Part 8

One evening at midnight as I cross the Thiergarten I pass a small procession of new recruits. Midnight, my friend tells me, is the favourite hour for seizing fresh food for cannon. There is something sinister in choosing dark hours, when the city sleeps, for this deed....

III--A BEAUTIFUL STORY TOLD IN GENEVA

While in Geneva I visited the Red Cross authorities. This is the Central Bureau for relief work. It gives aid to the wounded and prisoners of all the belligerent countries. Many horrible, tragic and beautiful stories pass through the committee's hands.

After the war these stories will come to light. At present the rigid censorship prevents publication, for it is impossible to carry printed or written material across frontiers.

But one story told me needed no notes. It became engraven in my memory. It is the story of an English boy and a German mother.

I could not secure the letters that passed between these two but their contents, and the other facts given are here set forth accurately. This is a true story.

* * * * *

The sky was a soft, shining blue. The air was still. The warmth of summer brooded over the land. But no bird's song broke the stillness. No bees fluttered over flowers. The earth lay torn and bare. In deep brown furrows of the earth, hundreds of restless men lay or knelt or stood.

The land was vibrant with living silence. But now and again a gigantic smashing roar broke the tense stillness. Then in some spots, the ground spit forth masses of dirt, a soldier's helmet, a tattered rag of uniform, and bits of a human body.

It was after such a mighty blast that a great winged object came speeding from the north. It skimmed low over the trenches and dipped, and circled and paused above the English line. Like a great eagle it seemed about to rush to earth, snatch its prey, and then be off. But as it hung suspended, another whirring monster flew swiftly from the south. It winged its way above its rival, then turning, plunged downward. The great cannons grew silent. The eyes of the pigmies in the trenches gazed skyward. A breathless tenseness gripped the earth. Only sun and sky shone on with no whisper of the mad fight of these two winged things.

For a few wild moments they rushed at one another. Then the whirring bird with wings of white rose high, turned back, and plunged again upon that other whose wings had huge, black crosses.

It missed its prey, but there came a cracking sound. A puff of smoke, like a hot breath, burst from the creature of the iron crosses. It shuddered, dropped, turned, and fell head down. With sweeping curves the pursuer also came to earth. A lean, young Englishman sprang from the whirring engine. His body quivered with excitement. He sped with running feet to the broken object lying on the ground. He knelt by the twisted mass. Beneath the splintered wood and iron he saw a boyish figure. It was still and motionless. He gently pulled the body out. A fair young German lay before him. A deep gash in the head showed where a blow had brought instant death. The body was straight and supple, the features clear cut and clean. A boy's face with frank and fearless brow looked up at the young Englishman. The eyes held no malice. They were full of shocked surprise. The brown haired lad felt the lifeless heart. A piece of cardboard met his fingers. He pulled it from the coat pocket. It was a picture--a picture of a woman--a woman with gray hair and kindly eyes,--a mother whose face bore lines of patient suffering. Scrawled beneath the portrait in boyish hand were the words, "Meine Mutter."

A sob choked the young Englishman. Tenderly he gathered the lifeless form in his strong arms. Then he rose and walked unheeding across the open field of battle. But no angry bullet pelted after those young figures. The men in the trenches saw and understood. Behind the lines the boy lay his burden down. Taking paper and pencil from his pocket and placing the little picture before him, he began to write.

When he had finished he placed the letter and portrait in a carefully directed envelope. Then walking hurriedly to his machine he prepared for flight. Soon he was whirring low over the enemy trenches. Leaning out, he dropped his missile. The cannons roared, but no rifle was turned on that bright figure. Instinctively, men knew his deed was one of mercy. As the little paper fluttered downward it was picked up by eager soldier hands. A little cheer broke from a hundred throats. Willing messengers passed it to the rear. Speedily it went on its way.

Twenty-four hours later a mother with pale face and trembling hands fingered the white scrap of paper. Her unseeing eyes gazed out on a smiling landscape. Between green meadows in the warm summer sunshine lay the glittering Rhine. But she saw nothing. Her baby boy was dead. Memories of him flooded her. She felt again the warmth of the baby body as it clung to hers and the pull of the tiny hands at her breast. She saw him as a boy, his eager restlessness. She heard his running steps at the door and his cry of "mother." It was over. That bright spirit was still. The third and last son had been exacted. Her fingers touched the letter in her lap. Her eyes fell on the penciled words. Slowly they took meaning. This boy who wrote: He'd seen the beauty of her son. He'd lifted the dear body in his arms. His heart was torn by anguish. What was it he said?

