Part 6
To every one I put that question. Summing up all opinions, I should say that the French thoroughly appreciate the value of Britain’s sea power and what it has meant to them for her to have control of the seas, but they regard her lack of military preparedness and the deficiency of technic among the British officers as inexcusable; they consider the deep-seated opposition to conscription in England as incomprehensible; they view the bickerings between British capital and labor as little short of criminal; they regard the British officers who needlessly expose themselves as being not heroic but insane. The attitude of the British press was, in the earlier days of the war at least, calculated to put a slight strain on the entente cordiale. Anxious, naturally enough, to throw into high relief the exploits of the British troops in France, the British newspapers vastly exaggerated the importance of the British expedition, thus throwing the whole picture of the war out of perspective. The behavior of the British officers, moreover, though punctiliously correct, was not such as to mend matters, for they assumed an attitude of haughty condescension which, as I happen to know, was extremely galling to their French colleagues, most of whom had forgotten more about the science of war than the patronizing youngsters who officered the new armies had ever known. “To listen to you English and to read your newspapers,” I heard a Frenchman say to an Englishman in the Traveller’s Club in Paris not long ago, “one would think that there was no one in France except the British Army and a few Germans.”
I have never heard any one in France suggest that the British officer is lacking in bravery, but I have often heard it intimated that he is lacking in brains. The view is held that he regards the war as a sporting affair, much as he would regard polo or big-game hunting, rather than as a deadly serious business. When the British officers in Flanders brought over several packs of hounds and thus attempted to combine war and hunting, it created a more unfavorable impression among the French than if the British had lost a battle. “The British Army,” a distinguished Italian general remarked to me shortly before Italy joined the Allies, “is composed of magnificent material; it is well fed and admirably equipped—but the men look on war as sport and go into battle as they would into a game of football.” To the Frenchman, whose soil is under the heel of the invader, whose women have been violated by a ruthless and brutal soldiery, whose historic monuments have been destroyed, and whose towns have been sacked and burned, this attitude of mind is absolutely incomprehensible, and in his heart he resents it. The above, mind you, is written in no spirit of criticism; I am merely attempting to show you the Englishman through French eyes.
I have heard it said, in criticism, that the new British Army is composed of youngsters. So it is, but for the life of me I fail to see why this should be any objection. The ranks of both armies during our Civil War were filled with boys still in their teens. It was one of Wellington’s generals, if I remember rightly, who used to say that, for really desperate work, he would always take lads in preference to seasoned veterans because the latter were apt to be “too cunning.” “These children,” exclaimed Marshal Ney, reviewing the beardless conscripts of 1813, “are wonderful! I can do anything with them; they will go anywhere!”
But the thing that really counts, when all is said and done, is the _spirit_ of the men. The British soldier of this new army has none of the rollicking, devil-may-care recklessness of the traditional Tommy Atkins. He has not joined the army from any spirit of adventure or because he wanted to see the world. He is not an adventurer; he is a crusader. With him it is a deadly serious business. He has not enlisted because he wanted to, or because he had to, but because he felt he ought to. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred he has left a family, a comfortable home, and a good job behind him. And, unlike the stay-at-homes in England, he doesn’t make the mistake of underrating his enemy. He knows that the headlines which appear regularly in the English papers exultantly announcing “another British advance” are generally buncombe. He knows that it isn’t a question of advancing but of hanging on. He knows that he will have to fight with every ounce of fight there is in him if he is to remain where he is now. He knows that before the Germans can be driven out of France and Belgium, much less across the Rhine, all England will be wearing crape. He knows that there is no truth in the reports that the enemy is weakening. He knows it because hasn’t he vainly thrown himself in successive waves against that unyielding wall of steel? He knows that it is going to be a long war—probably a very long war indeed. Every British officer or soldier with whom I have talked has said that he expects that the spring of 1916 will find them in virtually the same positions that they have occupied for the past year. They will gain ground in some places, of course, and lose ground in others, but the winter, so the men in the trenches believe, will see no radical alteration in the present western battle-line. All this, of course, will not make pleasant reading in England, where the Government and certain sections of the Press have given the people the impression that Germany is already beaten to her knees and that it is all over bar the shouting. Out along the battle-front, however, in the trenches, and around the camp-fires, you do not hear the men discussing “the terms of peace we will grant Germany,” or “What shall we do with the Kaiser?” They are not talking much, they are not singing much, they are not boasting at all, but they have settled down to the herculean task that lies before them with a grim determination, a bulldog tenacity of purpose, which is eventually, I believe, going to prove the deciding factor in the war. Nothing better illustrates this spirit than the inscription which I saw on a cross over a newly made grave in Flanders:
TELL ENGLAND, YE THAT PASS THIS MONUMENT, THAT WE WHO REST HERE DIED CONTENT.
