Chapter XVI: The Future--Peace or War 324 (5)

His growing beard did not conceal his smiling mouth. I wondered at his easy dialect, spoken without the London accent noticeable in so many Prussian officers. I asked him where he had learned to speak American. He told me he had worked in the Bronx--which those who are not New Yorkers may or may not know--and that he was a joiner in a piano factory. Every Sunday afternoon he played baseball in Claremont Park; his team had won a Church League championship. Bullets began to whistle overhead. Doubtless thinking that a reckless officer had exposed himself, the French were covering the pit. "Do you hear them?" grinned the Bronx piano joiner, as the whistle of the bullets kept up. "Fine, isn't it?"

"You like to hear bullets?" I asked. He nodded. Well, I suppose it's a cultivated taste, like German hors d'oeuvres. I began to think of him as of the Saxonians whom I saw drilling in the courtyard in Vis en Artois. Of course he liked this better than piecing together colorless bits of wood in a factory. Not a day passed, probably, but that he got his little thrill, and when the war was over he could go back to the Bronx--if he lived--and be a hero among his friends for the rest of his days. And as I wished him good luck and turned to overtake the others I wondered if this war is going to change the workingman in this way; if he is going to become so accustomed to a spicy existence that he never tasted before, that he will not follow to the humdrum of shops and mills as inevitably as before; rather demanding something more?

Beside the door to a dugout I saw on the wall a page torn from a French periodical _L'Illustration_. It was a lay-out of actresses and bicycle riders and it struck you as incongruous until you remembered that the trench had been captured from the French. I saw a profusion of mottoes lettered by the soldiers on their writing paper--_Gott mit uns_. You could not pass a rifle pit--and they are about ten yards apart--without seeing those words of the Emperor that have become the slogan of the German army; and you thought as you saw them, not printed under some official orders and sent to the soldiers so that they would ever have them before them, but written by the men themselves out of the feeling in their hearts, you thought that it is going to be a tremendous job to hold at bay an army, that thinks the Divine is on its side.

I noticed that the soldiers try to outdo each other in the individuality of their dugouts. There was one that had a little sign over the door "_Gasthaus zur Kron_" and the soldier inside told me that it was the name of the hotel he owned in his home town. I saw another with three inches of stove pipe protruding from the roof that billed itself as the _Schmaltz Kuchen Bäckerie_, under which was modestly written in pencil "Here is the best kitchen in the world." Delightful these signs, for presently I came upon an exceedingly frank one, the tenant of a dugout having stuck over the door, a shingle upon which was written "_Gasthaus der Wilde Wanze_," which means "The Inn of the Wild Bed Bug."

I went down into one of the dugouts. I saw a square hole in the earth where one had to move about stooped. A candle flickered on an empty box and in the corner I saw two piles of mud-caked blankets. A pair of wet socks hung from a string that had been fastened in some miraculous way from wall to wall and a soldier was straining his eyes in the candlelight, reading the tiny Bible which is part of the equipment of every German private. Perhaps I do the man an injustice but I imagined he was reading because he was bored; and that by the time this war is over, more Germans will know their Bible from cover to cover because of hours in the trenches when they had nothing else to do. I saw no crucifix in that room in the ground--and I have seen crucifixes in bombproofs--but I saw another cross, the Maltese outlines of the Iron Cross dug in the dirt wall, and I thought of it as that soldier's dream.

At the next passage to a rifle pit, the officers stopped and I saw that here were no soldiers on watch and that a narrow passageway opened up into the field.

"That is the way we advance our trenches," explained the Captain. "At different points we dig out like this and then after we have gone out awhile, we dig sideways in both directions, parallel to this trench. Soon the different little trenches that are being dug that way, meet. Then they are deepened and the soldiers leave pits here and take the new position."

It was the method, as old as fortifications that the Japanese gave perfected, to the military world at Port Arthur and that the Bulgarians copied around Adrianople, and it is the way by which the --th Infantry finally closed in Arras, the way the whole German line, meter by meter, is moving France, creeping this time, not running wild over the country side, as during those wild August days, but gaining slowly here, losing slowly there, instead of being driven back across their own frontier, as the English newspapers promised they would be long before this writing. I went up into one of the little outpost trenches. The approach was shallow and you had to walk doubled over. I passed a door of solid iron that slid into a groove dug in the mud, and through another gate, this one of wood and tangled with barbed wire.

"In case anything should happen during the night," offered the Captain with a smile; and then we came to the new trench where soldiers were digging, while a squad of eight stood guard with leveled rifles and a machine gun lest the French attack by surprise. It was not yet a trench in the military sense; only a ditch in which you dared not stand erect for even your chest would be exposed above the bags of sand that lined the top. Crouched beside a soldier I peered through an opening between the bags. I felt that the gray stone house that I had seen before, was approaching nearer. Where were the French? I stared across the plowed field. Finally I made out a furrow that was different from the others. It seemed higher and more gray than the color of dirt and I saw that it extended as far as the eye could see, and as I watched it I suddenly saw a speck of blue. It was the hat I had seen by the thousands in the prison camps. I had seen the French.

