Chapter XVI: The Future--Peace or War 324 (2)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III

TO THE WEST FRONT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV

ON THE BACK OF THE BIRD OF WAR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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