armistice the American soldiers
occupied German cities, the Germans were surprised to find that they
were in no wise punished or prevented from going about their regular
pursuits.
As a result of the World War, Italy recovered the unredeemed provinces,
and just before the signing of the armistice, she redeemed herself in
war by wiping out the memory of her humiliating defeat about a year
earlier at Caporetto.
The Italian war office in its official report of this second battle of
the Piave says in substance the following:--
"The war against Austria-Hungary which under the supreme direction of
the king, the commander-in-chief of the Italian army, began May 24,
1915, and which since then, with inferior numbers and material, has
been conducted with unflagging faith and constant valor for forty-one
months has been won.
"The gigantic battle of October 24 is victoriously ended. Fifty-one
Italian divisions, three British, two French, one Czechoslovak, and one
American regiment fought against sixty-three Austro-Hungarian divisions.
"The Austro-Hungarian army is destroyed. It suffered very heavy losses
in the fierce resistance of the first days of the battle, and in
retreat it lost an immense quantity of material of all kinds, nearly
all its stores and depots, and has left in our hands over 300,000
prisoners, with their commands complete, and not less than 5,000 guns.
"The defeat has left what was one of the most powerful armies in the
world in disorder and without hope of returning along the valleys
through which it advanced with proud assurance."
Church bells were rung all over Italy and parades and celebrations were
held in all the large cities.
President Wilson sent on November 4 the following message to the King
of Italy:--
May I not say how deeply and sincerely the people of the United States
rejoice that the soil of Italy is delivered from her enemies? In their
name I send your Majesty and the great Italian people the most
enthusiastic congratulations.
WOODROW WILSON.
During the war, Italy called to the colors from a male population of
only 17,000,000 nearly 5,500,000 men and suffered a loss of almost
1,000,000 of them. It is estimated that the nation's man power
suffered a permanent loss of over half a million.
But serious as is this loss, Italy inflicted an even greater punishment
upon the foe. In Austrian prisoners alone she captured over a million.
The Austrian loss in killed and wounded was doubtless far greater than
Italy's.
Over 2500 miles of roads were constructed on the mountains of Italy and
Albania, and 1000 miles of aërial cable railroads were built to carry
food, ammunition, and guns over deep ravines.
Italy's fighters and industrial workers accomplished their work with an
inadequate supply of materials and food that meant real and continuous
suffering such as probably was felt by no other of the warring peoples.
*******************
We will never bring disgrace to this, our city, by any act of
dishonesty or cowardice, nor ever desert our suffering comrades in the
ranks. We will fight for the ideals and sacred things of the city,
both alone and with many; we will revere and obey the city's laws and
do our best to incite a like respect and reverence in those above us
who are prone to annul or to set them at naught; we will strive
unceasingly to quicken the public's sense of civic duty. Thus in all
these ways we will transmit this city not only not less but greater,
better and more beautiful than it was transmitted to us.
_The Oath of the Athenian Youth._
SONG OF THE AVIATOR
(_This poem was written for an entertainment given by the Y.M.C.A. at
an aviation barracks in a large camp in France. Mrs. Wilcox addressed
five hundred aviators, and these verses were recited with great effect
by Mrs. May Randall. After the entertainment there was a rush to
obtain autographed copies of the poem._)
You may thrill with the speed of your thoroughbred steed,
You may laugh with delight as you ride the ocean,
You may rush afar in your touring car,
Leaping, sweeping by things that are creeping--
But you never will know the joy of motion
Till you rise up over the earth some day
And soar like an eagle, away--away.
High and higher, above each spire,
Till lost to sight is the tallest steeple,
With the winds you chase in a valiant race,
Looping, swooping, where mountains are grouping,
Hailing them comrades, in place of people.
Oh, vast is the rapture the bird man knows
As into the ether he mounts and goes.
He is over the sphere of human fear;
He has come into touch with things supernal.
At each man's gate death stands await;
And dying flying were better than lying
In sick beds crying for life eternal.
Better to fly halfway to God
Than to burrow too long like a worm in the sod.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX.
NATIONS BORN AND REBORN
In America, and in many other countries, people have listened with
wonder and enjoyment to strangely beautiful music played by, probably
the greatest of all pianists of today, Ignace Jan Paderewski. For
years he has traveled from country to country and from city to city,
playing the piano in a manner no other has been able to imitate,
although Chopin's playing, it is said, had much the same effect upon
the audiences. In Paderewski's playing as in his composition there is
always an undercurrent deeply sad and weird. No one but a genius from
the martyred land of Poland, or from some other that had equally
suffered, could play as Chopin and Paderewski played or could compose
music such as they composed. All the old glory of Poland in the
ancient centuries, her grievous losses, the terrible wrongs done her,
and the long-treasured dreams of a new and happier day for her people,
live in the soul of Paderewski, and vibrate through his very finger
tips as they move over the keys of his loved instrument.
Today the dreams of the Polish people are coming true. Hopes cherished
since about the twelfth century are through the World War being
realized in a new Poland.
The tenth century saw the formation of the first kingdom of Poland in
central Europe to the east of the Germans. The country grew and
prospered for two hundred years. Then, lacking kingly leadership, it
became weak, and was finally divided into many principalities. At that
time came the terrible Tartar invasion across Russia and into Poland,
resulting in shocking desolation and ruin.
When complete destruction was threatened from hostile peoples, on the
north and east, the Poles summoned aid from the Teutonic Knights, a
German crusading order.
The Germans drove out the hostile neighbors, promptly taking control of
their lands. Then Poland learned that she had even worse enemies to
fear in those she had called to help her. She watched them build up
military power to conquer her own lands. But by joining with the
Lithuanians, she managed at length to defeat the Germans at the famous
battle of Tannenberg in 1410.
For over three hundred years the kingdom possessed great power. But at
last it again began to weaken, and the year 1772 "saw the beginning of
the end." The three great nations, Russia, Prussia, and Austria, then
joined against Poland and began to divide the kingdom among themselves.
By 1795 Poland had ceased to exist as a nation.
The terrible misfortunes of the Polish people under these hostile
foreign powers served really to bind them together with one common
purpose--to win back the kingdom and to reëstablish a free country.
This was their dream.
When the World War came, the Polish people in many lands, especially in
the United States, volunteered for service on the French front. On
June 22, 1918, the first division of Polish troops in France was
presented with flags at a solemn ceremony, and listened to an address
by the French president. Soon large numbers of Poles were fighting the
Austrians and Germans in Italy and in Russia, although they knew that
capture meant court-martial and death, since Austria and Germany
considered them deserters, as they indeed were. The supreme commander
of Polish forces, General Josef Haller, had been a colonel in the
Austrian army. But he decided to desert the Austrian army to lead an
"Iron Brigade" of Poles against the enemies of freedom.
Eighty-eight officers and twenty-six privates in his regiment were
captured by the Austrians, court-martialed, and sentenced to death.
When offered pardon by the Emperor Karl, they refused, saying, "We are
soldiers of the Polish Nation. The Austrian government has no right to
grant us pardon even as it has no more right to inflict punishment upon
us than upon the soldiers of France and England."
Facing death, these men wrote to the Polish Parliamentary Club in
Vienna, their reasons for desertion,--namely, the unfair treatment at
the hands of the Austrians and their love for Poland. They had heard a
rumor that the Polish organization was about to secure a more liberal
sentence for them by agreeing to the cession of certain provinces of
Poland. So the prisoners further wrote:--
"We value greatly the love of our countrymen and we were touched deeply
by the generosity with which they thought of us, but we desire to
protest most energetically against relief and concessions secured for
us to the detriment of our country and the ancient rights of our nation.
"Do not permit our personal lot to weaken the united Polish front, for
the death penalty can affect us only physically. The sufferings
undergone by our grandfathers and fathers, we will continue to endure
and with the sincere conviction that we are serving a free, united, and
independent Poland."
A few days after they were condemned, the Polish National Committee
sent a message to Italy declaring that representatives from all classes
of the Polish people had met at Warsaw and proclaimed the union of all
Poland.
Italy, France, and Great Britain formally recognized the Polish
national army as independent and Allied, and on November 4, 1918,
Secretary Lansing, in a letter, to a representative of the Polish
National Committee, stated that the United States Government also
wished to recognize officially the independence of the Polish army as a
part of the Allied forces.
The people of the United States with those of other countries are
hoping that Paderewski's great national family shall become united in
one free and independent state. They now applaud this master of music
as the first leader of free Poland. He will help destroy Bolshevism
with its cry, "Death to the educated," which has resulted already in
the death of hundreds of doctors, professors, engineers, and in one
case, the extermination of all the pupils in a single high school. He
will join the other great leaders in their belief that "Economic
development, patriotism, and the ennobling of all human souls alone can
lead to freedom."
To the south of Poland in the very heart of Europe is another new
country, which already has set up a democratic government and elected
as its president,--Thomas G. Masaryk, a former professor in the
University of Prague, now the capital of Czecho-Slovakia.
Professor Masaryk spent some time in the United States conferring with
officials at Washington. He was here when he received word that he had
been elected first president of his newly formed country by a
convention held in Geneva, Switzerland.
