Many Fronts
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Title: Many Fronts
Author: Lewis R. Freeman
Release date: March 31, 2013 [eBook #42446]
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Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MANY FRONTS ***
MANY FRONTS
MANY FRONTS
BY
LEWIS R. FREEMAN
LONDON
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
1918
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
CONTENTS
PAGE
THE FIGHT FOR THE GARDEN OF EDEN 7
IT’S A WAY THEY HAVE IN THE AIR CORPS 38
SHARKS OF THE AIR 66
TO BRITISH MERCHANT CAPTAINS 96
THE PASSING OF A ZEPPELIN 112
FIGHTING FOR SERBIA 128
BEATING BACK FROM GERMANY 156
THE SINGING SOLDIER 192
BLOWING UP THE CASTELLETTO 219
WONDERS OF THE TELEFERICA 246
THE GARIBALDI FIGHT AGAIN FOR FREEDOM 280
My grateful acknowledgments are due to the several magazines in which
these stories and sketches have appeared:--_The Cornhill Magazine_,
_Land and Water_, and _The World’s Work_ in England; and in America,
_The Atlantic Monthly_, _The World’s Work_, and _The Outlook_.
L. R. F.
_October, 1918._
MANY FRONTS
THE FIGHT FOR THE GARDEN OF EDEN
I
I had known F---- through years of hunting and sports in India, but
never until the night that our old British-India coaster lay off the
Shat-el-Arab bar waiting for the turn of the tide to run up to
Bassorah, did I hear him speak of the things that were really next his
heart. Then it was that I was vouchsafed transient vision of the outer
strands of the previsionary web England was weaving beyond the marches
of India against events to come. I will give his story, as nearly as I
can remember, in his own words.
* * * * *
For the best part of the last five years [said he], I have been coming
to Arabia and Mesopotamia on “language study.” In all of that time I
have not been back to England, and I am almost a stranger to the
officers of my own regiment. I talk like an Arab, I am beginning to
think like an Arab, and, what with sunlight and dirt that have gone so
deep under my epidermis that they will never come out, I shall soon
look like an Arab. Perhaps in time--you’d never believe the appeal of
the Koran till you’ve bowed toward Mecca, with a Bedouin on either
side of you, morning and evening, for six months at a stretch--I shall
pray like an Arab. I have had smallpox, dysentery,--which has become
practically chronic,--and a dozen varieties of fevers and skin
diseases, and I’m mottled from head to foot with “Aleppo button”
scars, two of which have never healed. I’ve been alone so much that I
talk to myself even in Calcutta and Simla. The Persians in this region
distrust me, the Russians and Germans hate me, and the Turks are
perfectly frank in saying that they will send me on “the long
pilgrimage” if ever a fair chance offers.
All that my Government does is to allow my pay to go on and to provide
me with a passport that will land me at Koweit, Bassorah, or Bagdad.
If I get into trouble they will not--cannot, in fact--do as much for
me as they would for a spindle-legged Hindu coolie. And all this on
the chance that, some time before I am retired for old age or
invalided from the Indian army, the Great White Bear will try to come
down to the Persian Gulf to slake his age-long thirst. In this
contingency, of course, there is no denying the fact that I shall be
very much in demand, especially if operations are carried on in my own
“sphere,” that of North-Eastern Arabia and Southern Mesopotamia, up to
a line drawn from Bagdad to Hitt.
Afoot, or by horse or camel, I have traversed almost every square mile
of this region. There is not a bazaar from Kerbela to Koweit in which,
disguised, I cannot mingle unsuspected in the throng, or, in case of
need, call upon friends who will do anything, from giving me a
cigarette or a handful of dates to risking their lives to save my own.
I also know every one of the greater, as well as most of the lesser,
Bedouin sheikhs whose peoples roam the deserts between Bassorah and
Damascus; and with one of the most powerful of these--his camels are
over 100,000 in number and his sheep and goats three times that--I
have gone through the “blood brotherhood” ceremony. The blood of our
arms has actually mingled, and each is pledged to stop at no act to
serve the other. My friends, I need hardly say, are all Arabs,
Chaldeans, Syrians, Jews, or people of one of the other subject races
of this region; to the Turk, courteous as he is to me socially in
Bagdad and Bassorah, my name is anathema. A week hence, for instance,
I shall exchange Oriental amenities with the Vali of Bagdad in his
garden on the banks of the Tigris. He will toast me in scented coffee
and drink to the success of my visit; and all the while a double guard
of police will be watching the gates to prevent my getting away to the
desert and my Arab friends. Personally, I know it would pain him if I
were to be shot in the dark for neglecting to answer a sentry’s
challenge; but officially he is dead keen for it, and there is no
doubt that it would do him a lot of good in Stamboul, where he is not
in very high favour at present.
The whole thing, when all is said and done, resolves itself down to
about this: If a war involving operations in this “sphere” comes
within the next twenty years, I,--and a couple of other chaps who are
doing the same sort of work,--provided I do not lose my life, or my
health, or the best of my faculties in the interim, will probably
break all records outside of a Central American revolution for quick
promotion. I should probably be a brigadier-general at forty, with ten
or a dozen letters after my name. But if, as is likely, there is no
war, I shall probably continue these little jaunts into the desert
until my health gives out, when, at best, I shall be invalided home
and retired on the half-pay of a captain or a major.
So, you see, my future depends entirely upon whether or not some of
our neighbours, or would-be neighbours, see fit to “start something”
in this little neck of Central Asia within the next decade or two. And
now that Russia is in the Entente, and we are acting so entirely in
concert with her in Persia, I’m very much afraid that it’s going to be
a case of the “hope deferred which maketh the heart sick.”
II
The following day we caught the river steamer at Bassorah, and four
days later arrived at Bagdad, F---- putting up at the grim brown fort
which housed the British Consulate, post office, and telegraph
station. I saw him on and off for a week, usually at tiffins or
dinners given for him by some of his British friends. At other times
he was not to be found. “F---- _Sahib_ gone to bazaar,” his Pathan
bearer invariably answered my inquiries; and F---- himself volunteered
no more than that he was spending a good deal of time “renewing old
acquaintances.” Then, at the end of about ten days, without a good-bye
to anybody, so far as I could learn, he dropped from sight. “F---- is
off again to his Arabs,” said his friends.
“I am much relieved,” the Consul whispered to me. “They hung on him
like leeches this time, but F---- got away by togging up as an
Armenian _arabana_ driver when they were expecting him as an Arab. The
Armenian came here, F---- stained his face, got into the chap’s
clothes, and actually drove the _arabana_, with a load of passengers,
to Kerbela. The Turks nabbed the real driver when they caught him
going out on foot, but got little out of him, and I don’t think they
know yet exactly what happened. F---- is far into the desert by this
time.”
This was in 1912, and at that time no one--least of all F----, who had
the most to gain by such an event--appeared to dream that the
blood-drenched plains of Babylonia and Assyria were likely to echo ere
many years to the tramp of hostile armies. The broad scope of
Germany’s activities, extending far beyond the mere construction of
the Bagdad Railway, was evident to every one; but, this
notwithstanding, the general impression seemed to be that the
whip-hand in this region was Russia’s. This feeling was aptly
expressed by an old Turkish officer with whom I discussed Near Eastern
politics at Mosul. “The Germans may build railroads,” he said,
punctuating his measured speech with puffs from a gurgling _hookah_,
“and the British may build ships, and the Turks may build dams and
canals,”--referring to the reclamation work at Hindia on the
Euphrates,--“but in the end the Great White Bear will come down to the
Persian Gulf and have his drink of warm water.”
That the Germans had ambitious plans for controlling the commerce of
the incalculably rich Tigro-Euphrates Valley no one doubted, or even
that the Kaiser aimed at some sort of political control. But that
German influence should prevail over that of Britain and Russia in
Constantinople, to the extent of aligning the Porte on the side of the
Kaiser against the Triple Entente, was not dreamed of in Mesopotamia,
even by the Turks themselves. The price to the Entente, however, of
alienating Italy from the Triple Alliance by acquiescing in that
Power’s conquest of Tripoli, was the irretrievable loss of Turkey’s
friendship; and with the succession of Enver Pasha to the War Ministry
at the end of the first Balkan conflict, there is no doubt that the
Porte stood absolutely committed to action with Germany. After the
outbreak of the present war, Turkey’s participation on the side of the
Central Powers was only a matter of the Kaiser’s nod. Enver Pasha,
educated in Berlin and always actively anti-Russian, had spent nearly
two years in preparation for the struggle which the Germans had
doubtless assured him was inevitable; and the making ready for a fight
to the death at the Dardanelles was not allowed to interfere with a
general stiffening of the Eastern defences. This, briefly, was the way
in which it came about that Britain is facing Turkey instead of the
long-prepared-against Russia in the Mesopotamian “theatre.” But I will
let my friend F----, to whom it was given to help set and stage the
opening scenes of the play, tell something of what happened up to the
moment of his tragic exit.
Late in the fall of 1914, a hastily scribbled card reached me in
California. “Things looming large at last,” it read. “Am off for the
‘P.G.’[1] to-morrow with big work in prospect. Will write when I can
get anything of interest passed.” The card was post-marked Karachi,
and dated but a few days previous to Turkey’s official entry into the
war. I took it, therefore, that the Indian Government had discounted
this action, and that at the moment the Turks opened hostilities by
bombarding the Russian coast, F----, doubtless with considerable
forces, was on the way to his “sphere.”
[1] Persian Gulf.
The promised letter was long delayed, and when it came bore the
post-mark Bassorah, not in the pothook Turkish characters, but in
plain English letters, while the blue two-and-a-half anna stamp of
India appeared in the corner formerly sacred to the narrow, pink,
half-gummed one-piastre sticker which you had often to affix with a
pin to keep it from falling off. Thus ran the letter:--
“I am writing you this from the one-time home port of ‘Sinbad the
Sailor,’ which, I am rejoiced to say, has been under our flag for some
days. The Turks had considerable forces of seasoned troops
here,--doubtless you remember how much of the old town was taken up by
barracks,--but, evidently because they did not expect us so soon, or
in such force, had done little in the way of outpost defence. This,
coupled with the facts that our naval strength was overwhelming and
the river very ineffectively mined, made what might have been an
operation of tremendous difficulty comparatively easy. The guns of our
cruisers outranged those of the old forts at the mouth of the
Shat-el-Arab, and, with sweepers working ahead of them, the
light-draught gunboats peppered so hotly those dense palm groves which
fringe the river banks that we had little difficulty in fighting our
way through them without great loss.
“Co-operating with the advance up the river, our main force was landed
above Koweit and marched across the open desert to attack Bassorah on
the west, threatening the rear of the Turkish positions on the left
bank. Here the Turk could have made us no end of trouble had he been
in sufficient force, for the lowlands were partly inundated and a
defence of the practicable routes could have been made very effective.
“It was the weakness of the opposition met here that first led us to
hope that Bassorah was not going to be strongly defended. Although the
advance resolved itself into little more than a series of outpost
actions, the period was an anxious one for us--and especially for
me--in that it put to the acid test the result of our work, not only
in forecasting the capricious and variable overflow, but also in
conciliating the no less capricious and variable Arabs of a region
nominally subject to Turkey. I can only tell you now that things
turned out, and are continuing to turn out, even better than we had
any reason to hope they would. There was no suggestion of a menace to
our exposed left flank from the hordes of curious but in no wise
hostile Arabs who showed themselves all along the way, and the censor
will probably not allow me to tell you that our transport and
commissariat, if nothing more, will probably be much helped by active
assistance from this source. [Here several sentences, doubtless
telling something more of the attitude of the Arabs, were obscured by
the censor’s brush.] So you will see that the Turk is reaping the
harvest he deserves from his sowing of harshness and duplicity among
the Bedouins, and that the time and efforts of us ‘language students’
who have worked this sphere will not have been spent in vain.
“The Turks have undoubtedly been quite sound in deciding not to make a
stand at Bassorah. With the sea approaches in our hands, and with the
city entirely encompassed by desert and marsh, the holding of it for
any time would have hinged upon command of either the Tigris or the
Euphrates all the way to the rich agricultural region to the west of
Bagdad. As the cutting of this line by us was only a matter of time,
the city would have been isolated and forced to withstand a siege
which could only have ended in the capture of whatever forces were
locked up there. As it is, the most of these forces are now at liberty
to dispute our advance, through a very difficult country, to
Mesopotamia and Bagdad. Here it seems certain we shall have all the
fighting we care for.
“I have not mentioned the fact that I have received my captaincy and
am assigned to the general staff. In an ordinary campaign the latter
circumstance would mean a lot of dreary consultations at headquarters,
and no action. Here, Allah be praised, the case is quite different.
R----, K---- (the two chaps who have also worked this sphere), and I
are always called in, if we chance to be on hand, when the maps are
unrolled; but most of the time the whole lot of us are off on
something else. R---- has been through the Turkish lines twice, once
spending three days in Kurna, their advanced base, and I have been off
on a week’s journey to receive renewed assurances of the friendship of
my Bedouin ‘blood-brother.’ It is going to be a jolly amusing game.”
III
Another letter came from F---- a month later, this being in answer to
one I had rushed off on receiving the card announcing his departure
for the Persian Gulf:--
“You ask what we are driving at here, by which I suppose you mean,
‘What is our plan of campaign?’ This, obviously, is a question I can
answer only in the most general way. Our principal purpose in the
present campaign will be the occupation of southern and central
Mesopotamia up to and including the cities of Bagdad and Kerbela, a
region roughly corresponding to what might be called ancient Babylonia
proper. Our objective in this is twofold. First, to gain control of
all the irrigated--and hence highly productive--portion of the
Tigro-Euphrates Valley, and, second, to establish ourselves strongly
upon the flank of Persia in the event that that country should show a
disposition to make common cause with our enemy.
[Illustration: MAP OF THE TIGRO-EUPHRATES VALLEY, Where the
operations against Bagdad were carried out.]
“There is little doubt that the advance to Bagdad will be a fight all
the way. The most difficult country will be that between here and
about fifty miles north of where the Tigris and Euphrates come
together. Most of this area is marshy all the year, and practically
all of it will be under water from the spring floods by the time we
are ready to get into it. An endless network of ‘canals’ and backwater
channels makes it practically impossible to advance on foot even
across much of the overflow country, and one of the main reasons for
our long halt in Bassorah has been the training of our men in the use
of the various native craft which will have to figure in our
transport. Luckily, the Turks will be under the same handicap as
ourselves in this region, and our superior artillery and organisation
are sure to give us the ‘edge.’ The real fighting is going to come
when we emerge upon the level alluvial plains of Central Mesopotamia.
Here the enemy will have the Bagdad railway at his back, and, without
doubt, a pretty complete little system of German-made light railways
to keep him in munitions and food.
“It may be that it will take us to the end of 1915 to attain our first
goal. Then, if a decision in Europe has not been reached in the
meantime, our next general advance would be up the Tigris to Samara,
Tekrit, and Mosul, and up the Euphrates to Hitt and Deyr; this advance
would place in our hands an upland grain-growing region of
considerable productivity. Still another campaign would have to be
launched to occupy the country up to a line from Aleppo to Mardin or
Diarbekir; but Russia should reach this region from the Caucasus
before we can get there from the south. Upon the guns and munitions
which the Germans are able to send through to Bagdad will depend the
character of the stand that the Turk is going to make in Babylonia.
“But what a game it is going to be, this fight for the old Garden of
Eden,--with the high-banked canals and the crumbling walls of Babylon
and Hitt serving for trenches and forts, and the _khans_ which
sheltered Ali Baba and Haroun-al-Raschid as outposts! Why, the
‘G.C.C.’ and I have even discussed how we are going to use that
isolated old _tepe_ of Birs Nimrud--which some call the ‘Tower of
Babel’--when the time comes!
“Our transport for the new campaign will probably be the most
remarkable thing of the kind ever assembled. The fact that the
country into which we are advancing will be largely under water will
compel us to become practically amphibious. On land we are using
camels, horses, mules, and donkeys, while on the water the services of
everything, from the native _balems_, _gufas_, and _kaleks_ to
shallow-draught gunboats and river-steamers, will be in demand. The
old Bagdad side-wheelers have all been converted into gunboats, but
even their slight draught of five or six feet is too great for all but
the main river-channels. One of these, by the way, went into action
the other day with an armour improvised from mats of dried dates. Of
course the Turkish shrapnel made an awful mess of it, and, I am sorry
to say, also of the chaps behind it.
“The direction of the training of our men in the use of the native
watercraft has been one of my recent duties. The _balem_ is a
gondola-like sort of boat which has long been used for passenger
transport on the canals and rivers of this region. It may be rowed,
sculled, or paddled, and since it is of fairly stable equilibrium, the
men are not long in mastering it. The _gufa_, however, is quite
another matter. It is a slightly flattened ball of woven reeds covered
with pitch, having a hole from five to ten feet across at the top to
receive passengers and freight. It is propelled by paddling, now on
one side, now on the other, and two or three old hands can make very
fair progress with it. A novice, however, can do little more than make
the thing spin on its own axis. Moreover, he invariably renders
himself still more helpless by laughing at his own uselessness; and
although some of the more serious-minded Sepoys have made considerable
progress in handling the _gufa_, I am afraid we shall never be able to
make Thomas Atkins, or his equally frivolous comrade-in-arms, the
Ghurka, take it as other than a perpetual joke.
“A score of miles to the north of here, a few days ago, a dozen
dismounted troopers, in lieu of anything better to hand, tried to
cross a broad back channel of the Shat-el-Arab in a _gufa_, in order
to dislodge some troublesome Turkish snipers. Their best efforts,
however, served only to send the contrary craft bobbing down their own
bank, the finest kind of a mark for the enemy’s sharpshooters. The
latter (I have this on the word of the sergeant whose misplaced
enthusiasm was responsible for the trouble), evidently highly amused,
held their fire until after the ‘marines,’ as they have since been
dubbed by their comrades, had kicked a hole in the bottom of the
_gufa_ and been compelled to take to the water. The few scattering
shots fired even then were apparently sent only with the intent of
‘shooing’ several belligerent Tommies back to their own side, for the
only casualty reported was the drowning of a man who, in the language
of one of his surviving comrades, ‘caught ’is bloomin’ spur in the
bally goofy an’ got ’eld under water.’
“Which incident reminds me to say a word for our old friend, the Turk,
as a sporting fighter. Of course, we knew all the time that he was a
first-class offensive fighter and a superlative defensive one; but,
because for years we have known him under such characterisations as
‘The Terrible,’ and ‘The Unspeakable,’ we had come to expect from him
a programme of ‘frightfulness’ quite in keeping with that of his
allies of the Occident. That nothing of this character has been in
evidence is one of the most refreshing surprises of the campaign. I
can only set down here one of a number of instances in point which
have fallen under my observation.
“You doubtless read in the papers that the Turks made an attempt in
some force to recover Bassorah a few weeks ago, going by boats to
Nasire, on the Euphrates, and marching from there around the
inundation area to approach this point from the west. Fortunately, one
of our ‘friends’ sent us word of what was afoot, and we were able to
prepare a proper reception at Shaiba. It was after we had beaten them
back at this point, and while they were fighting rearguard actions in
a most cleverly conducted retreat, that the incident I have in mind
occurred. I was out with, though not in command of, a troop of cavalry
which was pressing the pursuit a considerable distance ahead of our
main force. About eleven o’clock in the morning we found our way
blocked by a small detachment of the enemy which had been left to make
a stand at an isolated _khan_, one of those walled desert
halting-places of the caravanserai order,--really more of a fort than
a tavern.
“There was no use in trying to dislodge the Turks until the guns came
up, but, unluckily, about a dozen chaps, out of touch with their
officer, attempted to rush the gate ’on their own.’ The enemy coolly
let them come on to about a hundred yards from the _khan_, and then,
unmasking a machine-gun, dropped them all in a space not fifty feet
square. A rifle volley brought down the three or four reckless spirits
who, in spite of wounds, staggered to their feet and lurched ahead.
Taking advantage of the cover afforded by a pair of old canal banks,
we managed to get up within about three hundred yards of the _khan_
gate without exposing ourselves dangerously, there to wait for our
field guns and to be ready to make it lively for our Turkish friends
in case they tried to evacuate in the meantime.
“For a while we thought that, mercifully, no life remained in any of
the still, sprawling brown figures in front of the _khan_; but
presently, with his face covered with the dirt a sniper’s bullet had
thrown on it as he put his head up for a look, a man crawled back to
report to Major S---- that he had seen a hand feebly raised as though
trying to attract our attention. Verifying the truth of the statement
at the risk of his big new _shikar_ helmet, S---- promptly called for
volunteers to try to bring the wounded man in. ‘It’s a slim chance,’
he said, ‘but this noonday sun would kill an unwounded man lying on
his face for an hour out there. We’ve got to make the attempt.’
