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Behind the Scenes in Warring Germany

by Edward Lyell Fox · English · Gutenberg #40792 · 504,467 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Behind the Scenes in Warring Germany

Author: Edward Lyell Fox


        
Release date: September 19, 2012 [eBook #40792]
                Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BEHIND THE SCENES IN WARRING GERMANY ***

    BEHIND THE SCENES IN WARRING GERMANY

[Illustration: Captain Tzschirner of Hindenburg's staff and Edward
Lyell Fox in Eydtkuhnen after the battle.]




    BEHIND THE SCENES
    IN WARRING GERMANY

    BY

    EDWARD LYELL FOX

    Special Correspondent with the Kaiser's Armies
    and in Berlin

    [Illustration]

    NEW YORK
    McBRIDE, NAST & COMPANY
    1915




    Copyright, 1915, by
    ILLUSTRATED SUNDAY MAGAZINES
    NEW YORK AMERICAN
    WILDMAN MAGAZINE AND NEWS SERVICE

    Copyright, 1915, by
    MCBRIDE, NAST & CO.

    _Published May, 1915_




    To
    E. W. F.




CONTENTS


    CHAPTER                                               PAGE

       I THE THRESHOLD OF WAR                                1

      II "THE BELOVED KING"                                 26

     III TO THE WEST FRONT                                  39

      IV ON THE BACK OF THE BIRD OF WAR                     55

       V BEHIND THE BATTLELINE                              73

      VI A NIGHT BEFORE YPRES                              100

     VII IN THE TRENCHES                                   126

    VIII CAPTURED BELGIUM AND ITS GOVERNOR GENERAL         160

      IX PRISONERS OF WAR                                  170

       X ON THE HEELS OF THE RUSSIAN RETREAT               194

      XI THE BATTLE OF AUGUSTOWO WALD                      222

     XII THE WAR ON THE RUSSIAN FRONTIER                   254

    XIII THE HERO OF ALL GERMANY                           274

     XIV WITH THE AMERICAN RED CROSS ON THE RUSSIAN
             FRONTIER                                      290

      XV THE SECRET BOOKS OF ENGLAND'S GENERAL
           STAFF                                           312

     XVI THE FUTURE--PEACE OR WAR                          324




THE ILLUSTRATIONS


    Capt. Tzschirner and the author                  _Frontispiece_

                                                        FACING PAGE
    Notifications from the German Foreign Office                 28

    Court filled with drilling soldiers                          80

    Ober-lieutenant Herrmann                                     80

    With French prisoners at Zossen                             182

    Burying Russians on East Prussian frontier                  196

    Reenforcements following our motor car into Russia          196

    Photographs of alleged British staff books                  312

    Aviator's guide book                                        316

    Aviator's key map                                           320




BEHIND THE SCENES IN WARRING GERMANY




I

THE THRESHOLD OF WAR


In the lingering twilight, the Baltic's choppy swells turned dark and
over the bow I saw a vague gray strip of land--Germany! I was at the
gateway of war.

For two hours the railway ferry had plowed between the mines that strew
the way to Denmark with potential death, and as slowly the houses of
Warnemunde appeared in shadow against the darkening day, some one
touched my arm.

"Safe now."

He was the courier. He had traveled with me from New York to Copenhagen,
a bland, reserved young man, with a caution beyond his years. I had come
to know he was making the trip as a German courier, and he was an
American with no Teutonic blood in his veins! Knowing the ropes, he had
suggested that he see me through to Berlin.

"It's good we came over the Baltic," he remarked, "instead of making
that long trip through Jutland. We save eight hours."

"Yes," I agreed, "nothing like slipping in the back door."

And being new to it then, and being very conscious of certain letters I
carried, and of the power implied in the documents which I knew he
carried, I wondered what the frontier guard would do. During the two
hours we ferried from the Danish shore the passengers talked in a
troubled way of the military search given every one at Warnemunde and I
smiled to myself in a reassuring way. Yes, they would be searched, poor
devils!... But the courier and I? I wondered if the German Lieutenant at
Warnemunde would ask us to take coffee with him. I even took out my
watch. No, it could hardly be done, for by the time the soldiers had
finished searching all these passengers the train would be leaving. Too
bad! Coffee and a chat with some other lieutenant, then.

"Yes," the courier was saying as the ferry docked and we caught, under
the glint of the sentries' rifles, a glimpse of the _Landwehr_ red and
blue, "it will be so easy here--just a formality, whereas if we had
taken the other route it no doubt would have been harder. You see," he
explained, "when a train crosses the Kiel canal a soldier is posted in
every compartment, the window shades are pulled down and the passengers
are warned not to look out on penalty of instant death. Of course that
is necessary for military reasons. Naturally the whole inspection at
that frontier is more severe because of the Kiel canal."

By this time the big boat had been made fast to a long railroad pier and
as we crossed the gang plank we made out in the bluish haze of an arc
lamp, a line of soldiers who seemed to be herding the passengers into
what appeared to be a long wooden shed newly built. Crowds are the same
the world over, so no one held back, all pushing, luggage and passports
in hand, into the frame structure built, I realized, for purposes of
military inspection.

Sluggishly the mass moved forward. Presently I saw it divide halfway
down the room, to pause before two openings at which six soldiers
waited, like ticket takers in a circus. I was near enough now to observe
the lantern light dimly shining upon two crude desk tops, slanting down
from the wall which gave entrance through a doorway to a larger room
beyond; and everywhere gleamed the glint of gun barrels, the red and
blue or gray of military hats, while an increasing flow of German,
punctuated with "_Donnerwetter!_" and "_Das ist genug_," was heard above
the shuffle of feet and the thumping of trunks and bags on the counters
in the room beyond. I wondered what two men in civilian clothes were
doing among the soldiers; I saw them dart about, notebooks in hand.
Later I learned more of these men who seemed to have it in their power
to make the passengers they challenged either comfortable or
uncomfortable.

And then it was my turn. Having seen the passenger in front throw both
hands over his head, unconsciously inviting the kind of search given a
criminal, I decided such submissiveness a blunder. As I expected, the
soldier was a perfectly sane human being who did not begin punching a
revolver against me--which certain printed words I had read in New York
implied was the usual prelude to a German searching party--rather this
soldier most courteously asked to see my wallet. I gave it to him. I
would have given him anything. Our cooperation was perfect. There was no
need for me to bring my exhaustive knowledge of the German language into
play. Talking fluently with my hands, now and then uttering "_danke_," I
tried to assist his search, meanwhile hopelessly looking about for the
courier. I was depending not only upon his fluent German but also upon
his superior knowledge of the situation to help me to pass serenely
through this ordeal. Alas, the crowd hid him.

Suddenly my soldier grunted something. Until now we had been getting
along splendidly and I could not conceal my surprise when he took from
my wallet a handful of letters and stared at them in bewilderment. The
more he stared the more his regard for me seemed to vanish. Although he
could not understand English he could recognize a proper name, for the
letters bore the addresses of decidedly influential men in Germany. They
challenged his suspicion. Thoroughly puzzled he opened the letters and
tried to read them. When he compared my passport with a letter I saw his
face light up. I realized that he had recognized my name in the
contents. Whereupon, greatly relieved, assured now that everything was
all right, I held out my hand for both letters and wallet. Not yet. A
rumble of words and the soldier called one of those busy civilians with
the notebooks.

This person spoke a little English. The letters interested him. Where
had I found them?... My spine began to feel cold. I replied that they
had been given me in New York and remembering that I had the courier to
rely on, I suggested that they have a word with him. It was then that I
heard an excited deluge of words and, glancing over my shoulder, I
observed that the courier was thoroughly flanked and surrounded by five
_Landwehr_ who apparently were much in earnest about something.
Concluding that some cog had slipped I racked my wits to make the best
of what was rapidly becoming a difficult situation.

The soldier having turned me over to the civilian I noticed several
suspicious glances in my direction, and blessed the luck that had
impelled me to go to the American Legation and the German Consulate in
Copenhagen for visés. That the civilian who was taking such an interest
in me belonged to the secret service, I was certain. I appealed to his
sense of discretion.

"Your passport seems all right," he thoughtfully observed, and opened a
little book. "Where are you going?"

I told him to Hamburg but could not tell him where I would stay, for the
excellent reason that not the name of a single Hamburg hotel was known
to me.

"Only for a few days, though," I said, adding hopefully; "after that I
go to Berlin to Hotel Adlon."

As fast as his pencil could move he wrote the address in his book.

"These letters," he said reluctantly, tapping them on his hand, "I must
take now. If everything is all right, they will be sent to you in
Berlin."

"But it is important that I have them," I protested, "they are my
introductions. You cannot tell me how long I may have to wait for them?
You can see from them that I am a responsible person known to your
people."

"I know," he replied, "but they are written in English, and to bring
letters written in English into Germany is forbidden. I am sorry."

He was thus politely relieving me of all my credentials when I happened
to think that in my inner waistcoat pocket lay a letter I had yet to
show them--a communication so important to me that I had kept it
separate from the others. Moreover I remembered it was sealed and that
properly used it might save the day. It was worth a trial.

Realizing that the thing had to be staged I impressively drew the police
spy aside and employing the familiar "stage business" of side glances
and exaggerated caution I slowly took the note--it was a mere letter of
introduction to the Foreign Office--from my waistcoat. If the soldier's
eyes had opened wide at the other addresses, the police agent's now
fairly bulged. Handing him the envelope I pointed to what was typed in
the upper left hand corner--_Kaiserliche Deutsche Botschaft, Washington,
D. C._--and simply said "_Verstehen sie?_"

He _verstehened_. Being an underling he understood so well that after a
few moments he returned all the letters he had appropriated and
instantly changing his manner, he facilitated the rest of the
inspection. After my baggage was examined by more soldiers (and those
soldiers did their duty, even going through the pockets of clothes in my
trunks) I was told I might go.

"_Gute reise_," the police agent called--"Good journey."

Although treated with all courtesy I was afraid somebody might change
his mind, so hurrying out of the last room of the long wooden shed I
proceeded down the platform to the train at a pace that must have shown
signs of breaking into a run. There in my compartment the thoughts that
came to me were in this order:

There must be reason for such a rigid inspection; no doubt spies must
have been caught recently trying to enter Germany at Warnemunde.

If I hadn't lost the courier in the crowd there would have been plain
sailing.

The minutes passed. It was nearly time for the train to start. Where was
the courier? Presently, rather pale, nervous in speech, but as reserved
and cool as ever he limply entered the compartment and threw himself on
the cushions.

"They took everything," he announced. "All they left me was a pair of
pajamas."

"What! You mean they have your papers?"

"All of them," he smiled. "Likewise a trunk full of letters and a
valise. Oh, well, they'll send them on. They took my address. Gad, they
stripped me through!"

I began laughing. The courier could see no mirth in the situation.

"You," I gasped, "you, who by all rights should have paraded through,
from you they take everything while they let me pass."

"Do you mean to say," he exclaimed, "that they didn't take your
letters."

"Not one," I grinned.

"Well, I'll be damned!" he said.

Locked in the compartment we nervously watched the door, half expecting
that the police spy would come back for us. We could not have been
delayed more than a few minutes, but it seemed hours, before, with
German regard for comfort, the train glided out of the shed. It must
have been trying on my companion's good humor, but the absurdity of
stripping a courier of everything he carried, was irresistible. Perhaps
it was our continued laughter that brought the knock on the door.

Pushing aside the curtains we saw outside--for it was one of the new
German wagons with a passageway running the entire length of one side of
the car--a tall, broad-shouldered, lean man with features and expression
both typical and unmistakable.

"An Englishman!"

We saw him smile and shake his head. I hesitatingly let fall the curtain
and looked at the courier.

"Let him in," he said. "He's got the brand of an English university boy
all over him. We'll have a chat with him. You don't mind, do you?"

"Mind!" In my eagerness I banged back the compartment doors with a crash
that brought down the conductor. I saw my companion hastily corrupt that
official whose murmured "_Bitteschon_" implied an un-Teutonic disregard
for the fact that he had done something _verboten_ by admitting a second
class passenger into a first class coupé; and the stranger entered.

We were gazing upon a strikingly handsome fair-haired man not yet
thirty. His eyes twinkled when he said that he supposed we were
Americans. His manner and intonation made me stare at him.

"And you?" we finally asked.

"I'm going first to Berlin, then to Petrograd," he said, perhaps
avoiding our question. "Business trip."

We chatted on, the obvious thought obsessing me. Of course the man was
an English spy. But how absurd! If his face did not give him away to any
one who knew--and my word for it, those police spies do know!--he would
be betrayed by his mannerisms. His accent would instantly cry out the
English in him. Of what could Downing Street be thinking? It was sending
this man to certain death. One began to feel sorry for him.

Feeling the intimacy brought by the common experience at Warnemunde, I
presently said:

"You certainly have your nerve with you, traveling in Germany with
_your_ accent."

"Why?" he laughed. "A neutral is safe."

Expecting he would follow this up by saying he was an American I looked
inquiring and when he sought to turn the subject I asked:

"Neutral? What country?"

"Denmark," he smiled.

"But your accent?" I persisted.

"I do talk a bit English, do I not? I had quite a go at it, though;
lived in London a few years, you know."

Nerve? I marveled at it. Stark foolhardy courage, or did a secret
commission from Downing Street make this the merest commonplace of duty?
Charming company, he hurried along the time with well told anecdotes of
the Russian capital and Paris, in both of which places he said he had
been since the war began. As we drew near Lübeck, where a thirty-five
minute stop was allowed for dinner in the station, and the stranger
showed no signs of going back to his own compartment, I could see that
the courier was becoming annoyed. Relapsing into silence he only broke
it to reply to the "Dane" in monosyllables; finally, to my surprise, the
courier became downright rude. As the stranger, from the start, had been
extremely courteous, this rudeness surprised me, more so, as it seemed
deliberate. Bludgeoned by obvious hints the stranger excused himself,
and as soon as he was gone my companion leaned towards me.

"You were surprised at my rudeness," he said, and then in an undertone;
"it was deliberate."

"I saw that. But why?"

"Because," he explained, "seeing we are Americans that fellow wanted to
travel with us all the way through. He must have known that American
company is the best to be seen in over here these days. He might have
made trouble for us."

"Then you also think he's English?"

"Think! Why they must have let him through at Warnemunde for a reason.
He has a Danish passport right enough. I saw it in the inspection room.
But I'll bet you anything there's a police spy in this train,
undoubtedly in the same compartment with him."

One felt uncomfortable. One thought that those police spies must dislike
one even more now.

"That means we may be suspected as being confederates," I gloomily
suggested.

Whether he was getting back for my having guyed him about losing his
papers I do not know, but the courier said we probably were suspected.
Whereupon the book I tried to read became a senseless jumble of words
and our compartment door became vastly more interesting. When would it
open to admit the police spy?... Confound the luck! Everything breaking
wrong.

But at Lübeck nothing happened--nothing to us. A train load of wounded
had just come in and our hearts jumped at the sight of the men in the
gray-green coats of the firing line, slowly climbing the long iron steps
from the train platforms. Hurrying, we saw them go clumping down a long
airy waiting room and as they approached the street their hobbling
steps suddenly quickened to the sharper staccato of the canes upon which
they leaned. Hurrying too, we saw there a vague mass of pallid faces in
a dense crowd; some one waved a flag;--it stuck up conspicuously above
that throng;--some one darted forth;--"_Vater!_"--"_Liebes Mütterchen!_"

Past the burly Landsturm, who was trying his utmost to frown his jolly
face into threatening lines that would keep back the crowd, a woman was
scurrying. One of the big gray-green wounded men caught her in his
arm--the other arm hung in a black sling--and she clung to him as though
some one might take him away, and because she was a woman, she wept in
her moment of happiness. Her _Mann_ had come home....

Forgetting the dinner we were to have eaten in the Lübeck station, we
finally heeded a trainman's warning and turned back to our car. There
remained etched in my mind the line of pallid, apprehensive faces, the
tiny waving flags, the little woman and the big man. It was my first
sight of war.

From Lübeck to Hamburg the ride was uneventful. The hour was not late
and beyond remarking that the towns through which we passed were not as
brilliantly lighted as usual, the courier could from the car window
observe no difference between the Germany of peace and of war. Here and
there we noticed bridges and trestles patroled by _Landwehr_ and outside
our compartment we read the handbill requesting every passenger to aid
the government in preventing spies throwing explosives from the car
windows. From the conductor we learned that there had been such
attempts to delay the passage of troop trains. Whereupon we
congratulated ourselves upon buying the conductor, as we had the
compartment to ourselves. One thought of what would have happened had
there been an excitable German in with us and while the train was
crossing a bridge, we had innocently opened a window for air!

It was almost ten when the close, clustered lights of Hamburg closed in
against the trackside and we caught our first glimpse of the swarming
_Bahnhof_. Soldiers everywhere. The blue of the Reservists, the
gray-green of the Regulars--a shifting tide of color swept the length of
the long platforms, rising against the black slopes of countless
staircases, overrunning the vast halls above, increasing, as car after
car emptied its load. And then, as at Lübeck, we saw white bandages
coming down under cloth-covered helmets and caps, or arms slung in black
slings; the slightly wounded were coming in from the western front.

All this time we had forgotten the Englishman, and it was with a start
that we recalled him.

"If he spots us," advised my companion, "we've got to hand him the cold
shoulder. Mark my words, he'll try to trail along to the same hotel and
stick like a leech."

Again he was right. At the baggage room the Englishman overtook us,
suggesting that we make a party of it--he knew a gay café--first going
to the hotel. He suggested the _Atlantic_. Bluntly he was informed we
were visiting friends, but nothing would do then but we must agree to
meet him in, say, an hour. Not until he found it an impossibility did he
give us up and finally, with marvelous good nature, he said good night.
The last I saw of him was his broad back disappearing through a door
into a street.

The courier nudged me.

"Quick," he whispered, "look,--the man going out the next door."

Before I could turn I knew whom he meant. I saw only the man's profile
before he too disappeared into the street; but it was a face difficult
to forget, for it had been close to me at Warnemunde; it was the face of
the police spy.

"I told you they purposely let him get through," continued my friend.
"That police fellow must have come down on the train from Warnemunde. I
tell you it's best not to pick up with any one these days. Suppose we
had fallen for that Englishman and gone to a café with him to-night--a
nice mess!"

It was in a restaurant a few hours later that I saw my first Iron Cross,
black against a gray-green coat and dangling from a button. In
_Bieber's_, a typical better class café of the new German type,
luxurious with its marble walls and floors, and with little soft rugs
underfoot and colored wicker tables and chairs, one felt the new spirit
of this miracle of nations. On the broad landing of a wide marble
staircase an orchestra played soldier songs and above the musicians,
looking down on his people, loomed a bust of Wilhelm II, _Von Gottes
Gnaden_, _Kaiser von Deutschland_. About him, between the flags of
Austria-Hungary and Turkey, blazed the black, white and red, and there
where all might read, hung the proclamation of August to the German
people. We had read it through to the last line: "_Forward with God who
will be with us as he was with our Fathers!_"--when we heard an excited
inflection in the murmurings from the many tables--"_Das Eiserne
Kreuz!_" And we saw the officer from whose coat dangled the black
maltese cross, outlined in silver. His cheeks flushed, proud of a
limping, shot-riddled leg, proud of his Emperor's decoration, but
prouder still that he was a German; he must have forgotten all of battle
and suffering during that brief walk between the tables. Cheers rang
out, then a song, and when finally the place quieted everybody stared at
that little cross of black as though held by some hypnotic power.

So! We were Americans, he said when we finally were presented. That was
good. We--that is--I had come to write of the war as seen from the
German side. Good, _sehr gut_! He had heard the Allies, especially the
English,--_Verfluchte Englanderschwein!_--were telling many lies in the
American newspapers. How could any intelligent man believe them?

In his zeal for the German cause his Iron Cross, his one shattered leg,
the consciousness that he was a hero, all were forgotten. Of course I
wanted to hear his story--the story of that little piece of metal
hanging from the black and white ribbon on his coat--but tenaciously he
refused. That surprised me until I knew Prussian officers.

So we left the man with the Iron Cross, marveling not at his modesty but
that it embodied the spirit of the German army; whereas I thought I knew
that spirit. But not until the next night, when I left Hamburg behind,
where every one was pretending to be busy and the nursemaids and
visitors were still tossing tiny fish to the wintering gulls in the
upper lake; not until the train was bringing me to Berlin did I
understand what it meant. At the stations I went out and walked with the
passengers and watched the crowds; I talked with a big business man of
Hamburg--bound for Berlin because he had nothing to do in Hamburg; then
it was I faintly began to grasp the tremendous emotional upheaval
rumbling in every Germanic soul.