Great preparations for his return were made by the people. When at one
o'clock on December 22, the booming of cannon told that the president's
train was drawing in at the station, the hundred thousand people who
had poured into the city of Prague were massed on every side to welcome
him and sang, as only the Slavs can sing, their national song.
Soon President Masaryk's train, with its engine elaborately decorated,
steamed in through the silent crowd. In complete silence, Masaryk,
gray-haired and distinguished appearing, left the train and entered the
station. There he saw groups of Czecho-Slovaks in French uniforms,
some wearing the war cross, and groups who had been fighting in the
Italian Alps. He saw also a group of university professors who had
come to honor him.
In the tense silence, one of the leaders of the new republic came
forward. He had for years conspired and worked with Masaryk for the
freedom of their country, and now he greeted him by throwing his arms
about him. After a further greeting from the government officials, and
from the nation's aged and honored poet, Masaryk gave a brief speech
telling of his hopes for the republic. He then passed out to the crowd
who hailed him in a tumult of joy. One who witnessed Masaryk's return
pictures the scenes on the way to the government buildings.
"There began a triumphal procession which took two hours to arrive at
the Parliament house. Every window, every balcony and every roof was
filled to overflowing, and every street lined on either side, twenty
deep. All this multitude, most of whom had been standing for hours,
had such joy written on their faces as has never before been seen and
cannot possibly be described. Elders were holding children on their
shoulders, all eyes were full of tears, all eyes smiling. The people
kissed the flags of the Allies as they would kiss their babies.
"Since the proclamation, all the young ladies of Prague have taken to
the fashion of peasant costumes, and several members of Parliament wore
the old national dress. Searchlights playing on the spires and
steeples of this most beautiful Slav city now again touch the great
castle, henceforth the seat of government, where hundreds of windows
are ablaze with lights, the first rejoicing it has known for three
hundred years."
For three hundred years the peasants of Bohemia together with Slovakia
which, with some smaller provinces, is now called Czecho-Slovakia, had
tried every means to free themselves from Austria. On the north and
west were the Germans and on the south the Austrians, both enemies,
seeking only to get what they could for themselves out of the little
country.
In their Declaration of Independence, given in Paris, October 18, 1918,
the people have told the story of their past, as well as their purposes
for the future.
"We make this declaration on the basis of our historic and natural
right. We have been an independent State since the seventh century,
and in 1526, as an independent State, consisting of Bohemia, Moravia,
and Silesia, we joined with Austria and Hungary in a defensive union
against the Turkish danger. We have never voluntarily surrendered our
rights as an independent State in this confederation. The Hapsburgs
broke their compact with our nation by illegally transgressing our
rights and violating the Constitution of our State, which they had
pledged themselves to uphold, and we therefore refuse longer to remain
a part of Austria-Hungary in any form.
"We claim the right of Bohemia to be reunited with her Slovak brethren
of Slovakia, once a part of our national State, later torn from our
national body, and fifty years ago incorporated in the Hungarian State
of the Magyars, who, by their unspeakable violence and ruthless
oppression of their subject races have lost all moral and human right
to rule anybody but themselves.
"The world knows the history of our struggle against the Hapsburg
oppression. The world knows the justice of our claims, which the
Hapsburgs themselves dared not deny. Francis Joseph in the most solemn
manner repeatedly recognized the sovereign rights of our nation. The
Germans and Magyars opposed this recognition, and Austria-Hungary,
bowing before the Pan-Germans, became a colony of Germany, and, as her
vanguard, to the East, provoked the last Balkan conflict, as well as
the present world war, which was begun by the Hapsburgs alone without
the consent of the representatives of the people.
"We cannot and will not continue to live under the direct or indirect
rule of the violators of Belgium, France, and Serbia, and would-be
murderers of Russia and Rumania, the murderers of tens of thousands of
civilians and soldiers of our blood, and the accomplices in numberless
unspeakable crimes committed in this war against humanity by the two
degenerate and irresponsible dynasties. We will not remain a part of a
State which has no justification for existence.
"We refuse to recognize the divine right of kings. Our nation elected
the Hapsburgs to the throne of Bohemia of its own free will, and by the
same right deposes them. We hereby declare the Hapsburg dynasty
unworthy of leading our nation, and deny all of their claims to rule in
the Czecho-Slovak land, which we here and now declare shall henceforth
be a free and independent people and nation.
"We accept and shall adhere to the ideals of modern democracy, as they
have been the ideals of our nation for centuries. We accept the
American principles as laid down by President Wilson; the principles of
liberated mankind--of the actual equality of nations--and of
Governments deriving all their just power from the consent of the
governed. We, the nation of Comenius, cannot but accept these
principles expressed in the American Declaration of Independence, the
principles of Lincoln, and of the declaration of the rights of man and
of the citizen. For these principles our nation shed its blood in the
memorable Hussite Wars, 500 years ago; and for these same principles,
beside her Allies, our nation is shedding its blood today in Russia,
Italy, and France."
It is said that the Czech soldiers fighting on the French front
received the news of the declaration with wild enthusiasm, rushed
forward, and wrested from the enemy one of the most difficult positions
on the Aisne.
The Czechs were also fighting in Italy, and in Russia, although they
had been first forced into the Austrian army. One Czech battalion
commanded by Austrians and ordered against the Russians, rushed
forward, but killed their officers on the way and surrendered in a body
to the Russians, asking to fight with them against the Austro-Germans.
If the Russian soldiers had held together and followed the invincible
Czechs, Germany would have been driven completely out of Russia.
But the Czechs did not deceive the Austrians. Their hopes and plans
were not secret. They openly warned Austria of their desertion. They
wrote in chalk on the outside of the cars: "With us the Monarchy will
not win."
Upon seeing this declaration, it is reported, the German and Austrian
officers ordered the trainload of men to stand in line, and then shot
every tenth man.
But the rest went on, through terrible and thrilling experiences,
fighting and dying by the hundreds for the sake of the new republic
which at last was born.
The story of the passage through Russia and Siberia of the
Czecho-Slovak troops, who were fighting with Russia against Austria and
Germany, is one of the most remarkable and exciting stories of history.
These troops probably saved Siberia for the Allies and were at last
able to join in the fighting on the western front.
Still another new nation now called Jugo-Slavia, although it may
finally be called Serbia or some other name, has risen south of
Austria-Hungary and east of the Adriatic Sea. It lies across from
Italy and is nearly the same size as the mainland of that country. Its
story, too, is one of conquest by northern enemies, followed by the
crushing out of all freedom. But since the beginning of the World War,
the people of Jugo-Slavia, on July 20, 1917, have set up a new republic
based upon the ideas of justice and democracy, united under one flag,
and granting its three different races equal rights and privileges.
Across the sea, in Arabia, the country of Hedjaz has been freed from
Germany's allies, the Turks. The people of Hedjaz also once enjoyed
freedom and glory, their power in early history reaching all the way
from France to China. Backed by the British in Egypt and Mesopotamia,
the Arabs revolted from the Turks, drove them out of the holy cities of
Mecca and Medina, and at length broke their power completely.
Mohammedans have always recognized the Mohammedan ruler who controlled
Mecca and Medina, the birthplace and the burial place of the prophet,
as their Kalif. If this custom is followed, the King of Hedjaz becomes
the Kalif in place of the Sultan of Turkey.
Hedjaz has already arisen from the ruins of the Turks as an independent
and separate state. Armenia, it is to be hoped, will do the same.
Each country needs only the will and the declaration of the people for
freedom in order to secure the sympathy, aid, and recognition of the
victorious Allied nations and the United States. As soon as they
declare their independence and choose their own government, the greater
nations at once rush to their relief. This was shown especially in the
case of Finland.
For centuries Finland's fate was uncertain, resting now in the hands of
Sweden, now in the power of Russia, and last, and worst of all, in the
hands of Germany. But the people rose united, expelled their new
rulers, who had been sent to them by the Germans, and declared their
independence.
At once the United States and the Allies, with Food Administrator
Hoover, planned a gigantic program for relief, which for Finland alone
provided 14,000 tons of food. They further promised aid to all Russian
provinces as fast as they should drive out the Bolsheviki, or at least
deprive them of power. This meant a shipment in three months of
200,000 tons of food, clothing, agricultural supplies, and railroad
equipment.
The world expects Russia to regain her equilibrium and reach the
greatest heights of power ever known in her history. Her possessions
will not be as large as they were before the World War, because of the
loss of Finland, and of provinces in the west and south which are
likely to become independent states.
In America the boys and girls scarcely realize what the blessings of
freedom mean, as the children of the new countries do. But that
America is indeed blessed with liberty and happiness is shown by the
closeness with which the new nations have followed her as a pattern.
Their appreciation of this country was clearly expressed in the
Czecho-Slovak Declaration of Independence, and again when President
Masaryk at the Hague, on December 30, 1918, spoke as follows:--
"Komensky's historic prayer has literally been fulfilled and our
people, free and independent, advances, respected and supported by
universal sympathy, into the community of European nations. Are we
living in a fairy tale? Politicians of all countries are asking this.