“Passing down the line, S---- picked the four spryest and wiriest
looking of the sprawling row of grimy Tommies, each of whom had raised
an appealing hand as the word for volunteers passed along. ‘Make the
best of the cover of that strip of date-palms, and bring in the
man--he’s the one nearest us--the same way,’ he ordered just about as
he would have sent them out on patrol. ‘We’ll give the Turks what
diversion we can in the meantime.’
“Then we began peppering the ports of the old _khan_ in a blind and
large sort of way that had little effect, as a consequence of the fact
that the machine-gun fire which came in reply made it impossible to
put our heads up to aim. Enough of a diversion was created, however,
to allow the volunteers to make their way, apparently unobserved, to
the farther end of the palm clump. But a hail of bullets met them as
they left cover, and the last of them dropped while he was still a
dozen yards from the object of his rush. The three first to fall lay
still,--shot dead, as we learned later,--but the last one, in spite of
a punctured femur, presently pulled himself together and began to
crawl forward. It was not until this moment, I am certain, that the
Turks fully comprehended what we were driving at; for now, although
they continued to keep us under cover with sweeping jets from their
machine-gun, not another shot was directed at the man on the ground.
Nor was there any attempt to check his painful progress as he dragged
the man he had been sent after back to the palm grove. Nor yet, finest
of all, did the Turks try to wing a single one of another brave four,
who, disdaining the cover of the palm trunks, dashed out to relieve
their comrade of his burden.
“Encouraged by the forbearance of the enemy, we were about to send out
a squad under a white flag to see if any more of the wounded were
alive, when dust clouds on the southern horizon warned the Turkish
leader that our field-guns were coming up; and, with his task of
delaying the pursuit well fulfilled, he made ready to retire by
sweeping our cover with a fresh fusillade. The only gate of the
_khan_, opening to the south, was completely covered from our
position; but the resourceful Turk coolly breached the northern wall
with a flake or two of gun-cotton, and, the first thing we knew, the
whole troop--machine-gun and all--went scurrying off across the
desert. For two or three minutes they were fair marks for us, and, as
they sent several Parthian volleys themselves, there was no military
reason why we should not have tried to bring down a few of them. As a
matter of fact, we did send a few perfunctory volleys; but if its
shooting on that occasion was any criterion of the marksmanship of
S----’s troop, Allah have mercy on it when it comes to real grips
with the Turk! Not one of the fugitives dropped from his saddle, and
I don’t think one of them was hit. If we had done for even a man of
them, imagine what our feelings would have been when, on taking
possession of the _khan_, we found, hung carefully in a thick-walled
crypt well beyond all danger from our rifle fire, three goatskins of
clear, cold water, while scrawled on the wall, in both French and
Turkish, was the direction, ‘For the Wounded.’ As we had been out of
water for hours ourselves, and as a few cups sufficed for the two or
three wounded who had survived the withering sun heat, you may surmise
that our hostility toward the ‘unspeakable Turk’ was not materially
increased by this latter incident.
“The chap who was rescued at so great a cost died a few hours later,
but rather from exposure to the sun than from his wound, which was
slight. The man who brought him in is well on the road to recovery
and, I trust, a V.C.”
IV
My next, and what proved to be my last, letter from F---- reached me
in London:--
“Our general advance has begun, and we have attained our first
important objective in the occupation of the ‘Garden of Eden.’ Not
the greater ‘Garden of Eden,’ which name Sir William Willcocks applies
to all of Mesopotamia south of Hitt and Samara, but the traditional
site of the Garden at the meeting of the Tigris and Euphrates. This
was surely one of the strangest engagements in history. The country
was under water for miles around, and the Turks had fortified and
elected to make their stand on the only dry ground in the whole
region, a series of low rises--hardly to be called hills--in the rear
of Kurna. Fortunately, their available artillery was not powerful. We
had prepared for the assault by emplacing batteries of heavy howitzers
at every point sufficiently solid to support them, while lighter guns
were mounted on the river-steamers and on barges.
“After a heavy shelling of the Turkish positions our troops, in
everything from _balems_ and _gufas_ to _kaleks_ and gunboats, were
rowed, paddled, poled, and steamed forward to the limit of the draught
of their respective craft. Then over they went into the water, and the
assault commenced. Luckily the Turkish guns had been pretty well put
out of action by our howitzers, else that half-mile or more through
mud and water would have been a very costly business for us. As it
was, some barges and _kaleks_ with machine-guns on them were brought
up close to the enemies’ lines, and, the fire of these and the
gunboats having made the Turkish positions practically untenable, the
troops had to do little more than go and round up a very sizeable
bunch of prisoners who had been cut off by a swift flanking movement
of a column of Sepoys. Some of our men, in their eagerness, went
overboard into deep water, and, as a consequence, had to chuck their
accoutrements and swim for it. A number of them, in fact, lost more
than their arms; and a bevy whom I saw later helping to shepherd some
Turkish prisoners aboard a gunboat had little to differentiate them,
sartorially, from Father Adam in the earliest days of this same
‘Garden of Eden.’
“I had a rather interesting job a few days ago. This was to lead a
small picked force across country and destroy a bridge of boats which
the Turks were endeavouring to maintain across the Tigris at the Tomb
of Ezra, for the use of any stragglers who might still be drifting
back from the south.
“You recall the Bible story of this famous structure. The Prophet
Ezra, faring about this region in his old age, feeling the hand of
Death upon him, directed his followers to bind his body to a camel,
drive the animal into the desert, and where it finally lay down to
rest, there to make the holy man’s burial-place. The camel headed
straight for the nearest reach of the Tigris, and there the
brilliantly-tiled tomb which was reared above the Prophet’s remains
stands to this day, a mecca for Jews and Mohammedans alike.
“I didn’t make a very brilliant success of my job with the bridge of
boats. We got into a marsh in the darkness and waded about in it until
too late to make the night surprise I had counted upon at Ezra’s Tomb.
We did get there at dawn, however, and, principally because the Turks
must have thought we had strong support coming up, managed to induce
the latter to evacuate his very good position about the Tomb and
retire to the east bank of the river. We established ourselves in one
of the Tomb gardens, but could go no farther for the moment on account
of the brisk and accurate fire of the enemy from the other side.
“Most of the day I lay on my back in a bed of petunias under the
garden wall, and gorged myself on the ripe pomegranates which the
Turkish bullets cut down from the trees above. But about mid-afternoon
they knocked a couple of bee-hives off the wall into the very midst of
us, and, as we were wearing ‘shorts,’ with nothing to protect the leg
from calf to knee, the sequel was a very unpleasant one. So dead sure
were those bees that our inoffensive little party was responsible for
upsetting their homes that they divided themselves into just as many
bands as we were men, and started, impartially and systematically, to
sting us to death. My men were out of hand in an instant, and I really
believe that, had not a modern miracle been wrought, another
minute would have seen the whole pack of us, careless of such
trifles as Turkish rifle and machine-gun fire, wallowing in the
fifty-yard-distant Tigris.
“The miracle was performed by a little pink-cheeked, bare-footed angel
of a Jewess, evidently the ‘shepherd of the bees.’ Unconcernedly
tripping out among the writhing ‘casualties,’ oblivious alike to the
threat of Turkish bullets and the roaring masses of bees, she set up
the punctured hives in a safe place under the wall, and then began to
beat sharply with a stick upon an old bronze gong which was suspended
from her neck by a thong. Instantly the bees stopped stinging, and
inside of five minutes the last of them was settling back with a
contented buzz into its hive. I could have kissed the stubby brown
toes of the pink-cheeked little angel of mercy. And here again let me
record to the credit of the Turks that, although her head and
shoulders must have been visible to them above the low wall, they made
no attempt to stop with a bullet the work which, had they only known
it, was all that prevented the whole lot of us from falling into their
hands.
“Every man of us was, of course, in beastly shape from the stings. My
own agony from this source was infinitely worse than that from a
bullet which ploughed up my scalp when we cut the bridge of boats
after darkness had fallen; in fact, if the truth were known, I think
the desperate pain all of the boys were in had a good deal to do with
the absolute recklessness they displayed when the time came for us to
try to fulfil our mission. I heard one chap tell another he was afraid
that he _wasn’t_ going to get shot, and the whole bunch acted as if
they felt the same way. Luckily, the Turks had no searchlight, and it
is probable their own fire helped not a little in breaking up the
bridge. At any rate, it went off down the yellow Tigris in a score of
sections, and we--or what was left of us--with it. A half-dozen
impetuous Turks who, in their eagerness to get at close quarters, had
come out to welcome us half-way, were also carried along when the
bridge broke up. After that it was a case of _sauve qui peut_ for all
of us, and I’m sorry to say that only about a third of the force I
started out with has, so far, straggled back to Kurna.”
V
I was still chuckling over F----’s account of his experience with the
bees when, opening the latest issue of the _Sphere_ the following
afternoon, I saw his familiar face smiling back at me from the corner
of one of the first pages. “Been getting mentioned in dispatches,” I
said to myself; and then the title of the page, on which appeared a
score of other portraits, met my eye: “Dead on the Field of Honour;
Officers Killed in Action.” There were no particulars, not even a
date; nor was anything further to be learned behind the tape-bound
portals of Whitehall. To the officers of F----’s regiment, now
fighting in Flanders, some few details were ultimately vouchsafed; and
from one of these, whom I encountered a few days ago, during his leave
in London, I learned all that I have so far been able to gather
concerning the death of my friend.
“F----’s work in cutting the bridge of boats across the Tigris,” he
said, “is spoken of as one of the most daring things of the
Mesopotamian campaign. Undoubtedly he deserved a V.C. for it, and it
is just possible one may be awarded posthumously. He was slightly
wounded there, but must have been out on duty again within a very few
days. According to the account we have received, he was off on some
special detail when he came upon a number of imbeciles of the
transport trying to ferry several camels and machine-guns across a
back channel of the Euphrates on a _kalek_, a sort of raft consisting
of a light platform resting on inflated sheepskins. One of the camels
had kicked a hole in the platform and was rapidly demolishing the
supporting skins, when F----, fearing the loss of the guns, swam off
to try and set things right. In endeavouring to extricate the camel,
he ducked under the _kalek_, where, it seems likely, his wounded head
was struck by one of the brute’s sharp hoofs, and he let go his grip
and sank before any one could get hold of him. Glorious death, wasn’t
it,--for a man who had led the life F---- had, and who, for that
particular region, was the most nearly indispensable man with the
expedition?”
Two months have gone by since F----’s last letter was written, and
the Mesopotamian campaign has been prosecuted along the general lines
he forecasted at the outset. Nasire and Amara have fallen, and the
early winter will see the armies drawn up for the final fight for
Bagdad, probably upon that same Plain of Shinar where the scarlet
desert flowers still keep alive the old belief that
Never blows so red
The rose as where some buried Cæsar bled.
For destiny has decreed that once more the might of two rival races
shall lock in death-grips for the possession of that age-old prize,
the Garden of Eden. Eve was put without the gates when she tasted of
the Forbidden Fruit, and right on down through the ages the same
undeviating penalty has been inflicted upon the Babylonian, Mede,
Assyrian, and other empires that gorged themselves upon the Forbidden
Fruit of Corruption. Brave foeman that he is, the Turk, cloyed with
the same Forbidden Fruit, has long been marked for the inexorable
justice of the ages, and every precedent of tradition, history, and
strategy points to the conclusion that the closing hour of his
stewardship of the Garden of Eden is about to strike.
“IT’S A WAY THEY HAVE IN THE AIR CORPS”
I
It had been all of nine years since I first met Horne at an _estancia_
house-party in the heart of the Argentine Pampas, and fully seven
since I last saw him at a banquet given at the Buenos Aires Jockey
Club in his honour, a day or two after he had led his four to victory
in the finals of the River Plate polo championships. Yet, in spite of
the pallor of a face I had always remembered as bronzed, and a slight
hitch in his once swinging gait, I recognised him instantly--it was
the keen, piercing glance, I think, and the sudden flash of white
teeth in the quick smile--when he hailed me from a passing taxi and
came hobbling back along the broad pavement of Whitehall to meet me.
“What does this mean?” I asked, indicating his jaunty Flying Corps
uniform, after we had shaken hands. “I thought it was the army you
were in before you resigned to become an opulent _estanciero_ and
‘man-about-the-Pampas.’”
“It was the army I came back to,” he replied, “and I was with my old
regiment at Neuve Chapelle when a fragment of hand-grenade effected a
semi-solution of the continuity of one of my Achilles tendons and put
a period on my further usefulness in that branch of the service. The
‘air’ was still open to me, however, and, as I had already dabbled in
flying,--I was the first man to pilot an aeroplane across the Plate
estuary,--I got a commission almost immediately, and so lost very
little time.”
“But your ‘lily-white’ face and hands,” I pressed. “I never heard that
the air had a bleaching effect on the complexion.”
“Oh--that--” (Horne looked absently at a blue-veined hand and shuffled
uneasily), “that must have come from my spell of ‘C.H.’--confined in
hospital. Got knocked up a bit again. Flying over Belgium. Got shot
down and hit the edge of Holland a trifle too hard when I volplaned
over the boundary. Telescoped a few vertebræ, that’s all. Now, be a
good chap and stop asking questions and jump in with me and come along
to the Club.”
Horne waited for me while I picked up a few promised figures at the
“Lloyd-Georgery,” as he facetiously called the new Ministry of
Munitions in Whitehall Gardens, and then took me up to one of the
Service clubs in Piccadilly. There, without giving me further chance
to “get him up into the air,” he launched at once into news and
reminiscence of the Plate and the Pampas. When I left him at six, we
had talked for close on two hours without more than the most casual
reference to events of the war.
“A keen patriot, like all the rest of these young Britons who have
flocked home from overseas to fight for their country,” I reflected as
I sauntered down through Green Park; “but certainly not keen on his
work.” I even speculated as to whether or not Horne might be in some
sort of trouble in the service. Nothing else seemed to account for the
man’s reticence regarding everything connected with his special
activities.
A few days later Horne called me up to ask me to dine with him that
evening at a famous old restaurant in the Strand.
“‘S----’s’ is a bit more ‘merry and bright’ than this old tomb of a
Club,” he said, “and a few of the Flying Corps chaps who are in the
habit of rendezvousing there while in London on leave you’ll find well
worth knowing.”
The gathering was even more informal than I had anticipated. One of
the long tables, it appeared, was set aside for “R.F.C.” officers and
their friends, and these dropped in by twos and threes, as suited
their convenience, all the way from seven to ten o’clock.
There were half-a-dozen men at the table when Horne and I entered, and
all of these--they had stalls for a new “revue”--presently took their
leave. One of the group was a South African, one a New Zealander, and
two Australians. The latter we found bent over the racing page of the
Sydney _Bulletin_, while the New Zealander was evidently trying to
persuade the Africander that a dairy herd near Wellington offered
better prospects than a general farm in Rhodesia. One of the
Australians, whose family was interested in an importing house,
lingered behind a moment to ask me if I thought the war was going to
force up the price of American agricultural machinery in foreign
markets. None of them said a word about flying, and Horne volunteered
no more than that they were all “good men--that little chap from New
Zealand really ‘topping.’”
Horne, with the fleshpots of Argentina in his mind, ordered solidly
and lengthily, and three or four more officers had “wolfed” hasty
meals of roast beef and whisky-and-soda before our _Chateaubriand_
(which represents the nearest Anglo-French equivalent to the _carne
asado_ of the Pampas) had been done to its proper turn over the
coals. These, like the others, rattled on about the music-halls, the
homeland, the “rotten London weather”--anything and everything, in
fact, save the war in general and the war in the air in particular.
One, it is true,--he had come from France only that afternoon,--in
accounting for a bandaged hand, did mention something about getting a
finger jammed under the belt of his machine-gun; but it seemed to
occur to no one to inquire what he had been shooting at, or whether or
not he had hit it, or any of a dozen or so other things concerning
which I, for one, was at once consumed with interest.
By nine all of those with theatre or other engagements had come and
gone, and the eight or ten still seated at the table were leisurely
diners with the evening on their hands. Yet not even among these
unhurried ones was there evident any inclination to talk of their
work. On the contrary, I fancied I discerned an inclination to avoid,
to “side-step” it. When they were reminiscent, it was the friends and
events of their old life--“trekking,” “caravanning,” “hiking,”
“mushing”; Arctic midnights and tropic dawns; strange odds and ends of
adventure by land and sea--that they called up. And when they spoke
of the present, it was in connection with little happenings incident
to their leaves--with the comparative merits of “kit” shops, Turkish
baths, “revue” favourites, the pros and cons of drink restriction, and
the extortionate charges of dentists.
Yet every man of them appeared true to what I have since come to
recognise as a rapidly-developing type--the “Flying Type.” The army
aviator of to-day is picked for his quickness of mind and body, and
the first thing that strikes you about him is a sort of feline,
wound-up-spring alertness. Then you note his reticence, the cool
reserve of a man whose lot it is to express himself in deeds rather
than words. And lastly there is the quiet seriousness, verging almost
on sadness, of the man who must hold himself ready to look Death
between the eyes at any moment, and yet keep his mind detached for
other things.
It was the youngest, and therefore the least “formed,” officer of the
lot--a lad who had left his cacao plantation in Trinidad to come home
and fight--who was responsible for the only “shop” discussion of the
evening. Noting that he was eating but little, and constantly passing
his hand over his temples, some one asked him banteringly if he was
“homesick or only lovesick.”
“Neither,” he answered, relaxing his set lips in a forced smile. “Had
a bit of an accident yesterday, and have had a deuce of a headache
ever since. Can’t for the life of me make out whether it comes from
going up too high or coming down too quick. I went up higher and came
down faster than ever before in my experience. Landed all right, but
ever since I’ve felt as though I were being blown up by a tire-pump
that was driving air into every capillary and nerve-tip. My head feels
as though some one was opening up a jack-screw inside of it. Suppose I
should have gone to the hospital and found out what was wrong, but I
didn’t want to spoil my leave. Maybe some of you chaps can tell me why
I feel as though I had to keep holding my head together to stop its
flying to pieces,” he concluded, pressing the heels of his hands to
his temples to offset the seeming pressure from within.
Every one stopped talking and leaned forward with interest, and for an
instant I thought the curtain was going to drop and reveal something
of the experiences, if not the minds, of those khaki-clad sphinxes of
the air. Horne’s coldly professional diagnosis dashed the hope.
“Altitude,” he pronounced laconically. “Got over twelve thousand,
didn’t you? Over thirteen thousand? That accounts for it. And you
went up wide-open, trying to take ‘pride of place’ away from a Fokker,
I suppose? Of course. And when you got there you began to feel like a
deep-sea fish looks when you bring him up out of the kelp-beds and his
own air-bladders blow him up? A man can go up fifteen thousand feet by
rail or on foot without more than a shortness of breath and occasional
nose-bleed. But not every man--and not even every seasoned flyer--can
stand jumping up to twelve thousand feet in the half-hour that some of
the new machines can negotiate that height in. The difficulty’s almost
entirely physical, and it all depends upon how a man is made whether
or not his flesh and blood will accommodate themselves to the suddenly
reduced pressure of the atmosphere. There’s no growing used to it. If
it ‘gets’ you once, it’s pretty sure to do it again. At the best you
may only have a bad headache and a sort of ‘boiled-owl’ feeling for a
week. At the worst you faint, lose control of your machine, and are
listed among the casualties of ’cause unknown.’ Did _you_ lose
control, by any chance?”
“I think not,” was the reply. “It was a second German machine--one
that I hadn’t seen--that brought me down. It came nose-diving down
out of a cloud, shaking its tail, and giving me a regular shower-bath
of bullets--the usual Fokker trick. I’m almost positive I can remember
all the way down. Fact is, with my machine in the shape that it was
after its peppering, any ‘lapse’ on my part would have started it
somersaulting at once. No. Rotten as I felt, I’m sure I kept
‘connected up’ mentally all the way down.”
Horne shook his head dubiously. “You may be able to stick it,” he
said; “but before you try any more big-game shooting among the high
places, best have a few practice flights in the upper empyrean. The
sooner a man learns his altitude limit the better. There’s plenty of
useful work below twelve thousand feet for the man who begins to
‘blow-up’--mentally or physically--above that height.”
Conversation became general again even before Horne had finished
speaking, for to most of them there was nothing new in what he was
saying. None but the man on the left of the young West Indian ventured
an inquiry as to the details of what had happened, and it was only by
straining my ears that I was able to catch the drift of the
low-voiced, almost monosyllabic exchange.
