Vive la France
by E. Alexander Powell



An Acknowledgment

For the assistance they hare given me, and for the innumerable
kindnesses they have shown me, I welcome this opportunity of
expressing my thanks and appreciation to his Excellency Jean Adrien
Antoine Jules Jusserand, French Ambassador to the United States;
to Lord Northcliffe, owner of the Times and the Daily Mail; to Ralph
Pulitzer, Esq., president, and C. M. Lincoln, Esq., managing editor, of
the New York World; to Major-General Ryerson, of the Canadian
Overseas Contingent; to Captain Count Grard de Ganay, who was
my companion from end to end of the Western battle-line; to Messrs.
Ponsot, Alexis Lger, and Henri Hoppenot, of the Bureau de la
Presse; to Lieutenant-Colonel Spencer Cosby, military attach of the
American Embassy in Paris; to Captain John W. Barker, of the
American Military Mission in France; to Honourable Walter V. R.
Berry; to Charles Prince, Esq., Herbert Corey, Esq., Lincoln Eyre,
Esq., and William Philip Simms, Esq., who on a score of occasions
have proved themselves my friends; and finally to James Hazen
Hyde, Esq., whose kindness I can never fully repay. To each of these
gentlemen I owe a debt of gratitude which I shall not forget.

E. ALEXANDER POWELL

HOTEL DE CRILLON, PARIS





Contents

An Acknowledgment
I. In The Field With The French
II. On The British Battle-Line
III. The Retaking Of Alsace
IV. Campaigning In The Vosges
V. The Fighting In Champagne
VI. The Conflict In The Clouds
VII. The Red Badge Of Mercy






I. In The Field With The French

Before going to France I was told that the French were very stingy
with their war. I was told that the only fighting I would be permitted to
see would be on moving-picture screens. I was assured that war
correspondents were about as welcome as the small-pox. But I found
that I had been misinformed. So far as I am concerned they have
been as generous with their war as a Kentucky colonel is with mint-
juleps. They have, in fact, been so willing to let me get close up to
where things were happening that, on one or two occasions, it looked
as though I would never see the Statue of Liberty again. I do not wish
to give the impression, however, that these facilities for flirting with
sudden death are handed out promiscuously to all who apply for
them. To obtain me permission to see the French fighting-machine in
action required the united influence of three Cabinet Ministers, a
British peer, two ambassadors, a score of newspapers--and the
patience of Job.

Unless you have attempted to pierce it, it is impossible to
comprehend the marvellous veil of secrecy which the Allied
Governments have cast over their military operations. I wonder if you,
who will read this, realize that, though the German trenches can be
reached by motor-car in ninety minutes from the Rue de la Paix, it is
as impossible for an unauthorized person to get within sound, much
less within sight, of them as it would be for a tourist to stroll into
Buckingham Palace and have a friendly chat with King George. The
good old days in Belgium, when the correspondents went flitting light-
heartedly about the zone of operations on bicycles and in taxi-cabs
and motor-cars, have passed, never to return. Imagine a battle in
which more men were engaged and the results of which were more
momentous than Waterloo, Gettysburg, and Sedan combined--a
battle in which Europe lost more men than the North lost in the whole
of the Civil War--being fought at, let us say, Manchester, in
December, and the people of London and Edinburgh not knowing the
details of that battle, the names of the regiments engaged, the
losses, or, indeed, the actual result, until the following March. It is, in
fact, not the slightest exaggeration to say that the people of Europe
knew more about the wars that were fought on the South African
veldt and on the Manchurian steppes than they do about this, the
greatest of all wars, which is being fought literally at their front doors.
So that when a correspondent does succeed in penetrating the veil of
mystery, when he obtains permission to see with his own eyes
something of what is happening on that five-hundred-mile-long
slaughter-house and cesspool combined which is called "the front,"
he has every excuse for self-congratulation.

