Chapter VII: Part 7

As our car ran up a gentle hill we noticed two soldiers driving a load of manure. This seemed a pretty prosaic, even humiliating, business, in a poetic sense, for the brave _poilus_, veterans of Lorraine’s great battle. But Father Joffre is a true Frenchman of his time. Why shouldn’t the soldiers help the farmers whose sons are away at the front and perhaps helping farmers back of some other point of the line?

Over the crest of the hill we came on long lines of soldiers bearing timbers and fascines for trench building, which explained why some of the villages were empty. A fascine is something usually made of woven branches which will hold dirt in position. The woven wicker cases for shells which the German artillery uses and leaves behind when it has to quit the field in a hurry, make excellent fascines, and a number that I saw were of this ready-made kind. After carrying shells for killing Frenchmen they were to protect the lives of Frenchmen. Near by other soldiers were turning up a strip of fresh earth against the snow, which looked like a rip in the frosting of a chocolate cake.

“How do you like this kind of war?” we asked. It is the kind that irrigationists and subway excavators do.

“We’ve grown to be very fond of it,” was the answer. “It is a cultivated taste, which becomes a passion with experience. After you have been shot at in the open you want all the earth you can get between you and the bullets.”

Now we alighted from the automobile and went forward on foot. We passed some eight lines of trenches before we came to the one where we were to stop. A practised military eye had gone over all that ground; a practised military hand had laid out each trench. After the work was done the civilian’s eye could grasp the principle. If one trench were taken, the men knew exactly how to fall back on the next, which commanded the ground they had left. The trenches were not continuous. There were open spaces left purposely. All that front was literally locked, and double and triple locked, with trenches. Break through one barred door and there is another and another confronting you. Considering the millions of burrowing and digging and watching soldiers, it occurred to one that if a _marmite_ (saucepan) came along and buried our little party, our loss would not be as much noticed as if a piece of coping from a high building had fallen and extinguished us on Broadway, which would be a relatively novel way of dying. Being killed in war had long ceased to be a novelty on the continent of Europe.

We seemed in a dead world, except for the leisurely, hoarse, muffled reports of a French gun in the woods on either side of the open space where we stood. Through our glasses we could see quite clearly the line of the German front trench, which was in the outskirts of a village on higher ground than the French. Not a human being was visible. Both sides were watching for any move of the other and meanwhile lying tight under cover. By day they were marooned. All supplies and all reliefs of men who are to take their turn in front go out by night.

There were no men in the trench where we stood; those who would man it in case of danger were in the adjoining woods, where they had only to cut down saplings and make shelters to be as comfortable as in a winter resort camp in the Adirondacks. Any minute they might receive a call-- which meant death for many. But they were used to that, and their card games went on none the less merrily.

“No farther?” we asked our major.

“No farther!” he said. “This is risk enough for you. It looks very peaceful, but the enemy could toss in some _marmites_ if it pleased him.” Perhaps he was exaggerating the risk for the sake of a realistic effect on the sightseers. No matter! In time one was to have risks enough in trenches. It was on such an occasion as this, on another part of the French line, that two correspondents slipped away from the officers conducting them, though their word of honour was given not to do so--which adds another reason for military suspicion of the press. The officers rang up the nearest telephone which connected with the front trenches, the batteries, and regimental and brigade headquarters, to apprehend two men of such-and-such description. They were taken as easily as a one-eyed, one-eared man, with a wooden leg and red hair, would be in trying to get out of police headquarters when the doorman had his Bertillon photograph and measurements to go by.

That battery hidden from aerial observation in the thick forest kept up its slow firing at intervals. It was “bothering” one of the German trenches. Fiendish the consistent regularity with which it kept on, and so easy for the gunners. They had only to slip in a shell, swing a breechlock home, and pull a lanyard. The German guns did not respond because they could not locate the French battery. They may have known that it was somewhere in the forest, but firing at two or three hundred acres of wood on the chance of reaching some guns heavily protected by earth and timbering was about like tossing a pea from the top of the Washington Monument on the chance of hitting a four-leafed clover on the lawn below.

Our little group remained, not standing in the trench, but back of it in full relief for some time; for the German gunners refused to play for realism by sending us a _marmite_. Probably they had seen us through the telescope at the start and concluded we weren’t worth a shot. In the first months of the war such a target would have received a burst of shells, for the fun of seeing us scatter, if nothing else. Then ammunition was plentiful and the sport of shooting had not lost its zest; but in these winter days orders were not to waste ammunition. The factories must manufacture a supply ahead for the summer campaign. There must be fifteen dollars’ worth of target in sight, say, for the smallest shell costs that; and the shorter you are of shells the more valuable the target must be. Besides, firing a cannon had become as commonplace a function to both French and German gunners as getting up to put another stick of wood in the stove or going to open the door to take a letter from the postman.