“Get your petrol tank?”
“No, for a wonder. Got about everything else, though. Propeller all
chewed up; wings a pair of sieves. Bumped the bumps all the way down.
Ground was about the softest thing I hit.”
“Any one get the Hun?”
“None of us. Got himself, though. He came breezing out of a tuft of
cirro-cumuli all of fifteen thousand feet up, and seemed to be going
wild; sort of running amuck. Seemed to be trying to ram me when he
nose-dived, and the reason he bored me so full of holes was that he
didn’t sheer off to give me a berth. Missed me by a hair, and almost
upset me with his wind. But he never recovered from his dive. Just
seemed to lose control and started going end over end. Fell almost
into some of our trenches. I landed five miles away from the wreck of
him with nothing shot up but my machine and my nerves.”
“Any one get the first machine--the one you went up after?”
“No. It had the heels of all of us. The Hun’s ‘Archies’[2] brought
down one of our machines that tried to follow it.”
[2] Soldiers’ slang for anti-aircraft guns.--THE EDITORS.
“Shop” interest waned at this juncture, and the conversation upon
which I had been eavesdropping veered off _viâ_ headache-remedies and
a pretty Scotch nurse at a hospital in France to the comparative
merits of the “Empire” and “Alhambra” choruses; and I was able to turn
both ears to Horne, who had been holding forth learnedly for some
minutes on the points of the Andean pony-thoroughbred cross as a polo
mount.
II
Our fellow diners drifted away as they had come--singly, and in twos
and threes--and by ten o’clock Horne and I were alone in the deserted
lounge with our cigars and coffee. He was expecting to be rung up at
ten-thirty, he said, and as the time approached I could not help
noticing that he became _distrait_ and nervous, palpably anxious. The
call came promptly, and it was with a look of ill-concealed
apprehension on his face that he rose to follow the summoning flunkey
to the telephone booth. A minute later he returned walking on air.
Twice or thrice he tried to take up the dropped thread of Argentine
reminiscence, finally giving it up as a bad job.
“I can’t help telling you that I’ve just had some very good news,” he
exclaimed, with beaming face. “For six weeks now I have been haunted
by a fear that that last jarring up I got was going to put me out of
the game for good. Yesterday I had the doctors go over me, and now,
after being kept all day on tenterhooks, comes word that, so far as
flying is concerned, I’m going to be as right as rain. Nothing
whatever likely to occur to prevent my going back in a fortnight. I
think I must be just about the happiest man in London to-night. I----”
He checked himself with a deprecatory gesture. “Really, you’ll have to
pardon my outburst, old chap; but I wasn’t half sure that I wasn’t in
line for invaliding out. Besides, I’ve been fairly itching to be ‘up’
all day. There’s been witchery in the air ever since sunrise. I’ve
never known more perfect flying weather. Which reminds me, by the way,
that the Zepps are expected in this vicinity to-night. They were on
the ‘East Coast’ last night, you know. It’s just a little too clear
for their purposes; but the air itself is perfect--_perfect_. There
haven’t been more than one or two other such days for flying as this
one since the war began. You can’t understand it till you’ve been in
the air yourself. It was in the blood of all those chaps at dinner
this evening. They talked about everything on earth except flying; and
were thinking about nothing else but that. Didn’t you notice that they
were as restive as the lions in the Zoo an hour before feeding time?”
Throwing aside all reserve, Horne began to speak of his work--his love
of it, the fascination of it, the great and increasingly important
part it was playing in the war. This was precisely what, hoping
against hope, I had been trying to draw him out on all the evening;
and so, lighting a fresh cigar, I sank back contentedly in my armchair
to play the part of the appreciative auditor. Scarcely was I well
settled, however, when Horne abruptly ceased speaking and leaned
forward with his head cocked in an attitude of attentive listening.
“Did you hear that?” he whispered; “and that, and that?”
“Nothing but the chatter of the first dribble of the supper crowd,” I
answered. “What is it?”
“Bombs,” was the reply; “three or four of them. And, I think,
gun-fire. The Zepps must be nearer London than they have been at any
time since last October. Let’s get down to the Embankment. We can see
from there, if anywhere. They never wander far from the ‘river road.’”
The Strand, packed with the crowds from the emptying theatres, was
plainly oblivious and unalarmed, and I promptly taxed Horne with
letting either the wine or the “perfect air conditions” go to his
head. He said nothing, but, all the way down the black little canyon
of a street along which we threaded our way, appeared to be listening
intently. Not until we were about to emerge into the brighter
blankness of the Embankment did he speak again.
“There have been no more bombs,” he said, “but I think the guns are
going right along. If the sound is too faint for your ‘unattuned’ ear,
perhaps the fact that you hear no shunting of trains or whistling at
Charing Cross or Waterloo (you know of the new order which halts all
trains during air-raids) will convince you that the Zepps are about.
Or if not that, then come along here and have some ocular evidence.
What do you say to that?” And Horne pointed off down past the looming
mass of St. Paul’s to where the stationary beam of a single
searchlight laid low along the eastern horizon.
“I see the searchlight plainly enough,” I said, “but where’s the
Zepp?”
“Take my glass,” said Horne, handing me a small pair of
semi-collapsible binoculars which was evidently a constant companion.
“Now focus on that point of brighter glow, with a shadow behind it,
half-way down the shaft--right there, straight over the back of the
right-hand lion at the foot of the Obelisk.”
I did as directed, fairly to gasp with astonishment as a tiny blur, so
indistinct as to go unnoticed by the passers-by on the Embankment,
sharpened to a long, yellow-ribbed pencil, with pin-points of
light--fireflies escorting a glow-worm--flashing out and disappearing
above and below and round about it.
“The first Zepp to get over London in six months,” I ejaculated
excitedly. “How long will she take to get here? Hadn’t we better get
away from the river and under cover? But no,” I went on, peering
through the glass again; “I don’t think she’s coming this way. Seems
to be standing still. Probably hovering over W----, the old
objective.”
“London! W----!” laughed Horne. “Do you realise that _you_ didn’t hear
any bombs, and that none of these people have any idea that there’s a
raiding Zeppelin, with shells bursting about it, squarely in their
range of vision? That fellow’s all of twenty-five miles away, and as
for its ‘hovering,’ you may rest assured that when you see a Zepp with
incendiary shells bursting _above_ it, it is either badly hit or else
doing seventy miles an hour toward the home hangars. As a matter of
fact, I’ve been expecting to see this fellow begin to drop at any
moment. He’s evidently run into better guns and gunners than he
counted on. Ah! No hope!” (Horne snatched his glass and turned it
quickly on the now agitated searchlight beam.) “He’s gone. Even the
light’s lost him.”
Horne turned around disgustedly, led the way to a bench by the curb,
pushed along a somnolent “match dame” to make room for him, and
wearily sat down.
“He’s slippery game--the Zepp,” he observed presently, after watching
the futile flounderings of the questing searchlight. “I didn’t tell
you, did I, that it was through trying to get a Zepp that I came that
last cropper of mine over Belgium?”
“You know perfectly well you didn’t,” I replied, folding a corner of
the old match-seller’s straggling cloak back over her knees and
sitting down in the space vacated. “Go to it.”
“I was starting on a reconnaissance over a corner of Belgium just as
the Zepp was returning from a raid over France. I got above him, and
just after I dropped my first bomb the ‘Archies’ opened up on me from
the ground and put me out at just about the first shot. Jolly nervy
work, with my machine only a couple of hundred feet above the Zepp. A
little too nervy, perhaps, for I’ve never been quite certain in my
own mind whether it was my bomb or one from the German guns which sent
the Zepp--not wrecked but pretty badly messed up--down into a
sugar-beet field. I headed----”
“Just a moment,” I interrupted, anticipating the end of the tale at
the end of Horne’s next breath. “You’re dumping over your story just
the way a Zeppelin under fire dumps over its bombs. Now please back up
and tell it properly. The night is young, the raiders are now headed
out to sea, and the lady and I are here to follow you to the end.”
III
Horne laughed uneasily, fumbled through his pockets in a vain search
for matches, filched a box from the tilted tray of our nodding
companion,--leaving a sixpence in its place,--lit his pipe, puffed
pensively for a minute or two; and even after all that preparation
made his beginning apologetic.
“I don’t know that I’ve ever told the yarn from the beginning,” he
said, “and I’m dead sure I’ve never said much about the end. If I
chatter a bit to-night, you’ll please check it up against the good
news I had a while ago--and the air. A man could pretty nearly walk on
the air as it has been to-day, and a machine would slide through it
like tearing silk. Funny thing, but it was in the dawn following
almost just such a night as this that I went off on the flight I have
spoken of.
“There are three main factors in flying,”--Horne spoke more freely
again as he digressed upon generalities,--“the man, the machine, and
the atmosphere. Theoretically, man and machine are supposed to be sent
out in perfect order, ready to take the air as they find it. There
_are_ days, of course, when you are ‘off’, your machine ‘cranky,’ and
the air all ‘heights’ and ‘hollows,’ and at such times there is pretty
sure to be a ‘stormy passage,’ if nothing worse. Usually, however,
it’s a fairly fit man and machine against indifferent air. But once or
twice a year there comes a period, like the last eighteen hours, when
the air is almost absolutely ‘homogeneous,’ and then, with his engine
running ‘sweet,’ the man has spells of fancying himself an ‘air god’
in fact as well as in name, and acts accordingly,--invariably either
to his own or his enemy’s sorrow.
“It was like that on the morning I am telling you about--man, machine,
and air all in harmony--yes, and with the usual result. I would have
remembered this flight for several reasons, even if the Zepp hadn’t
come along; for one, because of our ride down the wake of a ‘42’
shell; for another, on account of the terrific shelling they gave, or
tried to give us, as we passed over the German lines.
“The meeting with the shell was merely one of those freak experiences
that might happen to any one, or, just as well, never happen at all.
It was during the time I am speaking of that the Germans were amusing
themselves by a long-distance bombardment of N---- with their biggest
guns, and we--(I had an observation officer along, a chap named K----,
whom you may have heard of as a long-distance runner)--simply chanced
to meander into the path of one shell somewhere about the last quarter
of its trajectory. Watching from a distance, you can always see one of
these brutes go hurtling along, but this one we only heard,--and
felt,--and it was like two express trains, going in opposite
directions, passing at full speed. There was a strange soft sort of a
buzz, growing into a rushing roar inside of two or three seconds, a
blow from a solid wall of air that was like colliding with the side of
a house, and then, for two or three minutes, a series of bumps like
going over a corduroy road in a springless cart.
“I don’t know whether we interfered very much with the course of that
shell, but the shell pretty nearly brought _our_ flight to an end then
and there. Only the fact that we met the first big rush of air head-on
saved us. I wouldn’t have had one chance in a thousand of ‘correcting’
if it had caught us sideways--and even as it was, the machine, in
spite of its seventy-miles-an-hour headway, was stood up on its rudder
like a rearing horse. After that first ‘collision,’ our fluttering
flight down the wake of the ‘42’ was only ‘queer,’ but withal a
different sensation from anything I had ever experienced.
“I have no idea how close we passed to each-other. My impression of
the moment was that the distance was inside of fifty yards, though it
was doubtless really much greater. We were not, of course, going in
exactly opposite directions, for the shell must have been coming down
at a considerably greater angle than that at which we were going up.
Yet the ‘aerial surf’ stirred up by the passage of the Hun’s little
messenger of goodwill in that smooth stretch of atmosphere was heavy
and persistent enough to keep my machine wallowing for over a mile.
“The air was going by us in a swift, steady river as we neared the
German lines, and I never recall having been able to climb so quickly
and easily. Lucky it was, too, for the enemy--probably in anticipation
of a pursuit of their returning raiders--had their whole trench
‘hinterland’ planted with anti-aircraft guns, both stationary and
movable. There was one little strip that blossomed out like a poppy
garden as they opened up on us, and for a minute or so the smoke from
the spreading shell-bursts formed a good-sized little cloud of its
own. But they never had any real chance of getting us. My good little
engine, singing like the wind in the telephone wires, had enabled me
to get up over fourteen thousand feet without turning a hair and at
that height you’re a lot safer from shells in an aeroplane than from
taxis in crossing the Strand. K---- was feeling the altitude a bit, I
think; I saw him wiping blood from his nose and pressing his hands to
his ears, but he gave no signs of real distress. As for myself, beyond
a little swelling of the fingers and a drumming at the temples, I was
quite as usual.
“We passed over the main ‘bouquets’ of the ‘Archies’ without even
feeling the kick of the shells bursting beneath us; but in dropping
down to ten thousand feet a few miles beyond, we encountered an
unexpected ‘plant’ of them and the shrapnel bullets were flying all
about us for a minute or two. A score of neat little holes winked out
in the wings, and one friendly bit of a bullet--spent, but still hot
from its sharp flight--dropped gently into my lap and slightly singed
the fold of my coat in which it found lodgment. Then we left that
mare’s nest behind and the going grew smoother once more.
“It was only a few minutes later, and before any beginning had been
made on the work we had come for, that K---- picked up a Zepp through
his glass and began reporting its progress to me over the telephone.
At first it was flying very high, doubtless to keep above gun-fire in
crossing our lines. Once over, however, it came down rapidly,
probably, as K---- suggested, with the purpose of luring the pursuing
aeroplanes into easy range of the German ‘Archies.’ If that was the
plan, it was eminently successful; for K---- presently reported one of
our ‘chasers’ falling in flames, another planing for our own lines,
and two or three others turning back. I could see the marauder myself
by this time, and noted that it appeared to be heading off about
twenty-five degrees to the west of me, and flying already at a level
considerably lower than the twelve thousand feet I had run up to in
getting away from the last spasm of gun-fire.
“It was this commanding height, together with the fact that my engine
was running as sweetly as when it started, that determined me to take
a hand in the game at this juncture. Still keeping well up, I promptly
headed across to cut off the returning prodigal. For a minute or two
the Zepp either didn’t recognise me as ‘enemy,’ or else ignored me
entirely. But presently a sharp speeding up of its engines was
apparent, and for a moment I thought that it was going to challenge me
for a climbing contest, generally a Zepp’s first resort. But a few
seconds later it had altered its course through nearly half a quadrant
and headed off at top speed, at the same time beginning to descend at
what I figured was about an angle of ten per cent., or five hundred
feet to the mile. The ruse--to draw me down over some concealed line
of ‘Archies’ in that direction--was plain as day; but I had three
thousand feet of altitude to the good, power to burn, and, moreover,
was bitten deep for the moment with that ‘air-god’ bug I have spoken
of. It seemed as natural that I should chase Zepps as that a
fox-terrier should chase chickens. Without further thought, I accepted
the challenge and launched off in pursuit of the speeding ‘sausage.’
“It really never occurred to me to discuss the thing with K----, but,
like the trump he was, he never showed by word or sign that tilting at
airships had not been included in our orders. He, also, twigged the
game at once.
“‘Guns probably in that thick clump of trees by the little pond,’ his
far-away voice said over the telephone. ‘Best catch him as far this
side there as you can. One of his engines missing badly, and he’s not
going very fast.’
“With a quarter of an hour instead of a couple of minutes to work in,
I would have preferred to keep along on a comparatively high level,
and only descend, to drop my bombs, at an angle that would have kept
me pretty well out of the range of the Zepp’s guns. But K----’s
warning was too sound to be disregarded and, in this case, the
quickest way was also the only way. As it was, it was really almost a
nose-dive, and I did the first half of it with the throttle wide open.
So fast did we come up with the Zepp that it seemed almost as if a
giant had taken the big gas-bag in his hand and thrown it at us.
“The patter of machine-gun bullets sounded only for a second or
two--it wasn’t unlike walking over a lawn-sprinkler--and, so far as I
could see, did no harm. Then, cold as ice for the work in hand, I shot
straight down along the yellow spine of the airship, letting go a
couple of bombs before my terrific speed carried me beyond my mark.
“Now a perfect torrent of shrapnel burst out around me--the
smoke-tufts made the still distant clump of trees look like a cotton
field--and almost at the same instant there was a strong rush of air
from below. The machine teetered giddily on one wing-tip for a moment,
and I just managed to right it in time to free a hand to grab the tail
of K----’s coat as he, apparently unconscious, started to lurch over
the side. I don’t seem to have any very clear recollection of being
able to get him back into his seat at all.
“I didn’t have a chance for another good look at the Zepp; I only know
that it descended rapidly, although apparently not entirely out of
control. My machine, badly shot up as it was, still seemed to have a
good deal of ‘kick’ left, though the reek of petrol in the air wasn’t
an encouraging indication that its ‘vitality’ would continue. The
impetus of my descent quickly carried me out of range of that spiteful
but isolated little battery of ‘Archies’--luckily, too, in just the
direction I wanted to go.
“Just before I flew over the Zepp--it was while the machine-gun
bullets were still pattering, I have since recalled--K---- ’phoned me
the compass bearing of the nearest point of the Dutch boundary, and
said something about it being our only chance if things went wrong.
(That they had already ‘gone wrong’ with him he gave no hint.)
Strangely, the figures had stuck in my head, and it was in that
direction I sheered as soon as the machine was on an even keel again.
It was not far, thank heaven, and, partly planing, partly under the
power of that brave little half-fed engine, I somehow managed to keep
up long enough to clear the top wire of the boundary fence and pile up
in a heap in the hospitable silt of good old Holland.”
A dozen questions tumbled after each other off the tip of my eager
tongue, and the old “match dame,” who had snored peacefully all
through Horne’s even narration, stirred and muttered petulantly at the
unwonted disturbance. But Horne, rising and working his stiff joints,
essayed to answer all in a single breath.
“I don’t know how much harm was done to the Zepp, or whether it was I
or the Hun’s own ‘Archies’ that did it. K---- died in a Dutch
hospital, without regaining full consciousness, two days later. (It
was a bullet from one of the Zepp’s machine-guns that did for him.) I
can’t tell you how I managed to get out of Holland; and”--as a low
whistle sounded from Charing Cross and a hooded eye peeped cautiously
out of the black shed--“the trains are running again; so we may take
it that the little visitor we were watching is now out over the North
Sea and on its way home to bed. I think it’s high time that we
followed its good example on the latter score. Good-night and sweet
dreams, mother.” And he took my arm and began piloting me back to the
Strand to waylay a taxi.
* * * * *
Horne has been back at work for a month now, and, so far as I have
heard, with no recurrence of ill luck. Last week I met another friend
from Argentina--a doctor, returned to “do his bit” with the Red Cross.
“Horne has made a brilliant success of his flying,” he said; “did he
tell you anything of his exploits?”
“Only a little about a brush with a Zeppelin,” I replied, “and scant
details of that.”
“That’s all he has ever told any one. Yet the Dutch patrol swear that
he came down in Holland with the tail of his half-dead observation
officer’s coat in his teeth (only thing that kept the chap from
falling out); and there is also every reason to believe that it was
his bombs that brought that Zepp down, and badly knocked up, too.
Either one of them would bring him anything from the Military Cross to
the V.C. if he would tell even the plain, unvarnished tale of it. But
the quixotic idiot made his report so confoundedly non-committal that
there was simply nothing for his commander to go by. Was hardly enough
to merit mention in dispatches the way it stood, much less to award a
decoration on. Queer thing, but they say they’ve had the same sort of
trouble with a number of the flying chaps. Seems to be a sort of cult
with them. Can’t say it’s a wholly bad one, either.”
SHARKS OF THE AIR
The sea raid, the land raid, the airship raid--this was the trio of
bugaboos under the menace of which Britain, uninvaded, almost
unthreatened, for a thousand years, stirred uneasily at the outbreak
of the war and turned anxious eyes toward the leaden mist curtain
which veiled the North Sea. Then the bulldog of the Navy after a
tentative snap or two, set its teeth in an ever-tightening
strangle-hold, and with the dying gasps of German sea-power the threat
of the sea and land raids disappeared for good. So far as England was
concerned, only the ways of the air were left open to Germany; only
the menace of the Zeppelin remained.
And when weeks had lengthened to months, and summer had given way to
autumn, and autumn to winter, without the threatened bombing from the
sky, the name of Zeppelin ceased to have interest for the stolid
Briton, now just awakening to the fact that he had a mighty task to
perform beyond the sea. Continued immunity bred contempt, and even the
fore-running aids of the spring of 1915 failed to stir London from
her impassive calm. By midsummer she was showing signs of being bored
with the whole subject, and the sky-searching antics of the comedians
in her packed music halls began to be greeted with yawns from the
stalls. She was becoming impatient of her darkened streets, and
captious “Pro Bono Publicos” wrote to the papers demanding more
illumination and a general return to “Business as Usual.”