When the Ministry of War had reluctantly issued me the little yellow
card, with my photograph pasted on it, which, so far as this war is
concerned, is the equivalent of Aladdin's lamp and the magic carpet
put together, and I had become for the time being the guest of the
nation, my path was everywhere made smooth before me. I was
ciceroned by a staff-officer in a beautiful sky-blue uniform, and other
officers were waiting to explain things to me in the various divisions
through which we passed. We travelled by motor-car, with a pilot-car
ahead and a luggage-car behind, and we went so fast that it took two
people to tell about it, one to shout "Here they come!" and another,
"There they go!"

Leaving Paris, white and beautiful in the spring sunshine, behind us,
we tore down the historic highway which still bears the title of the
Route de Flandre, down which countless thousands of other men had
hastened, in bygone centuries, to the fighting in the north. The
houses of the city thinned and disappeared, and we came to open
fields across which writhed, like monstrous yellow serpents, the
zigzag lines of trenches. The whole countryside from the Aisne
straight away to the walls of Paris is one vast network of trenches and
barbed-wire entanglements, and, even in the improbable event of the
enemy breaking through the present line, he would be little better off
than he was before. The fields between the trenches were being
ploughed by women, driving sleek white oxen, but the furrows were
scarcely ever straight, for every few yards they would turn aside to
avoid a turf-covered mound surmounted by a rude cross and a
scarlet kepi. For half a hundred miles this portion of France is one
vast cemetery, for it was here that von Kluck made his desperate
attempt to break through to Paris, and it was here that Joffre, in the
greatest battle of all time, drove the German legions back across the
Marne and ended their dream of entering the French capital. We
whirled through villages whose main streets are lined with the broken,
blackened shells of what had once been shops and dwellings. At
once I felt at home, for with this sort of thing I had grown only too
familiar in Belgium during the earlier days of the war. But here the
Germans were either careless or in a hurry, for they had left many
buildings standing. In Belgium they made a more finished job of it.
Nothing better illustrates the implicit confidence which the French
people have in their army, and in its ultimate success, than the fact
that in all these towns through which we passed the people were hard
at work rebuilding their shattered homes, though the strokes of their
hammers were echoed by the sullen boom of German cannon. To
me there was something approaching the sublime in these
impoverished peasants turning with stout hearts and smiling faces to
the rebuilding of their homes and the refilling of their fields. To these
patient, toilworn men and women I lift my hat in respect and
admiration. They, no less than their sons and husbands and brothers
in the trenches, are fighting the battles of France.

As we approached the front the traditional brick-red trousers and
kepis still worn by the second-line men gave way to the new uniform
of silvery blue--the colour of early morning. There were soldiers
everywhere. Every town and hamlet through which we passed was
alive with them. The highways were choked with troops of all arms;
cuirassiers, with their mediaeval steel helmets and breastplates linen-
covered; dragoons, riding under thickets of gleaming lances; zouaves
in short blue jackets and baggy red breeches; spahis in turbans and
Senegalese in tarbooshes and Moroccans in burnouses; chasseurs
d'Afrique in sky-blue and scarlet; infantry of the line in all the shades
of blue that can be produced by dyes and by the weather; mile-long
strings of motor transports; field batteries; pontoon trains; balloon
corps; ambulances with staring scarlet crosses painted on their
canvas covers--all the nuts and bolts and springs and screws which
go to compose what has become, after months of testing and
improvements, as efficient a killing machine as the world has ever
seen. And it is, I am convinced, eventually going to do the business. It
struck me as having all, or nearly all, of the merits of the German
organization with the human element added.

