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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of My Year of the War, by Frederick Palmer
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: My Year of the War
+       Including an Account of Experiences with the Troops in France and
+       the Record of a Visit to the Grand Fleet Which is Here Given for the
+       First Time in its Complete Form
+       
+
+Author: Frederick Palmer
+
+Release Date: April 13, 2004 [EBook #12013]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MY YEAR OF THE WAR ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by A. Langley
+
+
+
+
+
+My Year Of The War
+
+Including An Account Of Experiences
+With The Troops In France, And The
+Record Of A Visit To The Grand
+Fleet, Which Is Here Given
+For The First Time In
+Its Complete Form
+
+By Frederick Palmer
+(Accredited American Correspondent at the British Front)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+To The Reader
+I. "Le Brave Belge!"
+II. Mons And Paris
+III. Paris Waits
+IV. On The Heels Of Von Kluck
+V. And Calais Waits
+VI. In Germany
+VII. How The Kaiser Leads
+VIII. In Belgium Under The Germans
+IX. Christmas In Belgium
+X. The Future Of Belgium
+XI. Winter In Lorraine
+XII. Smiles Among Ruins
+XIII. A Road Of War I Know
+XIV. Trenches In Winter
+XV. In Neuve Chapelle
+XVI. Nearer The Germans
+XVII. With The Guns
+XVIII. Archibald The Archer
+XIX. Trenches In Summer
+XX. A School In Bombing
+XXI. My Best Day At The Front
+XXII. More Best Day
+XXIII. Winning And Losing
+XXIV. The Maple Leaf Folk
+XXV. Many Pictures
+XXVI. Finding The Grand Fleet
+XXVII. On A Destroyer
+XXVIII. Ships That Have Fought
+XXIX. On The Inflexible
+XXX. On The Fleet Flagship
+XXXI. Simply Hard Work
+XXII. Hunting The Submarine
+XXXIII. The Fleet Puts To Sea
+XXIV. British Problems
+
+
+
+
+
+To the Reader
+
+
+
+In 'The Last Shot', which appeared only a few months before the
+Great War began, drawing from my experience in many wars, I
+attempted to describe the character of a conflict between two great
+European land-powers, such as France and Germany.
+
+"You were wrong in some ways," a friend writes to me, "but in other
+ways it is almost as if you had written a play and they were following
+your script and stage business."
+
+Wrong as to the duration of the struggle and its bitterness and the
+atrocious disregard of treaties and the laws of war by one side; right
+about the part which artillery would play; right in suggesting the
+stalemate of intrenchments when vast masses of troops occupied the
+length of a frontier. Had the Germans not gone through Belgium and
+attacked on the shorter line of the Franco-German boundary, the
+parallel of fact with that of prediction would have been more
+complete. As for the ideal of 'The Last Shot', we must await the
+outcome to see how far it shall be fulfilled by a lasting peace.
+
+Then my friend asks, "How does it make you feel?" Not as a prophet;
+only as an eager observer, who finds that imagination pales beside
+reality. If sometimes an incident seemed a page out of my novel, I
+was reminded how much better I might have done that page from life;
+and from life I am writing now.
+
+I have seen too much of the war and yet not enough to assume the
+pose of a military expert; which is easy when seated in a chair at
+home before maps and news dispatches, but becomes fantastic after
+one has lived at the front. One waits on more information before he
+forms conclusions about campaigns. He is certain only that the Marne
+was a decisive battle for civilization; that if England had not gone into
+the war the Germanic Powers would have won in three months.
+
+No words can exaggerate the heroism and sacrifice of the French or
+the importance of the part which the British have played, which we
+shall not realize till the war is over. In England no newspapers were
+suppressed; casualty lists were published; she gave publicity to
+dissensions and mistakes which others concealed, in keeping with
+her ancient birthright of free institutions which work out conclusions
+through discussion rather than take them ready-made from any ruler
+or leader.
+
+Whatever value this book has is the reflection of personal
+observation and the thoughts which have occurred to me when I
+have walked around my experiences and measured them and found
+what was worth while and what was not. Such as they are, they are
+real.
+
+Most vital of all in sheer expression of military power was the visit to
+the British Grand Fleet; most humanly appealing, the time spent in
+Belgium under German rule; most dramatic, the French victory on the
+Marne; most precious, my long stay at the British front.
+
+A traveller's view I had of Germany in the early period of the war; but I
+was never with the German army, which made Americans particularly
+welcome for obvious reasons. Between right and wrong one cannot
+be a neutral. In foregoing the diversion of shaking hands and passing
+the time of day on the Germanic fronts, I escaped any bargain with
+my conscience by accepting the hospitality of those warring for a
+cause and in a manner obnoxious to me. I was among friends, living
+the life of one army and seeing war in all its aspects from day to day,
+instead of having tourist glimpses.
+
+Chapters which deal with the British army in France and with the
+British fleet have been submitted to the censor. Though the censor
+may delete military secrets, he may not prompt opinions. Whatever
+notes of praise and of affection which you may read between the
+lines or in them spring from the mind and heart. Undemonstratively,
+cheerily as they would go for a walk, with something of old-fashioned
+chivalry, the British went to death.
+
+Their national weaknesses and strength, revealed under external
+differences by association, are more akin to ours than we shall realize
+until we face our own inevitable crisis. Though one's ancestors had
+been in America for nearly three centuries, he was continually finding
+how much of custom, of law, of habit, and of instinct he had in
+common with them; and how Americans who were not of British blood
+also shared these as an applied inheritance that has been the most
+formative element in the American crucible.
+
+My grateful acknowledgments are due to the American press
+associations who considered me worthy to be the accredited
+American correspondent at the British front, and to Collier's and
+Everybody's; and may an author who has not had the opportunity to
+read proofs request the reader's indulgence.
+
+FREDERICK PALMER. British Headquarters, France.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+My Year Of The War
+
+
+
+
+I
+"Le Brave Belge!"
+
+
+
+The rush from Monterey, in Mexico, when a telegram said that
+general European war was inevitable; the run and jump on board the
+Lusitania at New York the night that war was declared by England
+against Germany; the Atlantic passage on the liner of ineffaceable
+memory, a suspense broken by fragments of war news by wireless;
+the arrival in England before the war was a week old; the journey to
+Belgium in the hope of reaching the scene of action!--as I write, all
+seem to have the perspective of history, so final are the processes of
+war, so swift their execution, and so eager is everyone for each day's
+developments. As one grows older the years seem shorter; but the
+first year of the Great War is the longest year most of us have ever
+known.
+
+Le brave Belge! One must be honest about him. The man who lets
+his heart run away with his judgment does his mind an injustice. A
+fellow-countryman who was in London and fresh from home in the
+eighth month of the war, asked me for my views of the relative
+efficiency of the different armies engaged.
+
+"Do you mean that I am to speak without regard to personal
+sympathies?" I asked.
+
+"Certainly," he replied.
+
+When he had my opinion he exclaimed:
+
+"You have mentioned them all except the Belgian army. I thought it
+was the best of all."
+
+"Is that what they think at home?" I asked.
+
+"Yes, of course."
+
+"The Atlantic is broad," I suggested.
+
+This man of affairs, an exponent of the efficiency of business, was a
+sentimentalist when it came to war, as Anglo-Saxons usually are. The
+side which they favour--that is the efficient side. When I ventured to
+suggest that the Belgian army, in a professional sense, was hardly to
+be considered as an army, it was clear that he had ceased to
+associate my experience with any real knowledge.
+
+In business he was one who saw his rivals, their abilities, the
+organization of their concerns, and their resources of competition with
+a clear eye. He could say of his best personal friend: "I like him, but
+he has a poor head for affairs." Yet he was the type who, if he had
+been a trained soldier, would have been a business man of war who
+would have wanted a sharp, ready sword in a well-trained hand and
+to leave nothing to chance in a battle for the right. In Germany, where
+some of the best brains of the country are given to making war a
+business, he might have been a soldier who would rise to a position
+on the staff. In America he was the employer of three thousand men--
+a general of civil life.
+
+"But look how the Belgians have fought!" he exclaimed. "They
+stopped the whole German army for two weeks!"
+
+The best army was best because it had his sympathy. His view was
+the popular view in America: the view of the heart. America saw the
+pigmy fighting the giant rather than let him pass over Belgian soil.
+On that day when a gallant young king cried, "To arms!" all his
+people became gallant to the imagination.
+
+When I think of Belgium's part in the war I always think of the little
+Belgian dog, the schipperke who lives on the canal boats. He is a
+home-staying dog, loyal, affectionate, domestic, who never goes out
+on the tow-path to pick quarrels with other dogs; but let anything on
+two or four feet try to go on board when his master is away and he will
+fight with every ounce of strength in him. The King had the
+schipperke spirit. All the Belgians who had the schipperke spirit
+tried to sink their teeth in the calves of the invader.
+
+One's heart was with the Belgians on that eighteenth day of August,
+1914, when one set out toward the front in a motor-car from a
+Brussels rejoicing over bulletins of victory, its streets walled with
+bunting; but there was something brewing in one's mind which was as
+treason to one's desires. Let Brussels enjoy its flags and its capture
+of German cavalry patrols while it might!
+
+On the hills back of Louvain we came upon some Belgian troops in
+their long, cumbersome coats, dark silhouettes against the field,
+digging shallow trenches in an uncertain sort of way. Whether it was
+due to the troops or to Belgian staff officers hurrying by in their cars, I
+had the impression of the will and not the way and a parallel of raw
+militia in uniforms taken from grandfather's trunk facing the trained
+antagonists of an Austerlitz, or a Waterloo, or a Gettysburg.
+
+Le brave Beige! The question on that day was not, Are you brave?
+but, Do you know how to fight? Also, Would the French and the
+British arrive in time to help you? Of a thousand rumours about the
+positions of the French and the British armies, one was as good as
+another. All the observer knew was that he was an atom in a motor-
+car and all he saw for the defence of Belgium was a regiment of
+Belgians digging trenches. He need not have been in Belgium before
+to realize that here was an unwarlike people, living by intensive thrift
+and caution--a most domesticated civilization in the most thickly-
+populated workshop in Europe, counting every blade of grass and
+every kernel of wheat and making its pleasures go a long way at
+small cost; a hothouse of a land, with the door about to be opened to
+the withering blast of war.
+
+Out of the H�tel de Ville at Louvain, as our car halted by the cathedral
+door, came an elderly French officer, walking with a light, quick step,
+his cloak thrown back over his shoulders, and hurriedly entered a car;
+and after him came a tall British officer, walking more slowly,
+imperturbably, as a man who meant to let nothing disturb him or beat
+him--both characteristic types of race. This was the break-up of the
+last military conference held at Louvain, which had now ceased to be
+Belgian Headquarters.
+
+How little you knew and how much they knew! The sight of them was
+helpful. One was the representative of a force of millions of
+Frenchman; of the army. I had always believed in the French army,
+and have more reason now than ever to believe in it. There was no
+doubt that if a French corps and a German corps were set the task of
+marching a hundred miles to a strategic position, the French would
+arrive first and win the day in a pitched battle. But no one knew this
+better than that German Staff whose superiority, as von Moltke said,
+would always ensure victory. Was the French army ready? Could it
+bring the fullness of its strength into the first and perhaps the deciding
+shock of arms? Where was the French army?
+
+The other officer who came out of the H�tel de Ville was the
+representative of a little army--a handful of regulars--hard as nails and
+ready to the last button. Where was the British army? The restaurant
+keeper where we had luncheon at Louvain--he knew. He whispered
+his military secret to me. The British army was toward Antwerp,
+waiting to crush the Germans in the flank should they advance on
+Brussels. We were "drawing them on!" Most cheerful, most confident,
+mine host! When I went back to Louvain under German rule his
+restaurant was in ruins.
+
+We were on our way to as near the front as we would go, with a pass
+which was written for us by a Belgian reservist in Brussels between
+sips of beer brought him by a boy scout. It was a unique, a most
+accommodating pass; the only one I have received from the Allies'
+side which would have taken me into the German lines.
+
+The front which we saw was in the square of the little town of Haelen,
+where some dogs of a dog machine-gun battery lay panting in their
+traces. A Belgian officer in command there I recollect for his
+passionate repetition of, "Assassins! The barbarians!" which seemed
+to choke out any other words whenever he spoke of the Germans.
+His was a fresh, livid hate, born of recent fighting. We could go where
+we pleased, he said; and the Germans were "out there," not far away.
+Very tired he was, except for the flash of hate in his eyes; as tired as
+the dogs of the machine-gun battery.
+
+We went outside to see the scene of "the battle," as it was called in
+the dispatches; a field in the first flush of the war, where the headless
+lances of Belgian and German cavalrymen were still scattered about.
+The peasants had broken off the lance-heads for the steel, which was
+something to pay for the grain smouldering in the barn which had
+been shelled and burned.
+
+A battle! It was a battle because the reporters could get some
+account of it, and the fighting in Alsace was hidden under the cloud of
+secrecy. A superficial survey was enough to show that it had been
+only a reconnaissance by the Germans with some infantry and guns
+as well as cavalry. Their defeat had been an incident to the thrust of a
+tiny feeling finger of the German octopus for information. The
+scouting of the German cavalry patrols here and there had the same
+object. Waiting behind hedges or sweeping around in the rear of a
+patrol with their own cavalry when the word came by telephone, the
+Belgians bagged many a German, man and horse, dead and alive.
+Brussels and London and New York, too, thrilled over these exploits
+supplied to eager readers. It was the Uhlan week of the war; for every
+German cavalryman was a Uhlan, according to popular conception.
+These Uhlans seemed to have more temerity than sense from the
+accounts that you read. But if one out of a dozen of these mounted
+youths, with horses fresh and a trooper's zest in the first flush of war,
+returned to say that he had ridden to such and such points without
+finding any signs of British or French forces, he had paid for the loss
+of the others. The Germans had plenty of cavalry. They used it as the
+eyes of the army, in co-operation with the aerial eyes of the planes.
+
+A peasant woman came out of the house beside the battlefield with
+her children around her; a flat-chested, thin woman, prematurely old
+with toil. "Les Anglais!" she cried at sight of us. Seeing that we had
+some lances in the car, she rushed into her house and brought out
+half a dozen more. If the English wanted lances they should have
+them. She knew only a few words of French, not enough to express
+the question which she made understood by gestures. Her eyes were
+burning with appeal to us and flashing with hate as she shook her fist
+toward the Germans.
+
+When were the English coming? All her trust was in the English, the
+invincible English, to save her country. Probably the average
+European would have passed her by as an excited peasant woman.
+But pitiful she was to me, more pitiful than the raging officer and his
+dog battery, or the infantry awkwardly intrenching back of Louvain, or
+flag-bedecked Brussels believing in victory: one of the Belgians with
+the true schipperke spirit. She was shaking her fist at a dam which
+was about to burst in a flood.
+
+It was strange to an American, who comes from a land where
+everyone learns a single language, English, that she and her
+ancestors, through centuries of living neighbour in a thickly-populated
+country to people who speak French and to French civilization,
+should never have learned to express themselves in any but their
+own tongue--singular, almost incredible, tenacity in the age of popular
+education! She would save the lance-heads and garner every grain
+of wheat; she economized in all but racial animosity. This racial
+stubbornness of Europe--perhaps it keeps Europe powerful in jealous
+competition of race with race.
+
+The thought that went home was that she did not want the Germans
+to come; no Belgian wanted them; and this was the fact decisive in
+the scales of justice. She said, as the officer had said, that the
+Germans were "out there." Across the fields one saw nothing on that
+still August day; no sign of war unless a Taube overhead, the first
+enemy aeroplane I had seen in war. For the last two days the
+German patrols had ceased to come. Liege, we knew, had fallen.
+Looking at the map, we prayed that Namur would hold.
+
+"Out there" beyond the quiet fields, that mighty force which was to
+swing through Belgium in flank was massed and ready to move when
+the German Staff opened the throttle. A mile or so away a patrol of
+Belgian cyclists stopped us as we turned toward Brussels. They were
+dust-covered and weary; the voice of their captain was faint with
+fatigue. For over two weeks he had been on the hunt of Uhlan
+patrols. Another schipperke he, who could not only hate but fight
+as best he knew how.
+
+"We had an alarm," he said. "Have you heard anything?"
+
+When we told him no, he pedalled on more slowly, and oh, how
+wearily! to the front. Rather pitiful that, too, when you thought of what
+was "out there."
+
+One had learned enough to know, without the confidential information
+that he received, that the Germans could take Brussels if they chose.
+But the people of Brussels still thronged the streets under the
+blankets of bunting. If bunting could save Brussels, it was in no
+danger.
+
+There was a mockery about my dinner that night. The waiter who laid
+the white cloth on a marble table was unctuously suggestive as to
+menu. Luscious grapes and crisp salad, which Belgian gardeners
+grow with meticulous care, I remember of it. You might linger over
+your coffee, knowing the truth, and look out at the people who did not
+know it. When they were not buying more buttons with the allied
+colours, or more flags, or dropping nickel pieces in Red Cross boxes,
+they were thronging to the kiosks for the latest edition of the evening
+papers, which told them nothing.
+
+A man had to make up his mind. Clearly, he had only to keep in his
+room in his hotel in order to have a great experience. He might see
+the German troops enter Belgium. His American passport would
+protect him as a neutral. He could depend upon the legation to get
+him out of trouble.
+
+"Stick to the army you are with!" an eminent American had told me.
+
+"Yes, but I prefer to choose my army," I had replied.
+
+The army I chose was not about to enter Brussels. It was that of
+"mine own people" on the side of the schipperke dog machine-gun
+battery which I had seen in the streets of Haelen, and the peasant
+woman who shook her fist at the invader, and all who had the
+schipperke spirit.
+
+My empty appointment as the representative of the American Press
+with the British army was, at least, taken seriously by the policeman
+at the War Office in London when I returned from trips to Paris. The
+day came when it was good for British trenches and gun-positions;
+when it was worth all the waiting, because it was the army of my race
+and tongue.
+
+
+
+
+II
+Mons And Paris
+
+
+
+Back from Belgium to England; then across the Channel again to
+Boulogne, where I saw the last of the French garrison march away,
+their red trousers a throbbing target along the road. From Boulogne
+the British had advanced into Belgium. Now their base was moved on
+to Havre. Boulogne, which two weeks before had been cheering
+the advent of "Tommee Atkeens" singing "Why should we be
+downhearted?" was ominously lifeless. It was a town without soldiers;
+a town of brick and mortar and pavements whose very defencelessness
+was its best security should the Germans come.
+
+The only British there were a few stray wounded officers and men
+who had found their way back from Mons. They had no idea where
+the British army was. All they realized were sleepless nights, the
+shock of combat, overpowering artillery fire, and resisting the
+onslaught of outnumbering masses.
+
+An officer of Lancers, who had ridden through the German cavalry
+with his squadron, dwelt on the glory of that moment. What did his
+wound matter? It had come with the burst of a shell in a village street
+which killed his horse after the charge. He had hobbled away,
+reached a railroad train, and got on board. That was all he knew.
+
+A Scotch private had been lying with his battalion in a trench when a
+German aeroplane was sighted. It had hardly passed by when
+showers of shrapnel descended, and the Germans, in that grey-
+green so hard to see, were coming on as thick as locusts. Then the
+orders came to fall back, and he was hit as his battalion made
+another stand. He had crawled a mile across the fields in the night
+with a bullet in his arm. A medical corps officer told him to find any
+transportation he could; and he, too, was able to get aboard a train.
+That was all he knew.
+
+These wounded had been tossed aside into eddies by the maelstrom
+of action. They were interesting because they were the first British
+wounded that I had seen; because the war was young.
+
+Back to London again to catch the steamer with an article. One was
+to take a season ticket to the war from London as home. It was a
+base whence one sallied forth to get peeps through the curtain of
+military secrecy at the mighty spectacle. You soaked in England at
+intervals and the war at intervals. Whenever you stepped on the pier
+at Folkestone it was with a breath of relief, born of a sense of freedom
+long associated with fields and hedges on the other side of the chalk
+cliffs which seemed to make the sequestering barrier of the sea
+complete.
+
+Those days of late August and early September, 10.14, were gripping
+days to the memory. Eager armies were pressing forward to a
+cataclysm no longer of dread imagination but of reality. That ever-
+deepening and spreading stain from Switzerland to the North Sea
+was as yet only a splash of fresh blood. You still wondered if you
+might not wake up in the morning and find the war a nightmare.
+Pictures that grow clearer with time, which the personal memory
+chooses for its own, dissociate themselves from a background of
+detail.
+
+They were very quiet, this pair that sat at the next table in the dining-
+room of a London hotel. I never spoke to them, but only stole discreet
+glances, as we all will in irresistible temptation at any newly-wedded
+couple. Neither was of the worldly type. One knew that to this young
+girl London was strange; one knew the type of country home which
+had given her that simple charm which cities cannot breed; one
+knew, too, that this young officer, her husband, waited for word to go
+to the front.
+
+Unconsciously she would play with her wedding-ring. She stole covert
+glances at it and at him, of the kind that bring a catch in the throat,
+when he was not looking at her--which he was most of the time, for
+reasons which were good and sufficient to others besides himself.
+Apprehended in "wool-gathering," she mustered a smile which was
+so exclusively for him that the neighbour felt that he ought to be
+forgiven his peeps from the tail of his eye at it because it was so
+precious.
+
+They attempted little flights of talk about everything except the war.
+He was most solicitous that she should have something which she
+liked to eat, whilst she was equally solicitous about him. Wasn't he
+going "out there?" And out there he would have to live on army fare. It
+was all appealing to the old traveller. And then the next morning--she
+was alone, after she had given him that precious smile in parting. The
+incident was one of the thousands before the war had become an
+institution, death a matter of routine, and it was a commonplace for
+young wives to see young husbands away to the front with a smile.
+
+One such incident does for all, whether the war be young or old.
+There is nothing else to tell, even when you know wife and husband. I
+was rather glad that I did not know this pair. If I had known them I
+should be looking at the casualty list for his name and I might not
+enjoy my faith that he will return alive. These two seemed to me the
+best of England. I used to think of them when gossip sought the latest
+turn of intrigue under the mantle of censorship, when Parliament
+poured out its oral floods and the newspapers their volumes of words.
+The man went off to fight; the woman returned to her country home. It
+was the hour of war, not of talk.
+
+On that Sunday in London when the truth about Mons appeared stark
+to all England, another young man happened to buy a special edition
+at a street corner at the same time as myself. By all criteria, the world
+and his tailor had treated him well and he deserved well of the world.
+We spoke together about the news. Already the new democracy
+which the war has developed was in evidence. Everybody had
+common thoughts and a common thing at stake, with values
+reckoned in lives, and this makes for equality.
+
+"It's clear that we have had a bad knock. Why deny it?" he said. Then
+he added quietly, after a pause: "This is a personal call for me. I'm
+going to enlist."
+
+England's answer to that "bad knock" was out of her experience. She
+had never won at first, but she had always won in the end; she had
+won the last battle. The next day's news was worse and the next
+day's still worse. The Germans seemed to be approaching Paris by
+forced marches. Paris might fall--no matter! Though the French army
+were shattered, one heard Englishmen say that the British would
+create an army to wrest victory from defeat. The spirit of this was fine,
+but one realized the enormity of the task; should the mighty German
+machine crush the French machine, the Allies had lost. To say so
+then was heresy, when the world was inclined to think poorly of the
+French army and saw Russian numbers as irresistible.
+
+The personal call was to Paris before the fate of Paris was to be
+decided. My first crossing of the Channel had been to Ostend; the
+second, farther south to Boulogne; the third was still farther south, to
+Dieppe. Where next? To Havre! Events were moving with the speed
+which had been foreseen with myriads of soldiers ready to be thrown
+into battle by the quick march of the railroad trains.
+
+Every event was hidden under the "fog of war," then a current
+expression--meagre official bulletins which read like hope in their brief
+lines, while the imagination might read as it chose between the lines.
+The marvel was that any but troop trains should run. All night in that
+third-class coach from Dieppe to Paris! Tired and preoccupied
+passengers; everyone's heart heavy; everyone's soul wrenched;
+everyone prepared for the worst! You cared for no other man's views;
+the one thing you wanted was no bad news. France had known that
+when the war came it would be to the death. From the first no
+Frenchman could have had any illusions. England had not realized
+yet that her fate was with the soldiers of France, or France that her
+fate and all the world's was with the British fleet.
+
+An Italian in our compartment would talk, however, and he would
+keep the topic down to red trousers, and to the red trousers of a
+French Territorial opposite, with an index finger when his gesticulatory
+knowledge of the French language, which was excellent, came to the
+rescue of his verbal knowledge, which was poor. The Frenchman
+agreed that red trousers were a mistake, but pointed to the blue
+covering which he had for his cap--which made it all right. The Italian
+insisted on keeping to the trousers. He talked red trousers till the
+Frenchman got out at his station, and then turned to me to confirm
+his views on this fatal strategic and tactical error of the French. After
+all, he was more pertinent than most of the military experts trying to
+write on the basis of the military bulletins. It was droll to listen to
+this sartorial discourse, when at least two hundred thousand men
+lay dead and wounded from that day's fight on the soil of France.
+Red trousers were responsible for the death of a lot of those men.
+
+Dawn, early September dawn, on dew-moist fields, where the harvest
+lay unfinished as the workers, hastening to the call of war, had left the
+work. Across Paris, which seemed as silent as the fields, to an hotel
+with empty rooms! Five hundred empty rooms, with a clock ticking
+busily in every room! War or no war, that old man who wound the
+clocks was making his rounds softly through the halls from door to
+door. He was a good soldier, who had heeded Joffre's request that
+everyone should go on with his day's work.
+
+"They're done!" said an American in the foyer. "The French cannot
+stand up against the Germans--anybody could see that! It's too bad,
+but the French are licked. The Germans will be here to-morrow or the
+next day."
+
+I could not and would not believe it. Such a disaster was against all
+one's belief in the French army and in the real character of the
+French people. It meant that autocracy was making sport of
+democracy; it meant disaster to all one's precepts; a personal
+disaster.
+
+"Look at that interior line which the French now hold. Think of the
+power of the defensive with modern arms. No! The French have not
+had their battle yet!" I said.
+
+And the British Expeditionary Force was still intact; still an army, with
+lots of fight left in it.
+
+
+
+
+Ill
+Paris Waits
+
+
+
+It was then that people were speaking of Paris as a dead city--a Paris
+without theatres, without young men, without omnibuses, with the
+shutters of its shops down and its caf�s and restaurants in gloomy
+emptiness.
+
+The Paris the host of the idler and the traveller; the Paris of the
+boulevards and the night life provided for the tourist; the Paris that
+sparkled and smiled in entertainment; the Paris exploited to
+the average American through Sunday supplements and the
+reminiscences of smoking-rooms of transatlantic liners, was dead.
+Those who knew no other Paris and conjectured no other Paris
+departed as from the tomb of the pleasures which had been the
+passing extravaganza of relief, from dull lives elsewhere. The
+Parisienne of that Paris spent a thousand francs to get her pet dog
+safely away to Marseilles. Politicians of a craven type, who are the
+curse of all democracies, had gone to keep her company, leaving
+Paris cleaner than ever she was after the streets had had their
+morning bath on a spring day when the horse chestnuts were in
+bloom and madame was arranging her early editions on the table of
+her kiosk--a spiritually clean Paris.
+
+Monsieur, would you have America judged by the White Way? What
+has the White Way to do with the New York of Seventy-Second
+Street or Harlem? It serves the same purpose as the boulevards of
+furnishing scandalous little paragraphs for foreign newspapers.
+Foreigners visit it and think that they understand how Americans live
+in Stockbridge, Mass., or Springfield Illinois, Empty its hotels and
+nobody but sightseers and people interested in the White Way would
+know the difference.
+
+The other Paris, making ready to stand siege, with the Government
+gone to Bordeaux with all the gold of the Bank of France, with the
+enemy's guns audible in the suburbs and old men cutting down trees
+and tearing up paving-stones to barricade the streets--never had that
+Paris been more alive. It was after the death of the old and the birth of
+the new Paris that an elderly man, seeing a group of women at tea in
+one of the few fashionable refreshment places which were open,
+stopped and said:
+
+"Can you find nothing better than that to do, ladies, in a time like
+this?"
+
+And the Latin temperament gave the world a surprise. Those who
+judged France by her playful Paris thought that if a Frenchman
+gesticulated so emotionally in the course of everyday existence, he
+would get overwhelmingly excited in a great emergency. One
+evening, after the repulse of the Germans on the Marne, I saw two
+French reserves dining in a famous restaurant where, at this time of
+the year, four out of five diners ordinarily would be foreigners
+surveying one another in a study of Parisian life. They were big, rosy-
+cheeked men, country born and bred, belonging to the new France of
+sports, of action, of temperate habits, and they were joking about
+dining there just as two sturdy Westerners might about dining in a
+deserted Broadway. The foreigners and demimondaines were
+noticeably absent; a pair of Frenchmen were in the place of the
+absentees; and after their dinner they smoked their black brier-root
+pipes in that fashionable restaurant.
+
+Among the picture post-cards then on sale was one of Marianne, who
+is France, bound for the front in an aeroplane with a crowing French
+cock sitting on the brace above her. Marianne looked as happy as if
+she were going to the races; the cock as triumphant as if he had a
+spur through the German eagle's throat. However, there was little
+sale for picture post-cards or other trifles, while Paris waited for the
+siege. They did not help to win victories. News and not jeux d'esprit,
+victory and not wit, was wanted.
+
+For Marianne went to war with her liberty cap drawn tight over her
+brow, a beat in her temples, and her heart in her throat; and the cock
+had his head down and pointed at the enemy. She was relieved in a
+way, as all Europe was, that the thing had come; at last an end of the
+straining of competitive taxation and preparation; at last the test. She
+had no Channel, as England had, between her and the foe. Defeat
+meant the heel of the enemy on her soil, German sentries in her
+streets, submission. Long and hard she had trained; while the outside
+world, thinking of the Paris of the boulevards, thought that she could
+not resist the Kaiser's legions. She was effeminate, effete. She was
+all right to run caf�s and make artificial flowers, but she lacked beef.
+All the prestige was with her enemy. In '70 all the prestige had been
+with her. For there is no prestige like military prestige. It is all with
+those who won the last war.
+
+"But if we must succumb, let it be now," said the French.
+
+On, on--the German corps were coming like some machine-
+controlled avalanche of armed men. Every report brought them a little
+nearer Paris. Ah, monsieur, they had numbers, those Germans!
+Every German mother has many sons; a French mother only one or
+two.
+
+How could one believe those official communiqu�s which kept saying
+that the position of the French armies was favourable and then
+admitted that von Kluck had advanced another twenty miles? The
+heart of Paris stopped beating. Paris held its breath. Perhaps the
+reason there was no panic was that Parisians had been prepared for
+the worst.
+
+What silence! The old men and the women in the streets moved as
+under a spell, which was the sense of their own helplessness. But few
+people were abroad, and those going on errands apparently. The
+absence of traffic and pedestrians heightened the sepulchral
+appearance to superficial observation. At the windows of flats, inside
+the little shops, and on by-streets, you saw waiting faces, everyone
+with the weight of national grief become personal. Was Paris alive?
+Yes, if Paris is human and not bricks and stone. Every Parisian was
+living a century in a week. So, too, was one who loved France. In the
+prospect of its loss he realized the value of all that France stands for,
+her genius, her democracy, her spirit.
+
+One recalled how German officers had said that the next war would
+be the end of France. An indemnity which would crush out her power
+of recovery would be imposed on her. Her northern ports would be
+taken. France, the most homogeneous of nations, would be divided
+into separate nationalities--even this the Germans had planned.
+Those who read their Shakespeare in the language they learned in
+childhood had no doubt of England's coming out of the war secure;
+but if we thought which foreign civilization brought us the most in our
+lives, it was that of France.
+
+What would the world be without French civilization? To think of
+France dead was to think of cells in your own brain that had gone
+lifeless; of something irreparable extinguished to every man to whom
+civilization means more than material power of destruction. The
+sense of what might be lost was revealed to you at every turn in
+scenes once merely characteristic of a whole, each with an appeal of
+its own now; in the types of people who, by their conduct in this hour
+of trial, showed that Spartan hearts might beat in Paris-the Spartan
+hearts of the mass of everyday, workaday Parisians.
+
+Those waiting at home calmly with their thoughts, in a France of
+apprehension, knew that their fate was out of their hands in the hands
+of their youth. The tide of battle wavering from Meaux to Verdun
+might engulf them; it might recede; but Paris would resist to the last.
+That was something. She would resist in a manner worthy of Paris;
+and one could live on very little food. Their fathers had. Every day
+that Paris held out would be a day lost to the Germans and a day
+gained for Joffre and Sir John French to bring up reserves.
+
+The street lamps should not reveal to Zeppelins or Taubes the
+location of precious monuments. You might walk the length of the
+Champs Elys�es without meeting a vehicle or more than two or three
+pedestrians. The avenue was all your own; you might appreciate it as
+an avenue for itself; and every building and even the skyline of the
+streets you might appreciate, free of any association except the
+thought of the results of man's planning and building. Silent, deserted
+Paris by moonlight, without street lamps--few had ever seen that.
+Millionaire tourists with retinues of servants following them in motor-
+cars may never know this effect; nor the Parisienne who paid a
+thousand francs to send her pet dog to Marseilles.
+
+The moonlight threw the Arc de Triomphe in exaggerated spectral
+relief, sprinkled the leaves of the long rows of trees, glistened on the
+upsweep of the broad pavements, gleamed on the Seine. Paris was
+majestic, as scornful of Prussian eagles as the Parthenon of Roman
+eagles. A column of soldiery marching in triumph under the Arc might
+possess as a policeman possesses; but not by arms could they gain
+the quality that made Paris, any more than the Roman legionary
+became a Greek scholar by doing sentry go in front of the Parthenon.
+Every Parisian felt anew how dear Paris was to him; how worthy of
+some great sacrifice!
+
+If New York were in danger of falling to an enemy, the splendid length
+of Fifth Avenue and the majesty of the skyscrapers of lower
+Broadway and the bay and the rivers would become vivid to you in a
+way they never had before; or Washington, or San Francisco, or
+Boston--or your own town. The thing that is a commonplace, when
+you are about to lose it takes on a cherished value.
+
+To-morrow the German guns might be thundering in front of the
+fortifications. The communiqu�s from Joffre became less frequent
+and more laconic. Their wording was like some trembling, fateful
+needle of a barometer, pausing, reacting a little, but going down,
+down, down, indicator of the heart-pressure of Paris, shrivelling the
+flesh, tightening the nerves. Already Paris was in a state of siege, in
+one sense. Her exits were guarded against all who were not in
+uniform and going to fight; to all who had no purpose except to see
+what was passing where two hundred miles resounded with strife. It
+was enough to see Paris itself awaiting the siege; fighting one was yet
+to see to repletion.
+
+The situation must be very bad or the Government would not have
+gone to Bordeaux. Alors, one must trust the army and the army must
+trust Joffre. There is no trust like that of a democracy when it gives its
+heart to a cause; the trust of the mass in the strength of the mass
+which sweeps away the middlemen of intrigue.
+
+And silence, only silence in Paris; the silence of the old men and the
+women, and of children who had ceased to play and could not
+understand. No one might see what was going on unless he carried a
+rifle. No one might see even the wounded. Paris was spared this,
+isolated in the midst of war. The wounded were sent out of reach of
+the Germans in case they should come.
+
+Then the indicator stopped falling. It throbbed upward. The
+communiqu�s became more definite; they told of positions regained,
+and borne in the ether by the wireless of telepathy was something
+which confirmed the communiqu�s. At first Paris was uneasy with the
+news, so set had history been on repeating itself, so remorselessly
+certain had seemed the German advance. But it was true, true--the
+Germans were going, with the French in pursuit, now twenty, now
+thirty, now forty, now fifty, sixty, seventy miles away from Paris. Yes,
+monsieur, seventy!
+
+With the needle rising, did Paris gather in crowds and surge through
+the streets, singing and shouting itself hoarse, as it ought to have
+done according to the popular international idea? No, monsieur, Paris
+will not riot in joy in the presence of the dead on the battlefields and
+while German troops are still within the boundaries of France. Paris,
+which had been with heart standing still and breathing hard, began to
+breathe regularly again and the glow of life to run through her veins.
+In the markets, whither madame brought succulent melons, pears,
+and grapes with commonplace vegetables, the talk of bargaining
+housewives with their baskets had something of its old vivacity and
+madame stiffened prices a little, for there will be heavy taxes to pay
+for the war. Children, so susceptible to surroundings, broke out of the
+quiet alleys and doorways in play again.
+
+A Sunday of relief, with a radiant September sun shining, followed a
+Sunday of depression. The old taxicabs and the horse vehicles with
+their venerable steeds and drivers too old for service at the front,
+exhumed from the catacomb of the hours of doubt, ran up and down
+the Champs Elys�es with airing parties. At Notre Dame the religious
+rejoicing was expressed. A great service of prayer was held by the
+priests who were not away fighting for France, as three thousand are,
+while joyful prayers of thanks shone on the faces of that democratic
+people who have not hesitated to discipline the church as they have
+disciplined their rulers. Groups gathered in the caf�s or sauntered
+slowly, talking less than usual, gesticulating little, rolling over the
+good news in their minds as something beyond the power of
+expression. How banal to say, "C'est chic, �a!" or "C'est �patant!"
+Language is for little things.
+
+That pile of posters at the American Embassy had already become
+historical souvenirs which won a smile. The name of every American
+resident in Paris and his address had been filled in the blank space.
+He had only to put up the warning over his door that the premises
+were under the Embassy's protection. Ambassador Herrick, suave,
+decisive, resourceful, possessed the gift of acting in a great
+emergency with the same ease and simplicity as in a small one,
+which is a gift sometimes found wanting when a crisis breaks upon
+the routine of official life.
+
+He had the courage to act and the ability to secure a favour for an
+American when it was reasonable; and the courage to say "No" if it
+were unreasonable or impracticable. No one of the throngs who had
+business with him was kept long at the door in uncertainty. In its
+organization for facilitating the home-going of the thousands of
+Americans in Paris and the Americans coming to Paris from other
+parts of Europe, the American Embassy in Paris seemed as well
+mobilized for its part in the war as the German army.
+
+In spite of '70, France still lived. You noted the faces of the women in
+fresh black for their dead at the front, a little drawn but proud and
+victorious. The son or brother or husband had died for the country.
+When a fast motor-car bearing officers had a German helmet or two
+displayed, the people stopped to look. A captured German in the
+flesh on a front seat beside a soldier-chauffeur brought the knots to a
+standstill. "Voil� C'est un Allemand!" ran the exclamation. But Paris
+soon became used to these stray German prisoners, left-overs from
+the German retreat coming in from the fields to surrender. The
+batches went through by train without stopping for Paris, southward to
+the camps where they were to be interned; and the trains of wounded
+to winter resorts, whose hotels became hospitals, the verandas
+occupied by convalescents instead of gossiping tourists. It is tr�s � la
+mode to be wounded, monsieur--tr�s � la mode all over Europe.
+
+And, monsieur, all those barricades put up for nothing! They will not
+need the cattle gathered on Long-champs race-track and in the parks
+at Versailles for a siege. The people who laid in stocks of tinned
+goods till the groceries of Paris were empty of everything in tins--they
+will either have to live on canned food or confess that they were pigs,
+hein? Those volunteers, whether young men who had been excused
+because they were only sons or for weak hearts which now let them
+past the surgeons, whether big, hulking farmers, or labourers, or
+stooped clerks, drilling in awkward squads in the suburbs till they are
+dizzy, they will not have to defend Paris; but, perhaps, help to regain
+Alsace and Lorraine.
+
+Then there were stories going the rounds; stories of French courage
+and �lan which were cheering to the ears of those who had to remain
+at home. Did you hear about the big French peasant soldier who
+captured a Prussian eagle in Alsace? They had him come to Paris to
+give him the Legion of Honour and the great men made a ceremony
+of it, gathering around him at the Ministry of War. The simple fellow
+looked from one to another of the group, surprised at all this attention.
+It did not occur to him that he had done anything remarkable. He had
+seen a Prussian with a standard and taken the standard away from
+the Prussian.
+
+"If you like this so well," said that droll one, "I'll try to get another!"
+
+
+
+
+IV
+On The Heels Of Von Kluck
+
+
+
+Though the Germans were going, the siege by the cordon of French
+guards around Paris had not been raised. To them every civilian was
+a possible spy. So they let no civilians by. Must one remain for ever in
+Paris, screened from any view of the great drama? Was there no way
+of securing a blue card which would open the road to war for an atom
+of humanity who wanted to see Frenchmen in action and not to pry
+into generals' plans?
+
+Happily, an army winning is more hospitable than an army losing; and
+bonds of friendship which stretch around the world could be linked
+with authority which has only to say the word, in order that one might
+have a day's glimpse of the fields where von Kluck's Germans were
+showing their heels to the French.
+
+Ours, I think, was the pioneer of the sight-seeing parties which
+afterwards became the accepted form of war correspondence with
+the French. None could have been under more delightful auspices in
+companionship or in the event. Victory was in the hearts of our hosts,
+who included M. Paul Doumer, formerly President of the Chamber of
+Deputies and Governor of French Indo-China and now a senator, and
+General Febrier, of the French Medical Service, who was to have had
+charge of the sanitation of Paris in case of a siege.
+
+M. Doumer was acting as Chef de Cabinet to General Gallieni, the
+commandant of Paris, and he and General Febrier and two other
+officers of Gallieni's staff, who would have been up to their eyes in
+work if there had been a siege, wanted to see something of that army
+whose valour had given them a holiday. Why should not Roberts and
+myself come along? which is the pleasant way the French have of
+putting an invitation.
+
+Oh, the magic of a military pass and the companionship of an officer
+in uniform! It separates you from the crowd of millions on the other
+side of the blank wall of military secrecy and takes you into the area
+of the millions in uniform; it wins a nod of consent on a road from that
+middle-aged reservist whose bayonet has the police power of millions
+of bayonets in support of its authority.
+
+At last one was to see; the measure of his impressions was to be his
+own eyes and not written reports. Other passes I have had since,
+which gave me the run of trenches and shell-fire areas; but this pass
+opened the first door to the war. That day we ran by Meaux and
+Ch�teau Thierry to Soissons and back by Senlis to Paris. We saw a
+finger's breadth of battle area; a pin-point of army front. Only a ride
+along a broad, fine road out of Paris, at first; a road which our cars
+had all to themselves. Then at Claye we came to the high-water mark
+of the German invasion in this region. Thus close to Paris in that
+direction and no closer had the Germans come.
+
+There was the field where their skirmishers had turned back. Farther
+on, the branches of the avenue of trees which shaded the road had
+been slashed as if by a whirlwind of knives, where the French
+soixante-quinze field-guns had found a target. Under that sudden
+bath of projectiles, with the French infantry pressing forward on their
+front, the German gunners could not wait to take away the cord of
+five-inch shells which they had piled to blaze their way to Paris. One
+guessed their haste and their irritation. They were within range of the
+fortifications; within two hours' march of the suburbs; of the Mecca of
+forty years' preparation. After all that march from Belgium, with no
+break in the programme of success, the thunders broke and lightning
+flashed out of the sky as Manoury's army rushed upon von Kluck's
+flank.
+
+"It was not the way that they wanted us to get the shells," said a
+French peasant who was taking one of the shell-baskets for a
+souvenir. It would make an excellent umbrella stand.
+
+For the French it had been the turn of the tide; for that little British
+army which had fought its way back from Mons it was the sweet
+dream, which had kept men up on the retreat, come true. Weary
+Germans, after a fearful two weeks of effort, became the driven.
+Weary British and French turned drivers. A hypodermic of victory
+renewed their energy. Paris was at their back and the German backs
+in front. They were no longer leaving their dead and wounded behind
+to the foe; they were sweeping past the dead and wounded of the
+foe.
+
+But their happiness, that of a winning action, exalted and passionate,
+had not the depths of that of the refugees who had fled before the
+German hosts and were returning to their homes in the wake of their
+victorious army. We passed farmers with children perched on top of
+carts laden with household goods and drawn by broad-backed farm-
+horses, with usually another horse or a milch cow tied behind. The
+real power of France, these peasants holding fast to the acres they
+own, with the fire of the French nature under their thrifty
+conservatism. Others on foot were villagers who had lacked horses
+or carts to transport their belongings. In the packs on their backs
+were a few precious things which they had borne away and were now
+bearing back.
+
+Soon they would know what the Germans had done to the homes.
+What the Germans had done to one piano was evident. It stood in the
+yard of a house where grass and flowers had been trodden by horses
+and men. In the sport of victory the piano had been dragged out of
+the little drawing-room, while Fritz and Hans played and sang in the
+intoxication of a Paris gained, a France in submission. They did not
+know what Joffre had in pickle for them. It had all gone according to
+programme up to that moment. Nothing can stop us Germans!
+Champagne instead of beer! Set the glass on top of the piano and
+sing! Haven't we waited forty years for this day?
+
+Captured diaries of German officers, which reflect the seventh
+heaven of elation suddenly turned into grim depression, taken in
+connection with what one saw on the battlefield, reconstruct the
+scene around that piano. The cup to the lips; then dashed away. How
+those orders to retreat must have hurt!
+
+The state of the refugees' homes all depended upon the chances of
+war. War's lightning might have hit your roof-tree and it might not. It
+plays no favourites between the honest and the dishonest; the thrifty
+and the shiftless. We passed villages which exhibited no signs of
+destruction or of looting. German troops had marched through in the
+advance and in the retreat without being billeted. A hurrying army with
+another on its heels has no time for looting. Other villages had been
+points of topical importance; they had been in the midst of a fight.
+General Mauvaise Chance had it in for them. Shells had wrecked
+some houses; others were burned. Where a German non-commissioned
+officer came to the door of a French family and said that room must
+be made for German soldiers in that house and if anyone dared to
+interfere with them he would be shot, there the exhausted human
+nature of a people trained to think that "Krieg ist Krieg" and that the
+spoils of war are to the victor had its way.
+
+It takes generations to lift a man up a single degree; but so swift is the
+effect of war, when men live a year in a day, that he is demonized in a
+month. Before the occupants had to go, often windows were broken,
+crockery smashed, closets and drawers rifled. The soldiery which
+could not have its Paris "took it out" of the property of their hosts.
+Looting, destruction, one can forgive in the orgy of war which is
+organized destruction; one can even understand rapine and atrocities
+when armies, which include latent vile and criminal elements, are
+aroused to the kind of insane passion which war kindles in human
+beings. But some indecencies one could not understand in civilized
+men. All with a military purpose, it is said; for in the nice calculations
+of a staff system which grinds so very fine, nothing must be excluded
+that will embarrass the enemy. A certain foully disgusting practice
+was too common not to have had the approval of at least some
+officers, whose conduct in several ch�teaux includes them as
+accomplices. Not all officers, not all soldiers. That there should be a
+few is enough to sicken you of belonging to the human species.
+Nothing worse in Central America; nothing worse where civilized
+degeneracy disgraces savagery.
+
+But do not think that destruction for destruction's sake was done in all
+houses where German soldiers were billeted. If the good principle
+was not sufficiently impressed, Belgium must have impressed it; a
+looting army is a disorderly army. The soldier has burden enough to
+carry in heavy marching order without souvenirs. That collector of the
+stoppers of carafes who had thirty on his person when taken prisoner
+was bound to be a laggard in the retreat.
+
+To their surprise and relief, returning farmers found their big, conical
+haystacks untouched, though nothing could be more tempting to the
+wantonness of an army on enemy soil. Strike a match and up goes
+the harvest! Perhaps the Germans as they advanced had in mind to
+save the forage for their own horses, and either they were running too
+fast to stop or the staff overlooked the detail on the retreat.
+
+It was amazing how few signs of battle there were in the open.
+Occasionally one saw the hastily-made shelter-trenches of a skirmish
+line; and again, the emplacements for batteries--hurried field-
+emplacements, so puny beside those of trench warfare. It had been
+open fighting; the tide of an army sweeping forward and then,
+pursued, sweeping back. One side was trying to get away; the other
+to overtake. Here, a rearguard made a determined action which
+would have had the character of a battle in other days; there, a
+rearguard was pinched as the French or the British got around it.
+
+Swift marching and quick man�uvres of the type which gave war
+some of its old sport and zest; the advance all the while gathering
+force like the neap tide! Crowds of men hurrying across a harvested
+wheatfield or a pasture after all leave few marks of passage. A day's
+rain will wash away bloodstains and liven trampled vegetation. Nature
+hastens with a kind of contempt of man to repair the damage done by
+his murderous wrath.
+
+The cyclone past, the people turned out to put things in order.
+Peasants too old to fight, who had paid the taxes which paid for the
+rifles and guns and shell-fire, were moving across the fields with
+spades, burying the bodies of the young men and the horses that
+were war's victims. Long trenches full of dead told where the eddy of
+battle had been fierce and the casualties numerous; scattered
+mounds of fresh earth where they were light; and, sometimes, when
+the burying was unfinished--well, one draws the curtain over scenes
+like that in the woods at Betz, where Frenchmen died knowing that
+Paris was saved and Germans died knowing that they had failed to
+take Paris.
+
+Whenever we halted our statesman, M. Doumer, was active. Did we
+have difficulties over a culvert which had been hastily mended, he
+was out of the car and in command. Always he was meeting some
+man whom he knew and shaking hands like a senator at home. At
+one place a private soldier, a man of education by his speech, came
+running across the street at sight of him.
+
+"Son of an old friend of mine, from my town," said our statesman.
+Being a French private meant being any kind of a Frenchman. All
+inequalities are levelled in the ranks of a great conscript army.
+
+Be it through towns unharmed or towns that had been looted and
+shelled, the people had the smile of victory, the look of victory in their
+eyes. Children and old men and women, the stay-at-homes, waved to
+our car in holiday spirit. The laugh of a sturdy young woman who
+threw some flowers into the tonneau as we passed, in her tribute to
+the uniform of the army that had saved France, had the spirit of
+victorious France--France after forty years' waiting throwing back a
+foe that had two soldiers to every one of hers. All the land, rich fields
+and neat gardens and green stretches of woods in the fair, rolling
+landscape, basked in victory. Dead the spirit of anyone who could
+not, for the time being, catch the infection of it and feel himself a
+Frenchman. Far from the Paris of gay show for the tourist one
+seemed; in the midst of the France of the farms and the villages
+which had saved Paris and France.
+
+The car sped on over the hard road. Staff officers in other cars whom
+we passed alone suggested that there was war somewhere ahead.
+Were we never going to reach the battle-line, the magnet of our
+speed when a French army chauffeur made all speed laws obsolete?
+
+Shooting out of a grove, a valley made a channel for sound that
+brought to our ears the thunder of guns, with firing so rapid that it was
+like the roll of some cyclopean snare-drum beaten with sticks the size
+of ship-masts. From the crest of the next hill we had a glimpse of an
+open sweep of park-like country toward wooded hills. As far as we
+could see against the background of the foliage which threw it into
+relief was a continuous cloud of smoke from bursting shells, renewed
+with fresh, soft, blue puffs as fast as it was dissipated.
+
+This, then, was a battle. No soldiers, no guns, in sight; only against
+masses of autumn green a diaphanous, man-made nimbus which
+was raining steel hail. Ten miles of this, one would say; and under it
+lines of men in blue coats and red trousers and green uniforms
+hugging the earth, as unseen as a battalion of ants at work in the tall
+grass. Even if a charge swept across a field one would have been
+able to detect nothing except moving pin-points on a carpet.
+
+There was hard fighting; a lot of French and German were being
+killed in the direction of Compi�gne and Noyon to-day. Another dip
+into another valley and the thir-r-r of a rapid-firer and the muffled
+firing of a line of infantry were audible. Yes, we were getting up
+with the army, with one tiny section of it operating along the road on
+which we were. Multiply this by a thousand and you have the whole.
+
+Ahead was the army's larder on wheels; a procession of big motor
+transport trucks keeping their intervals of distance with the precision
+of a battleship fleet at sea. We should have known that they belonged
+to the army by the deafness of the drivers to appeals to let us pass.
+All army transports are like that. What the deuced right has anybody
+to pass? They are the transport, and only fighting men belong in front
+of them. Our car in trying to go by to one side got stuck in a rut that
+an American car, built for bad roads, would have made nothing of;
+which proves again how closely European armies are tied to their fine
+highways. We got out, and here again was our statesman putting his
+shoulder to the wheel. That is the way of the French in war.
+Everybody tries to help. By this time the transport chauffeurs
+remembered that they also were Frenchmen; and as Frenchmen are
+polite even in time of war, they let us by.
+
+A motor-cyclist approached with his hand up.
+
+"Stop here!" he called.
+
+Those transport chauffeurs who were deaf to ex-premiers heard
+instantly and obeyed. In front of them was a line of single horse-
+drawn carts, with an extra horse in the rear. They could take paths
+that the motor trucks could not. Archaic they seemed, yet friendly, as
+a relic of how armies were fed in other days. For the first time I was
+realizing what the motor truck means to war. It brings the army
+impedimenta close up to the army's rear; it means a reduction of road
+space occupied by transport by three-quarters; ease in keeping pace
+with food with the advance, speed in falling back in case of retreat.
+
+All that day I did not see a single piece of French army transport
+broken down. And this army had been fighting for weeks; it had been
+an army on the road. The valuable part of our experience was exactly
+in this: a glimpse of an army in action after it had been through all the
+vicissitudes that an army may have in marching and counter-
+marching and attack. Order one expected afterwards, behind the
+siege line of trenches, when there had been time to establish a
+routine; organization and smooth organization you had here at the
+climax of a month's strain. It told the story of the character of the
+French army and the reasons for its success other than its courage.
+The brains were not all with the German Staff.
+
+That winding road, with a new picture at every turn, now revealed the
+town of Soissons in the valley of the River Aisne. Soissons was ours,
+we knew, since yesterday. How much farther had we gone? Was our
+advance still continuing? For then, winter trench-fighting was
+unforeseen and the sightseers thought of the French army as
+following up success with success. Paris, rising from gloom to
+optimism, hoped to see the Germans speedily put out of France. The
+appetite for victory grew, after a week's bulletins which moved the
+flags forward on the map every day.
+
+Another turn and Soissons was hidden from view by a woodland.
+Here we came upon what looked like a leisurely family party of
+reserves. The French army, a small section of French army, along a
+road! And thus, if one would see the whole it must be in bits along the
+roads, when not on the firing-line. They were sprawling in the fields in
+the genial afternoon sun, looking as if they had no concern except to
+rest. Uniforms dusty and faces tanned and bearded told their story of
+the last month.
+
+The duty of a portion of a force is always to wait on what is being
+done by the others at the front. These were waiting near a fork which
+could take them to the right or the left, as the situation demanded. At
+the rear, their supply of small arms ammunition; in front, caissons of
+shells for a battery speaking from the woods near by; a troop of
+cavalry drawn up, the men dismounted, ready; and ahead of them
+more reserves ready; everything ready.
+
+This was where the general wanted the body of men and equipment
+to be, and here they were. There were no dragging ends in the rear,
+so far as I could see; nobody complaining that food or ammunition
+was not up; no aide looking for somebody who could not be found; no
+excited staff officer rushing about shouting for somebody to look
+sharp for somebody had made a mistake. The thing was unwarlike; it
+was like a particularly well-thought-out route march. Yet at the word
+that company of cavalry might be in the thick of it, at the point where
+they were wanted; the infantry rushing to the support of the firing-line;
+the motor transport facing around for withdrawal, if need be. It was
+only a little way, indeed, into the zone of death from the rear of that
+compact column. Thousands of such compact bodies on many
+roads, each seemingly a force by itself and each a part of the whole,
+which could be a dependable whole only when every part was ready,
+alert, and where it belonged! Nothing can be left to chance in a battle-
+line three hundred miles long. The general must know what to
+depend on, mile by mile, in his plans. Millions of human units are
+grouped in increasingly larger units, harmonized according to set
+forms. The most complex of all machines is that of a vast army, which
+yet must be kept most simple. No unit acts without regard to the
+others; every one must know how to do its part. The parts of the
+machine are standardized. One is like the other in training, uniform,
+and every detail, so that one can replace another. Oldest of all trades
+this of war; old experts the French. What one saw was like
+man�uvres. It must be like manoeuvres or the army would not hold
+together. Man�uvres are to teach armies coherence; war tries out
+that coherence, which you may not have if someone does not know
+just what to do; if he is uncertain in his r�le. Haste leads to confusion;
+haste is only for supreme moments. In order to know how to hasten
+when the hurry call comes, the mighty organism must move in its
+routine with the smoothness of a well-rehearsed play.
+
+Joffre and the others who directed the machine must know more than
+the mechanics of staff-control. They must know the character of the
+man-material in the machine. It was their duty as real Frenchmen to
+understand Frenchmen, their verve, their restlessness for the
+offensive, their individualism, their democratic intelligence, the value
+of their elation, the drawback of their tendency to depression and to
+think for themselves. Indeed, the leader must counteract the faults of
+his people and make the most of their virtues.
+
+Thus, we had a French army's historical part reversed: a French army
+falling back and concentrating on the Marne to receive the enemy
+blow. Equally alive to German racial traits, the German Staff had
+organized in their mass offensive the �lan which means fast
+marching and hard blows. So, we found the supposedly excitable
+French digging in to receive the onslaught of the supposedly
+phlegmatic German. When the time came for the charge--ah, you can
+always depend on a Frenchman to charge!
+
+Those reserves were pawns on a chessboard. They appeared like it;
+one thought that they realized it. Their individual intelligence
+and democracy had reasoned out the value of obedience and
+homogeneity, rather than accepted it as the dictum of any war lord.
+Difficult to think that 'each one had left a vacancy at a family board;
+difficult to think that all were not automatons in a process of endless
+routine of war; but not difficult to learn that they were Frenchmen
+once we had thrown our bombs in the midst of the group.
+
+Of old, one knew the wants of soldiers. One needed no hint of what
+was welcome at the front. Never at any front were there enough
+newspapers or tobacco. Men smoke twice as much as usual in the
+strain of waiting for action; men who do not use tobacco at all get the
+habit. Ask the G.A.R. men who fought in our great war if this is not
+true. Then, too, when your country is at war, when back at home
+hands stretch out for every fresh edition and you at the front know
+only what happens in your alley, think what a newspaper from Paris
+means out on the battle-line seventy miles from Paris! So I had
+brought a bundle of newspapers and many packets of cigarettes.
+
+Monsieur, the sensation is beyond even the French language to
+express--the sensation of sitting down by the roadside with this
+morning's edition and the first cigarette for twenty-four hours.
+
+"C'est �patant! C'est chic, �a! C'est magnifique! Alors, nom de Dieu!
+Tiens! H�las! Voil�! Merci, mille remerciments!"--it was an army of
+Frenchmen with ready words, quick, telling gestures, pouring out their
+volume of thanks as the car sped by and we tossed out our
+newspapers at intervals, so that all should have a look.
+
+An Echo de Paris that fell into the road was the centre of a flag-rush,
+which included an officer. Most un-military--an officer scrambling at
+the same time as his men! In the name of the Kaiser, what discipline!
+
+Then the car stopped long enough for me to see a private give the
+paper to his officer, who was plainly sensible of a loss of dignity, with
+a courtesy which said, "A thousand pardons, mon capitaine!" and the
+capitaine began reading the newspaper aloud to his men. Scores of
+human touches which were French, republican, democratic!
+
+With half our cigarettes gone, we fell in with some brown-skinned,
+native African troops, the Mohammedan Turcos. Their white teeth
+gleaming, their black eyes devilishly eager, they began climbing on to
+the car. We gave them all the cigarettes in sight; but fortunately our
+reserve supply was not visible, and an officer's sharp command
+saved us from being invested by storm.
+
+As we came into Soissons we left the reserves behind. They were
+kept back out of range of the German shells, making the town a dead
+space between them and the firing-line, which was beyond. When the
+Germans retreated through the streets the French had taken care, as
+it was their town, to keep their fire away from the cathedral and the
+main square to the outskirts and along the river. Not so the German
+guns when the French infantry passed through. Soissons was not a
+German town.
+
+We alighted from the car in a deserted street, with all the shutters of
+shops that had not been torn down by shell-fire closed. Soissons was
+as silent as the grave, within easy range of many enemy guns. War
+seemed only for the time being in this valley bottom shut in from the
+roar of artillery a few miles away, except for a French battery which
+was firing methodically and slowly, its shells whizzing toward the ridge
+back of the town.
+
+The next thing that one wanted most was to go into that battery and
+see the soixante-quinze and their skilful gunners. Our statesman said
+that he would try to locate it. We thought that it was in the direction of
+the river, that famous Aisne which has since given its name to the
+longest siege-line in history; a small, winding stream in the bottom of
+an irregular valley. Both bridges across it had been cut by the
+Germans. If that battery were on the other side under cover of any
+one of a score of blots of foliage we could not reach it. Another shot--
+and we were not sure that the battery was not on the opposite side of
+the town; a crack out of the landscape: this was modern artillery fire to
+one who faced it. Apparently the guns of the battery were scattered,
+according to the accepted practice, and from the central firing-station
+word to fire was being passed first to one gun and then to another.
+
+Beside the buttress of one bridge lay two still figures of Algerian
+Zouaves. These were fresh dead, fallen in the taking of the town.
+Only two men! There were dead by thousands which one might see
+in other places. These two had leaped out from cover to dash forward
+and bullets were waiting for them. They had rolled over on their
+backs, their rigid hands still in the position of grasping their rifles
+after the manner of crouching skirmishers.
+
+Our statesman said that we had better give up trying to locate the
+battery; and one of the officers called a halt to trying to go up to the
+firing-line on the part of a personally-conducted party, after we
+stopped a private hurrying back from the front on some errand. With
+his alertness, the easy swing of his walk, his light step, and his
+freedom of spirit and appearance, he typified the thing which the
+French call �lan. Whenever one asked a question of a French private
+you could depend upon a direct answer. He knew or he did not know.
+This definiteness, the result of military training as well as of Gallic
+lucidity of thought, is not the least of the human factors in making an
+efficient army, where every man and every unit must definitely know
+his part. This young man, you realized, had tasted the "salt of life," as
+Lord Kitchener calls it. He had heard the close sing of bullets; he had
+known the intoxication of a charge.
+
+"Does everything go well?" M. Doumer asked. "It is not going at all,
+now. It is sticking," was the answer. "Some Germans were busy up
+there in the stone quarries while the others were falling back. They
+have a covered trench and rapid-fire-gun positions to sweep a zone
+of fire which they have cleared."
+
+Famous stone quarries of Soissons, providing ready-made dug-outs
+as shelter from shells!
+
+There is a story of how before Marengo Napoleon heard a private
+saying: "Now this is what the general ought to do!" It was Napoleon's
+own plan revealed. "You keep still!" he said. "This army has too many
+generals."
+
+"They mean to make a stand," the private went on. "It's an ideal place
+for it. There is no use of an attack in front. We'd be mowed down by
+machine-guns." The br-r-r of a dozen shots from a German machine-
+gun gave point to his conclusion. "Our infantry is hugging what we
+have and intrenching. You'd better not go up. One has to know the
+way, or he'll walk right into a sharpshooter's bullet"--instructions that
+would have been applicable a year later when one was about to visit
+a British trench in almost the same location.
+
+The siege-warfare of the Aisne line had already begun. It was singular
+to get the first news of it from a private in Soissons and then to return
+to Paris and London, on the other side of the curtain of secrecy,
+where the public thought that the Allied advance would continue.
+
+"Allons!" said our statesman, and we went to the town square, where
+German guns had carpeted the ground with branches of shade trees
+and torn off the fronts of houses, revealing sections of looted interior
+which had been further messed by shell-bursts. Some women and
+children and a crippled man came out of doors at sight of us. M.
+Doumer introduced himself and shook hands all around. They were
+glad to meet him in much the same way as if he had been on an
+election campaign.
+
+"A German shell struck there across the square only half an hour
+ago," said one of the women.
+
+"What do you do when there is shelling?" asked M. Doumer.
+
+"If it is bad we go into the cellar," was the answer; an answer which
+implied that peculiar fearlessness of women, who get accustomed to
+fire easier than men. These were the fatalists of the town, who would
+not turn refugee; helpless to fight, but grimly staying with their homes
+and accepting what came with an incomprehensible stoicism, which
+possibly had its origin in a race-feeling so proud and bitter that they
+would not admit that they could be afraid of anything German, even a
+shell.
+
+"And how did the Germans act?"
+
+"They made themselves at home in our houses and slept in our beds,
+while we slept in the kitchen," she answered. "They said that if we
+kept indoors and gave them what they wanted we should not be
+harmed. But if anyone fired a shot at their troops or any arms were
+found in our houses, they would burn the town. When they were
+going back in a great hurry--how they scattered from our shells! We
+went out in the square to see our shells, monsieur!"
+
+What mattered the ruins of her home? "Our" shells had returned
+vengeance.
+
+Arrows with directions in German, "This way to the river," "This way to
+Villers-Cotteret," were chalked on the standing walls; and on door-
+casings the names of the detachments of the Prussian Guard billeted
+there, all in systematic Teutonic fashion.
+
+"Prince Albrecht Joachim, one of the Kaiser's sons, was here and I
+talked with him," said the Mayor, who thought we would enjoy a
+morsel from court circles in exchange for a copy of the Echo de Paris,
+which contained the news that Prince Albrecht had been wounded
+later. The Mayor looked tired, this local man of the people, who had to
+play the shepherd of a stricken flock. Afterwards, they said that he
+deserted his charge and a lady, Mme. M�cherez, took his place. All I
+know is that he was present that day; or, at least, a man who was
+introduced to me as mayor; and he was French enough to make a
+bon mot by saying that he feared there was some fault in his
+hospitality because he had been unable to keep his guest.
+
+"May I have this confiture?" asked a battle-stained French orderly,
+coming up to him. "I found it in that ruined house there--all the
+Germans had left. I haven't had a confiture for a long time, and,
+monsieur, you cannot imagine what a hunger I have for confitures."
+
+All the while the French battery kept on firing slowly, then again
+rapidly, their cracks trilling off like the drum of knuckles on a
+table-top. Another effort to locate one of the guns before we started
+back to Paris failed. Speeding on, we had again a glimpse of the
+landscape toward Noyon, sprinkled with shell-bursts. The reserves
+were around their camp-fires making savoury stews for the evening
+meal. They would sleep where night found them on the sward under
+the stars, as in wars of old. That scene remains indelible as one of
+many while the army was yet mobile, before the contest became
+one of the mole and the beaver.
+
+Though one had already seen many German prisoners in groups and
+convoys, the sight of two on the road fixed the attention because of
+the surroundings and the contrast suggested between French and
+German natures. Both were young, in the very prime of life, and both
+Prussian. One was dark-complexioned, with a scrubbly beard which
+was the product of the war. He marched with such rigidity that I
+should not have been surprised to see him break into a goose-step.
+The other was of that mild, blue-eyed, tow-haired type from the Baltic
+provinces, with the thin, white skin which does not tan but burns. He
+was frailer than the other and he was tired! He would lag and then
+stiffen back his shoulders and draw in his chin and force a trifle more
+energy into his steps.
+
+A typical, lively French soldier was escorting the pair. He looked pretty
+tired, too, but he was getting over the ground in the natural, easy way
+in which man is meant to walk. The aboriginal races, who have a
+genius for long distances on foot, do not march in the German
+fashion, which looks impressive, but lacks endurance. By the same
+logic, the cowboy pony's gait is better for thirty miles day in and day
+out than the gait of the high-stepping carriage horse.
+
+You could realize the contempt which those two martial Germans had
+for their captor. Four or five peasant women refugees by the roadside
+loosened their tongues in piercing feminine satire and upbraiding.
+
+"You are going to Paris, after all! This is what you get for invading our
+country; and you'll get more of it!"
+
+The little French soldier held up his hand to the women and shook his
+head. He was a chivalrous fellow, with imagination enough to
+appreciate the feelings of an enemy who has fought hard and lost.
+Such as he would fight fair and hold this war of the civilizations up to
+something like the standards of civilization.
+
+The very tired German stiffened up again, as his drill sergeant had
+taught him, and both stared straight ahead, proud and contemptuous,
+as their Kaiser would wish them to do. I should recognize the faces of
+those two Germans and of that little French guard if I saw them ten
+years hence. In ten years, what will be the Germans' attitude toward
+this war and their military lords?
+
+It is not often that one has a senator for a guide; and I never knew a
+more efficient one than our statesman. His own curiosity was the best
+possible aid in satisfying our own. Having seen the compactness and
+simplicity of an army column at the front, we were to find that the
+same thing applied to high command. A sentry and a small flag at the
+doorway of a village hotel: this was the headquarters of the Sixth
+Army, which General Manoury had formed in haste and flung at von
+Kluck with a spirit which crowned his white hairs with the audacity of
+youth. He was absent, but we might see something of the central
+direction of one hundred and fifty thousand men in the course of one
+of the most brilliant man�uvres of the war, before staffs had settled
+down to office existence in permanent quarters. That is, we might see
+the little there was to see: a soldier telegrapher in one bedroom, a
+soldier typewritist in another, officers at work in others. One realized
+that they could pack up everything and move in the time it takes to
+toss enough clothes into a bag to spend a night away from home.
+Apparently, when the French fought they left red tape behind with the
+bureaucracy.
+
+From his seat before a series of maps on a sitting-room table an
+officer of about thirty-five rose to receive us. It struck me that he
+exemplified self-possessed intelligence and definite knowledge; that
+he had coolness and steadiness plus that acuteness of perception
+and clarity of statement which are the gift of the French. You felt sure
+that no orders which left his hand wasted any words or lacked
+explicitness. The Staff is the brains of the army, and he had brains.
+
+"All goes well!" he said, as if there were no more to say. All goes well!
+He would say it when things looked black or when they looked bright,
+and in a way that would make others believe it.
+
+Outside the hotel were no cavalry escorts or commanders, no
+hurrying orderlies, none of the legendary activity that is associated
+with an army headquarters. A motor-car drove up, an officer got out;
+another officer descended the stairs to enter a waiting car. The wires
+carry word faster than the cars. Each subordinate commander was in
+his place along that line where we had seen the puffs of smoke
+against the landscape, ready to answer a question or obey an order.
+That simplicity, like art itself, which seems so easy is the most difficult
+accomplishment of all in war.
+
+After dark, in a drizzling rain, we came to what seemed to be a town,
+for our motor-car lamps spread their radiant streams over wet
+pavements. But these were the only lights. Tongues of loose bricks
+had been shot across the cobblestones and dimly the jagged skyline
+of broken walls of buildings on either side could be discerned. It was
+Senlis, the first town I had seen which could be classified as a town in
+ruins. Afterwards, one became a sort of specialist in ruins, comparing
+the latest with previous examples of destruction.
+
+Approaching footsteps broke the silence. A small, very small, French
+soldier--he was not more than five feet two--appeared, and we
+followed him to an ambulance that had broken down for want of
+petrol. It belonged to the Soci�t� de Femmes de France. The little
+soldier had put on a uniform as a volunteer for the only service his
+stature would permit. In those days many volunteer organizations
+were busy seeking to "help." There was a kind of competition among
+them for wounded. This ambulance had got one and was taking him
+to Paris, off the regular route of the wounded who were being sent
+south. The boot-soles of a prostrate figure showed out of the dark
+recess of the interior. This French officer, a major, had been hit in the
+shoulder. He tried to control the catch in his voice which belied his
+assertion that he was suffering little pain. The drizzling rain was chilly.
+It was a long way to Paris yet.
+
+"We will make inquiries," said our kindly general.
+
+A man who came out of the gloom said that there was a hospital kept
+by some Sisters of Charity in Senlis which had escaped destruction.
+The question was put into the recesses of the ambulance:
+
+"Would you prefer to spend the night here and go on in the morning?"
+
+"Yes, monsieur, I--should--like--that--better!" The tone left no doubt of
+the relief that the journey in a car with poor springs was not to be
+continued after hours of waiting, marooned in the street of a ruined
+town.
+
+Whilst the ambulance passed inside the hospital gate, I spoke with an
+elderly woman who came to a near-by door. Cool and definite she
+was as a French soldier, bringing home the character of the women
+of France which this war has made so well known to the world.
+
+"Were you here during the fighting?"
+
+"Yes, monsieur, and during the shelling and the burning. The shelling
+was not enough. The Germans said that someone fired on their
+soldiers--a boy, I believe--so they set fire to the houses. One could
+only look and hate and pray as their soldiers passed through, looking
+so unconquerable, making all seem so terrible for France. Was it to
+be '70 over again? One's heart was of stone, monsieur. Tiens! They
+came back faster than they went. A mitrailleuse was down there at
+the end of the street, our mitrailleuse! The bullets went cracking by.
+They crack, the bullets; they do not whistle like the stories say. Then
+the street was empty of Germans who could run. The dead they
+could not run, nor the wounded. Then the French came up the street,
+running too--running after the Germans. It was good, monsieur, good,
+good! My heart was not of stone then, monsieur. It could not beat fast
+enough for happiness. It was the heart of a girl. I remember it all very
+clearly. I always shall, monsieur."
+
+"Allons!" said our statesman. "The officer is well cared for."
+
+The world seemed normal again as we passed through other towns
+unharmed and swept by the dark countryside, till a red light rose in
+our path and a sharp "Qui vive?" came out of the night as we slowed
+down. This was not the only sentry call from a French Territorial in
+front of a barricade.
+
+At a second halt we found a chain as well as a barricade across the
+road. For a moment it seemed that even the suave parliamentarism
+of our statesman and the authority of our general and our passes
+could not convince one grizzled reservist, doing his duty for France at
+the rear whilst the young men were at the front, that we had any right
+to be going into Paris at that hour of the night. The password, which
+was "Paris," helped, and we felt it a most appropriate password as we
+came to the broad streets of the city that was safe.
+
+There is a popular idea that Napoleon was a super-genius who won
+his battles single-handed. It is wrong. He had a lot of Frenchmen
+along to help. Much the same kind of Frenchmen live to-day. Not until
+they fought again would the world believe this. It seems that the
+excitable Gaul, whom some people thought would become demoralized
+in face of German organization, merely talks with his hands. In a
+great crisis he is cool, as he always was. I like the French for their
+democracy and humanity. I like them, too, for leaving their war
+to France and Marianne; for not dragging in God as do the Germans.
+For it is just possible that God is not in the fight. We don't know
+that He even approved of the war.
+
+
+
+
+V
+And Calais Waits
+
+
+
+To the traveller, Calais had been the symbol of the shortest route
+from London to Paris, the shortest spell of torment in crossing the
+British Channel. It was a point where one felt infinite relief or sad
+physical anticipations. In the last days of November Calais became
+the symbol of a struggle for world-power. The British and the French
+were fighting to hold Calais; the Germans to get it. In Calais,
+Germany would have her foot on the Atlantic coast. She could look
+across only twenty-two miles of water to the chalk cliffs of Dover. She
+would be as near her rival as twice the length of Manhattan Island;
+within the range of a modern gun; within an hour by steamer and
+twenty minutes by aeroplane.
+
+The long battle-front from Switzerland to the North Sea had been
+established. There was no getting around the Allied flank; there had
+ceased to be a flank. To win Calais, Germany must crush through by
+main force, without any man�uvre. From the caf�s where the British
+journalists gathered England received its news, which they gleaned
+from refugees and stragglers and passing officers. They wrote
+something every day, for England must have something about that
+dizzy, head-on wrestle in the mud, that writhing line of changing
+positions of new trenches rising behind the old destroyed by German
+artillery. The British were fighting with their last reserves on the Ypres-
+Armenti�res line. The French divisions to the north were suffering no
+less heavily, and beyond them the Belgians were trying to hold the
+last strip of their land which remained under Belgian sovereignty.
+Cordons of guards which kept back the observer from the struggle
+could not keep back the truth. Something ominous was in the air.
+
+It was worth while being in that old town as it waited on the issue in
+the late October rains. Its fishermen crept out in the mornings from
+the shelter of its quays, where refugees gathered in crowds hoping to
+get away by steamer. Like lost souls, carrying all the possessions
+they could on their backs, these refugees. There was numbness in
+their movements and their faces were blank--the paralysis of brain
+from sudden disaster. The children did not cry, but mechanically
+munched the dry bread given them by their parents.
+
+The newspaper men said that "refugee stuff" was already stale;
+eviction and misery were stale. Was Calais to be saved? That was
+the only question. If the Germans came, one thought that madame at
+the hotel would still be at her desk, unruffled, businesslike, and she
+would still serve an excellent salad for d�jeuner; the fishermen would
+still go to sea for their daily catch.
+
+What was going to happen? What might not happen? It was human
+helplessness to the last degree for all behind the wrestlers. Fate was
+in the battle-line. There could be no resisting that fate. If the Germans
+came, they came. Belgian staff officers with their high-crowned, gilt-
+braided caps went flying by in their cars. There always seemed a
+great many Belgian staff officers back of the Belgian army in the
+restaurants and caf�s. Habit is strong, even in war. They did not often
+miss their d�jeuners. On the Dixmude line all that remained of the
+active Belgian army was in a death struggle in the rain and mud. To
+these "schipperkes" honour without stint, as to their gallant king.
+
+Slightly-wounded Belgians and Belgian stragglers roamed the streets
+of Calais. Some had a few belongings wrapped up in handkerchiefs.
+Others had only the clothes they wore. Yet they were cheerful; this
+was the amazing thing. They moved about, laughing and chatting in
+groups. Perhaps this was the best way. Possibly relief at being out of
+the hell at the front was the only emotion they could feel. But their
+cheerfulness was none the less a dash of sunlight for Calais.
+
+The French were grim. They were still polite; they went on with their
+work. No unwounded French soldiers were to be seen, except the old
+Territorials guarding the railroad and the highways. The military
+organization of France, which knew what war meant and had
+expected war, had drawn every man to his place and held him there
+with the inexorable hand of military and racial discipline. Calais had
+never considered caring for wounded, and the wounded poured in. I
+saw a motor-car with a wounded man stop at a crowded corner, in
+the midst of refugees and soldiers; a doctor was leaning over him,
+and he died whilst the car waited.
+
+But the journalists were saying that stories of wounded men were
+likewise stale. So they were, for Europe was red with wounded. Train
+after train brought in its load from the front, and Calais tried to care
+for them. At least, it had buildings which would give shelter from
+the rain. On the floor of a railway freight shed the wounded lay in
+long rows, with just enough space between them to make an alley.
+Those in the row against one of the walls were German prisoners.
+Their green uniforms melted into the stone of the wall and did not
+show the mud stains. Two slightly wounded had their heads together
+whispering. They were helplessly tired, though not as tired as most
+of the others, those two stalwart young men; but they seemed to be
+relieved, almost happy. It did not matter what happened to them, now,
+so long as they could rest.
+
+Next to them a German was dying, and others badly hit were glassy-
+eyed in their fatigue and exhaustion. This was the word, exhaustion,
+for all the wounded.
+
+They had not the strength for passion or emotion. The fuel for those
+fires was in ashes. All they wanted in this world was to lie quiet; and
+some fell asleep not knowing or caring probably whether they were in
+Germany or in France. In the other rows, in contrast with this
+chameleon, baffling green, were the red trousers of the French and
+the dark blue of the Belgian uniforms, sharing the democracy of
+exhaustion with their foe.
+
+A misty rain was falling. In a bright spot of light through a window one
+by one the wounded were being lifted up on to a seat, if they were not
+too badly hit, and on to an operating-table if their condition were
+serious. A doctor and a sturdy Frenchwoman of about thirty, in
+spotless white, were in charge. Another woman undid the first-aid
+bandage and still another applied a spray. No time was lost; there
+were too many wounded to care for. The thing must be done as
+rapidly as possible before another train-load came in. If these
+attendants were tired, they did not know it any more than the
+wounded had realized their fatigue in the passion of battle. The
+improvized arrangement to meet an emergency had an appeal which
+more elaborate arrangements of organization which I had seen
+lacked. It made war a little more red; humanity a little more human
+and kind and helpless under the scourge which it had brought on
+itself.
+
+Though Calais was not prepared for wounded, when they came the
+women of energy and courage turned to the work without jealousy,
+without regard to red tape, without fastidiousness. I have in mind half
+a dozen other women about the streets that day in uniforms of short
+skirts and helmets, who belonged to a volunteer organization which
+had taken some care as to its regimentals. They were types not
+characteristic of the whole, of whom one practical English doctor said:
+"We don't mind as long as they do not get in the way." Their criticisms
+of Calais and the arrangements were outspoken; nothing was
+adequate; conditions were filthy; it was shameful. They were going to
+write to the English newspapers about it and appeal for money. When
+they had organized a proper hospital, one should see how the thing
+ought to be done. Meantime, these volunteer Frenchwomen were
+doing the best they knew how and doing it now.
+
+A fine-looking young Frenchman who had a shell-wound in the thigh
+was being lifted on to the table. He shuddered with pain, as he
+clenched his teeth; yet when the dressing was finished he was able to
+breathe his thanks. On the seat was a Congo negro who had been
+with one of the Belgian regiments, coal black and thick-lipped, with
+bloodshot eyes; an unsensitized human organism, his face as
+expressionless as his bare back with holes made by shell-fragments.
+A young Frenchwoman--she could not have been more than nineteen
+--with a face of singular refinement, sprayed his wounds with the
+definiteness of one trained to such work, though two days before it
+had probably never occurred to her as being within the possibilities
+of her existence. Her coolness and the coolness of the other women
+in their silent activity had a charm that added to one's devout respect.
+
+The French wounded, too, were silent, as if in the presence of a crisis
+which overwhelmed personal thoughts. Help was needed at the front;
+they knew it. On sixty trains in one day sixty thousand French passed
+through Calais. With a pass from the French commandant at Calais, I
+got on board one of these trains down at the railroad yards at dawn.
+This lot were Turcos, under the command of a white-haired veteran of
+African campaigns. An utter change of atmosphere from the freight
+shed! Perhaps it is only the wounded who have time to think. My
+companions in the officers' car were as cheery as the brown devils
+whom they led. They had come from the trenches on the Marne, and
+their commissariat was a boiled ham, some bread and red wine.
+Enough! It was war time, as they said.
+
+"We were in the Paris railroad yards. That is all we saw of Paris--and
+in the night. Hard luck!"
+
+They had left the Marne the previous day. By night they could be in
+the fight. It did not take long to send reinforcements when the line
+was closed to all except military traffic and one train followed close on
+the heels of another.
+
+They did not know where they were going; one never knew. Probably
+they would get orders at Dunkirk. Father Joffre, when there was a call
+for reinforcements, never was in a panicky hurry. He seemed to
+understand that the general who made the call could hold out a little
+longer; but the reinforcements were always up on time. A long head
+had Father Joffre.
+
+Now I am going to say that life was going on as usual at Dunkirk; that
+is the obvious thing to say. The nearer the enemy, the more
+characteristic that trite observation of those who have followed the
+roads of war in Europe. At Dunkirk you might have a good meal
+within sound of the thunder of the guns of the British monitors which
+were helping the Belgians to hold their line. At Dunkirk most excellent
+p�tisserie was for sale in a confectionery shop. Why shouldn't
+tartmakers go on making tarts and selling them? The British naval
+reserve officers used to take tea in this shop. Little crowds of citizens
+who had nothing to do, which is the most miserable of vocations in
+such a crisis, gathered to look at armoured motor-cars which had
+come in from the front with bullet dents, which gave them the
+atmosphere of battle.
+
+Beyond Dunkirk, one might see wounded Belgians, fresh from the
+field of battle, staggering in, crawling in, hobbling in from the havoc of
+shell-fire, their first-aid bandages saturated with mud, their ungainly
+and impracticable uniforms oozing mud, ghosts of men-these
+"schipperkes" of the nation that was unprepared for war who had
+done their part, when the only military thought was for more men,
+unwounded men, British, French, Belgian, to stem the German tide.
+Yet many of these Belgians, even these, were cheerful. They could
+still smile and say, "Bonne chance!"
+
+Indeed, there seemed no limit to the cheerfulness of Belgians. At a
+hospital in Calais I met a Belgian professor with his head a white ball
+of bandages, showing a hole for one eye and a slit for the mouth. He
+had been one of the cyclist force which took account of many
+German cavalry scouts in the first two weeks of the war. A staff
+motor-car had run over him on the road.
+
+"I think the driver of the car was careless," he said mildly, as if he
+were giving a gentle reproof to a student.
+
+By contrast, he had reason to be thankful for his lot. Looked after by a
+brave man attendant in another room were the wounded who were
+too horrible to see; who must die. Then, in another, you had a picture
+of a smiling British regular, with a British nurse and an Englishwoman
+of Calais to look after him. They read to him, they talked to him, they
+vied with each other in rearranging his pillows or bedclothes. He was
+a hero of a story; but it rather puzzled him why he should be. Why
+were a lot of people paying so much attention to him for doing his
+duty?
+
+In the cavalry, he had been separated from his regiment on the
+retreat from Mons. Wandering about the country, he came up with a
+regiment of cuirassiers and asked if he might not fight with them. A
+number of the cuirassiers spoke English. They took him into the
+ranks. The regiment went far over on the Marne, through towns with
+French names which he could not pronounce, this man in khaki with
+the French troopers. He was marked. C'est un Anglais! People
+cheered him and threw flowers to him in regions which had never
+seen one of the soldiers of the Ally before.
+
+Yes, officers and gentlemen invited him to dine, like he was a
+gentleman, he said, and not a Tommy, and the French Government
+had given him a decoration called the Legion of Honour or something
+like that. This was all very fine; but the best thing was that his own
+colonel, when he returned, had him up before his company and made
+a speech to him for fighting with the French when he could not find
+his own regiment. He was supremely happy, this Tommy. In waiting
+Calais one might witness about all the emotions and contrasts of war
+--and many which one does not find at the front.
+
+
+
+
+
+VI
+In Germany
+
+
+
+Never had the war seemed a more monstrous satire than on that first
+day in Germany as the train took me to Berlin. It was the other side of
+the wall of gun and rifle-fire where another set of human beings were
+giving life in order to take life. The Lord had fashioned them in the
+same pattern on both sides of the wall. Their children were born in the
+same way; they bled from wounds in the same way--but why go on in
+this vicious circle of thought?
+
+My impressions of Germany were brief, and the clearer perhaps for
+being brief, and drawn on the fresh background of Paris and Calais
+waiting to know their fate; of England staring across the Channel, in a
+suspense which her stoicism would not confess, to learn the result of
+the battle for the Channel ports; of England and France straining with
+all their strength to hold, while the Germans exerted all theirs to gain,
+a goal; of Holland, stolid mistress of her neutrality, fearing for it and
+profiting by it while she took in the Belgian foundlings dropped on her
+steps--Holland, that little land at peace, with the storms lashing
+around her.
+
+The stiff and soldierly-appearing reserve officer with bristling
+Kaiserian moustache, so professedly alert and efficient, who looked
+at the mottled back of my passport and frowned at the recent visa, "A
+la Place de Calais, bon pour aller � Dunkerque, P.O. Le Chef d'Etat-
+Major," but let me by without questions or fuss, aroused visions of a
+frontier stone wall studded with bayonets.
+
+For something about him expressed a certain character of downright
+militancy lacking in either an English or a French guard. I could
+imagine his contempt for both and particularly for a "sloppy,
+undisciplined" American guard, as he would have called one of ours.
+Personal feelings did not enter into his thoughts. He had none; only
+national feelings, this outpost of the national organism. The mood of
+the moment was friendliness to Americans. Germany wished to
+create the impression on the outside world through the agency of the
+neutral press that she was in | danger of starving, whilst she amassed
+munitions for her summer campaign and the Allies were lulled into
+confidence of siege by famine rather than by arms. A double, a treble
+purpose the starving campaign served; for it also ensured economy
+of foodstuffs, whilst nothing so puts the steel into a soldier's heart as
+the thought that the enemy is trying to beat him through taking the
+bread out of his mouth and the mouths of the women and children
+dependent upon him.
+
+Tears and laughter and moods and passions organized! Seventy
+millions in the union of determined earnestness of a life-and-death
+issue! Germany had studied more than how to make war with an
+army. She had studied how the people at home should help an army
+to make war.
+
+"With our immense army, which consists of all the able-bodied youth
+of the people," as a German officer said, "when we go to war the
+people must be passionate for war. Their impulse must be the
+impulse of the army. Their spirit will drive the army on. They must be
+drilled, too, in their part. No item in national organization is too small
+to have its effect."
+
+Compared to the, French, who had turned grim and gave their prayers
+as individuals to hearten their soldiers, the Germans were as
+responsive as a stringed instrument to the master musician's touch. A
+whisper in Berlin was enough to set a new wave of passion in motion,
+which spread to the trenches east and west.
+
+Something like the team-work of the "rah-rah" of college athletics was
+applied to the nation. The soft pedal on this emotion, the loud on that,
+or a new cry inaugurated which all took up, not with the noisy, paid
+insincerity of a claque, but with the vibrant force of a trained orchestra
+with the brasses predominant.
+
+There seemed less of the spontaneity of an individualistic people than
+of the exaltation of a religious revival. If the army were a machine of
+material force, then the people were a machine of psychical force.
+Though the thing might leave the observer cold, as a religious revival
+leaves the sceptic, yet he must admire. I was told that I should
+succumb to the contagion as others had; but it was not the optimism
+which was dinned into my ears that affected me as much as
+sidelights.
+
+When I took a walk away from a railway station where I had to make
+a train connection, I saw a German reservist of forty-five who was
+helping with one hand to thresh the wheat from his farm, on a grey,
+lowering winter day. The other hand was in a bandage. He had been
+allowed to go home until he was well enough to fight again. The same
+sort of scene I had witnessed in France; the wounded man trying to
+make up to his family the loss of his labour during his absence at the
+front.
+
+Only, that man in France was on the defensive; he was righting to
+hold what he had and on his own soil. The German had been fighting
+on the enemy's soil to gain more land. He, too, thought of it as the
+defensive. All Germany insisted that it was on the defensive. But it
+was the defensive of a people who think only in the offensive. That
+was it--that was the vital impression of Germany revealed in every
+conversation and every act.
+
+The Englishman leans back on his oars; the German leans forward.
+The Englishman's phrase is "Stick it," which means to hold what you
+have; the German's phrase is "Onward." It was national youth against
+national middle-age. A vessel with pressure of increase from within
+was about to expand or burst. A vessel which is large and
+comfortable for its contents was resisting pressure from without. The
+French were saying, What if we should lose? And the Germans were
+saying, What if we should not win all that we are entitled to? Germany
+had been thinking of a mightier to-morrow and England of a to-
+morrow as good as to-day. Germany looked forward to a fortune to
+be won at thirty; England considered the safeguarding of her fortune
+at fifty.
+
+It is not professions that count so much as the thing that works out
+from the nature of a situation and the contemporaneous bent of a
+people. The Englishman thought of his defence as keeping what he
+already had; the German was defending what he considered that he
+was entitled to. If he could make more of Calais than the French, then
+Calais ought to be his. A nation, with the "closed in" culture of the
+French on one side and the enormous, unwieldy mass of Russia on
+the other, convinced of its superiority and its ability to beat either foe,
+thought that it was the friend of peace because it had withheld the
+blow. When the striking time came, it struck hard and forced the
+battle on enemy soil, which proved, to its logic, that it was only
+receiving payment of a debt owed it by destiny.
+
+Bred to win, confident that the German system was the right system
+of life, it could imagine the German Michael as the missionary of the
+system, converting the Philistine with machine-guns. Confidence, the
+confidence which must get new vessels for the energy that has
+overflowed, the confidence of all classes in the realization of the long-
+promised day of the "place in the sun" for the immense population
+drilled in the system, was the keynote. They knew that they could lick
+the other fellow and went at him from the start as if they expected to
+lick him, with a diligence which made the most of their training and
+preparation.
+
+When I asked for a room with a bath in a leading Berlin hotel, the
+clerk at the desk said, "I will see, sir." He ran his eye up and down the
+list methodically before he added: "Yes, we have a good room on the
+second floor." Afterwards, I learned that all except the first and
+second floors of the hotel were closed. The small dining-room only
+was open, and every effort was made to make the small dining-room
+appear normal.
+
+He was an efficient clerk; the buttons who opened the room door, a
+goose-stepping, alert sprout of German militarism, exhibiting a
+punctiliousness of attention which produced a further effect of
+normality. Those Germans who were not doing their part at the front
+were doing it at home by bluffing the other Germans and themselves
+into confidence. The clerk believed that some day he would have
+more guests than ever and a bigger hotel. All who suffered from the
+war could afford to wait. Germany was winning; the programme was
+being carried out. The Kaiser said so. In proof of it, multitudes of
+Russian soldiers were tilling the soil in place of Germans, who were at
+the front taking more Russian soldiers.
+
+Everybody that one met kept telling him that everything was perfectly
+normal. No intending purchaser of real estate in a boom town was
+ever treated to more optimistic propaganda. Perfectly normal--when
+one found only three customers in a large department store! Perfectly
+normal--when the big steamship offices presented in their windows
+bare blue seas which had once been charted with the going and
+coming of German ships! Perfectly normal--when the spool of the
+killed and wounded rolled out by yards like that of a ticker on a busy
+day on the Stock Exchange! Perfectly normal--when women tried to
+smile in the streets with eyes which had plainly been weeping at
+home!
+
+Are you for us or against us? The question was put straight to the
+stranger. Let him say that he was a neutral and they took it for
+granted that he was a pro-Ally. He must be pro-something.
+
+As I returned to the railway station after my walk, a soldier took me in
+charge and marched me to the office of the military commandant.
+"Are you an Englishman?" was his first question. The guttural, military
+emphasis which he put on "Englishman" was most significant. Which
+brings us to another factor in the psychology of war: hate.
+
+"If men are to fight well," said a German officer, "it is necessary that
+they hate. They must be exalted by a great passion when they charge
+into machine-guns."
+
+Hate was officially distilled and then instilled--hate against England,
+almost exclusively. The public rose to that. If England had not come
+in, the German military plan would have succeeded: first, the crushing
+of France; then, the crushing of Russia. The despised Belgian, that
+small boy who had tripped the giant and then hugged the giant's
+knees, delaying him on the road to Paris, was having a rest. For he
+had been hated very hard for a while with the hate of contempt--that
+miserable pigmy who had interfered with the plans of the machine.
+
+The French were almost popular. The Kaiser had spoken of them as
+"brave foes." What quarrel could France and Germany have? France
+had been the dupe of England. Cartoons of the hairy, barbarous
+Russian and the futile little Frenchman in his long coat, borne on
+German bayonets or pecking at the boots of a giant Michael, were not
+in fashion. For Germany was then trying to arrange a separate peace
+with both France and Russia. She was ready to yield at least part of
+Alsace-Lorraine to France. When the negotiations fell through,
+cartoonists were again free to make sport of the aenemic Gaul and
+the untutored Slav. It was not alone in Germany that a responsive
+Press played the weather vane to Government wishes; but in
+Germany the machinery ran smoothest.
+
+For the first time I knew what it was to have a human being whom I
+had never seen before hate me. At sight of me a woman who had
+been a good Samaritan, with human kindness and charity in her
+eyes, turned a malignant devil. Stalwart as Minerva she was, a fair-
+haired German type of about thirty-five, square-shouldered and
+robustly attractive in her Red Cross uniform. Being hungry at the
+station at Hanover, I rushed out of the train to get something to eat,
+and saw some Frankfurter sandwiches on a table in front of me as I
+alighted.
+
+My hand went out for one, when I was conscious of a movement and
+an exclamation which was hostile, and looked up to see Minerva, as
+her hand shot out to arrest the movement of mine, with a blaze of
+hate, hard, merciless hate, in her eyes, while her lips framed the
+word, "Englisher!" If looks were daggers I should have been pierced
+through the heart. Perhaps an English overcoat accounted for her
+error. Certainly, I promptly recognized mine when I saw that this was
+a Red Cross buffet. An Englishman had dared to try to buy a
+sandwich meant for German soldiers! She might at least glory in the
+fact that her majestic glare had made me most uncomfortable as I
+murmured an apology which she received with a stony frown.
+
+A moment later a soldier approached the buffet. She leaned over,
+smiling, as gentle as she had been fierce and malignant a moment
+before, making a picture, as she put some mustard on a sandwich for
+him, which recalled that of the Frenchwoman among the wounded in
+the freight shed at Calais--a simile which would anger them both.
+
+The Frenchwoman, too, had a Red Cross uniform; she, too,
+expressed the mercy and gentle ministration which we like to
+associate with woman. But there was the difference of the old culture
+and the new; of the race which was fighting to have and the race
+which was fighting to hold. The tactics which we call the offensive was
+in the German woman's, as in every German's, nature. It had been in
+the Frenchwoman's in Napoleon's time. Many racial hates the war
+has developed; but that of the German is a seventeen-inch-howitzer,
+asphyxiating-gas hate.
+
+If hates help to win, why not hate as hard as you can? Don't you go to
+war to win? There is no use talking of sporting rules and saying that
+this and that is "not done" in humane circles--win! The Germans
+meant to win. Always I thought of them as having the spirit of the
+Middle Ages in their hearts, organized for victory by every modern
+method. Three strata of civilization were really fighting, perhaps: The
+French, with its inherent individual patriotism which makes a
+Frenchman always a Frenchman, its philosophy which prevents
+increase of numbers, its thrift and its tenacity; the German, with its
+newborn patriotism, its discovery of what it thinks is the golden
+system, its fecundity, its aggressiveness, its industry, its ambition;
+and the Russian, patient and unbeatable, vague, glamorous,
+immense.
+
+The American is an outsider to them all; some strange melting-pot
+product of many races which is trying to forget the prejudices and
+hates of the old world and perhaps not succeeding very well, but not
+yet convinced that the best means of producing patriotic unity is war.
+After this and other experiences, after being given a compartment all
+to myself by men who glanced at me with eyes of hate and passed
+on to another compartment which was already crowded or stood up
+in the aisle of the car, I made a point of buying an American flag for
+my buttonhole.
+
+This helped; but still there was my name, which belonged to an
+ancestor who had gone from England to Connecticut nearly three
+hundred years ago. Palmer did not belong to the Germanic tribe. He
+must be pro the other side. He could not be a neutral and belong to
+the human kind with such a name. Only Swenson, or Gansevoort, or
+Ah Fong could really be a neutral; and even they were expected to be
+on your side secretly. If they weren't they must be on the other. Are
+you for us? or, Are you against us? I grew weary of the question in
+Germany. If I had been for them I should have "dug in" and not told
+them. In France and England they asked you objectively the state of
+sentiment in America. But, possibly, the direct, forcible way is the
+better for war purposes when you mean to win; for the Germans have
+made a study of war. They are experts in war.
+
+However, the rosy-cheeked German boy, in his green uniform which
+could not be washed clean of all the stains of campaigning, whom I
+met in the palace grounds at Charlottenberg, did not put this tiresome
+question to me. He was the only person I saw in the grounds, whose
+quiet I had sought for an hour's respite from war. One could be
+shown through the palace by the lonely old caretaker, who missed
+the American tourist, without hearing a guide's monotone explaining
+who the gentleman in the frame was and what he did and who
+painted his picture. This boy could have more influence in making me
+see the German view-point than the propagandist men in the
+Government offices and the belligerent German-Americans in hotel
+lobbies--those German-Americans who were so frequently in trouble
+in other days for disobeying the verbotens and then asking our State
+Department to get them out of it, now pluming themselves over
+victories won by another type of German.
+
+About twenty-one years old this boy, round-faced and blue-eyed, who
+saw in Queen Louisa the most beautiful heroine of all history. The
+hole in his blouse which the bullet had made was nicely sewed up
+and his wound had healed. He was fighting in France when he was
+hit; the name of the place he did not know. Karl, his chum, had been
+killed. The doctor had given him the bullet, which he exhibited proudly
+as if it were different from other bullets, as it was to him. In a few days
+he must return to the front. Perhaps the war would be over soon; he
+hoped so.
+
+The French were brave; but they hated the Germans and thought
+that they must make war on the Germans, and they were a cruel
+people, guilty of many atrocities. So the Fatherland had fought to
+conquer the enemies who planned her destruction. A peculiar,
+childlike na�vet� accompanied his intelligence, trained to run in certain
+grooves, which is the product of the German type of popular
+education; that trust in his superiors which comes from a diligent and
+efficient paternalism. He knew nothing of the atrocities which
+Germans were said to have committed in Belgium. The British and
+the French had set Belgium against Germany and Germany had to
+strike Belgium for playing false to her treaties. But he did think that
+the French were brave; only misled by their Government. And the
+Kaiser? His eyes lighted in a way that suggested that the Kaiser was
+almost a god to him. He had heard of the things that the British said
+against the Kaiser and they made him want to fight for his Kaiser. He
+was only one German--but the one was millions.
+
+In actual learning which comes from schoolbooks, I think that he was
+better informed than the average Frenchman of his class; but I
+should say that he had thought less; that his mind was more of a hot-
+house product of a skilful nurseryman's hand, who knew the value of
+training and feeding and pruning the plant if you were to make it yield
+well. A kindly, willing, likable boy, peculiarly simple and unspoiled, it
+seemed a pity that all his life he should have to bear the brand of the
+Lusitania on his brow; that event which history cannot yet put in its
+true perspective. Other races will think of the Lusitania when they
+meet a German long after the Belgian atrocities are forgotten. It will
+endure to plague a people like the exile of the Acadians, the
+guillotining of innocents in the French Revolution, and the burning of
+the Salem witches. But he had nothing to do with it. A German
+admiral gave an order as a matter of policy to make an impression
+that his submarine campaign was succeeding and to interfere with
+the transport of munitions, and the Kaiser told this boy that it was
+right. One liked the boy, his loyalty and his courage; liked him as a
+human being. But one wished that he might think more. Perhaps he
+will one of these days, if he survives the war.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+VII
+How The Kaiser Leads
+
+
+Only a week before I had seen wounded Germans in the freight shed
+at Calais; and all the prisoners that I had seen elsewhere, whether in
+ones or twos, brought in fresh from the front or in columns under
+escort, had been Germans. The sharpest contrast of all in war which
+the neutral may observe is seeing the men of one army which, from
+the other side, he had watched march into battle--armed, confident,
+disciplined parts of an organization, ready to sweep all before them in
+a charge--become so many sheep, disarmed, disorganized, rounded
+up like vagrants in a bread-line and surrounded by a fold of barbed
+wire and sentries.
+
+Such was the lot of the nine thousand British, French, and Russians
+whom I saw at D�beritz, near Berlin. This was a show camp, I was
+told, but it suffices. Conditions at other camps might be worse;
+doubtless were. England treated its prisoners best, unless my
+information from unprejudiced observers be wrong. But Germany had
+enormous numbers of prisoners. A nation in her frame of mind
+thought only of the care of the men who could fight for her, not of
+those who had fought against her.
+
+Then, the German nature is one thing and the British another.
+Crossing the Atlantic on the Lusitania we had a German reserve
+officer who was already on board when the evening editions arrived
+at the pier with news that England had declared war on Germany.
+Naturally he must become a prisoner upon his arrival at Liverpool. He
+was a steadfast German. When a wireless report of the German
+repulse at Liege came, he would not believe it. Germany had the
+system and Germany would win. But when he said, "I should rather
+be a German on board a British ship than a Briton on board a
+German ship, under the circumstances," his remark was significant in
+more ways than one.
+
+His English fellow-passengers on that splendid liner which a German
+submarine was to send to the bottom showed him no discourtesy.
+They passed the time of day with him and seemed to want to make
+his awkward situation easy. Yet it was apparent that he regarded their
+kindliness as racial weakness. Krieg ist Krieg. When Germany made
+war she made war.
+
+So allowances are in order. One prison camp was like another in this
+sense, that it deprived a man of his liberty. It put him in jail. The
+British regular, who is a soldier by profession, was, in a way, in a
+separate class. But the others were men of civil industries and
+settled homes. Except during their term in the army, they went to
+the shop or the office every day, or tilled their farms. They were
+free; they had their work to occupy their minds during the day and
+freedom of movement when they came home in the evening. They
+might read the news by their firesides; they were normal human
+beings in civilized surroundings.
+
+Here, they were pacing animals in a cage, commanded by two field-
+guns, who might walk up and down and play games and go through
+the daily drill under their own non-commissioned officers. It was the
+mental stagnation of the thing that was appalling. Think of such a lot
+for a man used to action in civil life--and they call war action! Think of
+a writer, a business man, a lawyer, a doctor, a teacher, reduced to
+this fenced-in existence, when he had been the kind who got
+impatient if he had to wait for a train that was late! Shut yourself up in
+your own backyard with a man with a rifle watching you for twenty-
+four hours and see whether, if you have the brain of a mouse, prison-
+camp life can be made comfortable, no matter how many greasy
+packs of cards you have. And lousy, besides! At times one had to
+laugh over what Mark Twain called "the damfool human race."
+
+Inside a cookhouse at one end of the enclosure was a row of soup-
+boilers. Outside was a series of railings, forming stalls for the
+prisoners when they lined up for meals. In the morning, some
+oatmeal and coffee; at noon, some cabbage soup boiled with
+desiccated meat and some bread; at night, more coffee and bread.
+How one thrived on this fare depended much upon how he liked
+cabbage soup. The Russians liked it. They were used to it.
+
+"We never keep the waiter late by tarrying over our liqueurs," said a
+Frenchman.
+
+Our reservist guide had run away to America in youth, where he had
+worked at anything he could find to do; but he had returned to Berlin,
+where he had a "good little business" before the war. He was stout
+and cheery, and he referred to the prisoners as "boys." The French
+and Russians were good boys; but the English were bad boys, who
+had no discipline. He said that all received the same food as German
+soldiers. It seemed almost ridiculous chivalry that men who had
+fought against you and were living inactive lives should be as well fed
+as the men who were fighting for you. The rations that I saw given to
+German soldiers were better. But that was what the guide said.
+
+"This is our little sitting-room for the English non-commissioned
+officers," he explained, as he opened the door of a shanty which had
+a pane of glass for a window. Some men sitting around a small stove
+arose. One, a big sergeant-major, towered over the others; he had
+the colours of the South African campaign on the breast of his worn
+khaki blouse and stood very straight as if on parade. By the window
+was a Scot in kilts, who was equally tall. He looked around over his
+shoulder and then turned his face away with the pride of a man who
+does not care to be regarded as a show.
+
+His uniform was as neat as if he were at inspection; and the way he
+held his head, the haughtiness of his profile against the stream of
+light, recalled the unconquerable spirit of the Prussian prisoner whom
+I had seen on the road during the fighting along the Aisne. Only a
+regular, but he was upholding the dignity of Britain in that prison camp
+better than many a member of Parliament on the floor of the House of
+Commons. I asked our guide about him.
+
+"A good boy that! All his boys obey him and he obeys all the
+regulations. But he acts as if we Germans were his prisoners."
+
+The British might not be good boys, but they would be clean. They
+were diligent in the chase in their underclothes; their tents were free
+from odour; and there was something resolute about a Tommy who
+was bare to the waist in that freezing wind, making an effort at a bath.
+I heard tales of Mr. Atkins' characteristic thoughtlessness. While the
+French took good care of their clothes and kept their tents neat, he
+was likely to sell his coat or his blanket if he got a chance in order to
+buy something that he liked to eat. One Tommy who sat on his straw
+tick inside the tent was knitting. When I asked him where he had
+learned to knit, he replied: "India!" and gave me a look as much as to
+say, "Now pass on to the next cage."
+
+The British looked the most pallid of all, I thought. They were not used
+to cabbage soup. Their stomachs did not take hold of it, as one said;
+and they loathed the black bread. No white bread and no jam! Only
+when you have seen Mr. Atkins with a pot of jam and a loaf of white
+bread and some bacon frizzling near by can you realize the hardship
+which cabbage soup meant to that British regular who gets lavish
+rations of the kind he hkes along with his shilling a day for
+professional soldiering.
+
+"You see, the boys go about as they please," said our guide. "They
+don't have a bad time. Three meals a day and nothing to do."
+
+Members of a laughing circle which included some British were taking
+turns at a kind of Russian blind man's buff, which seemed to me
+about in keeping with the mental capacity of a prison camp. "No
+French!" I remarked.
+
+"The French keep to themselves, but they are good boys," he replied.
+"Maybe it is because we have only a few of them here."
+
+Every time one sounded the subject he was struck by the attitude of
+the Germans toward the French, not alone explained by the policy of
+the hour which hoped for a separate peace with France. Perhaps it
+was best traceable to the Frenchman's sense of amour propre, his
+philosophy, his politeness, or an indefinable quality in the grain of the
+man.
+
+The Germans affected to look down on the French; yet there was
+something about the Frenchmen which the Germans had to respect--
+something not won by war. I heard admiration for them at the same
+time as contempt for their red trousers and their unprepared-ness.
+While we are in this avenue, German officers had respect for the
+dignity of British officers, the leisurely, easy quality of superiority
+which they preserved in any circumstances. The qualities of a
+race come out in adversity no less than in prosperity. Thus,
+their captors regarded the Russians as big, good-natured children.
+
+"Yes, they play games and we give the English an English newspaper
+to read twice a week," said our affable guide, unconscious, I think, of
+any irony in the remark. For the paper was the Continental News,
+published in "the American language" for American visitors. You
+make take it for granted that it did not exaggerate any success of the
+Allies.
+
+"We have a prince and the son of a rich man among the Russian
+prisoners--yes, quite in the Four Hundred," the guide went on. "They
+were such good boys we put them to work in the cookhouse. Star
+boarders, eh? They like it. They get more to eat."
+
+These two men were called out for exhibition. Youngsters of the first
+line they were and even in their privates' uniform they bore the
+unmistakable signs of belonging to the Russian upper class. Each
+saluted and made his bow, as if he had come on to do a turn before
+the footlights. It was not the first time they had been paraded before
+visitors. In the prince's eye I noted a twinkle, which as much as said:
+"Well, why not? We don't mind."
+
+When we were taken through the cookhouse I asked about a little
+Frenchman who was sitting with his nose in a soup bowl He seemed
+too near-sighted ever to get into any army. His face was distinctly that
+of a man of culture; one would have guessed that he was an artist.
+
+"Shrapnel injury," explained the guide. "He will never be able to see
+much again. We let him come in here to eat."
+
+I wanted to talk with him, but these exhibits are supposed to be all in
+pantomime; a question and you are urged along to the next exhibit.
+He was young and all his life he was to be like that--like some poor,
+blind kitten!
+
+The last among a number of Russians returning to the enclosure from
+some fatigue duty was given a blow in the seat of his baggy trousers
+with a stick which one of the guards carried. The Russian quickened
+his steps and seemed to think nothing of the incident. But to me it
+was the worst thing that I saw at D�beritz, this act of physical violence
+against a man by one who has power over him. The personal
+equation was inevitable to the observer. Struck in that way, could one
+fail to strike back? Would not he strike in red anger, without stopping
+to think of consequences? There is something bred into the Anglo-
+Saxon which resents a physical blow. We court-martial an officer for
+laying hands on a private, though that private may get ten years in
+prison on his trial. Yet the Russian thought nothing of it, or the guard,
+either. An officer in the German or the Russian army may strike a
+man.
+
+"Would the guard hit a Frenchman in that way?" I asked. Our guide
+said not; the French were good boys. Or an Englishman? He had
+not seen it done. The Englishman would swear and curse, he was
+sure, and might fight, they were such undisciplined boys. But the
+Russians--"they are like kids. It was only a slap. Didn't hurt him any."
+
+New barracks for the prisoners were being built which would be
+comfortable, if crowded, even in winter. The worst thing, I repeat, was
+the deadly monotony of the confinement for a period which would end
+only when the war ended. Any labour should be welcome to a
+healthy-minded man. It was a mercy that the Germans set prisoners
+to grading roads, to hoeing and harvesting, retrieving thus a little of
+the wastage of war. Or was it only the bland insistence that conditions
+were luxurious that one objected to?--not that they were really bad.
+The Germans had a horde of prisoners to care for; vast armies to
+maintain; and a new volunteer force of a million or more--two millions
+was the official report--to train.
+
+While we were at the prison camp we heard at intervals the rap-rap of
+a machine-gun at the practice range near by, drilling to take more
+prisoners, and on the way back to Berlin we passed companies of
+volunteers returning from drill with that sturdy march characteristic of
+German infantry.
+
+In Berlin I was told again that everything was perfectly normal. Trains
+were running as usual to Hamburg, if one cared to go there. "As
+usual" in war time was the ratio of one to five in peace time.
+
+At Hamburg, in sight of steamers with cold boilers and the forests of
+masts of idle ships, one saw what sea power meant. That city of
+eager shippers and traders, that doorstep of Germany, was as dead
+as Ypres, without a building being wrecked by shells. Hamburgers
+tried to make the best of it; they assumed an air of optimism; they still
+had faith that richer cargoes than ever might come over the sea,
+while a ghost, that of bankruptcy, walked the streets, looking at office-
+windows and the portholes of ships.
+
+For one had only to scratch the cuticle of that optimism to find that the
+corpuscles did not run red. They were blue. Hamburg's citizens had
+to exhibit the fortitude of those of Rheims under another kind of
+bombardment: that of the silent guns of British Dreadnoughts far out
+of range. They were good Germans; they meant to play the game;
+but that once prosperous business man of past middle age, too old to
+serve, who had little to do but think, found it hard to keep step with
+the propagandist attitude of Berlin.
+
+A free city, a commercial city, a city unto itself, Hamburg had been in
+other days a cosmopolitan trader with the rest of the world. It had
+even been called an English city, owing to the number of English
+business men there as agents of the immense commerce between
+England and Germany. Everyone who was a clerk or an employer
+spoke English; and through all the irritation between the two countries
+which led up to the war, English and German business men kept on
+the good terms which commerce requires and met at luncheons and
+dinners and in their clubs. Englishmen were married to German
+women and Germans to Englishwomen, while both prayed that their
+governments would keep the peace.
+
+Now the English husband of the German woman, though he had
+spent most of his life in Hamburg, though perhaps he had been born
+in Germany, had been interned and, however large his bank account,
+was taking his place with his pannikin in the stalls in front of some
+cookhouse for his ration of cabbage soup. Germans were kind to
+English friends personally; but when it came to the national feeling of
+Germany against England, nowhere was it so bitter as in Hamburg.
+Here the hate was born of more than national sentiment; it was of the
+pocket; of seeing fortunes that had been laboriously built dwindling,
+once thriving businesses in suspended animation. There was no
+moratorium in name; there was worse than one in fact. A patriotic
+freemasonry in misfortune took its place. No business man could
+press another for the payment of debts lest he be pressed in turn.
+What would happen when the war was over? How long would it last?
+
+It was not quite as cruel to give one's opinion as two years to the
+inquirers in Hamburg as to the director of the great Rudolph Virchow
+Hospital in Berlin. Here, again, the system; the submergence of the
+individual in the organization. The wounded men seemed parts of a
+machine; the human touch which may lead to disorganization was
+less in evidence than with us, where the thought is: This is an
+individual human being, with his own peculiarities of temperament, his
+own theories of life, his own ego; not just a quantity of brain, tissue,
+blood and bone which is required for the organism called man. A
+human mechanism wounded at the German front needed repairs and
+repairs were made to that mechanism. The niceties might be lacking
+but the repair factory ran steadily and efficiently at full blast. Germany
+had to care for her wounded by the millions and by the millions she
+cared for them. "Two years!"
+
+I was sorry that I had said this to the director, for its effect on him was
+like a blow in the chest. The vision of more and more wounded
+seemed to rise before the eyes of this man, weary with the strain of
+doing the work which he knew so well how to do as a cog in the
+system. But for only a moment. He stiffened; he became the
+drillmaster again; and the tragic look in his eyes was succeeded by
+one of that strange exaltation I had seen in the eyes of so many
+Germans, which appeared to carry their mind away from you and
+their surroundings to the battlefield where they were fighting for their
+"place in the sun." "Two years, then. We shall see it through!" He had
+a son who had been living in a French family near Lille studying
+French and he had heard nothing of him since the war began. They
+were good people, this French family; his son liked them. They would
+be kind to him; but what might not the French Government do to him,
+a German! He had heard terrible stories--the kind of stories that
+hardened the fighting spirit of German soldiers--about the treatment
+German civilians had received in France. He could think of one
+French family which he knew as being kind, but not of the whole
+French people as a family. As soon as the national and racial element
+were considered the enemy became a beast.
+
+To him, at least, Berlin was not normal; nor was it to that keeper of a
+small shop off Unter den Linden which sold prints and etchings and
+cartoons. What a boon my order of cartoons was! He forgot his
+psychology code and turned human and confidential. The war had
+been hard on him; there was no business at all, not even in cartoons.
+
+The Opera alone seemed something like normal to one who trusted
+his eyes rather than his ears for information. There was almost a full
+house for the "Rosenkavalier"; for music is a solace in time of
+trouble, as other capitals than Berlin revealed. Officers with close-
+cropped heads, wearing Iron Crosses, some with arms in slings,
+promenaded in the refreshment room of the Berlin Opera House
+between the acts. This in the hour of victory should mean a picture of
+gaiety. But there was a telling hush about the scene. Possibly music
+had brought out the truth in men's hearts that war, this kind of war,
+was not gay or romantic, only murderous and destructive. One had
+noticed already that the Prussian officer, so conscious of his caste,
+who had worked so indefatigably to make an efficient army, had
+become chastened. He had found that common men, butchers and
+bakers and candlestick makers, could be as brave for their Kaiser as
+he. And more of these officers had the Iron Cross than not.
+
+The prevalence of Iron Crosses appealed to the risibilities of the
+superficial observer. But in this, too, there was system. An officer who
+had been in several battles without winning one must feel a trifle
+declassed and that it was time for him to make amends to his pride. If
+many Crosses were given to privates, then the average soldier would
+not think the Cross a prize for the few who had luck, but something
+that he, too, might win by courage and prompt obedience to orders.
+
+The masterful calculation, the splendid pretence and magnificent
+offence could not hide the suspense and suffering. Nowhere were
+you able to forget the war or to escape the all-pervading influence of
+the Kaiser. The empty royal box at the Opera, His Opera, called him
+to mind. What would happen before he reappeared there for a gala
+performance? When again, in the shuffle of European politics, would
+the audience see the Tsar of Russia or the King of England by the
+Kaiser's side?
+
+It was his Berlin, the heart of his Berlin, that was before you when you
+left the Opera--the new Berlin, which he had fathered in its boom
+growth, taking few pages of a guidebook compared to Paris. In front
+of his palace Russian field-guns taken by von Hindenburg at
+Tannenberg were exhibited as the spoils of his war; while not far
+away the never-to-be-forgotten grandfather in bronze rode home in
+triumph from Paris.
+
+One wondered what all the people in the ocean of Berlin flats were
+thinking as one walked past the statue of Frederick the Great, with his
+sharp nose pointing the way for future conquerors, and on along
+Unter den Linden, with its broad pavements gleaming in a
+characteristic misty winter night, through the Brandenburg Gate of his
+Brandenburg dynasty, or to the statue of the blood-and-iron
+Bismarck, with his strong jaw and pugnacious nose--the statesman
+militant in uniform with a helmet over his bushy brow--who had made
+the German Empire, that young empire which had not yet known
+defeat because of the system which makes ready and chooses the
+hour for its blow.
+
+Not far away one had glimpses of the white statues of My Ancestors
+of the Sieges All�e, or avenue of victory--the present Kaiser's own
+idea--with the great men of the time on their right and left hands.
+People whose sense of taste, not to say of humour, may limit their
+statecraft had smiled at this monotonous and grandiose row of the
+dead bones of distinguished and mediocre royalty immortalized in
+marble to the exact number of thirty-two. But they were My Ancestors,
+O Germans, who made you what you are! Right dress and keep that
+line of royalty in mind! It is your royal line, older than the trees in the
+garden, firm as the rocks, Germany itself. The last is not the least in
+might nor the least advertised in the age of publicity. He is to make
+the next step in advance for Germany and bring more tribute home, if
+all Germans will be loyal to him.
+
+One paused to look at the photograph of the Kaiser in a shop
+window; a big photograph of that man whose photograph is
+everywhere in Germany. It is a stern face, this face, as the leader
+wishes his people to see him, with its erectile moustache, the lips firm
+set, the eyes challenging and the chin held so as to make it symbolic
+of strength: a face that strives to say in that pose: "Onward! I lead!"
+Germans have seen it every day for a quarter of a century. They
+have lived with it and the character of it has grown into their natures.
+
+In the same window was a smaller photograph of the Crown Prince,
+with his cap rakishly on the side of his head, as if to give himself a
+distinctive characteristic in the German eye; but his is the face of a
+man who is not mature for his years, and a trifle dissipated. For a
+while after the war began he, as leader of the war party, knew the joy
+of being more popular than the Kaiser. But the tide turned soon in
+favour of a father who appeared to be drawn reluctantly into the
+ordeal of death and wounds for his people in "defence of the
+Fatherland" and against a son who had clamoured for the horror
+which his people had begun to realize, particularly as his promised
+entry into Paris had failed. There can be no question which of the two
+has the wise head.
+
+The Crown Prince had passed into the background. He was
+marooned with ennui in the face of French trenches in the West,
+whilst all the glory was being won in the East. Indeed, father had put
+son in his place. One day, the gossips said, son might have to ask
+father, in the name of the Hohenzollerns, to help him recover his
+popularity. His photograph had been taken down from shop windows
+and in its place, on the right hand of the Kaiser in the Sieges All�e of
+contemporary fame, was the bull-dog face of von Hindenburg, victor
+of Tannenberg. The Kaiser shared von Hindenburg's glory; he has
+shared the glory of all victorious generals; such is his histrionic gift in
+the age of the spotlight.
+
+Make no mistake--his people, deluded or not, love him not only
+because he is Kaiser, but also for himself. He is a clever man, who
+began his career with the enormous capital of being emperor and
+made the most of his position to amaze the world with a more
+versatile and also a more inscrutable personality than most people
+realize. Poseur, perhaps, but an emperor these days may need to be
+a poseur in order to wear the ermine of Divine Right convincingly to
+most of his subjects.
+
+His pose is always that of the anointed King of My People. He has
+never given down on that point, however much he has applied State
+Socialism to appease the Socialistic agitation. He has personified
+Germany and German ambition with an adroit egoism and the
+sentiment of his inheritance. Those critics who see the machinery of
+the throne may say that he has the mind of a journalist, quick of
+perception, ready of assimilation, knowing many things in their
+essentials, but no one thing thoroughly. But this is the kind of mind
+that a ruler requires, plus the craft of the politician.
+
+Is he a good man? Is he a great man? Banal questions! He is the
+Kaiser on the background of the Sieges All�e, who has first promoted
+himself, then the Hohenzollerns, and then the interests of Germany,
+with all the zest of the foremost shareholder and chairman of the
+corporation. No German in the German hothouse of industry has
+worked harder than he. He has kept himself up to the mark and tried
+to keep his people up to the mark. It may be the wrong kind of a
+mark. Indeed, without threshing the old straw of argument, most of
+the people of the civilized world are convinced that it is.
+
+That young private I met in the grounds at Charlottenberg, that
+wounded man helping with the harvest, that tired hospital director, the
+small trader in Hamburg, the sturdy Red Cross woman in the station
+at Hanover, the peasants and the workers throughout Germany, kept
+unimaginatively at their tasks, do not see the machinery of the throne,
+only the man in the photograph who supplies them with a national
+imagination. His indefatigable goings and comings and his poses fill
+their minds with a personality which typifies the national spirit. Will
+this change after the war? But that, too, is not a subject for speculation
+here.
+
+Through the war his pose has met the needs of the hour. An emperor
+bowed down with the weight of his people's sacrifice, a grey,
+determined emperor hastening to honour the victors, covering up
+defeats, urging his legions on, himself at the front, never seen by the
+general public in the rear; a mysterious figure, not saying much and
+that foolish to the Allies but appealing to the Germans, rather
+appearing to submerge his own personality in the united patriotism of
+the struggle--such is the picture which the throne machinery has
+impressed on the German mind. The histrionic gift may be at its best
+in creating a saga.
+
+Always the offensive! Germany would keep on striking as long as she
+had strength for a blow, whilst making the pretence that she had the
+strength for still heavier blows. One wonders, should she gain peace
+by her blows, if the Allies would awaken after the treaty was signed to
+find how near exhaustion she had been, or that she was so self-
+contained in her production of war material that she had only
+borrowed from Hans to pay Fritz, who were both Germans. Russia
+did not know how' nearly she had Japan beaten until after
+Portsmouth. Japan's method was the German method; she learned it
+from Germany.
+
+At the end of my journey I was hearing the same din of systematic
+optimism in my ears as in the beginning.
+
+"Warsaw, then Paris, then our Zeppelins will finish London," said the
+restaurant keeper on the German side of the Dutch frontier; "and our
+submarines will settle the British navy before the summer is over. No,
+the war will not last a year."
+
+"And is America next on the programme?" I asked.
+
+"No. America is too strong; too far away."
+
+I was guilty of a faint suspicion that he was a diplomatist.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+In Belgium Under The Germans
+
+
+
+No week at the front, where war is made, left the mind so full as this
+week beyond the sound of the guns with war's results. It taught the
+meaning of the simple words life and death, hunger and food, love
+and hate. One was in a house with sealed doors where a family of
+seven millions sat in silence and idleness, thinking of nothing but war
+and feeling nothing but war. He had war cold as the fragments of an
+exploded shell beside a dead man on a frozen road; war analysed
+and docketed for exhibition, without its noise, its distraction, and its
+hot passion.
+
+In Ostend I had seen the Belgian refugees in flight, and I had seen
+them pouring into London stations, bedraggled outcasts of every
+class, with the staring uncertainty of the helpless human flock flying
+from the storm. England, who considered that they had suffered for
+her sake, opened her purse and her heart to them; she opened her
+homes, both modest suburban homes and big country houses which
+are particular about their guests in time of peace. No British family
+without a Belgian was doing its duty. Bishop's wife and publican's wife
+took whatever Belgian was sent to her. The refugee packet arrived
+without the nature of contents on the address tag. All Belgians had
+become heroic and noble by grace of the defenders of Liege.
+
+Perhaps the bishop's wife received a young woman who smoked
+cigarettes, and asked her hostess for rouge, and the publican's wife
+received a countess. Mrs. Smith, of Clapham, who had brought up
+her children in the strictest propriety, welcomed as play-mates for her
+dears, whom she had kept away from the contaminating associations
+of the alleys, Belgian children from the toughest quarters of Antwerp,
+who had a precocity that led to baffling confusion in Mrs. Smith's mind
+between parental responsibility and patriotic duty. Smart society gave
+the run of its houses sometimes to gentry who were used to getting
+the run of that kind of houses by lifting a window with a jemmy on a
+dark night. It was a refugee lottery. When two hosts met one said:
+"My Belgian is charming!" and the other said: "Mine isn't. Just listen--"
+
+But the English are game; they are loyal; they bear their burden of
+hospitality bravely.
+
+The strange things that happened were not the more agreeable
+because of the attitude of some refugees who, when they were
+getting better fare than they ever had at home, thought that, as they
+had given their "all" for England, they should be getting still better, not
+to mention wine on the table in temperance families; whilst there was
+a disinclination towards self-support by means of work on the part of
+certain heroes by proxy which promised a Belgian occupation of
+England that would last as long as the German occupation of
+Belgium. England was learning that there are Belgians and Belgians.
+She had received not a few of the "and Belgians."
+
+It was only natural. When the German cruisers bombarded
+Scarborough and the Hartlepools, the first to the station were not the
+finest and sturdiest. Those with good bank accounts and a
+disinclination to take any bodily or gastronomic risks, the young idler
+who stands on the street corner ogling girls and the girls who are
+always in the street to be ogled, the flighty-minded, the irresponsible,
+the tramp, the selfish, and the cowardly, are bound to be in the van of
+flight from any sudden disaster and to make the most of the generous
+sympathy of those who succour them.
+
+The courageous, the responsible, those with homes and property at
+stake, those with an inborn sense of real patriotism which means
+loyalty to locality and to their neighbours, are more inclined to remain
+with their homes and their property. Besides, a refugee hardly
+appears at his best. He is in a strange country, forlorn, homesick, a
+hostage of fate and personal misfortune. The Belgian nation had
+taken the Allies' side and now individual Belgians expected help from
+the Allies.
+
+England did not get the worst of the refugees. They could travel no
+farther than Holland, where the Dutch Government appropriated
+money to care for them at the same time that it was under the
+expense of keeping its army mobilized. Looking at the refugees in the
+camp at Bergen-op-Zoom, an observer might share some of the
+contempt of the Germans for the Belgians. Crowded in temporary
+huts in the chill, misty weather of a Dutch winter, they seemed listless,
+marooned human wreckage. They would not dig ditches to drain their
+camp; they were given to pilfering from one another the clothes which
+the world's charity supplied. The heart was out of them. They were
+numbed by disaster.
+
+"Are all these men and women who are living together married?" I
+asked the Dutch officer in charge.
+
+"It is not for us to inquire," he replied. "Most of them say that they
+have lost their marriage certificates."
+
+They were from the slums of that polyglot seaport town Antwerp,
+which Belgians say is anything but real Belgium. To judge Belgium by
+them is like judging an American town by the worst of its back streets,
+where saloons and pawnshops are numerous and red lights twinkle
+from dark doorways.
+
+Around a table in a Rotterdam hotel one met some generals who
+were organizing a different kind of campaign from that which brought
+glory to the generals who conquered Belgium. It was odd that Dr.
+Rose--that Dr. Rose who had discovered and fought the hook worm
+among the mountaineers of the Southern States--should be
+succouring Belgium, and yet only natural. Where else should he and
+Henry James, Jr., of the Rockefeller Foundation, and Mr. Bicknell, of
+the American Red Cross, be, if not here directing the use of an
+endowment fund set aside for just such purposes?
+
+They had been all over Belgium and up into the Northern
+Departments of France occupied by the Germans, investigating
+conditions. For they were practical men, trained for solving the
+problem of charity with wisdom, who wanted to know that their money
+was well spent. They had nothing for the refugees in London, but they
+found that the people who had stayed at home in Belgium were
+worthy of help. The fund was allowing five hundred thousand dollars a
+month for the American Commission for Relief in Belgium, which was
+the amount that the Germans had spent in a single day in the
+destruction of the town of Ypres with shells. Later they were to go to
+Poland; then to Serbia.
+
+With them was Herbert C. Hoover, a celebrated mining engineer, the
+head of the Commission. When American tourists were stranded
+over Europe at the outset of the war, with letters of credit which could
+not be cashed, their route homeward must lie through London. They
+must have steamer passage. Hoover took charge. When this work
+was done and Belgium must be helped, he took charge of a task that
+could be done only by a neutral. For the adjutants and field officers of
+his force he turned to American business men in London, to Rhodes
+scholars at Oxford, and to other volunteers hastening from America.
+
+When "Harvard, 1914," who had lent a hand in the American
+refugees' trials, appeared in Hoover's office to volunteer for the new
+campaign, Hoover said: "You are going to Rotterdam to-night." "So I
+am!" said Harvard, 1914, and started accordingly. Action and not red
+tape must prevail in such an organization.
+
+The Belgians whom I wished to see were those behind the line of
+guards on the Belgo-Dutch frontier; those who had remained at home
+under the Germans to face humiliation and hunger. This was possible
+if you had the right sort of influence and your passport the right sort of
+vis�s to accompany a Bescheinigung, according to the form of "31
+Oktober, 1914, Sect. 616, Nr. 1083," signed by the German consul at
+Rotterdam, which put me in the same motor-car with Harvard, 1914,
+that stopped one blustery, snowy day of late December before a
+gate, with Belgium on one side and Holland on the other side of it, on
+the Rosendaal-Antwerp road. "Once more!" said Harvard, 1914, who
+had made this journey many times as a dispatch rider.
+
+One of the conquerors, the sentry representing the majesty of
+German authority in Belgium, examined the pass. The conqueror was
+a good deal larger around the middle than when he was young, but
+not so large as when he went to war. He had a scarf tied over his
+ears under a cracked old patent-leather helmet, which the Saxon
+Landsturm must have taken from their garrets when the Kaiser sent
+the old fellows to keep the Belgians in order so that the young men
+could be spared to get rheumatism in the trenches if they escaped
+death.
+
+You could see that the conqueror missed his wife's cooking and
+Sunday afternoon in the beer garden with his family. However much
+he loved the Kaiser, it did not make him love home any the less. His
+nod admitted us into German-ruled Belgium. He looked so lonely that
+as our car started I sent him a smile. Surprise broke on his face.
+Somebody not a German in uniform had actually smiled at him in
+Belgium!
+
+My last glimpse of him was of a grin spreading under the scarf toward
+his ears.
+
+Belgium was webbed with these old Landsturm guards. If your
+Passierschein was not right, you might survive the first set of sentries
+and even the second, but the third, and if not the third some
+succeeding one of the dozens on the way to Brussels, would hale you
+before a Kommandatur. Then you were in trouble. In travelling about
+Europe I became so used to passes that when I returned to New
+York I could not have thought of going to Hoboken without the
+German consul's visa or of dining at a French restaurant without the
+French consul's.
+
+"And again!" said Harvard, 1914, as we came to another sentry.
+There was good reason why Harvard had his pass in a leather-bound
+case under a celluloid face. Otherwise, it would soon have been worn
+out in showing. He had been warned by the Commission not to talk
+and he did not talk. He was neutrality personified. All he did was to
+show his pass. He could be silent in three languages. The only time I
+got anything like partisanship out of him and two sentences in
+succession was when I mentioned the Harvard-Yale football game.
+"My! Wasn't that a smear! In their new stadium, too! Oh, my! Wish I
+had been there!"
+
+When the car broke a spring half-way to Antwerp, he remarked,
+"Naturally!" or, rather, a more expressive monosyllable which did not
+sound neutral.
+
+While he and the Belgian chauffeur, with the help of a Belgian farmer
+as spectator, were patching up the broken spring, I had a look at the
+farm. The winter crops were in; the cabbages and Brussels sprouts in
+the garden were untouched. It happened that the scorching finger of
+war's destruction had not been laid on this little property. In the yard
+the wife was doing the week's washing, her hands in hot water and
+her arms exposed to weather so cold that I felt none too warm in a
+heavy overcoat. At first sight she gave me a frown, which instantly
+dissipated into a smile when she saw that I was not German.
+
+If not German, I must be a friend. Yet if I were I would not dare talk--
+not with German sentries all about. She lifted her hand from the suds
+and swung it out to the west toward England and France with an
+eager, craving fire in her eyes, and then she swept it across in front of
+her as if she were sweeping a spider off a table. When it stopped at
+arm's length there was the triumph of hate in her eyes. I thought of
+the lid of a cauldron raised to let out a burst of steam as she asked
+"When?" When? When would the Allies come and turn the Germans
+out?
+
+She was a kind, hardworking woman, who would help any stranger in
+trouble the best she knew how. Probably that Saxon whose smile had
+spread under his scarf had much the same kind of wife. Yet I knew
+that if the Allies' guns were heard driving the Germans past her
+house and her husband had a rifle, he would put a shot in that
+Saxon's back, or she would pour boiling water on his head if she
+could. Then, if the Germans had time, they would burn the farmhouse
+and kill the husband who had shot one of their comrades.
+
+I recollect a youth who had been in a railroad accident saying: "That
+was the first time I had ever seen death; the first time I realized what
+death was." Exactly. You don't know death till you have seen it; you
+don't know invasion till you have felt it. However wise, however able
+the conquerors, life under them is a living death. True, the farmer's
+property was untouched, but his liberty was gone. If you, a well-
+behaved citizen, have ever been arrested and marched through the
+streets of your home town by a policeman, how did you like it? Give
+the policeman a rifle and a fixed bayonet and a full cartridge-box and
+transform him into a foreigner and the experience would not be any
+more pleasant.
+
+That farmer could not go to the next town without the permission of
+the sentries. He could not even mail a letter to his son who was in the
+trenches with the Allies. The Germans had taken his horse; theirs the
+power to take anything he had--the power of the bayonet. If he
+wanted to send his produce to a foreign market, if he wanted to buy
+food in a foreign market, the British naval blockade closed the sea to
+him. He was sitting on a chair of steel spikes, hands tied and mouth
+gagged, whilst his mind seethed, solacing its hate with hope through
+the long winter months. If you lived in Kansas and could not get your
+wheat to Chicago, or any groceries or newspapers from the nearest
+town, or learn whether your son in Wyoming were alive or dead, or
+whether the man who owned your mortgage in New York had
+foreclosed it or not--well, that is enough without the German sentry.
+
+Only, instead of newspapers or word about the mortgage, the thing
+you needed past that blockade was bread to keep you from starving.
+America opened a window and slipped a loaf into the empty larder.
+Those Belgian soldiers whom I had seen at Dixmude, wounded,
+exhausted, mud-caked, shivering, were happy beside the people at
+home. They were in the fight. It is not the destruction of towns and
+houses that impresses you most, but the misery expressed by that
+peasant woman over her washtub.
+
+A writer can make a lot of the burst of a single shell; a photographer
+showing the ruins of a block of buildings or a church makes it appear
+that all blocks and all churches are in ruins. Running through Antwerp
+in a car, one saw few signs of destruction from the bombardment.
+You will see them if you are specially conducted. Shops were open,
+people were moving about in the streets, which were well lighted. No
+need of darkness for fear of bombs dropping here! German barracks
+had safe shelter from aerial raids in a city whose people were the
+allies of England and France. But at intervals marched the German
+patrols.
+
+When our car stopped before a restaurant a knot gathered around it.
+Their faces were like all the other faces I saw in Belgium--unless
+German--with that restrained, drawn look of passive resistance,
+persistent even when they smiled. When? When were the Allies
+coming? Their eyes asked the question which their tongues dared
+not. Inside the restaurant a score of German officers served by
+Belgian waiters were dining. Who were our little party? What were we
+doing there and speaking English--English, the hateful language of
+the hated enemy? Oh, yes! We were Americans connected with the
+relief work. But between the officers' stares at the sound of English
+and the appealing inquiry of the faces in the street lay an abyss of
+war's fierce suspicion and national policies and racial enmity, which
+America had to bridge.
+
+Before we could help Belgium, England, blockading Germany to keep
+her from getting foodstuffs, had to consent. She would consent only if
+none of the food reached German mouths. Germany had to agree
+not to requisition any of the food. Someone not German and not
+British must see to its distribution. Those rigid German military
+authorities, holding fast to their military secrets, must consent to
+scores of foreigners moving about Belgium and sending messages
+across that Belgo-Dutch frontier which had been closed to all except
+official German messages. This called for men whom both the
+German and the British duellists would trust to succour the human
+beings crouched and helpless under the circling flashes of their steel.
+
+Fortunately, our Minister to Belgium was Brand Whitlock. He is no
+Talleyrand or Metternich. If he were, the Belgians might not have
+been fed, because he might have been suspected of being too much
+of a diplomatist. When an Englishman, or a German, or a Hottentot,
+or any other kind of a human being gets to know Whitlock, he
+recognizes that here is an honest man with a big heart. When leading
+Belgians came to him and said that winter would find Belgium without
+bread, he turned from the land that has the least food to that which
+has the most--his own land.
+
+For Belgium is a great shop in the midst of a garden. Her towns are
+so close together that they seem only suburbs of Brussels and
+Antwerp. She has the densest population in Europe. She produces
+only enough food to last her for two months of the year. The food for
+the other ten months she buys with the products of her factories. In
+1914-15 Belgium could not send out her products; so we were to help
+feed her without pay, and England and France were to give money to
+buy what food we did not give.
+
+But with the British navy generously allowing food to pass the
+blockade, the problem was far from solved. Ships laden with supplies
+steaming to Rotterdam--this was a matter of easy organization. How
+get the bread to the hungry mouths when the Germans were using
+Belgian railroads for military purposes? Germany was not inclined to
+allow a carload of wheat to keep a carload of soldiers from reaching
+the front, or to let food for Belgians keep the men in the trenches from
+getting theirs regularly. Horse and cart transport would be
+cumbersome, and the Germans would not permit Belgian teamsters
+to move about with such freedom. As likely as not they might be
+spies.
+
+Anybody who can walk or ride may be a spy. Therefore, the way to
+stop spying is not to let anyone walk or ride. Besides, Germany had
+requisitioned most of the horses that could do more than draw an
+empty phaeton on a level. But she had not drawn the water out of the
+canals; though the Belgians, always whispering jokes at the expense
+of the conquerors, said that the canals might have been emptied if
+their contents had been beer. There were plenty of idle boats in
+Holland, whose canals connect with the web of canals in Belgium.
+You had only to seal the cargoes against requisition, the seal to be
+broken only by a representative of the Relief Commission, and start
+them to their destination.
+
+And how make sure that those who had money should pay for their
+bread, while all who had not should be reached? The solution was
+simple compared to the distribution of relief after the San Francisco
+earthquake and fire, for example, in our own land, where a sparser
+population makes social organization comparatively loose.
+
+The people to be relieved were in their homes. Belgium is so old a
+country, her population so dense, she is so much like one big
+workshop, that the Government must keep a complete set of books.
+Every Belgian is registered and docketed. You know just how he
+makes his living and where he lives. Upon marriage a Belgian gets a
+little book, giving his name and his wife's, their ages, their
+occupations, and address. As children are born their names are
+added. A Belgian holds as fast to this book as a woman to a piece of
+jewellery that is an heirloom.
+
+With few exceptions, Belgian local officials had not fled the country.
+They realized that this was a time when they were particularly needed
+on the job to protect the people from German exactions and from
+their own rashness. There were also any number of volunteers. The
+thing was to get the food to them and let them organize local
+distribution.
+
+The small force of Americans required to oversee the transit must
+watch that the Germans did not take any of the food and retain both
+British and German confidence in the absolute good faith of their
+intentions. The volunteers were paid their expenses; the rest of their
+reward was experience, and it was "soom expeerience," as a Belgian
+said who was learning a little American slang. They talked about
+canal-boat cargoes as if they had been from Buffalo to Albany on the
+Erie Canal for years; they spoke of "my province" and compared
+bread-lines and the efficiency of local officials. And the Germans took
+none of the food; orders from Berlin were obeyed. Berlin knew that
+any requisitioning of relief supplies meant that the Relief Commission
+would cease work and announce to the world the reason.
+
+However many times Americans were arrested they must be patient.
+That exception who said, when he was put in a cell overnight
+because he entered the military zone by mistake, that he would not
+have been treated that way in England, needed a little more coaching
+in preserving his mask of neutrality. For I must say that nine out of ten
+of these young men, leaning over backward to be neutral, were pro-
+Ally, including some with German names. But publicly you could
+hardly get an admission out of them that there was any war. As for
+Harvard, 1914, hang a passport carrier around the Sphinx's neck and
+you have him done in stone.
+
+Fancy any Belgian trying to get him to carry a contraband letter or a
+German commander trying to work him for a few sacks of flour! When
+I asked him what career he had chosen he said, "Business!" without
+any waste of words. I think that he will succeed in a way to surprise
+his family. It is he and all those young Americans of whom he is a
+type, as distinctive of America in manner, looks, and thought as a
+Frenchman is of France or a German of Germany, who carried the
+torch of Peace's kindly work into war-ridden Belgium. They made you
+want to tickle the eagle on the throat so he would let out a gentle,
+well-modulated scream; of course, strictly in keeping with neutrality.