My first impression of Berlin was the long cement platform gliding by, a
dazzling brilliance of great arc lamps and a rumbling chorus of song.
Pulling down the compartment window I caught the words "_Wir kämpfen
Mann für Mann, für Kaiser und Reich!_" And leaning out I could see down
at the other end of the Friederichstrasse Station a regiment going to
the front.

Flowers bloomed from the long black tubes from which lead was soon to
pour; wreaths and garlands hung from cloth covered helmets; cartridge
belts and knapsacks were festooned with ferns. The soldiers were all
smoking; cigars and cigarettes had been showered upon them with prodigal
hand. Most of them held their guns in one hand and packages of
delicacies in the other; and they were climbing into the compartments
or hanging out of the windows singing, always singing, in the terrific
German way. Later I was to learn that they went into battle with the
"Wacht am Rhein" on their lips and a wonderful trust in God in their
hearts.

I felt that trust now. I saw it in the confident face of the young
private who hung far out of the compartment in order to hold his wife's
hand. It was not the way a conscript looks. This soldier's blue eyes
sparkled as with a holy cause, and as I watched this man and wife I
marveled at their sunny cheer. I saw that each was wonderfully proud of
the other and that this farewell was but an incident in the sudden
complexity of their lives. The Fatherland had been attacked: her man
must be a hero. It was all so easy, so brimming with confidence. Of
course he would come back to her.... You believed in the Infinite
ordering of things that he would.

Walking on down the platform I saw another young man. They were all
young, strapping fellows in their new uniforms of field gray. He was
standing beside the train; he seemed to want to put off entering the car
until the last minute. He was holding a bundle of something white in his
arms, something that he hugged to his face and kissed, while the woman
in the cheap furs wept, and I wondered if it was because of the baby she
cried, while that other childless young wife had smiled.

Back in the crowd I saw a little woman with white hair; she was too
feeble to push her way near the train. She was dabbing her eyes and
waving to a big, mustached man who filled a compartment door and who
shouted jokes to her. And almost before they all could realize it, the
train was slipping down the tracks; the car windows filled with singing
men, the long gray platform suddenly shuffling to the patter of men's
feet, as though they would all run after the train as far as they could
go. But the last car slipped away and the last waving hand fell weakly
against a woman's side. They seemed suddenly old, even the young wife,
as they slowly walked away. Theirs was not the easiest part to play in
the days of awful waiting while the young blood of the nation poured out
to turn a hostile country red.

I thought I had caught the German spirit at Lübeck and at the café in
Hamburg when the hero of the Iron Cross had declined to tell me his
tale; but this sensation that had come with my setting foot on the
Berlin station--this was something different. Fifteen hundred men going
off to what?--God only knows!--fifteen hundred virile types of this
nation of virility; and they had laughed and they had sung, and they had
kissed their wives and brothers and babies as though these helpless ones
should only be proud that their little household was helping their
Fatherland and their Emperor. Self? It was utterly submerged. On that
station platform I realized that there is but one self in all Germany
to-day and that is the soul of the nation. Nothing else matters; a
sacrifice is commonplace. Wonderful? Yes. But then we Americans fought
that way at Lexington; any nation can fight that way when it is a thing
of the heart; and this war is all of the heart in Germany. As we walked
through the station gates I understood why three million Socialists who
had fought their Emperor in and out of the Reichstag, suddenly rallied
to his side, agreeing "I know no parties, only Germans." I felt as I
thought of the young faces of the soldiers, cheerfully starting down
into the unknown hell of war, that undoubtedly among their number were
Socialists. In this national crisis partizan allegiance counted for
nothing, they had ceased dealing with the Fatherland in terms of the
mind and gave to it only the heart.

Even in Berlin I realized that war stalks down strange by-paths. It
forever makes one feel the incongruous. It disorders life in a monstrous
way. I have seen it in an instant make pictures that the greatest artist
would have given his life to have done. It likes to deal in contrasts;
it is jolting....

With General von Loebell I walked across the Doeberitz camp, which is
near Berlin. At Doeberitz new troops were being drilled for the front.
We walked towards a dense grove of pines above which loomed the sky,
threateningly gray. Between the trees I saw the flash of yellow flags; a
signal squad was drilling. Skirting the edge of the woods we came to a
huge, cleared indentation where twenty dejected English prisoners were
leveling the field for a parade ground. On the left I saw an opening in
the trees; a wagon trail wound away between the pines. And then above
the rattling of the prisoners' rakes I heard the distant strains of a
marching song that brought a lump to my throat. Back there in the woods
somewhere, some one had started a song; and countless voices took up the
chorus; and through the trees I saw a moving line of gray-green and down
the road tramped a company of soldiers. They were all singing and their
boyish voices blended with forceful beauty. "In the Heimat! In the
Heimat!" It was the favorite medley of the German army.

The prisoners stopped work; unconsciously some of those dispirited
figures in British khaki stiffened. And issuing from the woods in squads
of fours, all singing, tramped the young German reserves, swinging along
not fifteen feet from the prison gang in olive drab--"In the Heimat!"
And out across the Doeberitz plains they swung, big and snappy.

"They're ready," remarked General von Loebell. "They've just received
their field uniforms."

And then there tramped out of the woods another company, and another,
two whole regiments, the last thundering "Die Wacht am Rhein," and we
went near enough to see the pride in their faces, the excitement in
their eyes; near enough to see the Englishmen, young lads, too, who
gazed after the swinging column with a soldier's understanding, but
being prisoners and not allowed to talk, they gave no expression to
their emotions and began to scrape their rakes over the hard ground....

I stood on the Dorotheenstrasse looking up at the old red brick building
which before the second of August in this year of the world war was the
War Academy. I had heard that when tourists come to Berlin they like to
watch the gay uniformed officers ascending and descending the long
flights of gray steps; for there the cleverest of German military youths
are schooled for the General Staff. Like the tourists, I stood across
the street to-day and watched the old building and the people ascending
or descending the long flights of gray steps. Only I saw civilians, men
alone and in groups, women with shawls wrapped around their heads, women
with yellow topped boots, whose motors waited beside the curb, and
children, clinging to the hands of women, all entering or leaving by the
gray gate; some of the faces were happy and others were wet with tears,
and still others stumbled along with heavy steps. For this old building
on Dorotheenstrasse is no longer the War Academy; it is a place where
day after day hundreds assemble to learn the fate of husband, kin or
lover. For inside the gray gate sits the Information Bureau of the War
Ministry, ready to tell the truth about every soldier in the German
army! I, too, went to learn the truth.

I climbed a creaking staircase and went down a creaking hall. I met the
Count von Schwerin, who is in charge. I found myself in a big,
high-ceilinged room the walls of which were hung with heroic portraits
of military dignitaries. My first impression was of a wide arc of desks
that circling from wall to wall seemed to be a barrier between a number
of gentle spoken elderly gentlemen and a vague mass of people that
pressed forward. The anxious faces of all these people reminded me of
another crowd that I had seen--the crowd outside the White Star offices
in New York when the _Titanic_ went down. And I became conscious that
the decorations of this room which, the Count was explaining, was the
Assembly Hall of the War Academy, were singularly appropriate--the
pillars and walls of gray marble, oppressively conveying a sense of
coldness, insistent cold, like a tomb, and all around you the subtle
presence of death, the death of hopes. It was the Hall of Awful Doubt.

And as I walked behind the circle of desks I learned that these men of
tact and sympathy, too old for active service, were doing their part in
the war by helping to soften with kindly offices the blow of fate. I
stood behind them for some few moments and watched, although I felt like
one trespassing upon the privacy of grief. I saw in a segment of the
line a fat, plain-looking woman, with a greasy child clinging to her
dress, a white haired man with a black muffler wrapped around his neck,
a veiled woman, who from time to time begged one of the elderly clerks
to hurry the news of her husband, and then a wisp of a girl in a cheap,
rose-colored coat, on whose cheeks two dabs of rouge burned like coals.

Soldiers from the Berlin garrison were used there as runners. At the
bidding of the gentle old men they hastened off with the inquiry to one
of the many filing rooms and returned with the news. This day there was
a new soldier on duty; he was new to the Hall of Awful Doubt.

"I cannot imagine what is keeping him so long," I heard an elderly
clerk tell the woman with the veil. "He'll come any minute.... There he
is now. Excuse me, please."

And the elderly clerk hurried to meet the soldier, wanting to intercept
the news, if it were bad, and break it gently. But as he caught sight of
the clerk I saw the soldier click his heels and, as if he were
delivering a message to an officer, his voice boomed out: "_Tot!_" ...
Dead!

And the woman with the veil gave a little gasp, a long, low moan, and
they carried her to another room; and as I left the gray room, with the
drawn, anxious faces pushing forward for their turns at the
black-covered desks, I realized the heartrending sacrifice of the women
of France, Belgium, Russia, England, Servia, and Austria, who, like
these German mothers, wives, and sweethearts, had been stricken down in
the moment of hope.

That night I went to the Jägerstrasse, to Maxim's. The place is
everything the name suggests; one of those Berlin cafés that open when
the theaters are coming out and close when the last girl has smiled and
gone off with the last man. I sat in a white and gold room with a
cynical German surgeon, listening to his comments.

"It is the best in town now," he explained. "All the Palais de Danse
girls come here. Don't be in a hurry. I know what you want for your
articles. You'll see it soon."

Maxim's, like most places of the sort, was methodically banal. But one
by one officers strolled in and soon a piano struck up the notes of a
patriotic song. When the music began the girls left the little tables
where they had been waiting for some man to smile, and swarmed around
the piano, singing one martial song upon another, while officers
applauded, drank their healths, and asked them to sing again.

Time passed and the girls sang on, flushed and savage as the music
crashed to the cadenzas of war. What were the real emotions of these
subjects of Germany; had the war genuine thrills for them? I had talked
with decent women of all classes about the war; what of the women whose
hectic lives had destroyed real values?

"Get one of those girls over here," I told the surgeon, "and ask her
what she thinks of the war."

"Do you really mean it?" he said with a cynical smile.

"Surely. This singing interests me. I wonder what's back of it?"

He called one of them. "Why not sing?" Hilda said with a shrug. "What
else? There are few men here now and there are fewer every night. What
do I think of this war? My officer's gone to the front without leaving
me enough to keep up the apartment. _Krieg?_ _Krieg ist schrecklich!_
War is terrible!"

My German friend was laughing.

"War?" he smiled. "And you thought it was going to change that kind."

But I was thinking of the woman with the veil whom I had seen in the
Hall of Awful Doubt; and outside the night air felt cool and clean....

But my symbol of Berlin is not these things--not bustling streets filled
with motors, swarming with able-bodied men whom apparently the army did
not yet need. Its summation is best expressed by the varied sights and
emotions of an afternoon in mid-December.

Lódz has fallen; again Hindenburg has swept back the Russian hordes.
Black-shawled women call the extras. Berlin rises out of its calmness
and goes mad. Magically the cafés fill.... I am walking down a side
street. I see people swarming toward a faded yellow brick church. They
seem fired with a zealot's praise. I go in after them and see them fall
on their knees.... They are thanking Him for the Russian rout....
Wondering I go out. I come to another church. Its aisles are black with
bowed backs; the murmur of prayer drones like bees; a robed minister is
intoning:

"Oh, Almighty Father, we thank Thee that Thou art with us in our fight
for the right; we thank Thee that--"

It is very quiet in there. War seems a thing incredibly far away. The
sincerity of these people grips your heart. I feel as I never felt in
church before. Something mysteriously big and reverent stirs all
around.... Then outside in the street drums rattle, feet thump. A
regiment is going to the front! I hurry to see it go by, but back in the
church the bowed forms pray on.




II

"THE BELOVED KING"

_Being impressions gained during my talk with His Majesty King Ludwig of
Bavaria_


Knowing what was in the wind when the summons came that night, I hurried
down Unter den Linden and through Wilhelmstrasse to the Foreign Office.
Several days before, Excellence Freiherr von Mumm had discussed the
possibilities with me and as the old-fashioned portal of the Foreign
Office swung back to admit me, I wondered if the news would be good or
bad. Without delay I was ushered into the office of Dr. Roediger. He was
just laying the telephone aside.

"It has been arranged," he said. "I was just talking with München. You
are to leave Berlin to-night on the 10.40 train. Upon your arrival in
München in the morning, you will go to the Hotel Vierjahrzeiten. At ten
in the morning present yourself to Excellence Baron von Schön at the
Prussian Embassy in München. He will inform you as to the details. At
twelve o'clock His Majesty, the King of Bayern, will be pleased to
receive you.... Adieu and good luck."

Thanking Dr. Roediger for the arrangement--with true German thoroughness
they had laid out a perfect schedule for me, even to the hotel at which
I was to stop in München--I had a race of it to get packed and catch the
train. But once in the compartment, with the train whirling away from
Berlin, I had a chance to collect my thoughts. So, His Majesty would no
doubt talk with me upon some subject of interest to Americans. I ran
over half a dozen of these in my mind, but King Ludwig's personality
kept obtruding. What sort of a man was he? I had seen an excellent
colored photograph of him in a gallery in Unter den Linden. It was one
of those pictures which make you wonder at the reality and in this case
made me anticipate the meeting with unrestrained keenness. I remembered
that he had waited long for the throne, that it had not descended to him
until September of 1913, that he had been crowned King of his beloved
Bayern at the regal age of sixty-eight. I recalled that his house, the
house of Wittelsbacher, was the oldest in Germany, the line going back
to the year 907. King Ludwig, ruler of that southern German land where
so many Americans like to go, his home in Munich, which every American
sooner or later comes to admire for its famous galleries and golden
brown Münchener beer; King Ludwig, what would be his message to the
United States?

Ten o'clock the following morning found me shaking hands with Baron von
Schön, the Prussian Ambassador to Bavaria. It was the Baron who was
Germany's Ambassador to France at the outbreak of war, and how I
regretted that obligations of his diplomatic position forbade a
discussion of those frantic nights and days in Paris before the war. We
could talk of other things, however, and as there were two hours before
the appointed time of my presentation to King Ludwig, Baron von Schön
helped me to get my bearings. To my consternation I learned that the
King spoke only a little English. I informed the Baron that I spoke only
a little German. Whereupon immediately the Geheimrat's office in the
Embassy began to ring with one telephone call after another, for an
interpreter had to be secured, a man whom His Majesty would be pleased
to receive with me. And finally such a man was found in Counselor of
Legation von Stockhammern.

After motoring down a long avenue, lined with pretty residences, the car
turned in, approaching a rather old, unpretentious but severely
dignified building of faded yellow brick, suggesting Windsor. This was
the Wittelsbacher Palast, the home of King Ludwig. I remembered having
seen that morning on my way to the Embassy, a far more imposing looking
palace, the Residence, and contrasting its ornateness with the
simplicity of the building which we were approaching, I wondered at
royalty living there. It was typical of the democratic King I came to
know.

As our motor rolled up, I saw two blue and white striped sentry boxes
marking the entrance and through an arched driveway I had a glimpse of
an inner court paved with stones, where an official automobile waited.
Then I was escorted through the entrance to the right wing of the
palace. Here Staatsrat (Secretary of the Royal Cabinet) von Dandl, a
tall, soldierly looking man in uniform, greeted us, after which I was
taken to an antechamber, where Counselor of Legation von Stockhammern,
my interpreter, was waiting. There appeared a young Bavarian officer in
full dress uniform, whom I was told was the Adjutantour to the King.
Upon being introduced he left as quickly as he had come. It lacked a
quarter hour of the time of reception, and Von Stockhammern and I were
talking about München, when the young Adjutantour as quickly returned
and said that His Majesty would receive me.

[Illustration: Reproduction of the author's notifications from the
German Foreign Office.]

I climbed with Von Stockhammern several flights of a wooden staircase;
the tan and red bordered corded runaway reminded you of a church, as did
the bare white walls, and you felt a solemn silence, accentuated by the
jangling of the sword; and then turning with a last flight of steps, I
saw above two guards in the uniform of the Hartschier Regiment, two
white coated, blue trousered, plumed statues standing beside a wide
entrance door. The click of presenting arms and the statues came to
life, and passing between them we found ourselves in what was evidently
an antechamber of the Audience Saal, a comfortably furnished room; the
walls covered with small oil paintings. I remember a silk-stockinged,
stooping doorman who wore black satin breeches, like a character that I
had seen sometime in a French romantic play. He was standing with his
hand upon the knob of two brown oaken doors as if awaiting a signal.
Apparently it came, although I heard nothing, for suddenly the brown
doors swung back, and I found myself gazing into the long
high-ceilinged room, the Audience Saal, and in the middle of this room
stood an elderly man, in the dress uniform of an officer in the Second
Bavarian Infantry. The uniform was blue and red and braided with gold,
and the man had a white beard and a wonderfully kind face. It was His
Majesty King Ludwig of Bavaria.

My first thought, as I walked towards him, was of how closely he
resembled the picture I had seen of him in the gallery on Unter den
Linden. But as I drew nearer, I saw that the picture had not caught the
man. You were conscious of kind eyes smiling a welcome through silver
spectacles. You instantly felt that kindness seemed to be a dominant
note of his character, and you realized the intellectual power behind
that wide, thoughtful forehead; and you saw a firm mouth and chin
suggesting determination, kindness, brains, force, every inch a king!
But somehow, had I not known he was a king, the military regimentals
which he wore might have been a little incongruous; he impressed me as
being the kind of man you might expect to see in the black coated garb
of a professor; a man of great, grave and forceful dignity and learning,
and utterly foreign to the popular American conception of a monarch.

This impression was borne out a moment later, when as Staatsrat von
Dandl came forward to present me, King Ludwig showed me a delightful
courtesy. Casting court etiquette aside, he welcomed me in true American
fashion, his hand outstretched.

There began then the usual preliminaries to a conversation and while we
exchanged greetings, I noticed that His Majesty was wearing a great
number of minor orders, strung in a bright ribboned line across his
chest, and beneath them, on the left side, the Iron Cross, the Star of
St. Hubertus, and the Order of the Crown. Presently, in a pleasantly
modulated voice, King Ludwig told me that through his people he had long
felt a great friendship for America.

"All Germany has been deeply touched by the many kindnesses of your
country since the beginning of the war. You have been so thoughtful," he
said. "You have sent us your wonderful Red Cross doctors and nurses.
Throughout the empire we have heard expressions of good will from your
visiting countrymen. We have felt the spirit that prompted the gifts of
the American children which came through your Mr. O'Loughlin to the
children of Germany. Especially have we been touched here in München,
where your wonderful hospital is, and where we have so many Americans.
Between Germany and the United States there exists a strong bond through
commercial relations, but between your country and Bavaria there is
something more intimate. It is because so many of your countrymen come
here. They like the Wagner-festspiel, they are so fond of German music
and our Bavarian art. They like to spend their summers among us. They
get to know us and we them. You have no idea how many Americans live
here in München. And they find here the high regard in which your
country is held. They find that two of the best artists of their own
nation, Miss Fay and Miss Walker, both Americans, are regarded as the
best artists in the München Opera, and our people hold them in great
esteem. They are received in court society, and are very well seen."

The subject of America made the King enthusiastic and the sincere ring
of his voice and the warmth of his smile increased as he spoke. So I
took the opportunity of asking His Majesty a question so many of my
countrymen are thinking. What of America and war?

"America need fear no war," he replied quickly, adding, "No war on your
own soil. Geographically you are safe. You have only two neighbors,
Canada and Mexico." And the King smiled. "We, on the other hand, are
surrounded by enemies who are powerful. You have the Pacific between you
and your adversaries."

King Ludwig's omission of the Atlantic Ocean struck me as being
significant. He seemed to take it for granted that we could have but one
adversary--that yellow octopus of the Far East. Whereupon I mentioned
something which had come to me in Berlin concerning certain islands in
the Pacific. For a moment King Ludwig looked grave, and then he said
slowly: "America needs no large army; if she should need one she can
make it quickly. She has already shown that. To attack her on her home
soil is not practical, but she should have a large navy. I have heard
many compliments of your American navy, of its equipment, discipline and
gunnery; but it must be kept large."

"So you think, Your Majesty, that we are safe from war?"