The soldier beside me seemed engrossed in the gray stone house. He muttered something to the next man--there were not separate rifle pits here--just a line of men. I too watched the gray house. I saw on the roof the rack of a wireless, and in the middle of the wall where the garret must be, a circular open window looked almost as if it had been made as a shell. I became conscious that there was somebody in that room and the next moment I saw a figure slowly approach the big gaping window, and a head cautiously appeared. I had a glimpse of a pallid blank face and then a rifle roared in my ear, and three more went off in a salvo. "French officers in that room," remarked the soldier wisely. "We get them."

As I turned to go back to the main trench, I saw that already in this little ditch the irrepressible German soldier had been at work. There in the mud wall was a heart, outlined with the ends of exploded cartridges, and as I looked at it, a boyish man smiled sheepishly and turned away. On the battleline, less--here in the outermost ditch--than two hundred meters from the French, they draw pictures and trace hearts, these sentimental people; and yet they have been accused of wantonly burning houses, these Germans, to whom the home is the biggest thing in all existence. Were every American who believes those Belgian stories, to live with the German soldiers as I have, and to know them off duty, and to watch them in the trenches, he would be utterly at sea. The stories of Belgium do not agree with the men of the German army.

Back in the main trench, I turned off with the Lieutenant, going down what seemed to be a retreating trench until he stopped before a wooden sign that read _Kamp Fuhrer_. The sign marked his bombproof, and descending a flight of dirt steps, I entered his quarters, different naturally from the private soldiers. He lived in a warren of straw and mud-caked bags and the walls of his ten by ten room in the ground were covered with genuine Afghanistan rugs. The carved desk, strewn with personal belongings, also had the château look, although the rickety washstand seemed to have come from a farmhouse. There was even a tiny window looking out away from the French, a mirror, a hatrack and a stone, and when upon coming out I saw that the door to this strange abode could be locked and that a little weather vane fluttered from the roof, I gave him up. He was too wonderful. He had been watching me with the quiet smile with which all these German officers regard you when they show you the marvels of their army front, and he said: "Would you like to telephone anybody in Berlin? I shall have my orderly get the connection."

I began to catch on and when he said that I could stand at the field telephone which lay in a niche in the trench wall, near his bombproof and get a series of connections that would terminate in Germany and that I actually could carry on a conversation from the firing line with somebody in the Hotel Adlon at Berlin--well, you come to expect anything possible of achievement by these people. I thanked the Lieutenant, but told him I knew of no one to telephone and he said with a laugh that he felt sorry for me, that one always knew a Charlottenburg telephone number in Berlin.

To get back to our motors, we used other approach trenches, and we had not gone a hundred and fifty meters from the trenches, when Bob Dunn and I--we had lingered so long to talk to a German soldier who spoke American that our party had gone ahead--discovered that the water in the pits was rising above our knees. The only thing then that occurred to us when the trench ran close to a road was to climb up out of it. Dunn was hungry and took some bread and cheese from his pocket; munching it we walked along. The sky was white with tiny clouds hanging over the trees ahead. For January it was too warm; we unbuttoned our coats.

"Amazing people," Dunn was saying. I happened to look behind me. The gray stone house! "Do you know," I said feeling cold, "that we're exposed to the French trenches?"

"What of it, they're not firing now," remarked Dunn, who would no more have said that two hours before than I would. And we walked along the road, eating our bread and cheese with the French to look at our backs if they cared to, a quarter of a mile away. There was no danger; the only danger was potential. We had let ourselves feel comfortable in the lulling security of the trenches, which paradoxically kills men....

You have read that trenches have changed war, that the life of a soldier is regarded as so precious by those who devise the war machines, that everything is done to protect him. "Digging in" and "trench-work," reassuring phrases for those who do not know, or for those who do not think. By statistics I tried to show how safe the trenches are. Yes, everything is done to safeguard the soldier; he is valuable to the State, which is not a cynicism, for feeling the tremendous national spirit of Germany, you come to think that there is only one thing worth while in these years, and that is the State; and you feel that such a thing as national pride is more worth while than dollar pride; which is something which would come shamefacedly to most Americans were they to walk through the German trenches from the Channel to the Vosges. But if trenches were devised to save the soldier, modern artillery and explosives were devised to kill him; and the only thing that makes you wonder about the trenches and their relative value to life, is how a man can go into them and be alive at the end of the war. At Labasse one night I talked to a captain who told me something of these things.