+
+Red lanterns took the place of red flags swung by Landsturm sentries
+on the run to Brussels as darkness fell. There was no relaxation of
+watchfulness at night.
+
+All the twenty-four hours the systematic conquerors held the net tight.
+Once when my companion repeated his "Again!" and held out the
+pass in the lantern's rays, I broke into a laugh, which excited his
+curiosity, for you soon get out of the habit of laughing in Belgium.
+
+"It has just occurred to me that my guidebook states that passports
+are not required in Belgium!" I explained.
+
+The editor of that guidebook will have a busy time before he issues
+the next edition. For example, he will have a lot of new information
+about Malines, whose ruins were revealed by the motor-lamps in
+shadowy broken walls on either side of the main street. Other places
+where less damage had been done were equally silent. In the smaller
+towns and villages the population must keep indoors at night; for
+egress and ingress are more difficult to control there than in large
+cities, where guards at every corner suffice--watching, watching,
+these disciplined pawns of remorselessly efficient militarism; watching
+every human being in Belgium.
+
+"The last time I saw that statue of Liege," I remarked, peering into the
+darkness as we rode into the city, "the Legion of Honour conferred by
+France on Liege for its brave defence was hung on its breast. I
+suppose it is gone now."
+
+"I guess yes," said Harvard, 1914.
+
+We went to the hotel at Brussels which I had left the day before the
+city's fall. English railway signs on the walls of the corridor had not
+been disturbed. More ancient relic still seemed a bulletin board with
+its announcement of seven passages a day to England, traversing
+the Channel in "fifty-five minutes via Calais" and "three hours via
+Ostend," with the space blank where the state of the weather for the
+despair or the delight of intending voyagers had been chalked up in
+happier days. The same men were in attendance at the office as
+before; but they seemed older and their politeness that of cheerless
+automatons. For five months they had been serving German officers
+as guests with hate in their hearts and, in turn, trying to protect their
+property.
+
+A story is told of how that hotel had filled with officers after the
+arrival of the Germanic flood and how one day, when it was learned
+that the proprietor was a Frenchman, guards were suddenly placed
+at the doors and the hall was filled with luggage as every officer,
+acting with characteristic official solidarity, vacated his room and
+bestowed his presence elsewhere. Then the proprietor was informed
+that his guests would return if he would agree to employ German
+help and buy his supplies from Germany. He refused, for practical
+as well as for sentimental reasons. If he had consented, think what
+the Belgians would have done to him after the Germans were gone!
+However, officers were gradually returning, for this was the best
+hotel in town, and even conquerors are human and German conquerors
+have particularly human stomachs.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+Christmas In Belgium
+
+
+
+Christmas in Belgium with the bayonet and the wolf at the door taught
+me to value Christmas at home for more than its gifts and the cheer
+of the fireside. It taught me what it meant to belong to a free people
+and how precious is that old English saying that a man's house is his
+castle, which was the inception of so much in our lives which we
+accept as a commonplace. If such a commonplace can be made
+secure only by fighting, then it is best to fight. At any time a foreign
+soldier might enter the house of a Belgian and take him away for trial
+before a military court.
+
+Breakfast in the same restaurant as before the city's fall! Again the
+big grapes which are a luxury of the rich man's table or an
+extravagance for a sick friend with us! The hothouses still grew them.
+What else was there for he hothouses to do, though the export of
+their products was impossible? A shortage of the long, white-leafed
+chicory that we call endive in New York restaurants? There were piles
+of it in the Brussels market and on the hucksters' carts; nothing so
+cheap!
+
+One might have excellent steaks and roasts and delicious veal; for
+the heifers were being butchered as the Germans had taken all
+fodder. But the bread was the Commission's brown, which everyone
+had to eat. Belgium, growing quality on scanty acres with intensive
+farming, had food luxuries but not the staff of life.
+
+I looked out of the windows on to the square which four months
+before I had seen crowded with people bedecked with the Allies'
+colours and eagerly buying the latest editions containing the
+communiqu�s of hollow optimism. No flag in sight now except a
+German flag flying over the station! But small revenges may be
+enjoyed. A German soldier tried to jump on the tail of a cart driven by
+a Belgian, but the Belgian whipped up his horse and the German fell
+off on to the pavement, whilst the cart sped around a corner.
+
+Out of the station came a score of German soldiers returning from the
+trenches, on their way to barracks to regain strength in order that they
+could bear the ordeal of standing in icy water again. They were not
+the kind exhibited on Press tours to illustrate the "vigour of our
+indomitable army." Eyelids drooped over hollow eye-sockets; sore,
+numbed feet moved like feet which are asleep in their vain effort to
+keep step. Sensitiveness to surroundings, almost to existence,
+seemed to have been lost.
+
+One was a corporal, young, tall, and full-bearded. He might have
+been handsome if he had not been so haggard. He gave the lead to
+the others; he seemed to know where they were going, and they
+shuffled on after him in dogged painfulness. Four months ago that
+corporal, with the spring of the energy of youth when the war was
+young, was perhaps in that green column that went through the
+streets of Brussels in the thunderous beat of their regular tread on
+their way to Paris. The group was an object lesson in how much the
+victor must suffer in war in order to make his victim surfer.
+
+Some officers were at breakfast, too. Mostly they were reservists;
+mostly bespectacled, with middle age swelling their girth and
+hollowing their chests, but sturdy enough to apply the regulations
+made for conduct of the conquered. Whilst stronger men were under
+shell-fire at the front, they were under the fire of Belgian hate as
+relentless as their own hate of England. You saw them always in the
+good restaurants, but never in the company of Belgians, these
+ostracized rulers. In four months they had made no friends; at least,
+no friends who would appear with them in public. A few thousand
+guards in Belgium in the companionship of conquest and seven
+million Belgians in the companionship of a common helplessness!
+Bayonets may make a man silent, but they cannot stop his thinking.
+
+At the breakfast table on that Christmas morning in London, Paris, or
+Berlin the patriot could find the kind of news that he liked. His racial
+and rational predilections and animosities were solaced. If there
+were good news it was "played up"; if there were bad news, it was not
+published or it was explained. L'Echo Belge and L'Ind�pendance
+Belge and all the Brussels papers were either out of business or
+being issued as single sheets in Holland and England.
+
+The Belgian, keenest of all the peoples at war for news, having less
+occupation to keep his mind off the war, must read the newspapers
+established under German auspices, which fed him with the pabulum
+that German chefs provided, reflective of the stumbling degeneracy
+of England, French weariness of the war, Russian clumsiness, and
+the invincibility of Germany. If an Englishman had to read German, or
+a German English, newspapers every morning he might have
+understood how the Belgian felt.
+
+Those who had sons or fathers or husbands in the Belgian army
+could not send or receive letters, let alone presents. Families
+scattered in different parts of Belgium could not hold reunions. But at
+mass I saw a Belgian standard in the centre of the church. That flag
+was proscribed, but the priests knew it was safe in that sacred place
+and the worshippers might feast their eyes on it as they said their
+avis.
+
+A Bavarian soldier came in softly and stood a little apart from the
+worshippers, many in mourning, at the rear; a man who was of the
+same faith as the Belgians and who crossed himself with the others in
+the house of brotherly love. He would go outside to obey orders; and
+the others to nurse their hate of him and his race. This private in his
+faded green, bowing his head before that flag in the shadows of the
+nave, was war-sick, as most soldiers were; and the Belgians were
+heartsick. They had the one solace in common. But if you had
+suggested to him to give up Belgium, his answer would have been
+that of the other Germans: "Not after all we have suffered to take it!"
+Christians have a peculiar way of applying Christianity. Yet, if it were
+not for Christianity and that infernal thing called the world's opinion,
+which did not exist in the days of Caesar and the Belgse, the Belgians
+might have been worse off than they were. More of them might have
+been dead. When they were saying, "Give us this day our daily
+bread" they were thinking, "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,"
+if ever their turn came.
+
+A satirist might have repeated the apochryphal na�vet� of Marie
+Antoinette, who asked why the people wanted bread when they could
+buy such nice cakes for a sou! For all the p�tisserie shops were
+open. Brussels is famous for its French pastry. With a store of
+preserves, why shouldn't the bakeshops go on making tarts with
+heavy crusts of the brown flour, when war had not robbed the bakers
+of their art? It gave work to them; it helped the shops to keep open
+and make a show of normality. But I noticed that they were doing little
+business. Stocks were small and bravely displayed. Only the rich
+could afford such luxuries, which in ordinary times were what ice-
+cream cones are to us. Even the jewellery shops were open, with
+diamond rings flashing in the windows.
+
+"You must pay rent; you don't want to discharge your employees,"
+said a jeweller. "There is no place to go except your shop. If you
+closed it would look as if you were afraid of the Germans. It would
+make you blue and the people in the street blue. One tries to go
+through the motions of normal existence, anyway. But, of course, you
+don't sell anything. This week I have repaired a locket which carried
+the portrait of a soldier at the front and I've put a mainspring in a
+watch. I'll warrant that is more than some of my competitors have
+done."
+
+Swing around the circle in Brussels of a winter's morning and look at
+the only crowds that the Germans allow to gather, and any doubt that
+Belgium would have gone hungry if she had not received provisions
+from the outside was dispelled. Whenever I think of a bread-line
+again I shall see the faces of a Belgian bread-line. They blot out the
+memory of those at home, where men are free to go and come;
+where war has not robbed the thrifty of food.
+
+It was fitting that the great central soup kitchen should be established
+in the central express office of the city. For in Belgium these days
+there is no express business except in German troops to the front
+and wounded to the rear. The dispatch of parcels is stopped, no less
+than the other channels of trade, in a country where trade was so rife,
+a country that lived by trade. On the stone floor, where once
+packages were arranged for forwarding to the towns whose names are
+on the walls, were many great cauldrons in clusters of three, to economize
+space and fuel.
+
+"We don't lack cooks," said a chef-who had been in a leading hotel.
+"So many of us are out of work. Our society of hotel and restaurant
+keepers took charge. We know the practical side of the business. I
+suppose you have the same kind of a society in New York and would
+turn to it for help if the Germans occupied New York?"
+
+He gave me a printed report in which I read, for example, that "M.
+Arndt, professor of the �cole Normale, had been good enough to
+take charge of accounts," and "M. Catteau had been specially
+appointed to look after the distribution of bread." Most appetizing that
+soup prepared under direction of the best chefs in the city! The meat
+and green vegetables in it were Belgian and the peas American.
+Steaming hot in big cans it was sent to the communal centres, where
+lines of people with pots, pitchers, and pails waited to receive their
+daily allowance. A democracy was in that bread-line such as I have
+never seen anywhere except at San Francisco after the earthquake.
+Each person had a blue or a yellow ticket, with numbers to be
+punched, like a commuter. The blue tickets were for those who had
+proved to the communal authorities that they could not pay; the
+yellow for those who paid five centimes for each person served. A
+flutter of blue and yellow tickets all over Belgium, and in return life I
+With each serving of soup went a loaf of the American brown bread.
+The faces in the line were not those of people starving--they had
+been saved from starvation. There was none of the emaciation which
+pictures of famine in the Orient have made familiar; but they were
+pinched faces, bloodless faces, the faces of people on short rations.
+
+To the Belgian bread is not only the staff of life; it is the legs. At home
+we think of bread as something that goes with the rest of the meal; to
+the poorer classes of Belgians the rest of the meal is something that
+goes with bread. To you and me food has meant the payment of
+money to the baker and the butcher and the grocer, or the hotel-
+keeper. You get your money by work or from investments. What if
+there were no bread to be had for work or money? Sitting on a
+mountain of gold in the desert of Sahara would not quench thirst.
+Three hundred grammes, a minimum calculation--about half what the
+British soldier gets--was the ration. That small boy sent by his mother
+got five loaves; his ticket called for an allowance for a family of five.
+An old woman got one loaf, for she was alone in the world.
+
+Each one as he hurried by had a personal story of what war had
+meant to him. They answered your questions frankly, gladly, with the
+Belgian cheerfulness which was amazing considering the circumstances.
+A tall, distinguished-looking man was an artist.
+
+"No work for artists these days," he said.
+
+No work in a community of workers where every link of the chain of
+economic life had been broken. No work for the next man, a
+chauffeur, or the next, a brass worker; the next, a teamster; the next,
+a bank clerk; the next, a doorkeeper of a Government office; whilst
+the wives of those who still had work were buying in the only market
+they had. But the husbands of some were not at home. Each answer
+about the absent one had an appeal that nothing can picture better
+than the simple words or the looks that accompanied the words.
+
+"The last I heard of my husband he was fighting at Dixmude--two
+months ago."
+
+"Mine is wounded, somewhere in France."
+
+"Mine was with the army, too. I don't know whether he is alive or
+dead. I have not heard since Brussels was taken. He cannot get my
+letters and I cannot get his."
+
+"Mine was killed at Liege, but we have a son."
+
+So you out in Nebraska who gave a handful of wheat might know that
+said handful of wheat reached its destination in an empty stomach. If
+you sent a suit of clothes, or a cap, or a pair of socks, come along to
+the skating-rink, where ice-polo was played and matches and
+carnivals were held in better days, and look on at the boxes, packed
+tight with gifts of every manner of thing that men and women and
+children wear except silk hats, which are being opened and sorted
+and distributed into hastily-constructed cribs and compartments.
+
+A Belgian woman whose father was one of Belgium's leading
+lawyers--her husband was at the front-was the busy head of this
+organization, because, as she said, the busier she was the more it
+"keeps my mind off------" and she did not finish the sentence. How
+many times I heard that "keeps my mind off------" a sentence that was
+the more telling for not being finished. She and some other women
+began sewing and patching and collecting garments; "but our
+business grew so fast"--the business of relief is the one kind in
+Belgium that does grow these days--"that now we have hundreds of
+helpers. I begin to feel that I am what you would call in America a
+captainess of industry."
+
+Some of the good mothers in America were a little too thoughtful in
+their kindness. An odour in a box that had evidently travelled across
+the Atlantic close to the ship's boilers was traced to the pocket of a
+boy's suit, which contained the hardly-distinguishable remains of a
+ham sandwich, meant to be ready to hand for the hungry Belgian boy
+who got that suit. Broken pots of jam were quite frequent. But no
+matter. Soap and water and Belgian industry saved the suit, if not the
+sandwich. Sweaters and underclothes and overcoats almost new,
+and shiny old morning coats and trousers with holes in seat and
+knees might represent equal sacrifice on the part of some American
+three thousand miles away, and all were welcome. Needlewomen
+were given work cutting up the worn-outs of grown-ups and making
+them over into astonishingly good suits or dresses for youngsters.
+
+"We've really turned the rink into a kind of department store," said the
+lady. "Come into our boot department. We had some leather left in
+Belgium that the Germans did not requisition, so we bought it and that
+gave more Belgians work in the shoe factories. Work, you see, is
+what we want to keep our minds off------"
+
+Blue and yellow tickets here, too! Boots for children and thick-set
+working-women and watery-eyed old men!
+
+And each was required to leave behind the pair he was wearing.
+
+"Sometimes we can patch up the cast-offs, which means work for the
+cobblers," said the captainess of industry. "And who are our clerks?
+Why, the people who put on the skates for the patrons of the rink, of
+course!"
+
+One could write volumes on this systematic relief work, the
+businesslike industry of succouring Belgium by the businesslike
+Belgians, with American help. Certainly one cannot leave out those
+old men stragglers from Louvain and Bruges and Ghent--venerable
+children with no offspring to give them paternal care--who took their
+turn in getting bread, which they soaked thoroughly in their soup for
+reasons that would be no military secret, not even in the military zone.
+On Christmas Day an American, himself a smoker, thinking what
+class of children he could make happiest on a limited purse,
+remembered the ring around the stove and bought a basket of cheap
+brier pipes and tobacco. By Christmas night some toothless gums
+were sore, but a beatific smile of satiation played in white beards.
+
+Nor can one leave out the very young babies at home, who get their
+milk if grown people do not, and the older babies beyond milk but not
+yet old enough for bread and meat, whose mothers return from the
+bread-line to bring their children to another line, where they got
+portions of a syrupy mixture which those who know say is the right
+provender. On such occasions men are quite helpless. They can only
+look on with a frog in the throat at pale, improperly nourished mothers
+with bundles of potential manhood and womanhood in their arms. For
+this was woman's work for woman. Belgian women of every class
+joined in it: the competent wife of a workman, or the wife of a
+millionaire who had to walk like everybody else now that her motor-
+car was requisitioned by the army.
+
+Pop-eyed children, ruddy-cheeked, aggressive children, pinched-
+faced children, kept warm by sweaters that some American or
+English children spared, happy in that they did not know what their
+elders knew! Not the danger of physical starvation so much as the
+actual presence of mental starvation was the thing that got on your
+nerves in a land where the sun is seldom seen in winter and rainy
+days are the rule. It was bad enough in the "zone of occupation," so
+called, a line running from Antwerp past Brussels to Mons. One could
+guess what it was like in the military zone to the westward, where only
+an occasional American relief representative might go.
+
+This is not saying that the Germans were stricter than necessary, if
+we excuse the exasperation of their militarism, in order to prevent
+information from passing out, when a multitude of Belgians would
+have risked their lives gladly to help the Allies. One spy bringing
+accurate information might cost the German army thousands of
+casualties; perhaps decide the fate of a campaign. They saw the
+Belgians as enemies. They were fighting to take the lives of their
+enemies and save their own lives, which made it tough for them and
+the French and the British--tough all round, but very particularly tough
+for the Belgians.
+
+It was good for a vagrant American to dine at the American Legation,
+where Mr. and Mrs. Whitlock were far, very far, from the days in
+Toledo, Ohio, where he was mayor. Some said that the place of the
+Minister to Belgium was at Havre, where the Belgian Government
+had its offices; but neither Whitlock nor the Belgian people thought
+so, nor the German Government, since they had realized his prestige
+with the Belgians and how they would listen to him in any crisis when
+their passions might break the bonds of wisdom. Hugh Gibson, being
+the omnipresent Secretary of Legation in four languages, naturally
+was also present. We recalled dining together in Honduras, when he
+was in the thick of vexations.
+
+Trouble accommodatingly waits for him wherever he goes, because
+he has a gift for taking care of trouble, in the ascendancy of a
+cheerful spirit and much knowledge of international law. His present
+for the Minister, who daily received stacks of letters from all sources
+asking the impossible, as well as from Americans who wanted to be
+sure that the food they gave was not being purloined by the
+Germans, was a rubber stamp, "Blame-it-all-there's-a-state-of-war-in-
+Belgium!" which he suggested might save typewriting--a recommendation
+which the Minister refused to accept, not to Gibson's surprise.
+
+On that Christmas afternoon and evening, the people promenaded
+the streets as usual. You might have thought it a characteristic
+Christmas afternoon or evening except for the Landsturm patrols. But
+there was an absence of the old gaiety, and they were moving as if
+from habit and moving was all there was to do.
+
+They had heard the sound of the guns at Dixmude the night before.
+Didn't the sound seem a little nearer? No. The wind from that
+direction was stronger. When? When would the Allies come?
+
+
+
+
+X
+The Future Of Belgium
+
+
+
+In former days the traveller hardly thought of Belgium as possessing
+patriotic homogeneity. It was a land of two languages, French and
+Flemish. He was puzzled to meet people who looked like well-to-do
+mechanics, artisans, or peasants and find that they could not answer
+a simple question in French. This explained why a people so close to
+France, though they made Brussels a little Paris, would not join the
+French family and enter into the spirit and body of that great
+civilization on their borders, whose language was that of their own
+literature. Belgium seemed to have no character. Its nationality was
+the artificial product of European politics; a buffer divided in itself,
+which would be neither French, nor German, nor definitely Belgian.
+
+In later times Belgium had prospered enormously. It had developed
+the resources of the Congo in a way that had aroused a storm of
+criticism. Old King Leopold made the most of his neutral position to
+gain advantages which no one of the great Powers might enjoy
+because of jealousies. The International Sleeping Car Company was
+Belgian and Belgian capitalists secured concessions here and there,
+wherever the small tradesman might slip into openings suitable to his
+size. Leopold was not above crumbs; he made them profitable; he
+liked to make money; and Belgians liked to make money.
+
+Her defence guaranteed by neutrality, Belgium need have no thought
+except of thrift. Her ideals were those of prosperity. No ambition of
+national expansion stirred her imagination as Germany's was stirred;
+there was no fire in her soul as in that of France in apprehension of
+the day when she would have to fight for her life against Germany; no
+national cause to harden the sinews of patriotism. The immensity of
+her urban population contributed its effect in depriving her of the
+sterner stuff of which warriors are made. Success meant more
+comforts and luxuries. In towns like Brussels and Antwerp this
+doubtless had its effect on the moralities, which were hardly of the
+New England Puritan standard. She had a small standing army; a
+militia system in the process of reform against the conviction of the
+majority, unlike that of the Swiss mountaineers, that Belgium would
+never have any need for soldiers.
+
+If militarism means conscription as it exists in France and Germany,
+then militarism has improved the physique of races in an age when
+people are leaving the land for the factory. The prospect of battle's
+test unquestionably develops in a people certain sturdy qualities
+which can and ought to be developed in some other way than with
+the prospect of spending money for shells to kill people.
+
+With the world making every Belgian man a hero and the unknowing
+convinced that a citizen soldiery at Liege--defended by the Belgian
+standing army--had rushed from their homes with rifles and beaten
+German infantry, it is right to repeat that the schipperke spirit was not
+universal, that at no time had Belgium more than a hundred thousand
+men under arms, and that on the Dixmude line she maintained never
+more than eighty thousand men out of a population of seven millions,
+which should yield from seven hundred thousand to a million; while
+they lost a good deal of sympathy both in England and in France,
+from all I heard, through the number of able-bodied refugees who
+were disinclined to serve. It was a mistaken idealism that swept over
+the world, early in the war, characterizing a whole nation with the
+gallantry of its young king and his little army.
+
+The spirit of the Boers or of the Minute Men at Lexington was not in
+the Belgian people. It could not be from their very situation and
+method of life. They did not believe in war; they did not expect to
+practise war; but war came to them out of the still blue heavens as it
+came to the prosperous Incas of Peru.
+
+Where one was wrong was in the expectation that her bankers and
+capitalists--an aristocracy of money not given to the simple life--and
+her manufacturers, artisans, and traders, if not her peasants, would
+soon make truce with Caesar for individual profit. Therein, Belgium
+showed that she was not lacking in the moral spirit which, with the
+schipperke's, became a fighting spirit. It seemed as if the metal of
+many Belgians, struck to a white heat in the furnace of war, had
+cooled under German occupation to the tempered steel of a new
+nationalism.
+
+When you travelled over Belgium after it was pacified, the logic of
+German methods became clear. What was haphazard in their reign
+of terror was due to the inevitable excesses of a soldiery taking the
+calculated redress ordered by superiors as licence in the first red
+passion of war to a war-mad nation, which was sullen because
+Belgians had not given up the keys of the gate to France.
+
+The extent of the ruins in Belgium east of the Yser has been
+exaggerated. They were the first ruins, most photographed, most
+advertised; bad enough, inexcusable enough, and warrantedly
+causing a spell of horror throughout the civilized world. We have
+heard all about them, mind, while hearing nothing about those in
+Lorraine, where the Bavarians exceeded Prussian ruthlessness in
+reprisals. I mean, that to have read the newspapers in early
+September, 1914, one would have thought that half the towns of
+Belgium were debris while the truth is that only a small percentage
+are--those in the path of the German army's advance. Two-thirds of
+Louvain itself is unharmed; though the fact alone of its venerable
+library being in ashes is sufficient outrage, if not another building had
+been harmed.
+
+The German army planned destruction with all the regularity that it
+billeted troops, or requisitioned supplies, or laid war indemnities. It did
+not destroy by shells exclusively. It deliberately burned homes. No
+matter whether the owners were innocent or not, the homes were
+burned as an example. The principle applied was that of punishing
+half a dozen or all the boys in the class in the hope of getting the real
+culprit.
+
+Cold ruins mark blocks where sniping was thought to have occurred.
+The Germans insist that theirs was the merciful way. Krieg ist Krieg.
+When a hundred citizens of Louvain were gathered and shot
+because they were the first citizens of Louvain to hand, the purpose
+was the security of the mass at the expense of the individual,
+according to the war-is-war machine reasoning. No doubt there was
+firing on German troops by civilians. What did the Germans expect
+after the way that they had invaded Belgium? If they had bothered
+with trials and investigations, the conquerors say, sniping would have
+kept up. They may have taken innocent lives and burned the homes
+of the innocent, they admit, but their defence is that thereby they
+saved many thousands of their soldiers and of Belgians, and
+prevented the feud between the rulers and the ruled from becoming
+more embittered.
+
+Sniping over, the next step in policy was to keep the population quiet
+with a minimum of soldiery, which would permit a maximum at the
+front. In a thickly-settled country, so easily policed, in a land with the
+population inured to peace, the wisdom of keeping quiet was soon
+evident to the people. What if Boers had been in the Belgians' place?
+Would they have attempted guerrilla warfare? Would you or I want to
+bring destruction on neighbours in a land without any rural fastnesses
+as a rendezvous for operations? One could tell only if a section of our
+country were invaded.
+
+A burned block cost less than a dead German soldier. The system
+was efficacious. It was mercilessness mixed with craft. When
+Prussian brusqueness was found to be unnecessarily irritating to the
+population, causing rash Belgians to turn desperate, the elders of the
+Saxon and Bavarian coreligionists were called in. They were amiable
+fathers of families, who would obey orders without taking the law into
+their own hands. The occupation was strictly military. It concerned
+itself with the business of national suffocation. All the functions of
+government were in German hands. But Belgian policemen guided
+the street traffic, arrested culprits for ordinary misdemeanours, and
+took them before Belgian judges. This concession, which also meant
+a saving in soldiers, only aggravated to the Belgian the regulations
+directed against his personal freedom.
+
+"Eat, drink, and live as usual. Go to your own police courts for
+misdemeanours," was the German edict in a word; "but remember
+that ours is the military power, and no act that aids the enemy, that
+helps the cause of Belgium in this war, is permitted. Observe that
+particular affiche about a spy, please. He was shot."
+
+At every opportunity Belgians were told that the British and the
+French could never come to their rescue. The Allies were beaten. It
+was the British who got Belgium into trouble; the British who were
+responsible for the idleness, the penury, the hunger and the suffering
+in Belgium. The British had used Belgium as a cat's-paw; then they
+had deserted her. But Belgians remained mostly unconvinced. They
+were making war with mind and spirit, if not with arms.
+
+"We know how to suffer in Belgium," said a Belgian jurist. "Our ability
+to suffer and to hold fast to our hearths has kept us going through the
+centuries. Flemish and French, we have stubbornness in common.
+Now a ruffian has come into our house and taken us by the throat. He
+can choke us to death, or he can slowly starve us to death, but he
+cannot make us yield. No, we shall never forgive!"
+
+"You too hate, then?" I asked.
+
+"Of course I hate. For the first time in my life I know what it is to hate;
+and so do my countrymen. I begin to enjoy my hate. It is one of the
+privileges of our present existence. We cannot stand on chairs and
+tables as they do in Berlin caf�s and sing our hate, but no one can
+stop our hating in secret."
+
+Beside the latest verboten and regulation of Belgian conduct on the
+city walls were posted German official news bulletins. The Belgians
+stopped to read; they paused to re-read. And these were the rare
+occasions when they smiled, and they liked to have a German sentry
+see that smile.
+
+"Pour les enfants!" they whispered, as if talking to one another about
+a cr�che. Little ones, be good! Here is a new fairy tale!
+
+When a German wanted to buy something he got frigid politeness
+and attention--very frigid, telling politeness--from the clerk, which said:
+
+"Beast! Invader! I do not ask you to buy, but as you ask, I sell; and as
+I sell I hate! I hate! ! I hate! ! !"
+
+An officer entering a shop and seeing a picture of King Albert on the
+wall, said:
+
+"The orders are to take that down!"
+
+"But don't you love your Kaiser?" asked the woman who kept the
+shop.
+
+"Certainly!"
+
+"And I love my King!" was the answer. "I like to look at his picture just
+as much as you like to look at your Kaiser's."
+
+"I had not thought of it in that way!" said the officer.
+
+Indeed, it is very hard for any conqueror to think of it in that way. So
+the picture remained on the wall.
+
+How many soldiers would it take to enforce the regulation that no
+Belgian was to wear the Belgian colours? Imagine thousands and
+thousands of Landsturm men moving about and plucking King
+Albert's face or the black, yellow and red from Belgian buttonholes!
+No sooner would a buttonhole be cleared in front than the emblem
+would appear in a buttonhole in the rear. The Landsturm would face
+counter, flank, frontal, and rear attacks in a most amusing military
+manoeuvre, which would put those middle-aged conquerors fearfully
+out of breath and be rare sport for the Belgians. You could not arrest
+the whole population and lead them off to jail; and if you bayoneted a
+few--which really those phlegmatic, comfortable old Landsturms
+would not have the heart to do for such a little thing--why, it would get
+into the American Press, and the Berlin Foreign Office would say:
+
+"There you are, you soldiers, breaking all the crockery again!"
+
+In the smaller towns, where the Germans were billeted in Belgian
+houses, of course the hosts had to serve their unwelcome guests.
+
+"Yet we managed to let them know what was in our hearts," said one
+woman. "Some tried to be friendly. They said they had wives and
+children at home; and we said: 'How glad your wives and children
+would be to see you! Why don't you go home?'"
+
+When a report reached the commander in Ghent that an old man had
+concealed arms, a sergeant with a guard was sent to search the
+house.
+
+"Yes, my son has a rifle."
+
+"Where is it?"
+
+"In his hands on the Yser, if he is not dead, monsieur. You are
+welcome to search, monsieur."
+
+Belgium was developing a new humour, a humour at the expense of
+the Germans. In their homes they mimicked their rulers as freely as
+they pleased. To carry mimickry into the streets meant arrest for the
+elders, but not always for the children. You have heard the story,
+which is true, of how some gamins put carrots in old bowler hats to
+represent the spikes of German helmets, and at their leader's
+command of "On to Paris!" did a goose-step backwards. There is
+another which you may not have heard of a small boy who put on
+grandfather's spectacles, a pillow under his coat, and a card on his
+cap, 'Officer of the Landsturm.' The conquerors had enough sense
+not to interfere with the battalion which was taking Paris; but the
+pseudo-Landsturm officer was chased into a doorway and got a cuff
+after his placard was taken away from him.
+
+When a united public opinion faces bayonets it is not altogether
+helpless to reply. By the atmospheric force of mass it enjoys a
+conquest of its own. If a German officer or soldier entered a street
+car, women drew aside in a way to indicate that they did not want
+their garments contaminated. People walked by the sentries in the
+streets giving them room as you would give a mangy dog room, yet
+as if they did not see the sentries; as if no sentries existed.
+
+The Germans said that they wanted to be friendly. They even
+expressed surprise that the Belgians would not return their advances.
+They sent out invitations to social functions in Brussels, but no one
+came--not even to a ball given by the soldiers to the daughters of the
+poor. Belgium stared its inhospitality, its contempt, its cynical
+drolleries at the invader.
+
+I kept thinking of a story I heard in Alaska of a man who had shown
+himself yellow by cheating his partner out of a mine. He appeared
+one day hungry at a cabin occupied by half a dozen men who knew
+him. They gave him food and a bunk that night; they gave him
+breakfast; they even carried his blanket-roll out to his sled and
+harnessed his dogs as a hint, and saw him go without one man
+having spoken to him. No matter if that man believed he had done no
+wrong, he would have needed a rhinoceros hide not to have felt this
+silence. Such treatment the Belgians have given to the Germans,
+except that they furnished the shelter and harnessed the team under
+duress, as they so specifically indicate by every act. No wonder, then,
+that the old Landsturm guards, used at home to saying "Wie gehts?"
+and getting a cheery answer from the people they passed in the
+streets, were lonely.
+
+Not only stubborn, but shrewd, these Belgians. Both qualities were
+brought out in the officials who had to deal with the Germans,
+particularly in the small towns and where destruction had been worst.
+Take, for example, M. Nerincx, of Louvain, who has energy enough to
+carry him buoyantly through an American political campaign,
+speaking from morning to midnight. He had been in America. I
+insisted that he ought to give up his professorship, get naturalized,
+and run for office in America. I know that he would soon be mayor of
+a town, or in Congress.
+
+When the war began he was professor of international law at the
+ancient university whose walls alone stand, surrounding the ashes of
+its priceless volumes, across from the ruined cathedral. With the
+burgomaster a refugee from the horrors of that orgy, he turned man
+of action on behalf of the demoralized people of the town with a
+thousand homes in ruins. Very lucky the client in its lawyer. He is the
+kind of man who makes the best of the situation; picks up the
+fragments of the pitcher, cements them together with the first material
+at hand, and goes for more milk. It was he who got a German
+commander to sign an agreement not to "kill, burn, or plunder" any
+more, and the signs were still up on some houses saying that "This
+house is not to be burned except by official order."
+
+There in the H�tel de Ville, which is quite unharmed, he had his office,
+within reach of the German commander. He yielded to Caesar and
+protected his own people day in and day out, diplomatic, watchful,
+Belgian. And he was cheerful. What other people could have retained
+any vestige of cheer! Sometimes one wondered if it were not partly
+due to an absence of keen nerve-sensibilities, or to some other of the
+traits which are a product of the Belgian hothouse and Belgian
+inheritance.
+
+I might tell you about M. Nerincx's currency system; how he issued
+paper promises to pay when he gave employment to the idle in
+repairing those houses which permitted of being repaired, and
+cleaned the streets of debris, till ruined Louvain looked as shipshape
+as ruined Pompeii; and how he got a little real money from Brussels
+to stop depreciation when the storekeepers came to him and said
+that they had stacks of his notes which no mercantile concern would
+cash.
+
+M. Nerincx was practising in the life about all that he ever learned and
+taught at the university, "which we shall rebuild!" he declared, with
+cheery confidence. "You will help us in America," he said. "I'm going
+to America to lecture one of these days about Louvain!"
+
+"You have the most famous ruins, unless it is Rheims," I assured him.
+"You will get flocks of tourists"--particularly if he fenced in the ruins
+of the library and burned leaves of ancient books were on sale.
+
+"Then you will not only have fed, but have helped to rebuild Belgium,"
+he added.
+
+A shadow of apprehension overhung his anticipation of the day of
+Belgium's delivery. Many a Belgian had arms hidden from the alert
+eye of German espionage, and his bitterness was solaced by the
+thought; "I'll have a shot at the Germans when they go!" The lot of the
+last German soldier to leave a town, unless the garrison slips away
+overnight, would hardly make him a good life-insurance risk.
+
+My last look at a Belgian bread-line was at Liege, that town which
+had had a blaze of fame in August, 1914, and was now almost
+forgotten. An industrial town, its mines and works were idle. The
+Germans had removed the machinery for rifle-making, which has
+become the most valuable kind of machinery in the world next to that
+for making guns and shells. If skilled Belgians here or elsewhere were
+called upon to serve the Germans at their craft, they suddenly
+became butter-fingered. So that bread-line at Liege was long, its
+queue stretching the breadth of the cathedral square.
+
+As most of the regular German officers in Belgium were cavalrymen--
+there was nothing for cavalry to do on the Aisne line of trenches--it
+was quite in keeping that the aide to the commandant of Liege, who
+looked after my pass to leave the country, should be a young officer
+of Hussars. He spoke English well; he was amiable and intelligent.
+While I waited for the commandant to sign the pass the aide chatted
+of his adventures on the pursuit of the British to the Marne. The
+British fought like devils, he said. It was a question if their new army
+would be so good. He showed me a photograph of himself in a British
+Tommy's overcoat.
+
+"When we took some prisoners I was interested in their overcoats,"
+he explained. "I asked one of the Tommies to let me try on his. It fitted
+me perfectly, so I kept it as a souvenir and had this photograph made
+to show my friends."
+
+Perhaps a shade of surprise passed over my face.
+
+"You don't understand," he said. "That Tommy had to give me his
+coat! He was a prisoner."
+
+On my way out from Liege I was to see Vis�--the town of the
+gateway--the first town of the war to suffer from frightfulness. I had
+thought of it as entirely destroyed. A part of it had survived.
+
+A delightful old Bavarian Landsturmman searched me for contraband
+letters when our cart stopped on the Belgian side of a barricade at
+Maastricht, with Dutch soldiers on the other side. His examination
+was a little perfunctory, almost apologetic, and he did want to be
+friendly. You guessed that he was thinking he would like to go around
+the corner and have "ein Glas Bier" rather than search me. What a
+hearty "Auf wiedersehen!" he gave me when he saw that I was
+inclined to be friendly, too!
+
+I was glad to be across that frontier, with a last stamp on my
+Passierschein; glad to be out of the land of those ghostly Belgian
+millions in their living death; glad not to have to answer again their
+ravenously whispered "When?" When would the Allies come?
+
+The next time that I was in Belgium it was in the British lines of the
+Ypres salient, two months later. When should I be next in Brussels?
+With a victorious British army, I hoped. A long wait it was to be for a
+conquered people, listening each day and trying to think that the
+sound of gun-fire was nearer.
+
+The stubborn, passive resistance and self-sacrifice that I have
+pictured was that of a moral leadership of a majority shaming the
+minority; of an ostracism of all who had relations with the enemy. Of
+course, it was not the spirit of the whole. The American Commission,
+as charity usually must, had to overcome obstacles set in its path by
+those whom it would aid. Belgian politicians, in keeping with the
+weakness of their craft, could no more forego playing politics in time
+of distress than some that we had in San Francisco and some we
+have heard of only across the British Channel from Belgium.
+
+Zealous leaders exaggerated the famine of their districts in order to
+get larger supplies; communities in great need without spokesmen
+must be reached; powerful towns found excuses for not forwarding
+food to small villages which were without influence. Natural greed got
+the better of men used to turning a penny any way they could.
+Rascally bakers who sifted the brown flour to get the white to sell to
+p�tisserie shops and the well-to-do while the bread-line got the bran,
+required shrewd handling, and it was found that the best punishment
+was to let the public know the pariah part they had played. In fact that
+soon put a stop to the practice. It meant that the baker's business
+was ruined and he had lost his friends.
+
+A certain percentage of Belgians, as would happen in any country,
+saw the invasion only as a visitation of disaster, like an earthquake. A
+flat country of gardens limits one's horizon. They fell into line with the
+sentiment of the mass. But as time wore on into the summer and
+autumn of the second year, some of them began to think, What was
+the use? German propaganda was active. All that the Allies had
+cared for Belgium was to use her to check the German tide to Paris
+and the Channel ports! Perfidious England had betrayed Belgium!
+German business and banking influences, which had been considerable
+in Belgium before the war, and the numerous German residents
+who had returned, formed a busy circle of appeal to Belgian business
+men, who were told that the British navy stood between them and a
+return to prosperity. Germany was only too willing that they should
+resume their trade with the rest of the world.
+
+Why should not Belgium come into the German customs union? Why
+should not Belgium make the best of her unfortunate situation, as
+became a practical and thrifty people? But be it a customs union or
+annexation that Germany plans, the steel had entered the hearts of
+all Belgians with red corpuscles; and King Albert and his
+"schipperkes" were still fighting the Germans at Dixmude. A British
+army appearing before Brussels would end casuistry; and pessimism
+would pass, and the German residents, too, with the huzzas of all
+Belgium as the gallant king once more ascended the steps of his
+palace.
+
+Worthy of England at her best was her consent to allow the
+Commission's food to pass, which she accompanied by generous
+giving. She might seem slow in making ready her army--though I do
+not think that she was--but give she could and give she did. It was a
+grave question if her consent was in keeping with the military policy
+which believes that any concession to sentiment in the grim business
+of war is unwise. Certainly, the Krieg ist Krieg of Germany would not
+have permitted it.
+
+There is the very point of the war that ought to make any neutral take
+sides. If the Belgians had not received bread from the outside world,
+then Germany would either have had to spare enough to keep them
+from starving or faced the desperation of a people who would fight for
+food with such weapons as they had. This must have brought a
+holocaust of reprisals that would have made the orgy of Louvain
+comparatively insignificant. However much the Germans hampered
+the Commission with red tape and worse than red tape through the
+activities of German residents in Belgium, Germany did not want the
+Commission to withdraw. It was helping her to economize her food
+supplies. And England answered a human appeal at the cost of hard-
+and-fast military policy. She was still true to the ideals which have set
+their stamp on half the world.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+Winter In Lorraine
+
+
+
+Only a winding black streak, that four hundred and fifty miles of
+trenches on a flat map. It is difficult to visualize the whole as you see
+it in your morning paper, or to realize the labour it represents in its
+course through the mire and over mountain slopes, through villages
+and thick forests and across open fields.
+
+Every mile of it was located by the struggle of guns and rifles and
+men coming to a stalemate of effort, when both dug into the earth
+and neither could budge the other. It is a line of countless battles and
+broken hopes; of charges as brave as men ever made; a symbol of
+skill and dogged patience and eternal vigilance of striving foe against
+striving foe.
+
+From the first, the sector from Rheims to Flanders was most familiar
+to the public. The world still thinks of the battle of the Marne as an
+affair at the door of Paris, though the heaviest fighting was from Vitry-
+le-Fran�ois eastward and the fate of Paris was no less decided on the
+fields of Lorraine than on the fields of Champagne. The storming of
+Rheims Cathedral became the theme of thousands of words of print
+to one word for the defence of the Plateau d'Amance or the struggle
+around Lun�ville. Our knowledge of the war is from glimpses through
+the curtain of military secrecy which was drawn tight over Lorraine
+and the Vosges, shrouded in mountain mists. This is about Lorraine
+in winter, when the war was six months old.
+
+But first, on our way, a word about Paris, which I had not seen since
+September. At the outset of the war, Parisians who had not gone to
+the front were in a trance of suspense; they were magnetized by the
+tragic possibilities of the hour. The fear of disaster was in their hearts,
+though they might deny it to themselves. They could think of nothing
+but France. Now they realized that the best way to help France was
+by going on with their work at home. Paris was trying to be normal,
+but no Parisian was making the bluff that Paris was normal. The
+Gallic lucidity of mind prevented such self-deception.
+
+Is it normal to have your sons, brothers, and husbands up to their
+knees in icy water in the trenches, in danger of death every minute?
+This attitude seems human; it seems logical. One liked the French for
+it. One liked them for boasting so little. In their effort at normality
+they had accomplished more than they realized; for one-sixth of
+the wealth of France was in German hands. A line of steel made
+the rest safe for those not at the front to pursue the routine of peace.
+
+When I had been in Paris in September there was no certainty about
+railroad connections anywhere. You went to the station and took your
+chances, governed by the movement of troops, not to mention other
+conditions. This time I took the regular noon express to Nancy, as I
+might have done to Marseilles, or Rome, or Madrid, had I chosen.
+The sprinkling of quiet army officers on the train were in the new
+uniform of peculiar steely grey, in place of the target blue and red. But
+for them and the number of women in mourning and one other
+circumstance, the train might have been bound for Berlin, with Nancy
+only a stop on the way.
+
+The other circumstance was the presence of a soldier in the vestibule
+who said: "Votre laisser-passer, monsieur, s'il vous platt!" If you had a
+laisser-passer, he was most polite; but if you lacked one, he would
+also have been most polite and so would the guard that took you in
+charge at the next station. In other words, monsieur, you must have
+something besides a railroad ticket if you are on a train that runs past
+the fortress of Toul and your destination is Nancy. You must have a
+military pass, which was never given to foreigners if they were
+travelling alone in the zone of military operations. The pulse of the
+Frenchman beats high, his imagination bounds, when he looks
+eastward. To the east are the lost provinces and the frontier drawn by
+the war of '70 between French Lorraine and German Lorraine. This
+gave our journey interest.
+
+Nancy, capital of French Lorraine, is so near Metz, the great German
+fortress town of German Lorraine, that excursion trains used to run to
+Nancy in the opera season. "They are not running this winter," say
+the wits of Nancy. "For one reason, we have no opera--and there are
+other reasons."
+
+An aeroplane from the German lines has only to toss a bomb in the
+course of an average reconnaissance on Nancy if it chooses; for
+Zeppelins are within easy reach of Nancy. But here was Nancy as
+brilliantly lighted at nine in the evening as any city of its size at home.
+Our train, too, had run with the windows unshaded. After the
+darkness of London, and after English trains with every window-
+shade closely drawn, this was a surprise.
+
+It was a threat, an anticipation, that darkened London, while Nancy
+knew fulfilment. Bombardment and bomb-dropping were nothing new
+to Nancy. The spice of danger gives a fillip to business to the town
+whose population heard the din of the most thunderously spectacular
+action of the war echoing among the surrounding hills. Nancy saw the
+enemy beaten back. Now she was so close to the front that she felt
+the throb of the army's life.
+
+"Don't you ever worry about aerial raids?" I asked madame behind
+the counter at the hotel.
+
+"Do the men in the trenches worry about them?" she answered. "We
+have a much easier time than they. Why shouldn't we share some of
+their dangers? And when a Zeppelin appears and our guns begin
+firing, we all feel like soldiers under fire."
+
+"Are all the population here as usual?"
+
+"Certainly, monsieur!" she said. "The Germans can never take
+Nancy. The French are going to take Metz!"
+
+The meal which that hotel restaurant served was as good as in peace
+times. Who deserves a good meal if not the officer who comes in
+from the front? And madame sees that he gets it. She is as proud of
+her poulet en casserole as any commander of a soixante-quinze
+battery of its practice. There was steam heat, too, in the hotel, which
+gave an American a homelike feeling.
+
+In a score of places in the Eastern States you see landscapes with
+high hills like the spurs of the Vosges around Nancy sprinkled with
+snow and under a blue mist. And the air was dry; it had the life of our
+air. Old Civil War men who had been in the Tennessee Mountains or
+the Shenandoah Valley would feel perfectly at home in such
+surroundings; only the foreground of farm land which merges into the
+crests covered with trees in the distance is more finished. The people
+were tilling it hundreds of years before we began tilling ours. They till
+well; they make Lorraine a rich province of France.
+
+With guns pounding in the distance, boys in their capes were skipping
+and frolicking on their way to school; housewives were going to
+market, and the streets were spotlessly clean. All the men of Nancy
+not in the army pursued their regular routine while the army went
+about its business of throwing shells at the Germans. On the dead
+walls of the buildings were M. Deschanel's speech in the Chamber of
+Deputies, breathing endurance till victory, and the call for the class of
+recruits of 1915, which you will find on the walls of the towns of all
+France beside that of the order of mobilization in August, now
+weather-stained. Nancy seemed, if anything, more French than any
+interior French town. Though near the border, there is no touch of
+German influence. When you walked through the old Place
+Stanislaus, so expressive of the architectural taste bred for centuries
+in the French, you understand the glow in the hearts of this very
+French population which made them unconscious of danger while
+their flag was flying over this very French city.
+
+No two Christian peoples we know are quite so different as the
+French and the Germans. To each every national thought and habit
+incarnates a patriotism which is in defiance of that on the other side of
+the frontier. Over in America you may see the good in both sides, but
+no Frenchman and no German can on the Lorraine frontier. If he
+should, he would no longer be a Frenchman or a German in time of
+war.
+
+At our service in front of the hotel were waiting two mortals in goatskin
+coats, with scarfs around their ears and French military caps on top of
+the scarfs. They were official army chauffeurs. If you have ridden
+through the Alleghenies in winter in an open car, why explain that
+seeing the Vosges front in a motor-car may be a joy ride to an
+Eskimo, but not to your humble servant? But the roads were perfect;
+as good wherever we went in this mountain country as from New
+York to Poughkeepsie. I need not tell you this if you have been in
+France; but you will be interested to know that Lorraine keeps her
+roads in perfect repair even in war time.
+
+Crossing the swollen Moselle on a military bridge, twisting in and out
+of valleys and speeding through villages, one saw who were guarding
+the army's secrets, but little of the army itself and few signs of
+transportation on a bleak, snowy day. At the outskirts of every village,
+at every bridge, and at intervals along the road, Territorial sentries
+stopped the car. Having an officer along was not sufficient to let you
+whizz by important posts. He must show his pass. Every sentry was a
+reminder of the hopelessness of being a correspondent these days
+without official sanction.
+
+The sentries were men in the thirties. In Belgium, their German
+counterpart, the Landsturm, were the monitors of a journey that I
+made. No troops are more military than the first line Germans; but in
+the snap and spirit of his salute the French Territorial has an �lan, a
+martial fervour, which the phlegmatic German in the thirties lacks.
+
+Occasionally we passed scattered soldiers in the village streets, or a
+door opened to show a soldier figure in the doorway. The reason that
+we were not seeing anything of the army was the same that keeps
+the men and boys who are on the steps of the country grocery in
+summer at home around the stove in winter. All these villages were
+full of reservists who were indoors. They could be formed in the street
+ready for the march to any part of the line where a concentrated
+attack was made almost as soon after the alarm as a fire engine
+starts to a fire. Now, imagine your view of a cricket match limited to
+the bowler: and that is all you see in the low country of Flanders. You
+have no grasp of what all the noise and struggle means, for you
+cannot see over the shoulders of the crowd. But in Lorraine you have
+only to ascend a hill and the moves in the chess game of war are
+clear.
+
+A panorama unfolds as our car takes a rising grade to the village of
+Ste. Genevi�ve. We alight and walk along a bridge, where the sentry
+of a lookout is on watch. He seems quite alone, but at our approach a
+dozen of his comrades come out of their "home" dug in the hillside.
+Wherever you go about the frozen country of Lorraine it is a case of
+flushing soldiers from their shelters. A small, semicircular table is set
+up before the lookout, like his compass before a mariner. Here run
+blue pencil lines of direction pointing to Pont-�-Mousson, to Ch�teau-
+Salins, and other towns. Before us to the east rose the tree-clad
+crests of the famous Grand Couronn� of Nancy, and faintly in the
+distance we could see Metz.
+
+"Those guns that I hear, are they firing across the frontier?" I asked.
+For some French batteries command one of the outer forts of Metz.
+
+"No, they are near Pont-�-Mousson."
+
+To the north the little town of Pont-�-Mousson lay in the lap of the
+river bottom, and across the valley, to the west, the famous Bois le
+Pr�tre. More guns were speaking from the forest depths, which
+showed great scars where the trees had been cut to give fields of fire.
+This was well to the rear of our position, marking the boundaries of
+the wedge that the Germans drove into the French lines, with its point
+at St. Mihiel, in trying to isolate the forts of Verdun and Toul.
+Doubtless you have noticed that wedge on the snake maps and have
+wondered about it, as I have. It looks so narrow that the French ought
+to be able to shoot across it from both sides. If so, why don't the
+Germans widen it?
+
+Well, for one thing, a quarter of an inch on a map is a good many
+miles of ground. The Germans cannot spread their wedge because
+they would have to climb the walls of an alley. That was a fact as
+clear to the eye as the valley of the Hudson from West Point. The
+Germans occupy an alley within an alley, as it were. They have their
+own natural defences for the edges of their wedge; or, where they do
+not, they lie cheek by jowl with the French in such thick woods as the
+Bois le Pr�tre.
+
+At our feet, looking toward Metz, an apron of cultivated land swept
+down for a mile or more to a forest edge. This was cut by lines of
+trenches, whose barbed-wire protection pricked a blanket of snow.
+
+"Our front is in those woods," explained the colonel who was in
+command of the point.
+
+"A major when the war began and an officer of reserves," mon
+capitaine, who had brought us out from Paris, explained about the
+colonel. We were soon used to hearing that a colonel had been a
+major or a major a captain before the Kaiser had tried to get Nancy.
+There was quick death and speedy promotion at the great battle of
+Lorraine, as there was at Gettysburg and Antietam.
+
+"They charged out of the woods, and we had a battalion of reserves--
+here are some of them--mes poilus!"
+
+He turned affectionately to the bearded fellows in scarfs who had
+come out of the shelter. They smiled back. Now, as we all chatted
+together, officer-and-man distinction disappeared. We were in a
+family party.
+
+It was all very simple to mes poilus, that first fight. They had been told
+to hold. If Ste. Genevi�ve were lost, the Amance plateau was in
+danger, and the loss of the Amance plateau meant the fall of Nancy.
+Some military martinets say that the soldiers of France think too
+much. In this case thinking may have taught them responsibility. So
+they held; they lay tight, these reserves, and kept on firing as the
+Germans swarmed out of the woods.
+
+"And the Germans stopped there, monsieur. They hadn't very far to
+go, had they? But the last fifty yards, monsieur, are the hardest
+travelling when you are trying to take a trench."
+
+They knew, these poilus, these veterans. Every soldier who serves in
+Lorraine knows. They themselves have tried to rush out of the edge
+of a woods across an open space against intrenched Germans and
+found the shoe on the other foot.
+
+Now the fields in the foreground down to the woods' edge were bare
+of any living thing. You had to take mon capitaine's word for it that
+there were any soldiers in front of us.
+
+"The Boches are a good distance away at this point," he said. "They
+are in the next woods."
+
+A broad stretch of snow lay between the two clumps of woods. It was
+not worth while for either side to try to get possession of the
+intervening space. At the first movement by either French or
+Germans the woods opposite would hum with rifle fire and echo with
+cannonading. So, like rival parties of Arctic explorers waiting out the
+Arctic winter, they watched each other. But if one force or the other
+napped and the other caught him at it, then winter would not stay a
+brigade commander's ambition. Three days later in this region the
+French, by a quick movement, got a good bag of prisoners to make a
+welcome item for the daily French official bulletin.
+
+"We wait and the Germans wait on spring for any big movement,"
+said the colonel. "Men can't lie out all night in the advance in weather
+like this. In that direction------" He indicated a part of the line where
+the two armies were facing each other across the old frontier. Back
+and forth they had fought, only to arrive where they had begun.
+
+There was something else which the colonel wished us to see before
+we left the hill of Ste. Genevi�ve. It appealed to his Gallic sentiment,
+this quadrilateral of stone on the highest point where legend tells that
+"Jovin, a Christian and very faithful, vanquished the German
+barbarians 366 A.D."
+
+"We have to do as well in our day as Jovin in his," remarked the
+colonel.
+
+The church of Ste. Genevi�ve was badly smashed by shell. So was
+the church in the village on the Plateau d'Amance, as are most
+churches in this district of Lorraine. Framed through a great gap in
+the wall of the church of Amance was an immense Christ on the
+cross without a single abrasion, and a pile of debris at its feet. After
+seeing as many ruined churches as I have, one becomes almost
+superstitious at how often the figures of Christ escape. But I have
+also seen effigies of Christ blown to bits.
+
+Anyone who, from an eminence, has seen one battle fought
+visualizes another readily when the positions lie at his feet. Looking
+out on the field of Gettysburg from Round Top, I can always get the
+same thrill that I had when, seated in a gallery above the Russian and
+the Japanese armies, I saw the battle of Liao-yang. In sight of that
+Plateau d'Amance, which rises like a great knuckle above the
+surrounding country, a battle covering twenty times the extent of
+Gettysburg raged, and one could have looked over a battle-line as far
+as the eye may see from a steamer's mast.
+
+An icy gale swept across the white crest of the plateau on this
+January day, but it was nothing to the gale of shells that descended
+on it in late August and early September. Forty thousand shells, it is
+estimated, fell there. One kicked up fragments of steel on the field like
+peanut-shells after a circus has gone. Here were the emplacements
+of a battery of French soixante-quinze within a circle of holes torn by
+its adversaries' replies to its fire; a little farther along, concealed by
+shrubbery, the position of another battery which the enemy had not
+located.
+
+So that was it! The struggle on the immense landscape, where at
+least a quarter of a million men were killed and wounded, became as
+simple as some Brobdingnagian football match. Before the war
+began the French would not move a man within five miles of the
+frontier lest it be provocative; but once the issue was joined they
+sprang for Alsace and Lorraine, their imagination magnetized by the
+thought of the recovery of the lost provinces. Their Alpine chasseurs,
+mountain men of the Alpine and the Pyrenees districts, were
+concentrated for the purpose.
+
+I recalled a remark I had heard: "What a pitiful little offensive that
+was!" It was made by one of those armchair "military experts" who
+look at a map and jump at a conclusion. They appear very wise in
+their wordiness when real military experts are silent for want of
+knowledge. Pitiful, was it? Ask the Germans who faced it what they
+think. Pitiful, that sweep over those mountain walls and through the
+passes? Pitiful, perhaps, because it failed, though not until it had
+taken Ch�teau-Salins in the north and Mulhouse in the south. Ask the
+Germans if they think that it was pitiful! The Confederates also failed
+at Antietam and at Gettysburg, but the Union army never thought of
+their efforts as pitiful.
+
+The French fell back because all the weight of the German army was
+thrown against France, while the Austrians were left to look after the
+slowly mobilizing Russians. Two million five hundred thousand men
+on their first line the Germans had, as we know now, against the
+French twelve hundred thousand and Sir John French's army fighting
+one against four. To make sure of saving Paris as the Germans
+swung their mighty flanking column through Belgium, Joffre had to
+draw in his lines. The Germans came over the hills as splendidly as
+the French had gone. They struck in all directions toward Paris. In
+Lorraine was their left flank, the Bavarians, meant to play the same
+part to the east that von Kluck played to the west. We heard only of
+von Kluck; nothing of this terrific struggle in Lorraine.
+
+From the Plateau d'Amance you may see how far the Germans came
+and what was their object. Between the fortresses of Epinal and of
+Toul lies the Trou�e de Mirecourt--the Gap of Mirecourt. It is said that
+the French had purposely left it open when they were thinking of
+fighting the Germans on their own frontier and not on that of Belgium.
+They wanted the Germans to make their trial here--and wisely, for
+with all the desperate and courageous efforts of the Bavarian and
+Saxon armies they never got near the gap.
+
+If they had forced it, however, with von Kluck swinging on the other
+flank, they might have got around the French army. Such was the
+dream of German strategy, whose realization was so boldly and
+skilfully undertaken. The Germans counted on their immense force of
+artillery, built for this war in the last two years and out-ranging the
+French, to demoralize the French infantry. But the French infantry
+called the big shells marmites (saucepans), and made a joke of them
+and the death they spread as they tore up the fields in clouds of
+earth.
+
+Ah, it took more than artillery to beat back the best troops of France in
+a country like this--a country of rolling hills and fenceless fields cut by
+many streams and set among thick woods, where infantry on a bank
+or at a forest's edge with rifles and rapid-firers and guns kept their
+barrels cool until the charge developed in the open. Some of these
+forests are only a few acres in extent; others are hundreds of acres.
+In the dark depths of one a frozen lake was seen glistening from our
+viewpoint on the Plateau d'Amance.
+
+"Indescribable that scene which we witnessed from here," said an
+officer who had been on the plateau throughout the fighting. "All the
+splendid majesty of war was set on a stage before you. It was
+intoxication. We could see the lines of troops in their retreat and
+advance, batteries and charges shrouded in shrapnel smoke. What
+hosts of guns the Germans had! They seemed to be sowing the
+whole face of the earth with shells. The roar of the thing was like that
+of chaos itself. It was the exhilaration of the spectacle that kept us
+from dropping from fatigue. Two weeks of this business! Two weeks
+with every unit of artillery and infantry always ready, if not actually
+engaged!"
+
+The general in command was directing not one but many battles,
+each with a general of its own; manoeuvring troops across streams
+and open places, seeking the cover of forests, with the aeroplanes
+unable to learn how many of the enemy were hidden in the forests on
+his front, while he tried to keep his men out of angles and make his
+movements correspond with those of the divisions on his right and
+left. Skill this required; skill equivalent to German skill; the skill
+which you cannot command in a month after calling for a million
+volunteers, but which grows through years of organization.
+
+Shall I call the general in chief command General X? This is
+according to the custom of anonymity. A great modern army like the
+French is a machine; any man, high or low, only a unit of the
+machine. In this case the real name of X is Castelnau. If it lacks the
+fame which seems its due, that may be because he was too busy to
+take the Press into his confidence. Fame is not the business of
+French generals nowadays. It is war. What counted for France was
+that he never let the Germans get near the gap at Mirecourt.
+
+Having failed to reach the gap, the Germans, with that stubbornness
+of the offensive which characterizes them, tried to take Nancy. They
+got a battery of heavy guns within range of the city. From a high hill it
+is said that the Kaiser watched the bombardment. But here is a story.
+As the German infantry advanced toward their new objective they
+passed a French artillery officer in a tree. He was able to locate that
+heavy battery and able to signal its position back to his own side. The
+French concentrated sufficient fire to silence it after it had thrown forty
+shells into Nancy. The same report tells how the Kaiser folded his
+cloak around him and walked in silence from his eminence, where the
+sun blazed on his helmet. It was not the Germans' fault that they
+failed to take Nancy. It was due to the French.
+
+Some time a tablet will be put up to denote the high-water mark of the
+German invasion of Lorraine. It will be between the edge of the forest
+of Champenoux and the heights. When the Germans charged from
+the cover of the forest to get possession of the road to Nancy, the
+French artillery and machine-guns which had held their fire turned
+loose. The rest of the story is how the French infantry, impatient at
+being held back, swept down in a counter-attack, and the Germans
+had to give up their campaign in Lorraine as they gave up their
+campaign against Paris in the early part of September. Saddest of all
+lost opportunities to the correspondent in this war is this fighting in
+Lorraine. One had only to climb a hill in order to see everything!
+
+In half an hour, as the officer outlined the positions, we had lived
+through the two weeks' fighting; and, thanks to the fairness of his
+story--that of a professional soldier without illusions--we felt that we
+had been hearing history while it was very fresh.
+
+"They are very brave and skilful, the Germans," he said. "We still
+have a battery of heavy guns on the plateau. Let us go and see it."
+
+We went, picking our way among the snow-covered shell-pits. At one
+point we crossed a communication trench, where soldiers could go
+and come to the guns and the infantry positions without being
+exposed to shell-fire. I noticed that it carried a telephone wire.
+
+"Yes," said the officer; "we had no ditch during the fight with the
+Germans, and we were short of telephone wire for a while; so we had
+to carry messages back and forth as in the old days. It was a pretty
+warm kind of messenger service when the German marmites were
+falling their thickest."
+
+At length he stopped before a small mound of earth not in any way
+distinctive at a short distance on the uneven surface of the plateau. I
+did not even notice that there were three other such mounds. He
+pointed to a hole in the ground. I had been used to going through a
+manhole in a battleship turret, but not through one into a field-gun
+position before aeroplanes played a part in war.
+
+"Entrez, monsieur!"
+
+And I stepped down to face the breech of a gun whose muzzle
+pointed out of another hole in the timbered roof covered with earth.
+
+"It's very cosy!" I remarked.
+
+"Oh, this is the shop! The living room is below--here!"
+
+I descended a ladder into a cellar ten feet below the gun level, where
+some of the gunners were lying on a thick carpet of perfectly dry
+straw.
+
+"You are not doing much firing these days?" I suggested.
+
+"Oh, we gave the Boches a couple this morning so they shouldn't get
+cocky thinking they were safe It's necessary to keep your hand in
+even in the winter."
+
+"Don't you get lonesome?"
+
+"No, we shift on and off. We're not here all the while. It is quite warm
+in our salon, monsieur, and we have good comrades. It is war. It is for
+France. What would you?"
+
+Four other gun-positions and four other cellars like this! Thousands of
+gun-positions and thousands of cellars! Man invents new powers of
+destruction and man finds a way of escaping them.
+
+As we left the battery we started forward, and suddenly out of the
+dusk came a sharp call. A young corporal confronted us. Who were
+we and what business had we prowling about on that hill? If there had
+been no officer along and I had not had a laisser-passer on my
+person, the American Ambassador to France would probably have
+had to get another countryman out of trouble.
+
+The incident shows how thoroughly the army is policed and how
+surely. Editors who wonder why their correspondents are not in the
+front line catching bullets, please take notice.
+
+It was dark when we returned to the little village on the plateau where
+we had left the car. The place seemed uninhabited with all the blinds
+closed. But through one uncovered window I saw a room full of
+chatting soldiers. We went to pay our respects to the colonel in
+command, and found him and his staff around a table covered with
+oilcloth in the main living-room of a villager's house. He spoke of his
+men, of their loyalty and cheerfulness, as the other commanders had,
+as if this were his only boast. These French officers have little "side";
+none of that toe-the-mark, strutting militarism which the Germans
+think necessary to efficiency. They live very simply on campaign,
+though if they do get to town for a few hours they enjoy a good meal.
+If they did not, madame at the restaurant would feel that she was not
+doing her duty to France.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+XII
+Smiles Among Ruins
+
+
+
+Scorched piles of brick and mortar where a home has been ought to
+make about the same impression anywhere. When you have gone
+from Belgium to French Lorraine, however, you will know quite the
+contrary. In Belgium I suffered all the depression which a nightmare
+of war's misery can bring; in French Lorraine I found myself sharing
+something of the elation of a man who looks at a bruised knuckle with
+the consciousness that it broke a burglar's jaw.
+
+A Belgian repairing the wreck of his house was a grim, heartbreaking
+picture; a Frenchman of Lorraine repairing the wreck of his house had
+the light of hard-won victory, of confidence, of sacrifice made to a
+great purpose, of freedom secure for future generations, in his eyes.
+The difference was this: The Germans were still in Belgium; they were
+out of French Lorraine for good.
+
+"What matters a shell-hole through my walls and my torn roof!" said a
+Lorraine farmer. "Work will make my house whole. But nothing could
+ever have made my heart and soul whole while the Germans
+remained. I saw them go, monsieur; they left us ruins, but France is
+ours!"
+
+I had thought it a pretty good thing to see something of the Eastern
+French front; but a better thing was the happiness I found there.
+
+Mon capitaine had come out from the Ministry of War in Paris; but
+when we set out from Nancy southward, we had a different local
+guide, a major belonging to the command in charge of the region
+which we were to visit. He was another example which upsets certain
+popular notions of Frenchmen as gesticulating, excitable little men.
+Some six feet two in height, he had an eye that looked straight into
+yours, a very square chin, and a fine forehead. You had only to look
+at him and size him up on points to conclude that he was all there;
+that he knew his work.
+
+"Well, we've got good weather for it to-day, monsieur," said a voice
+out of a goatskin coat, and I found we had the same chauffeur as
+before.
+
+The sun was shining--a warm winter sun like that of a February thaw
+in our Northern States--glistening on the snowy fields and slopes
+among the forests and tree-clad hills of the mountainous country.
+Faces ambushed in whiskers thought it was a good day for trimming
+beards and washing clothes. The sentries along the roads had their
+scarfs around their necks instead of over their ears. A French soldier
+makes ear muffs, chest protector, nightcap, and a blanket out of the
+scarf which wife or sister knits for him. If any woman who reads this
+knits one to send to France she may be sure that the fellow who
+received it will get every stitch's worth out of it.
+
+To-day, then, it was war without mittens. You did not have to sound
+the bugle to get soldiers out of their burrows or their houses. Our first
+stop was at our own request, in a village where groups of soldiers
+were taking a sun bath. More came out of the doors as we alighted.
+They were all in the late twenties or early thirties, men of a reserve
+regiment. Some had been clerks, some labourers, some farmers,
+some employers, when the war began. Then they were piou-pious, in
+French slang; then all France prayed godspeed to its beloved piou-
+pious. Then you knew the clerk by his pallor; the labourer by his hard
+hands; the employer by his manner of command. Now they were
+poilus--bearded, hard-eyed veterans; you could not tell the clerk from
+the labourer or the employer from the peasant.
+
+Anyone who saw the tenderfoot pilgrimage to the Alaskan goldfield in
+'97-8 and the same crowd six months later will understand what had
+happened to these men. The puny had put on muscle; the city
+dweller had blown his lungs; the fat man had lost some adipose;
+social differences of habit had disappeared. The gentleman used to
+his bath and linen sheets and the hard-living farmer or labourer--both
+had had to eat the same kind of food, do the same work, run the
+same risks in battle, and sleep side by side in the houses where they
+were lodged and in the dug-outs of the trenches when it was their turn
+to occupy them through the winter. Any "snob" had his edges
+trimmed by the banter of his comrades. Their beards accentuated the
+likeness of type. A cheery lot of faces and intelligent, these, which
+greeted us with curious interest.
+
+"Perhaps President Wilson will make peace," one said.
+
+"When?"
+
+A shrug of the shoulder, a gesture to the East, and the answer was:
+
+"When we have Alsace-Lorraine back."
+
+Under a shed their d�jeuner was cooking. This meal at noon is the
+meal of the day to the average Frenchman who has only bread and
+coffee in the morning. They say that he objects to fighting at luncheon
+time. That is the hour when he wants to sit down and forget his work
+and laugh and talk and enjoy his eating. The Germans found this out
+and tried to take his trenches at the noon hour. Interference with his
+gastronomic habits made him so angry that he dropped the knife and
+fork for the bayonet and took back any lost ground in a ferocious
+counter-attack. He would teach those "Boches" to leave him to eat
+his d�jeuner in peace.
+
+That appetizing stew in the kettles in the shed once more proved that
+Frenchmen know how to cook. I didn't blame them for objecting to
+being shot at by the Germans when they were about to eat it. The
+average French soldier is better fed than at home; he gets more
+meat, for a hungry soldier is usually a poor soldier. It is a very simple
+problem with France's fine roads to feed that long line when it is
+stationary. It is like feeding a city stretched out over a distance of four
+hundred and fifty miles; a stated number of ounces each day for each
+man and a known number of men to feed. From the railway head
+trucks and motor-buses take the supplies up to the distributing points.
+At one place I saw ten Paris motor-buses, their signs painted over in
+a steel-grey to hide them from aeroplanes, and not one of them had
+broken down through the war. The French take good care of their
+equipment and their clothes; they waste no food. As a people is so is
+their army, and the French are thrifty by nature.
+
+Father Joffre, as the soldiers call him, is running the next largest
+boarding establishment in Europe after the Kaiser and the Tsar. And
+he has a happy family. It seemed to me that life ought to have been
+utterly dull for this characteristic group of poilus, living crowded
+together all winter in a remote village. Civilians sequestered in this
+fashion away from home are inclined to get grouchy on one another.
+
+One of the officers in speaking of this said that early in the autumn
+the reserves were pretty homesick. They wanted to get back to their
+wives and children. Nostalgia, next to hunger, is the worst thing for a
+soldier. Commanders were worried. But as winter wore on the spirit
+changed. The soldiers began to feel the spell of their democratic
+comradeship. The fact that they had fought together and survived
+together played its part; and individualism was sunk in the one
+thought that they were there for France. The fellowship of a cause
+taught them patience, brought them cheer. Another thing was the
+increasing sense of team play, of confidence in victory, which holds a
+ball team, a business enterprise, or an army together. Every day the
+organization of the army was improving; every day that indescribable
+and subtle element of satisfaction that the Germans were securely
+held was growing.
+
+Every Frenchman saves something of his income; madame sees to it
+that he does. He knows that if he dies he will not leave wife and
+children penniless. His son, not yet old enough to fight, will come on
+to take his place. Men at home of twenty-two or three years and
+unmarried, men of twenty-eight or thirty years and not long married,
+and men of forty with some money put by, will, in turn, understand
+how their own class feels.
+
+In ten minutes you had entered into the hearts of this single company
+in a way that made you feel that you had got into the heart of the
+whole French army. When you asked them if they would like to go
+home they didn't say "No!" all in a chorus, as if that were what the
+colonel had told them to say. They obey the colonel, but their
+thoughts are their own. Otherwise, these ruddy, healthy men,
+representing the people of France and not the caf�s of Paris, would
+not keep France a republic.
+
+Yes, they did want to go home. They did want to go home. They
+wanted their wives and babies; they wanted to sit down to morning
+coffee at their own tables. Lumps rose in their throats at the
+suggestion. But they were not going until the German peril was over
+for ever. Why stop now, only to have another terrible war in thirty or
+forty years? A peace that would endure must be won. They had
+thought that out for themselves. They would not stick to their
+determination if they had not. This is the way of democracies. Thus,
+everyone was conscious that he was fighting not merely to win, but
+for future generations.
+
+"It happened that this great struggle which we had long feared came
+in our day, and to us is the duty," said one. You caught the spirit of
+comradeship passing the time with jests at one another's expense.
+One of the men who was not a full thirty-third-degree poilu had
+compromised with the razor on a moustache as blazing red as his
+shock of hair.
+
+"I think that the colonel gave him the tip that he would light the way for
+Zeppelins!" said a comrade.
+
+"Envy! Sheer envy!" was the retort. "Look at him!" and he pointed at
+some scraggly bunches on chin and cheeks which resembled a
+young grass plat that had come up badly.
+
+"I don't believe in air-tight beards," was the response. When I
+produced a camera, the effect was the same as it always is with
+soldiers at the front. They all wanted to be in the photograph, on the
+chance that the folks at home might see how the absent son or father
+looked. Would I send them one? And the address was like this:
+"Monsieur Benevent, Corporal of Infantry 18th Company, 5th
+Battalion, 299th Regiment of Infantry, Postal Sector No. 121." by
+which you will know the rural free delivery methods along the French
+front. This address is the one rift in the blank wall of anonymity which
+hides the individuality of the millions under Joffre. Only the army
+knows the sector and the numbers of the regiment in that sector. By
+the same kind of a card-index system Joffre might lay his hand on
+any one of his millions, each a human being with all a human being's
+individual emotions, who, to be a good soldier, must be only one of
+the vast multitude of obedient chessmen.
+
+"We are ready to go after them when Father Joffre says the word," all
+agreed. Joffre has proved himself to the democracy, which means
+the enthusiastic loyalty of a democracy's intelligence.
+
+"If there are any homesick ones we should find them among the lot
+here," said mon capitaine.
+
+These were the men who had not been long married. They were not
+yet past the honeymoon period; they had young children at home;
+perhaps they had become fathers since they went to war. The
+younger men of the first line had the irresponsibility and the ardour of
+youth which makes comradeship easy.
+
+But the older men, the Territorials as they are called, in the late
+thirties and early forties, have settled down in life. Their families are
+established; their careers settled; some of them, perhaps, may enjoy
+a vacation from the wife; for you know madame, in France, with all
+her thrift, can be a little bossy, which is not saying that this is not a
+proper tonic for her lord. So the old boys seem the most content in
+the fellowship of winter quarters. What they cannot stand are
+repeated, long, hard marches; their legs give out under the load of
+rifle and pack. But their hearts are in the war, and right there is one
+very practical reason why they will fight well--and they have fought
+better as they hardened with time and the old French spirit revived in
+their blood. "Allons, messieurs!" said the tall major, who wanted us to
+see battlefields. It required no escort to tell us where the battlefield
+was. We knew it when we came to it, as you know the point reached
+by high tide on the sands--this field where many Gettysburgs were
+fought in one through that terrible fortnight in late August and early
+September, when the future of France and the whole world hung in
+the balance--as the Germans sought to reach Paris and win a
+decisive victory over the French army. Where destruction ended
+there the German invasion reached its limit.
+
+Forests and streams and ditches and railway culverts played their
+part in tactical surprises, as they did at Gettysburg; and cemetery
+walls, too. In all my battlefield visits in Europe I have not seen a single
+cemetery wall that was not loopholed. But the fences, which
+throughout the Civil War offered impediment to charges and screen
+to the troops which could reach them first, were missing. The fields
+lay in bold stretches, because it is the business of young boys and
+girls in Lorraine to watch the cows and keep them out of the corn.
+
+We stopped at a cross-roads where charges met and wrestled back
+and forth in and out of the ditches. Fragments of shells appeared as
+steps scuffed away the thin coating of snow. I picked up an old
+French cap, with a slash in the top that told how its owner came to his
+end, and near by a German helmet. For there are souvenirs in plenty
+lying in the young wheat which was sown after the battle was over.
+Millions of little nickel bullets are ploughed in with the blood of those
+who died to take the Kaiser to Paris and those who died to keep him
+out in this fighting across the fields and through the forests, in a tug-
+of-war of give-and-take, of men exhausted after nights and days
+under fire, men with bloodshot eyes sunk deep in the sockets, dust-
+laden, blood-spattered, with forty years of latent human powder
+breaking forth into hell when the war was only a month old and
+passion was at a white heat.
+
+Hasty shelter-trenches gridiron the land; such trenches as breathless
+men, dropping after a charge, threw up hurriedly with the spades that
+they carry on their backs to give them a little cover. And there is the
+trench that stopped the Germans--the trench which they charged but
+could not take. It lies among shell-holes so thick that you can step
+from one to another. In places its crest is torn away, which means
+that half a dozen men were killed in a group. But reserves filled their
+places. They kept pouring out their stream of lead which German
+courage could not endure. Thus far and no farther the invasion came
+in that wheat-field which will be ever memorable.
+
+We went up a hill once crowned by one of those clusters of farm-
+buildings of stone and mortar, where house and stables and
+granaries are close together. All around were bare fields. Those farm-
+buildings stood up like a mountain peak. The French had the hill and
+lost it and recovered it. Whichever side had it, the other was bound to
+bathe it in shells because it commanded the country around. The
+value of property meant nothing. All that counted was military
+advantage. Because churches are often on hill-tops, because they
+are bound to be used for lookouts, is why they get torn to pieces.
+When two men are fighting for life they don't bother about upsetting a
+table with a vase, or notice any "Keep off the grass" signs; no, not
+even if the family Bible be underfoot.
+
+None of the roof, none of the superstructure of these farm-buildings
+was left; only the lower walls, which were eighteen inches thick and in
+places penetrated by the shells. For when a Frenchman builds a
+farmhouse he builds it to last a few hundred years. The farm windmill
+was as twisted as a birdcage that has been rolled under a trolley car,
+but a large hayrake was unharmed. Such is the luck of war. I made
+up my mind that if I ever got under shell-fire I would make for the
+hayrake and avoid the windmill.
+
+Our tall major pointed out all the fluctuating positions during the battle.
+It was like hearing a chess match explained from memory by an
+expert. Words to him were something precious. He made each one
+count as he would the shots from his cannon. His narrative had the
+lucidity of a terse judge reviewing evidence. The battlefield was
+etched on his mind in every important phase of its action.
+
+Not once did he speak in abuse of the enemy. The staff officer who
+directs steel ringing on steel is too busy thrusting and keeping guard
+to indulge in diatribes. To him the enemy is a powerful impersonal
+devil, who must be beaten. When I asked about the conduct of the
+Germans in the towns they occupied, his lip tightened and his eyes
+grew hard.
+
+"I'm afraid it was pretty bad!" he said; as if he felt, besides the wrong
+to his own people, the shame that men who had fought so bravely
+should act so ill. I think his attitude toward war was this: "We will die
+for France, but calling the Germans names will not help us to win. It
+only takes breath."
+
+"Allons, messieurs!"
+
+As our car ran up a gentle hill we noticed two soldiers driving a load of
+manure. This seemed a pretty prosaic, even humiliating, business, in
+a poetic sense, for the brave poilus, veterans of Lorraine's great
+battle. But Father Joffre is a true Frenchman of his time. Why should
+not the soldiers help the farmers whose sons are away at the front
+and perhaps helping farmers back of some Other point of the line?
+
+Over the crest of the hill we came on long lines of soldiers bearing
+timbers and fascines for trench-building, which explained why some
+of the villages were empty. A fascine is something usually made of
+woven branches which will hold dirt in position. The woven wicker
+cases for shells which the German artillery uses and leaves behind
+when it has to quit the field in a hurry, make excellent fascines, and a
+number that I saw were of this ready-made kind. After carrying shell
+for killing Frenchmen they were to protect the lives of Frenchmen.
+Near by other soldiers were turning up a strip of fresh earth against
+the snow, which looked like a rip in the frosting of a chocolate cake.
+
+"How do you like this kind of war?" we asked. It is the kind that
+irrigationists and subway excavators make.
+
+"We've grown to be very fond of it," was the answer. "It is a cultivated
+taste, which becomes a passion with experience. After you have
+been shot at in the open you want all the earth you can get between
+you and the bullets."
+
+Now we alighted from the motor-car and went forward on foot. We
+passed some eight lines of trenches before we came to the one
+where we were to stop. A practised military eye had gone over all that
+ground; a practised military hand had laid out each trench. After the
+work was done the civilian's eye could grasp the principle. If one
+trench were taken, the men knew exactly how to fall back on the next,
+which commanded the ground they had left. The trenches were not
+continuous. There were open spaces left purposely. All that front was
+literally locked, and double and triple locked, with trenches. Break
+through one barred door and there is another and another
+confronting you. Considering the millions of burrowing and digging
+and watching soldiers, it occurred to one that if a marmite (saucepan)
+came along and buried our little party, our loss would not be as much
+noticed as if a piece of coping from a high building had fallen and
+extinguished us on Broadway, which would be a relatively novel way
+of dying. Being killed in war had long ceased to be a novelty on the
+continent of Europe.
+
+We seemed in a dead world, except for the leisurely, hoarse, muffled
+reports of a French gun in the woods on either side of the open space
+where we stood. Through our glasses we could see quite clearly the
+line of the German front trench, which was in the outskirts of a village
+on higher ground than the French. Not a human being was visible.
+Both sides were watching for any move of the other, meanwhile lying
+tight under cover. By day they were marooned. All supplies and all
+reliefs of men who are to take their turn in front go out by night.
+
+There were no men in the trench where we stood; those who would
+man it in case of danger were in the adjoining woods, where they had
+only to cut down saplings and make shelters to be as comfortable as
+in a winter resort camp in the Adirondacks. Any minute they might
+receive a call--which meant death for many. But they were used to
+that, and their card games went on none the less merrily.
+
+"No farther?" we asked our major.
+
+"No farther!" he said. "This is risk enough for you. It looks very
+peaceful, but the enemy could toss in some marmites if it pleased
+him." Perhaps he was exaggerating the risk for the sake of a realistic
+effect on the sightseers. No matter! In time one was to have risks
+enough in trenches. It was on such an occasion as this, on another
+part of the French line, that two correspondents slipped away from
+the officers conducting them, though their word of honour was given
+not to do so--which adds another reason for military suspicion of the
+Press. The officers rang up the nearest telephone which connected
+with the front trenches, the batteries, and regimental and brigade
+headquarters, to apprehend two men of such-and-such description.
+They were taken as easily as a one-eyed, one-eared man, with a
+wooden leg and red hair would be in trying to get out of police
+headquarters when the doormen had his Bertillon photograph and
+measurements to go by.
+
+That battery hidden from aerial observation in the thick forest kept up
+its slow firing at intervals. It was "bothering" one of the German
+trenches. Fiendish the consistent regularity with which it kept on, and
+so easy for the gunners. They had only to slip in a shell, swing a
+breech-lock home, and pull a lanyard. The German guns did not
+respond because they could not locate the French battery. They may
+have known that it was somewhere in the forest, but firing at two or
+three hundred acres of wood on the chance of reaching some guns
+heavily protected by earth and timbering was about like tossing a pea
+from the top of the Washington Monument on the chance of hitting a
+four-leafed clover on the lawn below.
+
+Our little group remained, not standing in the trench but back of it, in
+full relief for some time; for the German gunners refused to play for
+realism by sending us a marmite. Probably they had seen us through
+the telescope at the start and concluded we weren't worth a shot. In
+the first months of the war such a target would have received a burst
+of shells, for the fun of seeing us scatter, if nothing else. Then
+ammunition was plentiful and the sport of shooting had not lost its
+zest; but in these winter days orders were not to waste ammunition.
+
+The factories must manufacture a supply ahead for the summer
+campaign. There must be fifteen dollars' worth of target in sight, say,
+for the smallest shell costs that; and the shorter you are of shells the
+more valuable the target must be. Besides, firing a cannon had
+become as commonplace a function to both French and German
+gunners as getting up to put another stick of wood in the stove or
+going to open the door to take a letter from the postman.
+
+We had glimpses of other trenches; but this is not the place in this
+book to write of trenches. We shall see trenches till we are weary of
+them later. We are going direct to Gerb�viller which was--emphasis
+on the past tense--a typical little Lorraine town of fifteen hundred
+inhabitants. Look where you would now, as we drove along the road,
+and you saw churches without steeples, houses with roofs standing
+on sections of walls, houses smashed into bits.
+
+"I saw no such widespread destruction as this in Belgium!" I
+exclaimed.
+
+"There was no such fighting in Belgium," was the answer.
+
+Of course not, except in the south-western corner, where the armies
+still face each other.
+
+"Not all the damage was done by the Germans," the major explained.
+"Naturally, when they were pouring in death from the cover of a
+house, our guns let drive at that house," he went on. "The owners of
+the houses that were hit by our shells are rather proud--proud of our
+marksmanship, proud that we gave the unwelcome guest a hot pill to
+swallow."
+
+For ten days the Bavarians had Gerb�viller. They tore it to pieces
+before they got it, then burned the remains because they said the
+population sniped at them. All the orgy of Louvain was repeated here,
+unchronicled to our people at home. The church looks like a Swiss
+cheese from shell-holes. Its steeple was bound to be an observation
+post, reasoned the Germans; so they poured shells into it. But the
+brewery had a tall chimney which was an even better lookout, and the
+brewery is the one building unharmed in the town. The Bavarians
+knew that they would need that for their commissariat. For a Bavarian
+will not fight without his beer. The land was littered with barrels after
+they had gone. I saw some in trenches occupied by Bavarian
+reserves not far back of where their firing-line had been.
+
+"However, the fact that the brewery is intact and the church in ruins
+does not prove that a brewery is better than a church. It only proves
+which is the Lord's side in this war," said Sister Julie. But I get ahead
+of my story.
+
+In the middle of the main street were half a dozen smoke-blackened
+houses which remained standing, an oasis in the sea of destruction,
+with doors and windows intact facing gaps where doors and windows
+had been. We entered with a sense of awe of the chance which had
+spared these buildings.
+
+"Sister Julie!" the major called.
+
+A short, sturdy nun of about sixty years answered cheerily and
+appeared in the dark hall. She led us into the sitting-room, where she
+spryly placed chairs for our little party. She was smiling; her eyes
+were sparkling with a hospitable and kindly interest in us, while I felt,
+on my part, that thrill of curiosity that one always has when he meets
+some celebrated person for the first time--curiosity no less keen than
+if I were to meet Barbara Frietchie.
+
+Through all that battle of ten days, with the cannon never silent day or
+night, with shells screaming overhead and crashing into houses;
+through ten days of thunder and lightning and earthquake, she and
+her four sister associates remained in Gerb�viller. When the town
+was fired they moved from one building to another. They nursed both
+wounded French and Germans; also wounded townspeople who
+could not flee with the others.
+
+"You were not frightened? You did not think of going away?" she was
+asked.
+
+"Frightened?" she answered. "I had not time to think of that. Go
+away? How could I when the Lord's work had come to me?"
+
+President Poincar� went in person to give her the Legion of Honour,
+the first given to a woman in this war; so rarely given to a woman, and
+here bestowed with the love of a nation. Sister Marie was in the
+kitchen at the time, cooking the meal for the sick for whom the sisters
+are still caring. So Sister Julie took the President of France into the
+kitchen to meet Sister Marie, quite as she would take you or me. A
+human being is simply a human being to Sister Julie, to be treated
+courteously; and great men may not cause a meal for the sick to
+burn. After the complexity of French politics, President Poincar� was
+anything but unfavourably impressed by the incident.
+
+"He was such a little man, I could not believe at first that he could be
+President," she said. "I thought that the President of France would be
+a big man. But he was very agreeable and, I am sure, very wise.
+Then there were other men with him, a Monsieur de-de-Deschanel,
+who was president of something or other in Paris, and Monsieur du-
+du--yes, that was it, Du Bag. He also is president of something in
+Paris. They were very agreeable, too."
+
+"And your Legion of Honour?"
+
+"Oh, my medal that M. le Pr�sident gave me! I keep that in a drawer.
+I do not wear it every day when I am in my working-clothes."
+
+"Have you ever been to Paris?"
+
+"No, monsieur."
+
+"They will make a great ado over you when you go."
+
+"I must stay in Gerb�viller. If I stayed during the fighting and when the
+Germans were here, why should I leave now? Gerb�viller is my
+home. There is much to do here and there will be more to do when
+the people who were driven away return."
+
+These nuns saw their townspeople stood up against a wall and shot;
+they saw their townspeople killed by shells. The cornucopia of war's
+horrors was emptied at their door. And women of a provincial town,
+who had led peaceful, cloistered lives, they did not blench or falter in
+the presence of ghastliness which only men are supposed to have
+the stoicism to witness.
+
+What feature of the nightmare had held most vividly in Sister Julie's
+mind? It is hard to say; but the one which she dwelt on was about the
+boy and the cow. The invaders, when they came in, ordered that no
+inhabitant leave his house, on pain of death. A boy of ten took his
+cow to pasture in the morning as usual. He did not see anything
+wrong in that. The cow ought to go to pasture. And he was shot, for
+he broke a military regulation. He might have been a spy using the
+cow as a blind. War does not bother to discriminate. It kills.
+
+Sister Julie can enjoy a joke, particularly on the Germans, and her
+cheerful smile and genuine laugh are a lesson to all people who draw
+long faces in time of trouble and weep over spilt milk. A buoyant
+temperament and unshaken faith carried her through her ordeal.
+Though her hair is white, youth's optimism and confidence in the
+future and the joy of victory for France overshadowed the present.
+The town and church would be rebuilt; children would play in the
+streets again; there was a lot of the Lord's work to do yet.
+
+In every word and thought she is French--French in her liveliness of
+spirit and quickness of comprehension; wholly French there on the
+borderland of Germany. If we only went to the outskirts of the town,
+she reminded us, we could see how the soldiers of her beloved
+France fought and why she was happy to have remained in
+Gerb�viller to welcome them back.
+
+In sight of that intact brewery and that wreck of a church is a gentle
+slope of open field, cut by a road. Along the crest were many mounds
+as thick as the graves of a cemetery, and by the side of the road was
+a temporary monument above a big mound, surrounded by a sanded
+walk and a fence. The dead had been thickest at this point, and here
+they had been laid in a vast grave. The surviving comrades had
+made that monument; and, in memory of what the dead had fought
+for, the living said that they were not yet ready to quit fighting.
+
+Standing on this crest, you were a thousand yards away from the
+edge of a woods. German aeroplanes had seen the French massing
+for a charge under the cover of that crest; but French aeroplanes
+could not see what was in the woods. Rifles and machine-guns
+poured a spray of lead across the crest when the French appeared.
+But the French, who were righting for Sister Julie's town, would not
+stop their rush at first. They kept on, as Pickett's men did when the
+Federal guns riddled their ranks with grapeshot. This accounts for
+many of the mounds being well beyond the crest. The Germans
+made a mistake in firing too soon. They would have made a heavier
+killing if they had allowed the charge to go farther. After the French fell
+back, for two days and nights their wounded lay out on that field
+without water or food, between the two forces, and if their comrades
+approached to give succour the machine-guns blazed more death,
+because the Germans did not want to let the French dig a trench on
+the crest. After two days the French forced the Germans out of the
+woods by hitting them from another point.
+
+We went over the field of another charge half a mile away. There a
+French regiment put a stream with a single bridge at their back--which
+requires some nerve--and charged a German trench on rising
+ground. They took it. Then they tried to take the woods beyond.
+Before they were checked twenty-two officers out of a total of thirty
+fell. But they did not give up the ground they had won. They burrowed
+into the earth in a trench of their own, and when help came they put
+the Germans out of the woods.
+
+The men of this regiment were not first line, but the older fellows--men
+of the type we stopped to chat with in the village--hastening to the
+front when the war began. Their officers were mostly reserves, too,
+who left civil occupations at the call to arms. One of the eight
+survivors of the thirty was with us, a stocky little man, hardly looking
+the hero or the soldier. I expressed my admiration, and he answered
+quietly: "It was for France!" How often I have heard that as a reason
+for courage or sacrifice! The enemies of France have learned to
+respect it, though they had a poor opinion of the French army before
+the war began.
+
+"That railroad bridge yonder the Germans left intact when they
+occupied it because they were certain that they would need it to
+supply their troops when they took the Gap of Mirecourt and
+surrounded the French army," I was told. "However, they had to go in
+such a hurry that they failed to mine it. They must have fired five
+hundred shells afterwards to destroy it, in vain."
+
+It was dusk when we entered the city of Lun�ville for the second time.
+Whole blocks lay in ruins; others only showed where shells had
+crashed into walls. It is hard to estimate just how much damage shell-
+fire has done to a town, for you see the effects only where they have
+struck on the street sides and not when they strike in the centre of the
+block. But Lun�ville has certainly suffered as much as Louvain, only
+we did not hear about it. Grim, sad Louvain, with its German sentries
+among the ruins! Happy, triumphant Lun�ville, with its poilus instead
+of German sentries!
+
+"We are going to meet the mayor," said the major.
+
+First we went to his office. But that was a mistake. We were invited to
+his house, which was a fine, old, eighteenth-century building. If you
+could transport it to New York some arms-and-ammunition millionaire
+would give half a million dollars for it. The hallway was smoke-
+blackened and a burnt spot showed where the enemy had tried to set
+it on fire before evacuating the town. Ascending a handsome old
+staircase, we were in rooms with gilded mirrors and carved mantels,
+where we were introduced to His Honour, a lively man of some forty
+years.
+
+"I have been in Am�rique two months. So much English do I speak.
+No more!" said the mayor merrily, and introduced us in turn to his
+wife, who spoke not even "so much" English, but French as fast and
+as piquantly as none but a Frenchwoman can. Her only son, who was
+seventeen, was going up with the 1916 class of recruits very soon.
+He was a sturdy youngster; a type of Young France who will make
+the France of the future.
+
+"You hate to see him go?" I asked.
+
+"It is for France!" she answered.
+
+We had cakes and tea and a merrier--at least, a more heartfelt--party
+than at any mayor's reception in time of peace. Everybody talked. For
+the French do know how to talk, when they have not turned grim,
+silent soldiers. I heard story on story of the German occupation; and
+how the mayor was put in jail and held as a hostage; and what a
+German general said to him when he was brought in as a prisoner to
+be interrogated in his own house, which the general occupied as
+headquarters.
+
+Among the guests was the wife of a French general in her Red Cross
+cap. She might see her husband once a week by meeting him on the
+road between the city and the front. He could not afford to be any
+farther from his post, lest the Germans spring a surprise. The extent
+of the information which he gave her was that all went well for France.
+Father Joffre plays no favourites in his discipline.
+
+Happy, happy Lorraine in the midst of its ruins! Happy because her
+adored tricolour floats over those ruins.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+A Road Of War I Know
+
+
+
+Other armies go to war across the land, but the British go across the
+sea. They take the Channel ferry in order to reach the front. Theirs is
+the home road of war to me; the road of my affections, where men
+speak my mother tongue. It begins on the platform at Victoria Station,
+with the khaki of officers and men, returning from leave, relieved by
+the warmer colours of women who have come to say good-bye to
+those they love. In five hours from the time of starting one may be
+across that ribbon of salt water, which means much in isolation and
+little in distance, and in the trenches.
+
+That veteran regular--let us separate him from the crowd--is a type I
+have often seen, a type that has become as familiar as one's
+neighbours in one's own town. We will call him the tenth man. That is,
+of every ten men who went to the front a year ago in his battalion,
+nine are gone. All of the hardships and all of the terrors of war he has
+witnessed: men dropped neatly by a bullet; men mangled by shells.
+
+His khaki is spotless, thanks to his wife, who has dressed in her best
+for the occasion. Terrible as war itself, but new, that hat of hers, which
+probably represented a good deal of looking into windows and
+pricing; and her gown of the cheapest material, drooping from her
+round shoulders, is the product of the poor dress-making skill of
+hands which show only too well who does all the housework at home.
+The children, a boy of four and a girl of seven, are in their best, too,
+with faces scrubbed till they shine.
+
+You will see like scenes in stations at home when the father has
+found work in a distant city and is going on ahead to get established
+before the family follow him. Such incidents are common in civil life;
+they became common at Victoria Station. What is common has no
+significance, editors say.
+
+When the time came to go through the gate, the veteran picked the
+boy up in his arms and pressed him very close and the little girl
+looked on wonderingly, while the mother was not going to make it any
+harder for the father by tears. "Good-bye, Tom!" she said. So his
+name was Tom, this tenth man.
+
+I spoke with him. His battalion was full with recruits. It had been kept
+full. But, considering the law of chance, what about the surviving one
+out of an original ten?
+
+"Yes, I've had my luck with me," he said. "Probably my turn will come.
+Maybe I'll never see the wife and kids again."
+
+The morning roar of London had begun. That station was a small
+spot in the city. There were not enough officers and men taking the
+train to make up a day's casualty list; for ours was only a small party
+returning from leave. The transports, unseen, carried the multitudes.
+Wherever one had gone in England he had seen soldiers and
+wherever he went in France he was to see still more soldiers.
+England had become an armed camp; and England plodded on,
+"muddled" on, preparing, ever preparing, to forge in time of war the
+thunderbolt for war which was undreamed of in time of peace when
+other nations were forging their thunderbolts.
+
+Still the recruiting posters called for more soldiers and the casualty
+lists appeared day after day with the regularity of want
+advertisements. Imagine eight million men under arms in the United
+States and you have the equivalent to what England did by the
+volunteer system. The more there were the more pessimistic became
+the British Press. Pessimism brought in recruits. Bad news made
+England take another deep breath of energizing determination. It was
+the last battle which was decisive. She had always won that. She
+would win it again.
+
+They talk of war aboard the Pullman, after officers have waved their
+hands out of the windows to their wives, quite as if they were going to
+Scotland for a weekend instead of back to the firing-line. British
+phlegm this is called. No, British habit, I should say, the race-bred,
+individualistic quality of never parading emotions in public; the instinct
+of keeping things which are one's own to one's self. Personally, I like
+this way. In one form or another, as the hedges fly by the train
+windows, the subject is always war. War creeps into golf, or shooting,
+or investments, or politics. Only one suggestion quite frees the mind
+from the omnipresent theme: Will the Channel be smooth? The
+Germans have nothing to do with that. It is purely a matter of weather.
+Bad sailors are more worried about the crossing than about the shell-
+fire they are going to face.
+
+With bad sailors or good sailors, the significant thing which had
+become a commonplace was that the Channel was a safely-guarded
+British sea lane. In all my crossings I was never delayed. For England
+had one thunderbolt ready forged when the war began. The only
+submarines, or destroyers, or dirigibles that one saw were hers.
+Antennae these of the great fleet waiting with the threat of stored
+lightning ready to be flashed from gun-mouths; a threat as efficacious
+as action, in nowise mysterious or subtle, but definite as steel and
+powder, speaking the will of a people in their chosen field of power,
+felt over all the seas of the world, coast of Maine and the Carolinas no
+less than Labrador. Thousands of transports had come and gone,
+carrying hundreds of thousands of soldiers and food for men and
+guns to India; and on the high road to India, to Australia, to San
+Francisco, shipping went its way undisturbed by anything that dives
+or flies.
+
+The same white hospital ships lying in that French harbour; the same
+line of grey, dusty-looking ambulances parked on the quay!
+Everybody in the one-time sleepy, week-end tourist resort seems to
+be in uniform; to have something to do with war. All surroundings
+become those of war long before you reach the front. That knot of
+civilians, waiting their turn for another examination of the same kind
+as that on the other side of the Channel, have shown good reasons
+for going to Paris to the French Consul in London, or they might not
+proceed even this far on the road of war. They seem outcasts--a
+humble lot in the variegated costumes of the civil world--outcasts
+from the disciplined world in its pattern garb of khaki. Their excuse for
+not being in the game is that they are too old or that they are women.
+For now the war has sucked into its vortex the great majority of those
+who are strong enough to fight or work.
+
+A traveller might be a spy; hence, all this red tape for the many to
+catch the one. Even red tape seems now to have become normal.
+War is normal. It would seem strange to cross the Channel in time of
+peace; the harbour would not look like itself with civilians not having
+to show passports, and without the white hospital ships, and the
+white-bearded landing-officer at the foot of the gangway, and the
+board held up with lists of names of officers who have telegrams
+waiting for them.
+
+For the civilians a yellow card of disembarkation and for the military a
+white card. The officers and soldiers walk off at once and the queue
+of civilians waits. One civilian with a white card, who belongs to no
+regiment, who is not even a chaplain or a nurse, puzzles the landing-
+officer for a moment. But there is something to go with it--a
+correspondent's licence and a letter from a general who looks after
+such things. They show that you "belong"; and if you don't belong on
+the road of war you will not get far. As well try to walk past the
+doorman and take a seat in the United States Senate chamber during
+a session.
+
+Most precious that magical piece of paper. I happen to be the only
+American with one, unless he is in the fighting line--which is one sure
+way to get to the front. The price of all the opera boxes at the
+Metropolitan will not buy it; and it is the passport to the welcoming
+smile from an army chauffeur, whom I almost regard as my own. But
+its real value appears at the outskirts of the city. There the dead line
+is drawn; there the sheep are finally separated from the goats by a
+French sentry guarding the winding passageway between some
+carts, which have been in the same place in the road for months.
+
+The car spins over the broad, hard French road, in a land where for
+many miles you see no signs of war, until it turns into the grounds of a
+small ch�teau opposite a village church. The proprietor of a drygoods
+store in a neighbouring city spends his summers here; but this
+summer he is in town, because the Press wanted a place to live and
+he was good enough to rent us his country place. So this is home,
+where the five British and one American correspondents live and
+mess. The expense of our cars costs us treble all the rest of our
+expenses. They take us where we want to go. We go where we
+please, but we may not write what we please. We see something like
+a thousand times more than we can tell. The conditions are such as
+to make a news reporter throw up his hands and faint. But if he had
+his unbridled way, one day he might feel the responsibility for the loss
+of hundreds of British soldiers' lives.
+
+"It may be all right for war correspondents, but it is a devil of a poor
+place for a newspaper man," as one editor said. Yet it is the only
+place where you can really know anything about the war.
+
+We become part of the machinery of the great organization that
+encloses us in its regular processes. No one in his heart envies the
+press officer who holds the blue pencil over us. He has to "take it both
+going and coming." He labours on our behalf and sometimes we
+labour with him. The staff are willing enough to let us watch the army
+at work, but they do not care whether or not we write about their war;
+he wants us both to see it and to write about it. He tells us some big
+piece of news, and then says: "That is for yourselves; you may not
+write it."
+
+People do not want to read about the correspondents, of course.
+They want to read what the correspondents have to tell about the
+war; but the conditions of our work are interesting because we are the
+link between the army and the reading public. All that it learns from
+actual observation of what the army is doing comes through us.
+
+We may not give the names of regiments and brigades until weeks
+after a fight, because that will tell the enemy what troops are
+engaged; we may not give the names of officers, for that is glorifying
+one when possibly another did his duty equally well. It is the
+anonymity of the struggle that makes it all seem distant and unreal--till
+the telegram comes from the War Office to say that the one among
+the millions who is dear to you is dead or wounded. Otherwise, it is a
+torment of unidentified elements behind a curtain, which is parted for
+an announcement of gain or loss, or to give out a list of the fallen.
+
+The world wants to read that Peter Smith led the King's Own
+Particular Fusiliers in a charge. It may not know Peter Smith, but his
+name and that of his regiment make the information seem definite.
+The statement that a well-known millionaire yesterday gave a million
+dollars to charity, or that a man in a checked suit swam from the
+Battery to Coney Island, is not convincing; nor is the fact that one
+private unnamed held back the Germans with bombs in the traverse
+of a trench for hours until help came. We at the front, however, do
+know the names; we meet the officers and men. Ours is the intimacy
+which we may not interpret except in general terms.
+
+Every article, every dispatch, every letter, passes through the
+censor's hand. But we are never told what to write. The liberty of the
+Press is too old an institution in England for that. Always we may
+learn why an excision is made. The purpose is to keep information
+from the enemy. It is not like fighting Boers or Filipinos, this war of
+walls of men who can turn the smallest bit of information to
+advantage.
+
+Intelligence officers speak of their work as piecing together the parts
+of a jig-saw puzzle. What seems a most innocent fact by itself may
+furnish the bit which gives the figure in the picture its face. It does not
+follow because you are an officer that you know what may and what
+may not be of service to the enemy.
+
+A former British officer who had become a well-known military critic, in
+an account of a visit to the front mentioned having seen a battle from
+a certain church tower. Publication of the account was followed by a
+tornado of shell-fire that killed and wounded many British soldiers.
+Only a staff specialist, trained in intelligence work and in constant
+touch with the intelligence department, can be a safe censor. At the
+same time, he is the best friend of the correspondent. He knows what
+is harmless and what may not be allowed. He wants the Press to
+have as much as possible. For the more the public knows about its
+soldiers, the better the morale of the people, which reflects itself in the
+morale of the army.
+
+The published casualty lists giving the names of officers and men and
+their battalions is a means of causing casualties. From a prisoner
+taken the enemy learns what battalions were present at a given fight;
+he adds up the numbers reported killed and wounded and ascertains
+what the fight cost the enemy and, in turn, the effect of the fire from
+his side. But the British public demanded to see the casualty lists and
+the British Press were allowed to gratify the desire. They appeared in
+the newspapers, of course, days after the nearest relative of the dead
+or wounded man had received official notification from the War Office.
+
+Officers' letters from the front, so freely published earlier in the
+war, amazed experienced correspondents by their unconscious
+indiscretions. The line officer who had been in a fight told all that he
+saw. Twenty officers doing the same along a stretch of front and the
+jig-saw experts, plus what information they had from spies, were in
+clover. Editors said: "But these men are officers. They ought to know
+when they are imparting military secrets."
+
+Alas, they do not know! It is not to be expected that they should. Their
+business is to fight; the business of other experts is to safeguard
+information. For a long time the British army kept correspondents
+from the front on the principle that the business of a correspondent
+must be to tell what ought not to be told. Yet they were to learn that
+the accredited correspondent, an expert at his profession, working in
+harmony with the experts of the staff, let no military secrets pass.
+
+At our mess we get the Berlin dailies promptly. Soon after the
+Germans are reading the war correspondence from their own front
+we are reading it, and laughing at jokes in their comic papers and at
+cartoons which exhibit John Bull as a stricken old ogre and Britannia
+who Rules the Waves with the corners of her mouth drawn down to
+the bottom of her chin, as she sees the havoc that von Tirpitz is
+making with submarines which do not stop us from receiving our
+German jokes regularly across the Channel.
+
+Doubtless the German messes get their Punch and the London
+illustrated weeklies regularly. In the time that it took the English daily
+with the account of the action seen from the church tower to reach
+Berlin and the news to be wired to the front, the German guns made
+use of the information. Neutral little Holland is the telltale of both
+sides; the ally and the enemy of all intelligence corps. Scores of
+experts in jig-saw puzzles on both sides seize every scrap of
+information and piece them together. Each time that one gets a bit
+from a newspaper he is for a sharper Press censorship on his side
+and a more liberal one on the other.
+
+We six correspondents have our insignia, as must everyone who is
+free to move along the lines. By a glance you may tell everybody's
+branch and rank in that complicated and disciplined world, where no
+man acts for himself, but always on someone else's orders.
+
+"Don't you know who they are? They are the correspondents," I heard
+a soldier say. "D. Chron., that's the Daily Chronicle; M. Post, that's the
+Morning Post; D. Mail, that's the Daily Mail. There's one with U.S.A.
+What paper is that?"
+
+"It ain't a paper," said another. "It's the States--he's a Yank!"
+
+The War Office put it on the American cousin's arm, and wherever it
+goes it seems welcome. It may puzzle the gunners when the
+American says, "That was a peach of a shot, right across the pan!" or
+the infantry when he says, "It cuts no ice!" and there is no ice visible
+in Flanders; he speaks about typhoid to the medical corps which calls
+it enteric; and "fly-swatting" is a new word to the sanitarians, who are
+none the less busily engaged in that noble art. Lessons for the British
+in the "American language" while you wait! In return, the American is
+learning what a "stout-hearted thruster" and other phrases mean in
+the Simon-pure English.
+
+The correspondents are the spoiled spectators of the army's work;
+the itinerants of the road of war. Nobody sees so much as we,
+because we have nothing to do but to see. An officer looking at the
+towers of Ypres Cathedral a mile away from the trench where he was,
+said: "No, I've never been in Ypres. Our regiment has not been
+stationed in that part of the line."
+
+We have sampled all the trenches; we have studied the ruins of
+Ypres with an archaeologist's eye; we know the names of the
+estaminets of the villages, from "The Good Farmer" to "The
+Harvester's Rest" and "The Good Cousin," not to mention "The
+Omnibus Stop" on the Cassel Hill. Madame who keeps the hotel in
+the G.H.Q. town knows me so well that we wave hands to each other
+as I pass the door; and the clerks in a certain shop have learned that
+the American likes his fruit raw, instead of stewed in the English
+fashion, and plenty of it, especially if it comes from the South out of
+season, as it does from Florida or California to pampered human
+beings at home, who, if they could see as much of this war as I have
+seen, would appreciate what a fortunate lot they are to have not a
+ribbon of saltwater but a broad sea full of it, and the British navy, too,
+between them and the thing on the other side of the zone of death.
+
+G.H.Q. means General Headquarters and B.E.F., which shows the
+way for your letters from England, means British Expeditionary Force.
+The high leading, the brains of the army, are theoretically at G.H.Q.
+That word theoretically is used advisedly in view of opinion at other
+points. An officer sent from G.H.Q. to command a brigade had not
+been long out before he began to talk about those confounded one-
+thing-and-another fellows at G.H.Q. When he was at G.H.Q. he used
+to talk about those confounded one-thing-and-another fellows who
+commanded corps, divisions, and brigades at the front. The
+philosophers of G.H.Q. smiled and the philosophers of the army
+smiled--it was the old story of the staff and the line; of the main office
+and the branches. But the line did the most smiling to see the new
+brigadier getting a taste of his own medicine.
+
+G.H.Q. directs the whole; here every department of all that vast
+concern which supplies the hundreds of thousands of men and
+prepares for the other hundreds of thousands is focussed. The
+symbol of its authority is a red band round the cap, which means that
+you are a staff officer. No war at G.H.Q., only the driving force of war.
+It seems as far removed from the front as the New York office of a
+string of manufacturing plants.
+
+If one follows a red-banded cap into a door he sees other officers and
+clerks and typewriters, and a sign which says that a department chief
+has his desk in the drawing-room of a private house--where he has
+had it for months. Go to one mess and you will hear talk about
+garbage pails and how to kill flies; to another, about hospitals and
+clearing stations for the wounded; to another, about barbed wire,
+sandbags, spades, timber, and galvanized iron--the engineers; to
+another, about guns, shells, rifles, bullets, mortars, bombs, bayonets,
+and high explosives--the ordnance; to another, about jam, bread,
+bacon, uniforms, iron rations, socks, underclothes, tinned goods,
+fresh beef, and motor-trucks--the Army Service Corps; to another,
+about attacks, counter-attacks, and salients, and about what the
+others are doing and will have to do--the operations.
+
+The Chief of Staff drives the eight-horse team. He works sixteen
+hours a day. So do most of the others. This is how you prove to the
+line that you have a right to be at G.H.Q. When you get to know
+G.H.Q. it seems like any other business institution. Many are there
+who do not want to be there; but they have been found out. They are
+specialists, who know how to do one thing particularly well and are
+kept doing it. No use of growling that you would like a "fighting job."
+
+G.H.Q. is the main station on the road of war, which hears the sound
+of the guns faintly. Beyond is the region of all the activities that it
+commands, up to the trenches, where all roads end and all efforts
+consummate. One has seen dreary flat lands of mud and leafless
+trees become fair with the spring, the growing harvest reaped, and
+the leaves begin to fall. Always the factory of war was in the same
+place; the soldiers billeted in the same towns; the puffs of shrapnel
+smoke over the same belt of landscape; the ruins of the same
+villages being pounded by high explosives. Always the sound of
+guns; always the wastage of life, as passing ambulances, the curtains
+drawn, speed by, their part swiftly and covertly done. The enormity of
+the thing holds the imagination; its sure and orderly processes of an
+organized civilization working at destruction win the admiration. There
+is a thrill in the courage and sacrifice and the drilled readiness of
+response to orders.
+
+The spectator is under varying spells. To-day he seems in a fantastic
+world, whose horror makes it impossible of realization. To-morrow, as
+his car takes him along a pleasant by-road among wheat-fields where
+peasants are working and no soldier is in sight, it is a world of peace
+and one thinks that he has mistaken the roar of a train for the distant
+roar of gun-fire. Again, it seems the most real of worlds, an exclusive
+man's world, where nothing counts but organized material force, and
+all those cleanly, well-behaved men in khaki are a part of the
+permanent population.
+
+One sees the war as a colossal dynamo, where force is perpetual like
+the energy of the sun. The war is going on for ever. The reaper cuts
+the harvest, but another harvest comes. War feeds on itself, renews
+itself. Live men replace the dead. There seems no end to supplies of
+men. The pounding of the guns, like the roar of Niagara, becomes
+eternal. Nothing can stop it.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+Trenches In Winter
+
+
+
+The difference between trench warfare in winter and in summer is
+that between sleeping on the lawn in March and in July. It was in the
+mud and winds of March that I first saw the British front. The winds
+were much like the seasonal winds at home; but the Flanders mud is
+like no other mud, in the judgment of the British soldier. It is mixed
+with glue. When I returned to the front in June for a longer stay, the
+mud had become clouds of dust that trailed behind the motor-car.
+
+In March my eagerness to see a trench was that of one from the
+Western prairies to get his first glimpse of the ocean. Once I might go
+into a trench as often as I pleased I became "fed up" with trenches,
+as the British say. They did not mean much more than an alley or a
+railway cutting. One came to think of the average peaceful trench as
+a ditch where some men were eating marmalade and bully beef and
+looking across a field at some more men who were eating sausage
+and "K.K." bread, each party taking care that the other did not see
+him.
+
+Writers have served us trenches in every possible literary style that
+censorship will permit. Whoever "tours" them is convinced that none
+of the descriptions published heretofore has been adequate and
+writes one of his own which will be final. All agree that it is not like
+what they thought it was. But, despite all the descriptions, the public
+still fails to visualize a trench. You do not see a trench with your eyes
+so much as with your mind and imagination. That long line where all
+the powers of destruction within man's command are in deadlock has
+become a symbol for something which cannot be expressed by
+words. No one has yet really described a shell-burst, or a flash of
+lightning, or Niagara Falls; and no one will ever describe a trench. He
+cannot put anyone else there. He can only be there himself.
+
+The first time that I looked over a British parapet was in the edge of a
+wood. Board walks ran across the spongy earth here and there; the
+doors of little shanties with earth roofs opened on to those streets,
+which were called Piccadilly and the Strand. I was reminded of a
+pleasant prospector's camp in Alaska. Only, everybody was in
+uniform and occasionally something whished through the branches of
+the trees. One looked up to see what it was and where it was going,
+this stray bullet, without being any wiser.
+
+We passed along one of the walks until we came to a wall of
+sandbags--simply white bags about three-quarters of the size of an
+ordinary pillowslip, filled with earth and laid one on top of another like
+bags of grain. You stood beside a man who had a rifle laid across the
+top of the pile. Of course, you did not wear a white hat or wave a
+handkerchief. One does not do that when he plays hide-and-seek.
+
+Or, if you preferred, you might look into a chip of glass, with your
+head wholly screened by the wall of sandbags, which got a reflection
+from another chip of glass above the parapet. This is the trench
+periscope; the principle of all of them is the same. They have no more
+variety than the fashion in knives, forks and spoons on the dinner
+table.
+
+One hundred and fifty yards away across a dead field was another
+wall of sandbags. The distance is important. It is always stated in all
+descriptions. One hundred and fifty yards is not much. Only when you
+get within forty or fifty yards have you something to brag about. Yet
+three hundred yards may be more dangerous than fifteen, if an
+artillery "hate" is on.
+
+Look for an hour, and all you see is the wall of sandbags. Not even a
+rabbit runs across that dead space. The situation gets its power of
+suggestion from the fact that there are Germans behind the other
+wall--real, live Germans. They are trying to kill the British on our side
+and we are trying to kill them; and they are as coyly unaccommodating
+about putting up their heads as we are. The emotion of the situation
+is in the fact that a sharpshooter might send a shot at your cap; he
+might smash a periscope; a shell might come. A rifle cracks--that is
+all. Nearly everyone has heard the sound, which is no different at the
+front than elsewhere. And the sound is the only information you get.
+It is not so interesting as shooting at a deer, for you can tell whether
+you hit him or not. The man who fires from a trench is not even certain
+whether he saw a German or not. He shot at some shadow or object
+along the crest which might have been a German head.
+
+Thus, one must take the word of those present that there is any more
+life behind than in front of the sandbags. However, if you are sceptical
+you may have conviction by starting to crawl over the top of the
+British parapet. After dark the soldiers will slip over and bring back
+your body. It is this something you do not see, this something
+visualized by the imagination, which convinces you that you ought to
+be considerate enough of posterity to write the real description of a
+trench. Look for an hour at that wall of sandbags and your
+imagination sees more and more, while your eye sees only
+sandbags. What does this war mean to you? There it is: only you can
+describe what this war means to you.
+
+Many a soldier who has spent months in trenches has not seen a
+German. I boast that I have seen real Germans through my glasses.
+They were walking along a road back of their trenches. It was most
+fascinating. All the Germans I had ever seen in Germany were not
+half so interesting. I strained my eyes watching those wonderful
+beings as I might strain them at the first visiting party from Mars to
+earth. There must have been at least ten out of the Kaiser's millions.
+
+In summer that wood had become a sylvan bower, or a pastoral
+paradise, or a leafy nook, as you please. The sun played through the
+branches in a patchwork; flowers bloomed on the dirt roofs of the
+shanties, and a swallow had a nest--famous swallow!--on one of the
+parapets. True, it was not on the front parapet; it was on the reserve.
+The swallow knew what he was about. He was taking a reasonable
+amount of risk and playing reasonably secure to get a front seat,
+according to the ethics of the war correspondent. The two walls of
+sandbags were in the same place that they had been six months
+previously. A little patching had been done after some shells had hit
+the mark, though not many had come.
+
+For this was a quiet corner. Neither side was interested in stirring up
+the hornets' nest. If a member of Parliament wished to see what
+trench life was like he was brought here, because it was one of the
+safest places for a few minutes' look at the sandbags which Mr.
+Atkins stared at week in and week out. Some Conservatives,
+however, in the case of Radical members, would have chosen a
+different kind of trench to show; for example, that one which was
+suggested to me by the staff officer with the twinkle in his eye on my
+best day at the front.
+
+In want of an army pass to the front in order to write your own
+description, then, put up a wall of sandbags in a vacant lot and
+another one hundred and fifty yards away and fire a rifle occasionally
+from your wall at the head of a man on the opposite side, who will
+shoot at yours--and there you are. If you prefer the realistic to the
+romantic school and wish to appreciate the nature of trench life in
+winter, find a piece of wet, flat country, dig a ditch seven or eight feet
+deep, stand in icy water looking across at another ditch, and sleep in
+a cellar that you have dug in the wall, and you are near
+understanding what Mr. Atkins has been doing for his country. The
+ditch should be cut zigzag in and out, like the lines dividing the
+squares of a checker-board; that makes more work and localizes the
+burst of shells.
+
+Of course, the moist walls will be continually falling in and require
+mending in a drenching, freezing rain of the kind that the Lord visits
+on all who wage war underground in Flanders. Incidentally, you must
+look after the pumps, lest the water rise to your neck. For all the while
+you are fighting Flanders mud as well as the Germans.
+
+To carry realism to the limit of the Grand Guignol school, then,
+arrange some bags of bullets with dynamite charges on a wire, which
+will do for shrapnel; plant some dynamite in the parapet, which will do
+for high explosive shells that burst on contact; sink heavier charges of
+dynamite under your feet, which will do for mines, and set them off,
+while you engage someone to toss grenades and bombs at you.
+
+Though scores of officers' letters had given their account of trench life
+with the vividness of personal experience, I must mention my first
+trench in Flanders in winter when, with other correspondents, I saw
+the real thing under the guidance of the commanding officer of that
+particular section, a slight, wiry man who wore the ribbon of the
+Victoria Cross won in another war for helping to "save the guns." He
+made seeing trenches in the mud seem a pleasure trip. He was the
+kind who would walk up to his ball as if he knew how to play golf,
+send out a clean, fair, long drive, and then use his iron as if he knew
+how to use an iron, without talking about his game on the way around
+or when he returned to the club-house. Men could go into danger
+behind him without realizing that they were in danger; they could
+share hardship without realizing that there were any hardships. Such
+as he put faith and backbone into a soldier by their very manner; and
+if their professional training equal their talents, when war comes they
+win victories.
+
+We had rubber boots, electric torches, and wore British warms, those
+short, thick coats which collect a modicum of mud for you to carry
+besides what you are carrying on your boots. We walked along a
+hard road in the dark toward an aurora borealis of German flares,
+which popped into the sky like Roman candles and burst in circles of
+light. They seemed to be saying: "Come on! Try to crawl up on us
+and play us a trick and our eyes will find you and our marksmen will
+stop you. Come on! We make the night into day, and watching never
+ceases from our parapet."
+
+Occasional rifle-shots and a machine-gun's ter-rut were audible from
+the direction of the jumping red glare, which stretched right and left as
+far as the eye could see. We broke off the road into a morass of mud,
+as one might cross fields when he had lost his way, and plunged on
+till the commanding officer said, "We go in here!" and we descended
+into a black chasm in the earth. The wonder was that any ditch could
+be cut in soil which the rains had turned into syrup. Mud oozed from
+the sandbags, through the wire netting, and between the wooden
+supports which held the walls in place. It was just as bad over in the
+German trenches. General Mud laid siege to both armies. The field of
+battle where he gathered his gay knights was a slough. His tug of war
+was strife against landslides, rheumatism, pneumonia, and frozen
+feet.
+
+The soldier tries to kill his adversary; he tries to prevent his adversary
+from killing him. He is as busy in safeguarding as in taking life. While
+he breathes, thinks, fights mud, he blesses as well as curses mud.
+Mother Earth is still unconquerable. In her bosom man still finds
+security; such security that "dug in" he can defy at a hundred yards'
+distance rifles that carry death three thousand yards. She it is that
+has made the deadlock in the trenches and plastered their occupants
+with her miry hands.
+
+The C.O. lifted a curtain of bagging as you might lift a hanging over
+an alcove bookcase, and a young officer, rising from his blankets in
+his house in the trench wall to a stooping posture, said that all was
+quiet. His uniform seemed fleckless. Was it possible that he wore
+some kind of cloth which shed mud spatters? He was another of the
+type of Captain Q------, my host at Neuve Chapelle; a type formed on
+the type of seniors such as his C.O. Unanalysable this quality, but
+there is something distinguished about it and delightfully appealing. A
+man who can be the same in a trench in Flanders in mid-winter as in
+a drawing-room has my admiration. They never lose their manner,
+these English officers. They carry it into the charge and back in the
+ambulance with them to England, where they wish nothing so much
+as that their friends will "cut out the hero stuff," as our own officers
+say.
+
+In other dank cellars soldiers who were off guard were lying or sitting.
+The radiance of the flares lighted the profiles of those on guard,
+whose faces were half-hidden by coat-collars or ear-flaps--
+imperturbable, silent, marooned and marooning, watchful and
+fearless. The thing had to be done and they were doing it; and they
+were going to keep on doing it.
+
+There was nothing dry in that trench, unless it was the bowl of a
+man's pipe. There were not even any braziers. In your nostrils was
+the odour of the soil of Flanders cultivated by many generations
+through many wars. As night wore on the sky was brightened by cold,
+winter stars and their soft light became noticeable between the
+disagreeable flashes of the flares.
+
+We walked on and on. It was like walking in a winding ditch; that was
+all. The same kind of walls at every turn; the same kind of dim figures
+in saturated, heavy army overcoats. Slipping off the board walk into
+the ooze, one was thrown against the mud wall as his foot sank. Then
+he held fast to his boot-straps lest the boot remain in the mud while
+his foot came out. Only the CO. never slipped. He knew how to tour
+trenches. Beside him the others were as clumsy as if they were trying
+to walk a tight-rope.
+
+"Good-night!" he said to each group of men as he passed, with the
+cheer of one who brings a confident spirit to vigils in the mud and with
+that note of affection of the commander who has learned to love his
+men by the token of ordeals when he saw them hold fast against
+odds.
+
+"Good-night, sir!" they answered; and in their tone was something
+which you liked to hear--a finer tribute to the CO. than medals which
+kings can bestow. It was affection and trust. They were ready to
+follow him, for they knew that he knew how to lead. I was not
+surprised when I heard of his promotion, later. I shall not be surprised
+when I hear of it again. For he had brain and heart and the gift of
+command.
+
+"Shall we go on or shall we go back?" he asked when we had gone
+about a mile. "Have you had enough?"
+
+We had, without a dissenting voice. A ditch in the mud, that was all,
+no matter how much farther we went. So we passed out of the trench
+into a soapy, slippery mud which had been ploughed ground in the
+autumn, now become lathery with the beat of men's steps. Our party
+became separated when some foundered and tried to hoist
+themselves with both boot-straps at once. The CO. called out in order
+to locate us in the darkness, and the voice of an officer in the
+trenches cut in, "Keep still! The Germans are only a hundred yards
+away!"
+
+"Sorry!" whispered the CO. "I ought to have known better."
+
+Then one of the German searchlights that had been swinging its
+stream of light across the paths of the flares lay its fierce, comet eye
+on us, glistening on the froth-streaked mud and showing each mud-
+splashed figure in heavy coat in weird silhouette.
+
+"Standstill!"
+
+That is the order whenever the searchlights come spying in your
+direction. So we stood still in the mud, looking at one another and
+wondering. It was the one tense second of the night, which lifted our
+thoughts out of the mud with the elation of risk. That searchlight was
+the eye of death looking for a target. With the first crack of a bullet we
+should have known that we were discovered and that it was no longer
+good tactics to stand still. We should have dropped on all fours into
+the porridge. The searchlight swept on. Perhaps Hans at the
+machine-gun was nodding or perhaps he did not think us worth while.
+Either supposition was equally agreeable to us.
+
+We kept moving our mud-poulticed feet forward, with the flares at our
+backs, till we came to a road where we saw dimly a silent company of
+soldiers drawn up and behind them the supplies for the trench.
+Through the mud and under cover of darkness every bit of barbed
+wire, every board, every ounce of food, must go up to the moles in
+the ditch. The searchlights and the flares and the machine-guns
+waited for the relief. They must be fooled. But in this operation most
+of the casualties in the average trenches, both British and German,
+occurred. Without a chance to strike back, the soldier was shot at by
+an assassin in the night.
+
+When the men who had been serving their turn of duty in the
+trenches came out, a magnet drew their weary steps--cleanliness.
+They thought of nothing except soap and water. For a week they
+need not fight mud or Germans or parasites, which, like General Mud,
+waged war against both British and Germans. Standing on the slats
+of the concrete floor of a factory, they peeled off the filthy, saturated
+outer skin of clothing with its hideous, crawling inhabitants and,
+naked, leapt into great steaming vats, where they scrubbed and
+gurgled and gurgled and scrubbed. When they sprang out to apply
+the towels, they were men with the feel of new bodies in another
+world.
+
+Waiting for them were clean clothes, which had been boiled and
+disinfected; and waiting, too, was the shelter of their billets in the
+houses of French towns and villages, and rest and food and food and
+rest, and newspapers and tobacco and gossip--but chiefly rest and
+the joy of lethargy as tissue was rebuilt after the first long sleep, often
+twelve hours at a stretch. They knew all the sensations of physical
+man, man battling with nature, in contrasts of exhaustion and danger
+and recuperation and security, as the pendulum swung slowly back
+from fatigue to the glow of strength.
+
+Those who came out of the trenches quite "done up," Colonel Bate,
+Irish and genial, fatherly and not lean, claimed for his own. After the
+washing they lay on cots under a glass roof, and they might play
+dominoes and read the papers when they were well enough to sit up.
+They had the food which Colonel Bate knew was good for them, just
+as he knew what was deadly for the inhabitants whom they brought
+into that isolated room which every man must pass through before he
+was admitted to the full radiance of the colonel's curative smile. When
+they were able to return to the trenches, each was written down as
+one unit more in the colonel's weekly statistical reports. In summer he
+entertained al fresco in an open-air camp.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+In Neuve Chapelle
+
+
+
+Typical of many others, this quiet village in a flat country of rich
+farming land, with a church, a school, a post-office, and stores where
+the farmer could buy a pound of sugar or a spool of thread, employ a
+notary, or get a pair of shoes cobbled or a horse shod, without having
+to go to the neighbouring town of Bethune, Neuve Chapelle became
+famous only after it had ceased to exist--unless a village remains a
+village after it has been reduced to its original elements by shell-fire.
+
+It was the scene of one of those actions in the long siege line which
+have the dignity of a battle; the losses on either side, about sixteen
+thousand, were two-thirds of those at Waterloo or Gettysburg. Here
+the British after the long winter's stalemate in the mud, where they
+stuck when the exhausted Germans could press no farther, took the
+offensive, with the sap of spring rising in their veins.
+
+The guns blazed the way and the infantry charged in the path of the
+guns' destruction; and they kept on while the shield of shell-fire held.
+When it left an opening for the German machine-guns through its
+curtain and the German guns visited on the British what their guns
+had been visiting on the Germans, the British stopped. A lesson was
+learned; a principle established. A gain was made, if no goal were
+reached.
+
+The human stone wall had moved. It had broken some barriers and
+come to rest before others, again to become a stone wall. But it knew
+that the thing could be done with guns and shells enough--and only
+with enough. This means a good deal when you have been under
+dog for a long time. Months were to pass waiting for enough shells
+and guns, with many little actions and their steady drain of life, while
+everyone looked back to Neuve Chapelle as a landmark. It was
+something definite for a man to say that he had been wounded at
+Neuve Chapelle and quite indefinite to say that he had been
+wounded in the course of the day's work in the trenches.
+
+No one might see the battle in that sea of mud. He might as well have
+looked at the smoke of Vesuvius with an idea of learning what was
+going on inside of the crater. I make no further attempt at describing
+it. My view came after the battle was over and the cauldron was still
+steaming.
+
+Though in March, 1914, one would hardly have given Neuve
+Chapelle, intact and peaceful, a passing glance from a motor-car, in
+March, 1915, Neuve Chapelle in ruins was the one town in Europe
+which I most wanted to see. Correspondents had not then
+established themselves. The staff officer whom I asked if I might
+spend a night in the new British line was a cautious man. He bade me
+sign a paper freeing the British army from any responsibility. Judging
+by the general attitude of the Staff, one could hardly take the request
+seriously. One correspondent less ought to please any Staff; but he
+said that he had an affection for the regulars and knew that there
+were always plenty of recruits to take their places without resorting to
+conscription. The real responsibility was with the Germans. He
+suggested that I might go out to the German trenches and see if I
+could obtain a paper from them. He thought if I were quick about it I
+might get at least a yard in front of the British parapet in daylight. His
+sense of humour I had recognized when we had met in Bulgaria.
+
+Any traveller is bound to meet men whom he has met before in the
+travelled British army. At the brigade headquarters town, which, as
+one of the officers said, proved that bricks and mortar can float in
+mud, the face of the brigadier seemed familiar to me. I found that I
+had met him in Shanghai in the Boxer campaign, when he had come
+across a riotous China from India on one of those journeys in remote
+Asia which British officers are fond of making. He was "all there,"
+whether dealing with a mob of Orientals or with Germans in the
+trenches. I made myself at home in the parlour of the private house
+occupied by himself and staff, while he went on with his work. No flag
+outside the house; no sign that it was headquarters. Motor-cars
+stopped only long enough for an officer to enter or alight. Brigade
+headquarters is precisely the target that German aeroplanes or spies
+like to locate for their guns.
+
+"Are you ready? Have you your rubber boots?" the brigadier asked a
+few minutes later, as he put his head in at the parlour door. It would
+not do to approach the trenches until after dark. Of course, I had
+rubber boots. One might as well try to go to sea without a boat as to
+trenches without rubber boots in winter. "I'll take my constitutional," he
+added; "the trouble with this kind of war is that you get no exercise."
+
+He was a small man, but how he could walk! I began to understand
+why the Boxers could not catch him. He turned back after we had
+gone a mile or more and one of his staff went on with me to a point
+where, just at dusk, I was turned over to another pilot, an aide from
+battalion headquarters, and we set out across sodden fields that had
+yielded beetroot in the last harvest, taking care not to step in shell-
+holes. Dusk settled into darkness. No human being was in sight
+except ourselves.
+
+"There's the first line of German trenches before the attack," said my
+companion. "Our guns got fairly on them." Dimly I saw what seemed
+like a huge, long, irregular furrow of earth which had been torn almost
+out of the shape of a trench by British shells. "There was no living in it
+when the guns began all together. The only thing to do was to get
+out."
+
+Around us was utter silence, where the hell of thunders and
+destruction by the artillery had raged during the battle. Then a spent
+or ricochet bullet swept overhead, with the whistle of complaint of
+spent bullets at having travelled far without hitting any object. It had
+gone high over the British trenches; it had carried the full range, and
+the chance of its hitting anyone was ridiculously small. But the nearer
+you get to the trenches, the more likely these strays are to find a
+victim. "Hit by a stray bullet!" is a very common saying at the front.
+
+At last we felt the solidity of a paved road under our feet, and
+following this we came to a peasant's cottage. Inside, two soldiers
+were sitting beside telephone and telegraph instruments, behind a
+window stuffed with sandbags. On our way across the fields we had
+stepped on wires laid on the ground; we had stooped to avoid wires
+stretched on poles--the wires that form the web of the army's
+intelligence.
+
+Of course, no two units of communication are dependent on one wire.
+There is always a duplicate. If one is broken it is immediately
+repaired. The factories spin out wire to talk over and barbed wire for
+entanglements in front of trenches and weave millions of bags to be
+filled with sand for breastworks to protect men from bullets. If Sir John
+French wished, he could talk with Lord Kitchener in London and this
+battalion headquarters at Neuve Chapelle within the same space of
+time that a railroad president may speak over the Long Distance from
+Chicago to New York and order dinner out in the suburbs.
+
+These two men at the table, their faces tanned by exposure, men in
+the thirties, had the British regular of long service stamped all over
+them. War was an old story to them; and an old story, too, laying
+signal wires under fire.
+
+"We're very comfortable," said one. "No danger from stray bullets or
+from shrapnel; but if one of the Jack Johnsons come in, why, there's
+no more cottage and no more argument between you and me. We're
+dead and maybe buried, or maybe scattered over the landscape,
+along with the broken pieces of the roof."
+
+A soldier was on guard with bayonet fixed inside that little room, which
+had passageway to the cellar past the table, among straw beds. This
+seemed rather peculiar. The reason lay on one of the beds in a
+private's khaki. He had come into the battalion's trenches from our
+front and said that he belonged to the D------regiment and had been
+out on patrol and lost his way.
+
+It was two miles to that regiment and two miles is a long distance to
+stray between two lines of trenches so close together, when at any
+point in your own line you will find friends. It was possible that this
+fellow's real name was Hans Schmidt, who had learned cockney
+English in childhood in London, and in a dead British private's uniform
+had come into the British trenches to get information to which he was
+anything but welcome.
+
+He was to be sent under guard to the D------regiment
+for identification; and if he were found to be a Hans and not a
+Tommy--well, though he had tried a very stupid dodge he must have
+known what to expect when he was found out, if his officers had
+properly trained him in German rules of war.
+
+I had a glimpse of him in the candlelight before stooping to feel my
+way down three or four narrow steps to the cellar, where the farmer
+ordinarily kept potatoes and vegetables. There were straw beds
+around the walls here, too. The major commanding the battalion rose
+from his seat at a table on which were some cutlery, a jam pot,
+tobacco, pipes, a newspaper or two, and army telegraph forms and
+maps.
+
+If the hosts of mansions could only make their hospitality as simple as
+the major's, there would be less affectation in the world. He
+introduced me to an officer sitting on the other side of the table and to
+one lying in his blankets against the wall, who lifted his head and
+blinked and said that he was very glad to see me.
+
+It is a small world, for China cropped up here, as it had at brigade
+headquarters. The major had been in garrison at Peking when the
+war began. If my shipmate on a long battleship cruise, Lt.-Col. Dion
+Williams, U.S.M.C, reads this out in Peking let it tell him that the major
+is just as urbane in the cellar of a second-rate farmhouse on the
+outskirts of Neuve Chapelle as he would be in a corner of the Peking
+Club.
+
+"How is it? Painful now?" asked the major of Captain P-----, on the
+other side of the table.
+
+"Oh, no! It's quite all right," said the captain.
+
+"Using the sling?"
+
+"Part of the time. Hardly need it, though."
+
+Captain P-----was one of those men whose eyes are always smiling;
+who seems, wherever he is, to be glad that he is not in a worse place;
+who goes right on smiling at the mud in the trenches and bullets and
+shells and death. They are not emotional, the British, perhaps, but
+they are given to cheeriness, if not to laughter, and they have a way
+of smiling at times when smiles are much needed. The smile is more
+often found at the front than back at headquarters; or perhaps it is
+more noticeable there.
+
+"You see, he got a bullet through the arm yesterday," the major
+explained. "He was reported wounded, but remained on duty in the
+trench." I saw that the captain would rather not have publicity given to
+such an ordinary incident. He did not see why people should talk
+about his arm. "You are to go with him into the trench for the night,"
+the major added; and I thought myself very lucky in my companion.
+
+"Aren't you going to have dinner with us?" the major asked him.
+
+"Why, I had something to eat not very long ago," said Captain P-----.
+One was not sure whether he had or not.
+
+"There's plenty," said the major.
+
+"In that event, I don't see why I shouldn't eat when I have a chance,"
+the captain returned; which I found was a characteristic trench habit,
+particularly in winter when exposure to the raw, cold air calls for plenty
+of body-furnace heat.
+
+We had a ration soup and ration ham and ration prunes and cheese;
+what Tommy Atkins gets. When we were outside the house and
+starting for the trench this captain, with his wounded arm, wanted to
+carry my knapsack. He seemed to think that refusal was breaking the
+Hague conventions.
+
+Where we turned off the road, broken finger-points of brick walls in
+the faint moonlight indicated the site of Neuve Chapelle; other
+fragments of walls in front of us were the remains of a house; and
+that broken tree-trunk showed what a big shell can do. The trunk, a
+good eighteen inches in diameter, had not only been cut in two by
+one of the monsters of the new British artillery, but had been carried
+on for ten feet and left lying solidly in the bed of splinters of the top
+of the stump. All this had been in the field of that battle of a day,
+which was as fierce as the fiercest day at Gettysburg, and fought
+within about the same space. Every tree, every square rod of ground,
+had been paid for by shells, bullets, and human life.
+
+But now we were near the trenches; or, rather, the breastworks. We
+are always speaking of the trenches, while not all parts of the line are
+held by trenches. A trench is dug in the ground; a breastwork is
+raised from the level of the ground. At some points a trench becomes
+practically a breastwork, as its wall is raised to get free of the mud
+and water.
+
+We came into the open and heard the sound of voices and saw a
+spotty white wall; for some of the sandbags of the new British
+breastworks still retained their original colour. On the reverse side of
+this wall lines were leaning in readiness, their fixed bayonets faintly
+gleaming in the moonlight. I felt of the edge of one and it was sharp,
+quite prepared for business. In the surroundings of damp earth and
+mud-bespattered men, this rifle seemed the cleanest thing of all,
+meticulously clean, that ready weapon whose well-aimed and telling
+fire, in obedient and cool hands, was the object of all the drill of the
+new infantry in England; of all the drill of all infantry. Where pickets
+watched in the open in the old days before armies met in pitched
+battle, an occasional soldier now stands with rifle laid on the parapet,
+watching.
+
+Across a reach of field faintly were made out the white spots of
+another wall of breastworks, the German, at the edge of a stretch of
+woods, the Bois du Bies. The British reached these woods in their
+advance; but, their aeroplanes being unable to spot the fall of shells
+in the mist, they had to fall back for want of artillery support. Along
+this line where we stood outside the village they stopped; and to stop
+is to set the spades going to begin the defences which, later, had
+risen to a man's height, and with rifles and machine-guns had riddled
+the German counter-attack.
+
+And the Germans had to go back to the edge of the woods, where
+they, too, began digging and building their new line. So the enemies
+were fixed again behind their walls of earth, facing each other across
+the open, where it was death for any man to expose himself by day.
+
+"Will you have a shot, sir?" one of the sentries asked me.
+
+"At what?"
+
+"Why, at the top of the trench over there, or at anything you see
+moving," he said.
+
+But I did not think that it was an invitation for a non-combatant to
+accept. If the bullet went over the top of the trench it had still two
+thousand yards and more to go, and it might find a target before it
+died. So, in view of the law of probabilities, no bullet is quite waste.
+
+"Now, which is my house?" asked Captain P------.
+
+"I really can't find my own home in the dark."
+
+Behind the breastwork were many little houses three or four feet in
+height, all of the same pattern, and made of boards and mud. The
+mud is put on top to keep out shrapnel bullets.
+
+"Here you are, sir!" said a soldier.
+
+Asking me to wait until he made a light, the captain bent over as if
+about to crawl under the top rail of a fence and his head disappeared.
+After he had put a match to a candle and stuck it on a stick thrust into
+the wall, I could see the interior of his habitation. A rubber sheet
+spread on the moist earth served as floor, carpet, mattress, and bed.
+At a squeeze there was room for two others besides himself. They
+did not need any doormat, for when they lay down their feet would be
+at the door.
+
+"Quite cosy, don't you think?" remarked the captain. He seemed to
+feel that he had a royal chamber. But, then, he was the kind of man
+who might sleep in a muddy field under a wagon and regard the
+shelter of the wagon body as a luxury. "Leave your knapsack here,"
+he continued, "and we'll see what is doing along the line."
+
+In other words, after you had left your bag in the host's hall, he
+suggested a stroll in the village or across the fields. But only to see
+war would he have asked you to walk in such mud.
+
+"Not quite so loud!" he warned a soldier who was bringing up boards
+from the rear under cover of darkness. "If the Germans hear they
+may start firing."
+
+Two other men were piling mud on top of a section of breastwork at
+an angle to the main line.
+
+"What is that for?" the captain asked.
+
+"They get an enfilade on us here, sir, and Mr.------ (the lieutenant) told
+me to make this higher."
+
+"That's no good. A bullet will go right through," said the captain. "We'll
+have to wait until we get more sandbags."
+
+A little farther on we came to an open space, with no protection
+between us and the Germans. Half a dozen men were piling earth
+against a staked chicken wire to extend the breastworks. Rather, they
+were piling mud, and they were besmirched from head to foot. They
+looked like reeking Neptunes rising from a slough. In the same
+position in daylight, standing full height before German rifles at three
+hundred yards, they would have been shot dead before they could
+leap to cover.
+
+"How does it go?" asked the captain.
+
+"Very well, sir; though what we need is sandbags."
+
+"We'll have some up to-morrow."
+
+At the moment there was no firing in the vicinity. Faintly I heard the
+Germans pounding stakes, at work improving their own breastworks.
+
+A British soldier appeared out of the darkness in front.
