Part 9
It is not safe to assert that anything relating to this war is untrue merely because it is incredible. I have with my own eyes seen things which, had I been told about them before the war began, I would have set down as the imaginings of a disordered mind. Some one asked me if I knew that the scene-painters of the French theatres had been mobilized and formed into a battalion for the purpose of painting scenery to mask gun-positions—and I laughed at the story. Since then I have seen gun-positions so hidden. Suppose that it is found necessary to post a battery in the open, where no cover is available. In the ordinary course of events the German airmen would discover those guns before they had fired a dozen rounds, and the German batteries would promptly proceed to put them out of action. So they erect over them a sort of tent, and the scene-painters are set to work so to paint that tent that, from a little distance, it cannot be distinguished from the surrounding scenery. If it is on the Belgian littoral they will paint it to look like a sand-dune. If it is in the wooded country of Alsace or the Argonne they will so paint it that, seen from an aeroplane, it will look like a clump of trees. I have seen a whole row of aeroplane hangars, each of them the size of a church, so cleverly painted that, from a thousand feet above, they could not be seen at all. A road over which there is heavy traffic lies within both range and sight of the enemy’s guns. Anything seen moving along that road instantly becomes the target for a rain of shells. So along the side of the road nearest the enemy is raised a screen of canvas, like those which surround the side-shows at the circus, but, instead of being decorated with lurid representations of the Living Skeleton and the Wild Man from Borneo and the Fattest Woman on Earth, and the Siamese Twins, it is painted to represent a row of trees such as commonly border French highways. Behind that canvas screen horse, foot, and guns can then be moved in safety, though the road must be kept constantly sprinkled so that the suspicions of the German observers shall not be aroused by a telltale cloud of dust. The stalking-screen is a device used for approaching big game by sportsmen the world over. Now the idea has been applied by the French to warfare, the big game being in this case Germans. The screens are of steel plates covered with canvas so painted that it looks like a length of trench, the deception being heightened by sticking to the canvas tufts of grass. Thus screened from the enemy, two or three men may secretly keep watch at points considerably in advance of the real trenches, creeping forward as opportunity offers, pushing their scenery before them. Both sides have long been daubing field-guns and caissons and other bulky equipment with all the colors of the rainbow, like a futurist landscape, so that they assume the properties of a chameleon and become indistinguishable from the landscape. Now they are painting the faces of the snipers, and splashing their uniforms and rifle barrels with many colors and tying to their heads wisps of grass and foliage. But the crowning touch was when the French began systematically to paint their white horses with permanganate so as to turn them into less obtrusive browns and sorrels.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph by Meurisse._
Chevaux-de-frise and movable entanglements.
“Movable entanglements are constructed in the shelter of the trenches and pushed over the parapet with poles so that the men do not have to expose themselves.” ]
Hollowed at frequent intervals from the earthen back walls of the trenches are niches, in each of which is kept a bottle of hyposulphate of soda and a pail of water. When the yellow cloud which denotes that the Germans have turned loose their poison-gas comes rolling down upon them, the soldiers hastily empty the hyposulphate into the water, saturate in the solution thus formed a pad of gauze which they always carry with them, fasten it over the mouth and nostrils by means of an elastic, and, as an additional precaution, draw over the head a bag of blue linen with a piece of mica set in the front and a draw-string to pull it tight about the neck. Thus protected and looking strangely like the hooded familiars of the Inquisition, they are able to remain at their posts without fear of asphyxiation. But no protection has as yet been devised against the terrible flame projector which has been introduced on several portions of the western front by the Germans. It is a living sheet of flame, caused by a gas believed to be oxyacetylene, and is probably directed through a powerful air-jet. The pressure of the air must be enormous, for the flame, which springs from the ground level and expands into a roaring wave of fire, chars and burns everything within thirty yards. The flame is, indeed, very like that of the common blowpipe used by plumbers, but instead of being used upon lead pipe it is used upon human flesh and bone.
[Illustration:
Taking precautions against a gas attack.
