Part 8
So cleverly have the French engineers taken advantage of the configuration of the country in front of Altkirch, that we were able to enter the _boyaux_, or communication trenches, without leaving the shelter of the wood. Half an hour’s brisk walking through what would, in times of peace, be called a ditch, perhaps three feet wide and seven deep, its earthen walls kept in place by wattles of woven willows, and with as many twists and turns as the maze at Hampton Court, brought us at last into the fire-trenches. These were considerably roomier than the _boyaux_, being in places six feet wide and having a sort of raised step or platform of earth, on which the men stood to fire, running along the side nearest the enemy. Each soldier was protected by a steel shield about the size of a newspaper, and painted a lead-gray, set in the earth of the parapet. In the centre of the shield is cut an opening slightly larger than a playing-card, through which the soldier pokes his rifle when he wishes to fire, and which, when not in use, is screened by a steel shutter or a cloth curtain, so that the riflemen in the German trench cannot see any one who may happen to pass behind it. At intervals of five or six yards men were on watch, with their rifles laid. Their instructions are never to take their eyes off the enemy’s trenches, a shout from them bringing their comrades tumbling out of their dug-outs just as firemen respond to the clang of the fire-gong. When the men come rushing out of the shelters they have, in the earthen platform, a good steady footing which will bring their heads level with the parapet, where their rifles, leaning against the steel shields, await them. It is planned to always keep a sufficient force in the fire-trenches, so that, roughly speaking, there will be a man to every yard, which is about as close as they can fight to advantage. Every thirty yards or so, in a log-roofed shelter known as a gun-pit, is a machine-gun, though in the German trenches it is not at all uncommon to find a machine-gun to every fifteen men.
As we passed through the trenches I noticed at intervals of a hundred yards or so men, standing motionless as statues, who seemed to be intently listening. And that, I found, was precisely what they were doing. In this trench warfare men are specially told off to listen, both above and beneath the ground, for any sapping or mining operations on the part of the enemy. Without this precaution there would be the constant danger of the Germans driving a tunnel under the French trenches (or vice versa) and, by means of a mine, blowing those trenches and the men in them into the air. Indeed, scarcely a night passes that soldiers, armed with knives and pistols, do not crawl out on hands and knees between the trenches in order to find out, by holding the ear to the ground, whether the enemy is sapping. Should the listener hear the muffled sounds which would suggest that the enemy was driving a mine, he tells it in a whisper to his companion, who crawls back to his own trenches with the message, whereupon the engineers immediately take steps to start a counter-mine.
“Look through here,” said the intelligence officer who was acting as my guide, indicating the port-hole in one of the steel shields, “but don’t stay too long or a German sharpshooter may spot you. A second is long enough to get a bullet through the brain.” Cautiously applying my eye to the opening, I saw, perhaps a hundred yards away, a long, low mound of earth, such as would be thrown up from a sewer excavation, and dotting it at three-foot intervals darker patches which I knew to be just such steel shields as the one behind which I was sheltered. And I knew that behind each one of those steel shields was standing a keen-eyed rifleman searching for something suspicious at which to fire. Immediately in front of the German trench, just as in front of the trench in which I stood, a forest of stout stakes had been driven deep into the ground, and draped between these stakes were countless strands of barbed wire, so snarled and tangled, and interlaced and woven that a cat could not have gotten through unscratched. Between the two lines of entanglements stretched a field of ripening wheat, streaked here and there with patches of scarlet poppies. There were doubtless other things besides poppies amid that wheat, but, thank God, it was high enough to hide them. Rising from the wheatfield, almost midway between the French and German lines, was a solitary apple-tree. “Behind that tree,” whispered the officer standing beside me—for some reason they always speak in hushed tones in the trenches—“is a German outpost. He crawls out every morning before sunrise and is relieved at dark. Though some of our men keep their rifles constantly laid on the tree, we’ve never been able to get him. Still, he’s not a very good life-insurance risk, eh?” And I agreed that he certainly was not.
I must have remained at my loophole a little too long or possibly some movement of mine attracted the attention of a German sniper, for _pang_ came a bullet against the shield behind which I was standing, with the same ringing, metallic sound which a bullet makes when it hits the iron target in a shooting-gallery. In this case, however, _I_ was the bull’s-eye. Had that bullet been two inches nearer the centre there would have been, in the words of the poet, “more work for the undertaker, another little job for the casket-maker.”