+
+"We've found two of our men out there with their heads blown off by
+shells," he said. "Have we permission to go out and bury them, sir?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+They would be as safe as the fellows piling mud against the chicken
+wire, unless the Germans opened fire. If they did, we could fire on
+their working-party, or in the direction of the sound. For that matter,
+we knew through our glasses by day the location of any weak places
+in their breastworks, and they knew where ours were. A sort of "after-
+you-gentlemen-if-you-fire-we-shall" understanding sometimes exists
+between the foes up to a certain point. Each side understands
+instinctively the limitation of that point. Too much noise in working, a
+number of men going out to bury dead or making enough noise to be
+heard, and the ball begins. A deep, broad ditch filled with water made
+a break in our line. No doubt a German machine-gun was trained on
+it.
+
+"A little bridging is required here," said the captain. "We'll have it done
+to-morrow night. The break is no disadvantage if they attack; in fact,
+we'd rather like to have them try for it. But it makes movement along
+the line difficult by day."
+
+When we were across and once more behind the breastworks, he
+called my attention to some high ground in the rear.
+
+"One of our officers took a short cut across there in daylight," he said.
+"He was quite exposed, and they drew a bead on him from the
+German trench and got him through the arm. Not a serious hit. It
+wasn't cricket for anyone to go out to bring him in. He realized this,
+and called out to leave him to himself, and crawled to cover."
+
+I was getting the commonplaces of trench life. Thus far it had been a
+quiet night and was to remain so. Reddish, flickering swaths of light
+were thrown across the fields between the trenches by the enemy's
+Roman candle flares. One tried to estimate how many flares the
+Germans must use every night from Switzerland to the North Sea.
+
+On our side, the only light was from our braziers. Thomas Atkins has
+become a patron of braziers made by punching holes in buckets; and
+so have the Germans. Punch holes in a bucket, start a fire inside,
+and you have cheer and warmth and light through the long night
+vigils. Two or three days before we had located a sniper between the
+lines by seeing him swing his fire-pot to make a draught against the
+embers.
+
+If you have ever sat around a camp-fire in the forest or on the plains
+you need be told nothing further. One of the old, glamorous features
+of war survives in these glowing braziers, spreading their genial rays
+among the little houses and lighting the faces of the men who stand
+or squat in encircling groups around the coals, which dry wet clothes,
+slake the moisture of a section of earth, make the bayonets against
+the walls glisten, and reveal the position of a machine-gun with its
+tape ready for firing.
+
+Values are relative, and a brazier in the trenches makes the
+satisfaction of a steam-heated room in winter very superficial and
+artificial. You are at home there with Tommy Atkins, regular of an old
+line English regiment, in his heavy khaki overcoat and solid boots and
+wool puttees, a sturdy, hardened man of a terrific war. He, the
+regular, the shilling-a-day policeman of the empire, was still doing the
+fighting at the front. The new army, which embraces all classes, was
+not yet in action.
+
+This man and that one were at Mons. This one and that one had
+been through the whole campaign without once seeing Mother
+England for whom they were fighting. The affection in which Captain
+P------was held extended through his regiment, for we had left his own
+company behind. At every turn he was asked about his arm.
+
+"You've made a mistake, sir. This isn't a hospital," as one man
+expressed it. Oh, but the captain was bored with hearing about that
+arm! If he is wounded again I am sure that he will try to keep the fact
+a secret.
+
+These veterans could "grouse," as the British call it. Grousing is one
+of Tommy's privileges. When they got to grousing worst on the retreat
+from Mons, their officers knew that what they really wanted was to
+make another stand. They were tired of falling back; they meant to
+take a rest and fight a while. Their language was yours, the language
+in which our own laws and schoolbooks are written. They made the
+old blood call. For months they had been taking bitter medicine; very
+bitter for a British soldier. The way they took it will, perhaps, remain a
+greater tribute than any part they play in future victories.
+
+"How do they feel in the States?" I was asked. "Against us?"
+
+"No. By no means."
+
+"I don't see how they could be!" Tommy exclaimed.
+
+Tommy may not be much on argument as it is developed by the
+controversial spirit of college professors, but he had said about all
+there was to say. How can we be? Hardly, after you come to know T.
+Atkins and his officers and talk English with them around their camp-
+fires.
+
+"The Germans are always sending up flares," I remarked. "You send
+up none. How about it?"
+
+"It cheers them. They're downhearted!" said one of the group. "You
+wouldn't deny them their fireworks, would you, sir?"
+
+"That shows who is top dog," said another. "They're the ones that are
+worried."
+
+I had heard of trench exhaustion, trench despair, but there was no
+sign of it in a regiment that had been through all the hell and mire that
+the British army had known since the war began. To no one had
+Neuve Chapelle meant so much as to these common soldiers. It was
+their first real victory. They were standing on soil won from the
+Germans.
+
+"We're going to Berlin!" said a big fellow who was standing, palms
+downward to the fire. "It's settled. We're going to Berlin."
+
+A smaller man with his back against the sandbags disagreed. There
+was a trench argument.
+
+"No, we're going to the Rhine," he said. "The Russians are going to
+Berlin." (This was in March, 1915, remember.)
+
+"How can they when they ain't over the Balkans yet?"
+
+"The Carpathians, you mean."
+
+"Well, they're both mountains and the Russians have got to cross
+them. And there's a place called Cracow in that region. What's the
+matter of a pair of mountain ranges between you and me, Bill? You're
+strong on geography, but you fail to follow the campaign."
+
+"The Rhine, I say!"
+
+"It's the Rhine first, but Berlin is what you want to keep your mind on."
+
+Then I asked if they had ever had any doubt that they would reach
+the Rhine.
+
+"How could we, sir?"
+
+"And how about the Germans. Do you hate them?"
+
+"Hate!" exclaimed the big man. "What good would it do to hate them?
+No, we don't hate. We get our blood up when we're fighting and when
+they don't play the game. But hate! Don't you think that's kind of
+ridiculous, sir?"
+
+"How do they fight?"
+
+"They take a bit of beating, do the Boches!"
+
+"So you call them Boches!"
+
+"Yes. They don't like that. But sometimes we call them Allemands,
+which is Germans in French. Oh, we're getting quite French
+scholars!"
+
+"They're good soldiers. Not many tricks they're not up to. But in my
+opinion they're overdoing the hate. You can't keep up to your work on
+hate, sir. I should think it would be weakening to the mind, too."
+
+"Still, you would like the war over? You'd like to go home?"
+
+They certainly would. Back to the barracks, out of the trenches! They
+certainly would.
+
+"And call it a draw?"
+
+"Call it a draw, now! Call it a draw, after all we've been through------"
+
+"Spring is coming. The ground will dry up and it will be warm."
+
+"And the going will be good to Berlin, as it was back from Paris in
+August, we tell the Boches."
+
+"Good for the Russians going over the Carpathians, or the Pyrenees,
+or whatever those mountains are, too. I read they're all covered with
+snow in winter."
+
+It was good, regular soldier talk, very "homey" to me. As you will
+observe, I have not elided the h's. Indeed, Tommy has a way of
+prefixing his h's to the right vowels more frequently than a generation
+ago. The Soldiers Three type has passed. Popular education will
+have its way and induce better habits. Believing in the old remedy for
+exhaustion and exposure to cold, the army served out a tot of rum
+every day to the men. But many of them are teetotalers, these hardy
+regulars, and not even Mulvaney will think them effeminate when they
+have seen fighting which makes anything Mulvaney ever saw child's
+play. So they asked for candy and chocolate, instead of rum.
+
+Some people have said that Tommy has no patriotism. He fights
+because he is paid and it is his business. That is an insinuation.
+Tommy doesn't care for the "hero stuff," or for waving flags and
+speechmaking. Possibly he knows how few Germans that sort of
+thing kills. His weapons are bullets. To put it cogently, he is fighting
+because he doesn't want any Kaiser "in his."
+
+Is not that what all the speeches in Parliament are about and all the
+editorials and the recruiting campaign? Is not that what England and
+France are fighting for? It seems to me that Tommy's is a very
+practical patriotism, free from cant; and the way that he refuses to
+hate or to get excited, but sticks to it, must be very irritating to the
+Germans.
+
+"Would you like a Boche helmet for a souvenir, sir?" asked a soldier
+who appeared on the outer edge of the group. He was the small,
+active type, a British soldier with the �lan of the Frenchman. "There
+are lots of them out among the German dead "--the unburied German
+dead who fell like grass before the mower in a desperate and futile
+counter-attack to recover Neuve Chapelle. "I'll have one for you on
+your way back."
+
+There was no stopping him; he had gone.
+
+"Matty's a devil!" said the big man. "He'll get it, all right. He's equal
+to reaching over the Boches' parapet and picking one off a Boche's
+head!"
+
+As we proceeded on our way, officers came out of the little houses to
+meet Captain P------and the stranger civilian. They had to come out,
+as there was no room to take us inside; and sometimes they talked
+shop together after I had answered the usual question, "Is America
+against us?" There seemed to be an idea that we were, possibly
+because of the prodigious advertising tactics of a minority. But any
+feeling that we might be did not interfere with their simple courtesy, or
+lead them to express any bitterness or break into argument.
+
+"How are things going on over your side?"
+
+"Nicely."
+
+"Any shelling?"
+
+"A little this morning. No harm done."
+
+"We cleaned out one bad sniper to-day."
+
+"Ought to have some sandbags up to-night."
+
+"It's a bad place there. They've got a machine-gun trained which has
+quite a sweep. I asked if the artillery shouldn't put in a word, but the
+general didn't think it worth while."
+
+"You must run across that break. Three or four shots at you every
+time. We're gradually getting shipshape, though."
+
+Just then a couple of bullets went singing overhead. The group paid
+no attention to them. If you paid attention to bullets over the parapet
+you would have no time for anything else. But these bullets have a
+way of picking off tall officers who are standing up among their
+houses. In the course of their talk they happened to speak of such an
+instance, though not with reference to the two bullets I have
+mentioned.
+
+"Poor S------did not last long. He had been out only three weeks."
+
+"How is J------? Hit badly?"
+
+"Through the shoulder; not seriously."
+
+"H------is back. Recovered very quickly."
+
+Normal trench talk, this! A crack which signifies that the bullet has hit
+--another man down. One grows accustomed to it, and one of this
+group of officers might be gone to-morrow.
+
+"I have one, sir," said Matty, exhibiting a helmet when we returned
+past his station. "Bullet went right through the head and came out the
+peak!"
+
+It was time that Captain P------ was back to his own command. As we
+came to his company's line word was just being passed from sentry
+to sentry:
+
+"No firing. Patrols going out."
+
+It was midnight now.
+
+"We'll go in the other direction," said Captain P------ when he had
+learned that there was no news.
+
+This brought us to an Irish regiment. The Irish naturally had
+something to say.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+Nearer The Germans
+
+
+
+Here not the Irish Sea lay between the broad a and the brogue, but
+the space between two sentries or between two rifles with bayonets
+fixed, lying against the wall of the breastworks ready for their owners'
+hands when called to arms in case of an alarm. One stepped from
+England into Ireland; and my prediction that the Irish would have
+something to say was correct.
+
+The first man who made his presence felt was a good six feet in
+height, with a heavy moustache and the earpieces of his cap tied
+under his chin, though the night was not cold. He placed himself fairly
+in front of me in the narrow path back of the breastworks and he
+looked a cowled and sinister figure in the faint glow from a brazier. I
+certainly did not want any physical argument with a man of his build.
+
+"Who are you?" he demanded, as stiffly as if I had broken in at the
+veranda window with a jemmy.
+
+For the nearer you come to the front, the more you feel that you are
+in the way. You are a stray extra piece of baggage; a dead human
+weight. Everyone is doing something definite as a part of the machine
+except yourself; and in your civilian clothes you feel the self-
+conscious conspicuousness of appearing on a dancing-floor in a
+dressing-gown.
+
+Captain P------was a little way back in another passage. I was alone
+and in a rough tweed suit--a strange figure in that world of khaki and
+rifles.
+
+"A German spy! That's why I am dressed this way, so as not to excite
+suspicion," I was going to say, when a call from Captain P------
+identified me, and the sentry's attitude changed as suddenly as if the
+inspector of police had come along and told a patrolman that I might
+pass through the fire lines.
+
+"So it's you, is it, right from America?" he said. "I've a sister living at
+Nashua, New Hampshire, U.S.A. with three brothers in the United
+States army."
+
+Whether he had or not you can judge as well as I by the twinkle in his
+eye. He might have had five, and again he might not have one. I was
+a tenderfoot seeing the trenches.
+
+"It's mesilf that's going to America when me sarvice in the army is up
+in one year and six months," he continued. "That's some time yet. I'm
+going if I'm not killed by the Germans. It's a way that they have, or we
+wouldn't be killing them."
+
+"What are you going to do in America? Enlist in the army?"
+
+"No. I'm looking for a better job. I'm thinking I'll be one of your
+millionaires. Shure, but that would be to me taste."
+
+Not one Irishman was speaking really, but a dozen. They came out of
+their little houses and dug-outs to gather around the brazier; and for
+every remark I made I received a fusillade in reply. It was an event,
+an American appearing in the trench in the small hours of the
+morning.
+
+A trench-toughened, battle-toughened old sergeant was sitting in the
+doorway of his dug-out, frying a strip of bacon over one rim of the
+brazier and making tea over the other. The bacon sizzled with an
+appetizing aroma and a bullet sizzled harmlessly overhead. Behind
+that wall of sandbags all were perfectly safe, unless a shell came. But
+who worries about shells? It is like worrying about being struck by
+lightning when clouds gather in a summer sky.
+
+"It looks like good bacon," I remarked.
+
+"It is that!" said the sergeant. "And the hungrier ye are the better. It's
+your nose that's telling ye so this minute. I can see that ye're hungry
+yoursilf!"
+
+"Then you're pretty well fed?"
+
+"Well fed, is it? It's stuffed we are, like the geese that grow the paty-
+what-do-you-call-it? Eating is our pastime. We eat when we've
+nothing else to do and when we've got something to do. We get eggs
+up here--a fine man is Lord Kitchener--yes, sir, eggs up here in the
+trenches!"
+
+When they seemed to think that I was sceptical, he produced some
+eggs in evidence.
+
+"And if ye'll not have the bacon, ye'll have a drop of tea. Mind now,
+while your tongue is trying to be polite, your stomach is calling your
+tongue a liar!"
+
+Wouldn't I have a souvenir? Out came German bullets and buckles
+and officers' whistles and helmets and fragments of shells and
+German diaries.
+
+"It's easy to get them out there where the Germans fell that thick!" I
+was told. "And will ye look at this and take it home to give your pro-
+German Irish in America, to show what their friends are shooting at
+the Irish? I found them mesilf on a dead German."
+
+He passed me a clip of German bullets with the blunt ends instead of
+the pointed ends out. The change is readily made, for the German
+bullet is easily pulled out of the cartridge case and the pointed end
+thrust against the powder. Thus fired, it goes accurately four or five
+hundred yards, which is more than the average distance between
+German and British trenches. When it strikes flesh the effect is that of
+a dum-dum and worse; for the jacket splits into slivers, which spread
+through the pulpy mass caused by the explosion. A leg or an arm
+thus hit must almost invariably be amputated. I am not suggesting
+that this is a regular practice with German soldiers, but it shows what
+wickedness is in the power of the sinister one.
+
+"But ye'll take the tea," said the sergeant, "with a little rum hot in it.
+'Twill take the chill out of your bones."
+
+"What if I haven't a chill in my bones?"
+
+"Maybe it's there without speaking to ye and it will be speaking before
+an hour longer--or afther ye're home between the sheets with the
+rheumatiz, and yell be saying, 'Why didn't I take that glass?' which
+I'm holding out to ye this minute, steaming its invitation to be drunk."
+
+It was a memorable drink. Snatches of brogue followed me from the
+brazier's glow when I insisted that I must be going.
+
+Now our breastworks took a turn and we were approaching closer to
+the German breastworks. Both lines remained where they had "dug
+in" after the counter-attacks which followed the battle had ceased.
+Ground is too precious in this siege warfare to yield a foot. Soldiers
+become misers of soil. Where the flood is checked there you build
+your dam against another flood.
+
+"We are within about sixty yards of the Germans," said Captain P------
+at length, after we had gone in and out of the traverses and left the
+braziers well behind.
+
+Between the spotty, whitish wall of German sandbags, quite distinct in
+the moonlight, and our parapet were two mounds of sandbags about
+twenty feet apart. Snug behind one was a German and behind the
+other an Irishman, both listening. They were within easy bombing
+range, but the homicidal advantage of position of either resulted in a
+truce. Sixty yards! Pace it off. It is not far. In other places the enemies
+have been as close as five yards--only a wall of earth between them.
+Where a bombing operation ends in an attack, a German is naturally
+on one side of a traverse and a Briton on the other.
+
+The Germans were as busy as beavers dam-building. They had a lot
+of work to do before they had their new defences right. We heard
+them driving stakes and spading; we heard their voices with snatches
+of sentences intelligible, and occasionally the energetic, shouted,
+guttural commands of their officers. All through that night I never
+heard a British officer speak above a conversational tone. The orders
+were definite enough, but given with a certain companionable
+kindliness. I have spoken of the genuine affection which his men
+showed for Captain P------, and I was beginning to appreciate that it
+was not a particular instance.
+
+"What if you should shout at Tommy in the German fashion?" I
+asked.
+
+"He wouldn't have it; he'd get rebellious," was the reply. "No, you
+mustn't yell at Tommy. He's a little temperamental about some things
+and he will not be treated as if he were just a human machine."
+
+Yet no one will question the discipline of the British soldier. Discipline
+means that the officer knows his men, and British discipline, which
+bears a retreat like that from Mons, requires that the man likes to
+follow his officers, believes in his officers, loves his officers. Each
+army and each people to its own ways.
+
+Sixty yards! And the dead between the trenches and death lurking
+ready at a trigger's pull should life show itself! When daylight comes
+the British sing out their "Good-morning, Germans!" and the Germans
+answer, "Good-morning, British!" without adding, "We hope to kill
+some of you to-day!" Ragging banter and jest and worse than jest
+and grim defiance are exchanged between the trenches when they
+are within such easy hearing distance of each other; but always from
+a safe position behind the parapet which the adversaries squint
+across through their periscopes. At the gibe business the German is,
+perhaps, better than the Briton.
+
+Early in the evening a regiment on our right broke into a busy
+fusillade at some fancied movement of the enemy. In trench talk that
+is getting "jumpy." The Germans in front roared out their contempt in
+a chorus of guying laughter. Toward morning, these same Germans
+also became "jumpy" and began tearing the air with bullets, firing
+against nothing but the blackness of night. Tommy Atkins only made
+some characteristic comments; for he is a quiet fellow, except when
+he is played on the music-hall stage. Possibly he feels the
+inconsistency of laughter when you are killing human beings; for, as
+his officers say, he is temperamental and never goes to the trouble of
+analysing his emotions. A very real person and a good deal of a
+philosopher is Mr. Atkins, Britain's professional fighting man, who was
+the only kind of fighting man she had ready for the war.
+
+Any small boy who had never had enough fireworks in his life might
+be given a job in the German trenches, with the privilege of firing
+flares till he fell asleep from exhaustion. All night they were going, with
+the regularity of clockwork. The only ones sent up from our side that
+night were shot in order that I might get a better view of the German
+dead.
+
+You know how water lies in the low places on the ground after a
+heavy rain. Well, the patches of dead were like that, and dark in the
+spots where they were very thick--dark as with the darkness of
+deeper water. There were also irregular tongues of dead and
+scattered dead, with arms outstretched or under them as they fell,
+and faces white even in the reddish glare of the rockets and turned
+toward you in the charge that failed under the withering blasts of
+machine-guns, ripping out two or three hundred shots a minute, and
+well-aimed rifle-bullets, each bullet getting its man. Threatening that
+charge would have seemed to a recruit, but measured and calculated
+in certainty of failure in the minds of veteran defenders, who knew
+that the wheat could not stand before their mowers. Man's flesh is
+soft and a bullet is hard and travels fast.
+
+One bit of satire which Tommy sent across the field covered with its
+burden of slaughter to the Germans who are given to song, ought to
+have gone home. It was: "Why don't you stop singing and bury your
+dead?" But the Germans, having given no armistice in other times
+when British dead lay before the trenches, asked for none here. The
+dead were nearer to the British than to the Germans. The discomfort
+would be in British and not German nostrils. And the dead cannot
+fight; they can help no more to win victory for the Fatherland; and the
+time is A.D. 1915. Two or three thousand German dead altogether,
+perhaps--not many out of the Kaiser's millions. Yet they seemed a
+great many to one who saw them lying there.
+
+We stopped to read by the light of a brazier some German soldiers'
+diaries that the Irishmen had. They were cheap little books, bought for
+a few cents, each one telling the dead man's story and revealing the
+monotony of a soldier's existence in Europe to-day. These pawns of
+war had been marched here and there, they never knew why. The
+last notes were when orders came entraining them. They did not
+know that they were to be sent out of those woods yonder to recover
+Neuve Chapelle out of those woods in the test of all their drill and
+waiting. A Bavarian officer--for these were Bavarians--actually rode in
+that charge. He must have worked himself up to a strangely exalted
+optimism and contempt of British fire. Or was it that he, too, did not
+know what he was going against? that only the German general
+knew? Neither he nor his horse lasted long; not more than a dozen
+seconds. The thing was so splendidly foolhardy that in some little war
+it might have become the saga of a regiment, the subject of ballads
+and paintings. In this war it was an incident heralded for a day in one
+command and forgotten the next.
+
+"Good-night!" called the Irish.
+
+"Good-night and good luck!"
+
+"Tell them in America that the Irish are still fighting!"
+
+"Good luck, and may your travelling be aisy; but if ye trip, may ye fall
+into a gold mine!"
+
+We were back with the British regulars; and here, also, many of the
+men remained up around the braziers.
+
+The hours of duty of the few on watch do not take many of the
+twenty-four hours. One may sleep when he chooses in the little
+houses behind the breastworks. Night melts into day and day into
+night in the monotony of mud and sniping rifle-fire. By-and-by it is your
+turn to go into reserve; your turn to get out of your clothes--for there
+are no pyjamas for officers or men in these "crawls," as they are
+sometimes called. Boots off is the only undressing; boots off and
+puttees unloosed, which saves the feet. Yes, by-and-by the march
+back to the rear, where there are tubs filled with hot water and an
+outfit of clean clothes awaiting you, and nothing to do but rest and
+sleep.
+
+"How soon after we leave the trenches may we cheer?" officers have
+been asked in the dead of winter, when water stood deep over the
+porous mud and morning found a scale of ice around the legs.
+
+You, nicely testing the temperature of your morning tub; you, satisfied
+only with faucets of hot and cold water and a mat to stand on--you
+know nothing about the joy of bathing. Your bath is a mere part of the
+daily routine of existence. Try the trenches and get itchy with vermin;
+then you will know that heaven consists of soap and hot water.
+
+No bad odour assails your nostrils wherever you may go in the British
+lines. Its cleanliness, if nothing else, would make British army
+comradeship enjoyable. My wonder never ceases how Tommy keeps
+himself so neat; how he manages to shave every day and get a part,
+at least, of the mud off his uniform. This care makes him feel more as
+if he were "at home" in barracks.
+
+From the breastworks, Captain P------and I went for a stroll in the
+Village, or the site of the village, silent except for the occasional
+singing of a bullet. When we returned he lighted the candle on a stick
+stuck into the wall of his earth-roofed house and suggested a nap. It
+was three o'clock in the morning. Now I could see that my rubber
+boots had grown so heavy because I was carrying so much of the soil
+of Northern France. It looked as if I had gout in both feet--the over-
+bandaged, stage type of gout--which were encased in large mud
+poultices. I tried to stamp off the incubus, but it would not go. I tried
+scraping one foot on the other, and what I scraped off seemed to
+reattach itself as fast as I could remove it.
+
+"Don't try!" said the captain. "Lie down and pull your boots off in the
+doorway. Perhaps you will get some sleep before daybreak."
+
+Sleep! Does a d�butante go to sleep at her first ball? Sleep in such
+good company, the company of this captain who was smiling all the
+while with his eyes; smiling at his mud house, at the hardships in the
+trenches, and, I hope, at having a guest who had been with armies
+before!
+
+It was the first time that I had been in the trenches all night; the first
+time, indeed, when I had not been taken into them by an escort in a
+kind of promenade. On this account I was in the family. If it is the right
+kind of a family, that is the way to get a good impression. There would
+be plenty of time to sleep when I returned to London.
+
+So Captain P------ and I lay there talking. I felt the dampness of the
+earth under my body and the walls exuded moisture. The average
+cellar was dry by comparison. "You will get your death of cold!" any
+mother would cry in alarm if her boy were found even sitting on such
+cold, wet ground. For it was a clammy night of early spring. Yet,
+peculiarly enough, few men get colds from this exposure. One gets
+colds from draughts in overheated rooms much oftener. Luckily, it
+was not raining; it had been raining most of the winter in the flat
+country of Northern France and Flanders.
+
+"It is very horrible, this kind of warfare," said the captain. He was
+thinking of the method of it, rather than of the discomforts. "All war is
+very horrible, of course." Regular soldiers rarely take any other view.
+They know war.
+
+"With your wounded arm you might be back in England on leave," I
+suggested.
+
+"Oh, that arm is all right!" he replied. "This is what I am paid for"--
+which I had heard regulars say before. "And it is for England!" he
+added, in his quiet way. "Sometimes I think we should fight better if
+we officers could hate the Germans," he went on. "The German idea
+is that you must hate if you are going to fight well. But we can't hate."
+
+Sound views he had about the war; sounder than I have heard from
+the lips of Cabinet ministers. For these regular officers are specialists
+in war.
+
+"Do you think that we shall starve the Germans out?"
+
+"No. We must win by fighting," he replied. This was in March, 1915.
+"You know," he went on, taking another tack, "when one gets back to
+England out of this muck he wants good linen and everything very
+nice."
+
+"Yes. I've found the same after roughing it," I agreed. "One is most
+particular that he has every comfort to which civilization entitles him."
+
+We chatted on. Much of our talk was soldier shop talk, which you will
+not care to hear. Twice we were interrupted by an outburst of firing,
+and the captain hurried out to ascertain the reason. Some false alarm
+had started the rifles speaking from both sides. A fusillade for two or
+three minutes and the firing died down to silence.
+
+Dawn broke and it was time for me to go; and with daylight, when
+danger of a night surprise was over, the captain would have his
+sleep. I was leaving him to his mud house and his bed on the wet
+ground without a blanket. It was more important to have sandbags up
+for the breastworks than to have blankets; and as the men had not
+yet received theirs, he had none himself.
+
+"It's not fair to the men," he said. "I don't want anything they don't
+have."
+
+No better food and no better house and no warmer garments! He
+spoke not in any sense of stated duty, but in the affection of the
+comradeship of war; the affection born of that imperturbable courage
+of his soldiers who had stood a stone wall of cool resolution against
+German charges when it seemed as if they must go. The glamour of
+war may have departed, but not the brotherhood of hardship and
+dangers shared.
+
+What had been a routine night to him had been a great night to me;
+one of the most memorable of my life.
+
+"I was glad you could come," he said, as I made my adieu, quite as if
+he were saying adieu to a guest at home in England.
+
+Some of the soldiers called their cheery good-byes; and with a
+lieutenant to guide me, I set out while the light was still dusky, leaving
+the comforting parapet to the rear to go into the open, four hundred
+yards from the Germans. A German, though he could not have seen
+us distinctly, must have noted something moving. Two of his bullets
+came rather close before we passed out of his vision among some
+trees.
+
+In a few minutes I was again entering the peasant's cottage that was
+battalion headquarters; this time by daylight. Its walls were chipped by
+bullets that had come over the breastworks. The major was just
+getting up from his blankets in the cellar. By this time I had a real
+trench appetite. Not until after breakfast did it occur to me, with some
+surprise, that I had not washed my face.
+
+"The food was just as good, wasn't it?" remarked the major. "We get
+quite used to such breaches of convention. Besides, you had been
+up all night, so your breakfast might be called your after-the-theatre
+supper."
+
+With him I went to see what the ruins of Neuve Chapelle looked like
+by daylight. The destruction was not all the result of one
+bombardment, for the British had been shelling Neuve Chapelle off
+and on all winter. Of course, there is the old earthquake comparison.
+All writers have used it. But it is quite too feeble for Neuve Chapelle.
+An earthquake merely shakes down houses. The shells had done a
+good deal more than that. They had crushed the remains of the
+houses as under the pestle-head in a mortar; blown walls into dust;
+taken bricks from the east side of the house over to the west and
+thrown them back with another explosion. Neuve Chapelle had been
+literally flailed with the high explosive projectiles of the new British
+artillery, which the British had to make after the war began in order to
+compete with what the Germans already had; for poor, lone,
+wronged, bullied Germany, quite unprepared--Austria with her fifty
+millions does not count--was fighting on the defensive against wicked,
+aggressive enemies who were fully prepared. This explains why she
+invaded France and took possession of towns like Neuve Chapelle to
+defend her poor, unready people from the French, who had been
+plotting and planning "the day" when they would conquer the
+Germans.
+
+Bits of German equipment were mixed with ruins of clocks and family
+pictures and household utensils. I noticed a bicycle which had been
+cut in two, its parts separated by twenty feet; one wheel was twisted
+into a spool of wire, the other simply smashed.
+
+Where was the man who had kept the shop with a few letters of his
+name still visible on a splintered bit of board? Where the children who
+had played in the littered square in front of the church, with its
+steeples and walls piles of stone that had crushed the worshippers'
+benches? Refugees somewhere back of the British lines, working on
+the roads if strong enough, helping France in any way they could, not
+murmuring, even smiling, and praying for victory, which would let
+them return to their homes and daily duties. To their homes!
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+With The Guns
+
+
+
+It is a war of explosions, from bombs thrown by hand within ten yards
+of the enemy to shells thrown as far as twenty miles and to mines laid
+under the enemy's trenches; a war of guns, from seventeen-inch
+down to three-inch and machine-guns; a war of machinery, with man
+still the pre-eminent machine.
+
+Guns mark the limit of the danger zone. Their screaming shells laugh
+at the sentries at the entrances to towns and at cross-roads who
+demand passes of all other travellers. Anyone who tried to keep out
+of range of the guns would never get anywhere near the front. It is all
+a matter of chance with long odds or short odds, according to the
+neighbourhood you are in. If shells come, they come without warning
+and without ceremony. Nobody is afraid of shells and everybody is--at
+least, I am.
+
+"Gawd! Wat a 'ole!" remarks Mr. Thomas Atkins casually, at sight of
+an excavation in the earth made by a thousand-pound projectile.
+
+It is only eighteen years since I saw, at the battle of Domoko in the
+Greco-Turkish war, half a dozen Turkish batteries swing out on the
+plain of Thessaly, limber up in the open, and discharge salvos with
+black powder, in the good, old battle-panorama style. One battery of
+modern field guns unseen would wipe out the lot in five minutes. Only
+ten years ago, at the battle of Liao-yang, as I watched a cloud of
+shrapnel smoke sending down steel showers over the little hill of
+Manjanyama, which sent up showers of earth from shells burst by
+impact on the ground, a Japanese military attach� remarked:
+
+"There you have a prophecy of what a European war will be like!"
+
+He was right. He knew his business as a military attach�. But the
+Allies might also make guns and go on making them till they have
+enough. The voices of the guns along the front seem never silent. In
+some direction they are always firing. When one night the reports
+from a certain quarter seemed rather heavy, I asked the reason the
+next day.
+
+"No, not very heavy. No attack," a division staff officer explained.
+"The Boches had been building a redoubt, and we turned on some
+h.e.s."--meaning high explosive shells.
+
+Night after night, under cover of darkness, the Germans had been
+labouring on that redoubt, thinking that they were unobserved. They
+had kept extremely quiet, too, slipping their spades into the earth
+softly and hammering a nail ever so lightly; and, of course, the
+redoubt was placed behind a screen of foliage which hid it from the
+view of the British trenches. Such is the hide-and-seek character of
+modern war.
+
+What the German builders did not know was that a British aeroplane
+had been watching them day by day, and that the spot was nicely
+registered on a British gunner's map. On this map it was a certain
+numbered point. Press a button, as it were, and you ring the bell with
+a shell at that point. And the gunners waited till the house of cards
+was up before knocking it to pieces.
+
+Surprise is the thing with the guns. A town may go for weeks without
+getting a single shell. Then it may get a score of shells in ten minutes;
+or it may be shelled regularly every day for ensuing weeks. "They are
+shelling X again," or, "They have been leaving Z alone for a long
+time," is a part of the gossip up and down the line. Towns are proud
+of having escaped altogether, and proud of the number and size of
+the shells received.
+
+"Did you get any?" I asked the division staff officer who had told me
+about the session the six-inch howitzers had enjoyed. A common
+question that, at the front, "Did you get any?" (meaning Germans). A
+practical question, too. It has nothing to do with the form of play or
+any bit of sensational fielding; only with the score, with results, with
+casualties.
+
+"Yes, quite a number," said the officer. "Our observer saw them lying
+about."
+
+The guns are watching for the targets at all hours--the ever-hungry,
+ever-ready, murderous, cunning, quick, scientifically-calculating,
+marvellously-accurate and also the guessing, wondering, blind,
+groping, helpless guns, which toss their steel messengers over
+streams, woodlands, and towns, searching for unseen prey in a wide
+landscape.
+
+Accurate and murderous they seem when you drop low behind a
+trench wall or huddle in a dug-out as you hear an approaching
+scream and the earth trembles and the air is wracked by a
+concussion, and the cry of a man a few yards away tells of a hit. Very
+accurate when still others, sent from muzzles six or seven thousand
+yards distant, fall in that same line of trench! Very accurate when,
+before an infantry attack, with bursts of shrapnel bullets they cut to
+bits the barbed-wire entanglements in front of a trench! The power of
+chaos that they seem to possess when the firing-trench and the dug-
+outs and all the human warrens which protect the defenders are
+beaten as flour is kneaded!
+
+Blind and groping they seem when a dozen shells fall harmlessly in a
+field; when they send their missiles toward objects which may not be
+worth shooting at; when no one sees where the shells hit and the
+amount of damage they have done is all guesswork; and helpless
+without the infantry to protect them, the aeroplanes and the observers
+to see for them.
+
+One thinks of them as demons with subtle intelligence and long
+reach, their gigantic fists striking here and there at will, without a
+visible arm behind the blow. An army guards against the blows of an
+enemy's demons with every kind of cover, every kind of deception,
+with all resources of scientific ingenuity and invention; and an army
+guards its own demons in their lairs as preciously as if they were
+made of some delicate substance which would go up in smoke at a
+glance from the enemy's eye, instead of having barrels of the
+strongest steel that can be forged.
+
+Your personal feeling for the demons on your side is in ratio to the
+amount of hell sent by the enemy's which you have tasted. After you
+have been scared stiff, while pretending that you were not, by sharing
+with Mr. Atkins an accurate bombardment of a trench and are
+convinced that the next shell is bound to get you, you fall into the
+attitude of the army. You want to pat the demon on the back and say,
+"Nice old demon!" and watch him toss a shell three or four miles into
+the German lines from the end of his fiery tongue. Indeed, nothing so
+quickly develops interest in the British guns as having the German
+gunners take too much personal interest in you.
+
+You must have someone to show you the way or you would not find
+any guns. A man with a dog trained to hunt guns might spend a week
+on the gun-position area covering ten miles of the front and not locate
+half the guns. He might miss "Grandmother" and "Sister" and "Betsy"
+and "Mike" and even "Mister Archibald," who is the only one who
+does not altogether try to avoid publicity.
+
+When an attack or an artillery bombardment is on and you go to as
+high ground as possible for a bird's-eye view of battle, all that you see
+is the explosion of the shells; never anything of the guns which are
+firing. In the distance over the German lines and in the foreground
+over the British lines is a balloon, shaped like a caterpillar with folded
+wings--a chrysalis of a caterpillar.
+
+Tugging at its moorings, it turns this way and that with the breeze.
+The speck directly beneath it through the glasses becomes an
+ordinary balloon basket and other specks attached to a guy rope play
+the part of the tail of a kite, helping to steady the type of balloon which
+has taken the place of the old spherical type for observation. Anyone
+who has been up in a captive spherical balloon knows how difficult it
+is to keep his glasses focussed on any object, because of the jerking
+and pitching and trembling due to the envelope's response to air-
+movements. The new type partly overcomes this drawback. To
+shrapnel their thin envelope is as vulnerable as a paper drum-head to
+a knife; but I have seen them remain up defiantly when shells were
+bursting within three or four hundred yards, which their commanders
+seemed to understand was the limit of the German battery's reach.
+
+Again, I have seen a shrapnel burst alongside within range; and five
+minutes later the balloon was down and out of sight. No balloon
+observer hopes to see the enemy's guns. He is watching for shell-
+bursts, in order to inform the guns of his side whether they are on the
+target or not.
+
+Riding along the roads at the front one may know that there is a
+battery a stone's throw away only when a blast from a hidden gun-
+muzzle warns him of its presence. It is wonderful to me that the
+artillery general who took me gun-seeing knew where his own guns
+were, let alone the enemy's. I imagine that he could return to a field
+and locate a four-leafed clover that he had seen on a previous stroll.
+His dogs of war had become foxes of war, burrowing in places which
+wise old father foxes knew were safest from detection. Hereafter, I
+shall not be surprised to see a muzzle poking its head out of an oven,
+or from under grandfather's chair or a farm wagon, or up a tree, or in
+a garret. Think of the last place in the world for emplacing a gun and
+one may be there; think of the most likely place and one may be
+there. You might be walking across the fields and minded to go
+through a hedge, and bump into a black ring of steel with a gun's
+crew grinning behind it. They would grin because you had given proof
+of how well their gun was concealed. But they wouldn't grin as much
+as they would if they saw the enemy plunking shells into another
+hedge two hundred yards distant, where the German aeroplane
+observer thought he had seen a battery and had not.
+
+"I'll show you a big one, first!" said the general.
+
+We left the car at a cottage and walked along a lane. I looked all
+about the premises and could see only some artillerymen. An officer
+led me up to a gun-breech; at least, I know a gun-breech when it is
+one foot from my nose and a soldier has removed its covering. But I
+shall not tell how that gun was concealed; the method was so
+audacious that it was entirely successful. The Germans would like to
+know and we don't want them to know. A little pencil-point on their
+map for identification, and they would send a whirlwind of shells at
+that gun.
+
+And then?
+
+Would the gun try to fire back? No. Its gunners probably would not
+know the location of any of the guns of the German battery which had
+concentrated on their treasure. They would desert the gun. If they did
+not, they ought to be court-martialled for needlessly risking the
+precious lives of trained men. They would make for the "funk-pits," as
+they call the dug-outs, just as the gunners of any other Power would.
+
+The chances are that the gun itself would not be hit bodily by a shell.
+Fragments might strike it without causing more than an abrasion; for
+big guns have pretty thick cuticles. When the storm was over, the
+gunners would move their treasure to another hiding-place; which
+would mean a good deal of work, on account of its size.
+
+It is the inability of gun to see gun, and even when seen to knock out
+gun, which has put an end to the so-called artillery duel of pitched-
+battle days, when cannon walloped cannon to keep cannon from
+walloping the infantry. Now when there is an action, though guns still
+go after guns if they know where they are, most of the firing is done
+against trenches and to support trenches and infantry works, or with a
+view to demoralizing the infantry. Concentration of artillery fire will
+demolish an enemy's trench and let your infantry take possession of
+the wreckage remaining; but then the enemy's artillery concentrates
+on your infantry and frequently makes their new habitation untenable.
+
+Noiselessly except for a little click, with chickens clucking in a field
+near by, the big breech-block which held the shell fast, sending all the
+power of the explosion out of the muzzle, was swung back and one
+looked through the shining tube of steel, with its rifling which caught
+the driving band and gave the shell its rotation and accuracy in its
+long journey, which would close when, descending at the end of its
+parabola, its nose struck building, earth, or pavement and it exploded.
+
+Wheels that lift and depress and swing the muzzle, and gadgets with
+figures, and other scales which play between the map and the
+gadgets, and atmospheric pressure and wind-variation, all worked out
+with the same precision under a French hedge as on board a
+battleship where the gun-mounting is fast to massive ribs of steel--it
+seemed a matter of book-keeping and trigonometry rather than war.
+
+If a shell from this gun were to hit at the corner of Wall Street and
+Broadway at the noon hour, it would probably kill and wound a
+hundred men. If it went into the dug-out of a support trench it would
+get everybody there; but if it went ten yards beyond the trench into
+the open field, it would probably get nobody. "Cover!" someone
+exclaimed, while we were looking at the gun; and everybody promptly
+got under the branches of a tree or a shed. A German aeroplane was
+cruising in our direction. If the aviator saw a group of men standing
+about he might draw conclusions and pass the wireless word to send
+in some shells at whatever number on the German gunners' map
+was ours.
+
+These gunners loved their gun; loved it for the power which it could
+put into a blow under their trained hands; loved it for the care and the
+labour it had meant for them. It is the way of gunners to love their
+gun, or they would not be good gunners. Of all the guns I saw that
+day, I think that two big howitzers meant the most to their masters.
+These had just arrived. They had been set up only two days. They
+had not yet fired against the enemy. For many months the gunners
+had drilled in England, and they had tried their "eight-inch hows" out
+on the target range and brought them across the Channel and
+nursed them along French roads, and finally set them up in their
+hidden lair. Now they waited for observers to assist them in
+registration.
+
+When the general approached there was a call to turn out the guard;
+but the general stopped that. At the front there is an end of the
+ceremoniousness of the barracks. Military formality disappears.
+Discipline, as well as other things, is simpler and more real. The men
+went on with their recess playing football in a near-by field.
+
+The officers possibly were a trifle diffident and uncertain; they had not
+yet the veteran's manner. It was clear that they had done everything
+required by the textbook of theory--the latest, up-to-date textbook of
+experience at the front as taught in England. When they showed us
+how they had stored their stock of shells to be safe from a shot by the
+enemy, one remarked that the method was according to the latest
+directions, though there was some difference among military experts
+on the subject. When there is a difference, what is the beginner to
+do? An old hand, of course, does it his way until an order makes him
+do otherwise. The general had a suggestion about the application of
+the method. He had little to say, the general, and all was in the spirit
+of comradeship and quite to the point. Not much escaped his
+observation.
+
+It seems fairly true that one who knows his work well in any branch of
+human endeavour makes it appear easy. Once a gunner always a
+gunner is characteristic of all armies. The general had spent his life
+with guns. He was a specialist visiting his plant; one of the staff
+specialists responsible to a corps commander for the work of the
+guns on a certain section of map, for accuracy and promptness of fire
+when it was required in the commander's plans.
+
+If the newcomers put their shells into the target on their first trial they
+had qualified; and sometimes newcomers shoot quite as well as
+veterans, which is a surprise to both and the best kind of news for the
+general who is in charge of an expanding plant. The war will be
+decided by gunners and infantry that knew nothing of guns or drill
+when the war began.
+
+"Here are some who have been in France from the first," said the
+general, when we came to a battery of field guns; of the eighteen-
+pounders, the fellows you see behind the galloping horses, the "hell-
+for-leather" guns, the guns which bring the gleam of affection into the
+eyes of men who think of pursuits and covering retreats and the
+pitched-battle conditions before armies settled down in trenches and
+growled and hissed at each other day after day and brought up guns
+of calibres which we associate with battleships and coast
+fortifications.
+
+These are called "light stuff" and "whizz-bangs" now, in army
+parlance. They throw only an eighteen-pound shell which carries
+three hundred bullets, but so fast that they chase one another
+through the air. There has been so much talk about the need of
+heavy guns, you might think that eighteen-pounders were too small
+for consideration. Were the German line broken, these are the ones
+which could gallop on the heels of the infantry.
+
+They are the boys who weave the "curtain of fire" which you read
+about in the official bulletins as checking an infantry charge; which
+demolish the barbed-wire entanglements to let an infantry charge get
+into a trench. If a general wants a shower of bullets over any part of
+the German line he has only to call up the eighteen-pounders and it is
+sent as promptly as the pressure of a button brings a pitcher of iced-
+water to a room in a first-class hotel. A veteran eighteen-pounder
+crew in action is a poem in precision and speed of movement. The
+gun itself seems to possess intelligence.
+
+There was the finesse of gunners' craft worthy of veterans in the way
+that these eighteen-pounders were concealed. The Germans had put
+some shells in the neighbourhood, but without fooling the old hands.
+They did not change the location of their battery and their judgment
+that the shots which came near were chance shots fired at another
+object was justified. Particularly I should like to mention the nature of
+their "funk-pits," which kept them safe from the heaviest shells. For
+the veterans knew how to take care of themselves; they had an eye
+to the protection which comes of experience with German high
+explosives. Their expert knowledge of all the ins and outs of the
+business had been fought into them for over a year.
+
+Another field battery, also, I have in mind, placed in an orchard.
+Which orchard of all the thousands of orchards along the British front
+the German staff may guess, if they choose. If German guns fired at
+all the orchards, one by one, they might locate it--and then again they
+might not. Besides, this is a peculiar sort of orchard.
+
+It is a characteristic of gunners to be neat and to have an eye for the
+comeliness of things. These men had a lawn and a garden, tables
+and chairs. If you are familiar with the tidiness of a retired New
+England sailor, who regards his porch as a quarter-deck and sallies
+forth to remove each descending autumn leaf from the grass, then
+you know how scrupulous they were about litter.
+
+For weeks they had been in the same position, unseen by German
+aeroplanes. They had daily baths; they did their weekly laundry,
+taking care not to hang it where it would be visible from the sky. Every
+day they received the London papers and letters from home. When
+they were needed to help in making war, all they had to do was to slip
+a shell in the breech and send it with their compliments to the
+Germans. They were camping out at His Majesty's expense in the
+pleasant land of France in the joyous summer time; and on the roof of
+sod over their guns were pots of flowers, undisturbed by blasts from
+the gun-muzzles.
+
+It was when leaving another battery that out of the tail of my eye I
+caught a lurid flash through a hedge, followed by the sharp, ear-
+piercing crack that comes from being in line with a gun-muzzle when
+a shot is fired. We followed a path which took us to the rear of the
+report, where we stepped through undergrowth among the busy
+group around the breeches of some guns of one of the larger
+calibres.
+
+An order for some "heavy stuff" at a certain point on the map was
+being filled. Sturdy men were moving in a pantomime under the
+shade of a willow tree, each doing exactly his part in a process that
+seemed as simple as opening a cupboard door, slipping in a package
+of concentrated destruction, and closing the door. All that detail of
+range-finding and mathematical adjustment of aim at the unseen
+target which takes so long to explain was applied as automatically as
+an adding-machine adds up a column of figures. Everybody was as
+practice-perfect in his part as performers who have made hundreds
+of appearances in the same act on the stage.
+
+All ready, the word given, a thunder peal and through the air you saw
+a wingless, black object in a faint curve against the soft blue sky,
+which it seemed to sweep with a sound something like the escape of
+water through a break in the garden hose multiplied by ten, rising to
+its zenith and then descending, till it passed out of sight behind a
+green bank of foliage on the horizon.
+
+After the scream had been lost to the ear you heard the faint,
+thudding boom of an explosion from the burst of that conical piece of
+steel which you had seen slipped into the breech. This was the
+gunners' part in chessboard war, where the moves are made over
+signal wires, while the infantry endure the explosions in their trenches
+and fight in their charges in the traverses of trenches at as close
+quarters as in the days of the cave-dwellers.
+
+There was no stopping work when the general came, of course. It
+would have been the same had Lord Kitchener been present. The
+battery commander expressed his regret that he could not show me
+his guns without any sense of irony; meaning that he was sorry he
+was too busy to tell about his battery. In about the time that it took a
+telegraph key to click after each one of those distant bursts, he knew
+whether or not the shot was on the target and what variation of
+degree to make in the next if it were not; or, if the word came, to shift
+the point of aim a little, when you are trying to shake up the enemy
+here and there along a certain length of trench.
+
+At another wire-end someone was spotting the bursts. Perhaps he
+was in the kind of place where I found one observer, who was sitting
+on a cushion looking out through a chink in a wall, with a signal corps
+operator near by. It was a small chink, just large enough to allow the
+lens of a pair of glasses or a telescope a range of vision; and even
+then I was given certain warnings before the cover over the chink
+was removed, though there could not have been any German in
+uniform nearer than four thousand yards. But there may be spies
+within your own lines, looking for such holes.
+
+From this post I could make out the British and the German trenches
+in muddy white lines of sandbags running snake-like across the fields,
+and the officer identified points on the map to me. Every tree and
+hedge and ditch in the panorama were graven on his mind; all had
+language for him. His work was engrossing. It had risk, too; there was
+no telling when a shell might lift him off the cushion and provide a
+hole for the burial of his remains.
+
+If he were shelled, the observer would go to a funk-pit, as the
+gunners do, until the storm had passed; and then he would move on
+with his cushion and his telegraph instrument and make a hole in
+another wall, if he did not find a tree or some other eminence which
+suited his purpose better. Meanwhile, he was not the only observer in
+that section. There were others nearer the trenches, perhaps actually
+in the trenches. The two armies, seeming chained to their trenches,
+are set with veiled eyes at the end of wires; veiled eyes trying to
+locate the other's eyes, the other's guns and troops and the least
+movement which indicates any attempt to gain an advantage.
+
+"Gunnery is navigation, dead reckoning, with the spotting observer
+the sun by which you correct your figures," said one of the artillery
+officers.
+
+Firing enough one had seen--landscape bathed in smoke and dust
+and reverberating with explosions; but all as a spectacle from an
+orchestra seat, not too close at hand for comfort. This time I was to
+see the guns fire and the results of the firing in detail. Both can rarely
+be seen at the same time. It was not show firing this that we watched
+from an observing station, but part of the day's work for the guns and
+the general. First, the map, "Here and there," as an officer's finger
+pointed; and then one looked across fields, green and brown and
+golden with the summer crops.
+
+Item I. The Germans were fortifying a certain point on a certain farm.
+We were going to put some "heavy stuff" in there and some "light
+stuff," too. The burst of our shells could be located in relation to a
+certain tree.
+
+Item II. Our planes thought that the Germans had a wireless station in
+a certain building. "Heavy stuff" exclusively for this. No enemy's
+wireless station ought to be enjoying serene summer weather without
+interruption; and no German working-party ought to be allowed to
+build redoubts within range of our guns without a break in the
+monotony of their drudgery.
+
+Six lyddites were the order for the wireless station; six high explosives
+which burst on contact and make a hole in the earth large enough for
+a grave for the Kaiser and all his field marshals. Frequently, not only
+the number of shells to be fired, but also the intervals between them
+is given by the artillery commander, as part of his plan in his
+understanding of the object to be accomplished; and it is quite clear
+that the system is the same with the Germans.
+
+One side no sooner develops an idea than the other adopts it. By
+effect of the enemy's shells you judge what the effect of yours must
+be. Months of experience have done away with all theories and
+practice has become much the same by either adversary. For
+example, let a German or a British airman be winged by anti-aircraft
+gun-fire and the guns instantly loosen up on the point over his own
+lines, if he regains them, where he is seen to fall. All the soldiers in
+the neighbourhood are expected to run to his assistance; and, at any
+rate, you may get a trained aviator, whose life is a valuable asset on
+one side of the ledger and whose death an asset on the other. There
+is no sentiment left in war, you see. It is all killing and avoiding being
+killed.
+
+By the scream of a shell the practised ear of the artilleryman can tell
+whether it comes from a gun with a low trajectory or from a howitzer,
+whose projectile rises higher and falls at a sharper angle which
+enables it to enter the trenches; and he can even tell approximately
+the calibre.
+
+A scream sweeping past from our rear, and we knew that this was for
+the redoubt, as that was to have the first turn. A volume of dust and
+smoke breaking from the earth short of the redoubt, and after the
+second's delay of hearing the engine whistle after the burst of steam
+in the distance on a winter day, came the sound of the burst. The
+next was over. With the third the "heavy stuff" ought to be right on.
+
+But don't forget that there was also an order for some "Right stuff,"
+identified as shrapnel by its soft, nimbus-like puff which was
+scattering bullets as if giving chase to that working-party as it
+hastened to cover. There you had the ugly method of this modern
+artillery fire: death shot downward from the air and leaping up out of
+the earth. Unhappily, the third was not on, nor the fourth--not exactly
+on. Exactly on is the way that British gunners like to fill an order
+f.o.b., express charges prepaid, for the Germans.
+
+Ten years ago it would have seemed good shooting. It was not very
+good in the twelfth month of the war; for war beats the target range in
+developing accuracy. At five or six or seven or eight thousand yards'
+range the shells were bursting thirty or forty yards away from where
+they should.
+
+No, not very good; the general murmured as much. He did not need
+to say so aloud to the artillery officer responsible for that shooting,
+who was in touch with his batteries by wire. The officer knew it. He
+was the high-strung, ambitious sort. You had better not become a
+gunner unless you are. Any "good-enough" temperament is ruled off
+wasting munitions. Red was creeping through the tan from his throat
+to the roots of his hair. To have this happen in the presence of that
+veteran general, after all his efforts to try to remedy the error in those
+guns!
+
+But the general was quite human. He was not the "strafing" kind.
+
+"I know those guns have an error!" he said, as he put his hand on the
+officer's arm. That was all; and that was a good deal to the officer.
+Evidently, the general not only knew guns; he knew men. The officer
+had suffered admonition enough from his own injured pride.
+
+Besides, what we did to the supposed wireless station ought to keep
+any general from being downhearted. Neither guns, nor the powder
+which sent the big shells on their errand, nor the calculations of the
+gunners, nor their adjustment of the gadgets, had any error. With the
+first one, a great burst of the black smoke of deadly lyddite rose from
+the target. "Right on!"
+
+And again and again--right on! The ugly, spreading, low-hanging,
+dense cloud was renewed from its heart by successive bursts in the
+same place. If the aeroplane's conclusions were right, that wireless
+station must be very much wireless, now. The only safe discount for
+the life insurance of the operators was one hundred per cent.
+
+"Here, they are firing more than six!" said the general. "It's always
+hard to hold these gunners down when they are on the target like
+that."
+
+He spoke as if it would have been difficult for him to resist the
+temptation himself. The wireless station got two extra shells for full
+measure. Perhaps those two were waste; perhaps the first two had
+been enough. Conservation of shells has become a first principle of
+the artillerists' duty. The number fired by either side in the course of
+the routine of an average so-called peaceful day is surprising.
+Economy would be easier if it were harder to slip a shell into a gun-
+breech. The men in the trenches are always calling for shells. They
+want a tree or a house which is the hiding-place of a sniper knocked
+down. The men at the guns would be glad to accommodate them, but
+the say as to that is with commanders who know the situation.
+
+"The Boches will be coming back at us soon, you will see!" said one
+of the officers who was at our observation post. "They always do. The
+other day they chose this particular spot for their target"--which was a
+good reason why they would not this time, an optimist thought.
+
+Let either side start a bombardment and the other responds. There is
+a you-hit-me-and-I'll-hit-you character about siege warfare. Gun-fire
+provokes gun-fire. Neither adversary stays quiet under a blow. It was
+not long before we heard the whish of German shells passing some
+distance away.
+
+They say sport is out of war. Perhaps, but not its enthralling and
+horrible fascination. Knowing what the target is, knowing the object of
+the fire, hearing the scream of the projectile on the way and watching
+to see if it is to be a hit, when the British are fighting the Germans on
+the soil of France, has an intensive thrill which is missing to the
+spectator who looks on at the Home Sports Club shooting at clay
+pigeons--which is not in justification of war. It does explain, however,
+the attraction of gunnery to gunners. One forgets, for the instant, that
+men are being killed and mangled. He thinks only of points scored in
+a contest which requires all the wit and strength and fortitude of man
+and all his cunning in the manufacture and control of material.
+
+You want your side to win; in this case, because it is the side of
+humanity and of that kindly general and the things that he and the
+army he represents stand for. The blows which the demons from the
+British lairs strike are to you the blows of justice; and you are glad
+when they go home. They are your blows. You have a better reason
+for keeping an army's artillery secrets than for keeping secret the
+signals of your Varsity football team, which anyone instinctively
+keeps--the reason of a world cause.
+
+Yet another thing to see--an aeroplane assisting a battery by spotting
+the fall of its shells, which is engrossing enough, too, and amazingly
+simple. Of course this battery was proud of its method of
+concealment. Each battery commander will tell you that a British
+plane has flown very low, as a test, without being able to locate his
+battery. If it is located, there is more work due in "make-up" to
+complete the disguise. Competition among batteries is as keen as
+among battleships of our North Atlantic fleet.
+
+Situation favoured this battery, which was Canadian. It was as nicely
+at home as a first-class Adirondack camp. At any rate, no other
+battery had a dug-out for a litter of eight pups, with clean straw for
+their bed, right between two gun-emplacements.
+
+"We found the mother wild, out there in the woods," one of the men
+explained. "She, too, was a victim of war; a refugee from some home
+destroyed by shell-fire. At first she wouldn't let us approach her, and
+we tossed her pieces of meat from a safe distance. I think those pups
+will bring us luck. We'll take them along to the Rhine. Some mascots,
+eh?"
+
+On our way back to the general's headquarters we must have passed
+other batteries hidden from sight only a stone's throw away; and yet in
+an illustrated paper recently I saw a drawing of some guns emplaced
+on the crest of a bare hill, naked to all the batteries of the enemy, but
+engaged in destroying all the enemy's batteries, according to the
+account. Twelve months of war have not shaken conventional ideas
+about gunnery; which is one reason for writing this chapter.
+
+Also, on our way back we learned the object of the German fire in
+answer to our bombardment of the redoubt and the wireless station.
+They had shelled a cross-roads and a certain village again. As we
+passed through the village we noticed a new hole in the church tower,
+and three holes in the churchyard, which had scattered clods of earth
+about the pavement. A shopkeeper was engaged in repairing a
+window-frame that had been broken by a shell-fragment.
+
+There is no flustering the French population. That very day I heard of
+an old peasant who asked a British soldier if he could not get
+permission for the old farmer to wear some kind of an armband which
+both sides would respect, so that he could cut his field of wheat
+between the trenches. Why not? Wasn't it his wheat? Didn't he need
+the crop?
+
+And the Germans fire into villages and towns; for the women and
+children there are the women and children of the enemy. But those in
+the German lines belong to the ally of England. Besides, they are
+women and children. So British gunners avoid towns--which is, in one
+sense, a professional handicap.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+Archibald The Archer
+
+
+
+There is another kind of gun, vagrant and free lance, which deserves
+a chapter by itself. It has the same bark as the eighteen-pounder field
+piece; the flight of the shell makes the same kind of sound. But its
+scream, instead of passing in a long parabola toward the German
+lines, goes up in the heavens toward something as large as your
+hand against the light blue of the summer sky--a German aeroplane.
+
+At a height of seven or eight thousand feet the target seems almost
+stationary, when really it is going somewhere between fifty and ninety
+miles an hour. It has all the heavens to itself, and to the British it is a
+sinister, prying eye that wants to see if we are building any new
+trenches, if we are moving bodies of troops or of transport, and where
+our batteries are in hiding. That aviator three miles above the earth
+has many waiting guns at his command. A few signals from his
+wireless and they would let loose on the target he indicated.
+
+If the planes might fly as low as they pleased, they would know all that
+was going on in an enemy's lines. They must keep up so high that
+through the aviator's glasses a man on the road is the size of a pin-
+head. To descend low is as certain death as to put your head over
+the parapet of a trench when the enemy's trench is only a hundred
+yards away. There are dead lines in the air, no less than on the earth.
+
+Archibald, the anti-aircraft gun, sets the dead line. He watches over it
+as a cat watches a mouse. The trick of sneaking up under cover of a
+noonday cloud and all the other man-bird tricks he knows. A couple of
+seconds after that crack a tiny puff of smoke breaks about a hundred
+yards behind the Taube. A soft thistledown against the blue it seems
+at that altitude; but it would not if it were about your ears. Then it
+would sound like a bit of dynamite on an anvil struck by a hammer
+and you would hear the whizz of scores of bullets and fragments.
+
+The smoking brass shell-case is out of Archibald's steel throat, and
+another shell-case with its charge slipped into place and started on its
+way before the first puff breaks. The aviator knows what is coming.
+He knows that one means many, once he is in range.
+
+Archibald rushes the fighting; it is the business of the Taube to side-
+step. The aviator cannot hit back except through his allies, the
+German batteries, on the earth. They would take care of Archibald if
+they knew where he was. But all that the aviator can see is mottled
+landscape. From his side Archibald flies no goal flags. He is one of
+ten thousand tiny objects under the aviator's eye.
+
+Archibald's propensities are entirely peripatetic. He is the vagabond
+of the army lines. Locate him and he is gone. His home is where night
+finds him and the day's duties take him. He is the only gun that keeps
+regular hours like a Christian gentleman. All the others, great and
+small, raucous-voiced and shrill-voiced, fire at any hour, night or day.
+Aeroplanes rarely go up at night; and when no aeroplanes are up,
+Archibald has no interest in the war. But he is alert at the first flush of
+dawn, on the look-out for game with the avidity of a pointer dog; for
+aviators are also up early.
+
+Why he was named Archibald nobody knows. As his full name is
+Archibald the Archer, possibly it comes from some association with
+the idea of archery. If there were ten thousand anti-aircraft guns in the
+British army, every one would be known as Archibald.
+
+When the British Expeditionary Force went to France it had none. All
+the British could do was to bang away at Taubes with thousands of
+rounds of rifle-bullets, which might fall in their own lines, and with the
+field guns.
+
+It was pie in those days for the Taubes! Easy to keep out of the range
+of both rifles and guns and observe well! If the Germans did not know
+the progress of the British retreat from on high it was their own fault.
+Now, the business of firing at Taubes is left entirely to Archibald.
+When you see how hard it is for Archibald, after all his practice, to get
+a Taube, you understand how foolish it was for the field guns to try to
+get one.
+
+Archibald, who is quite the "swaggerist" of the gun tribe, has his own
+private car built especially for him. Such of the cavalry's former part
+as the planes do not play he plays. He keeps off the enemy's scouts.
+Do you seek team-work, spirit of corps, and smartness in this theatre
+of France, where all the old glamour of war is supposed to be
+lacking? You will find it in the attendants of Archibald. They have
+pride, �lan, alertness, pepper, and all the other appetizers and
+condiments. They are as neat as a private yacht's crew, and as lively
+as an infield of a major league team. The Archibaldians are naturally
+bound to think rather well of themselves.
+
+Watch them there, every man knowing his part, as they send their
+shells after the Taube! There is not enough waste motion among the
+lot to tip over the range-finder, or the telescopes, or the score board,
+or any of the other paraphernalia assisting the man who is looking
+through the sight in knowing where to aim next, as a screw answers
+softly to his touch.
+
+Is the sport of war dead? Not for Archibald! Here you see your target
+--which is so rare these days when British infantrymen have stormed
+and taken trenches without ever seeing a German--and the target is a
+bird, a man-bird. Puffs of smoke with bursting hearts of death are
+clustered around the Taube. One follows another in quick succession,
+for more than one Archibald is firing, before your entranced eye.
+
+You are staring like the crowd of a county fair at a parachute act. For
+the next puff may get him. Who knows this better than the aviator?
+He is, likely, an old hand at the game; or, if he is not, he has all the
+experience of other veterans to go by. His ruse is the same as that of
+the escaped prisoner who runs from the fire of a guard in a zigzag
+course, and more than that. If a puff comes near on the right, he turns
+to the left; if one comes near on the left, he turns to the right; if one
+comes under, he rises; over, he dips. This means that the next shell
+fired at the same point will be wide of the target.
+
+Looking through the sight, it seems easy to hit a plane. But here is
+the difficulty. It takes two seconds, say, for the shell to travel to the
+range of the plane. The gunner must wait for its burst before he can
+spot his shot. Ninety miles an hour is a mile and a half a minute.
+Divide that by thirty and you have about a hundred yards which the
+plane has travelled from the time the shell left the gun-muzzle till it
+burst. It becomes a matter of discounting the aviator's speed and
+guessing from experience which way he will turn next.
+
+That ought to have got him--the burst was right under. No! He rises.
+Surely that one got him! The puff is right in front, partly hiding the
+Taube from view. You see the plane tremble as if struck by a violent
+gust of wind. Close! Within thirty or forty yards, the telescope says.
+But at that range the naked eye is easily deceived about distance.
+Probably some of the bullets have cut his plane.
+
+But you must hit the man or the machine in a vital spot in order to
+bring down your bird. The explosions must be very close to count. It is
+amazing how much shell-fire an aeroplane can stand. Aviators are
+accustomed to the whizz of shell-fragments and bullets, and to have
+their planes punctured and ripped. Though their engines are put out
+of commission, and frequently though the man be wounded, they are
+able to volplane back to the cover of their own lines.
+
+To make a proper story we ought to have brought down this particular
+bird. But it had the luck, which most planes, British or German have,
+to escape antiaircraft gun-fire. It had begun edging away after the first
+shot and soon was out of range. Archibald had served the purpose of
+his existence. He had sent the prying aerial eye home.
+
+A fight between planes in the air very rarely happens, except in the
+imagination. Planes do not go up to fight other planes, but for
+observation. Their business is to see and learn and bring home their
+news.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+Trenches In Summer
+
+
+
+It was the same trench in June, still a relatively "quiet corner," which I
+had seen in March; but I would never have known it if its location had
+not been the same on the map. One was puzzled how a place that
+had been so wet could become so dry.
+
+This time the approach was made in daylight through a long
+communication ditch, which brought us to a shell-wrecked
+farmhouse. We passed through this and stepped down at the back
+door into deep traverses cut among the roots of an orchard; then
+behind walls of earth high above our heads to battalion headquarters
+in a neat little shanty, where I deposited the first of the cakes I had
+brought on the table beside some battalion reports. A cake is the right
+gift for the trenches, though less so in summer than in winter when
+appetites are less keen. The adjutant tried a slice while the colonel
+conferred with the general, who had accompanied me this far, and he
+glanced up at a sheet of writing with a line opposite hours of the day,
+pinned to a post of his dug-out.
+
+"I wanted to see if it were time to make another report," he said. "We
+are always making reports. Everybody is, so that whoever is superior
+to someone else knows what is happening in his subordinate's
+department."
+
+Then in and out in a maze, between walls with straight faces of the
+hard, dry earth, testifying to the beneficence of summer weather in
+constructing fastnesses from artillery fire, until we were in the firing-
+trench, where I was at home among the officers and men of a
+company. General Mud was "down and out." He waited on the winter
+rains to take command again. But winter would find an army prepared
+against his kind of campaign. Life in the trenches in summer was not
+so unpleasant but that some preferred it, with the excitement of
+sniping, to the boredom of billets.
+
+
+
+"What hopes!" was the current phrase I heard among the men in
+these trenches. It shared honours with strafe. You have only one life
+to live and you may lose that any second--what hopes! Dig, dig, dig,
+and set off a mine that sends Germans skyward in a cloud of dust--
+what hopes! Bully beef from Chicago and Argentina is no food for
+babes, but better than "K.K." bread--what hopes! Mr. Thomas Atkins,
+British regular, takes things as they come--and a lot of them come--
+shells, bullets, asphyxiating gas, grenades, and bombs.
+
+There is much to be thankful for. The King's Own Particular Fusiliers,
+as we shall call this regiment, had only three men hit yesterday. On
+every man's cap is a metal badge crowded with battle honours, from
+the storming of Quebec to the relief of Ladysmith. Heroic its history;
+but no battle honours equal that of the regiment's part in the second
+battle of Ypres; and no heroes of the regiment's story, whom you
+picture in imagination with haloes of glory in the wish that you might
+have met them in the flesh in their scarlet coats, are the equal of
+these survivors in plain khaki manning a ditch in A.D. 1915, whom
+anyone may meet.
+
+But do not tell them that they are heroes. They will deny it on the
+evidence of themselves as eyewitnesses of the action. To remark
+that the K.O.P.F. are brave is like remarking that water flows down
+hill. It is the business of the K.O.P.F. to be brave. Why talk about it?
+
+One of the three men hit was killed. Well, everybody in the war rather
+expects to be killed. The other two "got tickets to England," as they
+say. My lady will take the convalescents joy-riding in her car, and
+afterwards seat them in easy chairs, arranging the cushions with her
+own hands, and feed them slices of cold chicken in place of bully beef
+and strawberries and cream in place of ration marmalade. Oh, my!
+What hopes!
+
+Mr. Atkins does not mind being a hero for the purposes of such
+treatment. Then, with never a twinkle in his eye, he will tell my lady
+that he does not want to return to the front; he has had enough of it,
+he has. My lady's patriotism will be a trifle shocked, as Mr. Atkins
+knows it will be; and she will wonder if the "stick it" quality of the
+British soldier is weakening, as Mr. Atkins knows she will. For he has
+more kinks in his mental equipment than mere nobility ever guesses,
+and he is having the time of his life in more respects than
+strawberries and cream. What hopes! Of course, he will return and
+hold on in the face of all that the Germans can give, without any
+pretence to bravery.
+
+If you go as a stranger into the trenches on a sightseeing tour and
+says, "How are you?" and, "Are you going to Berlin?" and, "Are you
+comfortable?" etc., Tommy Atkins will say, "Yes, sir," and "Very well,
+sir," as becomes all polite regular soldier men; and you get to know
+him about as well as you know the members of a club if you are
+shown the library and dine at a corner table with a friend.
+
+Spend the night in the trenches and you are taken into the family, into
+that very human family of soldier-dom in a quiet corner; and the old,
+care-free spirit of war, which some people thought had passed, is
+found to be no less alive in siege warfare than on a march of regulars
+on the Indian frontier or in the Philippines. Gaiety and laughter and
+comradeship and "joshing" are here among men to whom wounds
+and death are a part of the game. One may challenge high
+explosives with a smile, no less than ancient round shot. Settle down
+behind the parapet, and the little incongruities of a trench, paltry
+without the intimacy of men and locality, make for humour no less
+than in a shop or a factory.
+
+Under the parapet runs the tangle of barbed wire--barbed wire from
+Switzerland to Belgium--to welcome visitors from that direction, which,
+to say the least, would be an impolitic direction of approach for any
+stranger.
+
+"All sightseers should come into the trenches from the rear," says Mr.
+Atkins. "Put it down in the guidebooks."
+
+Beyond the barbed wire in the open field the wheat which some
+farmer sowed before positions were established in this area is now in
+head, rippling with the breeze, making a golden sea up to the wall of
+sandbags which is the enemy's line. It was late June at its loveliest;
+no signs of war except the sound of our guns some distance away
+and an occasional sniper's bullet. One cracked past as I was looking
+through my glasses to see if there were any evidence of life in the
+German trenches.
+
+"Your hat, sir!"
+
+Another moved a sandbag slightly, but not until after the hat had
+come down and the head under it, most expeditiously. Up to eight
+hundred yards a bullet cracks; beyond that range it whistles, sighs,
+even wheezes. An elevation gives snipers, who are always trained
+shots, an angle of advantage. In winter they had to rely for cover on
+buildings, which often came tumbling down with them when hit by a
+shell. The foliage of summer is a boon to their craft.
+
+"Does it look to you like an opening in the branches of that tree--the
+big one at the right?"
+
+In the mass of leaves a dark spot was visible. It might be natural, or it
+might be a space cut away for the swing of a rifle-barrel. Perhaps
+sitting up there snugly behind a bullet-proof shield fastened to the
+limbs was a German sharpshooter, watching for a shot with the
+patience of a hound for a rabbit to come out of its hole.
+
+"It's about time we gave that tree a spray good for that kind of fungus,
+from a machine-gun!"
+
+A bullet coming from our side swept overhead. One of our own
+sharpshooters had seen something to shoot at.
+
+"Not giving you much excitement!" said Tommy.
+
+"I suppose I'd get a little if I stood up on the parapet?" I asked.
+
+"You wouldn't get a ticket for England; you'd get a box!"
+
+"There's a cemetery just behind the lines if you'd prefer to stay in
+France!"
+
+I had passed that cemetery with its fresh wooden crosses on my way
+to the trench. These tenderhearted soldiers who joked with death had
+placed flowers on the graves of fallen comrades and bought
+elaborate French funeral wreaths with their meagre pay--which is
+another side of Mr. Thomas Atkins. There is sentiment in him. Yes,
+he's loaded with sentiment, but not for the "movies."
+
+"Keep your head down there, Eames!" called a corporal. "I don't want
+to be taking an inventory of your kit."
+
+Eames did not even realize that his head was above the parapet. The
+hardest thing to teach a soldier is not to expose himself. Officers keep
+iterating warnings and then forget to practise what they preach. That
+morning a soldier had been shot through the heart and arm sideways
+behind the trench. He had lain down unnoticed for a nap in the sun, it
+was supposed. When he awoke, presumably he sat up and yawned
+and Herr Schmidt, from some platform in a tree, had a bloody reward
+for his patience.
+
+The next morning I saw the British take their revenge. Some German
+who thought that he could not be seen in the mist of dawn was
+walking along the German parapet. What hopes! Four or five men
+took careful aim and fired. That dim figure collapsed in a way that was
+convincing.
+
+As I swept the line of German trenches with the glasses I saw a wisp
+of flag clinging to its pole in the still air far down to the left. Flags
+are as unusual above trenches as men standing up in full view of
+the enemy. Then a breeze caught the folds, and I saw that it was
+the tricolour of France.
+
+"A Boche joke!" Tommy explained.
+
+"Probably they are hating the French to-day?"
+
+"No, it's been there for some days. They want us to shoot at the flag
+of our ally. They'd get a laugh out of that--a regular Boche notion of
+humour."
+
+"If it were a German flag?" I suggested.
+
+"What hopes! We'd make it into a lace curtain!"
+
+Even the guns had ceased firing. The birds in their evensong had all
+the war to themselves. It was difficult to believe that if you stood on
+top of the parapet anybody would shoot at you; no, not even if you
+walked down the road that ran through the wheatfield, everything was
+so peaceful. One grew sceptical of there being any Germans in the
+trenches opposite.
+
+"There are three or four sharpshooters and a fat old Boche professor
+in spectacles, who moves a machine-gun up and down for a bluff,"
+said a soldier, and another corrected him:
+
+"No, the old professor's the one that walks along at night sending up
+flares!"
+
+"Munching K.K. bread with his false teeth!"
+
+"And singing the hymn of hate!"
+
+Thus the talk ran on in the quiet of evening, till we heard a concussion
+and a quarter of a mile away, behind a screen of trees, a pillar of
+smoke rose to the height of two or three hundred feet.
+
+"A mine!" In front of the -th brigade!"
+
+"Ours or the Boches'?"
+
+"Ours, from the way the smoke went--our fuse!"
+
+"No, theirs!"
+
+Our colonel telephoned down to know if we knew whose mine it was,
+which was the question we wanted to ask him. The guns from both
+sides became busy under the column of smoke. Oh, yes, there were
+Germans in the trenches which had appeared vacant. Their shots
+and ours merged in the hissing medley of a tempest.
+
+"Not enough guns--not enough noise for an attack!" said experienced
+Tommy, who knew what an attack was like.
+
+The commander of the adjoining brigade telephoned to the division
+commander, who passed the word through to our colonel, who
+passed it to us that the mine was German and had burst thirty yards
+short of the British trench.
+
+"After all that digging, wasting Boche powder in that fashion! The
+Kaiser won't like it!" said Mr. Atkins. "We exploded one under them
+yesterday and it made them hate so hard they couldn't wait. They've
+awful tempers, the Boches!" And he finished the job on which he was
+engaged when interrupted, eating a large piece of ration bread
+surmounted by all the ration jam it could hold; while one of the
+company officers reminded me that it was about dinner time.
+
+
+
+"What do you think I am? A blooming traffic policeman?" growled the
+cook to two soldiers who had found themselves in a blind alley in the
+maze of streets back of the firing-trench. "My word! Is His Majesty's
+army becoming illiterate? Strafe that sign at the corner! What do you
+think we put it up for? To show what a beautiful hand we had at
+printing?"
+
+The sign on a board fastened against the earth wall read, "No
+thoroughfare!" The soldier-cook, with a fork in his hand, his sleeves
+rolled up, his shirt open at his tanned throat, looked formidable. He
+was preoccupied; he was at close quarters roasting a chicken over a
+small stove. Yes, they have cook-stoves in the trenches. Why not?
+The line had been in the same position for six months.
+
+"Little by little we improve our happy home," said the cook.
+
+The latest acquisition was a lace curtain for the officers' mess hall,
+bought at a shop in the nearest town.
+
+When the cook was inside his kitchen there was no room to spill
+anything on the floor. The kitchen was about three feet square, with
+boarded walls, and a roof covered with tar paper and a layer of earth
+set level with the trench parapet. The chicken roasted and the frying
+potatoes sizzled as an occasional bullet passed overhead, even as
+flies buzz about the screen door when Mary is making cakes for tea.
+
+The officers' mess hall, next to the kitchen and built in the same
+fashion, had some boards nailed on posts sunk in the ground for a
+table, which was proof against tipping when you climbed over it or
+squeezed around it to your place. The chairs were rifle-ammunition
+boxes, whose contents had been emptied with individual care, bullet
+by bullet, at the Germans in the trench on the other side of the
+wheatfield. Dinner was at nine in the evening, when it was still twilight
+in the longest days of the year in this region. The hour fits in with
+trench routine, when night is the time to be on guard and you sleep
+by day. Breakfast comes at nine in the morning. I was invited to help
+eat the chicken and to spend the night.
+
+Now, the general commanding the brigade who accompanied me to
+the trenches had been hit twice. So had the colonel, a man about
+forty. From forty, ages among the regimental officers dropped into the
+twenties.
+
+Many of the older men who started in the war had been killed, or were
+back in England wounded, or had been promoted to other commands
+where their experience was more useful. To youth, life is sweet and
+danger is life. The oldest of the officers of the proud old K.O.P.F. who
+gathered for dinner was about twenty-five, though when he assumed
+an air of authority he seemed to be forty. It was not right to ask the
+youngest his age. Parenthetically, let it be said that he is trying to
+start a moustache. They had come fresh from Sandhurst to swift
+tuition in gruelling, incessant warfare.
+
+"Has anyone asked him it yet?" one inquired, referring to some
+question to the guest.
+
+"Not yet? Then all together: When do you think that the war will be
+over?"
+
+It was the eternal question of the trenches, the army, and the world.
+We had it over with before the soldier-cook brought on the roast
+chicken, which was received with a befitting chorus of approbation.
+
+Who would carve? Who knew how to carve? Modesty passed the
+honour to her neighbour, till a brave man said:
+
+"I will! I will strafe the chicken!" 'Gott strafe England!' Strafe has
+become a noun, a verb, an adjective, a cussword, and a term of
+greeting. Soldier asks soldier how he is strafing to-day. When the
+Germans are not called Boches they are called Strafers. "Won't you
+strafe a little for us?" Tommy sings out to the German trenches when
+they are close. What hopes? That gallant youngster of the K.O.P.F. in
+the midst of bantering advice succeeded in separating the meat from
+the bones without landing a leg in anybody's lap or a wing in
+anybody's eye. Timid spectators who had hung back where he had
+dared might criticize his form, but they could not deny the efficiency of
+his execution. He was appointed permanent strafer of all the fowls
+that came to table.
+
+Everybody talked and joked about everything, from plays in London
+to the Germans. There were arguments about favourite actors and
+military methods. The sense of danger was as absent as if we had
+been dining in a summer garden. It was the parents and relatives in
+pleasant English homes in fear of a dread telegram who were
+worrying, not the sons and brothers in danger. Isn't it better that way?
+Would not the parents prefer it that way? Wasn't it the way of the
+ancestors in the scarlet coats and the Merrie England of their day?
+With the elasticity of youth my hosts adapted themselves to
+circumstances. In their lightheartedness they made war seem a keen
+sport. They lived war for all it was worth. If it gets on their nerves
+their efficiency is spoiled. There is no room for a jumpy, excitable
+man in the trenches. Youth's resources defy monotony and death
+at the same time.
+
+An expedition had been planned for that night. A patrol the previous
+night had brought in word that the Germans had been sneaking up
+and piling sandbags in the wheatfield. The plan was to slip out as
+soon as it was really dark with a machine-gun and a dozen men, get
+behind the Germans' own sandbags, and give them a perfectly
+informal reception when they returned to go on with their work.
+
+Before dinner, however, J------, who was to be the general of the
+expedition, and his subordinates made a reconnaissance. Two or
+more officers or men always go out together on any trip of this kind in
+that ticklish space between the trenches, where it is almost certain
+death to be seen by the enemy. If one is hit the other can help him
+back. If one survives he will bring back the result of his investigations.
+
+J----had his own ideas about comfort in trousers in the trench in
+summer. He wore shorts with his knees bare. When he had to do a
+"crawl" he unwound his puttees and wound them over his knees. He
+and the others slipped over the parapet without attracting the
+attention of the enemy's sharpshooters. On hands and knees, like
+boy scouts playing Indians, they passed through a narrow avenue in
+the ugly barbed wire, and still not a shot at them. A matter of the
+commonplace to the men in the trench held the spectator in
+suspense. There was a fascination about the thing, too; that of the
+sporting chance, without a full realization that failure in this hide-and-
+seek game might mean a spray of bullets and death for these young
+men.
+
+They entered the wheat, moving slowly like two land turtles. The grain
+parted in swaths over them. Surely the Germans might see the
+turtles' heads as they were raised to look around. No officer can be
+too young and supple for this kind of work. Here the company officer
+just out of school is in his element, with an advantage over older
+officers. That pair were used to crawling. They did not keep their
+heads up long. They knew just how far they might expose
+themselves. They passed out of sight, and reappeared and slipped
+back over the parapet again without the Germans being any the
+wiser. Hard luck! It is an unaccommodating world! They found that
+the patrol which had examined the bags at night had failed to discern
+that they were old and must have been there for some time.
+
+"I'll take the machine-gun out, anyhow, if the colonel will permit it,"
+said J------. For the colonel puts on the brakes. Otherwise, there is no
+telling what risks youth might take with machine-guns.
+
+We were half through dinner when a corporal came to report that a
+soldier on watch thought that he had seen some Germans moving in
+the wheat very near our barbed wire. Probably a false alarm; but no
+one in a trench ever acts on the theory that any alarm is false. Eternal
+vigilance is the price of holding a trench. Either side is cudgelling its
+brains day and night to spring some new trick on the other. If one side
+succeeds with a trick, the other immediately adopts it. No international
+copyright in strategy is recognized. We rushed out of the mess hall
+into the firing-trench, where we found the men on the alert, rifles laid
+on the spot where the Germans were supposed to have been seen.
+
+"Who are you? Answer, or we fire!" called the ranking young
+lieutenant.
+
+If any persons present out in front in the face of thirty rifles knew the
+English language and had not lost the instinct of self-preservation,
+they would certainly have become articulate in response to such an
+unveiled hint. Not a sound came. Probably a rabbit running through
+the wheat had been the cause of the alarm. But you take no risks.
+The order was given, and the men combed the wheat with a fusillade.
+
+"Enough! Cease fire!" said the officer. "Nobody there. If there had
+been we should have heard the groan of a wounded man or seen the
+wheat stir as the Germans hugged closer to the earth for cover."
+
+This he knew by experience. It was not the first time he had used a
+fusillade in this kind of a test.
+
+After dinner J------rolled his puttees up around his bare knees again,
+for the colonel had not withdrawn permission for the machine-gun
+expedition. J------'s knees were black and blue in spots; they were
+also--well, there is not much water for washing purposes in the
+trenches. Great sport that, crawling through the dew-moist wheat in
+the faint moonlight, looking for a bunch of Germans in the hope of
+turning a machine-gun on them before they turn one on you!
+
+"One man hit by a stray bullet," said J------on his return.
+
+"I heard the bullet go th-ip into the earth after it went through his leg,"
+said the other officer.
+
+"Blythe was a recruit and he had asked me to take him out the first
+time there was anything doing. I promised that I would, and he got
+about the only shot fired at us."
+
+"Need a stretcher?"
+
+"No."
+
+Blythe came hobbling through the traverse to the communication
+trench, seeming well pleased with himself. The soft part of the leg is
+not a bad place to receive a bullet if one is due to hit you.
+
+
+
+Night is always the time in the trenches when life grows more
+interesting and death more likely.
+
+"It's dark enough, now," said one of the youngsters who was out on
+another scout. "We'll go out with the patrol."
+
+By day, the slightest movement of the enemy is easily and instantly
+detected. Light keeps the combatants to the warrens which protect
+them from shell and bullet-fire. At night there is no telling what
+mischief the enemy may be up to; you must depend upon the ear
+rather than the eye for watching. Then the human soldier-fox comes
+out of his burrow and sneaks forth on the lookout for prey; both sides
+are on the prowl.
+
+"Trained owls would be the most valuable scouts we could have,"
+said the young officer. "They would be more useful than aeroplanes
+in locating the enemy's gun-positions. A properly reliable owl would
+come back and say that a German patrol was out in the wheatfield at
+such a point and a machine-gun would wipe out that patrol."
+
+We turned into a side trench, an alley off the main street, leading out
+of the front trench toward the Germans.
+
+"Anybody out?" he asked a soldier who was on guard at the end of it.
+
+"Yes, two."
+
+Climbing out of the ditch, we were in the midst of a tangle of barbed
+wire protecting the trench front, which was faintly visible in the
+starlight. There was a break in the tangle, a narrow cut in the hedge,
+as it were, kept open for just such purposes as this. When the patrol
+returned it closed the gate again.
+
+"Look out for that wire--just there! Do you see it? We've everything to
+keep the Boches off our front lawn except 'Keep off the grass!' signs."
+
+It was perfectly still, a warm summer night without a cat's-paw of
+breeze. Through the dark curtain of the sky in a parabola rising from
+the German trenches swept the brilliant sputter of red light of a
+German flare. It was coming as straight toward us as if it had been
+aimed at us. It cast a searching, uncanny glare over the tall wheat in
+head between the trenches.
+
+"Down flat!" whispered the officer.
+
+It seemed foolish to grovel before a piece of fireworks. There was no
+firing in our neighbourhood; nothing to indicate a state of war between
+the British Empire and Germany; no visual evidence of any German
+army in France except that flare. However, if a guide who knows as
+much about war as this one says you are to prostrate yourself when
+you are out between two lines of machine-guns and rifles--between
+the fighting powers of England and Germany--you take the hint. The
+flare sank into earth a few yards away, after a last insulting, ugly fling
+of sparks in our faces.
+
+"What if we had been seen?"
+
+"They'd have combed the wheat in this part thoroughly, and they
+might have got us."
+
+"It's hard to believe," I said.
+
+So it was, he agreed. That was the exasperating thing. Always hard
+to believe, perhaps, until after all the cries of wolf the wolf came; until
+after nineteen harmless flares the twentieth revealed to the watching
+enemy the figure of a man above the wheat, when a crackling chorus
+of bullets would suddenly break the silence of night by concentrating
+on a target. Keeping cover from German flares is a part of the minute,
+painstaking economy of war.
+
+We crawled on slowly, taking care to make no noise, till we brought
+up behind two soldiers hugging the earth, rifles in hand ready to fire
+instantly. It was their business not only to see the enemy first, but to
+shoot first, and to capture or kill any German patrol. The officer spoke
+to them and they answered. It was unnecessary for them to say that
+they had seen nothing. If they had we should have known it. He was
+out there less to scout himself than to make sure that they were on
+the job; that they knew how to watch. The visit was part of his routine.
+We did not even whisper. Preferably, all whispering would be done by
+any German patrol out to have a look at our barbed wire and
+overheard by us.
+
+Silence and the starlight and the damp wheat; but, yes, there was
+war. You heard gun-fire half a mile, perhaps a mile, away; and raising
+your head you saw auroras from bursting shells. We heard at our
+backs faintly snatches of talk from our trenches and faintly in front the
+talk from theirs. It sounded rather inviting and friendly from both sides,
+like that around some camp-fire on the plains.
+
+It seemed quite within the bounds of possibility that you might have
+crawled on up to the Germans and said, "Howdy!" But by the time
+you reached the edge of their barbed wire and before you could
+present your visiting-card, if not sooner, you would have been full of
+holes. That was just the kind of diversion from trench monotony for
+which the Germans were looking. "Well, shall we go back?" asked the
+officer. There seemed no particular purpose in spending the night
+prone in the wheat with your ears cocked like a pointer-dog's.
+Besides, he had other duties, exacting duties laid down by the colonel
+as the result of trench experience in his responsibility for the
+command of a company of men.
+
+It happened as we crawled back into the trench, that a fury of shots
+broke out from a point along the line two or three hundred yards
+away; sharp, vicious shots on the still night air, stabbing, merciless
+death in their sound. Oh, yes, there was war in France; unrelenting,
+shrewd, tireless war. A touch of suspicion anywhere and the hornets
+swarmed.
+
+
+
+It was two a.m. From the dug-outs came unmistakable sounds of
+slumber. Men off duty were not kept awake by cold and moisture in
+summer. They had fashioned for themselves comfortable dormitories
+in the hard earth walls. A cot in an officer's bedchamber was
+indicated as mine. The walls had been hung with cuts from illustrated
+papers and bagging spread on the floor to make it "home-like." He lay
+down on the floor because he was nearer the door in case he had to
+respond to an alarm; besides, he said I would soon appreciate that I
+was not the object of favouritism. So I did. It was a trench-made cot,
+fashioned by some private of engineers, I fancy, who had Germans
+rather than the American cousin in mind.
+
+"The wall side of the rib that runs down the middle is the comfortable
+side, I have found," said my host. "It may not appear so at first, but
+you will find it works out that way."
+
+Nevertheless, I slept, my last recollection that of sniping shots, to be
+awakened with the first streaks of day by the sound of a fusillade--the
+"morning hate" or the "morning strafe" as it is called. After the vigil of
+darkness it breaks the monotony to salute the dawn with a burst of
+rifle-shots. Eyes strained through the mist over the wheatfield
+watching for some one of the enemy who may be exposing himself,
+unconscious that it is light enough for him to be visible. Objects which
+are not men but look as if they might be in the hazy distance, called
+for attention on the chance. For ten minutes, perhaps, the serenade
+lasted, and then things settled down to the normal. The men were
+yawning and stirring from their dug-outs. After the muster they would
+take the places of those who had been "on the bridge" through the
+night.
+
+"It's a case of how little water you can wash with, isn't it?" I said to
+the cook, who appreciated my thoughtfulness when I made shift
+with a dipperful, as I had done on desert journeys. We were in a trench
+that was inundated with water in winter, and not more than two miles
+from a town which had water laid on. But bringing a water supply in
+pails along narrow trenches is a poor pastime, though better than
+bringing it up under the rifle-sights of snipers across the fields back
+of the trenches.
+
+"Don't expect much for breakfast," said the strafer of the chicken. But
+it was eggs and bacon, the British stand-by in all weathers, at home
+and abroad.
+
+J------was going to turn in and sleep. These youngsters could sleep at
+any time; for one hour, or two hours, or five, or ten, if they had a
+chance. A sudden burst of rifle-fire was the alarm clock which always
+promptly awakened them. The recollection of cheery hospitality and
+their fine, buoyant spirit is even clearer now than when I left the
+trench.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+A School In Bombing
+
+
+
+It was at a bombing school on a French farm, where chosen soldiers
+brought back from the trenches were being trained in the use of the
+anarchists' weapon, which has now become as respectable as the
+rifle. The war has steadily developed specialism. M.B. degrees for
+Master Bombers are not beyond the range of possibilities.
+
+Present was the chief instructor, a Scottish subaltern with blue eyes,
+a pleasant smile, and a Cock-o'-the-North spirit. He might have been
+twenty years old, though he did not look it. On his breast was the
+purple and white ribbon of the new order of the Military Cross, which
+you get for doing something in this war which would have won you a
+Victoria Cross in one of the other wars.
+
+Also present was the assistant instructor, a sergeant of regulars--and
+very much of a regular--who had three ribbons which he had won in
+previous campaigns. He, too, had blue eyes, bland blue eyes. These
+two understood each other.
+
+"If you don't drop it, why, it's all right!" said the sergeant. "Of course,
+if you do------"
+
+I did not drop it.
+
+"And when you throw it, sir, you must look out and not hit the man
+behind you and knock the bomb out of your hand. That has
+happened before to an absent-minded fellow who was about to toss
+one at the Boches, and it doesn't do to be absent-minded when you
+throw bombs."
+
+"They say that you sometimes pick up the German bombs and chuck
+them back before they explode," I suggested.
+
+"Yes, sir, I've read things like that in some of the accounts of the
+reporters who write from Somewhere in France. You don't happen to
+know where that is, sir? All I can say is that if you are going to do it
+you must be quick about it. I shouldn't advise delaying decision, sir, or
+perhaps when you reached down to pick it up, neither your hand nor
+the bomb would be there. They'd have gone off together, sir."
+
+"Have you ever been hurt in your handling of bombs?" I asked.
+
+Surprise in the bland blue eyes. "Oh, no, sir! Bombs are well behaved
+if you treat them right. It's all in being thoughtful and considerate of
+them!" Meanwhile, he was jerking at some kind of a patent fuse set in
+a shell of high explosive. "This is a poor kind, sir. It's been discarded,
+but I thought that you might like to see it. Never did like it. Always
+making trouble!"
+
+More distance between the audience and the performer. "Now I've
+got it, sir--get down, sir!" The audience carried out instructions to the
+letter, as army regulations require. It got behind the protection of one
+of the practice-trench traverses. He threw the discard behind another
+wall of earth. There was a sharp report, a burst of smoke, and some
+fragments of earth were tossed into the air.
+
+In a small affair of two hundred yards of trench a week before, it was
+estimated that the British and the Germans together threw about five
+thousand bombs in this fashion. It was enough to sadden any
+Minister of Munitions. However, the British kept the trench.
+
+"Do the men like to become bombers?" I asked the subaltern.
+
+"I should say so! It puts them up in front. It gives them a chance to
+throw something, and they don't get much cricket in France, you see.
+We had a pupil here last week who broke the throwing record for
+distance. He was as pleased as Punch with himself. A first-class
+bombing detachment has a lot of pride of corps."
+
+To bomb soon became as common a verb with the army as to
+bayonet. "We bombed them out" meant a section of trench taken by
+throwing bombs. As you know, a trench is dug and built with
+sandbags in zigzag traverses. In following the course of a trench it is
+as if you followed the sides of the squares of a checker board up and
+down and across on the same tier of squares. The square itself is a
+bank of earth, with the cut on either side and in front of it. When a
+bombing-party bombs its way into possession of a section of German
+trench, there are Germans under cover of the traverses on either
+side. They are waiting around the corner to shoot the first British head
+that shows itself.
+
+"It is important that you and not the Boches chuck the bombs over
+first," explained the subaltern. "Also, that you get them into the right
+traverse, or they may be as troublesome to you as to the enemy."
+
+With bombs bursting in their faces, the Germans who are not put out
+of action are blinded and stunned. In that moment when they are off
+guard, the aggressors leap around the corner.
+
+"And then?"
+
+"Stick 'em, sir!" said the matter-of-fact sergeant. "Yes, the cold steel is
+best. And do it first! As Mr. MacPherson said, it's very important to do
+it first."
+
+It has been found that something short is handy for this kind of work.
+In such cramped quarters--a ditch six feet deep and from two to three
+feet broad--the rifle is an awkward length to permit of prompt and
+skilful use of the bayonet.
+
+"Yes, sir, you can mix it up better with something handy--to think that
+British soldiers would come to fighting like assassins!" said the
+sergeant. "You must be spry on such occasions. It's no time for wool-
+gathering."
+
+Not a smile from him or the subaltern all the time. They were the kind
+you would like to have along in a tight corner, whether you had to fight
+with knives, fists, or seventeen-inch howitzers.
+
+The sergeant took us into the storehouse where he kept his supply of
+bombs.
+
+"What if a German shell should strike your storehouse?" I asked.
+
+"Then, sir, I expect that most of the bombs would be exploded.
+Bombs are very peculiar in their habits. What do you think, sir?"
+
+It was no trouble to show stock, as clerks at the stores say. He
+brought forth all the different kinds of bombs that British ingenuity had
+invented--but no, not all invented. These would mount into the
+thousands. Every British inventor who knows anything about
+explosives has tried his hand at a new kind of bomb. One means all
+the kinds which the British War Office has considered worth a
+practice test. The spectator was allowed to handle each one as much
+as he pleased. There had been occasions, that boyish Scottish
+subaltern told me, when the men who were examining the products of
+British ingenuity--well, the subaltern had sandy hair, too, which
+heightened the effect of his blue eyes.
+
+There were yellow and green and blue and black and striped bombs;
+egg-shaped, barrel-shaped, conical, and concave bombs; bombs that
+were exploded by pulling a string and by pressing a button--all these
+to be thrown by hand, without mentioning grenades and other larger
+varieties to be thrown by mechanical means, which would have made
+a Chinese warrior of Confucius' time or a Roman legionary feel at
+home.
+
+"This was the first-born," the subaltern explained, "the first thing we
+could lay our hands on when the close quarters' trench warfare
+began."
+
+It was as out of date as grandfather's smooth-bore, the tin-pot bomb
+that both sides used early in the winter. A wick was attached to the
+high explosive, wrapped in cloth and stuck in an ordinary army jam
+tin.
+
+"Quite home-made, as you see, sir," remarked the sergeant. "Used to
+fix them up ourselves in the trenches in odd hours--saved burying the
+refuse jam tins according to medical corps directions--and you threw
+them at the Boches. Had to use a match to light it. Very old-
+fashioned, sir. I wonder if that old fuse has got damp. No, it's going all
+right"--and he threw the jam pot, which made a good explosion. Later,
+when he began hammering the end of another he looked up in mild
+surprise at the dignified back-stepping of the spectators.
+
+"Is that fuse out?" someone asked.
+
+"Yes, sir. Of course, sir," he replied. "It's safer. But here is the best;
+we're discarding the others," he went on, as he picked up a bomb.
+
+It was a pleasure to throw this crowning achievement of experiments.
+It fitted your hand nicely; it threw easily; it did the business; it was
+fool-proof against a man in love or a war-poet.
+
+"We saw as soon as this style came out," said the sergeant, "that it
+was bound to be popular. Everybody asks for it--except the Boches,
+sir."
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+My Best Day At The Front
+
+
+
+It was the best day because one ran the gamut of the mechanics and
+emotions of modern war within a single experience--and oh, the
+twinkle in that staff officer's eye!
+
+It was on a Monday that I first met him in the ballroom of a large
+ch�teau. Here another officer was talking over a telephone in an
+explicit, businesslike fashion about "sending up more bombs," while
+we looked at maps spread out on narrow, improvised tables, such as
+are used for a buffet at a reception. Those maps showed all the
+British trenches and all the German trenches--spider-weblike lines
+that cunning human spiders had spun with spades--in that region;
+and where our batteries were and where some of the German
+batteries were, if our aeroplane observations were correct.
+
+To the layman they were simply blue prints, such as he sees in the
+office of an engineer or an architect, or elaborate printed maps with
+many blue and red pencil-lings. To the general in command they
+were alive with rifle-power and gun-power and other powers
+mysterious to us; the sword with which he thrust and feinted and
+guarded in the ceaseless fencing of trench warfare, while higher
+authorities than he kept their secrets as he kept his and bided their
+day.
+
+That morning one of the battalions which had its pencilled place on
+the map had taken a section of trench from the Germans about the
+length of two city blocks. It got into the official bulletins of both sides
+several times, this two hundred yards at Pilken in the everlastingly
+"hot corner" north of Ypres. So it was of some importance, though not
+on account of its length. To take two hundred yards of trench
+because it is two hundred yards of trench is not good war, tacticians
+agree. Good war is to have millions of shells and vast reserves ready
+and to go in over a broad area and keep on going night and day, with
+a Niagara of artillery, as fresh battalions are fed into the conflict.
+
+But the Germans had command of some rising ground in front of the
+British line at this point. They could fire down and crosswise into our
+trench. It was as if we were in the alley and they were in a first-floor
+window. This meant many casualties. It was man-economy and fire-
+economy to take that two hundred yards. A section of trench may
+always be taken if worth while. Reduce it to dust with shells and then
+dash into the breach and drive the enemy back from zigzag traverse
+to traverse with bombs. But such a small action requires as careful
+planning as a big operation of other days. We had taken the two
+hundred yards. The thing was to hold them. That is always the
+difficulty; for the enemy will concentrate his guns to give you the
+same dose that you gave him. In an hour after they were in, the
+British soldiers, who knew exactly what they had to do and how to do
+it, after months of experience, had turned the wreck of the German
+trench into a British trench which faced toward Berlin, rather than
+Calais.
+
+In their official bulletin the Germans said that they had recovered the
+trench. They did recover part of it for a few hours. It was then that the
+commander on the German side must have sent in his report to catch
+the late evening editions. Commanders do not like to confess the loss
+of trenches. It is the sort of thing that makes headquarters ask: "What
+is the matter with you over there, anyway?" There was a time when
+the German bulletins about the Western front seemed rather truthful;
+but of late they have been getting into bad habits.
+
+The British general knew what was coming; he knew that he would
+start the German hornets out of their nest when he took the trench;
+he knew, too, that he could rely upon his men to hold till they were
+told to retire or there were none left to retire. The British are a home-
+loving people, who do not like to be changing their habitations. In
+succeeding days the question up and down the lines was, "Have we
+still got that trench?" Only two hundred yards of ditch on the continent
+of Europe! But was it still ours? Had the Germans succeeded in
+"strafing" us out of it yet? They had shelled all the trenches in the
+region of the lost trench and had made three determined and
+unsuccessful counter-attacks when, on the fifth day, we returned to
+the ch�teau to ask if it were practicable to visit the new trench.
+
+"At your own risk!" said the staff officer. If we preferred we could sit on
+the veranda where there were easy chairs, on a pleasant summer
+day. Very peaceful the sweep of the well-kept grounds and the shade
+of the stately trees of that sequestered world of landscape. Who was
+at war? Why was anyone at war? Two staff motor-cars awaiting
+orders on the drive and a dust-laden dispatch rider with messages,
+who went past toward the rear of the house, were the only visual
+evidence of war. The staff officer served us with helmets for
+protection in case we got into a gas attack. He said that we might
+enter our front trenches at a certain point and then work our way as
+near the new part as we could; division headquarters, four or five
+miles distant, would show us the way. It was then that the twinkle in
+the staff officer's eye as it looked straight into yours became manifest.
+You can never tell, I have learned, just what a twinkle in a British staff
+officer's eye may portend. These fellows who are promoted up from
+the trenches to join the "brain-trust" in the ch�teau, know a great deal
+more about what is going on than you can learn by standing in the
+road far from the front and listening to the sound of the guns. We
+encountered a twinkle in another eye at division headquarters, which
+may have been telephoned ahead along with the instructions, "At
+their own risk."
+
+There are British staff officers who would not mind pulling a
+correspondent's leg on a summer day; though, perhaps, it was really
+the Germans who pulled ours, in this instance. Somebody did remark
+at some headquarters, I recall, that "You never know!" which shows
+that staff officers do not know everything. The Germans possess half
+the knowledge--and they are at great pains not to part with their half.
+
+We proceeded in our car along country roads, quiet, normal country
+roads off the main highway. It has been written again and again, and
+it cannot be written too many times, that life is going on as usual in
+the rear of the army. Nothing could be more wonderful and yet
+nothing more natural. All the men of fighting age were absent. White-
+capped grandmothers, too old to join the rest of the family in the
+fields, sat in doorways sewing. Everybody was at work and the crops
+were growing. You never tire of remarking the fact. It brings you back
+from the destructive orgy of war to the simple, constructive things of
+life. An industrious people go on cultivating the land and the land
+keeps on producing. It is pleasant to think that the crops of Northern
+France were good in 1915. That is cheering news from home for the
+soldiers of France at the front.
+
+At an indicated point we left the car to go forward on foot, and the
+chauffeur was told to wait for us at another point. If the car went any
+farther it might draw shell-fire. Army authorities know how far they
+may take cars with reasonable safety as well as a pilot knows the
+rocks and shoals at a harbour entrance.
+
+There was an end of white-capped grandmothers in doorways; an
+end of people working in the fields. Rents in the roofless walls of
+unoccupied houses stared at the passer-by. We were in a dead land.
+One of two soldiers whom we met coming from the opposite direction
+pointed at what looked like a small miner's cabin half covered with
+earth, screened by a tree, as the next headquarters which we were
+seeking in our progress.
+
+It was not for sightseers to take the time of the general who received
+us at the door of his dug-out. German guns had concentrated on a
+section of his trenches in a way that indicated that another attack was
+coming. One company already had suffered heavy losses. It was an
+hour of responsibility for the general, isolated in the midst of silent
+fields and houses, waiting for news from a region hidden from his
+view by trees and hedges in that flat country. He might not move from
+headquarters, for then he would be out of communication with his
+command. His men were being pounded by shells and the inexorable
+law of organization kept him at the rear. Up in the trench he might
+have been one helpless human being in a havoc of shells which had
+cut the wires. His place was where he could be in touch with his
+subordinates and his superiors.
+
+True, we wanted to go to the trench that the Germans had lost and
+his section was the short cut. Modesty was not the only reason for not
+taking it. As we started along a road parallel to the front, the head of a
+soldier popped out of the earth and told us that orders were to walk in
+the ditch. I judged that he was less concerned with our fate than with
+the likelihood of our drawing fire, which he and the others in a
+concealed trench would suffer after we had passed on.
+
+There were three of us, two correspondents, L------ and myself, and
+R------, an officer, which is quite enough for an expedition of this kind.
+Now we were finding our own way, with the help of the large scale
+army map which had every house, every farm, and every group of
+trees marked. The farms had been given such names as Joffre,
+Kitchener, French, Botha, and others which the Germans would not
+like. We cut across fields with the same confidence that, following a
+diagram of city streets in a guidebook, a man turns to the left for the
+public library and to the right for the museum.
+
+Our own guns were speaking here and there from their hiding-places;
+and overhead an occasional German shrapnel burst. This seemed a
+waste of the Kaiser's munitions as there was no one in sight. Yet
+there was purpose in the desultory scattering of bullets from on high.
+They were policing the district; they were warning the hated British in
+reserve not to play cricket in those fields or march along those
+deserted roads.
+
+The more bother in taking cover that the Germans can make the
+British, the better they like it; and the British return the compliment in
+kind. Anything that harasses your enemy is counted to the good. If
+every shell fired had killed a man in this war, there would be no
+soldiers left to fight on either side; yet never have shells been so
+important in war as now. They can reach the burrowing human
+beings in shelters which are bulletproof; they are the omnipresent
+threat of death. The firing of shells from batteries securely hidden and
+em-placed represents no cost of life to your side; only cost of
+material, which ridicules the foolish conclusion that machinery and not
+men count. It is because man is still the most precious machine--a
+machine that money cannot reproduce--that gun-machinery is so
+much in favour, and every commander wants to use shells as freely
+as you use city water when you do not pay for it by meter.
+
+Now another headquarters and another general, also isolated in a
+dug-out, holding the reins of his wires over a section of line adjoining
+the section we had just left. Before we proceeded we must look over
+his shelter from shell-storms. The only time that British generals
+become boastful is over their dug-outs. They take all the pride in
+them of the man who has bought a plot of land and built himself a
+home; and, like him, they keep on making improvements and calling
+attention to them. I must say that this was one of the best shelters I
+have seen anywhere in the tornado belt; and whatever I am not, I am
+certainly an expert in dug-outs. Of course, this general, too, said, "At
+your own risk!" He was good enough to send a young officer with us
+up to the trenches; then we should not make any mistakes about
+direction if we wanted to reach the neighbourhood of the two hundred
+yards which we had taken from the Germans. When we thanked him
+and said "Good-bye!" he remarked:
+
+"We never say good-bye up here. It does not sound pleasant. Make it
+au revoir." He, too, had a twinkle in his eye.
+
+By this time, one leg ought to have been so much longer than the
+other that one would have walked in a circle if he had not had a
+guide.
+
+That battery which had been near the dug-out kept on with its regular
+firing, its shells sweeping overhead. We had not gone far before we
+came to a board nailed to a tree, with the caution, "Keep to the right!"
+If you went to the left you might be seen by the enemy, though we
+were seeing nothing of him, nor of our own trenches yet. Every
+square yard of this ground had been tested by actual experience, at
+the cost of dead and wounded men, till safe lanes of approach had
+been found.
+
+Next was a clearing station, where the wounded are brought in from
+the trenches for transfer to ambulances. A glance at the burden on a
+stretcher just arrived automatically framed the word, "Shell-fire!" The
+stains over-running on tanned skin beyond the edge of the white
+bandage were bright in the sunlight. A khaki blouse torn open, or a
+trousers leg or a sleeve cut down the seam, revealing the white of the
+first aid and a splash of red, means one man wounded; and by the
+ones the thousands come.
+
+Fifty wounded men on the floor of a clearing station and the individual
+is lost in the crowd. When you see the one borne past, if there is
+nothing else to distract attention you always ask two questions: Will
+he die? Has he been maimed for life? If the answers to both are no,
+you feel a sense of triumph, as if you had seen a human play, built
+skilfully around a life to arouse your emotions, turn out happily.
+
+The man has fought in an honourable cause; he has felt the touch of
+death's fingers. How happy he is when he knows that he will get well!
+In prospect, as his wound heals into the scar which will be the lasting
+decoration of his courage, his home and all that it means to him.
+What kind of a home has he, this private soldier? In the slums, with a
+slattern wife, or in a cottage with a flower garden in front, only a few
+minutes' walk from the green fields of the English countryside? But
+we set out to tell you about the kind of inferno in which this man got
+his splash of red.
+
+We come to the banks of a canal which has carried the traffic of the
+Low Countries for many centuries; the canal where British and
+French had fought many a Thermopylae in the last eight months.
+Along its banks run rows of fine trees, narrowing in perspective before
+the eye. Some have been cut in two by the direct hit of a heavy shell
+and others splintered down, bit by bit. Others still standing have been
+hit many times. There are cuts as fresh as if the chips had just flown
+from the axeman's blow, and there are scars from cuts made last
+autumn which nature's sap, rising as it does in the veins of wounded
+men, has healed, while from the remaining branches it sent forth
+leaves in answer to the call of spring.
+
+In this section the earth is many-mouthed with caves and cut with
+passages running from cave to cave, so that the inhabitants may go
+and come hidden from sight. Jawbone and Hairyman and Lowbrow,
+of the Stone Age, would be at home there, squatting on their hunkers
+and tearing at their raw kill with their long incisors. It does not seem a
+place for men who walk erect, wear woven fabrics, enjoy a written
+language, and use soap and safety razors. One would not be
+surprised to see some figure swing down by a long, hairy arm from a
+branch of a tree and leap on all fours into one of the caves, where he
+would receive a gibbering welcome to the bosom of his family.
+
+Not so! Huddled in these holes in the earth are free-born men of an
+old civilization, who read the daily papers and eat jam on their bread.
+They do not want to be there, but they would not consider themselves
+worthy of the inheritance of free-born men if they were not. Only
+civilized man is capable of such stoicism as theirs. They have
+reverted to the cave-dweller's protection because their civilization is
+so highly developed that they can throw a piece of steel weighing
+from eighteen to two thousand pounds anywhere from five to twenty
+miles with merciless accuracy, and because the flesh of man is even
+more tender than in the cave-dweller's time, not to mention that his
+brain-case is a larger target.
+
+An officer calls attention to a shell-proof shelter with the civic pride of
+a member of a chamber of commerce pointing out the new Union
+Station.
+
+"Not even a high explosive"--the kind that bursts on impact after
+penetration--"could get into that!" he says. "We make them for
+generals and colonels and others who have precious heads on their
+shoulders."
+
+With material and labour, the same might have been constructed for
+the soldiers, which brings us back to the question of munitions in the
+economic balance against a human life. It was the first shelter of this
+kind which I had seen. You never go up to the trenches without
+seeing something new. The defensive is tireless in its ingenuity in
+saving lives and the offensive in taking them. Safeguards and
+salvage compete with destruction. And what labour all that excavation
+and construction represented--the cumulative labour of months and
+day-by-day repairs of the damage done by shells! After a
+bombardment, dig out the filled trenches and renew the smashed
+dug-outs to be ready for another go!
+
+The walls of that communication trench were two feet above our
+heads. We noticed that all the men were in their dug-outs; none were
+walking about in the open. One knew the meaning of this barometer--
+stormy. The German gunners were "strafing" in a very lively way this
+afternoon.
+
+Already we had noticed many shells bursting five or six hundred
+yards away, in the direction of the new British trench; but at that
+distance they do not count. Then a railroad train seemed to have
+jumped the track and started to fly. Fortunately and unfortunately,
+sound travels faster than big shells of low velocity; fortunately,
+because it gives you time to be undignified in taking cover;
+unfortunately, because it gives you a fraction of a second to reflect
+whether or not that shell has your name and your number on Dug-out
+Street.
+
+I was certain that it was a big shell, of the kind that will blow a dug-out
+to pieces. Anyone who had never heard a shell before would have
+"scrooched," as the small boys say, as instinctively as you draw back
+when the through express tears past the station. It is the kind of
+scream that makes you want to roll yourself into a package about the
+size of a pea, while you feel as tall and large as a cathedral, judging
+by the sensation that travels down your backbone.
+
+Once I was being hoisted up a cliff in a basket, when the rope on the
+creaking windlass above slipped a few inches. Well, it is like that, or
+like taking a false step on the edge of a precipice. Is the clock about
+to strike twelve or not? Not this time! The burst was thirty yards away,
+along the path we had just traversed, and the sound was like the
+burst of a shell and like nothing else in the world, just as the swirling,
+boring, growing scream of a shell is like no other scream in the world.
+A gigantic hammer-head sweeps through the air and breaks a steel
+drum-head.
+
+If we had come along half a minute later we should have had a better
+view, and perhaps now we should have been on a bed in a hospital
+worrying how we were going to pay the rent, or in the place where,
+hopefully, we shall have no worries at all. Between walls of earth the
+report was deadened to our ears in the same way as a revolver
+report in an adjoining room; and not much earth had gone down the
+backs of our necks from the concussion.
+
+Looking over the parapet, we saw a cloud of thick, black smoke; and
+we heard the outcry of a man who had been hit. That was all. The
+shell might have struck nearer without our having seen or heard any
+more. Shut in by the gallery walls, one knows as little of what
+happens in an adjoining cave as a clam buried in the sand knows of
+what is happening to a neighbour clam. A young soldier came half-
+stumbling into the nearest dug-out. He was shaking his head and
+batting his ears as if he had sand in them. Evidently he was returning
+to his home cave from a call on a neighbour which had brought him
+close to the burst.
+
+"That must have been about six or seven-inch," I said to the officer,
+trying to be moderate and casual in my estimate, which is the correct
+form on such occasions. My actual impression was forty-inch.
+
+"Nine-inch, h.e.," replied the expert.
+
+This was gratifying. It was the first time that I had been so near to a
+nine-inch-shell explosion. Its "eat 'em-alive" frightfulness was
+depressing. But the experience was worth having. You want all the
+experiences there are--but only "close." A delightful word that word
+close, at the front!
+
+The Germans were generous that afternoon. Another scream
+seemed aimed at my head. L------ disagreed with me; he said that it
+was aimed at his. We did not argue the matter to the point of a
+personal quarrel, for it might have got both our heads. It burst back of
+the trench about as far away as the other shell. After all, a trench is a
+pretty narrow ribbon, even on a gunner's large scale map, to hit. It is
+wonderful how, firing at such long range, he is able to hit a trench at
+all.
+
+This was all of the nine-inch variety for the time being. We got some
+fours and fives as we walked along. Three bursting as near together
+as the ticks of a clock made almost no smoke, as they brought some
+tree limbs down and tore away a section of a trunk. Then the
+thunderstorm moved on to another part of the line. Only, unlike the
+thunderstorms of nature, this, which is man-made and controlled as a
+fireman controls the nozzle of his hose, may sweep back again and
+yet again over its path. All depends upon the decision of a German
+artillery officer, just as whether or not a flower-bed shall get another
+sprinkle depends upon the will of the gardener.
+
+We were glad to turn out of the support trench into a communication
+trench leading toward the front trench; into another gallery cut deep in
+the fields, with scattered shell-pits on either side. Still more soldiers,
+leaning against the walls or seated with their legs stretched out
+across the bottom of the ditch; more waiting soldiers, only strung out
+in a line and as used to the passing of shells as people living along
+the elevated railroad line to the passing of trains. They did not look up
+at the screams boring the air any more than one who lives under the
+trains looks up every time that one passes. Theirs was the passivity
+of a queue waiting in line before the entrance to a theatre or a ball-
+grounds.
+
+A senator or a lawyer, used to coolness in debate, or to presiding
+over great meetings, or to facing crowds, who happened to visit the
+trenches could have got reassurance from the faces of any one of
+these private soldiers, who had been trained not to worry about death
+till death came. Harrowing every one of these screams, taken by
+itself. Instinctively, unnecessarily, you dodged at those which were
+low--unnecessarily, because they were from British guns. No danger
+from them unless there was a short fuse. To the soldiers, the low
+screams brought the delight of having blows struck from their side at
+the enemy, whom they themselves could not strike from their reserve
+position.
+
+For we were under the curving sweep of both the British and the
+German shells, as they passed in the air on the way to their targets. It
+was like standing between two railway tracks with trains going in
+opposite directions. You came to differentiate between the
+multitudinous screams. "Ours!" you exclaimed, with the same delight
+as when you see that your side has the ball. The spirit of battle
+contest rose in you. There was an end of philosophy. These soldiers
+in the trenches were your partisans. Every British shell was working
+for them and for you, giving blow for blow.
+
+The score of the contest of battle is in men down; in killed and
+wounded. For every man down on your side you want two men down
+on the enemy's. Sport ceases. It is the fight against a burglar with a
+revolver in his hand and a knife between his teeth; and a wounded
+man brought along the trench, a visible, intimate proof of a hit by the
+enemy, calls for more and harder blows.
+
+Looking over the parapet of the communication trench you saw fields,
+lifeless except for the singing birds in the wheat, who had also the
+spirit of battle. The more shells, the more they warble. It was always
+so on summer days. Between the screams you hear their full-pitched
+chorus, striving to make itself heard in competition with the song of
+German invasion and British resistance. Mostly, the birds seemed to
+take cover like mankind; but I saw one sweep up from the golden sea
+of ripening grain toward the men-brothers with their wings of cloth.
+
+Was this real, or was it extravaganza? Painted airships and a painted
+summer sky? The audacity of those British airmen! Two of them were
+spotting the work of British guns by their shell-bursts and watching for
+gun-flashes which would reveal concealed German battery-positions,
+and whispering results by wireless to their own batteries.
+
+It is a great game. Seven or eight thousand feet high, directly over the
+British planes, is a single Taube cruising for the same purpose. It
+looks like a beetle with gossamer wings suspended from a light cloud.
+The British aviators are so low that the bull's-eye identification marks
+are distinctly visible to the naked eye. They are playing in and out, like
+the short stop and second baseman around second, there in the very
+arc of the passing shells from both sides fired at other targets. But
+scores of other shells are most decidedly meant for them. In the
+midst of a lacework of puffs of shrapnel-bursts, which slowly spread in
+the still air, from the German anti-aircraft guns, they dip and rise and
+turn in skilful dodging. At length, one retires for good; probably his
+plane-cloth has become too much like a sieve from shrapnel-
+fragments to remain aloft longer.
+
+Come down, Herr Taube, come down where we can have a shot at
+you I Get in the game! You can see better at the altitude of the British
+airmen! But Herr Taube always stays high--the Br'er Fox of the air. Of
+course, it was not so exciting as the pictures that artists draw, but it
+was real.
+
+Every kind of shell was being fired, low and high velocity, small and
+large calibre. One-two-three-four in as quick succession as the roll of
+a drum, four German shells burst in line up in the region where we
+have made ourselves masters of the German trench. British shells
+responded.
+
+"Ours again!"
+
+But I had already ducked before I spoke, as you might if a pellet of
+steel weighing a couple of hundred pounds, going at the rate of a
+thousand yards a second or more, passed within a few yards of your
+head--ducked to find myself looking into the face of a soldier who was
+smiling. The smile was not scornful, but it was at least amused at the
+expense of the sightseer who had dodged one of our own shells. In
+addition to the respirators in case of a possible gas attack, supplied
+by that staff officer with a twinkle in his eye, we needed a steel rod
+fastened to the back of our necks and running down our spinal
+columns in order to preserve our dignity.
+
+We were witnessing what is called the "artillery preparation for an
+infantry attack," which was to try to recover that two hundred yards of
+trench from the British. Only the Germans did not limit their attention
+to the lost trench. It was hottest there around the bend of our line,
+from our view-point; for there they must maul the trench into formless
+debris and cut the barbed wire in front of it before the charge was
+made.
+
+"They touch up all the trenches in the neighbourhood to keep us
+guessing," said the officer, "before they make their final
+concentration. So it's pretty thick around this part."
+
+"Which might include the communication trench?"
+
+"Certainly. This makes a good line shot. No doubt they will spare us a
+few when they think it is our turn. We do the same thing. So it goes."
+
+From the variety of screams of big shells and little shells and screams
+harrowingly close and reassuringly high, which were indicated as
+ours, one was warranted in suggesting that the British were doing
+considerable artillery preparation themselves.
+
+"We must give them as good as they send--and better."
+
+Better seemed correct.
+
+"Those close ones you hear are doubtless meant for the front
+German trench, which accounts for their low trajectory; the others for
+their support trenches or any battery-positions that our planes have
+located." We could not see where the British shells were striking. We
+could judge only of the accuracy of some of the German fire.
+Considering the storm being visited on the support trench which we
+had just left, we were more than ever glad to be out of it. Artillery is
+the war burglar's jemmy; but it has to batter the house into ruins and
+blow up the safe and kill most of the family before the burglar can
+enter. Clouds of dust rose from the explosions; limbs of trees were
+lopped off by tornadoes of steel hail.
+
+"There! Look at that tree!"
+
+In front of a portion of the British support trench a few of a line of
+stately shade trees were still standing. A German shell, about an
+eight-inch, one judged, struck fairly in the trunk of one about the
+same height from the ground as the lumberman sinks his axe in the
+bark. The shimmer of hot gas spread out from the point of explosion.
+Through it as through an aureole one saw that twelve inches of green
+wood had been cut in two as neatly as a thistle-stem is severed by a
+sharp blow from a walking-stick. The body of the tree was carried
+across the splintered stump with crushing impact from the power of
+its flight, plus the power of the burst of the explosive charge which
+broke the shell-jacket into slashing fragments; and the towering
+column of limbs, branches, and foliage laid its length on the ground
+with a majestic dignity. Which shows what one shell can do, one of
+three which burst not far away at the same time. In time, the shells
+would get all the trees; make them into chips and splinters and
+toothpicks.
+
+"I'd rather that it would hit a tree-trunk than my trunk," said L------.
+
+"But you would not have got it as badly as the tree," said the officer
+reassuringly. "The substance would have been too soft for sufficient
+impact for a burst. It would have gone right through!"
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+More Best Day
+
+
+
+At battalion headquarters in the front trenches the battalion surgeon
+had just amputated an arm which had been mauled by a shell.
+
+"Without any anaesthetic," he explained. "No chance if we sent him
+back to the hospital. He would die on the way. Stood it very well.
+Already chirking up."
+
+A family practitioner at home, the doctor, when the war began, had
+left his practice to go with his Territorial battalion. He retains the
+family practitioner's cheery, assuring manner. He is the kind of man
+who makes you feel better immediately he comes into the sick-room;
+who has already made you forget yourself when he puts his finger
+on your pulse.
+
+"The same thing that we might have done in the Crimea," he
+continued, "only we have antiseptics now. It's wonderful how little you
+can work with and how excellent the results. Strong, healthy men,
+these, with great recuperative power and discipline and resolution--
+very different patients from those we usually operate on."
+
+Tea was served inside the battalion commander's dugout. Tea is as
+essential every afternoon to the British as ice to the average
+American in summer. They do not think of getting on without it if they
+can possibly have it, and it is part of the rations. As well take
+cigarettes away from those who smoke as tea from the British soldier.
+
+It was very much like tea outside the trenches, so far as any signs of
+perturbation about shells and casualties were concerned. In that the
+battalion commander had to answer telegrams, it had the aspect of a
+busy man's sandwich at his desk for luncheon. Good news to cheer
+the function had just come over the network of wires which connects
+up the whole army, from trenches to headquarters--good news in the
+midst of the shells.
+
+German West Africa had fallen. Botha, who was fighting against the
+British fifteen years ago, had taken it fighting for the British. A
+suggestive thought that. It is British character that brings enemies like
+Botha into the fold; the old, good-natured, sportsmanlike live-and-let-
+live idea, which has something to do with keeping the United States
+intact. A board with the news on it in German was put up over the
+British trenches. Naturally, the board was shot full of holes; for it is
+clear that the Germans are not yet ready to come into the British
+Empire.
+
+"Hans and Jacob we have named them," said the colonel, referring to
+two Germans who were buried back of his dug-out. "It's dull up here
+when the Boches are not shelling, so we let our imaginations play.
+We hold conversations with Hans and Jacob in our long watches.
+Hans is fat and cheerful and trusting. He believes every thing that the
+Kaiser tells him and has a cheerful disposition. But Jacob is a
+professor and a fearful 'strafer.' It seems a little gruesome, doesn't it,
+but not after you have been in the trenches for a while."
+
+A little gruesome--true! Not in the trenches--true, too! Where all is
+satire, no incongruity seems out of place. Life plays in and out with
+death; they intermingle; they look each other in the face and say: "I
+know you. We dwell together. Let us smile when we may, at what we
+may, to hide the character of our comradeship; for to-morrow------"
+
+Only half an hour before one of the officers had been shot through
+the head by a sniper. He was a popular officer. The others had
+messed with him and marched with him and known him in the
+fullness of affection of comradeship in arms and dangers shared. A
+heartbreak for some home in England. No one dwelt on the incident.
+What was there to say? The trembling lip, trembling in spite of itself,
+was the only outward sign of the depth of feeling that words could not
+reflect, at tea in the dug-out. The subject was changed to something
+about the living. One must carry on cheerfully; one must be on the
+alert; one must play his part serenely, unflinchingly, for the sake of the
+nerves around him and for his own sake. Such fortitude becomes
+automatic, it would seem. Please, I must not hesitate about having a
+slice of cake. They managed cake without any difficulty up there in
+the trenches. And who if not men in the trenches was entitled to cake,
+I should like to know? "It was here that he was hit," another officer
+said, as we moved on in the trench. "He was saying that the
+sandbags were a little weak and a bullet might go through and catch
+a man who thought himself safely under cover as he walked along.
+He had started to fix the sandbags himself when he got it. The bullet
+came right through the top of one of the bags in front of him."
+
+A bullet makes the merciful wound; and a bullet through the head is a
+simple way of going. The bad wounds come mostly from shells; but
+there is something about seeing anyone hit by a sniper which is more
+horrible. It is a cold-blooded kind of killing, more suggestive of
+murder, this single shot from a sharpshooter waiting as patiently as a
+cat for a mouse, aimed definitely to take the life of a man.
+
+Again we move on in that narrow cut of earth with its waiting soldiers,
+which the world knows so well from reading tours of the trenches. No
+one not on watch might show his head on an afternoon like this. The
+men were prisoners between those walls of earth; not even
+spectators of what the guns were doing; simply moles. They took it all
+as a part of the day's work, with that singular, redoubtable
+combination of British phlegm and cheerfulness.
+
+Of course, some of them were eating bread and marmalade and
+making tea. Where all the marmalade goes which Mr. Atkins uses for
+his personal munition in fighting the Germans puzzles the Army
+Service Corps, whose business it is to see that he is never without it.
+How could he sit so calmly under shell-fire without marmalade?
+Never! He would get fidgety and forget his lesson, I am sure, like the
+boy who had the button which he was used to fingering removed
+before he went to recite.
+
+Any minute a shell may come. Mr. Atkins does not think of that. Time
+enough to think after it has arrived. Then perhaps the burial party will
+be doing your thinking for you; or if not, the doctors and the nurses
+who look after you will.
+
+I noted certain acts of fellowship of comrades who are all in the same
+boat and have learned unselfishness. When they got up to let you
+pass and you smiled your thanks, you received a much pleasanter
+smile in return than you will from many a well-fed gentleman who has
+to stand aside to let you enter a restaurant. The manners of the
+trenches are good, better than in some places where good manners
+are a cult.
+
+There is no better place to send a spoiled, undisciplined, bumptious
+youth than to a British trench. He will learn that there are other men in
+the world besides himself and that a shell can kill a rich brute or a
+selfish brute as readily as a poor man. Democracy there is in the
+trenches; the democracy where all men are in the presence of death
+and "hazing" parties need not be organized among the students.
+
+But there is another and a greater element in the practical psychology
+of the trenches. These good-natured men, fighting the bitterest kind
+of warfare without the signs of brutality which we associate with the
+prize-fighter and the bully in their faces, know why they are fighting.
+They consider that their duty is in that trench, and that they could not
+have a title to manhood if they were not there. After the war the men
+who have been in the trenches will rule England. Their spirit and their
+thinking will fashion the new trend of civilization, and the men who
+have not fought will bear the worst scars from the war.
+
+Ridiculous it is that men should be moles, perhaps; but at the same
+time there is something sublime in the fellowship of their courage and
+purpose, as they "sit and take it," or guard against attacks, without
+the passion of battle of the old days of excited charges and quick
+results, and watch the toll pass by from hour to hour. Borne by
+comrades pick-a-back we saw the wounded carried along that
+passage too narrow for a litter. A splash of blood, a white bandage, a
+limp form!
+
+For the second permissible--periscopes are tempting targets--I
+looked through one over the top of the parapet. Another film! A big
+British lyddite shell went crashing into the German parapet. The dust
+from sandbags and dug-outs merged into an immense cloud of ugly,
+black smoke. As the cloud rose, one saw the figure of a German dart
+out of sight; then nothing was visible but the gap which the explosion
+had made. No wise German would show himself. British snipers were
+watching for him. At least half a dozen, perhaps a score, of men had
+been put out by this single "direct hit" of an h.e. (high explosive). Yes,
+the British gunners were shooting well, too. Other periscopic glimpses
+proved it.
+
+Through the periscope we learned also that the two lines of sandbags
+of German and British trenches were drawing nearer together.
+Another wounded man was brought by.
+
+"They're bombing up ahead. He has just been hit." As we drew aside
+to make room for him to pass, once more the civilian realized his
+helplessness and unimportance. One soldier was worth ten Prime
+Ministers in that place. We were as conspicuously mal � propos as an
+outsider at a bank directors' meeting or in a football scrimmage. The
+officer politely reminded us of the necessity of elbow room in the
+narrow quarters for the bombers, who were hidden from view by the
+zigzag traverses, and I was not sorry, though perhaps my
+companions were. If so, they did not say so, not being talkative men.
+We were not going to see the two hundred yards of captured trench
+that were beyond the bombing action, after all. Oh, the twinkle in that
+staff officer's eye!
+
+"A Boche gas shell!" we were told, as we passed an informal
+excavation in the communication trench on our way back.
+"Asphyxiating effect. No time to put on respirators when one
+explodes. Laid out half a dozen men like fish, gasping for air, but they
+will recover."
+
+"The Boches want us to hurry!" exclaimed L------.
+
+They were giving the communication trench a turn at "strafing," now,
+and shells were urgently dropping behind us. There was no use trying
+to respond to one's natural inclination to run away from the pursuing
+shower when you had to squeeze past soldiers as you went.
+
+"But look at what we are going into! This is like beating up grouse to
+the guns, and we are the birds! I am wondering if I like it."
+
+We could tell what had happened in our absence in the support
+trench by the litter of branches and leaves and by the excavations
+made by shells. It was still happening, too. Another nine-inch, with
+your only view of surroundings the wall of earth which you hugged.
+Crash--and safe again!
+
+"Pretty!" L------ said, smiling. He was referring to the cloud of black
+smoke from the burst. Pretty is a favourite word of his. I find that men
+use habitual exclamations on such occasions. R------, also smiling,
+had said, "A black business, this!" a favourite expression with him.
+
+"Yes--pretty!" R------and I exclaimed together.
+
+L------took a sliver off his coat and offered it to us as a souvenir. He
+did not know that he had said "Pretty!" or R------ that he had said "A
+black business!" several times that afternoon; nor did I know that I
+had exclaimed, "For the love of Mike!" Psychologists take notice; and
+golfers are reminded that their favourite expletives when they foozle
+will come perfectly natural to them when the Germans are "strafing."
+Then another nine-inch, when we were out of the gallery in front of
+the warrens. My companions happened to be near a dug-out. They
+did not go in tandem, but abreast. It was a "dead heat." All that I could
+see in the way of cover was a wall of sandbags, which looked about
+as comforting as tissue paper in such a crisis.
+
+At least, one faintly realized what it meant to be in the support
+trenches, where the men were still huddled in their caves. They never
+get a shot at the enemy or a chance to throw a bomb, unless they are
+sent forward to assist the front trenches in resisting an attack. It is for
+this purpose that they are kept within easy reach of the front
+trenches. They are like the prisoner tied to a chair-back, facing a gun.
+
+"Yes, this was pretty heavy shell-fire," said an officer who ought to
+know. "Not so bad as on the trenches which the infantry are to attack
+--that is the first degree. You might call this the second."
+
+It was heavy enough to keep any writer from being bored. The
+second degree will do. We will leave the first until another time.
+
+Later, when we were walking along a paved road, I heard again what
+seemed the siren call of a nine-inch.
+
+Once, in another war, I had been on a paved road when--well, I did
+not care to be on this one if a nine-inch hit it and turned fragments of
+paving-stones into projectiles. An effort to "run out the bunt"--Caesar's
+ghost! It was one of our own shells! Nerves! Shame! Two stretcher-
+bearers with a wounded man looked up in surprise, wondering what
+kind of a hide-and-seek game we were playing. They made a picture
+of imperturbability of the kind that is a cure for nerves under fire.
+If the other fellow is not scared it does not do for you to be scared.
+
+"Did you get any shells in your neighbourhood?" we asked the
+chauffeur--also British and imperturbable--whom we found waiting at
+a clearing station for wounded.
+
+"Yes, sir, I saw several, but none hit the car."
+
+As we came to the first cross-roads in that dead land back of the
+trenches which was still being shelled by shrapnel, though not
+another car was in sight, and ours had no business there (as we were
+told afterwards), that chauffeur, as he slowed up before turning, held
+out his hand from habit as he would have done in Piccadilly.
+
+Two or three days later things were normal along the front again, with
+Mr. Atkins still stuffing himself with marmalade in that two hundred
+yards of trench.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+Winning And Losing
+
+
+
+Seeming an immovable black line set as a frontier in peace, that
+Western front on your map which you bought early in the war in
+anticipation of rearranging the flags in keeping with each day's news
+was, in reality, a pulsating, changing line.
+
+At times you thought of it as an enormous rope under the constant
+pressure of soldiers on either side, who now and then, with an "all
+together" of a tug-of-war at a given point, straightened or made a
+bend, with the result imperceptible except as you measured it by a
+tree or a house. Battles as severe as the most important in South
+Africa, battles severe enough to have decided famous campaigns in
+Europe in former days, when one king rode forth against another,
+became landmark incidents of the give and take, the wrangling and
+the wrestling of siege operations.
+
+The sensation of victory or defeat for those engaged was none the
+less vivid because victory meant the gain of so little ground and
+defeat the loss of so little; perhaps the more vivid in want of the
+movement of pursuing or of being pursued in the shock of arms as in
+past times, when an army front hardly covered that of one brigade in
+the trenches. For winners and losers, returning to their billets in
+French villages as other battalions took their places, had time to think
+over the action.
+
+The offensive was mostly with the British through the summer of
+1915; any thrust by the Germans was usually to retake a section of
+trenches which they had lost. But our attacks did not all succeed, of
+course.
+
+Battalions knew success and failure; and their narratives were mine
+to share, just as one would share the good luck or the bad luck of his
+neighbours.
+
+You may have a story of heartbreak or triumph an hour after you
+have been chatting with playing children in a village street, as the car
+speeds toward the zone where reserves are billeted and the
+occasional shell is a warning that peace lies behind you. First, we
+alighted near the headquarters of two battalions which have been in
+an attack that failed. The colonel of the one to the left of the road was
+killed. We went across the fields to the right. Among the surviving
+officers resting in their shelter tents, where there is plenty of room
+now, is the adjutant, tall, boyish, looking tired, but still with no
+outward display of what he has gone through and what it has meant
+to him. I have seen him by the hundreds, this buoyant type of English
+youth.
+
+In army language, theirs had not been a "good show." We had heard
+the account of it with that matter-of-fact prefix from G.H.Q., where
+they took results with the necessarily cold eye of logic. The two
+battalions were set to take a trench; that was all. In the midst of
+merciless shell-fire they had waited for their own guns to draw all the
+teeth out of the trench. When the given moment came they swept
+forward. But our artillery had not "connected up" properly.
+
+The German machine-guns were not out of commission, and for
+them it was like working a loom playing bullets back and forth across
+the zone of a hundred yards which the British had to traverse. The
+British had been told to charge and they charged. Theirs not to
+reason why; that was the glory of the thing. Nothing more gallant in
+warfare than their persistence, till they found that it was like trying to
+swim in a cataract of lead. One officer got within fifty yards of the
+German parapet before he fell. At last they realized that it could not
+be done--later than they should, but they were a proud regiment, and
+though they had been too brave, there was something splendid about
+it.
+
+With a soldier's winning frankness and simplicity they told what had
+happened. Even before they charged they knew the machine-guns
+were in place; they knew what they had to face. One man spoke of
+seeing, as they lay waiting, a German officer standing up in the midst
+of the British shell-fire.
+
+"A stout-hearted fighter I We had to admire him!" said the adjutant.
+
+It was a chivalrous thought with a deep appeal, considering what he
+had been through. Oh, these English! They will not hate; they cannot
+be separated from their sense of sportsmanship.
+
+It was not the first time the guns had not "connected up" for either
+side, and German charges on many occasions had met a like fate.
+Calm enough, these officers, true to their birthright of phlegm. They
+did not make excuses. Success is the criterion of battle. They had
+failed. Their unblinking recognition of the fact was a sort of self-
+punishment which cut deep into your own sensitiveness. One young
+lieutenant could not keep his lip from trembling over that naked, grim
+thought. Pride of regiment had been struck a whip-blow, which meant
+more to the soldier than any injury to his personal pride.
+
+But next time! They wanted another try for that trench, these
+survivors. No matter about anything else--the battalion must have
+another chance. You appreciated this from a few words and more
+from the stubborn resolution in the bearing of all. There was no "let-
+us-at-'em-again" frightfulness. In order to end this war you must "lick"
+one side or the other, and these men were not "licked." You were
+sorry that you had gone to see them. It was like lacerating a wound.
+
+One could only assure them, in his faith in their gallantry, that they
+would win next time. And oh, how you wanted them to win! They
+deserved to win because they were such manly losers.
+
+At home in their rough wooden houses in camp we found a battalion
+which had won--the same undemonstrative type as the one that had
+lost; the same simplicity and kindly hospitality, which gives life at the
+front a charm in the midst of its tragedy, from these men of one of the
+dependable line regiments. This colonel knew the other colonel, and
+he said about the other what his fellow-officers had said: it was not his
+fault; he was a good man. If the guns were not "on," what happened
+to him was bound to happen to anybody. They had been "on" for the
+winning battalion; perfectly "on." They had buried the machine-guns
+and the Germans with them.
+
+When a man goes into the kind of charge that either battalion made
+he gives himself up for lost. The psychology is simple. You are going
+to keep on until------!
+
+Well, as Mr. Atkins has remarked in his own terse way, a battle was a
+lot of noise all around you and suddenly a big bang in your ear; and
+then somebody said, "please open your mouth and take this!" and
+you found yourself in a white, quiet place full of cots.
+
+The winning battalion was amazed how easily the thing was done.
+They had "walked in." They were a little surprised to be alive--thanks
+to the guns. "Here we are! Here we are again!" as the song at the
+front goes. It is all a lottery. Make up your mind to draw the death
+number; and if you don't, that is "velvet." Army courage these days is
+highly sensitized steel in response to will.
+
+They had won; there was a credit mark in the regimental record. All
+had won; nobody in particular, but the battalion, the lot of them. They
+did not boast about it. The thing just happened. They were alive and
+enjoying the sheer fact of life, writing letters home, rereading letters
+from home, looking at the pictures in illustrated papers, as they
+leaned back and smoked their brier-wood pipes and discussed
+politics with that freedom and directness of opinion which is an
+Englishman's pastime and his birthright.
+
+The captain who was describing the fight had retired from the army,
+gone into business, and returned as a reserve officer. The guns were
+to stop firing at a given moment. As the minute-hand lay over the
+figure on his wrist-watch he dashed for the broken parapet, still in the
+haze of dust from shell-bursts, to find not a German in sight. All were
+under cover. He enacted the ridiculous scene with humorous
+appreciation of how he came face to face with a German as he
+turned a traverse. He was ready with his revolver and the other was
+not, and the other was his prisoner.
+
+There was nothing gruesome about listening to a diffident soldier
+explaining how he "bombed them out," and you shared his
+amusement over the surprise of a German who stuck up his head
+from a dug-out within a foot of the face of a British soldier who was
+peeping inside to see if any more Germans were at home. You
+rejoiced with this battalion. Victory is sweet.
+
+When on the way back to quarters you passed some of the new army
+men, "the Keetcheenaires," as the French call them, you were
+reminded that although the war was old the British army was young.
+There was a "Watch our city grow!" atmosphere about it. Little by
+little, some great force seemed steadily pushing up from the rear. It
+made that business institution at G.H.Q. feel like bankers with an
+enormous, increasing surplus. In this the British is like no other army.
+One has watched it in the making.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+The Maple Leaf Folk
+
+
+
+These were "home folks" to the American. You might know all by their
+maple-leaf symbol; but even before you saw that, with its bronze
+none too prominent against the khaki, you knew those who were not
+recent emigrants from England to Canada by their accent and by
+certain slang phrases which pay no customs duty at the border.
+
+When, on a dark February night cruising in a slough of a road, I heard
+out of a wall of blackness back of the trenches, "Gee! Get on to the
+bus!" which referred to our car, and also, "Cut out the noise!" I was
+certain that I might dispense with an interpreter. After I had remarked
+that I came from New York, which is only across the street from
+Montreal as distances go in our countries, the American batting about
+the front at midnight was welcomed with a "glad hand" across that
+imaginary line which has and ever shall have no fortresses.
+
+What a strange place to find Canadians--at the front in Europe! I
+could never quite accommodate myself to the wonder of a man from
+Winnipeg, and perhaps a "neutral" from Wyoming in his company,
+fighting Germans in Flanders. A man used to a downy couch and an
+easy chair by the fire and steam-heated rooms, who had ten
+thousand a year in Toronto, when you found him in a chill, damp
+cellar of a peasant's cottage in range of the enemy's shells was
+getting something more than novel, if not more picturesque, than
+dog-mushing and prospecting on the Yukon; for we are quite used to
+that contrast.
+
+All I asked of the Canadians was to allow a little of the glory they had
+won--they had such a lot--to rub off on their neighbours. If there must
+be war, and no Canadian believed in it as an institution, why, to my
+mind, the Canadians did a fine thing for civilization's sake. It hurt
+sometimes to think that we also could not be in the fight for the good
+cause, particularly after the Lusitania was sunk, when my own
+feelings had lost all semblance of neutrality.
