Part 6

The difficulty of communication is one of the severe hardships that the German Government and people suffer. Mails to and from the empire are seized by the Allies, and if delivered at all, are so belated as to make them valueless. Only such cables as the Allies choose to pass are permitted transmission. Male Germans are not permitted to travel on the seas. So German communication is restricted to the wireless, to supposedly neutral couriers, and to submarines, both of the commercial type as the _Deutschland_, and of the war type, which have been secretly conveying important German mail to Spanish waters, where it is loaded upon friendly neutral vessels, which carry it into Spanish ports and thence forward it to America and other points. This last method has been a carefully guarded secret of the German Government. Mail sent out by Spain is not seized and censored by the Allies....

IV--A VISIT TO GENERAL LORINGHOVEN

To get the official view of the situation held by the officers of the general staff, I called on General von Freytag-Loringhoven at the general staff building in Berlin, where the great Moltke long presided. He received me in a room the distinguishing features of which were maps, not only showing the disposition of the German forces, but immense wall-sized ones on which were diagrammed the present locations of the Allies, showing their number, their commanders (designated by name and locations of headquarters), with their relative ranks indicated by little parti-coloured flags. I had just returned from the Somme, and as I saw how each of the French and British lines was clearly marked, I expressed my surprise.

The general smiled.

"Yes, our intelligence department is pretty thorough," he said, "but it is no better on the Somme than our enemy's is, for in France, where we stand on occupied soil, almost every civilian is an aid to the Allies.

"But despite that, despite all the French and English can do at the Somme," he went on, "they will never break through."...

I asked the general for his impressions of the French and British soldiers. He answered:

"The French are better soldiers. They are better schooled and drilled. They have been at it longer and they are enormously brave and sacrificing. But the British are proving their worth, too. They are all of them warlike and like to fight, but they don't know how as yet. You can't make a soldier in a few weeks or months; it takes time and patience.

"The French artillery is exceptional. The French artillery officers have always been of high repute. They are teaching much to the English and Russians, and these forces are showing a corresponding betterment.

"Because of their greater experience, I should say the French are better officered than the English. The Russian officers are a poor lot. There is no sympathy between them and their men. The men are brave enough, but are sheep-like in their lack of intelligence...."

In September, I stood in the general's field headquarters and watched the big guns drop shells all around the famous "windmill of Pozières" on the high ridge which had been taken by the British and was being used by their artillery observers, who gamely held on, although the position was anything but comfortable.

While we watched the bombardment a squadron of English fliers passed overhead. I ducked and made for the bomb-proof.

"Don't worry," said the general, "the fliers rarely bomb us. Our aviators generally leave their generals' headquarters alone, and they usually do the same by us. It is a sort of understood courtesy."...

While I stood in his observation-point with Wenninger an iron-gray quartermaster sergeant passed. He had been in the east against the Russians as well as in the west. In reply to my question as to his opinion of the schools of fighting, he answered:

"I'd rather face twenty infantry attacks from the Russians than bring up food to the first lines here (British). Their damned artillery makes it hell."

V--"AT THE SOMME, I MET VON PAPEN"

At the Somme I met Captain von Papen, the former German military attaché, who was sent home by America. After six weeks on the firing line he was made chief of staff to General Count Schweinitz, commanding the Fourth Guard Division and holding the Grevillers-Warlencourt-Ligny line. He has proved himself an efficient officer.

Captain Boy-Ed, the naval attaché, who was sent back to Germany at the same time, is now chief intelligence officer at the admiralty in Berlin. He is very bitter toward America, while von Papen is friendly. Dr. Dernburg, the other propagandist who was returned to the fatherland, is philosophical as regards his work in America, and is without rancour over his treatment. He is living in Berlin, working on housing plans for the poor, but he has lost the confidence of his Government....

All the world knows Hindenburg. Germany's Iron Man, the hero of the Masurian Swamps, a colossal wooden statue of whom stands opposite the Reichstag in the Sieges-allee, the Avenue of Victory, in Berlin's Tiergarten. But who is Ludendorff?

Ludendorff is Germany's man of mystery, the grim, inscrutable, silent man whose picture is on sale in every shop, whose name is in every mouth, but whose real personality is hidden even from his own countrymen.

Ludendorff is Hindenburg's indispensable right-hand man....

There are those who say that Ludendorff is Hindenburg's brain, and that Hindenburg's greatest successes have been planned by his silent, retiring assistant. Hindenburg, when in the mood, becomes very talkative and chatty, and at such times he often attributes his success to his assistant. There is a perfect harmony between the two; Ludendorff plans and Hindenburg decides....