The “authorities” still kept up a pretence of preparedness. The
so-called anti-aircraft guns--really a nondescript lot of ordnance,
left over after the fittest of the few available pieces had been
requisitioned for use in France, on the coast, or by the Navy--still
had their crews of half-trained amateurs, and the golden beams of the
searchlights continued to whirl and dip and curtsey in their nocturnal
minuets. Buckets of water and boxes of sand stood ready for emergency
use in the art galleries and museums, and on the hoardings conspicuous
posters gave with meticulous articularity instructions as to how one
should act if Zeppelin bombs began raining in his vicinity. At the
first sight of a hostile airship, we were told, we should repair at
once to the nearest cellar, and in case a smarting sensation in the
nostrils indicated the release of deleterious gas, the mouth and nose
should be covered with a moist double bandage containing a layer of
carbonate of soda. Some of the pharmacies displayed patent anti-gas
respirators in their windows, but none would admit ever having had an
inquiry for one.
“We’ve got a war to fight. Zepps ain’t war; fergit ’em.” So a London
bus conductor summed up the situation to me, and so seemed to feel the
majority of his fellow townsmen of all classes.
Such, as regards Zeppelins, was the spirit of “London and the Eastern
Counties”--to use the official phrase--as the summer of 1915 waxed and
began to wane. Something of how this spirit met the trying events of
the months which followed, I shall try to show by a few extracts from
my journal. In deference to the wishes of the British Censorship the
names of several points in London have been slightly altered.
I
On Board Yacht ----
_en voyage,_
Wroxham Broad to Hickling Broad.
_August--._
We sailed and poled along the river and canal yesterday, and in the
afternoon moored to the bank at this point, which is but a mile or two
from the North Sea. The morning papers, which we picked up as we
passed through the little village of Potter Heigham, contained an
official bulletin telling of a Zeppelin raid on the “Eastern Counties”
the previous night; and later in the day word was brought us that
Lowestoft, the great trawlers’ port about twenty miles to the
south-east, had been heavily bombed. A second raid in this vicinity
seemed, therefore, anything but likely.
The afternoon closed in one of those characteristic butterfly chases
of sunshine and showers so familiar to the August _voyageur_ on The
Broads, and, lounging at ease on deck after dinner, we had watched the
twilight aeroplane patrol, stencilled in black silhouette against the
glowing western clouds, pass north from Yarmouth to meet its fellow
from the Cromer hangars. A half-hour later the sharp staccato of its
engine, rather than its blurred image against the paling afterglow,
told us of its homeward flight.
It was a good two hours after the drumming of the aeroplane’s engine
had ceased to be heard that a strange new sound became audible, first
distantly, in the puffs of the quickening night breeze, soon more
imminent and with steady insistence. It was apparently the booming
explosions of powerful gas engines, and presently, blending with this,
could be distinguished a buzzing clackity-clack that suggested
whirring propellers.
“Another aeroplane,” suggested one. “A fleet of aeroplanes,” hazarded
another. “A dirigible threshing-machine,” opined a third. And, judging
by the now almost overpowering rush of sound, the latter was nearest
to the truth.
The whole universe seemed to have resolved itself into one mighty
roar, and I distinctly recall that the mainsail halyard by which I
steadied myself vibrated to the beat of the pulsating grind from
above. For a moment--sensing rather than seeing--I was aware of a
great black bulk blotting out the stars above the river, and then,
stabbing the darkness like a flaming sword, the yellow flash of a
search light leapt forth from the dusky void and ran in swift zigzags
back and forth across the marshes and canals beneath. Now a herd of
cows could be seen staggering dazedly to their feet, now the startled
bridge-players on the deck of the houseboat moored above were
revealed, and now our own eyes blinked blindly in the yellow glare
before the questing shaft darted on down the river to spot-light an
eel-fisher’s shanty on the dyke and the gaunt frame of a towering
Dutch windmill beyond.
Now it found the sharp right-angling bend of the river, quivered there
for a second or two and then flashed out, leaving a blanker blackness
behind. At almost the same instant the “Thing of Terror”--a hurtling
mass of roaring engines and clattering propellers--shot by overhead,
followed by a confused wake of conflicting air-currents. It passed
straight down above the middle of the river at a height of not over
300 feet, and beneath the dimly guessed bulk of it bright chinks and
squares of light, broken by the shadows of moving men, plotted the
lines of two under-slung cars. A Zeppelin had passed almost within a
stone’s throw.
The lights of the car leaped sharply upward almost as soon as the bend
of the river was reached, and at the end of a couple of minutes the
roar of the engines dwindled to a distant buzz and died away
completely. Ten minutes passed, during which the old eel-fisher went
on stringing his traps across the river and the house-boaters resumed
their interrupted bridge. Then a red signal light flashed out in the
heavens in the direction of Yarmouth, and at almost the same moment,
clear and sharp, came the sound of furious light-artillery fire. This
lasted for only a minute or two, and there was another eight- or
ten-minute interval before a still more distant sound of gun-fire
became faintly audible. Drowning the crack of these latest shots
suddenly came the roll of a heavy boom, quickly to be followed by
another, and another, and another, until a dozen or more had sounded.
Then the peaceful silence of the early evening resumed its sway.
The eel-fisher finished sinking his traps before paddling up the
gangway of the yacht and venturing a casual inquiry as to whether or
not we had “chanct to see the Zepp.” “’Er do this onct befoor,” he
chirruped. “’Er gets bearin’s from ’e’ riv’r an’ then ’eds off fu
No’ich o’ Ya’muth. I be thinkin’ if ’er knowed this grouse moor
b’longed tu Ser Edderd Grey, ’er’d a bombed it good as ’er goed by.”
This morning the London papers have the bulletin of still another raid
on the “Eastern Counties,” with a good many casualties; also an
account of how a Zeppelin was brought down in the North Sea and
destroyed by aeroplanes from Nieuport.
II
LONDON, _September_--.
Yesterday’s papers had the usual account of an air raid on the
“Eastern Counties,” and during the day word was passed round that
this had consisted of an attempt to bomb the Woolwich Arsenal. This
morning they have finally had to add “and London” to the regular
formula, as last night, for the first time, bombs were dropped upon
the heart of the city and seven million people watched the whole
performance. It was the nearest thing to their promised “big raid”
that the Germans have yet brought off, and to-day London--in the
defence of the metropolitan area of which guns were fired for the
first time in many hundreds of years--appears to have declared a sort
of informal half-holiday to note the consequences.
To Londoners, a Zeppelin raid appears to be a good deal like the
paradoxical “man-sitting-on-the-pin” joke--it is funniest to those who
miss the point. To the ones in the swath of the raid, like the one who
sits on the pin, it is anything but a laughing matter. “But the swath
of the raid is so narrow, London so broad; the killed so few,
Londoners so many. If this is the worst the Huns can do, on with
‘Business as Usual!’” There is no denying that this epitomises the
spirit of London--even as it mourns its dead--on the morrow of the
first great air raid of history. For myself, I must admit that I was
rather too near the point of the pin, and have since seen rather too
many of the “pin-pricks,” to be able to look at the diversion from
quite the standpoint of the great majority.
Last night was clear, calm, and moonless--ideal Zeppelin
conditions--and walking down from my hotel to the Coliseum at eight
o’clock, I noticed that the searchlights were turning the dome of the
sky into one great kaleidoscope with their weaving bands of
brightness. The warming-up drill was over as I entered the music hall,
and, returning home at the end of the “top-liner’s” act, I picked my
precarious way by the light of the stars and the diffused halos of
what had once been street lamps. I was in bed by a quarter to eleven,
and it was but a few moments later that the distant but unmistakable
boom of a bomb smote upon my unpillowed ear. I was at my east-facing
window with a jump, and an instant later the opaque curtain of the
night was being slashed to ribbons by the awakening searchlights.
For a minute or two, all of them seemed to be reeling blind and large
across the empty heavens, and then, guided by the nearing explosions,
one after another they veered off to the east and focussed in a great
cone of light where two or three slender slivers of vivid brightness
were gliding nearer above the dim bulks of the domes and spires of
the “City.”
Swiftly, undeviatingly, relentlessly, these little pale yellow dabs
came on, carrying with them, as by a sort of magnetic attraction, the
tip of the cone formed by the converged beams of the searchlights.
Nearer and louder sounded the detonations of the bombs. Now they burst
in salvos of threes and fours; now singly at intervals, but with never
more than a few seconds between. Always a splash of lurid light
preceded the sound of the explosion, in most instances to be followed
by the quick leap of flames against the skyline. Many of these fires
died away quickly,--sometimes through lack of fuel, as in a
stone-paved court; more often through being subdued by the firemen,
scores of whose engines could be heard clanging through the
streets,--others waxed bright and spread until the yellow shafts of
the searchlights paled against the heightening glow of the eastern
heavens.
The wooden clackity-clack of the raiders’ propellers came to my ears
at about the same moment that the sparkling trail of the fuse of an
incendiary bomb against the loom of a familiar spire roughly located
the van of the attack as now about half a mile distant. After that,
things happened so fast that my recollections, though photographically
vivid, are somewhat disconnected. My last “calmly calculative” act was
to measure one of the on-coming airships--then at about twenty-five
degrees from directly overhead--between the thumb and forefinger of my
outstretched right hand, these, extended to their utmost, framing the
considerably foreshortened gas-bag with about a half-inch to spare.
Up to this moment, the almost undeviating line of flight pursued by
the approaching Zeppelins appeared as likely to carry them on one side
of my coign of vantage as the other; that is to say, they _seemed_ not
unlikely to be going to pass directly overhead. It was at this
juncture, not unnaturally, that it occurred to me that the
basement--for the next minute or two at least--would be vastly
preferable, for any but observation purposes, to my top-floor window.
Before I could translate this discretionary impulse into action,
however, a small but brilliant light winked twice or thrice from below
the leading airship, and a point or two of change was made in the
course, with the possible purpose (it has since occurred to me) of
swinging across the great group of conjoined railway termini a
half-mile or so to the north. This meant that the swath of the bombs
would be cut at least a hundred yards to the north-east, and, impelled
by the fascination of the unfolding spectacle, I remained at my
window.
During the next half-minute the bombs fell singly at three-or
four-second intervals. Then the blinking light flashed out under the
leader again,--probably the order for “rapid fire,”--and immediately
afterwards a number of sputtering fire-trails--not unlike the wakes of
meteors--lengthened downward from beneath each of the two airships. (I
might explain that I did not see more than two Zeppelins at any one
time, though some have claimed to have seen three.)
Immediately following the release of the bombs, the lines of fire
streamed in a forward curve, but from about halfway down their fall
was almost perpendicular. As they neared the earth, the hiss of cloven
air--similar to but not so high-keyed as the shriek of a shell--became
audible, and a second or two later the flash of the explosion and the
rolling boom were practically simultaneous.
Between eight and a dozen bombs fell in a length of five blocks, and
at a distance of from one to three hundred yards from my window, the
echoes of one explosion mingling with the burst of the next. Broken
glass tinkled down to the left and right, and a fragment of slate
from the roof shattered upon my balcony. But the most remarkable
phenomenon was the rush of air from, or rather to, the explosion. With
each detonation I leaned forward instinctively and braced myself for a
blow on the chest, and lo--it descended upon my back. The same
mysterious force burst inward my half-latched door, and all down one
side of the square curtains were streaming outward from open or broken
windows. (I did not sit down and ponder the question at the moment,
but the phenomenon is readily explained by the fact that, because the
force of the explosives used in Zeppelin bombs is invariably exerted
upwards, the air from the lower level is drawn in to fill the vacuum
thus created. This also accounts for the fact that all of the window
glass shattered by the raiders has fallen on the sidewalks instead of
inside the rooms.)
Tremendous as was the spectacle of the long line of fires extending
out of eyescope to the City and beyond, there is no denying that the
dominating feature of the climax of the raid was the Zeppelins
themselves. Emboldened perhaps, by the absence of gun-fire, these had
slowed down for their parting salvo so as to be almost “hovering” when
the bombs were dropped opposite my vantage point. Brilliantly
illuminated by the searchlights, whose beams wove about below them
like the ribbons in a Maypole dance, the clean lines of their gaunt
frameworks stood out like bas-reliefs in yellow wax. Every now and
then one of them would lurch violently upward,--probably at the
release of a heavy bomb,--but, controlled by rudders and planes, the
movement had much of the easy power of the dart of a great fish.
Indeed, there was strong suggestion of something strangely familiar in
the lithe grace of those sleek yellow bodies, in the swift swayings
and rightings, in the powerful guiding movements of those hinged
“tails,” and all at once the picture of a gaunt “man-eater” nosing his
terribly purposeful way below the keel of a South-Sea pearler flashed
to my mind, and the words “Sharks! Sharks of the air!” leaped to my
lips.
While the marauders still floated with bare steerage-way in flaunting
disdain, the inexplicably delayed firing order to the guns was flashed
around, and--like a pack of dogs baying the moon, and with scarcely
more effect--London’s “air defence” came into action. Everything from
machine-guns to three-and four-inchers,--not one in the lot built for
anti-aircraft work,--belched forth the best it had. Up went the
bullets and shrapnel, and down they came again, down on the roofs and
streets of London. Far, far below the contemptuous airships the little
stars of bursting shrapnel spat forth their steel bullets in spiteful
impotence, and back they rained on the tiles and cobbles.
Suddenly a gruffer growl burst forth from the yelping pack, as the
gunners of some hitherto unleashed piece of ordnance received orders
to join the attack. At the first shot a star-burst pricked the night
in the rear of the second airship, and well on a line with it; a
second exploded fairly above it; and then--all at once I was conscious
that the searchlights were playing on a swelling cloud of white mist
which was trailing away into the north-east. The Zeppelin had
evidently taken a leaf from the book of the squid.
The tinkle of shrapnel bullets on the roof sent me down at this
juncture to join the gathering of my fellow guests on the ground
floor, where, on the manager’s calling attention to the fact that my
knees were shaking from the cold, I was glad to avail myself of the
loan of his overcoat. I was not unappreciative of his delicacy in
attributing the undeniable shiver in my frame to the cold, and I have
not yet entirely made up my mind just to what extent the chill night
air, standing in a twisted and cramped position in order to look up,
and sheer funk shared the responsibility for it.
I have been under shell-fire on several occasions, and I confess quite
frankly that I never before felt anywhere near so “panicky” as during
that long half-minute in which the airships appeared certain to pass
directly overhead. The explanation of this, it seems to me, may be
found in the fact that, in the trenches or in a fort which is under
fire, one is among cool, determined, and often callous men who are
meeting the expected as a part of the day’s work, while in a Zeppelin
raid one is more or less unconsciously affected by the unexpectedness
of it, and by the very natural terror of the unhardened
non-combatants. At any rate, to say that there was not a very
contagious brand of terror “in the air” in the immediate vicinity of
the swath of last night’s raid would be to say something that was not
true of my own neighbourhood.
As soon as the firing ceased I slipped into my street clothes and
hurried out, reaching the “Square” perhaps ten minutes after the last
bomb had fallen. That terror still brooded was evident from the white,
anxious faces at street doors and basement gratings, but a mounting
spirit was recorded in the gratuitous advice shouted out by the
“Boots” at a hotel entrance to a portly and not un-Teutonic-looking
gentleman who went puffing under a street-light.
“No use hurryin’, mister,” chirped the young irrepressible. “Last Zepp
fer Berlin’s just pulled out.”
At the end of a block my feet were crunching glass at every step, and
a few moments later I was in the direct track of the raid. By a
strange chance--it is impossible that it could have happened by
intent--that last fierce rain of bombs had descended upon the one part
of London where the hospitals stand thicker than in any other; and
yet, while every one of these was windowless and scarred from
explosions in streets and adjacent squares, not one appeared to have
been hit. One large building devoted entirely to nervous disorders was
a bedlam of hysteria, and the nurses are said to have had a terrible
time in getting their patients in hand. From another, given over to
infantile paralysis, hip-disease, and other ailments of children, came
a pitiful chorus of wails in baby treble. The other hospitals,
including one or two foreign ones, appeared to be proceeding quietly
with their share of the work of succour, receiving and caring for the
victims as fast as they could be hurried in.
The fires, except for a couple of wide glows in the direction of the
City and a gay geyser of flame from a broken gas main in the next
block, had disappeared as by magic, and most of the places where bombs
had dropped in this vicinity could be located only by the little knots
of people before the barred doors, or by following a line of hose from
an engine.
Except for an occasional covered stretcher being borne out to a
waiting ambulance, the killed and maimed were little in evidence; and
but for a chance encounter with a friend who was doing some sort of
volunteer surgical work, I should have failed entirely to have an
intimate glimpse of the grimmer side of the raid. I jostled him at a
barrier where the crowd was being held back from a bombed tenement,
and he pressed me into service forthwith.
“They are trying to uncover some kiddies on the second floor. Four of
them--all in one room,” he explained. “Two floors above smashed in on
them. Everybody fagged out, and I’m after some brandy to buck ’em up.
You’re fresh. Take this armlet and tell the police at the door I sent
you.”
The little lettered khaki band passed me by the police cordon, and I
found myself in the lantern-lighted hallway of a rickety brick
building such as they erected as tenements in London thirty or forty
years ago. Two blanket-covered bodies lay on the floor waiting to be
removed to the morgue, and a third, hideously mangled, but still
breathing, was being hastily bandaged by a doctor before sending on to
the hospital. A dozen children were crying in a room which opened off
the hall, and there, too, a hysterical woman in a nightgown, her face
and hands streaming blood, was being restrained by a couple of
uniformed police-women from rushing up the sagging stairway.
A fireman who had collapsed on the floor gave me his axe, and a
special constable with a lantern guided me up the quaking stairs to a
little back flat, where several men, distinguished by armlets as some
kind of volunteers, were hacking away at the pile of _débris_ which
filled most of one of the rooms. Four children had been sleeping in
that room, explained the policeman, and one of them had been heard
whimpering a while back. There was no light but a lantern and a flash
torch, he added, and every one was dead played out; but just the same,
they were going to stick to it as long as there was a chance that the
“nipper” was alive.
This must have been somewhere around midnight, and it was by the first
light of dawn leaking in through the shattered beams and rafters that
we reached the last of the little bruised bodies buried under the
_débris_. The ghastly interval between was in many respects the most
trying I have ever experienced. Somebody’s strength, or nerves, or
courage was giving way every few minutes, and there was one dreadful
quarter hour during which we all had to knock off and help hold down
the now stark-mad mother who had somehow escaped from the room below.
For our reward we found that the youngest child was breathing, and
might continue to do so, according to the doctor, for several hours.
Its two brothers and its sister had mercifully been killed outright in
the first crash.
* * * * *
_Same day_, 7.30 P.M.
I wrote the foregoing after a couple of hours of sleep; then went out
and spent the rest of the day back-tracking the raiders. As the swath
was largely cut through the tenement and slum districts of the East
End, the property damage was not great, but, for the same reason, the
loss of life must have been considerable. Pathetic little
funerals--the kind one sees advertised on posters of enterprising
Shoreditch and Whitechapel undertakers as costing two pounds ten
shillings, with hearse and two carriages, with an extra carriage
added for an even three pounds--were to be seen here and there; but
withal there was a remarkable absence of “hate” observable in the
crowds that thronged from far and near to view the work of the
nocturnal visitors from beyond the North Sea.
It is, indeed, well said that the Briton is a poor hater, and almost
the only evidence that I could see of his being stirred by the events
of last night was in the heightened activity of recruiting. The astute
authorities, quick to see the advantage of taking the tide at flood,
kept speakers--both civilians and soldiers--all day at the barriers
where the crowds were held back in the vicinities of the points
bombed, and many hitherto wavering volunteers were gathered in as a
consequence. Here and there threatening crowds gathered in front of
bakeries and butcher shops which bore German names; but their leaders
were half-tipsy cockney dames whom the ever imperturbable “Bobbies”
had no trouble in hustling on out of the way. No, stubborn fighter
that he is, the Briton is only the most indifferent of haters.
III
From the time of the big raid, in early September, until the second
week in October there was not a single night on which the moon, wind,
clouds, or some combination of meteorological conditions was not
unfavourable to Zeppelin action, and it was not until this date that
they tried to come again. Although rather nearer than before to two or
three of the explosions, I had no such opportunity to view the
progress of the raid as on the previous occasion, and this latest
bombing is, perhaps, most memorable to me as having served to shake
the monumental calm of two of the most famous and impressive of all
London’s institutions, the “Bobby” and the Frivolity chorus girl. I
turn again to my journal.