III CAMPAIGNING IN THE VOSGES
The sergeant in charge of the machine-gun, taking advantage of a lull in the rifle-fire which had crackled and roared along the trenches since dawn, was sprawled on his back in the gun-pit, reading a magazine. What attracted my attention was its being an American magazine.
“Where did you learn to read English?” I asked him curiously.
“In America,” said he.
“What part?” said I.
“Schenectady,” he answered. “Was with the General Electric until the war began.”
“I’m from up-State myself,” I remarked. “My people live in Syracuse.”
“The hell you say!” he exclaimed, scrambling to his feet and grasping my hand cordially. “I took you for an Englishman. From Syracuse, eh? Why, that makes us sort of neighbors, doesn’t it? We ought to have a drink on it. I suppose the Boches have plenty of beer over there,” waving his hand in the direction of the German trenches, of which I could catch a glimpse through a loophole, “but we haven’t anything here but water. I’ve got an idea, though! Back in the States, when they have those Old Home Week reunions, they always fire off an anvil or the town cannon. So what’s the matter with celebrating this reunion by letting the Boches have a few rounds from the machine-gun?”
Seating himself astride the bicycle saddle on the trail of the machine-gun, he swung the lean barrel of the wicked little weapon until it rested on the German trenches a hundred yards away. Then he slipped the end of a cartridge-carrier into the breech.
[Illustration:
In a bomb-proof gun-pit.
“_Rrr-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-rrrip_ went the mitrailleuse, with the noise of a million mowing-machines. The racket in the log-roofed gun-pit was deafening.” ]
“Three rousing cheers for the U. S. A.!” he shouted, and pressed a button. _Rrr-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-rrrip_ went the mitrailleuse, with the noise of a million mowing-machines. Flame spurted from its muzzle as water spurts from the nozzle of a fire-hose. The racket in the log-roofed gun-pit was ear-shattering. The blast of bullets spattered the German trenches, they _pinged_ metallically against the steel plates set in the embrasures, they kicked up countless spurts of yellow earth. The sergeant stood up, grinning, and with a grimy handkerchief wiped from his face the powder stains and perspiration.
[Illustration:
French trenches on the Somme.
“This is the sort of wall which one side or the other will have to break through in order to win this war.” ]
“If you should happen to be in Schenectady you might drop in at the General Electric plant and tell the boys—” he began, but the sentence was never finished, for just then a shell whined low above our heads and burst somewhere behind the trenches with the roar of an exploding powder-mill. We had disturbed the Germans’ afternoon siesta, and their batteries were showing their resentment.
“I think that perhaps I’d better be moving along,” said I hastily. “It’s getting on toward dinner time.”
“Well, s’long,” said he regretfully. “And say,” he called after me, “when you get back to little old New York would you mind dropping into the Knickerbocker and having a drink for me? And be sure and give my regards to Broadway.”
“I certainly will,” said I.
And that is how a Franco-American whose name I do not know, sergeant in a French line regiment whose number I may not mention, and I held an Old Home Week celebration of our own in the French trenches in Alsace. For all I know there may have been some other residents of central New York over in the German trenches. If so, they made no attempt to join our little reunion. Had they done so they would have received a _very_ warm reception.
[Illustration:
In the French trenches on the Yser.
To put one’s head a fraction of an inch above the parapet is to become a corpse, so a watch is kept on the enemy through periscopes. ]
There were several reasons why I welcomed the opportunity offered me by the French General Staff to see the fighting in Alsace. In the first place a veil of secrecy had been thrown over the operations in that region, and the mysterious is always alluring. Secondly, most of the fighting that I have seen has been either in flat or only moderately hilly countries, and I was curious to see how warfare is conducted in a region as mountainous and as heavily forested as the Adirondacks or Oregon. Again, the Alsace sector is at the extreme southern end of that great battle-line, more than four hundred miles long, which stretches its unlovely length across Europe from the North Sea to the Alps, like some monstrous and deadly snake. And lastly, I wanted to see the retaking of that narrow strip of territory lying between the summit of the Vosges and the Rhine which for more than forty years has been mourned by France as one of her “lost provinces.”
