Part 7
I have heard it said that the French army has been opposed, and in many instances betrayed, by the people whom they thought they were liberating from the German yoke, and that consequently the feeling of the French soldiers for the Alsatians is very bitter. This assertion is not true. I talked with a great many people during my stay in Alsace—with the _maires_ of towns, with shopkeepers, with peasant farmers, and with village priests—and I found that they welcomed the French as wholeheartedly as a citizen who hears a burglar in his house welcomes a policeman. I saw old men and women who had dwelt in Alsace before the Germans came, and who had given up all hope of seeing the beloved tricolor flying again above Alsatian soil, standing at the doors of their cottages, with tears coursing down their cheeks, while the endless columns of soldiery in the familiar uniform tramped by. In the schoolhouses of Alsace I saw French soldiers patiently teaching children of French blood, who have been born under German rule and educated under German schoolmasters, the meaning of “_Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité_,” and that _p-a-t-r-i-e_ spells France.
The change from Teutonic to Gallic rule is, however, by no means welcomed by all Alsatians. The Alsatians of to-day, remember, are not the Alsatians of 1870. It has been the consistent policy of the German Government to encourage and, where necessary, to assist German farmers to settle in Alsace, and as the years passed and the old hatred died down, these newcomers intermarried with the old French stock, so that to-day there are thousands of the younger generation in whose veins flow both French and German blood, and who scarcely know themselves to whom their allegiance belongs. As a result of this peculiar condition, both the French and German military authorities have to be constantly on their guard against treachery, for a woman bearing a French name may well be of German birth, while a man who speaks nothing but German may, nevertheless, be of pure French extraction. Hence spies, both French and German, abound. If the French Intelligence Department is well served, so is that of Germany. Peasants working in the fields, petty tradesmen in the towns, women of social position, and other women whose virtue is as easy as an old shoe, Germans dressed as priests, as hospital attendants, as Red Cross nurses, sometimes in French uniforms and travelling in motor-cars with all the necessary papers—all help to keep the German military authorities informed of what is going on behind the French lines. Sometimes they signal by means of lamps, or by raising and lowering the shade of a lighted room of some lonely farmhouse; sometimes by means of cunningly concealed telephone wires; occasionally by the fashion in which the family washing is arranged upon a line within range of German telescopes, innocent-looking red-flannel petticoats, blue-linen blouses, and white undergarments being used instead of signal-flags to spell out messages in code. A plough with a white or gray horse has more than once indicated the position of a French battery to the German airmen. The movements of a flock of sheep, driven by a spy disguised as a peasant, has sometimes given similar information. On one occasion three German officers in a motor-car managed to get right through the British lines in Flanders. Two of them were disguised as French officers, who were supposed to be bringing back the third as a prisoner, he being, of course, in German uniform. So clever and daring was their scheme that they succeeded in getting close to British headquarters before they were detected and captured. They are no cowards who do this sort of work. They know perfectly well what it means if they are caught: sunrise, a wall, and a firing-party.
[Illustration:
The German shells drop into the lake and stun hundreds of fish, whereupon the soldiers paddle out and gather them in. ]
[Illustration:
The first shot is the signal for the band to take position on the shore of the lake and play the _Marseillaise_. ]
On the Lac Noir.
From the _Hautes Chaumes_ we descended by a very steep and perilous path to the Lac Noir, where a battalion of Alpine chasseurs had built a cantonment at which we spent the night. The Lac Noir, or Black Lake, occupies the crater of an extinct volcano, whose rocky sides are so smooth and steep that it looks like a gigantic washtub, in which a weary Hercules might wash the clothing of the world. There were in the neighborhood of a thousand chasseurs in camp on the shores of the Lac Noir when I was there, the _chef de brigade_ having been, until the beginning of the war, military adviser to the President of China. The amazing democracy of the French army was illustrated by the fact that his second in command, Lieutenant-Colonel Messimy, was, until the change of cabinet which took place after the battle of the Marne, minister of war. The cantonment—“Black Lake City” Colonel Messimy jokingly called it—looked far more like a summer camp in the Adirondacks than a soldiers’ camp in Alsace. All the buildings were of logs, their roofs being covered with masses of green boughs to conceal them from inquisitive aeroplanes, and at the back of each hut, hollowed from the mountainside, was an underground shelter in which the men could take refuge in case of bombardment. Gravelled paths, sometimes bordered with flowers, wound amid the pine-trees; the officers’ quarters had broad verandas, with ingeniously made rustic furniture upon them; the mess-tables were set under leafy arbors; there was a swimming-raft and a diving-board, and a sort of rustic pavilion known as the “Casino,” where the men passed their spare hours in playing cards or danced to the music of a really excellent band. Over the doorway was a sign which read: “The music of the tambourine has been replaced by the music of the cannon.” Though the Lac Noir was, when I was there, within the French lines, it was within range of the German batteries, which shelled it almost daily. The slopes of the crater on which the cantonment was built are so steep, however, that the shells would miss the barracks altogether, dropping harmlessly in the middle of the little lake. The ensuing explosion would stun hundreds of fish, which would float upon the surface of the water, whereupon the soldiers would paddle out in a rickety flatboat and gather them in. In fact, a German bombardment came to mean that the chasseurs would have fish for dinner. This daily bombardment, which usually began just before sunset, the French called the “Evening Prayer.” The first shot was the signal for the band to take position on that shore of the lake which could not be reached by the German shells, and play the _Marseillaise_, a bit of irony which afforded huge amusement to the French and excessive irritation to the Germans.