+
+The Canadians enlivened life at the front; for they have a little more
+zip to them than the thorough-going British. Their climate spells
+"hustle," and we are all the product of climate to a large degree,
+whether in England, on the Mississippi flatlands, or in Manitoba.
+Eager and high-strung the Canadian born, quick to see and to act.
+Very restless they were when held up on Salisbury Plain, after they
+had come three-four-five-six thousand miles to fight and there was
+nothing to fight but mud in an English winter.
+
+One from the American contingent knew what ailed them; they
+wanted action. They may have seemed undisciplined to a drill
+sergeant; but the kind of discipline they needed was a sight of the real
+thing. They wanted to know, What for? And Lord Kitchener was
+kinder to them, though many were beginners, than to his own new
+army; he could be, as they were ready with guns and equipment. So
+he sent them over to France before it was too late in the spring to get
+frozen feet from standing in icy water looking over a parapet at a
+German parapet. They liked Flanders mud better than Salisbury Plain
+mud, because it meant that there was "something doing."
+
+It was in their first trenches that I saw them, and they were "on the
+job, all right," in face of scattered shell-fire and the sweep of
+searchlights and flares. They had become the most ardent of pupils,
+for here was that real thing which steadied them and proved their
+metal.
+
+They refashioned their trenches and drained them with the
+fastidiousness of good housekeepers who had a frontiersman's
+experience for an inheritance. In a week they appeared to be old
+hands at the business.
+
+"Their discipline is different from ours," said a British general, "but it
+works out. They are splendid. I ask for no better troops."
+
+They may have lacked the etiquette of discipline of British regulars,
+but they had the natural discipline of self-reliance and of "go to it"
+when a crisis came. This trench was only an introduction, a
+preparation for a thing which was about as real as ever fell to the lot
+of any soldiers. It is not for me to tell here the story of their part in
+the second battle of Ypres, when the gas fumes rolled in upon them.
+I should like to tell it and also the story of the deeds of many British
+regiments, from the time of Mons to Festubert. All Canada knows it in
+detail from their own correspondents and their record officer. England
+will one day know about her regiments; her stubborn regiments of the
+line, her county regiments, who have won the admiration of all the
+crack regiments, whether English or Scots.
+
+"When that gas came along," said one Canadian, who expressed the
+Canadian spirit, "we knew the Boches were springing a new one on
+us. You know how it is if a man is hit in the face by a cloud of smoke
+when he is going into a burning building to get somebody out. He
+draws back--and then he goes in. We went in. We charged--well, it
+was the way we felt about it. We wanted to get at them and we were
+boiling mad over such a dastardly kind of attack."
+
+Higher authorities than any civilian have testified to how that charge
+helped, if it did not save, the situation. And then at Givenchy--straight
+work into the enemy's trenches under the guns. Canada is part of the
+British Empire and a precious part; but the Canadians, all imperial
+politics aside, fought their way into the affection of the British army, if
+they did not already possess it. They made the Rocky Mountains
+seem more majestic and the Thousand Islands more lovely.
+
+If there are some people in the United States busy with their own
+affairs who look on the Canadians as living up north somewhere
+toward the Arctic Circle and not very numerous, that old criterion of
+worth which discovers in the glare of battle's publicity merit which
+already existed has given to the name Canadian a glory which can be
+appreciated only with the perspective of time. The Civil War left us a
+martial tradition; they have won theirs. Some day a few of their neutral
+neighbours who fought by their side will be joining in their army
+reunions and remarking, "Wasn't that mud in Flanders------" etc.
+
+My thanks to the Canadians for being at the front. They brought me
+back to the plains and the North-West, and they showed the
+Germans on some occasions what a blizzard is like when expressed
+in bullets instead of in snowflakes, by men who know how to shoot. I
+had continental pride in them. They had the dry, pungent philosophy
+and the indomitable optimism which the air of the plains and the St.
+Lawrence valley seems to develop. They were not afraid to be a little
+emotional and sentimental. There is room for that sort of thing
+between Vancouver and Halifax. They had been in some "tough
+scraps" which they saw clear-eyed, as they would see a boxing-
+match or a spill from a canoe into a Canadian rapids.
+
+As for the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, old soldiers of
+the South African campaign almost without exception, knowing and
+hardened, their veteran experience gave them an earlier opportunity
+in the trenches than the first Canadian division. Brigaded with British
+regulars, the Princess Pat's were a sort of corps d'�lite. Colonel
+Francis Farquhar, known as "Fanny," was their colonel, and he knew
+his men. After he was killed his spirit remained with them. Asked if
+they could stick they said, "Yes, sir!" cheerily, as he would have
+wanted them to say it.
+
+I am going to tell the story of their fight of May 8th, not to single them
+out from any other Canadian battalion, or any British battalions, but
+because the story came to me and it seemed illuminative of what
+other battalions had endured, this one picturesquely because of its
+membership and its distance from home.
+
+Losses in that Ypres salient at St. Eloi the P.P.s had suffered in the
+winter, dribbling, day-by-day losses, and heavier ones when they had
+made attacks and repulsed attacks. They had been holding down the
+lid of hell heretofore, as one said graphically, and on May 8th, to use
+his simile again, they held on to the edge of the opening by the skin of
+their teeth and looked down into the bowels of hell after the Germans
+had blown the lid off with high explosives.
+
+It was in a big ch�teau that I heard the story--a story characteristic of
+modern warfare at its highest pitch--and felt its thrill when told by the
+tongues of its participants. There were twenty bedrooms in that
+ch�teau. If I wished to stay all night I might occupy three or four. As
+for the bathroom, paradise to men who have been buried in filthy mud
+by high explosives, the Frenchman who planned it had the most
+spacious ideas of immersion. A tub, or a shower, or a hose, as you
+pleased. Some bathroom, that!
+
+For nothing in the British army was too good for the Princess Pat's
+before May 8th; and since May 8th nothing is quite good enough. Ask
+the generals in whose command they have served if you have any
+doubts. There is one way to win praise at the front: by fighting. The
+P.P.s knew the way.
+
+"Too bad Gault is not here. He's in England recovering from his
+wound. Gault is six feet tall and five feet of him legs. All day in that
+trench with a shell-wound in his thigh and arm. God! How he was
+suffering! But not a moan, his face twitching and trying to make the
+twitch into a smile, and telling us to stick.
+
+"Buller away, too. He was the second in command. Gault succeeded
+him. Buller was hit on May 5th and missed the big show--piece of
+shell in the eye."
+
+"And Charlie Stewart, who was shot through the stomach. How we
+miss him! If ever there were a 'live-wire' it's Charlie. Up or down, he's
+smiling and ready for the next adventure. Once he made thirty
+thousand dollars in the Yukon and spent it on the way to Vancouver.
+The first job he could get was washing dishes; but he wasn't washing
+them long. Again, he started out in the North-West on an expedition
+with four hundred traps, to cut into the fur business of the Hudson
+Bay Company. His Indians got sick. He wouldn't desert them, and
+before he was through he had a time which beat anything yet opened
+up for us by the Germans in Flanders. But you have heard such
+stories from the North-West before. Being shot through the stomach
+the way he was, all the doctors agreed that Charlie would die. It was
+like Charlie to disagree with them. He always had his own point of
+view. So he is getting well. Charlie came out to the war with the
+packing-case which had been used by his grandfather, who was an
+officer in the Crimean War. He said that it would bring him luck."
+
+The 4th of May was bad enough, a ghastly forerunner for the 8th. On
+the 4th the P.P.s, after having been under shell-fire throughout the
+second battle of Ypres, the "gas battle," were ordered forward to a
+new line to the south-east of Ypres. To the north of Ypres the British
+line had been driven back by the concentration of shell-fire and the
+rolling, deadly march of the clouds of asphyxiating gas.
+
+The Germans were still determined to take the town, which they had
+showered with four million dollars' worth of shells. It would be big
+news: the fall of Ypres as a prelude to the fall of Przemysl and of
+Lemberg in their summer campaign of 1915. A wicked salient was
+produced in the British line to the south-east by the cave-in to the
+north. It seems to be the lot of the P.P.s to get into salients. On the
+4th they lost twenty-eight men killed and ninety-eight wounded from a
+gruelling all-day shell-fire and stone-walling. That night they got relief
+and were out for two days, when they were back in the front trenches
+again. The 5th and the 6th were fairly quiet; that is, what the P.P.s or
+Mr. Thomas Atkins would call quiet. Average mortals wouldn't. They
+would try to appear unconcerned and say they had been under pretty
+heavy fire, which means shells all over the place and machine-guns
+combing the parapet. Very dull, indeed. Only three men killed and
+seventeen wounded.
+
+On the night of May 7th the P.P.s had a muster of six hundred and
+thirty-five men. This was a good deal less than half of the original total
+in the battalion, including recruits who had come out to fill the gaps
+caused by death, wounds, and sickness. Bear in mind that before this
+war a force was supposed to prepare for retreat with a loss of ten per
+cent, and get under way to the rear with the loss of fifteen per cent,
+and that with the loss of thirty per cent, it was supposed to have
+borne all that can be expected of the best trained soldiers.
+
+The Germans were quiet that night, suggestively quiet. At 4.30 a.m.
+the prelude began; by 5.30 the German gunners had fairly warmed to
+their work. They were using every kind of shell they had in the locker.
+Every signal wire the P.P.s possessed had been cut. The brigade
+commander could not know what was happening to them and they
+could not know his wishes; except that it may be taken for granted
+that the orders of any British brigade commander are always to "stick
+it." The shell-fire was as thick at the P.P.s' backs as in front of them;
+they were fenced in by it. And they were infantry taking what the guns
+gave in order to put them out of business so that the way would be
+clear for the German infantry to charge. In theory they ought to have
+been buried and mangled beyond the power of resistance by what is
+called "the artillery preparation for the infantry in attack."
+
+Every man of the P.P.s knew what was coming. There was relief in
+their hearts when they saw the Germans break from their trenches
+and start down the slope of the hill in front. Now they could take it out
+of the German infantry in payment for what the German guns were
+doing to them. This was their only thought. Being good shots, with the
+instinct of the man who is used to shooting at game, the P.P.s "shoot
+to kill" and at individual targets. The light green of the German
+uniform is more visible on the deep green background of spring grass
+and foliage than against the tints of autumn. At two or three or four
+hundred yards neither Corporal Christy, the old bear-hunter, lying on
+the parapet nor other marksmen of the P.P.s could miss their marks.
+They kept on knocking down Germans; they didn't know that men
+around them were being hit; they did not know they were being
+shelled except when a burst shook their aim or filled their eyes with
+dust. In that case they wiped the dust out of their eyes and went on.
+The first that many of them realized that the German attack was
+broken was when they saw green blots in front of the standing
+figures, which were now going in the other direction. Then the thing
+was to keep as many of these as possible from returning over the hill.
+After that they could dress the wounded and make the dying a little
+more comfortable. For there was no taking the wounded to the rear.
+They had to remain there in the trench perhaps to be wounded again,
+spectators of their comrades' valour without the preoccupation of
+action.
+
+In the official war journal where a battalion keeps its records--that
+precious historical document which will be safeguarded in fireproof
+vaults one of these days--you may read in cold, official language what
+happened in one section of the British line on the 8th of May. Thus:
+
+"7 a.m. Fire trench on right blown in at several points ... 9 a.m.
+Lieutenants Martin and Triggs were hit and came out of left
+communicating trench with number of wounded . . . Captain Still and
+Lieutenant de Bay hit also . . . 9.30 a.m. All machine-guns were
+buried (by high explosive shells) but two were dug out and mounted
+again. A shell killed every man in one section . . . 10.30 a.m.
+Lieutenant Edwards was killed . . . Lieutenant Crawford, who was
+most gallant, was severely wounded . . . Captain Adamson, who had
+been handing out ammunition, was hit in the shoulder, but continued
+to work with only one arm useful . . . Sergeant-Major Frazer, who was
+also handing out ammunition to support trenches, was killed instantly
+by a bullet in the head."
+
+At 10.30 only four officers remained fit for action. All were lieutenants.
+The ranking one of these was Niven, in command after Gault was
+wounded at 7 a.m. We have all met the Niven type anywhere from
+the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Circle, the high-strung, wiry type who
+moves about too fast to carry any loose flesh and accumulates none
+because he does move about so fast. A little man Niven, rancher and
+horseman, with a good education and a knowledge of men. He rather
+fits the old saying about licking his weight in wild cats--wild cats being
+nearer his size than lions or tigers.
+
+Eight months before he had not known any more about war than
+thousands of other Canadians of his type, except that soldiers carried
+rifles over their shoulders and kept step. But he had "Fanny"
+Farquhar, of the British army, for his teacher; and he studied the book
+of war in the midst of shells and bullets, which means that the lessons
+stick in the same way as the lesson the small boy receives when he
+touches the red-hot end of a poker to ascertain how it feels.
+
+Writing in the midst of ruined trenches rocked by the concussion of
+shells, every message he sent that day, every report he made by
+orderly after the wires were down was written out very explicitly; which
+Farquhar had taught him was the army way. The record is there of his
+coolness when the lid was blown off of hell. For all you can tell by the
+firm chirography, he might have been sending a note to a ranch
+foreman.
+
+When his communications were cut, he was not certain how much
+support he had on his flanks. It looked for a time as if he had none.
+After the first charge was repulsed, he made contact with the King's
+Royal Rifle Corps on his right. He knew from the nature of the first
+German charge that the second would be worse than the first. The
+Germans had advanced some machine-guns; they would be able to
+place their increased artillery fire more accurately.
+
+Again green figures started down that hill and again they were put
+back. Then Niven was able to establish contact with the Shropshire
+Light Infantry, another regiment on his left. So he knew that right and
+left he was supported, and by seasoned British regulars. This was
+very, very comforting, especially when German machine-gun fire was
+not only coming from the front but in enfilade, which is most trying to a
+soldier's steadiness. In other words, the P.P.s were shooting at
+Germans in front, while bullets were whipping crosswise of their
+trenches and of the regulars on their flanks, too. Some of the German
+infantrymen who had not been hit or had not fallen back had dug
+themselves cover and were firing at a closer range.
+
+The Germans had located the points in the P.P.s' trench occupied by
+machine-guns. At least, they could put these hornets' nests out of
+business if not all the individual riflemen. So they concentrated high
+explosive shells on the guns. This did the trick; it buried them. But a
+buried machine-gun may be dug out and fired again. It may be dug
+out two or three times and keep on firing as long as it will work and
+there is anyone to man it.
+
+While the machine-guns were being exhumed every man in one
+sector of the trench was killed. Then the left half of the right fire
+trench had three or four shells, one after another, bang into it. There
+was no trench left; only macerated earth and mangled men. Those
+emerging alive were told to retreat to the communication trench.
+Next, the right end of the left fire trench was blown in. When the
+survivors fell back to the communication trench that also was
+blown in their face.
+
+"Oh, but we were having a merry party!" as Lieutenant Vandenberg
+put it.
+
+Niven and his lieutenants were moving here and there to the point of
+each new explosion to ascertain the amount of damage and to
+decide what was to be done as the result. One soldier described
+Niven's eyes as sparks emitted from two holes in his dust-caked face.
+
+Pappineau tells how a tree outside the trench was cut in two by a
+shell and its trunk laid across the breach of the trench caused by
+another shell; and lying over the trunk, limp and lifeless where he had
+fallen, was a man killed by still another shell.
+
+"I remember how he looked because I had to step around him and
+over the trunk," said Pappineau.
+
+Unless you did have to step around a dead or a wounded man there
+was no time to observe his appearance; for by noon there were as
+many dead and wounded in the P.P.s' trench as there were men fit
+for action.
+
+Those unhurt did not have to be steadied by their superiors. Knocked
+down by a concussion they sprang up with the promptness of disgust
+of one thrown off a horse or tripped by a wire. When told to move
+from one part of the trench to another where there was desperate
+need, a word was sufficient. They understood what was wanted of
+them, these veterans. They went. They seized every lull to drop the
+rifle for the spade and repair the breaches. When they were not
+shooting they were digging. The officers had only to keep reminding
+them not to expose themselves in the breaches. For in the thick of it,
+and the thicker the more so, they must try to keep some dirt between
+all of their bodies except the head and arm which had to be up in
+order to fire.
+
+At 1.30 p.m. a cheer rose from that trench. It was in greeting of a
+platoon of the King's Royal Rifles which had come as a reinforcement.
+Oh, but this band of Tommies did look good to the P.P.s! And the
+little prize package that the very reliable Mr. Atkins had with him
+--the machine-gun! You can always count on Mr. Atkins to remain
+"among those present" to the last on such occasions.
+
+Now Niven got word by messenger to go to the nearest point where
+the telephone was working and tell the brigade commander the
+complete details of the situation. The brigade commander asked him
+if he could stick, and he said, "Yes, sir!" which is what Colonel
+"Fanny" Farquhar would have said. This trip was hardly what would
+be called peaceful. The orderly whom Niven had with him both going
+and coming was hit by high explosive shells. Niven is so small that it
+is difficult to hit him. He is about up to Major Gault's shoulder.
+
+He had been worrying about his supply of rifle-cartridges. There were
+not enough to take care of another German infantry charge, which
+was surely coming. After repelling two charges, think of failing to repel
+the third for want of ammunition! Think of Corporal Christy, the bear-
+hunter, with the Germans thick in front of him and no bullets for his
+rifle! But appeared again Mr. Thomas Atkins, another platoon of him,
+with twenty boxes of cartridges, which was rather a risky burden to
+bring through shell-fire. The relief as these were distributed was that
+of having something at your throat which threatens to strangle you
+removed.
+
+Making another tour of his trenches a little later in the afternoon,
+Niven found that there was a gap of fifty yards between his left and
+the right of the adjoining regiment. Fifty yards is the inch on the end of
+a man's nose in trench-warfare on such an occasion. He was able to
+place eight men in the gap. At least, they could keep a look out and
+tell him what was going on.
+
+It was not cheering news to learn that the regiments on his left had
+withdrawn to trenches about three hundred yards to the rear--a long
+distance in trench warfare. But the P.P.s had no time to retire. They
+could have gone only in the panic of men who think of nothing in their
+demoralization except to flee from the danger in front, regardless of
+more danger to the rear. They were held where they were under what
+cover they had by the renewed blasts of shells, putting the machine-
+guns out of action.
+
+Now the Germans were coming on again in their supreme effort. It
+was as a nightmare, in which only the objective of effort is recalled
+and all else is a vague struggle of every ounce of strength which one
+can exert against smothering odds. No use to ask these men what
+they thought. What do you think when you are climbing up a rope
+whose strands are breaking over the edge of a precipice? You climb;
+that is all.
+
+The P.P.s shot at Germans. After a night without sleep, after a day
+among their dead and wounded, after torrents of shell-fire, after
+breathing smoke, dust and gas, these veterans were in a state of
+exaltation entirely oblivious of danger, of their surroundings, mindless
+of what came next, automatically shooting to kill as they were trained
+to do, even as a man pulls with all his might in the crucial test of a tug
+of war. Old Corporal Christy, bear-hunter of the North-West, who
+could "shoot the eye off an ant," as Niven said, leaned out over the
+parapet, or what was left of it, because he could take better aim lying
+down and the Germans were so thick that he could not afford any
+misses.
+
+Corporal Dover had to give up firing his machine-gun at last.
+Wounded, he had dug it out of the earth after an explosion and set it
+up again. The explosion which destroyed the gun finally crushed his
+leg and arm. He crawled out of the debris toward the support trench
+which had become the fire trench, only to be killed by a bullet.
+
+The Germans got possession of a section of the P.P.s' trench where,
+it is believed, no Canadians were left. But the German effort died
+there. It could get no farther. This was as near to Ypres as the
+Germans were to go in this direction. When the day's work was done,
+there, in sight of the field scattered with German dead, the P.P.s
+counted their numbers. Of the six hundred and thirty-five men who
+had begun the fight at daybreak, one hundred and fifty men and four
+officers, Niven, Pappineau, Clark and Vandenberg, remained fit for
+duty.
+
+Vandenberg is a Hollander, but mostly he is Vandenberg. To him the
+call of youth is the call to arms. He knows the roads of Europe and
+the roads of Chihuahua. He was at home fighting with Villa at
+Zacetecas and at home fighting with the P.P.s in front of Ypres.
+
+Darkness found all the survivors among the P.P.s in the support and
+communication trenches. The fire trench had become an untenable
+dust-heap. They crept out only to bring in any wounded unable to
+help themselves; and wounded and rescuers were more than once
+hit in the process. It was too dangerous to attempt to bury the dead
+who were in the fire-trench. Most of them had already been buried by
+shells. For them and for the dead in the support trenches interred by
+their living comrades, Niven recited such portions as he could recall
+of the Church of England service for the dead--recited them with a
+tight throat. Then the P.P.s, unbeaten, marched out, leaving the
+position to their relief, a battalion of the King's Royal Rifle Corps.
+Corporal Christy, the bear-hunter, had his "luck with him." He had not
+even a scratch.
+
+Such is the story of a hard fight by one battalion in the kind of warfare
+waged in Europe these days, a story only partially told; a story to
+make a book. All the praise that the P.P.s, millionaire or labourer,
+scapegrace or respectable pillar of society, ask is that they are worthy
+of fighting side by side with Mr. Thomas Atkins, regular. At best, one
+poor, little, finite mind only observes through a rift in the black smoke
+and yellow smoke of high explosives and the clouds of dust and
+military secrecy something of what has happened many times in a
+small section of that long line from Switzerland to the North Sea.
+
+Leaning against the wall in a corner of the dining-room of the French
+ch�teau were the P.P.s colours. Major Niven took off the wrapper in
+order that I might see the flag with the initials of the battalion which
+Princess Patricia embroidered with her own hands. There is room,
+one repeats, for a little sentiment and a little emotion, too, between
+Halifax and Vancouver.
+
+"Of course we could not take our colours into action," said Niven.
+"They would have been torn into tatters or buried in a shell-crater. But
+we've always kept them up at battalion headquarters. I believe we are
+the only battalion that has. We promised the Princess that we would."
+
+In her honour, an old custom has been renewed in France: knights
+are fighting in the name of a fair lady.
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+Many Pictures
+
+
+
+A single incident, an impression photographic in its swiftness, a
+chance remark, may be more illuminating than a day's experiences.
+One does not need to go to the front for them. Sometimes they come
+to the gateway of our ch�teau. They are pages at random out of a
+library of overwhelming information.
+
+One of the aviation grounds is not far away. Look skyward at almost
+any hour of the day and you will see a plane, its propeller a roar or a
+hum according to its altitude. Sometimes it is circling in practice;
+again, it is off to the front. At break of day the planes appear; in the
+gloaming they return to roost.
+
+If an aviator has leave for two or three days in summer he starts in
+the late afternoon, flashing over that streak of Channel in half an
+hour, and may be at home for dinner without getting any dust on his
+clothes or having to bother with military red tape at steamer
+gangways or customs houses.
+
+The airmen are a type which one associates with certain marked
+characteristics. No nervous man is wanted, and it is time for an
+aviator to take a rest at the first sign of nerves. They seem rather shy,
+men given to observation rather than to talking; accustomed to using
+their eyes and hands. It is difficult to realize that some quiet, young
+fellow who is pointed out has had so many hairbreadth escapes.
+What tales, worthy of Arabian Nights' heroes who are borne away-on
+magic carpets, they bring home, relating them as matter-of-factly as if
+they had broken a shoelace.
+
+Up in their seat, a whir of the motor, and they are off on another
+adventure. They have all the spirit of corps of the oldest regiments,
+and, besides, a spirit peculiar to the newest branch in the service of
+war. Anonymity is absolute. Everything is done by the corps for the
+corps. Possibly because it is so young, because it started with
+chosen men, the British Aviation Corps is unsurpassed; but partly it is
+because of the British temperament, with that combination of
+coolness and innate love of risk which the British manner sometimes
+belies. Something of the old spirit of knighthood characterizes air
+service. It is individual work; its numbers are relatively few.
+
+Some mornings ago I saw several young soldiers with notebooks
+going about our village street. They were from the cadet school
+where privates, from the trenches, take a course and return with
+chocolate drops on their, sleeve-bands as commissioned officers.
+This was a course in billeting. For ours is not an army in tents, but
+one living in French houses and barns. The pupils were learning how
+to carry out this delicate task; for delicate it is. A stranger speaking
+another language becomes the guest of the host for whom he is
+fighting. Mr. Atkins receives only shelter; he supplies his own meals.
+His excess of marmalade one sees yellowing the cheeks of the
+children in the family where he is at home. Madame objects only to
+his efforts to cook in her kitchen; woman-like, she would rather handle
+the pots and pans herself.
+
+Tommy is thoroughly instructed in his duty as guest and under a
+discipline that is merciless so far as conduct toward the population
+goes; so the two get on better than French and English military
+authorities feared that they might. Time has taught them to
+understand each other and to see that difference in race does not
+mean absence of human qualities in common, though differently
+expressed. Many armies I have seen, but never one better behaved
+than the British army in France and Flanders in its respect for
+property and the rights of the population.
+
+And while the fledgling officers are going on with their billeting, we
+hear the t-r-r-t of a machine-gun at a machine-gun school about a
+mile distant, where picked men also from the trenches receive
+instruction in the use of an arm new to them. There are other schools
+within sound of the guns teaching the art of war to an expanding army
+in the midst of war, with the teachers bringing their experience from
+the battle-line.
+
+
+
+"Their shops and their houses all have fronts of glass," wrote a Sikh
+soldier home, "and even the poor are rich in this bountiful land."
+
+Sikhs and Ghurkas and Rajputs and Pathans and Gharwalis, the
+brown-skinned tribesmen in India, have been on a strange Odyssey,
+bringing picturesqueness to the khaki tone of modern war.
+Aeroplanes interested them less than a trotting dog in a wheel for
+drawing water. They would watch that for hours.
+
+Still fresh in mind is a scene when the air seemed a moist sponge
+and all above the earth was dripping and all under foot a mire. I was
+homesick for the flash on the windows of the New York skyscrapers
+or the gleam on the Hudson of that bright sunlight in a drier air, that is
+the secret of the American's nervous energy. It seemed to me that it
+was enough to have to exist in Northern France at that season of the
+year, let alone fighting Germans.
+
+Out of the drizzly, misty rain along a muddy road and turning past us
+came the Indian cavalry, which, like the British cavalry, had fought on
+foot in the trenches, while their horses led the leisurely life of true
+equine gentry. Erect in their saddles, their martial spirit defiant of
+weather, their black eyes flashing as they looked toward the
+reviewing officers, troop after troop of these sons of the East passed
+by, everyone seeming as fit for review as if he had cleaned his
+uniform and equipment in his home barracks instead of in French
+barns.
+
+You asked who had trained them; who had fashioned the brown clay
+into resolute and loyal obedience which stood the test of a Flanders
+winter? What was the force which could win them to cross the seas to
+fight for England? Among the brown faces topped with turbans
+appeared occasional white faces. These were the men; these the
+force.
+
+The marvel was not that the Indians were able to fight as well as they
+did in that climate, but that they fought at all. What welcome summer
+brought from their gleaming black eyes! July or August could not be
+too hot for them. On a plateau one afternoon I saw them in a
+gymkhana. It was a treat for the King of the Belgians, who has had
+few holidays, indeed, this last year, and for the French peasants who
+came from the neighbourhood. Yelling, wild as they were in tribal days
+before the British brought order and peace to India, the horsemen
+galloped across the open space, picking up handkerchiefs from the
+ground and impaling tent pegs on their lances. The French peasants
+clapped their hands and the British Indian officers said, "Good!" when
+the performer succeeded, or, "Too bad!" when he failed.
+
+If you asked the officers for the secret of the Indian Empire they said:
+"We try to be fair to the natives!" which means that they are just and
+even-tempered. An enormous, loose-jointed machine the British
+Empire, which seems sometimes to creak a bit, yet holds together for
+that very reason. Imperial weight may have interfered with British
+adaptability to the kind of warfare which was the one kind that the
+Germans had to train for; but certainly some Englishmen must know
+how to rule.
+
+That church bell across the street from our ch�teau begins its clangor
+at dawn, summoning the French women and children and the old
+men to the fields in harvest time. But its peal carrying across the
+farmlands is softened by distance and sweet to the tired workers in
+the evening. In the morning it tells them that the day is long and they
+have much to do before dark. After that thought I never complained
+because it robbed me of my sleep. I felt ashamed not to be up and
+doing myself, and worked with a better spirit.
+
+"Will they do it?"
+
+We asked this question as often in our mess in those August days
+as, Will the Russians lose Warsaw? Would the peasants be able to
+get in their crops, with all the able-bodied men away? I had inside
+information from the village mayor and the blacksmith and the baker
+that they would. A financial expert, the baker. Of course, he said,
+France would go on fighting till the Germans were beaten, just as the
+old men and the women and children said, whether the church bell
+were clanging the matins or the angelus. But there was the question
+of finances. It took money to fight. The Americans, he knew, had
+more money than they knew what to do with--as Europeans
+universally think, only, personally, I find that I was overlooked in the
+distribution--and if they would lend the Allies some of their spare
+billions, Germany was surely beaten.
+
+A busy man, the blacksmith, and brawny, if he had no spreading
+chestnut tree; busy not only shoeing farmhorses, but repairing
+American reapers and binders, whose owners profited exceedingly
+and saved the day. But not all farmers felt that they could afford the
+charge.
+
+These kept at their small patches with sickles. Gradually the carpets
+of gold waving in the breeze became bundles lying on the stubble,
+and great, conical harvest stacks rose, while children gathered the
+stray stems left on the ground by the reapers till they had immense
+bouquets of wheat-heads under their arms, enough to make two or
+three loaves of the pain de m�nage that the baker sold. So the
+peasants did it; they won; and this was some compensation for the
+loss of Warsaw.
+
+
+
+One morning we heard troops marching past, which was not unusual.
+But these were French troops in the British zone, en route from
+somewhere in France to somewhere else in France. There was not a
+person left in any house in that village. Everybody was out, with
+affection glowing in their eyes. For these were their own--their soldiers
+of France!
+
+
+
+When you see a certain big limousine flying a small British flag pass
+you know that it belongs to the Commander-in-Chief; and though it
+may be occupied only by one of his aides, often you will have a
+glimpse of a man with a square chin and a drooping white
+moustache, who is the sole one among the hundreds of thousands at
+the British front who wears the wreath-circled crossed batons of a
+field-marshal.
+
+It is erroneous to think that Sir John French or any other commander,
+though that is the case in time of action, spends all his time in the
+private house occupied as headquarters, designated by two wisps of
+flags, studying a map and sending and receiving messages, when
+the trench-line remains stationary. He goes here and there on
+inspections. It is the only way that a modern leader may let his
+officers and men know that he is a being of flesh and blood and not a
+name signed to reports and orders. A machine-gun company I knew
+had a surprise when resting in a field waiting for orders. They
+suddenly recognized in a figure coming through an opening in a
+hedge the supreme head of the British army in France. No need of a
+call to attention. The effect was like an electric shock, which sent
+every man to his place and made his backbone a steel rod. Those
+crossed batons represented a dizzy altitude to that battery which had
+just come out from England. Sir John walked up and down, looking
+over men and guns after their nine months' drill at home, and said,
+"Very good!" and was away to other inspections where he might not
+necessarily say, "Very good!"
+
+Frequently his inspections are formal. A battalion or a brigade is
+drawn up in a field, or they march past. Then he usually makes a
+short speech. On one occasion the officers had arranged a platform
+for the speech-making. Sir John gave it a glance and that was
+enough. It was the last of such platforms erected for him.
+
+"Inspections! They are second nature to us!" said a new army man.
+"We were inspected and inspected at home and we are inspected
+and inspected out here. If there is anything wrong with us it is the
+general's own fault if it isn't found out. When a general is not
+inspecting, some man from the medical corps is disinfecting."
+
+Battalions of the new army are frequently billeted for two or three
+days in our village. The barn up the road I know is capable of housing
+twenty men and one officer, for this is chalked on .the door. Before
+they turn in for the night the men frequently sing, and the sound of
+their voices is pleasant.
+
+A typical inspection was one that I saw in the main street. The
+battalion was drawn up in full marching equipment on the road. Of
+those officers with packs on their backs one was only nineteen. This
+is the limit of youth to acquire a chocolate drop on the sleeve. The
+sergeant-major was an old regular, the knowing back-bone of the
+battalion, who had taken the men of clay and taught them their letters
+and then how to spell and to add and subtract and divide. One of
+those impressive red caps arrived in a car, and the general who wore
+it went slowly up and down the line, front and rear, examining rifles
+and equipment, while the young officers and the old sergeant were
+hoping that Jones or Smith hadn't got some dust in his rifle-barrel at
+the last moment.
+
+Brokers and carpenters, bankers and mechanics, clerks and
+labourers, the new army is like the army of France, composed of all
+classes. One evening I had a chat with two young fellows in a
+battalion quartered in the village, who were seated beside the road.
+Both came from Buckinghamshire. One was a schoolmaster and the
+other an architect. They were "bunkies," pals, chums.
+
+"When did you enlist?" I asked.
+
+"In early September, after the Marne retreat. We thought that it was
+our duty, then; but we've been a long time arriving."
+
+"How do you like it?"
+
+"We are not yet masters of the language, we find," said the
+schoolmaster, "though I had a pretty good book knowledge of it."
+
+"I'm learning the gestures fast, though," said the architect.
+
+"The French are glad to see us," said the schoolmaster. "They call us
+the Keetcheenaires. I fancy they thought we were a long time coming.
+But now we are here, I think they will find that we can keep up our
+end."
+
+They had the fresh complexions which come from healthy, outdoor
+work. There was something engaging in their boyishness and their
+views. For they had a wider range of interests than that professional
+soldier, Mr. Atkins, these citizens who had taken up arms. They knew
+what trench-fighting meant by work in practice trenches at home.
+
+"Of course it will not be quite the same; theory and practice never
+are," said the schoolmaster.
+
+"We ought to be well grounded in the principles," said the architect
+thoughtfully, "and they say that in a week or two of actual experience
+you will have mastered the details that could not be taught in
+England. Then, too, having shells burst around you will be strange at
+first. But I think our battalion will give a good account of itself, sir.
+All the Bucks men have!" There crept in the pride of regiment, of
+locality, which is so characteristically Anglo-Saxon.
+
+They change life at the front, these new army men. If a carpenter, a
+lawyer, a sign-painter, an accountant, is wanted, you have only to
+speak to a new army battalion commander and one is forthcoming--a
+millionaire, too, for that matter, who gets his shilling a day for serving
+his country. Their intelligence permitted the architect and the
+schoolmaster to have no illusions about the character of the war they
+had to face. The pity was that such a fine force as the new army,
+which had not become trench stale, could not have a free space in
+which to make a great turning movement, instead of having to go
+against that solid battle front from Switzerland to the North Sea.
+
+We have heard enough--quite enough for most of us?--about the
+German Crown Prince. But there is also a prince with the British army
+in France. No lieutenant looks younger for his years than this one in
+the Grenadier Guards, and he seems of the same type as the others
+when you see him marching with his regiment or off for a walk
+smoking a brier-wood pipe. There are some officers who would rather
+not accompany him on his walks, for he can go fast and far. He
+makes regular reports of his observations, and he has opportunities
+for learning which other subalterns lack, for he may have both the
+staff and the army as personal instructors. Otherwise, his life is that of
+any other subaltern; for there is an instrument called the British
+Constitution which regulates many things. A little shy, very desirous to
+learn, is Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, heir to the throne of Great
+Britain and Ireland and the Empire of India. He might be called the
+willing prince.
+
+This was one of the shells that hit--one of the hundred that hit. The
+time was summer; the place, the La Bass�e region. Probably the
+fighting was all the harder here because it is so largely blind. When
+you cannot see what an enemy is doing you keep on pumping shells
+into the area which he occupies; you take no risks with him.
+
+The visitor may see about as much of what is going on in the La
+Bass�e region as an ant can see of the surrounding landscape when
+promenading in the grass. The only variation in the flatness of the
+land is the overworked ditches which try to drain it. Look upward, and
+rows of poplar trees along the level, and a hedge, a grove, a cottage,
+or trees and shrubs around it, limit your vision. Thus, if a breeze starts
+timidly in a field it is stopped before it goes far. That "hot corner" is
+all the hotter for a burning July sun. The army water-carts which run
+back to wells of cool water are busy filling empty canteens, while
+shrapnel trims the hedges.
+
+A stretcher was being borne into the doorway of an estaminet which
+had escaped destruction by shells, and above the door was chalked
+some lettering which indicated that it was a first clearing station for the
+wounded. Lying on other stretchers on the floor were some wounded
+men. Of the two nearest, one had a bandage around his head and
+one a bandage around his arm. They had been stunned, which was
+only natural when you have been as close as they had to a shell-
+burst--a shell that made a hit. The concussion was bound to have this
+effect.
+
+A third man was the best illustration of shell-destructiveness. Bullets
+make only holes. Shells make gouges, fractures, pulp. He, too, had a
+bandaged head and had been hit in several places; but the worst
+wound was in the leg, where an artery had been cut. He was weak,
+with a sort of where-am-I look in his eyes. If the fragment which had
+hit his leg had hit his head, or his neck, or his abdomen, he would
+have been killed instantly. He was also an illustration of how hard it is
+to kill a man even with several shell-fragments, unless some of them
+strike in the right place. For he was going to live; the surgeon had
+whispered the fact in his ear, that one important fact. He had beaten
+the German shell, after all.
+
+Returning by the same road by which we came a motor-car ran swiftly
+by, the only kind of car allowed on that road. We had a glimpse of the
+big, painted red cross on an ambulance side, and at the rear, where
+the curtains were rolled up for ventilation, of four pairs of soldier boot-
+soles at the end of four stretchers, which had been slid into place at
+the estaminet by the sturdy, kindly, experienced medical corps men.
+
+Before we reached the village where our car waited, the ambulance
+passed us on the way back to the estaminet. Very soon after the
+shell-burst, a telephone bell had rung down the line from the extreme
+front calling for an ambulance and stating the number of men hit, so
+that everybody would know what to prepare for. At the village, which
+was outside the immediate danger zone, was another clearing
+station. Here the stretchers were taken into a house--taken without a
+jolt by men who were specialists in handling stretchers--for any re-
+dressing if necessary, before another ambulance started journey,
+with motor-trucks and staff motor-cars giving right of way, to a
+spotless, white hospital ship which would take them home to England
+the next night.
+
+It had been an incident of life at the front, and of the organization of
+war, causing less flurry than an ambulance call to an accident in a
+great city.
+
+
+
+XXVI
+Finding The Grand Fleet
+
+
+
+Good fortune slipped a message across the Channel to the British
+front, which became the magic carpet of transition from the life of the
+burrowing army in its trenches to the life of battleships; from motors
+trailing dust over French roads, to destroyers trailing foam in choppy
+seas off English coasts.
+
+But there was more than one place to go in that wonderful week;
+more than ships to see if one would know something of the intricate,
+busy world of the Admiralty's work, which makes coastguards a part
+of its personnel. The transition is less sudden if we begin with a ride in
+an open car along the coast of Scotland. Dusk had fallen on the
+purple cloudlands of heather dotted with the white spots of grazing
+sheep in the Scottish Highlands under changing skies, with
+headlands stretching out into the misty reaches of the North Sea,
+forbidding in the chill air after the warmth of France and suggestive of
+the uninviting theatre where, in approaching winter, patrols and
+trawlers and mine-sweepers carried on their work to within range of
+the guns of Heligoland. A people who lived in such a chill land, in
+sight of such a chill sea, and who spoke of their "Bonnie Scotland
+forever," were worthy to be masters of that sea. The Americans who
+think of Britain as a small island forget the distance from Land's End
+to John o' Groat's, which represents coast line to be guarded; and we
+may find a lesson, too, we who must make our real defence by sea,
+in tireless vigils which may be our own if the old Armageddon beast
+ever comes threatening the far-longer coast line that we have to
+defend. For you may never know what war is till war comes. Not even
+the Germans knew, though they had practised with a lifelike dummy
+behind the curtains for forty years.
+
+At intervals, just as in the military zone in France, sentries stopped us
+and took the number of our car; but this time sentries who were
+guarding a navy's rather than an army's secrets. With darkness we
+passed the light of an occasional inn, while cottage lights made a
+scattered sprinkling among the dim masses of the hills. A man might
+have been puzzled as to where all the kilted Highland soldiers whom
+he had seen at the front came from, if he had not known that the
+canny Highlanders enlist Lowlanders in kilty regiments.
+
+The Frenchmen of our party--M. Stephen Pichon, former Foreign
+Minister, M. Ren� Bazin, of the Acad�mie Fran�aise, M. Joseph
+Reinach, of the Figaro, M. Pierre Mille, of Le Temps, and M. Henri
+Ponsot--who had never been in Scotland before, were on the look out
+for a civilian Scots in kilts and were grievously disappointed not to find
+a single one.
+
+This night ride convinced me that however many Germans might be
+moving about in England under the guise of cockney or of Lancashire
+dialects in quest of information, none has any chance in Scotland. He
+could never get the burr, I am sure, unless born in Scotland; and if he
+were, once he had it the triumph ought to make him a Scotsman at
+heart.
+
+The officer of the Royal Navy who was in the car with me confessed
+to less faith in his symbol of authority than in the generations' bred
+burr of our chauffeur to carry conviction of our genuineness; so
+arguments were left to him and successfully, including two or three
+with Scotch cattle, which seemed to be co-operating with the sentries
+to block the road.
+
+After an hour's run inland, as the car rose over a ridge and
+descended on a sharp grade, in the distance under the moonlight we
+saw the floor of the sea again, melting into opaqueness, with curving
+fringes of foam along the irregular shore cut by the indentations of the
+firths. Now the sentries were more frequent and more particular. Our
+single light gave dim form to the figures of sailors, soldiers, and boy
+scouts on patrol.
+
+"They have done remarkably well, these boys!" said the officer. "Our
+fears that, boy like, they would see all kinds of things which didn't
+exist were quite needless. The work has taught them a sense of
+responsibility which will remain with them after the war, when their
+experience will be a precious memory. They realize that it isn't play,
+but a serious business, and act accordingly."
+
+With all the houses and the countryside dark, the rays of our lamp
+seemed an invading comet to the men who held up lanterns with red
+twinkles of warning.
+
+"The patrol boats have complained about your lights, sir!" said one
+obdurate sentry.
+
+We looked out into the black wall in the direction of the sea and could
+see no sign of a patrol boat. How had it been able to inform this lone
+sentry of that flying ray which disclosed the line of a coastal road to
+anyone at sea? He would not accept the best argumentative burr that
+our chauffeur could produce as sufficient explanation or guarantee.
+Most Scottish of Scots in physiognomy and shrewd matter-of-
+factness, as revealed in the glare of the lantern, he might have been
+on watch in the Highland fastnesses in Prince Charlie's time.
+
+"Captain R------, of the Royal Navy!" explained the officer, introducing
+himself.
+
+"I'll take your name and address!" said the sentry.
+
+"The Admiralty. I take the responsibility."
+
+"As I'll report, sir!" said the sentry, not so convinced but he burred
+something further into the chauffeur's ear.
+
+This seems to have little to do with the navy, but it has much, indeed,
+as a part of unfathomable, complicated business of guards within
+guards, intelligence battling with intelligence, deceiving raiders by
+land or sea, of those responsible for the safety of England and the
+mastery of the seas.
+
+It is from the navy yard that the ships go forth to battle and to the
+navy yard they must return for supplies and for the grooming beat of
+hammers in the dry dock. Those who work at a navy yard keep the
+navy's house; welcome home all the family, from Dreadnoughts to
+trawlers, give them cheer and shelter and bind up their wounds.
+
+The quarter-deck of action for Admiral Lowry, commanding the great
+base on the Forth, which was begun before the war and hastened to
+completion since, was a substantial brick building. Adjoining his office,
+where he worked with engineers' blue prints as well as with sea
+charts, he had fitted up a small bedroom where he slept, to be at
+hand if an emergency arose.
+
+Partly we walked, as he showed us over his domain of steam-
+shovels, machine shops, cement factories, of building and repairs, of
+coaling and docking, and partly we rode on a car that ran over
+temporary rails laid for trucks loaded with rocks and dirt. Borrowing
+from Peter to pay Paul, a river bottom had been filled in back of the
+quays with material that had been excavated to form a vast basin with
+cement walls, where squadrons of Dreadnoughts might rest and
+await their turn to be warped into the great dry docks which open off it
+in chasmlike galleries.
+
+"The largest contract in all England," said the contractor. "And here is
+the man who checks up my work," he added, nodding to the lean,
+Scottish naval engineer who was with us. It was clear from his looks
+that only material of the best quality and work that was true would be
+acceptable to this canny mentor of efficiency, "And the workers?
+Have you had any strikes here?"
+
+"No. We have employed double the usual number of men from the
+start of the war," he said. "I'm afraid that the Welsh coal troubles have
+been accepted as characteristic. Our men have been reasonable and
+patriotic. They have shown the right spirit. If they hadn't, how could
+we have accomplished that?"
+
+We were looking down into the depths of a dry dock blasted out of the
+rock, which had been begun and completed within the year. And we
+had heard nothing of all this through those twelve months! No writer,
+no photographer, chronicled this silent labour! Double lines of guards
+surrounded the place day and night. Only tried patriots might enter
+this world of a busy army in smudged workmen's clothes, bending to
+their tasks with that ordered discipline of industrialism which wears no
+uniforms, marches without beat of drums, and toils that the ships
+shall want nothing to ensure victory.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+On A Destroyer
+
+
+
+Now we were on our way to the great thing--to our look behind the
+curtain at the hidden hosts of sea-power. Of some eight hundred tons
+burden our steed, doing eighteen knots, which was a dog-trot for one
+of her speed.
+
+"A destroyer is like a motor-car," said the commander. "If you rush
+her all the time she wears out. We give her the limit only when
+necessary."
+
+On the bridge the zest of travel on a dolphin of steel held the bridle on
+eagerness to reach the journey's end. We all like to see things well
+done, and here one had his first taste of how well things are done in
+the British navy, which did not have to make ready for war after the
+war began. With an open eye one went, and the experience of other
+navies as a balance for his observation; but one lost one's heart to
+the British navy and might as well confess it now. A six months' cruise
+with our own battleship fleet was a proper introduction to the
+experience.
+
+After the arduous monotony of the trenches and after the traffic of
+London, it was freedom and sport and ecstasy to be there, with the
+rush of salt air on the face! Our commander was under thirty years of
+age; and that destroyer responded to his will like a stringed
+instrument. He seemed a part of her, her nerves welded to his.
+
+"Specialized in torpedo work," he said, in answer to a question. "That
+is the way of the British navy: to learn one thing well before you go on
+with another. If in the course of it you learn how to command, larger
+responsibilities await you. If not--there's retired pay."
+
+Behind a shield which sheltered them from the spray on the forward
+deck, significantly free of everything but that four-inch gun, its crew
+was stationed. The commander had only to lean over and speak
+through a tube and give a range, and the music began. For the tube
+was bifurcated at the end to an ear-mask over a youngster's head; a
+youngster who had real sailor's smiling blue eyes, like the
+commander's own. For hours he would sit waiting in the hope that
+game would be sighted. No fisherman could be more patient or more
+cheerful.
+
+"Before he came into the navy he was a chauffeur. He likes this," said
+the commander.
+
+"In case of a submarine you do not want to lose any time; is that it?"
+
+"Yes," he replied. "You never can tell when we might have a chance
+to put a shot into Fritz's periscope or ram him--Fritz is our name for
+submarines."
+
+Were all the commanders of destroyers up to his mark? How many
+more had the British navy caught young and trained to such
+quickness of decision and in the art of imparting it to his men?
+
+Three hundred revolutions! The destroyer changed speed. Five
+hundred! She changed speed again. Out of the mist in the distance
+flashed a white ribbon knot that seemed to be tied to a destroyer's
+bow and behind it another destroyer, and still others, lean, catlike, but
+running as if legless, with greased bodies sliding over the sea. We
+snapped out a message to them and they answered like passing
+birds on the wing, before they swept out of sight behind a headland
+with uncanny ease of speed. Literal swarms of destroyers England
+had running to and fro in the North Sea, keen for the chase and too
+quick at dodging and too fast to be in any danger of the under-water
+dagger thrust of the assassins whom they sought. There cannot be
+too many. They are the eyes of the navy; they gather information and
+carry a sting in their torpedo tubes.
+
+
+
+It was chilly there on the bridge, with the prospect too entrancing not
+to remain even if one froze. But here stepped in naval preparedness
+with thick, short coats of llama wool.
+
+"Served out to all the men last winter, when we were in the thick of it
+patrolling," the commander explained. "You'll not get cold in that!"
+
+"And yourself?" was suggested to the commander.
+
+"Oh, it is not cold enough for that in September! We're hardened to it.
+You come from the land and feel the change of air; we are at sea all
+the time," he replied, He was without a great-coat; and the ease with
+which he held his footing made landlubbers feel their awkwardness.
+
+A jumpy, uncertain tidal sea was running. Yet our destroyer slipped
+over the waves, cut through them, played with them, and let them
+seem to play with her, all the while laughing at them in the confident
+power of her softly purring vitals.
+
+"Look out!" which at the front in France was a signal to jump for a
+"funk pit." We ducked, as a cloud of spray passed above the heavy
+canvas and clattered like hail against the smokestack. "There won't
+be any more!" said the commander. He was right. He knew that
+passage. One wondered if he did not know every gallon of water in
+the North Sea, which he had experienced in all its moods.
+
+Sheltered by the smokestack down on the main deck, one of our
+party, who loved not the sea for its own sake, but endured it as a
+passageway to the sight of the Grand Fleet, had found warmth, if not
+comfort. Not for him that invitation to come below given by the chief
+engineer, who rose out of a round hole with a pleasant "How d'y' do!"
+air to get a sniff of the fresh breeze, wizard of the mysterious power of
+the turbines which sent the destroyer marching so noiselessly. He
+was the one who transferred the commander's orders into that
+symphony in mechanism. Turn a lever and you had a dozen more
+knots; not with a leap or a jerk, but like a cat's sleek stretching of
+muscles. Not by the slightest tremor did you realize the acceleration;
+only by watching some stationary object as you flew past.
+
+Now a sweep of smooth water at the entrance to a harbour, and a
+turn--and there it was: the sea-power of England!
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+Ships That Have Fought
+
+
+
+But was that really it--that spread of greyish blue-green dots set on a
+huge greyish blue-green platter? One could not discern where ships
+began and water and sky which held them suspended left off.
+Invisible fleet it had been called. At first glance it seemed to be
+composed of phantoms, baffling, absorbing the tone of its
+background. Admiralty secrecy must be the result of a naval dislike of
+publicity.
+
+Still as if they were rooted, these leviathans! How could such a shy,
+peaceful-looking array send out broadsides of twelve and thirteen-five
+and fifteen-inch shells? What a paradise for a German submarine!
+Each ship seemed an inviting target. Only there were many gates
+and doors to the paradise, closed to all things that travel on and
+under the water without a proper identification. Submarines that had
+tried to pick one of the locks were like the fish who found going good
+into the trap. A submarine had about the same chance of reaching
+that anchorage as a German in the uniform of the Death's Head
+Hussars, with a bomb under his arm, of reaching the vaults of the
+Bank of England.
+
+And was this all of the greatest naval force ever gathered under a
+single command, these two or three lines of ships? But as the
+destroyer drew nearer the question changed. How many more? Was
+there no end to greyish blue-green monsters, in order as precise as
+the trees of a California orchard, that appeared out of the greyish
+blue-green background? First to claim attention was the Queen
+Elizabeth, with her eight fifteen-inch guns on a platform which could
+travel at nearly the speed of the average railroad train.
+
+The contrast of sea and land warfare appealed the more vividly to
+one fresh from the front in France. What infinite labour for an army to
+get one big gun into position! How heralded the snail-like travels of
+the big German howitzer! Here was ship after ship, whose guns
+seemed innumerable. One found it hard to realize the resisting power
+of their armour, painted to look as liquid as the sea, and the stability
+of their construction, which was able to bear the strain of firing the
+great shells that travelled ten miles to their target.
+
+Sea-power, indeed! And world-power, too, there in the hollow of a
+nation's hand, to throw in whatever direction she pleased. If an
+American had a lump in his throat at the thought of what it meant,
+what might it not mean to an Englishman? Probably the Englishman
+would say, "I think that the fleet is all right, don't you?"
+
+Land-power, too! On the continent vast armies wrestled for some
+square miles of earth. France has, say, three million soldiers;
+Germany, five; Austria, four--and England had, perhaps, a hundred
+thousand men, perhaps more, on board this fleet which defended the
+English land and lands far overseas without firing a shot. A battalion
+of infantry is more than sufficient in numbers to man a Dreadnought.
+How precious, then, the skill of that crew! Man-power is as
+concentrated as gun-power with a navy. Ride three hundred miles in
+a motor-car along an army front, with glimpses of units of soldiers,
+and you have seen little of a modern army. Here, moving down the
+lanes that separated these grey fighters, one could compass the
+whole!
+
+Four gold letters, spelling the word Lion, awakened the imagination to
+the actual fact of the Bluecher turning her bottom skyward before she
+sank off the Dogger Bank under the fire of the guns of the Lion and
+the Tiger astern of her, and the Princess Royal and the New Zealand,
+of the latest fashion in battle-cruiser squadrons which are known as
+the "cat" squadron. This work brought them into their own; proved
+how the British, who built the first Dreadnought, have kept a little
+ahead of their rivals in construction. With almost the gun-power of
+Dreadnoughts, better than three to two against the best battleships,
+with the speed of cruisers and capable of overpowering cruisers, or of
+pursuing any battleship, or getting out of range, they can run or strike,
+as they please.
+
+Ascend that gangway, so amazingly clean, as were the decks above
+and below and everything about the Lion or the Tiger, and you were
+on board one of the few major ships which had been under heavy
+fire. Her officers and men knew what modern naval war was like; her
+guns knew the difference between the wall of cloth of a towed target
+and an enemy's wall of armour.
+
+In the battle of Tsushima Straits, Russian and Japanese ships had
+fought at three and four thousand yards and closed into much shorter
+range. Since then, we had had the new method of marksmanship.
+Tsushima ceased to be a criterion. The Dogger Bank multiplied the
+range by five. A hundred years since England, all the while the most
+powerfully armed nation at sea, had been in a naval war of the first
+magnitude; and to the Lion and the Tiger had come the test. The
+Germans said that they had sunk the Tiger; but the Tiger afloat
+purred a contented denial.
+
+You could not fail to identify among the group of officers on the
+quarter-deck Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty, for his victory had
+impressed his features on the public's eye. Had his portrait not
+appeared in the press, one would have been inclined to say that a
+first lieutenant had put on a vice-admiral's coat by mistake. He was
+about the age of the first lieutenant of one of our battleships. Even as
+it was, one was inclined to exclaim: "There is some mistake! You are
+too young!" The Who is Who book says that he is all of forty-four
+years old and it must be right, though it disagrees with his
+appearance by five years.
+
+A vice-admiral at forty-four! A man who is a rear-admiral with us at
+fifty-five is very precocious. And all the men around him were young.
+The British navy did not wait for war to teach again the lesson of
+"youth for action!" They saved time by putting youth in charge at
+once.
+
+Their simple uniforms, the directness, alertness, and definiteness of
+these officers who had been with a fleet ready for a year to go into
+battle on a minute's notice, was in keeping with their surroundings of
+decks cleared for action and the absence of anything which did not
+suggest that hitting a target was the business of their life.
+
+"I had heard that you took your admirals from the schoolroom," said
+one of the Frenchmen, "but I begin to believe that it is the nursery."
+
+Night and day they must be on watch. No easy chairs; their shop is
+their home. They must have the vitality that endures a strain. One
+error in battle by any one of them might wreck the British Empire.
+
+It is difficult to write about any man-of-war and not be technical; for
+everything about her seems technical and mechanical except the fact
+that she floats. Her officers and crew are engaged in work which is
+legerdemain to the civilian.
+
+"Was it like what you thought it would be after all your training for a
+naval action?" one asked.
+
+"Yes, quite; pretty much as we reasoned it out," was the reply.
+"Indeed, this was the most remarkable thing. It was battle practice--
+with the other fellow shooting at you!"
+
+The fire-control officers, who were aloft, all agreed about one
+unexpected sensation, which had not occurred to any expert
+scientifically predicting what action would be like. They are the only
+ones who may really "see" the battle in the full sense.
+
+"When the shells burst against the armour," said one of these
+officers, "the fragments were visible as they flew about. We had a
+desire, in the midst of preoccupation with our work, to reach out and
+catch them. Singular mental phenomenon, wasn't it?"
+
+At eight or nine thousand yards one knew that the modern battleship
+could tear a target to pieces. But eighteen thousand--was accuracy
+possible at that distance?
+
+"Did one in five German shells hit at that range?" I asked.
+
+"No!"
+
+Or in ten? No! In twenty? Still no, though less decisively. You got a
+conviction, then, that the day of holding your fire until you were close
+in enough for a large percentage of hits was past. Accuracy was still
+vital and decisive, but generic accuracy. At eighteen thousand yards
+all the factors which send a thousand or fifteen hundred or two
+thousand pounds of steel that long distance cannot be so gauged
+that each one will strike in exactly the same line when ten issue from
+the gun-muzzles in a broadside. But if one out of twenty is on at
+eighteen thousand yards, it may mean a turret out of action. Again,
+four or five might hit, or none. So, no risk of waiting may be taken, in
+face of the danger of a chance shot at long range. It was a chance
+shot which struck the Lion's feed tank and disabled her and kept the
+cat squadron from doing to the other German cruisers what they had
+done to the Bluecher.
+
+"And the noise of it to you aloft, spotting the shots?" I suggested. "It
+must have been a lonely place in such a tornado."
+
+"Yes. Besides the crashing blasts from our own guns we had the
+screams of the shells that went over and the cataracts of water from
+those short sprinkling the ship with spray. But this was what one
+expected. Everything was what one expected, except that desire to
+catch the fragments. Naturally, one was too busy to think much of
+anything except the enemy's ships--to learn where your shells were
+striking."
+
+"You could tell?"
+
+"Yes--just as well and better than at target practice; for the target was
+larger and solid. It was enthralling, this watching the flight of our
+shells toward their target." Where were the scars from the wounds?
+One looked for them on both the Lion and the Tiger. An armour patch
+on the sloping top of a turret might have escaped attention if it had not
+been pointed out. A shell struck there and a fair blow, too. And what
+happened inside? Was the turret gear put out of order?
+
+To one who has lived in a wardroom a score of questions were on the
+tongue's end. The turret is the basket which holds the precious eggs.
+A turret out of action means two guns out of action; a broken knuckle
+for the pugilist.
+
+Constructors have racked their brains over the subject of turrets in
+the old contest between gun-power and protection. Too much gun-
+power, too little armour! Too much armour, too little gun-power!
+Finally, results depend on how good is your armour, how sound your
+machinery which rotates the turret. That shell did not go through
+bodily, only a fragment, which killed one man and wounded another.
+The turret would still rotate; the other gun kept in action and the one
+under the shell-burst was soon back in action. Very satisfactory to the
+naval constructors.
+
+Up and down the all but perpendicular steel ladders with their narrow
+steps, and through the winding passages below decks in those cities
+of steel, one followed his guide, receiving so much information and so
+many impressions that he was confused as to details between the
+two veterans, the Lion, which was hit fifteen times, and the Tiger,
+which was hit eight. Wherever you went every square inch of space
+and every bit of equipment seemed to serve some purpose.
+
+A beautiful hit, indeed, was that into a small hooded aperture where
+an observer looked out from a turret. He was killed and another man
+took his place. Fresh armour and no sign of where the shot had
+struck. Then below, into a compartment between the side of the ship
+and the armoured barbette which protects the delicate machinery for
+feeding shells and powder from the magazine deep below the water
+to the guns.
+
+"H----was killed here. Impact of the shell passing through the outer
+plates burst it inside; and, of course, the fragments struck harmlessly
+against the barbette."
+
+"Bang in the dug-out!" one exclaimed, from army habit.
+
+"Precisely! No harm done next door."
+
+Trench traverses and "funk-pit shelters" for localizing the effects of
+shell-bursts are the terrestrial expression of marine construction. No
+one shell happened to get many men either on the Lion or the Tiger.
+But the effect of the burst was felt in the passages, for the air-
+pressure is bound to be pronounced in enclosed spaces which allow
+of little room for expansion of the gases.
+
+Then up more ladders out of the electric light into the daylight,
+hugging a wall of armour whose thickness was revealed in the cut
+made for the small doorway which you were bidden to enter. Now you
+were in one of the brain-centres of the ship, where the action is
+directed. Through slits in that massive shelter of the hardest steel one
+had a narrow view. Above them on the white wall were silhouetted
+diagrams of the different types of German ships, which one found in
+all observing stations. They were the most popular form of mural
+decoration in the British navy.
+
+Underneath the slits was a literal panoply of the brass fittings of
+speaking-tubes and levers and push-buttons, which would have
+puzzled even the "Hello, Central" girl. To look at them revealed
+nothing more than the eye saw; nothing more than the face of a
+watch reveals of the character of its works. There was no telling how
+they ran in duplicate below the water line or under the protection of
+armour to the guns and the engines.
+
+"We got one in here, too. It was a good one!" said the host.
+
+"Junk, of course," was how he expressed the result. Here, too, a man
+stepped forward to take the place of the man who was killed, just as
+the first lieutenant takes the place of a captain of infantry who falls.
+With the whole telephone apparatus blown off the wall, as it were,
+how did he communicate?
+
+"There!" The host pointed toward an opening at his feet. If that failed
+there was still another way. In the final alternative, each turret could
+go on firing by itself. So the Germans must have done on the Bluecher
+and on the Gneisenau and the Scharnhorst in their last ghastly
+moments of bloody chaos.
+
+"If this is carried away and then that is, why, then, we have------" as
+one had often heard officers say on board our own ships. But that
+was hypothesis. Here was demonstration, which made a glimpse of
+the Lion and the Tiger so interesting. The Lion had had a narrow
+escape from going down after being hit in the feed tank; but once in
+dry dock, all her damaged parts had been renewed. Particularly it
+required imagination to realize that this tower had ever been struck;
+visually more convincing was a plate elsewhere which had been left
+unpainted, showing a spatter of dents from shell-fragments.
+
+"We thought that we ought to have something to prove that we had
+been in battle," said the host. "I think I've shown all the hits. There
+were not many."
+
+Having seen the results of German gun-fire, we were next to see the
+methods of British gun-fire; something of the guns and the men who
+did things to the Germans. I stooped under the overhang of the turret
+armour from the barbette and climbed up through an opening which
+allowed no spare room for the generously built, and out of the dim
+light appeared the glint of the massive steel breech block and gun,
+set in its heavy recoil mountings with roots of steel supports sunk into
+the very structure of the ship. It was like other guns of the latest
+improved type; but it had been in action, and you kept thinking of this
+fact which gave it a sort of majestic prestige. You wished that it might
+look a little different from the others, as the right of a veteran.
+
+As the plugman swung the breech open I had in mind a giant
+plugman on the U.S.S. Connecticut whom I used to watch at drills
+and target practice. Shall I ever forget the flash in his eye if there
+were a fraction of a second's delay in the firing after the breech had
+gone home! The way in which he made that enormous block obey his
+touch in oily obsequiousness suggested the apotheosis of the whole
+business of naval war. I don't know whether the plugman of H.M.S.
+Lion or the plugman of the U.S.S. Connecticut was the better. It would
+take a superman to improve on either.
+
+Like the block, it seemed as if the man knew only the movements of
+the drill; as if he had been bred and his muscles formed for that. You
+could conceive of him as playing diavolo with that breech. He
+belonged to the finest part of all the machinery, the human element,
+which made the parts of a steel machine play together in a beautiful
+harmony.
+
+The plugman's is the most showy part; others playing equally
+important parts are in the cavern below the turret; and most important
+of all is that of the man who keeps the gun on the target, whose true
+right eye may send twenty-five thousand tons of battleship to
+perdition. No one eye of any enlisted man can be as important as the
+gun-layer's. His the eye and the nerve trained as finely as the
+plugman's muscles. He does nothing else, thinks of nothing else. In
+common with painters and poets, gun-layers are born with a gift, and
+that gift is trained and trained and trained. It seems simple to keep
+right on, but it is not. Try twenty men in the most rudimentary test and
+you will find that it is not; then think of the nerve it takes to keep
+right on in battle, with your ship shaken by the enemy's hit.
+
+How long had the plugman been on his job? Six years. And the gun-
+layer? Seven. Twelve years is the term of enlistment in the British
+navy. Not too fast but thoroughly is the British way. The idea is to
+make a plugman or a gun-layer the same kind of expert as a master
+artisan in any other walk of life, by long service and selection.
+
+None of all the men serving these guns from the depths to the turret
+saw anything of the battle, except the gun-layer. It was easier for
+them than for him to be letter-perfect in the test, as he had to guard
+against the exhilaration of having an enemy's ship instead of a cloth
+target under his eye. Super-drilled he was to that eventuality; super-
+drilled all the others through the years, till each one knew his part as
+well as one knows how to turn the key of a drawer in his desk. Used
+to the shock of the discharges of their own guns at battle practice,
+many of the crew did not even know that their ship was hit, so
+preoccupied was each with his own duty and the need of going on
+with it until an order or a shell's havoc stopped him. Every mind was
+closed except to the thing which had been so established by drill in
+his nature that he did it instinctively.
+
+A few minutes later one was looking down from the upper bridge on
+the top of this turret and the black-lined planking of the deck eighty-
+five feet below, with the sweep of the firm lines of the sides
+converging toward the bow on the background of the water. Suddenly
+the ship seemed to have grown large, impressive; her structure had a
+rocklike solidity. Her beauty was in her unadorned strength. One was
+absorbing the majesty of a city from a cathedral tower after having
+been it its thoroughfares and seen the detail of its throbbing industry.
+
+Beyond the Lion's bow were more ships, and port and starboard and
+aft were still more ships. The compass range filled the eye with the
+stately precision of the many squadrons and divisions of leviathans.
+One could see all the fleet. This seemed to be the scenic climax; but
+it was not, as we were to learn later when we should see the fleet go
+to sea. Then we were to behold the mountains on the march.
+
+You glanced back at the deck and around the bridge with a sort of
+relief. The infinite was making you dizzy. You wanted to be in touch
+with the finite again. But it is the writer, not the practical, hardened
+seaman, who is affected in this way. To the seaman, here was a
+battle-cruiser with her sister battle-cruisers astern, and there around
+her were Dreadnoughts of different types and pre-Dreadnoughts and
+cruisers and all manner of other craft which could fight each in its
+way, each representing so much speed and so much metal which
+could be thrown a certain distance.
+
+"Homogeneity!" Another favourite word, I remember, from our own
+wardrooms. Here it was applied in the large. No experimental ships
+there, no freak variations of type, but each successive type as a unit
+of action. Homogeneous, yes--remorselessly homogeneous. The
+British do not simply build some ships; they build a navy. And of
+course the experts are not satisfied with it; if they were, the British
+navy would be in a bad way. But a layman was; he was overwhelmed.
+
+From this bridge of the Lion on the morning of the 24th of January,
+1915, Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty saw appear on the horizon a
+sight inexpressibly welcome to any commander who has scoured the
+seas in the hope that the enemy will come out in the open and give
+battle. Once that German battle-cruiser squadron had slipped across
+the North Sea and, under cover of the mist which has ever been the
+friend of the pirate, bombarded the women and children of
+Scarborough and the Hartle-pools with shells meant to be fired at
+hardened adult males sheltered behind armour; and then, thanks to
+the mist, they had slipped back to Heligoland with cheering news to
+the women and children of Germany. This time when they came out
+they encountered a British battle-cruiser squadron of superior speed
+and power, and they had to fight as they ran for home.
+
+Now, the place of an admiral is in his conning tower after he has
+made his deployments and the firing has begun. He, too, is a part of
+the machine; his position defined, no less than the plugman's and the
+gun-layer's. Sir David watched the ranging shots which fell short at
+first, until finally they were on, and the Germans were beginning to
+reply. When his staff warned him that he ought to go below, he put
+them off with a preoccupied shake of his head. He could not resist the
+temptation to remain where he was, instead of being shut up looking
+through the slits of a visor.
+
+But an admiral is as vulnerable to shell-fragments as a midshipman,
+and the staff did its duty, which had been thought out beforehand like
+everything else. The argument was on their side; the commander
+really had none on his. It was then that Vice-Admiral Beatty sent Sir
+David Beatty to the conning tower, much to the personal disgust of
+Sir David, who envied the observing officers aloft their free sweep of
+vision.
+
+Youth in Sir David's case meant suppleness of limb as well as youth's
+spirit and dash. When the Lion was disabled by the shot in her feed
+tank and had to fall out of line, Sir David must transfer his flag. He
+signalled for his destroyer, the Attack. When she came alongside he
+did not wait for a ladder, but jumped on board her from the deck of
+the Lion. An aged vice-admiral with chalky bones might have broken
+some of them, or at least received a shock to his presence of mind.
+
+Before he left the Lion Sir David had been the first to see the
+periscope of a German submarine in the distance, which sighted the
+wounded ship as inviting prey. Officers of the Lion dwelt more on the
+cruise home than on the battle. It was a case of being towed at five
+knots an hour by the Indomitable. If ever submarines had a fair
+chance to show what they could do it was then against that battleship
+at a snail's pace. But it is one thing to torpedo a merchant craft and
+another to get a major fighting ship, bristling with torpedo defence
+guns and surrounded by destroyers. The Lion reached port without
+further injury.
+
+
+
+
+XXIX
+On The "Inflexible"
+
+
+
+What Englishman, let alone an American, knows the names of even
+all the British Dreadnoughts? With a few exceptions, the units of the
+Grand Fleet seem anonymous. The Warspite was quite unknown to
+the fame which her sister ship the Queen Elizabeth had won. For
+"Lizzie" was back in the fold from the Dardanelles; and so was the
+Inflexible, heroine of the battle of the Falkland Islands. Of all the ships
+which Sir John Jellicoe had sent away on special missions, the
+Inflexible had had the grandest Odyssey. She, too, had been at the
+Dardanelles.
+
+The Queen Elizabeth was disappointing so far as wounds went. She
+had been so much in the public eye that one expected to find her
+badly battered, and she had suffered little, indeed, for the amount of
+sport she had had in tossing her fifteen-inch shells across the Gallipoli
+peninsula into the Turkish batteries and the amount of risk she had
+run from Turkish mines. Some of these monsters contained only
+eleven thousand shrapnel bullets. A strange business for a fifteen-
+inch naval gun to be firing shrapnel. A year ago no one could have
+imagined that one day the most powerful British ship, built with the
+single thought of overwhelming an enemy's Dreadnought, would ever
+be trying to force the Dardanelles.
+
+The trouble was that she could not fire an army corps ashore along
+with her shells to take possession of the land after she had put
+batteries out of action. She had some grand target practice; she
+escaped the mines; she kept out of reach of the German shells, and
+returned to report to Sir John with just enough scars to give zest to
+the recollection of her extraordinary adventure. All the fleet was
+relieved to see her back in her proper place. It is not the business of
+super-Dreadnoughts to be steaming around mine-fields, but to be
+surrounded by destroyers and light cruisers and submarines
+safeguarding her giant guns, which are depressed and elevated as
+easily as if they were drum-sticks. One had an abrasion, a tracery of
+dents.
+
+"That was from a Turkish shell," said an officer. "And you are standing
+where a shell hit."
+
+I looked down to see an irregular outline of fresh planking.
+
+"An accident when we did not happen to be out of their reach. We
+had the range of them," he added.
+
+"The range of them" is a great phrase. Sir Frederick Doveton Sturdee
+used it in speaking of the battle of the Falkland Islands. "The range of
+them" seems a sure prescription for victory. Nothing in all the history
+of the war appeals to me as quite so smooth a bit of tactics as the
+Falkland affair. It was so smooth that it was velvety; and it is worth
+telling again, as I understand it. Sir Frederick is another young
+admiral. Otherwise, how could the British navy have entrusted him
+with so important a task? He is a different type from Beatty, who in an
+army one judges might have been in the cavalry. Along with the
+peculiar charm and alertness which we associate with sailors--they
+imbibe it from the salt air and from meeting all kinds of weather and
+all kinds of men, I think--he has the quality of the scholar, with a
+suspicion of merriness in his eye.
+
+He was Chief of the War Staff at the Admiralty in the early stages of
+the war, which means, I take it, that he assisted in planning the
+moves on the chessboard. It fell to him to act; to apply the strategy
+and tactics which he planned for others at sea while he sat at a desk.
+It was his wit against von Spee's, who was not deficient in this
+respect. If he had been he might not have steamed into the trap. The
+trouble was that von Spee had some wit, but not enough. It would
+have been better for him if he had been as guileless as a parson.
+
+Sir Frederick is so gentle-mannered that one would never suspect
+him of a "double bluff," which was what he played on von Spee. After
+von Spee's victory over Cradock, Sturdee slipped across to the South
+Atlantic, without anyone knowing that he had gone, with a squadron
+strong enough to do unto von Spee what von Spee had done unto
+Cradock.
+
+But before you wing your bird you must flush him. The thing was to
+find von Spee and force him to give battle; for the South Atlantic is
+broad and von Spee, it is supposed, was in an Emden mood and
+bent on reaching harbour in German South-West Africa, whence he
+could sally out to destroy British shipping on the Cape route. When
+he intercepted a British wireless message--Sturdee had left off the
+sender's name and location--telling the plodding old Canopus seeking
+home or assistance before von Spee overtook her, that she would be
+perfectly safe in the harbour at Port William, as guns had been
+erected for her protection, von Spee guessed that this was a bluff,
+and rightly. But it was only Bluff Number One. He steamed to the
+Falklands with a view to finishing off the old Canopus on the way
+across to Africa. There he fell foul of Bluff Number Two. Sturdee did
+not have to seek him; he came to Sturdee.
+
+There was no convenient Dogger Bank fog in that latitude to cover
+his flight. Sturdee had the speed of von Spee and he had to fight. It
+was the one bit of strategy of the war which is like that of the story
+books and worked out as strategy always does in proper story books.
+Practically the twelve-inch guns of the Inflexible and the Invincible
+had only to keep their distance and hang on to the Scharnhorst and
+the Gneisenau in order to do the trick. Light-weights or middle-
+weights have no business trafficking with heavy-weights in naval
+warfare.
+
+"Von Spee made a brave fight," said Sir Frederick, "but we kept him
+at a distance that suited us, without letting him get out of range."
+
+He had had the fortune to prove an established principle in action. It
+was all in the course of duty, which is the way that all the officers and
+all the men look at their work. Only a few ships have had a chance to
+fight, and these are emblazoned on the public memory. But they did
+no better and no worse, probably, than the others would have done. If
+the public singles out ships, the navy does not. Whatever is done and
+whoever does it, why, it is to the credit of the family, according to the
+spirit of service that promotes uniformity of efficiency. Leaders and
+ships which have won renown are resolved into the whole in that
+harbour where the fleet is the thing; and the good opinion they most
+desire is that of their fellows. If they have that they will earn the
+public's when the test comes.
+
+Belonging to the class of the first of battle-cruisers is the Inflexible,
+which received a few taps in the Falklands and a blow that was nearly
+the death of her in the Dardanelles. Tribute enough for its courage--
+the tribute of a chivalrous enemy--von Spee's squadron receives
+from the officers and men of the Inflexible, who saw them go down
+into the sea tinged with sunset red with their colours still flying. Then
+in the sunset red the British saved as many of those afloat as they
+could.
+
+Those dripping German officers who had seen one of their battered
+turrets carried away bodily into the sea by a British twelve-inch shell,
+who had endured a fury of concussions and destruction, with steel
+missiles cracking steel structures into fragments, came on board the
+Inflexible looking for signs of some blows delivered in return for the
+crushing blows that had beaten their ships into the sea and saw none
+until they were invited into the wardroom, which was in chaos--and
+then they smiled.
+
+At least, they had sent one shell home. The sight was sweet to them,
+so sweet that, in respect to the feeling of the vanquished, the victors
+held silence with a knightly consideration. But where had the shell
+entered? There was no sign of any hole. Then they learned that the
+fire of the guns of the starboard turret midships over the wardroom,
+which was on the port side, had deposited a great many things on the
+floor which did not belong there; and their expression changed. Even
+this comfort was taken from them.
+
+"We had the range of you!" the British explained. The chaplain of the
+Inflexible was bound to have an anecdote. I don't know why, except
+that a chaplain's is not a fighting part and he may look on. His place
+was down behind the armour with the doctor, waiting for wounded. He
+stood in his particular steel cave listening to the tremendous blasts of
+her guns which shook the Inflexible's frame, and still no wounded
+arrived. Then he ran up a ladder to the deck and had a look around
+and saw the little points of the German ships with the shells sweeping
+toward them and the smoke of explosions which burst on board them.
+It was not the British who needed his prayers that day, but the
+Germans. Personally, I think the Germans are more in need of
+prayers at all times because of the damnable way they act.
+
+Perhaps the spirit of the Inflexible's story was best given by a
+midshipman with the down still on his cheek. Considering how young
+the British take their officer-beginners to sea, the admirals are not
+young, at least, in point of sea service. He got more out of the action
+than his elders; his impressions of the long cruises and the actions
+had the vividness of boyhood. Down in one of the caves, doing his
+part as the shells were sent up to feed the thundering guns above,
+the whispered news of the progress of battle was passed on at
+intervals till, finally, the guns were silent. Then he hurried on deck in
+the elation of victory, succeeded by the desire to save those whom
+they had fought. It had all been so simple; so like drill. You had only to
+go on shooting--that was all.
+
+Yes, he had been lucky. From the Falklands to the Dardanelles,
+which was a more picturesque business than the battle. Any minute
+off the Straits you did not know but a submarine would have a try at
+you or you might bump into a mine. And the Inflexible did bump into
+one. She had two thousand tons of water on board. It was fast work
+to keep the remainder of the sea from coming in, too, and the same
+kind of dramatic experience as the Lion's in reaching port. Yes, he
+had been very lucky. It was all a lark to that boy.
+
+"It never occurs to midshipmen to be afraid of anything," said one of
+the officers. "The more danger, the better they like it."
+
+In the wardroom was a piece of the mine or the torpedo, whichever it
+was, that struck the Inflexible; a strange, twisted, annealed bit of
+metal. Every ship which had been in action had some souvenir which
+the enemy had sent on board in anger and which was preserved with
+a collector's enthusiasm.
+
+The Inflexible seemed as good as ever she was. Such is the way of
+naval warfare. Either it is to the bottom of the sea or to dry docks and
+repairs. There is nothing half-way. So it is well to take care that you
+have "the range of them."
+
+
+
+
+XXX
+On The Fleet Flagship
+
+
+
+Thus far we have skirted around the heart of things, which in a fleet is
+always the Commander-in-Chief's flagship. Our handy, agile
+destroyer ran alongside a battleship with as much nonchalance as
+she would go alongside a pier. I should not have been surprised to
+see her pirouette over the hills or take to flying.
+
+There was a time when those majestic and pampered ladies, the
+battleships--particularly if there were a sea running as in this harbour
+at the time--having in mind the pride of paint, begged all destroyers to
+keep off with the superciliousness of grandes dames holding their
+skirts aloof from contact with nimble, audacious street gamins, who
+dodged in and out of the traffic of muddy streets. But destroyers have
+learned better manners, perhaps, and battleships have been
+democratized. It is the day of Russian dancers and when aeroplanes
+loop the loop, and we have grown used to all kinds of marvels.
+
+But the sea has refused to be trained. It is the same old sea that it
+was in Columbus' time, without any loss of trickiness in bumping
+small craft against towering sides. The way that this destroyer slid up
+to the flagship without any fuss and the way her bluejackets held her
+off from the paint, as she rose on the crests and slipped back into the
+trough, did not tell the whole story. A part of it was how, at the right
+interval, they assisted the landlubber to step from gunwale to
+gangway, making him feel perfectly safe when he would have been
+perfectly helpless but for them.
+
+I had often watched our own bluejackets at the same thing. They did
+not grin--not when you were looking at them. Nor did the British.
+Bluejackets are noted for their official politeness. I should like to have
+heard their remarks--they have a gift for remarks--about those
+invaders of their uniformed world in Scottish caps and other kinds of
+caps and the different kinds of clothes which tailors make for civilians.
+Without any intention of eavesdropping, I did overhear one asking
+another whence came these strange birds.
+
+You knew the flagship by the admirals' barges astern, as you know
+the location of an army headquarters by its motor-cars. It seemed in
+the centre of the fleet at anchor, if that is a nautical expression.
+Where its place would be in action is one of those secrets as
+important to the enemy as the location of a general's shell-proof
+shelter in Flanders. Perhaps Sir John Jellicoe may be on some other
+ship in battle. If there is any one foolish question which you should not
+ask it is this.
+
+As you mounted the gangway of this mighty super-Dreadnought you
+were bound to think--at least, an American was--of another flagship in
+Portsmouth harbour, Nelson's Victory. Probably an Englishman would
+not indulge in such a commonplace. I would like to know how many
+Englishmen had ever seen the old Victory. But then, how many
+Americans have been to Mount Vernon and Gettysburg?
+
+It was a hundred years, one repeats, since the British had fought a
+first-class naval war. Nelson did his part so well that he did not leave
+any fighting to be done by his successors. Maintaining herself as
+mistress of the seas by the threat of superior strength--except in the
+late 'fifties, when the French innovation of iron ships gave France a
+temporary lead on paper--ship after ship, through all the grades of
+progress in naval construction, has gone to the scrap heap without
+firing a shot in anger. The Victory was one landmark, or seamark, if
+you please, and this flagship was another. Between the two were
+generations of officers and men, working through the change from
+stagecoach to motors and aeroplanes and seaplanes, who had kept
+up to a standard of efficiency in view of a test that never came. A year
+of war and still the test had not come, for the old reason that England
+had superior strength. Her outnumbering guns which had kept the
+peace of the seas still kept it. All second nature to the Englishman
+this, as the defence of the immense distances of the steppes to the
+Russian or the Rocky Mountain wall and the Mississippi's flow to the
+man in Kansas. But the American kept thinking about it; and he
+wanted the Kansans to think about it, too. When he was about to
+meet Sir John Jellicoe he envisaged the tall column in Trafalgar
+Square, surmounted by the one-armed figure turned toward the
+wireless skein on top of the Admiralty building.
+
+I first heard of Jellicoe fifteen years ago when he was Chief of Staff to
+Sir Edward Seymour, then Commander-in-Chief of the Asiatic
+Squadron. Indeed, you were always hearing about Jellicoe in those
+days on the China coast. He was the kind of man whom people talk
+about after they have met him, which means personality. It was in
+China seas, you may remember, that when a few British seamen
+were hard pressed in a fight that was not ours the phrase, "Blood is
+thicker than water," sprang from the lips of an American commander,
+who waited not on international etiquette but went to the assistance of
+the British.
+
+Nor will anyone who was present in the summer of '98 forget how Sir
+Edward Chichester stood loyally by Admiral George Dewey, when the
+German squadron was empire-fishing in the waters of Manila Bay,
+until our Atlantic fleet had won the battle of Santiago and Admiral
+Dewey had received reinforcements and, east and west, we were
+able to look after the Germans. The British bluejackets said that the
+rations of frozen mutton from Australia which we sent alongside were
+excellent; but the Germans were in no position to judge, doubtless
+through an oversight in the detail of hospitality by one of Admiral
+Dewey's staff. Let us be officially correct and say there was no mutton
+to spare after the British had been supplied.
+
+In the gallant effort of the Allied force of sailors to relieve the
+legations against some hundreds of thousands of Boxers, Captain
+Bowman McCalla and his Americans worked with Admiral Seymour
+and his Britons in the most trying and picturesque adventure of its
+kind in modern history. McCalla, too, was always talking of Jellicoe,
+who was wounded on the expedition; and Sir John's face lighted at
+mention of McCalla's name. He recalled how McCalla had painted
+on the superstructure of the little Newark that saying of Farragut's,
+"The best protection against an enemy's fire is a well-directed fire
+of your own"; which has been said in other ways and cannot be
+said too often.
+
+"We called McCalla Mr. Lead," said Sir John; "he had been wounded
+so many times and yet was able to hobble along and keep on
+fighting. We corresponded regularly until his death."
+
+Beatty, too, was on that expedition; and he, too, was another
+personality one kept hearing about. It seemed odd that two men who
+had played a part in work which was a soldier's far from home should
+have become so conspicuous in the Great War. If on that day when,
+with ammunition exhausted, all members of the expedition had given
+up hope of ever returning alive, they had not accidentally come upon
+the Shi-kou arsenal, one would not be commanding the Grand Fleet
+and the other its battle-cruiser squadron.
+
+Before the war, I am told, when Admiralty Lords and others who had
+the decision to make were discussing who should command in case
+of war, opinion ran something like this: "Jellicoe! He has the brains."
+"Jellicoe! He has the health to endure the strain, with years enough
+and not too many." "Jellicoe! He has the confidence of the service."
+The choice literally made itself. When anyone is undertaking the
+gravest responsibility which has been an Englishman's for a hundred
+years, this kind of a recommendation helps. He had the guns; he had
+supreme command; he must deliver victory--such was England's
+message to him.
+
+When I mentioned in a dispatch that all that differentiated him from
+the officers around him was the broader band of gold lace on his arm,
+an English naval critic wanted to know if I expected to find him in cloth
+of gold. No; nor in full dress with all his medals on, as I saw him
+appear on the screen at a theatre in London.
+
+Any general of high command must be surrounded by more pomp
+than an admiral in time of action. A headquarters cannot have the
+simplicity of the quarter-deck. The force which the general commands
+is not in sight; the admiral's is. You saw the commander and you saw
+what it was that he commanded. Within the sweep of vision from the
+quarter-deck was the terrific power which the man with the broad gold
+band on his arm directed. At a signal from him it would move or it
+would stand still. That command of Joshua's if given by Sir John one
+thought might have been obeyed.
+
+One hundred, two hundred, three hundred, four hundred twelve-inch
+guns and larger, which could carry two hundred tons of metal in a
+single broadside for a distance of eighteen thousand yards! But do
+not forget the little guns, bristling under the big guns like needles from
+a cushion, which would keep off the torpedo assassins; or the light
+cruisers, or the colliers, or the destroyers, or the 2,300 trawlers and
+mine-layers, and what not, all under his direction. He had
+submarines, too, double the number of the German. But with all the
+German men-of-war in harbour, they had no targets. Where were
+they? You did not ask questions which would not be answered. The
+whole British fleet was waiting for the Germans to show their heads,
+while cruisers were abroad scouting in the North Sea.
+
+At the outset of the war the German fleet might have had one chance
+in ten of getting a turn of fortune in its favour by an unexpected stroke
+of strategy. This was the danger against which Jellicoe had to guard.
+For in one sense, the Germans had the tactical offensive by sea as
+well as by land; theirs the outward thrust from the centre. They could
+choose when to come out of their harbour; when to strike. The British
+had to keep watch all the time and be ready whenever the enemy
+should come.
+
+Thus, the British Grand Fleet was at sea in the early part of the war,
+cruising here and there, begging for battle. Then it was that it learned
+how to avoid submarines and mine-fields. Submarines had played a
+greater part than expected, because Germany had chosen a guerrilla
+naval warfare: to harass, to wound, to wear down. Doubtless she
+hoped to reduce the number of British fighting units by attrition.
+
+Weak England might be in plants for making arms for an army, but
+not in ship-building. Here was her true genius. She was a maritime
+power; Germany a land power. Her part as an ally of France and
+Russia being to command the sea, all demands of the Admiralty for
+material must take precedence over demands of the War Office. At
+the end of the first year she had increased her fighting power by sea
+to a still higher ratio of preponderance over the Germans; in another
+year she would increase it further.
+
+Admiral von Tirpitz wanted nothing so much as to draw the British
+fleet under the guns of Heligoland or into a mine-field and submarine
+trap. But Sir John Jellicoe refused the bait. When he had completed
+his precautions and his organization to meet new conditions, his fleet
+need not go into the open. His Dreadnoughts could rest at anchor at
+a base, while his scouts kept in touch with all that was passing, and
+his auxiliaries and destroyers fought the submarines. Without a British
+Dreadnought having fired a shot at a German Dreadnought, nowhere
+on the face of the seas might a single vessel show the German flag
+except by thrusting it above the water for a few minutes.
+
+If von Tirpitz sent his fleet out he, too, might find himself in a trap of
+mines and submarines. He was losing submarines and England was
+building more. His naval force rather than Sir John's was suffering
+from attrition. The blockade was complete from Iceland to the North
+Sea. While the world knew of the work of the armies, the care that
+this task required, the hardships endured, the enormous expenditure
+of energy, were all hidden behind that veil of secrecy which obviously
+must be more closely drawn over naval than over army operations.
+
+From the flagship the campaign was directed. One would think that
+many offices and many clerks would be required. But the offices and
+the clerks were at the Admiralty. Here was the execution. In a room
+perhaps four feet by six was the wireless focus which received all
+reports and sent all orders, with trim bluejackets at the keys. "Go!"
+and "Come!" the messages were saying; they wasted no words.
+Officers of the staff did their work in narrow space, yet seemed to
+have plenty of room. Red tape is inflammable. There is no more place
+for it on board a flagship prepared for action than for unnecessary
+woodwork.
+
+At every turn compression and concentration of power were like the
+guns and the decks, cleared for action, significant in directness of
+purpose. The system was planetary in its impressive simplicity, the
+more striking as nothing that man has ever made is more
+complicated or includes more kinds of machinery than a battleship.
+One battleship was one unit, one chessman on the naval board.
+
+Not all famous leaders are likeable, as every world traveller knows.
+They all have the magnetism of force, which is quite another thing
+from the magnetism of charm. What the public demands is that they
+shall win victories, whether personally likeable or not. But if they are
+likeable and simple and human and a sailor besides--well, we know
+what that means.
+
+Perhaps Sir John Jellicoe is not a great man. It is not for a civilian
+even to presume to judge. We have the word of those who ought to
+know, however, that he is. I hope that he is, because I like to think
+that great commanders need not necessarily appear formidable.
+Nelson refused to be cast for the heavy part, and so did Farragut. It
+may be a sailor characteristic. I predict that after this war is over,
+whatever honours or titles they may bestow upon him, the English are
+going to like Sir John Jellicoe not alone for his service to the nation,
+but for himself.
+
+Admiral Jellicoe is one with Captain Jellicoe, whose cheeriness even
+when wounded kept up the spirits of the others on the relief
+expedition of Boxer days. "He could do it, too!" one thought, having in
+mind Sir David Beatty's leap to the deck of a destroyer. Spare, of
+medium height, ruddy, and fifty-seven--so much for the health
+qualification which the Admiralty Lords dwelt upon as important. After
+he had been at sea for a year he seemed a human machine, much of
+the type of the destroyer as a steel machine--a thirty-knot human
+machine, capable of three hundred or five hundred revolutions,
+engines running smoothly, with no waste energy, slipping over the
+waves and cutting through them; a quick man, quick of movement,
+quick of comprehension and observation, of speech and of thought,
+with a delightful self-possession--for there are many kinds--which is
+instantly responsive with decision.
+
+A telescope under his arm, too, as he received his guests. You liked
+that. He keeps watch over the fleet himself when he is on the quarter-
+deck. You had a feeling that nothing could happen in all his range of
+vision, stretching down the "avenues of Dreadnoughts" to the light-
+cruiser squadron, and escape his attention. It hardly seems possible
+that he was ever bored. Everything around interests him. Energy he
+has, electric energy in this electric age, this man chosen to command
+the greatest war product of modern energy.
+
+Fastened to the superstructure near the ladder to his quarters was a
+new broom which South Africa had sent him. He was highly pleased
+with the present; only the broom was Tromp's emblem, while Blake's
+had been the whip. Possibly the South African Dutchmen, now
+fighting on England's side, knew that he already had the whip and
+they wanted him to have the Dutch broom, too.
+
+He had been using both, and many other devices in his campaign
+against von Tirpitz's "unter See" boats, as was illustrated by one of
+the maps hung in his cabin. Quite different this from maps in a
+general's headquarters, with the front trenches and support and
+reserve trenches and the gun-positions marked in vari-coloured
+pencillings. Instantly a submarine was sighted anywhere, Sir John
+had word of it, and a dot went down on the spot where it had been
+seen. In places the sea looked like a pepper-box cover. Dots were
+plentiful outside the harbour where we were; but well outside, like flies
+around sugar which they could not reach.
+
+Seeing Sir John among his admirals and guests one had a glimpse of
+the life of a sort of mysterious, busy brotherhood. I was still searching
+for an admiral with white hair. If there were none among these
+seniors, then all must be on shore. Spirit, I think, that is the word; the
+spirit of youth, of corps, of service, of the sea, of a ready, buoyant
+definiteness--yes, spirit was the word to characterize these leaders.
+Sir John moved from one to another in his quick way, asking a
+question, listening, giving a direction, his face smiling and expressive
+with a sort of infectious confidence.
+
+"He is the man!" said an admiral. I mean, several admirals and
+captains said so. They seemed to like to say it. Whenever he
+approached one noted an eagerness, a tightening of nerves. Natural
+leadership expresses itself in many ways; Sir John gave it a sailor's
+attractiveness. But I learned that there was steel under his happy
+smile; and they liked him for that, too. Watch out when he is not
+smiling, and sometimes when he is smiling, they say.
+
+For failure is never excused in the fleet, as more than one
+commander knows. It is a luxury of consideration which the British
+nation cannot afford by sea in time of war. The scene which one
+witnessed in the cabin of the Dreadnought flagship could not have
+been unlike that of Nelson and his young captains on the Victory, in
+the animation of youth governed with one thought under the one rule
+that you must make good.
+
+Splendid as the sight of the power which Sir John directed from his
+quarter-deck while the ships lay still in their plotted moorings, it paled
+beside that when the anchor chains began to rumble and, column by
+column, they took on life slowly and, majestically gaining speed, one
+after another turned toward the harbour's entrance.
+
+
+
+
+XXXI
+Simply Hard Work
+
+
+
+Besides the simple word spirit, there is the simple word work. Take
+the two together, mixing with them the proper quantity of intelligence,
+and you have something finer than Dreadnoughts; for it builds
+Dreadnoughts, or tunnels mountains, or wins victories.
+
+In no organization would it be so easy as in the navy to become
+slack. If the public sees a naval review it knows that its ships can
+steam and keep their formations; if it goes on board it knows that the
+ships are clean--at least, the limited part of them which it sees; and it
+knows that there are turrets and guns.
+
+But how does it know that the armour of the turrets is good, or that
+the guns will fire accurately? Indeed, all that it sees is the shell. The
+rest must be taken on trust. A navy may look all right and be quite
+bad. The nation gives a certain amount of money to build ships which
+are taken in charge by officers and men who, shut off from public
+observation, may do about as they please. The result rests with their
+industry and responsibility. If they are true to the character of the
+nation by and large that is all the nation may expect; if they are better,
+then the nation has reason to be grateful. Englishmen take more
+interest in their navy than Americans in theirs. They give it the best
+that is in them and they expect the best from it in return. Every
+youngster who hopes to be an officer knows that the navy is no place
+for idling; every man who enlists knows that he is in for no junket on a
+pleasure yacht. The British navy, I judged, had a relatively large
+percentage of the brains and application of England.
+
+"It is not so different from what it was for ten years preceding the
+war," said one of the officers. "We did all the work we could stand
+then; and whether cruising or lying in harbour, life is almost normal for
+us to-day."
+
+The British fleet was always on a war footing. It must be. Lack
+of naval preparedness is more dangerous than lack of land
+preparedness. It is fatal. I know of officers who had had only a week's
+leave in a year in time of peace; their pay is less than our officers'.
+Patriotism kept them up to the mark.
+
+And another thing: once a sailor, always a sailor, is an old saying; but
+it has a new application in modern navies. They become fascinated
+with the very drudgery of ship existence. They like their world, which
+is their house and their shop. It has the attraction of a world of
+priestcraft, with them alone understanding the ritual. Their drill at the
+guns becomes the preparation for the great sport of target practice,
+which beats any big-game shooting when guns compete with guns,
+with battle practice greater sport than target practice. Bringing a ship
+into harbour well, holding her to her place in the formation, roaming
+over the seas in a destroyer--all means eternal effort at the mastery
+of material, with the results positively demonstrated.
+
+On one of the Dreadnoughts I saw a gun's crew drilling with a dummy
+six-inch; weight, one hundred pounds.
+
+"Isn't that boy pretty young to handle that big shell?" an admiral asked
+a junior officer.
+
+"He doesn't think so," the officer replied. "We haven't anyone who
+could handle it better. It would break his heart if we changed his
+position."
+
+Not one of fifty German prisoners whom I had seen filing by over in
+France was as sturdy as this youngster. In the ranks of an infantry
+company of any army he would have been above the average of
+physique; but among the rest of the gun's crew he did appear slight.
+Need more be said about the physical standard of the crews of the
+fighting ships of the Grand Fleet?
+
+You had an eye to more than guns and machinery and to more than
+the character of the officers. You wanted to get better acquainted with
+the personnel of the men behind the guns. They formed patches of
+blue on the decks, as one looked around the fleet, against the
+background of the dull, painted bulwarks of steel--the human element
+whose skill gave the ships life--deep-chested, vigorous men in their
+prime, who had the air of men grounded in their work by long
+experience. I noted when an order was given that it was obeyed
+quickly by one who knew what he had to do because he had done it
+thousands of times.
+
+There are all kinds of bluejackets, as there are all kinds of other men.
+Before the war some took more than was good for them when on
+shore; some took nothing stronger than tea; some enjoyed the
+sailor's privilege of growling; some had to be kept up to the mark
+sharply; an occasional one might get rebellious against the merciless
+repetition of drills.
+
+The war imparted eagerness to all, the officers said. Infractions of
+discipline ceased. Days pass without anyone of the crew of a
+Dreadnought having to be called up as a defaulter, I am told. And
+their health? At first thought, one would say that life in the steel caves
+of a Dreadnought would mean pasty complexions and flabby
+muscles. For a year the crews had been prisoners of that readiness
+which must not lose a minute in putting to sea if von Tirpitz should
+ever try the desperate gamble of battle.
+
+After a turn in the trenches the soldiers can at least stretch their legs
+in billets. A certain number of a ship's company now and then get a
+tramp on shore; not real leave, but a personally conducted outing not
+far from the boats which will hurry them back to their stations on
+signal. However, all that one needs to keep well is fresh air and
+exercise. The blowers carry fresh air to every part of the ship; the
+breezes which sweep the deck from the North Sea are fresh enough
+in summer and a little too fresh in winter. There is exercise in the
+regular drills, supplemented by setting-up exercises. The food is good
+and no man drinks or eats what he ought not to, as he may on shore.
+So there is the fact and the reason for the fact: the health of the men,
+as well as their conduct, had never been so good.
+
+"Perhaps we are not quite so clean as we were before the war," said
+an officer. "We wash decks only twice a week instead of every day.
+This means that quarters are not so moist, and the men have more
+freedom of movement. We want them to have as much freedom as
+possible."
+
+Waiting, waiting, in such confinement for thirteen months; waiting for
+battle! Think of the strain of it! The British temperament is well
+fitted to undergo such a test, and particularly well fitted are these
+sturdy seamen of mature years. An enemy may imagine them
+wearing down their efficiency on the leash. They want a fight; naturally,
+they want nothing quite so much. But they have the seaman's
+philosophy. Old von Tirpitz may come out and he may not. It is for
+him to do the worrying. They sit tight. The men's ardour is not imposed
+upon. Care is taken that they should not be worked stale; for the
+marksman who puts a dozen shots through the bull's-eye had better
+not keep on firing, lest he begin rimming it and get into bad habits.
+
+Where an army officer has a change when he leaves the trench for
+his billet, there is none for the naval officer, who, unlike the army
+officer, is Spartan-bred to confinement. The army pays its daily toll of
+casualties; it lies cramped in dug-outs, not knowing what minute
+extinction may come. The Grand Fleet has its usual comforts; it is
+safe from submarines in a quiet harbour. Many naval officers spoke
+of this contrast with deep feeling, as if fate were playing favourites,
+though I have never heard an army officer mention it.
+
+The army can give each day fresh proof of its courage in face of the
+enemy. Courage! It takes on a new meaning with the Grand Fleet.
+The individual element of gallantry merges into gallantry of the whole.
+You have the very communism of courage. The thought is to keep a
+cool head and do your part as a cog in the vast machine. Courage is
+as much taken for granted as the breath of life. Thus, Cradock's men
+fought till they went down. It was according to the programme laid out
+for each turret and each gun in a turret.
+
+Smith, of the army, leads a bomb-throwing party from traverse to
+traverse; Smith, of the navy, turns one lever at the right second. Army
+gunners are improving their practice day by day against the enemy;
+all the improving by navy gunners must be done before the battle. No
+sieges in trenches; no attacks and counter-attacks: a decision within
+a few hours--perhaps within an hour.
+
+This partially explains the love of the navy for its work; its cheerful
+repetition of the drills which seem such a wearisome business to the
+civilian. The men know the reason of their drudgery. It is an all-
+convincing bull's-eye reason. Ping-ping! One heard the familiar sound
+of sub-calibre practice, which seems as out of proportion in a fifteen-
+inch gun as a mouse-squeak from an elephant whom you expect to
+trumpet. As the result appears in sub-calibre practice, so it is
+practically bound to appear in target practice; as it appears in target
+practice, so it is bound to appear in battle practice. It was on the
+flagship that I saw a device which Sir John referred to as the next
+best thing to having the Germans come out. He took as much delight
+in it as the gun-layers, who were firing at German Dreadnoughts of
+the first line, as large as your thumb, which were in front of a sort of
+hooded arrangement with the guns of a British Dreadnought inside--
+the rest I censor myself before the regular censor sees it.
+
+When we heard a report like that of a small target rifle inside the
+arrangement a small red or a small white splash rose from the
+metallic platter of a sea. Thus the whole German navy has been
+pounded to pieces again and again. It is a great game. The gun-
+layers never tire of it and they think they know the reason as well as
+anybody why von Tirpitz keeps his Dreadnoughts at home.
+
+But elsewhere I saw some real firing; for ships must have their regular
+target practice, war or no war. If those cruisers steaming across the
+range had been sending six or eight-inch shrapnel, we should have
+preferred not to be so near that towed square of canvas. Flashes
+from turrets indistinguishable at a distance from the neutral-toned
+bodies of the vessels and the shells struck, making great splashes
+just beyond the target, which was where they ought to go.
+
+A familiar scene, but with a new meaning when the time is one of war.
+So far as my observation is worth anything, it was very good
+shooting, indeed. One broadside would have put a destroyer out of
+business as easily as a "Jack Johnson" does for a dug-out; and it
+would have made a cruiser of the same class as the one firing pretty
+groggy--this not from any experience of being on a light cruiser or any
+desire to be on one when it receives such a salute. But it seems to be
+waiting for the Germans any time that they want it.
+
+Oh, that towed square of canvas! It is the symbol of the object of all
+building of guns, armour, and ships, all the nursing in dry dock, all the
+admiral's plans, all the parliamentary appropriations, all the striving on
+board ship in man's competition with man, crew with crew, gun with
+gun, and ship with ship. One had in mind some vast factory plant
+where every unit was efficiently organized; but that comparison would
+not do. None will. The Grand Fleet is the Grand Fleet. Ability gets its
+reward, as in the competition of civil life. There is no linear promotion
+indulgent to mediocrity and inferiority which are satisfied to keep step
+and harassing to those whom nature and application meant to lead.
+Armchairs and retirement for those whose inclinations run that way;
+the captain's bridge for those who are fit to command. Officers'
+records are the criterion when superiors come to making promotions.
+But does not outside influence play a part? you ask. If professional
+conscience is not enough to prevent this, another thing appears to
+be: that the British nation lives or dies with its navy. Besides, the
+British public has said to all and sundry outsiders: "Hands off the
+navy!" All honour to the British public, much criticized and often most
+displeased with its servants and itself, for keeping its eye on that
+canvas square of cloth! The language on board was the same as on
+our ships; the technical phraseology practically the same; we had
+inherited British traditions. But a man from Kansas and a man from
+Dorset live far apart. If they have a good deal in common they rarely
+meet to learn that they have. Our seamen do meet British seamen
+and share a fraternity which is more than that of the sea. Close one's
+eyes to the difference in uniform, discount the difference in accent,
+and one imagined that he might be with our North Atlantic fleet.
+
+The same sort of shop talk and banter in the wardroom, which trims
+and polishes human edges; the same fellowship of a world apart.
+Securely ready the British fleet waits. Enough drill and not too much;
+occasional visits between ships; books and newspapers and a
+lighthearted relaxation of scattered conversation in the mess. One
+wardroom had a thirty-five-second record for getting past all the
+pitfalls in the popular "Silver Bullet" game, if I remember correctly.
+
+
+
+
+XXXII
+Hunting The Submarine
+
+
+
+Seaplanes cut practice circles over the fleet and then flew away on
+their errands, to be lost in the sky beyond the harbour entrance. With
+their floats, they were like ducks when they came to rest on the water,
+sturdy and a little clumsy looking compared to those hawks the army
+planes, soaring to higher altitudes.
+
+The hawk had a broad, level field for its roost; the duck, bobbing with
+the waves after it came down, had its wings folded as became a bird
+at rest, after its engines stopped, and, a dead thing, was lifted on
+board its floating home with a crane, as cargo is swung into the hold.
+
+On shipboard there must be shipshapeness; and that capacious,
+one-time popular Atlantic liner had undergone changes to prepare it
+for its mothering part, with platforms in place of the promenades
+where people had lounged during the voyage and bombs in place of
+deck-quoits and dining-saloons turned into workshops. Of course,
+one was shown the different sizes and types of bombs. Aviators
+exhibit them with the pride of a collector showing his porcelains.
+Every time they seem to me to have grown larger and more
+diabolical. Where will aerial progress end? Will the next war be fought
+by forces that dive and fly like fishes and birds?
+
+"I'd like to drop that hundred-pounder on to a Zeppelin!" said one of
+the aviators. All the population of London would like to see him do it.
+And Fritz, the submarine, does not like to see the shadow of man's
+wings above the water.
+
+Seaplanes and destroyers carry the imagination away from the fleet
+to another sphere of activity, which I had not the fortune to see. An
+aviator can see Fritz below a smooth surface; for he cannot travel
+much deeper than thirty or forty feet. He leaves a characteristic ripple
+and tell-tale bubbles of air and streaks of oil. When the planes have
+located him they tell the hunters where to go. Sometimes it is known
+that a submarine is in a certain region; he is lost sight of and seen
+again; a squall may cover his track a second time, and the hunters,
+keeping touch with the planes by signals, course here and there on
+the look out for another glimpse. Perhaps he escapes altogether. It is
+a tireless game of hide and seek, like gunnery at the front. Naval
+ingenuity has invented no end of methods, and no end of
+experiments have been tried. Strictest kept of naval secrets, these.
+Fritz is not to be told what to avoid and what not to avoid.
+
+Very thin is the skin of a submarine; very fragile and complicated its
+machinery. It does not take much of a shock to put it out of order or a
+large charge of explosives to dent the skin beyond repair. It being in
+the nature of submarines to sink, how does the hunter know when he
+has struck a mortal blow? If oil and bubbles come up for some time in
+one place, or if they come up with a rush, that is suggestive. Then, it
+does not require a nautical mind to realize that by casting about on
+the bottom with a grapnel you will learn if an object with the bulk and
+size of a submarine is there. The Admiralty accept no guesswork
+from the hunters about their exploits; they must bring the brush to
+prove the kill.
+
+With Admiral Crawford I went to see the submarine defences of the
+harbour. It reminded one of the days of the drawbridge to a castle,
+when a friend rode freely in and an enemy might try to swim the moat
+and scale the walls if he pleased.
+
+"Take care! There is a tide here!" the coxswain was warned, lest the
+barge should get into some of the troubles meant for Fritz. "A cunning
+fellow, Fritz. We must give him no openings."
+
+The openings appear long enough to permit British craft, whether
+trawlers, or flotillas, or cruiser squadrons, to go and come. Lying as
+close together as fish in a basket, I saw at one place a number of
+torpedo boats home from a week at sea.
+
+"Here to-day and gone to-morrow," said an officer. "What a time they
+had last winter! You know how cold the North Sea is--no, you cannot,
+unless you have been out in a torpedo boat dancing the tango in the
+teeth of that bitter wind, with the spray whipping up to the tops of the
+smoke-stacks. In the dead of night they would come into this pitch-
+dark harbour. How they found their way is past me. It's a trick of those
+young fellows, who command."
+
+Stationary they seemed now as the quay itself; but let a signal speak,
+an alarm come, and they would soon be as alive as leaping
+porpoises. The sport is to those who scout and hunt. But do not
+forget those who watch, those who keep the blockade, from the
+Channel to Iceland, and the trawlers that plod over plotted sea-
+squares with the regularity of mowing-machines cutting a harvest, on
+their way back and forth sweeping up mines. They were fishermen
+before the war and are fishermen still. Night and day they keep at it.
+They come into the harbours stiff with cold, thaw out, and return to
+hardships which would make many a man prefer the trenches.
+Tributes to their patient courage, which came from the heart, were
+heard on board the battleships.
+
+"It is when we think of them," said an officer, "that we are most eager
+to have the German fleet come out, so that we can do our part."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+XXXIII
+The Fleet Puts To Sea
+
+
+
+There is another test besides that of gun-drills and target practice
+which reflects the efficiency of individual ships, and the larger the
+number of ships the more important it is. For the business of a fleet is
+to go to sea. At anchor, it is in garrison rather than on campaign, an
+assembly of floating forts. Navies one has seen which seemed
+excellent when in harbour, but when they started to get under way the
+result was hardly reassuring. Some erring sister fouled her anchor
+chain; another had engine-room trouble; another lagged for some
+other reason; there was fidgeting on the bridges. Then one asked,
+What if a summons to battle had come? Our own officers were
+authority enough that the British had no superiors in any of the tests.
+But strange reports dodged in and out of the alleys of pessimism in
+the company of German insistence that the Tiger and other ships
+which one saw afloat had been sunk. Was the fleet really held
+prisoner by fear of submarines? If it could go and come freely when it
+chose, the harbour was the place for it while it waited. If not, then,
+indeed, the submarine had revolutionized naval warfare. Admiral
+Jellicoe might lose some of his battleships before he could get into
+action against the Germans.
+
+"Oh, to hear the hoarse rattle of the anchor chains!" I kept thinking
+while I was with the fleet. "Oh, to see all these monsters on the
+move!"
+
+A vain wish it seemed, but it came true. A message from the
+Admiralty arrived while we were on the flagship. Admiral Jellicoe
+called his Flag Lieutenant and spoke a word to him, which was
+passed in a twinkling from flagship to squadron and division and ship.
+He made it as simple as ordering his barge alongside, this sending of
+the Grand Fleet to sea.
+
+From the bridge of a destroyer beyond the harbour entrance we saw
+it go. I shall not attempt to describe the spectacle, which convinced
+me that language is the vehicle for making small things seem great
+and great things seem small. If you wish words invite splendid and
+magnificent and overwhelming and all the reliable old friends to come
+forth in glad apparel from the dictionary. Personally, I was inarticulate
+at sight of that sea-march of dull-toned, unadorned power.
+
+First came the outriders of majesty, the destroyers; then the graceful
+light cruisers. How many destroyers has the British navy? I am only
+certain that it has not as many as it seems to have, which would
+mean thousands. Trying to count them is like trying to count the bees
+in the garden. You cannot keep your eye on the individual bees. You
+are bound to count some twice, so busy are their man�uvres.
+
+"Don't you worry, great ladies!" you imagined the destroyers were
+saying to the battleships. "We will clear the road. We will keep watch
+against snipers and assassins."
+
+"And if any knocks are coming, we will take them for you, great
+ladies!" said the cruisers. "If one of us went down, the loss would not
+be great. Keep your big guns safe to beat other battleships into
+scrap."
+
+For you may be sure that Fritz was on the watch in the open. He
+always is, like the highwayman hiding behind a hedge and envying
+people who have comfortable beds. Probably from a distance he had
+a peep through his periscope at the Grand Fleet before the approach
+of the policeman destroyers made him duck beneath the water; and
+probably he tried to count the number of ships and identify their
+classes in order to take the information home to Kiel. Besides, he
+always has his fingers crossed. He hopes that some day he may get
+a shot at something more warlike than a merchant steamer or an
+auxiliary; only that prospect becomes poorer as life for him grows
+harder. Except a miracle happened, the steaming fleet, with its
+cordons of destroyers, is as safe from him as from any other kind of
+fish.
+
+The harbour which is the fleet's home is landlocked by low hills. There
+is an eclipse of the sun by the smoke from the ships getting under
+way; streaming, soaring columns of smoke on the move rise above
+the skyline from the funnels of the battleships before they appear
+around a bend. Indefinite masses as yet they are, under their night-
+black plumes. Each ship seems too immense to respond to any will
+except its own. But there is something automatic in the regularity with
+which, one after another, they take the bend, as if a stop watch had
+been held on twenty thousand tons of steel for a second's variation.
+As they approach they become more distinct and, showing less
+smoke, there seems less effort. Their motive-power seems inherent,
+perpetual.
+
+There is some sea running outside the entrance, enough to make a
+destroyer roll. But the battleships disdain any notice of its existence. It
+is no more to them than a ripple of dust to a motor truck. They plough
+through it.
+
+Though you were within twenty yards of them you would feel quite
+safe. An express train was in no more danger of jumping the track.
+Mast in line with mast, they held the course with a majestic
+steadiness. Now the leading ship makes a turn of a few points. At the
+same spot, as if it were marked by the grooves of tyres in a road, the
+others make it. Any variation of speed between them would have
+been instantly noticeable, as one forged ahead or lagged; but the
+distance between bows and sterns did not change. A line of one
+length would do for each interval so far as one could discern.
+
+It was difficult to think that they were not attached to some taut,
+moving cable under water. How could such apparently unwieldy
+monsters, in such a slippery element as the sea, be made to obey
+their masters with such fine precision?
+
+The answer again is sheer hard work! Drills as arduous in the engine-
+room as at the guns; machinery kept in tune; traditions in
+manoeuvring in all weathers, which is kept up with tireless practice.
+
+Though all seemed perfection to the lay eye, let it be repeated that
+this was not so to the eyes of admirals. It never can be. Perfection is
+the thing striven for. Officers dwell on faults; all are critics. Thus you
+have the healthiest kind of spirit, which means that there will be no
+cessation in the striving.
+
+"Look at that!" exclaimed an officer on the destroyer. "They ought to
+try another painting on her and see if they can't do better."
+
+Ever changing that northern light. For an instant the sun's rays,
+strained by a patch of peculiar cloud, playing on a Dreadnought's
+side, made her colour appear molten, exaggerating her size till she
+seemed as colossal to the eye as to the thought.
+
+"But look, now!" said another officer. She was out of the patch and
+seemed miles farther away to the vision, a dim shape in the sea-
+haze.
+
+"You can't have it right for every atmospheric mood of the North Sea,
+I suppose!" muttered the critic. Still, it hurt his professional pride
+that a battleship should show up as such a glaring target even
+for a moment.
+
+The power of the fleet was more patent in movement than at rest; for
+the sea-lion was out of his lair on the hunt. Fluttering with flags at a
+review at Spithead, the battleships seemed out of their element;
+giants trying for a fairy's part. Display is not for them. It ill becomes
+them, as does a pink ribbon on a bulldog.
+
+Irresistibly ploughing their way they presented a picture of resolute
+utility--guns and turrets and speed. No spot of bright colour was
+visible on board. The crew was at the guns, I took it. Turn the turrets,
+give the range, lay the sights on the enemy's ships, and the battle
+was on.
+
+"There is the old Dreadnought," said an officer. The old Dreadnought
+--all of ten years of age, the senile old thing! What a mystery she was
+when she was building! The mystery accentuated her celebrity--and
+almost forgotten now, while the Queen Elizabeth and the Warspite,
+and others of their class with their fifteen-inch guns, would be in the
+public eye as the latest type till a new type came. A parade of naval
+types was passing. One seemed to shade into the other in
+harmonious effect. But here was an outsider, whom one noted
+instantly as he studied those rugged silhouettes of steel. She had
+twelve twelve-inch guns, with turret piled on turret in an exotic
+fashion--one of the two Turkish battleships building in England at the
+time of the war and taken over by the British.
+
+One division, two divisions, four ships, eight Dreadnoughts--even a
+squadron coming out of a harbour numbs the faculties with a sense
+of its might. Sixteen--twenty--twenty-four--it was the unending
+numbers of this procession of sea-power which was most impressive.
+An hour passed and all were not by. One sat down for a few minutes
+behind the wind-screen of the destroyer's bridge, only to look back
+and see more Dreadnoughts going by. A spectator had not realized
+that there were so many in the harbour. He had a suspicion that
+Admiral Jellicoe was a conjuror who could take Dreadnoughts out of
+a hat.
+
+The first was lost in the gathering darkness far out in the North Sea,
+and still the cloud of smoke over the anchorage was as thick as ever;
+still the black plumes kept appearing around the bend. The King
+Edward VII. class with their four twelve-inch guns and other ancients
+of the pre-Dreadnought era, which are still powerful antagonists, were
+yet to come. One's eyes ached. Those who saw a German corps
+march through Brussels said that it seemed irresistible. What if they
+had seen the whole German army? Here was the counterpart of the
+whole German army in sea-power and in land-power, too.
+
+The destroyer commander looked at his watch.
+
+"Time!" he said. "I'll put you on shore."
+
+He must take his place in the fleet at a given moment. A word to the
+engine-room and the next thing we knew we were off at thirty knots
+an hour, cutting straight across the bows of a Dreadnought steaming
+at twenty knots, towering over us threateningly, with a bone in her
+teeth.
+
+Imagination sped across seas where a man had cruised into
+harbours that he knew and across continents that he knew. He was
+trying to visualize the whole globe--all of it except the Baltic seas and
+a thumb-mark in the centre of Europe. Hong-Kong, Melbourne,
+Sydney, Halifax, Cape Town, Bombay--yes, and Rio and Valparaiso,
+Shanghai, San Francisco, New York, Boston, these and the lands
+back of them, where countless millions dwell, were all safe behind the
+barrier of that fleet.
+
+Then back through the land where Shakespeare wrote to London,
+with its glare of recruiting posters and the throbbing of that individual
+freedom which is on trial in battle with the Prussian system--and as
+one is going to bed the sound of guns in the heart of the city! From
+the window one looked upward to see, under a searchlight's play, the
+silken sheen of a cigar-shaped sort of aerial phantom which was
+dropping bombs on women and children, while never a shot is fired at
+those sturdy men behind armour.
+
+When you have travelled far; when you think of Botha and his Boers
+fighting for England; when you have found justice and fair play and
+open markets under the British flag; when you compare the
+vociferations of von Tirpitz, glorying in the torpedoing of a Lusitania,
+with the quiet manner of Sir John Jellicoe, you need only a little spark
+of conscience to prefer the way that the British have used their sea-
+power to the way that the men who send out Zeppelins to war on
+women and children would use that power if they had it.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIV
+British Problems
+
+
+
+Throughout the summer of 1915 the world was asking, What about
+the new British army? Why was it not attacking at the opportune
+moment when Germany was throwing her weight against Russia? A
+facile answer is easy; indeed, facile answers are always easy.
+Unhappily, they are rarely correct. None that was given in this
+instance was, to my mind. They sought to put a finger on one definite
+cause; again, on an individual or a set of individuals.
+
+The reasons were manifold; as old as Waterloo, as fresh as the last
+speech in Parliament. They were inherent in the Anglo-Saxon race.
+Whoever raised a voice and said, This, or that, or you, are
+responsible! should first have looked into his own mind and into the
+history of his race and then into a mirror. Least of all should any
+American have been puzzled by the delay.
+
+"Oh, we should have done better than that--we are Americans!" I
+hear my countrymen say. Perhaps we should. I hope so; I believe so.
+The British public thought that they were going to do better; military
+men were surprised that they did as well.
+
+Along with laws and language we have inherited our military ideas
+from England. In many qualities we are different--a distinct type; but in
+nothing are we more like the British than in our attitude toward the
+soldier and toward war. The character of any army reflects the
+character of its people. An army is the fist; but the muscle, the
+strength, of the physical organism behind the blow in the long run
+belong to the people. What they have prepared for in peace they
+receive in war, which decides whether they have been living in the
+paradise of a fool or of a wise man.
+
+As a boy I was brought up to believe, as an inheritance of the
+American Revolution, that one American could whip two Englishmen
+and five or six of any other nationality, which made the feathers of the
+eagle perched on the national escutcheon look glossy. It was a
+satisfying sort of faith. Americans had never tried five or six of any
+first-class fighting race; but that was not a thought which occurred to
+me. As we had won victories over the English and the English had
+whipped the French at Waterloo, the conclusion seemed obvious.
+English boys, I understand, also had been brought up to believe that
+one Englishman could whip five or six men of any other nationality,
+but, I take it for granted, only two Americans. This clothed the British
+lion with majesty, while the lower ratio of superiority over Americans
+returned the compliment in kind from the sons of the lion to the sons
+of the eagle.
+
+After I began to read history for myself and to think as I read, I found
+that when British and Americans had met, the generals on either side
+were solicitous about having superior forces, and in case of odds of
+two to one they made a "strategic retreat." When either side was
+beaten, the other always explained that he was overcome by superior
+numbers, though perhaps the adversary had not more than ten or
+fifteen per cent, advantage. Then I learned that the British had not
+whipped five or six times their number on the continent of Europe.
+The British Expeditionary Force made as fine an effort to do so at
+Mons as was ever attempted in history, but they did not succeed.
+
+It was a regular army that fought at Mons. The only two first-class
+nations which depend upon regulars to do their fighting are the British
+and the American. This is the vital point of similarity which is the
+practical manifestation of our military ideas. We have been the earth's
+spoiled children, thanks to the salt seas between us and other
+powerful military nations. Before any other Power could reach the
+United States it must overwhelm the British navy, and then it must
+overwhelm ours and bring its forces in transports. Sea-power, you
+say. That is the facile word, so ready to the lips that we do not realize
+the wonder of it any more than of the sun rising and setting.
+
+When we want soldiers our plan still is to advertise for them. The
+ways of our ancestors remain ours. We think that the volunteer must
+necessarily make the best soldier because he offers his services;
+while the conscript--rather a term of opprobrium to us--must be
+lukewarm. It hardly occurs to us that some forms of persuasion may
+amount to conscription, or that the volunteer, won by oratorical
+appeal to his emotions or by social pressure, may suffer a reaction
+after enlistment which will make him lukewarm also, particularly as he
+sees others, also young and fit, hanging back. Nor does it occur to us
+that there may be virtue in that fervour of national patriotism aroused
+by the command that all must serve, which, on the continent in this
+war, has meant universal exaltation to sacrifice. The life of Jones
+means as much to him as the life of Smith does to him; and when the
+whole nation is called to arms there ought to be no favourites in life-
+giving.
+
+For the last hundred years, if we except the American Civil War, ours
+have been comparatively little wars. The British regular army has
+policed an empire and sent punitive expeditions against rebellious
+tribes with paucity of numbers, in a work which the British so well
+understand. Our little regular army took care of the Red Indians as
+our frontier advanced from the Alleghenies to the Pacific. To put it
+bluntly, we have hired someone to do our fighting for us.
+
+Without ever seriously studying the business of soldiering, the
+average Anglo-Saxon thought of himself as a potential soldier, taking
+his sense of martial superiority largely from the work of the long-
+service, severely drilled regular. Also, we used our fists rather than
+daggers or duelling swords in personal encounters and, man to man,
+unequipped with fire-arms or blades, the quality which is responsible
+for our sturdy pioneering individualism gave us confidence in our
+physical prowess.
+
+Alas! modern wars are not fought with fists. A knock-kneed man who
+knows how to use a machine-gun and has one to use--which is also
+quite important--could mow down all the leading heavy-weights of the
+United States and England, with the latest champion leading the
+charge.
+
+Now, this regular who won our little wars was not representative of
+the people as a whole. He was the man "down on his luck," who went
+to the recruiting depot. Soldiering became his profession. He was in a
+class, like priests and vagabonds. When you passed him in the street
+you thought of him as a strange being, but one of the necessities of
+national existence. It did not interest you to be a soldier; but as there
+must be soldiers, you were glad that men who would be soldiers were
+forthcoming.
+
+When trouble broke, how you needed him! When the wires brought
+news of his gallantry you accepted the deeds of this man whom you
+had paid as the reflection of national courage, which thrilled you with
+a sense of national superiority. To him, it was in the course of duty;
+what he had been paid to do. He did not care about being called a
+hero; but it pleased the public to make him one--this professional who
+fights for a shilling a day in England and $17.50 a month in the United
+States.
+
+Though when the campaign went well the public was ready to take
+the credit as a personal tribute, when the campaign went badly they
+sought a scapegoat, and the general who might have been a hero
+was sent to the wilderness perhaps because those busy men in
+Congress or Parliament thought that the army could do without that
+little appropriation which was needed for some other purpose. The
+army had failed to deliver the goods which it was paid to produce.
+The army was to blame, when, of course, under free institutions the
+public was to blame, as the public is master of the army and not the
+army of the public.
+
+A first impression of the British army is always that of the regiment.
+Pride of regiment sometimes appears almost more deep-seated than
+army pride to the outsider. It has been so long a part of British martial
+inheritance that it is bred in the blood. In the old days of small armies
+and in the later days of small wars, while Europe was making every
+man a soldier by conscription, regiment vying with regiment won the
+battles of empire. The memory of the part each regiment played is the
+inspiration of its present; its existence is inseparable from the
+traditions of its long list of battle honours.
+
+The British public loves to read of its Guards' regiment and to watch
+them in their brilliant uniforms at review. When a cadet comes out of
+Sandhurst he names the regiment which he wishes to join, instead of
+being ordered to a certain regiment, as at West Point. It rests with the
+regimental commander whether or not he is accepted. Frequently the
+young man of wealth or family serves in the Guards or another crack
+regiment for awhile and resigns, usually to enjoy the semi-leisurely life
+which is the fortune of his inheritance.
+
+Then there are the county line regiments, such as the Yorkshires, the
+Kents, and the Durhams. In this war each county wanted to read
+about its own regiments at the same time as about the Guards, just
+as Kansans at home would want to read about the Kansas regiment
+and Georgians about the Georgia regiment. The most trying feature
+of the censorship to the British public was its refusal to allow the
+exploitation of regiments. The staff was adamant on this point; for the
+staff was thinking for the whole and of the interests of the whole. In
+the French and the German armies, as in our regular army, regiments
+are known by numbers.
+
+The young man who lives in the big house on the hill, the son of the
+man of wealth and power in the community, as a rule does not go to
+West Point. None of the youth of our self-called aristocracy which
+came up the golden road in a generation past those in modest
+circumstances who have generations of another sort back of them,
+think of going into the First Cavalry or the First Infantry for a few years
+as a part of the career of their class. A few rich men's sons enter our
+army, but only enough to prove the rule by the exception. They do not
+regard the army as "the thing." It does not occur to them that they
+ought to do something for their country. Rather, their country ought to
+do something for them.
+
+But sink the plummet a little deeper and these are not our aristocracy
+nor our ruling class, which is too numerous and too sound of thought
+and principle for them to feel at home in that company. Any boy,
+however humble his origin, may go to West Point if he can pass the
+competitive examination. Europe, particularly Germany, would not
+approve of this; but we think it the best way. The average graduate of
+the Point, whether the son of a doctor, a lawyer, or a farmer, sticks to
+the army as his profession. We maintain the Academy for the strict
+business purpose of teaching young men how to train our army in
+time of peace and to lead and direct it in time of action.
+
+Our future officers enter West Point when they are two years younger
+than is the average at Sandhurst; the course is four years compared
+with two at Sandhurst. I should venture to say that West Point is the
+harder grind; that the graduate of the Point has a more specifically
+academic military training than the graduate of Sandhurst. This is not
+saying that he may be any better in the performance of the simple
+duties of a company officer. It is not a new criticism that we train
+everybody at West Point to be a general, when many of the students
+may never rise above the command of a battalion. However, it is a
+significant fact that at the close of the Civil War every army
+commander was a West Point man and so were most of the corps
+commanders.
+
+The doors are open in the British army for a man to rise from the
+ranks; not as wide as in our army, but open. The Chief of Staff of the
+British Expeditionary Force, Sir William Robertson, was in the ranks
+for ten years. No man not a West Pointer had a position equivalent in
+importance to his at the close of the Civil War. His rise would have
+been possible in no other European army.
+
+But West Point sets the stamp on the American army, and Sandhurst
+and Woolwich, the engineering and artillery school, on the British
+army. At the end of the four years at West Point the men who survive
+the hard course may be tried by courtmartial not for conduct
+unbecoming an officer, but an officer and a gentleman. They are
+supposed, whatever their origin, to have absorbed certain qualities, if
+they were not inborn, which are not easily described but which we all
+recognize in any man. If they are absent it is not the fault of West
+Point; and if a man cannot acquire them there, then nature never
+meant them for him. From the time he entered the school the
+government has paid his way; and he is cared for until he dies, if he
+keeps step and avoids courtmartials.
+
+His position in life is secure. His pay, counting everything, is better
+than that of the average graduate of a university or a first-class
+professional school who practises a profession. Yet only three boys, I
+remember, wanted to go to West Point from our congressional district
+in my youth. Nothing could better illustrate the fact that we are not a
+military people. From West Point they go out to the little army which is
+to fight our wars; to the posts and the Philippines, and become a
+world in themselves; an isolated caste in spite of themselves. I am
+not at all certain that either the British or the American officer works
+as hard as the German in time of peace. Neither has the practical
+incentive nor the determined driver behind him.
+
+For it takes a soldier Secretary of War to drive a soldier; for example,
+Lord Kitchener. Those British officers who applied themselves in
+peace to the mastery of their profession and were not content with
+the day's routine requirements, had to play chess without chessmen;
+practise man�uvres on a board rather than with brigades, divisions,
+corps, and armies. They became the rallying points in the concourse
+of untrained recruits.
+
+German and French officers had the incentive and the chessmen.
+The Great War could not take them by surprise. They took the road
+with a machine whose parts had been long assembled. They had
+been trained for big war; their ambition and intelligence were under
+the whip of a definite anticipation.
+
+A factor overlooked, but even more significant than training or staff
+work, was that what might be called martial team-play had become
+an instinct with the continental peoples through the necessity of their
+situation. This the Japanese also possess. It is the right material
+ready to hand for the builder. Not that it is the kind of material one
+admires; but it is the right material for making a war-machine. One
+had only to read the expert military criticism in the British and the
+American Press at the outset of the war to realize how vague was the
+truth of the continental situation to the average Englishman or
+American--but not to the trained British Staff.
+
+So that little British Expeditionary Force, in ratio of number one to
+twenty or thirty of the French army, crossed the Channel to help save
+Belgium. Gallantry it had worthy of the brightest chapter in the
+immortal history of its regiments from Quebec to Kandahar, from
+Agincourt, Blenheim and Waterloo to South Africa, Guards and
+Hussars, Highlanders and Lowlanders, kilts and breeks, Connaught
+Rangers and Royal Fusiliers, Duke of Wellington's and Prince of
+Wales' Own, come again to Flanders. The best blood of England was
+leading Tommy Atkins. Whatever British aristocracy is or is not, it
+never forgets its duty to the England of its fathers. It is never ingrate
+to its fortune. The time had come to go out and die for England, if
+need be, and these officers went as their ancestors had gone before
+them, as they would go to lectures at Oxford, to the cricket field and
+the polo field, in outward phlegm, but with a mighty passion in their
+hearts.
+
+The Germans affected to despise this little army. It had not been
+trained in the mass tactics which hurl columns of flesh forward to gain
+tactical points that have been mauled by artillery fire. You do not use
+mass tactics against Boers, nor against Afridis, nor Filipinos. It is
+difficult to combine the two kinds of efficiency. Those who were on the
+march to the relief of the Peking Legations recall how the Germans
+were as ill at ease in that kind of work as the Americans and British
+were at home. It made us misjudge the Germans and the Germans
+misjudge us when they thought of us as trying to make war on the
+continent of Europe. A small, mobile, regular army, formed to go
+overseas and march long distances, was to fight in a war where
+millions were engaged and a day's march would cover an immense
+stretch of territory in international calculations of gain and loss.
+
+For its own purposes, the British Expeditionary Force was well-nigh a
+perfect instrument. As quantity of ammunition was an important factor
+in transport in the kind of campaign which it was prepared for, its
+guns were the most accurate on a given point and its system of fire
+adapted to that end; but the French system of fire, with plentiful
+ammunition from near bases over fine roads, was better adapted for
+a continental campaign. To the last button that little army was
+prepared. Man for man and regiment for regiment, I should say it was
+the best force that ever fired a shot in Europe; this without regard to
+national character. As England must make every regular soldier
+count, and as she depended upon the efficiency of the few rather
+than on numbers, she had trained her men in musketry. No
+continental army could afford to allow its soldiers to expend the
+amount of ammunition on the target range that the British had
+expended. Only by practice can you learn how to shoot. This gives
+the soldier confidence. He stays in his trench and keeps on shooting
+because he knows that he can hit those advancing figures and that
+this is his best protection. The more I learn, the more I am convinced
+that the Germans ought to have got the British Expeditionary Force;
+and the Germans were very surprised that they did not get it. With
+their surprise developed a respect for British arms, reported by all
+visitors to Germany.
+
+Mr. Thomas Atkins, none other, is the hero of that retreat from Mons.
+The first statue raised in London after the war ought to be of him. If
+there had been five hundred thousand of him in Belgium at the end of
+the second week in August, Brussels would now be under the Belgian
+flag. Like many other good things in this world, including the French
+army, there were not enough of him. Many a company on that retreat
+simply got tired of retreating, though orders were to fall back. It dug a
+trench and lay down and kept on firing--accurately, in the regular,
+businesslike way, reinforced by the "stick it" British character--until
+killed or engulfed. This held back the flood long enough for the
+remainder of the army to retire.
+
+Not all the generalship emanated from generals. I like best that story
+of the cross-roads where, with Germans pressing hard on all sides,
+two columns in retreat fell in together, uncertain which way to go. With
+confusion developing for want of instructions, a lone, exhausted staff
+officer who happened along took charge, and standing at the junction
+in the midst of shell-fire told every doubting unit what to do, with a
+one-two-three alacrity of decision. His work finished, he and his red
+cap disappeared, and I never could find anyone who knew who he
+was.
+
+After the retreat and after the victory of the Marne, what was
+England's position? The average Englishman had thought that
+England's part in the alliance was to send a small army to France and
+to take care of the German fleet. England's fleet was her first
+consideration; that must be served. France's demand for rifles and
+supplies must be attended to before the British demand. Serbia
+needed supplies; Russia needed supplies; a rebellion threatened in
+South Africa; the Turks threatened the invasion of Egypt. England
+had to spread her energy out over a vast empire with an army that
+had barely escaped annihilation. Every soldier who fought must be
+supplied overseas. German officers put a man on a railroad train and
+he detrained near the front. Every British soldier had to go on board a
+train and then a ship and then disembark from the ship and go on
+board another train. Every article of ordnance, engineering, medical
+supply, food supply, must be handled four times, while in Germany
+they need be handled but twice. Any railway traffic manager will
+understand what this means. Both the British supply system and the
+medical corps were marvels.
+
+Germany was stronger than the British public thought. Germany and
+Austria could put at the front in the first six months of the war
+practically double the number which the Allies could maintain. Russia
+had multitudes to draw from in reserve, but the need was multitudes
+at the front. There she was only as strong as the number she could
+feed and equip. In the first year of the war England suffered 380,000
+casualties on land, more than three times the number of men that
+she had at Mons. This wastage must be met before she could begin
+to increase her forces. The length of line on the western front that she
+was holding was not the criterion of her effort. The French who
+shared with the British that terrible Ypres salient realized this.
+
+Apart from the regulars she had the Territorials, who are much the
+same as our National Guard and vary in quality in the same way.
+Native Indian troops were brought to France to face the diabolical
+shell-fire of modern guns, and Territorials went out to India to take the
+place of the British regulars who were withdrawn for France. Every
+rifle that England could bring to the assistance of the French in their
+heroic stand was a rifle to the good.
+
+Meanwhile, she was making her new army. For the first time since
+Cromwell's day, all classes in England were going to war. Making an
+army out of the raw is like building a factory to be manned by expert
+labour which you have to train. Let us even suppose that the factory
+is ready and that the proprietor must mobilize his managers,
+overseers, foremen, and labour from far and near--a force individually
+competent, but which had never before worked together. It would
+require some time to organize team-play, wouldn't it? Particularly it
+would if you were short of managers, overseers, and foremen. To
+express my meaning from another angle, in talking once with an
+English pottery manufacturer he said:
+
+"We do not train our labour in the pottery district. We breed it from
+generation to generation."
+
+In Germany they have not only been training soldiers, but breeding
+them from generation to generation. You may think that system is
+wrong. It may be contrary to our ideals. But in fighting against that
+system for your ideals when war is violence and killing, you must
+have weapons as effective as the enemy's. You express only a part
+of Germany's preparedness by saying that the men who left the
+plough and the shop, the factory and the office, became trained
+soldiers at the command of the staff as soon as they were in uniform
+and had rifles. These men had the instinct of military co-ordination
+bred in them, and so had their officers, while England had to take
+men from the plough and the shop, the factory and the office, and
+equip them and teach them the rudiments of soldiering before she
+could consider making them into an army.
+
+It was one thing for the spirit of British manhood to rise to the
+emergency. Another and even more important requisite went with it. If
+my country ever faces such a crisis I hope that we also may have the
+courage of wisdom which leaves an expert's work to an expert.
+England had Lord Kitchener, who could hold the imagination and the
+confidence of the nation through the long months of preparation,
+when there was little to show except repetition of drills here and there
+on gloomy winter days. It required a man with a big conception and
+patience and authority to carry it through, and recruits with an
+unflinching sense of duty. The immensity of the task of transforming a
+non-military people into a great fighting force grew on one in all its
+humdrum and vital details as he watched the new army forming. "Are
+you learning to think in big numbers?" was Lord Kitchener's question
+to his generals.
+
+Half of the regular officers were killed or wounded.
+
+Where the leaders? Where the drillmasters for the new army? Old
+officers came out of retirement, where they had become used to an
+easy life as a rule, to twelve hours a day of hard application. "Dug-
+outs" they were called. Veteran non-commissioned officers had to drill
+new ones. It was demonstrated that a good infantry soldier can be
+made in six months; perhaps in three. But it takes seven months to
+build a rifle-plant; many more months to make guns--and the navy
+must never be stinted. Probably the English are slow; slow and
+thoroughgoing. They are good at the finish, but not quick at the start.
+They are used to winning the last battle, which they say is the one
+that counts. The complacency of empire with a century's power was a
+handicap, no doubt. We are inclined to lean forward on our oars, they
+to lean back--which does not mean that they cannot lean forward in
+an emergency or that they lack reserve strength. It may lead us to
+misjudge them.
+
+Public impatience was inevitable. It could not be kept silent; that is the
+English of it--the American, too. It demands to know what is being
+done. It was not silent in the Civil War. From the time McClellan
+started forming his new army until the Peninsular campaign was six
+months, if I remember rightly. Von Moltke, who built the German staff
+system, said that the Civil War was a strife between two armed mobs;
+though I think if he had brought his Prussians to Virginia a year later,
+in '63, which would have ended the Civil War there and then, he
+would have had an interesting time before he returned to Berlin.
+
+The British new army was not to face another new army, but the most
+thoroughly organized military machine that the world has ever known.
+Not only this, but the Germans, with a good start and their system
+established, were not standing still and waiting for the British to catch
+up, so that the two could begin again even, but were adapting
+themselves to the new features of the war. They had been the world's
+arms-makers. With vast munition plants ready, their feudal socialistic
+organization could make the most of their resources in men and
+material.
+
+More than two million Englishmen went to the recruiting depots,
+though no invader had set foot on their soil, and offered to serve in
+France or wherever they were needed overseas. If no magic could
+put rifles in their hands or summon batteries of guns to follow them on
+the march, the fact of their volunteering, when they knew by watching
+from day to day the drudgery that it meant and what trench warfare
+was, shows at least that the race is not yet decadent. Perhaps we
+should have done better. No one can know until we try it. If liberal
+treatment by the government and the course set by Secretary Root
+means anything, our staff ought to be better equipped for such a task
+than the English were; this, too, only war can decide.
+
+Whatsoever of pessimism appeared in the British Press was
+telegraphed to America. Pessimism was not permitted in the German
+Press. Imagine Germany holding control of the cable and allowing
+press dispatches from Germany to pass over it with the freedom that
+England allowed. Imagine Germany having waited as long as
+England before making cotton contraband. The British Press
+demanded information from the government which the German Press
+would never have dared to ask. I have known an American
+correspondent, fed out of hand in Germany and thankful for anything
+that the fearful German war-machine might vouchsafe, turning a
+belligerent when he was in London for privileges which he would
+never have thought of demanding in Berlin.
+
+If an English ship were reported sunk, he believed it must be, despite
+the government's denial. Did he go to the Germans and demand that
+he might publish the rumours of what had happened to the Moltke in
+the Gulf of Riga, or how many submarines Germany had really lost?
+Indeed, he was unconsciously paying a compliment to British free
+institutions. He expected more in England; it seemed a right to him,
+as it would at home. Englishmen talked frankly to him about mistakes;
+he heard all the gossip; and sometimes he concluded that England
+was in a bad way. In Germany such talk was not allowed. Every
+German said that the government was absolutely truthful; every
+German believed all of its reports. But ask this critical American how
+he would like to live under German rule, and then you found how anti-
+German he was at heart. Nothing succeeds like success, and
+Germany was winning and telling no one if she had any setbacks.
+
+If there were a strike, the British Press made the most of it, for it was
+big news. Pessimism is the Englishman's natural way of arousing
+himself to fresh energy. It is also against habit to be demonstrative in
+his effort; so it is not easy to understand how much he is doing. Then,
+pessimism brought recruits; it made the Englishman say, "I've got to
+put my back into it!" Muddling there was and mistakes, such as that
+of the method of attack at Gallipoli; but in the midst of all this
+dispiriting pessimism, no Englishman thought of anything but of
+putting his back into it more and more. Lord Kitchener had said that it
+was to be a long war and evidently it must be. Of course, England's
+misfortune was in having the war catch her in the transition from an
+old order of things to social reforms.
+
+But if the war shows anything it is that basically English character has
+not changed. She still has unconquerable, dogged persistence, and
+her defects for this kind of war are not among the least admirable of
+her traits to those who desire to live their own lives in their own way,
+as the English-speaking people have done for five hundred years,
+without having a verboten sign on every street corner.