On August 28 (1914) it was announced that the Russians were fleeing across the border. The news grew. Five army corps and three cavalry divisions had been annihilated. More than ninety thousand prisoners were taken. Tannenberg, one of the greatest victories of the war, had changed the whole face of affairs in the east.

There have been bigger battles and longer battles, and there have been battles of more significance in the history of the war, but there has been no other battle in which the result has been so overwhelming and complete a victory for either side.

Just what happened at Tannenberg and in the Masurian Swamps is still a secret. There have been stories that a hundred thousand men were drowned in the swamps. There have been tales of dikes released and men swept away in a swirl of rushing waters. All that is known certainly is that a Russian army disappeared.

(This American war correspondent then gives his impressions of men and events within the German Armies, telling many interesting tales of Boelcke, the German "knight of the air" who shot down thirty-eight enemy aeroplanes before he was killed in collision with one of his own German machines.)

FOOTNOTE:

[8] All numerals relate to stories herein told--not to chapters in the original sources.

"DIXMUDE"-AN EPIC OF THE FRENCH MARINES

_Story of the Murder of Commander Jeanniot_

_Told by Charles Le Goffic of the Fusiliers Marins--Translated by Florence Simmonds_

The story of the French Marines is one of the epics of the World's Wars. Such is the story of the Bretons. At Dixmude, under command of their own officers, retaining not only the costume, but the soul and language of their profession they were still sailors. Grouped with them were seamen from all the naval stations. The heroism of these sailors is told in the volume entitled "Dixmude," published by _J. B. Lippincott Company_. From these interesting stories, we here relate "The Murder of Captain Jeanniot."

[9] I-GREAT HEARTS OF THE FRENCH MARINES

I had opportunities of talking to several of these "Parigots," and I should not advise anyone to speak slightingly of their officers before them, though, indeed, so few of these have survived that nine times out of ten the quip could be aimed only at a ghost. The deepest and tenderest words I heard uttered concerning Naval Lieutenant Martin des Pallières were spoken by a Marine of the Rue des Martyrs, George Delaballe, who was one of his gunners in front of the cemetery the night when his machine-guns were jammed, and five hundred Germans, led by a major wearing the Red Cross armlet, threw themselves suddenly into our trenches.

"But why did you love him so?" I asked.

"I don't know.... We loved him because he was brave, and was always saying things that made us laugh, ... but above all because he loved us."

Here we have the secret of this extraordinary empire of the officers over their men, the explanation of that miracle of a four weeks' resistance, one against six, under the most formidable tempest of shells of every caliber that ever fell upon a position, in a shattered town where all the buildings were ablaze, and where, to quote the words of a _Daily Telegraph_ correspondent, it was no longer light or dark, "but only red." When the Boches murdered Commander Jeanniot, his men were half crazy. They would not have felt the death of a father more deeply. I have recently had a letter sent me written by a Breton lad, Jules Cavan, who was wounded at Dixmude. While he was in hospital at Bordeaux he was visited by relatives of Second-Lieutenant Gautier, who was killed on October 27 in the cemetery trenches.

"Dear Sir," he wrote to M. Dalché de Desplanels the following day, "you cannot imagine how your visit went to my heart.... On October 19, when my battalion took the offensive at Lannes, three kilometers from Dixmude, I was wounded by a bullet in the thigh. I dragged myself along as best I could on the battlefield, bullets falling thickly all around me. I got over about five hundred meters on the battlefield and reached the road. Just at that moment Lieutenant Gautier, who was coming towards me with a section, seeing me in the ditch, asked: 'Well, my lad, what is the matter with you?' 'Oh, Lieutenant, I am wounded in the leg, and I cannot drag myself further.' 'Here then, get on my back.' And he carried me to a house at Lannes, and said these words, which I shall never forget: 'Stay there, my lad, till they come and fetch you. I will let the motor ambulance men know.' Then he went off under the fire. Oh, the splendid fellow!"