"Yesterday," he said, "the English fired a hundred and fifty shells over our trench. One hundred and forty-eight burst harmlessly. The other two dropped into the trench and killed fifteen men. It took one hundred and fifty shells to do it, but fifteen men," and the Captain shook his head. I asked him what the effects of shell fire were on the men and he told me: "The moral influence of shells in breaking courage is terrific. That's why a heavy cannonading always precedes the storming of a trench. Especially is this so at night when you have to keep sending up rockets that light the ground between the trenches so the enemy cannot creep up. You see, during the day, the soldiers sight their rifles on different points and at night they simply sweep those points with fire. We only use machine guns to repel air attack, but further down the line where the French are, officers have told me that the French will waste ammunition firing a machine gun for hours, apparently satisfied if they kill only one man."

And in conversations that I had with officers at the different brigade and corps headquarters where I dined while in the West, and from things I heard in Berlin, I formed an opinion about the trenches. They are tremendously important to Germany. I would go so far as to say that everything depends upon that three hundred mile ditch in the West. If the Germans hold it, it means this: the war is going to end with Germany in possession of Belgium and a big section of industrial France; and somebody has to pay Germany's bill for this war; and German troops may not leave captured soil until the bill is paid; whereupon billions of dollars depend on a six-foot hole in the ground that twists and burrows across Europe....

I had seen the trenches by day; later I saw them by night. A tedious, slipping walk through half a mile of muddy, unroofed tunnels and I was in the front German line near Labasse.

When I had accustomed myself to the steady cracking of rifles in the firing pits which I could not see, but which I knew must be close by; when I had nervously counted the bursting of twenty shells, all in an appalling few minutes, yet had heard no plop of fragments burying themselves into the mud above, I began to be able to look about me. By turning my indispensable electric torch this way and that, I could see in the rear wall of the trench a series of caves dug in the earth, their entrances so low that a man would have to enter them on hands and knees, and in some I saw the yellowish gutter of candles and others were pitch dark. At Unter Officer Ochsler's suggestion I went down into one of the caves.

"Later," he said, "you won't want to be moving around much. It'll get hotter then and you'll want to remain in one place where you're sure the shelter is good."

From one of the candle-lighted dugouts, I heard part singing, a lively air, doubtless from some German operetta, and above us shells whined and burst roaring in the fields. It was while we were walking thus, peering to right and left into the life of the catacombs of mud, that a stentorian cry behind us seemed to spin the Lieutenant round on his heels and I followed him thumping heavily back down the slippery pit. "It's an attack," he shouted over his shoulder. "Get into one of the dugouts and stay there. And, if they get us, wave your passport if they find you, and yell you're an American."

Indicating one of the little passages towards the firing pits, he gave me a shove and spattered away to take command. Down on all fours I went. I wondered if the two soldiers in the pit saw me. Apparently not. Their shoulders were hunched to their guns. I hesitated. Of course the dugout would be the safest place, but shells had been flying over the trench for an hour now and nothing had happened; and their shriek and heavy boom no longer seemed so terrifying. But then the Lieutenant had strongly hinted about my being in the way. He had told me to get into that dugout and remain there. Was I not really under his orders? Strange things to be reasoning out with yourself, points of military etiquette, with the skies raining death and the whole line of the trenches blazing with a red, repelling flame. But war is strange, and now I wonder if in the firing line, cowardice and bravery do really exist; if it is not rather one man's nervous system responding to reckless hysteria quicker than another's?

You forgot the Lieutenant's request; you forgot that perhaps you owed it to some one to remain where it was safe--and dull. You forgot that these were not American soldiers leveling their guns not a stride from you, and that they were Englishmen who were pouring up over the trenches across that muddy field and storming towards you; you never thought of nationality, that was a creation of man's. You thought of nothing; you only felt things. You felt something chaotic going on, an inchoate impulse possessed you. It was to fire a gun. If only there was something to shoot, something to throw you into the surge of this fight so you could be thrilled the more. The men in front of you were fighting away; but it was not your fight.

And then came the quick banging beat of the machine guns and you ran to where they were, your pulse beating with them. As you ran, stumbling down the slippery trench, there seemed to jump out of the ground a soldier with black belts of cartridges slung over his shoulder. Then another darted up from another pit and you knew they were bringing ammunition for the gun. In an ecstasy you followed them. At the second little passageway they turned and you turned too and found yourself crouching behind an armored wall of mud, above which the machine gun lay between heavy bags, and you saw a man's elbow jerking round in a circle and you knew he was firing the gun. If only your arm could move like that!

And above even that incessant hellish clamor you heard the crackling report of rifles, one report seeming to run upon the other, as though trays of dishes were constantly being dropped downstairs, and then the heavy booming of shells would deafen all, to the fierce spurting of shrapnel and the slapping impact of fragments of _grenaten_ in the mud. Then a swift rush of air, as of a mighty exhalation, and rockets from our trenches began to swish, one after the other, in short flaming arcs that terminated in a burst of greenish light, turning the night into a mad radiance so that we might better see to kill. I crowded forward, wanting to peer through a slit between the bags, but a soldier pushed me back. I was in the way. I cannot convey how that makes you feel, a realization that you are indeed in the way with these men fighting for their lives and you just there watching them.