* * * * *
LONDON, _October_--
I was at the Frivolity last night with my friend Captain J----, of the
Royal Artillery, home from France on a week’s leave, to see an
oculist. About nine-thirty the nearing boom of heavy explosions
heralded another Zeppelin attack. I started for the door at once, but
J----, an old Londoner, pulled me down into my stall by the coat-tail,
dryly observing that, right before us under the Frivolity footlights,
there was transpiring an infinitely more epochal event than anything
that could possibly be seen outside.
“We have had other Zeppelin raids,” he shouted close to my ear, to
make himself heard above the uneasy bustle which filled the theatre as
the bombs boomed more imminent, “but never before in history has man
beheld the Frivolity chorus shaken from its traditional languor. But
now look! They faint to left and right, and I’m jolly certain that
M---- doesn’t get her cue to embrace G---- until the next act. ’Pon my
word, I never expected to live to see the waters of this fount of
brides for the British peerage so disturbed.” J----’s voice trailed
off into wondering speechlessness.
“Boom!” This time it was close at hand, and the rattle of falling
_débris_ could be heard above the discordant wail of the mechanically
labouring orchestra. Utterly unable to sit still any longer, I shook
off J----’s restraining arm, and reached a side exit just as two
bombs fell in quick succession, a hundred yards up the Avenue. Again I
was conscious of those strange rushes of air from the “wrong”
direction which I had experienced during the previous raid. The panes
of the upper windows shivered to bits, but the fragments, striking the
reinforced glass of the marquee, were robbed of their force before
they had caromed to the sidewalk.
On both sides of the Avenue glass was falling in countless tons,--in
one great corner building alone 25,000 pounds of plate glass are
estimated to have been shattered,--and there is no doubt that many
were killed and injured by being caught under the vitreous avalanche.
Almost immediately three or four more bombs fell beyond the Avenue,
there was another crescendo of falling glass, and then a lone
Zeppelin--apparently at the end of its ammunition--headed up and off
to the north-east pursued by a single searchlight beam and a
scattering gun-fire.
The Frivolity chorus, having been soothed and revived, resumed its
wonted demeanour and took up the dropped thread of the performance,
and J----, no longer held a fascinated captor by the wonder of its
lapse, joined me on the sidewalk to see what had been happening
outside. It is a remarkable fact that the great majority of the
audience, many of whom had not stirred from their seat, elected to
remain and see the show out. From the three theatres opposite,
however, one of which had been struck, considerable numbers were
pouring forth. But not in all the now dense crowd in the Avenue were
there the symptoms of a panic.
As we stepped from the curb something tinkled against my foot. Picking
it up, it turned out to be a still warm piece of torn steel which
J---- identified at once as a fragment of the casing of an incendiary
bomb. It was not over an eighth of an inch thick, but of such
superlative quality that it rang like a silver bell even to the tap of
a finger-nail. A far more murderous fragment of shivered metal, which
J---- kicked into a few minutes later, was a piece of shrapnel casing,
and there is no doubt that the casualties from anti-aircraft-gun
projectiles are very considerable.
The police and fire department work was even more remarkable than in
the September raid. Not a single tell-tale glow marked the path by
which the Zeppelin had come, and the only fire in our immediate
vicinity was the spout from another sundered gas main. Barriers
already shut off the crowds from the points where the worst damage had
been done, and the work of removing the dead and wounded was being
carried on quickly and expeditiously.
A bomb falling in the Avenue midway between a motor bus and a taxi had
taken a heavy toll of the passengers of both, while the two vehicles,
still standing upright, had been flattened until their appearance was
not unlike that of their respective “property” prototypes occasionally
employed to give perspective to the stage-setting of a street. A dozen
or more dead and wounded lay in a row in front of a gin palace which
had collapsed under a bomb; but, as far as we could see or learn,
there had been little, if any, loss of life in the historic old
theatre which had been struck.
A sinister coincidence had landed one bomb on a temporary wooden
building occupied as Belgian Refugee headquarters. Miraculously
however, although the rickety frame was blown quite out of shape, no
fire was started among the small mountains of highly inflammable
baggage on which the bomb exploded.
“The ’Uns ain’t satisfied with wot they did to ’em in Belg’um,”
snorted an indignant coster, viewing the wreck; “the baby-killers ’ad
to follow ’em to Lunnon.” This was, I believe, about the nearest thing
to “hate” that I heard expressed during the several hours we mingled
with the crowds on the streets.
Faring on down the “bomb-track” into that historic section of Old
London which lies to the east of the Avenue, we came upon an
apparition quite as astounding to me as the spectacle of the “panicky”
Frivolity girls had been to J----. It was nothing less than a London
police constable, hatless, breathless, and so little master of himself
that he was unable to respond with the customary “First to the right,
second to the left, and so on” formula when we asked him the way to
the B---- Court, where we had heard there had been heavy damage.
Slamming down on the pavement a heavy burden which he carried by a
loop of wire, he began jabbering something to the effect that the
“bloomin’ pill” came down “’arf a rod” from where he stood, and that
orders called for the instant fetching of all “evidences” to the
nearest station. I switched on my electric-torch--everybody here has
carried them since the streets were darkened,--to recoil before the
sight of the pear-shaped cone of dented steel toppled over on the
cobbles at my feet.
“Good heavens, man, you’ve got an unexploded bomb!” I gasped, backing
against the wall. “What do you mean by slamming it around in that
way?”
“If she didn’t go off after fallin’ from the sky, I fancy she can
stand a drop of a few inches,” was the reply. “It isn’t ’avin’ ’er
’ere, sir, that gets my nerves. They went to pieces when she came down
and bounced along the pavement in front of where I stood.”
“Perhaps she has a time fuse, set to go off when she gets a crowd
around her,” said the irrepressible J---- by way of encouragement.
“The Huns are adepts at just such forms of subtlety. Better leave her
alone for a spell.”
Shaking in every limb, but still resolved to carry out “orders” to the
last, the doughty chap slipped his bleeding fingers through the wire
loop and trudged off on his way to the station, staggering under the
weight of half a hundred pounds of “T.N.T.”[3] That he reached there
without mishap is evidenced by a flashlight in one of the “penny
pictorials” this morning showing both him and his booty at the wicket
of the B---- Street Police Station.
[3] Trinitrotoluol.
Two or three times during the next couple of hours searchlights
flashed out to the east and south, and the blink of shrapnel bursting
under barely defined patches of pale yellow indicated that the raid
was an ambitious one, participated in by many airships. The heart of
the city, however, was not reached again. I have it on good authority
this morning that a number of bombs were exploded on the works at
Woolwich, but, even if true, this only goes to show that Britain’s
great arsenal, if not less, is at least not more vulnerable than the
non-military areas.
If possible, London took this latest raid even more calmly than the
previous one, and the level-headed practicality of the remark of the
bus conductor I have quoted--“We’ve got a war to fight. Zepps ain’t
war; fergit ’em!”--may be taken as fairly representing the frame of
mind in which the metropolis awaits the really frightful visitation
that Germany has promised.
For three months following the October visitation there were no
further air raids on England, and it was known that this immunity was
due to one or more of four things: the strengthening of Britain’s
anti-aircraft defences, unfavourable weather, the efficacy of the
Allies’ reprisals on South German cities, or a dawning realisation on
the part of Germany that the maximum physical damage which can
possibly be inflicted on Great Britain by air raids can never be more
than an insignificant fraction of the damage done to the Teutonic
cause as a consequence of resorting to this form of terrorism.
As weeks lengthened to months without an attack--even though incessant
reports from a score of sources told of feverish Zeppelin construction
in all parts of the Kaiser’s dominions--there awakened a hope in the
breasts of Germany’s enemies and her friends that the humanitarian
consideration had been the moving one. This hope was rudely
crushed by the mid-January aeroplane raid--evidently a scouting
reconnaissance--upon Kent, and the renewed Zeppelin attacks on Paris
and the Midland counties. Subject only to the weather, then, and to
such defensive measures as may be taken in France and England, we now
know that this least warranted and most cruel of all forms of Teutonic
“frightfulness” may be expected to continue until the end of the war.
TO BRITISH MERCHANT CAPTAINS
All yesterday evening I came upon little knots of sailor men gathered
along the quay or at the corners of the streets of Harwich and
Dovercourt. Their weather-beaten parchment-brown faces were drawn and
troubled, and they spoke in the jerkily lowered voices of men not wont
to hold their tongues or passions in restraining leash. There was
something in the half-stunned, half-angry looks suggestive of the
expressions I had seen on the faces of the sailors at a North Wales
port on the evening that a carelessly-framed despatch had tricked them
into transient belief that the British Fleet had been beaten by the
Germans in the North Sea. But I had been with naval men all afternoon,
and knew that there was nothing fresh to report from behind the grey
fog-curtain to the north. The trouble was of another kind, but from
past experience I knew that the moment when the British sailor man
spoke through clenched teeth in those jerkily lowered tones, with his
brow corrugated in mahogany wrinkles of perturbation and his blue eyes
fixed absently on the fingers of his working hands, was not the one
for even the most sympathetically curious to intrude upon him.
Enlightenment came later, when I asked the maid who lowered the
shutters and drew the double curtains of my room in the little hotel
on the Dovercourt cliff, why it was that the children playing in a
narrow street that branched off diagonally below my window hushed
their voices and tiptoed as they came down toward the seaward end, and
why many of even belated and hurrying delivery carts were pulling up
and taking another way on their clattering rounds.
“Is somebody sick?” I asked, “or is one of the neighbours dead?”
“Didn’t you know, sir?” faltered the girl. “That is Captain Fryatt’s
’ome down there. It’s the little red-brick ’ouse--the fourth or fifth
from the corner, sir. We all o’ us ’ere knew ’im, sir, an’ loved ’im;
an’--you’ll excuse me, sir” (her voice broke for a moment and the
starting tears glistened in the flickering light of her candle)--“but
I was thinkin’ o’ the missus an’ the nippers. They’s waitin’ down
there for more news from Belg’um. I hates to think o’ ’em, sir. It
makes me want to scream an’--an’ to fight. I’ll be going now, sir; it
gets me all wrought up w’en I talks about it.”
It came to me all at once what those stunned angry sailors on the
street were talking of, and the hot wave of indignation--checked for
an hour or two by the excitement of meeting and boarding a returning
submarine--that had surged over me that afternoon when I first read
the news of Captain Fryatt’s execution in the paper, welled up anew
inside me and throbbed against my temples. I was conscious of the
passing of one of a class of men whom I had learned to know and love
during many years of intimate association--in craft stout and frail,
on seas fair and stormy--and the fact that the death of this man had
been compassed with a cold-blooded cynicism scarcely paralleled in
modern history brought the significance of it home to me with especial
poignancy. In a dull sort of way I had been conscious of a similar
feeling every time I had read of the loss of merchant officers and
crews from the inauguration of the submarine campaign, but only now
had I come to understand how much of a hold these same sailor men had
on my affection, what parts they had played in scores of the vivid
incidents of my life that I cared most to dwell upon in memory.
Three of the last ten years of my life had been spent upon the sea, I
reflected, and of this time perhaps six months had been put in on one
or another of the “floating palaces” of the main tourist routes, and
not more than that aboard ships under the German, French, Dutch, or
American flag. That left a good two years--more than seven hundred
days and nights--spent aboard the smaller British merchantmen--tramps,
coasters, colliers, traders, flat-bottomed river stern-wheelers--in
out-of-the-way water-lanes of the world.
Two years of my life--and what treasured years they were, too!--spent
in the care of the bold, bluff, bronzed British merchant captains who
drove “the swift shuttles of an Empire’s loom.” What strange seas they
had steered me through, and what strange corners in the ports that
served those seas! And what adventures they had run me into, and what
scrapes got me out of! And what courtesy, what consideration--aye,
even what tenderness in times of misadventure and sickness--had I not
enjoyed at their hands!
Pulling on my cardigan jacket, I “stood-by” at the hour of
one--midnight by the sun-time, by which the ships of the sea still
sail--and at the instant when the steamers in the harbour would have
been sounding “Eight bells” had there been no lurking Zeppelins to
guard against, leaned out of the open window till the indrifting fog
blew sharp against my face and began my “watch.”
Just so--with a rough blue sleeve brushing against my own--had I
leaned over the bridge or taffrail of a hundred steamers ploughing a
hundred sea-ways, and now, with the familiar breath of the sea in my
nostrils and the familiar mist of the sea damping my hair again, old
friends of other days strode down the corridors of memory and ranged
themselves, one at a time, by my side. At first I tried to muster them
chronologically, in the order I had known them from my first tentative
coastal voyages in the Pacific--(B----, of the Vancouver-Seattle
packet, who let me sleep on his cabin couch one night when the rooms
were all taken in order that I might be rested for the tennis
tournament I was engaging in at Tacoma on the morrow; R----, of the
old Alaska “Inland Passage” coaster, who taught me to “box” the
compass and awoke the slumbering love o’ the sea in my blood with
tales of the Victoria sealing fleet; P----, of the Mexican trader, who
smuggled me out of Guaymas when the Sonora authorities were trying to
arrest me for landing on Tiburon without a permit)--but presently the
magnet of my quickened memory began drawing them forward out of turn,
and ere long they were crowding on like guests at a reception.
Now I would think of the bravery of them, and instantly a series of
pictures took shape before my eyes, a score of names leapt to my lips,
a score of hands--hard brown hands, with a world of warmth in their
steady grip--reached out to clasp my own. Who was the bravest among
men that had all been brave? I asked myself; and then how the pictures
formed and dissolved as one stirring incident after another flashed
across my mind! What could have been finer than the way Captain K----,
of that cranky clipper-bowed old “C.N.” steamer, had stuck out that
typhoon off Taiwan, lashed to the bridge for three days, and
subsisting on coffee and rum and pilot bread? I could see his
brine-white face (as I saw it when I took a timid peep up the
companion way on the day the “twister” began to die down) taking shape
out there in the drifting fog even as the recollection of that
fearsome storm crystallised in my memory, and then fancy turned
another cog, and it was a sun-blistered South Pacific trader that I
seemed to see, with a sallow, fever-wracked figure at the wheel, and
two or three dozen naked blacks writhing in agony on the forrard deck.
How old B----, of the _Cora Andrews_, took his load of plague-stricken
Papuans through the Barrier Reef and into the quarantine station at
Townsville is a South Sea epic.
Then came memories with a more personal touch, and I dwelt for a few
moments over the shifting scenes of the mix-up I started the time I
tried to take a flashlight of the smokers in the “Opium Den” of the
old _Yo San_, plying on the Hongkong-Bangkok run. Some of the Chinese
crew were smuggling opium that voyage, and, taking me for a Secret
Service officer on search, started to wipe up the deck with my
protesting anatomy. Curled round my camera under a bunk in the corner
of the opium den, with nothing but the fact that my assailants were so
numerous that they got in each other’s way saving me from instant
annihilation, and expecting every moment that one of them would gather
his wits together sufficiently to pounce down on me through the slats,
I cowered in terror, and was ever music sweeter than the raucous
bellow of bluff old Captain G---- when, cursing like a pirate and
banging right and left with the belaying pins he held in either hand,
he ploughed his way into the den and yanked me out by the scruff of
the neck. Poor old G----! he was lost with his ship two voyages later,
when the ancient _Yo San_ was piled up by a typhoon on the Tongking
coast.
Then the recollection of the ignominious way in which old G---- had
pulled me out from under the bunk by the coat collar recalled the time
when another British skipper--his command was only a “P.S.N.C.” tender
in Valparaiso, and I had long since forgotten his name--saved my life
by handling me in quite the same unceremonious manner. The schooner on
which I had planned to sail to Juan Fernandez had broken loose in a
violent “Norther” and was fast driving before the mountainous swells
upon the _malecon_ or seawall, when the “Navigation Company’s” tender,
out to salve some drifting barges, came nosing cautiously in toward
where the hollow waves were curling over into crashing breakers. The
barges and their cargoes were probably worth more than our walty old
hooker, but the skipper of the tender, noting only that there were
lives to be saved on the latter, hesitated not an instant about
deciding to try and stand-by. Unfortunately, we had a lot of German
_colonistas_ aboard, and the panic among them prevented many from the
schooner being saved. I was one of the half-dozen who did not fail in
their leaps for the tender’s outreaching starboard bow, but my hold on
the slippery rail was so precarious that only the mighty hand of the
skipper on my neck prevented my slipping back into the sea. For a
moment now, out in the drifting fog, I saw his round red face, under
its “sou’wester,” just as I had peered up into it after he dragged me
over the rail and slammed me down on the heeling deck.
At times memories crowded so that they became confused. I was not
sure, for instance, whether it was T----, of the _Eimoo_, or P----, of
the _Levuka_, whom I had seen go over the rail into shark-infested
Rotrura Lagoon to jerk the kink out of an air-hose before his diver
strangled; or which of two otherwise well-remembered “B.I.” skippers
it was that waded in, barehanded, and floored every one of a bunch of
Lascars who were fighting with their knives; or whether it was the
mate or the skipper of the East African coaster who, with one of his
thighs being torn to ribbons by the beast’s hind claws, kept his grip
on the throat of a young leopard that had slipped from its cage, and
which he was afraid might become panic-stricken and jump overboard
before it could be recaptured; or whether it was the captain of a
“Burns, Philips” or a “Union” steamer that I had seen put out through
the tortuous passage of Suva Bay when the wind was snapping the tops
from the coconut palms, and the barometer was at 28.50 and still
falling, just because the wife of the missionary on some obscure
little bit of the Fijian Archipelago to the north was expecting to
become a mother and needed the attention of the ship’s doctor.
I would have gone on to the end of my “watch” thinking of the
bravery--moral and physical--the ready nerve and the general
“sufficiency unto occasion” of my old friends, but most that had been
brave had also been kind and considerate, and every now and then I
found my mind occupied with recollections of the little things they
had done for me, or that I had seen them do for others. There was
B----, of the old _Changsha_, running from Yokohama to Sydney, who
went miles off his course just to satisfy my whim to pass over the
spot where _Mary Gloster_ was buried at sea. What an afternoon that
was! The Straits of Macassar “oily and treacly,” just as Kipling had
described them, and the milk-warm land breeze wafting the odours of
the spice groves of Celebes. B---- had his volume of Kipling and I had
mine, and between us was the reef-freckled chart of Macassar Straits
with Borneo to starboard, Celebes to port, and a thousand dotted
lines indicating islets and reefs and rocks--mostly lurking,
half-submerged--in between.
“By the Little Paternosters, as you come to the Union Bank,
We dropped her--I think I told you--and I pricked it off where she
sank--
(Tiny she looked on the grating--that oily, treacly sea--)
Hundred and eighteen East, remember, and South just three.
Easy bearings to carry....”
read B----, running his finger along the chart.
“Aye, easy to carry. _Here’s_ the spot,” and he marked it with a
circled dot. Then we “dead reckoned” the latitude from the noon sight,
and “shot” for the longitude as we “came to the Union Bank.” And
finally, when we were over the spot as near as might be determined
from hasty reckoning, nothing would do but B---- must start the lead
going to determine the depth. Never shall I forget the way his face
lit up when the leadsmen droned out “Fourteen,” and there were tears
glistening in his eyes as he turned back a couple of pages and read--
“And we dropped her in fourteen fathoms; I pricked it off where
she sank.”
“I might have known that Kipling worked it out with a chart,” he
exclaimed; “but what a thrill it gives one to find it exact, even to
the soundings!”
The margins of “The _Mary Gloster_,” in my “Seven Seas,” bear the
pencilled records--now thumbed and fingered into dim blurs--of our
“mid-sea madness” to this day, and there is nothing that I treasure
more. B---- would never have taken his 5,000-ton freighter miles off
her course, at the cost of some hours of time and a number of tons of
good Nagasaki coal, had he been any less daft about Kipling than I
was. But all British sailors love Kipling; as a class, I have always
felt that they had a fuller appreciation of the message of “the
uncrowned Laureate” than have any others.
For an hour at least I must have turned in fancy the pages of Kipling,
now with this well-remembered skipper, now with that, until the
recollection of how kind old N----, of a Liverpool Para-Manaos
freighter, had read to me “The Hymn Before Action” one night when I
was half delirious from the Amazon “black-water” fever he had been
nursing me through set the current of my thought on another tack.
N---- was only one of a dozen who had coddled me through some sort of
tropical illness or patched me up after some sort of a smash-up.
It was R----, of the Valparaiso-Panama coaster, who had put my hand in
splints after it had been crushed between the gangway and a dug-out
full of ivory nuts off some pile-built village of Ecuador, and it was
my fault rather than his that the little finger was still crooked.