+
+It is still the law that when a company of infantry marches through
+London it must be escorted by a policeman. This means a good deal:
+that civil power is superior to military power. It is a symbol of what
+Englishmen have fought for with spades and pitchforks, and what we
+have fought Englishmen for. My own idea is that England is fighting
+for it in this struggle; and starting unready against a foe which was
+ready, as the free peoples always have done, she was fighting for
+time and experience before she could strike her sturdiest blows.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of My Year of the War, by Frederick Palmer
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: My Year of the War
+       Including an Account of Experiences with the Troops in France and
+       the Record of a Visit to the Grand Fleet Which is Here Given for the
+       First Time in its Complete Form
+
+
+Author: Frederick Palmer
+
+Release Date: April 13, 2004 [EBook #12013]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MY YEAR OF THE WAR ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by A. Langley
+
+
+
+
+
+My Year Of The War
+
+Including An Account Of Experiences
+With The Troops In France, And The
+Record Of A Visit To The Grand
+Fleet, Which Is Here Given
+For The First Time In
+Its Complete Form
+
+By Frederick Palmer
+(Accredited American Correspondent at the British Front)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+To The Reader
+I. "Le Brave Belge!"
+II. Mons And Paris
+III. Paris Waits
+IV. On The Heels Of Von Kluck
+V. And Calais Waits
+VI. In Germany
+VII. How The Kaiser Leads
+VIII. In Belgium Under The Germans
+IX. Christmas In Belgium
+X. The Future Of Belgium
+XI. Winter In Lorraine
+XII. Smiles Among Ruins
+XIII. A Road Of War I Know
+XIV. Trenches In Winter
+XV. In Neuve Chapelle
+XVI. Nearer The Germans
+XVII. With The Guns
+XVIII. Archibald The Archer
+XIX. Trenches In Summer
+XX. A School In Bombing
+XXI. My Best Day At The Front
+XXII. More Best Day
+XXIII. Winning And Losing
+XXIV. The Maple Leaf Folk
+XXV. Many Pictures
+XXVI. Finding The Grand Fleet
+XXVII. On A Destroyer
+XXVIII. Ships That Have Fought
+XXIX. On The Inflexible
+XXX. On The Fleet Flagship
+XXXI. Simply Hard Work
+XXII. Hunting The Submarine
+XXXIII. The Fleet Puts To Sea
+XXIV. British Problems
+
+
+
+
+
+To the Reader
+
+
+
+In 'The Last Shot', which appeared only a few months before the
+Great War began, drawing from my experience in many wars, I
+attempted to describe the character of a conflict between two great
+European land-powers, such as France and Germany.
+
+"You were wrong in some ways," a friend writes to me, "but in other
+ways it is almost as if you had written a play and they were following
+your script and stage business."
+
+Wrong as to the duration of the struggle and its bitterness and the
+atrocious disregard of treaties and the laws of war by one side; right
+about the part which artillery would play; right in suggesting the
+stalemate of intrenchments when vast masses of troops occupied the
+length of a frontier. Had the Germans not gone through Belgium and
+attacked on the shorter line of the Franco-German boundary, the
+parallel of fact with that of prediction would have been more
+complete. As for the ideal of 'The Last Shot', we must await the
+outcome to see how far it shall be fulfilled by a lasting peace.
+
+Then my friend asks, "How does it make you feel?" Not as a prophet;
+only as an eager observer, who finds that imagination pales beside
+reality. If sometimes an incident seemed a page out of my novel, I
+was reminded how much better I might have done that page from life;
+and from life I am writing now.
+
+I have seen too much of the war and yet not enough to assume the
+pose of a military expert; which is easy when seated in a chair at
+home before maps and news dispatches, but becomes fantastic after
+one has lived at the front. One waits on more information before he
+forms conclusions about campaigns. He is certain only that the Marne
+was a decisive battle for civilization; that if England had not gone into
+the war the Germanic Powers would have won in three months.
+
+No words can exaggerate the heroism and sacrifice of the French or
+the importance of the part which the British have played, which we
+shall not realize till the war is over. In England no newspapers were
+suppressed; casualty lists were published; she gave publicity to
+dissensions and mistakes which others concealed, in keeping with
+her ancient birthright of free institutions which work out conclusions
+through discussion rather than take them ready-made from any ruler
+or leader.
+
+Whatever value this book has is the reflection of personal
+observation and the thoughts which have occurred to me when I
+have walked around my experiences and measured them and found
+what was worth while and what was not. Such as they are, they are
+real.
+
+Most vital of all in sheer expression of military power was the visit to
+the British Grand Fleet; most humanly appealing, the time spent in
+Belgium under German rule; most dramatic, the French victory on the
+Marne; most precious, my long stay at the British front.
+
+A traveller's view I had of Germany in the early period of the war; but I
+was never with the German army, which made Americans particularly
+welcome for obvious reasons. Between right and wrong one cannot
+be a neutral. In foregoing the diversion of shaking hands and passing
+the time of day on the Germanic fronts, I escaped any bargain with
+my conscience by accepting the hospitality of those warring for a
+cause and in a manner obnoxious to me. I was among friends, living
+the life of one army and seeing war in all its aspects from day to day,
+instead of having tourist glimpses.
+
+Chapters which deal with the British army in France and with the
+British fleet have been submitted to the censor. Though the censor
+may delete military secrets, he may not prompt opinions. Whatever
+notes of praise and of affection which you may read between the
+lines or in them spring from the mind and heart. Undemonstratively,
+cheerily as they would go for a walk, with something of old-fashioned
+chivalry, the British went to death.
+
+Their national weaknesses and strength, revealed under external
+differences by association, are more akin to ours than we shall realize
+until we face our own inevitable crisis. Though one's ancestors had
+been in America for nearly three centuries, he was continually finding
+how much of custom, of law, of habit, and of instinct he had in
+common with them; and how Americans who were not of British blood
+also shared these as an applied inheritance that has been the most
+formative element in the American crucible.
+
+My grateful acknowledgments are due to the American press
+associations who considered me worthy to be the accredited
+American correspondent at the British front, and to Collier's and
+Everybody's; and may an author who has not had the opportunity to
+read proofs request the reader's indulgence.
+
+FREDERICK PALMER. British Headquarters, France.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+My Year Of The War
+
+
+
+
+I
+"Le Brave Belge!"
+
+
+
+The rush from Monterey, in Mexico, when a telegram said that
+general European war was inevitable; the run and jump on board the
+Lusitania at New York the night that war was declared by England
+against Germany; the Atlantic passage on the liner of ineffaceable
+memory, a suspense broken by fragments of war news by wireless;
+the arrival in England before the war was a week old; the journey to
+Belgium in the hope of reaching the scene of action!--as I write, all
+seem to have the perspective of history, so final are the processes of
+war, so swift their execution, and so eager is everyone for each day's
+developments. As one grows older the years seem shorter; but the
+first year of the Great War is the longest year most of us have ever
+known.
+
+Le brave Belge! One must be honest about him. The man who lets
+his heart run away with his judgment does his mind an injustice. A
+fellow-countryman who was in London and fresh from home in the
+eighth month of the war, asked me for my views of the relative
+efficiency of the different armies engaged.
+
+"Do you mean that I am to speak without regard to personal
+sympathies?" I asked.
+
+"Certainly," he replied.
+
+When he had my opinion he exclaimed:
+
+"You have mentioned them all except the Belgian army. I thought it
+was the best of all."
+
+"Is that what they think at home?" I asked.
+
+"Yes, of course."
+
+"The Atlantic is broad," I suggested.
+
+This man of affairs, an exponent of the efficiency of business, was a
+sentimentalist when it came to war, as Anglo-Saxons usually are. The
+side which they favour--that is the efficient side. When I ventured to
+suggest that the Belgian army, in a professional sense, was hardly to
+be considered as an army, it was clear that he had ceased to
+associate my experience with any real knowledge.
+
+In business he was one who saw his rivals, their abilities, the
+organization of their concerns, and their resources of competition with
+a clear eye. He could say of his best personal friend: "I like him, but
+he has a poor head for affairs." Yet he was the type who, if he had
+been a trained soldier, would have been a business man of war who
+would have wanted a sharp, ready sword in a well-trained hand and
+to leave nothing to chance in a battle for the right. In Germany, where
+some of the best brains of the country are given to making war a
+business, he might have been a soldier who would rise to a position
+on the staff. In America he was the employer of three thousand men--
+a general of civil life.
+
+"But look how the Belgians have fought!" he exclaimed. "They
+stopped the whole German army for two weeks!"
+
+The best army was best because it had his sympathy. His view was
+the popular view in America: the view of the heart. America saw the
+pigmy fighting the giant rather than let him pass over Belgian soil.
+On that day when a gallant young king cried, "To arms!" all his
+people became gallant to the imagination.
+
+When I think of Belgium's part in the war I always think of the little
+Belgian dog, the schipperke who lives on the canal boats. He is a
+home-staying dog, loyal, affectionate, domestic, who never goes out
+on the tow-path to pick quarrels with other dogs; but let anything on
+two or four feet try to go on board when his master is away and he will
+fight with every ounce of strength in him. The King had the
+schipperke spirit. All the Belgians who had the schipperke spirit
+tried to sink their teeth in the calves of the invader.
+
+One's heart was with the Belgians on that eighteenth day of August,
+1914, when one set out toward the front in a motor-car from a
+Brussels rejoicing over bulletins of victory, its streets walled with
+bunting; but there was something brewing in one's mind which was as
+treason to one's desires. Let Brussels enjoy its flags and its capture
+of German cavalry patrols while it might!
+
+On the hills back of Louvain we came upon some Belgian troops in
+their long, cumbersome coats, dark silhouettes against the field,
+digging shallow trenches in an uncertain sort of way. Whether it was
+due to the troops or to Belgian staff officers hurrying by in their cars, I
+had the impression of the will and not the way and a parallel of raw
+militia in uniforms taken from grandfather's trunk facing the trained
+antagonists of an Austerlitz, or a Waterloo, or a Gettysburg.
+
+Le brave Beige! The question on that day was not, Are you brave?
+but, Do you know how to fight? Also, Would the French and the
+British arrive in time to help you? Of a thousand rumours about the
+positions of the French and the British armies, one was as good as
+another. All the observer knew was that he was an atom in a motor-
+car and all he saw for the defence of Belgium was a regiment of
+Belgians digging trenches. He need not have been in Belgium before
+to realize that here was an unwarlike people, living by intensive thrift
+and caution--a most domesticated civilization in the most thickly-
+populated workshop in Europe, counting every blade of grass and
+every kernel of wheat and making its pleasures go a long way at
+small cost; a hothouse of a land, with the door about to be opened to
+the withering blast of war.
+
+Out of the Hotel de Ville at Louvain, as our car halted by the cathedral
+door, came an elderly French officer, walking with a light, quick step,
+his cloak thrown back over his shoulders, and hurriedly entered a car;
+and after him came a tall British officer, walking more slowly,
+imperturbably, as a man who meant to let nothing disturb him or beat
+him--both characteristic types of race. This was the break-up of the
+last military conference held at Louvain, which had now ceased to be
+Belgian Headquarters.
+
+How little you knew and how much they knew! The sight of them was
+helpful. One was the representative of a force of millions of
+Frenchman; of the army. I had always believed in the French army,
+and have more reason now than ever to believe in it. There was no
+doubt that if a French corps and a German corps were set the task of
+marching a hundred miles to a strategic position, the French would
+arrive first and win the day in a pitched battle. But no one knew this
+better than that German Staff whose superiority, as von Moltke said,
+would always ensure victory. Was the French army ready? Could it
+bring the fullness of its strength into the first and perhaps the deciding
+shock of arms? Where was the French army?
+
+The other officer who came out of the Hotel de Ville was the
+representative of a little army--a handful of regulars--hard as nails and
+ready to the last button. Where was the British army? The restaurant
+keeper where we had luncheon at Louvain--he knew. He whispered
+his military secret to me. The British army was toward Antwerp,
+waiting to crush the Germans in the flank should they advance on
+Brussels. We were "drawing them on!" Most cheerful, most confident,
+mine host! When I went back to Louvain under German rule his
+restaurant was in ruins.
+
+We were on our way to as near the front as we would go, with a pass
+which was written for us by a Belgian reservist in Brussels between
+sips of beer brought him by a boy scout. It was a unique, a most
+accommodating pass; the only one I have received from the Allies'
+side which would have taken me into the German lines.
+
+The front which we saw was in the square of the little town of Haelen,
+where some dogs of a dog machine-gun battery lay panting in their
+traces. A Belgian officer in command there I recollect for his
+passionate repetition of, "Assassins! The barbarians!" which seemed
+to choke out any other words whenever he spoke of the Germans.
+His was a fresh, livid hate, born of recent fighting. We could go where
+we pleased, he said; and the Germans were "out there," not far away.
+Very tired he was, except for the flash of hate in his eyes; as tired as
+the dogs of the machine-gun battery.
+
+We went outside to see the scene of "the battle," as it was called in
+the dispatches; a field in the first flush of the war, where the headless
+lances of Belgian and German cavalrymen were still scattered about.
+The peasants had broken off the lance-heads for the steel, which was
+something to pay for the grain smouldering in the barn which had
+been shelled and burned.
+
+A battle! It was a battle because the reporters could get some
+account of it, and the fighting in Alsace was hidden under the cloud of
+secrecy. A superficial survey was enough to show that it had been
+only a reconnaissance by the Germans with some infantry and guns
+as well as cavalry. Their defeat had been an incident to the thrust of a
+tiny feeling finger of the German octopus for information. The
+scouting of the German cavalry patrols here and there had the same
+object. Waiting behind hedges or sweeping around in the rear of a
+patrol with their own cavalry when the word came by telephone, the
+Belgians bagged many a German, man and horse, dead and alive.
+Brussels and London and New York, too, thrilled over these exploits
+supplied to eager readers. It was the Uhlan week of the war; for every
+German cavalryman was a Uhlan, according to popular conception.
+These Uhlans seemed to have more temerity than sense from the
+accounts that you read. But if one out of a dozen of these mounted
+youths, with horses fresh and a trooper's zest in the first flush of war,
+returned to say that he had ridden to such and such points without
+finding any signs of British or French forces, he had paid for the loss
+of the others. The Germans had plenty of cavalry. They used it as the
+eyes of the army, in co-operation with the aerial eyes of the planes.
+
+A peasant woman came out of the house beside the battlefield with
+her children around her; a flat-chested, thin woman, prematurely old
+with toil. "Les Anglais!" she cried at sight of us. Seeing that we had
+some lances in the car, she rushed into her house and brought out
+half a dozen more. If the English wanted lances they should have
+them. She knew only a few words of French, not enough to express
+the question which she made understood by gestures. Her eyes were
+burning with appeal to us and flashing with hate as she shook her fist
+toward the Germans.
+
+When were the English coming? All her trust was in the English, the
+invincible English, to save her country. Probably the average
+European would have passed her by as an excited peasant woman.
+But pitiful she was to me, more pitiful than the raging officer and his
+dog battery, or the infantry awkwardly intrenching back of Louvain, or
+flag-bedecked Brussels believing in victory: one of the Belgians with
+the true schipperke spirit. She was shaking her fist at a dam which
+was about to burst in a flood.
+
+It was strange to an American, who comes from a land where
+everyone learns a single language, English, that she and her
+ancestors, through centuries of living neighbour in a thickly-populated
+country to people who speak French and to French civilization,
+should never have learned to express themselves in any but their
+own tongue--singular, almost incredible, tenacity in the age of popular
+education! She would save the lance-heads and garner every grain
+of wheat; she economized in all but racial animosity. This racial
+stubbornness of Europe--perhaps it keeps Europe powerful in jealous
+competition of race with race.
+
+The thought that went home was that she did not want the Germans
+to come; no Belgian wanted them; and this was the fact decisive in
+the scales of justice. She said, as the officer had said, that the
+Germans were "out there." Across the fields one saw nothing on that
+still August day; no sign of war unless a Taube overhead, the first
+enemy aeroplane I had seen in war. For the last two days the
+German patrols had ceased to come. Liege, we knew, had fallen.
+Looking at the map, we prayed that Namur would hold.
+
+"Out there" beyond the quiet fields, that mighty force which was to
+swing through Belgium in flank was massed and ready to move when
+the German Staff opened the throttle. A mile or so away a patrol of
+Belgian cyclists stopped us as we turned toward Brussels. They were
+dust-covered and weary; the voice of their captain was faint with
+fatigue. For over two weeks he had been on the hunt of Uhlan
+patrols. Another schipperke he, who could not only hate but fight
+as best he knew how.
+
+"We had an alarm," he said. "Have you heard anything?"
+
+When we told him no, he pedalled on more slowly, and oh, how
+wearily! to the front. Rather pitiful that, too, when you thought of what
+was "out there."
+
+One had learned enough to know, without the confidential information
+that he received, that the Germans could take Brussels if they chose.
+But the people of Brussels still thronged the streets under the
+blankets of bunting. If bunting could save Brussels, it was in no
+danger.
+
+There was a mockery about my dinner that night. The waiter who laid
+the white cloth on a marble table was unctuously suggestive as to
+menu. Luscious grapes and crisp salad, which Belgian gardeners
+grow with meticulous care, I remember of it. You might linger over
+your coffee, knowing the truth, and look out at the people who did not
+know it. When they were not buying more buttons with the allied
+colours, or more flags, or dropping nickel pieces in Red Cross boxes,
+they were thronging to the kiosks for the latest edition of the evening
+papers, which told them nothing.
+
+A man had to make up his mind. Clearly, he had only to keep in his
+room in his hotel in order to have a great experience. He might see
+the German troops enter Belgium. His American passport would
+protect him as a neutral. He could depend upon the legation to get
+him out of trouble.
+
+"Stick to the army you are with!" an eminent American had told me.
+
+"Yes, but I prefer to choose my army," I had replied.
+
+The army I chose was not about to enter Brussels. It was that of
+"mine own people" on the side of the schipperke dog machine-gun
+battery which I had seen in the streets of Haelen, and the peasant
+woman who shook her fist at the invader, and all who had the
+schipperke spirit.
+
+My empty appointment as the representative of the American Press
+with the British army was, at least, taken seriously by the policeman
+at the War Office in London when I returned from trips to Paris. The
+day came when it was good for British trenches and gun-positions;
+when it was worth all the waiting, because it was the army of my race
+and tongue.
+
+
+
+
+II
+Mons And Paris
+
+
+
+Back from Belgium to England; then across the Channel again to
+Boulogne, where I saw the last of the French garrison march away,
+their red trousers a throbbing target along the road. From Boulogne
+the British had advanced into Belgium. Now their base was moved on
+to Havre. Boulogne, which two weeks before had been cheering
+the advent of "Tommee Atkeens" singing "Why should we be
+downhearted?" was ominously lifeless. It was a town without soldiers;
+a town of brick and mortar and pavements whose very defencelessness
+was its best security should the Germans come.
+
+The only British there were a few stray wounded officers and men
+who had found their way back from Mons. They had no idea where
+the British army was. All they realized were sleepless nights, the
+shock of combat, overpowering artillery fire, and resisting the
+onslaught of outnumbering masses.
+
+An officer of Lancers, who had ridden through the German cavalry
+with his squadron, dwelt on the glory of that moment. What did his
+wound matter? It had come with the burst of a shell in a village street
+which killed his horse after the charge. He had hobbled away,
+reached a railroad train, and got on board. That was all he knew.
+
+A Scotch private had been lying with his battalion in a trench when a
+German aeroplane was sighted. It had hardly passed by when
+showers of shrapnel descended, and the Germans, in that grey-
+green so hard to see, were coming on as thick as locusts. Then the
+orders came to fall back, and he was hit as his battalion made
+another stand. He had crawled a mile across the fields in the night
+with a bullet in his arm. A medical corps officer told him to find any
+transportation he could; and he, too, was able to get aboard a train.
+That was all he knew.
+
+These wounded had been tossed aside into eddies by the maelstrom
+of action. They were interesting because they were the first British
+wounded that I had seen; because the war was young.
+
+Back to London again to catch the steamer with an article. One was
+to take a season ticket to the war from London as home. It was a
+base whence one sallied forth to get peeps through the curtain of
+military secrecy at the mighty spectacle. You soaked in England at
+intervals and the war at intervals. Whenever you stepped on the pier
+at Folkestone it was with a breath of relief, born of a sense of freedom
+long associated with fields and hedges on the other side of the chalk
+cliffs which seemed to make the sequestering barrier of the sea
+complete.
+
+Those days of late August and early September, 10.14, were gripping
+days to the memory. Eager armies were pressing forward to a
+cataclysm no longer of dread imagination but of reality. That ever-
+deepening and spreading stain from Switzerland to the North Sea
+was as yet only a splash of fresh blood. You still wondered if you
+might not wake up in the morning and find the war a nightmare.
+Pictures that grow clearer with time, which the personal memory
+chooses for its own, dissociate themselves from a background of
+detail.
+
+They were very quiet, this pair that sat at the next table in the dining-
+room of a London hotel. I never spoke to them, but only stole discreet
+glances, as we all will in irresistible temptation at any newly-wedded
+couple. Neither was of the worldly type. One knew that to this young
+girl London was strange; one knew the type of country home which
+had given her that simple charm which cities cannot breed; one
+knew, too, that this young officer, her husband, waited for word to go
+to the front.
+
+Unconsciously she would play with her wedding-ring. She stole covert
+glances at it and at him, of the kind that bring a catch in the throat,
+when he was not looking at her--which he was most of the time, for
+reasons which were good and sufficient to others besides himself.
+Apprehended in "wool-gathering," she mustered a smile which was
+so exclusively for him that the neighbour felt that he ought to be
+forgiven his peeps from the tail of his eye at it because it was so
+precious.
+
+They attempted little flights of talk about everything except the war.
+He was most solicitous that she should have something which she
+liked to eat, whilst she was equally solicitous about him. Wasn't he
+going "out there?" And out there he would have to live on army fare. It
+was all appealing to the old traveller. And then the next morning--she
+was alone, after she had given him that precious smile in parting. The
+incident was one of the thousands before the war had become an
+institution, death a matter of routine, and it was a commonplace for
+young wives to see young husbands away to the front with a smile.
+
+One such incident does for all, whether the war be young or old.
+There is nothing else to tell, even when you know wife and husband. I
+was rather glad that I did not know this pair. If I had known them I
+should be looking at the casualty list for his name and I might not
+enjoy my faith that he will return alive. These two seemed to me the
+best of England. I used to think of them when gossip sought the latest
+turn of intrigue under the mantle of censorship, when Parliament
+poured out its oral floods and the newspapers their volumes of words.
+The man went off to fight; the woman returned to her country home. It
+was the hour of war, not of talk.
+
+On that Sunday in London when the truth about Mons appeared stark
+to all England, another young man happened to buy a special edition
+at a street corner at the same time as myself. By all criteria, the world
+and his tailor had treated him well and he deserved well of the world.
+We spoke together about the news. Already the new democracy
+which the war has developed was in evidence. Everybody had
+common thoughts and a common thing at stake, with values
+reckoned in lives, and this makes for equality.
+
+"It's clear that we have had a bad knock. Why deny it?" he said. Then
+he added quietly, after a pause: "This is a personal call for me. I'm
+going to enlist."
+
+England's answer to that "bad knock" was out of her experience. She
+had never won at first, but she had always won in the end; she had
+won the last battle. The next day's news was worse and the next
+day's still worse. The Germans seemed to be approaching Paris by
+forced marches. Paris might fall--no matter! Though the French army
+were shattered, one heard Englishmen say that the British would
+create an army to wrest victory from defeat. The spirit of this was fine,
+but one realized the enormity of the task; should the mighty German
+machine crush the French machine, the Allies had lost. To say so
+then was heresy, when the world was inclined to think poorly of the
+French army and saw Russian numbers as irresistible.
+
+The personal call was to Paris before the fate of Paris was to be
+decided. My first crossing of the Channel had been to Ostend; the
+second, farther south to Boulogne; the third was still farther south, to
+Dieppe. Where next? To Havre! Events were moving with the speed
+which had been foreseen with myriads of soldiers ready to be thrown
+into battle by the quick march of the railroad trains.
+
+Every event was hidden under the "fog of war," then a current
+expression--meagre official bulletins which read like hope in their brief
+lines, while the imagination might read as it chose between the lines.
+The marvel was that any but troop trains should run. All night in that
+third-class coach from Dieppe to Paris! Tired and preoccupied
+passengers; everyone's heart heavy; everyone's soul wrenched;
+everyone prepared for the worst! You cared for no other man's views;
+the one thing you wanted was no bad news. France had known that
+when the war came it would be to the death. From the first no
+Frenchman could have had any illusions. England had not realized
+yet that her fate was with the soldiers of France, or France that her
+fate and all the world's was with the British fleet.
+
+An Italian in our compartment would talk, however, and he would
+keep the topic down to red trousers, and to the red trousers of a
+French Territorial opposite, with an index finger when his gesticulatory
+knowledge of the French language, which was excellent, came to the
+rescue of his verbal knowledge, which was poor. The Frenchman
+agreed that red trousers were a mistake, but pointed to the blue
+covering which he had for his cap--which made it all right. The Italian
+insisted on keeping to the trousers. He talked red trousers till the
+Frenchman got out at his station, and then turned to me to confirm
+his views on this fatal strategic and tactical error of the French. After
+all, he was more pertinent than most of the military experts trying to
+write on the basis of the military bulletins. It was droll to listen to
+this sartorial discourse, when at least two hundred thousand men
+lay dead and wounded from that day's fight on the soil of France.
+Red trousers were responsible for the death of a lot of those men.
+
+Dawn, early September dawn, on dew-moist fields, where the harvest
+lay unfinished as the workers, hastening to the call of war, had left the
+work. Across Paris, which seemed as silent as the fields, to an hotel
+with empty rooms! Five hundred empty rooms, with a clock ticking
+busily in every room! War or no war, that old man who wound the
+clocks was making his rounds softly through the halls from door to
+door. He was a good soldier, who had heeded Joffre's request that
+everyone should go on with his day's work.
+
+"They're done!" said an American in the foyer. "The French cannot
+stand up against the Germans--anybody could see that! It's too bad,
+but the French are licked. The Germans will be here to-morrow or the
+next day."
+
+I could not and would not believe it. Such a disaster was against all
+one's belief in the French army and in the real character of the
+French people. It meant that autocracy was making sport of
+democracy; it meant disaster to all one's precepts; a personal
+disaster.
+
+"Look at that interior line which the French now hold. Think of the
+power of the defensive with modern arms. No! The French have not
+had their battle yet!" I said.
+
+And the British Expeditionary Force was still intact; still an army, with
+lots of fight left in it.
+
+
+
+
+Ill
+Paris Waits
+
+
+
+It was then that people were speaking of Paris as a dead city--a Paris
+without theatres, without young men, without omnibuses, with the
+shutters of its shops down and its cafes and restaurants in gloomy
+emptiness.
+
+The Paris the host of the idler and the traveller; the Paris of the
+boulevards and the night life provided for the tourist; the Paris that
+sparkled and smiled in entertainment; the Paris exploited to
+the average American through Sunday supplements and the
+reminiscences of smoking-rooms of transatlantic liners, was dead.
+Those who knew no other Paris and conjectured no other Paris
+departed as from the tomb of the pleasures which had been the
+passing extravaganza of relief, from dull lives elsewhere. The
+Parisienne of that Paris spent a thousand francs to get her pet dog
+safely away to Marseilles. Politicians of a craven type, who are the
+curse of all democracies, had gone to keep her company, leaving
+Paris cleaner than ever she was after the streets had had their
+morning bath on a spring day when the horse chestnuts were in
+bloom and madame was arranging her early editions on the table of
+her kiosk--a spiritually clean Paris.
+
+Monsieur, would you have America judged by the White Way? What
+has the White Way to do with the New York of Seventy-Second
+Street or Harlem? It serves the same purpose as the boulevards of
+furnishing scandalous little paragraphs for foreign newspapers.
+Foreigners visit it and think that they understand how Americans live
+in Stockbridge, Mass., or Springfield Illinois, Empty its hotels and
+nobody but sightseers and people interested in the White Way would
+know the difference.
+
+The other Paris, making ready to stand siege, with the Government
+gone to Bordeaux with all the gold of the Bank of France, with the
+enemy's guns audible in the suburbs and old men cutting down trees
+and tearing up paving-stones to barricade the streets--never had that
+Paris been more alive. It was after the death of the old and the birth of
+the new Paris that an elderly man, seeing a group of women at tea in
+one of the few fashionable refreshment places which were open,
+stopped and said:
+
+"Can you find nothing better than that to do, ladies, in a time like
+this?"
+
+And the Latin temperament gave the world a surprise. Those who
+judged France by her playful Paris thought that if a Frenchman
+gesticulated so emotionally in the course of everyday existence, he
+would get overwhelmingly excited in a great emergency. One
+evening, after the repulse of the Germans on the Marne, I saw two
+French reserves dining in a famous restaurant where, at this time of
+the year, four out of five diners ordinarily would be foreigners
+surveying one another in a study of Parisian life. They were big, rosy-
+cheeked men, country born and bred, belonging to the new France of
+sports, of action, of temperate habits, and they were joking about
+dining there just as two sturdy Westerners might about dining in a
+deserted Broadway. The foreigners and demimondaines were
+noticeably absent; a pair of Frenchmen were in the place of the
+absentees; and after their dinner they smoked their black brier-root
+pipes in that fashionable restaurant.
+
+Among the picture post-cards then on sale was one of Marianne, who
+is France, bound for the front in an aeroplane with a crowing French
+cock sitting on the brace above her. Marianne looked as happy as if
+she were going to the races; the cock as triumphant as if he had a
+spur through the German eagle's throat. However, there was little
+sale for picture post-cards or other trifles, while Paris waited for the
+siege. They did not help to win victories. News and not jeux d'esprit,
+victory and not wit, was wanted.
+
+For Marianne went to war with her liberty cap drawn tight over her
+brow, a beat in her temples, and her heart in her throat; and the cock
+had his head down and pointed at the enemy. She was relieved in a
+way, as all Europe was, that the thing had come; at last an end of the
+straining of competitive taxation and preparation; at last the test. She
+had no Channel, as England had, between her and the foe. Defeat
+meant the heel of the enemy on her soil, German sentries in her
+streets, submission. Long and hard she had trained; while the outside
+world, thinking of the Paris of the boulevards, thought that she could
+not resist the Kaiser's legions. She was effeminate, effete. She was
+all right to run cafes and make artificial flowers, but she lacked beef.
+All the prestige was with her enemy. In '70 all the prestige had been
+with her. For there is no prestige like military prestige. It is all with
+those who won the last war.
+
+"But if we must succumb, let it be now," said the French.
+
+On, on--the German corps were coming like some machine-
+controlled avalanche of armed men. Every report brought them a little
+nearer Paris. Ah, monsieur, they had numbers, those Germans!
+Every German mother has many sons; a French mother only one or
+two.
+
+How could one believe those official communiques which kept saying
+that the position of the French armies was favourable and then
+admitted that von Kluck had advanced another twenty miles? The
+heart of Paris stopped beating. Paris held its breath. Perhaps the
+reason there was no panic was that Parisians had been prepared for
+the worst.
+
+What silence! The old men and the women in the streets moved as
+under a spell, which was the sense of their own helplessness. But few
+people were abroad, and those going on errands apparently. The
+absence of traffic and pedestrians heightened the sepulchral
+appearance to superficial observation. At the windows of flats, inside
+the little shops, and on by-streets, you saw waiting faces, everyone
+with the weight of national grief become personal. Was Paris alive?
+Yes, if Paris is human and not bricks and stone. Every Parisian was
+living a century in a week. So, too, was one who loved France. In the
+prospect of its loss he realized the value of all that France stands for,
+her genius, her democracy, her spirit.
+
+One recalled how German officers had said that the next war would
+be the end of France. An indemnity which would crush out her power
+of recovery would be imposed on her. Her northern ports would be
+taken. France, the most homogeneous of nations, would be divided
+into separate nationalities--even this the Germans had planned.
+Those who read their Shakespeare in the language they learned in
+childhood had no doubt of England's coming out of the war secure;
+but if we thought which foreign civilization brought us the most in our
+lives, it was that of France.
+
+What would the world be without French civilization? To think of
+France dead was to think of cells in your own brain that had gone
+lifeless; of something irreparable extinguished to every man to whom
+civilization means more than material power of destruction. The
+sense of what might be lost was revealed to you at every turn in
+scenes once merely characteristic of a whole, each with an appeal of
+its own now; in the types of people who, by their conduct in this hour
+of trial, showed that Spartan hearts might beat in Paris-the Spartan
+hearts of the mass of everyday, workaday Parisians.
+
+Those waiting at home calmly with their thoughts, in a France of
+apprehension, knew that their fate was out of their hands in the hands
+of their youth. The tide of battle wavering from Meaux to Verdun
+might engulf them; it might recede; but Paris would resist to the last.
+That was something. She would resist in a manner worthy of Paris;
+and one could live on very little food. Their fathers had. Every day
+that Paris held out would be a day lost to the Germans and a day
+gained for Joffre and Sir John French to bring up reserves.
+
+The street lamps should not reveal to Zeppelins or Taubes the
+location of precious monuments. You might walk the length of the
+Champs Elysees without meeting a vehicle or more than two or three
+pedestrians. The avenue was all your own; you might appreciate it as
+an avenue for itself; and every building and even the skyline of the
+streets you might appreciate, free of any association except the
+thought of the results of man's planning and building. Silent, deserted
+Paris by moonlight, without street lamps--few had ever seen that.
+Millionaire tourists with retinues of servants following them in motor-
+cars may never know this effect; nor the Parisienne who paid a
+thousand francs to send her pet dog to Marseilles.
+
+The moonlight threw the Arc de Triomphe in exaggerated spectral
+relief, sprinkled the leaves of the long rows of trees, glistened on the
+upsweep of the broad pavements, gleamed on the Seine. Paris was
+majestic, as scornful of Prussian eagles as the Parthenon of Roman
+eagles. A column of soldiery marching in triumph under the Arc might
+possess as a policeman possesses; but not by arms could they gain
+the quality that made Paris, any more than the Roman legionary
+became a Greek scholar by doing sentry go in front of the Parthenon.
+Every Parisian felt anew how dear Paris was to him; how worthy of
+some great sacrifice!
+
+If New York were in danger of falling to an enemy, the splendid length
+of Fifth Avenue and the majesty of the skyscrapers of lower
+Broadway and the bay and the rivers would become vivid to you in a
+way they never had before; or Washington, or San Francisco, or
+Boston--or your own town. The thing that is a commonplace, when
+you are about to lose it takes on a cherished value.
+
+To-morrow the German guns might be thundering in front of the
+fortifications. The communiques from Joffre became less frequent
+and more laconic. Their wording was like some trembling, fateful
+needle of a barometer, pausing, reacting a little, but going down,
+down, down, indicator of the heart-pressure of Paris, shrivelling the
+flesh, tightening the nerves. Already Paris was in a state of siege, in
+one sense. Her exits were guarded against all who were not in
+uniform and going to fight; to all who had no purpose except to see
+what was passing where two hundred miles resounded with strife. It
+was enough to see Paris itself awaiting the siege; fighting one was yet
+to see to repletion.
+
+The situation must be very bad or the Government would not have
+gone to Bordeaux. Alors, one must trust the army and the army must
+trust Joffre. There is no trust like that of a democracy when it gives its
+heart to a cause; the trust of the mass in the strength of the mass
+which sweeps away the middlemen of intrigue.
+
+And silence, only silence in Paris; the silence of the old men and the
+women, and of children who had ceased to play and could not
+understand. No one might see what was going on unless he carried a
+rifle. No one might see even the wounded. Paris was spared this,
+isolated in the midst of war. The wounded were sent out of reach of
+the Germans in case they should come.
+
+Then the indicator stopped falling. It throbbed upward. The
+communiques became more definite; they told of positions regained,
+and borne in the ether by the wireless of telepathy was something
+which confirmed the communiques. At first Paris was uneasy with the
+news, so set had history been on repeating itself, so remorselessly
+certain had seemed the German advance. But it was true, true--the
+Germans were going, with the French in pursuit, now twenty, now
+thirty, now forty, now fifty, sixty, seventy miles away from Paris. Yes,
+monsieur, seventy!
+
+With the needle rising, did Paris gather in crowds and surge through
+the streets, singing and shouting itself hoarse, as it ought to have
+done according to the popular international idea? No, monsieur, Paris
+will not riot in joy in the presence of the dead on the battlefields and
+while German troops are still within the boundaries of France. Paris,
+which had been with heart standing still and breathing hard, began to
+breathe regularly again and the glow of life to run through her veins.
+In the markets, whither madame brought succulent melons, pears,
+and grapes with commonplace vegetables, the talk of bargaining
+housewives with their baskets had something of its old vivacity and
+madame stiffened prices a little, for there will be heavy taxes to pay
+for the war. Children, so susceptible to surroundings, broke out of the
+quiet alleys and doorways in play again.
+
+A Sunday of relief, with a radiant September sun shining, followed a
+Sunday of depression. The old taxicabs and the horse vehicles with
+their venerable steeds and drivers too old for service at the front,
+exhumed from the catacomb of the hours of doubt, ran up and down
+the Champs Elysees with airing parties. At Notre Dame the religious
+rejoicing was expressed. A great service of prayer was held by the
+priests who were not away fighting for France, as three thousand are,
+while joyful prayers of thanks shone on the faces of that democratic
+people who have not hesitated to discipline the church as they have
+disciplined their rulers. Groups gathered in the cafes or sauntered
+slowly, talking less than usual, gesticulating little, rolling over the
+good news in their minds as something beyond the power of
+expression. How banal to say, "C'est chic, ca!" or "C'est epatant!"
+Language is for little things.
+
+That pile of posters at the American Embassy had already become
+historical souvenirs which won a smile. The name of every American
+resident in Paris and his address had been filled in the blank space.
+He had only to put up the warning over his door that the premises
+were under the Embassy's protection. Ambassador Herrick, suave,
+decisive, resourceful, possessed the gift of acting in a great
+emergency with the same ease and simplicity as in a small one,
+which is a gift sometimes found wanting when a crisis breaks upon
+the routine of official life.
+
+He had the courage to act and the ability to secure a favour for an
+American when it was reasonable; and the courage to say "No" if it
+were unreasonable or impracticable. No one of the throngs who had
+business with him was kept long at the door in uncertainty. In its
+organization for facilitating the home-going of the thousands of
+Americans in Paris and the Americans coming to Paris from other
+parts of Europe, the American Embassy in Paris seemed as well
+mobilized for its part in the war as the German army.
+
+In spite of '70, France still lived. You noted the faces of the women in
+fresh black for their dead at the front, a little drawn but proud and
+victorious. The son or brother or husband had died for the country.
+When a fast motor-car bearing officers had a German helmet or two
+displayed, the people stopped to look. A captured German in the
+flesh on a front seat beside a soldier-chauffeur brought the knots to a
+standstill. "Voila C'est un Allemand!" ran the exclamation. But Paris
+soon became used to these stray German prisoners, left-overs from
+the German retreat coming in from the fields to surrender. The
+batches went through by train without stopping for Paris, southward to
+the camps where they were to be interned; and the trains of wounded
+to winter resorts, whose hotels became hospitals, the verandas
+occupied by convalescents instead of gossiping tourists. It is tres a la
+mode to be wounded, monsieur--tres a la mode all over Europe.
+
+And, monsieur, all those barricades put up for nothing! They will not
+need the cattle gathered on Long-champs race-track and in the parks
+at Versailles for a siege. The people who laid in stocks of tinned
+goods till the groceries of Paris were empty of everything in tins--they
+will either have to live on canned food or confess that they were pigs,
+hein? Those volunteers, whether young men who had been excused
+because they were only sons or for weak hearts which now let them
+past the surgeons, whether big, hulking farmers, or labourers, or
+stooped clerks, drilling in awkward squads in the suburbs till they are
+dizzy, they will not have to defend Paris; but, perhaps, help to regain
+Alsace and Lorraine.
+
+Then there were stories going the rounds; stories of French courage
+and elan which were cheering to the ears of those who had to remain
+at home. Did you hear about the big French peasant soldier who
+captured a Prussian eagle in Alsace? They had him come to Paris to
+give him the Legion of Honour and the great men made a ceremony
+of it, gathering around him at the Ministry of War. The simple fellow
+looked from one to another of the group, surprised at all this attention.
+It did not occur to him that he had done anything remarkable. He had
+seen a Prussian with a standard and taken the standard away from
+the Prussian.
+
+"If you like this so well," said that droll one, "I'll try to get another!"
+
+
+
+
+IV
+On The Heels Of Von Kluck
+
+
+
+Though the Germans were going, the siege by the cordon of French
+guards around Paris had not been raised. To them every civilian was
+a possible spy. So they let no civilians by. Must one remain for ever in
+Paris, screened from any view of the great drama? Was there no way
+of securing a blue card which would open the road to war for an atom
+of humanity who wanted to see Frenchmen in action and not to pry
+into generals' plans?
+
+Happily, an army winning is more hospitable than an army losing; and
+bonds of friendship which stretch around the world could be linked
+with authority which has only to say the word, in order that one might
+have a day's glimpse of the fields where von Kluck's Germans were
+showing their heels to the French.
+
+Ours, I think, was the pioneer of the sight-seeing parties which
+afterwards became the accepted form of war correspondence with
+the French. None could have been under more delightful auspices in
+companionship or in the event. Victory was in the hearts of our hosts,
+who included M. Paul Doumer, formerly President of the Chamber of
+Deputies and Governor of French Indo-China and now a senator, and
+General Febrier, of the French Medical Service, who was to have had
+charge of the sanitation of Paris in case of a siege.
+
+M. Doumer was acting as Chef de Cabinet to General Gallieni, the
+commandant of Paris, and he and General Febrier and two other
+officers of Gallieni's staff, who would have been up to their eyes in
+work if there had been a siege, wanted to see something of that army
+whose valour had given them a holiday. Why should not Roberts and
+myself come along? which is the pleasant way the French have of
+putting an invitation.
+
+Oh, the magic of a military pass and the companionship of an officer
+in uniform! It separates you from the crowd of millions on the other
+side of the blank wall of military secrecy and takes you into the area
+of the millions in uniform; it wins a nod of consent on a road from that
+middle-aged reservist whose bayonet has the police power of millions
+of bayonets in support of its authority.
+
+At last one was to see; the measure of his impressions was to be his
+own eyes and not written reports. Other passes I have had since,
+which gave me the run of trenches and shell-fire areas; but this pass
+opened the first door to the war. That day we ran by Meaux and
+Chateau Thierry to Soissons and back by Senlis to Paris. We saw a
+finger's breadth of battle area; a pin-point of army front. Only a ride
+along a broad, fine road out of Paris, at first; a road which our cars
+had all to themselves. Then at Claye we came to the high-water mark
+of the German invasion in this region. Thus close to Paris in that
+direction and no closer had the Germans come.
+
+There was the field where their skirmishers had turned back. Farther
+on, the branches of the avenue of trees which shaded the road had
+been slashed as if by a whirlwind of knives, where the French
+soixante-quinze field-guns had found a target. Under that sudden
+bath of projectiles, with the French infantry pressing forward on their
+front, the German gunners could not wait to take away the cord of
+five-inch shells which they had piled to blaze their way to Paris. One
+guessed their haste and their irritation. They were within range of the
+fortifications; within two hours' march of the suburbs; of the Mecca of
+forty years' preparation. After all that march from Belgium, with no
+break in the programme of success, the thunders broke and lightning
+flashed out of the sky as Manoury's army rushed upon von Kluck's
+flank.
+
+"It was not the way that they wanted us to get the shells," said a
+French peasant who was taking one of the shell-baskets for a
+souvenir. It would make an excellent umbrella stand.
+
+For the French it had been the turn of the tide; for that little British
+army which had fought its way back from Mons it was the sweet
+dream, which had kept men up on the retreat, come true. Weary
+Germans, after a fearful two weeks of effort, became the driven.
+Weary British and French turned drivers. A hypodermic of victory
+renewed their energy. Paris was at their back and the German backs
+in front. They were no longer leaving their dead and wounded behind
+to the foe; they were sweeping past the dead and wounded of the
+foe.
+
+But their happiness, that of a winning action, exalted and passionate,
+had not the depths of that of the refugees who had fled before the
+German hosts and were returning to their homes in the wake of their
+victorious army. We passed farmers with children perched on top of
+carts laden with household goods and drawn by broad-backed farm-
+horses, with usually another horse or a milch cow tied behind. The
+real power of France, these peasants holding fast to the acres they
+own, with the fire of the French nature under their thrifty
+conservatism. Others on foot were villagers who had lacked horses
+or carts to transport their belongings. In the packs on their backs
+were a few precious things which they had borne away and were now
+bearing back.
+
+Soon they would know what the Germans had done to the homes.
+What the Germans had done to one piano was evident. It stood in the
+yard of a house where grass and flowers had been trodden by horses
+and men. In the sport of victory the piano had been dragged out of
+the little drawing-room, while Fritz and Hans played and sang in the
+intoxication of a Paris gained, a France in submission. They did not
+know what Joffre had in pickle for them. It had all gone according to
+programme up to that moment. Nothing can stop us Germans!
+Champagne instead of beer! Set the glass on top of the piano and
+sing! Haven't we waited forty years for this day?
+
+Captured diaries of German officers, which reflect the seventh
+heaven of elation suddenly turned into grim depression, taken in
+connection with what one saw on the battlefield, reconstruct the
+scene around that piano. The cup to the lips; then dashed away. How
+those orders to retreat must have hurt!
+
+The state of the refugees' homes all depended upon the chances of
+war. War's lightning might have hit your roof-tree and it might not. It
+plays no favourites between the honest and the dishonest; the thrifty
+and the shiftless. We passed villages which exhibited no signs of
+destruction or of looting. German troops had marched through in the
+advance and in the retreat without being billeted. A hurrying army with
+another on its heels has no time for looting. Other villages had been
+points of topical importance; they had been in the midst of a fight.
+General Mauvaise Chance had it in for them. Shells had wrecked
+some houses; others were burned. Where a German non-commissioned
+officer came to the door of a French family and said that room must
+be made for German soldiers in that house and if anyone dared to
+interfere with them he would be shot, there the exhausted human
+nature of a people trained to think that "Krieg ist Krieg" and that the
+spoils of war are to the victor had its way.
+
+It takes generations to lift a man up a single degree; but so swift is the
+effect of war, when men live a year in a day, that he is demonized in a
+month. Before the occupants had to go, often windows were broken,
+crockery smashed, closets and drawers rifled. The soldiery which
+could not have its Paris "took it out" of the property of their hosts.
+Looting, destruction, one can forgive in the orgy of war which is
+organized destruction; one can even understand rapine and atrocities
+when armies, which include latent vile and criminal elements, are
+aroused to the kind of insane passion which war kindles in human
+beings. But some indecencies one could not understand in civilized
+men. All with a military purpose, it is said; for in the nice calculations
+of a staff system which grinds so very fine, nothing must be excluded
+that will embarrass the enemy. A certain foully disgusting practice
+was too common not to have had the approval of at least some
+officers, whose conduct in several chateaux includes them as
+accomplices. Not all officers, not all soldiers. That there should be a
+few is enough to sicken you of belonging to the human species.
+Nothing worse in Central America; nothing worse where civilized
+degeneracy disgraces savagery.
+
+But do not think that destruction for destruction's sake was done in all
+houses where German soldiers were billeted. If the good principle
+was not sufficiently impressed, Belgium must have impressed it; a
+looting army is a disorderly army. The soldier has burden enough to
+carry in heavy marching order without souvenirs. That collector of the
+stoppers of carafes who had thirty on his person when taken prisoner
+was bound to be a laggard in the retreat.
+
+To their surprise and relief, returning farmers found their big, conical
+haystacks untouched, though nothing could be more tempting to the
+wantonness of an army on enemy soil. Strike a match and up goes
+the harvest! Perhaps the Germans as they advanced had in mind to
+save the forage for their own horses, and either they were running too
+fast to stop or the staff overlooked the detail on the retreat.
+
+It was amazing how few signs of battle there were in the open.
+Occasionally one saw the hastily-made shelter-trenches of a skirmish
+line; and again, the emplacements for batteries--hurried field-
+emplacements, so puny beside those of trench warfare. It had been
+open fighting; the tide of an army sweeping forward and then,
+pursued, sweeping back. One side was trying to get away; the other
+to overtake. Here, a rearguard made a determined action which
+would have had the character of a battle in other days; there, a
+rearguard was pinched as the French or the British got around it.
+
+Swift marching and quick manoeuvres of the type which gave war
+some of its old sport and zest; the advance all the while gathering
+force like the neap tide! Crowds of men hurrying across a harvested
+wheatfield or a pasture after all leave few marks of passage. A day's
+rain will wash away bloodstains and liven trampled vegetation. Nature
+hastens with a kind of contempt of man to repair the damage done by
+his murderous wrath.
+
+The cyclone past, the people turned out to put things in order.
+Peasants too old to fight, who had paid the taxes which paid for the
+rifles and guns and shell-fire, were moving across the fields with
+spades, burying the bodies of the young men and the horses that
+were war's victims. Long trenches full of dead told where the eddy of
+battle had been fierce and the casualties numerous; scattered
+mounds of fresh earth where they were light; and, sometimes, when
+the burying was unfinished--well, one draws the curtain over scenes
+like that in the woods at Betz, where Frenchmen died knowing that
+Paris was saved and Germans died knowing that they had failed to
+take Paris.
+
+Whenever we halted our statesman, M. Doumer, was active. Did we
+have difficulties over a culvert which had been hastily mended, he
+was out of the car and in command. Always he was meeting some
+man whom he knew and shaking hands like a senator at home. At
+one place a private soldier, a man of education by his speech, came
+running across the street at sight of him.
+
+"Son of an old friend of mine, from my town," said our statesman.
+Being a French private meant being any kind of a Frenchman. All
+inequalities are levelled in the ranks of a great conscript army.
+
+Be it through towns unharmed or towns that had been looted and
+shelled, the people had the smile of victory, the look of victory in their
+eyes. Children and old men and women, the stay-at-homes, waved to
+our car in holiday spirit. The laugh of a sturdy young woman who
+threw some flowers into the tonneau as we passed, in her tribute to
+the uniform of the army that had saved France, had the spirit of
+victorious France--France after forty years' waiting throwing back a
+foe that had two soldiers to every one of hers. All the land, rich fields
+and neat gardens and green stretches of woods in the fair, rolling
+landscape, basked in victory. Dead the spirit of anyone who could
+not, for the time being, catch the infection of it and feel himself a
+Frenchman. Far from the Paris of gay show for the tourist one
+seemed; in the midst of the France of the farms and the villages
+which had saved Paris and France.
+
+The car sped on over the hard road. Staff officers in other cars whom
+we passed alone suggested that there was war somewhere ahead.
+Were we never going to reach the battle-line, the magnet of our
+speed when a French army chauffeur made all speed laws obsolete?
+
+Shooting out of a grove, a valley made a channel for sound that
+brought to our ears the thunder of guns, with firing so rapid that it was
+like the roll of some cyclopean snare-drum beaten with sticks the size
+of ship-masts. From the crest of the next hill we had a glimpse of an
+open sweep of park-like country toward wooded hills. As far as we
+could see against the background of the foliage which threw it into
+relief was a continuous cloud of smoke from bursting shells, renewed
+with fresh, soft, blue puffs as fast as it was dissipated.
+
+This, then, was a battle. No soldiers, no guns, in sight; only against
+masses of autumn green a diaphanous, man-made nimbus which
+was raining steel hail. Ten miles of this, one would say; and under it
+lines of men in blue coats and red trousers and green uniforms
+hugging the earth, as unseen as a battalion of ants at work in the tall
+grass. Even if a charge swept across a field one would have been
+able to detect nothing except moving pin-points on a carpet.
+
+There was hard fighting; a lot of French and German were being
+killed in the direction of Compiegne and Noyon to-day. Another dip
+into another valley and the thir-r-r of a rapid-firer and the muffled
+firing of a line of infantry were audible. Yes, we were getting up
+with the army, with one tiny section of it operating along the road on
+which we were. Multiply this by a thousand and you have the whole.
+
+Ahead was the army's larder on wheels; a procession of big motor
+transport trucks keeping their intervals of distance with the precision
+of a battleship fleet at sea. We should have known that they belonged
+to the army by the deafness of the drivers to appeals to let us pass.
+All army transports are like that. What the deuced right has anybody
+to pass? They are the transport, and only fighting men belong in front
+of them. Our car in trying to go by to one side got stuck in a rut that
+an American car, built for bad roads, would have made nothing of;
+which proves again how closely European armies are tied to their fine
+highways. We got out, and here again was our statesman putting his
+shoulder to the wheel. That is the way of the French in war.
+Everybody tries to help. By this time the transport chauffeurs
+remembered that they also were Frenchmen; and as Frenchmen are
+polite even in time of war, they let us by.
+
+A motor-cyclist approached with his hand up.
+
+"Stop here!" he called.
+
+Those transport chauffeurs who were deaf to ex-premiers heard
+instantly and obeyed. In front of them was a line of single horse-
+drawn carts, with an extra horse in the rear. They could take paths
+that the motor trucks could not. Archaic they seemed, yet friendly, as
+a relic of how armies were fed in other days. For the first time I was
+realizing what the motor truck means to war. It brings the army
+impedimenta close up to the army's rear; it means a reduction of road
+space occupied by transport by three-quarters; ease in keeping pace
+with food with the advance, speed in falling back in case of retreat.
+
+All that day I did not see a single piece of French army transport
+broken down. And this army had been fighting for weeks; it had been
+an army on the road. The valuable part of our experience was exactly
+in this: a glimpse of an army in action after it had been through all the
+vicissitudes that an army may have in marching and counter-
+marching and attack. Order one expected afterwards, behind the
+siege line of trenches, when there had been time to establish a
+routine; organization and smooth organization you had here at the
+climax of a month's strain. It told the story of the character of the
+French army and the reasons for its success other than its courage.
+The brains were not all with the German Staff.
+
+That winding road, with a new picture at every turn, now revealed the
+town of Soissons in the valley of the River Aisne. Soissons was ours,
+we knew, since yesterday. How much farther had we gone? Was our
+advance still continuing? For then, winter trench-fighting was
+unforeseen and the sightseers thought of the French army as
+following up success with success. Paris, rising from gloom to
+optimism, hoped to see the Germans speedily put out of France. The
+appetite for victory grew, after a week's bulletins which moved the
+flags forward on the map every day.
+
+Another turn and Soissons was hidden from view by a woodland.
+Here we came upon what looked like a leisurely family party of
+reserves. The French army, a small section of French army, along a
+road! And thus, if one would see the whole it must be in bits along the
+roads, when not on the firing-line. They were sprawling in the fields in
+the genial afternoon sun, looking as if they had no concern except to
+rest. Uniforms dusty and faces tanned and bearded told their story of
+the last month.
+
+The duty of a portion of a force is always to wait on what is being
+done by the others at the front. These were waiting near a fork which
+could take them to the right or the left, as the situation demanded. At
+the rear, their supply of small arms ammunition; in front, caissons of
+shells for a battery speaking from the woods near by; a troop of
+cavalry drawn up, the men dismounted, ready; and ahead of them
+more reserves ready; everything ready.
+
+This was where the general wanted the body of men and equipment
+to be, and here they were. There were no dragging ends in the rear,
+so far as I could see; nobody complaining that food or ammunition
+was not up; no aide looking for somebody who could not be found; no
+excited staff officer rushing about shouting for somebody to look
+sharp for somebody had made a mistake. The thing was unwarlike; it
+was like a particularly well-thought-out route march. Yet at the word
+that company of cavalry might be in the thick of it, at the point where
+they were wanted; the infantry rushing to the support of the firing-line;
+the motor transport facing around for withdrawal, if need be. It was
+only a little way, indeed, into the zone of death from the rear of that
+compact column. Thousands of such compact bodies on many
+roads, each seemingly a force by itself and each a part of the whole,
+which could be a dependable whole only when every part was ready,
+alert, and where it belonged! Nothing can be left to chance in a battle-
+line three hundred miles long. The general must know what to
+depend on, mile by mile, in his plans. Millions of human units are
+grouped in increasingly larger units, harmonized according to set
+forms. The most complex of all machines is that of a vast army, which
+yet must be kept most simple. No unit acts without regard to the
+others; every one must know how to do its part. The parts of the
+machine are standardized. One is like the other in training, uniform,
+and every detail, so that one can replace another. Oldest of all trades
+this of war; old experts the French. What one saw was like
+manoeuvres. It must be like manoeuvres or the army would not hold
+together. Manoeuvres are to teach armies coherence; war tries out
+that coherence, which you may not have if someone does not know
+just what to do; if he is uncertain in his role. Haste leads to confusion;
+haste is only for supreme moments. In order to know how to hasten
+when the hurry call comes, the mighty organism must move in its
+routine with the smoothness of a well-rehearsed play.
+
+Joffre and the others who directed the machine must know more than
+the mechanics of staff-control. They must know the character of the
+man-material in the machine. It was their duty as real Frenchmen to
+understand Frenchmen, their verve, their restlessness for the
+offensive, their individualism, their democratic intelligence, the value
+of their elation, the drawback of their tendency to depression and to
+think for themselves. Indeed, the leader must counteract the faults of
+his people and make the most of their virtues.
+
+Thus, we had a French army's historical part reversed: a French army
+falling back and concentrating on the Marne to receive the enemy
+blow. Equally alive to German racial traits, the German Staff had
+organized in their mass offensive the elan which means fast
+marching and hard blows. So, we found the supposedly excitable
+French digging in to receive the onslaught of the supposedly
+phlegmatic German. When the time came for the charge--ah, you can
+always depend on a Frenchman to charge!
+
+Those reserves were pawns on a chessboard. They appeared like it;
+one thought that they realized it. Their individual intelligence
+and democracy had reasoned out the value of obedience and
+homogeneity, rather than accepted it as the dictum of any war lord.
+Difficult to think that 'each one had left a vacancy at a family board;
+difficult to think that all were not automatons in a process of endless
+routine of war; but not difficult to learn that they were Frenchmen
+once we had thrown our bombs in the midst of the group.
+
+Of old, one knew the wants of soldiers. One needed no hint of what
+was welcome at the front. Never at any front were there enough
+newspapers or tobacco. Men smoke twice as much as usual in the
+strain of waiting for action; men who do not use tobacco at all get the
+habit. Ask the G.A.R. men who fought in our great war if this is not
+true. Then, too, when your country is at war, when back at home
+hands stretch out for every fresh edition and you at the front know
+only what happens in your alley, think what a newspaper from Paris
+means out on the battle-line seventy miles from Paris! So I had
+brought a bundle of newspapers and many packets of cigarettes.
+
+Monsieur, the sensation is beyond even the French language to
+express--the sensation of sitting down by the roadside with this
+morning's edition and the first cigarette for twenty-four hours.
+
+"C'est epatant! C'est chic, ca! C'est magnifique! Alors, nom de Dieu!
+Tiens! Helas! Voila! Merci, mille remerciments!"--it was an army of
+Frenchmen with ready words, quick, telling gestures, pouring out their
+volume of thanks as the car sped by and we tossed out our
+newspapers at intervals, so that all should have a look.
+
+An Echo de Paris that fell into the road was the centre of a flag-rush,
+which included an officer. Most un-military--an officer scrambling at
+the same time as his men! In the name of the Kaiser, what discipline!
+
+Then the car stopped long enough for me to see a private give the
+paper to his officer, who was plainly sensible of a loss of dignity, with
+a courtesy which said, "A thousand pardons, mon capitaine!" and the
+capitaine began reading the newspaper aloud to his men. Scores of
+human touches which were French, republican, democratic!
+
+With half our cigarettes gone, we fell in with some brown-skinned,
+native African troops, the Mohammedan Turcos. Their white teeth
+gleaming, their black eyes devilishly eager, they began climbing on to
+the car. We gave them all the cigarettes in sight; but fortunately our
+reserve supply was not visible, and an officer's sharp command
+saved us from being invested by storm.
+
+As we came into Soissons we left the reserves behind. They were
+kept back out of range of the German shells, making the town a dead
+space between them and the firing-line, which was beyond. When the
+Germans retreated through the streets the French had taken care, as
+it was their town, to keep their fire away from the cathedral and the
+main square to the outskirts and along the river. Not so the German
+guns when the French infantry passed through. Soissons was not a
+German town.
+
+We alighted from the car in a deserted street, with all the shutters of
+shops that had not been torn down by shell-fire closed. Soissons was
+as silent as the grave, within easy range of many enemy guns. War
+seemed only for the time being in this valley bottom shut in from the
+roar of artillery a few miles away, except for a French battery which
+was firing methodically and slowly, its shells whizzing toward the ridge
+back of the town.
+
+The next thing that one wanted most was to go into that battery and
+see the soixante-quinze and their skilful gunners. Our statesman said
+that he would try to locate it. We thought that it was in the direction of
+the river, that famous Aisne which has since given its name to the
+longest siege-line in history; a small, winding stream in the bottom of
+an irregular valley. Both bridges across it had been cut by the
+Germans. If that battery were on the other side under cover of any
+one of a score of blots of foliage we could not reach it. Another shot--
+and we were not sure that the battery was not on the opposite side of
+the town; a crack out of the landscape: this was modern artillery fire to
+one who faced it. Apparently the guns of the battery were scattered,
+according to the accepted practice, and from the central firing-station
+word to fire was being passed first to one gun and then to another.
+
+Beside the buttress of one bridge lay two still figures of Algerian
+Zouaves. These were fresh dead, fallen in the taking of the town.
+Only two men! There were dead by thousands which one might see
+in other places. These two had leaped out from cover to dash forward
+and bullets were waiting for them. They had rolled over on their
+backs, their rigid hands still in the position of grasping their rifles
+after the manner of crouching skirmishers.
+
+Our statesman said that we had better give up trying to locate the
+battery; and one of the officers called a halt to trying to go up to the
+firing-line on the part of a personally-conducted party, after we
+stopped a private hurrying back from the front on some errand. With
+his alertness, the easy swing of his walk, his light step, and his
+freedom of spirit and appearance, he typified the thing which the
+French call elan. Whenever one asked a question of a French private
+you could depend upon a direct answer. He knew or he did not know.
+This definiteness, the result of military training as well as of Gallic
+lucidity of thought, is not the least of the human factors in making an
+efficient army, where every man and every unit must definitely know
+his part. This young man, you realized, had tasted the "salt of life," as
+Lord Kitchener calls it. He had heard the close sing of bullets; he had
+known the intoxication of a charge.
+
+"Does everything go well?" M. Doumer asked. "It is not going at all,
+now. It is sticking," was the answer. "Some Germans were busy up
+there in the stone quarries while the others were falling back. They
+have a covered trench and rapid-fire-gun positions to sweep a zone
+of fire which they have cleared."
+
+Famous stone quarries of Soissons, providing ready-made dug-outs
+as shelter from shells!
+
+There is a story of how before Marengo Napoleon heard a private
+saying: "Now this is what the general ought to do!" It was Napoleon's
+own plan revealed. "You keep still!" he said. "This army has too many
+generals."
+
+"They mean to make a stand," the private went on. "It's an ideal place
+for it. There is no use of an attack in front. We'd be mowed down by
+machine-guns." The br-r-r of a dozen shots from a German machine-
+gun gave point to his conclusion. "Our infantry is hugging what we
+have and intrenching. You'd better not go up. One has to know the
+way, or he'll walk right into a sharpshooter's bullet"--instructions that
+would have been applicable a year later when one was about to visit
+a British trench in almost the same location.
+
+The siege-warfare of the Aisne line had already begun. It was singular
+to get the first news of it from a private in Soissons and then to return
+to Paris and London, on the other side of the curtain of secrecy,
+where the public thought that the Allied advance would continue.
+
+"Allons!" said our statesman, and we went to the town square, where
+German guns had carpeted the ground with branches of shade trees
+and torn off the fronts of houses, revealing sections of looted interior
+which had been further messed by shell-bursts. Some women and
+children and a crippled man came out of doors at sight of us. M.
+Doumer introduced himself and shook hands all around. They were
+glad to meet him in much the same way as if he had been on an
+election campaign.
+
+"A German shell struck there across the square only half an hour
+ago," said one of the women.
+
+"What do you do when there is shelling?" asked M. Doumer.
+
+"If it is bad we go into the cellar," was the answer; an answer which
+implied that peculiar fearlessness of women, who get accustomed to
+fire easier than men. These were the fatalists of the town, who would
+not turn refugee; helpless to fight, but grimly staying with their homes
+and accepting what came with an incomprehensible stoicism, which
+possibly had its origin in a race-feeling so proud and bitter that they
+would not admit that they could be afraid of anything German, even a
+shell.
+
+"And how did the Germans act?"
+
+"They made themselves at home in our houses and slept in our beds,
+while we slept in the kitchen," she answered. "They said that if we
+kept indoors and gave them what they wanted we should not be
+harmed. But if anyone fired a shot at their troops or any arms were
+found in our houses, they would burn the town. When they were
+going back in a great hurry--how they scattered from our shells! We
+went out in the square to see our shells, monsieur!"
+
+What mattered the ruins of her home? "Our" shells had returned
+vengeance.
+
+Arrows with directions in German, "This way to the river," "This way to
+Villers-Cotteret," were chalked on the standing walls; and on door-
+casings the names of the detachments of the Prussian Guard billeted
+there, all in systematic Teutonic fashion.
+
+"Prince Albrecht Joachim, one of the Kaiser's sons, was here and I
+talked with him," said the Mayor, who thought we would enjoy a
+morsel from court circles in exchange for a copy of the Echo de Paris,
+which contained the news that Prince Albrecht had been wounded
+later. The Mayor looked tired, this local man of the people, who had to
+play the shepherd of a stricken flock. Afterwards, they said that he
+deserted his charge and a lady, Mme. Macherez, took his place. All I
+know is that he was present that day; or, at least, a man who was
+introduced to me as mayor; and he was French enough to make a
+bon mot by saying that he feared there was some fault in his
+hospitality because he had been unable to keep his guest.
+
+"May I have this confiture?" asked a battle-stained French orderly,
+coming up to him. "I found it in that ruined house there--all the
+Germans had left. I haven't had a confiture for a long time, and,
+monsieur, you cannot imagine what a hunger I have for confitures."
+
+All the while the French battery kept on firing slowly, then again
+rapidly, their cracks trilling off like the drum of knuckles on a
+table-top. Another effort to locate one of the guns before we started
+back to Paris failed. Speeding on, we had again a glimpse of the
+landscape toward Noyon, sprinkled with shell-bursts. The reserves
+were around their camp-fires making savoury stews for the evening
+meal. They would sleep where night found them on the sward under
+the stars, as in wars of old. That scene remains indelible as one of
+many while the army was yet mobile, before the contest became
+one of the mole and the beaver.
+
+Though one had already seen many German prisoners in groups and
+convoys, the sight of two on the road fixed the attention because of
+the surroundings and the contrast suggested between French and
+German natures. Both were young, in the very prime of life, and both
+Prussian. One was dark-complexioned, with a scrubbly beard which
+was the product of the war. He marched with such rigidity that I
+should not have been surprised to see him break into a goose-step.
+The other was of that mild, blue-eyed, tow-haired type from the Baltic
+provinces, with the thin, white skin which does not tan but burns. He
+was frailer than the other and he was tired! He would lag and then
+stiffen back his shoulders and draw in his chin and force a trifle more
+energy into his steps.
+
+A typical, lively French soldier was escorting the pair. He looked pretty
+tired, too, but he was getting over the ground in the natural, easy way
+in which man is meant to walk. The aboriginal races, who have a
+genius for long distances on foot, do not march in the German
+fashion, which looks impressive, but lacks endurance. By the same
+logic, the cowboy pony's gait is better for thirty miles day in and day
+out than the gait of the high-stepping carriage horse.
+
+You could realize the contempt which those two martial Germans had
+for their captor. Four or five peasant women refugees by the roadside
+loosened their tongues in piercing feminine satire and upbraiding.
+
+"You are going to Paris, after all! This is what you get for invading our
+country; and you'll get more of it!"
+
+The little French soldier held up his hand to the women and shook his
+head. He was a chivalrous fellow, with imagination enough to
+appreciate the feelings of an enemy who has fought hard and lost.
+Such as he would fight fair and hold this war of the civilizations up to
+something like the standards of civilization.
+
+The very tired German stiffened up again, as his drill sergeant had
+taught him, and both stared straight ahead, proud and contemptuous,
+as their Kaiser would wish them to do. I should recognize the faces of
+those two Germans and of that little French guard if I saw them ten
+years hence. In ten years, what will be the Germans' attitude toward
+this war and their military lords?
+
+It is not often that one has a senator for a guide; and I never knew a
+more efficient one than our statesman. His own curiosity was the best
+possible aid in satisfying our own. Having seen the compactness and
+simplicity of an army column at the front, we were to find that the
+same thing applied to high command. A sentry and a small flag at the
+doorway of a village hotel: this was the headquarters of the Sixth
+Army, which General Manoury had formed in haste and flung at von
+Kluck with a spirit which crowned his white hairs with the audacity of
+youth. He was absent, but we might see something of the central
+direction of one hundred and fifty thousand men in the course of one
+of the most brilliant manoeuvres of the war, before staffs had settled
+down to office existence in permanent quarters. That is, we might see
+the little there was to see: a soldier telegrapher in one bedroom, a
+soldier typewritist in another, officers at work in others. One realized
+that they could pack up everything and move in the time it takes to
+toss enough clothes into a bag to spend a night away from home.
+Apparently, when the French fought they left red tape behind with the
+bureaucracy.
+
+From his seat before a series of maps on a sitting-room table an
+officer of about thirty-five rose to receive us. It struck me that he
+exemplified self-possessed intelligence and definite knowledge; that
+he had coolness and steadiness plus that acuteness of perception
+and clarity of statement which are the gift of the French. You felt sure
+that no orders which left his hand wasted any words or lacked
+explicitness. The Staff is the brains of the army, and he had brains.
+
+"All goes well!" he said, as if there were no more to say. All goes well!
+He would say it when things looked black or when they looked bright,
+and in a way that would make others believe it.
+
+Outside the hotel were no cavalry escorts or commanders, no
+hurrying orderlies, none of the legendary activity that is associated
+with an army headquarters. A motor-car drove up, an officer got out;
+another officer descended the stairs to enter a waiting car. The wires
+carry word faster than the cars. Each subordinate commander was in
+his place along that line where we had seen the puffs of smoke
+against the landscape, ready to answer a question or obey an order.
+That simplicity, like art itself, which seems so easy is the most difficult
+accomplishment of all in war.
+
+After dark, in a drizzling rain, we came to what seemed to be a town,
+for our motor-car lamps spread their radiant streams over wet
+pavements. But these were the only lights. Tongues of loose bricks
+had been shot across the cobblestones and dimly the jagged skyline
+of broken walls of buildings on either side could be discerned. It was
+Senlis, the first town I had seen which could be classified as a town in
+ruins. Afterwards, one became a sort of specialist in ruins, comparing
+the latest with previous examples of destruction.
+
+Approaching footsteps broke the silence. A small, very small, French
+soldier--he was not more than five feet two--appeared, and we
+followed him to an ambulance that had broken down for want of
+petrol. It belonged to the Societe de Femmes de France. The little
+soldier had put on a uniform as a volunteer for the only service his
+stature would permit. In those days many volunteer organizations
+were busy seeking to "help." There was a kind of competition among
+them for wounded. This ambulance had got one and was taking him
+to Paris, off the regular route of the wounded who were being sent
+south. The boot-soles of a prostrate figure showed out of the dark
+recess of the interior. This French officer, a major, had been hit in the
+shoulder. He tried to control the catch in his voice which belied his
+assertion that he was suffering little pain. The drizzling rain was chilly.
+It was a long way to Paris yet.
+
+"We will make inquiries," said our kindly general.
+
+A man who came out of the gloom said that there was a hospital kept
+by some Sisters of Charity in Senlis which had escaped destruction.
+The question was put into the recesses of the ambulance:
+
+"Would you prefer to spend the night here and go on in the morning?"
+
+"Yes, monsieur, I--should--like--that--better!" The tone left no doubt of
+the relief that the journey in a car with poor springs was not to be
+continued after hours of waiting, marooned in the street of a ruined
+town.
+
+Whilst the ambulance passed inside the hospital gate, I spoke with an
+elderly woman who came to a near-by door. Cool and definite she
+was as a French soldier, bringing home the character of the women
+of France which this war has made so well known to the world.
+
+"Were you here during the fighting?"
+
+"Yes, monsieur, and during the shelling and the burning. The shelling
+was not enough. The Germans said that someone fired on their
+soldiers--a boy, I believe--so they set fire to the houses. One could
+only look and hate and pray as their soldiers passed through, looking
+so unconquerable, making all seem so terrible for France. Was it to
+be '70 over again? One's heart was of stone, monsieur. Tiens! They
+came back faster than they went. A mitrailleuse was down there at
+the end of the street, our mitrailleuse! The bullets went cracking by.
+They crack, the bullets; they do not whistle like the stories say. Then
+the street was empty of Germans who could run. The dead they
+could not run, nor the wounded. Then the French came up the street,
+running too--running after the Germans. It was good, monsieur, good,
+good! My heart was not of stone then, monsieur. It could not beat fast
+enough for happiness. It was the heart of a girl. I remember it all very
+clearly. I always shall, monsieur."
+
+"Allons!" said our statesman. "The officer is well cared for."
+
+The world seemed normal again as we passed through other towns
+unharmed and swept by the dark countryside, till a red light rose in
+our path and a sharp "Qui vive?" came out of the night as we slowed
+down. This was not the only sentry call from a French Territorial in
+front of a barricade.
+
+At a second halt we found a chain as well as a barricade across the
+road. For a moment it seemed that even the suave parliamentarism
+of our statesman and the authority of our general and our passes
+could not convince one grizzled reservist, doing his duty for France at
+the rear whilst the young men were at the front, that we had any right
+to be going into Paris at that hour of the night. The password, which
+was "Paris," helped, and we felt it a most appropriate password as we
+came to the broad streets of the city that was safe.
+
+There is a popular idea that Napoleon was a super-genius who won
+his battles single-handed. It is wrong. He had a lot of Frenchmen
+along to help. Much the same kind of Frenchmen live to-day. Not until
+they fought again would the world believe this. It seems that the
+excitable Gaul, whom some people thought would become demoralized
+in face of German organization, merely talks with his hands. In a
+great crisis he is cool, as he always was. I like the French for their
+democracy and humanity. I like them, too, for leaving their war
+to France and Marianne; for not dragging in God as do the Germans.
+For it is just possible that God is not in the fight. We don't know
+that He even approved of the war.
+
+
+
+
+V
+And Calais Waits
+
+
+
+To the traveller, Calais had been the symbol of the shortest route
+from London to Paris, the shortest spell of torment in crossing the
+British Channel. It was a point where one felt infinite relief or sad
+physical anticipations. In the last days of November Calais became
+the symbol of a struggle for world-power. The British and the French
+were fighting to hold Calais; the Germans to get it. In Calais,
+Germany would have her foot on the Atlantic coast. She could look
+across only twenty-two miles of water to the chalk cliffs of Dover. She
+would be as near her rival as twice the length of Manhattan Island;
+within the range of a modern gun; within an hour by steamer and
+twenty minutes by aeroplane.
+
+The long battle-front from Switzerland to the North Sea had been
+established. There was no getting around the Allied flank; there had
+ceased to be a flank. To win Calais, Germany must crush through by
+main force, without any manoeuvre. From the cafes where the British
+journalists gathered England received its news, which they gleaned
+from refugees and stragglers and passing officers. They wrote
+something every day, for England must have something about that
+dizzy, head-on wrestle in the mud, that writhing line of changing
+positions of new trenches rising behind the old destroyed by German
+artillery. The British were fighting with their last reserves on the Ypres-
+Armentieres line. The French divisions to the north were suffering no
+less heavily, and beyond them the Belgians were trying to hold the
+last strip of their land which remained under Belgian sovereignty.
+Cordons of guards which kept back the observer from the struggle
+could not keep back the truth. Something ominous was in the air.
+
+It was worth while being in that old town as it waited on the issue in
+the late October rains. Its fishermen crept out in the mornings from
+the shelter of its quays, where refugees gathered in crowds hoping to
+get away by steamer. Like lost souls, carrying all the possessions
+they could on their backs, these refugees. There was numbness in
+their movements and their faces were blank--the paralysis of brain
+from sudden disaster. The children did not cry, but mechanically
+munched the dry bread given them by their parents.
+
+The newspaper men said that "refugee stuff" was already stale;
+eviction and misery were stale. Was Calais to be saved? That was
+the only question. If the Germans came, one thought that madame at
+the hotel would still be at her desk, unruffled, businesslike, and she
+would still serve an excellent salad for dejeuner; the fishermen would
+still go to sea for their daily catch.
+
+What was going to happen? What might not happen? It was human
+helplessness to the last degree for all behind the wrestlers. Fate was
+in the battle-line. There could be no resisting that fate. If the Germans
+came, they came. Belgian staff officers with their high-crowned, gilt-
+braided caps went flying by in their cars. There always seemed a
+great many Belgian staff officers back of the Belgian army in the
+restaurants and cafes. Habit is strong, even in war. They did not often
+miss their dejeuners. On the Dixmude line all that remained of the
+active Belgian army was in a death struggle in the rain and mud. To
+these "schipperkes" honour without stint, as to their gallant king.
+
+Slightly-wounded Belgians and Belgian stragglers roamed the streets
+of Calais. Some had a few belongings wrapped up in handkerchiefs.
+Others had only the clothes they wore. Yet they were cheerful; this
+was the amazing thing. They moved about, laughing and chatting in
+groups. Perhaps this was the best way. Possibly relief at being out of
+the hell at the front was the only emotion they could feel. But their
+cheerfulness was none the less a dash of sunlight for Calais.
+
+The French were grim. They were still polite; they went on with their
+work. No unwounded French soldiers were to be seen, except the old
+Territorials guarding the railroad and the highways. The military
+organization of France, which knew what war meant and had
+expected war, had drawn every man to his place and held him there
+with the inexorable hand of military and racial discipline. Calais had
+never considered caring for wounded, and the wounded poured in. I
+saw a motor-car with a wounded man stop at a crowded corner, in
+the midst of refugees and soldiers; a doctor was leaning over him,
+and he died whilst the car waited.
+
+But the journalists were saying that stories of wounded men were
+likewise stale. So they were, for Europe was red with wounded. Train
+after train brought in its load from the front, and Calais tried to care
+for them. At least, it had buildings which would give shelter from
+the rain. On the floor of a railway freight shed the wounded lay in
+long rows, with just enough space between them to make an alley.
+Those in the row against one of the walls were German prisoners.
+Their green uniforms melted into the stone of the wall and did not
+show the mud stains. Two slightly wounded had their heads together
+whispering. They were helplessly tired, though not as tired as most
+of the others, those two stalwart young men; but they seemed to be
+relieved, almost happy. It did not matter what happened to them, now,
+so long as they could rest.
+
+Next to them a German was dying, and others badly hit were glassy-
+eyed in their fatigue and exhaustion. This was the word, exhaustion,
+for all the wounded.
+
+They had not the strength for passion or emotion. The fuel for those
+fires was in ashes. All they wanted in this world was to lie quiet; and
+some fell asleep not knowing or caring probably whether they were in
+Germany or in France. In the other rows, in contrast with this
+chameleon, baffling green, were the red trousers of the French and
+the dark blue of the Belgian uniforms, sharing the democracy of
+exhaustion with their foe.
+
+A misty rain was falling. In a bright spot of light through a window one
+by one the wounded were being lifted up on to a seat, if they were not
+too badly hit, and on to an operating-table if their condition were
+serious. A doctor and a sturdy Frenchwoman of about thirty, in
+spotless white, were in charge. Another woman undid the first-aid
+bandage and still another applied a spray. No time was lost; there
+were too many wounded to care for. The thing must be done as
+rapidly as possible before another train-load came in. If these
+attendants were tired, they did not know it any more than the
+wounded had realized their fatigue in the passion of battle. The
+improvized arrangement to meet an emergency had an appeal which
+more elaborate arrangements of organization which I had seen
+lacked. It made war a little more red; humanity a little more human
+and kind and helpless under the scourge which it had brought on
+itself.
+
+Though Calais was not prepared for wounded, when they came the
+women of energy and courage turned to the work without jealousy,
+without regard to red tape, without fastidiousness. I have in mind half
+a dozen other women about the streets that day in uniforms of short
+skirts and helmets, who belonged to a volunteer organization which
+had taken some care as to its regimentals. They were types not
+characteristic of the whole, of whom one practical English doctor said:
+"We don't mind as long as they do not get in the way." Their criticisms
+of Calais and the arrangements were outspoken; nothing was
+adequate; conditions were filthy; it was shameful. They were going to
+write to the English newspapers about it and appeal for money. When
+they had organized a proper hospital, one should see how the thing
+ought to be done. Meantime, these volunteer Frenchwomen were
+doing the best they knew how and doing it now.
+
+A fine-looking young Frenchman who had a shell-wound in the thigh
+was being lifted on to the table. He shuddered with pain, as he
+clenched his teeth; yet when the dressing was finished he was able to
+breathe his thanks. On the seat was a Congo negro who had been
+with one of the Belgian regiments, coal black and thick-lipped, with
+bloodshot eyes; an unsensitized human organism, his face as
+expressionless as his bare back with holes made by shell-fragments.
+A young Frenchwoman--she could not have been more than nineteen
+--with a face of singular refinement, sprayed his wounds with the
+definiteness of one trained to such work, though two days before it
+had probably never occurred to her as being within the possibilities
+of her existence. Her coolness and the coolness of the other women
+in their silent activity had a charm that added to one's devout respect.
+
+The French wounded, too, were silent, as if in the presence of a crisis
+which overwhelmed personal thoughts. Help was needed at the front;
+they knew it. On sixty trains in one day sixty thousand French passed
+through Calais. With a pass from the French commandant at Calais, I
+got on board one of these trains down at the railroad yards at dawn.
+This lot were Turcos, under the command of a white-haired veteran of
+African campaigns. An utter change of atmosphere from the freight
+shed! Perhaps it is only the wounded who have time to think. My
+companions in the officers' car were as cheery as the brown devils
+whom they led. They had come from the trenches on the Marne, and
+their commissariat was a boiled ham, some bread and red wine.
+Enough! It was war time, as they said.
+
+"We were in the Paris railroad yards. That is all we saw of Paris--and
+in the night. Hard luck!"
+
+They had left the Marne the previous day. By night they could be in
+the fight. It did not take long to send reinforcements when the line
+was closed to all except military traffic and one train followed close on
+the heels of another.
+
+They did not know where they were going; one never knew. Probably
+they would get orders at Dunkirk. Father Joffre, when there was a call
+for reinforcements, never was in a panicky hurry. He seemed to
+understand that the general who made the call could hold out a little
+longer; but the reinforcements were always up on time. A long head
+had Father Joffre.
+
+Now I am going to say that life was going on as usual at Dunkirk; that
+is the obvious thing to say. The nearer the enemy, the more
+characteristic that trite observation of those who have followed the
+roads of war in Europe. At Dunkirk you might have a good meal
+within sound of the thunder of the guns of the British monitors which
+were helping the Belgians to hold their line. At Dunkirk most excellent
+patisserie was for sale in a confectionery shop. Why shouldn't
+tartmakers go on making tarts and selling them? The British naval
+reserve officers used to take tea in this shop. Little crowds of citizens
+who had nothing to do, which is the most miserable of vocations in
+such a crisis, gathered to look at armoured motor-cars which had
+come in from the front with bullet dents, which gave them the
+atmosphere of battle.
+
+Beyond Dunkirk, one might see wounded Belgians, fresh from the
+field of battle, staggering in, crawling in, hobbling in from the havoc of
+shell-fire, their first-aid bandages saturated with mud, their ungainly
+and impracticable uniforms oozing mud, ghosts of men-these
+"schipperkes" of the nation that was unprepared for war who had
+done their part, when the only military thought was for more men,
+unwounded men, British, French, Belgian, to stem the German tide.
+Yet many of these Belgians, even these, were cheerful. They could
+still smile and say, "Bonne chance!"
+
+Indeed, there seemed no limit to the cheerfulness of Belgians. At a
+hospital in Calais I met a Belgian professor with his head a white ball
+of bandages, showing a hole for one eye and a slit for the mouth. He
+had been one of the cyclist force which took account of many
+German cavalry scouts in the first two weeks of the war. A staff
+motor-car had run over him on the road.
+
+"I think the driver of the car was careless," he said mildly, as if he
+were giving a gentle reproof to a student.
+
+By contrast, he had reason to be thankful for his lot. Looked after by a
+brave man attendant in another room were the wounded who were
+too horrible to see; who must die. Then, in another, you had a picture
+of a smiling British regular, with a British nurse and an Englishwoman
+of Calais to look after him. They read to him, they talked to him, they
+vied with each other in rearranging his pillows or bedclothes. He was
+a hero of a story; but it rather puzzled him why he should be. Why
+were a lot of people paying so much attention to him for doing his
+duty?
+
+In the cavalry, he had been separated from his regiment on the
+retreat from Mons. Wandering about the country, he came up with a
+regiment of cuirassiers and asked if he might not fight with them. A
+number of the cuirassiers spoke English. They took him into the
+ranks. The regiment went far over on the Marne, through towns with
+French names which he could not pronounce, this man in khaki with
+the French troopers. He was marked. C'est un Anglais! People
+cheered him and threw flowers to him in regions which had never
+seen one of the soldiers of the Ally before.
+
+Yes, officers and gentlemen invited him to dine, like he was a
+gentleman, he said, and not a Tommy, and the French Government
+had given him a decoration called the Legion of Honour or something
+like that. This was all very fine; but the best thing was that his own
+colonel, when he returned, had him up before his company and made
+a speech to him for fighting with the French when he could not find
+his own regiment. He was supremely happy, this Tommy. In waiting
+Calais one might witness about all the emotions and contrasts of war
+--and many which one does not find at the front.
+
+
+
+
+
+VI
+In Germany
+
+
+
+Never had the war seemed a more monstrous satire than on that first
+day in Germany as the train took me to Berlin. It was the other side of
+the wall of gun and rifle-fire where another set of human beings were
+giving life in order to take life. The Lord had fashioned them in the
+same pattern on both sides of the wall. Their children were born in the
+same way; they bled from wounds in the same way--but why go on in
+this vicious circle of thought?
+
+My impressions of Germany were brief, and the clearer perhaps for
+being brief, and drawn on the fresh background of Paris and Calais
+waiting to know their fate; of England staring across the Channel, in a
+suspense which her stoicism would not confess, to learn the result of
+the battle for the Channel ports; of England and France straining with
+all their strength to hold, while the Germans exerted all theirs to gain,
+a goal; of Holland, stolid mistress of her neutrality, fearing for it and
+profiting by it while she took in the Belgian foundlings dropped on her
+steps--Holland, that little land at peace, with the storms lashing
+around her.
+
+The stiff and soldierly-appearing reserve officer with bristling
+Kaiserian moustache, so professedly alert and efficient, who looked
+at the mottled back of my passport and frowned at the recent visa, "A
+la Place de Calais, bon pour aller a Dunkerque, P.O. Le Chef d'Etat-
+Major," but let me by without questions or fuss, aroused visions of a
+frontier stone wall studded with bayonets.
+
+For something about him expressed a certain character of downright
+militancy lacking in either an English or a French guard. I could
+imagine his contempt for both and particularly for a "sloppy,
+undisciplined" American guard, as he would have called one of ours.
+Personal feelings did not enter into his thoughts. He had none; only
+national feelings, this outpost of the national organism. The mood of
+the moment was friendliness to Americans. Germany wished to
+create the impression on the outside world through the agency of the
+neutral press that she was in | danger of starving, whilst she amassed
+munitions for her summer campaign and the Allies were lulled into
+confidence of siege by famine rather than by arms. A double, a treble
+purpose the starving campaign served; for it also ensured economy
+of foodstuffs, whilst nothing so puts the steel into a soldier's heart as
+the thought that the enemy is trying to beat him through taking the
+bread out of his mouth and the mouths of the women and children
+dependent upon him.
+
+Tears and laughter and moods and passions organized! Seventy
+millions in the union of determined earnestness of a life-and-death
+issue! Germany had studied more than how to make war with an
+army. She had studied how the people at home should help an army
+to make war.
+
+"With our immense army, which consists of all the able-bodied youth
+of the people," as a German officer said, "when we go to war the
+people must be passionate for war. Their impulse must be the
+impulse of the army. Their spirit will drive the army on. They must be
+drilled, too, in their part. No item in national organization is too small
+to have its effect."
+
+Compared to the, French, who had turned grim and gave their prayers
+as individuals to hearten their soldiers, the Germans were as
+responsive as a stringed instrument to the master musician's touch. A
+whisper in Berlin was enough to set a new wave of passion in motion,
+which spread to the trenches east and west.
+
+Something like the team-work of the "rah-rah" of college athletics was
+applied to the nation. The soft pedal on this emotion, the loud on that,
+or a new cry inaugurated which all took up, not with the noisy, paid
+insincerity of a claque, but with the vibrant force of a trained orchestra
+with the brasses predominant.
+
+There seemed less of the spontaneity of an individualistic people than
+of the exaltation of a religious revival. If the army were a machine of
+material force, then the people were a machine of psychical force.
+Though the thing might leave the observer cold, as a religious revival
+leaves the sceptic, yet he must admire. I was told that I should
+succumb to the contagion as others had; but it was not the optimism
+which was dinned into my ears that affected me as much as
+sidelights.
+
+When I took a walk away from a railway station where I had to make
+a train connection, I saw a German reservist of forty-five who was
+helping with one hand to thresh the wheat from his farm, on a grey,
+lowering winter day. The other hand was in a bandage. He had been
+allowed to go home until he was well enough to fight again. The same
+sort of scene I had witnessed in France; the wounded man trying to
+make up to his family the loss of his labour during his absence at the
+front.
+
+Only, that man in France was on the defensive; he was righting to
+hold what he had and on his own soil. The German had been fighting
+on the enemy's soil to gain more land. He, too, thought of it as the
+defensive. All Germany insisted that it was on the defensive. But it
+was the defensive of a people who think only in the offensive. That
+was it--that was the vital impression of Germany revealed in every
+conversation and every act.
+
+The Englishman leans back on his oars; the German leans forward.
+The Englishman's phrase is "Stick it," which means to hold what you
+have; the German's phrase is "Onward." It was national youth against
+national middle-age. A vessel with pressure of increase from within
+was about to expand or burst. A vessel which is large and
+comfortable for its contents was resisting pressure from without. The
+French were saying, What if we should lose? And the Germans were
+saying, What if we should not win all that we are entitled to? Germany
+had been thinking of a mightier to-morrow and England of a to-
+morrow as good as to-day. Germany looked forward to a fortune to
+be won at thirty; England considered the safeguarding of her fortune
+at fifty.
+
+It is not professions that count so much as the thing that works out
+from the nature of a situation and the contemporaneous bent of a
+people. The Englishman thought of his defence as keeping what he
+already had; the German was defending what he considered that he
+was entitled to. If he could make more of Calais than the French, then
+Calais ought to be his. A nation, with the "closed in" culture of the
+French on one side and the enormous, unwieldy mass of Russia on
+the other, convinced of its superiority and its ability to beat either foe,
+thought that it was the friend of peace because it had withheld the
+blow. When the striking time came, it struck hard and forced the
+battle on enemy soil, which proved, to its logic, that it was only
+receiving payment of a debt owed it by destiny.
+
+Bred to win, confident that the German system was the right system
+of life, it could imagine the German Michael as the missionary of the
+system, converting the Philistine with machine-guns. Confidence, the
+confidence which must get new vessels for the energy that has
+overflowed, the confidence of all classes in the realization of the long-
+promised day of the "place in the sun" for the immense population
+drilled in the system, was the keynote. They knew that they could lick
+the other fellow and went at him from the start as if they expected to
+lick him, with a diligence which made the most of their training and
+preparation.
+
+When I asked for a room with a bath in a leading Berlin hotel, the
+clerk at the desk said, "I will see, sir." He ran his eye up and down the
+list methodically before he added: "Yes, we have a good room on the
+second floor." Afterwards, I learned that all except the first and
+second floors of the hotel were closed. The small dining-room only
+was open, and every effort was made to make the small dining-room
+appear normal.
+
+He was an efficient clerk; the buttons who opened the room door, a
+goose-stepping, alert sprout of German militarism, exhibiting a
+punctiliousness of attention which produced a further effect of
+normality. Those Germans who were not doing their part at the front
+were doing it at home by bluffing the other Germans and themselves
+into confidence. The clerk believed that some day he would have
+more guests than ever and a bigger hotel. All who suffered from the
+war could afford to wait. Germany was winning; the programme was
+being carried out. The Kaiser said so. In proof of it, multitudes of
+Russian soldiers were tilling the soil in place of Germans, who were at
+the front taking more Russian soldiers.
+
+Everybody that one met kept telling him that everything was perfectly
+normal. No intending purchaser of real estate in a boom town was
+ever treated to more optimistic propaganda. Perfectly normal--when
+one found only three customers in a large department store! Perfectly
+normal--when the big steamship offices presented in their windows
+bare blue seas which had once been charted with the going and
+coming of German ships! Perfectly normal--when the spool of the
+killed and wounded rolled out by yards like that of a ticker on a busy
+day on the Stock Exchange! Perfectly normal--when women tried to
+smile in the streets with eyes which had plainly been weeping at
+home!
+
+Are you for us or against us? The question was put straight to the
+stranger. Let him say that he was a neutral and they took it for
+granted that he was a pro-Ally. He must be pro-something.
+
+As I returned to the railway station after my walk, a soldier took me in
+charge and marched me to the office of the military commandant.
+"Are you an Englishman?" was his first question. The guttural, military
+emphasis which he put on "Englishman" was most significant. Which
+brings us to another factor in the psychology of war: hate.
+
+"If men are to fight well," said a German officer, "it is necessary that
+they hate. They must be exalted by a great passion when they charge
+into machine-guns."
+
+Hate was officially distilled and then instilled--hate against England,
+almost exclusively. The public rose to that. If England had not come
+in, the German military plan would have succeeded: first, the crushing
+of France; then, the crushing of Russia. The despised Belgian, that
+small boy who had tripped the giant and then hugged the giant's
+knees, delaying him on the road to Paris, was having a rest. For he
+had been hated very hard for a while with the hate of contempt--that
+miserable pigmy who had interfered with the plans of the machine.
+
+The French were almost popular. The Kaiser had spoken of them as
+"brave foes." What quarrel could France and Germany have? France
+had been the dupe of England. Cartoons of the hairy, barbarous
+Russian and the futile little Frenchman in his long coat, borne on
+German bayonets or pecking at the boots of a giant Michael, were not
+in fashion. For Germany was then trying to arrange a separate peace
+with both France and Russia. She was ready to yield at least part of
+Alsace-Lorraine to France. When the negotiations fell through,
+cartoonists were again free to make sport of the aenemic Gaul and
+the untutored Slav. It was not alone in Germany that a responsive
+Press played the weather vane to Government wishes; but in
+Germany the machinery ran smoothest.
+
+For the first time I knew what it was to have a human being whom I
+had never seen before hate me. At sight of me a woman who had
+been a good Samaritan, with human kindness and charity in her
+eyes, turned a malignant devil. Stalwart as Minerva she was, a fair-
+haired German type of about thirty-five, square-shouldered and
+robustly attractive in her Red Cross uniform. Being hungry at the
+station at Hanover, I rushed out of the train to get something to eat,
+and saw some Frankfurter sandwiches on a table in front of me as I
+alighted.
+
+My hand went out for one, when I was conscious of a movement and
+an exclamation which was hostile, and looked up to see Minerva, as
+her hand shot out to arrest the movement of mine, with a blaze of
+hate, hard, merciless hate, in her eyes, while her lips framed the
+word, "Englisher!" If looks were daggers I should have been pierced
+through the heart. Perhaps an English overcoat accounted for her
+error. Certainly, I promptly recognized mine when I saw that this was
+a Red Cross buffet. An Englishman had dared to try to buy a
+sandwich meant for German soldiers! She might at least glory in the
+fact that her majestic glare had made me most uncomfortable as I
+murmured an apology which she received with a stony frown.
+
+A moment later a soldier approached the buffet. She leaned over,
+smiling, as gentle as she had been fierce and malignant a moment
+before, making a picture, as she put some mustard on a sandwich for
+him, which recalled that of the Frenchwoman among the wounded in
+the freight shed at Calais--a simile which would anger them both.
+
+The Frenchwoman, too, had a Red Cross uniform; she, too,
+expressed the mercy and gentle ministration which we like to
+associate with woman. But there was the difference of the old culture
+and the new; of the race which was fighting to have and the race
+which was fighting to hold. The tactics which we call the offensive was
+in the German woman's, as in every German's, nature. It had been in
+the Frenchwoman's in Napoleon's time. Many racial hates the war
+has developed; but that of the German is a seventeen-inch-howitzer,
+asphyxiating-gas hate.
+
+If hates help to win, why not hate as hard as you can? Don't you go to
+war to win? There is no use talking of sporting rules and saying that
+this and that is "not done" in humane circles--win! The Germans
+meant to win. Always I thought of them as having the spirit of the
+Middle Ages in their hearts, organized for victory by every modern
+method. Three strata of civilization were really fighting, perhaps: The
+French, with its inherent individual patriotism which makes a
+Frenchman always a Frenchman, its philosophy which prevents
+increase of numbers, its thrift and its tenacity; the German, with its
+newborn patriotism, its discovery of what it thinks is the golden
+system, its fecundity, its aggressiveness, its industry, its ambition;
+and the Russian, patient and unbeatable, vague, glamorous,
+immense.
+
+The American is an outsider to them all; some strange melting-pot
+product of many races which is trying to forget the prejudices and
+hates of the old world and perhaps not succeeding very well, but not
+yet convinced that the best means of producing patriotic unity is war.
+After this and other experiences, after being given a compartment all
+to myself by men who glanced at me with eyes of hate and passed
+on to another compartment which was already crowded or stood up
+in the aisle of the car, I made a point of buying an American flag for
+my buttonhole.
+
+This helped; but still there was my name, which belonged to an
+ancestor who had gone from England to Connecticut nearly three
+hundred years ago. Palmer did not belong to the Germanic tribe. He
+must be pro the other side. He could not be a neutral and belong to
+the human kind with such a name. Only Swenson, or Gansevoort, or
+Ah Fong could really be a neutral; and even they were expected to be
+on your side secretly. If they weren't they must be on the other. Are
+you for us? or, Are you against us? I grew weary of the question in
+Germany. If I had been for them I should have "dug in" and not told
+them. In France and England they asked you objectively the state of
+sentiment in America. But, possibly, the direct, forcible way is the
+better for war purposes when you mean to win; for the Germans have
+made a study of war. They are experts in war.
+
+However, the rosy-cheeked German boy, in his green uniform which
+could not be washed clean of all the stains of campaigning, whom I
+met in the palace grounds at Charlottenberg, did not put this tiresome
+question to me. He was the only person I saw in the grounds, whose
+quiet I had sought for an hour's respite from war. One could be
+shown through the palace by the lonely old caretaker, who missed
+the American tourist, without hearing a guide's monotone explaining
+who the gentleman in the frame was and what he did and who
+painted his picture. This boy could have more influence in making me
+see the German view-point than the propagandist men in the
+Government offices and the belligerent German-Americans in hotel
+lobbies--those German-Americans who were so frequently in trouble
+in other days for disobeying the verbotens and then asking our State
+Department to get them out of it, now pluming themselves over
+victories won by another type of German.
+
+About twenty-one years old this boy, round-faced and blue-eyed, who
+saw in Queen Louisa the most beautiful heroine of all history. The
+hole in his blouse which the bullet had made was nicely sewed up
+and his wound had healed. He was fighting in France when he was
+hit; the name of the place he did not know. Karl, his chum, had been
+killed. The doctor had given him the bullet, which he exhibited proudly
+as if it were different from other bullets, as it was to him. In a few days
+he must return to the front. Perhaps the war would be over soon; he
+hoped so.
+
+The French were brave; but they hated the Germans and thought
+that they must make war on the Germans, and they were a cruel
+people, guilty of many atrocities. So the Fatherland had fought to
+conquer the enemies who planned her destruction. A peculiar,
+childlike naivete accompanied his intelligence, trained to run in certain
+grooves, which is the product of the German type of popular
+education; that trust in his superiors which comes from a diligent and
+efficient paternalism. He knew nothing of the atrocities which
+Germans were said to have committed in Belgium. The British and
+the French had set Belgium against Germany and Germany had to
+strike Belgium for playing false to her treaties. But he did think that
+the French were brave; only misled by their Government. And the
+Kaiser? His eyes lighted in a way that suggested that the Kaiser was
+almost a god to him. He had heard of the things that the British said
+against the Kaiser and they made him want to fight for his Kaiser. He
+was only one German--but the one was millions.
+
+In actual learning which comes from schoolbooks, I think that he was
+better informed than the average Frenchman of his class; but I
+should say that he had thought less; that his mind was more of a hot-
+house product of a skilful nurseryman's hand, who knew the value of
+training and feeding and pruning the plant if you were to make it yield
+well. A kindly, willing, likable boy, peculiarly simple and unspoiled, it
+seemed a pity that all his life he should have to bear the brand of the
+Lusitania on his brow; that event which history cannot yet put in its
+true perspective. Other races will think of the Lusitania when they
+meet a German long after the Belgian atrocities are forgotten. It will
+endure to plague a people like the exile of the Acadians, the
+guillotining of innocents in the French Revolution, and the burning of
+the Salem witches. But he had nothing to do with it. A German
+admiral gave an order as a matter of policy to make an impression
+that his submarine campaign was succeeding and to interfere with
+the transport of munitions, and the Kaiser told this boy that it was
+right. One liked the boy, his loyalty and his courage; liked him as a
+human being. But one wished that he might think more. Perhaps he
+will one of these days, if he survives the war.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+VII
+How The Kaiser Leads
+
+
+Only a week before I had seen wounded Germans in the freight shed
+at Calais; and all the prisoners that I had seen elsewhere, whether in
+ones or twos, brought in fresh from the front or in columns under
+escort, had been Germans. The sharpest contrast of all in war which
+the neutral may observe is seeing the men of one army which, from
+the other side, he had watched march into battle--armed, confident,
+disciplined parts of an organization, ready to sweep all before them in
+a charge--become so many sheep, disarmed, disorganized, rounded
+up like vagrants in a bread-line and surrounded by a fold of barbed
+wire and sentries.
+
+Such was the lot of the nine thousand British, French, and Russians
+whom I saw at Doeberitz, near Berlin. This was a show camp, I was
+told, but it suffices. Conditions at other camps might be worse;
+doubtless were. England treated its prisoners best, unless my
+information from unprejudiced observers be wrong. But Germany had
+enormous numbers of prisoners. A nation in her frame of mind
+thought only of the care of the men who could fight for her, not of
+those who had fought against her.
+
+Then, the German nature is one thing and the British another.
+Crossing the Atlantic on the Lusitania we had a German reserve
+officer who was already on board when the evening editions arrived
+at the pier with news that England had declared war on Germany.
+Naturally he must become a prisoner upon his arrival at Liverpool. He
+was a steadfast German. When a wireless report of the German
+repulse at Liege came, he would not believe it. Germany had the
+system and Germany would win. But when he said, "I should rather
+be a German on board a British ship than a Briton on board a
+German ship, under the circumstances," his remark was significant in
+more ways than one.
+
+His English fellow-passengers on that splendid liner which a German
+submarine was to send to the bottom showed him no discourtesy.
+They passed the time of day with him and seemed to want to make
+his awkward situation easy. Yet it was apparent that he regarded their
+kindliness as racial weakness. Krieg ist Krieg. When Germany made
+war she made war.
+
+So allowances are in order. One prison camp was like another in this
+sense, that it deprived a man of his liberty. It put him in jail. The
+British regular, who is a soldier by profession, was, in a way, in a
+separate class. But the others were men of civil industries and
+settled homes. Except during their term in the army, they went to
+the shop or the office every day, or tilled their farms. They were
+free; they had their work to occupy their minds during the day and
+freedom of movement when they came home in the evening. They
+might read the news by their firesides; they were normal human
+beings in civilized surroundings.
+
+Here, they were pacing animals in a cage, commanded by two field-
+guns, who might walk up and down and play games and go through
+the daily drill under their own non-commissioned officers. It was the
+mental stagnation of the thing that was appalling. Think of such a lot
+for a man used to action in civil life--and they call war action! Think of
+a writer, a business man, a lawyer, a doctor, a teacher, reduced to
+this fenced-in existence, when he had been the kind who got
+impatient if he had to wait for a train that was late! Shut yourself up in
+your own backyard with a man with a rifle watching you for twenty-
+four hours and see whether, if you have the brain of a mouse, prison-
+camp life can be made comfortable, no matter how many greasy
+packs of cards you have. And lousy, besides! At times one had to
+laugh over what Mark Twain called "the damfool human race."
+
+Inside a cookhouse at one end of the enclosure was a row of soup-
+boilers. Outside was a series of railings, forming stalls for the
+prisoners when they lined up for meals. In the morning, some
+oatmeal and coffee; at noon, some cabbage soup boiled with
+desiccated meat and some bread; at night, more coffee and bread.
+How one thrived on this fare depended much upon how he liked
+cabbage soup. The Russians liked it. They were used to it.
+
+"We never keep the waiter late by tarrying over our liqueurs," said a
+Frenchman.
+
+Our reservist guide had run away to America in youth, where he had
+worked at anything he could find to do; but he had returned to Berlin,
+where he had a "good little business" before the war. He was stout
+and cheery, and he referred to the prisoners as "boys." The French
+and Russians were good boys; but the English were bad boys, who
+had no discipline. He said that all received the same food as German
+soldiers. It seemed almost ridiculous chivalry that men who had
+fought against you and were living inactive lives should be as well fed
+as the men who were fighting for you. The rations that I saw given to
+German soldiers were better. But that was what the guide said.
+
+"This is our little sitting-room for the English non-commissioned
+officers," he explained, as he opened the door of a shanty which had
+a pane of glass for a window. Some men sitting around a small stove
+arose. One, a big sergeant-major, towered over the others; he had
+the colours of the South African campaign on the breast of his worn
+khaki blouse and stood very straight as if on parade. By the window
+was a Scot in kilts, who was equally tall. He looked around over his
+shoulder and then turned his face away with the pride of a man who
+does not care to be regarded as a show.
+
+His uniform was as neat as if he were at inspection; and the way he
+held his head, the haughtiness of his profile against the stream of
+light, recalled the unconquerable spirit of the Prussian prisoner whom
+I had seen on the road during the fighting along the Aisne. Only a
+regular, but he was upholding the dignity of Britain in that prison camp
+better than many a member of Parliament on the floor of the House of
+Commons. I asked our guide about him.
+
+"A good boy that! All his boys obey him and he obeys all the
+regulations. But he acts as if we Germans were his prisoners."
+
+The British might not be good boys, but they would be clean. They
+were diligent in the chase in their underclothes; their tents were free
+from odour; and there was something resolute about a Tommy who
+was bare to the waist in that freezing wind, making an effort at a bath.
+I heard tales of Mr. Atkins' characteristic thoughtlessness. While the
+French took good care of their clothes and kept their tents neat, he
+was likely to sell his coat or his blanket if he got a chance in order to
+buy something that he liked to eat. One Tommy who sat on his straw
+tick inside the tent was knitting. When I asked him where he had
+learned to knit, he replied: "India!" and gave me a look as much as to
+say, "Now pass on to the next cage."
+
+The British looked the most pallid of all, I thought. They were not used
+to cabbage soup. Their stomachs did not take hold of it, as one said;
+and they loathed the black bread. No white bread and no jam! Only
+when you have seen Mr. Atkins with a pot of jam and a loaf of white
+bread and some bacon frizzling near by can you realize the hardship
+which cabbage soup meant to that British regular who gets lavish
+rations of the kind he hkes along with his shilling a day for
+professional soldiering.
+
+"You see, the boys go about as they please," said our guide. "They
+don't have a bad time. Three meals a day and nothing to do."
+
+Members of a laughing circle which included some British were taking
+turns at a kind of Russian blind man's buff, which seemed to me
+about in keeping with the mental capacity of a prison camp. "No
+French!" I remarked.
+
+"The French keep to themselves, but they are good boys," he replied.
+"Maybe it is because we have only a few of them here."
+
+Every time one sounded the subject he was struck by the attitude of
+the Germans toward the French, not alone explained by the policy of
+the hour which hoped for a separate peace with France. Perhaps it
+was best traceable to the Frenchman's sense of amour propre, his
+philosophy, his politeness, or an indefinable quality in the grain of the
+man.
+
+The Germans affected to look down on the French; yet there was
+something about the Frenchmen which the Germans had to respect--
+something not won by war. I heard admiration for them at the same
+time as contempt for their red trousers and their unprepared-ness.
+While we are in this avenue, German officers had respect for the
+dignity of British officers, the leisurely, easy quality of superiority
+which they preserved in any circumstances. The qualities of a
+race come out in adversity no less than in prosperity. Thus,
+their captors regarded the Russians as big, good-natured children.
+
+"Yes, they play games and we give the English an English newspaper
+to read twice a week," said our affable guide, unconscious, I think, of
+any irony in the remark. For the paper was the Continental News,
+published in "the American language" for American visitors. You
+make take it for granted that it did not exaggerate any success of the
+Allies.
+
+"We have a prince and the son of a rich man among the Russian
+prisoners--yes, quite in the Four Hundred," the guide went on. "They
+were such good boys we put them to work in the cookhouse. Star
+boarders, eh? They like it. They get more to eat."
+
+These two men were called out for exhibition. Youngsters of the first
+line they were and even in their privates' uniform they bore the
+unmistakable signs of belonging to the Russian upper class. Each
+saluted and made his bow, as if he had come on to do a turn before
+the footlights. It was not the first time they had been paraded before
+visitors. In the prince's eye I noted a twinkle, which as much as said:
+"Well, why not? We don't mind."
+
+When we were taken through the cookhouse I asked about a little
+Frenchman who was sitting with his nose in a soup bowl He seemed
+too near-sighted ever to get into any army. His face was distinctly that
+of a man of culture; one would have guessed that he was an artist.
+
+"Shrapnel injury," explained the guide. "He will never be able to see
+much again. We let him come in here to eat."
+
+I wanted to talk with him, but these exhibits are supposed to be all in
+pantomime; a question and you are urged along to the next exhibit.
+He was young and all his life he was to be like that--like some poor,
+blind kitten!
+
+The last among a number of Russians returning to the enclosure from
+some fatigue duty was given a blow in the seat of his baggy trousers
+with a stick which one of the guards carried. The Russian quickened
+his steps and seemed to think nothing of the incident. But to me it
+was the worst thing that I saw at Doeberitz, this act of physical violence
+against a man by one who has power over him. The personal
+equation was inevitable to the observer. Struck in that way, could one
+fail to strike back? Would not he strike in red anger, without stopping
+to think of consequences? There is something bred into the Anglo-
+Saxon which resents a physical blow. We court-martial an officer for
+laying hands on a private, though that private may get ten years in
+prison on his trial. Yet the Russian thought nothing of it, or the guard,
+either. An officer in the German or the Russian army may strike a
+man.
+
+"Would the guard hit a Frenchman in that way?" I asked. Our guide
+said not; the French were good boys. Or an Englishman? He had
+not seen it done. The Englishman would swear and curse, he was
+sure, and might fight, they were such undisciplined boys. But the
+Russians--"they are like kids. It was only a slap. Didn't hurt him any."
+
+New barracks for the prisoners were being built which would be
+comfortable, if crowded, even in winter. The worst thing, I repeat, was
+the deadly monotony of the confinement for a period which would end
+only when the war ended. Any labour should be welcome to a
+healthy-minded man. It was a mercy that the Germans set prisoners
+to grading roads, to hoeing and harvesting, retrieving thus a little of
+the wastage of war. Or was it only the bland insistence that conditions
+were luxurious that one objected to?--not that they were really bad.
+The Germans had a horde of prisoners to care for; vast armies to
+maintain; and a new volunteer force of a million or more--two millions
+was the official report--to train.
+
+While we were at the prison camp we heard at intervals the rap-rap of
+a machine-gun at the practice range near by, drilling to take more
+prisoners, and on the way back to Berlin we passed companies of
+volunteers returning from drill with that sturdy march characteristic of
+German infantry.
+
+In Berlin I was told again that everything was perfectly normal. Trains
+were running as usual to Hamburg, if one cared to go there. "As
+usual" in war time was the ratio of one to five in peace time.
+
+At Hamburg, in sight of steamers with cold boilers and the forests of
+masts of idle ships, one saw what sea power meant. That city of
+eager shippers and traders, that doorstep of Germany, was as dead
+as Ypres, without a building being wrecked by shells. Hamburgers
+tried to make the best of it; they assumed an air of optimism; they still
+had faith that richer cargoes than ever might come over the sea,
+while a ghost, that of bankruptcy, walked the streets, looking at office-
+windows and the portholes of ships.
+
+For one had only to scratch the cuticle of that optimism to find that the
+corpuscles did not run red. They were blue. Hamburg's citizens had
+to exhibit the fortitude of those of Rheims under another kind of
+bombardment: that of the silent guns of British Dreadnoughts far out
+of range. They were good Germans; they meant to play the game;
+but that once prosperous business man of past middle age, too old to
+serve, who had little to do but think, found it hard to keep step with
+the propagandist attitude of Berlin.
+
+A free city, a commercial city, a city unto itself, Hamburg had been in
+other days a cosmopolitan trader with the rest of the world. It had
+even been called an English city, owing to the number of English
+business men there as agents of the immense commerce between
+England and Germany. Everyone who was a clerk or an employer
+spoke English; and through all the irritation between the two countries
+which led up to the war, English and German business men kept on
+the good terms which commerce requires and met at luncheons and
+dinners and in their clubs. Englishmen were married to German
+women and Germans to Englishwomen, while both prayed that their
+governments would keep the peace.
+
+Now the English husband of the German woman, though he had
+spent most of his life in Hamburg, though perhaps he had been born
+in Germany, had been interned and, however large his bank account,
+was taking his place with his pannikin in the stalls in front of some
+cookhouse for his ration of cabbage soup. Germans were kind to
+English friends personally; but when it came to the national feeling of
+Germany against England, nowhere was it so bitter as in Hamburg.
+Here the hate was born of more than national sentiment; it was of the
+pocket; of seeing fortunes that had been laboriously built dwindling,
+once thriving businesses in suspended animation. There was no
+moratorium in name; there was worse than one in fact. A patriotic
+freemasonry in misfortune took its place. No business man could
+press another for the payment of debts lest he be pressed in turn.
+What would happen when the war was over? How long would it last?
+
+It was not quite as cruel to give one's opinion as two years to the
+inquirers in Hamburg as to the director of the great Rudolph Virchow
+Hospital in Berlin. Here, again, the system; the submergence of the
+individual in the organization. The wounded men seemed parts of a
+machine; the human touch which may lead to disorganization was
+less in evidence than with us, where the thought is: This is an
+individual human being, with his own peculiarities of temperament, his
+own theories of life, his own ego; not just a quantity of brain, tissue,
+blood and bone which is required for the organism called man. A
+human mechanism wounded at the German front needed repairs and
+repairs were made to that mechanism. The niceties might be lacking
+but the repair factory ran steadily and efficiently at full blast. Germany
+had to care for her wounded by the millions and by the millions she
+cared for them. "Two years!"
+
+I was sorry that I had said this to the director, for its effect on him was
+like a blow in the chest. The vision of more and more wounded
+seemed to rise before the eyes of this man, weary with the strain of
+doing the work which he knew so well how to do as a cog in the
+system. But for only a moment. He stiffened; he became the
+drillmaster again; and the tragic look in his eyes was succeeded by
+one of that strange exaltation I had seen in the eyes of so many
+Germans, which appeared to carry their mind away from you and
+their surroundings to the battlefield where they were fighting for their
+"place in the sun." "Two years, then. We shall see it through!" He had
+a son who had been living in a French family near Lille studying
+French and he had heard nothing of him since the war began. They
+were good people, this French family; his son liked them. They would
+be kind to him; but what might not the French Government do to him,
+a German! He had heard terrible stories--the kind of stories that
+hardened the fighting spirit of German soldiers--about the treatment
+German civilians had received in France. He could think of one
+French family which he knew as being kind, but not of the whole
+French people as a family. As soon as the national and racial element
+were considered the enemy became a beast.
+
+To him, at least, Berlin was not normal; nor was it to that keeper of a
+small shop off Unter den Linden which sold prints and etchings and
+cartoons. What a boon my order of cartoons was! He forgot his
+psychology code and turned human and confidential. The war had
+been hard on him; there was no business at all, not even in cartoons.
+
+The Opera alone seemed something like normal to one who trusted
+his eyes rather than his ears for information. There was almost a full
+house for the "Rosenkavalier"; for music is a solace in time of
+trouble, as other capitals than Berlin revealed. Officers with close-
+cropped heads, wearing Iron Crosses, some with arms in slings,
+promenaded in the refreshment room of the Berlin Opera House
+between the acts. This in the hour of victory should mean a picture of
+gaiety. But there was a telling hush about the scene. Possibly music
+had brought out the truth in men's hearts that war, this kind of war,
+was not gay or romantic, only murderous and destructive. One had
+noticed already that the Prussian officer, so conscious of his caste,
+who had worked so indefatigably to make an efficient army, had
+become chastened. He had found that common men, butchers and
+bakers and candlestick makers, could be as brave for their Kaiser as
+he. And more of these officers had the Iron Cross than not.
+
+The prevalence of Iron Crosses appealed to the risibilities of the
+superficial observer. But in this, too, there was system. An officer who
+had been in several battles without winning one must feel a trifle
+declassed and that it was time for him to make amends to his pride. If
+many Crosses were given to privates, then the average soldier would
+not think the Cross a prize for the few who had luck, but something
+that he, too, might win by courage and prompt obedience to orders.
+
+The masterful calculation, the splendid pretence and magnificent
+offence could not hide the suspense and suffering. Nowhere were
+you able to forget the war or to escape the all-pervading influence of
+the Kaiser. The empty royal box at the Opera, His Opera, called him
+to mind. What would happen before he reappeared there for a gala
+performance? When again, in the shuffle of European politics, would
+the audience see the Tsar of Russia or the King of England by the
+Kaiser's side?
+
+It was his Berlin, the heart of his Berlin, that was before you when you
+left the Opera--the new Berlin, which he had fathered in its boom
+growth, taking few pages of a guidebook compared to Paris. In front
+of his palace Russian field-guns taken by von Hindenburg at
+Tannenberg were exhibited as the spoils of his war; while not far
+away the never-to-be-forgotten grandfather in bronze rode home in
+triumph from Paris.
+
+One wondered what all the people in the ocean of Berlin flats were
+thinking as one walked past the statue of Frederick the Great, with his
+sharp nose pointing the way for future conquerors, and on along
+Unter den Linden, with its broad pavements gleaming in a
+characteristic misty winter night, through the Brandenburg Gate of his
+Brandenburg dynasty, or to the statue of the blood-and-iron
+Bismarck, with his strong jaw and pugnacious nose--the statesman
+militant in uniform with a helmet over his bushy brow--who had made
+the German Empire, that young empire which had not yet known
+defeat because of the system which makes ready and chooses the
+hour for its blow.
+
+Not far away one had glimpses of the white statues of My Ancestors
+of the Sieges Allee, or avenue of victory--the present Kaiser's own
+idea--with the great men of the time on their right and left hands.
+People whose sense of taste, not to say of humour, may limit their
+statecraft had smiled at this monotonous and grandiose row of the
+dead bones of distinguished and mediocre royalty immortalized in
+marble to the exact number of thirty-two. But they were My Ancestors,
+O Germans, who made you what you are! Right dress and keep that
+line of royalty in mind! It is your royal line, older than the trees in the
+garden, firm as the rocks, Germany itself. The last is not the least in
+might nor the least advertised in the age of publicity. He is to make
+the next step in advance for Germany and bring more tribute home, if
+all Germans will be loyal to him.
+
+One paused to look at the photograph of the Kaiser in a shop
+window; a big photograph of that man whose photograph is
+everywhere in Germany. It is a stern face, this face, as the leader
+wishes his people to see him, with its erectile moustache, the lips firm
+set, the eyes challenging and the chin held so as to make it symbolic
+of strength: a face that strives to say in that pose: "Onward! I lead!"
+Germans have seen it every day for a quarter of a century. They
+have lived with it and the character of it has grown into their natures.
+
+In the same window was a smaller photograph of the Crown Prince,
+with his cap rakishly on the side of his head, as if to give himself a
+distinctive characteristic in the German eye; but his is the face of a
+man who is not mature for his years, and a trifle dissipated. For a
+while after the war began he, as leader of the war party, knew the joy
+of being more popular than the Kaiser. But the tide turned soon in
+favour of a father who appeared to be drawn reluctantly into the
+ordeal of death and wounds for his people in "defence of the
+Fatherland" and against a son who had clamoured for the horror
+which his people had begun to realize, particularly as his promised
+entry into Paris had failed. There can be no question which of the two
+has the wise head.
+
+The Crown Prince had passed into the background. He was
+marooned with ennui in the face of French trenches in the West,
+whilst all the glory was being won in the East. Indeed, father had put
+son in his place. One day, the gossips said, son might have to ask
+father, in the name of the Hohenzollerns, to help him recover his
+popularity. His photograph had been taken down from shop windows
+and in its place, on the right hand of the Kaiser in the Sieges Allee of
+contemporary fame, was the bull-dog face of von Hindenburg, victor
+of Tannenberg. The Kaiser shared von Hindenburg's glory; he has
+shared the glory of all victorious generals; such is his histrionic gift in
+the age of the spotlight.
+
+Make no mistake--his people, deluded or not, love him not only
+because he is Kaiser, but also for himself. He is a clever man, who
+began his career with the enormous capital of being emperor and
+made the most of his position to amaze the world with a more
+versatile and also a more inscrutable personality than most people
+realize. Poseur, perhaps, but an emperor these days may need to be
+a poseur in order to wear the ermine of Divine Right convincingly to
+most of his subjects.
+
+His pose is always that of the anointed King of My People. He has
+never given down on that point, however much he has applied State
+Socialism to appease the Socialistic agitation. He has personified
+Germany and German ambition with an adroit egoism and the
+sentiment of his inheritance. Those critics who see the machinery of
+the throne may say that he has the mind of a journalist, quick of
+perception, ready of assimilation, knowing many things in their
+essentials, but no one thing thoroughly. But this is the kind of mind
+that a ruler requires, plus the craft of the politician.
+
+Is he a good man? Is he a great man? Banal questions! He is the
+Kaiser on the background of the Sieges Allee, who has first promoted
+himself, then the Hohenzollerns, and then the interests of Germany,
+with all the zest of the foremost shareholder and chairman of the
+corporation. No German in the German hothouse of industry has
+worked harder than he. He has kept himself up to the mark and tried
+to keep his people up to the mark. It may be the wrong kind of a
+mark. Indeed, without threshing the old straw of argument, most of
+the people of the civilized world are convinced that it is.
+
+That young private I met in the grounds at Charlottenberg, that
+wounded man helping with the harvest, that tired hospital director, the
+small trader in Hamburg, the sturdy Red Cross woman in the station
+at Hanover, the peasants and the workers throughout Germany, kept
+unimaginatively at their tasks, do not see the machinery of the throne,
+only the man in the photograph who supplies them with a national
+imagination. His indefatigable goings and comings and his poses fill
+their minds with a personality which typifies the national spirit. Will
+this change after the war? But that, too, is not a subject for speculation
+here.
+
+Through the war his pose has met the needs of the hour. An emperor
+bowed down with the weight of his people's sacrifice, a grey,
+determined emperor hastening to honour the victors, covering up
+defeats, urging his legions on, himself at the front, never seen by the
+general public in the rear; a mysterious figure, not saying much and
+that foolish to the Allies but appealing to the Germans, rather
+appearing to submerge his own personality in the united patriotism of
+the struggle--such is the picture which the throne machinery has
+impressed on the German mind. The histrionic gift may be at its best
+in creating a saga.
+
+Always the offensive! Germany would keep on striking as long as she
+had strength for a blow, whilst making the pretence that she had the
+strength for still heavier blows. One wonders, should she gain peace
+by her blows, if the Allies would awaken after the treaty was signed to
+find how near exhaustion she had been, or that she was so self-
+contained in her production of war material that she had only
+borrowed from Hans to pay Fritz, who were both Germans. Russia
+did not know how' nearly she had Japan beaten until after
+Portsmouth. Japan's method was the German method; she learned it
+from Germany.
+
+At the end of my journey I was hearing the same din of systematic
+optimism in my ears as in the beginning.
+
+"Warsaw, then Paris, then our Zeppelins will finish London," said the
+restaurant keeper on the German side of the Dutch frontier; "and our
+submarines will settle the British navy before the summer is over. No,
+the war will not last a year."
+
+"And is America next on the programme?" I asked.
+
+"No. America is too strong; too far away."
+
+I was guilty of a faint suspicion that he was a diplomatist.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+In Belgium Under The Germans
+
+
+
+No week at the front, where war is made, left the mind so full as this
+week beyond the sound of the guns with war's results. It taught the
+meaning of the simple words life and death, hunger and food, love
+and hate. One was in a house with sealed doors where a family of
+seven millions sat in silence and idleness, thinking of nothing but war
+and feeling nothing but war. He had war cold as the fragments of an
+exploded shell beside a dead man on a frozen road; war analysed
+and docketed for exhibition, without its noise, its distraction, and its
+hot passion.
+
+In Ostend I had seen the Belgian refugees in flight, and I had seen
+them pouring into London stations, bedraggled outcasts of every
+class, with the staring uncertainty of the helpless human flock flying
+from the storm. England, who considered that they had suffered for
+her sake, opened her purse and her heart to them; she opened her
+homes, both modest suburban homes and big country houses which
+are particular about their guests in time of peace. No British family
+without a Belgian was doing its duty. Bishop's wife and publican's wife
+took whatever Belgian was sent to her. The refugee packet arrived
+without the nature of contents on the address tag. All Belgians had
+become heroic and noble by grace of the defenders of Liege.
+
+Perhaps the bishop's wife received a young woman who smoked
+cigarettes, and asked her hostess for rouge, and the publican's wife
+received a countess. Mrs. Smith, of Clapham, who had brought up
+her children in the strictest propriety, welcomed as play-mates for her
+dears, whom she had kept away from the contaminating associations
+of the alleys, Belgian children from the toughest quarters of Antwerp,
+who had a precocity that led to baffling confusion in Mrs. Smith's mind
+between parental responsibility and patriotic duty. Smart society gave
+the run of its houses sometimes to gentry who were used to getting
+the run of that kind of houses by lifting a window with a jemmy on a
+dark night. It was a refugee lottery. When two hosts met one said:
+"My Belgian is charming!" and the other said: "Mine isn't. Just listen--"
+
+But the English are game; they are loyal; they bear their burden of
+hospitality bravely.
+
+The strange things that happened were not the more agreeable
+because of the attitude of some refugees who, when they were
+getting better fare than they ever had at home, thought that, as they
+had given their "all" for England, they should be getting still better, not
+to mention wine on the table in temperance families; whilst there was
+a disinclination towards self-support by means of work on the part of
+certain heroes by proxy which promised a Belgian occupation of
+England that would last as long as the German occupation of
+Belgium. England was learning that there are Belgians and Belgians.
+She had received not a few of the "and Belgians."
+
+It was only natural. When the German cruisers bombarded
+Scarborough and the Hartlepools, the first to the station were not the
+finest and sturdiest. Those with good bank accounts and a
+disinclination to take any bodily or gastronomic risks, the young idler
+who stands on the street corner ogling girls and the girls who are
+always in the street to be ogled, the flighty-minded, the irresponsible,
+the tramp, the selfish, and the cowardly, are bound to be in the van of
+flight from any sudden disaster and to make the most of the generous
+sympathy of those who succour them.
+
+The courageous, the responsible, those with homes and property at
+stake, those with an inborn sense of real patriotism which means
+loyalty to locality and to their neighbours, are more inclined to remain
+with their homes and their property. Besides, a refugee hardly
+appears at his best. He is in a strange country, forlorn, homesick, a
+hostage of fate and personal misfortune. The Belgian nation had
+taken the Allies' side and now individual Belgians expected help from
+the Allies.
+
+England did not get the worst of the refugees. They could travel no
+farther than Holland, where the Dutch Government appropriated
+money to care for them at the same time that it was under the
+expense of keeping its army mobilized. Looking at the refugees in the
+camp at Bergen-op-Zoom, an observer might share some of the
+contempt of the Germans for the Belgians. Crowded in temporary
+huts in the chill, misty weather of a Dutch winter, they seemed listless,
+marooned human wreckage. They would not dig ditches to drain their
+camp; they were given to pilfering from one another the clothes which
+the world's charity supplied. The heart was out of them. They were
+numbed by disaster.
+
+"Are all these men and women who are living together married?" I
+asked the Dutch officer in charge.
+
+"It is not for us to inquire," he replied. "Most of them say that they
+have lost their marriage certificates."
+
+They were from the slums of that polyglot seaport town Antwerp,
+which Belgians say is anything but real Belgium. To judge Belgium by
+them is like judging an American town by the worst of its back streets,
+where saloons and pawnshops are numerous and red lights twinkle
+from dark doorways.
+
+Around a table in a Rotterdam hotel one met some generals who
+were organizing a different kind of campaign from that which brought
+glory to the generals who conquered Belgium. It was odd that Dr.
+Rose--that Dr. Rose who had discovered and fought the hook worm
+among the mountaineers of the Southern States--should be
+succouring Belgium, and yet only natural. Where else should he and
+Henry James, Jr., of the Rockefeller Foundation, and Mr. Bicknell, of
+the American Red Cross, be, if not here directing the use of an
+endowment fund set aside for just such purposes?
+
+They had been all over Belgium and up into the Northern
+Departments of France occupied by the Germans, investigating
+conditions. For they were practical men, trained for solving the
+problem of charity with wisdom, who wanted to know that their money
+was well spent. They had nothing for the refugees in London, but they
+found that the people who had stayed at home in Belgium were
+worthy of help. The fund was allowing five hundred thousand dollars a
+month for the American Commission for Relief in Belgium, which was
+the amount that the Germans had spent in a single day in the
+destruction of the town of Ypres with shells. Later they were to go to
+Poland; then to Serbia.
+
+With them was Herbert C. Hoover, a celebrated mining engineer, the
+head of the Commission. When American tourists were stranded
+over Europe at the outset of the war, with letters of credit which could
+not be cashed, their route homeward must lie through London. They
+must have steamer passage. Hoover took charge. When this work
+was done and Belgium must be helped, he took charge of a task that
+could be done only by a neutral. For the adjutants and field officers of
+his force he turned to American business men in London, to Rhodes
+scholars at Oxford, and to other volunteers hastening from America.
+
+When "Harvard, 1914," who had lent a hand in the American
+refugees' trials, appeared in Hoover's office to volunteer for the new
+campaign, Hoover said: "You are going to Rotterdam to-night." "So I
+am!" said Harvard, 1914, and started accordingly. Action and not red
+tape must prevail in such an organization.
+
+The Belgians whom I wished to see were those behind the line of
+guards on the Belgo-Dutch frontier; those who had remained at home
+under the Germans to face humiliation and hunger. This was possible
+if you had the right sort of influence and your passport the right sort of
+vises to accompany a Bescheinigung, according to the form of "31
+Oktober, 1914, Sect. 616, Nr. 1083," signed by the German consul at
+Rotterdam, which put me in the same motor-car with Harvard, 1914,
+that stopped one blustery, snowy day of late December before a
+gate, with Belgium on one side and Holland on the other side of it, on
+the Rosendaal-Antwerp road. "Once more!" said Harvard, 1914, who
+had made this journey many times as a dispatch rider.
+
+One of the conquerors, the sentry representing the majesty of
+German authority in Belgium, examined the pass. The conqueror was
+a good deal larger around the middle than when he was young, but
+not so large as when he went to war. He had a scarf tied over his
+ears under a cracked old patent-leather helmet, which the Saxon
+Landsturm must have taken from their garrets when the Kaiser sent
+the old fellows to keep the Belgians in order so that the young men
+could be spared to get rheumatism in the trenches if they escaped
+death.
+
+You could see that the conqueror missed his wife's cooking and
+Sunday afternoon in the beer garden with his family. However much
+he loved the Kaiser, it did not make him love home any the less. His
+nod admitted us into German-ruled Belgium. He looked so lonely that
+as our car started I sent him a smile. Surprise broke on his face.
+Somebody not a German in uniform had actually smiled at him in
+Belgium!
+
+My last glimpse of him was of a grin spreading under the scarf toward
+his ears.
+
+Belgium was webbed with these old Landsturm guards. If your
+Passierschein was not right, you might survive the first set of sentries
+and even the second, but the third, and if not the third some
+succeeding one of the dozens on the way to Brussels, would hale you
+before a Kommandatur. Then you were in trouble. In travelling about
+Europe I became so used to passes that when I returned to New
+York I could not have thought of going to Hoboken without the
+German consul's visa or of dining at a French restaurant without the
+French consul's.
+
+"And again!" said Harvard, 1914, as we came to another sentry.
+There was good reason why Harvard had his pass in a leather-bound
+case under a celluloid face. Otherwise, it would soon have been worn
+out in showing. He had been warned by the Commission not to talk
+and he did not talk. He was neutrality personified. All he did was to
+show his pass. He could be silent in three languages. The only time I
+got anything like partisanship out of him and two sentences in
+succession was when I mentioned the Harvard-Yale football game.
+"My! Wasn't that a smear! In their new stadium, too! Oh, my! Wish I
+had been there!"
+
+When the car broke a spring half-way to Antwerp, he remarked,
+"Naturally!" or, rather, a more expressive monosyllable which did not
+sound neutral.
+
+While he and the Belgian chauffeur, with the help of a Belgian farmer
+as spectator, were patching up the broken spring, I had a look at the
+farm. The winter crops were in; the cabbages and Brussels sprouts in
+the garden were untouched. It happened that the scorching finger of
+war's destruction had not been laid on this little property. In the yard
+the wife was doing the week's washing, her hands in hot water and
+her arms exposed to weather so cold that I felt none too warm in a
+heavy overcoat. At first sight she gave me a frown, which instantly
+dissipated into a smile when she saw that I was not German.
+
+If not German, I must be a friend. Yet if I were I would not dare talk--
+not with German sentries all about. She lifted her hand from the suds
+and swung it out to the west toward England and France with an
+eager, craving fire in her eyes, and then she swept it across in front of
+her as if she were sweeping a spider off a table. When it stopped at
+arm's length there was the triumph of hate in her eyes. I thought of
+the lid of a cauldron raised to let out a burst of steam as she asked
+"When?" When? When would the Allies come and turn the Germans
+out?
+
+She was a kind, hardworking woman, who would help any stranger in
+trouble the best she knew how. Probably that Saxon whose smile had
+spread under his scarf had much the same kind of wife. Yet I knew
+that if the Allies' guns were heard driving the Germans past her
+house and her husband had a rifle, he would put a shot in that
+Saxon's back, or she would pour boiling water on his head if she
+could. Then, if the Germans had time, they would burn the farmhouse
+and kill the husband who had shot one of their comrades.
+
+I recollect a youth who had been in a railroad accident saying: "That
+was the first time I had ever seen death; the first time I realized what
+death was." Exactly. You don't know death till you have seen it; you
+don't know invasion till you have felt it. However wise, however able
+the conquerors, life under them is a living death. True, the farmer's
+property was untouched, but his liberty was gone. If you, a well-
+behaved citizen, have ever been arrested and marched through the
+streets of your home town by a policeman, how did you like it? Give
+the policeman a rifle and a fixed bayonet and a full cartridge-box and
+transform him into a foreigner and the experience would not be any
+more pleasant.
+
+That farmer could not go to the next town without the permission of
+the sentries. He could not even mail a letter to his son who was in the
+trenches with the Allies. The Germans had taken his horse; theirs the
+power to take anything he had--the power of the bayonet. If he
+wanted to send his produce to a foreign market, if he wanted to buy
+food in a foreign market, the British naval blockade closed the sea to
+him. He was sitting on a chair of steel spikes, hands tied and mouth
+gagged, whilst his mind seethed, solacing its hate with hope through
+the long winter months. If you lived in Kansas and could not get your
+wheat to Chicago, or any groceries or newspapers from the nearest
+town, or learn whether your son in Wyoming were alive or dead, or
+whether the man who owned your mortgage in New York had
+foreclosed it or not--well, that is enough without the German sentry.
+
+Only, instead of newspapers or word about the mortgage, the thing
+you needed past that blockade was bread to keep you from starving.
+America opened a window and slipped a loaf into the empty larder.
+Those Belgian soldiers whom I had seen at Dixmude, wounded,
+exhausted, mud-caked, shivering, were happy beside the people at
+home. They were in the fight. It is not the destruction of towns and
+houses that impresses you most, but the misery expressed by that
+peasant woman over her washtub.
+
+A writer can make a lot of the burst of a single shell; a photographer
+showing the ruins of a block of buildings or a church makes it appear
+that all blocks and all churches are in ruins. Running through Antwerp
+in a car, one saw few signs of destruction from the bombardment.
+You will see them if you are specially conducted. Shops were open,
+people were moving about in the streets, which were well lighted. No
+need of darkness for fear of bombs dropping here! German barracks
+had safe shelter from aerial raids in a city whose people were the
+allies of England and France. But at intervals marched the German
+patrols.
+
+When our car stopped before a restaurant a knot gathered around it.
+Their faces were like all the other faces I saw in Belgium--unless
+German--with that restrained, drawn look of passive resistance,
+persistent even when they smiled. When? When were the Allies
+coming? Their eyes asked the question which their tongues dared
+not. Inside the restaurant a score of German officers served by
+Belgian waiters were dining. Who were our little party? What were we
+doing there and speaking English--English, the hateful language of
+the hated enemy? Oh, yes! We were Americans connected with the
+relief work. But between the officers' stares at the sound of English
+and the appealing inquiry of the faces in the street lay an abyss of
+war's fierce suspicion and national policies and racial enmity, which
+America had to bridge.
+
+Before we could help Belgium, England, blockading Germany to keep
+her from getting foodstuffs, had to consent. She would consent only if
+none of the food reached German mouths. Germany had to agree
+not to requisition any of the food. Someone not German and not
+British must see to its distribution. Those rigid German military
+authorities, holding fast to their military secrets, must consent to
+scores of foreigners moving about Belgium and sending messages
+across that Belgo-Dutch frontier which had been closed to all except
+official German messages. This called for men whom both the
+German and the British duellists would trust to succour the human
+beings crouched and helpless under the circling flashes of their steel.
+
+Fortunately, our Minister to Belgium was Brand Whitlock. He is no
+Talleyrand or Metternich. If he were, the Belgians might not have
+been fed, because he might have been suspected of being too much
+of a diplomatist. When an Englishman, or a German, or a Hottentot,
+or any other kind of a human being gets to know Whitlock, he
+recognizes that here is an honest man with a big heart. When leading
+Belgians came to him and said that winter would find Belgium without
+bread, he turned from the land that has the least food to that which
+has the most--his own land.
+
+For Belgium is a great shop in the midst of a garden. Her towns are
+so close together that they seem only suburbs of Brussels and
+Antwerp. She has the densest population in Europe. She produces
+only enough food to last her for two months of the year. The food for
+the other ten months she buys with the products of her factories. In
+1914-15 Belgium could not send out her products; so we were to help
+feed her without pay, and England and France were to give money to
+buy what food we did not give.
+
+But with the British navy generously allowing food to pass the
+blockade, the problem was far from solved. Ships laden with supplies
+steaming to Rotterdam--this was a matter of easy organization. How
+get the bread to the hungry mouths when the Germans were using
+Belgian railroads for military purposes? Germany was not inclined to
+allow a carload of wheat to keep a carload of soldiers from reaching
+the front, or to let food for Belgians keep the men in the trenches from
+getting theirs regularly. Horse and cart transport would be
+cumbersome, and the Germans would not permit Belgian teamsters
+to move about with such freedom. As likely as not they might be
+spies.
+
+Anybody who can walk or ride may be a spy. Therefore, the way to
+stop spying is not to let anyone walk or ride. Besides, Germany had
+requisitioned most of the horses that could do more than draw an
+empty phaeton on a level. But she had not drawn the water out of the
+canals; though the Belgians, always whispering jokes at the expense
+of the conquerors, said that the canals might have been emptied if
+their contents had been beer. There were plenty of idle boats in
+Holland, whose canals connect with the web of canals in Belgium.
+You had only to seal the cargoes against requisition, the seal to be
+broken only by a representative of the Relief Commission, and start
+them to their destination.
+
+And how make sure that those who had money should pay for their
+bread, while all who had not should be reached? The solution was
+simple compared to the distribution of relief after the San Francisco
+earthquake and fire, for example, in our own land, where a sparser
+population makes social organization comparatively loose.
+
+The people to be relieved were in their homes. Belgium is so old a
+country, her population so dense, she is so much like one big
+workshop, that the Government must keep a complete set of books.
+Every Belgian is registered and docketed. You know just how he
+makes his living and where he lives. Upon marriage a Belgian gets a
+little book, giving his name and his wife's, their ages, their
+occupations, and address. As children are born their names are
+added. A Belgian holds as fast to this book as a woman to a piece of
+jewellery that is an heirloom.
+
+With few exceptions, Belgian local officials had not fled the country.
+They realized that this was a time when they were particularly needed
+on the job to protect the people from German exactions and from
+their own rashness. There were also any number of volunteers. The
+thing was to get the food to them and let them organize local
+distribution.
+
+The small force of Americans required to oversee the transit must
+watch that the Germans did not take any of the food and retain both
+British and German confidence in the absolute good faith of their
+intentions. The volunteers were paid their expenses; the rest of their
+reward was experience, and it was "soom expeerience," as a Belgian
+said who was learning a little American slang. They talked about
+canal-boat cargoes as if they had been from Buffalo to Albany on the
+Erie Canal for years; they spoke of "my province" and compared
+bread-lines and the efficiency of local officials. And the Germans took
+none of the food; orders from Berlin were obeyed. Berlin knew that
+any requisitioning of relief supplies meant that the Relief Commission
+would cease work and announce to the world the reason.
+
+However many times Americans were arrested they must be patient.
+That exception who said, when he was put in a cell overnight
+because he entered the military zone by mistake, that he would not
+have been treated that way in England, needed a little more coaching
+in preserving his mask of neutrality. For I must say that nine out of ten
+of these young men, leaning over backward to be neutral, were pro-
+Ally, including some with German names. But publicly you could
+hardly get an admission out of them that there was any war. As for
+Harvard, 1914, hang a passport carrier around the Sphinx's neck and
+you have him done in stone.
+
+Fancy any Belgian trying to get him to carry a contraband letter or a
+German commander trying to work him for a few sacks of flour! When
+I asked him what career he had chosen he said, "Business!" without
+any waste of words. I think that he will succeed in a way to surprise
+his family. It is he and all those young Americans of whom he is a
+type, as distinctive of America in manner, looks, and thought as a
+Frenchman is of France or a German of Germany, who carried the
+torch of Peace's kindly work into war-ridden Belgium. They made you
+want to tickle the eagle on the throat so he would let out a gentle,
+well-modulated scream; of course, strictly in keeping with neutrality.
+
+Red lanterns took the place of red flags swung by Landsturm sentries
+on the run to Brussels as darkness fell. There was no relaxation of
+watchfulness at night.