I ran from the machine gun, ducking in at the first pit I came to, and here I saw men who without a word, their movements as regular as machines, were loading, firing ... loading, firing. They were shorter than I, and by raising a trifle on my toes, I could squint along their gun barrels and see the patch of the open field that their loop hole framed. I saw a confusion of color--the green, unearthly haze of the rockets; a wavering red hue of fire that had a way of rushing at you, vanishing and then appearing further back, rushing at you again; and I saw a patch of mud, glistening like mottled tarnished silver in the rain, and once when a whitish rocket burst, the air seemed to be sparkling with myriad drops of silver and diamonds. And the rain poured down; and the guns shook the sky; and the rifles rattled on.

I began to notice then, by craning my head from left to right, that the red wavering lines of fire, which had a way of rushing at you and vanishing to appear again further back, was slower now in appearing after it lost itself somewhere in the mud, and then it became even slower in showing itself and finally when it came, you saw that it had disintegrated into segments, that it was no longer a steady oncoming line, rather a slowly squirming thing like the curling parts of some monstrous fiery worm that had been chopped to bits and was squirming its life away out there on the mud. And it dawned upon you in horror that the fiery red lines had been lines of men, shooting as they had come; and that, when one line had been mowed down, another had rushed up from behind, so on almost endlessly it had seemed until they came broken and squirmed like the others had done, into the mud, and came no more. And the spell that you had been held in was broken; and you remembered that there was a God, and you thanked Him that your hands had found nothing with which to kill....

And coming across that stretch of mud--only one hundred and fifty meters were their trenches--broke forth the rattle of the English machine guns and the fever of it over, you could reason out what that meant. The English attack had failed and now they were sweeping the field with machine gun fire so that the Germans could not form and storm in turn. Their shells, too, no longer exploded behind our trenches, but in front, and you knew that the English had telephoned back to their artillery to shorten the range about fifty meters, making that field a muddy Golgotha in which nothing could live and upon which their own wounded must be being slain by the score.

We had almost ceased firing. In the pits I heard the straggling shots that mean "at will," but our machine guns were silent. The rockets still swished upward, making their parabola of sparks and keeping the night hideous with their bursting green. The Lieutenant was running down the trench towards me. "You're not hurt?" he asked. I told him no, and he seemed immeasurably relieved. What a futile outsider you felt!

"I think our losses were, by comparison, slight," he said, leading the way towards the passage that turned back into his bombproof. "I shall have an exact report on them in a few minutes." From out of the pits, as we passed, I heard a groan. Thinking the man might be alone, I paused and turned on my lamp. Its white light found a circle of brown mud and then moving down, it shone upon the grotesquely hunched up form of a man in soiled gray green, and wavering across the pit it rested then upon a pair of boots, their soles turned towards me.

"Probably shrapnel," remarked the Lieutenant, as he looked over my shoulder. "Both dead."

You caught a professional lack of emotion in his voice and you experienced a moment's unpleasantness before you realized that a kind providence makes the spectacle of death seem as commonplace to the soldier as it does to the surgeon; otherwise he should go mad. There was a business-like air about the Lieutenant now, rather different, you thought, from that rush through the mud when first the alarm sounded. By the way, how long ago was that; not more than twenty minutes? But when you looked at your watch, the hands shaped more. Two hours!

I followed the Lieutenant into his bombproof.

"We're safe here," he said in a dutiful way, "unless a shell should strike the roof. But I think they'll soon cease their artillery fire altogether."

He twirled the spark wheel of one of those patent lighters that the German soldiers carry and the glowing coal at the end of the chemically treated cord began to seek the wick of a candle. I flashed on my lamp to help him, and in a moment the little dirt walled room was faintly luminous with yellow light. It was possible to stand without bumping your head against the logged roof, and while he picked up the field telephone, whose slender tendrils crept up through the roof like a vine, I glanced around me. Over there in the corner one saw a red rubber wash basin, evidently folding, for it was creased in many places; it rested upon an empty ammunition box, and above it a tiny mirror gave out the reflection of the candle. I heard him call for regimental headquarters and then in a very calm voice he proceeded to give the details of the engagement insofar as he had been able to collect them in such a brief time. He begged me to excuse him while he wrote out a report.

"This must be delivered at once by a soldier to my Colonel," he explained. "I shall leave blanks for the number of our killed and wounded and telephone it to headquarters to be filled in as soon as the under officer brings me the figures."

I told him that I would go out and take a look around while he was writing his report. "I'll only be a minute," he begged.

"I'll be careful," I replied, and he smiled in a way that showed he understood. I then went down the line of the trench for perhaps fifty meters, stopping here and there to go into the firing pits, where by now most of the rifles were silent, one man in each pit watching through the oblong hole between the sand bags, lest the enemy creep up, for their cannonading had ceased and shells no longer fell upon that narrow zone between the trenches. They appeared to take turns watching, the two men in each pit, the one on relief sitting on the ground, his back against the dirt wall, as though fatigued.