[Illustration:
_From a photograph by E. A. Powell._
In the Vosges the French have built veritable underground cities. ]
[Illustration:
_From a photograph by Meurisse._
A 155-millimetre gun firing at a German position eight miles away. ]
Campaigning in the Vosges.
This land of Alsace is, in many respects, the most beautiful that I have ever seen. Strung along the horizon, like sentinels wrapped in mantles of green, the peaks of the Vosges loom against the sky. On the slopes of the ridges, massed in their black battalions, stand forests of spruce and pine. Through peaceful valleys silver streams meander leisurely, and in the meadows which border them cattle stand knee-deep amid the lush green grass. The villages, their tortuous, cobble-paved streets lined on either side by dim arcades, and the old, old houses, with their turrets and balconies and steep-pitched pottery roofs, give you the feeling that they are not real, but that they are scenery on a stage, and this illusion is heightened by the men in their jaunty _bérets_ and wooden _sabots_, and the women, whose huge black silk head-dresses accentuate the freshness of their complexions. It is at once a region of ruggedness and majesty and grandeur, of quaintness and simplicity and charm. As I motored through it, it was hard to make myself believe that death was abroad in so fair a land, and that over there, on the other side of those near-by hills, men were engaged in the business of wholesale slaughter. I was brought to an abrupt realization of it, however, as we were passing through the old gray town of Gérardmer. I heard a sudden outcry, and the streets, which a moment before had been a-bustle with the usual market-day crowd, were all at once deserted. The people dived into their houses as a woodchuck dives into its hole. The sentries on duty in front of the _État-Major_ were staring upward. High in the sky, approaching with the speed of an express-train, was what looked like a great white seagull, but which, from the silver sheen of its armor-plated body, I knew to be a German _Taube_. “We’re in for another bombardment,” remarked an officer. “The German airmen have been visiting us every day of late.” As the aircraft swooped lower and nearer, a field-gun concealed on the wooded hillside above the town spoke sharply, and a moment later there appeared just below the _Taube_ a sudden splotch of white, like one of those powder-puffs that women carry. From the opposite side of the town another antiaircraft gun began to bark defiance, until soon the aerial intruder was ringed about by wisps of fleecy smoke. At one time I counted as many as forty of them, looking like white tufts on a coverlet of turquoise blue. Things were getting too hot for the German, and with a beautiful sweep he swung about, and went sailing down the wind, content to wait until a more favorable opportunity should offer.
The inhabitants of these Alsatian towns have become so accustomed to visits from German airmen that they pay scarcely more attention to them than they do to thunderstorms, going indoors to avoid the bombs just as they go indoors to avoid the rain. I remarked, indeed, as I motored through the country, that nearly every town through which we passed showed evidences, either by shattered roofs or shrapnel-spattered walls, of aeroplane bombardment. Thus is the war brought home to those who, dwelling many miles from the line of battle, might naturally suppose themselves safe from harm. In those towns which are within range of the German guns the inhabitants are in double danger, yet the shops and schools are open, and the townspeople go about their business apparently wholly unmindful of the possibility that a shell may drop in on them at any moment. In St. Dié we stopped for lunch at the Hôtel Terminus, which is just opposite the railway-station. St. Dié is within easy range of the German guns—or was when I was there—and when the Germans had nothing better to do they shelled it, centring their fire, as is their custom, upon the railway-station, so as to interfere as much as possible with traffic and the movement of troops. The station and the adjacent buildings looked like cardboard boxes in which with a lead-pencil somebody had jabbed many ragged holes. The hotel, despite its upper floor having been wrecked by shell-fire only a few days previously, was open and doing business. Ranged upon the mantel of the dining-room was a row of German 77-millimetre shells, polished until you could see your face in them. “Where did you get those?” I asked the woman who kept the hotel. “Those are some German shells that fell in the garden during the last bombardment, and didn’t explode,” she answered carelessly. “I had them unloaded—the man who did it made an awful fuss about it, too—and I use them for hot-water bottles. Sometimes it gets pretty cold here at night, and it’s very comforting to have a nice hot shell in your bed.”