“Lucky for you that wasn’t one of the new armor-piercing bullets,” remarked the officer as I hastily stepped down. “After the Germans introduced the steel shields we went them one better by introducing a jacketed bullet which will go through a sheet of armor-plate as though it were made of cheese. We get lots of amusement from them. Sometimes one of our men will fire a dozen rounds of ordinary ammunition at a shield behind which he hears some Boches talking, and as the bullets glance off harmlessly they laugh and jeer at him. Then he slips in one of the jacketed bullets and—_whang!!!_—we hear a wounded Boche yelping like a dog that has been run over by a motor-car. Funny thing about the Germans. They’re brave enough—no one questions that—but they scream like animals when they’re wounded.”
From all that I could gather, the French did not have a particularly high opinion of the quality of the troops opposed to them in Alsace, most of whom, at the time I was there, were Bavarians and Saxons. An officer in the trenches on the Hartmannswillerkopf, where the French and German positions were in places very close together, told me that whenever the Germans attempted an attack the French trenches burst into so fierce a blast of rifle and machine-gun fire that the men in the spiked helmets refused to face it. “Vorwärts! Vorwärts!” the German officers would scream, exposing themselves recklessly. “Nein! Nein!” the fear-maddened men would answer as they broke and ran for the shelter of their trenches. Then the French would hear the angry bark of automatics as the officers pistoled their men.
When the French, in one of the bloodiest and most desperate assaults of the war, carried the summit of the Hartmannswillerkopf by storm, they claim to have found the German machine-gun crews chained to their guns as galley-slaves were chained to their oars. French artillery officers have repeatedly told me that when German infantry advances to take a position by assault, the men are frequently urged forward by their own batteries raking them from the rear. As the German gunners gradually advance their fire as the infantry moves forward, it is as dangerous for the men to retreat as to go on. Hence it is by no means uncommon, so the French officers assert, for the German troops to arrive pell-mell at the French trenches, breathless, terrified, hands above their heads, seeking not a fight but a chance to surrender.
One of the assertions that you hear repeated everywhere along the French lines, by officers and men alike, is that the German does not fight fair, that you cannot trust him, that he is not bound by any of the recognized rules of the game. Innumerable instances have been related to me of wounded Germans attempting to shoot or stab the French surgeons and nurses who were caring for them. An American serving in the Foreign Legion told me that on one occasion, when his regiment carried a German position by assault, the wounded Germans lying on the ground waited until the legionaries had passed, and then shot them in the back. Now, when the Foreign Legion goes into action, each company is followed by men with axes, whose business it is to see that such incidents do not happen again.
The reason for the French soldier’s deep-seated distrust of the German is illustrated by a grim comedy of which I heard when I was in Alsace.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph by E. A. Powell._
Each soldier is protected by a steel shield, in the centre of which is cut an opening slightly larger than a playing-card. ]
[Illustration:
_Photo by Meurisse._
A “poilu” in the Vosges. ]
[Illustration:
_Photo by E. A. Powell._
A French soldier wearing a mask as a protection against gas. ]
In the trenches in Alsace.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph by Meurisse._
Convoy of German prisoners guarded by Moroccan Spahis. ]
A company of German infantry was defending a stone-walled farmstead on the Fecht. So murderous was the fire of the French batteries that soon a white sheet was seen waving from one of the farmhouse windows. The French fire ceased, and through the gateway came a group of Germans, holding their hands above their heads and shouting: “Kamerad! Kamerad!” which has become the euphemism for “I surrender.” But when a detachment of chasseurs went forward to take them prisoners the Germans suddenly dropped to the ground, while from an upper window in the farmhouse a hidden machine-gun poured a stream of lead into the unsuspecting Frenchmen. Thereupon the French batteries proceeded to transform that farmhouse into a sieve. In a quarter of an hour the tablecloth was again seen waving, the French guns again ceased firing, and again the Germans came crowding out, with their hands above their heads. But this time they were stark naked! To prove that they had no concealed weapons they had stripped to the skin. It is scarcely necessary to add that those Germans were _not_ taken prisoners.
Though the incidents I have above related were told me by officers who claimed to have witnessed them, and whose reliability I have no reason to doubt, I do not vouch for them, mind you; I merely repeat them for what they are worth.