We had glimpses of other trenches; but this is not the place in this book to write of trenches. We shall see trenches till we are weary of them later. We are going direct to Gerbeviller, which was--emphasis on the past tense--a typical little Lorraine town of fifteen hundred inhabitants. Look where you would now, as we drove along the road, and you saw churches without steeples, houses with roofs standing on sections of walls, houses smashed into bits.

“I saw no such widespread destruction as this in Belgium!” I exclaimed.

“There was no such fighting in Belgium,” was the answer.

Of course not, except in the southwestern corner, where the armies still face each other.

“Not all the damage was done by the Germans,” the major explained. “Naturally, when they were pouring in death from the cover of a house, our guns let drive at that house,” he went on. “The owners of the houses that were hit by our shells are rather proud--proud of our marksmanship, proud that we gave the unwelcome guest a hot pill to swallow.”

For ten days the Bavarians had Gerbeviller. They tore it to pieces before they got it, then burned the remains because they said the population sniped at them. All the orgy of Louvain was repeated here, unchronicled to our people at home. The church looks like a Swiss cheese from shell-holes. Its steeple was bound to be an observation post, reasoned the Germans; so they poured shells into it. But the brewery had a tall chimney which was an even better lookout, and the brewery is the one building unharmed in the town. The Bavarians knew that they would need that for their commissariat. For a Bavarian will not fight without his beer. The land was littered with barrels after they had gone. I saw some in trenches occupied by Bavarian reserves not far back of where their firing-line had been.

“However, the fact that the brewery is intact and the church in ruins does not prove that a brewery is better than a church. It only proves which is the Lord’s side in this war,” said Sister Julie. But I get ahead of my story.

In the middle of the main street were half a dozen smoke-blackened houses which remained standing, an oasis in the sea of destruction, with doors and windows intact, facing gaps where doors and windows had been. We entered with a sense of awe of the chance which had spared these buildings.

“Sister Julie!” the major called.

A short, sturdy nun of about sixty years answered cheerily and appeared in the dark hall. She led us into the sitting-room, where she spryly placed chairs for our little party. She was smiling; her eyes were sparkling with a hospitable and kindly interest in us, while I felt, on my part, that thrill of curiosity that one always has when he meets some celebrated person for the first time--a curiosity no less keen than if I were to meet Barbara Frietchie.

Through all that battle of ten days, with the cannon never silent day or night, with shells screaming overhead and crashing into houses; through ten days of thunder and lightning and earthquake, she and her four sister associates remained in Gerbeviller. When the town was fired they moved from one building to another. They nursed both wounded French and Germans, also wounded townspeople who could not flee with the others.

“You were not frightened? You did not think of going away?” she was asked.

“Frightened?” she answered. “I had not time to think of that. Go away? How could I when the Lord’s work had come to me?”

President Poincaré went in person to give her the Legion of Honour, the first given to a woman in this war; so rarely given to a woman, and here bestowed with the love of a nation. Sister Marie was in the kitchen at the time, very busy cooking the meal for the sick whom the sisters are still caring for. So Sister Julie took the President of France into the kitchen to meet Sister Marie, quite as she would take you or me. A human being is simply a human being to Sister Julie, to be treated courteously; and great men may not cause a meal for the sick to burn. After the complexity of French politics, President Poincaré was anything but unfavourably impressed by the incident.

“He was such a little man, I could not believe at first that he could be President,” she said. “I thought that the president of France would be a big man. But he was very agreeable and, I am sure, very wise. Then there were other men with him, a Monsieur de-de-Deschanel, who was president of something or other in Paris, and Monsieur du-du--yes, that was it, Du Bag. He also is president of something in Paris. They were very agreeable, too.”

“And your Legion of Honour?”

“Oh, my medal that M. le Président gave me! I keep that in a drawer. I do not wear it every day when I am in my working clothes.”

“Have you ever been to Paris?”

“No, monsieur.”

“They will make a great ado over you when you go.”

“I must stay in Gerbeviller. If I stayed during the fighting and when the Germans were here, why should I leave now? Gerbeviller is my home. There is much to do here, and there will be more to do when the people who were driven away return.”

These nuns saw their townspeople stood up against a wall and shot; they saw their townspeople killed by shells. The cornucopia of war’s horrors was emptied at their door. And women of a provincial town, who had led peaceful, cloistered lives, they did not blench or falter in the presence of ghastliness which only men are supposed to have the stoicism to witness.

What feature of the nightmare had held most vividly in Sister Julie’s mind? It is hard to say; but the one which she dwelt on was about the boy and the cow. The invaders, when they came in, ordered that no inhabitant leave his house, on pain of death. A boy of ten took his cow to pasture in the morning as usual. He did not see anything wrong in that. The cow ought to go to pasture. And he was shot, for he broke a military regulation. He might have been a spy using the cow as a blind. War does not bother to discriminate. It kills.