I put the same question to myself and yet it is all an actual reality.
"When the German victories seemed about to realize the Pan-German plan
of the subjection of the whole of the Old World, America stepped out of
its reserve, replaced weary and betrayed Russia and within a short time
Marshal Foch dictated terms to beaten Germany and Austria-Hungary.
"President Wilson formulated the leading principle of democracy which
is contained in the American Declaration of Independence, where, as in
the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, revolution triumphed and
established that all political power comes from the people. And as
Lincoln said, is of the people, by the people, and for the people.
"President Wilson proclaimed as the object of the war the liberation of
all mankind. We Czechs and Slovaks could not stand aside in this world
war. We were obliged to decide against Austria-Hungary and Germany for
our whole history led us to democratic powers.
"In May of last year I was obliged to go to Russia whence in the
beginning of March I went to Japan and from Japan to the United
States,--a remarkable and unexpected journey round the world,--verily a
propaganda journey, winning the whole world for our national cause.
"After seven months I returned nominated by our government as the first
president of the Czecho-Slovak republic. I know not whom I ought to
thank first. It is natural that the recognition by England and the
United States, the greatest Allied Powers, has helped us greatly. The
United States guaranteed from their wealth abundant help, and we have
from them a definite promise for the future. President Wilson himself
has devoted sincere attention to our question and we are obliged to him
and the Allied Powers. They can always count on us.
"The real object of the war and peace is the reorganization of eastern
Europe and the solution of the eastern question. The war was a
culmination of many struggles to solve the eastern question in the
broad sense of the word. German pressure eastwards was directed
against a zone of small nations between Germany and Russia, beginning
with the Finns and going as far down as Greece, making a series of
eighteen small nations. German, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian
imperialism suffered shipwreck. The small nations are freed. The
war's negative task is fulfilled. The positive task awaits--to
organize east Europe and this with mankind in general. We stand on the
threshold of a new time when all mankind feels in unity. Our people
will contribute with full consciousness its part in the realization of
this great and lofty task."
*******************
And for your country, boy, and for that flag, never dream a dream but
of serving her as she bids you, though the service carry you through a
thousand hells. No matter what happens to you, no matter who flatters
you or who abuses you, never look to another flag, never let a night
pass but you pray God to bless that flag. Remember, boy, that behind
all these men you have to do with, behind officers, and government, and
people even, there is the Country Herself, your Country, and that you
belong to Her as you belong to your own mother. Stand by Her, boy, as
you would stand by your mother.
EDWARD EVERETT HALE.
"TO VILLINGEN--AND BACK"
Very remarkable in the world struggle for liberty was the eagerness of
the Allied soldiers to fight and to make the supreme sacrifice if
necessary. The Americans, especially, brought cheer and courage to the
tired French, Belgian, Italian, and British hearts, so daring and high
spirited were they when going into battle. With a smile, a shout, or a
song, they went over the top to meet the Huns, ready for anything
except to be taken prisoners into Germany.
This was the one possibility dreaded by the soldiers all along the
front. They knew that the Huns were not a pleasant company to meet;
that they sang only when ordered to do so, and sang only what they were
ordered to sing; that they laughed most and shouted loudest when
cruelly torturing innocent, unprotected, and unarmed people. What life
must be in a German prison at the mercy of German soldiers, they dared
hardly imagine.
It is not strange therefore that our men wished rather to die than to
be prisoners. Nor is it strange that, having been taken, they made the
most desperate attempts to escape.
Naturally the easiest time to break away was while being carried from
the front to the rear of the German lines. Once thrown into prison,
the difficulties were much greater.
Often the captive was handed back from one company of guards to
another, being made to work for the enemy on his way. Private Donahue
was one who was sent back in this manner, after being captured in a
midnight skirmish near Château-Thierry.
He was dropped unconscious on the ground outside a German officer's
tent, and when he revived he found that all his belongings,--even
letters and snapshots from home,--had been taken from him. A German
stood over him and began questioning him, hoping to gather important
military information.
When asked how many Americans were at the front, the prisoner said,
"Thirty-two American divisions and forty French."
"Pigs!" shouted the German lieutenant, and the cry was caught up by the
guards, who came at a signal and dragged Donahue away.
From early morning until nightfall, he worked with the camouflage men,
masking the batteries and cutting leafy branches for screening the
stores of ammunition heaped by the roadside.
The Germans gave him no blankets at night, and for food poured out for
him a sort of tasteless gruel and tossed him chunks of coarse black
bread to eat with it. Every day a different soldier took him in
charge. Each night he was closely guarded. He knew from the distant
sounds of the guns that he was being taken back into Germany.
On the seventh night, he lay on the ground with Germans sleeping all
about him. His guard sat beside him, leaning against a tree, his rifle
between his knees. Private Donahue wished that he were back in the
American lines, when suddenly in the moonlight he could see the guard's
head nodding and nodding. Now was his time to escape.
He stole away and began creeping through the woods. There were Germans
lying all around and he stumbled over several of them. But they only
grunted savagely, and he crept fearfully on.
Soon he reached the edge of the woods and crawled under a bush to think.
Above No Man's Land an occasional shell was bursting, by whose light he
could dimly see the American lines, eight kilometers away. He crept
along in the shadows, lying still whenever a soldier passed near him.
When morning came, he crawled into a grain field and lay down so that
no one might see him. Several times soldiers passed so close to him
that he could hear them talking. Once he was nearly trampled under the
hoofs of two horses, and twice a Red Cross dog threatened to disclose
his presence in the field. But he lay still as death and the dog went
off.
That night he was creeping up the side of a ravine when he was
discovered by the sentry.
"Halt!" cried the guard.
Private Donahue had been fearing that he would hear that word. But now
he recognized it as spoken by an American voice.
"I am an American!" he cried joyfully, springing to his feet.
Soon he was sleeping inside his own lines, under two old potato sacks.
At dawn he ate a good breakfast at the field kitchen, then reported at
headquarters.
He had kept his eyes open during his seven days' journey through the
German lines, and had some important information to give at French
headquarters.
But many times the captives had no opportunity to escape before they
were locked in the prison camp somewhere in Germany. Then it demanded
every bit of Yankee ingenuity to get away.
One of the most elaborate attempts, involving the escape of a great
number of men, is told in the following story.
There were seventy Americans among the prisoners in a German camp at
Villingen in Baden. Not all had arrived at the same time. Some were
newcomers, others unfortunately had been detained there for more than a
year.
The prison consisted of a barracks for the men, surrounded by a large
stretch of land, all inclosed with two rows of high wire fencing,
completely charged with electricity. The second fence, which was six
or eight feet away from the first, was very strong and bent inward
toward the top, so that if a prisoner by any possible means succeeded
in getting over the inner fence, he surely could not climb the outer.
Moreover, guards were kept on watch between the fences, and outside,
sentinels were stationed about thirty yards apart. It seemed
impossible for the prisoners to get away by daylight, and at night the
barracks with their iron-barred windows were closely guarded.
The treatment of the prisoners, especially of those who had made any
attempts to escape, was shameful and often cruel. The food, in
general, consisted of sour black bread, soup made largely from tree
leaves, and some sort of drink made from acorns and called coffee.
Needless to say, the prisoners were half starved. Indeed, two American
girls who were in Berne, Switzerland, working among the released
prisoners, in a letter to America showed in what an awful condition
they found some of the men. Their letter read:--
"We have gone to the station three times at four o'clock in the morning
to help feed the English soldiers who were on their way home after
being exchanged for German prisoners. We had the privilege of giving
some of them the first white bread they had had in four years. The men
who had been kept working behind the lines were in a pitiable
condition. One such man happened to be at my table,--for they are
taken off the train for two hours, given hot tea and roast beef and ham
sandwiches,--and the poor fellow began taking sandwiches, eating a few
bites, and stowing the rest feverishly away in his pocket. He couldn't
realize that he was in a place where he would be fed."
All of the seventy Americans at Villingen wished themselves anywhere
outside the prison camp, and most of all back on the firing line,
helping to win.
So much did they wish this that a few more daring than the rest had
twice attempted to escape together. Their attempts had ended in
failure, but that had only led them to spend months in making still
more elaborate plans to gain their freedom.
Not all could leave the camp, they knew. Many did not care to risk it,
while thirty of the seventy Americans were doctors and thought they
ought to stay and do what they could for their weak and sickly fellow
prisoners. But in the final plan, sixteen men were to try this break
for liberty.
One of the men was Lieutenant Harold Willis of Boston, an aviator in
the famous Lafayette Escadrille. He had been captured after a battle
in the air. Not even fourteen months in a German prison could kill the
daring spirit of this young lieutenant. Instead, the cruel treatment
of the prisoners, the daily contact with the stupid German guards, made
him long once more to cut through the clouds and bring down another
boche. Accordingly, he became a leader in carrying out the plans for
escape.