When only a short distance in the rear of the firing-line we left the car
and proceeded on foot down a winding country road which
debouched quite suddenly into a great, saucer-shaped valley. Its
gentle slopes were chequered with the brown squares of fresh-
ploughed fields and the green ones of sprouting grain. From beyond
a near-by bridge came the mutter of artillery, and every now and then
there appeared against the turquoise sky what looked like a patch of
cotton-wool but was in reality bursting shrapnel. The far end of the
valley was filled with what appeared at first glance to be a low-
hanging cloud of grey-blue mist, but which, as we drew nearer,
resolved itself into dense masses of troops drawn up in review
formation--infantry at the left, cavalry at the right, and guns in the
centre. I had heard much of the invisible qualities of the new field
uniform of the French Army, but I had heretofore believed it to be
greatly inferior to the German greenish grey. But I have changed my
mind. At three hundred yards twenty thousand men could scarcely be
distinguishable from the landscape. The only colourful note was
struck by the dragoons, who still retain their suicidal uniform of scarlet
breeches, blue tunic, and the helmet with its horse-tail plume, though
a concession has been made to practicality by covering the latter with
tan linen. The majority of the French woollen mills being in the region
held by the Germans, it has been possible to provide only a portion of
the army with the new uniform. As a result of this shortage of cloth,
thousands of soldiers have had recourse to the loose corduroy
trousers common among the peasantry, while for the territorials
almost any sort of a jacket will pass muster provided it is of a neutral
colour and has the regimental numerals on the collar. Those soldiers
who can afford to provide their own uniforms almost invariably have
them made of khaki, cut after the more practical British pattern, with
cap-covers of the same material. Owing to this latitude in the matter
of clothing, the French army during the first year of the war presented
an extraordinarily variegated and nondescript appearance, though
this lack of uniformity is gradually being remedied.

At three o'clock a rolling cloud of dust suddenly appeared on the road
from Compigne, and out of it tore a long line of military cars,
travelling at express-train speed. All save one were in war coats of
elephant grey. The exception was a low-slung racer painted a canary-
yellow. Tearing at top speed up the valley, it came to a sudden stop
before the centre of the mile-long line of soldiery. A mile of fighting
men stiffened to attention; a mile of rifle barrels formed a hedge of
burnished steel; the drums gave the long roll and the thirteen ruffles;
the colours swept the ground; the massed bands burst into the
splendid strains of the Marseillaise, and a little man, grey-
moustached, grey-bearded, inclined to stoutness, but with the
unmistakable carriage of a soldier, descended from the yellow car
and, followed by a staff in uniforms of light blue, of dark blue, of tan,
of green, of scarlet, walked briskly down the motionless lines. I was
having the unique privilege of seeing a President of France reviewing
a French army almost within sight of the invader and actually within
sound of his guns. It was under almost parallel circumstances that,
upward of half a century ago, on the banks of the Rappahannock,
another President of another mighty republic reviewed another army,
which was likewise fighting the battles of civilization.

Raymond Poincar is by no means an easy man to describe. He is
the only French President within my memory who looks the part of
ruler. In his person are centred, as it were, the aspirations of France,
for he is a native of Lorraine. He was a captain of Alpine Chasseurs in
his younger days and shows the result of his military training in his
erect and vigorous bearing. Were you to see him apart from his
official surroundings you might well take him, with his air of energy
and authority, for a great employer or a captain of industry. Take
twenty years from the age of Andrew Carnegie, trim his beard to a
point, throw his shoulders back and his chest out, and you will have
as good an idea as I can give you of the war-time President of
France.

At the President's right walked a thick-set, black-moustached man
whose rather shabby blue serge suit and broad-brimmed black
slouch hat were in strange contrast to the brilliant uniforms about him.
Yet this man in the wrinkled suit, with the unmilitary bearing, exercised
more power than the President and all the officers who followed him;
a word from him could make or break generals, could move armies;
he was Millerand, War Minister of France.

After passing down the lines and making a minute inspection of the
soldiers and their equipment, the President took his stand in front of
the grouped standards, and the officers and men who were to be
decorated for gallantry ranged themselves before him, some with
bandaged heads, some with their arms in slings, one hobbling
painfully along on crutches. Stepping forward, as the Minister of War
read off their names from a list, the President pinned to the tunic of
each man the coveted bit of ribbon and enamel and kissed him on
either cheek, while the troops presented arms and the massed bands
played the anthem. On general principles I should think that the
President would rebel at having to kiss so many men, even though
they are heroes and have been freshly shaved for the occasion.