And it was H----, of the big White Star freighter on the
Australia-South Africa run, who laboured for an hour in helping the
ship’s doctor worry back into place the shoulder I had dislocated in
the “sports” one afternoon; and it was D----, of the Rangoon-Calcutta
“B.I.,” who had reduced with horse-liniment the ankle I had sprained
in dodging out of the path of a temperamental water-buffalo while
ashore at Akyab; and it was A----, of the Lynch river boat plying from
Basra to Bagdad, who stitched up my scalp after the Arabs of the
bazaar of then almost unheard-of Kut-el-Amara had amused themselves
with bouncing rocks off my head because (this was during the
Turco-Italian war) they imagined I looked like an “alien enemy.”
A---- was killed when the Turks shelled his ship--then a
transport--early in the Mesopotamian operations, I remembered, and
this led my thoughts off to the long watch I kept by the bedside of
poor old Y----, on whose “B.P.” steamer I had been roaming in and out
among the Solomons, New Hebrides, Fijis and other islands of western
Polynesia for two months. Y----’s heart had been giving out for a
number of years, and now very hot weather following, the excitement of
seeing his ship through an unusually heavy hurricane had hastened an
end long inevitable. He knew his “number was up,” and so he told me,
that night, of things he wanted me to explain and set right for him in
Australia. It was the thinking of these, and the visit that I
subsequently paid to his wife and children in the Illawara, that
finally brought my mind back to that other bereaved family in the
little red house beneath my window.
The short night had passed, the fog had lifted, and now in the early
morning light I saw a milkman stop his cart a half-dozen doors from
the Fryatt home and go softly tip-toeing on his near-by deliveries to
avoid making unnecessary noise. Out of the retreating fog-bank to
seaward two small freighters took sharpened line and headed for the
harbour mouth. They were much of a size and type, but the gay red and
white splashes on the bows of the more northerly ones indicated she
sailed under the flag of an enterprising Scandinavian country, while
the unbroken black of the side of the other told just as plainly that
she was British. As I watched, the shifting of the shadows on the
sides of the Norwegian told me that she was altering her course
sharply every few hundred yards--“zigzagging” to minimise the danger
from submarine attacks. A wise precaution, I told myself; now what
about the other? I took up my glass and held it on the Briton. One,
two, three, four, five minutes passed. All the time the wave curled
evenly back from her forefoot; not a ripple of shifting light or
shadow told of deviation in her course of the fraction of a point.
“Straight on to your goal, little ship,” I said, saluting with my
glass.
But I might have known as much. That was Fryatt’s way, and that was
the way all my friends of the Red Ensign did, and always will do.
“Good luck, fair weather and snug berths to you all; aye, and a quiet
haven when the last watch, the long watch, is finally over!”
* * * * *
Knots of troubled sailor men still gathered along Harwich quay this
morning, but now that I understood by what they were moved I no longer
hesitated to mingle and talk with them. Their slow anger was steadily
mounting--gradually crowding out all other feelings--with every word
that was spoken, with every hour that passed; but among them were
still men who were stunned and dazed, who could not understand how a
thing so monstrous really could have happened.
“But w’y, w’y ha’ the ’Uns done it?” persisted a grizzled old salt,
turning his troubled eyes to mine after all the others had shaken
their heads perplexedly.
“It is just possible,” I said, “that the Germans believe that the
execution of one skipper who attempted to ram one of their submarines
will make the others think twice before trying to do the same thing.”
Two or three of the older men fairly snorted in their incredulity that
even the Germans should thus cheaply rate the British sailor, but the
plausibility of the theory soon convinced even these.
“Do you re’ly believe the ’Uns think that o’ us?” one of them finally
ventured.
“I do,” I replied, “for there is nothing else to think.”
The old man took a deep breath and turned his eyes away to sea. “God
pity all ’Uns!” he muttered, and “God pity ’em!” “God pity ’em!”
echoed his mates.
THE PASSING OF A ZEPPELIN
In the year that had gone by since the first great air-raid on London
we knew that much had been done in the way of strengthening the
defences. Just what had been done we did not, of course, and do not,
know. We knew that there were more and better guns and searchlights,
and probably greatly improved means of anticipating the coming of the
raiders and of following and reporting their movements after they did
come. At the same time we also knew that the latest Zeppelin had been
greatly improved; that it was larger, faster, capable of ascending to
a greater altitude, and probably able to stand more and heavier
gun-fire than its prototype of a year ago. It seemed to be a question,
therefore, of whether or not the guns could range the raiders, and, if
so, do them any vital damage when they did hit them. The aeroplane was
an unknown quantity, and, in the popular mind at least, not seriously
reckoned with. London knew that the crucial test would not come until
an airship tried again to penetrate to the heart of the metropolitan
area, and awaited the result calmly if not quite indifferently.
The Zeppelin raids of the spring and early summer, numerous as they
had been, had done a negligible amount of military damage and scarcely
more to civil property. The death list, too, had, mercifully, been
very low. It seemed significant, however, that the main London
defences had been avoided during all of this time, indicating,
apparently, that the raiders were reluctant to lift the lid of the
Pandora’s box that was laid out so temptingly before them for fear of
the possible consequences. Twice or thrice, watching with my glasses
after I had been awakened by distant bomb explosions or gun-fire, I
had seen a shell-pocketed airship draw back, as a yellow dog refuses
the challenge that his intrusion has provoked, and glide off into the
darkness of some safer area. “Would they try it again?” was the
question Londoners asked themselves as the dark of the moon came round
each month, and, except for the comparatively few who had had personal
experience of the terror and death that follow the swath of an
air-raider, most of them seemed rather anxious to have the matter put
to the test.
Last night--just twelve “darks-of-the-moon” after the first great
raid of 1915--the test came. It was hardly a conclusive one, perhaps
(though that may well have come before these lines find their way into
print), but it was certainly highly illuminative. I write this on my
return to London from viewing--twenty miles away--a tangled mass of
wreckage and a heap of charred trunks that are all that remain of a
Zeppelin and its crew which--whether by accident, intent, or the force
of circumstances will probably never be known--rushed in where two
others of its aerial sisters feared to fly, and paid the cost.
There was nothing of the surprise (to London, at least; as regards the
ill-starred Zeppelin crew none can say) in last night’s raid. The
night grew more heavily overcast as the darkness deepened, and towards
midnight stealthy little beams of hooded searchlights pirouetting on
the eastern clouds told the home-wending Saturday night theatre crowd
that, with the imminent approach of the raiders, London was lifting a
corner of its mask of blackness and throwing out an open challenge to
the enemy. This was the first time I had known the lights to precede
the actual explosion of bombs, and the cool confidence of the thing
suggested (as I heard one policeman tell another) that the defence had
something “up their sleeves.”
It was towards one in the morning when I finished my supper at a West
End restaurant and started walking through the almost deserted streets
to my hotel. London is anything but a bedlam after midnight, but the
silence in the early hours of this morning was positively uncanny.
Now, with the last of the ’buses gone and all trains stopped, only the
muffled buzz of an occasional belated taxi--pushing on cautiously with
hooded lights--broke the stillness.
Reaching my room I pulled on a sweater, ran up the curtain, laid my
glass ready and seated myself at the window, the same window from
which, a year ago, I had watched those two insolently contemptuous
raiders sail across overhead and leave a blazing wake of death and
destruction behind them. On that night, I reflected, I had felt the
rush of air from the bombs, and--later--had watched the firemen
extinguishing the flames and the ambulances carrying the wounded to
the hospitals. Would it be like that to-night? I wondered (there was
now no doubt that the raiders were near, for the searchlights had
multiplied, and far to the south-east, though no detonations were
audible, quick flashes told of scattering gun-fire), or would the
defence have more of a word to say for itself this time? I looked to
the eastern heavens where the shifting clouds were now “polka-dotted”
with the fluttering golden motes of a score of searchlights, and
thought I had found my answer.
There was no wheeling and reeling of the lights in wide circles, as a
year ago, but rather a steady persistent stabbing at the clouds, each
one appearing to keep to an allotted area of its own. “Stabbing”
expresses the action exactly, and it recalled to me an occasion, a
month ago, when a “Tommy,” who was showing me through some captured
dug-outs on the Somme, illustrated, with bayonet thrusts, the manner
in which they had originally searched for Germans hiding under the
straw mattresses. There was nothing “panicky” in the work of the
lights this time, but only the suggestion of methodical, ordered,
relentless vigilance.
“Encouraging as a preliminary,” I said to myself; “now” (for the night
was electric with import) “for the main event!”
There was not long to wait. To the south-east the gun-flashes had
increased in frequency, followed by mist-dulled blurs of brightness in
the clouds that told of bursting shells. Suddenly, through a rift in
the clouds, I saw a new kind of glare--the earthward-launched beam of
an airship’s searchlight groping for its target--but the shifting
mist-curtain intervened again even as one of the defending lights took
up the challenge and flashed its own rapier ray in quick reply.
Presently the muffled boom of bombs fleeted to my ears, and then the
sharper rattle of a sudden gust of gun-fire. This was quickly followed
by a confused roar of sound, evidently from many bombs dropped
simultaneously or in quick succession, and I knew that one of two
things had happened--either the raider had found its mark and was
delivering “rapid fire,” or the guns were making it so hot for the
visitor that it had been compelled to dump its explosives and seek
safety in flight. When a minute or more had gone by I felt sure that
the latter had been scuttled, and that it was now only a question of
which direction the flight was going to take.
Again the eastward searchlights gave me the answer. By twos and
threes--I could not follow the order of the thing--the lights that had
been “patrolling” the eastern sky moved over and took their station
around a certain low-hanging cloud to the south. The murky sheet of
cumulonimbus seemed to pale and dissolve in the concentrated rays, and
then, right into the focus of golden glow formed by the dancing light
motes, running wild and blind as a bull charges the red mantle
masking the matador, darted a huge Zeppelin.
Perhaps never before in all time has a single object been the centre
of so blinding a glare. It seemed that the optic nerve must wither in
so fierce a light, and certainly no unprotected eye could have opened
to it. Dark glasses might have made it bearable, but could not
possibly have resolved the earthward prospect into anything less than
the heart of a fiery furnace. Indeed, it is very doubtful if the
bewildered fugitive knew, in more than the most general way, where it
was. Cut off by the guns to the south-east from retreat in that
direction, but knowing that the North Sea and safety could be reached
by driving to the north-east, it is more than probable that the
harried raider found itself over the “Lion’s Den” rather because it
could not help it than by deliberate intent.
What a contrast was this blinded, reeling thing to those arrogantly
purposeful raiders of a year ago! Supremely disdainful of gun and
searchlight, these had prowled over London till the last of their
bombs had been planted, and one of them had even circled back the
better to see the ruin its passing had wrought. But _this_ raider--far
larger than its predecessors and flying at over twice as great a
height though it was--dashed on its erratic course as though pursued
by the vengeful spirits of those its harpy sisters had bombed to death
in their beds. If it still had bombs to drop its commander either had
no time or no heart for the job. Never have I seen an inanimate thing
typify terror--the terror that must have gripped the hearts of its
palpably flustered (to judge by the airship’s movements) crew--like
that staggering helpless maverick of a Zeppelin, when it finally found
itself clutched in the tentacles of the searchlights of the aerial
defences of London.
All this time the weird, uncanny silence that brooded over the streets
before I had come indoors held the city in its spell. The watching
thousands--nay, millions--kept their excitement in leash, and the
propeller of the raider--muffled by the mists intervening between the
earth and the 12,000 feet at which it whirred--dulled to a drowsy
drone. Into this tense silence the sudden fire of a hundred
anti-aircraft guns--opening in unison as though at the pull of a
single lanyard--cut in a blended roar like the Crack o’ Doom; indeed,
though few among those hushed watching millions realised it, it _was_
literally the Crack o’ Doom that was sounding. For perhaps a minute or
a minute and a half the air was vibrant with the roar of hard-pumped
guns and the shriek of speeding shell, the great sound from below
drowning the sharper cracks from the steel-cold flashes in the upper
air.
It was guns that were built for the job--not the hastily gathered and
wholly inadequate artillery of a year ago--that were speaking now, and
the voice was one of ordered, imperious authority. Range-finders had
the marauder’s altitude, and the information was being put at the
disposal of guns that had the power to “deliver the goods” at that
level. What a contrast the sequel was to that pitiful firing of the
other raid! Only the opening shots were “shorts” or “wides” now, and
ten seconds after the first gun a diamond-clear burst blinking out
through a rift in the upper clouds told that the raider--to use a
naval term--was “straddled,” had shells exploding both above and below
it. From that instant till the guns ceased to roar, seventy or eighty
seconds later, the shells burst, lacing the air with golden glimmers,
and meshed the flying raider in a fiery net.
For a few seconds it seemed to me that, close-woven as was the net of
shell-bursts, the flashes came hardly as fast as the roar of the guns
would seem to warrant, and I swept the heavens with my glasses in a
search for other possible targets. But no other raider was in sight;
there was no other “nodal centre” of gun-fire and searchlights.
Suddenly the reason for the apparent discrepancy was clear to me. The
flashes I saw (except for a few of the shrapnel bullets they were
releasing) were only the misses; the hits I could not see. The
long-awaited test was at its crucial stage. Empty of bombs and with
half of its fuel consumed, the raider was at the zenith of its flight,
and yet the guns were ranging it with ease. It was now a question of
how much shell-fire the Zeppelin could stand.
In spite of the fact that the airship--so far as I could see through
my glasses--did not appear to slow down or to be perceptibly racked by
the gun-fire, I have no doubt what the end would have been if the test
could have been pressed to its conclusion in an open country. But
bringing a burning Zeppelin down across three or four blocks of
thickly settled London was hardly a thing the Air Defence desired to
do if it could possibly be avoided. The plan was carried to its
conclusion with the almost mathematical precision that marked the
preliminary searchlight work and gunnery.
From the moment that it had burst into sight the raider had been
emitting clouds of white gas to hide itself from the searchlights and
guns, while the plainly visible movements of its lateral planes
seemed to indicate that it was making desperate efforts to climb still
higher into the thinning upper air. Neither expedient was of much use.
The swirling gas clouds might well have obscured a hovering airship,
but never one that was rushing through the air at seventy miles an
hour, while, far from increasing its altitude, there seemed to be a
slight but steady loss from the moment the guns ceased until, two or
three miles further along, it was hidden from sight for a minute by a
low-hanging cloud. Undoubtedly the aim of the gunners had been to
“hole,” not to fire the marauder, and it must have been losing gas
very rapidly even--as the climacteric moment of the attack
approached--at the time increased buoyancy was most desirable.
The “massed” searchlights of London “let go” shortly after the
gun-fire ceased, and now, as the raider came within their field, the
more scattered lights of the northern suburbs wheeled up and “fastened
on.” The fugitive changed its course from north to north-easterly
about this time, and the swelling clouds of vapour left behind
presently cut off its foreshortened length entirely from my view. A
heavy ground mist appeared to prevail beyond the heights to the
north, and in the diffused glow of the searchlights that strove to
pierce this mask my glasses showed the ghostly shadows of flitting
aeroplanes--manœuvring for the death-thrust.
The ground mist (which did not, however, cover London proper) kept the
full strength of the searchlights from the upper air, and it was in a
sky of almost Stygian blackness that the final blow was sent home. The
farmers of Hertfordshire tell weird stories of the detonations of
bursting bombs striking their fields, but all these sounds were
absorbed in the twenty-mile air-cushion that was now interposed
between my vantage point and the final scene of action.
Not a sound, not a shadow, heralded the flare of yellow light which
suddenly flashed out in the north-eastern heavens and spread
latitudinally until the whole body of a Zeppelin--no small object even
at twenty miles--stood out in glowing incandescence. Then a great
sheet of pink-white flame shot up, and in the ripples of rosy light
which suffused the earth for scores of miles I could read the gilded
lettering on my binoculars. This was undoubtedly the explosion of the
ignited hydrogen of the main gas-bags, and immediately following it
the great frame collapsed in the middle and began falling slowly
toward the earth, burning now with a bright yellow flame, above which
the curl of black smoke was distinctly visible. A lurid burst of
light--doubtless from the exploding petrol tanks--flared up as the
flaming mass struck the earth, and half a minute later the night, save
for the questing searchlights to east and south, was as black as ever
again.
Then perhaps the strangest thing of all occurred. London began to
cheer. I should have been prepared for it in Paris, or Rome, or
Berlin, or even New York, but that the Briton--who of all men in the
world most fears the sound of his own voice lifted in unrestrained
jubilation--was really cheering, and in millions, was almost too much.
I pinched my arm to be sure that I had not dozed away, and, lost in
wonder, forgot for a minute or two the great drama just enacted.
Under my window half a dozen Australian “Tommies” were rending the air
with “cooees” and dancing around a lamp-post, while all along the
street, from doorways and windows, exultant shouting could be heard.
For several blocks in all directions the cheers rang out loud and
clear, distinctly recognisable as such; the sound of the millions of
throats farther afield came only as a heavy rumbling hum. Perhaps
since the dawn of creation the air has not trembled with so strange a
sound--a sound which, though entirely human in its origin, was still
unhuman, unearthly, fantastic. Certainly never before in history--not
even during the great volcanic eruptions--has so huge a number of
people (the fall of the Zeppelin had been visible through a fifty-to
seventy-five-mile radius in all directions, a region with probably
from 10,000,000 to 15,000,000 inhabitants) been suddenly and intensely
stirred by a single event.
It was undoubtedly the spectacularity of the unexpected _coup_ that
had made these normally repressed millions so suddenly and so
violently vocal. Many--perhaps most--stopped cheering when they had
had time to realise that a score of human beings were being burned to
cinders in the heart of that flaming comet in the north-eastern
heavens; others--I knew the only recently restored tenements where
some of them were--must have shouted in all the grimmer exultation for
that very realisation. I can hardly say yet which stirred me more
deeply, the fall of the Zeppelin itself or that stupendous burst of
feeling aroused by its fall.
* * * * *
By taxi, milk-cart, tram, and any other conveyance that offered, but
mostly on foot, I threaded highway and byway for the next four hours,
and shortly after daybreak scrambled through the last of a dozen
thorny hedgerows and found myself beside the still smouldering
wreckage of the fallen raider. An orderly cordon of soldiers
surrounding an acre of blackened and twisted metal, miles and miles of
tangled wire, and a score or so of Flying Corps men already busily
engaged loading the wreckage into waiting motor-lorries--that was
about all there was to see. A ten-foot-square green tarpaulin covered
all that could be gathered together of the airship’s crew. Some of the
fragments were readily recognisable as having once been the arms and
legs and trunks of men; others were not. A man at my elbow stood
gazing at the pitiful heap for a space, his brow puckered in thought.
Presently he turned to me, a grim light in his eye, and spoke.
“Do you know,” he said, “that these” (indicating the charred stumps
under the square of canvas) “have just recalled to me the words Count
Zeppelin is reported to have used at a great mass meeting called in
Berlin to press for a more rigorous prosecution of the war against
England by air, for a further increase of frightfulness? Leading two
airship pilots to the front of the platform, he shouted to the crowd,
‘Here are two men who were over London last night!’ And the assembled
thousands, so the despatch said, roared their applause and clamoured
that the Zeppelins be sent again and again until the arrogant
Englanders were brought to their knees. Well”--he paused and drew a
deep breath as his eyes returned to the heap of blackened
fragments--“it appears that they _did_ send the Zeppelins again--more
than ever were sent before--and now it is _our_ turn to be presented
to ‘the men who were over London last night.’ I wonder if the flare
that consumed these poor devils was bright enough to pierce the black
night that has settled over Germany?”
* * * * *
The tenseness passed out of the night, and--the raid was over. Who
knows but what, so far as the threat to England is concerned, the
passing of _a_ Zeppelin marked also the passing of _the_ Zeppelin?
FIGHTING FOR SERBIA
I have had many strange meetings--strange in place and attendant
circumstance--in various and sundry odd corners of the world, but,
everything considered, I am inclined to think my encounter with
Radovitch, toward the end of last March, was the strangest of them
all.
It was on the gorgeously flower-carpeted slope of a mountain-side
in----. But let that transpire in its proper place.
There had been hint of gathering activity in the marching troops on
the roads, and I knew that some kind of a skirmish was on from the
scattering spatter of rifle-fire above and to my right; but that I had
actually blundered in between the combatants was not evident until the
staccato of a suddenly unmasked machine-gun broke out in the copse
below. I did not hear the familiarly ingratiating swish of speeding
bullets, and only an occasional twitching in the oak scrub told of a
skirmishing soldier, but it was plain that if the rifles were firing
in the direction of the machine-gun, and the machine-gun was firing in
the direction of the rifles, the position of my shivering anatomy
came pretty near to blocking a portion of the restricted little neck
of atmosphere along which the interchanged pellets must make their
way. One never learns it until he is under fire--especially
rifle-fire--for the first time, but the faculty for taking cover, for
making oneself inconspicuous at the approach of real or fancied
danger, is one of the few things in which the more or less degenerate
human of the present day suffers the least in comparison with that
fine and self-sufficient animal, his primitive ancestor.