Lieutenant Edward V. Isaacs, of Cresco, Iowa, an officer in the United
States Navy, was another leader. He was crossing the Atlantic in the
big American transport, President Lincoln, when it was torpedoed by the
submarine U-90, on May 31, 1918. He went down with the ship, but came
to the surface again and crawled up on a raft where he stayed until one
of the lifeboats came by and the men took him off. But the boat had
gone but a short distance, when the guilty submarine pushed its nose up
through the surface of the water near by. Its commander ordered the
lifeboat to draw near and the helpless oarsmen had to obey. When asked
the whereabouts of the captain of the vessel, the men in the lifeboat
answered that, as far as any of them knew, he had gone down with the
ship.
Then the commander, probably noticing his uniform, singled out
Lieutenant Isaacs, demanded that he come on board the submarine, and
informed him that if he did not find the captain, he would take him
instead to Germany.
Two days later, the U-boat carrying this American officer was sighted
by two American destroyers. Immediately the destroyers made for the
submarine and tried to sink it.
The U-boat quickly submerged and floated far below the surface while
the destroyers circled about for several hours dropping many depth
bombs, five of which exploded not three hundred yards from the
submarine. So great was the shock of these explosions that, in telling
of his experiences afterward, Isaacs said it seemed as if the ocean
shook the boat much as a dog shakes a rat.
During this time not a word was spoken except by the watch officers,
who were at their posts like the rest of the crew, and reported to the
commander the directions in which the bombs were falling, thus enabling
him to move the boat about in a safe course. The bombing continued
until nightfall. Then the commander thought he was safe. But the next
day, another American warship appeared, and the U-90 made for its home
port as fast as possible.
Lieutenant Isaacs, more fortunate than many U-boat prisoners, was
treated well by the officers and crew. He messed with the officers and
heard them most of the time discussing why the United States entered
the war. They told Isaacs that the only possible reason was that the
United States had loaned so much money to the Allies that she was
obliged to enter the war to make sure of being repaid.
But Isaacs had no intention of remaining in the U-boat. As it entered
neutral waters about four miles off the Danish coast, it began running
along above the surface.
Isaacs secretly left his room, hurried to the deck, and was just about
to dive over into the water, hoping to swim ashore, when Captain Remy,
the commander, caught hold of him. He had suspected Isaacs and had
followed him from below. "Stupid fool," he exclaimed as he drew him
away from the side of the boat and ordered him below.
On landing at Wilhelmshaven, Isaacs was questioned by German
intelligence officers, and then sent to Karlsruhe where he was again
examined with the hope that he would give out information which would
be valuable to the Germans. Here with several other prisoners, he was
held for three days in a "listening hotel" where dictographs had been
strung about the room. The German officers hoped that, left without
guards in the room, the prisoners would talk over military matters, not
knowing that the dictographs were there to record all that was said and
thus reveal all to the Germans. But the prisoners expected some trick,
discovered the dictographs, and pulled out the wires so that they would
not work.
Isaacs remained in Karlsruhe for some time, then was placed on a train
with several officers and started for the prison camp at Villingen in
Baden. At Karlsruhe he had been shamefully treated and he determined
he should never arrive in Baden.
On the train he was put in the charge of two guards and so closely was
he watched that he despaired of having any chance to escape. But
within five miles of his destination, he noticed that one guard became
drowsy, while the other had his attention on the passing landscape.
Then it was, with the train running forty miles an hour, that he jumped
to his feet and dived through the little car window. He landed on his
head and knees on the opposite track. Although badly stunned, he
struggled to his feet and began to run. By this time the train had
been stopped and the guards were pursuing, firing as they came on.
Isaacs went some distance but could hardly run for he had badly injured
his knees. A bullet whistled by his ear and he dropped and let the
guard come up to him.
Mad with rage the German kicked him, and beat him with his gun until he
broke it. The rest of the guards soon came up. Then they made Isaacs
walk the five miles into Baden, beating him now and then on the way.
On reaching the camp he was first taken to the officers' quarters and
threatened with death if he tried again to escape. After being
plastered with paper bandages he was put into solitary confinement for
three weeks. So poor was the prison food that had it not been for the
nourishment furnished by the American Red Cross, Isaacs never would
have recovered.
He had been threatened with death if he tried again to escape, but he
began at once to make plans and would have gained his liberty much
sooner than he did, had not the Russian prisoner attendants each time
betrayed his plans before he could try them. And now he and Lieutenant
Willis with fourteen other men decided to try again for freedom.
The prisoners were sometimes permitted to take walks with the guards
about the country. In this way the men who were to escape were able to
learn about the roads and the best hiding places. They managed to
secure maps and compasses by bribing some of the Russian attendants.
But these would only be of help when once outside the camp, and how to
get out was a serious question. Some believed that the best way was to
get past the guards through the big gate. To climb over the two wire
fences, so heavily charged with electricity, seemed entirely impossible.
But Isaacs discovered a way across that barbed wire.
He had seen two of the prisoners marking out the whitewashed lines on
the tennis court where the German officers played each day. The lines
were made by the use of two narrow wooden boards, eighteen feet long,
fastened together by crosspieces, allowing a small space of about two
inches between. While the boards seemed very light, they were so
fastened together that they were really quite strong. They could be
made even stronger by nailing on more cross-pieces. Then they would
form a sort of bridge over which the men could crawl from the barracks'
windows to the outer fence, where they could drop to the ground and run
from the sentinels.
For months the men gathered their necessary materials together. Many
of the prisoners, who were not to try to escape, were let into the
secret and helped as much as they could. They drew the screws out of
the doors and windows, and brought strips of wood from broken provision
boxes with which to finish making the bridges.
Best of all they secured three pairs of wire cutters, one from a
Russian prisoner, and a second from a Russian attendant. The third
pair was made by one of the prisoners.
This secret collection was a constant source of danger, as the
prisoners were searched nearly every day. It is said that one prisoner
was given solitary confinement because a map was found sewn in the seat
of his trousers. Therefore, much of the work, such as bringing the
boards into the barracks and nailing the bridges together, was left
until the last. A month before they were to escape, they were
suspected and the guard was doubled. Still they worked on and hoped on.
Their plans were nearly completed when it was suddenly announced that
the camp at Villingen would be used in the future as a prison for
Americans only. All other nationalities would be transferred at once
to some other camp. This, the prisoners knew, would mean first a
thorough searching of every corner and crevice in camp. Thus it seemed
necessary to break away at once before this careful inspection should
be made, or they probably could not escape at all that winter.
For two days they worked steadily and carefully. Night was their best
time to escape, but somehow the electric lighting system, as well as
the electric current in the wire fences, must be shut off. To do this,
it was necessary to find strips of wire for making short-circuiting
chains. A few of these strips they cut from the fencing back of the
tennis courts. Most of them, however, were taken from the steep prison
roof where they were used to hold the slate tiles in place. Nearly all
of these wires were drawn out, so that if a whirlwind had suddenly
swept across the country, that roof would have been scattered in every
direction.
All this had to be done very quietly. One or two would work at it
while others attracted the attention of the Germans by creating some
excitement in distant corners of the camp.
The night before the camp was to be inspected, the break was made. The
sixteen men were divided into four groups of four each, one in each
group acting as a leader.
The first group, with Lieutenant Isaacs leading, was to get over the
two fences from the windows by crossing on the bridges. The second
group, led by Lieutenant Willis, was to cut its way through the wire
fences. The third had ready some ladders made of strong rope, by which
they hoped to climb over the fences. The last group intended to rush
out with the guards when they ran through the gates to catch those who
were jumping from the bridges.
At 10:30 that night, a signal was given and everything followed like
clockwork. One of the prisoners short-circuited the wires, shutting
off the electric lighting system and the current in the wire fences.
There was no moon, and the camp was left in utter darkness.
At first the guards did not suspect anything, thinking the affair just
an accident.
But immediately Isaacs began cutting away the bars at the window. When
this was done, the prisoners helped him and his companions to throw
over their bridges. The first man got out upon this flimsy bridge and
when he was half way over, the inner end of the board was pushed out
farther and farther until it touched the outer fence. Reaching the
end, the man sprang to the ground, the inner part of the bridge was
drawn back in by the prisoners at the window, and another man crawled
out. This was continued until the four men had gone. It had been
decided that the lightest man in the company would try getting over the
bridge first, and Lieutenant Isaacs being the lightest led his group
across.
When he dropped to the ground, he landed on his hands and knees not six
feet from two German sentries, both of whom fired but did not even
touch him. Without waiting for the others he ran into the woods to a
spot two miles from camp which he and Lieutenant Willis had chosen for
a meeting place, if they should get away safely.
Unprepared, as always if taken by surprise, the Germans when they
realized the meaning of the disturbance rushed wildly about, one
officer shooting frantically straight up into the air.
Willis had started cutting a way through the wires; but when his group
was fired upon, they decided to change their plans and dash through the
gate with the last group as best they could. Willis knew that in the
darkness he might easily pass for one of the guards, so carefully had
he disguised himself. He wore an old raincoat, decorated with German
insignia and numerals, and a large belt-buckle, all cut out of a tin
can. He carried a dummy wooden gun, bundles of food, maps, and a
compass; and he wore a German cap.