It was in one of these pits that I stuck up my head--for the enemy's bullets no longer whizzed by--and looked out upon the little battle field. The rain had ceased; the stars were coming out. It was quiet out there now, but in the distance, north and south, you heard muffled uproars as though what had begun and ended here was happening there now. It was quiet out there, too quiet, not even the wounded groaned; there were no wounded; the artillery had turned them into dead. In the feeble starlight nothing was visible, only vague outlines as of a rise of ground, just at a distance, you imagined, for the English trenches to crest; only that and close by the short, shadowy posts across which the German barbed entanglements were strung. Slowly the silence grew upon you.

And then I heard the hiss of a rocket. I watched its arc of yellow sparks. I watched its burst, and in its light I saw that which I pray my eyes may never behold again. I saw in that eerie radiance the glistening, puddled field and across it, on the upward sloping ground what you might have thought were innumerable graves, but which you knew to be the bodies of men, fallen as they had come at the charge; in twos--threes--I counted ten in a perfect row; and behind them were more of these lumps which seemed to be of the earth, for they were the color of that blackish field; and there the mounds seemed higher, as though a pile of them lay there; and you heard the hissing rockets, and their greenish fires seemed to be now of that green which sometimes burns on an altar's rail. And then the rockets stopped, and the field of the dead was shut from your eyes.... If only a sound would come from out there....

I found the Lieutenant in his bombproof.

"I have been waiting for you," he called in a cheery way, and he reached down under the empty cartridge box. "Cognac," he exclaimed, producing a flask. "It will taste good now."

"I suppose," I nodded.

I admired his unshaking hand as he poured out the liquid. "There's only one glass," he smiled. "Go ahead, I insist."

I gulped down the stuff and hoped he had not noticed my manner. I watched him pour out his own drink, holding it like the connoisseur you felt him to be, before the candle flame. He must have been admiring the amber color when footfalls came from without. The under-officer saluted and handed him a bit of paper. Putting down the cognac and returning the salute, the Lieutenant picked up the telephone. I heard him call regimental headquarters, and then reading from the paper, he reported in German: "Fifteen dead--thirty-eight wounded." And laying aside the 'phone he picked up his cognac, slowly sipping it down....

I had seen the men in the trenches and it was at Commines that I saw them out. With a tall young Prussian officer, who told me in entire sincerity that before this war was done Germany was going to invade England and that the plans had all been perfected, but what they were he naturally could not say--I walked along the cobbled street of the old French town until I came to a gray stone factory. Through the paling of a picket fence I saw soldiers moving about in the yard, and going in we walked along a narrow cobbled driveway between dingy workshops until the officer opened a door, and we went into what had been a storeroom. I saw rows of pens, each as wide as a cot and filled with straw, and in the straw lay men. You thought of them as being too exhausted upon coming back from the trenches to take off their uniforms and wash before lying down. I saw their cartridge belts, knapsacks and guns strewn in the straw beside them, and I became conscious of a faint sickening odor that minute by minute became stronger in that stuffy room, the stench of men who had not been able to as much as unloosen their clothing for days at a time.

As I walked between the pens I saw further on that some of the men were awake. I saw their faces; the others seemed all to sleep with their faces buried in the straw; and they were wild, unshaven faces, yellowish with mud, and bleary with sleepless eyes that somehow could not sleep now. There was one munching on a big chunk of black bread, and another who had been leaning on his elbow, writing a letter, jumped up as I passed.

"You're an American, aren't you?" he called after me.

I saw from the blue and white button on his cap that he belonged to one of the Bavarian regiments.

"I lived in the United States," he told me, "until the war came. Then I joined my regiment. I was the cashier of a bank in Juarez, and I lived across the river. I used to make my money in Mexico and live in America."

He went on telling me of his experiences and obligingly answering certain questions that must have sounded foolish to him.

"We work here in the army," he said, "seven day shifts. We're in the trenches forty-eight hours and then out for twenty-four hours' rest; in again for twenty-four and then out for three days."

I asked him what the men did during the last three days and he told me.

"To-day, for instance, we get paid. Then we wash up and go out and buy cigars and cheese and things, though I'm afraid some of the boys will be laid up this time with the typhoid vaccine. We're fresh troops, you know, and haven't had it yet. I suppose when spring comes on, they'll have us working as farmers when we're not on duty."

I asked him what he meant, and he told me that all the captured farmland of Belgium and France that could be planted during the fall had been sown by German soldiers, and that when the crops were ready that the soldiers would harvest them. And again the marvelous details of this German machine amazed me.