"On your home soil, yes," he repeated, "but your navy must be strong.
When war will come, you can never tell. But you must never fear war. We
knew over here that this war was coming. We have long known it. We have
always wanted peace. For forty-one years I myself have been working for
peace, but we have always been surrounded by jealous neighbors. Last
January I spoke at a dinner given in honor of the anniversary of the
birthday of His Majesty Emperor Wilhelm II. I said then that we do not
wish a war, but that the German people have always shown that they do
not fear war."

I reflected what there was in the European situation of January, 1913,
to make King Ludwig talk of that time, in a way which suggested the
close proximity of this war. And I asked him concerning that situation.

"Yes, we knew war was coming," he admitted gravely. "Last winter the
great debates were going on in the French parliament over the question
of changing the term of military service from two to three years. We
could not understand that. The extra years would increase the annual
strength of the French army fully fifty per cent. It was ominous. Then
we knew that Russia had nine hundred thousand men under arms whose term
of service had expired and who had every right to return to their homes.
Why were they not sent? Yes, we knew it was coming, but we did not fear
it, and Germany will fight to the last drop of blood. You have but to
see the spirit of our troops and the spirit of the recruits,
disappointed because their offers to serve in the army are rejected. We
do not need every recruit now, and as we do take new men, there are
hundreds of thousands more, ready to serve the Fatherland--to the end."

"And when will the end be?" I asked His Majesty. When would peace be
declared? The King smiled, but it was a smile of reluctance.

"Who can say?" Then that Imperial chin suddenly seemed made of stone,
and there was fire in his eyes. He declared: "There will be no end to
this war until we have peace conditions which we shall judge to be
worthy of our nation and worthy of our sacrifice. This war was forced
upon us. We shall go through with it. We do not finish until we have an
uncontestable victory. The heart and soul of the whole country is in
this fight. Between all the German kings and confederated princes, there
is absolute unswerving unity. We are one idea, one hope, one ideal, one
wish."

Instantly I thought of the Socialists. We had heard in America there
could be no war. We had been told that the German Socialists would not
let their country go to war.

The King smiled, for it was obviously inconceivable to him. "We
Germans," he explained, "quarrel between ourselves in peaceful times,
but when we are surrounded by enemies, we are one. And the Socialists
know that war was as much against our plans as it was against theirs.
In times of stress, Germany is always a united nation. Beside the
Fatherland, dogmas are trivial. We Germans like to talk. We are great
philosophers. We go deep into things, but it is against our racial
instincts to let our own individualism come before the welfare of the
State. It is because we have deep national pride that we are one people
to-day."

"And, Your Majesty, after the war?" I asked, "what then? Is it to be the
last war of the world, so terrible that humanity will not tolerate
another?"

"This is for each nation to say," he replied gravely. "Our hands are
clean. For more than forty years we have worked for the peace of Europe,
and there have been times when, had our policy been such, it might have
been to our advantage to go to war. Our hands are clean," he repeated.
"They brought this upon us. We did not want it. After it is over, we
shall rebuild. I foresee an era of great prosperity for our country. We
shall not be impoverished. Many of our industries are working day and
night now. Until last August they were busy with the products of peace;
now it is with the products of war. So many skilled workmen are needed
to-day that we cannot take them from the shops to send them to the
front, even though their regiments go. And after the war the factories
will all go on as before, manufacturing the things of peace, and those
other industries which are closed now will be doubly busy. War, no
matter how severe it may be, cannot check the commercial growth of a
country like Germany."

When King Ludwig spoke of the industrial future, it was the voice of one
who had given deep study to everything of vital importance to his
country.

Baron von Schön had told me that all his life King Ludwig had been a
hard worker, that political economy, agriculture, industry, waterways,
were all subjects which fascinated him, that most of His Majesty's
evenings were spent attending conferences, given by the specialized
learned men in every branch of a nation's prosperity.

I mentioned the wonderful spirit of the Bavarian troops I had seen, and
His Majesty's face grew bright.

"I have two sons at the front," he said proudly. "Prince Francis,
commander of a brigade. He was wounded in Flanders, but he will be back
before the war is over; and as you know, Crown Prince Rupprecht is also
fighting in the West."

And I thought that an expression of longing crossed that kindly face, as
though the King wished he could be there too.

"I also am wounded," he said with a smile, "but that was long
ago--1866."

The conversation changed; it became more personal. Like most Americans,
King Ludwig showed himself to be thoroughly fond of sport. He told me
that he liked all forms of outdoor sports and admired America for its
almost national participation in them. He spoke of his fondness for
sailing, and horses, of yacht races on the Sternberger See. He mentioned
with enjoyment his great stables, where personally he concerns himself
with the breeding of his own horses, taking a great pride in them
whenever they race. He told me of his farm, Leutstetten, near München,
where he likes to spend the summers, living an outdoor life.

Further expressing again his warm feeling of friendship--a friendship
deeper than that dictated by the rules of mere international courtesy,
for it has come from the Americans who have lived from time to time in
Bavaria--King Ludwig concluded our talk with the message of German's
deep and sincere friendship to the people of the United States.

We shook hands again; it was an American farewell. The dapper Adjutant
came into the room, and I bid His Majesty "Adieu." My last impression
was of his straight uniformed figure standing in the center of the room,
across his breast the Iron Cross and the Order of St. Hubertus; then the
oaken doors closed. Back into the little antechamber with the countless
oil paintings, back through the austere reception hall, past the white
coated, white plumed Hartschier guards, down the great staircase, and
with Legation Counselor von Stockhammern, I was escorted into a motor.
As we drove down to the Promenade Platz, where I was to call at the
Foreign Ministry of Bavaria, I asked the Counselor about the
Wittelsbacher Palast.

"It is the palace," he said, "where the King has lived all his life, and
which he does not like at all to leave. When he became King two years
ago, he did not change in his tastes. Only on the occasion of great
ceremony is he to be seen in the Residence, where lived the former King
of Bavaria."

And I understood now what I had heard before, that King Ludwig was fond
only of a simple life, and that he loved only work, and family
happiness; and I thought that here was no case of mere birth making a
man high in the land, for Ludwig of Wittelsbacher would have made his
way if he had been born outside the purple; and I thought of something I
had heard, how a Bavarian Socialist had once said that though his party
might battle against the Government, they could never battle against
King Ludwig.

"Everybody in Bayern supports King Ludwig with all their heart," Von
Stockhammern was saying.

"I know now why you Bavarians love him," I replied.




III

TO THE WEST FRONT


A note from Dr. Roediger of the Foreign Office directed me to report
early in January at ten o'clock at that building on Moltkestrasse and
Königsplatz, where lives and works that marvelous central organization
of the German army, the Great General Staff. There I found waiting
Dawson, the photographer who had accompanied me from America, and a
plump, smiling, philosophical Austrian, Theyer, a Cino-operator who was
to go along with Dawson and make "movies" of the front.

Climbing endless wooden stairways in the old building, I was finally
shown into a room that only lacked wax flowers under glass to recall the
Rutherford B. Hayes period of interior decorating. Presently the door
opened to admit an officer whom I liked at the first glimpse, and in his
careful, groping English Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann of the Grosser General
Stab introduced himself. He explained that he would accompany us on our
trip to the front and bring us back to Berlin; whereupon I blessed the
Staff for giving me an officer with merry eyes and delightful
personality. He would do everything in his power--not small as I later
learned--to have me shown the things I wanted to see in that forbidden
city, the army front.

That afternoon I bought a dunnage bag such as navy men the world over
use, and remembering Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann's advice to carry as
little as possible, I packed only a change of boots, socks,
under-clothing, and flannel shirts. Come to think of it, an elaborate
series of cloth maps, each a minutely described small district of the
whole Western front, took up as much room as anything else. And as I had
heard officers say that a hypodermic with a shot of morphine was good to
carry in case one was hit, that went in, too. During our conversation at
the General Staff, Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann had emphasized the point
that it must be understood that this trip I was about to make was
entirely upon my own responsibility. A suit of army gray green was
desirable and a hat or gloves of a similar neutral color, prevented me
from being a conspicuous mark.

I think I was at Anhalter Bahnhof the next night half an hour before the
gate opened for the Metz train. There were no sleeping compartments
available, so securing a day compartment to themselves, Dawson and
Theyer withdrew to concoct a series of movie narratives, while the
Ober-Lieutenant induced the conductor to lock me up with him in a nearby
compartment meant for four, After the train had pulled out we discussed
the war between the United States and Japan, which all well informed
people whom I have met in Germany, diplomatic, naval, and army, believe
must soon come. For the first time I noticed that the Ober-Lieutenant's
uniform was different from any of the thousands of uniforms that I had
seen in Germany; trimmed with blue of a shade that I had never before
noticed, and across his left chest I observed an order, and that was
also as totally different, a bar about four inches long and one inch
high, wound with the black and white of the iron cross and yellow and
red. Pinned to it were two golden bars, bearing strange words:
_Heroland_, and some outlandish word that I have forgotten.

"You're puzzled at my uniform," smiled the Ober-Lieutenant. "It does not
surprise me. There are but two others in Germany. My uniform is that of
the regiment of German Southwest Africa. The Emperor created it a
special regiment after our campaign there." And I found myself looking
at the tiny golden bars, and wondering what deeds of daring this
merry-eyed man had performed there. His medals bore now the names of
battles in Africa. "My regiment," he explained, "is still in Africa.
Since August I have been with the General Staff in Berlin."

We talked long that night, while the train rushed towards the Southwest.
He told me of his experiences in German Southwest Africa, and of the
ways of the natives there. We slept that night, each sprawled out on a
compartment seat, and I awoke with a huge arc lamp glaring through the
window. My watch showed seven and when I drowsily heard the
Ober-Lieutenant say that we were in Frankfort, and that the train
stopped half an hour, and would I like to get out for coffee?

I rubbed open my eyes. We passed the photographers' compartment, to find
them both asleep, but then photographers in warring Germany can have
nothing but easy consciences; they see so little.

Long after day had broken--with the photographers still sleeping--we
passed the brown mountains of the Rhine, and at Bingen, where we saw the
old robber's castle clinging to the cliffs, with the watch tower on an
islet below, the train stopped. Opening one of the wide car windows we
saw a commotion under a shed of new boards, and there swarmed forth the
women of Bingen, with pails of smoking coffee and trays of sandwiches.
We saw them crowding past, and then by stretching our necks we were able
to see, three cars down, one after another helmeted head and gray-green
pair of shoulders pop forth, while the women smiled happily and passed
up the coffee and bread.

"I think a car full of soldiers for the front was joined on during the
night," observed Herrmann.

Our train passed through Lorraine which those who generalize like to
tell us was the cause of this war, forgetting Lombard Street and Honest
John Bull. I had heard how they hated the Germans, these people of
Lorraine, but at every station there were the women and girls with the
cans of coffee and the plates of _Butterbrot_. One saw no poverty there,
only neat, clean little houses--no squalor. Germany is wise in the
provisions made for the contentment of her working classes.

We drew near Metz, cupped by the distant blue ring of the fortified
Vosges where last August the army of the Crown Prince smashed the French
invasion. I saw beside a road four graves and four wooden crosses and
wondered if on one of those broiling summer days, a gray motor of the
Red Cross had not stopped there to bury the wounded. A field flew by,
serried with trenches that rotated like the spokes of a great wheel; but
the trenches were empty and the road that followed the wire fence close
by the tracks, was bare of soldiers. There was no need longer for
trenches, or that barbed entanglement of rusted wire, for the guns
rumbled now far beyond the guardian hills.

The shadows of a domed station fell over the train, likewise the shadows
of supervision, for I was to see none of the fortifications of Metz.
Historic Metz that guards the gate to Germany by the south, was not for
a foreigner's eyes. For only ten minutes was I in Metz and, although it
was the natural thing to do to spend them waiting on the station
platform, I had a feeling, though, that had I wished otherwise and
attempted to go out into the city, a soldier would have barred the way.
Never, not even in the captured French and Belgium cities that I later
saw, did I gain the impression of such intense watchfulness as prevailed
at Metz.

"We are going to the Great Headquarters now," said Ober-Lieutenant
Herrmann, explaining for the first time our destination. Whereupon, I
forgot my disappointment at not seeing Metz, and wondered if he had not
deliberately withheld this as a surprise for me. The Great
Headquarters! You thought of it as the place of mystery. In Berlin you
remembered hearing it spoken of only vaguely, its location never named.
You had heard it kept in darkness, that all lighted windows were
covered, lest French flyers seek it by night. You knew that from the
Great Headquarters three hundred miles of battle line were directed;
that it was the birthplace of stratagems; the council table around which
sat the Falkenheim, Chief of the General Staff, Tirpitz, ruler of the
Navy. Perhaps the Emperor was there!

I think I must have turned over in my mind for half an hour a certain
question, before deciding that it was not a breach of military etiquette
to put it to Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann.

"Where," I finally asked, "is the Great Headquarters located?"

"At Charleville," he promptly answered. "We shall not arrive there until
evening." And then, getting out a number of those marvelous maps of the
General Staff that show every tree, fence and brook, in the desired
district, he traced for me the route the train was following. "We cross
the Frontier into France, just beyond Fentsch and then go diagonally
northwest through Longuion, Montmédy and Sedan to Charleville. We are
going behind the battle line, out of artillery range, of course, but
still the French flyers watch this line," and Herrmann bent down to
glance towards the sky. "We may get some excitement."

There is something discomfortingly casual in the way these Prussian
officers talk of danger, and from the moment I saw the frontier post,
with its barber-pole stripings, slip by unguarded, and realized that
frontier guards were a thing of the past and that I was now with the
invaders in France, I could not help but feel that an aeroplane bomb was
the thing to be expected.

We passed, on a siding, a troop train filled with new troops from
Bavaria. One of the compartment doors was open and I saw that the floor
was strewn with straw. The soldiers grinned and waved to us and pointed
to the blue and white streamers so that we might know from what part of
Germany they came.

When we were approaching Audun le Roman, which is just across the
frontier on the road to Pierrepont, I saw on a hill not a quarter of a
mile from the train a row of gray plastered houses. Through them, the
gray sky showed in ragged, circular patches, framed by the holes in
their walls. Sunken roofs, shattered floors, heaps of black débris, the
charred walls gaping with shell holes; beside one house, a garden
surprisingly green for so early in the year, serenely impassive to the
story of the ruined walls--that row of little houses was as a guidepost.
At last we followed the road to war.

I saw in the next field a black swarm of birds pecking at the plowed
ground. Plow furrows? One wondered.... For a mile we did not see a
living thing, only the black birds, that feed on death.

"This place," observed Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann, whose face seemed to
have lost some of the former indifference to war, "was apparently under
heavy artillery fire when the Crown Prince invaded towards Longwy."

At Pierrepont I saw the first formal sign of the German occupation. Near
the railroad station in a little square, where you could not miss it,
loomed a large wooden sign, that began with "_nichts_" and ended with
"_verboten_." Then the train passed over a trestle and across the dirty
little road that ran beneath. I saw a German soldier hurrying towards a
squatty peasant house. I could see the door open and a blue-smocked old
man appear on the threshold. Why had the soldier hurried towards him;
what was the old man saying? Stories? You felt them to be in every
little house.

The train crept on. I saw a French inn with a German flag painted over
the red signboard. The tracks ran between fields scarred on either side
with the brown, muddy craters of shells. At the Longuion Station I
watched a German soldier standing on a ladder, painting out all French
words within the sweep of his brush. Further on I saw a two-wheeled cart
in a deserted farmhouse yard; its shafts were tilted up, and a load of
bags rotted on the ground, as though the owner, unhitching the horse,
had fled.

Almost stopping, so slowly did the train move, it approached a tunnel
that the retreating French had blown up. Inky darkness closed in, and
the Ober-Lieutenant was saying that the Germans were digging the tunnel
out, when a yellow torch flared against the window. I sprang to open it
and saw the ghostly forms of soldiers standing along the rails.

"_Zeitung! Zeitung!_" they cried, and in answer we tossed out to them
all the newspapers in the compartment. You had a feeling that the tunnel
was dangerous, for the shaky, temporary wooden trestle was yielding to
the train's weight. The tunnel marked the beginning of a destroyed
railroad and, as we proceeded, I found myself looking into a house flush
against the track. It was like a room on the stage, the fourth wall
removed. All the intimate possessions of the owner were before me; the
pink wall paper was hideous in its flamboyant bad taste. Herrmann came
to my rescue.

"The tracks from now are either repaired or laid new by our engineers.
As they retreated, the French blew up everything. In some cases we had
to run our line through houses."

The engineers had cut away the half of the house which was in their way
and left the remainder to be boarded up.

A gray castle, that crowned a hill, had been the vortex of the terrific
fighting that raged around Montmédy. It seemed tranquil enough now. I
saw the front door open, and down the terrace there shuffled a squad of
baggy red-trousered French prisoners with their watchful guards.

When we passed through Sedan it was almost dark, swarming with the
Germans as in 1870. One after another we tarried at the stations of
these captured towns. Finally we pulled up to a larger station where
the shadowy forms of houses were closer together. I was awakened from my
speculations by the Ober-Lieutenant saying: "We are in Charleville, the
Great Headquarters."

As I left the train I felt a thrill of anticipation that grew apace
during the long explanation that Herrmann was giving the station guards.
Outside loomed the vague tops of trees, and the whiteness of a house
accentuated against the dark night. Here and there a solitary light
burned, but Charleville was a place of darkness.

Herrmann had expected an automobile to be waiting, but when to the
saluting click of sentries' heels, we had gone the length of the station
front, he said to me: "You please get Mr. Dawson and Mr. Theyer and wait
in the dining-room. I shall walk to Headquarters and see what we are to
do."

Of course, I suggested going with him. There might be a chance of seeing
Falkenheim, who now is responsible for the movements of more than a
million men on the West front; perhaps I might even see the Emperor.
Perhaps Herrmann guessed why I insisted so strongly on keeping him
company on his walk to the Great Headquarters.

"The roads are muddy," he said, in a way that blended consideration with
decision. "Remain in there," and he pointed to the door of the station
dining-room, "until I return."

Then he showed us into a typical way station restaurant that would have
reminded you of any dirty American railroad lunchroom, had not the
principal object of furniture been a large buffet, shining with bottled
French wines and liqueurs. As I sat down at one of the marble-topped
tables, I realized that we were the only civilians in the room, except
the three men with white aprons and the pretty low-class French girl who
was waiting to take our order.

"_Diner_," I said briefly, not attempting to remember French after
struggling for weeks with German, and fell to studying the room. It
apparently was an officers' mess of the General Staff. The clean
field-green jackets and the dashing gray capes gave a touch of romance
to that dingy dining-room.

We lingered long over the coffee and Theyer, the Austrian, was telling
how he had been with Jack London, taking movies for Pathé in the South
Sea Islands, when Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann finally returned.

"We must go at once to the hotel," he said, "and go to bed. We shall
have to be up by five, and on our way to Lille."

So it was Lille! There was real fighting in that northern section of
France.

"How long do we remain in Lille?" I asked, disappointed at being rushed
away from the Great Headquarters.

"Five days," he replied, setting my fears at rest. "We shall use Lille
as a base and go out to different points on the front."

I knew then why he had been so long in returning; clearly he had been
receiving his instructions at the Great Headquarters, and the slight
distrust I had come to feel at being rushed away from Metz and now from
Charleville was entirely dissipated. After all, they meant business;
Lille proved that; and five days at the front!

If ever I return to Charleville and want to go to the Hotel de Commerce,
it will be impossible without a guide. I remember going the length of a
long street of shady trees, crossing a wide square, and then turning off
into a narrow alley where ancient lanterns, well masked, hung over from
grilled wall brackets. I remember flashing my electric pocket lamp down
on the cobbled street, for just an instant, when Herrmann dropped his
gloves. We stumbled down a blind alley that called to mind the
habitation of François Villon in "The Lodging for a Night." Then
Herrmann was rattling the knocker on the huge oaken doors of a two story
flat-roofed house that looked a century old. The door groaned back and I
found myself gazing into the blinking eyes of an old portier who held a
candle and who would have demanded what we wanted had he not suddenly
spied the military gray of Herrmann's cape and at once asked us to come
in.

The few hours I slept that night were in a venerable, four-posted bed,
in a low-ceilinged, high-casemented room such as you sometimes see on
the stage in a romantic play. I remember hearing a rapping on the door,
almost as soon, it seemed, as I had closed my eyes.