II--TALES OF THE BRAVE "PARIGOTS"

"The splendid fellow!" Jules Cavan echoes Georges Delaballe, the Breton, the "Parigot." There is the same heartfelt ring in the words of each. And sometimes, as I muse over these heroic shades, I ask myself which were the more admirable, officers or men. When Second-Lieutenant Gautier received orders to take the place of Lieutenant de Pallières, buried by a shell in the trench of the cemetery where Lieutenant Eno had already fallen, he read his fate plainly; he said: "It's my turn." And he smiled at Death, who beckoned him. But I know of one case when, as Death seemed about to pass them by, the Marines provoked it; when, after they had used up all their cartridges and were surrounded in a barn, twelve survivors only remaining with their captain, the latter, filled with pity for them, and recognizing the futility of further resistance, said to his men: "My poor fellows, you have done your duty. There is nothing for it but to surrender." Then, disobedient to their captain for the first time, they answered: "No!" To my mind nothing could show more clearly the degree of sublime exaltation and complete self-forgetfulness to which our officers had raised the _moral_ of their men. Such were the pupils these masters in heroism had formed, that often their own pupils surpassed them. There was at the Trouville Hospital a young Breton sailor called Michel Folgoas. His wound was one of the most frightful imaginable: the whole of his side was shaved off by a shell which killed one of his comrades in the trenches, who was standing next to him, on November 2. "I," he remarks in a letter, "was completely stunned at first. When I came to myself I walked three hundred meters before I noticed that I was wounded, and this was only when my comrades called out: '_Mon Dieu_, they have carried away half your side.'" It was true. But does he groan and lament over it? He makes a joke of it: "The Boches were so hungry that they took a beef-steak out of my side, but this won't matter, as they have left me a little."

Multiply this Michel Folgoas by 6,000, and you will have the brigade. This inferno of Dixmude was an inferno where everyone made the best of things. And the _battues_ of rabbits, the coursing of the red German hares which were running in front of the army of invasion, the bull-fights in which our Mokos impaled some pacific Flemish bull abandoned by its owners; more dubious escapades, sternly repressed, in the underground premises of the Dixmude drink-shops; a story of two Bretons who went off on a foraging expedition and were seen coming back along the canal in broad daylight towing a great cask of strong beer which they had unearthed Heaven knows where at a time when the whole brigade, officers as well as men, had nothing to drink but the brackish water of the Yser--these, and a hundred other tales of the same kind, which will some day delight village audiences gathered round festal evening fires, bear witness that Jean Gouin (or Le Gwenn, John the White, as the sailors call themselves familiarly[10]), did not lose his bearings even in his worst vicissitudes.

Dixmude was an epic then, or, as M. Victor Giraud proposes, a French _geste_, but a _geste_ in which the heroism is entirely without solemnity or deliberation, where the nature of the seaman asserts itself at every turn, where there are thunder, lightning, rain, mud, cold, bullets, shrapnel, high explosive shells, and all the youthful gaiety of the French race.

And this epic did not come to an end at Dixmude. The brigade did not ground arms after November 10. The gaps in its ranks being filled from the dépôts, it was kept up to the strength of two regiments, and reaped fresh laurels. At Ypres and Saint Georges it charged the troops of Prince Ruprecht of Bavaria and the Duke of Würtemberg in succession. Dixmude was but one panel of the triptych: on the broken apex of the black capital of the Communiers, on the livid backgrounds of the flat country about Nieuport, twice again did the brigade inscribe its stormy silhouette.

But at Ypres and Saint Georges the sailors had the bulk of the Anglo-French forces behind them; at Dixmude up to November 4 they knew that their enterprise was a forlorn hope. And in their hands they held the fate of the two Flanders. One of the heroes of Dixmude, Naval Lieutenant Georges Hébert, said that the Fusiliers had gained more than a naval battle there. My only objection to this statement is its modesty. Dixmude was our Thermopylæ in the north, as the Grand-Couronné, near Nancy, was our Thermopylæ in the east; the Fusiliers were the first and the most solid element of the long triumphant defensive which will one day be known as the victory of the Yser, a victory less decisive and perhaps less brilliant than that of the Marne, but not less momentous in its consequences.

The Generalissimo is credited with a dictum which he may himself have uttered with a certain astonishment:

"You are my best infantrymen," said he to the Fusiliers.

We will close with these simply, soldierly words, more eloquent than the most brilliant harangues. The brigade will reckon them among their proudest trophies to all time.

III--STORY OF MURDER OF DR. DUGUET

On October 25 (1914), we had not yet received any help from the inundation. Our troops were in dire need of rest, and the enemy was tightening his grip along the entire front. New reinforcements were coming up to fill the gaps in his ranks; our scouts warned us that fresh troops were marching upon Dixmude by the three roads of Essen, Beerst, and Woumen.[11] We had to expect a big affair the next day, if not that very night. It came off that night.