From St. Dié to Le Rudlin, where the road ends, is in the neighborhood of thirty miles, and we did it in not much over thirty minutes. We went so fast that the telegraph-poles looked like the palings in a picket fence, and we took the corners on two wheels—doubtless to save rubber. Of one thing I am quite certain: if I am killed in this war, it is not going to be by a shell or a bullet; it is going to be in a military motor-car. No cars save military ones are permitted on the roads in the zone of operations, and for the military cars no speed limits exist. As a result, the drivers tear through the country as though they were in the Vanderbilt Cup Race. Sometimes, of course, a wheel comes off, or they meet another vehicle when going round a corner at full speed—and the next morning there is a military funeral. To be the driver of a military car in the zone of operations is the joy-rider’s dream come true. The soldier who drove my car steered with one hand because he had to use the other to illustrate the stories of his exploits in the trenches. Despite the fact that we were on a mountain road, one side of which dropped away into nothingness, when he related the story of how he captured six Germans single-handed he took both hands off the wheel to tell about it. It would have made Barney Oldfield’s hair permanently pompadour.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph by Meurisse._
What the Germans did to the church at Ribécourt. ]
At Le Rudlin, where there is an outpost of Alpine chasseurs, we left the car, and mounted mules for the ascent of the _Hautes Chaumes_, or High Moors, which crown the summit of the Vosges. Along this ridge ran the imaginary line which Bismarck made the boundary between Germany and France. Each mule was led by a soldier, whose short blue tunic, scarlet breeches, blue puttees, rakish blue _béret_, and rifle slung hunter-fashion across his back, made him look uncommonly like a Spanish brigand, while another soldier hung to the mule’s tail to keep him on the path, which is as narrow and slippery as the path of virtue. Have you ever ridden the trail which leads from the rim of the Grand Canyon down to the Colorado? Yes? Well, the trail which we took up to the _Hautes Chaumes_ was in places like that, only more so. Yet over that and similar trails has passed an army of invasion, carrying with it, either on the backs of mules or on the backs of men, its guns, food, and ammunition, and sending back in like fashion its wounded. Reaching the summit, the trail debouched from the dense pine forest onto an open, wind-swept moor. Dotting the backbone of the ridge, far as the eye could see, ran a line of low stone boundary posts. On one side of each post was carved the letter F. On the other, the eastern face, was the letter D. Is it necessary to say that F stood for France and D for Deutschland? Squatting beside one of the posts was a French soldier busily engaged with hammer and chisel in cutting away the D. “It will not be needed again,” he explained, grinning.
[Illustration:
On the summit of the Vosges.
Mr. Powell standing beside one of the stone posts which formerly marked the frontier of Germany and France. ]
Leaving the mules in the shelter of the wood, we proceeded across the open tableland which crowns the summit of the ridge on foot, for, being now within both sight and range of the German batteries, there seemed no object in attracting more attention to ourselves than was absolutely necessary. Half a mile or so beyond the boundary posts the plateau suddenly fell away in a sheer precipice, a thin screen of bushes bordering its brink. The topographical officer who had assumed the direction of the expedition at Le Rudlin motioned me to come forward. “Have a look,” said he, “but be careful not to show yourself or to shake the bushes, or the Boches may send us a shell.” Cautiously I peered through an opening in the branches. The mountain slope below me, almost at the foot of the cliff on which I stood, was scarred across by two great undulating yellow ridges. In places they were as much as a thousand yards apart, in others barely ten. I did not need to be told what they were. I knew. The ridge higher up the slope marked the line of the French trenches; the lower that of the German. From them came an incessant crackle and splutter which sounded like a forest fire. Sometimes it would die down until only an occasional shot would punctuate the mountain silence, and then, apparently without cause, it would rise into a clatter which sounded like an army of carpenters shingling a roof. In the forests on either side of us batteries were at work steadily, methodically, and, though we could not see the guns, the frequent fountains of earth thrown up along both lines of trenches by bursting shells showed how heavy was the bombardment that was in progress, and how accurate was both the French and German fire. We were watching what the official _communiqué_ described the next day as the fighting on the Fecht very much as one would watch a football game from the upper row of seats in the Harvard stadium. Above the forest at our right swayed a French observation balloon, tugging impatiently at its rope, while the observer, glasses glued to his eyes, telephoned to the commander of the battery in the wood below him where his shells were hitting. Suddenly, from the French position just below me, there rose, high above the duotone of rifle and artillery fire, the shrill clatter of a quick-firer. _Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat_ it went, for all the world like one of those machines which they use for riveting steel girders. And, when you come to think about it, that is what it _was_ doing: riveting the bonds which bind Alsace to France.