Part 10
When the reveille rang out along the French lines at five-thirty on the morning of September 25 the whole world seemed gray; lead-colored clouds hung low overhead, and a drizzling rain was falling. But the men refused to be depressed. They drank their morning coffee and then, the roar of the artillery making conversation out of the question, they sat down to smoke and wait. Through the loopholes they could watch the effect of the fire of the French batteries, could see the fountains of earth and smoke thrown up by the bursting shells, could even see arms and legs flying in the air. Each man wore between his shoulders, pinned to his coat, a patch of white calico, in order to avoid the possibility of the French gunners firing into their own men. Several men in each company carried small, colored signal-flags for the same purpose. The watches of the officers had been carefully synchronized, and at nine o’clock the order to fall in was given, and there formed up in the advance trenches long rows of strange fighting figures in their “invisible” pale-blue uniforms, their grim, set faces peering from beneath steel helmets plastered with chalk and mud. The company rolls were called. The drummers and buglers took up their positions, for orders had been issued that the troops were to be played into action. _Nine-five!_ The regimental battle-flags were brought from the dug-outs, the water-proof covers were slipped off, and the sacred colors, on whose faded silk were embroidered “Les Pyramides,” “Wagram,” “Jena,” “Austerlitz,” “Marengo,” were reverently unrolled. For the first time in this war French troops were to go into action with their colors flying. _Nine-ten!_ The officers, endeavoring to make their voices heard above the din of cannon, told the men in a few shouted sentences what France and the regiment expected of them. _Nine-fourteen!_ The officers, having jerked loose their automatics, stood with their watches in their hands. The men were like sprinters on their marks, waiting with tense nerves and muscles for the starter’s pistol. _Nine-fifteen!_ Above the roar of the artillery the whistles of the officers shrilled loud and clear. The bugles pealed the charge. “_En avant, mes enfants!_” screamed the officers, “_En avant! Vaincre ou_ _mourir!_” and over the tops of the trenches, with a roar like an angry sea breaking on a rock-bound coast, surged a fifteen-mile-long human wave tipped with glistening steel. As the blue billows of men burst into the open, hoarsely cheering, the French batteries which had been shelling the German first-line trenches ceased firing with an abruptness that was startling. In the comparative quiet thus suddenly created could be plainly heard the orders of the officers and the cheering of the men, some of whom shouted “_Vive la France!_” while others sang snatches of the _Marseillaise_ and the _Carmagnole_. Though every foot of ground over which they were advancing had for three days been systematically flooded with shell, though the German trenches had been pounded until they were little more than heaps of dirt and débris, the German artillery was still on the job, and the ranks of the advancing French were swept by a hurricane of fire. General Marchand, the hero of the famous incident at Fashoda, who was in command of the Colonials, led his men to the assault, but fell wounded at the very beginning of the engagement as, surrounded by his staff, he stood on the crest of a trench, cane in hand, smoking his pipe and encouraging the succeeding waves of men racing forward into battle. His two brigade-commanders fell close beside him. Three minutes after the first of the Colonials had scrambled over the top of their trenches they had reached the German first line. After them came the First and Second Regiments of the Foreign Legion and the Moroccan division. As they ran they broke out from columns of two (advancing in twos with fifty paces between each pair) into columns of squad (each man alone, twenty-five paces from his neighbor) as prettily and perfectly as though on a parade-ground.
[Illustration:
The battle-field of Champagne, showing the French high-explosive shells bursting on the German trenches. ]
Great as was the destruction wrought by the bombardment, the French infantry had no easy task before them, for stretches of wire entanglements still remained in front of portions of the German trenches, while at frequent intervals the Germans had left behind them machine-gun sections, who from their sunken positions poured in a deadly fire, until the oncoming wave overwhelmed and blotted them out. It was these death-traps that brought out in the French soldier those same heroic qualities which had enabled him, under the leadership of Napoleon, to enter as a conqueror every capital in Europe. A man who was shot while cutting a way for his company through the wire entanglements, turned and gave the cutters to a comrade before he fell. A wounded soldier lying on the ground called out to an officer who was stepping aside to avoid him: “Go on. Don’t mind stepping on me. I’m wounded. It’s only you who are whole who matter now.” A man with his abdomen ripped open by a shell appealed to an officer to be moved to a dressing-station. “The first thing to move are the guns to advanced positions, my friend,” was the answer. “That’s right,” said the man; “I can wait.” Said a wounded soldier afterward in describing the onslaught: “When the bugles sounded the charge and the trumpets played the _Marseillaise_, we were no longer mere men marching to the assault. We were a living torrent which drives all before it. The colors were flying at our side. It was splendid. Ay, my friend, when one has seen that one is proud to be alive.”