“When the poison-gas comes rolling down upon the trenches the soldiers fasten over the mouth and nostrils a pad of gauze saturated in a hyposulphate solution.” ]
But poison-gas and flame projectors are by no means the most devilish of the devices introduced by the Germans. The soldiers of the Kaiser have now adopted the weapon of the jealous prostitute and are throwing vitriol. The acid is contained in fragile globes or phials which break upon contact, scattering the liquid fire upon everything in the immediate vicinity. I might add that I do not make this assertion except after the fullest investigation and confirmation. I have not only talked with officers and men who were in the trenches into which these vitriol bombs were thrown, but American ambulance drivers both in the Vosges and the Argonne told me that they had carried to the hospitals French soldiers whose faces had been burned almost beyond recognition.
“But we captured one of the vitriol-throwers,” said an officer who was telling me about the hellish business. “He was pretty badly burned himself.”
“I suppose you shot him then and there,” said I.
“Oh, no,” was the answer, “we sent him along with the other prisoners.”
“You don’t mean to say,” I exclaimed, indignation in my voice, “that you captured a man who had been throwing vitriol at your soldiers and let him live?”
“Naturally,” said the officer quietly. “There was nothing else to do. You see, monsieur, we French are civilized.”
V THE FIGHTING IN CHAMPAGNE
When the history of this war comes to be written, the great French offensive which began on the 25th of September, 1915, midway between Rheims and Verdun, will doubtless be known as the Battle of Champagne. Hell holds no horrors for one who has seen that battle-field. Could Dante have walked beside me across that dreadful place, which had been transformed by human agency from a peaceful countryside to a garbage heap, a cesspool, and a charnel-house combined, he would never have written his “Inferno,” because the hell of his imagination would have seemed colorless and tame. The difficulty in writing about it is that people will not believe me. I shall be accused of imagination and exaggeration, whereas the truth is that no one could imagine, much less exaggerate, the horrors that I saw upon those rolling, chalky plains.
[Illustration:
The battle-field of Champagne.
“A peaceful countryside transformed by human agency to a garbage heap, a cesspool, and a charnel-house combined.” ]
[Illustration:
Bringing in the wounded during the battle of Champagne.
This battle cost Europe more men in killed and wounded than fought at Gettysburg. ]
In order that you may get clearly in your mind the setting of this titanic conflict, in which nearly a million and a half Frenchmen and Germans were engaged and in which Europe lost more men in killed and wounded than fought at Gettysburg, get out your atlas, and on the map of eastern France draw a more or less irregular line from Rheims to Verdun. This line roughly corresponds to the battle-front in Champagne. On the south side of it were the French, on the north the Germans. About midway between Rheims and Verdun mark off on that line a sector of some fifteen miles. If you have a sufficiently large scale map, the hamlet of Auberive may be taken as one end of the sector and Massiges as the other. This, then, was the spot chosen by the French for their sledge-hammer blow against the German wall of steel.
There is scarcely a region in all France where a battle could have been fought with less injury to property. Imagine, if you please, an immense undulating plain, its surface broken by occasional low hills and ridges, none of them much over six hundred feet in height, and wandering in and out between those ridges the narrow stream which is the Marne. The country hereabouts is very sparsely settled; the few villages that dot the plain are wretchedly poor; the trees on the slopes of the ridges are stunted and scraggly; the soil is of chalky marl, which you have only to scratch to leave a staring scar, and the grass which tries to grow upon it seems to wither and die of a broken heart. This was the great manœuvre ground of Chalons, and it was good for little else, yet only a few miles to the westward begin the vineyards which are France’s chief source of wealth, and an hour’s journey to the eastward is the beautiful forest of the Argonne.