I might mention in passing that the decoration most highly prized by
the French soldier is not, as is popularly supposed, the Legion of
Honour, which, like the Iron Cross, has greatly depreciated because
of its wholesale distribution (it is the policy of the German military
authorities, I believe, to give the Iron Cross to one in every twenty
men), but the Mdaille Militaire, which, like the Victoria Cross and the
Prussian decoration, Pour le Mrite, is awarded only for deeds of the
most conspicuous bravery. The Mdaille Militaire, moreover, can be
won only by privates and non-commissioned officers or by generals,
though the Croix de Guerre, the little bronze cross which signifies that
the wearer has been mentioned in despatches, is awarded to all
ranks and occasionally to women, among the dcores being
Madame Alexis Carrel, the wife of the famous surgeon.

The picturesque business of recognizing the brave being concluded,
the review of the troops began. Topping a rise, they swept down upon
us in line of column--a moving cloud of greyish blue under shifting,
shimmering, slanting lines of steel. Company after company,
regiment after regiment, brigade after brigade, swept past,
businesslike as a locomotive, implacable as a trip-hammer, irresistible
as a steam-roller, moving with mechanical precision to the exultant
strains of the march of the Sambre et Meuse. These were the famous
poilus, the bearded ones, the men with hair on their chests. Their
uniforms were not immaculate. They were faded by wind and rain and
sometimes stained with blood. On their boots was the mud of the
battle-fields along the Aisne. Fresh from the trenches though they
were, they were as pink-cheeked as athletes, and they marched with
the buoyancy of men in high spirits and in perfect health. Here before
me was a section of that wall of steel which stands unbroken between
Western Europe and the Teutonic hordes. Hard on the heels of the
infantry came the guns--the famous "75's"--a dozen batteries, well
horsed and well equipped, at a spanking trot. A little space to let the
foot and guns get out of the way, and then we heard the wild, shrill
clangour of the cavalry trumpets pealing the charge. Over the rise
they came, helmeted giants on gigantic horses. The earth shook
beneath their gallop. The scarlet breeches of the riders gleamed fiery
in the sunlight; the horsehair plumes of the helmets floated out
behind; the upraised sword-blades formed a forest of glistening steel.
As they went thundering past us in a whirlwind of dust and colour they
rose in their stirrups, and high above the clank of steel and the
trample of hoofs came the deep-mouthed Gallic battle-cry: "Vive la
France! Vive la France!"

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.

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 peep-a-boo from the clouds.

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 coloured pebbles. Scattered about
were ingeniously constructed rustic seats and tables. Within ten feet
of one of the great grey 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 arbour 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-colours. It was a good picture. I saw it
afterward on exhibition in the Salon des Humoristes in Paris. A few
yards behind 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.

"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 being 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 London 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 find
myself looking down upon the winding course of the Aisne; to the
south-west 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 black-and-white 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 husband-less, 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 behind 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 weatherproof 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.' "

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 high road 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 entrenched 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.

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 Republique 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 cafs 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
parlour suite. The only thing unharmed was a sign which read "Cheap
and a bargain."

In the very heart of Soissons stands the huge bulk of the magnificent
twelfth-century cathedral, its massive tower rising skyward like a
finger pointing toward heaven. There are few nobler piles in France.
Repeated rappings at a door in the churchyard wall brought the cur,
a white-haired, kindly faced giant of a man. Under his guidance we
entered the cathedral, or rather what remains of it, for its famous
Gothic windows are now but heaps of shattered glass, the splendid
nave is open to the sky, half the roof has been torn away, the pulpit
with its exquisite carvings has been splintered by a shell, and the
massive columns have been chipped and scarred. Carvings which
were the pride of master craftsmen long centuries dead have been
damaged past repair. In the floor of the nave yawns a hole large
enough to hold a horse. Around the statues which flank the altar, and
which are too large to move, have been raised barricades of sand-
bags. And this, mind you, in the house of Him who was the Apostle of
Peace!

While the cur was pointing out to us the ruined beauties of his
celebrated windows, something passed overhead with a wail like a
lost soul. A moment later came an explosion which made the walls of
the cathedral tremble. "Ah," remarked the cur unconcernedly,
"they've begun again. I thought it must be nearly time. They bombard
the cathedral every evening between five and seven."

As he finished speaking, another shell came whining over the
housetops and burst with a prodigious racket in the street outside.

"How far away was that one?" I asked one of the officers.

"Only about a hundred metres," was the careless reply.