Sister Julie can enjoy a joke, particularly on the Germans, and her cheerful smile and genuine laugh are a lesson to all people who draw long faces in time of trouble and weep over spilt milk. A buoyant temperament and unshaken faith carried her through her ordeal. Though her hair is white, youth’s optimism and confidence in the future and the joy of victory for France overshadowed the present. The town and church would be rebuilt; children would play in the streets again; there was a lot of the Lord’s work to do yet.

In every word and thought she is French--French in her liveliness of spirit and quickness of comprehension; wholly French there on the borderland of Germany. If we only went to the outskirts of the town, she reminded us, we could see how the soldiers of her beloved France fought and why she was happy to have remained in Gerbeviller to welcome them back.

In sight of that intact brewery and that wreck of a church is a gentle slope of open field, cut by a road. Along the crest were many mounds as thick as the graves of a cemetery, and by the side of the road was a temporary monument above a big mound, surrounded by a sanded walk and a fence. The dead had been thickest at this point, and here they had been laid in a vast grave. The surviving comrades had made that monument; and, in memory of what the dead had fought for, the living said that they were not yet ready to quit fighting.

Standing on this crest, you were a thousand yards away from the edge of a woods. German aeroplanes had seen the French massing for a charge under the cover of that crest; but French aeroplanes could not see what was in the woods. Rifles and machine guns poured a spray of lead across the crest when the French appeared. But the French, who were fighting for Sister Julie’s town, would not stop their rush at first. They kept on, as Pickett’s men did when the Federal guns riddled their ranks with grapeshot. This accounts for many of the mounds being well beyond the crest. The Germans made a mistake in firing too soon. They would have made a heavier killing if they had allowed the charge to go farther. After the French fell back, for two days and nights their wounded lay out on that field without water or food, between the two forces, and if their comrades approached to give succour the machine guns blazed more death, because the Germans did not want to let the French dig a trench on the crest. After two days the French forced the Germans out of the woods by hitting them from another point.

We went over the field of another charge half a mile away. There a French regiment put a stream with a single bridge at their back-- which requires some nerve--and charged a German trench on rising ground. They took it. Then they tried to take the woods beyond. Before they were checked twenty-two officers out of a total of thirty fell. But they did not give up the ground they had won. They burrowed into the earth in a trench of their own, and when help came they put the Germans out of the woods.

The men of this regiment were not first line, but the older fellows-- men of the type we stopped to chat with in the village--hastening to the front when the war began. Their officers were mostly reserves, too, who left their civil occupations at the call of arms. One of the eight survivors of the thirty was with us, a stocky little man, hardly looking the hero or the soldier. I expressed my admiration, and he answered quietly: “It was for France!” How often I have heard that as a reason for courage or sacrifice! The brave enemies of France have learned to respect it, though they had a poor opinion of the French army before the war began. “That railroad bridge yonder the Germans left intact when they occupied it because they were certain that they would need it to supply their troops when they took the Gap of Mirecourt and surrounded the French army,” I was told. “However, they had to go in such a hurry that they failed to mine it. They must have fired five hundred shells afterward to destroy it, in vain.”

It was dusk when we entered the city of Lunéville for the second time. Whole blocks lay in ruins; others only showed where shells had crashed into walls. It is hard to estimate just how much damage shell-fire has done to a town, for you see the effects only where they have struck on the street sides and not when they strike in the centre of the block. But Lunéville has certainly suffered as much as Louvain, only we did not hear about it. Grim, sad Louvain, with its sentries among the ruins! Happy, triumphant Lunéville, with its _poilus_ instead of German sentries!

“We are going to meet the mayor,” said the major.

First we went to his office. But that was a mistake. We were invited to his house, which was a fine, old eighteenth-century building. If you could transport it to New York some arms-and-ammunition millionaire would give half a million dollars for it. The hallway was smoke-blackened and a burnt spot showed where the enemy had tried to set it on fire before evacuating the town. An ascent of a handsome old staircase and we were in rooms with gilded mirrors and carved old mantels, where we were introduced to His Honour, a lively man of forty.

“I have been in Amerique two months. So much English do I speak. No more!” said the mayor merrily, and introduced us in turn to his wife, who spoke not even “so much” English, but French as fast and as piquantly as only a Frenchwoman can. Her only son, who was seventeen, was going up with the 1916 class of recruits very soon. He was a sturdy youngster; a type of Young France who will make the France of the future.

“You hate to see him go?” I asked.

“It is for France!” she answered.

We had cakes and tea and a merrier--at least, a more heartfelt--party than at any mayor’s reception in time of peace. Everybody talked. For the French do know how to talk, when they have not turned grim, silent soldiers. Foreigners say we do. Maybe it is a democratic weakness. I heard story on story of the German occupation, and how the mayor was put in jail and held as hostage, and what a German general said to him when he was brought in as a prisoner to be interrogated in his own house, which the general occupied as headquarters.