+
+All the twenty-four hours the systematic conquerors held the net tight.
+Once when my companion repeated his "Again!" and held out the
+pass in the lantern's rays, I broke into a laugh, which excited his
+curiosity, for you soon get out of the habit of laughing in Belgium.
+
+"It has just occurred to me that my guidebook states that passports
+are not required in Belgium!" I explained.
+
+The editor of that guidebook will have a busy time before he issues
+the next edition. For example, he will have a lot of new information
+about Malines, whose ruins were revealed by the motor-lamps in
+shadowy broken walls on either side of the main street. Other places
+where less damage had been done were equally silent. In the smaller
+towns and villages the population must keep indoors at night; for
+egress and ingress are more difficult to control there than in large
+cities, where guards at every corner suffice--watching, watching,
+these disciplined pawns of remorselessly efficient militarism; watching
+every human being in Belgium.
+
+"The last time I saw that statue of Liege," I remarked, peering into the
+darkness as we rode into the city, "the Legion of Honour conferred by
+France on Liege for its brave defence was hung on its breast. I
+suppose it is gone now."
+
+"I guess yes," said Harvard, 1914.
+
+We went to the hotel at Brussels which I had left the day before the
+city's fall. English railway signs on the walls of the corridor had not
+been disturbed. More ancient relic still seemed a bulletin board with
+its announcement of seven passages a day to England, traversing
+the Channel in "fifty-five minutes via Calais" and "three hours via
+Ostend," with the space blank where the state of the weather for the
+despair or the delight of intending voyagers had been chalked up in
+happier days. The same men were in attendance at the office as
+before; but they seemed older and their politeness that of cheerless
+automatons. For five months they had been serving German officers
+as guests with hate in their hearts and, in turn, trying to protect their
+property.
+
+A story is told of how that hotel had filled with officers after the
+arrival of the Germanic flood and how one day, when it was learned
+that the proprietor was a Frenchman, guards were suddenly placed
+at the doors and the hall was filled with luggage as every officer,
+acting with characteristic official solidarity, vacated his room and
+bestowed his presence elsewhere. Then the proprietor was informed
+that his guests would return if he would agree to employ German
+help and buy his supplies from Germany. He refused, for practical
+as well as for sentimental reasons. If he had consented, think what
+the Belgians would have done to him after the Germans were gone!
+However, officers were gradually returning, for this was the best
+hotel in town, and even conquerors are human and German conquerors
+have particularly human stomachs.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+Christmas In Belgium
+
+
+
+Christmas in Belgium with the bayonet and the wolf at the door taught
+me to value Christmas at home for more than its gifts and the cheer
+of the fireside. It taught me what it meant to belong to a free people
+and how precious is that old English saying that a man's house is his
+castle, which was the inception of so much in our lives which we
+accept as a commonplace. If such a commonplace can be made
+secure only by fighting, then it is best to fight. At any time a foreign
+soldier might enter the house of a Belgian and take him away for trial
+before a military court.
+
+Breakfast in the same restaurant as before the city's fall! Again the
+big grapes which are a luxury of the rich man's table or an
+extravagance for a sick friend with us! The hothouses still grew them.
+What else was there for he hothouses to do, though the export of
+their products was impossible? A shortage of the long, white-leafed
+chicory that we call endive in New York restaurants? There were piles
+of it in the Brussels market and on the hucksters' carts; nothing so
+cheap!
+
+One might have excellent steaks and roasts and delicious veal; for
+the heifers were being butchered as the Germans had taken all
+fodder. But the bread was the Commission's brown, which everyone
+had to eat. Belgium, growing quality on scanty acres with intensive
+farming, had food luxuries but not the staff of life.
+
+I looked out of the windows on to the square which four months
+before I had seen crowded with people bedecked with the Allies'
+colours and eagerly buying the latest editions containing the
+communiques of hollow optimism. No flag in sight now except a
+German flag flying over the station! But small revenges may be
+enjoyed. A German soldier tried to jump on the tail of a cart driven by
+a Belgian, but the Belgian whipped up his horse and the German fell
+off on to the pavement, whilst the cart sped around a corner.
+
+Out of the station came a score of German soldiers returning from the
+trenches, on their way to barracks to regain strength in order that they
+could bear the ordeal of standing in icy water again. They were not
+the kind exhibited on Press tours to illustrate the "vigour of our
+indomitable army." Eyelids drooped over hollow eye-sockets; sore,
+numbed feet moved like feet which are asleep in their vain effort to
+keep step. Sensitiveness to surroundings, almost to existence,
+seemed to have been lost.
+
+One was a corporal, young, tall, and full-bearded. He might have
+been handsome if he had not been so haggard. He gave the lead to
+the others; he seemed to know where they were going, and they
+shuffled on after him in dogged painfulness. Four months ago that
+corporal, with the spring of the energy of youth when the war was
+young, was perhaps in that green column that went through the
+streets of Brussels in the thunderous beat of their regular tread on
+their way to Paris. The group was an object lesson in how much the
+victor must suffer in war in order to make his victim surfer.
+
+Some officers were at breakfast, too. Mostly they were reservists;
+mostly bespectacled, with middle age swelling their girth and
+hollowing their chests, but sturdy enough to apply the regulations
+made for conduct of the conquered. Whilst stronger men were under
+shell-fire at the front, they were under the fire of Belgian hate as
+relentless as their own hate of England. You saw them always in the
+good restaurants, but never in the company of Belgians, these
+ostracized rulers. In four months they had made no friends; at least,
+no friends who would appear with them in public. A few thousand
+guards in Belgium in the companionship of conquest and seven
+million Belgians in the companionship of a common helplessness!
+Bayonets may make a man silent, but they cannot stop his thinking.
+
+At the breakfast table on that Christmas morning in London, Paris, or
+Berlin the patriot could find the kind of news that he liked. His racial
+and rational predilections and animosities were solaced. If there
+were good news it was "played up"; if there were bad news, it was not
+published or it was explained. L'Echo Belge and L'Independance
+Belge and all the Brussels papers were either out of business or
+being issued as single sheets in Holland and England.
+
+The Belgian, keenest of all the peoples at war for news, having less
+occupation to keep his mind off the war, must read the newspapers
+established under German auspices, which fed him with the pabulum
+that German chefs provided, reflective of the stumbling degeneracy
+of England, French weariness of the war, Russian clumsiness, and
+the invincibility of Germany. If an Englishman had to read German, or
+a German English, newspapers every morning he might have
+understood how the Belgian felt.
+
+Those who had sons or fathers or husbands in the Belgian army
+could not send or receive letters, let alone presents. Families
+scattered in different parts of Belgium could not hold reunions. But at
+mass I saw a Belgian standard in the centre of the church. That flag
+was proscribed, but the priests knew it was safe in that sacred place
+and the worshippers might feast their eyes on it as they said their
+avis.
+
+A Bavarian soldier came in softly and stood a little apart from the
+worshippers, many in mourning, at the rear; a man who was of the
+same faith as the Belgians and who crossed himself with the others in
+the house of brotherly love. He would go outside to obey orders; and
+the others to nurse their hate of him and his race. This private in his
+faded green, bowing his head before that flag in the shadows of the
+nave, was war-sick, as most soldiers were; and the Belgians were
+heartsick. They had the one solace in common. But if you had
+suggested to him to give up Belgium, his answer would have been
+that of the other Germans: "Not after all we have suffered to take it!"
+Christians have a peculiar way of applying Christianity. Yet, if it were
+not for Christianity and that infernal thing called the world's opinion,
+which did not exist in the days of Caesar and the Belgse, the Belgians
+might have been worse off than they were. More of them might have
+been dead. When they were saying, "Give us this day our daily
+bread" they were thinking, "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,"
+if ever their turn came.
+
+A satirist might have repeated the apochryphal naivete of Marie
+Antoinette, who asked why the people wanted bread when they could
+buy such nice cakes for a sou! For all the patisserie shops were
+open. Brussels is famous for its French pastry. With a store of
+preserves, why shouldn't the bakeshops go on making tarts with
+heavy crusts of the brown flour, when war had not robbed the bakers
+of their art? It gave work to them; it helped the shops to keep open
+and make a show of normality. But I noticed that they were doing little
+business. Stocks were small and bravely displayed. Only the rich
+could afford such luxuries, which in ordinary times were what ice-
+cream cones are to us. Even the jewellery shops were open, with
+diamond rings flashing in the windows.
+
+"You must pay rent; you don't want to discharge your employees,"
+said a jeweller. "There is no place to go except your shop. If you
+closed it would look as if you were afraid of the Germans. It would
+make you blue and the people in the street blue. One tries to go
+through the motions of normal existence, anyway. But, of course, you
+don't sell anything. This week I have repaired a locket which carried
+the portrait of a soldier at the front and I've put a mainspring in a
+watch. I'll warrant that is more than some of my competitors have
+done."
+
+Swing around the circle in Brussels of a winter's morning and look at
+the only crowds that the Germans allow to gather, and any doubt that
+Belgium would have gone hungry if she had not received provisions
+from the outside was dispelled. Whenever I think of a bread-line
+again I shall see the faces of a Belgian bread-line. They blot out the
+memory of those at home, where men are free to go and come;
+where war has not robbed the thrifty of food.
+
+It was fitting that the great central soup kitchen should be established
+in the central express office of the city. For in Belgium these days
+there is no express business except in German troops to the front
+and wounded to the rear. The dispatch of parcels is stopped, no less
+than the other channels of trade, in a country where trade was so rife,
+a country that lived by trade. On the stone floor, where once
+packages were arranged for forwarding to the towns whose names are
+on the walls, were many great cauldrons in clusters of three, to economize
+space and fuel.
+
+"We don't lack cooks," said a chef-who had been in a leading hotel.
+"So many of us are out of work. Our society of hotel and restaurant
+keepers took charge. We know the practical side of the business. I
+suppose you have the same kind of a society in New York and would
+turn to it for help if the Germans occupied New York?"
+
+He gave me a printed report in which I read, for example, that "M.
+Arndt, professor of the Ecole Normale, had been good enough to
+take charge of accounts," and "M. Catteau had been specially
+appointed to look after the distribution of bread." Most appetizing that
+soup prepared under direction of the best chefs in the city! The meat
+and green vegetables in it were Belgian and the peas American.
+Steaming hot in big cans it was sent to the communal centres, where
+lines of people with pots, pitchers, and pails waited to receive their
+daily allowance. A democracy was in that bread-line such as I have
+never seen anywhere except at San Francisco after the earthquake.
+Each person had a blue or a yellow ticket, with numbers to be
+punched, like a commuter. The blue tickets were for those who had
+proved to the communal authorities that they could not pay; the
+yellow for those who paid five centimes for each person served. A
+flutter of blue and yellow tickets all over Belgium, and in return life I
+With each serving of soup went a loaf of the American brown bread.
+The faces in the line were not those of people starving--they had
+been saved from starvation. There was none of the emaciation which
+pictures of famine in the Orient have made familiar; but they were
+pinched faces, bloodless faces, the faces of people on short rations.
+
+To the Belgian bread is not only the staff of life; it is the legs. At home
+we think of bread as something that goes with the rest of the meal; to
+the poorer classes of Belgians the rest of the meal is something that
+goes with bread. To you and me food has meant the payment of
+money to the baker and the butcher and the grocer, or the hotel-
+keeper. You get your money by work or from investments. What if
+there were no bread to be had for work or money? Sitting on a
+mountain of gold in the desert of Sahara would not quench thirst.
+Three hundred grammes, a minimum calculation--about half what the
+British soldier gets--was the ration. That small boy sent by his mother
+got five loaves; his ticket called for an allowance for a family of five.
+An old woman got one loaf, for she was alone in the world.
+
+Each one as he hurried by had a personal story of what war had
+meant to him. They answered your questions frankly, gladly, with the
+Belgian cheerfulness which was amazing considering the circumstances.
+A tall, distinguished-looking man was an artist.
+
+"No work for artists these days," he said.
+
+No work in a community of workers where every link of the chain of
+economic life had been broken. No work for the next man, a
+chauffeur, or the next, a brass worker; the next, a teamster; the next,
+a bank clerk; the next, a doorkeeper of a Government office; whilst
+the wives of those who still had work were buying in the only market
+they had. But the husbands of some were not at home. Each answer
+about the absent one had an appeal that nothing can picture better
+than the simple words or the looks that accompanied the words.
+
+"The last I heard of my husband he was fighting at Dixmude--two
+months ago."
+
+"Mine is wounded, somewhere in France."
+
+"Mine was with the army, too. I don't know whether he is alive or
+dead. I have not heard since Brussels was taken. He cannot get my
+letters and I cannot get his."
+
+"Mine was killed at Liege, but we have a son."
+
+So you out in Nebraska who gave a handful of wheat might know that
+said handful of wheat reached its destination in an empty stomach. If
+you sent a suit of clothes, or a cap, or a pair of socks, come along to
+the skating-rink, where ice-polo was played and matches and
+carnivals were held in better days, and look on at the boxes, packed
+tight with gifts of every manner of thing that men and women and
+children wear except silk hats, which are being opened and sorted
+and distributed into hastily-constructed cribs and compartments.
+
+A Belgian woman whose father was one of Belgium's leading
+lawyers--her husband was at the front-was the busy head of this
+organization, because, as she said, the busier she was the more it
+"keeps my mind off------" and she did not finish the sentence. How
+many times I heard that "keeps my mind off------" a sentence that was
+the more telling for not being finished. She and some other women
+began sewing and patching and collecting garments; "but our
+business grew so fast"--the business of relief is the one kind in
+Belgium that does grow these days--"that now we have hundreds of
+helpers. I begin to feel that I am what you would call in America a
+captainess of industry."
+
+Some of the good mothers in America were a little too thoughtful in
+their kindness. An odour in a box that had evidently travelled across
+the Atlantic close to the ship's boilers was traced to the pocket of a
+boy's suit, which contained the hardly-distinguishable remains of a
+ham sandwich, meant to be ready to hand for the hungry Belgian boy
+who got that suit. Broken pots of jam were quite frequent. But no
+matter. Soap and water and Belgian industry saved the suit, if not the
+sandwich. Sweaters and underclothes and overcoats almost new,
+and shiny old morning coats and trousers with holes in seat and
+knees might represent equal sacrifice on the part of some American
+three thousand miles away, and all were welcome. Needlewomen
+were given work cutting up the worn-outs of grown-ups and making
+them over into astonishingly good suits or dresses for youngsters.
+
+"We've really turned the rink into a kind of department store," said the
+lady. "Come into our boot department. We had some leather left in
+Belgium that the Germans did not requisition, so we bought it and that
+gave more Belgians work in the shoe factories. Work, you see, is
+what we want to keep our minds off------"
+
+Blue and yellow tickets here, too! Boots for children and thick-set
+working-women and watery-eyed old men!
+
+And each was required to leave behind the pair he was wearing.
+
+"Sometimes we can patch up the cast-offs, which means work for the
+cobblers," said the captainess of industry. "And who are our clerks?
+Why, the people who put on the skates for the patrons of the rink, of
+course!"
+
+One could write volumes on this systematic relief work, the
+businesslike industry of succouring Belgium by the businesslike
+Belgians, with American help. Certainly one cannot leave out those
+old men stragglers from Louvain and Bruges and Ghent--venerable
+children with no offspring to give them paternal care--who took their
+turn in getting bread, which they soaked thoroughly in their soup for
+reasons that would be no military secret, not even in the military zone.
+On Christmas Day an American, himself a smoker, thinking what
+class of children he could make happiest on a limited purse,
+remembered the ring around the stove and bought a basket of cheap
+brier pipes and tobacco. By Christmas night some toothless gums
+were sore, but a beatific smile of satiation played in white beards.
+
+Nor can one leave out the very young babies at home, who get their
+milk if grown people do not, and the older babies beyond milk but not
+yet old enough for bread and meat, whose mothers return from the
+bread-line to bring their children to another line, where they got
+portions of a syrupy mixture which those who know say is the right
+provender. On such occasions men are quite helpless. They can only
+look on with a frog in the throat at pale, improperly nourished mothers
+with bundles of potential manhood and womanhood in their arms. For
+this was woman's work for woman. Belgian women of every class
+joined in it: the competent wife of a workman, or the wife of a
+millionaire who had to walk like everybody else now that her motor-
+car was requisitioned by the army.
+
+Pop-eyed children, ruddy-cheeked, aggressive children, pinched-
+faced children, kept warm by sweaters that some American or
+English children spared, happy in that they did not know what their
+elders knew! Not the danger of physical starvation so much as the
+actual presence of mental starvation was the thing that got on your
+nerves in a land where the sun is seldom seen in winter and rainy
+days are the rule. It was bad enough in the "zone of occupation," so
+called, a line running from Antwerp past Brussels to Mons. One could
+guess what it was like in the military zone to the westward, where only
+an occasional American relief representative might go.
+
+This is not saying that the Germans were stricter than necessary, if
+we excuse the exasperation of their militarism, in order to prevent
+information from passing out, when a multitude of Belgians would
+have risked their lives gladly to help the Allies. One spy bringing
+accurate information might cost the German army thousands of
+casualties; perhaps decide the fate of a campaign. They saw the
+Belgians as enemies. They were fighting to take the lives of their
+enemies and save their own lives, which made it tough for them and
+the French and the British--tough all round, but very particularly tough
+for the Belgians.
+
+It was good for a vagrant American to dine at the American Legation,
+where Mr. and Mrs. Whitlock were far, very far, from the days in
+Toledo, Ohio, where he was mayor. Some said that the place of the
+Minister to Belgium was at Havre, where the Belgian Government
+had its offices; but neither Whitlock nor the Belgian people thought
+so, nor the German Government, since they had realized his prestige
+with the Belgians and how they would listen to him in any crisis when
+their passions might break the bonds of wisdom. Hugh Gibson, being
+the omnipresent Secretary of Legation in four languages, naturally
+was also present. We recalled dining together in Honduras, when he
+was in the thick of vexations.
+
+Trouble accommodatingly waits for him wherever he goes, because
+he has a gift for taking care of trouble, in the ascendancy of a
+cheerful spirit and much knowledge of international law. His present
+for the Minister, who daily received stacks of letters from all sources
+asking the impossible, as well as from Americans who wanted to be
+sure that the food they gave was not being purloined by the
+Germans, was a rubber stamp, "Blame-it-all-there's-a-state-of-war-in-
+Belgium!" which he suggested might save typewriting--a recommendation
+which the Minister refused to accept, not to Gibson's surprise.
+
+On that Christmas afternoon and evening, the people promenaded
+the streets as usual. You might have thought it a characteristic
+Christmas afternoon or evening except for the Landsturm patrols. But
+there was an absence of the old gaiety, and they were moving as if
+from habit and moving was all there was to do.
+
+They had heard the sound of the guns at Dixmude the night before.
+Didn't the sound seem a little nearer? No. The wind from that
+direction was stronger. When? When would the Allies come?
+
+
+
+
+X
+The Future Of Belgium
+
+
+
+In former days the traveller hardly thought of Belgium as possessing
+patriotic homogeneity. It was a land of two languages, French and
+Flemish. He was puzzled to meet people who looked like well-to-do
+mechanics, artisans, or peasants and find that they could not answer
+a simple question in French. This explained why a people so close to
+France, though they made Brussels a little Paris, would not join the
+French family and enter into the spirit and body of that great
+civilization on their borders, whose language was that of their own
+literature. Belgium seemed to have no character. Its nationality was
+the artificial product of European politics; a buffer divided in itself,
+which would be neither French, nor German, nor definitely Belgian.
+
+In later times Belgium had prospered enormously. It had developed
+the resources of the Congo in a way that had aroused a storm of
+criticism. Old King Leopold made the most of his neutral position to
+gain advantages which no one of the great Powers might enjoy
+because of jealousies. The International Sleeping Car Company was
+Belgian and Belgian capitalists secured concessions here and there,
+wherever the small tradesman might slip into openings suitable to his
+size. Leopold was not above crumbs; he made them profitable; he
+liked to make money; and Belgians liked to make money.
+
+Her defence guaranteed by neutrality, Belgium need have no thought
+except of thrift. Her ideals were those of prosperity. No ambition of
+national expansion stirred her imagination as Germany's was stirred;
+there was no fire in her soul as in that of France in apprehension of
+the day when she would have to fight for her life against Germany; no
+national cause to harden the sinews of patriotism. The immensity of
+her urban population contributed its effect in depriving her of the
+sterner stuff of which warriors are made. Success meant more
+comforts and luxuries. In towns like Brussels and Antwerp this
+doubtless had its effect on the moralities, which were hardly of the
+New England Puritan standard. She had a small standing army; a
+militia system in the process of reform against the conviction of the
+majority, unlike that of the Swiss mountaineers, that Belgium would
+never have any need for soldiers.
+
+If militarism means conscription as it exists in France and Germany,
+then militarism has improved the physique of races in an age when
+people are leaving the land for the factory. The prospect of battle's
+test unquestionably develops in a people certain sturdy qualities
+which can and ought to be developed in some other way than with
+the prospect of spending money for shells to kill people.
+
+With the world making every Belgian man a hero and the unknowing
+convinced that a citizen soldiery at Liege--defended by the Belgian
+standing army--had rushed from their homes with rifles and beaten
+German infantry, it is right to repeat that the schipperke spirit was not
+universal, that at no time had Belgium more than a hundred thousand
+men under arms, and that on the Dixmude line she maintained never
+more than eighty thousand men out of a population of seven millions,
+which should yield from seven hundred thousand to a million; while
+they lost a good deal of sympathy both in England and in France,
+from all I heard, through the number of able-bodied refugees who
+were disinclined to serve. It was a mistaken idealism that swept over
+the world, early in the war, characterizing a whole nation with the
+gallantry of its young king and his little army.
+
+The spirit of the Boers or of the Minute Men at Lexington was not in
+the Belgian people. It could not be from their very situation and
+method of life. They did not believe in war; they did not expect to
+practise war; but war came to them out of the still blue heavens as it
+came to the prosperous Incas of Peru.
+
+Where one was wrong was in the expectation that her bankers and
+capitalists--an aristocracy of money not given to the simple life--and
+her manufacturers, artisans, and traders, if not her peasants, would
+soon make truce with Caesar for individual profit. Therein, Belgium
+showed that she was not lacking in the moral spirit which, with the
+schipperke's, became a fighting spirit. It seemed as if the metal of
+many Belgians, struck to a white heat in the furnace of war, had
+cooled under German occupation to the tempered steel of a new
+nationalism.
+
+When you travelled over Belgium after it was pacified, the logic of
+German methods became clear. What was haphazard in their reign
+of terror was due to the inevitable excesses of a soldiery taking the
+calculated redress ordered by superiors as licence in the first red
+passion of war to a war-mad nation, which was sullen because
+Belgians had not given up the keys of the gate to France.
+
+The extent of the ruins in Belgium east of the Yser has been
+exaggerated. They were the first ruins, most photographed, most
+advertised; bad enough, inexcusable enough, and warrantedly
+causing a spell of horror throughout the civilized world. We have
+heard all about them, mind, while hearing nothing about those in
+Lorraine, where the Bavarians exceeded Prussian ruthlessness in
+reprisals. I mean, that to have read the newspapers in early
+September, 1914, one would have thought that half the towns of
+Belgium were debris while the truth is that only a small percentage
+are--those in the path of the German army's advance. Two-thirds of
+Louvain itself is unharmed; though the fact alone of its venerable
+library being in ashes is sufficient outrage, if not another building had
+been harmed.
+
+The German army planned destruction with all the regularity that it
+billeted troops, or requisitioned supplies, or laid war indemnities. It did
+not destroy by shells exclusively. It deliberately burned homes. No
+matter whether the owners were innocent or not, the homes were
+burned as an example. The principle applied was that of punishing
+half a dozen or all the boys in the class in the hope of getting the real
+culprit.
+
+Cold ruins mark blocks where sniping was thought to have occurred.
+The Germans insist that theirs was the merciful way. Krieg ist Krieg.
+When a hundred citizens of Louvain were gathered and shot
+because they were the first citizens of Louvain to hand, the purpose
+was the security of the mass at the expense of the individual,
+according to the war-is-war machine reasoning. No doubt there was
+firing on German troops by civilians. What did the Germans expect
+after the way that they had invaded Belgium? If they had bothered
+with trials and investigations, the conquerors say, sniping would have
+kept up. They may have taken innocent lives and burned the homes
+of the innocent, they admit, but their defence is that thereby they
+saved many thousands of their soldiers and of Belgians, and
+prevented the feud between the rulers and the ruled from becoming
+more embittered.
+
+Sniping over, the next step in policy was to keep the population quiet
+with a minimum of soldiery, which would permit a maximum at the
+front. In a thickly-settled country, so easily policed, in a land with the
+population inured to peace, the wisdom of keeping quiet was soon
+evident to the people. What if Boers had been in the Belgians' place?
+Would they have attempted guerrilla warfare? Would you or I want to
+bring destruction on neighbours in a land without any rural fastnesses
+as a rendezvous for operations? One could tell only if a section of our
+country were invaded.
+
+A burned block cost less than a dead German soldier. The system
+was efficacious. It was mercilessness mixed with craft. When
+Prussian brusqueness was found to be unnecessarily irritating to the
+population, causing rash Belgians to turn desperate, the elders of the
+Saxon and Bavarian coreligionists were called in. They were amiable
+fathers of families, who would obey orders without taking the law into
+their own hands. The occupation was strictly military. It concerned
+itself with the business of national suffocation. All the functions of
+government were in German hands. But Belgian policemen guided
+the street traffic, arrested culprits for ordinary misdemeanours, and
+took them before Belgian judges. This concession, which also meant
+a saving in soldiers, only aggravated to the Belgian the regulations
+directed against his personal freedom.
+
+"Eat, drink, and live as usual. Go to your own police courts for
+misdemeanours," was the German edict in a word; "but remember
+that ours is the military power, and no act that aids the enemy, that
+helps the cause of Belgium in this war, is permitted. Observe that
+particular affiche about a spy, please. He was shot."
+
+At every opportunity Belgians were told that the British and the
+French could never come to their rescue. The Allies were beaten. It
+was the British who got Belgium into trouble; the British who were
+responsible for the idleness, the penury, the hunger and the suffering
+in Belgium. The British had used Belgium as a cat's-paw; then they
+had deserted her. But Belgians remained mostly unconvinced. They
+were making war with mind and spirit, if not with arms.
+
+"We know how to suffer in Belgium," said a Belgian jurist. "Our ability
+to suffer and to hold fast to our hearths has kept us going through the
+centuries. Flemish and French, we have stubbornness in common.
+Now a ruffian has come into our house and taken us by the throat. He
+can choke us to death, or he can slowly starve us to death, but he
+cannot make us yield. No, we shall never forgive!"
+
+"You too hate, then?" I asked.
+
+"Of course I hate. For the first time in my life I know what it is to hate;
+and so do my countrymen. I begin to enjoy my hate. It is one of the
+privileges of our present existence. We cannot stand on chairs and
+tables as they do in Berlin cafes and sing our hate, but no one can
+stop our hating in secret."
+
+Beside the latest verboten and regulation of Belgian conduct on the
+city walls were posted German official news bulletins. The Belgians
+stopped to read; they paused to re-read. And these were the rare
+occasions when they smiled, and they liked to have a German sentry
+see that smile.
+
+"Pour les enfants!" they whispered, as if talking to one another about
+a creche. Little ones, be good! Here is a new fairy tale!
+
+When a German wanted to buy something he got frigid politeness
+and attention--very frigid, telling politeness--from the clerk, which said:
+
+"Beast! Invader! I do not ask you to buy, but as you ask, I sell; and as
+I sell I hate! I hate! ! I hate! ! !"
+
+An officer entering a shop and seeing a picture of King Albert on the
+wall, said:
+
+"The orders are to take that down!"
+
+"But don't you love your Kaiser?" asked the woman who kept the
+shop.
+
+"Certainly!"
+
+"And I love my King!" was the answer. "I like to look at his picture just
+as much as you like to look at your Kaiser's."
+
+"I had not thought of it in that way!" said the officer.
+
+Indeed, it is very hard for any conqueror to think of it in that way. So
+the picture remained on the wall.
+
+How many soldiers would it take to enforce the regulation that no
+Belgian was to wear the Belgian colours? Imagine thousands and
+thousands of Landsturm men moving about and plucking King
+Albert's face or the black, yellow and red from Belgian buttonholes!
+No sooner would a buttonhole be cleared in front than the emblem
+would appear in a buttonhole in the rear. The Landsturm would face
+counter, flank, frontal, and rear attacks in a most amusing military
+manoeuvre, which would put those middle-aged conquerors fearfully
+out of breath and be rare sport for the Belgians. You could not arrest
+the whole population and lead them off to jail; and if you bayoneted a
+few--which really those phlegmatic, comfortable old Landsturms
+would not have the heart to do for such a little thing--why, it would get
+into the American Press, and the Berlin Foreign Office would say:
+
+"There you are, you soldiers, breaking all the crockery again!"
+
+In the smaller towns, where the Germans were billeted in Belgian
+houses, of course the hosts had to serve their unwelcome guests.
+
+"Yet we managed to let them know what was in our hearts," said one
+woman. "Some tried to be friendly. They said they had wives and
+children at home; and we said: 'How glad your wives and children
+would be to see you! Why don't you go home?'"
+
+When a report reached the commander in Ghent that an old man had
+concealed arms, a sergeant with a guard was sent to search the
+house.
+
+"Yes, my son has a rifle."
+
+"Where is it?"
+
+"In his hands on the Yser, if he is not dead, monsieur. You are
+welcome to search, monsieur."
+
+Belgium was developing a new humour, a humour at the expense of
+the Germans. In their homes they mimicked their rulers as freely as
+they pleased. To carry mimickry into the streets meant arrest for the
+elders, but not always for the children. You have heard the story,
+which is true, of how some gamins put carrots in old bowler hats to
+represent the spikes of German helmets, and at their leader's
+command of "On to Paris!" did a goose-step backwards. There is
+another which you may not have heard of a small boy who put on
+grandfather's spectacles, a pillow under his coat, and a card on his
+cap, 'Officer of the Landsturm.' The conquerors had enough sense
+not to interfere with the battalion which was taking Paris; but the
+pseudo-Landsturm officer was chased into a doorway and got a cuff
+after his placard was taken away from him.
+
+When a united public opinion faces bayonets it is not altogether
+helpless to reply. By the atmospheric force of mass it enjoys a
+conquest of its own. If a German officer or soldier entered a street
+car, women drew aside in a way to indicate that they did not want
+their garments contaminated. People walked by the sentries in the
+streets giving them room as you would give a mangy dog room, yet
+as if they did not see the sentries; as if no sentries existed.
+
+The Germans said that they wanted to be friendly. They even
+expressed surprise that the Belgians would not return their advances.
+They sent out invitations to social functions in Brussels, but no one
+came--not even to a ball given by the soldiers to the daughters of the
+poor. Belgium stared its inhospitality, its contempt, its cynical
+drolleries at the invader.
+
+I kept thinking of a story I heard in Alaska of a man who had shown
+himself yellow by cheating his partner out of a mine. He appeared
+one day hungry at a cabin occupied by half a dozen men who knew
+him. They gave him food and a bunk that night; they gave him
+breakfast; they even carried his blanket-roll out to his sled and
+harnessed his dogs as a hint, and saw him go without one man
+having spoken to him. No matter if that man believed he had done no
+wrong, he would have needed a rhinoceros hide not to have felt this
+silence. Such treatment the Belgians have given to the Germans,
+except that they furnished the shelter and harnessed the team under
+duress, as they so specifically indicate by every act. No wonder, then,
+that the old Landsturm guards, used at home to saying "Wie gehts?"
+and getting a cheery answer from the people they passed in the
+streets, were lonely.
+
+Not only stubborn, but shrewd, these Belgians. Both qualities were
+brought out in the officials who had to deal with the Germans,
+particularly in the small towns and where destruction had been worst.
+Take, for example, M. Nerincx, of Louvain, who has energy enough to
+carry him buoyantly through an American political campaign,
+speaking from morning to midnight. He had been in America. I
+insisted that he ought to give up his professorship, get naturalized,
+and run for office in America. I know that he would soon be mayor of
+a town, or in Congress.
+
+When the war began he was professor of international law at the
+ancient university whose walls alone stand, surrounding the ashes of
+its priceless volumes, across from the ruined cathedral. With the
+burgomaster a refugee from the horrors of that orgy, he turned man
+of action on behalf of the demoralized people of the town with a
+thousand homes in ruins. Very lucky the client in its lawyer. He is the
+kind of man who makes the best of the situation; picks up the
+fragments of the pitcher, cements them together with the first material
+at hand, and goes for more milk. It was he who got a German
+commander to sign an agreement not to "kill, burn, or plunder" any
+more, and the signs were still up on some houses saying that "This
+house is not to be burned except by official order."
+
+There in the Hotel de Ville, which is quite unharmed, he had his office,
+within reach of the German commander. He yielded to Caesar and
+protected his own people day in and day out, diplomatic, watchful,
+Belgian. And he was cheerful. What other people could have retained
+any vestige of cheer! Sometimes one wondered if it were not partly
+due to an absence of keen nerve-sensibilities, or to some other of the
+traits which are a product of the Belgian hothouse and Belgian
+inheritance.
+
+I might tell you about M. Nerincx's currency system; how he issued
+paper promises to pay when he gave employment to the idle in
+repairing those houses which permitted of being repaired, and
+cleaned the streets of debris, till ruined Louvain looked as shipshape
+as ruined Pompeii; and how he got a little real money from Brussels
+to stop depreciation when the storekeepers came to him and said
+that they had stacks of his notes which no mercantile concern would
+cash.
+
+M. Nerincx was practising in the life about all that he ever learned and
+taught at the university, "which we shall rebuild!" he declared, with
+cheery confidence. "You will help us in America," he said. "I'm going
+to America to lecture one of these days about Louvain!"
+
+"You have the most famous ruins, unless it is Rheims," I assured him.
+"You will get flocks of tourists"--particularly if he fenced in the ruins
+of the library and burned leaves of ancient books were on sale.
+
+"Then you will not only have fed, but have helped to rebuild Belgium,"
+he added.
+
+A shadow of apprehension overhung his anticipation of the day of
+Belgium's delivery. Many a Belgian had arms hidden from the alert
+eye of German espionage, and his bitterness was solaced by the
+thought; "I'll have a shot at the Germans when they go!" The lot of the
+last German soldier to leave a town, unless the garrison slips away
+overnight, would hardly make him a good life-insurance risk.
+
+My last look at a Belgian bread-line was at Liege, that town which
+had had a blaze of fame in August, 1914, and was now almost
+forgotten. An industrial town, its mines and works were idle. The
+Germans had removed the machinery for rifle-making, which has
+become the most valuable kind of machinery in the world next to that
+for making guns and shells. If skilled Belgians here or elsewhere were
+called upon to serve the Germans at their craft, they suddenly
+became butter-fingered. So that bread-line at Liege was long, its
+queue stretching the breadth of the cathedral square.
+
+As most of the regular German officers in Belgium were cavalrymen--
+there was nothing for cavalry to do on the Aisne line of trenches--it
+was quite in keeping that the aide to the commandant of Liege, who
+looked after my pass to leave the country, should be a young officer
+of Hussars. He spoke English well; he was amiable and intelligent.
+While I waited for the commandant to sign the pass the aide chatted
+of his adventures on the pursuit of the British to the Marne. The
+British fought like devils, he said. It was a question if their new army
+would be so good. He showed me a photograph of himself in a British
+Tommy's overcoat.
+
+"When we took some prisoners I was interested in their overcoats,"
+he explained. "I asked one of the Tommies to let me try on his. It fitted
+me perfectly, so I kept it as a souvenir and had this photograph made
+to show my friends."
+
+Perhaps a shade of surprise passed over my face.
+
+"You don't understand," he said. "That Tommy had to give me his
+coat! He was a prisoner."
+
+On my way out from Liege I was to see Vise--the town of the
+gateway--the first town of the war to suffer from frightfulness. I had
+thought of it as entirely destroyed. A part of it had survived.
+
+A delightful old Bavarian Landsturmman searched me for contraband
+letters when our cart stopped on the Belgian side of a barricade at
+Maastricht, with Dutch soldiers on the other side. His examination
+was a little perfunctory, almost apologetic, and he did want to be
+friendly. You guessed that he was thinking he would like to go around
+the corner and have "ein Glas Bier" rather than search me. What a
+hearty "Auf wiedersehen!" he gave me when he saw that I was
+inclined to be friendly, too!
+
+I was glad to be across that frontier, with a last stamp on my
+Passierschein; glad to be out of the land of those ghostly Belgian
+millions in their living death; glad not to have to answer again their
+ravenously whispered "When?" When would the Allies come?
+
+The next time that I was in Belgium it was in the British lines of the
+Ypres salient, two months later. When should I be next in Brussels?
+With a victorious British army, I hoped. A long wait it was to be for a
+conquered people, listening each day and trying to think that the
+sound of gun-fire was nearer.
+
+The stubborn, passive resistance and self-sacrifice that I have
+pictured was that of a moral leadership of a majority shaming the
+minority; of an ostracism of all who had relations with the enemy. Of
+course, it was not the spirit of the whole. The American Commission,
+as charity usually must, had to overcome obstacles set in its path by
+those whom it would aid. Belgian politicians, in keeping with the
+weakness of their craft, could no more forego playing politics in time
+of distress than some that we had in San Francisco and some we
+have heard of only across the British Channel from Belgium.
+
+Zealous leaders exaggerated the famine of their districts in order to
+get larger supplies; communities in great need without spokesmen
+must be reached; powerful towns found excuses for not forwarding
+food to small villages which were without influence. Natural greed got
+the better of men used to turning a penny any way they could.
+Rascally bakers who sifted the brown flour to get the white to sell to
+patisserie shops and the well-to-do while the bread-line got the bran,
+required shrewd handling, and it was found that the best punishment
+was to let the public know the pariah part they had played. In fact that
+soon put a stop to the practice. It meant that the baker's business
+was ruined and he had lost his friends.
+
+A certain percentage of Belgians, as would happen in any country,
+saw the invasion only as a visitation of disaster, like an earthquake. A
+flat country of gardens limits one's horizon. They fell into line with the
+sentiment of the mass. But as time wore on into the summer and
+autumn of the second year, some of them began to think, What was
+the use? German propaganda was active. All that the Allies had
+cared for Belgium was to use her to check the German tide to Paris
+and the Channel ports! Perfidious England had betrayed Belgium!
+German business and banking influences, which had been considerable
+in Belgium before the war, and the numerous German residents
+who had returned, formed a busy circle of appeal to Belgian business
+men, who were told that the British navy stood between them and a
+return to prosperity. Germany was only too willing that they should
+resume their trade with the rest of the world.
+
+Why should not Belgium come into the German customs union? Why
+should not Belgium make the best of her unfortunate situation, as
+became a practical and thrifty people? But be it a customs union or
+annexation that Germany plans, the steel had entered the hearts of
+all Belgians with red corpuscles; and King Albert and his
+"schipperkes" were still fighting the Germans at Dixmude. A British
+army appearing before Brussels would end casuistry; and pessimism
+would pass, and the German residents, too, with the huzzas of all
+Belgium as the gallant king once more ascended the steps of his
+palace.
+
+Worthy of England at her best was her consent to allow the
+Commission's food to pass, which she accompanied by generous
+giving. She might seem slow in making ready her army--though I do
+not think that she was--but give she could and give she did. It was a
+grave question if her consent was in keeping with the military policy
+which believes that any concession to sentiment in the grim business
+of war is unwise. Certainly, the Krieg ist Krieg of Germany would not
+have permitted it.
+
+There is the very point of the war that ought to make any neutral take
+sides. If the Belgians had not received bread from the outside world,
+then Germany would either have had to spare enough to keep them
+from starving or faced the desperation of a people who would fight for
+food with such weapons as they had. This must have brought a
+holocaust of reprisals that would have made the orgy of Louvain
+comparatively insignificant. However much the Germans hampered
+the Commission with red tape and worse than red tape through the
+activities of German residents in Belgium, Germany did not want the
+Commission to withdraw. It was helping her to economize her food
+supplies. And England answered a human appeal at the cost of hard-
+and-fast military policy. She was still true to the ideals which have set
+their stamp on half the world.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+Winter In Lorraine
+
+
+
+Only a winding black streak, that four hundred and fifty miles of
+trenches on a flat map. It is difficult to visualize the whole as you see
+it in your morning paper, or to realize the labour it represents in its
+course through the mire and over mountain slopes, through villages
+and thick forests and across open fields.
+
+Every mile of it was located by the struggle of guns and rifles and
+men coming to a stalemate of effort, when both dug into the earth
+and neither could budge the other. It is a line of countless battles and
+broken hopes; of charges as brave as men ever made; a symbol of
+skill and dogged patience and eternal vigilance of striving foe against
+striving foe.
+
+From the first, the sector from Rheims to Flanders was most familiar
+to the public. The world still thinks of the battle of the Marne as an
+affair at the door of Paris, though the heaviest fighting was from Vitry-
+le-Francois eastward and the fate of Paris was no less decided on the
+fields of Lorraine than on the fields of Champagne. The storming of
+Rheims Cathedral became the theme of thousands of words of print
+to one word for the defence of the Plateau d'Amance or the struggle
+around Luneville. Our knowledge of the war is from glimpses through
+the curtain of military secrecy which was drawn tight over Lorraine
+and the Vosges, shrouded in mountain mists. This is about Lorraine
+in winter, when the war was six months old.
+
+But first, on our way, a word about Paris, which I had not seen since
+September. At the outset of the war, Parisians who had not gone to
+the front were in a trance of suspense; they were magnetized by the
+tragic possibilities of the hour. The fear of disaster was in their hearts,
+though they might deny it to themselves. They could think of nothing
+but France. Now they realized that the best way to help France was
+by going on with their work at home. Paris was trying to be normal,
+but no Parisian was making the bluff that Paris was normal. The
+Gallic lucidity of mind prevented such self-deception.
+
+Is it normal to have your sons, brothers, and husbands up to their
+knees in icy water in the trenches, in danger of death every minute?
+This attitude seems human; it seems logical. One liked the French for
+it. One liked them for boasting so little. In their effort at normality
+they had accomplished more than they realized; for one-sixth of
+the wealth of France was in German hands. A line of steel made
+the rest safe for those not at the front to pursue the routine of peace.
+
+When I had been in Paris in September there was no certainty about
+railroad connections anywhere. You went to the station and took your
+chances, governed by the movement of troops, not to mention other
+conditions. This time I took the regular noon express to Nancy, as I
+might have done to Marseilles, or Rome, or Madrid, had I chosen.
+The sprinkling of quiet army officers on the train were in the new
+uniform of peculiar steely grey, in place of the target blue and red. But
+for them and the number of women in mourning and one other
+circumstance, the train might have been bound for Berlin, with Nancy
+only a stop on the way.
+
+The other circumstance was the presence of a soldier in the vestibule
+who said: "Votre laisser-passer, monsieur, s'il vous platt!" If you had a
+laisser-passer, he was most polite; but if you lacked one, he would
+also have been most polite and so would the guard that took you in
+charge at the next station. In other words, monsieur, you must have
+something besides a railroad ticket if you are on a train that runs past
+the fortress of Toul and your destination is Nancy. You must have a
+military pass, which was never given to foreigners if they were
+travelling alone in the zone of military operations. The pulse of the
+Frenchman beats high, his imagination bounds, when he looks
+eastward. To the east are the lost provinces and the frontier drawn by
+the war of '70 between French Lorraine and German Lorraine. This
+gave our journey interest.
+
+Nancy, capital of French Lorraine, is so near Metz, the great German
+fortress town of German Lorraine, that excursion trains used to run to
+Nancy in the opera season. "They are not running this winter," say
+the wits of Nancy. "For one reason, we have no opera--and there are
+other reasons."
+
+An aeroplane from the German lines has only to toss a bomb in the
+course of an average reconnaissance on Nancy if it chooses; for
+Zeppelins are within easy reach of Nancy. But here was Nancy as
+brilliantly lighted at nine in the evening as any city of its size at home.
+Our train, too, had run with the windows unshaded. After the
+darkness of London, and after English trains with every window-
+shade closely drawn, this was a surprise.
+
+It was a threat, an anticipation, that darkened London, while Nancy
+knew fulfilment. Bombardment and bomb-dropping were nothing new
+to Nancy. The spice of danger gives a fillip to business to the town
+whose population heard the din of the most thunderously spectacular
+action of the war echoing among the surrounding hills. Nancy saw the
+enemy beaten back. Now she was so close to the front that she felt
+the throb of the army's life.
+
+"Don't you ever worry about aerial raids?" I asked madame behind
+the counter at the hotel.
+
+"Do the men in the trenches worry about them?" she answered. "We
+have a much easier time than they. Why shouldn't we share some of
+their dangers? And when a Zeppelin appears and our guns begin
+firing, we all feel like soldiers under fire."
+
+"Are all the population here as usual?"
+
+"Certainly, monsieur!" she said. "The Germans can never take
+Nancy. The French are going to take Metz!"
+
+The meal which that hotel restaurant served was as good as in peace
+times. Who deserves a good meal if not the officer who comes in
+from the front? And madame sees that he gets it. She is as proud of
+her poulet en casserole as any commander of a soixante-quinze
+battery of its practice. There was steam heat, too, in the hotel, which
+gave an American a homelike feeling.
+
+In a score of places in the Eastern States you see landscapes with
+high hills like the spurs of the Vosges around Nancy sprinkled with
+snow and under a blue mist. And the air was dry; it had the life of our
+air. Old Civil War men who had been in the Tennessee Mountains or
+the Shenandoah Valley would feel perfectly at home in such
+surroundings; only the foreground of farm land which merges into the
+crests covered with trees in the distance is more finished. The people
+were tilling it hundreds of years before we began tilling ours. They till
+well; they make Lorraine a rich province of France.
+
+With guns pounding in the distance, boys in their capes were skipping
+and frolicking on their way to school; housewives were going to
+market, and the streets were spotlessly clean. All the men of Nancy
+not in the army pursued their regular routine while the army went
+about its business of throwing shells at the Germans. On the dead
+walls of the buildings were M. Deschanel's speech in the Chamber of
+Deputies, breathing endurance till victory, and the call for the class of
+recruits of 1915, which you will find on the walls of the towns of all
+France beside that of the order of mobilization in August, now
+weather-stained. Nancy seemed, if anything, more French than any
+interior French town. Though near the border, there is no touch of
+German influence. When you walked through the old Place
+Stanislaus, so expressive of the architectural taste bred for centuries
+in the French, you understand the glow in the hearts of this very
+French population which made them unconscious of danger while
+their flag was flying over this very French city.
+
+No two Christian peoples we know are quite so different as the
+French and the Germans. To each every national thought and habit
+incarnates a patriotism which is in defiance of that on the other side of
+the frontier. Over in America you may see the good in both sides, but
+no Frenchman and no German can on the Lorraine frontier. If he
+should, he would no longer be a Frenchman or a German in time of
+war.
+
+At our service in front of the hotel were waiting two mortals in goatskin
+coats, with scarfs around their ears and French military caps on top of
+the scarfs. They were official army chauffeurs. If you have ridden
+through the Alleghenies in winter in an open car, why explain that
+seeing the Vosges front in a motor-car may be a joy ride to an
+Eskimo, but not to your humble servant? But the roads were perfect;
+as good wherever we went in this mountain country as from New
+York to Poughkeepsie. I need not tell you this if you have been in
+France; but you will be interested to know that Lorraine keeps her
+roads in perfect repair even in war time.
+
+Crossing the swollen Moselle on a military bridge, twisting in and out
+of valleys and speeding through villages, one saw who were guarding
+the army's secrets, but little of the army itself and few signs of
+transportation on a bleak, snowy day. At the outskirts of every village,
+at every bridge, and at intervals along the road, Territorial sentries
+stopped the car. Having an officer along was not sufficient to let you
+whizz by important posts. He must show his pass. Every sentry was a
+reminder of the hopelessness of being a correspondent these days
+without official sanction.
+
+The sentries were men in the thirties. In Belgium, their German
+counterpart, the Landsturm, were the monitors of a journey that I
+made. No troops are more military than the first line Germans; but in
+the snap and spirit of his salute the French Territorial has an elan, a
+martial fervour, which the phlegmatic German in the thirties lacks.
+
+Occasionally we passed scattered soldiers in the village streets, or a
+door opened to show a soldier figure in the doorway. The reason that
+we were not seeing anything of the army was the same that keeps
+the men and boys who are on the steps of the country grocery in
+summer at home around the stove in winter. All these villages were
+full of reservists who were indoors. They could be formed in the street
+ready for the march to any part of the line where a concentrated
+attack was made almost as soon after the alarm as a fire engine
+starts to a fire. Now, imagine your view of a cricket match limited to
+the bowler: and that is all you see in the low country of Flanders. You
+have no grasp of what all the noise and struggle means, for you
+cannot see over the shoulders of the crowd. But in Lorraine you have
+only to ascend a hill and the moves in the chess game of war are
+clear.
+
+A panorama unfolds as our car takes a rising grade to the village of
+Ste. Genevieve. We alight and walk along a bridge, where the sentry
+of a lookout is on watch. He seems quite alone, but at our approach a
+dozen of his comrades come out of their "home" dug in the hillside.
+Wherever you go about the frozen country of Lorraine it is a case of
+flushing soldiers from their shelters. A small, semicircular table is set
+up before the lookout, like his compass before a mariner. Here run
+blue pencil lines of direction pointing to Pont-a-Mousson, to Chateau-
+Salins, and other towns. Before us to the east rose the tree-clad
+crests of the famous Grand Couronne of Nancy, and faintly in the
+distance we could see Metz.
+
+"Those guns that I hear, are they firing across the frontier?" I asked.
+For some French batteries command one of the outer forts of Metz.
+
+"No, they are near Pont-a-Mousson."
+
+To the north the little town of Pont-a-Mousson lay in the lap of the
+river bottom, and across the valley, to the west, the famous Bois le
+Pretre. More guns were speaking from the forest depths, which
+showed great scars where the trees had been cut to give fields of fire.
+This was well to the rear of our position, marking the boundaries of
+the wedge that the Germans drove into the French lines, with its point
+at St. Mihiel, in trying to isolate the forts of Verdun and Toul.
+Doubtless you have noticed that wedge on the snake maps and have
+wondered about it, as I have. It looks so narrow that the French ought
+to be able to shoot across it from both sides. If so, why don't the
+Germans widen it?
+
+Well, for one thing, a quarter of an inch on a map is a good many
+miles of ground. The Germans cannot spread their wedge because
+they would have to climb the walls of an alley. That was a fact as
+clear to the eye as the valley of the Hudson from West Point. The
+Germans occupy an alley within an alley, as it were. They have their
+own natural defences for the edges of their wedge; or, where they do
+not, they lie cheek by jowl with the French in such thick woods as the
+Bois le Pretre.
+
+At our feet, looking toward Metz, an apron of cultivated land swept
+down for a mile or more to a forest edge. This was cut by lines of
+trenches, whose barbed-wire protection pricked a blanket of snow.
+
+"Our front is in those woods," explained the colonel who was in
+command of the point.
+
+"A major when the war began and an officer of reserves," mon
+capitaine, who had brought us out from Paris, explained about the
+colonel. We were soon used to hearing that a colonel had been a
+major or a major a captain before the Kaiser had tried to get Nancy.
+There was quick death and speedy promotion at the great battle of
+Lorraine, as there was at Gettysburg and Antietam.
+
+"They charged out of the woods, and we had a battalion of reserves--
+here are some of them--mes poilus!"
+
+He turned affectionately to the bearded fellows in scarfs who had
+come out of the shelter. They smiled back. Now, as we all chatted
+together, officer-and-man distinction disappeared. We were in a
+family party.
+
+It was all very simple to mes poilus, that first fight. They had been told
+to hold. If Ste. Genevieve were lost, the Amance plateau was in
+danger, and the loss of the Amance plateau meant the fall of Nancy.
+Some military martinets say that the soldiers of France think too
+much. In this case thinking may have taught them responsibility. So
+they held; they lay tight, these reserves, and kept on firing as the
+Germans swarmed out of the woods.
+
+"And the Germans stopped there, monsieur. They hadn't very far to
+go, had they? But the last fifty yards, monsieur, are the hardest
+travelling when you are trying to take a trench."
+
+They knew, these poilus, these veterans. Every soldier who serves in
+Lorraine knows. They themselves have tried to rush out of the edge
+of a woods across an open space against intrenched Germans and
+found the shoe on the other foot.
+
+Now the fields in the foreground down to the woods' edge were bare
+of any living thing. You had to take mon capitaine's word for it that
+there were any soldiers in front of us.
+
+"The Boches are a good distance away at this point," he said. "They
+are in the next woods."
+
+A broad stretch of snow lay between the two clumps of woods. It was
+not worth while for either side to try to get possession of the
+intervening space. At the first movement by either French or
+Germans the woods opposite would hum with rifle fire and echo with
+cannonading. So, like rival parties of Arctic explorers waiting out the
+Arctic winter, they watched each other. But if one force or the other
+napped and the other caught him at it, then winter would not stay a
+brigade commander's ambition. Three days later in this region the
+French, by a quick movement, got a good bag of prisoners to make a
+welcome item for the daily French official bulletin.
+
+"We wait and the Germans wait on spring for any big movement,"
+said the colonel. "Men can't lie out all night in the advance in weather
+like this. In that direction------" He indicated a part of the line where
+the two armies were facing each other across the old frontier. Back
+and forth they had fought, only to arrive where they had begun.
+
+There was something else which the colonel wished us to see before
+we left the hill of Ste. Genevieve. It appealed to his Gallic sentiment,
+this quadrilateral of stone on the highest point where legend tells that
+"Jovin, a Christian and very faithful, vanquished the German
+barbarians 366 A.D."
+
+"We have to do as well in our day as Jovin in his," remarked the
+colonel.
+
+The church of Ste. Genevieve was badly smashed by shell. So was
+the church in the village on the Plateau d'Amance, as are most
+churches in this district of Lorraine. Framed through a great gap in
+the wall of the church of Amance was an immense Christ on the
+cross without a single abrasion, and a pile of debris at its feet. After
+seeing as many ruined churches as I have, one becomes almost
+superstitious at how often the figures of Christ escape. But I have
+also seen effigies of Christ blown to bits.
+
+Anyone who, from an eminence, has seen one battle fought
+visualizes another readily when the positions lie at his feet. Looking
+out on the field of Gettysburg from Round Top, I can always get the
+same thrill that I had when, seated in a gallery above the Russian and
+the Japanese armies, I saw the battle of Liao-yang. In sight of that
+Plateau d'Amance, which rises like a great knuckle above the
+surrounding country, a battle covering twenty times the extent of
+Gettysburg raged, and one could have looked over a battle-line as far
+as the eye may see from a steamer's mast.
+
+An icy gale swept across the white crest of the plateau on this
+January day, but it was nothing to the gale of shells that descended
+on it in late August and early September. Forty thousand shells, it is
+estimated, fell there. One kicked up fragments of steel on the field like
+peanut-shells after a circus has gone. Here were the emplacements
+of a battery of French soixante-quinze within a circle of holes torn by
+its adversaries' replies to its fire; a little farther along, concealed by
+shrubbery, the position of another battery which the enemy had not
+located.
+
+So that was it! The struggle on the immense landscape, where at
+least a quarter of a million men were killed and wounded, became as
+simple as some Brobdingnagian football match. Before the war
+began the French would not move a man within five miles of the
+frontier lest it be provocative; but once the issue was joined they
+sprang for Alsace and Lorraine, their imagination magnetized by the
+thought of the recovery of the lost provinces. Their Alpine chasseurs,
+mountain men of the Alpine and the Pyrenees districts, were
+concentrated for the purpose.
+
+I recalled a remark I had heard: "What a pitiful little offensive that
+was!" It was made by one of those armchair "military experts" who
+look at a map and jump at a conclusion. They appear very wise in
+their wordiness when real military experts are silent for want of
+knowledge. Pitiful, was it? Ask the Germans who faced it what they
+think. Pitiful, that sweep over those mountain walls and through the
+passes? Pitiful, perhaps, because it failed, though not until it had
+taken Chateau-Salins in the north and Mulhouse in the south. Ask the
+Germans if they think that it was pitiful! The Confederates also failed
+at Antietam and at Gettysburg, but the Union army never thought of
+their efforts as pitiful.
+
+The French fell back because all the weight of the German army was
+thrown against France, while the Austrians were left to look after the
+slowly mobilizing Russians. Two million five hundred thousand men
+on their first line the Germans had, as we know now, against the
+French twelve hundred thousand and Sir John French's army fighting
+one against four. To make sure of saving Paris as the Germans
+swung their mighty flanking column through Belgium, Joffre had to
+draw in his lines. The Germans came over the hills as splendidly as
+the French had gone. They struck in all directions toward Paris. In
+Lorraine was their left flank, the Bavarians, meant to play the same
+part to the east that von Kluck played to the west. We heard only of
+von Kluck; nothing of this terrific struggle in Lorraine.
+
+From the Plateau d'Amance you may see how far the Germans came
+and what was their object. Between the fortresses of Epinal and of
+Toul lies the Trouee de Mirecourt--the Gap of Mirecourt. It is said that
+the French had purposely left it open when they were thinking of
+fighting the Germans on their own frontier and not on that of Belgium.
+They wanted the Germans to make their trial here--and wisely, for
+with all the desperate and courageous efforts of the Bavarian and
+Saxon armies they never got near the gap.
+
+If they had forced it, however, with von Kluck swinging on the other
+flank, they might have got around the French army. Such was the
+dream of German strategy, whose realization was so boldly and
+skilfully undertaken. The Germans counted on their immense force of
+artillery, built for this war in the last two years and out-ranging the
+French, to demoralize the French infantry. But the French infantry
+called the big shells marmites (saucepans), and made a joke of them
+and the death they spread as they tore up the fields in clouds of
+earth.
+
+Ah, it took more than artillery to beat back the best troops of France in
+a country like this--a country of rolling hills and fenceless fields cut by
+many streams and set among thick woods, where infantry on a bank
+or at a forest's edge with rifles and rapid-firers and guns kept their
+barrels cool until the charge developed in the open. Some of these
+forests are only a few acres in extent; others are hundreds of acres.
+In the dark depths of one a frozen lake was seen glistening from our
+viewpoint on the Plateau d'Amance.
+
+"Indescribable that scene which we witnessed from here," said an
+officer who had been on the plateau throughout the fighting. "All the
+splendid majesty of war was set on a stage before you. It was
+intoxication. We could see the lines of troops in their retreat and
+advance, batteries and charges shrouded in shrapnel smoke. What
+hosts of guns the Germans had! They seemed to be sowing the
+whole face of the earth with shells. The roar of the thing was like that
+of chaos itself. It was the exhilaration of the spectacle that kept us
+from dropping from fatigue. Two weeks of this business! Two weeks
+with every unit of artillery and infantry always ready, if not actually
+engaged!"
+
+The general in command was directing not one but many battles,
+each with a general of its own; manoeuvring troops across streams
+and open places, seeking the cover of forests, with the aeroplanes
+unable to learn how many of the enemy were hidden in the forests on
+his front, while he tried to keep his men out of angles and make his
+movements correspond with those of the divisions on his right and
+left. Skill this required; skill equivalent to German skill; the skill
+which you cannot command in a month after calling for a million
+volunteers, but which grows through years of organization.
+
+Shall I call the general in chief command General X? This is
+according to the custom of anonymity. A great modern army like the
+French is a machine; any man, high or low, only a unit of the
+machine. In this case the real name of X is Castelnau. If it lacks the
+fame which seems its due, that may be because he was too busy to
+take the Press into his confidence. Fame is not the business of
+French generals nowadays. It is war. What counted for France was
+that he never let the Germans get near the gap at Mirecourt.
+
+Having failed to reach the gap, the Germans, with that stubbornness
+of the offensive which characterizes them, tried to take Nancy. They
+got a battery of heavy guns within range of the city. From a high hill it
+is said that the Kaiser watched the bombardment. But here is a story.
+As the German infantry advanced toward their new objective they
+passed a French artillery officer in a tree. He was able to locate that
+heavy battery and able to signal its position back to his own side. The
+French concentrated sufficient fire to silence it after it had thrown forty
+shells into Nancy. The same report tells how the Kaiser folded his
+cloak around him and walked in silence from his eminence, where the
+sun blazed on his helmet. It was not the Germans' fault that they
+failed to take Nancy. It was due to the French.
+
+Some time a tablet will be put up to denote the high-water mark of the
+German invasion of Lorraine. It will be between the edge of the forest
+of Champenoux and the heights. When the Germans charged from
+the cover of the forest to get possession of the road to Nancy, the
+French artillery and machine-guns which had held their fire turned
+loose. The rest of the story is how the French infantry, impatient at
+being held back, swept down in a counter-attack, and the Germans
+had to give up their campaign in Lorraine as they gave up their
+campaign against Paris in the early part of September. Saddest of all
+lost opportunities to the correspondent in this war is this fighting in
+Lorraine. One had only to climb a hill in order to see everything!
+
+In half an hour, as the officer outlined the positions, we had lived
+through the two weeks' fighting; and, thanks to the fairness of his
+story--that of a professional soldier without illusions--we felt that we
+had been hearing history while it was very fresh.
+
+"They are very brave and skilful, the Germans," he said. "We still
+have a battery of heavy guns on the plateau. Let us go and see it."
+
+We went, picking our way among the snow-covered shell-pits. At one
+point we crossed a communication trench, where soldiers could go
+and come to the guns and the infantry positions without being
+exposed to shell-fire. I noticed that it carried a telephone wire.
+
+"Yes," said the officer; "we had no ditch during the fight with the
+Germans, and we were short of telephone wire for a while; so we had
+to carry messages back and forth as in the old days. It was a pretty
+warm kind of messenger service when the German marmites were
+falling their thickest."
+
+At length he stopped before a small mound of earth not in any way
+distinctive at a short distance on the uneven surface of the plateau. I
+did not even notice that there were three other such mounds. He
+pointed to a hole in the ground. I had been used to going through a
+manhole in a battleship turret, but not through one into a field-gun
+position before aeroplanes played a part in war.
+
+"Entrez, monsieur!"
+
+And I stepped down to face the breech of a gun whose muzzle
+pointed out of another hole in the timbered roof covered with earth.
+
+"It's very cosy!" I remarked.
+
+"Oh, this is the shop! The living room is below--here!"
+
+I descended a ladder into a cellar ten feet below the gun level, where
+some of the gunners were lying on a thick carpet of perfectly dry
+straw.
+
+"You are not doing much firing these days?" I suggested.
+
+"Oh, we gave the Boches a couple this morning so they shouldn't get
+cocky thinking they were safe It's necessary to keep your hand in
+even in the winter."
+
+"Don't you get lonesome?"
+
+"No, we shift on and off. We're not here all the while. It is quite warm
+in our salon, monsieur, and we have good comrades. It is war. It is for
+France. What would you?"
+
+Four other gun-positions and four other cellars like this! Thousands of
+gun-positions and thousands of cellars! Man invents new powers of
+destruction and man finds a way of escaping them.
+
+As we left the battery we started forward, and suddenly out of the
+dusk came a sharp call. A young corporal confronted us. Who were
+we and what business had we prowling about on that hill? If there had
+been no officer along and I had not had a laisser-passer on my
+person, the American Ambassador to France would probably have
+had to get another countryman out of trouble.
+
+The incident shows how thoroughly the army is policed and how
+surely. Editors who wonder why their correspondents are not in the
+front line catching bullets, please take notice.
+
+It was dark when we returned to the little village on the plateau where
+we had left the car. The place seemed uninhabited with all the blinds
+closed. But through one uncovered window I saw a room full of
+chatting soldiers. We went to pay our respects to the colonel in
+command, and found him and his staff around a table covered with
+oilcloth in the main living-room of a villager's house. He spoke of his
+men, of their loyalty and cheerfulness, as the other commanders had,
+as if this were his only boast. These French officers have little "side";
+none of that toe-the-mark, strutting militarism which the Germans
+think necessary to efficiency. They live very simply on campaign,
+though if they do get to town for a few hours they enjoy a good meal.
+If they did not, madame at the restaurant would feel that she was not
+doing her duty to France.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+XII
+Smiles Among Ruins
+
+
+
+Scorched piles of brick and mortar where a home has been ought to
+make about the same impression anywhere. When you have gone
+from Belgium to French Lorraine, however, you will know quite the
+contrary. In Belgium I suffered all the depression which a nightmare
+of war's misery can bring; in French Lorraine I found myself sharing
+something of the elation of a man who looks at a bruised knuckle with
+the consciousness that it broke a burglar's jaw.
+
+A Belgian repairing the wreck of his house was a grim, heartbreaking
+picture; a Frenchman of Lorraine repairing the wreck of his house had
+the light of hard-won victory, of confidence, of sacrifice made to a
+great purpose, of freedom secure for future generations, in his eyes.
+The difference was this: The Germans were still in Belgium; they were
+out of French Lorraine for good.
+
+"What matters a shell-hole through my walls and my torn roof!" said a
+Lorraine farmer. "Work will make my house whole. But nothing could
+ever have made my heart and soul whole while the Germans
+remained. I saw them go, monsieur; they left us ruins, but France is
+ours!"
+
+I had thought it a pretty good thing to see something of the Eastern
+French front; but a better thing was the happiness I found there.
+
+Mon capitaine had come out from the Ministry of War in Paris; but
+when we set out from Nancy southward, we had a different local
+guide, a major belonging to the command in charge of the region
+which we were to visit. He was another example which upsets certain
+popular notions of Frenchmen as gesticulating, excitable little men.
+Some six feet two in height, he had an eye that looked straight into
+yours, a very square chin, and a fine forehead. You had only to look
+at him and size him up on points to conclude that he was all there;
+that he knew his work.
+
+"Well, we've got good weather for it to-day, monsieur," said a voice
+out of a goatskin coat, and I found we had the same chauffeur as
+before.
+
+The sun was shining--a warm winter sun like that of a February thaw
+in our Northern States--glistening on the snowy fields and slopes
+among the forests and tree-clad hills of the mountainous country.
+Faces ambushed in whiskers thought it was a good day for trimming
+beards and washing clothes. The sentries along the roads had their
+scarfs around their necks instead of over their ears. A French soldier
+makes ear muffs, chest protector, nightcap, and a blanket out of the
+scarf which wife or sister knits for him. If any woman who reads this
+knits one to send to France she may be sure that the fellow who
+received it will get every stitch's worth out of it.
+
+To-day, then, it was war without mittens. You did not have to sound
+the bugle to get soldiers out of their burrows or their houses. Our first
+stop was at our own request, in a village where groups of soldiers
+were taking a sun bath. More came out of the doors as we alighted.
+They were all in the late twenties or early thirties, men of a reserve
+regiment. Some had been clerks, some labourers, some farmers,
+some employers, when the war began. Then they were piou-pious, in
+French slang; then all France prayed godspeed to its beloved piou-
+pious. Then you knew the clerk by his pallor; the labourer by his hard
+hands; the employer by his manner of command. Now they were
+poilus--bearded, hard-eyed veterans; you could not tell the clerk from
+the labourer or the employer from the peasant.
+
+Anyone who saw the tenderfoot pilgrimage to the Alaskan goldfield in
+'97-8 and the same crowd six months later will understand what had
+happened to these men. The puny had put on muscle; the city
+dweller had blown his lungs; the fat man had lost some adipose;
+social differences of habit had disappeared. The gentleman used to
+his bath and linen sheets and the hard-living farmer or labourer--both
+had had to eat the same kind of food, do the same work, run the
+same risks in battle, and sleep side by side in the houses where they
+were lodged and in the dug-outs of the trenches when it was their turn
+to occupy them through the winter. Any "snob" had his edges
+trimmed by the banter of his comrades. Their beards accentuated the
+likeness of type. A cheery lot of faces and intelligent, these, which
+greeted us with curious interest.
+
+"Perhaps President Wilson will make peace," one said.
+
+"When?"
+
+A shrug of the shoulder, a gesture to the East, and the answer was:
+
+"When we have Alsace-Lorraine back."
+
+Under a shed their dejeuner was cooking. This meal at noon is the
+meal of the day to the average Frenchman who has only bread and
+coffee in the morning. They say that he objects to fighting at luncheon
+time. That is the hour when he wants to sit down and forget his work
+and laugh and talk and enjoy his eating. The Germans found this out
+and tried to take his trenches at the noon hour. Interference with his
+gastronomic habits made him so angry that he dropped the knife and
+fork for the bayonet and took back any lost ground in a ferocious
+counter-attack. He would teach those "Boches" to leave him to eat
+his dejeuner in peace.
+
+That appetizing stew in the kettles in the shed once more proved that
+Frenchmen know how to cook. I didn't blame them for objecting to
+being shot at by the Germans when they were about to eat it. The
+average French soldier is better fed than at home; he gets more
+meat, for a hungry soldier is usually a poor soldier. It is a very simple
+problem with France's fine roads to feed that long line when it is
+stationary. It is like feeding a city stretched out over a distance of four
+hundred and fifty miles; a stated number of ounces each day for each
+man and a known number of men to feed. From the railway head
+trucks and motor-buses take the supplies up to the distributing points.
+At one place I saw ten Paris motor-buses, their signs painted over in
+a steel-grey to hide them from aeroplanes, and not one of them had
+broken down through the war. The French take good care of their
+equipment and their clothes; they waste no food. As a people is so is
+their army, and the French are thrifty by nature.
+
+Father Joffre, as the soldiers call him, is running the next largest
+boarding establishment in Europe after the Kaiser and the Tsar. And
+he has a happy family. It seemed to me that life ought to have been
+utterly dull for this characteristic group of poilus, living crowded
+together all winter in a remote village. Civilians sequestered in this
+fashion away from home are inclined to get grouchy on one another.
+
+One of the officers in speaking of this said that early in the autumn
+the reserves were pretty homesick. They wanted to get back to their
+wives and children. Nostalgia, next to hunger, is the worst thing for a
+soldier. Commanders were worried. But as winter wore on the spirit
+changed. The soldiers began to feel the spell of their democratic
+comradeship. The fact that they had fought together and survived
+together played its part; and individualism was sunk in the one
+thought that they were there for France. The fellowship of a cause
+taught them patience, brought them cheer. Another thing was the
+increasing sense of team play, of confidence in victory, which holds a
+ball team, a business enterprise, or an army together. Every day the
+organization of the army was improving; every day that indescribable
+and subtle element of satisfaction that the Germans were securely
+held was growing.
+
+Every Frenchman saves something of his income; madame sees to it
+that he does. He knows that if he dies he will not leave wife and
+children penniless. His son, not yet old enough to fight, will come on
+to take his place. Men at home of twenty-two or three years and
+unmarried, men of twenty-eight or thirty years and not long married,
+and men of forty with some money put by, will, in turn, understand
+how their own class feels.
+
+In ten minutes you had entered into the hearts of this single company
+in a way that made you feel that you had got into the heart of the
+whole French army. When you asked them if they would like to go
+home they didn't say "No!" all in a chorus, as if that were what the
+colonel had told them to say. They obey the colonel, but their
+thoughts are their own. Otherwise, these ruddy, healthy men,
+representing the people of France and not the cafes of Paris, would
+not keep France a republic.
+
+Yes, they did want to go home. They did want to go home. They
+wanted their wives and babies; they wanted to sit down to morning
+coffee at their own tables. Lumps rose in their throats at the
+suggestion. But they were not going until the German peril was over
+for ever. Why stop now, only to have another terrible war in thirty or
+forty years? A peace that would endure must be won. They had
+thought that out for themselves. They would not stick to their
+determination if they had not. This is the way of democracies. Thus,
+everyone was conscious that he was fighting not merely to win, but
+for future generations.
+
+"It happened that this great struggle which we had long feared came
+in our day, and to us is the duty," said one. You caught the spirit of
+comradeship passing the time with jests at one another's expense.
+One of the men who was not a full thirty-third-degree poilu had
+compromised with the razor on a moustache as blazing red as his
+shock of hair.
+
+"I think that the colonel gave him the tip that he would light the way for
+Zeppelins!" said a comrade.
+
+"Envy! Sheer envy!" was the retort. "Look at him!" and he pointed at
+some scraggly bunches on chin and cheeks which resembled a
+young grass plat that had come up badly.
+
+"I don't believe in air-tight beards," was the response. When I
+produced a camera, the effect was the same as it always is with
+soldiers at the front. They all wanted to be in the photograph, on the
+chance that the folks at home might see how the absent son or father
+looked. Would I send them one? And the address was like this:
+"Monsieur Benevent, Corporal of Infantry 18th Company, 5th
+Battalion, 299th Regiment of Infantry, Postal Sector No. 121." by
+which you will know the rural free delivery methods along the French
+front. This address is the one rift in the blank wall of anonymity which
+hides the individuality of the millions under Joffre. Only the army
+knows the sector and the numbers of the regiment in that sector. By
+the same kind of a card-index system Joffre might lay his hand on
+any one of his millions, each a human being with all a human being's
+individual emotions, who, to be a good soldier, must be only one of
+the vast multitude of obedient chessmen.
+
+"We are ready to go after them when Father Joffre says the word," all
+agreed. Joffre has proved himself to the democracy, which means
+the enthusiastic loyalty of a democracy's intelligence.
+
+"If there are any homesick ones we should find them among the lot
+here," said mon capitaine.
+
+These were the men who had not been long married. They were not
+yet past the honeymoon period; they had young children at home;
+perhaps they had become fathers since they went to war. The
+younger men of the first line had the irresponsibility and the ardour of
+youth which makes comradeship easy.
+
+But the older men, the Territorials as they are called, in the late
+thirties and early forties, have settled down in life. Their families are
+established; their careers settled; some of them, perhaps, may enjoy
+a vacation from the wife; for you know madame, in France, with all
+her thrift, can be a little bossy, which is not saying that this is not a
+proper tonic for her lord. So the old boys seem the most content in
+the fellowship of winter quarters. What they cannot stand are
+repeated, long, hard marches; their legs give out under the load of
+rifle and pack. But their hearts are in the war, and right there is one
+very practical reason why they will fight well--and they have fought
+better as they hardened with time and the old French spirit revived in
+their blood. "Allons, messieurs!" said the tall major, who wanted us to
+see battlefields. It required no escort to tell us where the battlefield
+was. We knew it when we came to it, as you know the point reached
+by high tide on the sands--this field where many Gettysburgs were
+fought in one through that terrible fortnight in late August and early
+September, when the future of France and the whole world hung in
+the balance--as the Germans sought to reach Paris and win a
+decisive victory over the French army. Where destruction ended
+there the German invasion reached its limit.
+
+Forests and streams and ditches and railway culverts played their
+part in tactical surprises, as they did at Gettysburg; and cemetery
+walls, too. In all my battlefield visits in Europe I have not seen a single
+cemetery wall that was not loopholed. But the fences, which
+throughout the Civil War offered impediment to charges and screen
+to the troops which could reach them first, were missing. The fields
+lay in bold stretches, because it is the business of young boys and
+girls in Lorraine to watch the cows and keep them out of the corn.
+
+We stopped at a cross-roads where charges met and wrestled back
+and forth in and out of the ditches. Fragments of shells appeared as
+steps scuffed away the thin coating of snow. I picked up an old
+French cap, with a slash in the top that told how its owner came to his
+end, and near by a German helmet. For there are souvenirs in plenty
+lying in the young wheat which was sown after the battle was over.
+Millions of little nickel bullets are ploughed in with the blood of those
+who died to take the Kaiser to Paris and those who died to keep him
+out in this fighting across the fields and through the forests, in a tug-
+of-war of give-and-take, of men exhausted after nights and days
+under fire, men with bloodshot eyes sunk deep in the sockets, dust-
+laden, blood-spattered, with forty years of latent human powder
+breaking forth into hell when the war was only a month old and
+passion was at a white heat.
+
+Hasty shelter-trenches gridiron the land; such trenches as breathless
+men, dropping after a charge, threw up hurriedly with the spades that
+they carry on their backs to give them a little cover. And there is the
+trench that stopped the Germans--the trench which they charged but
+could not take. It lies among shell-holes so thick that you can step
+from one to another. In places its crest is torn away, which means
+that half a dozen men were killed in a group. But reserves filled their
+places. They kept pouring out their stream of lead which German
+courage could not endure. Thus far and no farther the invasion came
+in that wheat-field which will be ever memorable.
+
+We went up a hill once crowned by one of those clusters of farm-
+buildings of stone and mortar, where house and stables and
+granaries are close together. All around were bare fields. Those farm-
+buildings stood up like a mountain peak. The French had the hill and
+lost it and recovered it. Whichever side had it, the other was bound to
+bathe it in shells because it commanded the country around. The
+value of property meant nothing. All that counted was military
+advantage. Because churches are often on hill-tops, because they
+are bound to be used for lookouts, is why they get torn to pieces.
+When two men are fighting for life they don't bother about upsetting a
+table with a vase, or notice any "Keep off the grass" signs; no, not
+even if the family Bible be underfoot.
+
+None of the roof, none of the superstructure of these farm-buildings
+was left; only the lower walls, which were eighteen inches thick and in
+places penetrated by the shells. For when a Frenchman builds a
+farmhouse he builds it to last a few hundred years. The farm windmill
+was as twisted as a birdcage that has been rolled under a trolley car,
+but a large hayrake was unharmed. Such is the luck of war. I made
+up my mind that if I ever got under shell-fire I would make for the
+hayrake and avoid the windmill.
+
+Our tall major pointed out all the fluctuating positions during the battle.
+It was like hearing a chess match explained from memory by an
+expert. Words to him were something precious. He made each one
+count as he would the shots from his cannon. His narrative had the
+lucidity of a terse judge reviewing evidence. The battlefield was
+etched on his mind in every important phase of its action.
+
+Not once did he speak in abuse of the enemy. The staff officer who
+directs steel ringing on steel is too busy thrusting and keeping guard
+to indulge in diatribes. To him the enemy is a powerful impersonal
+devil, who must be beaten. When I asked about the conduct of the
+Germans in the towns they occupied, his lip tightened and his eyes
+grew hard.
+
+"I'm afraid it was pretty bad!" he said; as if he felt, besides the wrong
+to his own people, the shame that men who had fought so bravely
+should act so ill. I think his attitude toward war was this: "We will die
+for France, but calling the Germans names will not help us to win. It
+only takes breath."
+
+"Allons, messieurs!"
+
+As our car ran up a gentle hill we noticed two soldiers driving a load of
+manure. This seemed a pretty prosaic, even humiliating, business, in
+a poetic sense, for the brave poilus, veterans of Lorraine's great
+battle. But Father Joffre is a true Frenchman of his time. Why should
+not the soldiers help the farmers whose sons are away at the front
+and perhaps helping farmers back of some Other point of the line?
+
+Over the crest of the hill we came on long lines of soldiers bearing
+timbers and fascines for trench-building, which explained why some
+of the villages were empty. A fascine is something usually made of
+woven branches which will hold dirt in position. The woven wicker
+cases for shells which the German artillery uses and leaves behind
+when it has to quit the field in a hurry, make excellent fascines, and a
+number that I saw were of this ready-made kind. After carrying shell
+for killing Frenchmen they were to protect the lives of Frenchmen.
+Near by other soldiers were turning up a strip of fresh earth against
+the snow, which looked like a rip in the frosting of a chocolate cake.
+
+"How do you like this kind of war?" we asked. It is the kind that
+irrigationists and subway excavators make.
+
+"We've grown to be very fond of it," was the answer. "It is a cultivated
+taste, which becomes a passion with experience. After you have
+been shot at in the open you want all the earth you can get between
+you and the bullets."
+
+Now we alighted from the motor-car and went forward on foot. We
+passed some eight lines of trenches before we came to the one
+where we were to stop. A practised military eye had gone over all that
+ground; a practised military hand had laid out each trench. After the
+work was done the civilian's eye could grasp the principle. If one
+trench were taken, the men knew exactly how to fall back on the next,
+which commanded the ground they had left. The trenches were not
+continuous. There were open spaces left purposely. All that front was
+literally locked, and double and triple locked, with trenches. Break
+through one barred door and there is another and another
+confronting you. Considering the millions of burrowing and digging
+and watching soldiers, it occurred to one that if a marmite (saucepan)
+came along and buried our little party, our loss would not be as much
+noticed as if a piece of coping from a high building had fallen and
+extinguished us on Broadway, which would be a relatively novel way
+of dying. Being killed in war had long ceased to be a novelty on the
+continent of Europe.
+
+We seemed in a dead world, except for the leisurely, hoarse, muffled
+reports of a French gun in the woods on either side of the open space
+where we stood. Through our glasses we could see quite clearly the
+line of the German front trench, which was in the outskirts of a village
+on higher ground than the French. Not a human being was visible.
+Both sides were watching for any move of the other, meanwhile lying
+tight under cover. By day they were marooned. All supplies and all
+reliefs of men who are to take their turn in front go out by night.
+
+There were no men in the trench where we stood; those who would
+man it in case of danger were in the adjoining woods, where they had
+only to cut down saplings and make shelters to be as comfortable as
+in a winter resort camp in the Adirondacks. Any minute they might
+receive a call--which meant death for many. But they were used to
+that, and their card games went on none the less merrily.
+
+"No farther?" we asked our major.
+
+"No farther!" he said. "This is risk enough for you. It looks very
+peaceful, but the enemy could toss in some marmites if it pleased
+him." Perhaps he was exaggerating the risk for the sake of a realistic
+effect on the sightseers. No matter! In time one was to have risks
+enough in trenches. It was on such an occasion as this, on another
+part of the French line, that two correspondents slipped away from
+the officers conducting them, though their word of honour was given
+not to do so--which adds another reason for military suspicion of the
+Press. The officers rang up the nearest telephone which connected
+with the front trenches, the batteries, and regimental and brigade
+headquarters, to apprehend two men of such-and-such description.
+They were taken as easily as a one-eyed, one-eared man, with a
+wooden leg and red hair would be in trying to get out of police
+headquarters when the doormen had his Bertillon photograph and
+measurements to go by.
+
+That battery hidden from aerial observation in the thick forest kept up
+its slow firing at intervals. It was "bothering" one of the German
+trenches. Fiendish the consistent regularity with which it kept on, and
+so easy for the gunners. They had only to slip in a shell, swing a
+breech-lock home, and pull a lanyard. The German guns did not
+respond because they could not locate the French battery. They may
+have known that it was somewhere in the forest, but firing at two or
+three hundred acres of wood on the chance of reaching some guns
+heavily protected by earth and timbering was about like tossing a pea
+from the top of the Washington Monument on the chance of hitting a
+four-leafed clover on the lawn below.
+
+Our little group remained, not standing in the trench but back of it, in
+full relief for some time; for the German gunners refused to play for
+realism by sending us a marmite. Probably they had seen us through
+the telescope at the start and concluded we weren't worth a shot. In
+the first months of the war such a target would have received a burst
+of shells, for the fun of seeing us scatter, if nothing else. Then
+ammunition was plentiful and the sport of shooting had not lost its
+zest; but in these winter days orders were not to waste ammunition.
+
+The factories must manufacture a supply ahead for the summer
+campaign. There must be fifteen dollars' worth of target in sight, say,
+for the smallest shell costs that; and the shorter you are of shells the
+more valuable the target must be. Besides, firing a cannon had
+become as commonplace a function to both French and German
+gunners as getting up to put another stick of wood in the stove or
+going to open the door to take a letter from the postman.
+
+We had glimpses of other trenches; but this is not the place in this
+book to write of trenches. We shall see trenches till we are weary of
+them later. We are going direct to Gerbeviller which was--emphasis
+on the past tense--a typical little Lorraine town of fifteen hundred
+inhabitants. Look where you would now, as we drove along the road,
+and you saw churches without steeples, houses with roofs standing
+on sections of walls, houses smashed into bits.
+
+"I saw no such widespread destruction as this in Belgium!" I
+exclaimed.
+
+"There was no such fighting in Belgium," was the answer.
+
+Of course not, except in the south-western corner, where the armies
+still face each other.
+
+"Not all the damage was done by the Germans," the major explained.
+"Naturally, when they were pouring in death from the cover of a
+house, our guns let drive at that house," he went on. "The owners of
+the houses that were hit by our shells are rather proud--proud of our
+marksmanship, proud that we gave the unwelcome guest a hot pill to
+swallow."
+
+For ten days the Bavarians had Gerbeviller. They tore it to pieces
+before they got it, then burned the remains because they said the
+population sniped at them. All the orgy of Louvain was repeated here,
+unchronicled to our people at home. The church looks like a Swiss
+cheese from shell-holes. Its steeple was bound to be an observation
+post, reasoned the Germans; so they poured shells into it. But the
+brewery had a tall chimney which was an even better lookout, and the
+brewery is the one building unharmed in the town. The Bavarians
+knew that they would need that for their commissariat. For a Bavarian
+will not fight without his beer. The land was littered with barrels after
+they had gone. I saw some in trenches occupied by Bavarian
+reserves not far back of where their firing-line had been.
+
+"However, the fact that the brewery is intact and the church in ruins
+does not prove that a brewery is better than a church. It only proves
+which is the Lord's side in this war," said Sister Julie. But I get ahead
+of my story.
+
+In the middle of the main street were half a dozen smoke-blackened
+houses which remained standing, an oasis in the sea of destruction,
+with doors and windows intact facing gaps where doors and windows
+had been. We entered with a sense of awe of the chance which had
+spared these buildings.
+
+"Sister Julie!" the major called.
+
+A short, sturdy nun of about sixty years answered cheerily and
+appeared in the dark hall. She led us into the sitting-room, where she
+spryly placed chairs for our little party. She was smiling; her eyes
+were sparkling with a hospitable and kindly interest in us, while I felt,
+on my part, that thrill of curiosity that one always has when he meets
+some celebrated person for the first time--curiosity no less keen than
+if I were to meet Barbara Frietchie.
+
+Through all that battle of ten days, with the cannon never silent day or
+night, with shells screaming overhead and crashing into houses;
+through ten days of thunder and lightning and earthquake, she and
+her four sister associates remained in Gerbeviller. When the town
+was fired they moved from one building to another. They nursed both
+wounded French and Germans; also wounded townspeople who
+could not flee with the others.
+
+"You were not frightened? You did not think of going away?" she was
+asked.
+
+"Frightened?" she answered. "I had not time to think of that. Go
+away? How could I when the Lord's work had come to me?"
+
+President Poincare went in person to give her the Legion of Honour,
+the first given to a woman in this war; so rarely given to a woman, and
+here bestowed with the love of a nation. Sister Marie was in the
+kitchen at the time, cooking the meal for the sick for whom the sisters
+are still caring. So Sister Julie took the President of France into the
+kitchen to meet Sister Marie, quite as she would take you or me. A
+human being is simply a human being to Sister Julie, to be treated
+courteously; and great men may not cause a meal for the sick to
+burn. After the complexity of French politics, President Poincare was
+anything but unfavourably impressed by the incident.
+
+"He was such a little man, I could not believe at first that he could be
+President," she said. "I thought that the President of France would be
+a big man. But he was very agreeable and, I am sure, very wise.
+Then there were other men with him, a Monsieur de-de-Deschanel,
+who was president of something or other in Paris, and Monsieur du-
+du--yes, that was it, Du Bag. He also is president of something in
+Paris. They were very agreeable, too."
+
+"And your Legion of Honour?"
+
+"Oh, my medal that M. le President gave me! I keep that in a drawer.
+I do not wear it every day when I am in my working-clothes."
+
+"Have you ever been to Paris?"
+
+"No, monsieur."
+
+"They will make a great ado over you when you go."
+
+"I must stay in Gerbeviller. If I stayed during the fighting and when the
+Germans were here, why should I leave now? Gerbeviller is my
+home. There is much to do here and there will be more to do when
+the people who were driven away return."
+
+These nuns saw their townspeople stood up against a wall and shot;
+they saw their townspeople killed by shells. The cornucopia of war's
+horrors was emptied at their door. And women of a provincial town,
+who had led peaceful, cloistered lives, they did not blench or falter in
+the presence of ghastliness which only men are supposed to have
+the stoicism to witness.
+
+What feature of the nightmare had held most vividly in Sister Julie's
+mind? It is hard to say; but the one which she dwelt on was about the
+boy and the cow. The invaders, when they came in, ordered that no
+inhabitant leave his house, on pain of death. A boy of ten took his
+cow to pasture in the morning as usual. He did not see anything
+wrong in that. The cow ought to go to pasture. And he was shot, for
+he broke a military regulation. He might have been a spy using the
+cow as a blind. War does not bother to discriminate. It kills.
+
+Sister Julie can enjoy a joke, particularly on the Germans, and her
+cheerful smile and genuine laugh are a lesson to all people who draw
+long faces in time of trouble and weep over spilt milk. A buoyant
+temperament and unshaken faith carried her through her ordeal.
+Though her hair is white, youth's optimism and confidence in the
+future and the joy of victory for France overshadowed the present.
+The town and church would be rebuilt; children would play in the
+streets again; there was a lot of the Lord's work to do yet.
+
+In every word and thought she is French--French in her liveliness of
+spirit and quickness of comprehension; wholly French there on the
+borderland of Germany. If we only went to the outskirts of the town,
+she reminded us, we could see how the soldiers of her beloved
+France fought and why she was happy to have remained in
+Gerbeviller to welcome them back.
+
+In sight of that intact brewery and that wreck of a church is a gentle
+slope of open field, cut by a road. Along the crest were many mounds
+as thick as the graves of a cemetery, and by the side of the road was
+a temporary monument above a big mound, surrounded by a sanded
+walk and a fence. The dead had been thickest at this point, and here
+they had been laid in a vast grave. The surviving comrades had
+made that monument; and, in memory of what the dead had fought
+for, the living said that they were not yet ready to quit fighting.
+
+Standing on this crest, you were a thousand yards away from the
+edge of a woods. German aeroplanes had seen the French massing
+for a charge under the cover of that crest; but French aeroplanes
+could not see what was in the woods. Rifles and machine-guns
+poured a spray of lead across the crest when the French appeared.
+But the French, who were righting for Sister Julie's town, would not
+stop their rush at first. They kept on, as Pickett's men did when the
+Federal guns riddled their ranks with grapeshot. This accounts for
+many of the mounds being well beyond the crest. The Germans
+made a mistake in firing too soon. They would have made a heavier
+killing if they had allowed the charge to go farther. After the French fell
+back, for two days and nights their wounded lay out on that field
+without water or food, between the two forces, and if their comrades
+approached to give succour the machine-guns blazed more death,
+because the Germans did not want to let the French dig a trench on
+the crest. After two days the French forced the Germans out of the
+woods by hitting them from another point.
+
+We went over the field of another charge half a mile away. There a
+French regiment put a stream with a single bridge at their back--which
+requires some nerve--and charged a German trench on rising
+ground. They took it. Then they tried to take the woods beyond.
+Before they were checked twenty-two officers out of a total of thirty
+fell. But they did not give up the ground they had won. They burrowed
+into the earth in a trench of their own, and when help came they put
+the Germans out of the woods.
+
+The men of this regiment were not first line, but the older fellows--men
+of the type we stopped to chat with in the village--hastening to the
+front when the war began. Their officers were mostly reserves, too,
+who left civil occupations at the call to arms. One of the eight
+survivors of the thirty was with us, a stocky little man, hardly looking
+the hero or the soldier. I expressed my admiration, and he answered
+quietly: "It was for France!" How often I have heard that as a reason
+for courage or sacrifice! The enemies of France have learned to
+respect it, though they had a poor opinion of the French army before
+the war began.
+
+"That railroad bridge yonder the Germans left intact when they
+occupied it because they were certain that they would need it to
+supply their troops when they took the Gap of Mirecourt and
+surrounded the French army," I was told. "However, they had to go in
+such a hurry that they failed to mine it. They must have fired five
+hundred shells afterwards to destroy it, in vain."
+
+It was dusk when we entered the city of Luneville for the second time.
+Whole blocks lay in ruins; others only showed where shells had
+crashed into walls. It is hard to estimate just how much damage shell-
+fire has done to a town, for you see the effects only where they have
+struck on the street sides and not when they strike in the centre of the
+block. But Luneville has certainly suffered as much as Louvain, only
+we did not hear about it. Grim, sad Louvain, with its German sentries
+among the ruins! Happy, triumphant Luneville, with its poilus instead
+of German sentries!
+
+"We are going to meet the mayor," said the major.
+
+First we went to his office. But that was a mistake. We were invited to
+his house, which was a fine, old, eighteenth-century building. If you
+could transport it to New York some arms-and-ammunition millionaire
+would give half a million dollars for it. The hallway was smoke-
+blackened and a burnt spot showed where the enemy had tried to set
+it on fire before evacuating the town. Ascending a handsome old
+staircase, we were in rooms with gilded mirrors and carved mantels,
+where we were introduced to His Honour, a lively man of some forty
+years.
+
+"I have been in Amerique two months. So much English do I speak.
+No more!" said the mayor merrily, and introduced us in turn to his
+wife, who spoke not even "so much" English, but French as fast and
+as piquantly as none but a Frenchwoman can. Her only son, who was
+seventeen, was going up with the 1916 class of recruits very soon.
+He was a sturdy youngster; a type of Young France who will make
+the France of the future.
+
+"You hate to see him go?" I asked.
+
+"It is for France!" she answered.
+
+We had cakes and tea and a merrier--at least, a more heartfelt--party
+than at any mayor's reception in time of peace. Everybody talked. For
+the French do know how to talk, when they have not turned grim,
+silent soldiers. I heard story on story of the German occupation; and
+how the mayor was put in jail and held as a hostage; and what a
+German general said to him when he was brought in as a prisoner to
+be interrogated in his own house, which the general occupied as
+headquarters.
+
+Among the guests was the wife of a French general in her Red Cross
+cap. She might see her husband once a week by meeting him on the
+road between the city and the front. He could not afford to be any
+farther from his post, lest the Germans spring a surprise. The extent
+of the information which he gave her was that all went well for France.
+Father Joffre plays no favourites in his discipline.
+
+Happy, happy Lorraine in the midst of its ruins! Happy because her
+adored tricolour floats over those ruins.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+A Road Of War I Know
+
+
+
+Other armies go to war across the land, but the British go across the
+sea. They take the Channel ferry in order to reach the front. Theirs is
+the home road of war to me; the road of my affections, where men
+speak my mother tongue. It begins on the platform at Victoria Station,
+with the khaki of officers and men, returning from leave, relieved by
+the warmer colours of women who have come to say good-bye to
+those they love. In five hours from the time of starting one may be
+across that ribbon of salt water, which means much in isolation and
+little in distance, and in the trenches.
+
+That veteran regular--let us separate him from the crowd--is a type I
+have often seen, a type that has become as familiar as one's
+neighbours in one's own town. We will call him the tenth man. That is,
+of every ten men who went to the front a year ago in his battalion,
+nine are gone. All of the hardships and all of the terrors of war he has
+witnessed: men dropped neatly by a bullet; men mangled by shells.
+
+His khaki is spotless, thanks to his wife, who has dressed in her best
+for the occasion. Terrible as war itself, but new, that hat of hers, which
+probably represented a good deal of looking into windows and
+pricing; and her gown of the cheapest material, drooping from her
+round shoulders, is the product of the poor dress-making skill of
+hands which show only too well who does all the housework at home.
+The children, a boy of four and a girl of seven, are in their best, too,
+with faces scrubbed till they shine.
+
+You will see like scenes in stations at home when the father has
+found work in a distant city and is going on ahead to get established
+before the family follow him. Such incidents are common in civil life;
+they became common at Victoria Station. What is common has no
+significance, editors say.
+
+When the time came to go through the gate, the veteran picked the
+boy up in his arms and pressed him very close and the little girl
+looked on wonderingly, while the mother was not going to make it any
+harder for the father by tears. "Good-bye, Tom!" she said. So his
+name was Tom, this tenth man.
+
+I spoke with him. His battalion was full with recruits. It had been kept
+full. But, considering the law of chance, what about the surviving one
+out of an original ten?
+
+"Yes, I've had my luck with me," he said. "Probably my turn will come.
+Maybe I'll never see the wife and kids again."
+
+The morning roar of London had begun. That station was a small
+spot in the city. There were not enough officers and men taking the
+train to make up a day's casualty list; for ours was only a small party
+returning from leave. The transports, unseen, carried the multitudes.
+Wherever one had gone in England he had seen soldiers and
+wherever he went in France he was to see still more soldiers.
+England had become an armed camp; and England plodded on,
+"muddled" on, preparing, ever preparing, to forge in time of war the
+thunderbolt for war which was undreamed of in time of peace when
+other nations were forging their thunderbolts.
+
+Still the recruiting posters called for more soldiers and the casualty
+lists appeared day after day with the regularity of want
+advertisements. Imagine eight million men under arms in the United
+States and you have the equivalent to what England did by the
+volunteer system. The more there were the more pessimistic became
+the British Press. Pessimism brought in recruits. Bad news made
+England take another deep breath of energizing determination. It was
+the last battle which was decisive. She had always won that. She
+would win it again.
+
+They talk of war aboard the Pullman, after officers have waved their
+hands out of the windows to their wives, quite as if they were going to
+Scotland for a weekend instead of back to the firing-line. British
+phlegm this is called. No, British habit, I should say, the race-bred,
+individualistic quality of never parading emotions in public; the instinct
+of keeping things which are one's own to one's self. Personally, I like
+this way. In one form or another, as the hedges fly by the train
+windows, the subject is always war. War creeps into golf, or shooting,
+or investments, or politics. Only one suggestion quite frees the mind
+from the omnipresent theme: Will the Channel be smooth? The
+Germans have nothing to do with that. It is purely a matter of weather.
+Bad sailors are more worried about the crossing than about the shell-
+fire they are going to face.
+
+With bad sailors or good sailors, the significant thing which had
+become a commonplace was that the Channel was a safely-guarded
+British sea lane. In all my crossings I was never delayed. For England
+had one thunderbolt ready forged when the war began. The only
+submarines, or destroyers, or dirigibles that one saw were hers.
+Antennae these of the great fleet waiting with the threat of stored
+lightning ready to be flashed from gun-mouths; a threat as efficacious
+as action, in nowise mysterious or subtle, but definite as steel and
+powder, speaking the will of a people in their chosen field of power,
+felt over all the seas of the world, coast of Maine and the Carolinas no
+less than Labrador. Thousands of transports had come and gone,
+carrying hundreds of thousands of soldiers and food for men and
+guns to India; and on the high road to India, to Australia, to San
+Francisco, shipping went its way undisturbed by anything that dives
+or flies.
+
+The same white hospital ships lying in that French harbour; the same
+line of grey, dusty-looking ambulances parked on the quay!
+Everybody in the one-time sleepy, week-end tourist resort seems to
+be in uniform; to have something to do with war. All surroundings
+become those of war long before you reach the front. That knot of
+civilians, waiting their turn for another examination of the same kind
+as that on the other side of the Channel, have shown good reasons
+for going to Paris to the French Consul in London, or they might not
+proceed even this far on the road of war. They seem outcasts--a
+humble lot in the variegated costumes of the civil world--outcasts
+from the disciplined world in its pattern garb of khaki. Their excuse for
+not being in the game is that they are too old or that they are women.
+For now the war has sucked into its vortex the great majority of those
+who are strong enough to fight or work.
+
+A traveller might be a spy; hence, all this red tape for the many to
+catch the one. Even red tape seems now to have become normal.
+War is normal. It would seem strange to cross the Channel in time of
+peace; the harbour would not look like itself with civilians not having
+to show passports, and without the white hospital ships, and the
+white-bearded landing-officer at the foot of the gangway, and the
+board held up with lists of names of officers who have telegrams
+waiting for them.
+
+For the civilians a yellow card of disembarkation and for the military a
+white card. The officers and soldiers walk off at once and the queue
+of civilians waits. One civilian with a white card, who belongs to no
+regiment, who is not even a chaplain or a nurse, puzzles the landing-
+officer for a moment. But there is something to go with it--a
+correspondent's licence and a letter from a general who looks after
+such things. They show that you "belong"; and if you don't belong on
+the road of war you will not get far. As well try to walk past the
+doorman and take a seat in the United States Senate chamber during
+a session.
+
+Most precious that magical piece of paper. I happen to be the only
+American with one, unless he is in the fighting line--which is one sure
+way to get to the front. The price of all the opera boxes at the
+Metropolitan will not buy it; and it is the passport to the welcoming
+smile from an army chauffeur, whom I almost regard as my own. But
+its real value appears at the outskirts of the city. There the dead line
+is drawn; there the sheep are finally separated from the goats by a
+French sentry guarding the winding passageway between some
+carts, which have been in the same place in the road for months.
+
+The car spins over the broad, hard French road, in a land where for
+many miles you see no signs of war, until it turns into the grounds of a
+small chateau opposite a village church. The proprietor of a drygoods
+store in a neighbouring city spends his summers here; but this
+summer he is in town, because the Press wanted a place to live and
+he was good enough to rent us his country place. So this is home,
+where the five British and one American correspondents live and
+mess. The expense of our cars costs us treble all the rest of our
+expenses. They take us where we want to go. We go where we
+please, but we may not write what we please. We see something like
+a thousand times more than we can tell. The conditions are such as
+to make a news reporter throw up his hands and faint. But if he had
+his unbridled way, one day he might feel the responsibility for the loss
+of hundreds of British soldiers' lives.
+
+"It may be all right for war correspondents, but it is a devil of a poor
+place for a newspaper man," as one editor said. Yet it is the only
+place where you can really know anything about the war.
+
+We become part of the machinery of the great organization that
+encloses us in its regular processes. No one in his heart envies the
+press officer who holds the blue pencil over us. He has to "take it both
+going and coming." He labours on our behalf and sometimes we
+labour with him. The staff are willing enough to let us watch the army
+at work, but they do not care whether or not we write about their war;
+he wants us both to see it and to write about it. He tells us some big
+piece of news, and then says: "That is for yourselves; you may not
+write it."
+
+People do not want to read about the correspondents, of course.
+They want to read what the correspondents have to tell about the
+war; but the conditions of our work are interesting because we are the
+link between the army and the reading public. All that it learns from
+actual observation of what the army is doing comes through us.
+
+We may not give the names of regiments and brigades until weeks
+after a fight, because that will tell the enemy what troops are
+engaged; we may not give the names of officers, for that is glorifying
+one when possibly another did his duty equally well. It is the
+anonymity of the struggle that makes it all seem distant and unreal--till
+the telegram comes from the War Office to say that the one among
+the millions who is dear to you is dead or wounded. Otherwise, it is a
+torment of unidentified elements behind a curtain, which is parted for
+an announcement of gain or loss, or to give out a list of the fallen.
+
+The world wants to read that Peter Smith led the King's Own
+Particular Fusiliers in a charge. It may not know Peter Smith, but his
+name and that of his regiment make the information seem definite.
+The statement that a well-known millionaire yesterday gave a million
+dollars to charity, or that a man in a checked suit swam from the
+Battery to Coney Island, is not convincing; nor is the fact that one
+private unnamed held back the Germans with bombs in the traverse
+of a trench for hours until help came. We at the front, however, do
+know the names; we meet the officers and men. Ours is the intimacy
+which we may not interpret except in general terms.
+
+Every article, every dispatch, every letter, passes through the
+censor's hand. But we are never told what to write. The liberty of the
+Press is too old an institution in England for that. Always we may
+learn why an excision is made. The purpose is to keep information
+from the enemy. It is not like fighting Boers or Filipinos, this war of
+walls of men who can turn the smallest bit of information to
+advantage.
+
+Intelligence officers speak of their work as piecing together the parts
+of a jig-saw puzzle. What seems a most innocent fact by itself may
+furnish the bit which gives the figure in the picture its face. It does not
+follow because you are an officer that you know what may and what
+may not be of service to the enemy.
+
+A former British officer who had become a well-known military critic, in
+an account of a visit to the front mentioned having seen a battle from
+a certain church tower. Publication of the account was followed by a
+tornado of shell-fire that killed and wounded many British soldiers.
+Only a staff specialist, trained in intelligence work and in constant
+touch with the intelligence department, can be a safe censor. At the
+same time, he is the best friend of the correspondent. He knows what
+is harmless and what may not be allowed. He wants the Press to
+have as much as possible. For the more the public knows about its
+soldiers, the better the morale of the people, which reflects itself in the
+morale of the army.
+
+The published casualty lists giving the names of officers and men and
+their battalions is a means of causing casualties. From a prisoner
+taken the enemy learns what battalions were present at a given fight;
+he adds up the numbers reported killed and wounded and ascertains
+what the fight cost the enemy and, in turn, the effect of the fire from
+his side. But the British public demanded to see the casualty lists and
+the British Press were allowed to gratify the desire. They appeared in
+the newspapers, of course, days after the nearest relative of the dead
+or wounded man had received official notification from the War Office.
+
+Officers' letters from the front, so freely published earlier in the
+war, amazed experienced correspondents by their unconscious
+indiscretions. The line officer who had been in a fight told all that he
+saw. Twenty officers doing the same along a stretch of front and the
+jig-saw experts, plus what information they had from spies, were in
+clover. Editors said: "But these men are officers. They ought to know
+when they are imparting military secrets."
+
+Alas, they do not know! It is not to be expected that they should. Their
+business is to fight; the business of other experts is to safeguard
+information. For a long time the British army kept correspondents
+from the front on the principle that the business of a correspondent
+must be to tell what ought not to be told. Yet they were to learn that
+the accredited correspondent, an expert at his profession, working in
+harmony with the experts of the staff, let no military secrets pass.
+
+At our mess we get the Berlin dailies promptly. Soon after the
+Germans are reading the war correspondence from their own front
+we are reading it, and laughing at jokes in their comic papers and at
+cartoons which exhibit John Bull as a stricken old ogre and Britannia
+who Rules the Waves with the corners of her mouth drawn down to
+the bottom of her chin, as she sees the havoc that von Tirpitz is
+making with submarines which do not stop us from receiving our
+German jokes regularly across the Channel.
+
+Doubtless the German messes get their Punch and the London
+illustrated weeklies regularly. In the time that it took the English daily
+with the account of the action seen from the church tower to reach
+Berlin and the news to be wired to the front, the German guns made
+use of the information. Neutral little Holland is the telltale of both
+sides; the ally and the enemy of all intelligence corps. Scores of
+experts in jig-saw puzzles on both sides seize every scrap of
+information and piece them together. Each time that one gets a bit
+from a newspaper he is for a sharper Press censorship on his side
+and a more liberal one on the other.
+
+We six correspondents have our insignia, as must everyone who is
+free to move along the lines. By a glance you may tell everybody's
+branch and rank in that complicated and disciplined world, where no
+man acts for himself, but always on someone else's orders.
+
+"Don't you know who they are? They are the correspondents," I heard
+a soldier say. "D. Chron., that's the Daily Chronicle; M. Post, that's the
+Morning Post; D. Mail, that's the Daily Mail. There's one with U.S.A.
+What paper is that?"
+
+"It ain't a paper," said another. "It's the States--he's a Yank!"
+
+The War Office put it on the American cousin's arm, and wherever it
+goes it seems welcome. It may puzzle the gunners when the
+American says, "That was a peach of a shot, right across the pan!" or
+the infantry when he says, "It cuts no ice!" and there is no ice visible
+in Flanders; he speaks about typhoid to the medical corps which calls
+it enteric; and "fly-swatting" is a new word to the sanitarians, who are
+none the less busily engaged in that noble art. Lessons for the British
+in the "American language" while you wait! In return, the American is
+learning what a "stout-hearted thruster" and other phrases mean in
+the Simon-pure English.
+
+The correspondents are the spoiled spectators of the army's work;
+the itinerants of the road of war. Nobody sees so much as we,
+because we have nothing to do but to see. An officer looking at the
+towers of Ypres Cathedral a mile away from the trench where he was,
+said: "No, I've never been in Ypres. Our regiment has not been
+stationed in that part of the line."
+
+We have sampled all the trenches; we have studied the ruins of
+Ypres with an archaeologist's eye; we know the names of the
+estaminets of the villages, from "The Good Farmer" to "The
+Harvester's Rest" and "The Good Cousin," not to mention "The
+Omnibus Stop" on the Cassel Hill. Madame who keeps the hotel in
+the G.H.Q. town knows me so well that we wave hands to each other
+as I pass the door; and the clerks in a certain shop have learned that
+the American likes his fruit raw, instead of stewed in the English
+fashion, and plenty of it, especially if it comes from the South out of
+season, as it does from Florida or California to pampered human
+beings at home, who, if they could see as much of this war as I have
+seen, would appreciate what a fortunate lot they are to have not a
+ribbon of saltwater but a broad sea full of it, and the British navy, too,
+between them and the thing on the other side of the zone of death.
+
+G.H.Q. means General Headquarters and B.E.F., which shows the
+way for your letters from England, means British Expeditionary Force.
+The high leading, the brains of the army, are theoretically at G.H.Q.
+That word theoretically is used advisedly in view of opinion at other
+points. An officer sent from G.H.Q. to command a brigade had not
+been long out before he began to talk about those confounded one-
+thing-and-another fellows at G.H.Q. When he was at G.H.Q. he used
+to talk about those confounded one-thing-and-another fellows who
+commanded corps, divisions, and brigades at the front. The
+philosophers of G.H.Q. smiled and the philosophers of the army
+smiled--it was the old story of the staff and the line; of the main office
+and the branches. But the line did the most smiling to see the new
+brigadier getting a taste of his own medicine.
+
+G.H.Q. directs the whole; here every department of all that vast
+concern which supplies the hundreds of thousands of men and
+prepares for the other hundreds of thousands is focussed. The
+symbol of its authority is a red band round the cap, which means that
+you are a staff officer. No war at G.H.Q., only the driving force of war.
+It seems as far removed from the front as the New York office of a
+string of manufacturing plants.
+
+If one follows a red-banded cap into a door he sees other officers and
+clerks and typewriters, and a sign which says that a department chief
+has his desk in the drawing-room of a private house--where he has
+had it for months. Go to one mess and you will hear talk about
+garbage pails and how to kill flies; to another, about hospitals and
+clearing stations for the wounded; to another, about barbed wire,
+sandbags, spades, timber, and galvanized iron--the engineers; to
+another, about guns, shells, rifles, bullets, mortars, bombs, bayonets,
+and high explosives--the ordnance; to another, about jam, bread,
+bacon, uniforms, iron rations, socks, underclothes, tinned goods,
+fresh beef, and motor-trucks--the Army Service Corps; to another,
+about attacks, counter-attacks, and salients, and about what the
+others are doing and will have to do--the operations.
+
+The Chief of Staff drives the eight-horse team. He works sixteen
+hours a day. So do most of the others. This is how you prove to the
+line that you have a right to be at G.H.Q. When you get to know
+G.H.Q. it seems like any other business institution. Many are there
+who do not want to be there; but they have been found out. They are
+specialists, who know how to do one thing particularly well and are
+kept doing it. No use of growling that you would like a "fighting job."
+
+G.H.Q. is the main station on the road of war, which hears the sound
+of the guns faintly. Beyond is the region of all the activities that it
+commands, up to the trenches, where all roads end and all efforts
+consummate. One has seen dreary flat lands of mud and leafless
+trees become fair with the spring, the growing harvest reaped, and
+the leaves begin to fall. Always the factory of war was in the same
+place; the soldiers billeted in the same towns; the puffs of shrapnel
+smoke over the same belt of landscape; the ruins of the same
+villages being pounded by high explosives. Always the sound of
+guns; always the wastage of life, as passing ambulances, the curtains
+drawn, speed by, their part swiftly and covertly done. The enormity of
+the thing holds the imagination; its sure and orderly processes of an
+organized civilization working at destruction win the admiration. There
+is a thrill in the courage and sacrifice and the drilled readiness of
+response to orders.
+
+The spectator is under varying spells. To-day he seems in a fantastic
+world, whose horror makes it impossible of realization. To-morrow, as
+his car takes him along a pleasant by-road among wheat-fields where
+peasants are working and no soldier is in sight, it is a world of peace
+and one thinks that he has mistaken the roar of a train for the distant
+roar of gun-fire. Again, it seems the most real of worlds, an exclusive
+man's world, where nothing counts but organized material force, and
+all those cleanly, well-behaved men in khaki are a part of the
+permanent population.
+
+One sees the war as a colossal dynamo, where force is perpetual like
+the energy of the sun. The war is going on for ever. The reaper cuts
+the harvest, but another harvest comes. War feeds on itself, renews
+itself. Live men replace the dead. There seems no end to supplies of
+men. The pounding of the guns, like the roar of Niagara, becomes
+eternal. Nothing can stop it.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+Trenches In Winter
+
+
+
+The difference between trench warfare in winter and in summer is
+that between sleeping on the lawn in March and in July. It was in the
+mud and winds of March that I first saw the British front. The winds
+were much like the seasonal winds at home; but the Flanders mud is
+like no other mud, in the judgment of the British soldier. It is mixed
+with glue. When I returned to the front in June for a longer stay, the
+mud had become clouds of dust that trailed behind the motor-car.
+
+In March my eagerness to see a trench was that of one from the
+Western prairies to get his first glimpse of the ocean. Once I might go
+into a trench as often as I pleased I became "fed up" with trenches,
+as the British say. They did not mean much more than an alley or a
+railway cutting. One came to think of the average peaceful trench as
+a ditch where some men were eating marmalade and bully beef and
+looking across a field at some more men who were eating sausage
+and "K.K." bread, each party taking care that the other did not see
+him.
+
+Writers have served us trenches in every possible literary style that
+censorship will permit. Whoever "tours" them is convinced that none
+of the descriptions published heretofore has been adequate and
+writes one of his own which will be final. All agree that it is not like
+what they thought it was. But, despite all the descriptions, the public
+still fails to visualize a trench. You do not see a trench with your eyes
+so much as with your mind and imagination. That long line where all
+the powers of destruction within man's command are in deadlock has
+become a symbol for something which cannot be expressed by
+words. No one has yet really described a shell-burst, or a flash of
+lightning, or Niagara Falls; and no one will ever describe a trench. He
+cannot put anyone else there. He can only be there himself.
+
+The first time that I looked over a British parapet was in the edge of a
+wood. Board walks ran across the spongy earth here and there; the
+doors of little shanties with earth roofs opened on to those streets,
+which were called Piccadilly and the Strand. I was reminded of a
+pleasant prospector's camp in Alaska. Only, everybody was in
+uniform and occasionally something whished through the branches of
+the trees. One looked up to see what it was and where it was going,
+this stray bullet, without being any wiser.
+
+We passed along one of the walks until we came to a wall of
+sandbags--simply white bags about three-quarters of the size of an
+ordinary pillowslip, filled with earth and laid one on top of another like
+bags of grain. You stood beside a man who had a rifle laid across the
+top of the pile. Of course, you did not wear a white hat or wave a
+handkerchief. One does not do that when he plays hide-and-seek.
+
+Or, if you preferred, you might look into a chip of glass, with your
+head wholly screened by the wall of sandbags, which got a reflection
+from another chip of glass above the parapet. This is the trench
+periscope; the principle of all of them is the same. They have no more
+variety than the fashion in knives, forks and spoons on the dinner
+table.
+
+One hundred and fifty yards away across a dead field was another
+wall of sandbags. The distance is important. It is always stated in all
+descriptions. One hundred and fifty yards is not much. Only when you
+get within forty or fifty yards have you something to brag about. Yet
+three hundred yards may be more dangerous than fifteen, if an
+artillery "hate" is on.
+
+Look for an hour, and all you see is the wall of sandbags. Not even a
+rabbit runs across that dead space. The situation gets its power of
+suggestion from the fact that there are Germans behind the other
+wall--real, live Germans. They are trying to kill the British on our side
+and we are trying to kill them; and they are as coyly unaccommodating
+about putting up their heads as we are. The emotion of the situation
+is in the fact that a sharpshooter might send a shot at your cap; he
+might smash a periscope; a shell might come. A rifle cracks--that is
+all. Nearly everyone has heard the sound, which is no different at the
+front than elsewhere. And the sound is the only information you get.
+It is not so interesting as shooting at a deer, for you can tell whether
+you hit him or not. The man who fires from a trench is not even certain
+whether he saw a German or not. He shot at some shadow or object
+along the crest which might have been a German head.
+
+Thus, one must take the word of those present that there is any more
+life behind than in front of the sandbags. However, if you are sceptical
+you may have conviction by starting to crawl over the top of the
+British parapet. After dark the soldiers will slip over and bring back
+your body. It is this something you do not see, this something
+visualized by the imagination, which convinces you that you ought to
+be considerate enough of posterity to write the real description of a
+trench. Look for an hour at that wall of sandbags and your
+imagination sees more and more, while your eye sees only
+sandbags. What does this war mean to you? There it is: only you can
+describe what this war means to you.
+
+Many a soldier who has spent months in trenches has not seen a
+German. I boast that I have seen real Germans through my glasses.
+They were walking along a road back of their trenches. It was most
+fascinating. All the Germans I had ever seen in Germany were not
+half so interesting. I strained my eyes watching those wonderful
+beings as I might strain them at the first visiting party from Mars to
+earth. There must have been at least ten out of the Kaiser's millions.
+
+In summer that wood had become a sylvan bower, or a pastoral
+paradise, or a leafy nook, as you please. The sun played through the
+branches in a patchwork; flowers bloomed on the dirt roofs of the
+shanties, and a swallow had a nest--famous swallow!--on one of the
+parapets. True, it was not on the front parapet; it was on the reserve.
+The swallow knew what he was about. He was taking a reasonable
+amount of risk and playing reasonably secure to get a front seat,
+according to the ethics of the war correspondent. The two walls of
+sandbags were in the same place that they had been six months
+previously. A little patching had been done after some shells had hit
+the mark, though not many had come.
+
+For this was a quiet corner. Neither side was interested in stirring up
+the hornets' nest. If a member of Parliament wished to see what
+trench life was like he was brought here, because it was one of the
+safest places for a few minutes' look at the sandbags which Mr.
+Atkins stared at week in and week out. Some Conservatives,
+however, in the case of Radical members, would have chosen a
+different kind of trench to show; for example, that one which was
+suggested to me by the staff officer with the twinkle in his eye on my
+best day at the front.
+
+In want of an army pass to the front in order to write your own
+description, then, put up a wall of sandbags in a vacant lot and
+another one hundred and fifty yards away and fire a rifle occasionally
+from your wall at the head of a man on the opposite side, who will
+shoot at yours--and there you are. If you prefer the realistic to the
+romantic school and wish to appreciate the nature of trench life in
+winter, find a piece of wet, flat country, dig a ditch seven or eight feet
+deep, stand in icy water looking across at another ditch, and sleep in
+a cellar that you have dug in the wall, and you are near
+understanding what Mr. Atkins has been doing for his country. The
+ditch should be cut zigzag in and out, like the lines dividing the
+squares of a checker-board; that makes more work and localizes the
+burst of shells.
+
+Of course, the moist walls will be continually falling in and require
+mending in a drenching, freezing rain of the kind that the Lord visits
+on all who wage war underground in Flanders. Incidentally, you must
+look after the pumps, lest the water rise to your neck. For all the while
+you are fighting Flanders mud as well as the Germans.
+
+To carry realism to the limit of the Grand Guignol school, then,
+arrange some bags of bullets with dynamite charges on a wire, which
+will do for shrapnel; plant some dynamite in the parapet, which will do
+for high explosive shells that burst on contact; sink heavier charges of
+dynamite under your feet, which will do for mines, and set them off,
+while you engage someone to toss grenades and bombs at you.
+
+Though scores of officers' letters had given their account of trench life
+with the vividness of personal experience, I must mention my first
+trench in Flanders in winter when, with other correspondents, I saw
+the real thing under the guidance of the commanding officer of that
+particular section, a slight, wiry man who wore the ribbon of the
+Victoria Cross won in another war for helping to "save the guns." He
+made seeing trenches in the mud seem a pleasure trip. He was the
+kind who would walk up to his ball as if he knew how to play golf,
+send out a clean, fair, long drive, and then use his iron as if he knew
+how to use an iron, without talking about his game on the way around
+or when he returned to the club-house. Men could go into danger
+behind him without realizing that they were in danger; they could
+share hardship without realizing that there were any hardships. Such
+as he put faith and backbone into a soldier by their very manner; and
+if their professional training equal their talents, when war comes they
+win victories.
+
+We had rubber boots, electric torches, and wore British warms, those
+short, thick coats which collect a modicum of mud for you to carry
+besides what you are carrying on your boots. We walked along a
+hard road in the dark toward an aurora borealis of German flares,
+which popped into the sky like Roman candles and burst in circles of
+light. They seemed to be saying: "Come on! Try to crawl up on us
+and play us a trick and our eyes will find you and our marksmen will
+stop you. Come on! We make the night into day, and watching never
+ceases from our parapet."
+
+Occasional rifle-shots and a machine-gun's ter-rut were audible from
+the direction of the jumping red glare, which stretched right and left as
+far as the eye could see. We broke off the road into a morass of mud,
+as one might cross fields when he had lost his way, and plunged on
+till the commanding officer said, "We go in here!" and we descended
+into a black chasm in the earth. The wonder was that any ditch could
+be cut in soil which the rains had turned into syrup. Mud oozed from
+the sandbags, through the wire netting, and between the wooden
+supports which held the walls in place. It was just as bad over in the
+German trenches. General Mud laid siege to both armies. The field of
+battle where he gathered his gay knights was a slough. His tug of war
+was strife against landslides, rheumatism, pneumonia, and frozen
+feet.
+
+The soldier tries to kill his adversary; he tries to prevent his adversary
+from killing him. He is as busy in safeguarding as in taking life. While
+he breathes, thinks, fights mud, he blesses as well as curses mud.
+Mother Earth is still unconquerable. In her bosom man still finds
+security; such security that "dug in" he can defy at a hundred yards'
+distance rifles that carry death three thousand yards. She it is that
+has made the deadlock in the trenches and plastered their occupants
+with her miry hands.
+
+The C.O. lifted a curtain of bagging as you might lift a hanging over
+an alcove bookcase, and a young officer, rising from his blankets in
+his house in the trench wall to a stooping posture, said that all was
+quiet. His uniform seemed fleckless. Was it possible that he wore
+some kind of cloth which shed mud spatters? He was another of the
+type of Captain Q------, my host at Neuve Chapelle; a type formed on
+the type of seniors such as his C.O. Unanalysable this quality, but
+there is something distinguished about it and delightfully appealing. A
+man who can be the same in a trench in Flanders in mid-winter as in
+a drawing-room has my admiration. They never lose their manner,
+these English officers. They carry it into the charge and back in the
+ambulance with them to England, where they wish nothing so much
+as that their friends will "cut out the hero stuff," as our own officers
+say.
+
+In other dank cellars soldiers who were off guard were lying or sitting.
+The radiance of the flares lighted the profiles of those on guard,
+whose faces were half-hidden by coat-collars or ear-flaps--
+imperturbable, silent, marooned and marooning, watchful and
+fearless. The thing had to be done and they were doing it; and they
+were going to keep on doing it.
+
+There was nothing dry in that trench, unless it was the bowl of a
+man's pipe. There were not even any braziers. In your nostrils was
+the odour of the soil of Flanders cultivated by many generations
+through many wars. As night wore on the sky was brightened by cold,
+winter stars and their soft light became noticeable between the
+disagreeable flashes of the flares.
+
+We walked on and on. It was like walking in a winding ditch; that was
+all. The same kind of walls at every turn; the same kind of dim figures
+in saturated, heavy army overcoats. Slipping off the board walk into
+the ooze, one was thrown against the mud wall as his foot sank. Then
+he held fast to his boot-straps lest the boot remain in the mud while
+his foot came out. Only the CO. never slipped. He knew how to tour
+trenches. Beside him the others were as clumsy as if they were trying
+to walk a tight-rope.
+
+"Good-night!" he said to each group of men as he passed, with the
+cheer of one who brings a confident spirit to vigils in the mud and with
+that note of affection of the commander who has learned to love his
+men by the token of ordeals when he saw them hold fast against
+odds.
+
+"Good-night, sir!" they answered; and in their tone was something
+which you liked to hear--a finer tribute to the CO. than medals which
+kings can bestow. It was affection and trust. They were ready to
+follow him, for they knew that he knew how to lead. I was not
+surprised when I heard of his promotion, later. I shall not be surprised
+when I hear of it again. For he had brain and heart and the gift of
+command.
+
+"Shall we go on or shall we go back?" he asked when we had gone
+about a mile. "Have you had enough?"
+
+We had, without a dissenting voice. A ditch in the mud, that was all,
+no matter how much farther we went. So we passed out of the trench
+into a soapy, slippery mud which had been ploughed ground in the
+autumn, now become lathery with the beat of men's steps. Our party
+became separated when some foundered and tried to hoist
+themselves with both boot-straps at once. The CO. called out in order
+to locate us in the darkness, and the voice of an officer in the
+trenches cut in, "Keep still! The Germans are only a hundred yards
+away!"
+
+"Sorry!" whispered the CO. "I ought to have known better."
+
+Then one of the German searchlights that had been swinging its
+stream of light across the paths of the flares lay its fierce, comet eye
+on us, glistening on the froth-streaked mud and showing each mud-
+splashed figure in heavy coat in weird silhouette.
+
+"Standstill!"
+
+That is the order whenever the searchlights come spying in your
+direction. So we stood still in the mud, looking at one another and
+wondering. It was the one tense second of the night, which lifted our
+thoughts out of the mud with the elation of risk. That searchlight was
+the eye of death looking for a target. With the first crack of a bullet we
+should have known that we were discovered and that it was no longer
+good tactics to stand still. We should have dropped on all fours into
+the porridge. The searchlight swept on. Perhaps Hans at the
+machine-gun was nodding or perhaps he did not think us worth while.
+Either supposition was equally agreeable to us.
+
+We kept moving our mud-poulticed feet forward, with the flares at our
+backs, till we came to a road where we saw dimly a silent company of
+soldiers drawn up and behind them the supplies for the trench.
+Through the mud and under cover of darkness every bit of barbed
+wire, every board, every ounce of food, must go up to the moles in
+the ditch. The searchlights and the flares and the machine-guns
+waited for the relief. They must be fooled. But in this operation most
+of the casualties in the average trenches, both British and German,
+occurred. Without a chance to strike back, the soldier was shot at by
+an assassin in the night.
+
+When the men who had been serving their turn of duty in the
+trenches came out, a magnet drew their weary steps--cleanliness.
+They thought of nothing except soap and water. For a week they
+need not fight mud or Germans or parasites, which, like General Mud,
+waged war against both British and Germans. Standing on the slats
+of the concrete floor of a factory, they peeled off the filthy, saturated
+outer skin of clothing with its hideous, crawling inhabitants and,
+naked, leapt into great steaming vats, where they scrubbed and
+gurgled and gurgled and scrubbed. When they sprang out to apply
+the towels, they were men with the feel of new bodies in another
+world.
+
+Waiting for them were clean clothes, which had been boiled and
+disinfected; and waiting, too, was the shelter of their billets in the
+houses of French towns and villages, and rest and food and food and
+rest, and newspapers and tobacco and gossip--but chiefly rest and
+the joy of lethargy as tissue was rebuilt after the first long sleep, often
+twelve hours at a stretch. They knew all the sensations of physical
+man, man battling with nature, in contrasts of exhaustion and danger
+and recuperation and security, as the pendulum swung slowly back
+from fatigue to the glow of strength.
+
+Those who came out of the trenches quite "done up," Colonel Bate,
+Irish and genial, fatherly and not lean, claimed for his own. After the
+washing they lay on cots under a glass roof, and they might play
+dominoes and read the papers when they were well enough to sit up.
+They had the food which Colonel Bate knew was good for them, just
+as he knew what was deadly for the inhabitants whom they brought
+into that isolated room which every man must pass through before he
+was admitted to the full radiance of the colonel's curative smile. When
+they were able to return to the trenches, each was written down as
+one unit more in the colonel's weekly statistical reports. In summer he
+entertained al fresco in an open-air camp.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+In Neuve Chapelle
+
+
+
+Typical of many others, this quiet village in a flat country of rich
+farming land, with a church, a school, a post-office, and stores where
+the farmer could buy a pound of sugar or a spool of thread, employ a
+notary, or get a pair of shoes cobbled or a horse shod, without having
+to go to the neighbouring town of Bethune, Neuve Chapelle became
+famous only after it had ceased to exist--unless a village remains a
+village after it has been reduced to its original elements by shell-fire.
+
+It was the scene of one of those actions in the long siege line which
+have the dignity of a battle; the losses on either side, about sixteen
+thousand, were two-thirds of those at Waterloo or Gettysburg. Here
+the British after the long winter's stalemate in the mud, where they
+stuck when the exhausted Germans could press no farther, took the
+offensive, with the sap of spring rising in their veins.
+
+The guns blazed the way and the infantry charged in the path of the
+guns' destruction; and they kept on while the shield of shell-fire held.
+When it left an opening for the German machine-guns through its
+curtain and the German guns visited on the British what their guns
+had been visiting on the Germans, the British stopped. A lesson was
+learned; a principle established. A gain was made, if no goal were
+reached.
+
+The human stone wall had moved. It had broken some barriers and
+come to rest before others, again to become a stone wall. But it knew
+that the thing could be done with guns and shells enough--and only
+with enough. This means a good deal when you have been under
+dog for a long time. Months were to pass waiting for enough shells
+and guns, with many little actions and their steady drain of life, while
+everyone looked back to Neuve Chapelle as a landmark. It was
+something definite for a man to say that he had been wounded at
+Neuve Chapelle and quite indefinite to say that he had been
+wounded in the course of the day's work in the trenches.
+
+No one might see the battle in that sea of mud. He might as well have
+looked at the smoke of Vesuvius with an idea of learning what was
+going on inside of the crater. I make no further attempt at describing
+it. My view came after the battle was over and the cauldron was still
+steaming.
+
+Though in March, 1914, one would hardly have given Neuve
+Chapelle, intact and peaceful, a passing glance from a motor-car, in
+March, 1915, Neuve Chapelle in ruins was the one town in Europe
+which I most wanted to see. Correspondents had not then
+established themselves. The staff officer whom I asked if I might
+spend a night in the new British line was a cautious man. He bade me
+sign a paper freeing the British army from any responsibility. Judging
+by the general attitude of the Staff, one could hardly take the request
+seriously. One correspondent less ought to please any Staff; but he
+said that he had an affection for the regulars and knew that there
+were always plenty of recruits to take their places without resorting to
+conscription. The real responsibility was with the Germans. He
+suggested that I might go out to the German trenches and see if I
+could obtain a paper from them. He thought if I were quick about it I
+might get at least a yard in front of the British parapet in daylight. His
+sense of humour I had recognized when we had met in Bulgaria.
+
+Any traveller is bound to meet men whom he has met before in the
+travelled British army. At the brigade headquarters town, which, as
+one of the officers said, proved that bricks and mortar can float in
+mud, the face of the brigadier seemed familiar to me. I found that I
+had met him in Shanghai in the Boxer campaign, when he had come
+across a riotous China from India on one of those journeys in remote
+Asia which British officers are fond of making. He was "all there,"
+whether dealing with a mob of Orientals or with Germans in the
+trenches. I made myself at home in the parlour of the private house
+occupied by himself and staff, while he went on with his work. No flag
+outside the house; no sign that it was headquarters. Motor-cars
+stopped only long enough for an officer to enter or alight. Brigade
+headquarters is precisely the target that German aeroplanes or spies
+like to locate for their guns.
+
+"Are you ready? Have you your rubber boots?" the brigadier asked a
+few minutes later, as he put his head in at the parlour door. It would
+not do to approach the trenches until after dark. Of course, I had
+rubber boots. One might as well try to go to sea without a boat as to
+trenches without rubber boots in winter. "I'll take my constitutional," he
+added; "the trouble with this kind of war is that you get no exercise."
+
+He was a small man, but how he could walk! I began to understand
+why the Boxers could not catch him. He turned back after we had
+gone a mile or more and one of his staff went on with me to a point
+where, just at dusk, I was turned over to another pilot, an aide from
+battalion headquarters, and we set out across sodden fields that had
+yielded beetroot in the last harvest, taking care not to step in shell-
+holes. Dusk settled into darkness. No human being was in sight
+except ourselves.
+
+"There's the first line of German trenches before the attack," said my
+companion. "Our guns got fairly on them." Dimly I saw what seemed
+like a huge, long, irregular furrow of earth which had been torn almost
+out of the shape of a trench by British shells. "There was no living in it
+when the guns began all together. The only thing to do was to get
+out."
+
+Around us was utter silence, where the hell of thunders and
+destruction by the artillery had raged during the battle. Then a spent
+or ricochet bullet swept overhead, with the whistle of complaint of
+spent bullets at having travelled far without hitting any object. It had
+gone high over the British trenches; it had carried the full range, and
+the chance of its hitting anyone was ridiculously small. But the nearer
+you get to the trenches, the more likely these strays are to find a
+victim. "Hit by a stray bullet!" is a very common saying at the front.
+
+At last we felt the solidity of a paved road under our feet, and
+following this we came to a peasant's cottage. Inside, two soldiers
+were sitting beside telephone and telegraph instruments, behind a
+window stuffed with sandbags. On our way across the fields we had
+stepped on wires laid on the ground; we had stooped to avoid wires
+stretched on poles--the wires that form the web of the army's
+intelligence.
+
+Of course, no two units of communication are dependent on one wire.
+There is always a duplicate. If one is broken it is immediately
+repaired. The factories spin out wire to talk over and barbed wire for
+entanglements in front of trenches and weave millions of bags to be
+filled with sand for breastworks to protect men from bullets. If Sir John
+French wished, he could talk with Lord Kitchener in London and this
+battalion headquarters at Neuve Chapelle within the same space of
+time that a railroad president may speak over the Long Distance from
+Chicago to New York and order dinner out in the suburbs.
+
+These two men at the table, their faces tanned by exposure, men in
+the thirties, had the British regular of long service stamped all over
+them. War was an old story to them; and an old story, too, laying
+signal wires under fire.
+
+"We're very comfortable," said one. "No danger from stray bullets or
+from shrapnel; but if one of the Jack Johnsons come in, why, there's
+no more cottage and no more argument between you and me. We're
+dead and maybe buried, or maybe scattered over the landscape,
+along with the broken pieces of the roof."
+
+A soldier was on guard with bayonet fixed inside that little room, which
+had passageway to the cellar past the table, among straw beds. This
+seemed rather peculiar. The reason lay on one of the beds in a
+private's khaki. He had come into the battalion's trenches from our
+front and said that he belonged to the D------regiment and had been
+out on patrol and lost his way.
+
+It was two miles to that regiment and two miles is a long distance to
+stray between two lines of trenches so close together, when at any
+point in your own line you will find friends. It was possible that this
+fellow's real name was Hans Schmidt, who had learned cockney
+English in childhood in London, and in a dead British private's uniform
+had come into the British trenches to get information to which he was
+anything but welcome.
+
+He was to be sent under guard to the D------regiment
+for identification; and if he were found to be a Hans and not a
+Tommy--well, though he had tried a very stupid dodge he must have
+known what to expect when he was found out, if his officers had
+properly trained him in German rules of war.
+
+I had a glimpse of him in the candlelight before stooping to feel my
+way down three or four narrow steps to the cellar, where the farmer
+ordinarily kept potatoes and vegetables. There were straw beds
+around the walls here, too. The major commanding the battalion rose
+from his seat at a table on which were some cutlery, a jam pot,
+tobacco, pipes, a newspaper or two, and army telegraph forms and
+maps.
+
+If the hosts of mansions could only make their hospitality as simple as
+the major's, there would be less affectation in the world. He
+introduced me to an officer sitting on the other side of the table and to
+one lying in his blankets against the wall, who lifted his head and
+blinked and said that he was very glad to see me.
+
+It is a small world, for China cropped up here, as it had at brigade
+headquarters. The major had been in garrison at Peking when the
+war began. If my shipmate on a long battleship cruise, Lt.-Col. Dion
+Williams, U.S.M.C, reads this out in Peking let it tell him that the major
+is just as urbane in the cellar of a second-rate farmhouse on the
+outskirts of Neuve Chapelle as he would be in a corner of the Peking
+Club.
+
+"How is it? Painful now?" asked the major of Captain P-----, on the
+other side of the table.
+
+"Oh, no! It's quite all right," said the captain.
+
+"Using the sling?"
+
+"Part of the time. Hardly need it, though."
+
+Captain P-----was one of those men whose eyes are always smiling;
+who seems, wherever he is, to be glad that he is not in a worse place;
+who goes right on smiling at the mud in the trenches and bullets and
+shells and death. They are not emotional, the British, perhaps, but
+they are given to cheeriness, if not to laughter, and they have a way
+of smiling at times when smiles are much needed. The smile is more
+often found at the front than back at headquarters; or perhaps it is
+more noticeable there.
+
+"You see, he got a bullet through the arm yesterday," the major
+explained. "He was reported wounded, but remained on duty in the
+trench." I saw that the captain would rather not have publicity given to
+such an ordinary incident. He did not see why people should talk
+about his arm. "You are to go with him into the trench for the night,"
+the major added; and I thought myself very lucky in my companion.
+
+"Aren't you going to have dinner with us?" the major asked him.
+
+"Why, I had something to eat not very long ago," said Captain P-----.
+One was not sure whether he had or not.
+
+"There's plenty," said the major.
+
+"In that event, I don't see why I shouldn't eat when I have a chance,"
+the captain returned; which I found was a characteristic trench habit,
+particularly in winter when exposure to the raw, cold air calls for plenty
+of body-furnace heat.
+
+We had a ration soup and ration ham and ration prunes and cheese;
+what Tommy Atkins gets. When we were outside the house and
+starting for the trench this captain, with his wounded arm, wanted to
+carry my knapsack. He seemed to think that refusal was breaking the
+Hague conventions.
+
+Where we turned off the road, broken finger-points of brick walls in
+the faint moonlight indicated the site of Neuve Chapelle; other
+fragments of walls in front of us were the remains of a house; and
+that broken tree-trunk showed what a big shell can do. The trunk, a
+good eighteen inches in diameter, had not only been cut in two by
+one of the monsters of the new British artillery, but had been carried
+on for ten feet and left lying solidly in the bed of splinters of the top
+of the stump. All this had been in the field of that battle of a day,
+which was as fierce as the fiercest day at Gettysburg, and fought
+within about the same space. Every tree, every square rod of ground,
+had been paid for by shells, bullets, and human life.
+
+But now we were near the trenches; or, rather, the breastworks. We
+are always speaking of the trenches, while not all parts of the line are
+held by trenches. A trench is dug in the ground; a breastwork is
+raised from the level of the ground. At some points a trench becomes
+practically a breastwork, as its wall is raised to get free of the mud
+and water.
+
+We came into the open and heard the sound of voices and saw a
+spotty white wall; for some of the sandbags of the new British
+breastworks still retained their original colour. On the reverse side of
+this wall lines were leaning in readiness, their fixed bayonets faintly
+gleaming in the moonlight. I felt of the edge of one and it was sharp,
+quite prepared for business. In the surroundings of damp earth and
+mud-bespattered men, this rifle seemed the cleanest thing of all,
+meticulously clean, that ready weapon whose well-aimed and telling
+fire, in obedient and cool hands, was the object of all the drill of the
+new infantry in England; of all the drill of all infantry. Where pickets
+watched in the open in the old days before armies met in pitched
+battle, an occasional soldier now stands with rifle laid on the parapet,
+watching.
+
+Across a reach of field faintly were made out the white spots of
+another wall of breastworks, the German, at the edge of a stretch of
+woods, the Bois du Bies. The British reached these woods in their
+advance; but, their aeroplanes being unable to spot the fall of shells
+in the mist, they had to fall back for want of artillery support. Along
+this line where we stood outside the village they stopped; and to stop
+is to set the spades going to begin the defences which, later, had
+risen to a man's height, and with rifles and machine-guns had riddled
+the German counter-attack.
+
+And the Germans had to go back to the edge of the woods, where
+they, too, began digging and building their new line. So the enemies
+were fixed again behind their walls of earth, facing each other across
+the open, where it was death for any man to expose himself by day.
+
+"Will you have a shot, sir?" one of the sentries asked me.
+
+"At what?"
+
+"Why, at the top of the trench over there, or at anything you see
+moving," he said.
+
+But I did not think that it was an invitation for a non-combatant to
+accept. If the bullet went over the top of the trench it had still two
+thousand yards and more to go, and it might find a target before it
+died. So, in view of the law of probabilities, no bullet is quite waste.
+
+"Now, which is my house?" asked Captain P------.
+
+"I really can't find my own home in the dark."
+
+Behind the breastwork were many little houses three or four feet in
+height, all of the same pattern, and made of boards and mud. The
+mud is put on top to keep out shrapnel bullets.
+
+"Here you are, sir!" said a soldier.
+
+Asking me to wait until he made a light, the captain bent over as if
+about to crawl under the top rail of a fence and his head disappeared.
+After he had put a match to a candle and stuck it on a stick thrust into
+the wall, I could see the interior of his habitation. A rubber sheet
+spread on the moist earth served as floor, carpet, mattress, and bed.
+At a squeeze there was room for two others besides himself. They
+did not need any doormat, for when they lay down their feet would be
+at the door.
+
+"Quite cosy, don't you think?" remarked the captain. He seemed to
+feel that he had a royal chamber. But, then, he was the kind of man
+who might sleep in a muddy field under a wagon and regard the
+shelter of the wagon body as a luxury. "Leave your knapsack here,"
+he continued, "and we'll see what is doing along the line."
+
+In other words, after you had left your bag in the host's hall, he
+suggested a stroll in the village or across the fields. But only to see
+war would he have asked you to walk in such mud.
+
+"Not quite so loud!" he warned a soldier who was bringing up boards
+from the rear under cover of darkness. "If the Germans hear they
+may start firing."
+
+Two other men were piling mud on top of a section of breastwork at
+an angle to the main line.
+
+"What is that for?" the captain asked.
+
+"They get an enfilade on us here, sir, and Mr.------ (the lieutenant) told
+me to make this higher."
+
+"That's no good. A bullet will go right through," said the captain. "We'll
+have to wait until we get more sandbags."
+
+A little farther on we came to an open space, with no protection
+between us and the Germans. Half a dozen men were piling earth
+against a staked chicken wire to extend the breastworks. Rather, they
+were piling mud, and they were besmirched from head to foot. They
+looked like reeking Neptunes rising from a slough. In the same
+position in daylight, standing full height before German rifles at three
+hundred yards, they would have been shot dead before they could
+leap to cover.
+
+"How does it go?" asked the captain.
+
+"Very well, sir; though what we need is sandbags."
+
+"We'll have some up to-morrow."
+
+At the moment there was no firing in the vicinity. Faintly I heard the
+Germans pounding stakes, at work improving their own breastworks.
+
+A British soldier appeared out of the darkness in front.
+
+"We've found two of our men out there with their heads blown off by
+shells," he said. "Have we permission to go out and bury them, sir?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+They would be as safe as the fellows piling mud against the chicken
+wire, unless the Germans opened fire. If they did, we could fire on
+their working-party, or in the direction of the sound. For that matter,
+we knew through our glasses by day the location of any weak places
+in their breastworks, and they knew where ours were. A sort of "after-
+you-gentlemen-if-you-fire-we-shall" understanding sometimes exists
+between the foes up to a certain point. Each side understands
+instinctively the limitation of that point. Too much noise in working, a
+number of men going out to bury dead or making enough noise to be
+heard, and the ball begins. A deep, broad ditch filled with water made
+a break in our line. No doubt a German machine-gun was trained on
+it.