As unmoved as though at a church supper, the cure placidly
continued his recital of the cathedral's departed glories, reeling off the
names of the saints and martyrs who lie buried beneath the floor of its
nave, his recital being punctuated at thirty-second intervals by
explosions, each a little louder than the one preceding. Finally a shell
came so low that I thought it was going through the roof. It came so
near, in fact, that I suggested it was getting on toward dinner time and
that we really ought to be on our way. But the cur was not to be
hurried. He had had no visitors for nearly a year and he was
determined to make the most of us. He insisted on showing us that
cathedral from sacristy to belfry, and if he thought that we were
missing anything he carefully explained it all over again.

"Why do you stay on here, father?" I asked him. "A shell is likely to
drop in on you at any moment."

"That is as God wills, monsieur," was the quiet answer. "A captain
does not leave his ship in a storm. I have my people to look after, for
they are as helpless as children and look to me for advice. And the
wounded also. We have turned the sacristy, as you saw, into a
dressing-station. Yes, there is much to do. If a shell comes it will find
me at my post of duty doing what I may to serve God and France."

So we went away and left him standing there alone in the doorway of
his shattered cathedral, a picturesque and gallant figure, with his
white hair coming down upon his shoulders and his tall figure
wrapped in the black soutane. To such men as these the people of
France owe a debt that they can never repay. Though they wear
cassocks instead of cuirasses, though they carry Bibles instead of
bayonets, they are none the less real soldiers--soldiers of the Lord.

It must be borne in mind that the task of the artillery is far easier in
hilly or mountainous country, such as is found along the Aisne and in
the Vosges and Alsace, where the movements of the enemy can be
observed with comparative facility and where both observers and
gunners can usually find a certain degree of shelter, than in Artois
and Flanders, where the country is as flat as the top of a table, with
nothing even remotely resembling a hill on which the observers can
be stationed or behind which the guns can be concealed. In the flat
country the guns, which in all cases are carefully masked by means
of branches from detection by hostile aircraft, take position at
distances varying from two thousand to five thousand yards from the
enemy's trenches. Immediately in the rear of each gun is a
subterranean shelter, in which the gunners can take refuge in case a
German battery locates them and attempts to shell them out. An
artillery subaltern, known in the British service as the "forward
observing officer," goes up to the infantry trenches and chooses a
position, sometimes in a tree, sometimes in a shattered church-tower,
sometimes in a sort of dug-out, from which he can obtain an
unobstructed view of his battery's zone of fire. He is to his battery
very much what a coach is to a football team, giving his men
directions by telephone instead of through a megaphone, but, unlike
the coach, he is stationed not on the side-line but on the firing-line.
Laid on the surface of the ground, connecting him with the battery, is
the field-telephone. As wires are easily cut by bursting shells, they are
now being laid in a sort of ladder formation so that a dozen wires may
be cut without interrupting communication. When the noise is so
deafening that the voice of the observing officer cannot be heard on
the field-telephone communication is carried on in the Morse code by
means of a giant buzzer.

Amid all the uproar of battle the observing officer has to keep careful
track, through his glasses, of every shell his battery fires, and to
inform his battery commander by telephone of the effect of his fire.
He must make no mistakes, for on those portions of the battle-line
where the trenches are frequently less than a hundred yards apart
the slightest miscalculation in giving the range might land the shells
among his own men. The critical moment for the observing officer is,
however, when the enemy makes a sudden rush and swarms of
helmeted, grey-clad figures, climbing out of their trenches, come
rolling forward in a steel-tipped wave, tripping in the barbed wire and
falling in ones and twos and dozens. Instantly the French trenches
crackle and roar into the full blast of magazine fire. The rattle of the
machine guns sounds like a boy drawing a stick along the palings of
a picket fence. The air quivers to the incessant crash of bursting
shrapnel. "Infantry attack!" calls the observation officer into the
telephone receiver which is clamped to his head. "Commence firing!"
and his battery, two or three miles in the rear, begins pouring
shrapnel on the advancing Germans. But still the grey figures come
on, hoarsely cheering. "Drop twenty-five!" he orders. "Careful with
your fuse-setting... very close to our trenches."