I said good-by to the Bavarian who had made his money in Mexico, spent it in America, and did his fighting with Germany in France, and went down the damp cobbled alley where you thought the wagons used to drive into these mills with their supplies; the officer told me a thousand soldiers rested, bathed and were fed every day in the factory. We saw the room where they bathed, one tub running the entire length of the machine room--overhead the motionless belt wheels looked self-conscious--this tub for the legs, another for the feet, while in the middle of the stone floor the army barbers, daubed white with lather, were shaving the soldiers and clipping their hair to the scalp.

"These are three companies of the --th Bavarian Infantry who have the room for this hour. They must be bathed and shaved within that time."

Outside I saw three soldiers picking mud off their uniforms; and when we returned to the street, waiting for our car, three of them passed with shiny shaven faces and puffing on long cigars. We saw three girls and the soldiers smiled. It was their day off....

When I think of the trenches again I think of the bombproof, near Labasse. The English have attacked, to be beaten back. The young German officer has just telephoned his report to his Colonel, and is pouring himself a second glass of cognac. They are the same at night as they are in the day, these trenches; they have the same bored men lounging in the dugouts, waiting for an attack; the same tensely watchful men in the rifle pits, scanning the enemy's line. I heard a harmonica. The dead still lay where they fell, the wounded were getting first aid, and you could hear the whining harmonica above the scattering spatter of the shrapnel. Yes, in the trenches it was the same; they had settled down once more into the lulling secure feeling of the protection of a dirt wall, six feet high, which paradoxically ends by killing them. Only the night was different.

Hideous night, pierced with flame, serried with a rocket's gleaming train, weird with bursting bombs that light the glistening fields a grayish green; awful night, shaking to the booming of heavy guns, blotched with the red of splitting shells, quivering insanely to a machine gun's steady beat; night of death, with the wounded turning white, waiting for the hours just before the dawn when the firing stops and their comrades may be spared to carry them back; with the field of the soaked dead, a nightmare of lumpy things, seen hellishly in the rocket's glow.

But in the trenches--all along the big ditch from the dunes of Flanders to the foothills of the Vosges--it is the same night and day; and bullets are whistling and harmonicas are playing. I heard them both at Arras and Labasse.

VIII

CAPTURED BELGIUM AND ITS GOVERNOR GENERAL

"The Governor General will receive you at four," said Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann, explaining things; "I shall accompany you."

As we had just come up from the front around Lille, the only clothes we had were those on our backs; and to Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann's officer's boots and my puttees, the mud of the trenches still clung in yellow cakes. Hardly the most proper clothes in which to meet King Albert's successor; but in field gray we had to go. Through the busy streets, up the long hill, to the Government buildings, we skirted the edge of that rectangle of stone buildings where Belgian officials used to conduct Belgian affairs. At the corner we turned, passing up the Rue de la Loi, where King Albert's palace frowns down upon two black and white striped Prussian sentry boxes, and then entered the Belgian War Ministry building. A German private ushered us up a flight of marble stairs to an antechamber, where we waited, while an adjutant disappeared through a pretentious white double door, to tell His Excellency that we had come. I noticed two marble busts in that antechamber, white busts on pedestals in opposite corners--the King and Queen of Belgium, and I wondered if they ever visited this city again, would it be an official visit, the guests of another nation, or a home-coming.

The Governor General received me in a dainty, Louis Quinze room, done in rose and French gray, and filled incongruously with delicate chairs and heavy brocaded curtains, a background which you felt precisely suited His Excellency. In the English newspapers, which by the way, the Germans do not childishly bar from the Berlin cafés, I had read of His Excellency as the "Iron Fist," or the "Heavy Heel," and I rather expected to see a heavy, domineering man. Instead, a slender, stealthy man in the uniform of a general, rose from behind a tapestry-topped table, revealing as he did, a slight stoop in his back, and held out a long-fingered hand. As I looked at Governor General von Bissing I saw that he wore the second class of the Iron Cross and no other decorations; at the same time I imagined he had been awarded about ten orders which he could have strung across his narrow chest. His black, glistening, almost artificial-looking hair, was brushed back tight over his head, and when I noticed his eyes, I saw that they were of bluish gray, heavy and unrelenting, pouched and lined, glowing in a way that either made you want to turn away, or else stare, fascinated by their powers. He struck me as being rather longer headed than most Germans, and his straggly grayish mustache only half hid the thin, straight, ruthless lines of his mouth; but when you tried to study his face, you could discern only two things, features thin, but intensely strong, pierced with two points of fire, sunken, glowering eyes. And I knew then what they meant by the Iron Fist.

General von Bissing spoke no English. Somehow I imagined him to be one of those old patriots who would never learn the language simply because it was English. Through Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann I asked the Governor General what Germany was doing towards the reconstruction of Belgium. I asked Herrmann to explain to him--for I dreaded attempting my ungrammatical German--that America, when I had left it, was under the impression that Belgium was a land utterly laid waste by the German armies; in America the common belief was that the German military Government meant tyranny; what was Germany doing for Belgium?