Five o'clock! And I heard the portier shuffling down the hall and then
the hollow, rapping sound of another early morning call on the
Ober-Lieutenant's door. Below in the alley panted one of the gray-green
army motors waiting to bring us to the station. Cold sprouts, coffee,
and a roll, and we had climbed into a compartment of the train for
Lille. From now on, soldiers with fixed bayonets composed the train
crew. We crossed a wooden trestle built by German pioneers high above a
green swirl of water between pretty trees, and on the left we saw the
ruins of a stone bridge dynamited by the French. We rushed out at St.
Vincennes to eat at an officers' mess, and as the train moved on I saw
at a siding a long line of cars, their sides and roofs marked with the
Red Cross; and even as we passed I saw two stretchers being borne along
the track and lifted with their wounded through the open windows of one
of the cars. I saw a white bandaged leg as the stretcher tilted and then
the attendants inside the car covered it from sight. Hourly the front
drew nearer.

Trenches appeared. The train suddenly slid into a station and stopped.
We were in Lille. While two soldiers were loading the luggage,
photograph apparatus and all, upon a small truck, Herrmann suddenly
plucked my arm. "Look," he exclaimed, pointing up at the huge
glass-domed roof. I saw there a big hole, edged with splintered glass,
and a fragment of blue sky beyond. "That's the hole made by a French
aeroplane bomb. The Staff told me to look for it when we came to Lille.
The bomb never exploded and was picked up on the tracks over there."

Not the most reassuring thought in the world, that French fliers had
marked this place for destruction. In the waiting-rooms I saw nothing
but soldiers--fresh troops with clean uniforms, unshaven men whose
clothes were brownish with the mud of the trenches. By that time I had
become used to being saluted, and to enjoy the click of a sentry's
heels. While Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann was telephoning for a military
automobile I noticed one of the _Landwehr_ guards begin to eye
suspiciously the photographers and their formidable luggage. I saw him
call another of the dark-coated _Landwehr_, and they were obviously on
the point of making a possible arrest when the Ober-Lieutenant returned,
averting the situation.

We were, the Ober-Lieutenant informed us, to wait in the Café de
Paris,--which was just across the square from the station,--until he
returned.

"The telephones have all been cut," he explained with a smile. "I shall
have to walk to Headquarters and bring back a motor for us. I may be
gone half an hour, or an hour, but please remain in the café. Remember
Lille is a captured city."

So we crossed the square, Dawson, Theyer and I, while the wind brought
us the grumbling of heavy cannon from the West where, not fifteen miles
away, the Germans were making their terrific drive on that segment of
the Allies' line, extending out from the Channel shore. Boo-omm,
Boo-omm, Boo-omm, with the last syllable prolonged like a low note on
the piano. Army transports rattled over the cobbled square; one of the
gray motors with its muffler cut out, snorted past; and then the eye
began to take in its surroundings.

There on my left, as I went away from the station, I saw a place of
destruction, an entire block of ruined buildings, their shattered sides
rearing with hideous ugliness against the perspective of untouched
houses beyond. Blackened walls, gaping holes, roofless skeletons of
houses; and within, a chaos of plaster and falling floors, one house
after another, some almost razed to the ground, others with only their
tops shot off, but all desolation and ruin. It was not the destruction
that made me stop in the square and stare about me, for I had become
sated with shelled houses, all the way from Charleville to Lille; it was
amazement at the artillery fire that could lay low an entire block and
not even drop a shell. The undisturbed cobbles in the square confirmed
this conclusion. What deadly accuracy! How, if something be marked for
destruction in this war, can it escape? I stood in the square for
several minutes and counted thirty-eight soldiers and sixty civilians
walk past the ruins and no one so much as turned his head to glance even
indifferently upon them.

"How long," I asked the fatherly, white-haired Frenchman who brought us
our coffee in the Café de Paris, "is it, since those buildings over
there were destroyed?"

"A month, sir," he said, and in a moment he added wearily, "Our city has
been captured and recaptured three times."

And it was easy then to know why they had all walked by without the
slightest interest in the ruins beside them; think of people becoming
bored with destruction! A typical French café with its big window, the
Paris gave a view of the sidewalk. I saw a beautiful, dark-eyed French
boy, dirtily clad, selling post cards of Lille to a good natured German
infantryman. The soldier went away and then, what appeared to be the
other members of the firm, a bigger and a smaller boy, darted from a
doorway to divide the spoils with the dark-eyed youngster who had closed
the deal. I saw five different parties of German soldiers come into the
Café de Paris, and I heard not even a loud word or jest against the
French; and three black-bearded Frenchmen played dominoes nearby. The
soldiers ordered their coffee, or wine, paid for it, and minded their
own business, just as they would at home, perhaps even more scrupulously
so.

Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann was an hour longer than he expected, but he had
good news for me.

"I have a car outside," he said hurriedly. "We shall bring Mr. Dawson
and Mr. Theyer to the Staff and then I shall take you to an aeroplane
base not far from here. It has been arranged for you to go up--if you
wish."

Hmm! The battle line could not be more than forty kilometers away, and a
French flyer had almost wrecked the Lille station.

"A fine day for flying," observed the Ober-Lieutenant. "You can see
much," and he smiled. "A fine day also for the French fliers."

"_Schön_," I said, but refused to believe that a German aeroplane was
ever hit. "Let's go."




IV

ON THE BACK OF THE BIRD OF WAR


Two hours after the crawling military train had set us down in what used
to be the Gare du Nord in Lille, but which is now the Nord Bahnhof, I
was hurriedly getting into a fur-lined military undercoat in the Hotel
d'Europe. About to go up in one of Germany's war planes, I was
determined to be comfortable, if not mentally, physically.
Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann laughed when he saw me appear, as bulky with
clothing as a polar explorer, and said: "We shall have to hurry if we
are to reach the aviation base before dark." We hurried.

I have ridden with Robertson, Strang, and other race drivers. I have had
my blood turned to ice when they skidded their cars around hairpin
turns. But I never rode before with a chauffeur of the German army who
was in a hurry; nor shall I again--if I can help it. Bound for a place
near Lens, so small that it appears only on the wonderful
_Automobilkartes_ that the Germans have made of all Europe, the brown
leather-coated soldier-chauffeur began to distance everything on the
road. It was one of those long, rakish motors, painted field gray green,
that the Benz Company manufactures only for the army, cabalistic black
letters and numerals marking its hood. As, with the muffler cut out, we
roared through the streets of Lille, I saw the civilians pause to watch
us pass with sullen eyes. Poor Herrmann had his arm working like a
restless semaphore, returning salutes, and as we thundered through the
silenced business streets at mile a minute speed, military trumpetings
warned the poor bewildered citizens of Lille of our approach. The car
began its mad dance through the outskirts of the city and down between
the sentinel poplars toward Lens. Not two months before I had been
riding down Fifth Avenue on the roof of a slumbering bus; to-day I was
speeding in a German car through captured France.

Ahead we saw the gray canvas tops of a transport train. The trumpet
blared, but those mud-splashed, creaking wagons had the right of way.
What if the two lancers who rode as a rear guard did recognize the
officer in our car? After all, he was only an officer, and they were
bringing ammunition for the entrenched battle line. So our
soldier-chauffeur swore, but indifferent to his "_Donnerwetters_," the
drivers astride the transport horses stolidly held their course as, with
an angry rasping of the tires, we skidded over to the side of the road,
and rushed on in a splatter of mud. I looked at Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann
and shouted: "They knew their business, those fellows back there."

"Certainly," he replied, "their work is most important. They were
entirely right in not turning off the road for an officer's automobile.
Everything depends on the transports, you know."

Whereupon I began to have a greater respect for the light, rattling
supply wagons that we passed by the dozen on the road to Lens, and found
myself thinking how unjustly those men might be regarded. "What did you
do in the war?" ... "I drove a supply cart." ... How unheroic it sounds.
Yet the Ober-Lieutenant told me that those men astride the bulky,
unpicturesque dray horses were often put to the severest tests of
courage.

"During our drive on Paris," he said, "the French would often succeed in
covering a segment of road with their long range artillery, and
continually drop shells upon it. They knew, of course, that our
infantry, by making a detour through the fields, could avoid this death
zone, but they shelled on, knowing that our transport trains would have
to go by the road. So the transports would make a rush for it, and of
course many were killed."

Another mile passed without our seeing any more of the gray wagon
trains, and now the distant artillery grumbled louder. Two Uhlans
cantered by, scanning us, and further on we passed another patrol. A
corral of the familiar gray-topped wagons beside red brick farm
buildings showed the location of a base of supplies, and in front of the
house we saw a naked soldier unconcernedly scrubbing himself in a tub of
water. And always the sullen roaring guns grew steadier and more
disconcertingly clear.

"On this section of the line," Ober-Lieutenant explained, "the Staff
told me that the French generally begin their heaviest firing every day
at half past three."

I asked him why that was--it was like the curtain going up in a theater
at a certain time. But he did not know, and could not even guess. I was
wondering how much further we were going to rush towards that unearthly
booming when at a muddy crossroad, patrolled by a Uhlan, as motionless
as Remington might have painted him, we made a quick turn and plowed
away. Apparently we were bound for a weather-beaten house and barn, half
hidden by a leafless clump of willows, apparently shorn by shrapnel, for
the broken branches hung down dead in a perfect arc as though the
projectile had burst, perhaps right there above the tiny moss-banked
stream, and sprayed its leaden shower.

As our motor, which had been heavily crawling along the farmhouse lane,
finally sogged in the mud, refusing to go further, I followed
Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann out of the machine, across the yard to where a
sentry stood before the barn door. They exchanged words and then the
barn door slid back a trifle, a youngish man, wearing the black leather
helmet and coat of the aviation corps, appearing in the aperture.
Excusing himself, Herrmann drew him aside and now and then I heard their
voices raised in assent; they were evidently discussing my proposed
flight. I guessed that Herrmann wanted to know exactly how much danger
there would be. Conjecturing that he was apparently satisfied that the
risk was a minimum, and that the aviator had been instructed to bring
me nowhere near the firing line, I waited for their conference to break
up.

Their talk evidently finished to the satisfaction of both, introductions
were in order. Then the aviator, Hals, shouted a command into the barn
and instantly there issued from the gloom within, four soldiers. I
watched them roll back the creaking door and then, as though it were a
fragile thing, they began slowly to push out the aeroplane--a monoplane
I judged, as its long, tapering fuselage protruded into the farm yard,
and then I saw with a start that the wings were a biplane's--a strange
craft.

Events passed with bewildering rapidity. Half in a daze I saw the tall,
solemn-looking aviator survey my warm clothing with an approving nod.
The next instant I was buckling on a steel head protector, and when I
noticed the machine again, it had been wheeled out into the flat,
neighboring field. A level place I observed, packed hard with shale and
dirt, made into a landing place for the planes. I caught a glimpse, at
the extreme end of the field near the house, of two soldiers, fitting
two wooden objects, painted the drab green of the field, into two pairs
of prepared holes, one thirty feet behind the other. They were stout
hoops, supported by posts, and rimmed with electric light bulbs. I
noticed that the rear was perhaps two feet less in diameter than the
other, and that when you stood directly in front of them, they gave the
effect of concentric circles, their circumference but a foot apart.

"What is that for?" I asked Hals, and he explained that if it grew
dark, the lights were lit, and if from above the aviator saw two fiery
circles concentric, he knew that he could fly straight for them and
alight in safety.

"But I hope," he added, "that nothing will prevent us from landing in
daylight."

I did not like that "nothing will prevent us." I found myself wondering
what could prevent us, deciding finally that it was only the usual
jocular way of the aviator to frighten his passenger unduly before the
flight begins. Had I but known!

I was hurrying across the field towards the aeroplane, its fish-like
tail bearing the black inscription "B 604/14," which I later came to
know meant biplane number 604 of the year 1914. Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann
was wishing me luck and in the same breath whispering admonitions to the
grave aviator. I climbed up into the observer's compartment and found
myself staring, first at the brown propeller blades only the length of
the wagon in front of me, then at the brass petrol tank overhead, and
the thick, curving celluloid shield behind, through which I could see
the black sleeved arms of the aviator, moving towards the levers. I
glanced down at Herrmann, who looked a little nervous I thought. Two
soldiers were grasping the brown wings on my left. The brown propeller
began to spin, lazily at first, then faster, while the engine that I
could have reached forward and touched, began its roaring. A quick
comparison between the observer's compartment of this machine, and the
one in which I had sat at the Doeberitz Flugplatz near Berlin came to
me--that one had the tiny, brass, bomb-dropping levers, two on each side
of the rail; these were all in one line and on the left; that one had a
writing shelf that fell out from the front wall of the tiny tonneau, so
had this, and I touched the lever that brought the shelf sloping down
towards my knees; the floor of that machine had seemed solid, though
perhaps not, for this was cut to admit the insertion of an observing
device which, protruding up between my knees, offered a lens on which
the eyes might be cupped by a shield as on a Graflex camera. I was
wondering if four bombs dangled from the four releasing hooks below,
when the engine started, smiting my ears with a mad roaring, and driving
cold air against my face. I remembered to pull down my goggles and the
next moment I felt a shudder run the length of the machine as it lurched
forward, running over the field, to rise slightly, bump gently on its
rubbered wheels, and then gliding upward on a gradual slant, sail
towards the willows, dead sentinels grotesquely standing at the far end
of the field with their shrapnel-torn branches dangling against the
gray-ringed dreariness of sky.

One or two little spasms of fear and, as the aeroplane climbed towards a
wood, I began to want to recognize instantly all the objects on the
earth. They spread out, unrolling as on a huge panorama, a patchwork of
many shaded woods and fields; there the brownish ribbon of a road losing
itself like a thread in the gray distance, here little groups of
absurdly small brick houses, off to the right a church steeple and
beside it the uneven blackened walls of a shell-riddled building. The
motor had settled now into an ever-increasing clamor, in which, if you
caught one false beat, you would have cause for alarm. No longer
visible, the propeller blades had lost their individuality in a grayish
blur out there in front, shadowy scimiters whirling too fast for the eye
to see. You thought of the engine and the blades but a moment, and then
they seemed to become a part of you, and I wonder now if my heart did
not try to synchronize its beat with theirs.

We climbed higher and higher. Although minutes ago, objects had ceased
to seem strange by their magical tininess, you could sense the growing
height now by the development of color; you never knew that the drab
winter earth could have so many hues and wondrous shades of brown, gray,
green, ochre, and purple; they separated each into fantastic tintings,
as though earth's beauties were not for those who dwelt upon it. The
long army transport that we had passed on the road, was just a gray
worm, crawling along in its brown dirt. And over there by the village,
in that field where the thin bluish smoke wraiths were crawling, must be
the field kitchens ... and that multitude of specks, a regiment off
duty, back from the trenches, waiting to be fed.

A gust felt cold on my cheek. The machine was turning. Now faintly,
almost lost in the roaring of our motor, I imagined I heard once more
that other sound, the grumbling of the guns, and now I thought of it as
the hungry growls of some monster, already sated with the puny living
things in that other world beneath us, but which ever grumbled for more.
And then suddenly I saw a white cloud appear in the gray sky, and then
the white cloud was gone and there came a second, a third, a fourth
white cloud, then no more for a minute it seemed, and then four more
again. And you knew that over there the enemy's shrapnel was bursting.
Fascinated, I watched the pure ringing, billowing beauty of the smoke,
celestial, white roses that bloomed out of nothing, dropped death from
their petals, and died themselves in the gray sepulcher of sky. We
banked away; we saw the white clouds no more.

I was conjecturing in a feverish sort of way how far we had been from
the trenches and if that shrapnel line had been bursting over them, or
if the enemy, spotting a base of some kind, had begun to shell it, when
growing out of the air there approached a sound. Scarcely audible at
first, like the faint whining of the wind, gathering its frenzy, now
whistling, screaming, shrieking, I heard somewhere near in the void, the
song of a shell. And when writing on the observer's table, I was trying
to jot down how it felt, I heard another, nearer it seemed, and the
pencil fell from my fingers, rolling down until it stopped by the ledge
while I sat staring at it and trying not to think what might have
occurred had we been a few seconds faster or the shell a few seconds
slower. And then I felt myself slide forward in the seat and I knew that
the machine was diving down. There was no danger, I felt; of course the
aviator was all right, No shrapnel had burst near us but then, we might
have been within rifle range. No! Absurd! Yet I quickly glanced over my
shoulder and felt centuries younger when I saw the smile on Hals' solemn
face. And then, as unexpectedly as it had begun, the downward bolt
ceased. Hals was rattling the celluloid screen. It dawned on me that he
wanted to tell me something. I leaned back and he leaned forward. I
could hear him but faintly although he shouted. "Those shells were on
the same elevation as we, or we could not have heard them. So I dove."
And there they were screaming their death song overhead now, although I
could no longer hear them.

We flew towards a yellow château and then once more began to climb. Of
course we were out of the path of the shells, but Hals had not then
known that we were in the line of howitzers. The minutes passed, and
slowly I admitted that the danger was over. A stinging pain, moreover,
was settling above my eyes, and what I might have put down to the quick
breathing of excitement, I realized now to be the gasping of the lungs
in a rarified atmosphere. High indeed we were climbing, for the earth
seemed to shrink and its many colors to blend themselves in a vague
tinting suffusion of purple and gold, the veil of a dream.

Heaven only knows what the officers must think who sit in the observing
compartment as did I, though they know that this upward climb has a
purpose, a purpose of war, as I was soon to see. More faint, then
befogged, became the diaphanously veiled earth. Clouds interspersed,
graying the vision, clouds and a drifting, wet mist that settled in
beads on the glass of my goggles so that I was continually rubbing away
with my gloved fingers. We were hidden now, from the earth, and the
earth from us. Marching gray gloom all around, ghostly wet wisps that
straggled past, caressing one's face. In that Nomad's void, in which
even the voice of the engine seemed hesitant and more subdued, I began
to feel as if I was making some awful intrusion--into what I did not
know, but one felt the guilt of an appalling, defying presumption.

And then I realized that we had been slowly descending through the
clouds, for suddenly to the left I saw a patch of the purplish dream
veil, and in a moment we were gliding down through the clouds and
running just beneath them. Hals was shouting and pointing down. And I
saw the battlefield.

At first you thought of a cotton field, of white blown buds and then, as
your vision shook off the spell of the bursting shells, you discerned
down there a purplish, grayish patch of the earth, of which you were no
longer a part, so remote, that only by peering down between your knees
into the graflex-like observing glass set in the bottom of the car,
could you distinguish even vaguely a single object in that colorous haze
of distance. And then gradually there took shape in the glass, as in a
crystal ball, accented lines and dabs of color, and there grew before
you the black, zigzagging scars of the trenches--although you knew them
to be brown with wet clay--and behind them more black lines, only
straighter--and you guessed those to be reserve pits--and behind them,
approaching at right angles, more black lines, only fewer and further
apart--and these you judged the approach trenches. As you stared with
the glass your eye never ranged the whole battle line, always the white
puffing smoke obscured the view in tiny, white, swift-dispelling clouds,
that rose from the area between the zigzagging lines. You wondered which
were the French and which were the German trenches. Now a white spot
suddenly appeared, exactly upon one of the black lines, and in fancy you
heard the explosion of a shell and the groans of men, and you wondered
if observers had seen officers coming up and if that shell had been
particularly well aimed. A patch of earth, purplish gray in that
hastening dusk, and illimitable lines of black stretching away, puffing
white smoke quickly coming, quickly going; that was the battlefield as I
saw it below the clouds.

Possibly my eyes were accustoming themselves to the great height, for in
the glass between my feet objects were becoming clearer. From the
thinnest thread the black lines had thickened perceptibly and now as it
grew darker, I began to see innumerable, tiny, yellow-red tongues that
had a way of darting out from the black lines and as suddenly
withdrawing, and I began to think I heard a faint sound like the broken
rolling of a drum, and somewhere very far off some one seemed to be
beating a bass drum with less frequent but perfectly timed strokes, and
there came up to me the booming of the battle--or did I imagine it?
Observers tell me it is next to impossible to hear.

Even clearer became the battlefield, clearer though it was ever
darkening, and it dawned upon me that we were descending; approaching
that patch of black-lined land where the pygmies played with death. It
was with a weird trembling fascination that you saw the picture in the
glass become more and more distinct. It looked like a relief map now,
with objects coming out of the purplish gray haze, and you wondered at
the geometrical precision of it all. By staring steadily at the black
scarred lines you slowly discerned another color and there at intervals,
which gave that same impression of mathematical exactness, you made out
darker colored dots. "The soldiers!" Involuntarily the words escaped me.
And then the black lines seemed to march across the glass and were gone
and you saw now only the parallels of the approach trenches, one at one
extreme of the lines, the other but half visible on the outer edge.