The French shrapnel sprays the ground immediately in front of the
French trenches as a street cleaner sprays the pavement with a
hose. The grey line checks, falters, sways uncertainly before the blast
of steel. Men begin to fall by dozens and scores, others turn and run
for their lives. With a shrill cheer the French infantry spring from their
trenches in a counter-attack. "Raise twenty-five! ... raise fifty!"
telephones the observing officer as the blue figures of his countrymen
sweep forward in the charge. And so it goes, the guns backing up the
French attacks and breaking the German ones, shelling a house or a
haystack for snipers, putting a machine gun out of business, dropping
death into the enemy's trenches or sending its steel calling-cards
across to a German battery whose position has been discovered and
reported by wireless by a scouting French aeroplane. And all the time
the youngster out in front, flattened to the ground, with glasses at his
eyes and a telephone at his lips, acts the part of prompter and tells
the guns when to speak their parts.

In reading accounts of artillery fire it should be remembered that there
are two types of shell in common use to-day--shrapnel and high
explosive--and that they are used for entirely different purposes and
produce entirely different results. Shrapnel, which is intended only for
use against infantry in the open, or when lightly entrenched, is a shell
with a very thin steel body and a small bursting charge, generally of
low-power explosive, in the base. By means of a time-fuse the
projectile is made to burst at any given moment after leaving the gun,
the explosion of the weak charge breaking the thin steel case and
liberating the bullets, which fly forward with the velocity of the
shrapnel, scattering much as do the pellets from a shot-gun. At a
range of 3500 yards the bullets of a British 18-pound shrapnel, 375 in
number, cover a space of 250 yards long and 30 yards wide--an area
of more than one and a half acres. Though terribly effective against
infantry attacks or unprotected batteries, shrapnel are wholly useless
against fortified positions, strongly built houses, or deep and well-
planned entrenchments. The difference between shrapnel and high
explosive is the difference between a shot-gun and an elephant rifle.
The high-explosive shell, which is considerably stronger than the
shrapnel, contains no bullets but a charge of high explosive--in the
French service melinite, in the British usually lyddite, and in the
German army trinitrotoluene. The effect of the high explosive is far
more concentrated than that of shrapnel, covering only one-fifteenth
of the area affected by the latter. Though shrapnel has practically no
effect on barbed-wire entanglements or on concrete, and very little on
earthworks, high-explosive shells of the same calibre destroy
everything in the vicinity, concrete, wire entanglements, steel shields,
guns, and even the trenches themselves disappearing like a
dynamited stump before the terrific blast. The men holding the
trenches are driven into their dug-outs, and may be reached even
there by high-explosive shells fired from high-angle howitzers.

The commanding importance of the high-explosive shell in this war is
due to the peculiar nature of the conflict. Instead of fighting in the
open field, the struggle has developed into what is, to all intents and
purposes, a fortress warfare on the most gigantic scale. In this
warfare all strategic manuvres are absent, because manuvres
are impossible on ground where every square yard is marked and
swept by artillery fire. The opposing armies are not simply
entrenched. They have protected themselves with masses of
concrete and steel armour, so that the so-called trenches are in
reality concrete forts, shielded and casemated with armour plate,
flanked with rapid-firers and mortars, linked to one another by
marvellously concealed communicating trenches which are protected
in turn by the fire of heavy batteries, guarded by the most ingenious
entanglements, pitfalls and other obstructions that the mind of man
has been able to devise, and defended by machine guns, in the
enormous proportion of one to every fifty men, mounted behind steel
plates and capable of firing six hundred shots a minute. In these
subterranean works dwell the infantry, abundantly provided with hand
grenades and appliances for throwing bombs and flaming oil, their
rifles trained, day and night, on the space over which an enemy must
advance. That is the sort of wall which one side or the other will have
to break through in order to win in this war. The only way to take such
a position is by frontal attack, and the only way to make a frontal
attack possible is by paving the way with such a torrent of high
explosive that both entanglements and earthworks are literally torn to
pieces and the infantry defending them demoralized or annihilated.
No one before the war could have imagined the vast quantity of
shells required for such an operation.

