Part 2
To have had a battery of French artillery go into action and pour a torrent of steel-cased death upon the enemy’s trenches for one’s special benefit is, so far as I am aware, a courtesy which the General Staff has seen fit to extend to no other correspondent. That the guns were of the new 105-millimetre model, which are claimed to be as much superior to the “75’s” as the latter are to all other field artillery, made the exhibition all the more interesting. The road which we had to take in order to reach this particular battery leads for several miles across an open plateau within full view of the German positions. As we approached this danger zone the staff-officer who accompanied me spoke to our driver, who opened up the throttle, and we took that stretch of exposed highway as a frightened cat takes the top of a backyard fence. “Merely a matter of precaution,” explained my companion. “Sometimes when the Germans see a car travelling along this road they send a few shells across in the hope of getting a general. There’s no use in taking unnecessary chances.” Though I didn’t say so, it struck me that I was in considerably more danger from the driving than I was from a German shell.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph copyright by M. Rol._
The effect of shrapnel from a French “seventy-five” on a German battery. ]
Leaving the car in the shelter of the ridge on which the battery was posted, we ascended the steep hillside on foot. I noticed that the slope we were traversing was pitted with miniature craters, any one of which was large enough to hold a barrel. “It might be as well to hurry across here,” the artillery officer who was acting as our guide casually remarked. “Last evening the Germans dropped eight hundred shells on this field that we are crossing, and one never knows, of course, when they will do it again.”
Part way up the slope we entered what appeared to be a considerable grove of young trees. Upon closer inspection, however, I discovered that it was not a natural grove but an artificial one, hundreds of saplings having been brought from elsewhere and set upright in the ground. Soon I saw the reason, for in a little cleared space in the heart of this imitation wood, mounted on what looked not unlike gigantic step-ladders, were two field-guns with their muzzles pointing skyward. “These guns are for use against aircraft,” explained the officer in charge. “The German airmen are constantly trying to locate our batteries, and in order to discourage their inquisitiveness we’ve put these guns in position.” The guns were of the regulation _soixante-quinze_ pattern, but so elevated that the wheels were at the height of a man’s head from the ground, the barrels thus being inclined at such an acute angle that, by means of a sort of turntable on which the platforms were mounted, the gunners were able to sweep the sky. “This,” said the artillery officer, calling my attention to a curious-looking instrument, “is the telemeter. By means of it we are able to obtain the exact altitude of the aircraft at which we are firing, and thus know at what elevation to set our guns. It is as simple as it is ingenious. There are two apertures, one for each eye. In one the aircraft is seen right side up; in the other it is inverted. By turning this thumbscrew the images are brought together. When one is superimposed exactly over the other the altitude is shown in metres on this dial below. Then we open on the airman with shrapnel.” Since these guns were placed in position the German air-scouts have found it extremely hazardous to play peek-a-boo from the clouds.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph copyright by M. Rol._
French 155-millimetre gun shelling the German trenches on the Aisne.
“The guns were so ingeniously masked that fifty feet away one could detect nothing about that apparently innocent clump of tangled vegetation to suggest that it concealed an amazing quantity of potential death.” ]
A few minutes’ walk along the ridge brought us to the battery of 105’s, which was the real object of our visit. The guns were not posted on the summit of the ridge, as a layman might suppose, but a quarter of a mile behind it, so that the ridge itself, a dense forest, and the river Aisne intervened between the battery and the German position. The guns were sunk in pits so ingeniously masked with shrubs and branches that the keenest-eyed airman, flying low overhead, would have seen nothing to arouse his suspicions. Fifty feet away one could detect nothing about that apparently innocent clump of tangled vegetation to suggest that it concealed an amazing quantity of potential death. This battery had been here through the winter, and the gunners had utilized the time, which hung heavy on their hands, in making themselves comfortable and in beautifying their surroundings. With the taste and ingenuity so characteristic of the French, they had transformed their battery into a sylvan grotto. The earthen walls of the gun-pits were kept in place by deftly woven wattles, and the paths leading to them had borders of white sand, on which were patriotic mottoes in colored pebbles. Scattered about were ingeniously constructed rustic seats and tables. Within ten feet of one of the great gray guns a bed of hyacinths made the air heavy with their fragrance. The next gun-pit was banked about with yellow crocus. Hanging from the arbor which shielded another of the steel monsters were baskets made of moss and bark, in which were growing violets. At a rustic table, under a sort of pergola, a soldier was painting a picture in water-colors. It was a good picture. I saw it afterward on exhibition in the Salon des Humoristes in Paris. A few yards back of each gun-emplacement were cave-like shelters, dug in the hillside, in which the men sleep, and in which they take refuge during the periodic shell-storms which visit them. Those into which I went were warm and dry and not at all uncomfortable. Over the entrance to one of these troglodyte dwellings was a sign announcing that it was the Villa des Roses.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph copyright by M. Rol._
French artillery officers, in an observatory on the Aisne, watching the effect of shell-fire on the German trenches.