Among the guests was the wife of a French general in her Red Cross cap. She might see her husband once a week by meeting him on the road between the city and the front. He could not afford to be any farther from his post, lest the Germans spring a surprise. The extent of the information which he gave her was that all went well for France. Father Joffre plays no favourites in his discipline.

Happy, happy Lorraine in the midst of its ruins! Happy because her adored tricolour floats over those ruins.

XIV

A ROAD OF WAR I KNOW

Victoria Station--The “tenth man”--Leavetaking--Roar of London--
British habits--Everywhere khaki--System at the French port--
The correspondents’ home--Strict censorship--The one link
with the reading public--Necessity for censorship--Freedom
of the press--“Jig-saw” intelligence experts--The run of
the trenches--Exchange of slang--Organisation of General
Headquarters--A business institution--A colossal dynamo.

Other armies go to war across the land, but the British go across the sea. They take the Channel ferry in order to reach the front. Theirs is the home road of war to me; the road of my affections, where men speak my mother tongue. It begins on the platform at Victoria Station, with the khaki of officers and men returning from leave, relieved by the warmer colours of women who have come to say good-bye to those they love. In five hours from the time of starting one may be across that ribbon of salt water, which means much in isolation and little in distance, and in the trenches.

That veteran regular--let us separate him from the crowd,--is a type I have often seen, a type that has become as familiar as one’s neighbours in one’s own town. We will call him the tenth man. That is, of every ten men who went to the front a year ago in his battalion, nine are gone. All of the hardships and all of the terrors of war he has witnessed: men dropped neatly by a bullet; men mangled by shells.

His khaki is spotless, thanks to his wife, who has dressed in her best for the occasion. Terrible as war itself, but new, that hat of hers, which probably represented a good deal of looking into windows and pricing; and her gown of the cheapest material, drooping from her round shoulders, is the product of the poor dressmaking skill of hands which show only too well who does all the housework at home. The children, a boy of four and a girl of seven, are in their best, too, with faces scrubbed till they shine.

You will see like scenes in stations at home when the father has found work in a distant city and is going on ahead to get established before the family follow him. Such incidents are common in civil life; they became common at Victoria Station. What is common has no significance, editors say.

When the time came to go through the gate, the veteran picked the boy up in his arms and pressed him very close and the little girl looked on wonderingly, while the mother was not going to make it any harder for the father by tears. “Good-bye, Tom!” she said. So his name was Tom, this tenth man.

I spoke with him. His battalion was full with recruits. It had been kept full. But, considering the law of chance, what about the surviving one out of an original ten?

“Yes, I’ve had my luck with me,” he said. “Probably my turn will come. Maybe I’ll never see the wife and kids again.”

The morning roar of London had begun. That station was a small spot in the city. There were not enough officers and men taking the train to make up a day’s casualty list; for ours was only a small party returning from leave. The transports, unseen, carried the multitudes. Wherever one had gone in England he had seen soldiers and wherever he went in France he was to see still more soldiers. England had become an armed camp; and England plodded on, “muddled” on, preparing, ever preparing, to forge in time of war the thunderbolt for war which was undreamed of in time of peace when other nations were forging their thunderbolts.

Still the recruiting posters called for more soldiers and the casualty lists appeared day after day with the regularity of want advertisements. Imagine eight million men under arms in the United States and you have the equivalent to what England did by the volunteer system. The more there were the more pessimistic became the British press. Pessimism brought in recruits. Bad news made England take another deep breath of energising determination. It was the last battle which was decisive. She had always won that. She would win it again.

They talk of war aboard the Pullman, after officers have waved their hands out of the windows to their wives, quite as if they were going to Scotland for a week-end instead of back to the firing-line. British phlegm that is called. No, British habit, I should say, the race-bred, individualistic quality of never parading emotions in public, the instinct of keeping things which are one’s own to one’s self. Personally, I like this way. In one form or another, as the hedges fly by the train windows, the subject is always war. War creeps into golf, or shooting, or investments, or politics. Only one suggestion quite frees the mind from the omnipresent theme: Will the Channel be smooth? The Germans have nothing to do with that. It is purely a matter of weather. Bad sailors are more worried about the crossing than about the shell-fire they are going to face.

With bad sailors or good sailors, the significant thing which had become a commonplace was that the Channel was a safely-guarded British sea lane. In all my crossings I was never delayed. For England had one thunderbolt ready forged when the war began. The only submarines, or destroyers, or dirigibles that one saw were hers. Antennæ these of the great fleet waiting with the threat of stored lightning ready to be flashed from gun-mouths; a threat as efficacious as action, in nowise mysterious or subtle, but definite as steel and powder, speaking the will of a people in their chosen field of power, felt over all the seas of the world, coast of Maine and the Carolinas no less than Labrador. Thousands of transports had come and gone, carrying hundreds of thousands of soldiers and food for men and guns to India; and on the highroad to India, to Australia, to San Francisco, shipping went its way undisturbed by anything that dives or flies.