He expected that the gates would be opened at once, but they remained
locked while the patrol went into the guardhouse to report. But as
they marched back again, the gates were thrown open and Willis and the
other men dashed out.
They sped past the camp toward the dense forest. Willis darted off
across the fields to a steep hill up which he ran, the guards firing
continually at him.
As he reached the summit, he turned into the forest and hastened in the
direction he had agreed upon with Isaacs. He soon met him, and
together they started off toward the southwest, guided by the compass
they had brought with them. They did not see any of the other men,
with the exception of one whom Isaacs had heard puffing and grunting
past him as they ran from camp. In the darkness he had not been able
to recognize him.
That night they traveled about twenty-five miles. Hidden in the brush,
they slept by day and traveled on again at night. It was a perilous
trip through the forest, lasting eight days. Often they could only
push their way backwards for long distances, through the terrible
thickets. It rained and they were cold and wet. But on the eighth day
they found themselves on the top of a dizzy precipice just above the
Rhine. There they lay hidden until nightfall, although they were in
constant danger of being discovered by German sentinels and townspeople
who passed near them. When darkness came, they crawled about for two
hours, seeking to find a trail that would lead them down to the river.
If only they could cross the river, they were sure of safety. But
wherever there was a possible way of reaching the river, there was a
German sentry. Once Willis kneeled on a dry twig which snapped. In a
trice a German sentinel flashed a bright pocket searchlight--but in the
opposite direction.
The hearts of the two men sank in fear lest having nearly gained their
freedom they should again be captured. Then they decided that they
must creep down by one of the little tributaries flowing into the
Rhine. So they stepped into the little stream and crawled down it,
feeling for loose stones that might rattle and attract the attention of
the sentry.
After several hours they reached the water's edge, about two o'clock in
the morning.
The water was freezing cold, as the streams flowing into the river come
from the mountains where snow and ice are found nearly the year around.
As they stood knee-deep in the water and looked across to the other
shore, they doubted whether they could swim the long distance. Here
the Rhine is about seven hundred feet wide. Moreover, there are many
whirlpools in the river and the current itself is very swift. The men
besides were tired and weak from lack of food. But they could not
think of turning back, and there was no other way of getting across.
So they removed their shoes and outer garments.
Isaacs stood talking softly with Willis, when suddenly there was no
answer to one of his questions. He moved toward the spot where Willis
had been standing, but his feet went from under him and he was carried
by the current out into the river. Then he knew that the same thing
must have happened to Willis, and that he had not called to him for
fear of being heard by the sentry.
If the water was cold near the shore, it was colder in the river
itself. The men had to fight hard against the current.
When about halfway across, Isaacs was caught in a whirlpool which spun
him round and round until it left him nearly exhausted. Just as he was
thinking that he would have to give up, he made one last mighty effort
and reached the shore.
When he could gather himself up he discovered that he had landed on the
Swiss shore, near Basel. Soon he found a family willing to get up in
the middle of the night to give him food and a warm bed. One of the
men started out to find Willis, but met a messenger who had been sent
by Willis to find Isaacs. The messenger said that Willis had succeeded
in reaching the Swiss shore, although some distance from the spot where
Isaacs landed. The next day the men went on and finally walked into
the French lines.
They received a welcome that would warm the coldest heart, and learned
that another aviator, Lieutenant George Puryear, who was also one of
the men to make the break with them from the prison camp, had arrived
before them.
They told of the awful conditions in the German camps, of how the
officers themselves did not seem to favor Prussia, and of many serious
strikes which had occurred in that country, about which the Allies knew
nothing.
Isaacs had been treated so badly and was so exhausted that he was soon
sent to London to rest, and later to his home in the United States
where he landed on the day before the armistice was signed,--the first
U-boat prisoner to escape.
Willis was anxious to get into actual service again and make up for
lost time, although he was joyfully informed that peace at last seemed
near. He was obliged to wait in Paris until certain formalities were
attended to, before he could fight once more. He then went to the
front to study the latest improvements that had been made in airplanes
during his absence, in order to take his place again in the fighting
which, however, was drawing rapidly to a close.
ALSACE-LORRAINE
On slight pretext, Germany in 1864 and in 1866 had made wars against
Denmark and Austria that might easily have been avoided.
France took notice of the warlike ambitions of her neighbor and began
to prepare for the war that she knew would soon come between her and
Germany. The French emperor probably also desired this war, but the
French people did not and France was not ready for it.
The Prussian chancellor, Bismarck, was a man of "iron and blood," for
only by these two forces did he believe the Germans could advance.
In 1870, the Spanish Liberals expelled Queen Isabella II and offered
the crown of Spain to a Hohenzollern prince. The offer was declined,
but after Bismarck saw to what its acceptance might lead, he succeeded
in having it renewed. Then the Emperor Napoleon informed King William
that he would regard its acceptance as a sufficient ground for war
against Germany. The Hohenzollern prince, however, rejected the offer
and the matter might have ended here, had not Napoleon directed the
French ambassador to secure from King William a promise never to permit
a Hohenzollern prince to accept the Spanish crown.
King William who was at Ems refused to do this and declined to give the
French ambassador another interview as he was leaving Ems that night.
He telegraphed an account of the affair to Bismarck who realized that
here was his chance to bring on the war he desired. He changed the
wording of King William's telegram in such a way that when it was given
out the next day, it gave the impression to Germans that their king had
been insulted by the French ambassador and to Frenchmen that their
ambassador had been insulted by the king of Prussia.
"There is little doubt," writes a German historian, "that, had this
telegram been worded differently, the Franco-German struggle might have
been avoided."
French pride would not now allow France to withdraw her request, and
the war that Bismarck desired became certain--a war caused by a scrap
of paper on which were written German lies signed by German leaders.
After reading this story of the falsity of the greatest of all Prussian
statesmen, Bismarck, it does not seem strange that another scrap of
paper on which the Prussian government had written lies brought England
into the World War and assured the defeat of Germany.
Poorly prepared, France could not stand long against the Prussian war
machine. After a sharp conflict lasting about six months, the French
National Assembly at Bordeaux was forced to ratify the unfair treaty
which required her to pay a great indemnity in money and to give up the
coveted provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, with the exception of
Belfort. The beautiful country which had been the home of Jeanne
d'Arc, the sacred heroine of France, was to be given over to rough and
haughty bands of soldiers such as she had given her life to expel from
her beloved France. But France had to choose between losing a small
portion of the country, or meeting with complete destruction in war
against greatly superior forces who had already destroyed the French
military power.
[Illustration: Jeanne d'Arc, rising in her stirrups, holds on high her
sword, as if to consecrate it for a war of Right. This inspiring
statue, located near Grant's Tomb on Riverside Drive, New York City,
overlooks the Hudson, where it bade Godspeed to all the American
soldiers and sailors going overseas to deliver France from the Hun.]
One morning in that fateful year of 1871, a notice was posted in the
towns and villages of Alsace and Lorraine telling the people that the
next day these provinces would pass from French into German hands. In
anticipation of this, petitions from these provinces had continually
been sent both to France and Germany declaring deep loyalty only to
France. For the last forty-eight years these glowing words have been
true.
"France cannot consent to it. Europe cannot sanction it. We call upon
the Governments and Nations of the whole World to witness in advance
that we hold null and void all acts and treaties . . . which so consent
to the abandoning to the foreigner all or any part of our Provinces of
Alsace and Lorraine."
And their plea, drawn up and signed by the fifteen representatives to
the Reichstag, is still kept at Metz. Some one has well said that it
is "one of the _scraps of paper_ against which the strength of the
German Empire has been broken."
The Germans after hearing innumerable petitions became exasperated.
They imprisoned many of the inhabitants, censored the press, and
established such a strict system of passports that "a veritable Chinese
wall was raised around the annexed country."
And more than this, although the Germans may not always have realized
that they were doing so, they humiliated the people by degrading things
looked upon by them as holy. For instance, the Kaiser had a statue of
himself, upturned moustache and all, placed upon the cathedral of Metz.
He wore a Biblical cowl and was pointing impressively to a parchment
scroll. He was supposed to represent the prophet Daniel. This statue
was found headless in December, 1918.
Despite the petitions, for all those years the policy of the government
never varied. The chancellor, Bismarck, replied every time that
Alsace-Lorraine was not annexed for the sake of the people. They could
move to some section still under French control. The provinces were
taken from France only to further the interest of the German Empire.
"If this were a permanent peace," he said, "we would not have done it.
So long as France possesses Strassburg and Metz her strategical
position is stronger offensively than ours is defensively." There was
going to be another war and Germany needed these provinces for military
advantage!
But the German government did realize more and more how bitterly
opposed to the annexation were these unfortunate people, and decided to
crush out everything French in Alsace-Lorraine. The people were
forbidden to write or speak the French language; even the signboards at
the street crossings were changed to German. How the children spent
the last day that French could be taught in the schools is told by a
little Alsatian boy.
That morning I was very late for school, and was terribly afraid of
being scolded, for M. Hamel, the schoolmaster, had said he intended to
examine us on the participles, and I knew not a word about them. The
thought came into my head that I would skip the class altogether, and
so off I went across the fields.