"I think," replied Governor General von Bissing, "that we are doing everything that can be done under the circumstances. Those farmlands which Lieutenant Herrmann tells me you saw, coming up from Lille to Brussels, were planted by German soldiers and in the spring they will be harvested by our soldiers. Belgium has not been devastated, and its condition has been grievously misstated, as you have seen. You must remember that the armies have passed back and forth across it--German, Belgian, English, and French, but I think you have seen that only in the paths of these armies has the countryside suffered. Where engagements were not fought or shots fired, Belgium is as it was. There has been no systematic devastation for the purpose of intimidating the people. You will learn this if you go all over Belgium. As for the cities, we are doing the best we can to encourage business. Of course, with things the way they are now, it is difficult. I can only ask you to go down one of the principal business streets here, the Rue de la Neuve for instance, and price the articles that you find in the shops, and compare them with the Berlin prices. The merchants of Brussels are not having to sacrifice their stock by cutting prices, and equally important, there are people buying. I can unhesitatingly say that things are progressing favorably in Belgium."

And although I felt General von Bissing could be a hard master, he impressed me like a good many hard masters, as being thoroughly sincere. Thinking of Schleswig, I asked him if he thought that Belgium could ever be Germanized. Suppose after the peace treaty was signed that Germany decided to keep Belgium, would the Empire ever be able to assimilate the new people? Before replying, General von Bissing appeared to be thinking hard; he dropped his eyes and hesitated long, finally saying: "I do not think that it is the time for me to discuss this point."

The conversation turned upon Belgian and English relations before this war. The Governor General mentioned the documentary evidence found in the archives in Brussels, and proving an understanding between these countries against Germany. He talked briefly about the point that the subjects of King Albert had been betrayed into the hands of English financiers, and then laconically said: "The people of Belgium are politically undisciplined children. You may know of the high percentage of criminality in Belgium. You may have heard that the slums of Antwerp are considered the worst in the world. Apparently education was never designed in Belgium for the mass of the people. They knew nothing, they could conjecture nothing, about what was going on between their rulers and the rulers of other countries. Even now they believe that relief is at any moment at hand. They think the English will deliver them," and the Governor General sneered. "They are the victims of subtle propaganda that generally takes the form of articles in French and neutral newspapers," and General von Bissing looked me straight in the eyes, as though to emphasize that by neutral, he meant the newspapers of the United States.

"I can understand the French doing this," he said, "because they always use the Belgians, and do not care what happens to them. It is beyond my comprehension, though, how the Government of any neutral country permits the publication of newspaper articles that can have but one effect, and that is to encourage revolt in a captured people. A country likes to call itself humanitarian, and yet it persists in allowing the publication of articles that only excite an ignorant, undisciplined people and lead them to acts of violence that must be wiped out by force," and the Governor General's mouth closed with a click.

"Do you know that the people of Brussels, whenever a strong wind carries the booming of heavy guns miles in from the front, think that French and English are going to recapture the city. Any day that we can hear the guns faintly, we know that there is an undercurrent of nervous expectancy running through the whole city. It goes down alleys, and avenues, and fills the cafés. You can see Belgians standing together whispering. Twice they actually set the date when King Albert would return.

"This excitement and unrest, and the feeling of the English coming in, is fostered and encouraged by the articles in French and neutral newspapers that are smuggled in. I do not anticipate any uprising among the Belgians, although the thoughtless among them have encouraged it. An uprising is a topic of worry in our councils. It could do us no harm. We could crush it out like that," and Von Bissing snapped his thin fingers, "but if only for the sake of these misled and betrayed people, all seditious influences should cease."

I asked the Governor General about the attitude of officials of the Belgian Government, who were being used by the Germans in directing affairs.

"My predecessor, General von der Gotz," he replied, "informed me that the municipal officials in Brussels and most Belgian cities, showed a good cooperative spirit from the start. The higher officials were divided, some refusing flatly to deal with the German administration. I do not blame these men, especially the railway officials, for I can see their viewpoint. In these days, railway roads and troop trains were inseparable, and if those Belgian railway officials had helped us, they would have committed treason against their country. There was no need, though, for the Post Office officials to hold out, and only lately they have come around. Realizing, however, that without their department, the country would be in chaos, the officials of the Department of Justice immediately cooperated with us. To-day the Belgian civil courts try all ordinary misdemeanors and felonies. Belgium penal law still exists and is administered by Belgians. However, all other cases are tried by a military tribunal, the _Feld Gericht_."

I asked Excellence von Bissing if there was much need for this military tribunal.

"We have a few serious cases," he said; "occasionally there is a little sedition, but for the most part it is only needle pricks. They are quiet now. They know why," and slowly shaking his head, Von Bissing, who is known as the sternest disciplinarian in the entire German army, smiled.

And then I urged the most important question--Belgian neutrality.