You knew then that you were flying away from the battle firing line, but
even as you looked, what seemed to be a row of broken boxes, moved
across the glass, hesitated and paused there as the aeroplane hovered
above them; and in that moment a yellowish box which seemed to stand
apart from the others, and which you guessed to be the great house of
the village, was blotted out by the spewing gray white smoke of a
_grenat_ and when the glass cleared you saw that the yellow box had
changed to a jagged shape, red with flames. Fascinated, you watched the
burning house, and then you realized that the celluloid shield behind
you was rattling from violent rapping. Hals was shouting something;
finally I guessed what it was--"Want to go down?" I shook my head no. As
he bent to the levers, I think he chuckled.

I wondered if what immediately followed had anything to do with that
mirth. My muscles were cramped from bending over the glass. I tried now
the naked eye, but the gray dusk was blackening and the fringe of flame
on the trenches becoming redder and more vivid. But this flame, which
should have been even more lurid, began to grow dim and to wane away,
like a thousand guttering candles, and I knew then that we were climbing
once more; why, only the man behind me knew.

The flickering trenches slid by and away; below us the earth had become
calm, luminous blue, pricked here and there with yellow pin points of
light; but still I thought I heard that measured, muffled beating as of
a great drum, only presently it became harsher as though the drummer was
wielding his stick with sudden fury, an insanely growing fury; and you
felt a wind on your face, then it was gone, and you felt it again, for
the aeroplane had begun to swing round in a slow circle, a nightbird you
thought, seeking something below. And then again came the roars, two,
one almost upon the other; they seemed ahead on our right somewhere; and
again I felt the wind on my cheek, but not again; we were flying
straight now.

By this time I thought I knew what Hals had planned. Those pausing,
slow, swinging circles had been made in order to get the exact source
of the sound, and now Hals was flying towards it--his object the
location of one of the enemy's batteries, a new battery, I judged as yet
unknown to the Germans, possibly the one that had dropped the shell on
the yellow house. Now, had Hals known that the shell was from a battery
just getting into action? Because they are men of air as well as of
earth, have these soldier-fliers strange powers?

I noticed that the tiny lights from what must be a farmhouse down there,
had a way of increasing and as suddenly decreasing from two to four to
two; and always the vanishing lights would be patches, not pinpricks,
more vivid, too, as though they were not shone through glass, but came
from doors that opened into illuminated rooms. And I was wondering why
these doors always kept opening and closing. The place must be a brigade
headquarters or something equally important. That was it! Soldiers were
constantly coming and going. And as regularly appearing, these patches
of light grew more lurid, and the guns raged on, I thought with a smile
that the firing might well be the slamming of those farmhouse doors, for
just then the two had perfectly synchronized--the sudden flaring lights,
the faint sound of guns. And then it happened again, one upon the other,
and I must have risen to my feet for it dawned upon me--There's the
battery over there! Those lights that I thought were part of the
farmhouse! Our motor seemed to thunder unnaturally loud then, again they
flashed down there, again the faint boom tore up to us. "_Kollosal!_"
Hals had spotted the French guns.

Of the race back through the night, I have only the most feverish
recollections. I knew we were flying faster than ever before, for the
fuselage was throbbing madly and you had a feeling that to escape an
awful strain put upon it, the engine was trying to tear itself loose.
And then you thought of the need for this speed. Had I been careless
with the electric torch? Had we been seen? Might not even now the enemy
be after us? Perhaps a telephone call from the battery down to the
trenches where the muzzle of an aeroplane gun was tilted to the sky. Or
had they telephoned their own aeroplanes to put up after us? Why the
speed that Hals evidently deemed necessary?

You knew, too, that somewhere down there, shells from the German
batteries were whining towards the enemy's positions. You knew, too,
that to reach the earth, you would have to bolt down through this
battle-filled sky. The chances were one in five thousand that we would
be in the line of our own shell fire. You did not like to think of that
one chance. The machine had ceased to shake. I imagined that Hals was
looking down on all sides. The wind, certain signal of a turn, struck my
cheek. The slow swinging circles began as before. And then, just upon
sighting the French battery, Hals suddenly drove the machine forward.
Off to the left, what had seemed an unnaturally bright point of light
grew incredibly fast into a circle of light and beside it a smaller
circle, and their circumferences seemed to be restlessly moving,
intersecting here and there with exasperating frequency, although
gradually becoming steadier and finally becoming almost concentric,
intersecting not at all, the smaller though seeming to have moved in
front of the larger, shifting from side to side, although never touching
the outer fiery rim. And suddenly I remembered the two circular
frameworks, fitted with the electric bulbs, in the field by the
shrapnel-scarred willows and I recalled the explanation of them, that
they were guide posts for an aviator at night, and that once he had them
concentric, he knew that he was flying true to his landing field.

So we were almost home now--home!--the thought made you grimace--miles
away! And in a moment now we must drop, begin that bolt down through
that zone, through which the shells of our own batteries were flying.
And I heard that most disconcerting of all sounds that you hear in the
air, the shutting off of the motor--an instant, and as we slid forward,
I felt for the brass handles to brace myself, and no longer sped round
by the motor's power, the propeller blades became as the strings of a
monstrous harp through which the rushing wind wailed a weird song; and
we bolted down.... If a shell passed I did not hear it. Gaining in
violence, the wind shrieked through the slowly spinning blades, shrieked
as though the very air had gone mad; and just when you had begun to
doubt that it was beyond human skill to bring an aeroplane to earth
through the night like this, you felt a sudden forward horizontal
glide, and the next moment the rubber tired wheels were bouncing over
the hardened field, and the shadowy forms of soldiers seemed to spring
out of the earth, laying hold of the wings as though to make it captive,
and the concentric lights were gleaming just in front; and a voice you
knew to be Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann's was calling, with a trace of
relief, you thought: "Well, how was it?"

Laboriously climbing down from the fuselage, I looked for the aviator,
Hals.

"He ran off to telephone," a soldier said.

"The French battery," I said aloud.

As we motored back to Lille, I heard a German howitzer open fire.




V

BEHIND THE BATTLELINE


The service was as good as you get at the Waldorf. Moving with deft
skill round the long table, as if their training in the array had
consisted of passing platters of food, the soldiers in field gray
silently importuned you to have at least another helping of cheese. In a
detached way I was gazing at the big canvas hanging on the brocaded
wall, the lower part of the picture half hidden by the smart jackets and
shaven heads of the Prussian officers, sitting opposite; then I saw a
soldier opening one of the stained glass windows, and muttering along
the wet wind, I heard the muffled grumbling of the guns.

"An excellent canvas, is it not?" the staff officer at my right was
saying, a slender man with one of those young mustaches; he wore a
monocle, and the Iron Cross. "The Marquis, you know, has one of the best
collections in France. He has several Rubens, I believe, but I have
never seen them," he added hastily. "The gallery is on the second floor,
and the Marchioness has a perfect terror of our going in there--we
barbarians," he laughed.

Through the opened window I could see the green tops of the winter
trees, enveloping each in a separate silvery haze, as the unceasing
rains that have turned these Western battle lines into quagmires
drizzled down. The sullen monotone of the guns made you glance around at
Commander von Arnim, the rather frail, reserved, iron-grayed aristocrat
who leads the Fourth Army Corps. Finding no trace of emotion there, you
scanned the line of his staff, whose faces, thoughtful, mature, or as
young and dapper as musical comedy ever staged its "Lieutenant of the
Huzzars," all seemed as unconcerned as though they were lunching in a
Berlin café. And, when the noise of the guns obsessed you, your ear
caught the incongruity of the tinkle of coffee cups and you wanted to
laugh, although you did not know why.

The Lieutenant who had spoken of the Marquis's paintings was saying that
he had been in New York last winter--and asked where one went there
after the restaurants closed at one o'clock? Just then I saw that
Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann, who had been talking with Commander von Arnim,
wanted to speak to me. I had learned that the Ober-Lieutenant generally
had something keenly interesting to say, especially after conversing
with a Corps Commander.

"We must go now," said Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann.

"Back to Lille?" I asked in dismay.

"Not until the evening when we go to the Second Bavarian Corps Staff for
dinner. Meanwhile we see something behind the battle line."

Assured that they were not hurrying me away because at three o'clock--so
they all had said--the French artillery invariably began heavy firing, I
said good-by to the officers and climbed into one of the fast army
motors, painted the same gray green as the uniforms, unable to shake off
the feeling that it was not war at all, but that this buff-walled
château in the beautiful iron-fenced park, had not been commandeered as
an army headquarters, but that it was simply the home of one of these
young men who had invited all his brother officers from a nearby
garrison to a luncheon; and that now we were leaving to catch a train.
But as the motor lurched soggily from the soaked driveway I took a last
glance at the château; a wisp of blackish smoke beaten low by the rain,
was creeping along the brick chimney, and an old servant was sweeping
away the mud that our boots had left on the stoop; but as the motor
swung past the little square-paned library windows I saw that they were
pierced with tiny holes, through which passed the thin tendrils of six
wires, caught against a great tree and leading off through the park; and
in the window I saw a soldier telephoning, while another at a table
seemed to be writing down what the man in the window was calling off.
Ahead a tranquil driveway tunneled through the trees....

The army chauffeur, ignoring the insane skidding of the car, was racing
through a desolated country. It is the contrast that always catches you
in this war, and in the sugar beet fields that came up to the road I
began to see an increasing number of mounds, some four, some thirty feet
long, incongruously protruding from the flat ground. And I began to see
little wooden crosses, turned the deeper yellow that new wood turns in
the rain, and some of the crosses loosened by the downpours, leaned
over, their arms resting in the mud, and on one a helmet hung. On either
side the unharvested fields of sugar beets had become the harvested
fields of the dead....

Where I saw the white sides of a farmhouse, no smoke mounted from the
gaunt, gray chimney; and in the yard beyond, no human thing moved, for
we were passing through a countryside where the armies had passed. We
drove on, but we could not leave the long, sinister mounds behind, and I
began to think: What an awful thing it is not to be able to go a hundred
yards without seeing a grave. I noticed that Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann no
longer sat hunched with the blue collar of his cape turned up to his
ears and staring straight ahead; restlessly he seemed ever glancing from
left to right. I wondered what he, a soldier, who had been decorated for
bravery in German Southwest Africa, thought of these things that he so
restlessly saw.

"A great battle was fought here early in October," he said, after a
time. "Sixty thousand men were engaged." He paused. "There were six
thousand dead. Every day for five days a hundred were wounded for each
mile of a forty-mile line."

That was all, but his eyes roved from grave to grave. For two miles we
followed the avenue of wooden crosses and then, still in the open
country, the car stopped. I saw that the car ahead with the staff
officers had stopped too, and that they were getting out.

"Over to the right there," said a captain, pointing towards a clump of
trees through which the ruins of cottages loomed dismally in the rain,
"is a village which we had to shell because the French had a position
there. Then they took up positions in the cemetery," and, with a wave of
his hand, the Captain indicated an ancient brick wall that had seemed to
enclose a grove of tall cassia at the end of the sugar beet field. "It
took us three days of hard fighting to capture the cemetery," he
continued, as we waded through the mud.

"Three days and how many lives?" I thought, as we approached the brick
wall, "and now it is not considered of enough importance to have a
single soldier on guard"; which is one of the false impressions that
always comes to you after hearing that a certain point was taken at such
sacrifice, and then to find that point abandoned. For the moment you
seem to think of it as being typically futile of war; and then its place
in the vast strategical contemplation of a battle line three hundred
miles long emerges from your temporarily befogged vision. It is the
military point of view to think that too much peace makes a nation soft,
and you become angry at the feeling that has whispered that war is
futile and forthwith you place war where the idealists forget that it
belongs, not beside barbarism, but with civilization.

We entered by the rusted iron gate and stood among the place of
desecrated graves. But as I walked among them, their white monuments
chipped with rifle balls, the leafless boughs of the great trees
overspreading above splintered with shrapnel, the red wall torn open
here and there to admit the shells that must have burst in that
rain-filled crater by the iron-railed shaft; as I saw a clutter of rifle
butts, smashed off against a tombstone, perhaps, so that the metal parts
could be taken back to an ordnance factory to be molded again, I was
thinking of the men who had fought here, and whether they had lived. I
was wondering how many of those thick, white, bullet-chipped tombstones
had shielded men from death. I was wondering how many more of them would
have been killed had they fought in the open field; and as I examined
the shattered granite slabs, I thought of the protection they had given.

One of the staff officers was speaking to me. "Will you return to
headquarters with us for tea?" he was saying, and he gave a slight
shudder. Perhaps it was from the cold rain.

As we motored into Vis en Artois, the sun broke through the gray-ringed
dreariness of sky. Up a narrow hill street with the powerful car waking
the echoes among the low white stone houses, two or three peasants in
wooden shoes flattening themselves against the walls to escape the muddy
spray from our tires, and we stopped in what seemed to be the village
center. Down the street I could see the last hooped roof of a transport
caravan, and from a stealthy creaking in the house across the street, I
had an idea that shutters were being slowly pushed open and that there
were frightened, bewildered eyes behind.

With Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann, whose French is better than mine, I
crossed the street to read the proclamation--_Avis!_--pasted to the wall
of a church. Worded by the Germans and signed by the French Burgomaster
of Vis en Artois, it told the inhabitants what to do if they would keep
out of trouble.

From the church we walked to a tall, gray stone, square-turreted
building that loomed above everything in the village and passing through
a wide archway we came into a court filled with drilling soldiers. I
wondered what it could have been before the war, for the stacks of hay
and the manure piles were wholly incongruous. Clearly, it now was being
utilized as a transport station, for at the end of the court I saw four
empty, gray, canvas-covered wagons. Turning to the soldiers, you were
instantly struck by the fact that they were smaller than any you had
ever seen in uniforms. All of the same size divided into squads, each in
the hands of a drill sergeant. I watched them doing the "goose steps,"
to the proud clapping of their boots on the cobbled court, while others
marched by briskly in twos, saluting. It was the barest rudimentary
training that they were being put through--but it was stiffening them
for the firing line--and as they drilled these raw troops, I could hear
in the distance the drumming of the guns. It seemed to electrify these
stocky little fellows in the new uniforms, for their feet stamped the
louder, and their saluting hands snapped up like automatons; and I
wondered if it were hard to content yourself with harmless drilling in
a manure-strewn yard, with the music of war playing for you to march; or
if behind any of those stupid, utterly peasant faces there lurked a
craven thought that they were glad to be there and not where those
shells were bursting. But as I watched them and felt the eagerness with
which they went about the drill, I found myself thinking of the craving
I had seen the Jews of New York's Ghetto show for education and that
these stolid peasants were just as eager to learn that they might go to
war. And I wondered if after all it might not be a lark for the youth in
them, better than giving themselves day after day to an industrialism
that made them old before their time. Was it not better than trudging
off in the morning to the blowing of a whistle? I asked Ober-Lieutenant
Herrmann where they came from.

"They are all Saxonians," he explained; and I remembered what a German
Socialist had told me, that the low laboring class of Saxony is
notoriously poor and short-lived, their years taken by work in the
mines. No wonder they had pranced at the roll of the guns! They were
thinking of it as a deliverance.... Into what?

We walked under the gray arch and across the muddy street into a paved
school yard, where evergreen hedges bloomed in pretty red tubs. The sun,
as if to make up to those rain-soaked men who crouched in the trenches
but six kilometers away, streamed down, as in a glory before its
setting, and as the school yard rung to the fall of our heavy boots, it
seemed for a moment as if the brown door must open and children come
pouring forth.

[Illustration: "We came to a court filled with drilling soldiers."]

[Illustration: Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann, detailed by the General Staff
to accompany Mr. Fox along the Western front.]

We entered the school house and turning into the classroom on the left,
I saw twelve cots made of rough boards and twelve wan, unshaven men who
lay there as men dead, although, at the sound of our approach, their
eyes turned in a disinterested stare. I observed a German, who seemed to
tremble under the covers, and as I walked beside his bed, I saw that the
sweat was standing out on his face.

"How high is his fever?" I asked the surgeon.

"He has no fever. He is sweating with pain."

I turned to go out. I think the surgeon was offended that I did not make
the rounds with him, for, with true German consideration and
thoroughness, it was doubtless his plan to show me every detail of his
little hospital.

"Eight weeks ago," he was saying, as I walked back towards the door, "we
had two hundred wounded in here--but now," and his tone was almost
apologetic.

I asked him how far the wounded had to be transported from here before
they could be placed in a hospital train.

"Thirty-five kilometers," he said; "that is to Cambrai," and he was
explaining something about his interesting cases, and doubtless
wondering why I did not write them down in the memorandum that stuck
from my pocket. Two weeks before I would have done so, but as you come
to see the wounded in this war, you feel--rightly or wrongly; I do not
know--that it is the grossest banalism to draw a notebook before the
eyes of the wounded and write of their sufferings. Unthinking, I did it
once in the hospital at Gleiwitz, and I shall never forget the look in a
dying Austrian's eyes.

Close by the door, I noticed a black-bearded Frenchman, his leg heavily
bandaged, and over his head on the schoolroom wall hung a cheap copy of
an etching of Friedland with the victorious French cuirassiers galloping
by. What a world of sadness looked out from that wounded Frenchman's
eyes. As we walked out into the court, you could hear the cannon more
plainly, a steady crashing seeming ever to grow in violence as though
one new battery after another was being unlimbered to make work for the
surgeons in little school houses the countryside round. In great
indignation, the surgeon drew a fragment of metal from his pocket and
explained that two days ago an English aviator had dropped the bomb of
which that was a part, only eighty meters from the hospital. But I
scarcely heard him. From the manure-strewn courtyard across the street
floated a cheer. Had the Saxonians been told they were to be sent to the
trenches? And I wondered if this was to be their deliverance--the beds
of unpainted wood, where I had seen a man sweat with pain.

That evening, after a successful dinner, Herrmann took the edge off our
pleasure by announcing that we must get up at five o'clock next morning.
"You will be taken to the trenches with Captain Kliewer's party (another
group of correspondents had come to Lille). We will all meet in
Commines for luncheon and in the afternoon you may see a field battery
in action. Of course, it is expected that you will not want to go, and
it is understood that those who wish to remain in Lille may do so with
the full approval of the staff."

Rotkohl was approved; so was the Dutch general. Rotkohl said something
about his grandmother, who lived on the Christiania Fjord, and the
general--well, he said there were more pretty girls to be seen in Lille
than along those muddy roads; besides it might rain, and suppose his
patent umbrella did not work. In three motors, one for Ober-Lieutenant
Herrmann and I, and the others for Captain Kliewer's party, we raced
through Lille long before dawn, to get into the trenches before daylight
would reveal our approach to the French. We lunched with the Second
Bavarian Army Corps at Commines as the guests of General von Stettin and
we told every officer in the room that we wanted to see the trenches by
night, and, being Bavarians, they thought it a tremendous joke, and
roared with laughter.

Bidding the Bavarian staff good-by, we went out to our motors. With
Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann and the photographers, I was supposed to go to
a battery already in action. Hauptmann Kliewer's party were going to see
their battery later. Telling myself that this early start--the heavy
artillery firing never begins around Commines until four in the
afternoon--was being made so that the photographers could photograph the
battery, and that at this time of day there would be little doing there,
I explained the situation to Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann. With the utmost
good nature--I knew from his smile that I had guessed right--he spoke to
Hauptmann Kliewer, who courteously granted my request. So, with Poole,
Reed and Dunn, I rode away from Commines, Hauptmann Kliewer following
with an officer in another car. Poole was telling us that the Major who
sat beside him at luncheon said that last night the English had dropped
four shells into Commines, evidently taking a long chance on hitting
headquarters; and Reed came back with another officer's story of how the
enemy's observers had seen a motor leaving Commines and had put three
_grenaten_ in the field beside the road not forty yards away. And as the
gray-green army auto car soughed down the heavy roads and you saw the
puddled fields beginning to mirror a suddenly sunlit sky, you wondered
if the enemy's observers could see your car too, and you caught
yourself, every now and then, watching the sky, as though to spy the
shell they had picked out for you. Nothing happened in that ride, but
from the moment of leaving Commines we thrilled to innumerable
paradoxical motions too laboriously complex to describe, that always
come when you are approaching the firing line and the novelty has not
worn off. Growing heavier with the sound, until it became almost the
slow roll of huge drums, the sky filled itself with the echoes of the
guns, crashing and crashing as though the heavens were a vault of blue
steel. And always, out of that growing grumble towards which we rode, we
heard more distinctly the explosions of the shells, each in a separate
disconcerting violence, and always louder, nearer.