In many places the attacking columns found themselves abruptly halted by steel _chevaux-de-frise_, with German machine-guns spitting death from behind them. The men would pelt them with hand-grenades until the sappers came up and blew the obstructions away. Then they would sweep forward again with the bayonet, yelling madly. The great craters caused by the explosion of the French land mines were occupied as soon as possible and immediately turned into defensible positions, thus affording advanced footholds within the enemy’s line of trenches. At a few points in the first line the Germans held out, but at others they surrendered in large numbers, while many were shot down as they were running back to the second line. As a matter of fact, the Germans had no conception of what the French had in store for them, and it was not until their trenches began to give way under the terrible hammering of the French artillery that they realized how desperate was their situation. It was then too late to strengthen their front, however, as it would have been almost certain death to send men forward through the curtain of shell-fire which the French batteries were dropping between the first and second lines. Nor were the Germans prepared when the infantry attack began, as was shown by the fact that a number of officers were captured in their beds. The number of prisoners taken—twenty-one thousand was the figure announced by the French General Staff—showed clearly that they had had enough of it. They surrendered by sections and by companies, hundreds at a time. Most of them had had no food for several days, and were suffering acutely from thirst, and all of them seemed completely unstrung and depressed by the terrible nature of the French bombardment.
[Illustration:
Fighting in a quarrel that is not his own.
A trooper from France’s African possessions on duty in the trenches. ]
Choosing the psychological moment, when the retirement of the Germans showed signs of turning into panic, the African troops were ordered to go in and finish up the business with cold steel. Before these dark-skinned, fierce-faced men from the desert, who came on brandishing their weapons and shouting “Allah! Allah! Allah!” the Germans, already demoralized, incontinently broke and ran. Hard on the heels of the Africans trotted the dragoons and the _chasseurs à cheval_—the first time since the trench warfare began that cavalry have had a chance to fight from the saddle—sabring the fleeing Germans or driving them out of their dug-outs with their long lances. But in the vast maze of communication trenches and in the underground shelters Germans still swarmed thickly, so the “trench cleaners,” as the Algerian and Senegalese tirailleurs are called, were ordered to clear them out, a task which they performed with neatness and despatch, revolver in one hand and cutlass in the other. Even five days after the trenches were taken occasional Germans were found in hiding in the labyrinth of underground shelters.
[Illustration:
The first-line German trenches captured by the French in Champagne.
The battle-field of Champagne looked as though all the garbage cans in Europe and America had been emptied upon it. ]
The thing of which the Champagne battle-field most reminded me was a garbage-dump. It looked and smelled as though all the garbage cans in Europe and America had been emptied upon it. This region, as I have remarked before, is of a chalk formation, and wherever a trench had been dug, or a shell had burst, or a mine had been exploded, it left on the face of the earth a livid scar. The destruction wrought by the French artillery fire is almost beyond imagining. Over an area as long as from the Battery to Harlem and as wide as from the East River to the Hudson the earth is pitted with the craters caused by bursting shells as is pitted the face of a man who has had the small-pox. Any of these shell-holes was large enough to hold a barrel; many of them would have held a horse; I saw one, caused by the explosion of a mine, which we estimated to be seventy feet deep and twice that in diameter. In the terrific blast that caused it five hundred German soldiers perished. At another point on what had been the German first line I saw a yawning hole as large as the cellar of a good-sized apartment-house. It marked the site of a German blockhouse, but the blockhouse and the men who composed its garrison had been blown out of existence by a torrent of 370-millimetre high-explosive shells.