The same white hospital ships lying in that French harbour; the same line of grey, dusty-looking ambulances parked on the quay! Everybody in that one-time sleepy, week-end tourist resort seems to be in uniform; to have something to do with war. All surroundings become those of war long before you reach the front. That knot of civilians, waiting their turn for another examination of the same kind as that on the other side of the Channel, have shown good reasons for going to Paris to the French consul in London, or they might not proceed even this far on the road of war. They seem outcasts--a humble lot in the variegated costumes of the civil world--outcasts from the disciplined world in its pattern garb of khaki. Their excuse for not being in the game is that they are too old or that they are women. For now the war has sucked into its vortex all who are strong enough to fight.

A traveller might be a spy; hence all this red tape for the many to catch the one in its mesh. Even this red tape seems now to have become normal. War is normal. It would seem strange to cross the Channel in a time of peace; the harbour would not look like itself with civilians not having to show their passports, and without the white hospital ships, and the white-bearded landing-officer at the foot of the gangway, and the board held up with lists of names of officers who have telegrams waiting for them.

For the civilians a yellow card of disembarkation and for the military a white card. The officers and soldiers walk off at once and the queue of civilians waits. One civilian with a white card, who belongs to no regiment, who is not even a chaplain or a nurse, puzzles the landing-officer for a moment. But there is something to go with it-- a correspondent’s licence and a letter from a general who looks after such things. They show that you “belong”; and if you don’t belong on the road of war you will not get far. As well try to walk past the doorman and take a seat in the United States Senate chamber during a session.

Most precious that magical piece of paper. I happen to be the only American with one, unless he is in the fighting line--which is one sure way to get to the front. The price of all the opera boxes at the Metropolitan will not buy it; and it is the passport to the welcoming smile from an army chauffeur whom I almost regard as my own. But its real value appears at the outskirts of the city. There the dead line is drawn; there the sheep are finally separated from the goats by a French sentry guarding the winding passageway between some carts, which have been in the same place in the road for months.

The car spins over the broad, hard French road, in a land where for many miles you see no signs of war, until it turns into the grounds of a small château opposite a village church. The proprietor of a dry-goods store in a neighbouring city spends his summers here; but this summer he is in town, because the press wanted a place to live and he was good enough to rent us his country place. So this is home, where the five British and one American correspondents live and mess. The expense of our cars costs us treble all the rest of our expenses. They take us where we want to go. We go where we please, but we may not write what we please. We see something like a thousand times more than we can tell. The conditions are such as to make a news reporter throw up his hands and faint. But if he had his unbridled way, one day he might feel the responsibility for the loss of some hundreds of British soldiers’ lives.

“It may be all right for war correspondents, but it is a devil of a poor place for a newspaper man,” as one editor said. Yet it is the only place where you can really know anything about the war.

We become a part of the machinery of the great organisation that encloses us in its regular processes. No one in his heart envies the press officer, who holds the blue pencil over us. He has to “take it both going and coming.” He labours on our behalf and sometimes we labour with him. The staff are willing enough to let us watch the army at work, but they do not care whether or not we write about their war; he wants us both to see it and to write about it. He tells us some big piece of news, and then says: “That is for yourselves; you may not write it.”

People do not want to read about the correspondents, of course. They want to read what the correspondents have to tell about the war; but the conditions of our work are interesting because we are the link between the army and the reading public. All that it learns from actual observation of what the army is doing comes through us.

We may not give the names of regiments and brigades until weeks after a fight, because that will tell the enemy what troops were engaged; we may not give the names of officers, for that is glorifying one when possibly another did his duty equally well. It is the anonymity of the struggle that makes it all seem distant and unreal--till the telegram comes from the War Office to say that the one among the millions who is dear to you is dead or wounded. Otherwise, it is a torment of unidentified elements behind a curtain, which is parted for an announcement of a gain or a loss, or to give out a list of the fallen.

The world wants to read that Peter Smith led the King’s Own Particular Fusiliers in a charge. It may not know Peter Smith, but his name and that of his regiment make the information seem definite. The statement that a well-known millionaire yesterday gave a million dollars to charity, or that a man in a checked suit swam from the Battery to Coney Island, is not convincing; nor is the fact that one private unnamed held back the Germans with bombs in the traverse of a trench for hours until help came. We at the front, however, do know the names; we meet the officers and men. Ours is the intimacy which we may not interpret except in general terms.