Two Uhlans, their mortar board helmets covered with cloth, galloped by;
we overtook a transport train, the light, springy wagons moving easily
through the mud, the drivers posting in their stirrups, which somehow
seemed like an exhibition of beautiful riding that should have been done
in a park. We turned out, our wheels spinning in mud up to the hubs, to
let one of the big gray motor ambulances painted with huge red crosses,
rumble by, with its red load for the field hospital in Commines. We
passed two rosy-cheeked peasant girls, who carried food in baskets, and
then the clank and jangle of a string of caissons, going at a canter, as
though a battery needed shells. Perhaps the very battery we sought.

Somewhere on that road we must have crossed the Belgian frontier, for
after passing through silent, shelled Maraid we drove into Houthem,
Commando of the Second Bavarian Corps. We had been following a road that
ran parallel to the firing line only a mile on our left. Shells from the
German batteries had been flying overhead, but the muffler cut-out had
drowned their wicked whine. We were in Houthem, and across the muddy
fields there was that row of trenches where the German line seems to
come to a point, and where there was a colonel of whom we had heard in
Commines, Oberst Meyer of the Seventeenth Bavarians, who had pushed
forward as far as he dared go, lest he be enfiladed, was waiting now for
his supports to come up--hence the point that you may have seen on your
newspaper maps of January of the lines near Ypres.

I looked out from under the dirt-colored top of our motor to find that
we had stopped before a little yellow-brown building over the door of
which was nailed a black and white letter shingle, saying that here were
the headquarters of an artillery regiment. Seeing Hauptmann Kliewer and
the Corps Staff officer from Commines get out of their car and enter the
house, I concluded they were arranging for our visit to the battery, and
climbed out with the others to look around. We stood at the intersection
of one narrow, muddy road with another that seemed to lead off at right
angles towards the trenches. I looked up the village street, at the end
of which a red brick church laid its high white steeple against the blue
sky. I could see the shell holes in the church walls, but the steeple
appeared untouched. Poor marksmanship! I saw what had been a row of
houses. All that was standing now was their walls, and in the ruins of
one I saw soldiers picking up the heavy roof tiles; they would use them
to floor their dugouts in the trenches.

A group of soldiers, evidently off duty, had been watching us, and one
of them came over. "I'm a German-American," he said, introducing
himself. "I lived in Brooklyn. I worked in an exporting house on Hanover
Square."

"You're not a German-American," I replied. "There's no such thing.
You're a German. That's why you came over to fight, isn't it?"

"Sure," he grinned; and then he put to me that everlasting question:
"What do Americans think now? Are they more friendly than when I left?"
(That was in August, and he had stowed away on an Italian steamer.)

I told him that I thought they were; whereupon, apparently greatly
relieved, he told me something about the street upon which we stood.

"You see those houses over there?" and he pointed to the row of ruins.
"Well, when we first came here, Artillery Headquarters were in the last
house. Then a shell hit it when the officers were out--_Gott sei
Dank!_--so they moved next door. A shell bursting on the street
here"--and he indicated where the road was filled in--"smashed up that
house so that it caught fire. Then the Colonel moved down to the yellow
house there. I wonder when he'll have to move again."

I wondered too, and began to feel uncomfortable. Over in front of the
yellow house--the first floor had evidently been a store--I saw a group
of soldiers looking in the window. They were closely inspecting and
talking about the photographic reproductions that have evidently been
hung there by orders, there where all the soldiers, back from the
trenches on their relief, might see. For I noticed that there were
pictures of captured Russian guns, of General Hindenburg, of the
victorious German troops entering Lódz. And I thought that here was but
another instance of the marvelous system which is carrying on this war
against nearly all Europe. Pictures of triumph from the Eastern lines
posted where the soldiers in the West can see and be thrilled with
national pride.

I began to notice these soldiers who, back from the trenches and cleaned
up, were strolling around Houthem as on holiday, shaved, their uniforms
made as clean as possible, smoking cigars, they reminded me of the
workmen you see stopping before the windows of the cheap shop in a
factory town on pay-envelope afternoon. In a field close by I saw a
swarm of them, gathered round one of the yellow and black _Liebesgaben_
wagons that bring gifts from home to the soldiers free of charge.
Presently, his back bending under the weight of a bulky white bag, I saw
one of the soldiers come away from the wagon and slowly shuffle down the
street. You guessed he had been the one chosen to get the gifts sent to
the men of his company, and as he plodded on past the shelled houses, I
heard him whistling. There came, a few minutes later, from behind a gray
shed where a transport had been delivering lumber, two other soldiers,
and on their shoulders they carried a long box made of new wood--a
coffin. And in confusion I thought it must be for some officer, and I
thought of the man with the _Liebesgaben_ pack and of the homes that had
sent the gifts it contained, and that when he would read off the names,
that there would be names of the dead....

The yard in front of the white-steepled church of the Annunciation of
Mary the Virgin was filled with the familiar little wooden crosses,
fitted in, it seemed, between the old tombstones of the Belgian
inhabitants. As Hauptmann Kliewer swung back the heavy door, I was
amazed to see that the church swarmed with soldiers. A confusing clash
between the instincts of religion and military necessity, and I walked
among the soldiers. They were recruits receiving a last drill in the use
of arms, stiffening them before they went down into the trenches. You
told yourself that you were glad all the benches had been torn from this
church so that these men might be drilled here without being exposed to
the shelling that their detected massed presence anywhere around Houthem
would of a certainty bring on. I know had it not been war, instincts of
my upbringing would have revolted against this, that the thoughtless
like to speak of as desecration. But the more you see of war, the more
you come to measure the things of war time solely in terms of life and
death. It is not the spilling of Holy Water that matters, only blood.

Almost in a daze, I stared up at the gaping holes that the shells had
made in the roof. Broken slates stuck down from out the smashed plaster
ceiling, and you thought of them as of bones, and the brown tatters of
hanging plaster as wounded flesh, for you came to think of this place as
being a stricken personality, call it a stricken religion, if you like.
But was it not written that He suffered so that a world might be saved?
Surely, then, what could mean a few shell holes in one of His houses, if
most of those who hid there might still be spared.

I walked between the lines of young recruits, some loading, others
learning the sights, others emptying their magazines, and I came at
last to a shrine of the Virgin built in a recess in the wall. Above it I
could see a patch of the blue sky, framed in the hole of a shell; but it
was not the shrine that held me; it was the soldiers before it. They
were down on one knee, and I wondered if they were Catholics worshiping
there while the others drilled. "_Feuer!_" And each man whom I had
thought on reverent knee, snapped a gun to his shoulder; I heard the
hammers click. They had been learning to shoot kneeling. I wondered if
any of them thought of the Virgin.... "Damn dumbheads!" cried an
officer. "Faster!"

Explaining that the enemy had left an observation post in the steeple
and that the Germans were using it for the same purpose now, Hauptmann
Kliewer led us into a circular staircase of wood that coiled away into
the darkness of the narrow tower. Did we wish to climb up to it? The
Hauptmann explained that it was dangerous, for "knowing we had observers
in the steeple, the French artillery would, sooner or later, open fire."
But arguing with yourself that the French had evidently tried to hit the
steeple before but had only succeeded in putting a few shell holes in
the church roof, you became convinced of the comparative safety of it,
and began to climb the spiral stairs. The higher you got, the more
rotten the boards became, and I was wondering if there wasn't more
danger from my two hundred odd pounds being brought down on a rotten
step than there was of a shell crashing through the brick cylinder.
After climbing up a series of shaky vertical ladders we stepped out on
the observing platform. To put us at our ease, Hauptmann Kliewer warned
us all about not gathering around the observing window, a hole, a foot
square, cut in the wall, adding that the platform was not strong. So,
two at a time, we stood at the window and looked out.

I saw the country laid out as it is from a low-flying aeroplane, the
soggy fields exaggerating the squareness that the gray fences gave;
beyond the flat red-roofed houses I saw a dark green fringe of trees,
and then above that a tiny puff of white smoke appeared, then another,
until I counted four, all billowing out in the thinnest of fleecy
clouds, until thinning all in a white blur, they vanished.

"That's shrapnel," Hauptmann Kliewer was saying. "Our trenches are right
by the woods there."

And it came to me, the wondrous glory of the little white clouds; if
that was so the soldiers might look upon beauty before death. The wind
was blowing towards us, and we heard the shrapnel's peculiar whistling
burst and then the heavy shaking roar of _grenaten_ and over to the
right, just at the edge of the wood, I saw rising the blackish smoke of
heavy shells. About a mile away, exactly opposite, I saw a brown tower
between the trees.

"Our artillery observers are in there," explained Hauptmann Kliewer,
"and the French must know it, for they've had a cross fire on it from
right and left all day."

I watched the steeple with a new fascination. Shrapnel framed it in a
soft billow of clouds, and lower, where _grenaten_ struck the ground, I
saw the dissolving blackish smoke. Would they hit it?

"They have fired a hundred shells at the tower since morning," laughed
the Hauptmann. "They're not shooting very well to-day."

I forgot everything but the brown tower. I felt that any moment it must
sway and topple over, but when we were told to leave, it was still
standing. I wonder if it is there now. As we left the church and plowed
through the mud to our motors, I saw a battalion of artillerymen drawn
up before the little yellow headquarters, receiving their instructions.
I caught one admonition not to be careless with ammunition, and then we
were told that we were going to a battery. Down a road, where we saw
five abandoned French caissons mired in a field, we had another
experience with a most disconcerting sign. Hauptmann Kliewer's
automobile stopped and seeing him get out, we followed, joining line in
mud that came above our shoe tops.

"It is unsafe," he explained, "to take these motors any further. Knowing
we were officers, the French would surely spray the road with shrapnel."

"Then the French observer can see us?"

The Hauptmann laughed.

"They've probably seen us from the moment we entered Houthem, and if our
artillery hadn't been keeping them busy, they probably would have thrown
some shells at our automobiles. But here we haven't even that chance. We
walk to the battery. Separate yourselves at intervals of fifty paces so
that if a shell drops on the road we won't all get it."

Too business-like a tone had come into his voice to let you think he was
fooling. At once his manner became that of the officer in action, terse
and taking instant obedience as a matter of course. We spread out. I
found myself walking with Poole. We were approaching a high-banked
railroad track, the road disappearing under a trestle. I suppose the
field must have been strewn with the objects of war. I did not see them.
I was staring straight ahead at the sky, looking for shells, and getting
ready to throw myself on my face--as I had been told to--if one came.
And then, from behind the railroad embankment, came a terrific explosion
and I was watching a whisk of grayish smoke trailing away. I stood for a
moment unable to talk. The embankment was only a hundred yards away.

"Poole," I remember saying. "That was close."

"The French must be trying to destroy the railroad," he returned.

He was saying something else when another explosion shook the air,
almost in the same place. Badly rattled, for I could see Hauptmann
Kliewer and the Second Bavarian Army Corps Staff Officer calmly walking
on, where every stride was bringing us nearer the track, I tried to say
unconcernedly: "That's wonderful marksmanship. Two in the same place,"
thinking, "suppose another battery not so accurate, should open up, and
missing the tracks, drop one where we stood." "Wonderful shooting," I
repeated, adding to myself, "and we're walking right into it."

Whereupon Poole and I decided that if two German officers wanted to
commit suicide, good enough, but as for us, we were not going another
step further unless there was some other way than by this road that ran
under the tracks not thirty feet from the bursting shells. Yet I found
myself walking on, although my blood had long ago turned cold; and I
wonder now if that is the way some men go into action, ashamed to hold
back. But we weren't going into action and there was no hot, nervous
frenzy of battle and patriotism to urge us on. Walking towards those
explosions was a case of "going in cold."

Disobeying orders, we hurried forward, overtaking the officers, and to
our amazement we learned that the explosions were not of bursting
shells; but the firing of our own battery hidden behind the tracks!
Sheepishly, we trudged under the trestle. We had had all the sensations
of being under heavy shell fire, dangerously close, and there had been
no shells at all!

Coming out from under the trestle, I saw, sleeping under the high
embankment of the railway, a greenish canal. Dug in the side of the
opposite bank, that slanted upward forty feet from the water, I saw a
hole shaped like a door, and as I looked, an officer darted forth and,
scrambling up over the slippery clay, disappeared in a scraggle of
bushes. I saw the mud-spattered carriages of two German field pieces,
their dull barrels lying back between the wheels and serenely pointing
into the blue and gray mottled sky.

Leaving the road, we sank shin deep into a yellow ooze, and standing on
some planks about the yards behind the guns, we waited. The
boyish-looking artillerymen, rigid gray-green figures, so statuesque
that something in the mud must have turned them to stone, they seemed
waiting too. And then, from the direction of the hole in the bank, I
heard:

"_Links! Ein viertal tiefer!_"

And the statues by the guns became alive; they darted this way and that.
They reminded me of sprinters leaving the mark. One leaped to the
sights. "_Links! Ein viertal tiefer!_" And as the man on the bank
bellowed again, the soldiers at the sights began tugging madly on
something I could not see; and I knew that the range receiving
telephones must be in that cave in the bank, for it dawned upon me now
what that shouting meant: "Left! A quarter deeper." Sight the gun to the
left, advancing the range a quarter--some scale on the gun
obviously--and they would get the French! I glanced towards the shouter;
he was disappearing into the hole in the bank.

I saw another of the boyish artillerymen bend down over one of the brown
straw baskets that stood in neat little piles and lift from it a shell,
evidently heavy, for while stripping off a waterproofed cover, he rested
the projectile on his knee. As he darted towards the opened muzzle, the
waterproof cover fell in the mud, but instantly the soldier who had just
lain the brown shell basket upon a pile of empties, picked up the cover
and, neatly folding it, saved that too. And I saw a pile of discharged
shell cases; copper was too valuable these days to leave in the mud. And
as I saw them load and prepare to fire, each man doing his task with the
speed and deftness of a whirling gear, I thought of it as one part of
the war machine in which individuality was utterly lost in the gun; but
that was before I went into the hole in the canal bank.

And then I saw that all the soldiers were holding their hands on their
ears; and I was quick to put mine there too. But even then, as the gun
discharged, I could feel my ear drums trembling as though they would
break--the long red flash, the roar, the frightened recoil of the
barrel, the dark puff of quick dispelling smoke, the air flying with
black specks, and then a sound like a gigantic coil of wire being
whirled through the air and a 7.7 centimeter shell was whistling towards
the French line.

As swiftly as they had loaded and fired, the youthful artillerymen
withdrew the shell and when one of them stood patting the copper jacket
of a new projective and glancing towards the edge of the bank, as if
waiting for the man who cried "_Links, ein viertal tiefer!_" to appear,
I knew that they were firing shrapnel. They must wait for the range
before setting the tiny indicator which travels with the projectile
through the air. And as I waited, marveling at the detailed accuracy for
shooting at an enemy who must be nearly two miles away, the other gun in
the battery went off with a roar, and, while my ears throbbed madly, I
watched the village hidden among the dense trees about a quarter of a
mile away, for an enemy's shrapnel was spreading its white clouds there.
And just above those trees there appeared another white speck, two more
and the sky was ringed with curling smoke; then two heavy booms and
tatters of black smoke whirled from the trees. The French had opened
fire on the village. As I waded through the mud to go down into the
bombproof, it struck me uneasily that our officers glanced at each
other.

I was slipping down the bank as the "Links ein viertal tiefer" man
rushed from the bombproof, bellowing something to the gun crews. Then we
climbed down through the hole of a door into darkness. The first thing I
saw by flashing on an electric lamp was a dirt wall, a little artificial
Christmas tree that stood in a niche in the walls; beside it a half loaf
of black bread, a bottle of wine and a picture of the Emperor. And then
the man who lived there nodded to me.

He was sitting at a rough board table. He looked as absurdly young as
the men under his command. I saw from his shoulder straps that he was an
Unter-Lieutenant, and, even as I looked, his features seemed to grow
grave with something he must be hearing through the telephone, which was
strapped to his head. The stub of a candle guttered on the table and
only his face seemed lighted; everything else faded away into shadowy
silhouetting darkness. I saw him begin to race his pencil across a
little pad and calling the orderly who, standing back in the darkness, I
had not seen, he sent him scurrying away. The telephone buzzed. He
called into it, lighting as he did a cigarette; from the blackened stubs
strewn on the table, it was evident that he smoked constantly. He began
scribbling again. I saw that he was looking at me nervously. I was
thinking how this little room with the bread, wine, and Christmas tree,
and the Emperor's picture, was the very organism of the battery and that
this good-looking, nervous young lieutenant was directing it all, when I
saw the orderly hurrying in. Another officer hurried after him. I
noticed that the Lieutenant at the table looked relieved.

"You gentlemen will have to go now," said the officer, whom I saw was an
artillery captain. "The French have opened the village with heavy
_grenaten_ and two just burst four hundred yards from here."

"What was that lieutenant so excited about?" I asked, as we left the
bombproof.

"Why, his observer just telephoned that the French and their aeroplanes
were ascending."

Even as I climbed up the canal bank, I saw the young artillerymen
reluctantly covering their guns with branches, until, through a distant
field glass, they would seem to be bushes. Their battery was
"strategically silenced." I saw the under officers scampering down into
the bombproof and their guns transformed into big gray leafless bushes,
the boyish soldiers ran into hiding behind the blackened brick wall of a
shelled house. Boo-oom! Boo-oom! Over in the village the smoke was
pouring from a burning house and above the treetops the shrapnel spread
their fleecy clouds.

In the next field I saw a patch of blackened smoke; dirt flew.

"Run!" shouted the Bavarian Captain, who had been in America. "Run like
hell."

And as we tore pell mell past the ruined house, the artillerymen grinned
and waved their hands.

"_Gute Reise!_" one of them yelled.

Pleasant journey!




VI

A NIGHT BEFORE YPRES


The following are expanded pages of the diary that I kept from five
o'clock in the evening of January 10th, 1915, to seven o'clock the next
morning.

5 P. M.: The motor has stopped, but I wonder why. In Houthem the
Bavarian captain told us that we were going to Brigade Headquarters. I
can see though only a dirty brick farmhouse; its door is open and the
light of a lamp falling on the yard seems to float in a yellow watery
pool. But the other gray-green army car has stopped too, and Hauptmann
Kliewer is getting out.

So we pile out on the muddy road just as Hauptmann Kliewer beckons us to
come on. Behind us the ruined walls of Houthem are hiding in the
thickening dusk, but the grayish steeple where the Germans have--and the
French used to have--their observers, persistently shows itself.

Hauptmann Kliewer and the Bavarian captain have left the road and are
wading through the mud of the farmhouse yard. I thought we were going to
Brigade Headquarters. We splash on after them. Hours before at the
battery we sank in mud to the tops of our puttees; now the novelty has
worn off. Through an open barn door I see a motor and think of it as
being hidden there, an impression which grows, upon noticing that all
the windows in the rear of the house are covered with boards, so that no
light is visible. But the front door is visible. Yes, but that faces
Houthem where the Germans are, and these rear windows face Ypres and the
English and the French. About that silent house broods mystery.
Hauptmann Kliewer is knocking and the door opens just enough for us to
pass in one at a time, and is hurriedly closed. I wonder if a French
observer could have seen that narrow bar of light. Probably not, for in
the room only candles are burning--three stubby candles on a long
kitchen table, around which soldiers are sitting. And something buzzes,
and picking up one of the many telephones, a soldier says into it,
"_Brigade Hauptquartier._" A moment, and it buzzes again. And once more
the monotonous "_Brigade Hauptquartier._" And it dawns upon me that this
dirty farmhouse must be the Brigade Headquarters that they told us we
would visit. The kitchen now has a new interest.

Bidding us wait, Hauptmann Kliewer and the Bavarian captain have gone
with an orderly into another room. The man at the table with the ragged
beard and the boyish face has clamped a telephone to his head and is
writing rapidly, pausing now and then to assure the man at the other end
of the wire that he is getting every word. I wonder where that other man
is? Down in a trench, perhaps, or possibly in the regimental
headquarters. What is he saying? Have the French attacked? The other man
at the table, puffing stolidly at the briar pipe, is clasping a
telephone as though ready should the buzzer call. I wonder how he can be
fresh and clean shaven, when all the other faces seen in the flickering
candle light look weary and unkempt.