Virtually, the entire summer of 1915 was spent by the French in making their preparations for the great offensive. These preparations were assisted by the extension of the British front as far as the Somme, thus releasing a large number of French troops for the operations in Champagne; by the formation of new French units; and by the extraordinary quantity of ammunition made available by hard and continuous work in the factories. The volume of preparatory work was stupendous. Artillery of every pattern and caliber, from the light mountain guns to the monster weapons which the workers of Le Creusot and Bourges had prophetically christened “_Les Vainqueurs_,” was gradually assembled until nearly three thousand guns had been concentrated on a front of only fifteen miles. Had the guns been placed side by side they would have extended far beyond the fifteen-mile battle-front. There were cannon everywhere. Each battery had a designated spot to fire at and a score of captive balloons with telephonic connections directed the fire. One battery was placed just opposite a German redoubt which, the Germans boasted, could be held against the whole French army by two washerwomen with machine-guns. Behind each of the French guns were stacked two thousand shells. A network of light railways was built in order to get this enormous supply of ammunition up to the guns. From the end of the railway they built a macadamized highway, forty feet wide and nine miles long, straight as a ruler across the rolling plain. Underground shelters for the men were dug and underground stores for the arms and ammunition. The field was dotted with subterranean first-aid stations, their locations indicated by sign-boards with scarlet arrows and by the Red Cross flags flying over them. That the huge masses of infantry to be used in the attack might reach their stations without being annihilated by German shell-fire, the French dug forty miles of reserve and communication trenches, ten miles of which were wide enough for four men to walk abreast. Hospitals all over France were emptied and put in readiness for the river of wounded which would soon come flowing in. In addition to all this, moral preparation was also necessary, for it was a question whether the preceding months of trench warfare and the individual character it gives to actions had not affected the control of the officers over their men. Everything was foreseen and provided for; nothing was left to chance. The French had undertaken the biggest job in the world, and they set about accomplishing it as systematically, as methodically as though they had taken a contract to build a Simplon Tunnel or to dig a Panama Canal.
The Germans had held the line from Auberive to the Forest of the Argonne since the battle of the Marne. For more than a year they had been constructing fortifications and defenses of so formidable a nature that it is scarcely to be wondered at that they considered their position as being virtually impregnable. Their trenches, which were topped with sand-bags and in many cases had walls of concrete, were protected by wire entanglements, some of which were as much as sixty yards deep. The ground in front of the entanglements was strewn with sharpened stakes and _chevaux-de-frise_ and land mines and bombs which exploded upon contact. The men manning the trenches fought from behind shields of armor-plate and every fifteen yards was a machine-gun. Mounted on the trench walls were revolving steel turrets, miniature editions of those on battleships, all save the top of the turret and the muzzle of the quick-firing gun within it being embedded in the ground. The trenches formed a veritable maze, with traps and blind passageways and cul-de-sacs down which attackers would swarm only to be wiped out by skilfully concealed machine-guns. At some points there were five lines of trenches, one behind the other, the ground behind them being divided into sections and supplied with an extraordinary number of communication trenches, protected by wire entanglements on both sides, so that, in case the first line was compelled to give way, the assailants would find themselves confronted by what were to all intents a series of small forts, heavily armed and communicating one with the other, thus enabling the defenders to rally and organize flank attacks without the slightest delay. This elaborate system of trenches formed only the first German line of defense, remember; behind it there was a second line, the artillery being stationed between the two. There was, moreover, an elaborate system of light railways, some of which came right up to the front line, connecting with the line from Challerange to Bazancourt, that there might be no delay in getting up ammunition and fresh troops from the bases in the rear. No wonder that the Germans regarded their position as an inland Gibraltar and listened with amused complacence to the reports brought in by their aviators of the great preparations being made behind the French lines. Not yet had they heard the roar of France’s massed artillery or seen the heavens open and rain down death.