[Illustration:
This crater, seventy feet deep and twice that in diameter, was caused by the explosion of a mine. In the terrific blast five hundred Germans perished. ]
The captured German trenches presented the most horrible sight that I have ever seen or ever expect to see. This is not rhetoric; this is fact. Along the whole front of fifteen miles the earth was littered with torn steel shields and twisted wire, with broken wagons, bits of harness, cartridge-pouches, dented helmets, belts, bayonets—some of them bent double—broken rifles, field-gun shells and rifle cartridges, hand-grenades, aerial torpedoes, knapsacks, bottles, splintered planks, sheets of corrugated iron which had been turned into sieves by bursting shrapnel, trench mortars, blood-soaked bandages, fatigue-caps, intrenching tools, stoves, iron rails, furniture, pots of jam and marmalade, note-books, water-bottles, mattresses, blankets, shreds of clothing, and, most horrible of all, portions of what had once been human bodies. Passing through an abandoned German trench, I stumbled over a mass of gray rags, and they dropped apart to disclose a headless, armless, legless torso already partially devoured by insects. I kicked a hobnailed German boot out of my path and from it fell a rotting foot. A hand with awful, outspread fingers thrust itself from the earth as though appealing to the passerby to give decent burial to its dead owner. I peered inquisitively into a dug-out only to be driven back by an overpowering stench. A French soldier, more hardened to the business than I, went in with a candle, and found the shell-blackened bodies of three Germans. Clasped in the dead fingers of one of them was a post-card dated from a little town in Bavaria. It began: “My dearest Heinrich: You went away from us just a year ago to-day. I miss you terribly, as do the children, and we all pray hourly for your safe return—” The rest we could not decipher; it had been blotted out by a horrid crimson stain. Without the war that man might have been returning, after a day’s work in field or factory, to a neat Bavarian cottage, with geraniums growing in the dooryard, and a wife and children waiting for him at the gate.
[Illustration:
German officers captured during the battle of Champagne. ]
Though when I visited the battle-field of Champagne the guns were still roaring—for the Germans were attempting to retake their lost trenches in a desperate series of counter-attacks—the field was already dotted with thousands upon thousands of little wooden crosses planted upon new-made mounds. Above many of the graves there had been no time to erect crosses or headboards, so into the soft soil was thrust, neck downward, a bottle, and in the bottle was a slip of paper giving the name and the regiment of the soldier who lay beneath. In one place the graves had been dug so as to form a vast rectangle, and a priest, his cassock tucked up so that it showed his military boots and trousers, was at work with saw and hammer building in the centre of that field of graves a little shrine.
[Illustration]
[Illustration:
The price of victory.
The battle-field was dotted with thousands upon thousands of new-made mounds and little wooden crosses. ]
[Illustration:
Instruction against gas attacks.
At various points behind the lines are schools where the men are instructed in the use of the anti-gas respirators. ]
Scrawled in pencil on one of the pitiful little crosses I read: “Un brave—Emile Petit—Mort aux Champ d’Honneur—Priez pour lui.” Six feet away was another cross which marks the spot where sleeps Gottlieb Zimmerman, of the Würtemberg Pioneers, and underneath, in German script, that line from the Bible which reads: “He fought the good fight.” Close by was still another little mound under which rested, so the headboard told me, Mohammed ben Hassen Bazazou of the Fourth Algerian Tirailleurs. In life those men had never so much as heard of one another. Doubtless they must often have wondered why they were fighting and what the war was all about. Now they rest there quietly, side by side, Frenchman and German and African, under the soil of Champagne, while somewhere in France and in Würtemberg and in Algeria women are praying for the safety of Emile and of Gottlieb and of Mohammed.
During the three days that I spent upon the battle-field of Champagne the roar of the guns never ceased and rarely slackened, yet not a sign of any human being could I see as I gazed out over that desolate plain on which was being fought one of the greatest battles of all time. There were no moving troops, no belching batteries, no flaunting colors—only a vast slag heap on which moved no living thing. Yet I knew that hidden beneath the ground all around me, as well as over there where the German trenches ran, men were waiting to kill or to be killed, and that behind the trench-scarred ridges at my back, and behind the low-lying crests in front of me, sweating men were at work loading and firing the great guns whose screaming missiles crisscrossed like invisible express trains overhead to burst miles away, perhaps, with the crash which scatters death. The French guns seemed to be literally everywhere. One could not walk a hundred yards without stumbling on a skilfully concealed battery. In the shelter of a ridge was posted a battery of 155-millimetre monsters painted with the markings of a giraffe in order to escape the searching eyes of the German aviators and named respectively Alice, Fernande, Charlotte, and Maria. From a square opening, which yawned like a cellar window in the earth, there protruded the long, lean muzzle of an eight-inch naval gun, the breech of which was twenty feet below the level of the ground in a gun-pit which was capable of resisting any high explosive that might chance to fall upon it. This marine monster was in charge of a crew of sailors who boasted that their pet could drop two hundred pounds of melinite on any given object thirteen miles away. But the guns to which the French owe their success in Champagne, the guns which may well prove the deciding factor in this war, are not the cumbersome siege pieces or the mammoth naval cannon, but the mobile, quick-firing, never-tiring, hard-hitting, “seventy-fives,” whose fire, the Germans resentfully exclaim, is not deadly but murderous.