“From these secret _observatoires_ the French observers keep an unceasing watch on the movements of the enemy and, by means of telephones, direct and control the fire of their own batteries with incredible accuracy.” ]
“Do the Germans know the position of these guns?” I asked the battery commander.
“Not exactly, though they have, of course, a pretty general idea.”
“Then you are not troubled by German shells,” I remarked.
“Indeed we are,” was the answer. “Though they have not been able to locate us exactly, they know that we are somewhere at the back of this ridge, so every now and then they attempt to clear us out by means of progressive fire. That is, they start in at the summit, and by gradually increasing the elevation of their guns, systematically sweep the entire reverse slope of the ridge, so that some of their shells are almost certain to drop in on us. Do you appreciate, however, that, though we have now been in this same position for nearly six months, though not a day goes by that we are not under fire, and though a number of my men have been killed and wounded, we have never seen the target at which we are firing and we have never seen a German soldier?”
A ten-minute walk across the open tableland which lay in front of the battery, and which forms the summit of the ridge, then through a dense bit of forest, and we found ourselves at the entrance to one of those secret _observatoires_ from which the French observers keep an unceasing watch on the movements of the enemy, and by means of telephones, control the fire of their own batteries with incredible accuracy. This particular _observatoire_ occupied the mouth of a cave on the precipitous hillside above the Aisne, being rendered invisible by a cleverly arranged screen of bushes. Pinned to the earthen walls were contour maps and fire-control charts; powerful telescopes mounted on tripods brought the German trenches across the river so close to us that, had a German soldier been incautious enough to show himself, we could almost have seen the spike upon his helmet; and a military telephonist with receivers clamped to his ears sat at a switchboard and pushed buttons or pulled out pegs just as the telephone girls do in New York hotels. The chief difference was that this operator, instead of ordering a bellhop to take ice-water and writing-paper to Room 511, would tell the commander of a battery, four or five or six miles away, to send over to a German trench, which he would designate by number, a few rounds of shrapnel or high explosive.
An officer in a smart uniform of dark blue with the scarlet facings of the artillery beckoned to me to come forward, and indicated a small opening in the screen of branches.
“Look through there,” he said, “but please be extremely careful not to show yourself or to shake the branches. That hillside opposite us is dotted with the enemy’s _observatoires_, just as this hillside is dotted with ours, and they are constantly sweeping this ridge with powerful glasses in the hope of spotting us and shelling us out. Thus far they’ve not been able to locate us. We’ve had better luck, however. We’ve located two of their fire-control stations, and put them out of business.”
As I was by no means anxious to have a storm of shrapnel bursting about my head, I was careful not to do anything which might attract the attention of a German with a telescope glued to his eye. Peering cautiously through the opening in the screen of bushes, I found myself looking down upon the winding course of the Aisne; to the southwest I could catch a glimpse of the pottery roofs of Soissons, while from the farther bank of the river rose the gentle slopes which formed the opposite side of the river valley. These slopes were everywhere slashed and scarred by zigzag lines of yellow which I knew to be the German trenches. But, though I knew that those trenches sheltered an invading army, not a sign of life was to be seen. Barring a few cows grazing contentedly in a pasture, the landscape was absolutely deserted. There was something strangely oppressive and uncanny about this great stretch of fertile countryside, dotted here and there with white-walled cottages and clumps of farm buildings, but with not a single human being to be seen. On the other side of the opposite ridge I knew that the German batteries were posted, just as the French guns were stationed out of sight at the back of the ridge on which I stood. This artillery warfare is, after all, only a gigantic edition of the old-fashioned game of hide-and-seek. The chief difference being that when you catch sight of your opponent, instead of saying politely, “I see you!” you try to kill him with a three-inch shell.