The weather was so hot and clear!
One could hear the blackbirds whistling on the edge of the wood; in
Ripperts' meadow, behind the sawyard, the Prussian soldiers were
drilling. All this attracted me much more than the rules about
participles; but I had the strength to resist and so I turned and ran
quickly back towards the school.
In passing before the town hall, I saw that a number of people were
stopping before the little grating where notices are posted up. For
two years past it was there we learned all the bad news, the battles
lost, and the orders of the commandant; so I thought to myself without
stopping: "What can it be now?" Then, as I was running across the
square, the blacksmith, Wachter, who was there with his apprentice,
just going to read the notice, cried out to me:--
"Don't be in such a hurry, little fellow, you will be quite early
enough for your school."
I thought he was making fun of me, and I was quite out of breath when I
entered M. Hamel's little courtyard.
Generally, at the beginning of the class, there was a great uproar
which one could hear in the street; desks opened and shut, lessons
studied aloud all together, with hands over ears to learn better, and
the big ruler of the master tapping on the table: "More silence there."
I had counted on all this commotion to gain my desk unobserved; but
precisely that day all was quiet as a Sunday morning. Through the open
window I could see my schoolmates already in their places, and M.
Hamel, who was walking up and down with the terrible ruler under his
arm. I had to open the door and enter in the midst of this complete
silence. You can fancy how red I turned and how frightened I was.
But no, M. Hamel looked at me without any anger, and said very gently:--
"Take your place quickly, my little Franz, we were just going to begin
without you."
I climbed up on the bench and sat down at once at my desk.
Only then, a little recovered from my fright, I noticed that our master
had on his new green overcoat, his fine plaited frill, and the
embroidered black skull-cap which he put on for the inspection days or
the prize distributions. Besides, all the class wore a curious solemn
look. But what surprised me most of all was to see at the end of the
room, on the seats which were usually empty, a number of the village
elders seated and silent like the rest of us; old Hansor with his
cocked hat, the former mayor, the old postman, and a lot of other
people. Everybody looked melancholy; and Hansor had brought an old
spelling book, ragged at the edges, which he held wide open on his
knees, with his big spectacles laid across the pages.
While I was wondering over all this, M. Hamel had placed himself in his
chair, and with the same grave, soft voice in which he had spoken to
me, he addressed us:--
"My children, it is the last time that I shall hold class for you. The
order is come from Berlin that only German is to be taught in the
schools of Alsace and Lorraine from now on. The new master arrives
tomorrow. Today is your last lesson in French. I ask you to be very
attentive."
These words quite upset me. Ah, the wretches! this then was what they
had posted up at the town hall.
My last lesson in French!
And I who hardly knew how to write. I should never learn then! I must
stop where I was! How I longed now for the wasted time, for the
classes when I played truant to go birds'-nesting, or to slide on the
Saar! The books which I was used to find so wearisome, so heavy to
carry--my grammar, my history--now seemed to me old friends whom I was
very sorry to part with. The same with M. Hamel. The idea that he was
going away, that I should never see him again, made me forget the
punishment and the raps with the ruler.
Poor man!
It was in honor of this last class that he had put on his Sunday
clothes, and now I understood why the elders of the village had come
and seated themselves in the schoolroom. That meant that they were
grieved not to have come oftener to the school. It was a sort of way
of thanking our master for his forty years of good service, and of
showing their respect for their country that was being taken from them.
I had come as far as this in my reflections when I heard my name
called. It was my turn to recite. What would I not have given to have
been able to say right through that famous rule of the participles,
quite loud and very clear, without a stumble; but I bungled at the
first word, and stopped short, balancing myself on my bench, with
bursting heart, not daring to raise my head. I heard M. Hamel speak to
me:--
"I shall not scold thee, my little Franz, thou must be punished enough
without that. See how it is. Every day one says, 'Bah! There is time
enough. I shall learn tomorrow.' And then see what happens. Ah! that
has been the great mistake of our Alsace, always to defer its lesson
until tomorrow. Now those folk have a right to say to us, 'What! you
pretend to be French and you cannot even speak or write your language!'
In all that, my poor Franz, it is not only thou that art guilty. We
must all bear our full share in the blame. Your parents have not cared
enough to have you taught. They liked better to send you to work on
the land or at the factory to gain a few more pence. And I too, have I
nothing to reproach myself with? Have I not often made you water my
garden instead of learning your lessons? And when I wanted to fish for
trout, did I ever hesitate to dismiss you?"
Then from one thing to another M. Hamel began to talk to us about the
French language, saying that it was the most beautiful language in the
world, the clearest, the most forceful; that we must guard it among us
and never forget it, because when a people falls into slavery, as long
as it holds firmly to its own tongue, it holds the key of its prison.
Then he took a grammar and gave us our lesson. I was astonished to
find how well I understood. All he said seemed to me so easy, so easy.
I think, too, that I never listened so hard, and that he had never
taken such pains to explain. One would have said that before going
away the poor man wished to give us all his knowledge, to ram it all
into our heads at one blow.
That lesson finished, we passed to writing. For that day M. Hamel had
prepared for us some quite fresh copies, on which was written in
beautiful round hand: _France, Alsace, France, Alsace_. They looked
like little banners floating round the class room on the rail of our
desks. To see how hard every one tried! And what a silence there was!
One could hear nothing but the scraping of the pens on the paper. Once
some cock-chafers flew in; but nobody took any heed, not even the
little ones, who worked away at their pothooks with such enthusiasm and
conscientiousness as if feeling there was something French about them.
On the roof of the school the pigeons cooed softly, and I thought to
myself, hearing them:--
"Are they to be forced to sing in German too?"
From time to time, when I raised my eyes from the page, I saw M. Hamel
motionless in his chair, looking fixedly at everything round him, as if
he would like to carry away in his eyes all his little schoolhouse.
Think of it! For forty years he had been in the same place, in his
court outside or with his class before him. Only the benches and the
desks had grown polished by the constant rubbing; the walnut trees in
the courtyard had grown up, and the honeysuckle, which he had planted
himself, now garlanded the windows up to the roof. What a heart-break
it must be for this poor man to leave all these things, and to hear his
sister coming and going in the room above, packing up their boxes, for
they were to go the next day--to leave the country forever.
All the same, what courage he had to carry out the class to the end!
After the writing we had our history lesson; then the little ones sang
all together their Ba, Be, Bi, Bo, Bu. There at the end of the room,
old Hansor put on his spectacles, and holding his spelling-book with
both hands, he spelt the letters with them. One could see that he too
did his best; his voice trembled with emotion, and it was so funny to
hear him that we all wanted to laugh and cry at once. Ah! I shall
always remember that class.
Suddenly the clock of the church rang for noon, then for the Angelus.
At the same moment, the trumpets of the Prussians returning from drill
pealed out under our windows. M. Hamel rose from his chair, turning
very pale. Never had he looked to me so tall.
"My friends," he said, "my friends, I--I--" But something choked him.
He could not finish the sentence.
Then he turned to the blackboard, took a piece of chalk, and pressing
with all his might, he wrote as large as he could:--
VIVE LA FRANCE[1]
The determination of the people of Alsace and Lorraine not to submit to
the pressure of their conquerors was made evident even up to the very
day that war was declared in 1914. Von Moltke had predicted that "It
will require no less than fifty years to wean the hearts of her lost
Provinces from France." Notwithstanding all their efforts, the German
leaders in 1890 had said, "After nineteen years of annexation, German
influence has made no progress in Alsace." When the German soldiers at
the beginning of the World War entered the provinces, their officers
said to them, "We are now in enemy country."
This remark seems all the more strange because the population of the
provinces was largely German. Most of the French citizens had
emigrated to France, and all the young men had left to avoid German
military service and the possibility of being forced to fight France.
Many Germans had moved in. Indeed if at this late day a vote had been
taken, no doubt the majority would have expressed the desire to remain
under German rule. But Germany still considered the country as an
enemy. She knew the whole world disapproved of her seizing the
provinces. Therefore it did not surprise the German government to
learn that President Wilson, as one of the fourteen points to be
observed in making a permanent peace for the world, gave as the
eighth,--
"The wrong done to France by Prussia in 1871, in the matter of
Alsace-Lorraine, which has unsettled the peace of the world for nearly
fifty years should be righted."
At the foot of the Vosges mountains near the Lorraine border, the
American armies joined those of France. There in the Lorraine sector
they fought valiantly and finally drove the enemy headlong before them
through the Argonne forest, helping to make it possible for the
peacemakers to gather again in the great council hall at Versailles
where, nearly half a century before, France had seen the first German
emperor crowned and then had been forced to sign the humiliating
agreement that later became the Treaty of Frankfort.
But now the tables were turned; this meeting was in answer to the plea
of a defeated Germany who was to agree to return her stolen property
and to make good as far as possible the wrong she had done France and
the world.