[Illustration:
The penalty for treason. ]
When the history of the campaign in the Vosges comes to be written, a great many pages will have to be devoted to recounting the exploits of the _chasseurs alpins_. The “Blue Devils,” as the Germans have dubbed them, are the Highlanders of the French army, being recruited from the French slopes of the Alps and the Pyrenees. Tough as rawhide, keen as razors, hard as nails, they are the ideal troops for mountain warfare. They wear a distinctive dark-blue uniform, and the _béret_, or cap, of the French Alps, a flat-topped, jaunty head-dress which is brother to the tam-o’-shanter. The frontier of Alsace, from a point opposite Strasbourg to a point opposite Mülhausen, follows the summit of the Vosges, and over this range, which in places is upward of four thousand feet in height, have poured the French armies of invasion. In the van of those armies have marched the _chasseurs alpins_, dragging their guns by hand up the almost sheer precipices, and dragging the gun-mules after them; advancing through forests so dense that they had to chop paths for the line regiments which followed them; carrying by storm the apparently impregnable positions held by the Germans; sleeping often without blankets and with the mercury hovering near zero on the heights which they had captured; taking their batteries into positions where it was believed no batteries could go; raining shells from those batteries upon the wooded slopes ahead, and, under cover of that fire, advancing, always advancing. Think of what it meant to get a great army over such a mountain range in the face of desperate opposition; think of the labor involved in transporting the enormous supplies of food, clothing, and ammunition required by that army; think of the sufferings of the wounded who had to be taken back across those mountains, many of them in the depths of winter, sometimes in litters, sometimes lashed to the backs of mules. The mule, whether from the Alps, the Pyrenees, or from Missouri, is playing a brave part in this mountain warfare, and whenever I saw one I felt like the motorist who, after his automobile had been hauled out of an apparently bottomless Southern bog by a negro who happened to be passing with a mule team, said to his son: “My boy, from now on always raise your hat to a mule.”
Just as the crimson disk of the sun peered cautiously over the crater’s rim, we bade good-by to our friends the _chasseurs alpins_, and turned the noses of our mules up the mountains. As we reached the summit of the range, the little French captain who was acting as our guide halted us with a gesture. “Look over there,” he said, pointing to where, far beyond the trench-scarred hillsides, a great, broad valley was swimming in the morning mists. There were green squares which I knew for meadow-lands, and yellow squares which were fields of ripening grain; here and there were clusters of white-walled, red-roofed houses, with ancient church-spires rising above them; and winding down the middle of the plain was a broad gray ribbon which turned to silver when the sun struck upon it.
“Look,” said the little captain again, and there was a break in his voice. “That is what we are fighting for. That is Alsace.”
Then I knew that I was looking upon what is, to every man of Gallic birth, the Promised Land; I knew that the great, dim bulk which loomed against the distant sky-line was the Black Forest; I knew that somewhere up that mysterious, alluring valley, Strasbourg sat on her hilltop, like an Andromeda waiting to be freed; and that the broad, silent-flowing river which I saw below me was none other than the Rhine.
And as I looked I recalled another scene, on another continent and beside another river, two years before. I was standing with a colored cavalry sergeant of the border patrol on the banks of the Rio Grande, and we were looking southward to where the mountains of Chihuahua rose, purple, mysterious, forbidding, grim, against the evening sky. On the Mexican side of the river a battle was in progress.