+
+"A little bridging is required here," said the captain. "We'll have it done
+to-morrow night. The break is no disadvantage if they attack; in fact,
+we'd rather like to have them try for it. But it makes movement along
+the line difficult by day."
+
+When we were across and once more behind the breastworks, he
+called my attention to some high ground in the rear.
+
+"One of our officers took a short cut across there in daylight," he said.
+"He was quite exposed, and they drew a bead on him from the
+German trench and got him through the arm. Not a serious hit. It
+wasn't cricket for anyone to go out to bring him in. He realized this,
+and called out to leave him to himself, and crawled to cover."
+
+I was getting the commonplaces of trench life. Thus far it had been a
+quiet night and was to remain so. Reddish, flickering swaths of light
+were thrown across the fields between the trenches by the enemy's
+Roman candle flares. One tried to estimate how many flares the
+Germans must use every night from Switzerland to the North Sea.
+
+On our side, the only light was from our braziers. Thomas Atkins has
+become a patron of braziers made by punching holes in buckets; and
+so have the Germans. Punch holes in a bucket, start a fire inside,
+and you have cheer and warmth and light through the long night
+vigils. Two or three days before we had located a sniper between the
+lines by seeing him swing his fire-pot to make a draught against the
+embers.
+
+If you have ever sat around a camp-fire in the forest or on the plains
+you need be told nothing further. One of the old, glamorous features
+of war survives in these glowing braziers, spreading their genial rays
+among the little houses and lighting the faces of the men who stand
+or squat in encircling groups around the coals, which dry wet clothes,
+slake the moisture of a section of earth, make the bayonets against
+the walls glisten, and reveal the position of a machine-gun with its
+tape ready for firing.
+
+Values are relative, and a brazier in the trenches makes the
+satisfaction of a steam-heated room in winter very superficial and
+artificial. You are at home there with Tommy Atkins, regular of an old
+line English regiment, in his heavy khaki overcoat and solid boots and
+wool puttees, a sturdy, hardened man of a terrific war. He, the
+regular, the shilling-a-day policeman of the empire, was still doing the
+fighting at the front. The new army, which embraces all classes, was
+not yet in action.
+
+This man and that one were at Mons. This one and that one had
+been through the whole campaign without once seeing Mother
+England for whom they were fighting. The affection in which Captain
+P------was held extended through his regiment, for we had left his own
+company behind. At every turn he was asked about his arm.
+
+"You've made a mistake, sir. This isn't a hospital," as one man
+expressed it. Oh, but the captain was bored with hearing about that
+arm! If he is wounded again I am sure that he will try to keep the fact
+a secret.
+
+These veterans could "grouse," as the British call it. Grousing is one
+of Tommy's privileges. When they got to grousing worst on the retreat
+from Mons, their officers knew that what they really wanted was to
+make another stand. They were tired of falling back; they meant to
+take a rest and fight a while. Their language was yours, the language
+in which our own laws and schoolbooks are written. They made the
+old blood call. For months they had been taking bitter medicine; very
+bitter for a British soldier. The way they took it will, perhaps, remain a
+greater tribute than any part they play in future victories.
+
+"How do they feel in the States?" I was asked. "Against us?"
+
+"No. By no means."
+
+"I don't see how they could be!" Tommy exclaimed.
+
+Tommy may not be much on argument as it is developed by the
+controversial spirit of college professors, but he had said about all
+there was to say. How can we be? Hardly, after you come to know T.
+Atkins and his officers and talk English with them around their camp-
+fires.
+
+"The Germans are always sending up flares," I remarked. "You send
+up none. How about it?"
+
+"It cheers them. They're downhearted!" said one of the group. "You
+wouldn't deny them their fireworks, would you, sir?"
+
+"That shows who is top dog," said another. "They're the ones that are
+worried."
+
+I had heard of trench exhaustion, trench despair, but there was no
+sign of it in a regiment that had been through all the hell and mire that
+the British army had known since the war began. To no one had
+Neuve Chapelle meant so much as to these common soldiers. It was
+their first real victory. They were standing on soil won from the
+Germans.
+
+"We're going to Berlin!" said a big fellow who was standing, palms
+downward to the fire. "It's settled. We're going to Berlin."
+
+A smaller man with his back against the sandbags disagreed. There
+was a trench argument.
+
+"No, we're going to the Rhine," he said. "The Russians are going to
+Berlin." (This was in March, 1915, remember.)
+
+"How can they when they ain't over the Balkans yet?"
+
+"The Carpathians, you mean."
+
+"Well, they're both mountains and the Russians have got to cross
+them. And there's a place called Cracow in that region. What's the
+matter of a pair of mountain ranges between you and me, Bill? You're
+strong on geography, but you fail to follow the campaign."
+
+"The Rhine, I say!"
+
+"It's the Rhine first, but Berlin is what you want to keep your mind on."
+
+Then I asked if they had ever had any doubt that they would reach
+the Rhine.
+
+"How could we, sir?"
+
+"And how about the Germans. Do you hate them?"
+
+"Hate!" exclaimed the big man. "What good would it do to hate them?
+No, we don't hate. We get our blood up when we're fighting and when
+they don't play the game. But hate! Don't you think that's kind of
+ridiculous, sir?"
+
+"How do they fight?"
+
+"They take a bit of beating, do the Boches!"
+
+"So you call them Boches!"
+
+"Yes. They don't like that. But sometimes we call them Allemands,
+which is Germans in French. Oh, we're getting quite French
+scholars!"
+
+"They're good soldiers. Not many tricks they're not up to. But in my
+opinion they're overdoing the hate. You can't keep up to your work on
+hate, sir. I should think it would be weakening to the mind, too."
+
+"Still, you would like the war over? You'd like to go home?"
+
+They certainly would. Back to the barracks, out of the trenches! They
+certainly would.
+
+"And call it a draw?"
+
+"Call it a draw, now! Call it a draw, after all we've been through------"
+
+"Spring is coming. The ground will dry up and it will be warm."
+
+"And the going will be good to Berlin, as it was back from Paris in
+August, we tell the Boches."
+
+"Good for the Russians going over the Carpathians, or the Pyrenees,
+or whatever those mountains are, too. I read they're all covered with
+snow in winter."
+
+It was good, regular soldier talk, very "homey" to me. As you will
+observe, I have not elided the h's. Indeed, Tommy has a way of
+prefixing his h's to the right vowels more frequently than a generation
+ago. The Soldiers Three type has passed. Popular education will
+have its way and induce better habits. Believing in the old remedy for
+exhaustion and exposure to cold, the army served out a tot of rum
+every day to the men. But many of them are teetotalers, these hardy
+regulars, and not even Mulvaney will think them effeminate when they
+have seen fighting which makes anything Mulvaney ever saw child's
+play. So they asked for candy and chocolate, instead of rum.
+
+Some people have said that Tommy has no patriotism. He fights
+because he is paid and it is his business. That is an insinuation.
+Tommy doesn't care for the "hero stuff," or for waving flags and
+speechmaking. Possibly he knows how few Germans that sort of
+thing kills. His weapons are bullets. To put it cogently, he is fighting
+because he doesn't want any Kaiser "in his."
+
+Is not that what all the speeches in Parliament are about and all the
+editorials and the recruiting campaign? Is not that what England and
+France are fighting for? It seems to me that Tommy's is a very
+practical patriotism, free from cant; and the way that he refuses to
+hate or to get excited, but sticks to it, must be very irritating to the
+Germans.
+
+"Would you like a Boche helmet for a souvenir, sir?" asked a soldier
+who appeared on the outer edge of the group. He was the small,
+active type, a British soldier with the elan of the Frenchman. "There
+are lots of them out among the German dead "--the unburied German
+dead who fell like grass before the mower in a desperate and futile
+counter-attack to recover Neuve Chapelle. "I'll have one for you on
+your way back."
+
+There was no stopping him; he had gone.
+
+"Matty's a devil!" said the big man. "He'll get it, all right. He's equal
+to reaching over the Boches' parapet and picking one off a Boche's
+head!"
+
+As we proceeded on our way, officers came out of the little houses to
+meet Captain P------and the stranger civilian. They had to come out,
+as there was no room to take us inside; and sometimes they talked
+shop together after I had answered the usual question, "Is America
+against us?" There seemed to be an idea that we were, possibly
+because of the prodigious advertising tactics of a minority. But any
+feeling that we might be did not interfere with their simple courtesy, or
+lead them to express any bitterness or break into argument.
+
+"How are things going on over your side?"
+
+"Nicely."
+
+"Any shelling?"
+
+"A little this morning. No harm done."
+
+"We cleaned out one bad sniper to-day."
+
+"Ought to have some sandbags up to-night."
+
+"It's a bad place there. They've got a machine-gun trained which has
+quite a sweep. I asked if the artillery shouldn't put in a word, but the
+general didn't think it worth while."
+
+"You must run across that break. Three or four shots at you every
+time. We're gradually getting shipshape, though."
+
+Just then a couple of bullets went singing overhead. The group paid
+no attention to them. If you paid attention to bullets over the parapet
+you would have no time for anything else. But these bullets have a
+way of picking off tall officers who are standing up among their
+houses. In the course of their talk they happened to speak of such an
+instance, though not with reference to the two bullets I have
+mentioned.
+
+"Poor S------did not last long. He had been out only three weeks."
+
+"How is J------? Hit badly?"
+
+"Through the shoulder; not seriously."
+
+"H------is back. Recovered very quickly."
+
+Normal trench talk, this! A crack which signifies that the bullet has hit
+--another man down. One grows accustomed to it, and one of this
+group of officers might be gone to-morrow.
+
+"I have one, sir," said Matty, exhibiting a helmet when we returned
+past his station. "Bullet went right through the head and came out the
+peak!"
+
+It was time that Captain P------ was back to his own command. As we
+came to his company's line word was just being passed from sentry
+to sentry:
+
+"No firing. Patrols going out."
+
+It was midnight now.
+
+"We'll go in the other direction," said Captain P------ when he had
+learned that there was no news.
+
+This brought us to an Irish regiment. The Irish naturally had
+something to say.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+Nearer The Germans
+
+
+
+Here not the Irish Sea lay between the broad a and the brogue, but
+the space between two sentries or between two rifles with bayonets
+fixed, lying against the wall of the breastworks ready for their owners'
+hands when called to arms in case of an alarm. One stepped from
+England into Ireland; and my prediction that the Irish would have
+something to say was correct.
+
+The first man who made his presence felt was a good six feet in
+height, with a heavy moustache and the earpieces of his cap tied
+under his chin, though the night was not cold. He placed himself fairly
+in front of me in the narrow path back of the breastworks and he
+looked a cowled and sinister figure in the faint glow from a brazier. I
+certainly did not want any physical argument with a man of his build.
+
+"Who are you?" he demanded, as stiffly as if I had broken in at the
+veranda window with a jemmy.
+
+For the nearer you come to the front, the more you feel that you are
+in the way. You are a stray extra piece of baggage; a dead human
+weight. Everyone is doing something definite as a part of the machine
+except yourself; and in your civilian clothes you feel the self-
+conscious conspicuousness of appearing on a dancing-floor in a
+dressing-gown.
+
+Captain P------was a little way back in another passage. I was alone
+and in a rough tweed suit--a strange figure in that world of khaki and
+rifles.
+
+"A German spy! That's why I am dressed this way, so as not to excite
+suspicion," I was going to say, when a call from Captain P------
+identified me, and the sentry's attitude changed as suddenly as if the
+inspector of police had come along and told a patrolman that I might
+pass through the fire lines.
+
+"So it's you, is it, right from America?" he said. "I've a sister living at
+Nashua, New Hampshire, U.S.A. with three brothers in the United
+States army."
+
+Whether he had or not you can judge as well as I by the twinkle in his
+eye. He might have had five, and again he might not have one. I was
+a tenderfoot seeing the trenches.
+
+"It's mesilf that's going to America when me sarvice in the army is up
+in one year and six months," he continued. "That's some time yet. I'm
+going if I'm not killed by the Germans. It's a way that they have, or we
+wouldn't be killing them."
+
+"What are you going to do in America? Enlist in the army?"
+
+"No. I'm looking for a better job. I'm thinking I'll be one of your
+millionaires. Shure, but that would be to me taste."
+
+Not one Irishman was speaking really, but a dozen. They came out of
+their little houses and dug-outs to gather around the brazier; and for
+every remark I made I received a fusillade in reply. It was an event,
+an American appearing in the trench in the small hours of the
+morning.
+
+A trench-toughened, battle-toughened old sergeant was sitting in the
+doorway of his dug-out, frying a strip of bacon over one rim of the
+brazier and making tea over the other. The bacon sizzled with an
+appetizing aroma and a bullet sizzled harmlessly overhead. Behind
+that wall of sandbags all were perfectly safe, unless a shell came. But
+who worries about shells? It is like worrying about being struck by
+lightning when clouds gather in a summer sky.
+
+"It looks like good bacon," I remarked.
+
+"It is that!" said the sergeant. "And the hungrier ye are the better. It's
+your nose that's telling ye so this minute. I can see that ye're hungry
+yoursilf!"
+
+"Then you're pretty well fed?"
+
+"Well fed, is it? It's stuffed we are, like the geese that grow the paty-
+what-do-you-call-it? Eating is our pastime. We eat when we've
+nothing else to do and when we've got something to do. We get eggs
+up here--a fine man is Lord Kitchener--yes, sir, eggs up here in the
+trenches!"
+
+When they seemed to think that I was sceptical, he produced some
+eggs in evidence.
+
+"And if ye'll not have the bacon, ye'll have a drop of tea. Mind now,
+while your tongue is trying to be polite, your stomach is calling your
+tongue a liar!"
+
+Wouldn't I have a souvenir? Out came German bullets and buckles
+and officers' whistles and helmets and fragments of shells and
+German diaries.
+
+"It's easy to get them out there where the Germans fell that thick!" I
+was told. "And will ye look at this and take it home to give your pro-
+German Irish in America, to show what their friends are shooting at
+the Irish? I found them mesilf on a dead German."
+
+He passed me a clip of German bullets with the blunt ends instead of
+the pointed ends out. The change is readily made, for the German
+bullet is easily pulled out of the cartridge case and the pointed end
+thrust against the powder. Thus fired, it goes accurately four or five
+hundred yards, which is more than the average distance between
+German and British trenches. When it strikes flesh the effect is that of
+a dum-dum and worse; for the jacket splits into slivers, which spread
+through the pulpy mass caused by the explosion. A leg or an arm
+thus hit must almost invariably be amputated. I am not suggesting
+that this is a regular practice with German soldiers, but it shows what
+wickedness is in the power of the sinister one.
+
+"But ye'll take the tea," said the sergeant, "with a little rum hot in it.
+'Twill take the chill out of your bones."
+
+"What if I haven't a chill in my bones?"
+
+"Maybe it's there without speaking to ye and it will be speaking before
+an hour longer--or afther ye're home between the sheets with the
+rheumatiz, and yell be saying, 'Why didn't I take that glass?' which
+I'm holding out to ye this minute, steaming its invitation to be drunk."
+
+It was a memorable drink. Snatches of brogue followed me from the
+brazier's glow when I insisted that I must be going.
+
+Now our breastworks took a turn and we were approaching closer to
+the German breastworks. Both lines remained where they had "dug
+in" after the counter-attacks which followed the battle had ceased.
+Ground is too precious in this siege warfare to yield a foot. Soldiers
+become misers of soil. Where the flood is checked there you build
+your dam against another flood.
+
+"We are within about sixty yards of the Germans," said Captain P------
+at length, after we had gone in and out of the traverses and left the
+braziers well behind.
+
+Between the spotty, whitish wall of German sandbags, quite distinct in
+the moonlight, and our parapet were two mounds of sandbags about
+twenty feet apart. Snug behind one was a German and behind the
+other an Irishman, both listening. They were within easy bombing
+range, but the homicidal advantage of position of either resulted in a
+truce. Sixty yards! Pace it off. It is not far. In other places the enemies
+have been as close as five yards--only a wall of earth between them.
+Where a bombing operation ends in an attack, a German is naturally
+on one side of a traverse and a Briton on the other.
+
+The Germans were as busy as beavers dam-building. They had a lot
+of work to do before they had their new defences right. We heard
+them driving stakes and spading; we heard their voices with snatches
+of sentences intelligible, and occasionally the energetic, shouted,
+guttural commands of their officers. All through that night I never
+heard a British officer speak above a conversational tone. The orders
+were definite enough, but given with a certain companionable
+kindliness. I have spoken of the genuine affection which his men
+showed for Captain P------, and I was beginning to appreciate that it
+was not a particular instance.
+
+"What if you should shout at Tommy in the German fashion?" I
+asked.
+
+"He wouldn't have it; he'd get rebellious," was the reply. "No, you
+mustn't yell at Tommy. He's a little temperamental about some things
+and he will not be treated as if he were just a human machine."
+
+Yet no one will question the discipline of the British soldier. Discipline
+means that the officer knows his men, and British discipline, which
+bears a retreat like that from Mons, requires that the man likes to
+follow his officers, believes in his officers, loves his officers. Each
+army and each people to its own ways.
+
+Sixty yards! And the dead between the trenches and death lurking
+ready at a trigger's pull should life show itself! When daylight comes
+the British sing out their "Good-morning, Germans!" and the Germans
+answer, "Good-morning, British!" without adding, "We hope to kill
+some of you to-day!" Ragging banter and jest and worse than jest
+and grim defiance are exchanged between the trenches when they
+are within such easy hearing distance of each other; but always from
+a safe position behind the parapet which the adversaries squint
+across through their periscopes. At the gibe business the German is,
+perhaps, better than the Briton.
+
+Early in the evening a regiment on our right broke into a busy
+fusillade at some fancied movement of the enemy. In trench talk that
+is getting "jumpy." The Germans in front roared out their contempt in
+a chorus of guying laughter. Toward morning, these same Germans
+also became "jumpy" and began tearing the air with bullets, firing
+against nothing but the blackness of night. Tommy Atkins only made
+some characteristic comments; for he is a quiet fellow, except when
+he is played on the music-hall stage. Possibly he feels the
+inconsistency of laughter when you are killing human beings; for, as
+his officers say, he is temperamental and never goes to the trouble of
+analysing his emotions. A very real person and a good deal of a
+philosopher is Mr. Atkins, Britain's professional fighting man, who was
+the only kind of fighting man she had ready for the war.
+
+Any small boy who had never had enough fireworks in his life might
+be given a job in the German trenches, with the privilege of firing
+flares till he fell asleep from exhaustion. All night they were going, with
+the regularity of clockwork. The only ones sent up from our side that
+night were shot in order that I might get a better view of the German
+dead.
+
+You know how water lies in the low places on the ground after a
+heavy rain. Well, the patches of dead were like that, and dark in the
+spots where they were very thick--dark as with the darkness of
+deeper water. There were also irregular tongues of dead and
+scattered dead, with arms outstretched or under them as they fell,
+and faces white even in the reddish glare of the rockets and turned
+toward you in the charge that failed under the withering blasts of
+machine-guns, ripping out two or three hundred shots a minute, and
+well-aimed rifle-bullets, each bullet getting its man. Threatening that
+charge would have seemed to a recruit, but measured and calculated
+in certainty of failure in the minds of veteran defenders, who knew
+that the wheat could not stand before their mowers. Man's flesh is
+soft and a bullet is hard and travels fast.
+
+One bit of satire which Tommy sent across the field covered with its
+burden of slaughter to the Germans who are given to song, ought to
+have gone home. It was: "Why don't you stop singing and bury your
+dead?" But the Germans, having given no armistice in other times
+when British dead lay before the trenches, asked for none here. The
+dead were nearer to the British than to the Germans. The discomfort
+would be in British and not German nostrils. And the dead cannot
+fight; they can help no more to win victory for the Fatherland; and the
+time is A.D. 1915. Two or three thousand German dead altogether,
+perhaps--not many out of the Kaiser's millions. Yet they seemed a
+great many to one who saw them lying there.
+
+We stopped to read by the light of a brazier some German soldiers'
+diaries that the Irishmen had. They were cheap little books, bought for
+a few cents, each one telling the dead man's story and revealing the
+monotony of a soldier's existence in Europe to-day. These pawns of
+war had been marched here and there, they never knew why. The
+last notes were when orders came entraining them. They did not
+know that they were to be sent out of those woods yonder to recover
+Neuve Chapelle out of those woods in the test of all their drill and
+waiting. A Bavarian officer--for these were Bavarians--actually rode in
+that charge. He must have worked himself up to a strangely exalted
+optimism and contempt of British fire. Or was it that he, too, did not
+know what he was going against? that only the German general
+knew? Neither he nor his horse lasted long; not more than a dozen
+seconds. The thing was so splendidly foolhardy that in some little war
+it might have become the saga of a regiment, the subject of ballads
+and paintings. In this war it was an incident heralded for a day in one
+command and forgotten the next.
+
+"Good-night!" called the Irish.
+
+"Good-night and good luck!"
+
+"Tell them in America that the Irish are still fighting!"
+
+"Good luck, and may your travelling be aisy; but if ye trip, may ye fall
+into a gold mine!"
+
+We were back with the British regulars; and here, also, many of the
+men remained up around the braziers.
+
+The hours of duty of the few on watch do not take many of the
+twenty-four hours. One may sleep when he chooses in the little
+houses behind the breastworks. Night melts into day and day into
+night in the monotony of mud and sniping rifle-fire. By-and-by it is your
+turn to go into reserve; your turn to get out of your clothes--for there
+are no pyjamas for officers or men in these "crawls," as they are
+sometimes called. Boots off is the only undressing; boots off and
+puttees unloosed, which saves the feet. Yes, by-and-by the march
+back to the rear, where there are tubs filled with hot water and an
+outfit of clean clothes awaiting you, and nothing to do but rest and
+sleep.
+
+"How soon after we leave the trenches may we cheer?" officers have
+been asked in the dead of winter, when water stood deep over the
+porous mud and morning found a scale of ice around the legs.
+
+You, nicely testing the temperature of your morning tub; you, satisfied
+only with faucets of hot and cold water and a mat to stand on--you
+know nothing about the joy of bathing. Your bath is a mere part of the
+daily routine of existence. Try the trenches and get itchy with vermin;
+then you will know that heaven consists of soap and hot water.
+
+No bad odour assails your nostrils wherever you may go in the British
+lines. Its cleanliness, if nothing else, would make British army
+comradeship enjoyable. My wonder never ceases how Tommy keeps
+himself so neat; how he manages to shave every day and get a part,
+at least, of the mud off his uniform. This care makes him feel more as
+if he were "at home" in barracks.
+
+From the breastworks, Captain P------and I went for a stroll in the
+Village, or the site of the village, silent except for the occasional
+singing of a bullet. When we returned he lighted the candle on a stick
+stuck into the wall of his earth-roofed house and suggested a nap. It
+was three o'clock in the morning. Now I could see that my rubber
+boots had grown so heavy because I was carrying so much of the soil
+of Northern France. It looked as if I had gout in both feet--the over-
+bandaged, stage type of gout--which were encased in large mud
+poultices. I tried to stamp off the incubus, but it would not go. I tried
+scraping one foot on the other, and what I scraped off seemed to
+reattach itself as fast as I could remove it.
+
+"Don't try!" said the captain. "Lie down and pull your boots off in the
+doorway. Perhaps you will get some sleep before daybreak."
+
+Sleep! Does a debutante go to sleep at her first ball? Sleep in such
+good company, the company of this captain who was smiling all the
+while with his eyes; smiling at his mud house, at the hardships in the
+trenches, and, I hope, at having a guest who had been with armies
+before!
+
+It was the first time that I had been in the trenches all night; the first
+time, indeed, when I had not been taken into them by an escort in a
+kind of promenade. On this account I was in the family. If it is the right
+kind of a family, that is the way to get a good impression. There would
+be plenty of time to sleep when I returned to London.
+
+So Captain P------ and I lay there talking. I felt the dampness of the
+earth under my body and the walls exuded moisture. The average
+cellar was dry by comparison. "You will get your death of cold!" any
+mother would cry in alarm if her boy were found even sitting on such
+cold, wet ground. For it was a clammy night of early spring. Yet,
+peculiarly enough, few men get colds from this exposure. One gets
+colds from draughts in overheated rooms much oftener. Luckily, it
+was not raining; it had been raining most of the winter in the flat
+country of Northern France and Flanders.
+
+"It is very horrible, this kind of warfare," said the captain. He was
+thinking of the method of it, rather than of the discomforts. "All war is
+very horrible, of course." Regular soldiers rarely take any other view.
+They know war.
+
+"With your wounded arm you might be back in England on leave," I
+suggested.
+
+"Oh, that arm is all right!" he replied. "This is what I am paid for"--
+which I had heard regulars say before. "And it is for England!" he
+added, in his quiet way. "Sometimes I think we should fight better if
+we officers could hate the Germans," he went on. "The German idea
+is that you must hate if you are going to fight well. But we can't hate."
+
+Sound views he had about the war; sounder than I have heard from
+the lips of Cabinet ministers. For these regular officers are specialists
+in war.
+
+"Do you think that we shall starve the Germans out?"
+
+"No. We must win by fighting," he replied. This was in March, 1915.
+"You know," he went on, taking another tack, "when one gets back to
+England out of this muck he wants good linen and everything very
+nice."
+
+"Yes. I've found the same after roughing it," I agreed. "One is most
+particular that he has every comfort to which civilization entitles him."
+
+We chatted on. Much of our talk was soldier shop talk, which you will
+not care to hear. Twice we were interrupted by an outburst of firing,
+and the captain hurried out to ascertain the reason. Some false alarm
+had started the rifles speaking from both sides. A fusillade for two or
+three minutes and the firing died down to silence.
+
+Dawn broke and it was time for me to go; and with daylight, when
+danger of a night surprise was over, the captain would have his
+sleep. I was leaving him to his mud house and his bed on the wet
+ground without a blanket. It was more important to have sandbags up
+for the breastworks than to have blankets; and as the men had not
+yet received theirs, he had none himself.
+
+"It's not fair to the men," he said. "I don't want anything they don't
+have."
+
+No better food and no better house and no warmer garments! He
+spoke not in any sense of stated duty, but in the affection of the
+comradeship of war; the affection born of that imperturbable courage
+of his soldiers who had stood a stone wall of cool resolution against
+German charges when it seemed as if they must go. The glamour of
+war may have departed, but not the brotherhood of hardship and
+dangers shared.
+
+What had been a routine night to him had been a great night to me;
+one of the most memorable of my life.
+
+"I was glad you could come," he said, as I made my adieu, quite as if
+he were saying adieu to a guest at home in England.
+
+Some of the soldiers called their cheery good-byes; and with a
+lieutenant to guide me, I set out while the light was still dusky, leaving
+the comforting parapet to the rear to go into the open, four hundred
+yards from the Germans. A German, though he could not have seen
+us distinctly, must have noted something moving. Two of his bullets
+came rather close before we passed out of his vision among some
+trees.
+
+In a few minutes I was again entering the peasant's cottage that was
+battalion headquarters; this time by daylight. Its walls were chipped by
+bullets that had come over the breastworks. The major was just
+getting up from his blankets in the cellar. By this time I had a real
+trench appetite. Not until after breakfast did it occur to me, with some
+surprise, that I had not washed my face.
+
+"The food was just as good, wasn't it?" remarked the major. "We get
+quite used to such breaches of convention. Besides, you had been
+up all night, so your breakfast might be called your after-the-theatre
+supper."
+
+With him I went to see what the ruins of Neuve Chapelle looked like
+by daylight. The destruction was not all the result of one
+bombardment, for the British had been shelling Neuve Chapelle off
+and on all winter. Of course, there is the old earthquake comparison.
+All writers have used it. But it is quite too feeble for Neuve Chapelle.
+An earthquake merely shakes down houses. The shells had done a
+good deal more than that. They had crushed the remains of the
+houses as under the pestle-head in a mortar; blown walls into dust;
+taken bricks from the east side of the house over to the west and
+thrown them back with another explosion. Neuve Chapelle had been
+literally flailed with the high explosive projectiles of the new British
+artillery, which the British had to make after the war began in order to
+compete with what the Germans already had; for poor, lone,
+wronged, bullied Germany, quite unprepared--Austria with her fifty
+millions does not count--was fighting on the defensive against wicked,
+aggressive enemies who were fully prepared. This explains why she
+invaded France and took possession of towns like Neuve Chapelle to
+defend her poor, unready people from the French, who had been
+plotting and planning "the day" when they would conquer the
+Germans.
+
+Bits of German equipment were mixed with ruins of clocks and family
+pictures and household utensils. I noticed a bicycle which had been
+cut in two, its parts separated by twenty feet; one wheel was twisted
+into a spool of wire, the other simply smashed.
+
+Where was the man who had kept the shop with a few letters of his
+name still visible on a splintered bit of board? Where the children who
+had played in the littered square in front of the church, with its
+steeples and walls piles of stone that had crushed the worshippers'
+benches? Refugees somewhere back of the British lines, working on
+the roads if strong enough, helping France in any way they could, not
+murmuring, even smiling, and praying for victory, which would let
+them return to their homes and daily duties. To their homes!
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+With The Guns
+
+
+
+It is a war of explosions, from bombs thrown by hand within ten yards
+of the enemy to shells thrown as far as twenty miles and to mines laid
+under the enemy's trenches; a war of guns, from seventeen-inch
+down to three-inch and machine-guns; a war of machinery, with man
+still the pre-eminent machine.
+
+Guns mark the limit of the danger zone. Their screaming shells laugh
+at the sentries at the entrances to towns and at cross-roads who
+demand passes of all other travellers. Anyone who tried to keep out
+of range of the guns would never get anywhere near the front. It is all
+a matter of chance with long odds or short odds, according to the
+neighbourhood you are in. If shells come, they come without warning
+and without ceremony. Nobody is afraid of shells and everybody is--at
+least, I am.
+
+"Gawd! Wat a 'ole!" remarks Mr. Thomas Atkins casually, at sight of
+an excavation in the earth made by a thousand-pound projectile.
+
+It is only eighteen years since I saw, at the battle of Domoko in the
+Greco-Turkish war, half a dozen Turkish batteries swing out on the
+plain of Thessaly, limber up in the open, and discharge salvos with
+black powder, in the good, old battle-panorama style. One battery of
+modern field guns unseen would wipe out the lot in five minutes. Only
+ten years ago, at the battle of Liao-yang, as I watched a cloud of
+shrapnel smoke sending down steel showers over the little hill of
+Manjanyama, which sent up showers of earth from shells burst by
+impact on the ground, a Japanese military attache remarked:
+
+"There you have a prophecy of what a European war will be like!"
+
+He was right. He knew his business as a military attache. But the
+Allies might also make guns and go on making them till they have
+enough. The voices of the guns along the front seem never silent. In
+some direction they are always firing. When one night the reports
+from a certain quarter seemed rather heavy, I asked the reason the
+next day.
+
+"No, not very heavy. No attack," a division staff officer explained.
+"The Boches had been building a redoubt, and we turned on some
+h.e.s."--meaning high explosive shells.
+
+Night after night, under cover of darkness, the Germans had been
+labouring on that redoubt, thinking that they were unobserved. They
+had kept extremely quiet, too, slipping their spades into the earth
+softly and hammering a nail ever so lightly; and, of course, the
+redoubt was placed behind a screen of foliage which hid it from the
+view of the British trenches. Such is the hide-and-seek character of
+modern war.
+
+What the German builders did not know was that a British aeroplane
+had been watching them day by day, and that the spot was nicely
+registered on a British gunner's map. On this map it was a certain
+numbered point. Press a button, as it were, and you ring the bell with
+a shell at that point. And the gunners waited till the house of cards
+was up before knocking it to pieces.
+
+Surprise is the thing with the guns. A town may go for weeks without
+getting a single shell. Then it may get a score of shells in ten minutes;
+or it may be shelled regularly every day for ensuing weeks. "They are
+shelling X again," or, "They have been leaving Z alone for a long
+time," is a part of the gossip up and down the line. Towns are proud
+of having escaped altogether, and proud of the number and size of
+the shells received.
+
+"Did you get any?" I asked the division staff officer who had told me
+about the session the six-inch howitzers had enjoyed. A common
+question that, at the front, "Did you get any?" (meaning Germans). A
+practical question, too. It has nothing to do with the form of play or
+any bit of sensational fielding; only with the score, with results, with
+casualties.
+
+"Yes, quite a number," said the officer. "Our observer saw them lying
+about."
+
+The guns are watching for the targets at all hours--the ever-hungry,
+ever-ready, murderous, cunning, quick, scientifically-calculating,
+marvellously-accurate and also the guessing, wondering, blind,
+groping, helpless guns, which toss their steel messengers over
+streams, woodlands, and towns, searching for unseen prey in a wide
+landscape.
+
+Accurate and murderous they seem when you drop low behind a
+trench wall or huddle in a dug-out as you hear an approaching
+scream and the earth trembles and the air is wracked by a
+concussion, and the cry of a man a few yards away tells of a hit. Very
+accurate when still others, sent from muzzles six or seven thousand
+yards distant, fall in that same line of trench! Very accurate when,
+before an infantry attack, with bursts of shrapnel bullets they cut to
+bits the barbed-wire entanglements in front of a trench! The power of
+chaos that they seem to possess when the firing-trench and the dug-
+outs and all the human warrens which protect the defenders are
+beaten as flour is kneaded!
+
+Blind and groping they seem when a dozen shells fall harmlessly in a
+field; when they send their missiles toward objects which may not be
+worth shooting at; when no one sees where the shells hit and the
+amount of damage they have done is all guesswork; and helpless
+without the infantry to protect them, the aeroplanes and the observers
+to see for them.
+
+One thinks of them as demons with subtle intelligence and long
+reach, their gigantic fists striking here and there at will, without a
+visible arm behind the blow. An army guards against the blows of an
+enemy's demons with every kind of cover, every kind of deception,
+with all resources of scientific ingenuity and invention; and an army
+guards its own demons in their lairs as preciously as if they were
+made of some delicate substance which would go up in smoke at a
+glance from the enemy's eye, instead of having barrels of the
+strongest steel that can be forged.
+
+Your personal feeling for the demons on your side is in ratio to the
+amount of hell sent by the enemy's which you have tasted. After you
+have been scared stiff, while pretending that you were not, by sharing
+with Mr. Atkins an accurate bombardment of a trench and are
+convinced that the next shell is bound to get you, you fall into the
+attitude of the army. You want to pat the demon on the back and say,
+"Nice old demon!" and watch him toss a shell three or four miles into
+the German lines from the end of his fiery tongue. Indeed, nothing so
+quickly develops interest in the British guns as having the German
+gunners take too much personal interest in you.
+
+You must have someone to show you the way or you would not find
+any guns. A man with a dog trained to hunt guns might spend a week
+on the gun-position area covering ten miles of the front and not locate
+half the guns. He might miss "Grandmother" and "Sister" and "Betsy"
+and "Mike" and even "Mister Archibald," who is the only one who
+does not altogether try to avoid publicity.
+
+When an attack or an artillery bombardment is on and you go to as
+high ground as possible for a bird's-eye view of battle, all that you see
+is the explosion of the shells; never anything of the guns which are
+firing. In the distance over the German lines and in the foreground
+over the British lines is a balloon, shaped like a caterpillar with folded
+wings--a chrysalis of a caterpillar.
+
+Tugging at its moorings, it turns this way and that with the breeze.
+The speck directly beneath it through the glasses becomes an
+ordinary balloon basket and other specks attached to a guy rope play
+the part of the tail of a kite, helping to steady the type of balloon which
+has taken the place of the old spherical type for observation. Anyone
+who has been up in a captive spherical balloon knows how difficult it
+is to keep his glasses focussed on any object, because of the jerking
+and pitching and trembling due to the envelope's response to air-
+movements. The new type partly overcomes this drawback. To
+shrapnel their thin envelope is as vulnerable as a paper drum-head to
+a knife; but I have seen them remain up defiantly when shells were
+bursting within three or four hundred yards, which their commanders
+seemed to understand was the limit of the German battery's reach.
+
+Again, I have seen a shrapnel burst alongside within range; and five
+minutes later the balloon was down and out of sight. No balloon
+observer hopes to see the enemy's guns. He is watching for shell-
+bursts, in order to inform the guns of his side whether they are on the
+target or not.
+
+Riding along the roads at the front one may know that there is a
+battery a stone's throw away only when a blast from a hidden gun-
+muzzle warns him of its presence. It is wonderful to me that the
+artillery general who took me gun-seeing knew where his own guns
+were, let alone the enemy's. I imagine that he could return to a field
+and locate a four-leafed clover that he had seen on a previous stroll.
+His dogs of war had become foxes of war, burrowing in places which
+wise old father foxes knew were safest from detection. Hereafter, I
+shall not be surprised to see a muzzle poking its head out of an oven,
+or from under grandfather's chair or a farm wagon, or up a tree, or in
+a garret. Think of the last place in the world for emplacing a gun and
+one may be there; think of the most likely place and one may be
+there. You might be walking across the fields and minded to go
+through a hedge, and bump into a black ring of steel with a gun's
+crew grinning behind it. They would grin because you had given proof
+of how well their gun was concealed. But they wouldn't grin as much
+as they would if they saw the enemy plunking shells into another
+hedge two hundred yards distant, where the German aeroplane
+observer thought he had seen a battery and had not.
+
+"I'll show you a big one, first!" said the general.
+
+We left the car at a cottage and walked along a lane. I looked all
+about the premises and could see only some artillerymen. An officer
+led me up to a gun-breech; at least, I know a gun-breech when it is
+one foot from my nose and a soldier has removed its covering. But I
+shall not tell how that gun was concealed; the method was so
+audacious that it was entirely successful. The Germans would like to
+know and we don't want them to know. A little pencil-point on their
+map for identification, and they would send a whirlwind of shells at
+that gun.
+
+And then?
+
+Would the gun try to fire back? No. Its gunners probably would not
+know the location of any of the guns of the German battery which had
+concentrated on their treasure. They would desert the gun. If they did
+not, they ought to be court-martialled for needlessly risking the
+precious lives of trained men. They would make for the "funk-pits," as
+they call the dug-outs, just as the gunners of any other Power would.
+
+The chances are that the gun itself would not be hit bodily by a shell.
+Fragments might strike it without causing more than an abrasion; for
+big guns have pretty thick cuticles. When the storm was over, the
+gunners would move their treasure to another hiding-place; which
+would mean a good deal of work, on account of its size.
+
+It is the inability of gun to see gun, and even when seen to knock out
+gun, which has put an end to the so-called artillery duel of pitched-
+battle days, when cannon walloped cannon to keep cannon from
+walloping the infantry. Now when there is an action, though guns still
+go after guns if they know where they are, most of the firing is done
+against trenches and to support trenches and infantry works, or with a
+view to demoralizing the infantry. Concentration of artillery fire will
+demolish an enemy's trench and let your infantry take possession of
+the wreckage remaining; but then the enemy's artillery concentrates
+on your infantry and frequently makes their new habitation untenable.
+
+Noiselessly except for a little click, with chickens clucking in a field
+near by, the big breech-block which held the shell fast, sending all the
+power of the explosion out of the muzzle, was swung back and one
+looked through the shining tube of steel, with its rifling which caught
+the driving band and gave the shell its rotation and accuracy in its
+long journey, which would close when, descending at the end of its
+parabola, its nose struck building, earth, or pavement and it exploded.
+
+Wheels that lift and depress and swing the muzzle, and gadgets with
+figures, and other scales which play between the map and the
+gadgets, and atmospheric pressure and wind-variation, all worked out
+with the same precision under a French hedge as on board a
+battleship where the gun-mounting is fast to massive ribs of steel--it
+seemed a matter of book-keeping and trigonometry rather than war.
+
+If a shell from this gun were to hit at the corner of Wall Street and
+Broadway at the noon hour, it would probably kill and wound a
+hundred men. If it went into the dug-out of a support trench it would
+get everybody there; but if it went ten yards beyond the trench into
+the open field, it would probably get nobody. "Cover!" someone
+exclaimed, while we were looking at the gun; and everybody promptly
+got under the branches of a tree or a shed. A German aeroplane was
+cruising in our direction. If the aviator saw a group of men standing
+about he might draw conclusions and pass the wireless word to send
+in some shells at whatever number on the German gunners' map
+was ours.
+
+These gunners loved their gun; loved it for the power which it could
+put into a blow under their trained hands; loved it for the care and the
+labour it had meant for them. It is the way of gunners to love their
+gun, or they would not be good gunners. Of all the guns I saw that
+day, I think that two big howitzers meant the most to their masters.
+These had just arrived. They had been set up only two days. They
+had not yet fired against the enemy. For many months the gunners
+had drilled in England, and they had tried their "eight-inch hows" out
+on the target range and brought them across the Channel and
+nursed them along French roads, and finally set them up in their
+hidden lair. Now they waited for observers to assist them in
+registration.
+
+When the general approached there was a call to turn out the guard;
+but the general stopped that. At the front there is an end of the
+ceremoniousness of the barracks. Military formality disappears.
+Discipline, as well as other things, is simpler and more real. The men
+went on with their recess playing football in a near-by field.
+
+The officers possibly were a trifle diffident and uncertain; they had not
+yet the veteran's manner. It was clear that they had done everything
+required by the textbook of theory--the latest, up-to-date textbook of
+experience at the front as taught in England. When they showed us
+how they had stored their stock of shells to be safe from a shot by the
+enemy, one remarked that the method was according to the latest
+directions, though there was some difference among military experts
+on the subject. When there is a difference, what is the beginner to
+do? An old hand, of course, does it his way until an order makes him
+do otherwise. The general had a suggestion about the application of
+the method. He had little to say, the general, and all was in the spirit
+of comradeship and quite to the point. Not much escaped his
+observation.
+
+It seems fairly true that one who knows his work well in any branch of
+human endeavour makes it appear easy. Once a gunner always a
+gunner is characteristic of all armies. The general had spent his life
+with guns. He was a specialist visiting his plant; one of the staff
+specialists responsible to a corps commander for the work of the
+guns on a certain section of map, for accuracy and promptness of fire
+when it was required in the commander's plans.
+
+If the newcomers put their shells into the target on their first trial they
+had qualified; and sometimes newcomers shoot quite as well as
+veterans, which is a surprise to both and the best kind of news for the
+general who is in charge of an expanding plant. The war will be
+decided by gunners and infantry that knew nothing of guns or drill
+when the war began.
+
+"Here are some who have been in France from the first," said the
+general, when we came to a battery of field guns; of the eighteen-
+pounders, the fellows you see behind the galloping horses, the "hell-
+for-leather" guns, the guns which bring the gleam of affection into the
+eyes of men who think of pursuits and covering retreats and the
+pitched-battle conditions before armies settled down in trenches and
+growled and hissed at each other day after day and brought up guns
+of calibres which we associate with battleships and coast
+fortifications.
+
+These are called "light stuff" and "whizz-bangs" now, in army
+parlance. They throw only an eighteen-pound shell which carries
+three hundred bullets, but so fast that they chase one another
+through the air. There has been so much talk about the need of
+heavy guns, you might think that eighteen-pounders were too small
+for consideration. Were the German line broken, these are the ones
+which could gallop on the heels of the infantry.
+
+They are the boys who weave the "curtain of fire" which you read
+about in the official bulletins as checking an infantry charge; which
+demolish the barbed-wire entanglements to let an infantry charge get
+into a trench. If a general wants a shower of bullets over any part of
+the German line he has only to call up the eighteen-pounders and it is
+sent as promptly as the pressure of a button brings a pitcher of iced-
+water to a room in a first-class hotel. A veteran eighteen-pounder
+crew in action is a poem in precision and speed of movement. The
+gun itself seems to possess intelligence.
+
+There was the finesse of gunners' craft worthy of veterans in the way
+that these eighteen-pounders were concealed. The Germans had put
+some shells in the neighbourhood, but without fooling the old hands.
+They did not change the location of their battery and their judgment
+that the shots which came near were chance shots fired at another
+object was justified. Particularly I should like to mention the nature of
+their "funk-pits," which kept them safe from the heaviest shells. For
+the veterans knew how to take care of themselves; they had an eye
+to the protection which comes of experience with German high
+explosives. Their expert knowledge of all the ins and outs of the
+business had been fought into them for over a year.
+
+Another field battery, also, I have in mind, placed in an orchard.
+Which orchard of all the thousands of orchards along the British front
+the German staff may guess, if they choose. If German guns fired at
+all the orchards, one by one, they might locate it--and then again they
+might not. Besides, this is a peculiar sort of orchard.
+
+It is a characteristic of gunners to be neat and to have an eye for the
+comeliness of things. These men had a lawn and a garden, tables
+and chairs. If you are familiar with the tidiness of a retired New
+England sailor, who regards his porch as a quarter-deck and sallies
+forth to remove each descending autumn leaf from the grass, then
+you know how scrupulous they were about litter.
+
+For weeks they had been in the same position, unseen by German
+aeroplanes. They had daily baths; they did their weekly laundry,
+taking care not to hang it where it would be visible from the sky. Every
+day they received the London papers and letters from home. When
+they were needed to help in making war, all they had to do was to slip
+a shell in the breech and send it with their compliments to the
+Germans. They were camping out at His Majesty's expense in the
+pleasant land of France in the joyous summer time; and on the roof of
+sod over their guns were pots of flowers, undisturbed by blasts from
+the gun-muzzles.
+
+It was when leaving another battery that out of the tail of my eye I
+caught a lurid flash through a hedge, followed by the sharp, ear-
+piercing crack that comes from being in line with a gun-muzzle when
+a shot is fired. We followed a path which took us to the rear of the
+report, where we stepped through undergrowth among the busy
+group around the breeches of some guns of one of the larger
+calibres.
+
+An order for some "heavy stuff" at a certain point on the map was
+being filled. Sturdy men were moving in a pantomime under the
+shade of a willow tree, each doing exactly his part in a process that
+seemed as simple as opening a cupboard door, slipping in a package
+of concentrated destruction, and closing the door. All that detail of
+range-finding and mathematical adjustment of aim at the unseen
+target which takes so long to explain was applied as automatically as
+an adding-machine adds up a column of figures. Everybody was as
+practice-perfect in his part as performers who have made hundreds
+of appearances in the same act on the stage.
+
+All ready, the word given, a thunder peal and through the air you saw
+a wingless, black object in a faint curve against the soft blue sky,
+which it seemed to sweep with a sound something like the escape of
+water through a break in the garden hose multiplied by ten, rising to
+its zenith and then descending, till it passed out of sight behind a
+green bank of foliage on the horizon.
+
+After the scream had been lost to the ear you heard the faint,
+thudding boom of an explosion from the burst of that conical piece of
+steel which you had seen slipped into the breech. This was the
+gunners' part in chessboard war, where the moves are made over
+signal wires, while the infantry endure the explosions in their trenches
+and fight in their charges in the traverses of trenches at as close
+quarters as in the days of the cave-dwellers.
+
+There was no stopping work when the general came, of course. It
+would have been the same had Lord Kitchener been present. The
+battery commander expressed his regret that he could not show me
+his guns without any sense of irony; meaning that he was sorry he
+was too busy to tell about his battery. In about the time that it took a
+telegraph key to click after each one of those distant bursts, he knew
+whether or not the shot was on the target and what variation of
+degree to make in the next if it were not; or, if the word came, to shift
+the point of aim a little, when you are trying to shake up the enemy
+here and there along a certain length of trench.
+
+At another wire-end someone was spotting the bursts. Perhaps he
+was in the kind of place where I found one observer, who was sitting
+on a cushion looking out through a chink in a wall, with a signal corps
+operator near by. It was a small chink, just large enough to allow the
+lens of a pair of glasses or a telescope a range of vision; and even
+then I was given certain warnings before the cover over the chink
+was removed, though there could not have been any German in
+uniform nearer than four thousand yards. But there may be spies
+within your own lines, looking for such holes.
+
+From this post I could make out the British and the German trenches
+in muddy white lines of sandbags running snake-like across the fields,
+and the officer identified points on the map to me. Every tree and
+hedge and ditch in the panorama were graven on his mind; all had
+language for him. His work was engrossing. It had risk, too; there was
+no telling when a shell might lift him off the cushion and provide a
+hole for the burial of his remains.
+
+If he were shelled, the observer would go to a funk-pit, as the
+gunners do, until the storm had passed; and then he would move on
+with his cushion and his telegraph instrument and make a hole in
+another wall, if he did not find a tree or some other eminence which
+suited his purpose better. Meanwhile, he was not the only observer in
+that section. There were others nearer the trenches, perhaps actually
+in the trenches. The two armies, seeming chained to their trenches,
+are set with veiled eyes at the end of wires; veiled eyes trying to
+locate the other's eyes, the other's guns and troops and the least
+movement which indicates any attempt to gain an advantage.
+
+"Gunnery is navigation, dead reckoning, with the spotting observer
+the sun by which you correct your figures," said one of the artillery
+officers.
+
+Firing enough one had seen--landscape bathed in smoke and dust
+and reverberating with explosions; but all as a spectacle from an
+orchestra seat, not too close at hand for comfort. This time I was to
+see the guns fire and the results of the firing in detail. Both can rarely
+be seen at the same time. It was not show firing this that we watched
+from an observing station, but part of the day's work for the guns and
+the general. First, the map, "Here and there," as an officer's finger
+pointed; and then one looked across fields, green and brown and
+golden with the summer crops.
+
+Item I. The Germans were fortifying a certain point on a certain farm.
+We were going to put some "heavy stuff" in there and some "light
+stuff," too. The burst of our shells could be located in relation to a
+certain tree.
+
+Item II. Our planes thought that the Germans had a wireless station in
+a certain building. "Heavy stuff" exclusively for this. No enemy's
+wireless station ought to be enjoying serene summer weather without
+interruption; and no German working-party ought to be allowed to
+build redoubts within range of our guns without a break in the
+monotony of their drudgery.
+
+Six lyddites were the order for the wireless station; six high explosives
+which burst on contact and make a hole in the earth large enough for
+a grave for the Kaiser and all his field marshals. Frequently, not only
+the number of shells to be fired, but also the intervals between them
+is given by the artillery commander, as part of his plan in his
+understanding of the object to be accomplished; and it is quite clear
+that the system is the same with the Germans.
+
+One side no sooner develops an idea than the other adopts it. By
+effect of the enemy's shells you judge what the effect of yours must
+be. Months of experience have done away with all theories and
+practice has become much the same by either adversary. For
+example, let a German or a British airman be winged by anti-aircraft
+gun-fire and the guns instantly loosen up on the point over his own
+lines, if he regains them, where he is seen to fall. All the soldiers in
+the neighbourhood are expected to run to his assistance; and, at any
+rate, you may get a trained aviator, whose life is a valuable asset on
+one side of the ledger and whose death an asset on the other. There
+is no sentiment left in war, you see. It is all killing and avoiding being
+killed.
+
+By the scream of a shell the practised ear of the artilleryman can tell
+whether it comes from a gun with a low trajectory or from a howitzer,
+whose projectile rises higher and falls at a sharper angle which
+enables it to enter the trenches; and he can even tell approximately
+the calibre.
+
+A scream sweeping past from our rear, and we knew that this was for
+the redoubt, as that was to have the first turn. A volume of dust and
+smoke breaking from the earth short of the redoubt, and after the
+second's delay of hearing the engine whistle after the burst of steam
+in the distance on a winter day, came the sound of the burst. The
+next was over. With the third the "heavy stuff" ought to be right on.
+
+But don't forget that there was also an order for some "Right stuff,"
+identified as shrapnel by its soft, nimbus-like puff which was
+scattering bullets as if giving chase to that working-party as it
+hastened to cover. There you had the ugly method of this modern
+artillery fire: death shot downward from the air and leaping up out of
+the earth. Unhappily, the third was not on, nor the fourth--not exactly
+on. Exactly on is the way that British gunners like to fill an order
+f.o.b., express charges prepaid, for the Germans.
+
+Ten years ago it would have seemed good shooting. It was not very
+good in the twelfth month of the war; for war beats the target range in
+developing accuracy. At five or six or seven or eight thousand yards'
+range the shells were bursting thirty or forty yards away from where
+they should.
+
+No, not very good; the general murmured as much. He did not need
+to say so aloud to the artillery officer responsible for that shooting,
+who was in touch with his batteries by wire. The officer knew it. He
+was the high-strung, ambitious sort. You had better not become a
+gunner unless you are. Any "good-enough" temperament is ruled off
+wasting munitions. Red was creeping through the tan from his throat
+to the roots of his hair. To have this happen in the presence of that
+veteran general, after all his efforts to try to remedy the error in those
+guns!
+
+But the general was quite human. He was not the "strafing" kind.
+
+"I know those guns have an error!" he said, as he put his hand on the
+officer's arm. That was all; and that was a good deal to the officer.
+Evidently, the general not only knew guns; he knew men. The officer
+had suffered admonition enough from his own injured pride.
+
+Besides, what we did to the supposed wireless station ought to keep
+any general from being downhearted. Neither guns, nor the powder
+which sent the big shells on their errand, nor the calculations of the
+gunners, nor their adjustment of the gadgets, had any error. With the
+first one, a great burst of the black smoke of deadly lyddite rose from
+the target. "Right on!"
+
+And again and again--right on! The ugly, spreading, low-hanging,
+dense cloud was renewed from its heart by successive bursts in the
+same place. If the aeroplane's conclusions were right, that wireless
+station must be very much wireless, now. The only safe discount for
+the life insurance of the operators was one hundred per cent.
+
+"Here, they are firing more than six!" said the general. "It's always
+hard to hold these gunners down when they are on the target like
+that."
+
+He spoke as if it would have been difficult for him to resist the
+temptation himself. The wireless station got two extra shells for full
+measure. Perhaps those two were waste; perhaps the first two had
+been enough. Conservation of shells has become a first principle of
+the artillerists' duty. The number fired by either side in the course of
+the routine of an average so-called peaceful day is surprising.
+Economy would be easier if it were harder to slip a shell into a gun-
+breech. The men in the trenches are always calling for shells. They
+want a tree or a house which is the hiding-place of a sniper knocked
+down. The men at the guns would be glad to accommodate them, but
+the say as to that is with commanders who know the situation.
+
+"The Boches will be coming back at us soon, you will see!" said one
+of the officers who was at our observation post. "They always do. The
+other day they chose this particular spot for their target"--which was a
+good reason why they would not this time, an optimist thought.
+
+Let either side start a bombardment and the other responds. There is
+a you-hit-me-and-I'll-hit-you character about siege warfare. Gun-fire
+provokes gun-fire. Neither adversary stays quiet under a blow. It was
+not long before we heard the whish of German shells passing some
+distance away.
+
+They say sport is out of war. Perhaps, but not its enthralling and
+horrible fascination. Knowing what the target is, knowing the object of
+the fire, hearing the scream of the projectile on the way and watching
+to see if it is to be a hit, when the British are fighting the Germans on
+the soil of France, has an intensive thrill which is missing to the
+spectator who looks on at the Home Sports Club shooting at clay
+pigeons--which is not in justification of war. It does explain, however,
+the attraction of gunnery to gunners. One forgets, for the instant, that
+men are being killed and mangled. He thinks only of points scored in
+a contest which requires all the wit and strength and fortitude of man
+and all his cunning in the manufacture and control of material.
+
+You want your side to win; in this case, because it is the side of
+humanity and of that kindly general and the things that he and the
+army he represents stand for. The blows which the demons from the
+British lairs strike are to you the blows of justice; and you are glad
+when they go home. They are your blows. You have a better reason
+for keeping an army's artillery secrets than for keeping secret the
+signals of your Varsity football team, which anyone instinctively
+keeps--the reason of a world cause.
+
+Yet another thing to see--an aeroplane assisting a battery by spotting
+the fall of its shells, which is engrossing enough, too, and amazingly
+simple. Of course this battery was proud of its method of
+concealment. Each battery commander will tell you that a British
+plane has flown very low, as a test, without being able to locate his
+battery. If it is located, there is more work due in "make-up" to
+complete the disguise. Competition among batteries is as keen as
+among battleships of our North Atlantic fleet.
+
+Situation favoured this battery, which was Canadian. It was as nicely
+at home as a first-class Adirondack camp. At any rate, no other
+battery had a dug-out for a litter of eight pups, with clean straw for
+their bed, right between two gun-emplacements.
+
+"We found the mother wild, out there in the woods," one of the men
+explained. "She, too, was a victim of war; a refugee from some home
+destroyed by shell-fire. At first she wouldn't let us approach her, and
+we tossed her pieces of meat from a safe distance. I think those pups
+will bring us luck. We'll take them along to the Rhine. Some mascots,
+eh?"
+
+On our way back to the general's headquarters we must have passed
+other batteries hidden from sight only a stone's throw away; and yet in
+an illustrated paper recently I saw a drawing of some guns emplaced
+on the crest of a bare hill, naked to all the batteries of the enemy, but
+engaged in destroying all the enemy's batteries, according to the
+account. Twelve months of war have not shaken conventional ideas
+about gunnery; which is one reason for writing this chapter.
+
+Also, on our way back we learned the object of the German fire in
+answer to our bombardment of the redoubt and the wireless station.
+They had shelled a cross-roads and a certain village again. As we
+passed through the village we noticed a new hole in the church tower,
+and three holes in the churchyard, which had scattered clods of earth
+about the pavement. A shopkeeper was engaged in repairing a
+window-frame that had been broken by a shell-fragment.
+
+There is no flustering the French population. That very day I heard of
+an old peasant who asked a British soldier if he could not get
+permission for the old farmer to wear some kind of an armband which
+both sides would respect, so that he could cut his field of wheat
+between the trenches. Why not? Wasn't it his wheat? Didn't he need
+the crop?
+
+And the Germans fire into villages and towns; for the women and
+children there are the women and children of the enemy. But those in
+the German lines belong to the ally of England. Besides, they are
+women and children. So British gunners avoid towns--which is, in one
+sense, a professional handicap.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+Archibald The Archer
+
+
+
+There is another kind of gun, vagrant and free lance, which deserves
+a chapter by itself. It has the same bark as the eighteen-pounder field
+piece; the flight of the shell makes the same kind of sound. But its
+scream, instead of passing in a long parabola toward the German
+lines, goes up in the heavens toward something as large as your
+hand against the light blue of the summer sky--a German aeroplane.
+
+At a height of seven or eight thousand feet the target seems almost
+stationary, when really it is going somewhere between fifty and ninety
+miles an hour. It has all the heavens to itself, and to the British it is a
+sinister, prying eye that wants to see if we are building any new
+trenches, if we are moving bodies of troops or of transport, and where
+our batteries are in hiding. That aviator three miles above the earth
+has many waiting guns at his command. A few signals from his
+wireless and they would let loose on the target he indicated.
+
+If the planes might fly as low as they pleased, they would know all that
+was going on in an enemy's lines. They must keep up so high that
+through the aviator's glasses a man on the road is the size of a pin-
+head. To descend low is as certain death as to put your head over
+the parapet of a trench when the enemy's trench is only a hundred
+yards away. There are dead lines in the air, no less than on the earth.
+
+Archibald, the anti-aircraft gun, sets the dead line. He watches over it
+as a cat watches a mouse. The trick of sneaking up under cover of a
+noonday cloud and all the other man-bird tricks he knows. A couple of
+seconds after that crack a tiny puff of smoke breaks about a hundred
+yards behind the Taube. A soft thistledown against the blue it seems
+at that altitude; but it would not if it were about your ears. Then it
+would sound like a bit of dynamite on an anvil struck by a hammer
+and you would hear the whizz of scores of bullets and fragments.
+
+The smoking brass shell-case is out of Archibald's steel throat, and
+another shell-case with its charge slipped into place and started on its
+way before the first puff breaks. The aviator knows what is coming.
+He knows that one means many, once he is in range.
+
+Archibald rushes the fighting; it is the business of the Taube to side-
+step. The aviator cannot hit back except through his allies, the
+German batteries, on the earth. They would take care of Archibald if
+they knew where he was. But all that the aviator can see is mottled
+landscape. From his side Archibald flies no goal flags. He is one of
+ten thousand tiny objects under the aviator's eye.
+
+Archibald's propensities are entirely peripatetic. He is the vagabond
+of the army lines. Locate him and he is gone. His home is where night
+finds him and the day's duties take him. He is the only gun that keeps
+regular hours like a Christian gentleman. All the others, great and
+small, raucous-voiced and shrill-voiced, fire at any hour, night or day.
+Aeroplanes rarely go up at night; and when no aeroplanes are up,
+Archibald has no interest in the war. But he is alert at the first flush of
+dawn, on the look-out for game with the avidity of a pointer dog; for
+aviators are also up early.
+
+Why he was named Archibald nobody knows. As his full name is
+Archibald the Archer, possibly it comes from some association with
+the idea of archery. If there were ten thousand anti-aircraft guns in the
+British army, every one would be known as Archibald.
+
+When the British Expeditionary Force went to France it had none. All
+the British could do was to bang away at Taubes with thousands of
+rounds of rifle-bullets, which might fall in their own lines, and with the
+field guns.
+
+It was pie in those days for the Taubes! Easy to keep out of the range
+of both rifles and guns and observe well! If the Germans did not know
+the progress of the British retreat from on high it was their own fault.
+Now, the business of firing at Taubes is left entirely to Archibald.
+When you see how hard it is for Archibald, after all his practice, to get
+a Taube, you understand how foolish it was for the field guns to try to
+get one.
+
+Archibald, who is quite the "swaggerist" of the gun tribe, has his own
+private car built especially for him. Such of the cavalry's former part
+as the planes do not play he plays. He keeps off the enemy's scouts.
+Do you seek team-work, spirit of corps, and smartness in this theatre
+of France, where all the old glamour of war is supposed to be
+lacking? You will find it in the attendants of Archibald. They have
+pride, elan, alertness, pepper, and all the other appetizers and
+condiments. They are as neat as a private yacht's crew, and as lively
+as an infield of a major league team. The Archibaldians are naturally
+bound to think rather well of themselves.
+
+Watch them there, every man knowing his part, as they send their
+shells after the Taube! There is not enough waste motion among the
+lot to tip over the range-finder, or the telescopes, or the score board,
+or any of the other paraphernalia assisting the man who is looking
+through the sight in knowing where to aim next, as a screw answers
+softly to his touch.
+
+Is the sport of war dead? Not for Archibald! Here you see your target
+--which is so rare these days when British infantrymen have stormed
+and taken trenches without ever seeing a German--and the target is a
+bird, a man-bird. Puffs of smoke with bursting hearts of death are
+clustered around the Taube. One follows another in quick succession,
+for more than one Archibald is firing, before your entranced eye.
+
+You are staring like the crowd of a county fair at a parachute act. For
+the next puff may get him. Who knows this better than the aviator?
+He is, likely, an old hand at the game; or, if he is not, he has all the
+experience of other veterans to go by. His ruse is the same as that of
+the escaped prisoner who runs from the fire of a guard in a zigzag
+course, and more than that. If a puff comes near on the right, he turns
+to the left; if one comes near on the left, he turns to the right; if one
+comes under, he rises; over, he dips. This means that the next shell
+fired at the same point will be wide of the target.
+
+Looking through the sight, it seems easy to hit a plane. But here is
+the difficulty. It takes two seconds, say, for the shell to travel to the
+range of the plane. The gunner must wait for its burst before he can
+spot his shot. Ninety miles an hour is a mile and a half a minute.
+Divide that by thirty and you have about a hundred yards which the
+plane has travelled from the time the shell left the gun-muzzle till it
+burst. It becomes a matter of discounting the aviator's speed and
+guessing from experience which way he will turn next.
+
+That ought to have got him--the burst was right under. No! He rises.
+Surely that one got him! The puff is right in front, partly hiding the
+Taube from view. You see the plane tremble as if struck by a violent
+gust of wind. Close! Within thirty or forty yards, the telescope says.
+But at that range the naked eye is easily deceived about distance.
+Probably some of the bullets have cut his plane.
+
+But you must hit the man or the machine in a vital spot in order to
+bring down your bird. The explosions must be very close to count. It is
+amazing how much shell-fire an aeroplane can stand. Aviators are
+accustomed to the whizz of shell-fragments and bullets, and to have
+their planes punctured and ripped. Though their engines are put out
+of commission, and frequently though the man be wounded, they are
+able to volplane back to the cover of their own lines.
+
+To make a proper story we ought to have brought down this particular
+bird. But it had the luck, which most planes, British or German have,
+to escape antiaircraft gun-fire. It had begun edging away after the first
+shot and soon was out of range. Archibald had served the purpose of
+his existence. He had sent the prying aerial eye home.
+
+A fight between planes in the air very rarely happens, except in the
+imagination. Planes do not go up to fight other planes, but for
+observation. Their business is to see and learn and bring home their
+news.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+Trenches In Summer
+
+
+
+It was the same trench in June, still a relatively "quiet corner," which I
+had seen in March; but I would never have known it if its location had
+not been the same on the map. One was puzzled how a place that
+had been so wet could become so dry.
+
+This time the approach was made in daylight through a long
+communication ditch, which brought us to a shell-wrecked
+farmhouse. We passed through this and stepped down at the back
+door into deep traverses cut among the roots of an orchard; then
+behind walls of earth high above our heads to battalion headquarters
+in a neat little shanty, where I deposited the first of the cakes I had
+brought on the table beside some battalion reports. A cake is the right
+gift for the trenches, though less so in summer than in winter when
+appetites are less keen. The adjutant tried a slice while the colonel
+conferred with the general, who had accompanied me this far, and he
+glanced up at a sheet of writing with a line opposite hours of the day,
+pinned to a post of his dug-out.
+
+"I wanted to see if it were time to make another report," he said. "We
+are always making reports. Everybody is, so that whoever is superior
+to someone else knows what is happening in his subordinate's
+department."
+
+Then in and out in a maze, between walls with straight faces of the
+hard, dry earth, testifying to the beneficence of summer weather in
+constructing fastnesses from artillery fire, until we were in the firing-
+trench, where I was at home among the officers and men of a
+company. General Mud was "down and out." He waited on the winter
+rains to take command again. But winter would find an army prepared
+against his kind of campaign. Life in the trenches in summer was not
+so unpleasant but that some preferred it, with the excitement of
+sniping, to the boredom of billets.
+
+
+
+"What hopes!" was the current phrase I heard among the men in
+these trenches. It shared honours with strafe. You have only one life
+to live and you may lose that any second--what hopes! Dig, dig, dig,
+and set off a mine that sends Germans skyward in a cloud of dust--
+what hopes! Bully beef from Chicago and Argentina is no food for
+babes, but better than "K.K." bread--what hopes! Mr. Thomas Atkins,
+British regular, takes things as they come--and a lot of them come--
+shells, bullets, asphyxiating gas, grenades, and bombs.
+
+There is much to be thankful for. The King's Own Particular Fusiliers,
+as we shall call this regiment, had only three men hit yesterday. On
+every man's cap is a metal badge crowded with battle honours, from
+the storming of Quebec to the relief of Ladysmith. Heroic its history;
+but no battle honours equal that of the regiment's part in the second
+battle of Ypres; and no heroes of the regiment's story, whom you
+picture in imagination with haloes of glory in the wish that you might
+have met them in the flesh in their scarlet coats, are the equal of
+these survivors in plain khaki manning a ditch in A.D. 1915, whom
+anyone may meet.
+
+But do not tell them that they are heroes. They will deny it on the
+evidence of themselves as eyewitnesses of the action. To remark
+that the K.O.P.F. are brave is like remarking that water flows down
+hill. It is the business of the K.O.P.F. to be brave. Why talk about it?
+
+One of the three men hit was killed. Well, everybody in the war rather
+expects to be killed. The other two "got tickets to England," as they
+say. My lady will take the convalescents joy-riding in her car, and
+afterwards seat them in easy chairs, arranging the cushions with her
+own hands, and feed them slices of cold chicken in place of bully beef
+and strawberries and cream in place of ration marmalade. Oh, my!
+What hopes!
+
+Mr. Atkins does not mind being a hero for the purposes of such
+treatment. Then, with never a twinkle in his eye, he will tell my lady
+that he does not want to return to the front; he has had enough of it,
+he has. My lady's patriotism will be a trifle shocked, as Mr. Atkins
+knows it will be; and she will wonder if the "stick it" quality of the
+British soldier is weakening, as Mr. Atkins knows she will. For he has
+more kinks in his mental equipment than mere nobility ever guesses,
+and he is having the time of his life in more respects than
+strawberries and cream. What hopes! Of course, he will return and
+hold on in the face of all that the Germans can give, without any
+pretence to bravery.
+
+If you go as a stranger into the trenches on a sightseeing tour and
+says, "How are you?" and, "Are you going to Berlin?" and, "Are you
+comfortable?" etc., Tommy Atkins will say, "Yes, sir," and "Very well,
+sir," as becomes all polite regular soldier men; and you get to know
+him about as well as you know the members of a club if you are
+shown the library and dine at a corner table with a friend.
+
+Spend the night in the trenches and you are taken into the family, into
+that very human family of soldier-dom in a quiet corner; and the old,
+care-free spirit of war, which some people thought had passed, is
+found to be no less alive in siege warfare than on a march of regulars
+on the Indian frontier or in the Philippines. Gaiety and laughter and
+comradeship and "joshing" are here among men to whom wounds
+and death are a part of the game. One may challenge high
+explosives with a smile, no less than ancient round shot. Settle down
+behind the parapet, and the little incongruities of a trench, paltry
+without the intimacy of men and locality, make for humour no less
+than in a shop or a factory.
+
+Under the parapet runs the tangle of barbed wire--barbed wire from
+Switzerland to Belgium--to welcome visitors from that direction, which,
+to say the least, would be an impolitic direction of approach for any
+stranger.
+
+"All sightseers should come into the trenches from the rear," says Mr.
+Atkins. "Put it down in the guidebooks."
+
+Beyond the barbed wire in the open field the wheat which some
+farmer sowed before positions were established in this area is now in
+head, rippling with the breeze, making a golden sea up to the wall of
+sandbags which is the enemy's line. It was late June at its loveliest;
+no signs of war except the sound of our guns some distance away
+and an occasional sniper's bullet. One cracked past as I was looking
+through my glasses to see if there were any evidence of life in the
+German trenches.
+
+"Your hat, sir!"
+
+Another moved a sandbag slightly, but not until after the hat had
+come down and the head under it, most expeditiously. Up to eight
+hundred yards a bullet cracks; beyond that range it whistles, sighs,
+even wheezes. An elevation gives snipers, who are always trained
+shots, an angle of advantage. In winter they had to rely for cover on
+buildings, which often came tumbling down with them when hit by a
+shell. The foliage of summer is a boon to their craft.
+
+"Does it look to you like an opening in the branches of that tree--the
+big one at the right?"
+
+In the mass of leaves a dark spot was visible. It might be natural, or it
+might be a space cut away for the swing of a rifle-barrel. Perhaps
+sitting up there snugly behind a bullet-proof shield fastened to the
+limbs was a German sharpshooter, watching for a shot with the
+patience of a hound for a rabbit to come out of its hole.
+
+"It's about time we gave that tree a spray good for that kind of fungus,
+from a machine-gun!"
+
+A bullet coming from our side swept overhead. One of our own
+sharpshooters had seen something to shoot at.
+
+"Not giving you much excitement!" said Tommy.
+
+"I suppose I'd get a little if I stood up on the parapet?" I asked.
+
+"You wouldn't get a ticket for England; you'd get a box!"
+
+"There's a cemetery just behind the lines if you'd prefer to stay in
+France!"
+
+I had passed that cemetery with its fresh wooden crosses on my way
+to the trench. These tenderhearted soldiers who joked with death had
+placed flowers on the graves of fallen comrades and bought
+elaborate French funeral wreaths with their meagre pay--which is
+another side of Mr. Thomas Atkins. There is sentiment in him. Yes,
+he's loaded with sentiment, but not for the "movies."
+
+"Keep your head down there, Eames!" called a corporal. "I don't want
+to be taking an inventory of your kit."
+
+Eames did not even realize that his head was above the parapet. The
+hardest thing to teach a soldier is not to expose himself. Officers keep
+iterating warnings and then forget to practise what they preach. That
+morning a soldier had been shot through the heart and arm sideways
+behind the trench. He had lain down unnoticed for a nap in the sun, it
+was supposed. When he awoke, presumably he sat up and yawned
+and Herr Schmidt, from some platform in a tree, had a bloody reward
+for his patience.
+
+The next morning I saw the British take their revenge. Some German
+who thought that he could not be seen in the mist of dawn was
+walking along the German parapet. What hopes! Four or five men
+took careful aim and fired. That dim figure collapsed in a way that was
+convincing.
+
+As I swept the line of German trenches with the glasses I saw a wisp
+of flag clinging to its pole in the still air far down to the left. Flags
+are as unusual above trenches as men standing up in full view of
+the enemy. Then a breeze caught the folds, and I saw that it was
+the tricolour of France.
+
+"A Boche joke!" Tommy explained.
+
+"Probably they are hating the French to-day?"
+
+"No, it's been there for some days. They want us to shoot at the flag
+of our ally. They'd get a laugh out of that--a regular Boche notion of
+humour."
+
+"If it were a German flag?" I suggested.
+
+"What hopes! We'd make it into a lace curtain!"
+
+Even the guns had ceased firing. The birds in their evensong had all
+the war to themselves. It was difficult to believe that if you stood on
+top of the parapet anybody would shoot at you; no, not even if you
+walked down the road that ran through the wheatfield, everything was
+so peaceful. One grew sceptical of there being any Germans in the
+trenches opposite.
+
+"There are three or four sharpshooters and a fat old Boche professor
+in spectacles, who moves a machine-gun up and down for a bluff,"
+said a soldier, and another corrected him:
+
+"No, the old professor's the one that walks along at night sending up
+flares!"
+
+"Munching K.K. bread with his false teeth!"
+
+"And singing the hymn of hate!"
+
+Thus the talk ran on in the quiet of evening, till we heard a concussion
+and a quarter of a mile away, behind a screen of trees, a pillar of
+smoke rose to the height of two or three hundred feet.
+
+"A mine!" In front of the -th brigade!"
+
+"Ours or the Boches'?"
+
+"Ours, from the way the smoke went--our fuse!"
+
+"No, theirs!"
+
+Our colonel telephoned down to know if we knew whose mine it was,
+which was the question we wanted to ask him. The guns from both
+sides became busy under the column of smoke. Oh, yes, there were
+Germans in the trenches which had appeared vacant. Their shots
+and ours merged in the hissing medley of a tempest.
+
+"Not enough guns--not enough noise for an attack!" said experienced
+Tommy, who knew what an attack was like.
+
+The commander of the adjoining brigade telephoned to the division
+commander, who passed the word through to our colonel, who
+passed it to us that the mine was German and had burst thirty yards
+short of the British trench.
+
+"After all that digging, wasting Boche powder in that fashion! The
+Kaiser won't like it!" said Mr. Atkins. "We exploded one under them
+yesterday and it made them hate so hard they couldn't wait. They've
+awful tempers, the Boches!" And he finished the job on which he was
+engaged when interrupted, eating a large piece of ration bread
+surmounted by all the ration jam it could hold; while one of the
+company officers reminded me that it was about dinner time.
+
+
+
+"What do you think I am? A blooming traffic policeman?" growled the
+cook to two soldiers who had found themselves in a blind alley in the
+maze of streets back of the firing-trench. "My word! Is His Majesty's
+army becoming illiterate? Strafe that sign at the corner! What do you
+think we put it up for? To show what a beautiful hand we had at
+printing?"
+
+The sign on a board fastened against the earth wall read, "No
+thoroughfare!" The soldier-cook, with a fork in his hand, his sleeves
+rolled up, his shirt open at his tanned throat, looked formidable. He
+was preoccupied; he was at close quarters roasting a chicken over a
+small stove. Yes, they have cook-stoves in the trenches. Why not?
+The line had been in the same position for six months.
+
+"Little by little we improve our happy home," said the cook.
+
+The latest acquisition was a lace curtain for the officers' mess hall,
+bought at a shop in the nearest town.
+
+When the cook was inside his kitchen there was no room to spill
+anything on the floor. The kitchen was about three feet square, with
+boarded walls, and a roof covered with tar paper and a layer of earth
+set level with the trench parapet. The chicken roasted and the frying
+potatoes sizzled as an occasional bullet passed overhead, even as
+flies buzz about the screen door when Mary is making cakes for tea.
+
+The officers' mess hall, next to the kitchen and built in the same
+fashion, had some boards nailed on posts sunk in the ground for a
+table, which was proof against tipping when you climbed over it or
+squeezed around it to your place. The chairs were rifle-ammunition
+boxes, whose contents had been emptied with individual care, bullet
+by bullet, at the Germans in the trench on the other side of the
+wheatfield. Dinner was at nine in the evening, when it was still twilight
+in the longest days of the year in this region. The hour fits in with
+trench routine, when night is the time to be on guard and you sleep
+by day. Breakfast comes at nine in the morning. I was invited to help
+eat the chicken and to spend the night.
+
+Now, the general commanding the brigade who accompanied me to
+the trenches had been hit twice. So had the colonel, a man about
+forty. From forty, ages among the regimental officers dropped into the
+twenties.
+
+Many of the older men who started in the war had been killed, or were
+back in England wounded, or had been promoted to other commands
+where their experience was more useful. To youth, life is sweet and
+danger is life. The oldest of the officers of the proud old K.O.P.F. who
+gathered for dinner was about twenty-five, though when he assumed
+an air of authority he seemed to be forty. It was not right to ask the
+youngest his age. Parenthetically, let it be said that he is trying to
+start a moustache. They had come fresh from Sandhurst to swift
+tuition in gruelling, incessant warfare.
+
+"Has anyone asked him it yet?" one inquired, referring to some
+question to the guest.
+
+"Not yet? Then all together: When do you think that the war will be
+over?"
+
+It was the eternal question of the trenches, the army, and the world.
+We had it over with before the soldier-cook brought on the roast
+chicken, which was received with a befitting chorus of approbation.
+
+Who would carve? Who knew how to carve? Modesty passed the
+honour to her neighbour, till a brave man said:
+
+"I will! I will strafe the chicken!" 'Gott strafe England!' Strafe has
+become a noun, a verb, an adjective, a cussword, and a term of
+greeting. Soldier asks soldier how he is strafing to-day. When the
+Germans are not called Boches they are called Strafers. "Won't you
+strafe a little for us?" Tommy sings out to the German trenches when
+they are close. What hopes? That gallant youngster of the K.O.P.F. in
+the midst of bantering advice succeeded in separating the meat from
+the bones without landing a leg in anybody's lap or a wing in
+anybody's eye. Timid spectators who had hung back where he had
+dared might criticize his form, but they could not deny the efficiency of
+his execution. He was appointed permanent strafer of all the fowls
+that came to table.
+
+Everybody talked and joked about everything, from plays in London
+to the Germans. There were arguments about favourite actors and
+military methods. The sense of danger was as absent as if we had
+been dining in a summer garden. It was the parents and relatives in
+pleasant English homes in fear of a dread telegram who were
+worrying, not the sons and brothers in danger. Isn't it better that way?
+Would not the parents prefer it that way? Wasn't it the way of the
+ancestors in the scarlet coats and the Merrie England of their day?
+With the elasticity of youth my hosts adapted themselves to
+circumstances. In their lightheartedness they made war seem a keen
+sport. They lived war for all it was worth. If it gets on their nerves
+their efficiency is spoiled. There is no room for a jumpy, excitable
+man in the trenches. Youth's resources defy monotony and death
+at the same time.
+
+An expedition had been planned for that night. A patrol the previous
+night had brought in word that the Germans had been sneaking up
+and piling sandbags in the wheatfield. The plan was to slip out as
+soon as it was really dark with a machine-gun and a dozen men, get
+behind the Germans' own sandbags, and give them a perfectly
+informal reception when they returned to go on with their work.
+
+Before dinner, however, J------, who was to be the general of the
+expedition, and his subordinates made a reconnaissance. Two or
+more officers or men always go out together on any trip of this kind in
+that ticklish space between the trenches, where it is almost certain
+death to be seen by the enemy. If one is hit the other can help him
+back. If one survives he will bring back the result of his investigations.
+
+J----had his own ideas about comfort in trousers in the trench in
+summer. He wore shorts with his knees bare. When he had to do a
+"crawl" he unwound his puttees and wound them over his knees. He
+and the others slipped over the parapet without attracting the
+attention of the enemy's sharpshooters. On hands and knees, like
+boy scouts playing Indians, they passed through a narrow avenue in
+the ugly barbed wire, and still not a shot at them. A matter of the
+commonplace to the men in the trench held the spectator in
+suspense. There was a fascination about the thing, too; that of the
+sporting chance, without a full realization that failure in this hide-and-
+seek game might mean a spray of bullets and death for these young
+men.
+
+They entered the wheat, moving slowly like two land turtles. The grain
+parted in swaths over them. Surely the Germans might see the
+turtles' heads as they were raised to look around. No officer can be
+too young and supple for this kind of work. Here the company officer
+just out of school is in his element, with an advantage over older
+officers. That pair were used to crawling. They did not keep their
+heads up long. They knew just how far they might expose
+themselves. They passed out of sight, and reappeared and slipped
+back over the parapet again without the Germans being any the
+wiser. Hard luck! It is an unaccommodating world! They found that
+the patrol which had examined the bags at night had failed to discern
+that they were old and must have been there for some time.
+
+"I'll take the machine-gun out, anyhow, if the colonel will permit it,"
+said J------. For the colonel puts on the brakes. Otherwise, there is no
+telling what risks youth might take with machine-guns.
+
+We were half through dinner when a corporal came to report that a
+soldier on watch thought that he had seen some Germans moving in
+the wheat very near our barbed wire. Probably a false alarm; but no
+one in a trench ever acts on the theory that any alarm is false. Eternal
+vigilance is the price of holding a trench. Either side is cudgelling its
+brains day and night to spring some new trick on the other. If one side
+succeeds with a trick, the other immediately adopts it. No international
+copyright in strategy is recognized. We rushed out of the mess hall
+into the firing-trench, where we found the men on the alert, rifles laid
+on the spot where the Germans were supposed to have been seen.
+
+"Who are you? Answer, or we fire!" called the ranking young
+lieutenant.
+
+If any persons present out in front in the face of thirty rifles knew the
+English language and had not lost the instinct of self-preservation,
+they would certainly have become articulate in response to such an
+unveiled hint. Not a sound came. Probably a rabbit running through
+the wheat had been the cause of the alarm. But you take no risks.
+The order was given, and the men combed the wheat with a fusillade.
+
+"Enough! Cease fire!" said the officer. "Nobody there. If there had
+been we should have heard the groan of a wounded man or seen the
+wheat stir as the Germans hugged closer to the earth for cover."
+
+This he knew by experience. It was not the first time he had used a
+fusillade in this kind of a test.
+
+After dinner J------rolled his puttees up around his bare knees again,
+for the colonel had not withdrawn permission for the machine-gun
+expedition. J------'s knees were black and blue in spots; they were
+also--well, there is not much water for washing purposes in the
+trenches. Great sport that, crawling through the dew-moist wheat in
+the faint moonlight, looking for a bunch of Germans in the hope of
+turning a machine-gun on them before they turn one on you!
+
+"One man hit by a stray bullet," said J------on his return.
+
+"I heard the bullet go th-ip into the earth after it went through his leg,"
+said the other officer.
+
+"Blythe was a recruit and he had asked me to take him out the first
+time there was anything doing. I promised that I would, and he got
+about the only shot fired at us."
+
+"Need a stretcher?"
+
+"No."
+
+Blythe came hobbling through the traverse to the communication
+trench, seeming well pleased with himself. The soft part of the leg is
+not a bad place to receive a bullet if one is due to hit you.
+
+
+
+Night is always the time in the trenches when life grows more
+interesting and death more likely.
+
+"It's dark enough, now," said one of the youngsters who was out on
+another scout. "We'll go out with the patrol."
+
+By day, the slightest movement of the enemy is easily and instantly
+detected. Light keeps the combatants to the warrens which protect
+them from shell and bullet-fire. At night there is no telling what
+mischief the enemy may be up to; you must depend upon the ear
+rather than the eye for watching. Then the human soldier-fox comes
+out of his burrow and sneaks forth on the lookout for prey; both sides
+are on the prowl.
+
+"Trained owls would be the most valuable scouts we could have,"
+said the young officer. "They would be more useful than aeroplanes
+in locating the enemy's gun-positions. A properly reliable owl would
+come back and say that a German patrol was out in the wheatfield at
+such a point and a machine-gun would wipe out that patrol."
+
+We turned into a side trench, an alley off the main street, leading out
+of the front trench toward the Germans.
+
+"Anybody out?" he asked a soldier who was on guard at the end of it.
+
+"Yes, two."
+
+Climbing out of the ditch, we were in the midst of a tangle of barbed
+wire protecting the trench front, which was faintly visible in the
+starlight. There was a break in the tangle, a narrow cut in the hedge,
+as it were, kept open for just such purposes as this. When the patrol
+returned it closed the gate again.
+
+"Look out for that wire--just there! Do you see it? We've everything to
+keep the Boches off our front lawn except 'Keep off the grass!' signs."
+
+It was perfectly still, a warm summer night without a cat's-paw of
+breeze. Through the dark curtain of the sky in a parabola rising from
+the German trenches swept the brilliant sputter of red light of a
+German flare. It was coming as straight toward us as if it had been
+aimed at us. It cast a searching, uncanny glare over the tall wheat in
+head between the trenches.
+
+"Down flat!" whispered the officer.
+
+It seemed foolish to grovel before a piece of fireworks. There was no
+firing in our neighbourhood; nothing to indicate a state of war between
+the British Empire and Germany; no visual evidence of any German
+army in France except that flare. However, if a guide who knows as
+much about war as this one says you are to prostrate yourself when
+you are out between two lines of machine-guns and rifles--between
+the fighting powers of England and Germany--you take the hint. The
+flare sank into earth a few yards away, after a last insulting, ugly fling
+of sparks in our faces.
+
+"What if we had been seen?"
+
+"They'd have combed the wheat in this part thoroughly, and they
+might have got us."
+
+"It's hard to believe," I said.
+
+So it was, he agreed. That was the exasperating thing. Always hard
+to believe, perhaps, until after all the cries of wolf the wolf came; until
+after nineteen harmless flares the twentieth revealed to the watching
+enemy the figure of a man above the wheat, when a crackling chorus
+of bullets would suddenly break the silence of night by concentrating
+on a target. Keeping cover from German flares is a part of the minute,
+painstaking economy of war.
+
+We crawled on slowly, taking care to make no noise, till we brought
+up behind two soldiers hugging the earth, rifles in hand ready to fire
+instantly. It was their business not only to see the enemy first, but to
+shoot first, and to capture or kill any German patrol. The officer spoke
+to them and they answered. It was unnecessary for them to say that
+they had seen nothing. If they had we should have known it. He was
+out there less to scout himself than to make sure that they were on
+the job; that they knew how to watch. The visit was part of his routine.
+We did not even whisper. Preferably, all whispering would be done by
+any German patrol out to have a look at our barbed wire and
+overheard by us.
+
+Silence and the starlight and the damp wheat; but, yes, there was
+war. You heard gun-fire half a mile, perhaps a mile, away; and raising
+your head you saw auroras from bursting shells. We heard at our
+backs faintly snatches of talk from our trenches and faintly in front the
+talk from theirs. It sounded rather inviting and friendly from both sides,
+like that around some camp-fire on the plains.
+
+It seemed quite within the bounds of possibility that you might have
+crawled on up to the Germans and said, "Howdy!" But by the time
+you reached the edge of their barbed wire and before you could
+present your visiting-card, if not sooner, you would have been full of
+holes. That was just the kind of diversion from trench monotony for
+which the Germans were looking. "Well, shall we go back?" asked the
+officer. There seemed no particular purpose in spending the night
+prone in the wheat with your ears cocked like a pointer-dog's.
+Besides, he had other duties, exacting duties laid down by the colonel
+as the result of trench experience in his responsibility for the
+command of a company of men.
+
+It happened as we crawled back into the trench, that a fury of shots
+broke out from a point along the line two or three hundred yards
+away; sharp, vicious shots on the still night air, stabbing, merciless
+death in their sound. Oh, yes, there was war in France; unrelenting,
+shrewd, tireless war. A touch of suspicion anywhere and the hornets
+swarmed.
+
+
+
+It was two a.m. From the dug-outs came unmistakable sounds of
+slumber. Men off duty were not kept awake by cold and moisture in
+summer. They had fashioned for themselves comfortable dormitories
+in the hard earth walls. A cot in an officer's bedchamber was
+indicated as mine. The walls had been hung with cuts from illustrated
+papers and bagging spread on the floor to make it "home-like." He lay
+down on the floor because he was nearer the door in case he had to
+respond to an alarm; besides, he said I would soon appreciate that I
+was not the object of favouritism. So I did. It was a trench-made cot,
+fashioned by some private of engineers, I fancy, who had Germans
+rather than the American cousin in mind.
+
+"The wall side of the rib that runs down the middle is the comfortable
+side, I have found," said my host. "It may not appear so at first, but
+you will find it works out that way."
+
+Nevertheless, I slept, my last recollection that of sniping shots, to be
+awakened with the first streaks of day by the sound of a fusillade--the
+"morning hate" or the "morning strafe" as it is called. After the vigil of
+darkness it breaks the monotony to salute the dawn with a burst of
+rifle-shots. Eyes strained through the mist over the wheatfield
+watching for some one of the enemy who may be exposing himself,
+unconscious that it is light enough for him to be visible. Objects which
+are not men but look as if they might be in the hazy distance, called
+for attention on the chance. For ten minutes, perhaps, the serenade
+lasted, and then things settled down to the normal. The men were
+yawning and stirring from their dug-outs. After the muster they would
+take the places of those who had been "on the bridge" through the
+night.
+
+"It's a case of how little water you can wash with, isn't it?" I said to
+the cook, who appreciated my thoughtfulness when I made shift
+with a dipperful, as I had done on desert journeys. We were in a trench
+that was inundated with water in winter, and not more than two miles
+from a town which had water laid on. But bringing a water supply in
+pails along narrow trenches is a poor pastime, though better than
+bringing it up under the rifle-sights of snipers across the fields back
+of the trenches.
+
+"Don't expect much for breakfast," said the strafer of the chicken. But
+it was eggs and bacon, the British stand-by in all weathers, at home
+and abroad.
+
+J------was going to turn in and sleep. These youngsters could sleep at
+any time; for one hour, or two hours, or five, or ten, if they had a
+chance. A sudden burst of rifle-fire was the alarm clock which always
+promptly awakened them. The recollection of cheery hospitality and
+their fine, buoyant spirit is even clearer now than when I left the
+trench.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+A School In Bombing
+
+
+
+It was at a bombing school on a French farm, where chosen soldiers
+brought back from the trenches were being trained in the use of the
+anarchists' weapon, which has now become as respectable as the
+rifle. The war has steadily developed specialism. M.B. degrees for
+Master Bombers are not beyond the range of possibilities.
+
+Present was the chief instructor, a Scottish subaltern with blue eyes,
+a pleasant smile, and a Cock-o'-the-North spirit. He might have been
+twenty years old, though he did not look it. On his breast was the
+purple and white ribbon of the new order of the Military Cross, which
+you get for doing something in this war which would have won you a
+Victoria Cross in one of the other wars.
+
+Also present was the assistant instructor, a sergeant of regulars--and
+very much of a regular--who had three ribbons which he had won in
+previous campaigns. He, too, had blue eyes, bland blue eyes. These
+two understood each other.
+
+"If you don't drop it, why, it's all right!" said the sergeant. "Of course,
+if you do------"
+
+I did not drop it.
+
+"And when you throw it, sir, you must look out and not hit the man
+behind you and knock the bomb out of your hand. That has
+happened before to an absent-minded fellow who was about to toss
+one at the Boches, and it doesn't do to be absent-minded when you
+throw bombs."
+
+"They say that you sometimes pick up the German bombs and chuck
+them back before they explode," I suggested.
+
+"Yes, sir, I've read things like that in some of the accounts of the
+reporters who write from Somewhere in France. You don't happen to
+know where that is, sir? All I can say is that if you are going to do it
+you must be quick about it. I shouldn't advise delaying decision, sir, or
+perhaps when you reached down to pick it up, neither your hand nor
+the bomb would be there. They'd have gone off together, sir."
+
+"Have you ever been hurt in your handling of bombs?" I asked.
+
+Surprise in the bland blue eyes. "Oh, no, sir! Bombs are well behaved
+if you treat them right. It's all in being thoughtful and considerate of
+them!" Meanwhile, he was jerking at some kind of a patent fuse set in
+a shell of high explosive. "This is a poor kind, sir. It's been discarded,
+but I thought that you might like to see it. Never did like it. Always
+making trouble!"
+
+More distance between the audience and the performer. "Now I've
+got it, sir--get down, sir!" The audience carried out instructions to the
+letter, as army regulations require. It got behind the protection of one
+of the practice-trench traverses. He threw the discard behind another
+wall of earth. There was a sharp report, a burst of smoke, and some
+fragments of earth were tossed into the air.
+
+In a small affair of two hundred yards of trench a week before, it was
+estimated that the British and the Germans together threw about five
+thousand bombs in this fashion. It was enough to sadden any
+Minister of Munitions. However, the British kept the trench.
+
+"Do the men like to become bombers?" I asked the subaltern.
+
+"I should say so! It puts them up in front. It gives them a chance to
+throw something, and they don't get much cricket in France, you see.
+We had a pupil here last week who broke the throwing record for
+distance. He was as pleased as Punch with himself. A first-class
+bombing detachment has a lot of pride of corps."
+
+To bomb soon became as common a verb with the army as to
+bayonet. "We bombed them out" meant a section of trench taken by
+throwing bombs. As you know, a trench is dug and built with
+sandbags in zigzag traverses. In following the course of a trench it is
+as if you followed the sides of the squares of a checker board up and
+down and across on the same tier of squares. The square itself is a
+bank of earth, with the cut on either side and in front of it. When a
+bombing-party bombs its way into possession of a section of German
+trench, there are Germans under cover of the traverses on either
+side. They are waiting around the corner to shoot the first British head
+that shows itself.
+
+"It is important that you and not the Boches chuck the bombs over
+first," explained the subaltern. "Also, that you get them into the right
+traverse, or they may be as troublesome to you as to the enemy."
+
+With bombs bursting in their faces, the Germans who are not put out
+of action are blinded and stunned. In that moment when they are off
+guard, the aggressors leap around the corner.
+
+"And then?"
+
+"Stick 'em, sir!" said the matter-of-fact sergeant. "Yes, the cold steel is
+best. And do it first! As Mr. MacPherson said, it's very important to do
+it first."
+
+It has been found that something short is handy for this kind of work.
+In such cramped quarters--a ditch six feet deep and from two to three
+feet broad--the rifle is an awkward length to permit of prompt and
+skilful use of the bayonet.
+
+"Yes, sir, you can mix it up better with something handy--to think that
+British soldiers would come to fighting like assassins!" said the
+sergeant. "You must be spry on such occasions. It's no time for wool-
+gathering."
+
+Not a smile from him or the subaltern all the time. They were the kind
+you would like to have along in a tight corner, whether you had to fight
+with knives, fists, or seventeen-inch howitzers.
+
+The sergeant took us into the storehouse where he kept his supply of
+bombs.
+
+"What if a German shell should strike your storehouse?" I asked.
+
+"Then, sir, I expect that most of the bombs would be exploded.
+Bombs are very peculiar in their habits. What do you think, sir?"
+
+It was no trouble to show stock, as clerks at the stores say. He
+brought forth all the different kinds of bombs that British ingenuity had
+invented--but no, not all invented. These would mount into the
+thousands. Every British inventor who knows anything about
+explosives has tried his hand at a new kind of bomb. One means all
+the kinds which the British War Office has considered worth a
+practice test. The spectator was allowed to handle each one as much
+as he pleased. There had been occasions, that boyish Scottish
+subaltern told me, when the men who were examining the products of
+British ingenuity--well, the subaltern had sandy hair, too, which
+heightened the effect of his blue eyes.
+
+There were yellow and green and blue and black and striped bombs;
+egg-shaped, barrel-shaped, conical, and concave bombs; bombs that
+were exploded by pulling a string and by pressing a button--all these
+to be thrown by hand, without mentioning grenades and other larger
+varieties to be thrown by mechanical means, which would have made
+a Chinese warrior of Confucius' time or a Roman legionary feel at
+home.
+
+"This was the first-born," the subaltern explained, "the first thing we
+could lay our hands on when the close quarters' trench warfare
+began."
+
+It was as out of date as grandfather's smooth-bore, the tin-pot bomb
+that both sides used early in the winter. A wick was attached to the
+high explosive, wrapped in cloth and stuck in an ordinary army jam
+tin.
+
+"Quite home-made, as you see, sir," remarked the sergeant. "Used to
+fix them up ourselves in the trenches in odd hours--saved burying the
+refuse jam tins according to medical corps directions--and you threw
+them at the Boches. Had to use a match to light it. Very old-
+fashioned, sir. I wonder if that old fuse has got damp. No, it's going all
+right"--and he threw the jam pot, which made a good explosion. Later,
+when he began hammering the end of another he looked up in mild
+surprise at the dignified back-stepping of the spectators.
+
+"Is that fuse out?" someone asked.
+
+"Yes, sir. Of course, sir," he replied. "It's safer. But here is the best;
+we're discarding the others," he went on, as he picked up a bomb.
+
+It was a pleasure to throw this crowning achievement of experiments.
+It fitted your hand nicely; it threw easily; it did the business; it was
+fool-proof against a man in love or a war-poet.
+
+"We saw as soon as this style came out," said the sergeant, "that it
+was bound to be popular. Everybody asks for it--except the Boches,
+sir."
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+My Best Day At The Front
+
+
+
+It was the best day because one ran the gamut of the mechanics and
+emotions of modern war within a single experience--and oh, the
+twinkle in that staff officer's eye!
+
+It was on a Monday that I first met him in the ballroom of a large
+chateau. Here another officer was talking over a telephone in an
+explicit, businesslike fashion about "sending up more bombs," while
+we looked at maps spread out on narrow, improvised tables, such as
+are used for a buffet at a reception. Those maps showed all the
+British trenches and all the German trenches--spider-weblike lines
+that cunning human spiders had spun with spades--in that region;
+and where our batteries were and where some of the German
+batteries were, if our aeroplane observations were correct.
+
+To the layman they were simply blue prints, such as he sees in the
+office of an engineer or an architect, or elaborate printed maps with
+many blue and red pencil-lings. To the general in command they
+were alive with rifle-power and gun-power and other powers
+mysterious to us; the sword with which he thrust and feinted and
+guarded in the ceaseless fencing of trench warfare, while higher
+authorities than he kept their secrets as he kept his and bided their
+day.
+
+That morning one of the battalions which had its pencilled place on
+the map had taken a section of trench from the Germans about the
+length of two city blocks. It got into the official bulletins of both sides
+several times, this two hundred yards at Pilken in the everlastingly
+"hot corner" north of Ypres. So it was of some importance, though not
+on account of its length. To take two hundred yards of trench
+because it is two hundred yards of trench is not good war, tacticians
+agree. Good war is to have millions of shells and vast reserves ready
+and to go in over a broad area and keep on going night and day, with
+a Niagara of artillery, as fresh battalions are fed into the conflict.
+
+But the Germans had command of some rising ground in front of the
+British line at this point. They could fire down and crosswise into our
+trench. It was as if we were in the alley and they were in a first-floor
+window. This meant many casualties. It was man-economy and fire-
+economy to take that two hundred yards. A section of trench may
+always be taken if worth while. Reduce it to dust with shells and then
+dash into the breach and drive the enemy back from zigzag traverse
+to traverse with bombs. But such a small action requires as careful
+planning as a big operation of other days. We had taken the two
+hundred yards. The thing was to hold them. That is always the
+difficulty; for the enemy will concentrate his guns to give you the
+same dose that you gave him. In an hour after they were in, the
+British soldiers, who knew exactly what they had to do and how to do
+it, after months of experience, had turned the wreck of the German
+trench into a British trench which faced toward Berlin, rather than
+Calais.
+
+In their official bulletin the Germans said that they had recovered the
+trench. They did recover part of it for a few hours. It was then that the
+commander on the German side must have sent in his report to catch
+the late evening editions. Commanders do not like to confess the loss
+of trenches. It is the sort of thing that makes headquarters ask: "What
+is the matter with you over there, anyway?" There was a time when
+the German bulletins about the Western front seemed rather truthful;
+but of late they have been getting into bad habits.
+
+The British general knew what was coming; he knew that he would
+start the German hornets out of their nest when he took the trench;
+he knew, too, that he could rely upon his men to hold till they were
+told to retire or there were none left to retire. The British are a home-
+loving people, who do not like to be changing their habitations. In
+succeeding days the question up and down the lines was, "Have we
+still got that trench?" Only two hundred yards of ditch on the continent
+of Europe! But was it still ours? Had the Germans succeeded in
+"strafing" us out of it yet? They had shelled all the trenches in the
+region of the lost trench and had made three determined and
+unsuccessful counter-attacks when, on the fifth day, we returned to
+the chateau to ask if it were practicable to visit the new trench.
+
+"At your own risk!" said the staff officer. If we preferred we could sit on
+the veranda where there were easy chairs, on a pleasant summer
+day. Very peaceful the sweep of the well-kept grounds and the shade
+of the stately trees of that sequestered world of landscape. Who was
+at war? Why was anyone at war? Two staff motor-cars awaiting
+orders on the drive and a dust-laden dispatch rider with messages,
+who went past toward the rear of the house, were the only visual
+evidence of war. The staff officer served us with helmets for
+protection in case we got into a gas attack. He said that we might
+enter our front trenches at a certain point and then work our way as
+near the new part as we could; division headquarters, four or five
+miles distant, would show us the way. It was then that the twinkle in
+the staff officer's eye as it looked straight into yours became manifest.
+You can never tell, I have learned, just what a twinkle in a British staff
+officer's eye may portend. These fellows who are promoted up from
+the trenches to join the "brain-trust" in the chateau, know a great deal
+more about what is going on than you can learn by standing in the
+road far from the front and listening to the sound of the guns. We
+encountered a twinkle in another eye at division headquarters, which
+may have been telephoned ahead along with the instructions, "At
+their own risk."
+
+There are British staff officers who would not mind pulling a
+correspondent's leg on a summer day; though, perhaps, it was really
+the Germans who pulled ours, in this instance. Somebody did remark
+at some headquarters, I recall, that "You never know!" which shows
+that staff officers do not know everything. The Germans possess half
+the knowledge--and they are at great pains not to part with their half.
+
+We proceeded in our car along country roads, quiet, normal country
+roads off the main highway. It has been written again and again, and
+it cannot be written too many times, that life is going on as usual in
+the rear of the army. Nothing could be more wonderful and yet
+nothing more natural. All the men of fighting age were absent. White-
+capped grandmothers, too old to join the rest of the family in the
+fields, sat in doorways sewing. Everybody was at work and the crops
+were growing. You never tire of remarking the fact. It brings you back
+from the destructive orgy of war to the simple, constructive things of
+life. An industrious people go on cultivating the land and the land
+keeps on producing. It is pleasant to think that the crops of Northern
+France were good in 1915. That is cheering news from home for the
+soldiers of France at the front.
+
+At an indicated point we left the car to go forward on foot, and the
+chauffeur was told to wait for us at another point. If the car went any
+farther it might draw shell-fire. Army authorities know how far they
+may take cars with reasonable safety as well as a pilot knows the
+rocks and shoals at a harbour entrance.
+
+There was an end of white-capped grandmothers in doorways; an
+end of people working in the fields. Rents in the roofless walls of
+unoccupied houses stared at the passer-by. We were in a dead land.
+One of two soldiers whom we met coming from the opposite direction
+pointed at what looked like a small miner's cabin half covered with
+earth, screened by a tree, as the next headquarters which we were
+seeking in our progress.
+
+It was not for sightseers to take the time of the general who received
+us at the door of his dug-out. German guns had concentrated on a
+section of his trenches in a way that indicated that another attack was
+coming. One company already had suffered heavy losses. It was an
+hour of responsibility for the general, isolated in the midst of silent
+fields and houses, waiting for news from a region hidden from his
+view by trees and hedges in that flat country. He might not move from
+headquarters, for then he would be out of communication with his
+command. His men were being pounded by shells and the inexorable
+law of organization kept him at the rear. Up in the trench he might
+have been one helpless human being in a havoc of shells which had
+cut the wires. His place was where he could be in touch with his
+subordinates and his superiors.
+
+True, we wanted to go to the trench that the Germans had lost and
+his section was the short cut. Modesty was not the only reason for not
+taking it. As we started along a road parallel to the front, the head of a
+soldier popped out of the earth and told us that orders were to walk in
+the ditch. I judged that he was less concerned with our fate than with
+the likelihood of our drawing fire, which he and the others in a
+concealed trench would suffer after we had passed on.
+
+There were three of us, two correspondents, L------ and myself, and
+R------, an officer, which is quite enough for an expedition of this kind.
+Now we were finding our own way, with the help of the large scale
+army map which had every house, every farm, and every group of
+trees marked. The farms had been given such names as Joffre,
+Kitchener, French, Botha, and others which the Germans would not
+like. We cut across fields with the same confidence that, following a
+diagram of city streets in a guidebook, a man turns to the left for the
+public library and to the right for the museum.
+
+Our own guns were speaking here and there from their hiding-places;
+and overhead an occasional German shrapnel burst. This seemed a
+waste of the Kaiser's munitions as there was no one in sight. Yet
+there was purpose in the desultory scattering of bullets from on high.
+They were policing the district; they were warning the hated British in
+reserve not to play cricket in those fields or march along those
+deserted roads.
+
+The more bother in taking cover that the Germans can make the
+British, the better they like it; and the British return the compliment in
+kind. Anything that harasses your enemy is counted to the good. If
+every shell fired had killed a man in this war, there would be no
+soldiers left to fight on either side; yet never have shells been so
+important in war as now. They can reach the burrowing human
+beings in shelters which are bulletproof; they are the omnipresent
+threat of death. The firing of shells from batteries securely hidden and
+em-placed represents no cost of life to your side; only cost of
+material, which ridicules the foolish conclusion that machinery and not
+men count. It is because man is still the most precious machine--a
+machine that money cannot reproduce--that gun-machinery is so
+much in favour, and every commander wants to use shells as freely
+as you use city water when you do not pay for it by meter.
+
+Now another headquarters and another general, also isolated in a
+dug-out, holding the reins of his wires over a section of line adjoining
+the section we had just left. Before we proceeded we must look over
+his shelter from shell-storms. The only time that British generals
+become boastful is over their dug-outs. They take all the pride in
+them of the man who has bought a plot of land and built himself a
+home; and, like him, they keep on making improvements and calling
+attention to them. I must say that this was one of the best shelters I
+have seen anywhere in the tornado belt; and whatever I am not, I am
+certainly an expert in dug-outs. Of course, this general, too, said, "At
+your own risk!" He was good enough to send a young officer with us
+up to the trenches; then we should not make any mistakes about
+direction if we wanted to reach the neighbourhood of the two hundred
+yards which we had taken from the Germans. When we thanked him
+and said "Good-bye!" he remarked:
+
+"We never say good-bye up here. It does not sound pleasant. Make it
+au revoir." He, too, had a twinkle in his eye.
+
+By this time, one leg ought to have been so much longer than the
+other that one would have walked in a circle if he had not had a
+guide.
+
+That battery which had been near the dug-out kept on with its regular
+firing, its shells sweeping overhead. We had not gone far before we
+came to a board nailed to a tree, with the caution, "Keep to the right!"
+If you went to the left you might be seen by the enemy, though we
+were seeing nothing of him, nor of our own trenches yet. Every
+square yard of this ground had been tested by actual experience, at
+the cost of dead and wounded men, till safe lanes of approach had
+been found.
+
+Next was a clearing station, where the wounded are brought in from
+the trenches for transfer to ambulances. A glance at the burden on a
+stretcher just arrived automatically framed the word, "Shell-fire!" The
+stains over-running on tanned skin beyond the edge of the white
+bandage were bright in the sunlight. A khaki blouse torn open, or a
+trousers leg or a sleeve cut down the seam, revealing the white of the
+first aid and a splash of red, means one man wounded; and by the
+ones the thousands come.
+
+Fifty wounded men on the floor of a clearing station and the individual
+is lost in the crowd. When you see the one borne past, if there is
+nothing else to distract attention you always ask two questions: Will
+he die? Has he been maimed for life? If the answers to both are no,
+you feel a sense of triumph, as if you had seen a human play, built
+skilfully around a life to arouse your emotions, turn out happily.
+
+The man has fought in an honourable cause; he has felt the touch of
+death's fingers. How happy he is when he knows that he will get well!
+In prospect, as his wound heals into the scar which will be the lasting
+decoration of his courage, his home and all that it means to him.
+What kind of a home has he, this private soldier? In the slums, with a
+slattern wife, or in a cottage with a flower garden in front, only a few
+minutes' walk from the green fields of the English countryside? But
+we set out to tell you about the kind of inferno in which this man got
+his splash of red.
+
+We come to the banks of a canal which has carried the traffic of the
+Low Countries for many centuries; the canal where British and
+French had fought many a Thermopylae in the last eight months.
+Along its banks run rows of fine trees, narrowing in perspective before
+the eye. Some have been cut in two by the direct hit of a heavy shell
+and others splintered down, bit by bit. Others still standing have been
+hit many times. There are cuts as fresh as if the chips had just flown
+from the axeman's blow, and there are scars from cuts made last
+autumn which nature's sap, rising as it does in the veins of wounded
+men, has healed, while from the remaining branches it sent forth
+leaves in answer to the call of spring.
+
+In this section the earth is many-mouthed with caves and cut with
+passages running from cave to cave, so that the inhabitants may go
+and come hidden from sight. Jawbone and Hairyman and Lowbrow,
+of the Stone Age, would be at home there, squatting on their hunkers
+and tearing at their raw kill with their long incisors. It does not seem a
+place for men who walk erect, wear woven fabrics, enjoy a written
+language, and use soap and safety razors. One would not be
+surprised to see some figure swing down by a long, hairy arm from a
+branch of a tree and leap on all fours into one of the caves, where he
+would receive a gibbering welcome to the bosom of his family.
+
+Not so! Huddled in these holes in the earth are free-born men of an
+old civilization, who read the daily papers and eat jam on their bread.
+They do not want to be there, but they would not consider themselves
+worthy of the inheritance of free-born men if they were not. Only
+civilized man is capable of such stoicism as theirs. They have
+reverted to the cave-dweller's protection because their civilization is
+so highly developed that they can throw a piece of steel weighing
+from eighteen to two thousand pounds anywhere from five to twenty
+miles with merciless accuracy, and because the flesh of man is even
+more tender than in the cave-dweller's time, not to mention that his
+brain-case is a larger target.
+
+An officer calls attention to a shell-proof shelter with the civic pride of
+a member of a chamber of commerce pointing out the new Union
+Station.
+
+"Not even a high explosive"--the kind that bursts on impact after
+penetration--"could get into that!" he says. "We make them for
+generals and colonels and others who have precious heads on their
+shoulders."
+
+With material and labour, the same might have been constructed for
+the soldiers, which brings us back to the question of munitions in the
+economic balance against a human life. It was the first shelter of this
+kind which I had seen. You never go up to the trenches without
+seeing something new. The defensive is tireless in its ingenuity in
+saving lives and the offensive in taking them. Safeguards and
+salvage compete with destruction. And what labour all that excavation
+and construction represented--the cumulative labour of months and
+day-by-day repairs of the damage done by shells! After a
+bombardment, dig out the filled trenches and renew the smashed
+dug-outs to be ready for another go!
+
+The walls of that communication trench were two feet above our
+heads. We noticed that all the men were in their dug-outs; none were
+walking about in the open. One knew the meaning of this barometer--
+stormy. The German gunners were "strafing" in a very lively way this
+afternoon.
+
+Already we had noticed many shells bursting five or six hundred
+yards away, in the direction of the new British trench; but at that
+distance they do not count. Then a railroad train seemed to have
+jumped the track and started to fly. Fortunately and unfortunately,
+sound travels faster than big shells of low velocity; fortunately,
+because it gives you time to be undignified in taking cover;
+unfortunately, because it gives you a fraction of a second to reflect
+whether or not that shell has your name and your number on Dug-out
+Street.
+
+I was certain that it was a big shell, of the kind that will blow a dug-out
+to pieces. Anyone who had never heard a shell before would have
+"scrooched," as the small boys say, as instinctively as you draw back
+when the through express tears past the station. It is the kind of
+scream that makes you want to roll yourself into a package about the
+size of a pea, while you feel as tall and large as a cathedral, judging
+by the sensation that travels down your backbone.
+
+Once I was being hoisted up a cliff in a basket, when the rope on the
+creaking windlass above slipped a few inches. Well, it is like that, or
+like taking a false step on the edge of a precipice. Is the clock about
+to strike twelve or not? Not this time! The burst was thirty yards away,
+along the path we had just traversed, and the sound was like the
+burst of a shell and like nothing else in the world, just as the swirling,
+boring, growing scream of a shell is like no other scream in the world.
+A gigantic hammer-head sweeps through the air and breaks a steel
+drum-head.
+
+If we had come along half a minute later we should have had a better
+view, and perhaps now we should have been on a bed in a hospital
+worrying how we were going to pay the rent, or in the place where,
+hopefully, we shall have no worries at all. Between walls of earth the
+report was deadened to our ears in the same way as a revolver
+report in an adjoining room; and not much earth had gone down the
+backs of our necks from the concussion.
+
+Looking over the parapet, we saw a cloud of thick, black smoke; and
+we heard the outcry of a man who had been hit. That was all. The
+shell might have struck nearer without our having seen or heard any
+more. Shut in by the gallery walls, one knows as little of what
+happens in an adjoining cave as a clam buried in the sand knows of
+what is happening to a neighbour clam. A young soldier came half-
+stumbling into the nearest dug-out. He was shaking his head and
+batting his ears as if he had sand in them. Evidently he was returning
+to his home cave from a call on a neighbour which had brought him
+close to the burst.
+
+"That must have been about six or seven-inch," I said to the officer,
+trying to be moderate and casual in my estimate, which is the correct
+form on such occasions. My actual impression was forty-inch.
+
+"Nine-inch, h.e.," replied the expert.
+
+This was gratifying. It was the first time that I had been so near to a
+nine-inch-shell explosion. Its "eat 'em-alive" frightfulness was
+depressing. But the experience was worth having. You want all the
+experiences there are--but only "close." A delightful word that word
+close, at the front!
+
+The Germans were generous that afternoon. Another scream
+seemed aimed at my head. L------ disagreed with me; he said that it
+was aimed at his. We did not argue the matter to the point of a
+personal quarrel, for it might have got both our heads. It burst back of
+the trench about as far away as the other shell. After all, a trench is a
+pretty narrow ribbon, even on a gunner's large scale map, to hit. It is
+wonderful how, firing at such long range, he is able to hit a trench at
+all.
+
+This was all of the nine-inch variety for the time being. We got some
+fours and fives as we walked along. Three bursting as near together
+as the ticks of a clock made almost no smoke, as they brought some
+tree limbs down and tore away a section of a trunk. Then the
+thunderstorm moved on to another part of the line. Only, unlike the
+thunderstorms of nature, this, which is man-made and controlled as a
+fireman controls the nozzle of his hose, may sweep back again and
+yet again over its path. All depends upon the decision of a German
+artillery officer, just as whether or not a flower-bed shall get another
+sprinkle depends upon the will of the gardener.
+
+We were glad to turn out of the support trench into a communication
+trench leading toward the front trench; into another gallery cut deep in
+the fields, with scattered shell-pits on either side. Still more soldiers,
+leaning against the walls or seated with their legs stretched out
+across the bottom of the ditch; more waiting soldiers, only strung out
+in a line and as used to the passing of shells as people living along
+the elevated railroad line to the passing of trains. They did not look up
+at the screams boring the air any more than one who lives under the
+trains looks up every time that one passes. Theirs was the passivity
+of a queue waiting in line before the entrance to a theatre or a ball-
+grounds.
+
+A senator or a lawyer, used to coolness in debate, or to presiding
+over great meetings, or to facing crowds, who happened to visit the
+trenches could have got reassurance from the faces of any one of
+these private soldiers, who had been trained not to worry about death
+till death came. Harrowing every one of these screams, taken by
+itself. Instinctively, unnecessarily, you dodged at those which were
+low--unnecessarily, because they were from British guns. No danger
+from them unless there was a short fuse. To the soldiers, the low
+screams brought the delight of having blows struck from their side at
+the enemy, whom they themselves could not strike from their reserve
+position.
+
+For we were under the curving sweep of both the British and the
+German shells, as they passed in the air on the way to their targets. It
+was like standing between two railway tracks with trains going in
+opposite directions. You came to differentiate between the
+multitudinous screams. "Ours!" you exclaimed, with the same delight
+as when you see that your side has the ball. The spirit of battle
+contest rose in you. There was an end of philosophy. These soldiers
+in the trenches were your partisans. Every British shell was working
+for them and for you, giving blow for blow.
+
+The score of the contest of battle is in men down; in killed and
+wounded. For every man down on your side you want two men down
+on the enemy's. Sport ceases. It is the fight against a burglar with a
+revolver in his hand and a knife between his teeth; and a wounded
+man brought along the trench, a visible, intimate proof of a hit by the
+enemy, calls for more and harder blows.
+
+Looking over the parapet of the communication trench you saw fields,
+lifeless except for the singing birds in the wheat, who had also the
+spirit of battle. The more shells, the more they warble. It was always
+so on summer days. Between the screams you hear their full-pitched
+chorus, striving to make itself heard in competition with the song of
+German invasion and British resistance. Mostly, the birds seemed to
+take cover like mankind; but I saw one sweep up from the golden sea
+of ripening grain toward the men-brothers with their wings of cloth.
+
+Was this real, or was it extravaganza? Painted airships and a painted
+summer sky? The audacity of those British airmen! Two of them were
+spotting the work of British guns by their shell-bursts and watching for
+gun-flashes which would reveal concealed German battery-positions,
+and whispering results by wireless to their own batteries.
+
+It is a great game. Seven or eight thousand feet high, directly over the
+British planes, is a single Taube cruising for the same purpose. It
+looks like a beetle with gossamer wings suspended from a light cloud.
+The British aviators are so low that the bull's-eye identification marks
+are distinctly visible to the naked eye. They are playing in and out, like
+the short stop and second baseman around second, there in the very
+arc of the passing shells from both sides fired at other targets. But
+scores of other shells are most decidedly meant for them. In the
+midst of a lacework of puffs of shrapnel-bursts, which slowly spread in
+the still air, from the German anti-aircraft guns, they dip and rise and
+turn in skilful dodging. At length, one retires for good; probably his
+plane-cloth has become too much like a sieve from shrapnel-
+fragments to remain aloft longer.
+
+Come down, Herr Taube, come down where we can have a shot at
+you I Get in the game! You can see better at the altitude of the British
+airmen! But Herr Taube always stays high--the Br'er Fox of the air. Of
+course, it was not so exciting as the pictures that artists draw, but it
+was real.
+
+Every kind of shell was being fired, low and high velocity, small and
+large calibre. One-two-three-four in as quick succession as the roll of
+a drum, four German shells burst in line up in the region where we
+have made ourselves masters of the German trench. British shells
+responded.
+
+"Ours again!"
+
+But I had already ducked before I spoke, as you might if a pellet of
+steel weighing a couple of hundred pounds, going at the rate of a
+thousand yards a second or more, passed within a few yards of your
+head--ducked to find myself looking into the face of a soldier who was
+smiling. The smile was not scornful, but it was at least amused at the
+expense of the sightseer who had dodged one of our own shells. In
+addition to the respirators in case of a possible gas attack, supplied
+by that staff officer with a twinkle in his eye, we needed a steel rod
+fastened to the back of our necks and running down our spinal
+columns in order to preserve our dignity.
+
+We were witnessing what is called the "artillery preparation for an
+infantry attack," which was to try to recover that two hundred yards of
+trench from the British. Only the Germans did not limit their attention
+to the lost trench. It was hottest there around the bend of our line,
+from our view-point; for there they must maul the trench into formless
+debris and cut the barbed wire in front of it before the charge was
+made.
+
+"They touch up all the trenches in the neighbourhood to keep us
+guessing," said the officer, "before they make their final
+concentration. So it's pretty thick around this part."
+
+"Which might include the communication trench?"
+
+"Certainly. This makes a good line shot. No doubt they will spare us a
+few when they think it is our turn. We do the same thing. So it goes."
+
+From the variety of screams of big shells and little shells and screams
+harrowingly close and reassuringly high, which were indicated as
+ours, one was warranted in suggesting that the British were doing
+considerable artillery preparation themselves.
+
+"We must give them as good as they send--and better."
+
+Better seemed correct.
+
+"Those close ones you hear are doubtless meant for the front
+German trench, which accounts for their low trajectory; the others for
+their support trenches or any battery-positions that our planes have
+located." We could not see where the British shells were striking. We
+could judge only of the accuracy of some of the German fire.
+Considering the storm being visited on the support trench which we
+had just left, we were more than ever glad to be out of it. Artillery is
+the war burglar's jemmy; but it has to batter the house into ruins and
+blow up the safe and kill most of the family before the burglar can
+enter. Clouds of dust rose from the explosions; limbs of trees were
+lopped off by tornadoes of steel hail.
+
+"There! Look at that tree!"
+
+In front of a portion of the British support trench a few of a line of
+stately shade trees were still standing. A German shell, about an
+eight-inch, one judged, struck fairly in the trunk of one about the
+same height from the ground as the lumberman sinks his axe in the
+bark. The shimmer of hot gas spread out from the point of explosion.
+Through it as through an aureole one saw that twelve inches of green
+wood had been cut in two as neatly as a thistle-stem is severed by a
+sharp blow from a walking-stick. The body of the tree was carried
+across the splintered stump with crushing impact from the power of
+its flight, plus the power of the burst of the explosive charge which
+broke the shell-jacket into slashing fragments; and the towering
+column of limbs, branches, and foliage laid its length on the ground
+with a majestic dignity. Which shows what one shell can do, one of
+three which burst not far away at the same time. In time, the shells
+would get all the trees; make them into chips and splinters and
+toothpicks.
+
+"I'd rather that it would hit a tree-trunk than my trunk," said L------.
+
+"But you would not have got it as badly as the tree," said the officer
+reassuringly. "The substance would have been too soft for sufficient
+impact for a burst. It would have gone right through!"
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+More Best Day
+
+
+
+At battalion headquarters in the front trenches the battalion surgeon
+had just amputated an arm which had been mauled by a shell.
+
+"Without any anaesthetic," he explained. "No chance if we sent him
+back to the hospital. He would die on the way. Stood it very well.
+Already chirking up."
+
+A family practitioner at home, the doctor, when the war began, had
+left his practice to go with his Territorial battalion. He retains the
+family practitioner's cheery, assuring manner. He is the kind of man
+who makes you feel better immediately he comes into the sick-room;
+who has already made you forget yourself when he puts his finger
+on your pulse.
+
+"The same thing that we might have done in the Crimea," he
+continued, "only we have antiseptics now. It's wonderful how little you
+can work with and how excellent the results. Strong, healthy men,
+these, with great recuperative power and discipline and resolution--
+very different patients from those we usually operate on."
+
+Tea was served inside the battalion commander's dugout. Tea is as
+essential every afternoon to the British as ice to the average
+American in summer. They do not think of getting on without it if they
+can possibly have it, and it is part of the rations. As well take
+cigarettes away from those who smoke as tea from the British soldier.
+
+It was very much like tea outside the trenches, so far as any signs of
+perturbation about shells and casualties were concerned. In that the
+battalion commander had to answer telegrams, it had the aspect of a
+busy man's sandwich at his desk for luncheon. Good news to cheer
+the function had just come over the network of wires which connects
+up the whole army, from trenches to headquarters--good news in the
+midst of the shells.
+
+German West Africa had fallen. Botha, who was fighting against the
+British fifteen years ago, had taken it fighting for the British. A
+suggestive thought that. It is British character that brings enemies like
+Botha into the fold; the old, good-natured, sportsmanlike live-and-let-
+live idea, which has something to do with keeping the United States
+intact. A board with the news on it in German was put up over the
+British trenches. Naturally, the board was shot full of holes; for it is
+clear that the Germans are not yet ready to come into the British
+Empire.
+
+"Hans and Jacob we have named them," said the colonel, referring to
+two Germans who were buried back of his dug-out. "It's dull up here
+when the Boches are not shelling, so we let our imaginations play.
+We hold conversations with Hans and Jacob in our long watches.
+Hans is fat and cheerful and trusting. He believes every thing that the
+Kaiser tells him and has a cheerful disposition. But Jacob is a
+professor and a fearful 'strafer.' It seems a little gruesome, doesn't it,
+but not after you have been in the trenches for a while."
+
+A little gruesome--true! Not in the trenches--true, too! Where all is
+satire, no incongruity seems out of place. Life plays in and out with
+death; they intermingle; they look each other in the face and say: "I
+know you. We dwell together. Let us smile when we may, at what we
+may, to hide the character of our comradeship; for to-morrow------"
+
+Only half an hour before one of the officers had been shot through
+the head by a sniper. He was a popular officer. The others had
+messed with him and marched with him and known him in the
+fullness of affection of comradeship in arms and dangers shared. A
+heartbreak for some home in England. No one dwelt on the incident.
+What was there to say? The trembling lip, trembling in spite of itself,
+was the only outward sign of the depth of feeling that words could not
+reflect, at tea in the dug-out. The subject was changed to something
+about the living. One must carry on cheerfully; one must be on the
+alert; one must play his part serenely, unflinchingly, for the sake of the
+nerves around him and for his own sake. Such fortitude becomes
+automatic, it would seem. Please, I must not hesitate about having a
+slice of cake. They managed cake without any difficulty up there in
+the trenches. And who if not men in the trenches was entitled to cake,
+I should like to know? "It was here that he was hit," another officer
+said, as we moved on in the trench. "He was saying that the
+sandbags were a little weak and a bullet might go through and catch
+a man who thought himself safely under cover as he walked along.
+He had started to fix the sandbags himself when he got it. The bullet
+came right through the top of one of the bags in front of him."
+
+A bullet makes the merciful wound; and a bullet through the head is a
+simple way of going. The bad wounds come mostly from shells; but
+there is something about seeing anyone hit by a sniper which is more
+horrible. It is a cold-blooded kind of killing, more suggestive of
+murder, this single shot from a sharpshooter waiting as patiently as a
+cat for a mouse, aimed definitely to take the life of a man.
+
+Again we move on in that narrow cut of earth with its waiting soldiers,
+which the world knows so well from reading tours of the trenches. No
+one not on watch might show his head on an afternoon like this. The
+men were prisoners between those walls of earth; not even
+spectators of what the guns were doing; simply moles. They took it all
+as a part of the day's work, with that singular, redoubtable
+combination of British phlegm and cheerfulness.
+
+Of course, some of them were eating bread and marmalade and
+making tea. Where all the marmalade goes which Mr. Atkins uses for
+his personal munition in fighting the Germans puzzles the Army
+Service Corps, whose business it is to see that he is never without it.
+How could he sit so calmly under shell-fire without marmalade?
+Never! He would get fidgety and forget his lesson, I am sure, like the
+boy who had the button which he was used to fingering removed
+before he went to recite.
+
+Any minute a shell may come. Mr. Atkins does not think of that. Time
+enough to think after it has arrived. Then perhaps the burial party will
+be doing your thinking for you; or if not, the doctors and the nurses
+who look after you will.
+
+I noted certain acts of fellowship of comrades who are all in the same
+boat and have learned unselfishness. When they got up to let you
+pass and you smiled your thanks, you received a much pleasanter
+smile in return than you will from many a well-fed gentleman who has
+to stand aside to let you enter a restaurant. The manners of the
+trenches are good, better than in some places where good manners
+are a cult.
+
+There is no better place to send a spoiled, undisciplined, bumptious
+youth than to a British trench. He will learn that there are other men in
+the world besides himself and that a shell can kill a rich brute or a
+selfish brute as readily as a poor man. Democracy there is in the
+trenches; the democracy where all men are in the presence of death
+and "hazing" parties need not be organized among the students.
+
+But there is another and a greater element in the practical psychology
+of the trenches. These good-natured men, fighting the bitterest kind
+of warfare without the signs of brutality which we associate with the
+prize-fighter and the bully in their faces, know why they are fighting.
+They consider that their duty is in that trench, and that they could not
+have a title to manhood if they were not there. After the war the men
+who have been in the trenches will rule England. Their spirit and their
+thinking will fashion the new trend of civilization, and the men who
+have not fought will bear the worst scars from the war.
+
+Ridiculous it is that men should be moles, perhaps; but at the same
+time there is something sublime in the fellowship of their courage and
+purpose, as they "sit and take it," or guard against attacks, without
+the passion of battle of the old days of excited charges and quick
+results, and watch the toll pass by from hour to hour. Borne by
+comrades pick-a-back we saw the wounded carried along that
+passage too narrow for a litter. A splash of blood, a white bandage, a
+limp form!
+
+For the second permissible--periscopes are tempting targets--I
+looked through one over the top of the parapet. Another film! A big
+British lyddite shell went crashing into the German parapet. The dust
+from sandbags and dug-outs merged into an immense cloud of ugly,
+black smoke. As the cloud rose, one saw the figure of a German dart
+out of sight; then nothing was visible but the gap which the explosion
+had made. No wise German would show himself. British snipers were
+watching for him. At least half a dozen, perhaps a score, of men had
+been put out by this single "direct hit" of an h.e. (high explosive). Yes,
+the British gunners were shooting well, too. Other periscopic glimpses
+proved it.
+
+Through the periscope we learned also that the two lines of sandbags
+of German and British trenches were drawing nearer together.
+Another wounded man was brought by.
+
+"They're bombing up ahead. He has just been hit." As we drew aside
+to make room for him to pass, once more the civilian realized his
+helplessness and unimportance. One soldier was worth ten Prime
+Ministers in that place. We were as conspicuously mal a propos as an
+outsider at a bank directors' meeting or in a football scrimmage. The
+officer politely reminded us of the necessity of elbow room in the
+narrow quarters for the bombers, who were hidden from view by the
+zigzag traverses, and I was not sorry, though perhaps my
+companions were. If so, they did not say so, not being talkative men.
+We were not going to see the two hundred yards of captured trench
+that were beyond the bombing action, after all. Oh, the twinkle in that
+staff officer's eye!
+
+"A Boche gas shell!" we were told, as we passed an informal
+excavation in the communication trench on our way back.
+"Asphyxiating effect. No time to put on respirators when one
+explodes. Laid out half a dozen men like fish, gasping for air, but they
+will recover."
+
+"The Boches want us to hurry!" exclaimed L------.
+
+They were giving the communication trench a turn at "strafing," now,
+and shells were urgently dropping behind us. There was no use trying
+to respond to one's natural inclination to run away from the pursuing
+shower when you had to squeeze past soldiers as you went.
+
+"But look at what we are going into! This is like beating up grouse to
+the guns, and we are the birds! I am wondering if I like it."
+
+We could tell what had happened in our absence in the support
+trench by the litter of branches and leaves and by the excavations
+made by shells. It was still happening, too. Another nine-inch, with
+your only view of surroundings the wall of earth which you hugged.
+Crash--and safe again!
+
+"Pretty!" L------ said, smiling. He was referring to the cloud of black
+smoke from the burst. Pretty is a favourite word of his. I find that men
+use habitual exclamations on such occasions. R------, also smiling,
+had said, "A black business, this!" a favourite expression with him.
+
+"Yes--pretty!" R------and I exclaimed together.
+
+L------took a sliver off his coat and offered it to us as a souvenir. He
+did not know that he had said "Pretty!" or R------ that he had said "A
+black business!" several times that afternoon; nor did I know that I
+had exclaimed, "For the love of Mike!" Psychologists take notice; and
+golfers are reminded that their favourite expletives when they foozle
+will come perfectly natural to them when the Germans are "strafing."
+Then another nine-inch, when we were out of the gallery in front of
+the warrens. My companions happened to be near a dug-out. They
+did not go in tandem, but abreast. It was a "dead heat." All that I could
+see in the way of cover was a wall of sandbags, which looked about
+as comforting as tissue paper in such a crisis.
+
+At least, one faintly realized what it meant to be in the support
+trenches, where the men were still huddled in their caves. They never
+get a shot at the enemy or a chance to throw a bomb, unless they are
+sent forward to assist the front trenches in resisting an attack. It is for
+this purpose that they are kept within easy reach of the front
+trenches. They are like the prisoner tied to a chair-back, facing a gun.
+
+"Yes, this was pretty heavy shell-fire," said an officer who ought to
+know. "Not so bad as on the trenches which the infantry are to attack
+--that is the first degree. You might call this the second."
+
+It was heavy enough to keep any writer from being bored. The
+second degree will do. We will leave the first until another time.
+
+Later, when we were walking along a paved road, I heard again what
+seemed the siren call of a nine-inch.
+
+Once, in another war, I had been on a paved road when--well, I did
+not care to be on this one if a nine-inch hit it and turned fragments of
+paving-stones into projectiles. An effort to "run out the bunt"--Caesar's
+ghost! It was one of our own shells! Nerves! Shame! Two stretcher-
+bearers with a wounded man looked up in surprise, wondering what
+kind of a hide-and-seek game we were playing. They made a picture
+of imperturbability of the kind that is a cure for nerves under fire.
+If the other fellow is not scared it does not do for you to be scared.
+
+"Did you get any shells in your neighbourhood?" we asked the
+chauffeur--also British and imperturbable--whom we found waiting at
+a clearing station for wounded.
+
+"Yes, sir, I saw several, but none hit the car."
+
+As we came to the first cross-roads in that dead land back of the
+trenches which was still being shelled by shrapnel, though not
+another car was in sight, and ours had no business there (as we were
+told afterwards), that chauffeur, as he slowed up before turning, held
+out his hand from habit as he would have done in Piccadilly.
+
+Two or three days later things were normal along the front again, with
+Mr. Atkins still stuffing himself with marmalade in that two hundred
+yards of trench.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+Winning And Losing
+
+
+
+Seeming an immovable black line set as a frontier in peace, that
+Western front on your map which you bought early in the war in
+anticipation of rearranging the flags in keeping with each day's news
+was, in reality, a pulsating, changing line.
+
+At times you thought of it as an enormous rope under the constant
+pressure of soldiers on either side, who now and then, with an "all
+together" of a tug-of-war at a given point, straightened or made a
+bend, with the result imperceptible except as you measured it by a
+tree or a house. Battles as severe as the most important in South
+Africa, battles severe enough to have decided famous campaigns in
+Europe in former days, when one king rode forth against another,
+became landmark incidents of the give and take, the wrangling and
+the wrestling of siege operations.
+
+The sensation of victory or defeat for those engaged was none the
+less vivid because victory meant the gain of so little ground and
+defeat the loss of so little; perhaps the more vivid in want of the
+movement of pursuing or of being pursued in the shock of arms as in
+past times, when an army front hardly covered that of one brigade in
+the trenches. For winners and losers, returning to their billets in
+French villages as other battalions took their places, had time to think
+over the action.
+
+The offensive was mostly with the British through the summer of
+1915; any thrust by the Germans was usually to retake a section of
+trenches which they had lost. But our attacks did not all succeed, of
+course.
+
+Battalions knew success and failure; and their narratives were mine
+to share, just as one would share the good luck or the bad luck of his
+neighbours.
+
+You may have a story of heartbreak or triumph an hour after you
+have been chatting with playing children in a village street, as the car
+speeds toward the zone where reserves are billeted and the
+occasional shell is a warning that peace lies behind you. First, we
+alighted near the headquarters of two battalions which have been in
+an attack that failed. The colonel of the one to the left of the road was
+killed. We went across the fields to the right. Among the surviving
+officers resting in their shelter tents, where there is plenty of room
+now, is the adjutant, tall, boyish, looking tired, but still with no
+outward display of what he has gone through and what it has meant
+to him. I have seen him by the hundreds, this buoyant type of English
+youth.
+
+In army language, theirs had not been a "good show." We had heard
+the account of it with that matter-of-fact prefix from G.H.Q., where
+they took results with the necessarily cold eye of logic. The two
+battalions were set to take a trench; that was all. In the midst of
+merciless shell-fire they had waited for their own guns to draw all the
+teeth out of the trench. When the given moment came they swept
+forward. But our artillery had not "connected up" properly.
+
+The German machine-guns were not out of commission, and for
+them it was like working a loom playing bullets back and forth across
+the zone of a hundred yards which the British had to traverse. The
+British had been told to charge and they charged. Theirs not to
+reason why; that was the glory of the thing. Nothing more gallant in
+warfare than their persistence, till they found that it was like trying to
+swim in a cataract of lead. One officer got within fifty yards of the
+German parapet before he fell. At last they realized that it could not
+be done--later than they should, but they were a proud regiment, and
+though they had been too brave, there was something splendid about
+it.
+
+With a soldier's winning frankness and simplicity they told what had
+happened. Even before they charged they knew the machine-guns
+were in place; they knew what they had to face. One man spoke of
+seeing, as they lay waiting, a German officer standing up in the midst
+of the British shell-fire.
+
+"A stout-hearted fighter I We had to admire him!" said the adjutant.
+
+It was a chivalrous thought with a deep appeal, considering what he
+had been through. Oh, these English! They will not hate; they cannot
+be separated from their sense of sportsmanship.
+
+It was not the first time the guns had not "connected up" for either
+side, and German charges on many occasions had met a like fate.
+Calm enough, these officers, true to their birthright of phlegm. They
+did not make excuses. Success is the criterion of battle. They had
+failed. Their unblinking recognition of the fact was a sort of self-
+punishment which cut deep into your own sensitiveness. One young
+lieutenant could not keep his lip from trembling over that naked, grim
+thought. Pride of regiment had been struck a whip-blow, which meant
+more to the soldier than any injury to his personal pride.
+
+But next time! They wanted another try for that trench, these
+survivors. No matter about anything else--the battalion must have
+another chance. You appreciated this from a few words and more
+from the stubborn resolution in the bearing of all. There was no "let-
+us-at-'em-again" frightfulness. In order to end this war you must "lick"
+one side or the other, and these men were not "licked." You were
+sorry that you had gone to see them. It was like lacerating a wound.
+
+One could only assure them, in his faith in their gallantry, that they
+would win next time. And oh, how you wanted them to win! They
+deserved to win because they were such manly losers.
+
+At home in their rough wooden houses in camp we found a battalion
+which had won--the same undemonstrative type as the one that had
+lost; the same simplicity and kindly hospitality, which gives life at the
+front a charm in the midst of its tragedy, from these men of one of the
+dependable line regiments. This colonel knew the other colonel, and
+he said about the other what his fellow-officers had said: it was not his
+fault; he was a good man. If the guns were not "on," what happened
+to him was bound to happen to anybody. They had been "on" for the
+winning battalion; perfectly "on." They had buried the machine-guns
+and the Germans with them.
+
+When a man goes into the kind of charge that either battalion made
+he gives himself up for lost. The psychology is simple. You are going
+to keep on until------!
+
+Well, as Mr. Atkins has remarked in his own terse way, a battle was a
+lot of noise all around you and suddenly a big bang in your ear; and
+then somebody said, "please open your mouth and take this!" and
+you found yourself in a white, quiet place full of cots.
+
+The winning battalion was amazed how easily the thing was done.
+They had "walked in." They were a little surprised to be alive--thanks
+to the guns. "Here we are! Here we are again!" as the song at the
+front goes. It is all a lottery. Make up your mind to draw the death
+number; and if you don't, that is "velvet." Army courage these days is
+highly sensitized steel in response to will.
+
+They had won; there was a credit mark in the regimental record. All
+had won; nobody in particular, but the battalion, the lot of them. They
+did not boast about it. The thing just happened. They were alive and
+enjoying the sheer fact of life, writing letters home, rereading letters
+from home, looking at the pictures in illustrated papers, as they
+leaned back and smoked their brier-wood pipes and discussed
+politics with that freedom and directness of opinion which is an
+Englishman's pastime and his birthright.
+
+The captain who was describing the fight had retired from the army,
+gone into business, and returned as a reserve officer. The guns were
+to stop firing at a given moment. As the minute-hand lay over the
+figure on his wrist-watch he dashed for the broken parapet, still in the
+haze of dust from shell-bursts, to find not a German in sight. All were
+under cover. He enacted the ridiculous scene with humorous
+appreciation of how he came face to face with a German as he
+turned a traverse. He was ready with his revolver and the other was
+not, and the other was his prisoner.
+
+There was nothing gruesome about listening to a diffident soldier
+explaining how he "bombed them out," and you shared his
+amusement over the surprise of a German who stuck up his head
+from a dug-out within a foot of the face of a British soldier who was
+peeping inside to see if any more Germans were at home. You
+rejoiced with this battalion. Victory is sweet.
+
+When on the way back to quarters you passed some of the new army
+men, "the Keetcheenaires," as the French call them, you were
+reminded that although the war was old the British army was young.
+There was a "Watch our city grow!" atmosphere about it. Little by
+little, some great force seemed steadily pushing up from the rear. It
+made that business institution at G.H.Q. feel like bankers with an
+enormous, increasing surplus. In this the British is like no other army.
+One has watched it in the making.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+The Maple Leaf Folk
+
+
+
+These were "home folks" to the American. You might know all by their
+maple-leaf symbol; but even before you saw that, with its bronze
+none too prominent against the khaki, you knew those who were not
+recent emigrants from England to Canada by their accent and by
+certain slang phrases which pay no customs duty at the border.
+
+When, on a dark February night cruising in a slough of a road, I heard
+out of a wall of blackness back of the trenches, "Gee! Get on to the
+bus!" which referred to our car, and also, "Cut out the noise!" I was
+certain that I might dispense with an interpreter. After I had remarked
+that I came from New York, which is only across the street from
+Montreal as distances go in our countries, the American batting about
+the front at midnight was welcomed with a "glad hand" across that
+imaginary line which has and ever shall have no fortresses.
+
+What a strange place to find Canadians--at the front in Europe! I
+could never quite accommodate myself to the wonder of a man from
+Winnipeg, and perhaps a "neutral" from Wyoming in his company,
+fighting Germans in Flanders. A man used to a downy couch and an
+easy chair by the fire and steam-heated rooms, who had ten
+thousand a year in Toronto, when you found him in a chill, damp
+cellar of a peasant's cottage in range of the enemy's shells was
+getting something more than novel, if not more picturesque, than
+dog-mushing and prospecting on the Yukon; for we are quite used to
+that contrast.
+
+All I asked of the Canadians was to allow a little of the glory they had
+won--they had such a lot--to rub off on their neighbours. If there must
+be war, and no Canadian believed in it as an institution, why, to my
+mind, the Canadians did a fine thing for civilization's sake. It hurt
+sometimes to think that we also could not be in the fight for the good
+cause, particularly after the Lusitania was sunk, when my own
+feelings had lost all semblance of neutrality.
+
+The Canadians enlivened life at the front; for they have a little more
+zip to them than the thorough-going British. Their climate spells
+"hustle," and we are all the product of climate to a large degree,
+whether in England, on the Mississippi flatlands, or in Manitoba.