"It would have been a very grave mistake," said Von Bissing, slowly, "not to have invaded Belgium. It would have been an unforgivable military blunder. I justified the invading of Belgium on absolutely military grounds. What other grounds are there worth while talking about when a nation is in a war for its existence? If we had not sent our troops into Belgium the English would have landed their entire expeditionary army at Antwerp, and cut our line of communication. How do I know that? Simply because England would have been guilty of the grossest blunder if she had not done that, and the man who is in charge of England's army has never been known as a blunderer. It was the only way. Subsequent events, the finding of diplomatic documents, have proven the English agreements with Belgium. In the captured fortresses at Namur, Lüttich (Liége), and Antwerp, we found stores of French guns and ammunition. Germany would have been much worse off than she is to-day if she had not gone through Belgium. A great state like Germany could not permit holding back at such a time in its history."

This led us into talking about the situation in America. We talked about the burning of Louvain, which I later saw and found to be comparatively little damaged, roughly, but one-twelfth was destroyed, and I saw the paintings that German officers risked their lives in fire to save. We talked about Louvain and then about General Sherman's march from Atlanta to the sea, when a whole state was burned and laid waste.

"The truth will come out," said Von Bissing slowly. "Your country is renowned for fair play. You will be fair to Germany, I know. Your American Relief Commission is doing excellent work. It is in the highest degree necessary. At first the German army had to use the food they could get by foraging in Belgium, for the country does not begin to produce the food it needs for its own consumption, and there were no great reserves that our troops could use. But the German army is not using any of Belgian food now."

I asked the Governor General if the Germans had not been very glad that America was sending over food. I told him that when I left New York, the number of unemployed there was huge--largest, so Mayor Mitchell had said, in the city's history--and that some Americans were so unsentimental as to think that this food for Belgium might better be distributed in their own country. This seemed to disturb General von Bissing.

"It is most important," he repeated, "that America regularly sends provisions to Belgium. Your country should feel very proud of the good it has done here." Somehow I had the idea that His Excellency was indulging in quiet amusement at my expense. He impressed me as being far too clever to make such a statement in entire sincerity. "I welcome the American Relief Committee," he said. "We are working in perfect harmony. Despite reports to the contrary, we never have had any misunderstanding. Through the American Press, please thank your people for their kindness to Belgium."

General von Bissing held out his hand; the interview was over. In the next room I saw on a little table a pot of tea and a plate of little cakes. I wondered if the Governor General really ate cakes. I bowed my way out of the rose and French gray room and walked with Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann down the marble stairs. I was thinking of a story that I had heard of His Excellency. A few years ago he was having great difficulty in keeping orderlies; they all found him too strict. Finally he obtained a new orderly, a grim looking individual.

"What were you before you entered the army?" Von Bissing asked him.

"A lion tamer," replied the orderly.

"Good," exclaimed Von Bissing, "you stay."

Try to think of a slender, slightly stooped military man, perhaps a trifle foppish, with his sleek, brilliantined hair, sitting in a delicate gold and tapestried chair, and directing the affairs of a captured nation. His face is sallow, and his sunken eyes always seemed to smolder, and his mouth is so thin and straight, as almost to be cruel, but you feel that he is absolutely fair, and it is hard to think of him as breaking his word. I cannot imagine Governor General von Bissing doing that. I think he is ruthlessly honest, ruthlessly just, hard, a rigid disciplinarian, and scrupulously fair, and if reprisals are necessary no sentimentality will stay his hand. "They are only needle pricks," he says of seditious Belgians,--"they know why." The ideal man for a military government, his is an Iron Fist; but if the fist were of softer stuff, all Belgium would be in chaos.

IX

PRISONERS OF WAR

Promptly at two o'clock the gray army automobile emblazoned with Prussian eagles in black, left Wilhelmstrasse. Half an hour's run--and the drivers of those army motor cars know not a speed law--and we were at garrison headquarters on Doeberitz Road. One saw a fence of white palings, a lawn surprisingly green for winter, symmetrically laid out among gray gravel walks that lead up to a square business-like house of brown stucco, over the door of which was printed "_Kaiser Wilhelm Soldatenheim, 1914_." Off to the right loomed a long weather-beaten line of huge tents, one of which was open, showing the tail of a Taube monoplane. Across the road behind us, unpainted barrack sheds and soldiers showed through a grove of pine trees, and then while Dr. Roediger of the Foreign Office, my escort, went to find Major General von Loebell, commanding the entire Doeberitz camp and garrison, I heard something that reminded me of the riveting machines on the skyscrapers in New York. Imagine your state of mind with twenty riveting machines, all making their infernal clatter at the same time, only each capable of double the usual noise. That is the sound that suddenly broke in upon us at Doeberitz Road, and off in the fields we saw battery after battery of machine gun men, learning their deadly trade. While we waited Dr. Roediger's return, more guns broke loose, and by the time the General came, he could scarcely make himself heard. He began by explaining from his military point of view the Doeberitz camp.