I hurdled neatly over a natural “entanglement” of magenta-blossomed
cactus, dived through a bosky tunnel in the gnarled oak scrub, and
landed comfortably in the matted mass of soft maiden-hair where the
water dripped from the side of a deep hole excavated by the village
brick-makers in taking out clay. There was ample cover from anything
but high-angle artillery fire on either side; so, picking out a bed of
lush grass with a cornflower and buttercup pillow, I stretched in
luxurious ease to let the battle blow over.
The rifles spat back at the woodpecker drum of the machine-gun for a
minute or two, then quieted suddenly and gave way to the crashing of
underbrush and the chesty ’tween-the-teeth oaths that tell of
charging men. Scatteringly, in ones and twos and threes, they began
stumbling by above my head, now revealed by the quick silhouette of a
set jaw and forward-flung shoulders, and now by the glint of a bobbing
bayonet, but mostly by those guttural swearwords which mark the
earnest man on business bent. One of them--a gaunt-eyed Serb in the
faded horizon-blue uniform of a French _poilu_--who passed near enough
to the rim of my refuge to allow of a three-quarters length glimpse of
him, carried a squawking golden-hued hen by the feathers of her
hackle, and I was just reflecting how every other soldier that I had
ever known would have put a period on that tell-tale racket by
extending his grip round the windpipe, when Radovitch came down to
join me. Not that he had anything of the ulterior intention of seeking
cover that brought me there--quite to the contrary, indeed. I saw him
running hard and low (as every good soldier goes into grips with his
foe), burst out of the thicket, saw him straighten up and try to
swerve to the right as the hole suddenly yawned across his path, and,
finally, saw the quick tautening of the scaly yellow loop of
earth-running aloe root which deftly caught the toe of his shambling
boot and defeated the manœuvre.
There was little of the fine finesse of my own soft landing in the
whacking “kerplump” which completed the high dive executed by
Radovitch after his contact with the aloe root. His gun out-dived him
and cut short its parabola with the bayonet spiking a fern frond on
the opposite bank, but his broad, bronzed Slavic face was the first
part of Radovitch himself to reach the bottom, so that all the inertia
of the bone and muscle in his firmly-knit frame was exerted in driving
the ivory crescent of the teeth of his back-bent lower jaw in a swift,
rough gouge through the yielding turf. He pulled himself together in a
dazed sort of way, sat up, rubbed the grass out of his eyes, and
kneaded gently the strained joints of his jaw to see that they were
still swinging on their hinges. Reassured, he spat forth sputteringly
asphodel and anemone and the rest of his mouthful of flower-bed,
completing the operation by running an index finger around between the
lower teeth and lip to remove lurking bits of earth and gravel.
There was something strangely familiar in that index-finger operation,
and it was the sudden recollection that was the identical way in which
we used to get rid of the gridiron clods that had been forced under
our football nose-guards which was responsible for my fervent
ejaculation of surprise. I don’t recall exactly what I said, but it
was probably something akin to “I’ll be blowed!”
The look of dazed resentment on Radovitch’s grass-and dirt-stained
face changed instantly to one of blank surprise. The poor strained jaw
relaxed, and he turned on me a stare of open-eyed wonder.
“Where in ’ell d’you come from?” he gasped finally; and then, “You
speak English?”
When, ignoring the former query, I grinned acquiescence to the latter,
he came back with, “Ain’t ’Merican, are you? Don’t know New York, do
you?”
On my admission of guilt on both charges, he crawled over and gripped
my hand crushingly in his grimy paw.
“My name’s Radovitch. ’Merican citizen myself,” he said proudly. “Took
out my last papers just ’fore I came over to fight for Serbia. Went to
school five years in New York when I was a kid. Ever been in Chicago?”
“Of course.”
Radovitch’s excitement, increasing when he found I had been in Omaha
(where he had worked in the stockyards), and Jerome, Arizona (where he
had “dumped slag” in the copper smelter), reached its climax when I
assured him that I had once played a game of baseball at Aldridge, a
little coal-mining town in Montana, near the northern portal of
Yellowstone Park.
“I got a store there, and a half int’rest in the baseball grounds and
a dance-hall,” he cried; and he was just in the midst of an excited
account of his rise to fortune in what he called the “hottest little
ol’ camp in the Yellowstone,” when the din of two or three fresh
machine-guns opening in unison drowned his voice, and a few minutes
later a half-dozen rifle muzzles were poked over the edge of our
refuge, while a gruff-voiced Serb corporal, in the khaki tunic of a
British Tommy and the baggy breeches of a French Zouave, informed us
that we were his prisoners.
Radovitch, with a sheepish grin on his face, threw up his hands with
the classic cry of “Kamerad!” and then, shambling over opposite his
captors, coolly bade them toss down a box of cigarettes for him and
his “Merikansky” friend.
“Smashed mine when I fell,” he explained, sauntering back and offering
me a “Macedonia.” “Wouldn’t you reckon we’d had about enough fighting
in Serbia without these d---- d sham fights while we’re supposed to be
resting up here in Corfu? It may be all right for new recruits; but
you’ll have to admit that two years of the brand of scrapping we’ve
been getting over yonder in those mountains is not going to put us on
edge for play-fighting like this. But never mind, we’ll be back to the
real thing again in a month or two. Come on along down to the camp and
meet my Colonel. We were kids together in Prilep. Now he’s in command
of three thousand men and I’m only a corporal; but just the same I
could buy him out twenty times over.”
The bare outline of Radovitch’s story he told me that evening (after
he had officially been “set free” again), as I trudged beside him
across the hills to his camp; but it was not until he obtained an
afternoon’s leave three or four days later, and took me for a stroll
through the Serbian Relief Camp, that I learned he had been one of
that immortal band of heroes who, disdaining to take advantage of the
open roads to the Adriatic or Macedonia after Belgrade fell, made
their way to a mountain fastness in the heart of their own country and
stayed behind to wage such warfare as they could on the hated invader.
What sort of a warfare this was--indeed, what sort of a warfare it
_is_, for the band still survives, making up in an unquenchable
spirit what it has lost in numbers--I then learned for the first time.
It was only the unexpected coming across a newly arrived comrade
(suffering--and it looked to me, dying--from an open bayonet wound and
an advanced and hitherto neglected attack of scurvy), that turned
Radovitch from wistful reminiscence of Aldridge, Montana, and set him
talking of the grim realities of the life he had been leading in
Serbia, a subject on which I had found him strangely reticent up to
that moment. The things he spoke of that afternoon covered only an
incident or two of his life with a body of men who, steadily depleted
and yet as steadily recruited from Heaven knows where, have furnished
an example of bravery and devotion to an all but lost cause almost
without a parallel even in a war in which bravery and devotion form
the regular grist of the day’s work.
Because this band in question, although its exploits are even now
being sung of by the Serbs along with those of the half-legendary
heroes of their early history, is still a “force in being,” exercising
in its sphere an influence of its own on the course of the war, it is
necessary that the names of the villages and towns and mountains and
valleys and rivers to which Radovitch so constantly referred in his
narrative should be entirely suppressed. I may say, however, that
later inquiry which I made at Serbian Headquarters at Salonika
revealed ample evidence that the things he told me of--as well as
others scarcely less remarkable of which the time has not yet come to
write--occurred beyond the shadow of a doubt.
The mood to talk did not seize Radovitch until after he had led me to
the summit of the hill behind the Relief Camp, from which lofty
vantage the eye roved eastward across a purple strait to the
snow-capped peaks of Epirus and Albania, westward to where what was
once the Kaiser’s villa of Achilleon stood out sharply against the
sombre green of the backbone ridge of the island, northward to where
its twin castles flanked to right and left the white walls and red
roofs of Corfu town, and southward to the dim outlines of Leukas and
Cephalonia, thinning in the violet haze of late afternoon. Below, on
three sides, was the sea, with the storied Isles of Ulysses bracing
themselves against the flood-tide racing into the bay; above, a vault
of cloudless sky, and round about a thousand-year-old forest of
gnarled olives. It was the effect of all this, together with the sight
of his friend from Serbia in the little tented hospital of the Relief
Camp, which set Radovitch talking of things I had been vainly trying
to draw him out upon ever since I met him. While the mood lasted he
seemed to need no other encouragement than the attentive listener so
ready to hand; when it had passed he was back to the mines of Montana
again, deaf and blind to my every attempt to make him talk of Serbia
and what had befallen him there.
“How did your band get together in the first place?” I had asked, “and
what sort of men was it made up of? Was there some kind of
organisation before the retreat, or did you simply drift together
afterwards?”
“It must have been mostly ‘drift,’” replied Radovitch. “Probably the
Government and our generals knew we’d have to give way when the
Austrians and Bulgars together came at us, but none of the rest of us
ever dreamed we couldn’t wallop the whole bunch. So I don’t think
there is much truth in the yarn about the band of ‘blood brothers’
that had been formed in advance. We were about evenly made up at the
start of men who wouldn’t leave the country and men who couldn’t leave
the country. The first were mostly mountain men of the region we went
to. There were a lot of ex-brigands among them, and most of them had
been fighting the Turk, or the Bulgar, or the Government, or each
other, all their lives. It was to the way these fellows knew the
country, and how to live off it and fight in it, that we owed most of
our success. The rest of us were all sorts of odds and ends who had
fallen out of the retreat but had still been able to keep out of enemy
hands.
“At first this particular mountain region--which later became our
stronghold, and is now the only part of Old Serbia in which the enemy
has never set foot--was but a refuge, and for a few weeks we were
pretty hard put to find enough to live on. It was touch and go for
food all of the first winter, and we lived mostly by night raids on
straggling Austrian supply trains. But before long we rounded up
enough sheep and goats to keep us going, and in the spring got one of
the little mountain valleys under cultivation. Since last
summer--except for vegetables, which we had no luck with--food was one
of our least troubles.
“We had plenty of rifles from the first. A Serb will drop his clothes
before he will his gun, as you will find if you ever see our army in
action where a river has to be forded. Many a man straggled in to us
without pants or shirt, but never a one that I ever heard of without
his rifle, We were also tolerably well fixed for cartridges, because
a man don’t use one in raiding or fighting from ambush to a hundred he
pots off in the trenches. We always managed to have enough for our own
regular army rifles, and after we got well started raiding, Austrian
rifles and munition came in faster than we ever had use for them. We
could have done with an extra machine-gun or two before we had our
stone-rolling defence organised, and before the Austrians had learned
that it didn’t pay to try and crawl in and pull us out of our holes.
But before the winter was over we had enough spare ‘spit-firers,’ so
that we didn’t mind risking the loss of one or two by taking them
along on raiding parties.
“The lay of the mountains made the whole _mesa_[4] just one big
natural fort, and I miss my guess if in all the world there’s another
place of the same kind so easy to defend and so hard to attack. The
mountains are steeper and rockier than that main range of Albania you
see across there against the sky, and that’s going some. I never
struck anything half so rough in all the summers I put in prospecting
in Arizona, Utah, and Colorado. Only one of the passes had a cart-road
up to it, and only three had mule trails. At two or three other
places a man could scramble up by using his hands, but everywhere else
he would need to have ropes and scaling ladders.
[4] Table-land.
“At every one of the passes--including the one of the cart-road--a
half-dozen good rock-rollers, with plenty of ‘ammunition,’ could put
the kibosh on an army, and you may bet we saw to it that there was no
shortage of pebbles on hand. For the first week or two my fingers were
worn pretty near to the bone from handling rocks. The only way the
Austrians could have got the best of us, once we had made ourselves at
home, would have been with not less than a dozen regiments of their
Kaiser Jaeger, mountain batteries and all; but by the time this fact
sunk into them the Italians were keeping them so busy that they
probably figured they couldn’t spare any such number of Alpine troops
for side-shows. Anyhow, they never even gave us a good run for our
money in the way of attacks, though of course some of the raiding
parties came in for pretty bad punishings every now and then.
“The one thing that we needed most, first and last, was dynamite. If
we could have got hold of even half a ton of it in the first month or
two, before the Austrians got their patrols organised, we could have
done no end of harm in blowing up bridges and tunnels where they had
been missed in the rush of the retreat, and upsetting communications
generally. When we finally did begin to get hold of powder, all the
danger-points were so heavily guarded that we never got a fair chance
at them. Once, with fifty men armed with knives, we rushed the guard
at an important bridge and cleaned up the lot before a shot was fired.
But something must have been wrong with the fuse or caps, for the
dynamite placed under the near abutment never exploded, and there
wasn’t time to go back and do the job over. The next time we tried the
same tactics it was on a tunnel, but here they had an ambush ready,
and only about a dozen of the hundred men who were in the raid ever
came back. The smoothest piece of tunnel work ever brought off was not
done by our gang at all, but by a much smaller one that worked in the
region of Uskub for a while, led by a Serbian Intelligence Officer
from Salonika who had been dropped there a month before from an
aeroplane. They descended into a very important pass in broad
daylight, seized a train of empty freight cars that was waiting on a
siding for a south-bound troop-train to go by, held it until a signal
arranged for in advance told them the troop-train was entering the
north end of the longest tunnel in that part of the country, and then
turned the freight loose into the other end. We had word later that
never a man was brought out alive, but the best effect of the job was
its setting afire the lime rock in the heart of the mountain and the
blocking of traffic for many months.
“This southern band--after recruiting up to over a thousand men at one
time, and making life miserable for the Austrians for nearly four
months--ran short of food in mid-winter and had to break up. Its
leader, however, disguised as a Bulgar soldier, worked his way back
through the enemy lines, and after just missing being potted by the
first Serb patrol he ran into after crossing the Cerna, reached
Salonika in safety with a complete report of what he had seen during
five months in hostile territory. It was the slickest job of the kind
that has been put through in this neck of the war. The guy’s name
is----, and, unless he’s off on another lay of the same kind, you can
probably see him in Salonika.[5]
[5] Through the courtesy of the Crown Prince of Serbia, the
writer, on his subsequent visit to Salonika, was granted an
interview with the Intelligence Officer in question, and expects
shortly to have permission to write a complete account of what
was undoubtedly not only one of the most daring, but also one of
the most successful exploits of the war.
“As I was telling you,” resumed Radovitch, “dynamite was the one thing
we felt the need of more than anything else, and yet--perhaps the one
big thing we did wouldn’t have been half so big (and maybe it would
have failed completely) if we’d had the powder to go about the job the
way we planned to do it in the first place. Did you ever hear what
happened to the Austrian force that was camped in the ---- Valley last
spring?”
“I remember reading one of their bulletins,” I replied, “which
admitted losing a battalion or two in a flood in that region. But that
was due to ‘natural causes,’ wasn’t it? Didn’t a broken dam have
something to do with it?”
“Natural causes and a busted dam did have something to do with it,”
said Radovitch with a grin; “but nature in this case had some active
assistance, and that was where we came in. It wasn’t just a battalion
that went down-stream, either; it was more like two of their big
regiments--the whole of the main force they had shivvied together to
bottle us up with. It was the best thing we did by a mile; and, as I
told you, it wouldn’t have been half the clean-up it was if we’d had
in the first place the powder to do it in the ‘regular way.’ If we
_had_ had the powder, we’d never have given Providence a chance, and,
believe me, it was nothing but Providence that could have worked
things round the way they finally came out.
“You see, it was this way,” went on Radovitch, settling back
comfortably and smiling the pleased smile of reminiscence that sits on
the face of a man who recalls events in which he has taken keen pride
and enjoyment, “the most open approach to our mountain country was by
the gorge up which ran the cart-road. There was a good-sized area of
watershed draining out this way, so that the little river running
through the gorge was a pretty powerful stream even in low water--a
good bit bigger than the old Firehole in Yellowstone Park. This river
flowed out of the main mass of the mountains into a fine bowl of an
uplands valley, and then on out of that, through a rough range of
foothills, in another gorge. At the head of this last gorge is a
natural site to store water, and there--as a project of an old
Government reclamation scheme that had been held up halfway for lack
of money to go on with--a high dam had been built which backed up a
deep, narrow lake four or five miles long.
“The Austrians had a small force in the little village in the valley
of the lake, and patrolled four or five miles of the cart-road into
the mountains, but the main lot of them were camped below the second
gorge in an open, triangle-shaped valley that ran up from the plain to
the foothills. It was a good, safe, healthy, well-drained camp, well
above the top marks of spring high-water. The only threat to it was
the lake behind the dam in the valley above, but, unluckily for them,
they didn’t know all the facts about that dam.
“The truth was that this dam was built to hold up a lake half again as
deep as the one then there, but poor engineering and scamp contracting
combined to make it too weak to stand the pressure up to the level
intended. The English engineer who came to inspect it put a mark about
two-thirds of the way up, and warned that it wouldn’t be safe to ever
let the water rise above that height. As a precaution, it had been the
custom every February or March, before the spring thaw came, to drain
off the water of the lake during the month or two before the run-off
was the greatest, so that there was plenty of margin against the
floods shoving up the level above the danger-point. The Austrians were
good enough engineers to know that it was a rotten dam, but they
didn’t seem to have the sense to start lowering the water level before
the spring freshets set in.
“Of course we didn’t have to set up nights to figure what a break in
the dam--if only it came sudden enough--would do to the main Austrian
camp; but the contriving of ways and means to bring about that ‘sudden
break’ seemed to have us guessing from the first. The simple and
natural thing would have been to try and work down a couple of raiding
parties on either side of the lake, rush the guards at the dam with
knives (as we did later at the bridge I told you of), plant two or
three charges of dynamite, touch off the fuses, and beat it back to
the hills. If we’d had enough powder, probably that’s the thing we’d
have tried, but with what success it’s hard to say. The chances
against anything like a ‘clean job’ were anywhere from ten to fifty to
one. In the first place, there was the chance of some of the raiders
running into an Austrian patrol or sentry and starting something
before they ever got near the dam. Then there was the chance that the
rush at the dam might not go off quietly enough to keep from bringing
the force in the village down on us and making it hopeless to try and
place the powder, even if we had cleaned up the guards. Or, if we did
get the powder placed, there was the chance that we might fail to
explode it (as happened at the bridge); or even if it did explode, it
was no cinch that the dam would go all at once, or that the camp below
wouldn’t be warned in time to get clear. Yes, I’m sure it was a good
fifty-to-one that one of these things would have upset the apple-cart
if we’d happened to be in shape to try and do the job with dynamite.
And once we’d showed our hand, of course, the Austrians had only to
let the water out of the lake or move the lower camp, and the game was
up for good.
“But the hundred or so sticks of forty per cent. ‘giant’ we had in
stock were out of the question to tackle the job with, and so no move
was made that might have stirred the enemy’s suspicions of what we had
in pickle for him. So, far from taking any precautions as the flood
season approached, he only let the water go on rising in the lake and
extended the main camp a hundred yards nearer the river. We talked
over a hundred plans in the long winter nights, but it was not till
the snow began to turn slushy at noonday, along towards the middle of
March, that we hit on one that seemed to promise a chance of success.
“We had been hoping all along that the Austrians might let the water
go on piling up behind the dam until it gave way, but it was not till
one day when our scouts brought word that the gates had now been
opened, with the evident intention of holding the lake at a level
which they figured at about ten feet above the danger-point, that it
occurred to us that we might do something to help the good work along.
Nobody ever recalled afterwards whose idea it was, but a dozen of
us--officers and men together, in the Serbian fashion--suddenly found
ourselves waving our arms and getting red in the face discussing a
plan for building a little dam of our own, backing up as big a lakeful
of water behind it as we could, and then turning it loose on the big
lake below at the crest of the spring floods. If any of us had had any
engineering sense we’d have known that we couldn’t build--with no
tools but a few axes and spades, and no materials but what nature had
put there--a dam in a year big enough to be of any use, let alone in a
month. But having no sense to speak of in things of that kind, we went
ahead with the job, and, with the luck of fools, pulled it off.
“There was a fine site for a dam at the upper end of the cart-road
gorge, where it looked as though a solid barrier thirty feet high
would back up a lake something like three-quarters of a mile long and
from a quarter to half a mile wide. We began by building a ‘crib’ of
pine-trunks thirty feet wide--which was to be filled with boulders
and gravel. On our pencil plan of it, it was to be heavily buttressed
from below and slope from both sides till it was only ten feet wide at
the top. Our idea was to make it as much like a fort as possible, so
that if the Austrians piped it off from an aeroplane they would think
we were only working on defences. A hole was to be left in the middle
for the river to flow out through, as we didn’t intend to store water
till the big rains and thaws set in. As it was rainy or windy every
day from the time we started to work, the Austrians--as far as we ever
knew--did no flying over the mountains, so that we had no worry on
that score.