“I suppose,” I remarked to my companion, “that you’ll be mighty glad when orders come to cross the border and clean things up over there in Mexico.”
“Mistah,” he answered earnestly, “we ain’t nevah gwine tuh _cross_ dat bodah, but one of these yere days wese a gwine tuh pick dat bodah up an’ carry it right down to Panama.”
And that is what the French are doing in Alsace. They have not crossed the border, but they have picked the border up, and are carrying it right down to the banks of the Rhine.
IV THE RETAKING OF ALSACE
When I asked the general commanding the armies operating in Alsace for permission to visit the fire-trenches, I did it merely as a matter of form. I was quite prepared to be met with a polite but firm refusal, for it is as difficult to get into the French trenches as it is to get behind the scenes of a Broadway theatre on the first night of a big production. This, understand, is not from any solicitude for your safety, but because a fire-trench is usually a very busy place indeed, and a visitor is apt to get in the way and make himself a nuisance generally. Imagine my astonishment, then, when the general said, “Certainly, if you wish,” just as though he were giving me permission to visit his stables or his gardens. I might add that almost every correspondent who has succeeded in getting to the French front has been taken, with a vast deal of ceremony and precaution, into a trench of some sort, thus giving him an experience to tell about all the rest of his life, but those who have been permitted to visit the actual fire-trenches might almost be numbered on one’s fingers. In this respect the French have been much less accommodating than the Belgians or the Germans. The fire, or first-line, trench, is the one nearest the enemy, and both from it and against it there is almost constant firing. The difference between a second-line, or reserve, trench, and a fire-trench is the difference between sitting in a comfortable orchestra stall and in being on the stage and a part of the show.
Before they took me out to the trenches we lunched in Dannemarie, or, as it used to be known under German rule, Dammerkirch. Though the town was within easy range of the German guns, and was shelled by them on occasion, the motto of the townsfolk seemed to be “business as usual,” for the shops were busy and the schools were open. We had lunch at the local inn: it began with fresh lobster, followed by _omelette au fromage_, spring lamb, and asparagus, and ended with strawberries, and it cost me sixty cents, wine included. From which you will gather that the people behind the French lines are not suffering for food.
Just outside Dannemarie the railway crosses the River Ill by three tremendous viaducts eighty feet in height. When, early in the war, the Germans fell back before the impetuous French advance, they effectually stopped railway traffic by blowing up one of these viaducts behind them. Urged by the railway company, which preferred to have the government foot the bill, the viaduct was rebuilt by the French military authorities, and a picture of the ceremony which marked its inauguration by the Minister of War was published in one of the Paris illustrated papers. The jubilation of the French was a trifle premature, however, for a few days later the Germans moved one of their monster siege-guns into position and, at a range of eighteen miles, sent over a shell which again put the viaduct out of commission. That explains, perhaps, why the censorship is so strict on pictures taken in the zone of operations.
Dannemarie is barely ten miles from that point where the French and German trenches, after zigzagging across more than four hundred miles of European soil, come to an abrupt end against the frontier of Switzerland. The Swiss, who are taking no chances of having the violation of Belgium repeated with their own country for the victim, have at this point massed a heavy force of extremely businesslike-looking troops, the frontier is marked by a line of wire entanglements, and a military zone has been established, civilians not being permitted to approach within a mile or more of the border. When I was in that region the French officers gave a dinner to the officers in command of the Swiss frontier force opposite them. That there might be no embarrassing breaches of neutrality the table was set exactly on the international boundary, so that the Swiss officers sat in Switzerland, and the French officers sat in France. One of the amusing incidents of the war was when the French “put one over” on the Germans at the beginning of hostilities in this region. Taking advantage of a sharp angle in the contour of the Swiss frontier, the French posted one of their batteries in such a position, that though it could sweep the German trenches, it was so close to the border that whenever the German guns replied their shells fell on Swiss soil, and an international incident was created.
[Illustration:
Troglodyte dwellings in Alsace.