"Come!" Hauptmann Kliewer is calling us, so we leave the men around the
kitchen table, who, unlike most of the German soldiers we have met, seem
too exhausted to talk, and file through a latched door into a room that
might have been in a farmhouse somewhere near Monroe, New York. The
little black, pillow-seated chairs, the old-fashioned piano with its
rack of torn music, the red-cushioned stool with the stuffing coming
out, a hideous colored print of Antwerp on the wall, the oil lamp with
the buff china shade, it all seems so utterly un-European. And then the
door to an adjoining room opens and a slender, nervous-looking man in
the fifties, whose impressive shoulder straps indicate an officer of
high rank, begins to bow to us all. "General Major Clauss," Hauptmann
Kliewer is introducing us, and at once the General Major dominates the
room. It is for him to say whether we must go back to Lille, or spend
the night at one of his regimental headquarters.

He begins a long conversation with the Hauptmann. General Major Clauss
is shaking his head. I guess it's back to Lille.

"Ask him," I beg the Hauptmann, as he begins to give us the substance of
what had been said, "if they cannot let us go to the firing line, if
they'll let us stay here until morning."

With a smile, Hauptmann Kliewer is telling the General Major our wishes,
but he too smiles, and spreads out his hands--the right one is
wounded--as though it were out of the question.

The little parlor is filling with officers. They are all bowing and
smiling in a friendly way. I appeal to one of them, a young chap,
handsome in spite of the dueling scar across his chin. "We can do
nothing," he says regretfully, in English. The General Major,
apparently, is reluctant even to ask one of his regimental commanders to
assume the responsibility for us. As if to bid us good-by, the staff is
standing at attention. We urge the Hauptmann to telephone. "I shall
try," he says, with rare good nature. General Major Clauss has closed
the door behind him in his bedroom, and the Hauptmann buttonholes a
Major. The Staff officers look at each other in surprise. They believed
they were well rid of us. Briefly the Hauptmann is making the point for
us. The young officer with the scarred chin puts in a word. The Major
seems undecided. A lieutenant says something that I imagine would
translate into, "Telephone,--anything to be rid of them," but he regards
us with the amazing polite smile.

The Major darts into the kitchen where the telephones are and then,
smiling broadly, Hauptmann Kliewer comes in followed by the Major.

"Permission has been granted," he says, "for you to go to the
headquarters of the Seventeenth Regiment. You will spend the night
there, and be here at seven in the morning, where I shall meet you with
the motor."

"Aren't you coming with us, Captain?" somebody asks.

"I'm going to spend the evening in the headquarters of my own regiment
in Commines," the Hauptmann explains. "One of the officers here will
take you to the Seventeenth's headquarters."

Thanking everybody, we leave the parlor, and the officers smile
sententiously. We pass through the dimly lit kitchen where the tired
soldiers sit around the table, and cautiously opening that betraying
light filled door, we file, one at a time, into the stable yard. It is
still dusk, and as we follow our officer towards the narrow road, that
meets the one we had taken from Houthem, Kliewer bids us good-by. "Be
careful," he calls. His motor drives away, and to my surprise our car
follows. "Call back that driver," I say to our officer, "he's made a
mistake."

"No, he is right," smiles the officer. "No automobile ever goes up this
road. The French would see it. It's an easy walk, only a mile."

We follow him through the mud, finally setting foot on the road, less
muddy I notice, than the road from Houthem. We are on our way to the
headquarters of the Seventeenth Regiment, The dream of every
correspondent in this war is about to be realized. We are on our way to
spend the night on the firing line.

5:30. We have been walking ten minutes. We have passed a mounted patrol
and an unarmed private, walking fast. The long twilight has grayed, but
even far up the road I can still distinguish the posts of the wire
fence. We have just passed a lonely, brown frame cottage, the last house
between the open fields and a fringe of wood, when the Lieutenant stops
short and faces us.

"From now on," says the Lieutenant, with that easy way of authority, "we
shall walk at intervals of thirty paces."

I know what that means. Only a few hours before, when approaching a
battery, Hauptmann Kliewer told us the same thing. I remember his words:
"Altogether we make too plain a mark. We must separate."... How uneasy
you feel, walking along this way. Not only are you gauging your own
interval of thirty paces, but you are careful to keep an eye on the
others, ready to warn them if they draw too close; and they are keeping
an eye on you. You expect something to happen. Uneasy, you watch the
sky, but no shrapnel is bursting nearby. Ahead somewhere the artillery
is booming, but here everything is quiet. This walking along, pacing
your distance, restlessly glancing to right and left, and listening, is
getting on my nerves. No wonder I can't hear anything. The flaps of that
aviator's cap are tight around my ears. Expectantly I unloosen them. And
then I hear it, above us, a sound that makes me stop short; a sound as
though a giant had sucked in his breath.

Above us a shell is screaming on its way to the French trenches. From
beyond the woods the cannonading sounds heavier. Through the trees,
where the road bends to the right, a row of roofless houses seems
ghostly gray in the dusk. "That's what's left of Hollenbeck," I am
saying to Poole; "I heard the Major say we'd pass through it." And then
it seems as though the air is being sucked in all around us; it shrills
to a multitude of strange whistlings. The fence wire rings; a twig
rattles along the dried limbs of a tree and floats down; something spats
against a stone and goes ricocheting away. I'm positive we're going to
be hit; the air is wild with bullets. The trees are closer. There we'll
be safe. Why don't the others hurry, so that we can move faster, too?

And then, right on the road, almost where my heel has just lifted, a
bullet strikes. The dirt flies high. Instinctively I lurch forward and
fall on one knee. Forgetting his blanket, Poole bends over me. "Did you
get it?" he asks. I wonder if I didn't, and look at my foot. "It was
close," he says, relieved; "I heard the thing hit right behind you."

"I don't think we're seen," I unconcernedly try to say. "They wouldn't
have let us come up here if we were. These must be wild bullets flying
above the trenches. They're just beyond the wood, you know."

"Too wild," is Poole's comment, with which I agree. We are climbing a
slight hill now, the road turning to the right into Hollenbeck, a silent
place of unroofed, shell-battered houses. Here you feel safe for the
walls protect you, but over our head the loud whining of the German
shells keeps up the sound of war. Passing the last house we come upon
two squads of soldiers waiting in its shelter, and as we go on out into
the open road, they grin. The dusk is turning to black, and ahead it is
hard to tell where the tops of that clump of trees leave off, and the
sky begins. I am certain that those trees are our destination, and
although the bullets are whistling again, one feels safe.

A few minutes' walking and we have turned into what seems to be a wooded
lawn. A hundred feet away the vague shape of a low roofed house marks
itself by a thin bar of light, evidently from a closed door. The lawn is
muddy, and as, walking in single file, we cross on planks, the liquid
ground sloshes beneath our feet. As we approach what seems to be the
stable of a farm, those in front walk slower, and even slower descend
into the earth. Poole and I follow them down a flight of rough stone
steps, and seeing two uprights of stout logs standing as a doorway and,
level with my head as I descend, a roof of tree trunks and dirt, I
whisper, "Bombproof."

The opening of what seems to be an old kitchen door. A warning to keep
your head down, and we go stooping into a room dug in the ground, at the
other end of which a genial, gray-haired man, whom you instantly decide
is Colonel Meyer of the Seventeenth Infantry, is rising from beside a
homemade table spread with military maps, a hospitable smile on his
ruddy face.

"Welcome," he is saying in German. "So you got up the road all right?"

A sudden suspicion possesses me, and after introductions are over, I
ask: "Colonel, there were too many bullets on that road. Where did they
come from? Wild?"

"Wild?" he chuckled. "Why, sir, that road is our line of communication.
It is watched and is covered by French sharpshooters. We lose half a
dozen men on it every day."

And the officers at Brigade Headquarters smiled.

       *       *       *       *       *

5:57 P. M. The broad wooden benches against the walls seem to us as
comfortable as a cushioned lounge, and repeating, with many a "_glaube
mir_"--which the Colonel and his Adjutant are quick to catch on to as
the "believe me" of American slang--that wild horses couldn't drag us
out on that road again, we take in the details of the room. It is about
ten feet from where I sit to the strip of burlap covering the earthen
wall behind the opposite bench. I should say that from the shelf, where
the Colonel has his personal belongings, down to the other end of the
room, which the glow from our big oil table lamp only lights faintly, is
about twenty-five feet, enough for men to sleep on the benches along
either wall. In the middle squats a red bellied stove, its pipe going up
through the roof. The door looks as if it came from a farmhouse kitchen;
it is paneled with four little squares of glass, one of them cracked,
probably from the concussion of a bursting shell.

Yes, the timbers overhead look strong, intensely safe unless a _grenat_
should burst squarely on top of them. And only by one chance in a
thousand could a shrapnel ball fly down through the door. Yes, it seems
safe in here; slowly we began to forget about the road. The Colonel
excuses himself to study a map that seems to have been done by a
stencil, and I cannot help but notice that it has been executed to the
most minute detail, even individual trees and bushes being marked. I
wonder what the scale is. I have to compel myself to glance elsewhere,
for the fascination of the map is strong.

Above the shelf that runs across the end of the room, just so high that
the Colonel who is sitting beside me, can reach up and take from it what
he wants, stands a large square mirror. It seems also to be doing
service as a visiting card tray, for stuck in the frame are five or six
cards bearing the names of officers and their regiments. Somebody is
taking good care of the Colonel--I imagine he's married--for the shelf
is filled with luxuries, boxes of cigars and cigarettes, bottles of
liquor, and there's a quart of sparkling Moselle! Strewn in a long row
are all varieties of those wonderful food pastes that Germany began to
put up so extensively in tubes, since the war--Strassburg gooselivers,
anchovies, rum chocolate. Colonel, you're living well down here!

It's queer how you can, in a few minutes, learn the tastes and habits of
a man in a place like this. The Colonel is religious. There is a
crucifix fastened to the burlap over my head. The Colonel must sleep on
this bench. At the ends of his shelf, I see two other crucifixes, and
there, standing on the top of a box of cigars, is a colored print, a
Station of the Cross. I begin to know the Colonel better than if I had
observed him for months in his Bavarian home. As I gaze at him now,
bending over the map, that in his preoccupation he has pushed farther
across the table, the lamp's yellow glow shows me his face in relief
against the shadowed walls. It is a strong face, and kind; the chin is
grim and square, but the eyes are big and gentle, grayish though, the
color of a fighter. The gray mustache almost hides it, but reveals
enough of the full mouth of one who is not ascetic. As for the
crucifixes and the picture; they belong to the eyes. A seasoned man, the
Colonel.

With a nervous start, that seems incongruous with his broad shoulders,
the Colonel looks up. Then, appearing suddenly to remember something, he
pushes the map towards me. I see it is a map of his position.

"There," he says, running his finger the length of a broken line in the
upper right hand corner, "are the French trenches." "There," and he
points to lines paralleling them, "is our position. Here," and his
finger travels down the map, to rest on a group of oblongs and squares,
"is where we are now. This _unterstand_," and he makes a mark beside the
smallest square, "was dug next to the shed where the farmer kept his
wagons. This place is known as...." Were I to name this place, it would,
upon publication, be cabled to France, and telephoned out to the French
artillery positions. "Now," and the Colonel smiles and runs his finger
along a thick blue line that makes an angle and then disappears at the
lower end of the map, "that is the road by which you came from Houthem,
and at this point you were fired upon. Notice the curve that the French
trenches make. From the extremity of that trench," and the Colonel
indicates an imaginary line sweeping a section of the road, "it is not a
thousand meters, easy for a sharpshooter."

"And that," I laugh, and I'm trying to make this gaiety real, "is the
point that we don't care about crossing when we return."

"Can we not go back by some other road," Poole suggests, "a longer way,
making a detour?"

The Colonel shakes his head with a reluctant smile.

I hear then the same buzzing that I heard in the kitchen at Brigade
headquarters. And from the top of a varnished box, on the floor where I
had not seen it, the Adjutant picks up a telephone. "_Hier ist Siebzehn
Bayrischer Regiment_," he calls, and hands the instrument across the
table to the Colonel. "_Hier ist Oberst Meyer_," says the Colonel, "_Ja
... Jawohl ... Adieu_." With a chuckle, he turns to us. "That was
Hauptmann Kliewer," he explains, "telephoning from Houthem. Somebody
must have told him there about the road. He was rather concerned for
you, but I assured him that you were about to take dinner."

Feebly we try to protest. But the Colonel insists that we'll have to eat
with him, and we all feel guilty and self-conscious. It's just like
these Germans to share their black bread and army wurst with us. But
this is the firing line; this bombproof is only eight hundred meters
from the French trenches, and every scrap of food must count. An
electric torch flashes on the wall outside the door; some one is coming
down. A black mustached, young Bavarian comes in, and picking up the
varnished box, which I now see sprouts with vine-like wires that climb
up the wall and out under the roof, he carries the telephone away. The
door opens again and another private comes in. Clicking his heels in a
salute, he bows low from the waist, and then announces dinner. In
bewilderment we look at each other and follow the Colonel up the earthen
stairs.

"I always dine," Colonel Meyer seems to be apologizing, "in the
farmhouse."

Overhead a stray bullet whistles, and I hear it rattling through the
dried tops of the trees.

       *       *       *       *       *

7:05 P. M. It seems safe, until leaving the shelter of the bar, we see
that we have to cross an open space before reaching the farmhouse. I can
see, standing outside the door there, the vague form of a soldier. He
passes the shaded window, a faint orange square in the shadowy wall, and
his bayonet flashes. As we cross this open space the Adjutant is asking
us to turn off our electric lamps, for their reflection might attract
French observers. So we trust to luck in the darkness and, slipping in
mud, dart behind the shelter of the farmhouse. I hear a bullet thudding
against the stone wall of the barn.

The door creaks open and we go in. As I gape around, the fragrance of
good cooking comes from a coal stove, crammed with tall cylindrical army
pots. The room is evidently the kitchen--a typical farmhouse kitchen
with a wide fireplace of red bricks and a long mixing table along the
wall by the shade-drawn window. Tacked to a slate-colored pantry door is
a calendar with the month of October not yet torn off, and on top of the
fireplace an old wooden clock that has run down at half past four--was
it on the day the Germans came? "Sit down, gentlemen," the Colonel is
saying, indicating a round kitchen table, around which six chairs are
crowded. On a snow white cloth our places have been set. There are not
enough forks to go round so some have soup spoons. I see only three
knives, so some of us will have to use our pocket knives. A comfortable
yellow light falls from the yellow lamp in the center of the table. We
begin to feel as snug as a fireside cat. "Our knives and forks are
rather limited," apologizes the Adjutant, who introduces himself as
Hauptmann Koller, a tall handsome Bavarian with a scraggy black growth
on his chin. "However, there are dishes enough to go around." I begin to
have a suspicion that our sympathy has been absurd. Black bread and army
wurst never gave out the odors that are coming from those pots on the
stoves, and then our surprise is complete when the Colonel offers us a
cocktail. Cocktails, and the French trenches eight hundred meters away!

"A German cocktail," smiles the Colonel, as he pours out the white
_schnapps_, "not like the kind you have in America. One of my friends
had a bottle of them in München--Bronx cocktails," and the Colonel makes
a grimace. There are only two cordial glasses, but by passing them
around, we succeed in drinking the Colonel's health. As we take our
seats at the table I notice that while four of the chairs seem to belong
to the kitchen, the other two are richly tapestried. There must be a
château near here. The Colonel is sitting in one of them and Dunn in the
other. Leave it to Dunn to be lounging in the other tapestried chair.
Hauptmann Koller, who is opposite, is hacking off chunks of bread from a
round rye loaf. On my other side Reed is looking at the bottle of
_schnapps_ and wearing his unextinguishable smile.

A soldier brings a pot from the stove and the Colonel serves us. It is
an oxtail stew, canned of course, but smells appetizing. "The Colonel
hasn't any left for himself," exclaims Poole; but the Colonel is holding
up his hand. "There is plenty," he says, and the soldier brings another
steaming pot. Magically, tall, dark liter bottles make their appearance
and on the labels I see "_Hacker-Brau_."

"Münchener Beer," cries Reed. "Isn't this amazing?" The Colonel looks at
Hauptmann Koller and grins. I think that from their viewpoint they are
enjoying it as much as we. Canned boiled beef follows the stew; more of
the tall, dark bottles appear. I see a soldier open a green door in the
wall at my left and, reaching into what is evidently another room,
straighten up with his arms full of beer bottles. "That is our
Bierkeller in there," explains Koller. Dunn decides that it is the very
place for him to sleep.

"Colonel," says Poole, pointing at the wall behind me, "what did you do,
have those windows boarded up so that the light wouldn't be seen?"

Hauptmann Koller is laughing and rubbing his frowsy chin in delight.

"Those are not windows," the Colonel says, with a laugh. "They are shell
holes." We press Koller to give us the story: "The Colonel was dictating
a report in here one morning. That orderly was writing it," and Koller
nods towards the smiling, good-looking private with the Iron Cross, who
is writing at the mixing table. "Without warning, for our battery was
not in action and there was nothing to draw the French fire, two
shrapnels tore through the wall and burst in the room. You can see the
holes their balls made in the other walls and the floor--and the Colonel
wasn't hit!"

With a wave of his hand the Colonel indicates the last of three cots
against the wall. "I was sitting on the edge of that bed," he says, "and
the shells passed over the other two beds."

Almost incredulously we gaze at him as if to make sure that he is
wounded but doesn't know it.

I am staring now at the walls and ceiling, trying to count the little
shrapnel holes. Above the Colonel's head there is an Empire mirror that
never hung in any farmhouse, and perched upon it a brass-black,
hair-plumed helmet of a French Cuirassier.

"Out in the yard," remarks the Colonel, "there is an unexploded shell,
one of the French 'twenty-eights.' It fell there one day and didn't
burst. We had one of our ordnance experts up to examine it, but he says
it won't explode now. If it did, it would blow up the house."

So we sit here thinking of the silent guest in the yard outside. I
forget that there is something more to eat. With the cheese and coffee,
the evening concert begins. A German field piece in the woods close by
has opened fire. Suddenly the night is roaring with the bursting of
shells, and down in the trenches the rifles begin their incessant harsh
croaking. The Colonel is looking at the tiny watch dial on his wrist.
"The same as last night," he remarks to Hauptmann Koller, adding to us,
"The French always open heavy fire at eight."

That's the third German officer I've heard make that statement in as
many days. The French always shelled Mouchy at three; they put
_grenaten_ in Houthem every evening at six; they concentrated their fire
here at eight. Frenchmen, the last people in the world you would suspect
of systemization!

"They'll keep it up," continues the Colonel, "until two, and then
they'll stop and begin again at five for two hours. We know exactly what
to expect from them. They're hammering on us, for we hold the furthest
front on this part of the line. I dare not advance any further until my
supports come up."

We ask him to tell us something about the fighting here.

"The French attacked on December second," says Colonel Meyer, "more than
a month ago. They came in columns of fours, and you can see them now,
lying out there between the trenches in columns of fours. They were
mowed down, and for a month the fighting has been so heavy that they
can't get out to bury their dead. You can see them afterwards when the
rockets go up. They make it quite bright."

"How many rockets, Colonel, do you send up in a night?"

"About a hundred generally."

"And how many men on an average are in the trenches?"

The Colonel considers long. "That varies greatly," he says finally. "At
some points only 400 men of a regiment are in the trenches, at a time;
at others, 800. I have used as high as 1200 for repelling a hard
attack."

"Strange things happen, fighting the French," he muses. "The night after
they were cut up so, they were ordered to attack again. As soon as it
came dark, one of our soldiers heard a Frenchman calling across to him
in German. The Frenchman had crawled across from his own trench on his
belly. 'Don't shoot,' he told my man. 'Two hundred soldiers and an
officer want to surrender.' The soldier kept him covered, and sent for
an under officer. They telephoned me from the trenches and I told them
to let the Frenchmen come over if they threw down their arms. And two
hundred Frenchmen with their officers, did come over. I asked their
officer why they had surrendered, and he told me that the order had
come to storm our trenches again that night, and that all day his men
had been looking out and seeing their comrades lying in the mud in
columns of fours, and that they nearly went mad." And the Colonel slowly
shakes his head. "I saw them lying there, too. I can understand how it
affected them."

As Hauptmann Koller pushes back his chair and goes to the fireplace, I
notice that his shoulder straps are covered with meaningless cloth; no
sharpshooter will pick him for choice game. And from beside the old
wooden clock Koller takes down a box of cigars, piling on it a tin of
cigarettes, while with the other hand he picks up a bottle of Anisette.
"They're Austrian cigars," he says, "but they're all right." While we
are lighting up, he pours out the Anisette. This time we drink Koller's
health and then the officers insist upon drinking ours; we return with a
toast to Bavaria. Colonel comes back with a standing health to the
United States.