The statue of Strassburg in Paris had been stripped of the mourning
which had covered it for nearly fifty years. Germany, as a victor, had
indeed been a hard master, not caring in the least for the interests of
the people in the conquered territories. How different was the spirit
of the French as victors is shown in General Pétain's orders to the
French armies after the signing of the armistice.
[Illustration: Memorial Day, 1918, was celebrated abroad as well as at
home. In Masevaux, the provisional capital of the recaptured Alsatian
territory, the American troops, headed by their band, paraded through
the streets. In the contingent directly behind the band you can see a
delegation of American and French officers and prominent citizens.]
As a piece of military literature it ranks with the soundest and the
most eloquent ever delivered. In the spirit of President Lincoln's
second inaugural address, "With malice towards none, with charity for
all," it emphasizes a contrast which will be remembered for
generations, to the everlasting shame of Germany and the glory of
France. To every true American patriot it means that our armies have
been fighting with the flower and chivalry of France, not for revenge,
but for the overthrow of oppression, the freedom of the oppressed, and
for honorable and permanent peace.
To the French Armies:--
During long months you have fought. History will record the tenacity
and fierce energy displayed during these four years by our country
which had to vanquish in order not to die.
Tomorrow, in order to better dictate peace, you are going to carry your
arms as far as the Rhine. Into that land of Alsace-Lorraine that is so
dear to us, you will march as liberators. You will go further: all the
way into Germany to occupy lands which are the necessary guarantees of
just reparation.
France has suffered in her ravaged fields and in her ruined villages.
The freed provinces have had to submit to intolerable, vexatious, and
odious outrages, but you are not to answer these crimes by the
commission of violences, which, under the spur of your resentment, may
seem to you legitimate.
You are to remain under discipline and to show respect to persons and
property. You will know, after having vanquished your adversary by
force of arms, how to impress him further by the dignity of your
attitude, and the world will not know which to admire more, your
conduct in success or your heroism in fighting.
I address a fond and affectionate greeting to our dead, whose
sacrifices gave us the victory. And I send a message of salutation,
full of sad affection, to the fathers, to the mothers, to the widows
and orphans of France, who, in these days of national joy, dry their
tears for a moment to acclaim the triumph of our arms. I bow my head
before your magnificent flags.
Vive la France!
(Signed) PETAIN.
[1] Translated from the French of Alphonse Daudet.
THE CALL TO ARMS IN OUR STREET
There's a woman sobs her heart out,
With her head against the door,
For the man that's called to leave her,
--God have pity on the poor!
But it's beat, drums, beat,
While the lads march down the street,
And it's blow, trumpets, blow,
Keep your tears until they go.
There's a crowd of little children
That march along and shout,
For it's fine to play at soldiers
Now their fathers are called out.
So it's beat, drums, beat;
And who will find them food to eat?
And it's blow, trumpets, blow,
Oh, it's little children know.
* * * * *
There's a young girl who stands laughing,
For she thinks a war is grand,
And it's fine to see the lads pass,
And it's fine to hear the band.
So it's beat, drums, beat,
To the fall of many feet;
And it's blow, trumpets, blow,
God go with you where you go.
W. M. LETTS.
THE KAISER'S CROWN
(VERSAILLES, JANUARY 18, 1871)
The wind on the Thames blew icy breath,
The wind on the Seine blew fiery death,
The snow lay thick on tower and tree,
The streams ran black through wold and lea;
As I sat alone in London town
And dreamed a dream of the Kaiser's crown.
Holy William, that conqueror dread,
Placed it himself on his hoary head,
And sat on his throne with his nobles about,
And his captains raising the wild war-shout;
And asked himself, 'twixt a smile and a sigh,
"Was ever a Kaiser so great as I?"
From every jewel, from every gem
In that imperial diadem,
There came a voice and a whisper clear--
I heard it, and I still can hear--
Which said, "O Kaiser great and strong,
God's sword is double-edged and long!"
"Aye," said the emeralds, flashing green--
"The fruit shall be what the seed has been--
His realm shall reap what his hosts have sown;
Debt and misery, tear and groan,
Pang and sob, and grief and shame,
And rapine and consuming flame!"
"Aye," said the rubies, glowing red--
"There comes new life from life-blood shed;
And though the Goth o'erride the Gaul.
Eternal justice rides o'er all!
Might may be Right for its own short day,
But Right is Might forever and aye!"
"Aye," said the diamonds, tongued with fire;
"Grief tracks the pathways of desire.
Our Kaiser, on whose head we glow,
Takes little heed of his people's woe,
Or the deep, deep thoughts in the people's brain
That burn and throb like healing pain.
"Thinks not that Germany, joyous now,
Cares naught for the crown upon his brow,
But much for the Freedom--wooed, not won--
That must be hers ere all is done,--
That gleams, and floats, and shines afar,
A glorious and approaching star!"
"Aye!" said they all, with one accord,
"He is the Kaiser, King, and Lord;
But kings are small, the people great;
And Freedom cometh, sure, though late--
A stronger than he shall cast him down!"
This was my dream of the Kaiser's crown.
CHARLES MACKAY--1871.
THE QUALITY OF MERCY
There is an old saying, "Like king, like people," which means that the
king is usually not very different from the people whose executive he
is. If this is true of kings, it surely must be true of American
presidents. With this in mind, contrast the German Kaiser, William II,
with Abraham Lincoln. The first constantly talked of himself and God
as ruling the world. Boastfully declaring that he was the greatest of
all men and that he ruled by divine right, the former German emperor
brought upon the world the greatest evil that has ever befallen it
through selfish ambition for himself, his family, and for the German
autocracy; the other claiming to be a common man, a servant of men,
seeking no riches, no throne, no personal power, entirely unselfish,
gave his life at last to save a united democracy. Shall we not say
that Lincoln served by the right of the divine qualities in him, while
the Kaiser turned the world into a hell because of the selfish aims of
his nature--aims that are just the opposite of divine?
During the American Civil War, Mrs. Bixby, a Massachusetts mother, lost
five sons. President Lincoln wrote her the following letter:--
"I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of
the Adjutant General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five
sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel how weak
and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile
you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain
from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks
of the Republic they died to save. I pray that our Heavenly Father may
assuage the anguish of your bereavement and leave you only the
cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must
be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom."
During the World War, Frau Meter, a German mother, lost nine sons.
Kaiser William wrote her the following letter:--
"His Majesty the Kaiser hears that you have sacrificed nine sons in
defense of the Fatherland in the present war. His Majesty is immensely
gratified at the fact, and in recognition is pleased to send you his
photograph, with frame and autograph signature."
Is it necessary to add a word to make one who reads the two letters
understand the difference between the two rulers and the two ideals
they represent? God is man's highest ideal of good. Which represents
this ideal, Lincoln or the Kaiser? The United States or Germany?
A poet says of the Kaiser's letter:--
"What bit of writing plainer tells
That neither love nor mercy dwells
Within his heart? What picture grim
Could better paint the soul of him?"
The Kaiser was reported to have said that no family in Germany had
escaped loss. Perhaps he was "gratified" at this as he was at the fact
that Frau Meter had lost nine sons. One family in Germany lost neither
father nor any one of the six adult sons,--the family of Kaiser William
II. Certainly no other family in Germany of such a size escaped loss.
Would the Kaiser have felt equally "gratified" if his six sons had
given up their lives in fighting Germany's war of plunder and conquest?
In the last days of the war, American soldiers found upon a German
prisoner a postal card with a picture of Quentin Roosevelt lying dead
beside his airplane. Below was printed in German the statement that
America was so short of fliers, that she had to use her presidents'
sons. Germans could not understand that in America the presidents'
sons would be the first to offer their services and for work of the
most dangerous kind. The sons of the Kaiser were carefully kept out of
danger.
THE REALLY INVINCIBLE ARMADA
The northern coast of Scotland is about as far north as the southern
point of Greenland and nearly all of Norway lies still nearer the pole.
Across the stretch of ocean between Scotland and Norway, a distance of
about three hundred miles, for over four years the English navy kept
guard, summer and winter. After the United States entered the war, the
entire distance was protected also by mines.
The hardships suffered by the crews of these blockading ships during
the terrible winters in that northern latitude can never be fully
appreciated by any one who did not have to endure them and overcome
them. This called for courage of the highest order, and the British
sailors proved again, as they have so many times in the past, that they
possessed it.
For thirty to forty days, each blockading ship kept the seas and then
returned to port for a short period of rest. When on blockade, the men
were frequently on duty on deck for twenty hours at a time wet through
to the skin; they then went below to their berths for a few hours'
sleep, to be followed by twenty hours more of duty on deck. "Blow
high, blow low, rain, hail, or snow, mines or submarines," said one of
them, "we have to go through it."
A suspicious vessel is sighted, headed for Norway, Denmark, or Holland.