IV--WHAT THE GERMAN MOTHER READ ON THE SCRAP OF PAPER

"'It's your son. I know you can't forgive me for I killed him. But I want you to know he didn't suffer. The end came quickly. He was very brave. He must also have been very good. He had your picture in his pocket. I am sending it back, though I should like to keep it. I suppose I am his enemy, yet I don't feel so at all. I'd give my life to have him back. I didn't think of him or you when I shot at his machine. He was an enemy spying out our men. I couldn't let him get back to tell his news. It meant death to our men. It was a plucky deed. We were covered up with brush. He had to come quite low to see us and he came bravely. He nearly escaped me. He handled his machine magnificently. I thought how I should like to fly with him. But he was the enemy and had to be destroyed. I fired. It was over in a second. Just a blow on the head as the machine crashed to earth. His face shows no suffering, only excitement. His eyes are bright and fearless. I know you must have loved him. My mother died when I was quite a little boy. But I know what she would have felt if I had been killed. War isn't fair to women. God! how I wish it were over. It is a nightmare. I feel if I just touched your boy, he'd wake and we'd be friends. I know his body must be dear to you. I will take care of it and mark his grave with a little cross. After the war you may want to take him home.

"'For the first time, I'm almost glad my mother isn't living. She could not have borne what I have done. My own heart is heavy. I felt it was my duty. Yet now when I see your son lifeless before me and hold your picture in my hand, it all seems wrong. The world is dark. O Mother, be my mother just a little too, and tell me what to do.--HUGH.'"

Slowly great tears rolled down the woman's cheeks. What was this monster that was smashing men? Her boy and this other, they were the same. No hate was in their hearts. They suffered--the whole world suffered. Her country went in hunger. The babies in the nearby cottages grew weak for want of milk. She mustn't tell that to the English lad. His heart would break. Why must such suffering be? Was she to blame? There was the English lad without a mother. She had not thought of him and others like him. Her home, her sons, her Fatherland, these had been sufficient. But each life hangs on every other. Motherhood is universal.

V--A GERMAN MOTHER TO THE ENGLISH BOY WHO KILLED HER SON

Suddenly she knew what to write. What she must say to that grief-stricken English boy. Quickly her hand penned the words:

"DEAR LAD: There is nothing to forgive. I see you as you are--your troubled goodness. I feel you coming to me like a little boy astounded at having done ill when you meant well. You seem my son. I am glad your hands cared for my other boy. I had rather you than any other touched his earthly body. He was my youngest. I think you saw his fineness. I know the torture of your heart since you have slain him. To women brotherhood is a reality. For all men are our sons. That makes war a monster that brother must slay brother. Yet perhaps women more than men have been to blame for this world war. We did not think of the world's children, our children. The baby hands that clutched our breast were so sweet, we forgot the hundred other baby hands stretched out to us. But the Earth does not forget, she mothers all. And now my heart aches with repentance. I long to take you in my arms and lay your head upon my breast to make you feel through me your kinship with all the earth. Help me, my son, I need you. Be your vision, my vision. Spread the dream of oneness and love throughout the land. When the war is over come to me. I am waiting for you.--DEINE MUTTER."

FOOTNOTE:

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

FIGHTING "WITH THE RUSSIAN ARMY"--ON AUSTRIAN FRONT

_The Colossal Struggle of the Slavs_

_Told by Bernard Pares, Official Observer with the Russian Army_

This is one of the most important narratives in the records of the War; it is an invaluable witness of the colossal struggle waged on the Eastern battle front. The author was granted official privileges awarded to no other non-combatant. He passed through the first Warsaw Campaign, the crucial battle of Dunajec, and the Russian retreat. When Germany declared war on Russia, he volunteered for service and went to Petrograd and Moscow, where he was appointed official correspondent with the Russian Army, traveling with the general staff. He later joined the third army as an attaché. Here he was given written permit by General Radko Dmitriev to visit any part of the firing line. "We were the advance guard," he says, "of the liberation of the Slavs ... the retreat of the army to the San and to the Province of Lublin. We were driven out by sheer weight of metal ... it was a delight to be with such splendid men as the Staff of the Russian Army. I never saw anything base all the while I was with the Army. There was no drunkenness, everyone was at his best, and it was the simplest and noblest atmosphere in which I have ever lived." His experiences have been gathered into a volume entitled, "Day by Day With the Russian Army," from which the following incidents are retold by permission of his American publishers, Houghton, Mifflin and Company.