"Tell them," he begs, "that we are not barbarians. I have a sister who
lives in Wyckoff, New York, and I'm afraid that by reading your
newspapers, she thinks that I've become a terrible ogre." Again the
Colonel is the easy smiling host.

The door opens; a private comes in and sits by the telephone. He moves
it down the mixing table quite close to us. "Is it time for the
concert?" asks the Colonel.

Hauptmann Koller nods. "At eight thirty. It's that now."

"_Gut!_" and the Colonel indicates us with a wave of his hand,
"Gentlemen, be my guests at our regular evening concert."

We look at each other blankly. The Colonel seems to have a huge joke up
his sleeve. He is bustling about the telephone like a man dressing a
Christmas tree. He takes up the instrument and holds it to his ear.
"Come," he says, beckoning me. I pick up the receiver and almost drop it
in my amazement. Somewhere an excellent pianist is playing the
_Valkerie_. In a spell, I listen to the music, each note retaining its
sweetness over the wire. The music stops; I hear a flutter of
handclapping.

"Where is it?" I gasp, coming over to the table.

"That comes from the headquarters in Houthem," explains Koller, while
the Colonel nods, smiling, as with a surprise well planned. "That was
General Major Clauss at the piano. He was playing under great
difficulties."

"The man with the wounded hand!" I exclaim. Poole takes up the 'phone.

"He is playing Tristam," whispers Poole, and outside I hear the growing
fury of the shells and the crash of the German field piece close by. The
Colonel is telling me how on Christmas Eve they played "_Heilige Nacht_"
for them, down in Houthem, and that while he was listening to the music
a heavy shell burst down in the trenches, killing eight of his men. But
I am not following half of what he says. Everything seems to be in a
daze. It is all too incredible. We have finished what seemed to be one
of the best savory dinners I have ever eaten. The supply of
golden-brown Münchener beer seems to be limitless. We are finishing with
coffee, cigarettes, cigars, and a cordial; and now a concert. And
outside the sky is hideous with war, and eight hundred meters away are
the French. And this is war.

Koller is at the 'phone now. "When General Clauss is through," I tell
him, "ask him to play something from Chopin." In a moment Koller nods
for me to come over. And I am listening to the opening bars--perhaps my
nerves are overstrained--but I hear a noise that sounds like a bullet
hitting a wire fence, and the music is still. Snatching up the 'phone
the orderly tries in vain for a connection and finally transfers it to
another wire. Perhaps, after all, I heard only a normal snapping of the
wire. Imagination plays strange tricks in this world of uncanny and
violent impressions.

The door opens and an orderly comes in with the mail. There are two
letters for the Colonel, and while he is reading them Koller opens a
bottle of cognac. The Colonel is stuffing one of the letters inside his
coat. His eyes are wet and, not to embarrass him, I watch Hauptmann
Koller measuring out the cognac. Probably a letter from the Colonel's
wife. The door opens again; the room fills with officers, who click
their heels and bow to us. "The relief," whispers Koller.

A thin, gray-mustached man, whose precise speech makes you think of a
university professor, comes forward; the Colonel remains on his feet.
The room seems to stiffen with military etiquette. The Major is making
his report to the Colonel. I catch the words: "They put heavy shells on
us, beginning with eleven o'clock last night and lasting until one."
What time is it now? Ten thirty-three. Soon the shelling starts. It is a
very detailed report and, unfolding his map, the Colonel spreads it on
the table and indicates a position. The Major studies it and offers some
thoughtful comment. How like those Civil War plays played in New York
years ago, in fact identical in situation. The Colonel gives some
orders, asks if there are any questions, and to the clicking of heels
and polite adieus, the relief officers file out. They are going to the
trenches.

The good looking private with the Iron Cross salutes. "Sir, the concert
is ready."

What! do they keep it up all night? But the Colonel is getting up,
leading us out of the room. We follow him out into the night--and the
sky seems faintly luminous with weird light--going along the farmhouse
wall until we come to a short flight of steps into the ground.
Descending, we are seated in an extremely low-roofed bombproof, in which
five soldiers, half in uniform, are sitting around a wooden table. They
look like the comic band of the music halls. One has a harmonica,
another a flute, another sits before an inverted glass bowl, which he is
ready to tap with a bayonet tip and beside him is the guitar man--a
wonderfully made guitar, its wires, telephone strings, its box, a case
for canned goods, planed thin; and there is a serious-faced drummer. But
facing them, blasé and autocratic, is a man with sensitive features and
pince nez. He has discarded his uniform for an old black coat, and with
a dirty hat pulled down over his eyes, he suggests the Jewish comedian
of burlesque. Evidently he is the leader for, raising a bayonet
scabbard, counting, "_Ein, zwei, drei_," he brings it down and the
concert begins.

You recognize _Puppchen_. Leisurely beating time, sipping a glass of
coffee that our orderly with the Iron Cross has filled for him from a
pot that simmers on the squat coal stove, the leader is having the time
of his life. They play some old German Folk songs, and once the
harmonica man is late in starting and receives a boisterous reprimand
from the leader. They are singing now, "_Röslein auf der Heide ...
Morgen Rot_," and you think how sinister the words are, "leads me to an
early death." Red morning! Will it ever be for them? Even here under the
earth I can hear the hungry growling of the shells.

Modestly the leader is telling us that the Bavarian musicians are the
best in Germany, "therefore our band is the best in the trenches," and
the Colonel is beaming on them all. The orderly with the Iron Cross,
who, unable to speak a word of English, has been smiling at me all
night, urges us to take some more coffee; and it's "Good-by, boys! Good
Luck," and we're out into the battle-shaken night.

"Want to have a look at it?" Hauptmann Koller asks me. I nod, yes.
Hugging the wall, Koller and I turn the corner of the barn and slowly go
down the open space between the buildings, that we had rushed past
earlier in the evening, plastering ourselves against the walls. As if
that would do us any good! We can hear the French bullets whistling by,
and the air is shaking with heavy guns.

"After eleven," remarks Koller, "I fancy the French are at it with big
_grenaten_," and as he speaks I see a flash in the trees not two hundred
meters away and a field piece discharges with a crash. "Our seven
answering them," Koller is pointing towards where a greenish light seems
to flash in the sky. "Over there about a mile," he says, "is the Ypres
Canal. The Thirty-sixth Division is on the other bank, and as soon as
they push back the French, we'll go ahead again," he speaks with a quiet
confidence that makes you feel that the advance of his regiment is a
matter of course.

"Come down here," he suggests, "and you can see the battle. Don't scorn
the shelter of those trees. Keep them between you and the trenches. Go
from one tree to the other."

I hear him splash through the mud; he is waving from behind a tree. I
plow after him, going so fast that I almost slip and fall. The whistle
of a bullet will make you move faster than you ever thought possible.
Out of breath we come to the edge of the little grove and look out on
the battlefield.

It is all color and noise--unearthly colors, unearthly noises. I stand
at the edge of an Inferno. The heavens streak with a sulphurous green,
and the earth is scarred with flame. I see the rockets swishing up from
the trenches, breaking with the weird light that would reveal any enemy
creeping up, and falling in a shower of sparks, like shooting stars. It
gives a strange confirmation of an old saying that when a star falls
some one dies.

I see the steady, streaming, reddish line of rifle fire and the yellow
flash of shells. I hear their fierce, harsh croaking and their deafening
boom. I see, in the burst of a rocket, the wet fields glistening with
mud; and the night crashes and rolls with awful clamor.

Koller is handing me his binoculars. Through them I can see the Ypres
Canal, a monstrous glistening water snake, sleepily drinking the blood
of men. It is a green night, a green land, a universe gone mad, for the
sky was never meant to shine with those hideous lights. And the rockets
spread their fiery trail and spill their hideous glare; and the line of
fire brightens and grows dim and brightens again; perhaps as men are
falling and others are springing to their places, and I turn my glasses
on the glistening fields, and think I can see the columns of fours, the
mounds of the dirt, the color of the mud, and I can hear the bullets
panging in the mud at our feet. How they must be riddling the bodies of
the dead!

"I've had enough," I tell Hauptmann Koller.

We say good night and cross the farmyard. The din of the battle seems to
have died down, although the bullets still whistle and rattle among the
dried trees. We lie down on the benches in the bombproof, with our
clothes on, with the dirty blankets over us. Our night of nights is
done.

12 P. M. to 6 A. M. Bits of dirt from the ceiling fall on my face.
Hauptmann Koller is snoring.... The guns are rumbling again. Koller
snores blissfully on. The cannonading is terrific. Those poor devils
down in the trenches.... The cannonading sounds fainter and fainter....
The handsome orderly with the Iron Cross is flashing a lamp on Koller's
blanket. "All right," calls Koller, but in a moment he's snoring. Only
stray rifles are crackling now. The glowing phosphorescent face of the
watch on my wrist shows six o'clock. Morning! Hauptmann Koller is
already out of bed.

"Good morning," he says, with a yawn. "The orderly was in a minute ago.
Breakfast will be served at six-thirty."

In the trenches it's the hour when they pick up the dead.




VII

IN THE TRENCHES


By the first of October, 1914, every European war map had become a bore.
After Von Kluck had conducted what a United States military attaché in
Berlin told me was the most masterly retreat in the history of the
world, the black fishhook line stopped moving across northern France and
fastening its barb in Belgium, it ceased to move. Day after day, as we
read the newspapers we saw that the line was the same; perhaps near
Dixmude or Mulhausen it changed from time to time, but by November first
it was evident that it was there to stay--for a time at least--and war
maps became a bore. The reality of that line of ink is not, I assure
you.

The next time you read your newspaper, glance again at the map of the
West front. Follow the line that begins on the Channel above Calais,
turning southeast above Ypres and ending in the passes of the Vosges in
Alcasse; and then think of it in this way. On the dunes you can enter a
ditch that has been dug across Europe from the English Channel to
Mulhausen. You can walk about three hundred miles under ground, eat
three meals a day, and sleep on officers' cots without once having to
expose yourself in the open. You will realize as you see second, third,
and fourth trenches parallel and connecting by labyrinthine passages
that the amount of excavating required would dig a subway. The labor
involved in the New York Aqueduct, the Chicago Subway, the irrigation
works of our West seem trivial when you consider this work was done
under fire.

Before I came to Germany I was told: "There is not much doing in the
West. Both armies are marking time." Since then the battle line has
become about three hundred miles long. A surgeon in the _Feld
Lazarette_, in Vis-en-Artois, told me that they had on the average ten
wounded a day and that their hospital was fed by a segment of the front
about two miles long. When you recall the terrific fighting near the
Channel ports, this average is not high for the whole line. So when you
glance at the little map in your newspaper think of it as meaning three
thousand wounded men a day, ninety thousand a month, and a tenth as many
dead. Remember also the Ypres Canal, where soldiers have gone mad and
thrown themselves into red water, and at the same time the field of
Soissons, strewn twice with the dead; of men in the trenches of the
Argonne, undermined, dynamited, their bodies blown as high as leafless
forest trees.

Again, when any one says to you, "There is not much doing in the West,"
imagine a three hundred mile line with three quarters of a million
soldiers standing in muddy brown water, and three quarters of a million
more, too, whom they have just relieved, lying on beds of straw, too
exhausted to remove their uniforms until it is time to wash; think of
that line in which for every five minutes of every day a German is
being killed--and God knows how many English, French and Belgians.

For two days I had been in the vicinity of Lille with Ober-Lieutenant
Herrmann of the Great General Staff. Near Labasse I had seen the
trenches at night, but I wanted to see them by day; for at night the
soldiers are all keyed high; it is then that the hard fighting is done.
What did they do with themselves during the day? It was at Lille, the
fifth night after I had left Berlin, that I met five other American
correspondents, a Hollander and a Norwegian, who were in Hauptmann
Kliewer's party. After dinner in the Hotel de Europe, Ober-Lieutenant
Herrmann, who had gone with Hauptmann Kliewer to the Staff of the Second
Bavarian Army Corps, told me that from now on the two parties would
travel together until we reached Brussels. "In the morning," he said,
"we go to the trenches in front of Arras. You must be here in the lobby
ready to take the motor not later than six."

In the inky darkness of a clear, cold morning three army automobiles
left the Hotel de Europe and roared away through the streets of Lille. A
Second Army Corps officer whom Bob Dunn, the New York _Post's_
correspondent, was apologetically explaining as being a cousin of his,
rode in the first car. This officer, who had never traveled the road to
Arras before, was acting as our guide; soon we understood Dunn's
apologetic way, for after one challenge upon another came ringing out of
the night, and we had stopped to have our papers read in the lantern
light of sentries and patrols, Dunn's cousin lost the way. "I knew he
would," remarked Dunn. "No one related to me could go straight."

The officer tried again. He took us along the crumbling path of war,
along a road where under a dark centered half moon we saw in the silvery
graying light the lanes of abandoned trenches and rows of gaping shell
torn houses, while one by one the stars turned to tiny icicle tips, and
day slowly came on. I think after crossing the Ypres Canal at Douai,
that we followed every blind alley between there and Vitry, for turning
one corner after another, with each new row of poplars coloring clearer
against a brightening sky, we seemed to come no nearer to the boom of
the guns.

As we plowed through a heavy cross road to Mouchy le Preux and came out
on the highway to Arras, we saw a German battery. The last stars had
withdrawn, and in the grayish morning light the clanking field pieces
lumbered by, a ghostly company with vague gray ghostly men on ghostly
horses. I imagined they were moving parallel to the firing line,
changing position. How close were we now? Probably six kilometers. Two
miles riding up the road to Arras with the battlefield of October 1st,
the muddy, desolated fields on either side. It was up this road that the
French artillery made its retreat, across those fields that their
infantry poured with the Duke of Altenburg's Saxonians in hot pursuit.
Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann had told me that the French had given way all
along the line here before the German second drive, retreating to
Arras, which they now held. I remember that he had spoken of Arras as an
objective and that the Germans were constantly drawing nearer. How close
were they now? How far from the French would we be in the trench? One
began to feel a tremulous excitement.

Hauptmann Kliewer and Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann told us that this was as
far as they dared go with the motors. To approach closer than two
kilometers to Arras with automobiles, and we easily would be discerned
by the French artillery observers. Evidently having been telephoned that
we were coming, two gray cloaked officers were waiting for us outside a
little brown shack that I guessed was regimental headquarters. The
Captain, an intelligent looking Prussian--and, by the way, I've yet to
see one of the upturned mustached bullies of whom our cartoonists are so
fond--spoke perfect English.

"Leave your overcoats here," he advised. "It's rather warm going up to
the trenches." Then he glanced at our feet and gave an approving nod.
"No pumps or gaiters, I see. That's good; you'll be up to your knees in
water," and as I walked up the road towards Arras, he told me that two
Italian journalists--any newspaper man is a journalist in Europe--had
visited the trenches at Arras. And the Captain laughed. "One wore a pair
of gray spats and the other had one of those artist ties, those black
fluffy things. One of our soldiers drew a sketch of them." When we had
gone about a hundred yards, we turned to the right, descending by an
abrupt runaway into a trench that dug in a plowed field, led away at
right angles from the road. More than a thousand meters from the French
trench, and with rifle fire yet to begin, and shielded by the very fact
that you walked in a narrow pit seven feet under ground, comparatively
less in danger than you had been in the motor from Mouchy le Preux on,
you nevertheless tingled with a strange exhilaration. Keeping one eye on
the top of the trench, prepared to duck, lest it suddenly became uniform
in height and expose your head to the open field, gazing the rest of the
time at the bottom of the pit, lest you slip in a hole and go sprawling
in the yellow liquid ooze, we followed the officers, slavishly imitating
their movements of progress. Then we came to another trench that made a
right angle with our own, advancing towards the firing line, parallel to
the road we had left as unsafe, exactly as in the approach trenches at
Labasse. But as we trudged on, splashing now and then through water to
our knees, we no longer imitated the officers. They walked as before,
unconcernedly and erect. We were going along ducking our backs, for
shrapnel was beginning to fly in a neighboring field, and I heard it
panging in the mud on all sides.

It was light now, although a fleecy white moon still hung in the sky,
and as it grew brighter, one after another, the batteries began the
forenoon cannonade, and as I heard the bursting shrapnel ever growing
more numerous, I guessed it was the same as at that other point on the
line where I had been two days before, where the French cannonade before
and after luncheon, always beginning at the same time. And then
directly above me I heard the disconcerting burst of shrapnel and I saw
the pretty billowing white clouds that the explosion always makes, and
knowing that to be directly under shrapnel is to be out of danger for
the little balls spray like the stream of a watering cart, I comfortably
watched the smoke until it drifted away, thinning like blown silk.

From the field the trench sloped up into a deserted house. Obviously a
part of the trench, I saw the wall of the house had been pierced to make
a passage the same width of the ditch, and that in the far wall there
loomed a similar passage doubtless leading down into the trench again.
As I walked through the ground floor rooms of the house, it reminded me
of something I had seen from the windows of the military train that had
brought me from Metz to Lille. There the survey of the German pioneers
had hit through the middle of certain villages, and I had seen houses
flush against the track, with their side walls torn off so that the
trains might pass without smashing into them; and I had seen everything
in the disordered rooms of those houses. Here it was the same, only this
time war had invaded homes with a trench instead of a train. First one,
then through a doorway into a second room in utter disorder. I saw
concentric holes that marked the entrance and exit of a shell and the
confusion of turmoil and pillage. A bureau with the drawers emptied out,
clothing strewn on the floor, a baby's high chair overturned, a crucifix
lying broken in a heap of fallen plaster, those rooms seemed to be a
contrast, a chaos, the picture of the illimitable dissolution of war in
one home. Into the trench again, up another slope through another silent
house, through a stableyard, vile with blackish typhus water, and so on
along a path of desolation, if not where the trench led through
farmhouses where it pierced unharvested beet fields, with the panging of
shrapnel and now the sucking whistle of rifle balls until we came to
another and wider trench. This at right angles to our own, crossed the
road to Arras.

"This is the line," the Captain explained. "The French are only two
hundred meters away. Don't expose yourself, and when you hear shrapnel
close, it is best to stoop down a little. Come," and turning into the
pit, he led the way towards the highway. We were walking parallel to the
French, and they were only two hundred meters away. And I thought then
of it being the great ditch, burrowed under Europe for three hundred
miles, and I was soon to feel that I was among the inhabitants of a new
and terrible world.

Your pulse quickened. Back there where you left the road and the brown
muddy walls about you there had come a thrill; as you floundered on up
through the approaches hearing the burst of shrapnel and the spatter of
the balls on the soaked field, you were uneasy; but now as you gazed up
and down the trench, which you have thought of not in so commonplace a
way as to call it "trench," rather "firing line," as slowly its
impressions came upon you, they left you amazed. This goal that you had
been striving for during a whole month was a place where men looked
bored!

And how can any one be uneasy or frightened when every one else seems as
though the very safety of their existence is torturing them to death?
But that was before I went into the advance trenches, for out posts make
a difference in the soldiers, as I was presently to see.

"This position," explained the Captain, as we walked in single file,
"was a French trench. We did some work on it. Made bombproofs out of
some of their old rifle pits and dug new ones along what was the back of
their trenches. Now the French see our guns sticking out where their
stove pipes used to be."

I noticed one little square doorway after another cut in the back wall
of the trench, curtained with burlap bags, and as we passed, the
curtains were pushed aside and I saw the soldiers sitting inside playing
cards by candlelight or smoking and talking, and all looking so
comfortably bored; just as you would imagine them sitting in a
Friedrichstrasse café and watching the crowds go by. "There's no
attacking now," explained the Captain, "so only half the men are on duty
in the rifle pits. The others lounge in their dugouts."

And as we went further along I saw signs of idle time when soldiers
revert to childhood and remember that they used to dig things in the
dirt and sand. Here in the trench wall four nitches had been dug, three
in a line and the other below. And in the upper nitches, tiled in
various attitudes suggestive of destruction, were three toy battleships,
flying tiny Union Jacks and below them a toy submarine with U 9 painted
on his gray hull. And I was positive that I knew the store in
Leipzigerstrasse from which they had been sent by _Feld Post_.

To the right I saw the short wide passages leading up to the rifle pits
where two soldiers stood on a platform cut in the dirt. One was cleaning
his gun while the other squinted along a rifle barrel that protruded
through a narrow port reenforced with bags of sand, and watched. His
manner, the stiffened pose of the gray-green shoulders, the boot br

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