A soldier set a tripod in position and on it carefully adjusted a powerful telescope. The colonel motioned me to look through it, and suddenly the things that had looked like sinuous yellow lines became recognizable as marvellously constructed earthworks.
“Now,” said the colonel, “focus your glass on that trench just above the ruined farmhouse and I will show you what our gunners can do.” After consulting a chart with innumerable radiating blue and scarlet lines which was pinned to a drafting-table, and making some hasty calculations with a pencil, he gave a few curt orders to a junior officer who sat at a telephone switchboard with receivers clamped to his ears. The young officer spoke some cabalistic figures into the transmitter and concluded with the order: “_Tir rapide._”
“Now, Monsieur Powell,” called the colonel, “watch the trenches.” A moment later, from somewhere behind the ridge at the back of us, came in rapid succession six splitting crashes—_bang! bang! bang! bang! bang! bang!_ A fraction of a second later I saw six puffs of black smoke suddenly appear against one of the yellow lines on the distant hillside; six fountains of earth shot high into the air.
“Right into the trenches!” exclaimed the colonel, who was kneeling beside me with his glasses glued to his eyes. “Watch once more.” Again six splitting crashes, six distant puffs of smoke, and, floating back to us a moment later, six muffled detonations.
“The battery that has just fired is four miles from those trenches,” remarked the colonel casually. “Not so bad, eh?”
“It’s marvellous,” I answered, but all the time I was wondering how many lives had been snuffed out for my benefit that morning on the distant hillside, how many men with whom I have no quarrel had been maimed for life, how many women had been left husbandless, how many children fatherless.
“I do not wish to hasten your departure, Monsieur Powell,” apologized the colonel, “but if you wish to get back to your car without annoyance, I think that you had better be starting. We’ve stirred up the Boches, and at any moment now their guns may begin to answer.”
He knew what he was talking about, did that colonel. In fact, we had delayed our departure too long, for just as we reached the edge of the wood, and started across the open plateau which crowns the summit, something hurtled through the air above the tree-tops with a sound between a moan and a snarl and exploded with a crash like a thousand cannon crackers set off together a few yards in front of us. Before the echoes of the first had time to die away came another and yet another. They burst to the right of us, to the left of us, seemingly all around us. We certainly had stirred up the Germans. For a few minutes we were in a very warm corner, and I am no stranger to shell-fire, either. At first we decided to make a dash for it across the plateau, but a shell which burst in the undergrowth not thirty feet ahead induced us to change our minds, and we precipitately retreated to the nearest bomb-proof. The next half-hour we spent snugly and securely several feet below the surface of the earth, while shrapnel whined overhead like bloodhounds seeking their prey. Have you ever heard shrapnel by any chance? No? Well, it sounds as much as anything else like a winter gale howling through the branches of a pine-tree. It is a moan, a groan, a shriek, and a wail rolled into one, and when the explosion comes it sounds as though some one had touched off a stick of dynamite under a grand piano. And it is not particularly cheering to know that the ones you hear do not harm you, and that it is the ones you do not have time to hear that send you to the cemetery. The French artillery officers tell me that the German ammunition has noticeably deteriorated of late. Well, perhaps. Still, I hadn’t noticed it. It was thirty minutes before the storm of shrapnel slackened and it was safe to start for the car. We had a mile of open field to cross with shells still occasionally falling. I felt like a man wearing a silk hat who has just passed a gang of boys engaged in making snowballs. In a lifetime largely made up of interesting experiences, that exhibition of French gunnery will always stand out as one of the most interesting things I have ever seen. But all the way back to headquarters I kept wondering about those men in the trenches where the shells had fallen, and about the women and children who are waiting and watching and praying for them over there across the Rhine.
I had expressed a wish to visit Soissons, and, upon communicating with division headquarters, permission was granted and the necessary orders issued. Before we started, however, I was told quite frankly that the military authorities accepted no responsibility for the consequences of the proposed excursion, for, though the town was in the possession of the French, it was under almost constant bombardment by the Germans. In order to get the setting of the picture clearly in your mind, you must picture two parallel ranges of hills, separated by a wonderfully fertile valley, perhaps three miles in width, down which meanders, with many twists and hairpin turns, the silver ribbon which is the Aisne. On its north bank, at a gentle bend in the river, stands the quaint old town of Soissons, so hoary with antiquity that its earlier history is lost in the mists of tradition. Of its normal population of fifteen thousand, when I was there only a few score remained, and those only because they had no other place to go.