I had, of course, heard many stories of the German ranks being filled with boys and old men, but the large convoys of prisoners which I saw in Alsace and in Champagne convinced me that there is but little truth in the assertion. Some of the prisoners, it is true, looked as though they should have been in high school, and others as though they had been called from old soldiers’ homes, but these formed only a sprinkling of the whole. By far the greater part of the prisoners that I saw were men between eighteen and forty, and they all impressed me as being in the very pink of physical condition and this despite the fact that they were dirty and hungry and very, very tired. But they struck me as being not at all averse to being captured. They seemed exhausted and dispirited and crushed, as though all the fight had gone out of them. In those long columns of weary, dirty men were represented all the Teutonic types: arrogant, supercilious Prussians; strapping young peasants from the Silesian farm lands; tradesmen and mechanics from the great industrial centres; men from the mines of Würtemberg and the forests of Baden; scowling Bavarians and smiling Saxons. Among them were some brutish faces, accentuated, no doubt, by the close-cropped hair which makes any man look like a convict, but the countenances of most of them were frank and honest and open. Two things aroused my curiosity. The first was that I did not see a helmet—a _pickelhaube_—among them. When I asked the reason they explained that they had been captured in the fire-trenches, and that they seldom wear their helmets there, as the little round gray caps with the scarlet band are less conspicuous and more comfortable. The other thing that aroused my curiosity was when I saw French soldiers, each with a pair of scissors, going from prisoner to prisoner.
“What on earth are you doing?” I asked.
“We are cutting the suspenders of the Boches,” was the answer. “Their trousers are made very large around the waist so that if their suspenders are cut they have to hold them up with their hands, thus making it difficult for them to run away.”
As I looked at these unshaven, unkempt men in their soiled and tattered uniforms, it was hard to make myself believe that they had been a part of that immaculate, confident, and triumphant army which I had seen roll across Belgium like a tidal wave in the late summer of 1914.
[Illustration:
A French smoke bomb.
The French are using these smoke bombs to screen the movements of troops just as the smoke from a destroyer screens the movements of a battleship. ]
Though the French and German positions in Alsace are rarely less than a hundred yards apart and usually considerably more, there is one point on the line, known as La Fontenelle, where, owing to a peculiar rocky formation, _the French and German trenches are within six yards of each other_. The only reason one side does not blow up the other by means of mines is because the vein of rock which separates them is too hard to tunnel through. In cases where the trenches are exceptionally close together, the men have the comfort of knowing that they are at least safe from shell-fire, for, as the battery commanders are perfectly aware that the slightest error in calculating the range, or the least deterioration in the rifling of the guns, would result in their shells landing among their own men, they generally play safe and concentrate their fire on the enemy’s second-line trenches instead of on the first-line. The fighting in these close-up positions has consequently degenerated into a warfare of bombs, hand-grenades, poison-gas, burning oil, and other methods reminiscent of the Middle Ages. As a protection against bombs and hand-grenades, some of the trenches which I visited had erected along their parapets ten-foot-high screens of wire netting, like the back nets of tennis-courts.
[Illustration:
With hand-grenades in the trenches.
“In this war the hand-grenade is king. Beside it the high-power rifle is a joke.” ]
In this war the hand-grenade is king. Compared with it the high-power rifle is a joke. The grenadier regiments again deserve the name. For cleaning out a trench or stopping a massed charge there is nothing like a well-aimed volley of hand-grenades. I believe that the total failure of the repeated German attempts to break through on the western front is due to three causes: the overwhelming superiority of the French artillery; the French addiction to the use of the bayonet—for the Germans do not like cold steel; and to the remarkable proficiency of the French in the use of hand-grenades. The grenade commonly used by the French is of the “bracelet” type, consisting of a cast-iron ball filled with explosive. The thrower wears on his wrist a leather loop or bracelet which is prolonged by a piece of cord about a foot in length with an iron hook at the end. Just before the grenade is thrown, the hook is passed through the ring of a friction-pin inside the firing-plug which closes the iron ball. By a sharp backward turn of the wrist when the grenade is thrown, the ring, with the friction-pin, held back by the hook, is torn off, the grenade itself continuing on its brief journey of destruction. The French also use a primed grenade attached to a sort of wooden racket, which can be quickly improvised on the spot, and which, from its form, is popularly known as the “hair-brush.” To acquire proficiency in the use of grenades requires considerable practise, for the novice who attempts to throw one of these waspish-tempered missiles is as likely to blow up his comrades as he is the enemy. So at various points along the front the French have established bomb-throwing schools, under competent instructors, where the soldiers are taught the proper method of throwing grenades, just as, at the winter training-camps, candidates for the big leagues are taught the proper method of throwing a baseball.