On the morning of September 22 began the great bombardment—the greatest that the world had ever known. On that morning the French commander issued his famous general order: “I want the artillery so to bend the trench parapets, so to plough up the dug-outs and subterranean defenses of the enemy’s line, as to make it almost possible for my men to march to the assault with their rifles at the shoulder.” It will be seen that the French artillerymen had their work laid out for them. But they went about it knowing exactly what they were doing. During the long months of waiting the French airmen had photographed and mapped every turn and twist in the enemy’s trenches, every entanglement, every path, every tree, so that when all was in readiness the French were almost as familiar with the German position as were the Germans themselves. The first task of the French gunners was to destroy the wire entanglements, and when they finished few entanglements remained. The next thing was to bury the Germans in their dug-outs, and so terrific was the torrent of high explosive that whole companies which had taken refuge in their underground shelters were annihilated. The parapets and trenches had also to be levelled so that the infantry could advance, and so thoroughly was this done that the French cavalry actually charged over the ground thus cleared. Then, while the big guns were shelling the German cantonments, the staff headquarters, and the railways by which reinforcements might be brought up, the field-batteries turned their attention to the communication trenches, dropping such a hail of projectiles that all telephone communication between the first and second lines was interrupted, so that the second line did not know what was happening in the first. There are no words between the covers of the dictionary to describe what it must have been like within the German lines under that rain of death. The air was crowded with the French shells. No wonder that scores of the German prisoners were found to be insane. A curtain of shell-fire made it impossible for food or water to be brought to the men in the bombarded trenches, and made it equally impossible for these men to retreat. Hundreds of them who had taken refuge in their underground shelters were buried alive when the explosion of the great French _marmites_ sent the earthen walls crashing in upon them. Whole forests of trees were mown down by the blast of steel from the French guns as a harvester mows down a field of grain. The wire entanglements before the German trenches were swept away as though by the hand of God. The steel _chevaux-de-frise_ and the shields of armor-plate were riddled like a sheet of paper into which has been emptied a charge of buckshot. Trenches which it had taken months of painstaking toil to build were utterly demolished in an hour. The sand-bags which lined the parapets were set on fire by the French high explosive and the soldiers behind them were suffocated by the fumes. The bursts of the big shells were like volcanoes above the German lines, vomiting skyward huge geysers of earth and smoke which hung for a time against the horizon and were then gradually dissipated by the wind. For three days and two nights the bombardment never ceased nor slackened. The French gunners, streaming with sweat and grimed with powder, worked like the stokers on a record-breaking liner. The metallic _tang_ of the “_soixante-quinze_” and the deep-mouthed roar of the 120’s, the 155’s, and the 370’s, and the screech and moan of the shells passing overhead combined to form a hurricane of sound. Conversation was impossible. To speak to a man beside him a soldier had to shout. Though the ears of the men were stuffed with cotton they ached and throbbed to the unending detonation. An American aviator who flew over the lines when the bombardment was at its height told me that the German trenches could not be seen at all because of the shells bursting upon them. “The noise,” he said, “was like a machine-gun made of cannon.” Imagine, then, what must have been the terror of the Germans cowering in the trenches which they had confidently believed were proof against anything and which they suddenly found were no protection at all against that rain of death which seemed to come from no human agency, but to be hellish in the frightfulness of its effect. When the bombardment was at its height the shells burst at the rate of twenty a second, forming one wave of black smoke, one unbroken line of exploding shells, as far as the horizon.
Graphic glimpses of what it must have been like in the German trenches during that three days’ bombardment are given by the letters and diaries found on the bodies of German soldiers—written, remember, in the very shadow of death, some of them rendered illegible because spattered with the blood of the men who wrote them.
“The railway has been shelled so heavily that all trains are stopped. We have been in the first line for three days, and during that time the French have kept up such a fire that our trenches cannot be seen at all.”
“The artillery are firing almost as fast as the infantry. The whole front is covered with smoke and we can see nothing. Men are dying like flies.”
“A hail of shells is falling upon us. No food can be brought to us. When will the end come? ‘Peace!’ is what every one is saying. Little is left of the trench. It will soon be on a level with the ground.”
“The noise is awful. It is like a collapse of the world. Sixty men out of a company of two hundred and fifty were killed last night. The force of the French shells is frightful. A dug-out fifteen feet deep, with seven feet of earth and two layers of timber on top, was smashed up like so much matchwood.”
[Illustration:
The battle of Champagne.
“When the order to fall in was given, there formed up in the advance trenches long rows of strange fighting figures wearing steel casques and the ‘invisible’ pale-blue uniforms.” ]