A sandstone ridge which rises abruptly from the south bank of the river directly opposite Soissons was held by the French, and from its shelter their batteries spat unceasing defiance at the Germans, under General von Heeringen, whose trenches lined the heights on the other side of the river and immediately back of the town. From dawn to dark and often throughout the night, the screaming messengers of death crisscrossed above the red-tiled roofs of Soissons and served to make things interesting for the handful of inhabitants who remained. Every now and then the German gunners, apparently for no reason save pure deviltry, would drop a few shells into the middle of the town. They argued, no doubt, that it would keep the townsfolk from becoming ennuied and give them something to occupy their minds.
The ridge on the French side of the river is literally honeycombed with quarries, tunnels, and caverns, many of these subterranean chambers being as large and as curiously formed as the grottoes in the Mammoth Cave. Being weather-proof as well as shell-proof, the French had turned them to excellent account, utilizing them for barracks, ammunition stores, fire-control stations, hospitals, and even stables. In fact, I can recall few stranger sights than that of a long line of helmeted horsemen, comprising a whole squadron of dragoons, disappearing into the mouth of one of these caverns like a gigantic snake crawling into its lair.
Leaving the car three miles from the outskirts of Soissons, we made our way through dense undergrowth up a hillside until we came quite unexpectedly upon the yawning mouth of a tunnel, which, I surmised, passed completely under the backbone of the ridge. Groping our way for perhaps an eighth of a mile through inky blackness, we suddenly emerged, amid a blinding glare of sunlight, into just such another observing station as we had visited that morning farther up the Aisne. This _observatoire_, being in the mouth of the tunnel, could not be seen from above, while a screen of branches and foliage concealed it from the German observers across the river. The officer in command at this point was anxious to give us a demonstration of the accuracy with which his gunners could land on the German solar plexus, but when he learned that we were going into the town he changed his mind.
“They’ve been quiet all day,” he explained, “and if you are going across the river it’s just as well not to stir them up. You’ll probably get a little excitement in any event, for the Boches usually shell the town for an hour or so at sunset before knocking off for supper. We call it ‘The Evening Prayer.’”
[Illustration:
In an underground first-aid station.
The caves and grottoes in the cliffs along the Aisne are utilized for first-aid dressing-stations. ]
Slipping through an opening in the screen of foliage which masked the _observatoire_, we found ourselves at the beginning of a _boyau_, or communication trench, which led diagonally down the face of the hillside to the river. Down this we went, sometimes on hands and knees and always stooping, for as long as we were on the side of the hill we were within sight of the German positions, and to have shown our heads above the trench would have attracted the bullets of the German sharpshooters. And a second is long enough for a bullet to do its business. Emerging from the _boyau_ at the foot of the hill, we crossed the river by an ancient stone bridge and for a mile or more followed a cobble-paved highroad which ran between rows of workmen’s cottages which had been wrecked by shell-fire. Some had shattered roofs and the plastered walls of others were pockmarked with bullets, for here the fighting had been desperate and bloody. But over the garden walls strayed blossom-laden branches of cherry, peach, and apple trees. The air was heavy with their fragrance. Black-and-white cattle grazed contentedly knee-deep in lush green grass. Pigeons cooed and chattered on the housetops. By an open window an old woman with a large white cat in her lap sat knitting. As she knitted she looked out across the blossoming hillsides to the sky-line where the invaders lay intrenched and waiting. I wondered what she was thinking about. She must have remembered quite distinctly when the Germans came to Soissons for the first time, five and forty years before, and how they shot the townsmen in the public square. A few years ago the people of Soissons unveiled a monument to those murdered citizens. When this war is over they will have more names to add to those already carved on its base.
[Illustration:
Zouaves carrying a German position in the Belgian sand-dunes by storm. ]
It is not a cheerful business strolling through a shell-shattered and deserted town. You feel depressed and speak in hushed tones, as though you were in a house that had been visited by death as, indeed, you are. In the Place de la République we found a score or so of infantrymen on duty, these being the only soldiers that we saw in the town. Along the main thoroughfares nearly every shop was closed and its windows shuttered. Some tobacconists and two or three cafés remained bravely open, but little business was being done. I do not think that I am exaggerating when I say that every fourth or fifth house we passed showed evidences of the German bombardment. One shell, I remember, had exploded in the show-window of a furniture store and had demolished a gilt-and-red-plush parlor suite. The only thing unharmed was a sign which read “Cheap and a bargain.”