About 7 o'clock the Gamas company went to relieve the men in the southern trenches. On their way, immediately outside the town, they fell in with a German force of about the same strength as themselves, which had crept up no one knew how. There was a fusillade and a general _mêlée_, in which our sailors opened a passage through the troop with bayonets and butt-ends, disposing of some forty Germans and putting the rest to flight.[12] Then there was a lull. The splash of rain was the only sound heard till 2 A.M., when suddenly a fresh outbreak of rifle-fire was heard near the Caeskerke station, right inside the defences. It was suggested that our men or our allies, exasperated by their life of continual alarms, had been carried away by some reckless impulse. The bravest soldiers admit that hallucinations are not uncommon at night in the trenches. All the pitfalls of darkness rise before the mind; the circulation of the blood makes a noise like the tramp of marching troops; if by chance a nervous sentry should fire his rifle, the whole section will follow suit.

Convinced that some misunderstanding of this kind had taken place, the Staff, still quartered at the Caeskerke railway station, shouted to the sections to cease firing. As, however, the fusillade continued in the direction of the town, the Admiral sent one of his officers, Lieutenant Durand-Gasselin, to reconnoiter. He got as far as the Yser without finding the enemy; the fusillade had ceased; the roads were clear. He set out on his way back to Caeskerke. On the road he passed an ambulance belonging to the brigade going up towards Dixmude, which, on being challenged, replied: "Rouge Croix." Rather surprised at this inversion, he stopped the ambulance; it was full of Germans, who, however, surrendered without offering any resistance. But this capture suggested a new train of thought to the Staff: they were now certain that there had been an infantry raid upon the town; the Germans in the ambulance probably belonged to a troop of mysterious assailants who had made their way into Dixmude in the night and had vanished no less mysteriously after this extraordinary deed of daring. One of our covering trenches must have given way, but which? Our allies held the railway line by which the enemy had penetrated into the defences, sounding the charge.... The riddle was very disturbing, but under the veil of a thick, damp night, which favored the enemy, it was useless to seek a solution. It was found next morning at dawn, when one of our detachments on guard by the Yser suddenly noticed in a meadow a curious medley of Belgians, French Marines, and Germans. Had our men been made prisoners? This uncertainty was of brief duration. There was a sharp volley; the sailors fell; the Germans made off. This was what had happened!

Various versions have been given of this incident, one of the most dramatic of the defence, in the course of which the heroic Commander Jeanniot and Dr. Duguet, chief officer of the medical staff, fell mortally wounded, with several others. The general opinion, however, seems to be that the German attack, which was delivered at 2:30 P.M., was closely connected with the surprise movement attempted at 7 o'clock in the evening on the Essen road and so happily frustrated by the intervention of the Gamas company. It is not impossible that it was carried out by the fragments of the force we had scattered, reinforced by new elements and charging to the sound of the bugle. This would explain the interval of several hours between the two attacks, which were no doubt the outcome of a single inspiration.

"The night," says an eye-witness, "was pursuing its normal course, and as there were no indications of disturbance, Dr. Duguet took the opportunity to go and get a little rest in the house where he was living, which was just across the street opposite his ambulance. The Abbé Le Helloco, chaplain of the 2nd Regiment, had joined him at about 1:30 A.M. The latter admits that he was rather uneasy because of the earlier skirmish, in which, as was his habit, he had been unremitting in his ministrations to the wounded. After a few minutes' talk the two men separated to seek their straw pallets. The Abbé had been asleep for an hour or two, when he was awakened by shots close at hand. He roused himself and went to Dr. Duguet, who was already up. The two did not exchange a word. Simultaneously, without taking the precaution of extinguishing the lights behind them, they hurried to the street. Enframed by the lighted doorway, they at once became a target; a volley brought them down in a moment. Dr. Duguet had been struck by a bullet in the abdomen; the Abbé was hit in the head, the arm, and the right thigh. The two bodies were touching each other. 'Abbé,' said Dr. Duguet, 'we are done for. Give me absolution. I regret....' The Abbé found strength to lift his heavy arm and to make the sign of the cross upon his dying comrade. Then he fainted, and this saved him. Neither he nor Dr. Duguet had understood for the moment what was happening. Whence had the band of marauders who had struck them down come, and how had they managed to steal into our lines without being seen? It was a mystery. This fusillade breaking out behind them had caused a certain disorder in the sections nearest to it, who thought they were being taken in the rear, and who would have been, indeed, had the attack been maintained. The band arrived in front of the ambulance station at the moment when the staff (three Belgian doctors, a few naval hospital orderlies, and Quartermaster Bonnet) were attending to Dr. Duguet, who was still breathing. They made the whole lot prisoners and carried them along in their idiotic rush through the streets. Both officers and soldiers must have been drunk. This is the only reasonable explanation of their mad venture. We held all the approaches to Dixmude; the brief panic that took place in certain sections had been at once controlled."

IV--STORY OF MURDER OF COMMANDER JEANNIOT