Every article, every despatch, every letter, passes through the censor’s hand. But we are never told what to write. The liberty of the press is too old an institution in England for that. Always we may learn why an excision is made. The purpose is to keep information from the enemy. It is not like fighting Boers or Filipinos, this war of walls of men who can turn the smallest bit of information to advantage.

Intelligence officers speak of their work as piecing together the parts of a jig-saw puzzle. What seems a most innocent fact by itself may furnish the bit which gives the figure in the picture its face. It does not follow because you are an officer that you know what may and what may not be of service to the enemy.

A former British officer who had become a well-known military critic, in an account of a visit to the front mentioned having seen a battle from a certain church tower. Publication of the account was followed by a tornado of shell-fire that killed and wounded many British soldiers. Only a staff specialist, trained in intelligence work and in constant touch with the intelligence department, can be a safe censor. At the same time, he is the best friend of the correspondent. He knows what is harmless and what may not be allowed. He wants the press to have as much as possible. For the more the public knows about its soldiers, the better the _morale_ of the people, which reflects itself in the _morale_ of the army.

The published casualty lists giving the names of officers and men and their battalions is a means of causing casualties. From a prisoner taken the enemy learns what battalions were present at a given fight; he adds up the numbers reported killed and wounded and ascertains what the fight cost the enemy and, in turn, the effect of the fire from his side. But the British public demanded to see the casualty lists and the British press were allowed to gratify the desire. They appeared in the newspapers, of course, days after the nearest relative of the dead or wounded man had received official notification from the War Office.

Officers’ letters from the front, so freely published earlier in the war, amazed experienced correspondents by their unconscious indiscretions. The line officer who had been in a fight told all that he saw. Twenty officers doing the same along a stretch of front and the jig-saw experts, plus what information they had from spies, were in clover. Editors said: “But these men are officers. They ought to know when they are imparting military secrets.”

Alas, they do not know! It is not to be expected that they should. Their business is to fight; the business of other experts is to safeguard information. For a long time the British army kept correspondents from the front on the principle that the business of a correspondent must be to tell what ought not to be told. Yet they were to learn that the accredited correspondent, an expert at his profession, working in harmony with the experts of the staff, let no military secrets pass.

At our mess we get the Berlin dailies promptly. Soon after the Germans are reading the war correspondence from their own front we are reading it, and laughing at jokes in their comic papers and at cartoons which exhibit John Bull as a stricken old ogre and Britannia who Rules the Waves with the corners of her mouth drawn down to the bottom of her chin, as she sees the havoc that von Tirpitz is making with submarines which do not stop us from receiving our German jokes regularly across the Channel.

Doubtless the German messes get their _Punch_ and the London illustrated weeklies regularly. In the time that it took the English daily with the account of the action seen from the church tower to reach Berlin and the news to be wired to the front, the German guns made use of the information. Neutral little Holland is the telltale of both sides; the ally and the enemy of all intelligence corps. Scores of experts in jig-saw puzzles on both sides seize every scrap of information and piece them together. Each time that one gets a bit from a newspaper he is for a sharper press censorship on his side and a more liberal one on the other.

We six correspondents have our insignia, as must every one who is free to move along the lines. By a glance you may tell everybody’s branch and rank in that complicated and disciplined world, where no man acts for himself, but always on some one else’s orders.

“Don’t you know who they are? They are the correspondents,” I heard a soldier say. “D. Chron., that’s the _Daily Chronicle_; M. Post, that’s the _Morning Post_; D. Mail, that’s the _Daily Mail_. There’s one with U. S. A. What paper is that?”

“It ain’t a paper,” said another. “It’s the States--he’s a Yank!” The War Office put it on the American cousin’s arm, and wherever it goes it seems welcome. It may puzzle the gunners when the American says, “That was a peach of a shot, right across the pan!” or the infantry when he says, “It cuts no ice!” and there is no ice visible in Flanders; he speaks about typhoid to the medical corps which calls it enteric; and “fly-swatting” is a new word to the sanitarians, who are none the less busily engaged in that noble art. Lessons for the British in the “American language” while you wait! In return, the American is learning what a “stout-hearted thruster” and other phrases mean in the Simon-pure English.

The correspondents are the spoiled spectators of the army’s work; the itinerants of the road of war. Nobody sees so much as we, because we have nothing to do but to see. An officer looking at the towers of Ypres cathedral, a mile away from the trench where he was, said: “No, I’ve never been in Ypres. Our regiment has not been stationed in that part of the line.”

We have sampled all the trenches; we have studied the ruins of Ypres with an archæologist’s eye; we know the names of the estaminets of the villages, from “The Good Farmer” to “The Harvester’s Rest” and “The Good Cousin,” not to mention “The Omnibus Stop” on the Cassell Hill. Madame who keeps the hotel in the G. H. Q. town knows me so well that we wave hands to each other as I pass the door; and the clerks in a certain shop have learned that the American likes his fruit raw, instead of stewed in the English fashion, and plenty of it, especially if it comes from the South out of season, as it does from Florida or California to pampered human beings at home, who, if they could see as much of this war as I have seen, would appreciate what a fortunate lot they are to have not a ribbon of salt water but a broad sea full of it, and the British navy, too, between them and the thing on the other side of the zone of death.