[Illustration:
“Men were at work rolling up the barbed wire in the captured German entanglements.” ]
The battle-field was almost as thickly strewn with unexploded shells, hand-grenades, bombs, and aerial torpedoes as the ground under a pine-tree is with cones. One was, in fact, compelled to walk with the utmost care in order to avoid stepping upon these tubes filled with sudden death and being blown to kingdom come. I had picked up and was casually examining what looked like a piece of broom-handle with a tin tomato-can on the end, when the intelligence officer who was accompanying me noticed what I was doing. “Don’t drop that!” he exclaimed, “put it down gently. It’s a German hand-grenade that has failed to explode and the least jar may set it off. They’re as dangerous to tamper with as nitroglycerine.” I put it down as carefully as though it were a sleeping baby that I did not wish to waken. As the French Government has no desire to lose any of its soldiers unnecessarily, men had been set to work building around the unexploded shells and torpedoes little fences of barbed wire, just as a gardener fences in a particularly rare shrub or tree. Other men were at work carefully rolling up the barbed wire in the captured German entanglements, in collecting and sorting out the arms and equipment with which the field was strewn, in stacking up the thousands upon thousands of empty brass shell-cases to be shipped back to the factories for reloading, and even in emptying the bags filled with sand which had lined the German parapets and tying them in bundles ready to be used over again. They are a thrifty people, are the French. There was enough junk of one sort and another scattered over the battle-field to have stocked all the curio-shops in Europe and America for years to come, but as everything on a field of battle is claimed by the government nothing can be carried away. This explains why the brass shells that are smuggled back to Paris readily sell for ten dollars apiece, while for German helmets the curio dealers can get almost any price that they care to ask. As a matter of fact, it is against the law to offer any war trophies for sale or, indeed, to have any in one’s possession. What the French intend to do with the vast quantity of junk which they have taken from the battle-fields, heaven only knows. It is said that they have great storehouses filled with German helmets and similar trophies which they are going to sell after the war to souvenir collectors, thus adding to the national revenues. If this is so there will certainly be a glut in the curio market and it will be a poor household indeed that will not have on the sitting-room mantel a German _pickelhaube_. After the war is over hordes of tourists will no doubt make excursions to these battle-fields, just as they used to make excursions to Waterloo and Gettysburg, and the farmers who own the fields will make their fortunes showing the visitors through the trenches and dug-outs at five francs a head.
[Illustration:
The thousands upon thousands of empty brass shell-cases with which the battle-fields are strewn are collected and sent back to the factory for reloading. ]
[Illustration:
Mounted on the German trench walls were revolving steel turrets containing quick-firing guns.
When the French captured the turret shown above they found inside it three dead Germans, who, they assert, had been locked in by their officers and left to die. ]
The French officers who accompanied me over the battle-field particularly called my attention to a steel turret, some six feet high and eight or nine feet in diameter, which had been mounted on one of the German trench walls. The turret, which had a revolving top, contained a 50-millimetre gun served by three men. The French troops who stormed the German position found that the small steel door giving access to the interior of the turret was fastened on the outside by a chain and padlock. When they broke it open they found, so they told me, the bodies of three Germans who had apparently been locked in by their officers, and left there to fight and die with no chance of escape. I have no reason in the world to doubt the good faith of the officers who showed me the turret and told me the story, and yet—well, it is one of those things which seems too improbable to be true. When I was in Alsace the French officers told me of having found in certain of the captured positions German soldiers chained to their machine-guns. There again the inherent improbability of the incident leads one to question its truth. From what I have seen of the German soldier, I should say that he was the last man in the world who had to be chained to his gun in order to make him fight. Yet in this war so many wildly improbable, wholly incredible things have actually occurred that one is not justified in denying the truth of an assertion merely because it sounds unlikely.
[Illustration:
“Brown-skinned men from North Africa in turbans and burnooses.” ]
[Illustration:
Motor-buses with wire-netting tops filled with carrier pigeons. ]