[16] I--WAR STORIES FROM THE RUSSIANS

It is wonderful how little effect the war seems to have made on the body of Russia. On the other hand, the atmosphere of nervous tension begins to disappear the moment one begins to get really near to the front. In the Red Cross offices at Kiev I found the same straining toward the front as elsewhere, only much calmer because these were people who had a big war work to do. Hospitals meet the eye in the streets at every turn.

Once in the train for Galicia it was again the war atmosphere and simplicity itself. The talk was all of people engaged directly or indirectly in it. A graceful old lady with a very attentive son was on her way to get a sight of her husband, one of the generals. A young officer, whose wound has kept him out of it for three weeks, is on his way to the front before Cracow. A fresh-looking young man, at first unrecognisable to his friends with his close-cropped bullet head, tells how he went on a reconnaissance, how he came on the Austrians, how their first line held up their muskets and when the Russians had passed on fired on their rear, how nevertheless practically all came back safe and sound. It was told with a kind of schoolboy ingenuousness and without suggestion or comment of any kind on the conduct of those concerned. Then followed an account of a war marriage, at first put off and then carried out as quietly as possible. All the friends of every one seemed to be at the war.

At the old frontier some of the buildings near the station were wrecked by artillery fire, and the railway was lined with a succession of solid hospital barracks, with the local commandant's flag flying over one of them. There was plenty to eat at the station; and though we moved on very quickly, every one from our crowded train managed to find a place in the Austrian carriages, chiefly because every one was ready to help his neighbour. The corridors jammed with passengers and kits, we moved on through the typical "strips" of Russian peasant culture, a pleasant wooded country, passing a draft detachment on the halt which waved greetings to us. My companion, Mr. Stakhovich, a phenomenally strong man and imbued by a fine spirit, was talking of the indifference of the Russian peasant to danger; he regarded it as an indifference to all sensations; anyhow they go forward, whatever the conditions, as a sheer matter of course. With the ordinary educated man the mind must be kept occupied with work if unpleasant possibilities of all kinds are to be kept out of it; but General Radko Dmitriev, to whom we are going, will jump up from a meal, however hungry, when there is a chance of getting under fire.

II--IN THE CONQUERED CITY OF LVOV

We draw up in the great station at Lvov. To the right of us stretch endless lines crowded with wagons, especially with sanitary trains. In the lofty passages and waiting-rooms are sleeping troops with piled muskets, some wounded on stretchers tended by the sisters of mercy who are constantly on duty here, and a crowd of men, all soldiers, coming and going. One passed many Austrian prisoners, of whom another enormous batch was just announced to arrive; and elsewhere a Russian private explained to me the excellent quality of the Hungarian knapsack, which he and his comrades had turned into busbies. One man was asleep inside the rail opposite the ticket office. He did not seem to mind how often he was awakened.

In the town everything is quiet, and life goes so naturally that no one could take it for a conquered city. In the country this might have been expected because far the greater part of the population is Little Russian; but in Lvov the Russians are only about 17 per cent. and the predominant element is the Polish (60 per cent.), the rest being Jews (20 per cent.) or Germans (3 per cent.).

Lvov is taking on more of the character of a Russian town. Many of the Jews have left. The Russian signs over new restaurants, stores, etc., meet the eye everywhere. Of the Little Russian party which supported the Austrians, many have now returned and are making their peace with the new authorities. The Russian soldier is quite at home in Lvov, as one sees when the singing "drafts" swing past the Governor-General's palace; the Austrian prisoners in uniform, who are allowed liberty on parole, seem equally at their ease. Numbers of Russian priests are pouring into Galicia, but not fast enough for the Uniat villages which have embraced Orthodoxy; as soon as they arrive, peasants come with their carts and take them off to their parishes, without waiting for any formal distribution. The Uniat creed and ritual are practically identical with the Orthodox, so that the difference between the two was purely political. At the new People's Palace of Nicholas II, I saw a number of children, principally from families that had suffered severely at the hands of Austrian troops, receive Christmas presents on the day of St. Nicholas, who is the Russian Santa Claus. Archbishop Eulogius, in a very effective little address, told them that the biggest Christmas present which they were receiving was the liberty to speak their own language and worship in their own way in union with their Russian brothers.