G. H. Q. means General Headquarters, and B. E. F., which shows the way for your letters from England, means British Expeditionary Force. The high leading, the brains, of the army are theoretically at G. H. Q. That word theoretically is used advisedly in view of opinion at other points. An officer sent from G. H. Q. to command a brigade had not been long out before he began to talk about those confounded one-thing-and-another fellows at G. H. Q. When he was at G. H. Q., he used to talk about those confounded one-thing-and-another fellows who commanded corps, divisions, and brigades at the front. The philosophers of G. H. Q. smiled and the philosophers of the army smiled--it was the old story of the staff and the line; of the main office and the branches. But the line did the most smiling to see the new brigadier getting a taste of his own medicine.

G. H. Q. directs the whole; here every department of all that vast concern which supplies the hundreds of thousands of men and prepares for the other hundreds of thousands is focussed. The symbol of its authority is a red band around the cap, which means that you are a staff officer. No war at G. H. Q., only the driving force of war. It seems as far removed from the front as the New York office of a string of manufacturing plants.

If one follows a red-banded cap into a door he sees other officers and clerks and typewriters, and a sign which says that a department chief has his desk in the drawing-room of a private house--where he has had it for months. Go to one mess and you will hear talk about garbage pails and how to kill flies; to another, about hospitals and clearing stations for the wounded; to another, about barbed wire, sandbags, spades, timber, and galvanised iron--the engineers; to another, about guns, shells, rifles, bullets, mortars, bombs, bayonets, and high explosives--the ordnance; to another, about jam, bread, bacon, uniforms, iron rations, socks, underclothes, canned goods, fresh beef, and motor trucks--the Army Service Corps; to another, about attacks, counter-attacks, and salients, and about what the others are doing and will have to do--the operations.

The chief of staff drives the eight-horse team. He works sixteen hours a day. So do most of the others. This is how you prove to the line that you have a right to be at G. H. Q. When you get to know G. H. Q. it seems like any other business institution. Many are there who don’t want to be there; but they have been found out. They are specialists, who know how to do one thing particularly well and are kept doing it. No use of growling that you would like a “fighting job.”

G. H. Q. is the main station on the road of war, which hears the sound of the guns faintly. Beyond is the region of all the activities that it commands, up to the trenches, where all roads end and all efforts consummate. One has seen dreary, flat lands of mud and leafless trees become fair with the spring, the growing harvests reaped, and the leaves begin to fall. Always the factory of war was in the same place; the soldiers billeted in the same villages; the puffs of shrapnel smoke over the same belt of landscape; the ruins of the same villages being pounded by high explosives. Always the sound of guns; always the wastage of life, as passing ambulances, the curtains drawn, speed by, their part swiftly and covertly done. The enormity of the thing holds the imagination; its sure and orderly processes of an organised civilisation working at destruction win the admiration. There is a thrill in the courage and sacrifice and the drilled readiness of response to orders.

One is under varying spells. To-day he seems in the midst of a fantastic world, whose horror makes it impossible of realisation. To-morrow, as his car takes him along a pleasant by-road among wheat-fields where peasants are working and no soldier is in sight, it is a world of peace, and one thinks that he has mistaken the roar of a train for the distant roar of gun-fire. Again, it seems the most real of worlds, an exclusive man’s world, where nothing counts but organised material force, and all those cleanly, well-behaved men in khaki are a part of the permanent population.

One sees the war as a colossal dynamo, where force is perpetual like the energy of the sun. The war is going on forever. The reaper cuts the harvest, but another harvest comes. War feeds on itself, renews itself. Live men replace the dead. There seems no end to supplies of men. The pounding of the guns, like the roar of Niagara, becomes eternal. Nothing can stop it.

XV

TRENCHES IN WINTER

A trench must be “experienced”--Appearance of the trench--A
trench periscope--“One hundred and fifty yards away”--
Imagination at work--The dead wall opposite--Trench realism--
A genuine officer--A night excursion--General Mud--The German
flares--A house in a trench wall--Oozing walls--“A ditch in
the mud”--Discovered by a searchlight--Suspense--Arrival of
supplies--The relief and cleanliness.

The difference between trench warfare in winter and in summer is that between sleeping on the lawn in March and in July. It was in the mud and winds of March that I first saw the British front. The winds were much like the seasonal winds at home; but the Flanders mud is like no other mud, in the judgment of the British soldier. It is mixed with glue. When I returned to the front in June for a longer stay, the mud had become clouds of dust that trailed behind the automobile.