“Twenty feet below the surface of the earth are rooms with sleeping-quarters for many men.” ]
The trenches in front of Altkirch, and indeed throughout Alsace, are flanked by patches of dense woods, and it is in these woods that the cantonments for the men are built, and amid their leafy recesses that the soldiers spend their time when off duty in sleeping, smoking, and card-playing. Though the German batteries periodically rake the woods with shell-fire, it is an almost total waste of ammunition, for the men simply retreat to the remarkable underground cities which they have constructed, and stay there until the shell-storm is over. The troglodyte habitations which have come into existence along the entire length of the western battle-front are perhaps the most curious products of this siege warfare. In these dwellings burrowed out of the earth the soldiers of France live as the cavemen lived before the dawn of civilization. A dozen to twenty feet below the surface of the ground, and so strongly roofed over with logs and earth as to render their occupants safe from the most torrential rain of high explosive, I was shown rooms with sleeping-quarters for a hundred men apiece, blacksmith and carpenter shops, a recreation room where the men lounged and smoked and read the papers and wrote to the folks at home, a telegraph station, a telephone exchange from which one could talk with any section of the trenches, with division headquarters, or with Paris; a bathing establishment with hot and cold water and shower-baths; a barber shop—all with board floors, free from dampness, and surprisingly clean. The trenches and passageways connecting these underground dwellings were named and marked like city streets—the Avenue Joffre, the Avenue Foch, the Rue des Victoires—and many of them were electric-lighted. The bedroom of an artillery officer, twenty feet underground, had its walls and ceiling covered with flowered cretonne—heaven knows where he got it!—and the tiny windows of the division commander’s headquarters, though they gave only on a wall of yellow mud, were hung with dainty muslin curtains—evidently the work of a woman’s loving fingers. In one place a score of steps led down to a passageway whose mud walls were so close together that I brushed one with either elbow as I passed. On this subterranean corridor doors—real doors—opened. One of these doors led into an officer’s sitting-room. The floor and walls were covered with planed wood and there was even an attempt at polish. The rustic furniture was excellently made. Beside the bed was a telephone and an electric light, and on a rude table was a brass shell-case filled with wild flowers. On the walls the occupant had tacked pictures of his wife and children in a pitiful attempt to make this hole in the ground look “homelike.”
[Illustration:
_From a photograph by Meurisse._
The straggling columns of unkempt, unshaven men were in striking contrast to the helmeted giants on gigantic horses who guarded them. ]
But don’t get the idea, from anything that I have said, that life in the trenches is anything more than endurable. Two words describe it: misery and muck. War is not only fighting, as many people seem to think. Bronchitis is more deadly than bullets. Pneumonia does more harm than poison-gas. Shells are less dangerous than lack of sanitation. To be attacked by strange and terrible diseases; to stand day after day, week after week, between walls of oozy mud and amid seas of slime; to be eaten alive by vermin; to suffer the intolerable irritation of the itch; to be caked with mud and filth; to go for weeks and perhaps for months with no opportunity to bathe; to be so foul of person that you are an offense to all who come near—such are the real horrors of the trench.
Yet, when the circumstances are taken into consideration, the French soldier is admirably cared for. His health is carefully looked after. He is well fed, well clothed, and, following the policy of conserving by every possible means the lives of the men, he is afforded every protection that human ingenuity can devise. The _képi_ has been replaced by the trench-helmet, a light casque of blued steel, which will protect a man’s brain-pan from shell-splinter, shrapnel, or grenade, and which has saved many a man’s life. Rather a remarkable thing, is it not, that the French soldier of to-day should adopt a head-dress almost identical with the casque worn by his ancestor, the French man-at-arms of the Middle Ages? I am convinced that it is this policy of conserving the lives of her fighting men which is going to win the war for France. If necessity demands that a position be taken with the bayonet, no soldiers in the world sacrifice themselves more freely than the French, but the military authorities have realized that men, unlike shells, cannot be replaced. “The duration and the outcome of the war,” General de Maud’huy remarked to me, “depends upon how fast we can kill off the Germans. Their army has reached its maximum strength, and every day sees it slowly but surely weakening. Our game, therefore, is to kill as many as possible of the enemy while at the same time saving our own men. It is, after all, a purely mathematical proposition.”
I believe that the losses incidental to trench warfare, as it is being conducted in Alsace, have been considerably exaggerated. The officer in command of the French positions in front of Altkirch told me that, during the construction of some of the trenches, the Germans rained twelve thousand shells upon the working parties, yet not a man was killed and only ten were wounded. The modern trench is so ingeniously constructed that, even in the comparatively rare event of a shell dropping squarely into it, only the soldiers in the immediate vicinity, seldom more than half a dozen at the most, are injured, the others being protected from the flying steel by the traverses, earthen walls which partially intersect the trench at intervals of a few yards. In the trench one has only to keep one’s head down, and he is nearly as safe as though he were at home. To crouch, to move bowed, to keep always the parapet between your head and the German riflemen, becomes an instinct, like the lock-step which used to be the rule for the convicts at Sing Sing.