“Upwards of five hundred husky Serbs can do a deal of work,
but it didn’t take more than three days of log-rolling and
rock-packing to show that--even at the pace we were hitting it--that
hundred-yard-long, thirty-feet-high dam wouldn’t be finished before
the next season, and that, even if we did get it done some time, the
stuff we were putting in it was too loose to stop water. It was at
this stage of things that I had _my_ big idea. I had worked in
hydraulic mines in the West, and while we had nothing to rig up a pipe
and nozzle from, there _was_ a chance to divert a little mountain
torrent that came tumbling down from the snows only a few yards below
our dam site. Why not, I suggested, build up only a narrow crib of
boulders and pine logs to act as a barrier, and then bring over this
little torrent--it was flowing about a hundred miner’s inches at this
time--and let it sluice down the loose ‘conglomerate’ from the
four-hundred-foot-high cliff through which it flowed? Because no one
had anything else to offer, we decided to try the thing.
“We used up a good half of our poor little store of powder in making
the cut to bring over the stream, but the job was mostly easy digging,
and we finished it in three days. My young ‘hydraulic’ sure tore down
a lot of rock and gravel, but, as we couldn’t rig up anything to
confine it properly, it only spread out in a big ‘fan,’ which in turn
was sluiced away by the river. That fairly stumped us, and when on top
of it a big storm came on and brought down a flood that washed away
all our cribbing, we chucked up in disgust our project of ‘harnessing
nature’ against the Austrian and began to plan raids again.
“All that night it rained cats and dogs, and when I looked out of my
hut the next morning the river was over its banks and humping it like
a ‘locoed’ mustang. But the funny thing was that the cascade from the
little stream we had diverted seemed to have disappeared. At first I
thought it had bucked its way back into its old channel, but when I
went down to look I found that it had been ‘swallowed’ up by the
cliff. Five times as big as on the night before, it came tumbling down
over an up-ended stratum of slate, to disappear in a foamy
yellow-white spout into a deep crack it had sluiced into the soft
‘conglomerate.’ At the bottom of the cliff it came boiling out from
under the angling slate-layer in a stream that looked to be about
equal parts of gravel and water. My baby ‘hydraulic’ had evidently
undermined a sloping section of the cliff for a hundred feet or more,
and only the tough slate stratum was staving off a big cave-in. How
big a cave-in it was going to be, and what it was going to lead to, I
never guessed.
“The warm rain kept plugging down all day, and was still pelting hard
when I went to sleep that night. Towards morning I was waked up with a
roar a hundred times louder than any snow-slide I ever heard, and then
came a jar that rocked the whole valley. I felt sure a piece of the
cliff had come down, but didn’t have the least hunch that anything
like what the first daylight showed up had come off. The first thing I
saw as the dark slacked off was the shimmer of a flat stretch of
water in the bottom of the valley, a lake--just as if it had been
dropped from the sky--right where we’d been trying to start one
ourselves.
“The cliff had broken back a couple of hundred feet or more all the
way to the top, and in falling had piled up clear across the head of
the gorge. On the near side it was about one hundred and fifty feet
high, on the farther side something like sixty.
“With the rain still pouring pitchforks and the snow melting all over
the mountains, water was coming down at a rate that had the lake
rising at the rate of two feet an hour all morning, and better than
half that fast even when it began to spread out over the valley floor
in the afternoon. The storm kept right on for three days. The second
morning there was twenty-five feet of water at the dam, on the third
forty feet and on the fourth near to fifty. The lake by this time was
both bigger and deeper than the one we’d planned to make ourselves.
“By good luck the streams ramping down from the mountains into the
gorge below the slide kept two or three times its average flow in the
river, and so the Austrians--who didn’t know its habits very
well--failed to notice that anything unusual had come off up-stream.
Our scouts reported that the water in the lower lake had not risen
much, and that it seemed to stand at about fifteen feet above the
danger mark. The Austrians, they said, did not appear to be paying any
more attention to the dam than usual.
“We were hoping that the storm would hold until enough water was
backed up to bust the dam on its own, but when it began to clear on
the fourth day it was plain the best way out of it was to give the
thing a push on our own account. We didn’t have a hundredth of enough
‘giant’ to do the job, so had to rig the best makeshift we could by
turning the still husky stream of my ‘hydraulic’ right along the
sloping top of the slide and off down into the gorge.
“It was about midday when we set it sluicing, and all afternoon it
licked off the loose earth as if it was sugar. By dark half the near
end of the slide had slushed away, and the wall that still held was
beginning to bulge and cave with the seep forced through from the
other side. Half an hour later our pitch-pine torches showed the water
bubbling through all the way along, and we knew it was time for us to
clear out. It was none too soon either, for the last man was just out
of the way when a heavy sort of rolling-grind started, and
then--whouf!--out she went.
“I’ve been in ‘Yankee Jim’s’ Canyon of the Yellowstone when the flood
behind the break-up of the ice-jam in the lake came down, but that was
a rat-a-tat to the roar that sounded now. The mountains themselves
were shaking, and the movement started the ‘hanging’ snow-slides all
the way down the gorge. It must have been a racket like that when the
world was made. The lake was drained of all but mud in ten minutes,
and it must have been about twice that long before a new sound broke
in--a roar so deep that it seemed to almost be a rumbling from under
the earth. But we knew that it was the big dam going--that our work
was done for that night.
“The next morning at daybreak every man in shape to stand the climb
over a mountain path we knew--the road down the gorge had been scoured
out clean--dropped down from three sides on the little Austrian force
in the village where the dam had been, and killed or captured the
whole bunch. Then we pushed on to the top of the foothills looking
down to the plain. Where the main Austrian camp had been was a slither
of smooth mud, dotted with the stumps of snapped-off trees; and just
that, and no more, was all we could see as far as our eyes could
reach.
“And just so,” cried Radovitch, leaping to his feet and shaking a fist
toward the serrated sky-line to the north-east, beyond which ran the
roads to Monastir and Prilep and Uskub; “just so, when the time comes,
will the whole ---- ---- herd of the swine be swept out of Serbia!”
BEATING BACK FROM GERMANY
(AS TOLD BY AN ESCAPED PRISONER).
I was born on a Wisconsin farm, almost within sight of Lake Michigan
and only a few miles from the Illinois State line. My father was Irish
and my mother German. Like my name, most of my qualities--both good
and bad--were those of my father rather than my mother. He died when I
was ten, and within a year my mother married our German hired-man. My
mother was never unkind to me, but my stepfather was a brute, and from
the day of his coming to live with us I date a steadily growing
dislike for his race, which has been made worse by a sort of fatality
which, in spite of myself, has seemed to work to throw me amongst them
all my life.
My stepfather was always rough with me, but until I was sixteen
confined himself to a black-snake and horsewhip in beating me. I got
on as best I could with him, but when he celebrated my coming to what
he called “man’s estate” by starting in on me with a hoe-handle, it
was more than I could stand. The second time he tried it I was ready
for him and caught him a blow behind the ear with an iron
monkey-wrench that laid him out across the chopping-block. Afraid that
I had killed him--he was really not hurt much--I ran away, taking
nothing with me but the wrench I had in my hand. I never parted with
that good old monkey-wrench during all my wanderings of the next ten
years, and I felt worse about losing it to the Germans in Flanders
than I did about the two fingers their shrapnel bashed off.
For the next few years I did all kinds of farm work, always being
employed by Germans because nearly all of the farms in southern
Wisconsin are owned by those people. Possibly there were many good
people amongst them, but it always seemed to be my luck to get with
the others. Hard workers themselves, they were also hard drivers of
those who worked for them, and full of mean little tricks for getting
more time out of you or for giving you less money. Of course, being
quick-tempered and with a sort of standing grudge against all
“square-heads” growing up inside of me anyhow, I was in hot water most
of the time. The week that went by without a fight was very
exceptional. If they were content to go after me with their fists, I
usually kept to the same weapons, and hardly recall a time when I
didn’t have the best of it. But if they ever tried anything else I
always fell back on my trusty monkey-wrench, which I generally carried
swung to my belt with a raw-hide. After a while, just as the Indians
used to tally their scalps on the handles of their tomahawks, I
started cutting a notch on the wooden grip of my monkey-wrench for
every time I had dropped--I don’t think I ever killed one--a
“square-head” with it. At first--proud of what they stood for--I cut
them broad and long, but soon I saw I was using up my limited space
too fast, and, to provide for “future developments,” began cutting
them smaller. It was surprising how much the notches improved the
grip.
By the time I was twenty I was able to run both the engine and the
separator of a threshing-machine outfit, and started going west every
summer to the Dakotas and Montana to get the benefit of the high
harvest pay. My winters I spent in a big factory in Racine, learning
to repair and build threshers and tractors. Partly to save the money
that I would have had to pay for a ticket, but more for the lark of
it, I started beating my way back and forth between the east and the
west on the trains. Sometimes I stowed away with a week’s food in an
empty furniture car, sometimes I rode the “blind baggage,” but mostly
it was the old stand-by of the “bindle-stiff” called “riding the
rods.” My nerve was good and my arms strong, and it wasn’t long before
I could swing up and disappear inside the “bumpers” of a train doing
thirty miles an hour as easily as the conductor swung on to the tail
of the caboose by his hand-rail. It was little idea I had that the
tricks I learned in those days were going to make all the difference
between my starving in a German prison camp and (what is happening
now) being fed on chocolates and pink teas in London by way of
training for another go at the Huns.
In 1913 I went to South America to set up and run threshing outfits
that had been sold to the ranchers by the Racine company I had been
working for winters. I had a two years’ contract, and was supposed to
go to Uruguay or the Argentine. If I had done that, probably things
would have been all right. But at the last moment, as a result of some
one else dropping out, I was sent to Rio Grande do Sul, in the
southern “pan-handle” of Brazil. But don’t believe that because it was
Brazil there were any Brazilians there, or leastways any that counted
for anything. The Germans have been swarming into Rio Grande and
Santa Catharina for thirty years, and to-day southern Brazil is as
“Dutch” as--southern Wisconsin. Probably, in fact, it is more so, for
there are over half a million Germans there, and hardly a third that
many Brazilians.
I had been avoiding German farms for the last two or three years, but
in Rio Grande all the ranchers were Germans, and I had to go wherever
an outfit had been sold anyhow. The notches multiplied pretty fast on
my old monkey-wrench for about three weeks, but at the end of that
time I found myself in jail for knocking out the front teeth of a fat
German farmer after I had ducked a prod from his pitchfork. Our agent
at Santa Catharina and the American Consul at Santos got me clear, but
the former took the occasion to cancel my contract and ship me home
before, as he put it, I had ruined the company’s trade in that end of
Brazil.
I was breaking prairie with a big gasoline tractor outfit in northern
Manitoba when the European War started, and so sure I was that my
country was going to take some kind of a stand against the invasion of
Belgium that I got ready at once to go home and enlist in case we had
to back up the protest with force. I waited, with my grip packed,
until it was plain that there was no chance of any move from our
brave statesmen at Washington--it must have been three or four weeks
before I gave up hope--and then threw up my job, did sixty miles on
horseback in nine hours to the railway station, and went to the
nearest recruiting office. They would probably have taken me as an
American, but I was taking no chances on being rejected. I told them I
was an Irish-Canadian, and the next day was being put through the
paces by the drill-sergeant. I could have got much more pay and a
better billet generally by going into the transport service and
driving a motor truck, but I had suddenly become aware that I had been
nursing a sort of slumbering desire to kill Germans for the last
decade, and I wasn’t going to miss the chance to let that desire wake
up. I sewed an extra loop on my belt so that I could have my good old
monkey-wrench always handy, and began looking anxiously forward to the
time when I should be able to complete my “register” of bashed-up
Dutchmen on the handle. I might have to use my rifle for long-range
work, I told myself, but for the close-in action in the trenches I was
going to do with my wrench what the other fellows did with their
bayonets. Lucky it was for my peace of mind in those days that I
couldn’t look forward and see what the end of the next eight or ten
months had in pickle for me.
The call was pretty persistent for men in those first months of the
war and, in spite of the shortage of all kinds of equipment, our
training was rushed from the very beginning. Most of the boys in my
regiment had seen service or had training--some had been in the South
African War, and others had been members of the English Territorials
or the Canadian Militia--already, and we made much better progress
than the rawer contingents that came later. We had about three months
in Canada, a little longer in England (where I had a touch of typhoid
on Salisbury Plain), and by the early spring of 1915 we were in
reserve in Flanders. By the time the Germans made their second attempt
to drive through Ypres to Calais we had been pushed up into the first
line. Until the big attack came, however, we had had no real fighting.
The Germans--I had begun to call them Huns by this time instead of
Dutchmen--made scattering raids on our trenches and we made scattering
raids on theirs, but I never figured in any of this to the extent of
mixing in hand-to-hand work. I had no chances to add any notches to
the handle of my old monkey-wrench, but from my always carrying it
around with me the English “Tommies” (who call a wrench a spanner)
had dubbed me “Spanner Mike.” They pretended to believe I was a little
“cracked” about my trusty old friend, but I found that they were never
above borrowing it for everything, from opening boxes from home to
tinkering the gear of broken-down automobile trucks--“motor lorries,”
they call them. It’s really remarkable what a lot of things a man can
use a monkey-wrench for if only he happens to have it handy when he
needs it.
For some days the shell-fire against us had been getting heavier--at
least they called it heavy then; it would be nothing now--and we knew
that the Huns were getting ready for some kind of an attack. What kind
it was going to be we little dreamed, for even our officers seem to
have known nothing about the gas they had been experimenting with over
in Germany. When it came--it rolled toward us in heavy clouds like the
morning mists in the Dakota “Bad Lands”--the word went round that the
Huns’ munitions had got afire, and we were telling each other that we
ought to be sent across to take advantage of the confusion. It was
only when we began to notice that it was bubbling up at fairly regular
intervals--thick greasy yellow clouds of it--that it seemed they
might be putting up a game on us, and by that time one of the advanced
tongues of the stuff lapped over into our trench.
I shall never forget the horrible agony and surprise in the eyes of
the men who got that first dose. It was the look of a dog being
suddenly beaten for something it hadn’t done. They looked at each
other with questioning eyes--I only recall hearing one man start
cursing--then they began gulping and coughing, and then fell down with
their faces in their hands. All the time the shrapnel was popping
overhead and raining bullets about, and, just as the gas began to pour
over my parapet, a bullet knocked my rifle out of my hand, and I
slipped in the mud as I jumped back and went down in a heap. It must
have been all of six weeks before I stood on my feet again.
My first sensation was of a smarting way up inside of my nose. This
quickly extended to my throat, and then, as my lungs suddenly seemed
filled with red-hot needles, I was seized with a spasm of coughing.
Coughing up red-hot needles is not exactly a pleasant operation, and
the pain was intense. Mercifully, it was only a few minutes before a
sort of stupor seemed to come on, but even as I passed into
half-consciousness I was aware of my outraged lungs revolting, in
heaves that shook my frame, against the poison that had swamped the
trench. With some of my comrades the fighting instinct was the last
thing that died, and I have a sort of a recollection of two or three
of them clutching at the parapet and firing from cough-shaken
shoulders off into the depths of the rolling yellow gas clouds. One
lad toppled over beside me and still kept pumping shots from the
bottom of the trench. I remember hazily trying to kick his rifle out
of his hand as he discharged it over my ear, and, failing to locate it
with my foot, recall groping instinctively for my old wrench and
trying to disarm him with that. My last recollection of this stage of
things was the shock of feeling the wrench-handle swing backward
harmlessly for lack of my two shrapnel-smashed fingers to steady it.
I had rolled and writhed, in the agony of the pain of the gas in my
lungs, in a pool of slush in the bottom of the trench, and it must
have been the lying with my face buried in the shoulder of my wet
woollen tunic that saved my life. Most of my comrades were quite
unconscious when the Huns, with their heads protected by baggy
“snoots,” came pouring into the trench, but I had enough of my senses
left unparalysed to be able to watch them in a hazy sort of way. The
horrible quietness of the thing was positively uncanny. Always before
the enemy had charged with yells (it is directed in their manual that
they do so, though, of course, a man “gives tongue” naturally on such
occasions from sheer excitement), but now they were hardly making a
sound. Probably this was by orders, so that no more air than was
necessary should be taken into the lungs, but even when some of them
did try to speak the words were so muffled that it must have been very
hard to make them out.
The Huns were pretty excited at first, and started right down the
trench bayoneting one body after another. But before they got to me an
officer stopped them for a minute and evidently gave them to
understand that they were to confine their butchery only to those that
tried to resist. Two or three of our boys, who had not gone under
entirely but had not sense enough to understand the uselessness of
putting up a fight, made a few groggy passes at the Huns and paid the
penalty. I lay quiet and played “possum,” but got a nasty prod in the
groin when one of them turned me over with his bayonet to see where I
was wounded. There was still a good deal of gas in the bottom of the
trench, and between that and loss of blood I must have lost
consciousness entirely about this time.
My recollections covering the next day or two are very dim and
confused, but one thing was photographed so clearly on my mind that
the image of it has never faded; I even grow hot as I think of it now,
over a year later. This was the last thing I saw before I “went to
sleep” in the trenches--two Huns using my monkey-wrench (the tool I
had been “strafing” “Dutchmen” with for the last ten years, and which
I had brought along to continue that good work with) to tinker up one
of our own smashed machine-guns to use against our own men. I never
saw it again, and its loss rankled in my mind during the whole year
that I was doomed to spend in German hospitals and prison camps.
I have some memory of being carried in a stretcher, and of passing
through one or two dressing-stations where my wounds were washed and
bandaged. My connected recollections begin after my waking up in a
hospital--well back from the Front, but still not out of the sound of
the guns--that was evidently devoted entirely to “gas” cases. The ward
I was in was filled with men from my own regiment, but what interested
me specially--as soon as I was able to take any interest in anything
beyond my own suffering--was to observe that a great many Germans
were also being treated in the same hospital. I never did find out
just how these happened to be “gassed,” but presume it was either
through accidents to their apparatus or from their “snoots” being
faulty.
At any rate, the Germans had evidently prepared in advance for “gas”
cases, and the chances are that they pulled through a good many of us
who might have died had we been taken back to our own hospitals, where
they had, at that time, small facilities for handling that kind of
trouble. The ward was kept as hot as a Turkish bath, and some of our
chaps thought this was done with the idea of making our agony worse.
One of them, who jumped out of bed, threw up a window, got a lungful
of cold air, and died the same night, gave us a proper object-lesson
in why the air had to be kept at close to blood heat. Some of them
also thought that a kind of stuff they gave us to inhale made us worse
rather than better, but that was only their imagination. If there was
any real ground for complaint it might have been on the score that the
doctors tried a good many experiments on us because this was the first
chance they had had to study gas poisoning on a large scale, but that
was no more than we could have expected. Probably our own doctors
would have been glad of some “dogs,” in the shape of Huns, to “try it
on” when they first began to study “gassing.”
But the doctors were always attentive, and the nurses always
kind--more than kind, most of them. But I already had learned that a
nurse’s best stock-in-trade is her “sympathy,” and those I met in
Germany were no exception to the rule. I think it was the way that
those plump blonde _fräuleins_ looked after us poor devils in that
steaming-hot ward that kept me from trying to run amuck and commit
murder as soon as I was well enough to be sure that my memory of those
two Huns tinkering at our machine-gun with my old monkey-wrench was no
“fevered vision.”
I have been told often since returning to England that it will be just
as well not to say too much about my hardships in the German prison
camps, as it might be the way of making things all the worse for those
still doomed to remain there. So I shall touch lightly on this side of
my experiences, and, to be on the safe side, will try not to mention
any camps or other German localities by name. I was sent to what, had
I but known it, was the most liberally run prison camp in Germany
after my discharge from the hospital, but even at that the treatment
was so abominable in comparison with what I had been receiving and had
a right to expect that it undid at once the “soothing” effect the kind
nurses and doctors had had on me. I don’t mean that I went back
physically a great deal--my constitution was too strong for that--but
only that my old hate of the Hun redoubled. This would have been all
very well if I had only been back in the trenches, but in a prison
camp it could only have one end. I dropped in his tracks with my
fist--mighty hard it was his shaved head felt to my half-healed
“right”--the first guard that tried to hustle me into line with the
toe of
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