In March my eagerness to see a trench was that of one from the Western prairies to get his first glimpse of the ocean. Once I might go into a trench as often as I pleased I became “fed up” with trenches, as the British say. They did not mean much more than an alley or a railroad cut. One came to think of the average peaceful trench as a ditch where some men were eating marmalade and bully beef and looking across a field at some more men who were eating sausage and “K. K.” bread, each party taking care that the other did not see him.

Writers have served us trenches in every possible literary style that censorship will permit. Whoever “tours” one is convinced that none of the descriptions published heretofore has been adequate and writes one of his own which will be final. All agree that it is not like what they thought it was. But, despite all the descriptions, the public still fails to visualise a trench. You do not see a trench with your eyes so much as with your mind and imagination. That long line where all the powers of destruction within man’s command are in deadlock has become a symbol for something which cannot be expressed by words. No one has yet really described a shell-burst, or a flash of lightning, or Niagara Falls; and no one will ever describe a trench. He cannot put any one else there. He can only be there himself.

The first time that I looked over a British parapet was in the edge of a wood. Board walks ran across the spongy earth here and there; the doors of little shanties with earth roofs opened on to those streets, which were called Piccadilly and the Strand. I was reminded of a pleasant prospector’s camp in Alaska. Only everybody was in uniform and occasionally something whished through the branches of the trees. One looked up to see what it was and where it was going, this stray bullet, without being any wiser.

We passed along one of the walks until we came to a wall of sandbags-- simply white bags about three-quarters of the size of an ordinary pillowslip, filled with earth and laid one on top of another like bags of grain. You stood beside a man who had a rifle laid across the top of the pile. Of course, you did not wear a white hat or wave a handkerchief. One does not do that when he plays hide-and-seek.

Or, if you preferred, you might look into a chip of glass, with your head wholly screened by the wall of sandbags, which got a reflection from another chip of glass above the parapet. This is the trench periscope; the principle of all of them is the same. They have no more variety than the fashions in knives, forks and spoons on the dinner table.

One hundred and fifty yards away across a dead field was another wall of sandbags. The distance is important. It is always stated in all descriptions. One hundred and fifty yards is not much. Only when you get within forty or fifty yards have you something to brag about. Yet three hundred yards may be more dangerous than fifteen, if an artillery “hate” is on.

Look for an hour and all you see is the wall of sandbags. Not even a rabbit runs across that dead space. The situation gets its power of suggestion from the fact that there are Germans behind the other wall-- real, live Germans. They are trying to kill the British on our side and we are trying to kill them; and they are as coyly unaccommodating about putting up their heads as we are. The emotion of the situation is in the fact that a sharpshooter might send a shot at your cap; he might smash a periscope; a shell might come. A rifle cracks--that is all. Nearly every one has heard the sound, which is no different at the front than elsewhere. And the sound is the only information you get. It is not so interesting as shooting at a deer, for you can tell whether you hit him or not. The man who fires from a trench is not even certain whether he saw a German or not. He shot at some shadow or object along the crest which might have been a German head.

Thus, one must take the word of those present that there is any more life behind than in front of the sandbags. However, if you are sceptical you may have conviction by starting to crawl over the top of the British parapet. After dark the soldiers will slip over and bring your body back. It is this something you do not see, this something the imagination visualises, that convinces you that you ought to be considerate enough of posterity to write the real description of a trench. Look for an hour at that wall of sandbags and your imagination sees more and more, while your eye sees only sandbags. What does this war mean to you? There it is; only you can describe what this war means to you.

Many a soldier who has spent months in trenches has not seen a German. I boast that I have seen real Germans through my glasses. They were walking along a road back of their trenches. It was most fascinating. All the Germans I had ever seen in Germany were not half so interesting. I strained my eyes watching those wonderful beings as I might at the first visiting party from Mars to earth. There must have been at least ten out of the Kaiser’s millions.

In summer that wood had become a sylvan bower, or a pastoral paradise, or a leafy nook, as you please. The sun played through the branches in a patchwork; flowers bloomed on the dirt roofs of the shanties, and a swallow had a nest--famous swallow!--on one of the parapets. True, it was not on the front parapet; it was on the reserve. The swallow knew what he was about. He was taking a reasonable amount of risk and playing reasonably secure to get a front seat, according to the ethics of the war correspondent. The two walls of sandbags were in the same place that they had been six months previously. A little patching had been done after some shells had hit the mark, though not many had come.

For this was a quiet corner. Neither side was interested in stirring up the hornets’ nest. If a member of Parliament wished to see what trench life was like he was brought here, because it was one of the safest places for a few minutes’ look at the sandbags which Mr. Atkins stared at week in and week out. Some Conservatives, however, in the case of Radical members, would have chosen a different kind of trench to show; for example, that one which was suggested to me by the staff officer with the twinkle in his eye in my best day at the front.