+Eager and high-strung the Canadian born, quick to see and to act.
+Very restless they were when held up on Salisbury Plain, after they
+had come three-four-five-six thousand miles to fight and there was
+nothing to fight but mud in an English winter.
+
+One from the American contingent knew what ailed them; they
+wanted action. They may have seemed undisciplined to a drill
+sergeant; but the kind of discipline they needed was a sight of the real
+thing. They wanted to know, What for? And Lord Kitchener was
+kinder to them, though many were beginners, than to his own new
+army; he could be, as they were ready with guns and equipment. So
+he sent them over to France before it was too late in the spring to get
+frozen feet from standing in icy water looking over a parapet at a
+German parapet. They liked Flanders mud better than Salisbury Plain
+mud, because it meant that there was "something doing."
+
+It was in their first trenches that I saw them, and they were "on the
+job, all right," in face of scattered shell-fire and the sweep of
+searchlights and flares. They had become the most ardent of pupils,
+for here was that real thing which steadied them and proved their
+metal.
+
+They refashioned their trenches and drained them with the
+fastidiousness of good housekeepers who had a frontiersman's
+experience for an inheritance. In a week they appeared to be old
+hands at the business.
+
+"Their discipline is different from ours," said a British general, "but it
+works out. They are splendid. I ask for no better troops."
+
+They may have lacked the etiquette of discipline of British regulars,
+but they had the natural discipline of self-reliance and of "go to it"
+when a crisis came. This trench was only an introduction, a
+preparation for a thing which was about as real as ever fell to the lot
+of any soldiers. It is not for me to tell here the story of their part in
+the second battle of Ypres, when the gas fumes rolled in upon them.
+I should like to tell it and also the story of the deeds of many British
+regiments, from the time of Mons to Festubert. All Canada knows it in
+detail from their own correspondents and their record officer. England
+will one day know about her regiments; her stubborn regiments of the
+line, her county regiments, who have won the admiration of all the
+crack regiments, whether English or Scots.
+
+"When that gas came along," said one Canadian, who expressed the
+Canadian spirit, "we knew the Boches were springing a new one on
+us. You know how it is if a man is hit in the face by a cloud of smoke
+when he is going into a burning building to get somebody out. He
+draws back--and then he goes in. We went in. We charged--well, it
+was the way we felt about it. We wanted to get at them and we were
+boiling mad over such a dastardly kind of attack."
+
+Higher authorities than any civilian have testified to how that charge
+helped, if it did not save, the situation. And then at Givenchy--straight
+work into the enemy's trenches under the guns. Canada is part of the
+British Empire and a precious part; but the Canadians, all imperial
+politics aside, fought their way into the affection of the British army, if
+they did not already possess it. They made the Rocky Mountains
+seem more majestic and the Thousand Islands more lovely.
+
+If there are some people in the United States busy with their own
+affairs who look on the Canadians as living up north somewhere
+toward the Arctic Circle and not very numerous, that old criterion of
+worth which discovers in the glare of battle's publicity merit which
+already existed has given to the name Canadian a glory which can be
+appreciated only with the perspective of time. The Civil War left us a
+martial tradition; they have won theirs. Some day a few of their neutral
+neighbours who fought by their side will be joining in their army
+reunions and remarking, "Wasn't that mud in Flanders------" etc.
+
+My thanks to the Canadians for being at the front. They brought me
+back to the plains and the North-West, and they showed the
+Germans on some occasions what a blizzard is like when expressed
+in bullets instead of in snowflakes, by men who know how to shoot. I
+had continental pride in them. They had the dry, pungent philosophy
+and the indomitable optimism which the air of the plains and the St.
+Lawrence valley seems to develop. They were not afraid to be a little
+emotional and sentimental. There is room for that sort of thing
+between Vancouver and Halifax. They had been in some "tough
+scraps" which they saw clear-eyed, as they would see a boxing-
+match or a spill from a canoe into a Canadian rapids.
+
+As for the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, old soldiers of
+the South African campaign almost without exception, knowing and
+hardened, their veteran experience gave them an earlier opportunity
+in the trenches than the first Canadian division. Brigaded with British
+regulars, the Princess Pat's were a sort of corps d'elite. Colonel
+Francis Farquhar, known as "Fanny," was their colonel, and he knew
+his men. After he was killed his spirit remained with them. Asked if
+they could stick they said, "Yes, sir!" cheerily, as he would have
+wanted them to say it.
+
+I am going to tell the story of their fight of May 8th, not to single them
+out from any other Canadian battalion, or any British battalions, but
+because the story came to me and it seemed illuminative of what
+other battalions had endured, this one picturesquely because of its
+membership and its distance from home.
+
+Losses in that Ypres salient at St. Eloi the P.P.s had suffered in the
+winter, dribbling, day-by-day losses, and heavier ones when they had
+made attacks and repulsed attacks. They had been holding down the
+lid of hell heretofore, as one said graphically, and on May 8th, to use
+his simile again, they held on to the edge of the opening by the skin of
+their teeth and looked down into the bowels of hell after the Germans
+had blown the lid off with high explosives.
+
+It was in a big chateau that I heard the story--a story characteristic of
+modern warfare at its highest pitch--and felt its thrill when told by the
+tongues of its participants. There were twenty bedrooms in that
+chateau. If I wished to stay all night I might occupy three or four. As
+for the bathroom, paradise to men who have been buried in filthy mud
+by high explosives, the Frenchman who planned it had the most
+spacious ideas of immersion. A tub, or a shower, or a hose, as you
+pleased. Some bathroom, that!
+
+For nothing in the British army was too good for the Princess Pat's
+before May 8th; and since May 8th nothing is quite good enough. Ask
+the generals in whose command they have served if you have any
+doubts. There is one way to win praise at the front: by fighting. The
+P.P.s knew the way.
+
+"Too bad Gault is not here. He's in England recovering from his
+wound. Gault is six feet tall and five feet of him legs. All day in that
+trench with a shell-wound in his thigh and arm. God! How he was
+suffering! But not a moan, his face twitching and trying to make the
+twitch into a smile, and telling us to stick.
+
+"Buller away, too. He was the second in command. Gault succeeded
+him. Buller was hit on May 5th and missed the big show--piece of
+shell in the eye."
+
+"And Charlie Stewart, who was shot through the stomach. How we
+miss him! If ever there were a 'live-wire' it's Charlie. Up or down, he's
+smiling and ready for the next adventure. Once he made thirty
+thousand dollars in the Yukon and spent it on the way to Vancouver.
+The first job he could get was washing dishes; but he wasn't washing
+them long. Again, he started out in the North-West on an expedition
+with four hundred traps, to cut into the fur business of the Hudson
+Bay Company. His Indians got sick. He wouldn't desert them, and
+before he was through he had a time which beat anything yet opened
+up for us by the Germans in Flanders. But you have heard such
+stories from the North-West before. Being shot through the stomach
+the way he was, all the doctors agreed that Charlie would die. It was
+like Charlie to disagree with them. He always had his own point of
+view. So he is getting well. Charlie came out to the war with the
+packing-case which had been used by his grandfather, who was an
+officer in the Crimean War. He said that it would bring him luck."
+
+The 4th of May was bad enough, a ghastly forerunner for the 8th. On
+the 4th the P.P.s, after having been under shell-fire throughout the
+second battle of Ypres, the "gas battle," were ordered forward to a
+new line to the south-east of Ypres. To the north of Ypres the British
+line had been driven back by the concentration of shell-fire and the
+rolling, deadly march of the clouds of asphyxiating gas.
+
+The Germans were still determined to take the town, which they had
+showered with four million dollars' worth of shells. It would be big
+news: the fall of Ypres as a prelude to the fall of Przemysl and of
+Lemberg in their summer campaign of 1915. A wicked salient was
+produced in the British line to the south-east by the cave-in to the
+north. It seems to be the lot of the P.P.s to get into salients. On the
+4th they lost twenty-eight men killed and ninety-eight wounded from a
+gruelling all-day shell-fire and stone-walling. That night they got relief
+and were out for two days, when they were back in the front trenches
+again. The 5th and the 6th were fairly quiet; that is, what the P.P.s or
+Mr. Thomas Atkins would call quiet. Average mortals wouldn't. They
+would try to appear unconcerned and say they had been under pretty
+heavy fire, which means shells all over the place and machine-guns
+combing the parapet. Very dull, indeed. Only three men killed and
+seventeen wounded.
+
+On the night of May 7th the P.P.s had a muster of six hundred and
+thirty-five men. This was a good deal less than half of the original total
+in the battalion, including recruits who had come out to fill the gaps
+caused by death, wounds, and sickness. Bear in mind that before this
+war a force was supposed to prepare for retreat with a loss of ten per
+cent, and get under way to the rear with the loss of fifteen per cent,
+and that with the loss of thirty per cent, it was supposed to have
+borne all that can be expected of the best trained soldiers.
+
+The Germans were quiet that night, suggestively quiet. At 4.30 a.m.
+the prelude began; by 5.30 the German gunners had fairly warmed to
+their work. They were using every kind of shell they had in the locker.
+Every signal wire the P.P.s possessed had been cut. The brigade
+commander could not know what was happening to them and they
+could not know his wishes; except that it may be taken for granted
+that the orders of any British brigade commander are always to "stick
+it." The shell-fire was as thick at the P.P.s' backs as in front of them;
+they were fenced in by it. And they were infantry taking what the guns
+gave in order to put them out of business so that the way would be
+clear for the German infantry to charge. In theory they ought to have
+been buried and mangled beyond the power of resistance by what is
+called "the artillery preparation for the infantry in attack."
+
+Every man of the P.P.s knew what was coming. There was relief in
+their hearts when they saw the Germans break from their trenches
+and start down the slope of the hill in front. Now they could take it out
+of the German infantry in payment for what the German guns were
+doing to them. This was their only thought. Being good shots, with the
+instinct of the man who is used to shooting at game, the P.P.s "shoot
+to kill" and at individual targets. The light green of the German
+uniform is more visible on the deep green background of spring grass
+and foliage than against the tints of autumn. At two or three or four
+hundred yards neither Corporal Christy, the old bear-hunter, lying on
+the parapet nor other marksmen of the P.P.s could miss their marks.
+They kept on knocking down Germans; they didn't know that men
+around them were being hit; they did not know they were being
+shelled except when a burst shook their aim or filled their eyes with
+dust. In that case they wiped the dust out of their eyes and went on.
+The first that many of them realized that the German attack was
+broken was when they saw green blots in front of the standing
+figures, which were now going in the other direction. Then the thing
+was to keep as many of these as possible from returning over the hill.
+After that they could dress the wounded and make the dying a little
+more comfortable. For there was no taking the wounded to the rear.
+They had to remain there in the trench perhaps to be wounded again,
+spectators of their comrades' valour without the preoccupation of
+action.
+
+In the official war journal where a battalion keeps its records--that
+precious historical document which will be safeguarded in fireproof
+vaults one of these days--you may read in cold, official language what
+happened in one section of the British line on the 8th of May. Thus:
+
+"7 a.m. Fire trench on right blown in at several points ... 9 a.m.
+Lieutenants Martin and Triggs were hit and came out of left
+communicating trench with number of wounded . . . Captain Still and
+Lieutenant de Bay hit also . . . 9.30 a.m. All machine-guns were
+buried (by high explosive shells) but two were dug out and mounted
+again. A shell killed every man in one section . . . 10.30 a.m.
+Lieutenant Edwards was killed . . . Lieutenant Crawford, who was
+most gallant, was severely wounded . . . Captain Adamson, who had
+been handing out ammunition, was hit in the shoulder, but continued
+to work with only one arm useful . . . Sergeant-Major Frazer, who was
+also handing out ammunition to support trenches, was killed instantly
+by a bullet in the head."
+
+At 10.30 only four officers remained fit for action. All were lieutenants.
+The ranking one of these was Niven, in command after Gault was
+wounded at 7 a.m. We have all met the Niven type anywhere from
+the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Circle, the high-strung, wiry type who
+moves about too fast to carry any loose flesh and accumulates none
+because he does move about so fast. A little man Niven, rancher and
+horseman, with a good education and a knowledge of men. He rather
+fits the old saying about licking his weight in wild cats--wild cats being
+nearer his size than lions or tigers.
+
+Eight months before he had not known any more about war than
+thousands of other Canadians of his type, except that soldiers carried
+rifles over their shoulders and kept step. But he had "Fanny"
+Farquhar, of the British army, for his teacher; and he studied the book
+of war in the midst of shells and bullets, which means that the lessons
+stick in the same way as the lesson the small boy receives when he
+touches the red-hot end of a poker to ascertain how it feels.
+
+Writing in the midst of ruined trenches rocked by the concussion of
+shells, every message he sent that day, every report he made by
+orderly after the wires were down was written out very explicitly; which
+Farquhar had taught him was the army way. The record is there of his
+coolness when the lid was blown off of hell. For all you can tell by the
+firm chirography, he might have been sending a note to a ranch
+foreman.
+
+When his communications were cut, he was not certain how much
+support he had on his flanks. It looked for a time as if he had none.
+After the first charge was repulsed, he made contact with the King's
+Royal Rifle Corps on his right. He knew from the nature of the first
+German charge that the second would be worse than the first. The
+Germans had advanced some machine-guns; they would be able to
+place their increased artillery fire more accurately.
+
+Again green figures started down that hill and again they were put
+back. Then Niven was able to establish contact with the Shropshire
+Light Infantry, another regiment on his left. So he knew that right and
+left he was supported, and by seasoned British regulars. This was
+very, very comforting, especially when German machine-gun fire was
+not only coming from the front but in enfilade, which is most trying to a
+soldier's steadiness. In other words, the P.P.s were shooting at
+Germans in front, while bullets were whipping crosswise of their
+trenches and of the regulars on their flanks, too. Some of the German
+infantrymen who had not been hit or had not fallen back had dug
+themselves cover and were firing at a closer range.
+
+The Germans had located the points in the P.P.s' trench occupied by
+machine-guns. At least, they could put these hornets' nests out of
+business if not all the individual riflemen. So they concentrated high
+explosive shells on the guns. This did the trick; it buried them. But a
+buried machine-gun may be dug out and fired again. It may be dug
+out two or three times and keep on firing as long as it will work and
+there is anyone to man it.
+
+While the machine-guns were being exhumed every man in one
+sector of the trench was killed. Then the left half of the right fire
+trench had three or four shells, one after another, bang into it. There
+was no trench left; only macerated earth and mangled men. Those
+emerging alive were told to retreat to the communication trench.
+Next, the right end of the left fire trench was blown in. When the
+survivors fell back to the communication trench that also was
+blown in their face.
+
+"Oh, but we were having a merry party!" as Lieutenant Vandenberg
+put it.
+
+Niven and his lieutenants were moving here and there to the point of
+each new explosion to ascertain the amount of damage and to
+decide what was to be done as the result. One soldier described
+Niven's eyes as sparks emitted from two holes in his dust-caked face.
+
+Pappineau tells how a tree outside the trench was cut in two by a
+shell and its trunk laid across the breach of the trench caused by
+another shell; and lying over the trunk, limp and lifeless where he had
+fallen, was a man killed by still another shell.
+
+"I remember how he looked because I had to step around him and
+over the trunk," said Pappineau.
+
+Unless you did have to step around a dead or a wounded man there
+was no time to observe his appearance; for by noon there were as
+many dead and wounded in the P.P.s' trench as there were men fit
+for action.
+
+Those unhurt did not have to be steadied by their superiors. Knocked
+down by a concussion they sprang up with the promptness of disgust
+of one thrown off a horse or tripped by a wire. When told to move
+from one part of the trench to another where there was desperate
+need, a word was sufficient. They understood what was wanted of
+them, these veterans. They went. They seized every lull to drop the
+rifle for the spade and repair the breaches. When they were not
+shooting they were digging. The officers had only to keep reminding
+them not to expose themselves in the breaches. For in the thick of it,
+and the thicker the more so, they must try to keep some dirt between
+all of their bodies except the head and arm which had to be up in
+order to fire.
+
+At 1.30 p.m. a cheer rose from that trench. It was in greeting of a
+platoon of the King's Royal Rifles which had come as a reinforcement.
+Oh, but this band of Tommies did look good to the P.P.s! And the
+little prize package that the very reliable Mr. Atkins had with him
+--the machine-gun! You can always count on Mr. Atkins to remain
+"among those present" to the last on such occasions.
+
+Now Niven got word by messenger to go to the nearest point where
+the telephone was working and tell the brigade commander the
+complete details of the situation. The brigade commander asked him
+if he could stick, and he said, "Yes, sir!" which is what Colonel
+"Fanny" Farquhar would have said. This trip was hardly what would
+be called peaceful. The orderly whom Niven had with him both going
+and coming was hit by high explosive shells. Niven is so small that it
+is difficult to hit him. He is about up to Major Gault's shoulder.
+
+He had been worrying about his supply of rifle-cartridges. There were
+not enough to take care of another German infantry charge, which
+was surely coming. After repelling two charges, think of failing to repel
+the third for want of ammunition! Think of Corporal Christy, the bear-
+hunter, with the Germans thick in front of him and no bullets for his
+rifle! But appeared again Mr. Thomas Atkins, another platoon of him,
+with twenty boxes of cartridges, which was rather a risky burden to
+bring through shell-fire. The relief as these were distributed was that
+of having something at your throat which threatens to strangle you
+removed.
+
+Making another tour of his trenches a little later in the afternoon,
+Niven found that there was a gap of fifty yards between his left and
+the right of the adjoining regiment. Fifty yards is the inch on the end of
+a man's nose in trench-warfare on such an occasion. He was able to
+place eight men in the gap. At least, they could keep a look out and
+tell him what was going on.
+
+It was not cheering news to learn that the regiments on his left had
+withdrawn to trenches about three hundred yards to the rear--a long
+distance in trench warfare. But the P.P.s had no time to retire. They
+could have gone only in the panic of men who think of nothing in their
+demoralization except to flee from the danger in front, regardless of
+more danger to the rear. They were held where they were under what
+cover they had by the renewed blasts of shells, putting the machine-
+guns out of action.
+
+Now the Germans were coming on again in their supreme effort. It
+was as a nightmare, in which only the objective of effort is recalled
+and all else is a vague struggle of every ounce of strength which one
+can exert against smothering odds. No use to ask these men what
+they thought. What do you think when you are climbing up a rope
+whose strands are breaking over the edge of a precipice? You climb;
+that is all.
+
+The P.P.s shot at Germans. After a night without sleep, after a day
+among their dead and wounded, after torrents of shell-fire, after
+breathing smoke, dust and gas, these veterans were in a state of
+exaltation entirely oblivious of danger, of their surroundings, mindless
+of what came next, automatically shooting to kill as they were trained
+to do, even as a man pulls with all his might in the crucial test of a tug
+of war. Old Corporal Christy, bear-hunter of the North-West, who
+could "shoot the eye off an ant," as Niven said, leaned out over the
+parapet, or what was left of it, because he could take better aim lying
+down and the Germans were so thick that he could not afford any
+misses.
+
+Corporal Dover had to give up firing his machine-gun at last.
+Wounded, he had dug it out of the earth after an explosion and set it
+up again. The explosion which destroyed the gun finally crushed his
+leg and arm. He crawled out of the debris toward the support trench
+which had become the fire trench, only to be killed by a bullet.
+
+The Germans got possession of a section of the P.P.s' trench where,
+it is believed, no Canadians were left. But the German effort died
+there. It could get no farther. This was as near to Ypres as the
+Germans were to go in this direction. When the day's work was done,
+there, in sight of the field scattered with German dead, the P.P.s
+counted their numbers. Of the six hundred and thirty-five men who
+had begun the fight at daybreak, one hundred and fifty men and four
+officers, Niven, Pappineau, Clark and Vandenberg, remained fit for
+duty.
+
+Vandenberg is a Hollander, but mostly he is Vandenberg. To him the
+call of youth is the call to arms. He knows the roads of Europe and
+the roads of Chihuahua. He was at home fighting with Villa at
+Zacetecas and at home fighting with the P.P.s in front of Ypres.
+
+Darkness found all the survivors among the P.P.s in the support and
+communication trenches. The fire trench had become an untenable
+dust-heap. They crept out only to bring in any wounded unable to
+help themselves; and wounded and rescuers were more than once
+hit in the process. It was too dangerous to attempt to bury the dead
+who were in the fire-trench. Most of them had already been buried by
+shells. For them and for the dead in the support trenches interred by
+their living comrades, Niven recited such portions as he could recall
+of the Church of England service for the dead--recited them with a
+tight throat. Then the P.P.s, unbeaten, marched out, leaving the
+position to their relief, a battalion of the King's Royal Rifle Corps.
+Corporal Christy, the bear-hunter, had his "luck with him." He had not
+even a scratch.
+
+Such is the story of a hard fight by one battalion in the kind of warfare
+waged in Europe these days, a story only partially told; a story to
+make a book. All the praise that the P.P.s, millionaire or labourer,
+scapegrace or respectable pillar of society, ask is that they are worthy
+of fighting side by side with Mr. Thomas Atkins, regular. At best, one
+poor, little, finite mind only observes through a rift in the black smoke
+and yellow smoke of high explosives and the clouds of dust and
+military secrecy something of what has happened many times in a
+small section of that long line from Switzerland to the North Sea.
+
+Leaning against the wall in a corner of the dining-room of the French
+chateau were the P.P.s colours. Major Niven took off the wrapper in
+order that I might see the flag with the initials of the battalion which
+Princess Patricia embroidered with her own hands. There is room,
+one repeats, for a little sentiment and a little emotion, too, between
+Halifax and Vancouver.
+
+"Of course we could not take our colours into action," said Niven.
+"They would have been torn into tatters or buried in a shell-crater. But
+we've always kept them up at battalion headquarters. I believe we are
+the only battalion that has. We promised the Princess that we would."
+
+In her honour, an old custom has been renewed in France: knights
+are fighting in the name of a fair lady.
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+Many Pictures
+
+
+
+A single incident, an impression photographic in its swiftness, a
+chance remark, may be more illuminating than a day's experiences.
+One does not need to go to the front for them. Sometimes they come
+to the gateway of our chateau. They are pages at random out of a
+library of overwhelming information.
+
+One of the aviation grounds is not far away. Look skyward at almost
+any hour of the day and you will see a plane, its propeller a roar or a
+hum according to its altitude. Sometimes it is circling in practice;
+again, it is off to the front. At break of day the planes appear; in the
+gloaming they return to roost.
+
+If an aviator has leave for two or three days in summer he starts in
+the late afternoon, flashing over that streak of Channel in half an
+hour, and may be at home for dinner without getting any dust on his
+clothes or having to bother with military red tape at steamer
+gangways or customs houses.
+
+The airmen are a type which one associates with certain marked
+characteristics. No nervous man is wanted, and it is time for an
+aviator to take a rest at the first sign of nerves. They seem rather shy,
+men given to observation rather than to talking; accustomed to using
+their eyes and hands. It is difficult to realize that some quiet, young
+fellow who is pointed out has had so many hairbreadth escapes.
+What tales, worthy of Arabian Nights' heroes who are borne away-on
+magic carpets, they bring home, relating them as matter-of-factly as if
+they had broken a shoelace.
+
+Up in their seat, a whir of the motor, and they are off on another
+adventure. They have all the spirit of corps of the oldest regiments,
+and, besides, a spirit peculiar to the newest branch in the service of
+war. Anonymity is absolute. Everything is done by the corps for the
+corps. Possibly because it is so young, because it started with
+chosen men, the British Aviation Corps is unsurpassed; but partly it is
+because of the British temperament, with that combination of
+coolness and innate love of risk which the British manner sometimes
+belies. Something of the old spirit of knighthood characterizes air
+service. It is individual work; its numbers are relatively few.
+
+Some mornings ago I saw several young soldiers with notebooks
+going about our village street. They were from the cadet school
+where privates, from the trenches, take a course and return with
+chocolate drops on their, sleeve-bands as commissioned officers.
+This was a course in billeting. For ours is not an army in tents, but
+one living in French houses and barns. The pupils were learning how
+to carry out this delicate task; for delicate it is. A stranger speaking
+another language becomes the guest of the host for whom he is
+fighting. Mr. Atkins receives only shelter; he supplies his own meals.
+His excess of marmalade one sees yellowing the cheeks of the
+children in the family where he is at home. Madame objects only to
+his efforts to cook in her kitchen; woman-like, she would rather handle
+the pots and pans herself.
+
+Tommy is thoroughly instructed in his duty as guest and under a
+discipline that is merciless so far as conduct toward the population
+goes; so the two get on better than French and English military
+authorities feared that they might. Time has taught them to
+understand each other and to see that difference in race does not
+mean absence of human qualities in common, though differently
+expressed. Many armies I have seen, but never one better behaved
+than the British army in France and Flanders in its respect for
+property and the rights of the population.
+
+And while the fledgling officers are going on with their billeting, we
+hear the t-r-r-t of a machine-gun at a machine-gun school about a
+mile distant, where picked men also from the trenches receive
+instruction in the use of an arm new to them. There are other schools
+within sound of the guns teaching the art of war to an expanding army
+in the midst of war, with the teachers bringing their experience from
+the battle-line.
+
+
+
+"Their shops and their houses all have fronts of glass," wrote a Sikh
+soldier home, "and even the poor are rich in this bountiful land."
+
+Sikhs and Ghurkas and Rajputs and Pathans and Gharwalis, the
+brown-skinned tribesmen in India, have been on a strange Odyssey,
+bringing picturesqueness to the khaki tone of modern war.
+Aeroplanes interested them less than a trotting dog in a wheel for
+drawing water. They would watch that for hours.
+
+Still fresh in mind is a scene when the air seemed a moist sponge
+and all above the earth was dripping and all under foot a mire. I was
+homesick for the flash on the windows of the New York skyscrapers
+or the gleam on the Hudson of that bright sunlight in a drier air, that is
+the secret of the American's nervous energy. It seemed to me that it
+was enough to have to exist in Northern France at that season of the
+year, let alone fighting Germans.
+
+Out of the drizzly, misty rain along a muddy road and turning past us
+came the Indian cavalry, which, like the British cavalry, had fought on
+foot in the trenches, while their horses led the leisurely life of true
+equine gentry. Erect in their saddles, their martial spirit defiant of
+weather, their black eyes flashing as they looked toward the
+reviewing officers, troop after troop of these sons of the East passed
+by, everyone seeming as fit for review as if he had cleaned his
+uniform and equipment in his home barracks instead of in French
+barns.
+
+You asked who had trained them; who had fashioned the brown clay
+into resolute and loyal obedience which stood the test of a Flanders
+winter? What was the force which could win them to cross the seas to
+fight for England? Among the brown faces topped with turbans
+appeared occasional white faces. These were the men; these the
+force.
+
+The marvel was not that the Indians were able to fight as well as they
+did in that climate, but that they fought at all. What welcome summer
+brought from their gleaming black eyes! July or August could not be
+too hot for them. On a plateau one afternoon I saw them in a
+gymkhana. It was a treat for the King of the Belgians, who has had
+few holidays, indeed, this last year, and for the French peasants who
+came from the neighbourhood. Yelling, wild as they were in tribal days
+before the British brought order and peace to India, the horsemen
+galloped across the open space, picking up handkerchiefs from the
+ground and impaling tent pegs on their lances. The French peasants
+clapped their hands and the British Indian officers said, "Good!" when
+the performer succeeded, or, "Too bad!" when he failed.
+
+If you asked the officers for the secret of the Indian Empire they said:
+"We try to be fair to the natives!" which means that they are just and
+even-tempered. An enormous, loose-jointed machine the British
+Empire, which seems sometimes to creak a bit, yet holds together for
+that very reason. Imperial weight may have interfered with British
+adaptability to the kind of warfare which was the one kind that the
+Germans had to train for; but certainly some Englishmen must know
+how to rule.
+
+That church bell across the street from our chateau begins its clangor
+at dawn, summoning the French women and children and the old
+men to the fields in harvest time. But its peal carrying across the
+farmlands is softened by distance and sweet to the tired workers in
+the evening. In the morning it tells them that the day is long and they
+have much to do before dark. After that thought I never complained
+because it robbed me of my sleep. I felt ashamed not to be up and
+doing myself, and worked with a better spirit.
+
+"Will they do it?"
+
+We asked this question as often in our mess in those August days
+as, Will the Russians lose Warsaw? Would the peasants be able to
+get in their crops, with all the able-bodied men away? I had inside
+information from the village mayor and the blacksmith and the baker
+that they would. A financial expert, the baker. Of course, he said,
+France would go on fighting till the Germans were beaten, just as the
+old men and the women and children said, whether the church bell
+were clanging the matins or the angelus. But there was the question
+of finances. It took money to fight. The Americans, he knew, had
+more money than they knew what to do with--as Europeans
+universally think, only, personally, I find that I was overlooked in the
+distribution--and if they would lend the Allies some of their spare
+billions, Germany was surely beaten.
+
+A busy man, the blacksmith, and brawny, if he had no spreading
+chestnut tree; busy not only shoeing farmhorses, but repairing
+American reapers and binders, whose owners profited exceedingly
+and saved the day. But not all farmers felt that they could afford the
+charge.
+
+These kept at their small patches with sickles. Gradually the carpets
+of gold waving in the breeze became bundles lying on the stubble,
+and great, conical harvest stacks rose, while children gathered the
+stray stems left on the ground by the reapers till they had immense
+bouquets of wheat-heads under their arms, enough to make two or
+three loaves of the pain de menage that the baker sold. So the
+peasants did it; they won; and this was some compensation for the
+loss of Warsaw.
+
+
+
+One morning we heard troops marching past, which was not unusual.
+But these were French troops in the British zone, en route from
+somewhere in France to somewhere else in France. There was not a
+person left in any house in that village. Everybody was out, with
+affection glowing in their eyes. For these were their own--their soldiers
+of France!
+
+
+
+When you see a certain big limousine flying a small British flag pass
+you know that it belongs to the Commander-in-Chief; and though it
+may be occupied only by one of his aides, often you will have a
+glimpse of a man with a square chin and a drooping white
+moustache, who is the sole one among the hundreds of thousands at
+the British front who wears the wreath-circled crossed batons of a
+field-marshal.
+
+It is erroneous to think that Sir John French or any other commander,
+though that is the case in time of action, spends all his time in the
+private house occupied as headquarters, designated by two wisps of
+flags, studying a map and sending and receiving messages, when
+the trench-line remains stationary. He goes here and there on
+inspections. It is the only way that a modern leader may let his
+officers and men know that he is a being of flesh and blood and not a
+name signed to reports and orders. A machine-gun company I knew
+had a surprise when resting in a field waiting for orders. They
+suddenly recognized in a figure coming through an opening in a
+hedge the supreme head of the British army in France. No need of a
+call to attention. The effect was like an electric shock, which sent
+every man to his place and made his backbone a steel rod. Those
+crossed batons represented a dizzy altitude to that battery which had
+just come out from England. Sir John walked up and down, looking
+over men and guns after their nine months' drill at home, and said,
+"Very good!" and was away to other inspections where he might not
+necessarily say, "Very good!"
+
+Frequently his inspections are formal. A battalion or a brigade is
+drawn up in a field, or they march past. Then he usually makes a
+short speech. On one occasion the officers had arranged a platform
+for the speech-making. Sir John gave it a glance and that was
+enough. It was the last of such platforms erected for him.
+
+"Inspections! They are second nature to us!" said a new army man.
+"We were inspected and inspected at home and we are inspected
+and inspected out here. If there is anything wrong with us it is the
+general's own fault if it isn't found out. When a general is not
+inspecting, some man from the medical corps is disinfecting."
+
+Battalions of the new army are frequently billeted for two or three
+days in our village. The barn up the road I know is capable of housing
+twenty men and one officer, for this is chalked on .the door. Before
+they turn in for the night the men frequently sing, and the sound of
+their voices is pleasant.
+
+A typical inspection was one that I saw in the main street. The
+battalion was drawn up in full marching equipment on the road. Of
+those officers with packs on their backs one was only nineteen. This
+is the limit of youth to acquire a chocolate drop on the sleeve. The
+sergeant-major was an old regular, the knowing back-bone of the
+battalion, who had taken the men of clay and taught them their letters
+and then how to spell and to add and subtract and divide. One of
+those impressive red caps arrived in a car, and the general who wore
+it went slowly up and down the line, front and rear, examining rifles
+and equipment, while the young officers and the old sergeant were
+hoping that Jones or Smith hadn't got some dust in his rifle-barrel at
+the last moment.
+
+Brokers and carpenters, bankers and mechanics, clerks and
+labourers, the new army is like the army of France, composed of all
+classes. One evening I had a chat with two young fellows in a
+battalion quartered in the village, who were seated beside the road.
+Both came from Buckinghamshire. One was a schoolmaster and the
+other an architect. They were "bunkies," pals, chums.
+
+"When did you enlist?" I asked.
+
+"In early September, after the Marne retreat. We thought that it was
+our duty, then; but we've been a long time arriving."
+
+"How do you like it?"
+
+"We are not yet masters of the language, we find," said the
+schoolmaster, "though I had a pretty good book knowledge of it."
+
+"I'm learning the gestures fast, though," said the architect.
+
+"The French are glad to see us," said the schoolmaster. "They call us
+the Keetcheenaires. I fancy they thought we were a long time coming.
+But now we are here, I think they will find that we can keep up our
+end."
+
+They had the fresh complexions which come from healthy, outdoor
+work. There was something engaging in their boyishness and their
+views. For they had a wider range of interests than that professional
+soldier, Mr. Atkins, these citizens who had taken up arms. They knew
+what trench-fighting meant by work in practice trenches at home.
+
+"Of course it will not be quite the same; theory and practice never
+are," said the schoolmaster.
+
+"We ought to be well grounded in the principles," said the architect
+thoughtfully, "and they say that in a week or two of actual experience
+you will have mastered the details that could not be taught in
+England. Then, too, having shells burst around you will be strange at
+first. But I think our battalion will give a good account of itself, sir.
+All the Bucks men have!" There crept in the pride of regiment, of
+locality, which is so characteristically Anglo-Saxon.
+
+They change life at the front, these new army men. If a carpenter, a
+lawyer, a sign-painter, an accountant, is wanted, you have only to
+speak to a new army battalion commander and one is forthcoming--a
+millionaire, too, for that matter, who gets his shilling a day for serving
+his country. Their intelligence permitted the architect and the
+schoolmaster to have no illusions about the character of the war they
+had to face. The pity was that such a fine force as the new army,
+which had not become trench stale, could not have a free space in
+which to make a great turning movement, instead of having to go
+against that solid battle front from Switzerland to the North Sea.
+
+We have heard enough--quite enough for most of us?--about the
+German Crown Prince. But there is also a prince with the British army
+in France. No lieutenant looks younger for his years than this one in
+the Grenadier Guards, and he seems of the same type as the others
+when you see him marching with his regiment or off for a walk
+smoking a brier-wood pipe. There are some officers who would rather
+not accompany him on his walks, for he can go fast and far. He
+makes regular reports of his observations, and he has opportunities
+for learning which other subalterns lack, for he may have both the
+staff and the army as personal instructors. Otherwise, his life is that of
+any other subaltern; for there is an instrument called the British
+Constitution which regulates many things. A little shy, very desirous to
+learn, is Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, heir to the throne of Great
+Britain and Ireland and the Empire of India. He might be called the
+willing prince.
+
+This was one of the shells that hit--one of the hundred that hit. The
+time was summer; the place, the La Bassee region. Probably the
+fighting was all the harder here because it is so largely blind. When
+you cannot see what an enemy is doing you keep on pumping shells
+into the area which he occupies; you take no risks with him.
+
+The visitor may see about as much of what is going on in the La
+Bassee region as an ant can see of the surrounding landscape when
+promenading in the grass. The only variation in the flatness of the
+land is the overworked ditches which try to drain it. Look upward, and
+rows of poplar trees along the level, and a hedge, a grove, a cottage,
+or trees and shrubs around it, limit your vision. Thus, if a breeze starts
+timidly in a field it is stopped before it goes far. That "hot corner" is
+all the hotter for a burning July sun. The army water-carts which run
+back to wells of cool water are busy filling empty canteens, while
+shrapnel trims the hedges.
+
+A stretcher was being borne into the doorway of an estaminet which
+had escaped destruction by shells, and above the door was chalked
+some lettering which indicated that it was a first clearing station for the
+wounded. Lying on other stretchers on the floor were some wounded
+men. Of the two nearest, one had a bandage around his head and
+one a bandage around his arm. They had been stunned, which was
+only natural when you have been as close as they had to a shell-
+burst--a shell that made a hit. The concussion was bound to have this
+effect.
+
+A third man was the best illustration of shell-destructiveness. Bullets
+make only holes. Shells make gouges, fractures, pulp. He, too, had a
+bandaged head and had been hit in several places; but the worst
+wound was in the leg, where an artery had been cut. He was weak,
+with a sort of where-am-I look in his eyes. If the fragment which had
+hit his leg had hit his head, or his neck, or his abdomen, he would
+have been killed instantly. He was also an illustration of how hard it is
+to kill a man even with several shell-fragments, unless some of them
+strike in the right place. For he was going to live; the surgeon had
+whispered the fact in his ear, that one important fact. He had beaten
+the German shell, after all.
+
+Returning by the same road by which we came a motor-car ran swiftly
+by, the only kind of car allowed on that road. We had a glimpse of the
+big, painted red cross on an ambulance side, and at the rear, where
+the curtains were rolled up for ventilation, of four pairs of soldier boot-
+soles at the end of four stretchers, which had been slid into place at
+the estaminet by the sturdy, kindly, experienced medical corps men.
+
+Before we reached the village where our car waited, the ambulance
+passed us on the way back to the estaminet. Very soon after the
+shell-burst, a telephone bell had rung down the line from the extreme
+front calling for an ambulance and stating the number of men hit, so
+that everybody would know what to prepare for. At the village, which
+was outside the immediate danger zone, was another clearing
+station. Here the stretchers were taken into a house--taken without a
+jolt by men who were specialists in handling stretchers--for any re-
+dressing if necessary, before another ambulance started journey,
+with motor-trucks and staff motor-cars giving right of way, to a
+spotless, white hospital ship which would take them home to England
+the next night.
+
+It had been an incident of life at the front, and of the organization of
+war, causing less flurry than an ambulance call to an accident in a
+great city.
+
+
+
+XXVI
+Finding The Grand Fleet
+
+
+
+Good fortune slipped a message across the Channel to the British
+front, which became the magic carpet of transition from the life of the
+burrowing army in its trenches to the life of battleships; from motors
+trailing dust over French roads, to destroyers trailing foam in choppy
+seas off English coasts.
+
+But there was more than one place to go in that wonderful week;
+more than ships to see if one would know something of the intricate,
+busy world of the Admiralty's work, which makes coastguards a part
+of its personnel. The transition is less sudden if we begin with a ride in
+an open car along the coast of Scotland. Dusk had fallen on the
+purple cloudlands of heather dotted with the white spots of grazing
+sheep in the Scottish Highlands under changing skies, with
+headlands stretching out into the misty reaches of the North Sea,
+forbidding in the chill air after the warmth of France and suggestive of
+the uninviting theatre where, in approaching winter, patrols and
+trawlers and mine-sweepers carried on their work to within range of
+the guns of Heligoland. A people who lived in such a chill land, in
+sight of such a chill sea, and who spoke of their "Bonnie Scotland
+forever," were worthy to be masters of that sea. The Americans who
+think of Britain as a small island forget the distance from Land's End
+to John o' Groat's, which represents coast line to be guarded; and we
+may find a lesson, too, we who must make our real defence by sea,
+in tireless vigils which may be our own if the old Armageddon beast
+ever comes threatening the far-longer coast line that we have to
+defend. For you may never know what war is till war comes. Not even
+the Germans knew, though they had practised with a lifelike dummy
+behind the curtains for forty years.
+
+At intervals, just as in the military zone in France, sentries stopped us
+and took the number of our car; but this time sentries who were
+guarding a navy's rather than an army's secrets. With darkness we
+passed the light of an occasional inn, while cottage lights made a
+scattered sprinkling among the dim masses of the hills. A man might
+have been puzzled as to where all the kilted Highland soldiers whom
+he had seen at the front came from, if he had not known that the
+canny Highlanders enlist Lowlanders in kilty regiments.
+
+The Frenchmen of our party--M. Stephen Pichon, former Foreign
+Minister, M. Rene Bazin, of the Academie Francaise, M. Joseph
+Reinach, of the Figaro, M. Pierre Mille, of Le Temps, and M. Henri
+Ponsot--who had never been in Scotland before, were on the look out
+for a civilian Scots in kilts and were grievously disappointed not to find
+a single one.
+
+This night ride convinced me that however many Germans might be
+moving about in England under the guise of cockney or of Lancashire
+dialects in quest of information, none has any chance in Scotland. He
+could never get the burr, I am sure, unless born in Scotland; and if he
+were, once he had it the triumph ought to make him a Scotsman at
+heart.
+
+The officer of the Royal Navy who was in the car with me confessed
+to less faith in his symbol of authority than in the generations' bred
+burr of our chauffeur to carry conviction of our genuineness; so
+arguments were left to him and successfully, including two or three
+with Scotch cattle, which seemed to be co-operating with the sentries
+to block the road.
+
+After an hour's run inland, as the car rose over a ridge and
+descended on a sharp grade, in the distance under the moonlight we
+saw the floor of the sea again, melting into opaqueness, with curving
+fringes of foam along the irregular shore cut by the indentations of the
+firths. Now the sentries were more frequent and more particular. Our
+single light gave dim form to the figures of sailors, soldiers, and boy
+scouts on patrol.
+
+"They have done remarkably well, these boys!" said the officer. "Our
+fears that, boy like, they would see all kinds of things which didn't
+exist were quite needless. The work has taught them a sense of
+responsibility which will remain with them after the war, when their
+experience will be a precious memory. They realize that it isn't play,
+but a serious business, and act accordingly."
+
+With all the houses and the countryside dark, the rays of our lamp
+seemed an invading comet to the men who held up lanterns with red
+twinkles of warning.
+
+"The patrol boats have complained about your lights, sir!" said one
+obdurate sentry.
+
+We looked out into the black wall in the direction of the sea and could
+see no sign of a patrol boat. How had it been able to inform this lone
+sentry of that flying ray which disclosed the line of a coastal road to
+anyone at sea? He would not accept the best argumentative burr that
+our chauffeur could produce as sufficient explanation or guarantee.
+Most Scottish of Scots in physiognomy and shrewd matter-of-
+factness, as revealed in the glare of the lantern, he might have been
+on watch in the Highland fastnesses in Prince Charlie's time.
+
+"Captain R------, of the Royal Navy!" explained the officer, introducing
+himself.
+
+"I'll take your name and address!" said the sentry.
+
+"The Admiralty. I take the responsibility."
+
+"As I'll report, sir!" said the sentry, not so convinced but he burred
+something further into the chauffeur's ear.
+
+This seems to have little to do with the navy, but it has much, indeed,
+as a part of unfathomable, complicated business of guards within
+guards, intelligence battling with intelligence, deceiving raiders by
+land or sea, of those responsible for the safety of England and the
+mastery of the seas.
+
+It is from the navy yard that the ships go forth to battle and to the
+navy yard they must return for supplies and for the grooming beat of
+hammers in the dry dock. Those who work at a navy yard keep the
+navy's house; welcome home all the family, from Dreadnoughts to
+trawlers, give them cheer and shelter and bind up their wounds.
+
+The quarter-deck of action for Admiral Lowry, commanding the great
+base on the Forth, which was begun before the war and hastened to
+completion since, was a substantial brick building. Adjoining his office,
+where he worked with engineers' blue prints as well as with sea
+charts, he had fitted up a small bedroom where he slept, to be at
+hand if an emergency arose.
+
+Partly we walked, as he showed us over his domain of steam-
+shovels, machine shops, cement factories, of building and repairs, of
+coaling and docking, and partly we rode on a car that ran over
+temporary rails laid for trucks loaded with rocks and dirt. Borrowing
+from Peter to pay Paul, a river bottom had been filled in back of the
+quays with material that had been excavated to form a vast basin with
+cement walls, where squadrons of Dreadnoughts might rest and
+await their turn to be warped into the great dry docks which open off it
+in chasmlike galleries.
+
+"The largest contract in all England," said the contractor. "And here is
+the man who checks up my work," he added, nodding to the lean,
+Scottish naval engineer who was with us. It was clear from his looks
+that only material of the best quality and work that was true would be
+acceptable to this canny mentor of efficiency, "And the workers?
+Have you had any strikes here?"
+
+"No. We have employed double the usual number of men from the
+start of the war," he said. "I'm afraid that the Welsh coal troubles have
+been accepted as characteristic. Our men have been reasonable and
+patriotic. They have shown the right spirit. If they hadn't, how could
+we have accomplished that?"
+
+We were looking down into the depths of a dry dock blasted out of the
+rock, which had been begun and completed within the year. And we
+had heard nothing of all this through those twelve months! No writer,
+no photographer, chronicled this silent labour! Double lines of guards
+surrounded the place day and night. Only tried patriots might enter
+this world of a busy army in smudged workmen's clothes, bending to
+their tasks with that ordered discipline of industrialism which wears no
+uniforms, marches without beat of drums, and toils that the ships
+shall want nothing to ensure victory.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+On A Destroyer
+
+
+
+Now we were on our way to the great thing--to our look behind the
+curtain at the hidden hosts of sea-power. Of some eight hundred tons
+burden our steed, doing eighteen knots, which was a dog-trot for one
+of her speed.
+
+"A destroyer is like a motor-car," said the commander. "If you rush
+her all the time she wears out. We give her the limit only when
+necessary."
+
+On the bridge the zest of travel on a dolphin of steel held the bridle on
+eagerness to reach the journey's end. We all like to see things well
+done, and here one had his first taste of how well things are done in
+the British navy, which did not have to make ready for war after the
+war began. With an open eye one went, and the experience of other
+navies as a balance for his observation; but one lost one's heart to
+the British navy and might as well confess it now. A six months' cruise
+with our own battleship fleet was a proper introduction to the
+experience.
+
+After the arduous monotony of the trenches and after the traffic of
+London, it was freedom and sport and ecstasy to be there, with the
+rush of salt air on the face! Our commander was under thirty years of
+age; and that destroyer responded to his will like a stringed
+instrument. He seemed a part of her, her nerves welded to his.
+
+"Specialized in torpedo work," he said, in answer to a question. "That
+is the way of the British navy: to learn one thing well before you go on
+with another. If in the course of it you learn how to command, larger
+responsibilities await you. If not--there's retired pay."
+
+Behind a shield which sheltered them from the spray on the forward
+deck, significantly free of everything but that four-inch gun, its crew
+was stationed. The commander had only to lean over and speak
+through a tube and give a range, and the music began. For the tube
+was bifurcated at the end to an ear-mask over a youngster's head; a
+youngster who had real sailor's smiling blue eyes, like the
+commander's own. For hours he would sit waiting in the hope that
+game would be sighted. No fisherman could be more patient or more
+cheerful.
+
+"Before he came into the navy he was a chauffeur. He likes this," said
+the commander.
+
+"In case of a submarine you do not want to lose any time; is that it?"
+
+"Yes," he replied. "You never can tell when we might have a chance
+to put a shot into Fritz's periscope or ram him--Fritz is our name for
+submarines."
+
+Were all the commanders of destroyers up to his mark? How many
+more had the British navy caught young and trained to such
+quickness of decision and in the art of imparting it to his men?
+
+Three hundred revolutions! The destroyer changed speed. Five
+hundred! She changed speed again. Out of the mist in the distance
+flashed a white ribbon knot that seemed to be tied to a destroyer's
+bow and behind it another destroyer, and still others, lean, catlike, but
+running as if legless, with greased bodies sliding over the sea. We
+snapped out a message to them and they answered like passing
+birds on the wing, before they swept out of sight behind a headland
+with uncanny ease of speed. Literal swarms of destroyers England
+had running to and fro in the North Sea, keen for the chase and too
+quick at dodging and too fast to be in any danger of the under-water
+dagger thrust of the assassins whom they sought. There cannot be
+too many. They are the eyes of the navy; they gather information and
+carry a sting in their torpedo tubes.
+
+
+
+It was chilly there on the bridge, with the prospect too entrancing not
+to remain even if one froze. But here stepped in naval preparedness
+with thick, short coats of llama wool.
+
+"Served out to all the men last winter, when we were in the thick of it
+patrolling," the commander explained. "You'll not get cold in that!"
+
+"And yourself?" was suggested to the commander.
+
+"Oh, it is not cold enough for that in September! We're hardened to it.
+You come from the land and feel the change of air; we are at sea all
+the time," he replied, He was without a great-coat; and the ease with
+which he held his footing made landlubbers feel their awkwardness.
+
+A jumpy, uncertain tidal sea was running. Yet our destroyer slipped
+over the waves, cut through them, played with them, and let them
+seem to play with her, all the while laughing at them in the confident
+power of her softly purring vitals.
+
+"Look out!" which at the front in France was a signal to jump for a
+"funk pit." We ducked, as a cloud of spray passed above the heavy
+canvas and clattered like hail against the smokestack. "There won't
+be any more!" said the commander. He was right. He knew that
+passage. One wondered if he did not know every gallon of water in
+the North Sea, which he had experienced in all its moods.
+
+Sheltered by the smokestack down on the main deck, one of our
+party, who loved not the sea for its own sake, but endured it as a
+passageway to the sight of the Grand Fleet, had found warmth, if not
+comfort. Not for him that invitation to come below given by the chief
+engineer, who rose out of a round hole with a pleasant "How d'y' do!"
+air to get a sniff of the fresh breeze, wizard of the mysterious power of
+the turbines which sent the destroyer marching so noiselessly. He
+was the one who transferred the commander's orders into that
+symphony in mechanism. Turn a lever and you had a dozen more
+knots; not with a leap or a jerk, but like a cat's sleek stretching of
+muscles. Not by the slightest tremor did you realize the acceleration;
+only by watching some stationary object as you flew past.
+
+Now a sweep of smooth water at the entrance to a harbour, and a
+turn--and there it was: the sea-power of England!
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+Ships That Have Fought
+
+
+
+But was that really it--that spread of greyish blue-green dots set on a
+huge greyish blue-green platter? One could not discern where ships
+began and water and sky which held them suspended left off.
+Invisible fleet it had been called. At first glance it seemed to be
+composed of phantoms, baffling, absorbing the tone of its
+background. Admiralty secrecy must be the result of a naval dislike of
+publicity.
+
+Still as if they were rooted, these leviathans! How could such a shy,
+peaceful-looking array send out broadsides of twelve and thirteen-five
+and fifteen-inch shells? What a paradise for a German submarine!
+Each ship seemed an inviting target. Only there were many gates
+and doors to the paradise, closed to all things that travel on and
+under the water without a proper identification. Submarines that had
+tried to pick one of the locks were like the fish who found going good
+into the trap. A submarine had about the same chance of reaching
+that anchorage as a German in the uniform of the Death's Head
+Hussars, with a bomb under his arm, of reaching the vaults of the
+Bank of England.
+
+And was this all of the greatest naval force ever gathered under a
+single command, these two or three lines of ships? But as the
+destroyer drew nearer the question changed. How many more? Was
+there no end to greyish blue-green monsters, in order as precise as
+the trees of a California orchard, that appeared out of the greyish
+blue-green background? First to claim attention was the Queen
+Elizabeth, with her eight fifteen-inch guns on a platform which could
+travel at nearly the speed of the average railroad train.
+
+The contrast of sea and land warfare appealed the more vividly to
+one fresh from the front in France. What infinite labour for an army to
+get one big gun into position! How heralded the snail-like travels of
+the big German howitzer! Here was ship after ship, whose guns
+seemed innumerable. One found it hard to realize the resisting power
+of their armour, painted to look as liquid as the sea, and the stability
+of their construction, which was able to bear the strain of firing the
+great shells that travelled ten miles to their target.
+
+Sea-power, indeed! And world-power, too, there in the hollow of a
+nation's hand, to throw in whatever direction she pleased. If an
+American had a lump in his throat at the thought of what it meant,
+what might it not mean to an Englishman? Probably the Englishman
+would say, "I think that the fleet is all right, don't you?"
+
+Land-power, too! On the continent vast armies wrestled for some
+square miles of earth. France has, say, three million soldiers;
+Germany, five; Austria, four--and England had, perhaps, a hundred
+thousand men, perhaps more, on board this fleet which defended the
+English land and lands far overseas without firing a shot. A battalion
+of infantry is more than sufficient in numbers to man a Dreadnought.
+How precious, then, the skill of that crew! Man-power is as
+concentrated as gun-power with a navy. Ride three hundred miles in
+a motor-car along an army front, with glimpses of units of soldiers,
+and you have seen little of a modern army. Here, moving down the
+lanes that separated these grey fighters, one could compass the
+whole!
+
+Four gold letters, spelling the word Lion, awakened the imagination to
+the actual fact of the Bluecher turning her bottom skyward before she
+sank off the Dogger Bank under the fire of the guns of the Lion and
+the Tiger astern of her, and the Princess Royal and the New Zealand,
+of the latest fashion in battle-cruiser squadrons which are known as
+the "cat" squadron. This work brought them into their own; proved
+how the British, who built the first Dreadnought, have kept a little
+ahead of their rivals in construction. With almost the gun-power of
+Dreadnoughts, better than three to two against the best battleships,
+with the speed of cruisers and capable of overpowering cruisers, or of
+pursuing any battleship, or getting out of range, they can run or strike,
+as they please.
+
+Ascend that gangway, so amazingly clean, as were the decks above
+and below and everything about the Lion or the Tiger, and you were
+on board one of the few major ships which had been under heavy
+fire. Her officers and men knew what modern naval war was like; her
+guns knew the difference between the wall of cloth of a towed target
+and an enemy's wall of armour.
+
+In the battle of Tsushima Straits, Russian and Japanese ships had
+fought at three and four thousand yards and closed into much shorter
+range. Since then, we had had the new method of marksmanship.
+Tsushima ceased to be a criterion. The Dogger Bank multiplied the
+range by five. A hundred years since England, all the while the most
+powerfully armed nation at sea, had been in a naval war of the first
+magnitude; and to the Lion and the Tiger had come the test. The
+Germans said that they had sunk the Tiger; but the Tiger afloat
+purred a contented denial.
+
+You could not fail to identify among the group of officers on the
+quarter-deck Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty, for his victory had
+impressed his features on the public's eye. Had his portrait not
+appeared in the press, one would have been inclined to say that a
+first lieutenant had put on a vice-admiral's coat by mistake. He was
+about the age of the first lieutenant of one of our battleships. Even as
+it was, one was inclined to exclaim: "There is some mistake! You are
+too young!" The Who is Who book says that he is all of forty-four
+years old and it must be right, though it disagrees with his
+appearance by five years.
+
+A vice-admiral at forty-four! A man who is a rear-admiral with us at
+fifty-five is very precocious. And all the men around him were young.
+The British navy did not wait for war to teach again the lesson of
+"youth for action!" They saved time by putting youth in charge at
+once.
+
+Their simple uniforms, the directness, alertness, and definiteness of
+these officers who had been with a fleet ready for a year to go into
+battle on a minute's notice, was in keeping with their surroundings of
+decks cleared for action and the absence of anything which did not
+suggest that hitting a target was the business of their life.
+
+"I had heard that you took your admirals from the schoolroom," said
+one of the Frenchmen, "but I begin to believe that it is the nursery."
+
+Night and day they must be on watch. No easy chairs; their shop is
+their home. They must have the vitality that endures a strain. One
+error in battle by any one of them might wreck the British Empire.
+
+It is difficult to write about any man-of-war and not be technical; for
+everything about her seems technical and mechanical except the fact
+that she floats. Her officers and crew are engaged in work which is
+legerdemain to the civilian.
+
+"Was it like what you thought it would be after all your training for a
+naval action?" one asked.
+
+"Yes, quite; pretty much as we reasoned it out," was the reply.
+"Indeed, this was the most remarkable thing. It was battle practice--
+with the other fellow shooting at you!"
+
+The fire-control officers, who were aloft, all agreed about one
+unexpected sensation, which had not occurred to any expert
+scientifically predicting what action would be like. They are the only
+ones who may really "see" the battle in the full sense.
+
+"When the shells burst against the armour," said one of these
+officers, "the fragments were visible as they flew about. We had a
+desire, in the midst of preoccupation with our work, to reach out and
+catch them. Singular mental phenomenon, wasn't it?"
+
+At eight or nine thousand yards one knew that the modern battleship
+could tear a target to pieces. But eighteen thousand--was accuracy
+possible at that distance?
+
+"Did one in five German shells hit at that range?" I asked.
+
+"No!"
+
+Or in ten? No! In twenty? Still no, though less decisively. You got a
+conviction, then, that the day of holding your fire until you were close
+in enough for a large percentage of hits was past. Accuracy was still
+vital and decisive, but generic accuracy. At eighteen thousand yards
+all the factors which send a thousand or fifteen hundred or two
+thousand pounds of steel that long distance cannot be so gauged
+that each one will strike in exactly the same line when ten issue from
+the gun-muzzles in a broadside. But if one out of twenty is on at
+eighteen thousand yards, it may mean a turret out of action. Again,
+four or five might hit, or none. So, no risk of waiting may be taken, in
+face of the danger of a chance shot at long range. It was a chance
+shot which struck the Lion's feed tank and disabled her and kept the
+cat squadron from doing to the other German cruisers what they had
+done to the Bluecher.
+
+"And the noise of it to you aloft, spotting the shots?" I suggested. "It
+must have been a lonely place in such a tornado."
+
+"Yes. Besides the crashing blasts from our own guns we had the
+screams of the shells that went over and the cataracts of water from
+those short sprinkling the ship with spray. But this was what one
+expected. Everything was what one expected, except that desire to
+catch the fragments. Naturally, one was too busy to think much of
+anything except the enemy's ships--to learn where your shells were
+striking."
+
+"You could tell?"
+
+"Yes--just as well and better than at target practice; for the target was
+larger and solid. It was enthralling, this watching the flight of our
+shells toward their target." Where were the scars from the wounds?
+One looked for them on both the Lion and the Tiger. An armour patch
+on the sloping top of a turret might have escaped attention if it had not
+been pointed out. A shell struck there and a fair blow, too. And what
+happened inside? Was the turret gear put out of order?
+
+To one who has lived in a wardroom a score of questions were on the
+tongue's end. The turret is the basket which holds the precious eggs.
+A turret out of action means two guns out of action; a broken knuckle
+for the pugilist.
+
+Constructors have racked their brains over the subject of turrets in
+the old contest between gun-power and protection. Too much gun-
+power, too little armour! Too much armour, too little gun-power!
+Finally, results depend on how good is your armour, how sound your
+machinery which rotates the turret. That shell did not go through
+bodily, only a fragment, which killed one man and wounded another.
+The turret would still rotate; the other gun kept in action and the one
+under the shell-burst was soon back in action. Very satisfactory to the
+naval constructors.
+
+Up and down the all but perpendicular steel ladders with their narrow
+steps, and through the winding passages below decks in those cities
+of steel, one followed his guide, receiving so much information and so
+many impressions that he was confused as to details between the
+two veterans, the Lion, which was hit fifteen times, and the Tiger,
+which was hit eight. Wherever you went every square inch of space
+and every bit of equipment seemed to serve some purpose.
+
+A beautiful hit, indeed, was that into a small hooded aperture where
+an observer looked out from a turret. He was killed and another man
+took his place. Fresh armour and no sign of where the shot had
+struck. Then below, into a compartment between the side of the ship
+and the armoured barbette which protects the delicate machinery for
+feeding shells and powder from the magazine deep below the water
+to the guns.
+
+"H----was killed here. Impact of the shell passing through the outer
+plates burst it inside; and, of course, the fragments struck harmlessly
+against the barbette."
+
+"Bang in the dug-out!" one exclaimed, from army habit.
+
+"Precisely! No harm done next door."
+
+Trench traverses and "funk-pit shelters" for localizing the effects of
+shell-bursts are the terrestrial expression of marine construction. No
+one shell happened to get many men either on the Lion or the Tiger.
+But the effect of the burst was felt in the passages, for the air-
+pressure is bound to be pronounced in enclosed spaces which allow
+of little room for expansion of the gases.
+
+Then up more ladders out of the electric light into the daylight,
+hugging a wall of armour whose thickness was revealed in the cut
+made for the small doorway which you were bidden to enter. Now you
+were in one of the brain-centres of the ship, where the action is
+directed. Through slits in that massive shelter of the hardest steel one
+had a narrow view. Above them on the white wall were silhouetted
+diagrams of the different types of German ships, which one found in
+all observing stations. They were the most popular form of mural
+decoration in the British navy.
+
+Underneath the slits was a literal panoply of the brass fittings of
+speaking-tubes and levers and push-buttons, which would have
+puzzled even the "Hello, Central" girl. To look at them revealed
+nothing more than the eye saw; nothing more than the face of a
+watch reveals of the character of its works. There was no telling how
+they ran in duplicate below the water line or under the protection of
+armour to the guns and the engines.
+
+"We got one in here, too. It was a good one!" said the host.
+
+"Junk, of course," was how he expressed the result. Here, too, a man
+stepped forward to take the place of the man who was killed, just as
+the first lieutenant takes the place of a captain of infantry who falls.
+With the whole telephone apparatus blown off the wall, as it were,
+how did he communicate?
+
+"There!" The host pointed toward an opening at his feet. If that failed
+there was still another way. In the final alternative, each turret could
+go on firing by itself. So the Germans must have done on the Bluecher
+and on the Gneisenau and the Scharnhorst in their last ghastly
+moments of bloody chaos.
+
+"If this is carried away and then that is, why, then, we have------" as
+one had often heard officers say on board our own ships. But that
+was hypothesis. Here was demonstration, which made a glimpse of
+the Lion and the Tiger so interesting. The Lion had had a narrow
+escape from going down after being hit in the feed tank; but once in
+dry dock, all her damaged parts had been renewed. Particularly it
+required imagination to realize that this tower had ever been struck;
+visually more convincing was a plate elsewhere which had been left
+unpainted, showing a spatter of dents from shell-fragments.
+
+"We thought that we ought to have something to prove that we had
+been in battle," said the host. "I think I've shown all the hits. There
+were not many."
+
+Having seen the results of German gun-fire, we were next to see the
+methods of British gun-fire; something of the guns and the men who
+did things to the Germans. I stooped under the overhang of the turret
+armour from the barbette and climbed up through an opening which
+allowed no spare room for the generously built, and out of the dim
+light appeared the glint of the massive steel breech block and gun,
+set in its heavy recoil mountings with roots of steel supports sunk into
+the very structure of the ship. It was like other guns of the latest
+improved type; but it had been in action, and you kept thinking of this
+fact which gave it a sort of majestic prestige. You wished that it might
+look a little different from the others, as the right of a veteran.
+
+As the plugman swung the breech open I had in mind a giant
+plugman on the U.S.S. Connecticut whom I used to watch at drills
+and target practice. Shall I ever forget the flash in his eye if there
+were a fraction of a second's delay in the firing after the breech had
+gone home! The way in which he made that enormous block obey his
+touch in oily obsequiousness suggested the apotheosis of the whole
+business of naval war. I don't know whether the plugman of H.M.S.
+Lion or the plugman of the U.S.S. Connecticut was the better. It would
+take a superman to improve on either.
+
+Like the block, it seemed as if the man knew only the movements of
+the drill; as if he had been bred and his muscles formed for that. You
+could conceive of him as playing diavolo with that breech. He
+belonged to the finest part of all the machinery, the human element,
+which made the parts of a steel machine play together in a beautiful
+harmony.
+
+The plugman's is the most showy part; others playing equally
+important parts are in the cavern below the turret; and most important
+of all is that of the man who keeps the gun on the target, whose true
+right eye may send twenty-five thousand tons of battleship to
+perdition. No one eye of any enlisted man can be as important as the
+gun-layer's. His the eye and the nerve trained as finely as the
+plugman's muscles. He does nothing else, thinks of nothing else. In
+common with painters and poets, gun-layers are born with a gift, and
+that gift is trained and trained and trained. It seems simple to keep
+right on, but it is not. Try twenty men in the most rudimentary test and
+you will find that it is not; then think of the nerve it takes to keep
+right on in battle, with your ship shaken by the enemy's hit.
+
+How long had the plugman been on his job? Six years. And the gun-
+layer? Seven. Twelve years is the term of enlistment in the British
+navy. Not too fast but thoroughly is the British way. The idea is to
+make a plugman or a gun-layer the same kind of expert as a master
+artisan in any other walk of life, by long service and selection.
+
+None of all the men serving these guns from the depths to the turret
+saw anything of the battle, except the gun-layer. It was easier for
+them than for him to be letter-perfect in the test, as he had to guard
+against the exhilaration of having an enemy's ship instead of a cloth
+target under his eye. Super-drilled he was to that eventuality; super-
+drilled all the others through the years, till each one knew his part as
+well as one knows how to turn the key of a drawer in his desk. Used
+to the shock of the discharges of their own guns at battle practice,
+many of the crew did not even know that their ship was hit, so
+preoccupied was each with his own duty and the need of going on
+with it until an order or a shell's havoc stopped him. Every mind was
+closed except to the thing which had been so established by drill in
+his nature that he did it instinctively.
+
+A few minutes later one was looking down from the upper bridge on
+the top of this turret and the black-lined planking of the deck eighty-
+five feet below, with the sweep of the firm lines of the sides
+converging toward the bow on the background of the water. Suddenly
+the ship seemed to have grown large, impressive; her structure had a
+rocklike solidity. Her beauty was in her unadorned strength. One was
+absorbing the majesty of a city from a cathedral tower after having
+been it its thoroughfares and seen the detail of its throbbing industry.
+
+Beyond the Lion's bow were more ships, and port and starboard and
+aft were still more ships. The compass range filled the eye with the
+stately precision of the many squadrons and divisions of leviathans.
+One could see all the fleet. This seemed to be the scenic climax; but
+it was not, as we were to learn later when we should see the fleet go
+to sea. Then we were to behold the mountains on the march.
+
+You glanced back at the deck and around the bridge with a sort of
+relief. The infinite was making you dizzy. You wanted to be in touch
+with the finite again. But it is the writer, not the practical, hardened
+seaman, who is affected in this way. To the seaman, here was a
+battle-cruiser with her sister battle-cruisers astern, and there around
+her were Dreadnoughts of different types and pre-Dreadnoughts and
+cruisers and all manner of other craft which could fight each in its
+way, each representing so much speed and so much metal which
+could be thrown a certain distance.
+
+"Homogeneity!" Another favourite word, I remember, from our own
+wardrooms. Here it was applied in the large. No experimental ships
+there, no freak variations of type, but each successive type as a unit
+of action. Homogeneous, yes--remorselessly homogeneous. The
+British do not simply build some ships; they build a navy. And of
+course the experts are not satisfied with it; if they were, the British
+navy would be in a bad way. But a layman was; he was overwhelmed.
+
+From this bridge of the Lion on the morning of the 24th of January,
+1915, Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty saw appear on the horizon a
+sight inexpressibly welcome to any commander who has scoured the
+seas in the hope that the enemy will come out in the open and give
+battle. Once that German battle-cruiser squadron had slipped across
+the North Sea and, under cover of the mist which has ever been the
+friend of the pirate, bombarded the women and children of
+Scarborough and the Hartle-pools with shells meant to be fired at
+hardened adult males sheltered behind armour; and then, thanks to
+the mist, they had slipped back to Heligoland with cheering news to
+the women and children of Germany. This time when they came out
+they encountered a British battle-cruiser squadron of superior speed
+and power, and they had to fight as they ran for home.
+
+Now, the place of an admiral is in his conning tower after he has
+made his deployments and the firing has begun. He, too, is a part of
+the machine; his position defined, no less than the plugman's and the
+gun-layer's. Sir David watched the ranging shots which fell short at
+first, until finally they were on, and the Germans were beginning to
+reply. When his staff warned him that he ought to go below, he put
+them off with a preoccupied shake of his head. He could not resist the
+temptation to remain where he was, instead of being shut up looking
+through the slits of a visor.
+
+But an admiral is as vulnerable to shell-fragments as a midshipman,
+and the staff did its duty, which had been thought out beforehand like
+everything else. The argument was on their side; the commander
+really had none on his. It was then that Vice-Admiral Beatty sent Sir
+David Beatty to the conning tower, much to the personal disgust of
+Sir David, who envied the observing officers aloft their free sweep of
+vision.
+
+Youth in Sir David's case meant suppleness of limb as well as youth's
+spirit and dash. When the Lion was disabled by the shot in her feed
+tank and had to fall out of line, Sir David must transfer his flag. He
+signalled for his destroyer, the Attack. When she came alongside he
+did not wait for a ladder, but jumped on board her from the deck of
+the Lion. An aged vice-admiral with chalky bones might have broken
+some of them, or at least received a shock to his presence of mind.
+
+Before he left the Lion Sir David had been the first to see the
+periscope of a German submarine in the distance, which sighted the
+wounded ship as inviting prey. Officers of the Lion dwelt more on the
+cruise home than on the battle. It was a case of being towed at five
+knots an hour by the Indomitable. If ever submarines had a fair
+chance to show what they could do it was then against that battleship
+at a snail's pace. But it is one thing to torpedo a merchant craft and
+another to get a major fighting ship, bristling with torpedo defence
+guns and surrounded by destroyers. The Lion reached port without
+further injury.
+
+
+
+
+XXIX
+On The "Inflexible"
+
+
+
+What Englishman, let alone an American, knows the names of even
+all the British Dreadnoughts? With a few exceptions, the units of the
+Grand Fleet seem anonymous. The Warspite was quite unknown to
+the fame which her sister ship the Queen Elizabeth had won. For
+"Lizzie" was back in the fold from the Dardanelles; and so was the
+Inflexible, heroine of the battle of the Falkland Islands. Of all the ships
+which Sir John Jellicoe had sent away on special missions, the
+Inflexible had had the grandest Odyssey. She, too, had been at the
+Dardanelles.
+
+The Queen Elizabeth was disappointing so far as wounds went. She
+had been so much in the public eye that one expected to find her
+badly battered, and she had suffered little, indeed, for the amount of
+sport she had had in tossing her fifteen-inch shells across the Gallipoli
+peninsula into the Turkish batteries and the amount of risk she had
+run from Turkish mines. Some of these monsters contained only
+eleven thousand shrapnel bullets. A strange business for a fifteen-
+inch naval gun to be firing shrapnel. A year ago no one could have
+imagined that one day the most powerful British ship, built with the
+single thought of overwhelming an enemy's Dreadnought, would ever
+be trying to force the Dardanelles.
+
+The trouble was that she could not fire an army corps ashore along
+with her shells to take possession of the land after she had put
+batteries out of action. She had some grand target practice; she
+escaped the mines; she kept out of reach of the German shells, and
+returned to report to Sir John with just enough scars to give zest to
+the recollection of her extraordinary adventure. All the fleet was
+relieved to see her back in her proper place. It is not the business of
+super-Dreadnoughts to be steaming around mine-fields, but to be
+surrounded by destroyers and light cruisers and submarines
+safeguarding her giant guns, which are depressed and elevated as
+easily as if they were drum-sticks. One had an abrasion, a tracery of
+dents.
+
+"That was from a Turkish shell," said an officer. "And you are standing
+where a shell hit."
+
+I looked down to see an irregular outline of fresh planking.
+
+"An accident when we did not happen to be out of their reach. We
+had the range of them," he added.
+
+"The range of them" is a great phrase. Sir Frederick Doveton Sturdee
+used it in speaking of the battle of the Falkland Islands. "The range of
+them" seems a sure prescription for victory. Nothing in all the history
+of the war appeals to me as quite so smooth a bit of tactics as the
+Falkland affair. It was so smooth that it was velvety; and it is worth
+telling again, as I understand it. Sir Frederick is another young
+admiral. Otherwise, how could the British navy have entrusted him
+with so important a task? He is a different type from Beatty, who in an
+army one judges might have been in the cavalry. Along with the
+peculiar charm and alertness which we associate with sailors--they
+imbibe it from the salt air and from meeting all kinds of weather and
+all kinds of men, I think--he has the quality of the scholar, with a
+suspicion of merriness in his eye.
+
+He was Chief of the War Staff at the Admiralty in the early stages of
+the war, which means, I take it, that he assisted in planning the
+moves on the chessboard. It fell to him to act; to apply the strategy
+and tactics which he planned for others at sea while he sat at a desk.
+It was his wit against von Spee's, who was not deficient in this
+respect. If he had been he might not have steamed into the trap. The
+trouble was that von Spee had some wit, but not enough. It would
+have been better for him if he had been as guileless as a parson.
+
+Sir Frederick is so gentle-mannered that one would never suspect
+him of a "double bluff," which was what he played on von Spee. After
+von Spee's victory over Cradock, Sturdee slipped across to the South
+Atlantic, without anyone knowing that he had gone, with a squadron
+strong enough to do unto von Spee what von Spee had done unto
+Cradock.
+
+But before you wing your bird you must flush him. The thing was to
+find von Spee and force him to give battle; for the South Atlantic is
+broad and von Spee, it is supposed, was in an Emden mood and
+bent on reaching harbour in German South-West Africa, whence he
+could sally out to destroy British shipping on the Cape route. When
+he intercepted a British wireless message--Sturdee had left off the
+sender's name and location--telling the plodding old Canopus seeking
+home or assistance before von Spee overtook her, that she would be
+perfectly safe in the harbour at Port William, as guns had been
+erected for her protection, von Spee guessed that this was a bluff,
+and rightly. But it was only Bluff Number One. He steamed to the
+Falklands with a view to finishing off the old Canopus on the way
+across to Africa. There he fell foul of Bluff Number Two. Sturdee did
+not have to seek him; he came to Sturdee.
+
+There was no convenient Dogger Bank fog in that latitude to cover
+his flight. Sturdee had the speed of von Spee and he had to fight. It
+was the one bit of strategy of the war which is like that of the story
+books and worked out as strategy always does in proper story books.
+Practically the twelve-inch guns of the Inflexible and the Invincible
+had only to keep their distance and hang on to the Scharnhorst and
+the Gneisenau in order to do the trick. Light-weights or middle-
+weights have no business trafficking with heavy-weights in naval
+warfare.
+
+"Von Spee made a brave fight," said Sir Frederick, "but we kept him
+at a distance that suited us, without letting him get out of range."
+
+He had had the fortune to prove an established principle in action. It
+was all in the course of duty, which is the way that all the officers and
+all the men look at their work. Only a few ships have had a chance to
+fight, and these are emblazoned on the public memory. But they did
+no better and no worse, probably, than the others would have done. If
+the public singles out ships, the navy does not. Whatever is done and
+whoever does it, why, it is to the credit of the family, according to the
+spirit of service that promotes uniformity of efficiency. Leaders and
+ships which have won renown are resolved into the whole in that
+harbour where the fleet is the thing; and the good opinion they most
+desire is that of their fellows. If they have that they will earn the
+public's when the test comes.
+
+Belonging to the class of the first of battle-cruisers is the Inflexible,
+which received a few taps in the Falklands and a blow that was nearly
+the death of her in the Dardanelles. Tribute enough for its courage--
+the tribute of a chivalrous enemy--von Spee's squadron receives
+from the officers and men of the Inflexible, who saw them go down
+into the sea tinged with sunset red with their colours still flying. Then
+in the sunset red the British saved as many of those afloat as they
+could.
+
+Those dripping German officers who had seen one of their battered
+turrets carried away bodily into the sea by a British twelve-inch shell,
+who had endured a fury of concussions and destruction, with steel
+missiles cracking steel structures into fragments, came on board the
+Inflexible looking for signs of some blows delivered in return for the
+crushing blows that had beaten their ships into the sea and saw none
+until they were invited into the wardroom, which was in chaos--and
+then they smiled.
+
+At least, they had sent one shell home. The sight was sweet to them,
+so sweet that, in respect to the feeling of the vanquished, the victors
+held silence with a knightly consideration. But where had the shell
+entered? There was no sign of any hole. Then they learned that the
+fire of the guns of the starboard turret midships over the wardroom,
+which was on the port side, had deposited a great many things on the
+floor which did not belong there; and their expression changed. Even
+this comfort was taken from them.
+
+"We had the range of you!" the British explained. The chaplain of the
+Inflexible was bound to have an anecdote. I don't know why, except
+that a chaplain's is not a fighting part and he may look on. His place
+was down behind the armour with the doctor, waiting for wounded. He
+stood in his particular steel cave listening to the tremendous blasts of
+her guns which shook the Inflexible's frame, and still no wounded
+arrived. Then he ran up a ladder to the deck and had a look around
+and saw the little points of the German ships with the shells sweeping
+toward them and the smoke of explosions which burst on board them.
+It was not the British who needed his prayers that day, but the
+Germans. Personally, I think the Germans are more in need of
+prayers at all times because of the damnable way they act.
+
+Perhaps the spirit of the Inflexible's story was best given by a
+midshipman with the down still on his cheek. Considering how young
+the British take their officer-beginners to sea, the admirals are not
+young, at least, in point of sea service. He got more out of the action
+than his elders; his impressions of the long cruises and the actions
+had the vividness of boyhood. Down in one of the caves, doing his
+part as the shells were sent up to feed the thundering guns above,
+the whispered news of the progress of battle was passed on at
+intervals till, finally, the guns were silent. Then he hurried on deck in
+the elation of victory, succeeded by the desire to save those whom
+they had fought. It had all been so simple; so like drill. You had only to
+go on shooting--that was all.
+
+Yes, he had been lucky. From the Falklands to the Dardanelles,
+which was a more picturesque business than the battle. Any minute
+off the Straits you did not know but a submarine would have a try at
+you or you might bump into a mine. And the Inflexible did bump into
+one. She had two thousand tons of water on board. It was fast work
+to keep the remainder of the sea from coming in, too, and the same
+kind of dramatic experience as the Lion's in reaching port. Yes, he
+had been very lucky. It was all a lark to that boy.
+
+"It never occurs to midshipmen to be afraid of anything," said one of
+the officers. "The more danger, the better they like it."
+
+In the wardroom was a piece of the mine or the torpedo, whichever it
+was, that struck the Inflexible; a strange, twisted, annealed bit of
+metal. Every ship which had been in action had some souvenir which
+the enemy had sent on board in anger and which was preserved with
+a collector's enthusiasm.
+
+The Inflexible seemed as good as ever she was. Such is the way of
+naval warfare. Either it is to the bottom of the sea or to dry docks and
+repairs. There is nothing half-way. So it is well to take care that you
+have "the range of them."
+
+
+
+
+XXX
+On The Fleet Flagship
+
+
+
+Thus far we have skirted around the heart of things, which in a fleet is
+always the Commander-in-Chief's flagship. Our handy, agile
+destroyer ran alongside a battleship with as much nonchalance as
+she would go alongside a pier. I should not have been surprised to
+see her pirouette over the hills or take to flying.
+
+There was a time when those majestic and pampered ladies, the
+battleships--particularly if there were a sea running as in this harbour
+at the time--having in mind the pride of paint, begged all destroyers to
+keep off with the superciliousness of grandes dames holding their
+skirts aloof from contact with nimble, audacious street gamins, who
+dodged in and out of the traffic of muddy streets. But destroyers have
+learned better manners, perhaps, and battleships have been
+democratized. It is the day of Russian dancers and when aeroplanes
+loop the loop, and we have grown used to all kinds of marvels.
+
+But the sea has refused to be trained. It is the same old sea that it
+was in Columbus' time, without any loss of trickiness in bumping
+small craft against towering sides. The way that this destroyer slid up
+to the flagship without any fuss and the way her bluejackets held her
+off from the paint, as she rose on the crests and slipped back into the
+trough, did not tell the whole story. A part of it was how, at the right
+interval, they assisted the landlubber to step from gunwale to
+gangway, making him feel perfectly safe when he would have been
+perfectly helpless but for them.
+
+I had often watched our own bluejackets at the same thing. They did
+not grin--not when you were looking at them. Nor did the British.
+Bluejackets are noted for their official politeness. I should like to have
+heard their remarks--they have a gift for remarks--about those
+invaders of their uniformed world in Scottish caps and other kinds of
+caps and the different kinds of clothes which tailors make for civilians.
+Without any intention of eavesdropping, I did overhear one asking
+another whence came these strange birds.
+
+You knew the flagship by the admirals' barges astern, as you know
+the location of an army headquarters by its motor-cars. It seemed in
+the centre of the fleet at anchor, if that is a nautical expression.
+Where its place would be in action is one of those secrets as
+important to the enemy as the location of a general's shell-proof
+shelter in Flanders. Perhaps Sir John Jellicoe may be on some other
+ship in battle. If there is any one foolish question which you should not
+ask it is this.
+
+As you mounted the gangway of this mighty super-Dreadnought you
+were bound to think--at least, an American was--of another flagship in
+Portsmouth harbour, Nelson's Victory. Probably an Englishman would
+not indulge in such a commonplace. I would like to know how many
+Englishmen had ever seen the old Victory. But then, how many
+Americans have been to Mount Vernon and Gettysburg?
+
+It was a hundred years, one repeats, since the British had fought a
+first-class naval war. Nelson did his part so well that he did not leave
+any fighting to be done by his successors. Maintaining herself as
+mistress of the seas by the threat of superior strength--except in the
+late 'fifties, when the French innovation of iron ships gave France a
+temporary lead on paper--ship after ship, through all the grades of
+progress in naval construction, has gone to the scrap heap without
+firing a shot in anger. The Victory was one landmark, or seamark, if
+you please, and this flagship was another. Between the two were
+generations of officers and men, working through the change from
+stagecoach to motors and aeroplanes and seaplanes, who had kept
+up to a standard of efficiency in view of a test that never came. A year
+of war and still the test had not come, for the old reason that England
+had superior strength. Her outnumbering guns which had kept the
+peace of the seas still kept it. All second nature to the Englishman
+this, as the defence of the immense distances of the steppes to the
+Russian or the Rocky Mountain wall and the Mississippi's flow to the
+man in Kansas. But the American kept thinking about it; and he
+wanted the Kansans to think about it, too. When he was about to
+meet Sir John Jellicoe he envisaged the tall column in Trafalgar
+Square, surmounted by the one-armed figure turned toward the
+wireless skein on top of the Admiralty building.
+
+I first heard of Jellicoe fifteen years ago when he was Chief of Staff to
+Sir Edward Seymour, then Commander-in-Chief of the Asiatic
+Squadron. Indeed, you were always hearing about Jellicoe in those
+days on the China coast. He was the kind of man whom people talk
+about after they have met him, which means personality. It was in
+China seas, you may remember, that when a few British seamen
+were hard pressed in a fight that was not ours the phrase, "Blood is
+thicker than water," sprang from the lips of an American commander,
+who waited not on international etiquette but went to the assistance of
+the British.
+
+Nor will anyone who was present in the summer of '98 forget how Sir
+Edward Chichester stood loyally by Admiral George Dewey, when the
+German squadron was empire-fishing in the waters of Manila Bay,
+until our Atlantic fleet had won the battle of Santiago and Admiral
+Dewey had received reinforcements and, east and west, we were
+able to look after the Germans. The British bluejackets said that the
+rations of frozen mutton from Australia which we sent alongside were
+excellent; but the Germans were in no position to judge, doubtless
+through an oversight in the detail of hospitality by one of Admiral
+Dewey's staff. Let us be officially correct and say there was no mutton
+to spare after the British had been supplied.
+
+In the gallant effort of the Allied force of sailors to relieve the
+legations against some hundreds of thousands of Boxers, Captain
+Bowman McCalla and his Americans worked with Admiral Seymour
+and his Britons in the most trying and picturesque adventure of its
+kind in modern history. McCalla, too, was always talking of Jellicoe,
+who was wounded on the expedition; and Sir John's face lighted at
+mention of McCalla's name. He recalled how McCalla had painted
+on the superstructure of the little Newark that saying of Farragut's,
+"The best protection against an enemy's fire is a well-directed fire
+of your own"; which has been said in other ways and cannot be
+said too often.
+
+"We called McCalla Mr. Lead," said Sir John; "he had been wounded
+so many times and yet was able to hobble along and keep on
+fighting. We corresponded regularly until his death."
+
+Beatty, too, was on that expedition; and he, too, was another
+personality one kept hearing about. It seemed odd that two men who
+had played a part in work which was a soldier's far from home should
+have become so conspicuous in the Great War. If on that day when,
+with ammunition exhausted, all members of the expedition had given
+up hope of ever returning alive, they had not accidentally come upon
+the Shi-kou arsenal, one would not be commanding the Grand Fleet
+and the other its battle-cruiser squadron.
+
+Before the war, I am told, when Admiralty Lords and others who had
+the decision to make were discussing who should command in case
+of war, opinion ran something like this: "Jellicoe! He has the brains."
+"Jellicoe! He has the health to endure the strain, with years enough
+and not too many." "Jellicoe! He has the confidence of the service."
+The choice literally made itself. When anyone is undertaking the
+gravest responsibility which has been an Englishman's for a hundred
+years, this kind of a recommendation helps. He had the guns; he had
+supreme command; he must deliver victory--such was England's
+message to him.
+
+When I mentioned in a dispatch that all that differentiated him from
+the officers around him was the broader band of gold lace on his arm,
+an English naval critic wanted to know if I expected to find him in cloth
+of gold. No; nor in full dress with all his medals on, as I saw him
+appear on the screen at a theatre in London.
+
+Any general of high command must be surrounded by more pomp
+than an admiral in time of action. A headquarters cannot have the
+simplicity of the quarter-deck. The force which the general commands
+is not in sight; the admiral's is. You saw the commander and you saw
+what it was that he commanded. Within the sweep of vision from the
+quarter-deck was the terrific power which the man with the broad gold
+band on his arm directed. At a signal from him it would move or it
+would stand still. That command of Joshua's if given by Sir John one
+thought might have been obeyed.
+
+One hundred, two hundred, three hundred, four hundred twelve-inch
+guns and larger, which could carry two hundred tons of metal in a
+single broadside for a distance of eighteen thousand yards! But do
+not forget the little guns, bristling under the big guns like needles from
+a cushion, which would keep off the torpedo assassins; or the light
+cruisers, or the colliers, or the destroyers, or the 2,300 trawlers and
+mine-layers, and what not, all under his direction. He had
+submarines, too, double the number of the German. But with all the
+German men-of-war in harbour, they had no targets. Where were
+they? You did not ask questions which would not be answered. The
+whole British fleet was waiting for the Germans to show their heads,
+while cruisers were abroad scouting in the North Sea.
+
+At the outset of the war the German fleet might have had one chance
+in ten of getting a turn of fortune in its favour by an unexpected stroke
+of strategy. This was the danger against which Jellicoe had to guard.
+For in one sense, the Germans had the tactical offensive by sea as
+well as by land; theirs the outward thrust from the centre. They could
+choose when to come out of their harbour; when to strike. The British
+had to keep watch all the time and be ready whenever the enemy
+should come.
+
+Thus, the British Grand Fleet was at sea in the early part of the war,
+cruising here and there, begging for battle. Then it was that it learned
+how to avoid submarines and mine-fields. Submarines had played a
+greater part than expected, because Germany had chosen a guerrilla
+naval warfare: to harass, to wound, to wear down. Doubtless she
+hoped to reduce the number of British fighting units by attrition.
+
+Weak England might be in plants for making arms for an army, but
+not in ship-building. Here was her true genius. She was a maritime
+power; Germany a land power. Her part as an ally of France and
+Russia being to command the sea, all demands of the Admiralty for
+material must take precedence over demands of the War Office. At
+the end of the first year she had increased her fighting power by sea
+to a still higher ratio of preponderance over the Germans; in another
+year she would increase it further.
+
+Admiral von Tirpitz wanted nothing so much as to draw the British
+fleet under the guns of Heligoland or into a mine-field and submarine
+trap. But Sir John Jellicoe refused the bait. When he had completed
+his precautions and his organization to meet new conditions, his fleet
+need not go into the open. His Dreadnoughts could rest at anchor at
+a base, while his scouts kept in touch with all that was passing, and
+his auxiliaries and destroyers fought the submarines. Without a British
+Dreadnought having fired a shot at a German Dreadnought, nowhere
+on the face of the seas might a single vessel show the German flag
+except by thrusting it above the water for a few minutes.
+
+If von Tirpitz sent his fleet out he, too, might find himself in a trap of
+mines and submarines. He was losing submarines and England was
+building more. His naval force rather than Sir John's was suffering
+from attrition. The blockade was complete from Iceland to the North
+Sea. While the world knew of the work of the armies, the care that
+this task required, the hardships endured, the enormous expenditure
+of energy, were all hidden behind that veil of secrecy which obviously
+must be more closely drawn over naval than over army operations.
+
+From the flagship the campaign was directed. One would think that
+many offices and many clerks would be required. But the offices and
+the clerks were at the Admiralty. Here was the execution. In a room
+perhaps four feet by six was the wireless focus which received all
+reports and sent all orders, with trim bluejackets at the keys. "Go!"
+and "Come!" the messages were saying; they wasted no words.
+Officers of the staff did their work in narrow space, yet seemed to
+have plenty of room. Red tape is inflammable. There is no more place
+for it on board a flagship prepared for action than for unnecessary
+woodwork.
+
+At every turn compression and concentration of power were like the
+guns and the decks, cleared for action, significant in directness of
+purpose. The system was planetary in its impressive simplicity, the
+more striking as nothing that man has ever made is more
+complicated or includes more kinds of machinery than a battleship.
+One battleship was one unit, one chessman on the naval board.
+
+Not all famous leaders are likeable, as every world traveller knows.
+They all have the magnetism of force, which is quite another thing
+from the magnetism of charm. What the public demands is that they
+shall win victories, whether personally likeable or not. But if they are
+likeable and simple and human and a sailor besides--well, we know
+what that means.
+
+Perhaps Sir John Jellicoe is not a great man. It is not for a civilian
+even to presume to judge. We have the word of those who ought to
+know, however, that he is. I hope that he is, because I like to think
+that great commanders need not necessarily appear formidable.
+Nelson refused to be cast for the heavy part, and so did Farragut. It
+may be a sailor characteristic. I predict that after this war is over,
+whatever honours or titles they may bestow upon him, the English are
+going to like Sir John Jellicoe not alone for his service to the nation,
+but for himself.
+
+Admiral Jellicoe is one with Captain Jellicoe, whose cheeriness even
+when wounded kept up the spirits of the others on the relief
+expedition of Boxer days. "He could do it, too!" one thought, having in
+mind Sir David Beatty's leap to the deck of a destroyer. Spare, of
+medium height, ruddy, and fifty-seven--so much for the health
+qualification which the Admiralty Lords dwelt upon as important. After
+he had been at sea for a year he seemed a human machine, much of
+the type of the destroyer as a steel machine--a thirty-knot human
+machine, capable of three hundred or five hundred revolutions,
+engines running smoothly, with no waste energy, slipping over the
+waves and cutting through them; a quick man, quick of movement,
+quick of comprehension and observation, of speech and of thought,
+with a delightful self-possession--for there are many kinds--which is
+instantly responsive with decision.
+
+A telescope under his arm, too, as he received his guests. You liked
+that. He keeps watch over the fleet himself when he is on the quarter-
+deck. You had a feeling that nothing could happen in all his range of
+vision, stretching down the "avenues of Dreadnoughts" to the light-
+cruiser squadron, and escape his attention. It hardly seems possible
+that he was ever bored. Everything around interests him. Energy he
+has, electric energy in this electric age, this man chosen to command
+the greatest war product of modern energy.
+
+Fastened to the superstructure near the ladder to his quarters was a
+new broom which South Africa had sent him. He was highly pleased
+with the present; only the broom was Tromp's emblem, while Blake's
+had been the whip. Possibly the South African Dutchmen, now
+fighting on England's side, knew that he already had the whip and
+they wanted him to have the Dutch broom, too.
+
+He had been using both, and many other devices in his campaign
+against von Tirpitz's "unter See" boats, as was illustrated by one of
+the maps hung in his cabin. Quite different this from maps in a
+general's headquarters, with the front trenches and support and
+reserve trenches and the gun-positions marked in vari-coloured
+pencillings. Instantly a submarine was sighted anywhere, Sir John
+had word of it, and a dot went down on the spot where it had been
+seen. In places the sea looked like a pepper-box cover. Dots were
+plentiful outside the harbour where we were; but well outside, like flies
+around sugar which they could not reach.
+
+Seeing Sir John among his admirals and guests one had a glimpse of
+the life of a sort of mysterious, busy brotherhood. I was still searching
+for an admiral with white hair. If there were none among these
+seniors, then all must be on shore. Spirit, I think, that is the word; the
+spirit of youth, of corps, of service, of the sea, of a ready, buoyant
+definiteness--yes, spirit was the word to characterize these leaders.
+Sir John moved from one to another in his quick way, asking a
+question, listening, giving a direction, his face smiling and expressive
+with a sort of infectious confidence.
+
+"He is the man!" said an admiral. I mean, several admirals and
+captains said so. They seemed to like to say it. Whenever he
+approached one noted an eagerness, a tightening of nerves. Natural
+leadership expresses itself in many ways; Sir John gave it a sailor's
+attractiveness. But I learned that there was steel under his happy
+smile; and they liked him for that, too. Watch out when he is not
+smiling, and sometimes when he is smiling, they say.
+
+For failure is never excused in the fleet, as more than one
+commander knows. It is a luxury of consideration which the British
+nation cannot afford by sea in time of war. The scene which one
+witnessed in the cabin of the Dreadnought flagship could not have
+been unlike that of Nelson and his young captains on the Victory, in
+the animation of youth governed with one thought under the one rule
+that you must make good.
+
+Splendid as the sight of the power which Sir John directed from his
+quarter-deck while the ships lay still in their plotted moorings, it paled
+beside that when the anchor chains began to rumble and, column by
+column, they took on life slowly and, majestically gaining speed, one
+after another turned toward the harbour's entrance.
+
+
+
+
+XXXI
+Simply Hard Work
+
+
+
+Besides the simple word spirit, there is the simple word work. Take
+the two together, mixing with them the proper quantity of intelligence,
+and you have something finer than Dreadnoughts; for it builds
+Dreadnoughts, or tunnels mountains, or wins victories.
+
+In no organization would it be so easy as in the navy to become
+slack. If the public sees a naval review it knows that its ships can
+steam and keep their formations; if it goes on board it knows that the
+ships are clean--at least, the limited part of them which it sees; and it
+knows that there are turrets and guns.
+
+But how does it know that the armour of the turrets is good, or that
+the guns will fire accurately? Indeed, all that it sees is the shell. The
+rest must be taken on trust. A navy may look all right and be quite
+bad. The nation gives a certain amount of money to build ships which
+are taken in charge by officers and men who, shut off from public
+observation, may do about as they please. The result rests with their
+industry and responsibility. If they are true to the character of the
+nation by and large that is all the nation may expect; if they are better,
+then the nation has reason to be grateful. Englishmen take more
+interest in their navy than Americans in theirs. They give it the best
+that is in them and they expect the best from it in return. Every
+youngster who hopes to be an officer knows that the navy is no place
+for idling; every man who enlists knows that he is in for no junket on a
+pleasure yacht. The British navy, I judged, had a relatively large
+percentage of the brains and application of England.
+
+"It is not so different from what it was for ten years preceding the
+war," said one of the officers. "We did all the work we could stand
+then; and whether cruising or lying in harbour, life is almost normal for
+us to-day."
+
+The British fleet was always on a war footing. It must be. Lack
+of naval preparedness is more dangerous than lack of land
+preparedness. It is fatal. I know of officers who had had only a week's
+leave in a year in time of peace; their pay is less than our officers'.
+Patriotism kept them up to the mark.
+
+And another thing: once a sailor, always a sailor, is an old saying; but
+it has a new application in modern navies. They become fascinated
+with the very drudgery of ship existence. They like their world, which
+is their house and their shop. It has the attraction of a world of
+priestcraft, with them alone understanding the ritual. Their drill at the
+guns becomes the preparation for the great sport of target practice,
+which beats any big-game shooting when guns compete with guns,
+with battle practice greater sport than target practice. Bringing a ship
+into harbour well, holding her to her place in the formation, roaming
+over the seas in a destroyer--all means eternal effort at the mastery
+of material, with the results positively demonstrated.
+
+On one of the Dreadnoughts I saw a gun's crew drilling with a dummy
+six-inch; weight, one hundred pounds.
+
+"Isn't that boy pretty young to handle that big shell?" an admiral asked
+a junior officer.
+
+"He doesn't think so," the officer replied. "We haven't anyone who
+could handle it better. It would break his heart if we changed his
+position."
+
+Not one of fifty German prisoners whom I had seen filing by over in
+France was as sturdy as this youngster. In the ranks of an infantry
+company of any army he would have been above the average of
+physique; but among the rest of the gun's crew he did appear slight.
+Need more be said about the physical standard of the crews of the
+fighting ships of the Grand Fleet?
+
+You had an eye to more than guns and machinery and to more than
+the character of the officers. You wanted to get better acquainted with
+the personnel of the men behind the guns. They formed patches of
+blue on the decks, as one looked around the fleet, against the
+background of the dull, painted bulwarks of steel--the human element
+whose skill gave the ships life--deep-chested, vigorous men in their
+prime, who had the air of men grounded in their work by long
+experience. I noted when an order was given that it was obeyed
+quickly by one who knew what he had to do because he had done it
+thousands of times.
+
+There are all kinds of bluejackets, as there are all kinds of other men.
+Before the war some took more than was good for them when on
+shore; some took nothing stronger than tea; some enjoyed the
+sailor's privilege of growling; some had to be kept up to the mark
+sharply; an occasional one might get rebellious against the merciless
+repetition of drills.
+
+The war imparted eagerness to all, the officers said. Infractions of
+discipline ceased. Days pass without anyone of the crew of a
+Dreadnought having to be called up as a defaulter, I am told. And
+their health? At first thought, one would say that life in the steel caves
+of a Dreadnought would mean pasty complexions and flabby
+muscles. For a year the crews had been prisoners of that readiness
+which must not lose a minute in putting to sea if von Tirpitz should
+ever try the desperate gamble of battle.
+
+After a turn in the trenches the soldiers can at least stretch their legs
+in billets. A certain number of a ship's company now and then get a
+tramp on shore; not real leave, but a personally conducted outing not
+far from the boats which will hurry them back to their stations on
+signal. However, all that one needs to keep well is fresh air and
+exercise. The blowers carry fresh air to every part of the ship; the
+breezes which sweep the deck from the North Sea are fresh enough
+in summer and a little too fresh in winter. There is exercise in the
+regular drills, supplemented by setting-up exercises. The food is good
+and no man drinks or eats what he ought not to, as he may on shore.
+So there is the fact and the reason for the fact: the health of the men,
+as well as their conduct, had never been so good.
+
+"Perhaps we are not quite so clean as we were before the war," said
+an officer. "We wash decks only twice a week instead of every day.
+This means that quarters are not so moist, and the men have more
+freedom of movement. We want them to have as much freedom as
+possible."
+
+Waiting, waiting, in such confinement for thirteen months; waiting for
+battle! Think of the strain of it! The British temperament is well
+fitted to undergo such a test, and particularly well fitted are these
+sturdy seamen of mature years. An enemy may imagine them
+wearing down their efficiency on the leash. They want a fight; naturally,
+they want nothing quite so much. But they have the seaman's
+philosophy. Old von Tirpitz may come out and he may not. It is for
+him to do the worrying. They sit tight. The men's ardour is not imposed
+upon. Care is taken that they should not be worked stale; for the
+marksman who puts a dozen shots through the bull's-eye had better
+not keep on firing, lest he begin rimming it and get into bad habits.
+
+Where an army officer has a change when he leaves the trench for
+his billet, there is none for the naval officer, who, unlike the army
+officer, is Spartan-bred to confinement. The army pays its daily toll of
+casualties; it lies cramped in dug-outs, not knowing what minute
+extinction may come. The Grand Fleet has its usual comforts; it is
+safe from submarines in a quiet harbour. Many naval officers spoke
+of this contrast with deep feeling, as if fate were playing favourites,
+though I have never heard an army officer mention it.
+
+The army can give each day fresh proof of its courage in face of the
+enemy. Courage! It takes on a new meaning with the Grand Fleet.
+The individual element of gallantry merges into gallantry of the whole.
+You have the very communism of courage. The thought is to keep a
+cool head and do your part as a cog in the vast machine. Courage is
+as much taken for granted as the breath of life. Thus, Cradock's men
+fought till they went down. It was according to the programme laid out
+for each turret and each gun in a turret.
+
+Smith, of the army, leads a bomb-throwing party from traverse to
+traverse; Smith, of the navy, turns one lever at the right second. Army
+gunners are improving their practice day by day against the enemy;
+all the improving by navy gunners must be done before the battle. No
+sieges in trenches; no attacks and counter-attacks: a decision within
+a few hours--perhaps within an hour.
+
+This partially explains the love of the navy for its work; its cheerful
+repetition of the drills which seem such a wearisome business to the
+civilian. The men know the reason of their drudgery. It is an all-
+convincing bull's-eye reason. Ping-ping! One heard the familiar sound
+of sub-calibre practice, which seems as out of proportion in a fifteen-
+inch gun as a mouse-squeak from an elephant whom you expect to
+trumpet. As the result appears in sub-calibre practice, so it is
+practically bound to appear in target practice; as it appears in target
+practice, so it is bound to appear in battle practice. It was on the
+flagship that I saw a device which Sir John referred to as the next
+best thing to having the Germans come out. He took as much delight
+in it as the gun-layers, who were firing at German Dreadnoughts of
+the first line, as large as your thumb, which were in front of a sort of
+hooded arrangement with the guns of a British Dreadnought inside--
+the rest I censor myself before the regular censor sees it.
+
+When we heard a report like that of a small target rifle inside the
+arrangement a small red or a small white splash rose from the
+metallic platter of a sea. Thus the whole German navy has been
+pounded to pieces again and again. It is a great game. The gun-
+layers never tire of it and they think they know the reason as well as
+anybody why von Tirpitz keeps his Dreadnoughts at home.
+
+But elsewhere I saw some real firing; for ships must have their regular
+target practice, war or no war. If those cruisers steaming across the
+range had been sending six or eight-inch shrapnel, we should have
+preferred not to be so near that towed square of canvas. Flashes
+from turrets indistinguishable at a distance from the neutral-toned
+bodies of the vessels and the shells struck, making great splashes
+just beyond the target, which was where they ought to go.
+
+A familiar scene, but with a new meaning when the time is one of war.
+So far as my observation is worth anything, it was very good
+shooting, indeed. One broadside would have put a destroyer out of
+business as easily as a "Jack Johnson" does for a dug-out; and it
+would have made a cruiser of the same class as the one firing pretty
+groggy--this not from any experience of being on a light cruiser or any
+desire to be on one when it receives such a salute. But it seems to be
+waiting for the Germans any time that they want it.
+
+Oh, that towed square of canvas! It is the symbol of the object of all
+building of guns, armour, and ships, all the nursing in dry dock, all the
+admiral's plans, all the parliamentary appropriations, all the striving on
+board ship in man's competition with man, crew with crew, gun with
+gun, and ship with ship. One had in mind some vast factory plant
+where every unit was efficiently organized; but that comparison would
+not do. None will. The Grand Fleet is the Grand Fleet. Ability gets its
+reward, as in the competition of civil life. There is no linear promotion
+indulgent to mediocrity and inferiority which are satisfied to keep step
+and harassing to those whom nature and application meant to lead.
+Armchairs and retirement for those whose inclinations run that way;
+the captain's bridge for those who are fit to command. Officers'
+records are the criterion when superiors come to making promotions.
+But does not outside influence play a part? you ask. If professional
+conscience is not enough to prevent this, another thing appears to
+be: that the British nation lives or dies with its navy. Besides, the
+British public has said to all and sundry outsiders: "Hands off the
+navy!" All honour to the British public, much criticized and often most
+displeased with its servants and itself, for keeping its eye on that
+canvas square of cloth! The language on board was the same as on
+our ships; the technical phraseology practically the same; we had
+inherited British traditions. But a man from Kansas and a man from
+Dorset live far apart. If they have a good deal in common they rarely
+meet to learn that they have. Our seamen do meet British seamen
+and share a fraternity which is more than that of the sea. Close one's
+eyes to the difference in uniform, discount the difference in accent,
+and one imagined that he might be with our North Atlantic fleet.
+
+The same sort of shop talk and banter in the wardroom, which trims
+and polishes human edges; the same fellowship of a world apart.
+Securely ready the British fleet waits. Enough drill and not too much;
+occasional visits between ships; books and newspapers and a
+lighthearted relaxation of scattered conversation in the mess. One
+wardroom had a thirty-five-second record for getting past all the
+pitfalls in the popular "Silver Bullet" game, if I remember correctly.
+
+
+
+
+XXXII
+Hunting The Submarine
+
+
+
+Seaplanes cut practice circles over the fleet and then flew away on
+their errands, to be lost in the sky beyond the harbour entrance. With
+their floats, they were like ducks when they came to rest on the water,
+sturdy and a little clumsy looking compared to those hawks the army
+planes, soaring to higher altitudes.
+
+The hawk had a broad, level field for its roost; the duck, bobbing with
+the waves after it came down, had its wings folded as became a bird
+at rest, after its engines stopped, and, a dead thing, was lifted on
+board its floating home with a crane, as cargo is swung into the hold.
+
+On shipboard there must be shipshapeness; and that capacious,
+one-time popular Atlantic liner had undergone changes to prepare it
+for its mothering part, with platforms in place of the promenades
+where people had lounged during the voyage and bombs in place of
+deck-quoits and dining-saloons turned into workshops. Of course,
+one was shown the different sizes and types of bombs. Aviators
+exhibit them with the pride of a collector showing his porcelains.
+Every time they seem to me to have grown larger and more
+diabolical. Where will aerial progress end? Will the next war be fought
+by forces that dive and fly like fishes and birds?
+
+"I'd like to drop that hundred-pounder on to a Zeppelin!" said one of
+the aviators. All the population of London would like to see him do it.
+And Fritz, the submarine, does not like to see the shadow of man's
+wings above the water.
+
+Seaplanes and destroyers carry the imagination away from the fleet
+to another sphere of activity, which I had not the fortune to see. An
+aviator can see Fritz below a smooth surface; for he cannot travel
+much deeper than thirty or forty feet. He leaves a characteristic ripple
+and tell-tale bubbles of air and streaks of oil. When the planes have
+located him they tell the hunters where to go. Sometimes it is known
+that a submarine is in a certain region; he is lost sight of and seen
+again; a squall may cover his track a second time, and the hunters,
+keeping touch with the planes by signals, course here and there on
+the look out for another glimpse. Perhaps he escapes altogether. It is
+a tireless game of hide and seek, like gunnery at the front. Naval
+ingenuity has invented no end of methods, and no end of
+experiments have been tried. Strictest kept of naval secrets, these.
+Fritz is not to be told what to avoid and what not to avoid.
+
+Very thin is the skin of a submarine; very fragile and complicated its
+machinery. It does not take much of a shock to put it out of order or a
+large charge of explosives to dent the skin beyond repair. It being in
+the nature of submarines to sink, how does the hunter know when he
+has struck a mortal blow? If oil and bubbles come up for some time in
+one place, or if they come up with a rush, that is suggestive. Then, it
+does not require a nautical mind to realize that by casting about on
+the bottom with a grapnel you will learn if an object with the bulk and
+size of a submarine is there. The Admiralty accept no guesswork
+from the hunters about their exploits; they must bring the brush to
+prove the kill.
+
+With Admiral Crawford I went to see the submarine defences of the
+harbour. It reminded one of the days of the drawbridge to a castle,
+when a friend rode freely in and an enemy might try to swim the moat
+and scale the walls if he pleased.
+
+"Take care! There is a tide here!" the coxswain was warned, lest the
+barge should get into some of the troubles meant for Fritz. "A cunning
+fellow, Fritz. We must give him no openings."
+
+The openings appear long enough to permit British craft, whether
+trawlers, or flotillas, or cruiser squadrons, to go and come. Lying as
+close together as fish in a basket, I saw at one place a number of
+torpedo boats home from a week at sea.
+
+"Here to-day and gone to-morrow," said an officer. "What a time they
+had last winter! You know how cold the North Sea is--no, you cannot,
+unless you have been out in a torpedo boat dancing the tango in the
+teeth of that bitter wind, with the spray whipping up to the tops of the
+smoke-stacks. In the dead of night they would come into this pitch-
+dark harbour. How they found their way is past me. It's a trick of those
+young fellows, who command."
+
+Stationary they seemed now as the quay itself; but let a signal speak,
+an alarm come, and they would soon be as alive as leaping
+porpoises. The sport is to those who scout and hunt. But do not
+forget those who watch, those who keep the blockade, from the
+Channel to Iceland, and the trawlers that plod over plotted sea-
+squares with the regularity of mowing-machines cutting a harvest, on
+their way back and forth sweeping up mines. They were fishermen
+before the war and are fishermen still. Night and day they keep at it.
+They come into the harbours stiff with cold, thaw out, and return to
+hardships which would make many a man prefer the trenches.
+Tributes to their patient courage, which came from the heart, were
+heard on board the battleships.
+
+"It is when we think of them," said an officer, "that we are most eager
+to have the German fleet come out, so that we can do our part."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+XXXIII
+The Fleet Puts To Sea
+
+
+
+There is another test besides that of gun-drills and target practice
+which reflects the efficiency of individual ships, and the larger the
+number of ships the more important it is. For the business of a fleet is
+to go to sea. At anchor, it is in garrison rather than on campaign, an
+assembly of floating forts. Navies one has seen which seemed
+excellent when in harbour, but when they started to get under way the
+result was hardly reassuring. Some erring sister fouled her anchor
+chain; another had engine-room trouble; another lagged for some
+other reason; there was fidgeting on the bridges. Then one asked,
+What if a summons to battle had come? Our own officers were
+authority enough that the British had no superiors in any of the tests.
+But strange reports dodged in and out of the alleys of pessimism in
+the company of German insistence that the Tiger and other ships
+which one saw afloat had been sunk. Was the fleet really held
+prisoner by fear of submarines? If it could go and come freely when it
+chose, the harbour was the place for it while it waited. If not, then,
+indeed, the submarine had revolutionized naval warfare. Admiral
+Jellicoe might lose some of his battleships before he could get into
+action against the Germans.
+
+"Oh, to hear the hoarse rattle of the anchor chains!" I kept thinking
+while I was with the fleet. "Oh, to see all these monsters on the
+move!"
+
+A vain wish it seemed, but it came true. A message from the
+Admiralty arrived while we were on the flagship. Admiral Jellicoe
+called his Flag Lieutenant and spoke a word to him, which was
+passed in a twinkling from flagship to squadron and division and ship.
+He made it as simple as ordering his barge alongside, this sending of
+the Grand Fleet to sea.
+
+From the bridge of a destroyer beyond the harbour entrance we saw
+it go. I shall not attempt to describe the spectacle, which convinced
+me that language is the vehicle for making small things seem great
+and great things seem small. If you wish words invite splendid and
+magnificent and overwhelming and all the reliable old friends to come
+forth in glad apparel from the dictionary. Personally, I was inarticulate
+at sight of that sea-march of dull-toned, unadorned power.
+
+First came the outriders of majesty, the destroyers; then the graceful
+light cruisers. How many destroyers has the British navy? I am only
+certain that it has not as many as it seems to have, which would
+mean thousands. Trying to count them is like trying to count the bees
+in the garden. You cannot keep your eye on the individual bees. You
+are bound to count some twice, so busy are their manoeuvres.
+
+"Don't you worry, great ladies!" you imagined the destroyers were
+saying to the battleships. "We will clear the road. We will keep watch
+against snipers and assassins."
+
+"And if any knocks are coming, we will take them for you, great
+ladies!" said the cruisers. "If one of us went down, the loss would not
+be great. Keep your big guns safe to beat other battleships into
+scrap."
+
+For you may be sure that Fritz was on the watch in the open. He
+always is, like the highwayman hiding behind a hedge and envying
+people who have comfortable beds. Probably from a distance he had
+a peep through his periscope at the Grand Fleet before the approach
+of the policeman destroyers made him duck beneath the water; and
+probably he tried to count the number of ships and identify their
+classes in order to take the information home to Kiel. Besides, he
+always has his fingers crossed. He hopes that some day he may get
+a shot at something more warlike than a merchant steamer or an
+auxiliary; only that prospect becomes poorer as life for him grows
+harder. Except a miracle happened, the steaming fleet, with its
+cordons of destroyers, is as safe from him as from any other kind of
+fish.
+
+The harbour which is the fleet's home is landlocked by low hills. There
+is an eclipse of the sun by the smoke from the ships getting under
+way; streaming, soaring columns of smoke on the move rise above
+the skyline from the funnels of the battleships before they appear
+around a bend. Indefinite masses as yet they are, under their night-
+black plumes. Each ship seems too immense to respond to any will
+except its own. But there is something automatic in the regularity with
+which, one after another, they take the bend, as if a stop watch had
+been held on twenty thousand tons of steel for a second's variation.
+As they approach they become more distinct and, showing less
+smoke, there seems less effort. Their motive-power seems inherent,
+perpetual.
+
+There is some sea running outside the entrance, enough to make a
+destroyer roll. But the battleships disdain any notice of its existence. It
+is no more to them than a ripple of dust to a motor truck. They plough
+through it.
+
+Though you were within twenty yards of them you would feel quite
+safe. An express train was in no more danger of jumping the track.
+Mast in line with mast, they held the course with a majestic
+steadiness. Now the leading ship makes a turn of a few points. At the
+same spot, as if it were marked by the grooves of tyres in a road, the
+others make it. Any variation of speed between them would have
+been instantly noticeable, as one forged ahead or lagged; but the
+distance between bows and sterns did not change. A line of one
+length would do for each interval so far as one could discern.
+
+It was difficult to think that they were not attached to some taut,
+moving cable under water. How could such apparently unwieldy
+monsters, in such a slippery element as the sea, be made to obey
+their masters with such fine precision?
+
+The answer again is sheer hard work! Drills as arduous in the engine-
+room as at the guns; machinery kept in tune; traditions in
+manoeuvring in all weathers, which is kept up with tireless practice.
+
+Though all seemed perfection to the lay eye, let it be repeated that
+this was not so to the eyes of admirals. It never can be. Perfection is
+the thing striven for. Officers dwell on faults; all are critics. Thus you
+have the healthiest kind of spirit, which means that there will be no
+cessation in the striving.
+
+"Look at that!" exclaimed an officer on the destroyer. "They ought to
+try another painting on her and see if they can't do better."
+
+Ever changing that northern light. For an instant the sun's rays,
+strained by a patch of peculiar cloud, playing on a Dreadnought's
+side, made her colour appear molten, exaggerating her size till she
+seemed as colossal to the eye as to the thought.
+
+"But look, now!" said another officer. She was out of the patch and
+seemed miles farther away to the vision, a dim shape in the sea-
+haze.
+
+"You can't have it right for every atmospheric mood of the North Sea,
+I suppose!" muttered the critic. Still, it hurt his professional pride
+that a battleship should show up as such a glaring target even
+for a moment.
+
+The power of the fleet was more patent in movement than at rest; for
+the sea-lion was out of his lair on the hunt. Fluttering with flags at a
+review at Spithead, the battleships seemed out of their element;
+giants trying for a fairy's part. Display is not for them. It ill becomes
+them, as does a pink ribbon on a bulldog.
+
+Irresistibly ploughing their way they presented a picture of resolute
+utility--guns and turrets and speed. No spot of bright colour was
+visible on board. The crew was at the guns, I took it. Turn the turrets,
+give the range, lay the sights on the enemy's ships, and the battle
+was on.
+
+"There is the old Dreadnought," said an officer. The old Dreadnought
+--all of ten years of age, the senile old thing! What a mystery she was
+when she was building! The mystery accentuated her celebrity--and
+almost forgotten now, while the Queen Elizabeth and the Warspite,
+and others of their class with their fifteen-inch guns, would be in the
+public eye as the latest type till a new type came. A parade of naval
+types was passing. One seemed to shade into the other in
+harmonious effect. But here was an outsider, whom one noted
+instantly as he studied those rugged silhouettes of steel. She had
+twelve twelve-inch guns, with turret piled on turret in an exotic
+fashion--one of the two Turkish battleships building in England at the
+time of the war and taken over by the British.
+
+One division, two divisions, four ships, eight Dreadnoughts--even a
+squadron coming out of a harbour numbs the faculties with a sense
+of its might. Sixteen--twenty--twenty-four--it was the unending
+numbers of this procession of sea-power which was most impressive.
+An hour passed and all were not by. One sat down for a few minutes
+behind the wind-screen of the destroyer's bridge, only to look back
+and see more Dreadnoughts going by. A spectator had not realized
+that there were so many in the harbour. He had a suspicion that
+Admiral Jellicoe was a conjuror who could take Dreadnoughts out of
+a hat.
+
+The first was lost in the gathering darkness far out in the North Sea,
+and still the cloud of smoke over the anchorage was as thick as ever;
+still the black plumes kept appearing around the bend. The King
+Edward VII. class with their four twelve-inch guns and other ancients
+of the pre-Dreadnought era, which are still powerful antagonists, were
+yet to come. One's eyes ached. Those who saw a German corps
+march through Brussels said that it seemed irresistible. What if they
+had seen the whole German army? Here was the counterpart of the
+whole German army in sea-power and in land-power, too.
+
+The destroyer commander looked at his watch.
+
+"Time!" he said. "I'll put you on shore."
+
+He must take his place in the fleet at a given moment. A word to the
+engine-room and the next thing we knew we were off at thirty knots
+an hour, cutting straight across the bows of a Dreadnought steaming
+at twenty knots, towering over us threateningly, with a bone in her
+teeth.
+
+Imagination sped across seas where a man had cruised into
+harbours that he knew and across continents that he knew. He was
+trying to visualize the whole globe--all of it except the Baltic seas and
+a thumb-mark in the centre of Europe. Hong-Kong, Melbourne,
+Sydney, Halifax, Cape Town, Bombay--yes, and Rio and Valparaiso,
+Shanghai, San Francisco, New York, Boston, these and the lands
+back of them, where countless millions dwell, were all safe behind the
+barrier of that fleet.
+
+Then back through the land where Shakespeare wrote to London,
+with its glare of recruiting posters and the throbbing of that individual
+freedom which is on trial in battle with the Prussian system--and as
+one is going to bed the sound of guns in the heart of the city! From
+the window one looked upward to see, under a searchlight's play, the
+silken sheen of a cigar-shaped sort of aerial phantom which was
+dropping bombs on women and children, while never a shot is fired at
+those sturdy men behind armour.
+
+When you have travelled far; when you think of Botha and his Boers
+fighting for England; when you have found justice and fair play and
+open markets under the British flag; when you compare the
+vociferations of von Tirpitz, glorying in the torpedoing of a Lusitania,
+with the quiet manner of Sir John Jellicoe, you need only a little spark
+of conscience to prefer the way that the British have used their sea-
+power to the way that the men who send out Zeppelins to war on
+women and children would use that power if they had it.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIV
+British Problems
+
+
+
+Throughout the summer of 1915 the world was asking, What about
+the new British army? Why was it not attacking at the opportune
+moment when Germany was throwing her weight against Russia? A
+facile answer is easy; indeed, facile answers are always easy.
+Unhappily, they are rarely correct. None that was given in this
+instance was, to my mind. They sought to put a finger on one definite
+cause; again, on an individual or a set of individuals.
+
+The reasons were manifold; as old as Waterloo, as fresh as the last
+speech in Parliament. They were inherent in the Anglo-Saxon race.
+Whoever raised a voice and said, This, or that, or you, are
+responsible! should first have looked into his own mind and into the
+history of his race and then into a mirror. Least of all should any
+American have been puzzled by the delay.
+
+"Oh, we should have done better than that--we are Americans!" I
+hear my countrymen say. Perhaps we should. I hope so; I believe so.
+The British public thought that they were going to do better; military
+men were surprised that they did as well.
+
+Along with laws and language we have inherited our military ideas
+from England. In many qualities we are different--a distinct type; but in
+nothing are we more like the British than in our attitude toward the
+soldier and toward war. The character of any army reflects the
+character of its people. An army is the fist; but the muscle, the
+strength, of the physical organism behind the blow in the long run
+belong to the people. What they have prepared for in peace they
+receive in war, which decides whether they have been living in the
+paradise of a fool or of a wise man.
+
+As a boy I was brought up to believe, as an inheritance of the
+American Revolution, that one American could whip two Englishmen
+and five or six of any other nationality, which made the feathers of the
+eagle perched on the national escutcheon look glossy. It was a
+satisfying sort of faith. Americans had never tried five or six of any
+first-class fighting race; but that was not a thought which occurred to
+me. As we had won victories over the English and the English had
+whipped the French at Waterloo, the conclusion seemed obvious.
+English boys, I understand, also had been brought up to believe that
+one Englishman could whip five or six men of any other nationality,
+but, I take it for granted, only two Americans. This clothed the British
+lion with majesty, while the lower ratio of superiority over Americans
+returned the compliment in kind from the sons of the lion to the sons
+of the eagle.
+
+After I began to read history for myself and to think as I read, I found
+that when British and Americans had met, the generals on either side
+were solicitous about having superior forces, and in case of odds of
+two to one they made a "strategic retreat." When either side was
+beaten, the other always explained that he was overcome by superior
+numbers, though perhaps the adversary had not more than ten or
+fifteen per cent, advantage. Then I learned that the British had not
+whipped five or six times their number on the continent of Europe.
+The British Expeditionary Force made as fine an effort to do so at
+Mons as was ever attempted in history, but they did not succeed.
+
+It was a regular army that fought at Mons. The only two first-class
+nations which depend upon regulars to do their fighting are the British
+and the American. This is the vital point of similarity which is the
+practical manifestation of our military ideas. We have been the earth's
+spoiled children, thanks to the salt seas between us and other
+powerful military nations. Before any other Power could reach the
+United States it must overwhelm the British navy, and then it must
+overwhelm ours and bring its forces in transports. Sea-power, you
+say. That is the facile word, so ready to the lips that we do not realize
+the wonder of it any more than of the sun rising and setting.
+
+When we want soldiers our plan still is to advertise for them. The
+ways of our ancestors remain ours. We think that the volunteer must
+necessarily make the best soldier because he offers his services;
+while the conscript--rather a term of opprobrium to us--must be
+lukewarm. It hardly occurs to us that some forms of persuasion may
+amount to conscription, or that the volunteer, won by oratorical
+appeal to his emotions or by social pressure, may suffer a reaction
+after enlistment which will make him lukewarm also, particularly as he
+sees others, also young and fit, hanging back. Nor does it occur to us
+that there may be virtue in that fervour of national patriotism aroused
+by the command that all must serve, which, on the continent in this
+war, has meant universal exaltation to sacrifice. The life of Jones
+means as much to him as the life of Smith does to him; and when the
+whole nation is called to arms there ought to be no favourites in life-
+giving.
+
+For the last hundred years, if we except the American Civil War, ours
+have been comparatively little wars. The British regular army has
+policed an empire and sent punitive expeditions against rebellious
+tribes with paucity of numbers, in a work which the British so well
+understand. Our little regular army took care of the Red Indians as
+our frontier advanced from the Alleghenies to the Pacific. To put it
+bluntly, we have hired someone to do our fighting for us.
+
+Without ever seriously studying the business of soldiering, the
+average Anglo-Saxon thought of himself as a potential soldier, taking
+his sense of martial superiority largely from the work of the long-
+service, severely drilled regular. Also, we used our fists rather than
+daggers or duelling swords in personal encounters and, man to man,
+unequipped with fire-arms or blades, the quality which is responsible
+for our sturdy pioneering individualism gave us confidence in our
+physical prowess.
+
+Alas! modern wars are not fought with fists. A knock-kneed man who
+knows how to use a machine-gun and has one to use--which is also
+quite important--could mow down all the leading heavy-weights of the
+United States and England, with the latest champion leading the
+charge.
+
+Now, this regular who won our little wars was not representative of
+the people as a whole. He was the man "down on his luck," who went
+to the recruiting depot. Soldiering became his profession. He was in a
+class, like priests and vagabonds. When you passed him in the street
+you thought of him as a strange being, but one of the necessities of
+national existence. It did not interest you to be a soldier; but as there
+must be soldiers, you were glad that men who would be soldiers were
+forthcoming.
+
+When trouble broke, how you needed him! When the wires brought
+news of his gallantry you accepted the deeds of this man whom you
+had paid as the reflection of national courage, which thrilled you with
+a sense of national superiority. To him, it was in the course of duty;
+what he had been paid to do. He did not care about being called a
+hero; but it pleased the public to make him one--this professional who
+fights for a shilling a day in England and $17.50 a month in the United
+States.
+
+Though when the campaign went well the public was ready to take
+the credit as a personal tribute, when the campaign went badly they
+sought a scapegoat, and the general who might have been a hero
+was sent to the wilderness perhaps because those busy men in
+Congress or Parliament thought that the army could do without that
+little appropriation which was needed for some other purpose. The
+army had failed to deliver the goods which it was paid to produce.
+The army was to blame, when, of course, under free institutions the
+public was to blame, as the public is master of the army and not the
+army of the public.
+
+A first impression of the British army is always that of the regiment.
+Pride of regiment sometimes appears almost more deep-seated than
+army pride to the outsider. It has been so long a part of British martial
+inheritance that it is bred in the blood. In the old days of small armies
+and in the later days of small wars, while Europe was making every
+man a soldier by conscription, regiment vying with regiment won the
+battles of empire. The memory of the part each regiment played is the
+inspiration of its present; its existence is inseparable from the
+traditions of its long list of battle honours.
+
+The British public loves to read of its Guards' regiment and to watch
+them in their brilliant uniforms at review. When a cadet comes out of
+Sandhurst he names the regiment which he wishes to join, instead of
+being ordered to a certain regiment, as at West Point. It rests with the
+regimental commander whether or not he is accepted. Frequently the
+young man of wealth or family serves in the Guards or another crack
+regiment for awhile and resigns, usually to enjoy the semi-leisurely life
+which is the fortune of his inheritance.
+
+Then there are the county line regiments, such as the Yorkshires, the
+Kents, and the Durhams. In this war each county wanted to read
+about its own regiments at the same time as about the Guards, just
+as Kansans at home would want to read about the Kansas regiment
+and Georgians about the Georgia regiment. The most trying feature
+of the censorship to the British public was its refusal to allow the
+exploitation of regiments. The staff was adamant on this point; for the
+staff was thinking for the whole and of the interests of the whole. In
+the French and the German armies, as in our regular army, regiments
+are known by numbers.
+
+The young man who lives in the big house on the hill, the son of the
+man of wealth and power in the community, as a rule does not go to
+West Point. None of the youth of our self-called aristocracy which
+came up the golden road in a generation past those in modest
+circumstances who have generations of another sort back of them,
+think of going into the First Cavalry or the First Infantry for a few years
+as a part of the career of their class. A few rich men's sons enter our
+army, but only enough to prove the rule by the exception. They do not
+regard the army as "the thing." It does not occur to them that they
+ought to do something for their country. Rather, their country ought to
+do something for them.
+
+But sink the plummet a little deeper and these are not our aristocracy
+nor our ruling class, which is too numerous and too sound of thought
+and principle for them to feel at home in that company. Any boy,
+however humble his origin, may go to West Point if he can pass the
+competitive examination. Europe, particularly Germany, would not
+approve of this; but we think it the best way. The average graduate of
+the Point, whether the son of a doctor, a lawyer, or a farmer, sticks to
+the army as his profession. We maintain the Academy for the strict
+business purpose of teaching young men how to train our army in
+time of peace and to lead and direct it in time of action.
+
+Our future officers enter West Point when they are two years younger
+than is the average at Sandhurst; the course is four years compared
+with two at Sandhurst. I should venture to say that West Point is the
+harder grind; that the graduate of the Point has a more specifically
+academic military training than the graduate of Sandhurst. This is not
+saying that he may be any better in the performance of the simple
+duties of a company officer. It is not a new criticism that we train
+everybody at West Point to be a general, when many of the students
+may never rise above the command of a battalion. However, it is a
+significant fact that at the close of the Civil War every army
+commander was a West Point man and so were most of the corps
+commanders.
+
+The doors are open in the British army for a man to rise from the
+ranks; not as wide as in our army, but open. The Chief of Staff of the
+British Expeditionary Force, Sir William Robertson, was in the ranks
+for ten years. No man not a West Pointer had a position equivalent in
+importance to his at the close of the Civil War. His rise would have
+been possible in no other European army.
+
+But West Point sets the stamp on the American army, and Sandhurst
+and Woolwich, the engineering and artillery school, on the British
+army. At the end of the four years at West Point the men who survive
+the hard course may be tried by courtmartial not for conduct
+unbecoming an officer, but an officer and a gentleman. They are
+supposed, whatever their origin, to have absorbed certain qualities, if
+they were not inborn, which are not easily described but which we all
+recognize in any man. If they are absent it is not the fault of West
+Point; and if a man cannot acquire them there, then nature never
+meant them for him. From the time he entered the school the
+government has paid his way; and he is cared for until he dies, if he
+keeps step and avoids courtmartials.
+
+His position in life is secure. His pay, counting everything, is better
+than that of the average graduate of a university or a first-class
+professional school who practises a profession. Yet only three boys, I
+remember, wanted to go to West Point from our congressional district
+in my youth. Nothing could better illustrate the fact that we are not a
+military people. From West Point they go out to the little army which is
+to fight our wars; to the posts and the Philippines, and become a
+world in themselves; an isolated caste in spite of themselves. I am
+not at all certain that either the British or the American officer works
+as hard as the German in time of peace. Neither has the practical
+incentive nor the determined driver behind him.
+
+For it takes a soldier Secretary of War to drive a soldier; for example,
+Lord Kitchener. Those British officers who applied themselves in
+peace to the mastery of their profession and were not content with
+the day's routine requirements, had to play chess without chessmen;
+practise manoeuvres on a board rather than with brigades, divisions,
+corps, and armies. They became the rallying points in the concourse
+of untrained recruits.
+
+German and French officers had the incentive and the chessmen.
+The Great War could not take them by surprise. They took the road
+with a machine whose parts had been long assembled. They had
+been trained for big war; their ambition and intelligence were under
+the whip of a definite anticipation.
+
+A factor overlooked, but even more significant than training or staff
+work, was that what might be called martial team-play had become
+an instinct with the continental peoples through the necessity of their
+situation. This the Japanese also possess. It is the right material
+ready to hand for the builder. Not that it is the kind of material one
+admires; but it is the right material for making a war-machine. One
+had only to read the expert military criticism in the British and the
+American Press at the outset of the war to realize how vague was the
+truth of the continental situation to the average Englishman or
+American--but not to the trained British Staff.
+
+So that little British Expeditionary Force, in ratio of number one to
+twenty or thirty of the French army, crossed the Channel to help save
+Belgium. Gallantry it had worthy of the brightest chapter in the
+immortal history of its regiments from Quebec to Kandahar, from
+Agincourt, Blenheim and Waterloo to South Africa, Guards and
+Hussars, Highlanders and Lowlanders, kilts and breeks, Connaught
+Rangers and Royal Fusiliers, Duke of Wellington's and Prince of
+Wales' Own, come again to Flanders. The best blood of England was
+leading Tommy Atkins. Whatever British aristocracy is or is not, it
+never forgets its duty to the England of its fathers. It is never ingrate
+to its fortune. The time had come to go out and die for England, if
+need be, and these officers went as their ancestors had gone before
+them, as they would go to lectures at Oxford, to the cricket field and
+the polo field, in outward phlegm, but with a mighty passion in their
+hearts.
+
+The Germans affected to despise this little army. It had not been
+trained in the mass tactics which hurl columns of flesh forward to gain
+tactical points that have been mauled by artillery fire. You do not use
+mass tactics against Boers, nor against Afridis, nor Filipinos. It is
+difficult to combine the two kinds of efficiency. Those who were on the
+march to the relief of the Peking Legations recall how the Germans
+were as ill at ease in that kind of work as the Americans and British
+were at home. It made us misjudge the Germans and the Germans
+misjudge us when they thought of us as trying to make war on the
+continent of Europe. A small, mobile, regular army, formed to go
+overseas and march long distances, was to fight in a war where
+millions were engaged and a day's march would cover an immense
+stretch of territory in international calculations of gain and loss.
+
+For its own purposes, the British Expeditionary Force was well-nigh a
+perfect instrument. As quantity of ammunition was an important factor
+in transport in the kind of campaign which it was prepared for, its
+guns were the most accurate on a given point and its system of fire
+adapted to that end; but the French system of fire, with plentiful
+ammunition from near bases over fine roads, was better adapted for
+a continental campaign. To the last button that little army was
+prepared. Man for man and regiment for regiment, I should say it was
+the best force that ever fired a shot in Europe; this without regard to
+national character. As England must make every regular soldier
+count, and as she depended upon the efficiency of the few rather
+than on numbers, she had trained her men in musketry. No
+continental army could afford to allow its soldiers to expend the
+amount of ammunition on the target range that the British had
+expended. Only by practice can you learn how to shoot. This gives
+the soldier confidence. He stays in his trench and keeps on shooting
+because he knows that he can hit those advancing figures and that
+this is his best protection. The more I learn, the more I am convinced
+that the Germans ought to have got the British Expeditionary Force;
+and the Germans were very surprised that they did not get it. With
+their surprise developed a respect for British arms, reported by all
+visitors to Germany.
+
+Mr. Thomas Atkins, none other, is the hero of that retreat from Mons.
+The first statue raised in London after the war ought to be of him. If
+there had been five hundred thousand of him in Belgium at the end of
+the second week in August, Brussels would now be under the Belgian
+flag. Like many other good things in this world, including the French
+army, there were not enough of him. Many a company on that retreat
+simply got tired of retreating, though orders were to fall back. It dug a
+trench and lay down and kept on firing--accurately, in the regular,
+businesslike way, reinforced by the "stick it" British character--until
+killed or engulfed. This held back the flood long enough for the
+remainder of the army to retire.
+
+Not all the generalship emanated from generals. I like best that story
+of the cross-roads where, with Germans pressing hard on all sides,
+two columns in retreat fell in together, uncertain which way to go. With
+confusion developing for want of instructions, a lone, exhausted staff
+officer who happened along took charge, and standing at the junction
+in the midst of shell-fire told every doubting unit what to do, with a
+one-two-three alacrity of decision. His work finished, he and his red
+cap disappeared, and I never could find anyone who knew who he
+was.
+
+After the retreat and after the victory of the Marne, what was
+England's position? The average Englishman had thought that
+England's part in the alliance was to send a small army to France and
+to take care of the German fleet. England's fleet was her first
+consideration; that must be served. France's demand for rifles and
+supplies must be attended to before the British demand. Serbia
+needed supplies; Russia needed supplies; a rebellion threatened in
+South Africa; the Turks threatened the invasion of Egypt. England
+had to spread her energy out over a vast empire with an army that
+had barely escaped annihilation. Every soldier who fought must be
+supplied overseas. German officers put a man on a railroad train and
+he detrained near the front. Every British soldier had to go on board a
+train and then a ship and then disembark from the ship and go on
+board another train. Every article of ordnance, engineering, medical
+supply, food supply, must be handled four times, while in Germany
+they need be handled but twice. Any railway traffic manager will
+understand what this means. Both the British supply system and the
+medical corps were marvels.
+
+Germany was stronger than the British public thought. Germany and
+Austria could put at the front in the first six months of the war
+practically double the number which the Allies could maintain. Russia
+had multitudes to draw from in reserve, but the need was multitudes
+at the front. There she was only as strong as the number she could
+feed and equip. In the first year of the war England suffered 380,000
+casualties on land, more than three times the number of men that
+she had at Mons. This wastage must be met before she could begin
+to increase her forces. The length of line on the western front that she
+was holding was not the criterion of her effort. The French who
+shared with the British that terrible Ypres salient realized this.
+
+Apart from the regulars she had the Territorials, who are much the
+same as our National Guard and vary in quality in the same way.
+Native Indian troops were brought to France to face the diabolical
+shell-fire of modern guns, and Territorials went out to India to take the
+place of the British regulars who were withdrawn for France. Every
+rifle that England could bring to the assistance of the French in their
+heroic stand was a rifle to the good.
+
+Meanwhile, she was making her new army. For the first time since
+Cromwell's day, all classes in England were going to war. Making an
+army out of the raw is like building a factory to be manned by expert
+labour which you have to train. Let us even suppose that the factory
+is ready and that the proprietor must mobilize his managers,
+overseers, foremen, and labour from far and near--a force individually
+competent, but which had never before worked together. It would
+require some time to organize team-play, wouldn't it? Particularly it
+would if you were short of managers, overseers, and foremen. To
+express my meaning from another angle, in talking once with an
+English pottery manufacturer he said:
+
+"We do not train our labour in the pottery district. We breed it from
+generation to generation."
+
+In Germany they have not only been training soldiers, but breeding
+them from generation to generation. You may think that system is
+wrong. It may be contrary to our ideals. But in fighting against that
+system for your ideals when war is violence and killing, you must
+have weapons as effective as the enemy's. You express only a part
+of Germany's preparedness by saying that the men who left the
+plough and the shop, the factory and the office, became trained
+soldiers at the command of the staff as soon as they were in uniform
+and had rifles. These men had the instinct of military co-ordination
+bred in them, and so had their officers, while England had to take
+men from the plough and the shop, the factory and the office, and
+equip them and teach them the rudiments of soldiering before she
+could consider making them into an army.
+
+It was one thing for the spirit of British manhood to rise to the
+emergency. Another and even more important requisite went with it. If
+my country ever faces such a crisis I hope that we also may have the
+courage of wisdom which leaves an expert's work to an expert.
+England had Lord Kitchener, who could hold the imagination and the
+confidence of the nation through the long months of preparation,
+when there was little to show except repetition of drills here and there
+on gloomy winter days. It required a man with a big conception and
+patience and authority to carry it through, and recruits with an
+unflinching sense of duty. The immensity of the task of transforming a
+non-military people into a great fighting force grew on one in all its
+humdrum and vital details as he watched the new army forming. "Are
+you learning to think in big numbers?" was Lord Kitchener's question
+to his generals.
+
+Half of the regular officers were killed or wounded.
+
+Where the leaders? Where the drillmasters for the new army? Old
+officers came out of retirement, where they had become used to an
+easy life as a rule, to twelve hours a day of hard application. "Dug-
+outs" they were called. Veteran non-commissioned officers had to drill
+new ones. It was demonstrated that a good infantry soldier can be
+made in six months; perhaps in three. But it takes seven months to
+build a rifle-plant; many more months to make guns--and the navy
+must never be stinted. Probably the English are slow; slow and
+thoroughgoing. They are good at the finish, but not quick at the start.
+They are used to winning the last battle, which they say is the one
+that counts. The complacency of empire with a century's power was a
+handicap, no doubt. We are inclined to lean forward on our oars, they
+to lean back--which does not mean that they cannot lean forward in
+an emergency or that they lack reserve strength. It may lead us to
+misjudge them.
+
+Public impatience was inevitable. It could not be kept silent; that is the
+English of it--the American, too. It demands to know what is being
+done. It was not silent in the Civil War. From the time McClellan
+started forming his new army until the Peninsular campaign was six
+months, if I remember rightly. Von Moltke, who built the German staff
+system, said that the Civil War was a strife between two armed mobs;
+though I think if he had brought his Prussians to Virginia a year later,
+in '63, which would have ended the Civil War there and then, he
+would have had an interesting time before he returned to Berlin.
+
+The British new army was not to face another new army, but the most
+thoroughly organized military machine that the world has ever known.
+Not only this, but the Germans, with a good start and their system
+established, were not standing still and waiting for the British to catch
+up, so that the two could begin again even, but were adapting
+themselves to the new features of the war. They had been the world's
+arms-makers. With vast munition plants ready, their feudal socialistic
+organization could make the most of their resources in men and
+material.
+
+More than two million Englishmen went to the recruiting depots,
+though no invader had set foot on their soil, and offered to serve in
+France or wherever they were needed overseas. If no magic could
+put rifles in their hands or summon batteries of guns to follow them on
+the march, the fact of their volunteering, when they knew by watching
+from day to day the drudgery that it meant and what trench warfare
+was, shows at least that the race is not yet decadent. Perhaps we
+should have done better. No one can know until we try it. If liberal
+treatment by the government and the course set by Secretary Root
+means anything, our staff ought to be better equipped for such a task
+than the English were; this, too, only war can decide.
+
+Whatsoever of pessimism appeared in the British Press was
+telegraphed to America. Pessimism was not permitted in the German
+Press. Imagine Germany holding control of the cable and allowing
+press dispatches from Germany to pass over it with the freedom that
+England allowed. Imagine Germany having waited as long as
+England before making cotton contraband. The British Press
+demanded information from the government which the German Press
+would never have dared to ask. I have known an American
+correspondent, fed out of hand in Germany and thankful for anything
+that the fearful German war-machine might vouchsafe, turning a
+belligerent when he was in London for privileges which he would
+never have thought of demanding in Berlin.
+
+If an English ship were reported sunk, he believed it must be, despite
+the government's denial. Did he go to the Germans and demand that
+he might publish the rumours of what had happened to the Moltke in
+the Gulf of Riga, or how many submarines Germany had really lost?
+Indeed, he was unconsciously paying a compliment to British free
+institutions. He expected more in England; it seemed a right to him,
+as it would at home. Englishmen talked frankly to him about mistakes;
+he heard all the gossip; and sometimes he concluded that England
+was in a bad way. In Germany such talk was not allowed. Every
+German said that the government was absolutely truthful; every
+German believed all of its reports. But ask this critical American how
+he would like to live under German rule, and then you found how anti-
+German he was at heart. Nothing succeeds like success, and
+Germany was winning and telling no one if she had any setbacks.
+
+If there were a strike, the British Press made the most of it, for it was
+big news. Pessimism is the Englishman's natural way of arousing
+himself to fresh energy. It is also against habit to be demonstrative in
+his effort; so it is not easy to understand how much he is doing. Then,
+pessimism brought recruits; it made the Englishman say, "I've got to
+put my back into it!" Muddling there was and mistakes, such as that
+of the method of attack at Gallipoli; but in the midst of all this
+dispiriting pessimism, no Englishman thought of anything but of
+putting his back into it more and more. Lord Kitchener had said that it
+was to be a long war and evidently it must be. Of course, England's
+misfortune was in having the war catch her in the transition from an
+old order of things to social reforms.
+
+But if the war shows anything it is that basically English character has
+not changed. She still has unconquerable, dogged persistence, and
+her defects for this kind of war are not among the least admirable of
+her traits to those who desire to live their own lives in their own way,
+as the English-speaking people have done for five hundred years,
+without having a verboten sign on every street corner.
+
+It is still the law that when a company of infantry marches through
+London it must be escorted by a policeman. This means a good deal:
+that civil power is superior to military power. It is a symbol of what
+Englishmen have fought for with spades and pitchforks, and what we
+have fought Englishmen for. My own idea is that England is fighting
+for it in this struggle; and starting unready against a foe which was
+ready, as the free peoples always have done, she was fighting for
+time and experience before she could strike her sturdiest blows.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of My Year of the War, by Frederick Palmer
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author	Roger Frank <rfrank@pglaf.org>	2025-10-15 04:38:40 -0700
committer	Roger Frank <rfrank@pglaf.org>	2025-10-15 04:38:40 -0700
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