She must be hailed, stopped, and boarded to make sure she is not
carrying cotton or rubber, or other contraband of war intended for
Germany. No matter how rough the sea or what the temperature, this
duty must be done. "We have just crawled into port again," wrote an
officer; "what fearful weather it has been, nothing but gales, rain and
snow, with rough seas. Two nights out of the last four were terrible
and for the last fortnight it seems to have been one incessant gale,
sometimes from the east, and then, for a change, from the west, with
rain all the time. The strictest lookout must be kept at all times, as
with the rough seas that are going now, a submarine's periscope takes a
bit of spotting, likewise a floating mine, the lookout hanging on to
the rigging in blinding rain, with seas drenching over them for hours
at a time, peering into the darkness."
W. Macneile Dixon gives the following vivid account of the work of the
British navy. "So it goes, and none save these who know the sea can
form a picture or imagine at all the unrelaxing toil and strain aboard
these ocean outposts that link northern with southern climes and draw
their invisible barrier across the waters. The sea, if you would
traffic with her, demands a vigilance such as no landsman dreams of,
but here you have men who to the vigilance of the mariner have added
that of the scout, who to the sailor's task have added the sentry's,
and on an element whose moods are in ceaseless change, today bright as
the heavens, tomorrow murky as the pit.
"To this rough duty in northern seas what greater contrast than that
other in southern, the naval bombardment of the Dardanelles? How broad
and various the support given by the British fleet to the Allies can
thus be judged. Separated each from the other by some thousands of
miles, the one fleet spread over leagues of ocean, kept every ship its
lonely watch, while the bombarding vessels, concentrated in imposing
strength, attempted to force a passage through a channel, the most
powerfully protected in the world. Unsuccessfully, it is true, but in
the grand manner of the old and vanished days when war had still
something of romance, and was less the hideous thing it has become.
"We have here at least a standard by which to measure the doings of
Britain on the sea. For remember the attempt upon the Dardanelles,
with all the strength and energy displayed in it, must be thought of as
no more than a minor episode in the work of the navy, not in any way
vital to the great issue. It was not the first nor even the second
among the tasks allotted to it. For while, first of all, the great
vessels under the commander-in-chief paralyzed the activities of the
whole German navy, while second in importance, the cruising patrols
held all the doors of entrance and exit to the German ports, still
another fleet of great battleships remained free to conduct so daring
an adventure as the attempt upon the Dardanelles. Nor was this all,
for, when the unsupported fleet could do no more, another heroic
undertaking was planned upon which fortune beguilingly smiled--the
landing on the historic beaches of Gallipoli.
"Take, first, the attempt of the ships upon the Straits. In the light
of failure no doubt it must be written down a military folly. Ships
against forts had long been held a futile and unequal contest. But it
was not the forts that saved Constantinople. In the narrow gulf
leading to the Sea of Marmora no less than eight mine fields zigzagged
their venomous coils across the channel. The strong, unchanging
current of the Dardanelles, flowing steadily south, carried with it all
floating mines dropped in the upper reaches. Torpedo tubes ranged on
the shore discharged their missiles halfway across the Straits. Before
warships could enter these waters a lane had to be swept and kept.
Daily, therefore, the minesweepers steamed ahead of the fleet to clear
the necessary channel. But when thus engaged they became the target of
innumerable and hidden guns, secluded among the rocks, in gullies and
ruins and behind the shoulders of the hills, in every fold of the
landscape. To 'spot' these shy, retiring batteries was of course
imperative, but when spotted they vanished to some other coign of
vantage, equally inconspicuous, and continued to rain fire upon the
minesweepers. The warships poured cataracts of shell along the shores
and among the slopes, the sea trembled, and the earth quaked. Amid the
devastating uproar the trawlers swept and grappled and destroyed the
discovered mines, but almost as fast as they removed them others were
floated down to fill their places. Ships that ventured too far in
support of the sweepers, like the _Bouvet_ and the _Triumph_, perished;
the waterways were alleys of death. Progress indeed was made, but
progress at a cost too heavy, and wisdom decreed the abandonment of the
original plan.
"There remained another way. An army landed on the peninsula might
cross the narrow neck of land, demolish the batteries, and free the
minesweepers from their destructive fire. Could that be done, it was
thought the ships might yet force a passage into the broader waters and
approach within easy range of the Turkish capital. After long and
fatal delay the attempt was made. What might have been easily
accomplished a month or two earlier had increased hour by hour in
difficulty. Warned in good time of the coming danger, the Turks
converted Gallipoli, a natural fortress, into a position of
immeasurable strength. With consuming energy, in armies of thousands,
they worked with pick and shovel till every yard of ground commanding a
landing place was trench or rifle pit or gun emplacement. An
impenetrable thicket of barbed wire ran up and down and across the
gullies, stretched to the shore and netted the shallow waters of the
beach itself. Then when all that man could do was done, they awaited
the British attack in full confidence that no army, regiment, or man
could land on that peninsula and live.
"No more extraordinary venture than this British landing on a naked
beach within point-blank range of the most modern firearms can be read
in history or fable. It was a landing of troops upon a foreign shore
thousands of miles from home, hundreds from any naval base. Without
absolute command of the sea, it could not have been so much as thought
of. Men, guns, food, ammunition, even water had to be conveyed in
ships and disembarked under the eyes of a hostile army, warned, armed,
alert, and behind almost impregnable defenses.
"To conceive the preposterous thing was itself a kind of sublime folly;
to accomplish it, simply and plainly stated, a feat divine. Though a
thousand pens in the future essay the task no justice in words can ever
be done to the courage and determination of the men who made good that
landing. Put aside for a moment the indisputable fact that the whole
gigantic undertaking achieved in a sense nothing whatever. View it
only as an exploit, a martial achievement, and it takes rank as the
most amazing feat of arms that the world has ever seen or is likely to
see. That at least remains, and as that, and no less than that, with
the full price of human life and treasure expended, it goes upon the
record, immortal as the soul of man. And nothing could be more fitting
than that an accomplishment which dims the glory of all previous
martial deeds, which marks the highest point of courage and resolution
reached by Britain in all her wars, should have been carried through by
British, Irish, and Colonial troops, representatives of the whole
empire under the guidance and protecting guard, of the British fleet.
"At Lemnos, for the more than Homeric endeavor on Homer's sea, lay an
assemblage of shipping such as no harbor had ever held. Within sight
of Troy they came and went, and in the classic waters ringed round by
classic hills waited for the day, a great armada, line upon line of
black transports, crowded with the finest flower of modern youth, and
beyond them, nearer the harbor mouth, the long, projecting guns and
towering hulls of the warships. On April 24th they sailed, while, amid
tempests of cheering, as the anchors were got and the long procession
moved away, the bands of the French vessels played them to the Great
Endeavor. There is no need to tell again the story of the arrival, the
stupendous uproar of the bombardments, so that men dizzy with it
staggered as they walked, the slaughter in the boats and on the
bullet-torn shingle, the making good of the landings and all the
subsequent battles on that inhuman coast. They will be told and retold
while the world lasts. And now that all is over, the chapter closed,
the blue water rippling undisturbed which once was white with a tempest
of shrapnel, now that all is over, the armies and the ships withdrawn,
and one reflects upon the waste of human life, the gallant hearts that
beat no longer, the prodigal expenditure of thought and energy and
treasure, there should perhaps mingle with our poignant regret and
disappointment no sense of exultation. Yet it surges upward and
overcomes all else. For our nature is so molded that it can never
cease to admire such doings, the more perhaps if victory be denied the
doers. And here at least on the shell-swept beaches, among the rocks
and flowery hillsides of Gallipoli, men of the British race wrote,
never to be surpassed, one of the world's deathless tales. . . .
"There are navies and navies. The old and fighting British navy, whose
representatives keep the seas today against the king's enemies, has
been heard of once or twice during the present war, but for the most
part preserves a certain aristocratic and dignified aloofness from the
public gaze. There is, however, another and an older navy which comes
and goes under the eyes of all, as it has done any time these three or
four centuries. On its six or eight thousand ships, to prove that
England is Old England still, the Elizabethan mariner has come to life
again, who took war very much as he took peace, unconcernedly, in his
day's work. Needless to say no other nation on earth could have
produced, either in numbers or quality, for no other nation possessed
these men, bred to the sea and the risks of the sea, born where the air
is salt, who, undeterred by the hazards of war, which was none of their
employ, answered their country's call as in the old Armada days. From
the Chinese and Indian seas they came, from the Pacific and Atlantic
trade routes, from whaling, it might be, or the Newfoundland fishing
grounds or the Dogger Bank--three thousand officers and some two
hundred thousand men--to supply the Grand Fleet, to patrol the
waterways, to drag for the German mines, to carry the armies of the
Alliance, and incidentally, to show the world, what it has perhaps
forgotten, that it is not by virtue of their fighting navy that the
British are a maritime people, but by virtue of an instinct amounting
to genius, rooted in a very ancient and unmatched experience of
shipping and the sea. The Grand Fleet is only the child of this
service which was already old before the word 'Admiralty' was first
employed, which made its own voyages and fought its own battles since
Columbus discovered America, and before even that considerable event.
These travel-worn ships formed the solid bridge across which flowed in
unbroken files the men and supplies to the British and the Allied
fronts.
"Picture a great railroad which has for its main line a track four or
five thousand miles in length, curving from Archangel in Russia to
Alexandria in Egyp
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