Some of the grenades are too large to be thrown by hand and so they are hurled into the enemy’s trenches by various ingenious machines designed for the purpose. There is, for example, the _sauterelle_, a modern adaptation of the ancient arbalist, which can toss a bomb the size of a nail-keg into a trench ninety feet away. Mortars which did good service in the days of Bertrand du Guesclin have been unearthed from ancient citadels, and in the trenches are again barking defiance at the enemies of France. Because of their frog-like appearance, the soldiers have dubbed them _crapouillots_, and they are used for throwing bombs of the horned variety, which look more than anything else like snails pushing their heads out of their shells. Still another type, known as the _taupia_, consists merely of a German 77-millimetre shell-case with a touch-hole bored in the base so that it can be fired by a match. This little improvised mortar, whose name was no doubt coined from the French word for “mole” (_taupe_) as appropriate to underground warfare, throws a tin containing two and a quarter pounds of high explosive for a short distance with considerable accuracy. Still another type of bomb is hurled from a catapult, which does not differ materially from those which were used at the siege of Troy. Doubtless the most accurate and effective of all the bombs used in this trench warfare is the so-called air-torpedo, a cigar-shaped shell about thirty inches long and weighing thirty-three pounds, which is fitted with steel fins, like the feathers on an arrow and for the same purpose. This projectile, which is fired from a specially designed mortar, has an effective range of five hundred yards and carries a charge of high explosive sufficient to demolish everything within a radius of twenty feet. Tens of thousands of these torpedoes of the air were used during the French offensive in Champagne and created terrible havoc in the German trenches. But by far the most imposing of these trench projectiles is the great air-mine, weighing two hundred and thirty-six pounds and as large as a barrel, which is fired from an 80-millimetre mountain gun with the wheels removed and mounted on an oak platform. In the case of both the air-torpedo and the air-mine the projectile does not enter the barrel of the gun from which it is fired, but is attached to a tube which alone receives the propulsive force. At first the various forms of trench mortars—_minenwerfer_, the Germans call them—were unsatisfactory because they were not accurate and could not be depended upon, no one being quite sure whether the resulting explosion was going to occur in the French trenches or in the German. They have been greatly improved, however, and though no attempt has been made to give them velocity, they drop their bombs with reasonable accuracy. You can see them plainly as they end-over-end toward you, like beer-bottles or beer-kegs coming through the air.
Nor does this by any means exhaust the list of killing devices which have been produced by this war. There is, for example, the little, insignificant-looking bomb with wire triggers sticking out from it in all directions, like the prickers on a horse-chestnut burr. These bombs are thickly strewn over the ground between the trenches. If the enemy attempts to charge across that ground some soldier is almost certain to step on one of those little trigger-wires. To collect that soldier’s remains it would be necessary to use a pail and shovel. The Germans are said to dig shallow pools outside their trenches and cement the bottoms of those pools and fill them with acid, which is masked by boughs or straw. Any soldiers who stumbled into those pools of acid would have their feet burned off. This I have not seen, but I have been assured that it is so. Along certain portions of the front the orthodox barbed-wire entanglements are giving way to great spirals of heavy telegraph wire, which, lying loose upon the ground, envelop and hamper an advancing force like the tentacles of a giant cuttlefish. This wire comes in coils about three feet in diameter, but instead of unwinding it the coils are opened out into a sort of spiral cage, which can be rolled over the tops of the trenches without exposing a man. A bombardment which would wipe the ordinary barbed-wire entanglement out of existence, does this new form of obstruction comparatively little harm, while the wire is so tough and heavy that the soldiers with nippers who precede a storming-party cannot cut it. Another novel contrivance is the hinged entanglement, a sort of barbed-wire fence which, when not in use, lies flat upon the ground, where it is but little exposed to shell-fire, but which, by means of wires running back to the trenches, can be pulled upright in case of an attack, so that the advancing troops suddenly find themselves confronted by a formidable and unexpected barrier. In cases where the lines are so close together that for men to expose themselves would mean almost certain death, _chevaux-de-frise_ of steel and wire are constructed in the shelter of the trenches and pushed over the parapet with poles. The French troops now frequently advance to the assault, carrying huge rolls of thick linoleum, which is unrolled and thrown across the entanglements, thus forming a sort of bridge, by means of which the attacking force is enabled to cross the river of barbed wire in front of the German trenches.