Starting for the army, I spent a night of strange happening in the great railway station, as our train was delayed till the morning. At one time I went, in the frosty night, to look for it at the goods station, where there were endless rails and wagons, and found it after a long search. In the big restaurant four little boys made great friends with me, one of fourteen in uniform and spurs who had been serving as mounted scout with a regiment at the front, and one of thirteen who had attached himself in the same capacity to a battery. Both were small creatures, and the first was a remarkable little person, with all the smartness and determination of a soldier, relieved by an amusing childlike grace and courtesy. He said to me in a confidential voice, "I see you are very fond of little children," and he ordered with pride lemonade and chocolates for us both. He said the men at the front could last a week to ten days, if necessary, without any food but _sukhari_ (army biscuit), so long as they had cigarettes. His imagination had been caught by the aeroplanes over Peremyshl, and also by the Carpathians, which he described with an up and down movement of the hand. He had a great disgust for anything mean and a warlike pride in the exploits of the soldiers of his regiment. His model was a boy, now a young man, who had been through the Japanese War. "If a general comes past," and he made a salute to show the extreme respect felt for his hero. Many a time in that long night, while the weary heads of doctors and sisters of mercy were bent in sheer tiredness against the tables, he would come and sit by me and ask me to read the war news to him, or to tell him about the English submarines. He left me with the smartest of salutes in the early hours of the morning.

III--TALES TOLD ON AN ARMY TRAIN

Our train is an enormous one with endless warm carriages (_teplushki_) for the wounded. The staff of sanitars and sisters, working for the Zemstvo Red Cross, live in a spotlessly clean carriage, and there are special carriages for drugs, stores, kitchen, etc. They are simple and interesting people, and, as I am now in the Red Cross and have many interests in common with them, they kindly made me up a bed in their carriage, where we discussed Russia in all its bearings.

We carry a group of passengers who have all made friends after the Russian way. A colonel and his wife are going to fetch the body of a fallen comrade. Another colonel, a delightfully simple man with close-cropped hair, thin brown face and bright, clever eyes seems to know all the Slavonic languages and has much to say of the Austrians. He has seen twenty of them surrender to a priest and his clerk who came on them in a wood, made the sign of the cross and told them to come with them. In another place twenty-two Austrians were captured by two Russians. The Austrian officers put quick-firing guns behind their own rifle pits for the "encouragement" of their men, on whom he has seen them fire. They make their gunners fire every two hours in the night as a kind of exercise. He has seen them form their men in close column under fire and march them about up and down along the line of the Russian trenches. The Austrian artillery seldom takes cover; the Russian directs its fire on the enemy rather than on his batteries. In one place, heavy Russian artillery at a range of seven miles demolished an Austrian field train and two battalions who were lunching in the square of a small town. He is full of life and confidence, and all that he says breathes of fresh air and of work.

Our train made its way through to the furthest point up. We had to stop several times to let through the ambulance trains already charged with wounded, which take precedence. We had to go very slowly over several repaired bridges; and this was no simple matter, as we had twenty-seven long and heavy coaches. Some of these repairs were complicated pieces of work, as the bridges were high above the level of the rivers. At point after point, and especially on the Austrian sides of the rivers, we passed lines of carefully prepared trenches, and in one place there was a masterpiece of artillery cover, with every arrangement for a long stay.

The damage done by the artillery fire was sporadic--here a smashed station building, there a town where several houses had suffered. But there was nothing indiscriminate; and the Polish population, which showed no sign of any hostility to the Russians, seemed to find the war conditions livable.

As in other parts, I was specially struck by the easy relations existing between the inhabitants, the Austrian soldiers and their Russian captors. There were exceptions. I had some talk with a few Austrian Germans from Vienna. They were simple folk and seemed to have no grudge against the Russians; and the circumstance in their position which they felt most--they were only taken the day before yesterday--was that this was Christmas Eve, the "_stille Nacht, heilige Nacht_" of the beautiful German hymn, and that they were far from home among strange people. They kept apart as far as possible not only from their captors but from their fellow prisoners from Bohemia and Moravia. These last seemed at least quite comfortable, smoking their long pipes and leisurely sweeping the platforms. They were quite a large company. They understood my Russian better than my German. When I asked them how they stood with the German troops, instead of the sturdy "Gut" of their Viennese fellows, they answered with a slang word and a gesture. When asked about the Russians, they replied in a quite matter-of-course way: "We are brothers and speak the same tongue; we are one people." For any difficulties, the Poles often prove good interpreters. It is very different for the Austrian captive officers, who often cannot understand their own men.