In order to prepare the way for an infantry attack on a German
position near Arras, the French fired two hundred thousand rounds of
high explosive in a single day--and the scouts came back to report
that not a barbed-wire entanglement, a trench, or a living human
being remained. During the same battle the British, owing to a
shortage of high-explosive ammunition, were able to precede their
attack by only forty minutes of shell fire. This was wholly insufficient to
clear away the entanglements and other obstructions, and, as a
result, the men were literally mowed down by the German machine
guns. Even when the storming-parties succeed in reaching the first
line of the enemy's trenches and bayonet or drive out the defenders,
the opposing artillery, with a literal wall of fire, effectively prevents
any reinforcements from advancing to their support. Shattered and
exhausted though they are, the attackers must instantly set to work to
fortify and consolidate the captured trenches, being subjected,
meanwhile, to a much more accurate bombardment, as the enemy
knows, of course, the exact range of his former positions and is able
to drop his shells into them with unerring accuracy. It is obvious that
such offensive movements cannot be multiplied or prolonged
indefinitely, both on account of the severe mental and physical strain
on the men and the appalling losses which they involve. Neither can
such offensives be improvised.

A commanding officer cannot smash home a frontal attack on an
enemy's position at any moment that he deems auspicious any more
than a surgeon can perform a major operation without first preparing
his patient physically. Before launching an attack the ground must be
minutely studied; the position to be attacked must be reconnoitred
and photographed by aviators; advanced trenches must be dug;
reserve troops must be moved forward and batteries brought into
position without arousing the suspicions of the enemy; and, most
important of all, enormous quantities of projectiles and other material
must be gathered in one place designated by the officer in charge of
the operations. The greatest problem presented by an offensive
movement is that of delivering to the artillery the vast supplies of
shells necessary to pave the way for a successful attack. To give
some idea of what this means, I might mention that the Germans,
during the crossing of the San, fired seven hundred thousand shells
in four hours.

There are no words between the covers of the dictionary which can
convey any adequate idea of what one of these great artillery actions
is like. One has to see--and hear--it. Buildings of brick and stone
collapse as though they were built of cards. Whole towns are razed to
the ground as a city of tents would be levelled by a cyclone. Trees are
snapped off like carrots. Gaping holes as large as cottage cellars
suddenly appear in the fields and in the stone-paved roads. Geysers
of smoke and earth shoot high into the air. The fields are strewn with
the shocking remains of what had once been men: bodies without
heads or without legs; legs and arms and heads without bodies.
Dead horses, broken waggons, bent and shattered equipment are
everywhere. The noise is beyond all description--yes, beyond all
conception. It is like a close-by clap of thunder which, instead of
lasting for a fraction of a second, lasts for hours. There is no break,
no pause in the hell of sound, not even a momentary diminution. The
ground heaves and shudders beneath your feet. You find it difficult to
breathe. Your head throbs until you think that it is about to burst. Your
eyeballs ache and burn. Giant fingers seem to be steadily pressing
your ear-drums inward. The very atmosphere palpitates to the
tremendous detonations. The howl of the shell-storm passing
overhead gives you the feeling that the skies are falling. Compared
with it the roar of the cannon at Waterloo or even at Gettysburg must
have sounded like the popping of fire-crackers.

Inconceivably awe-inspiring and terrifying as is a modern artillery
action, one eventually becomes accustomed to it, but I have yet to
meet the person who could say with perfect truthfulness that he was
indifferent to the fire of the great German siege cannon. I have three
times been under the fire of the German siege-guns--during the
bombardments of Antwerp, of Soissons, and of Dunkirk--and I hope
with all my heart that I shall never have the experience again. Let me
put it to you, my friends. How would you feel if you were sleeping
quite peacefully in--let us say--the Hotel Mtropole, and at six o'clock
in the morning something dropped from the clouds, and in the
pavement of Northumberland Avenue blew a hole large enough to
bury a horse in? And what would be your sensations if, still
bewildered by the suddenness of your awakening, you ran to the
window to see what had happened, and something that sounded like
an express-train came hurtling through the air from somewhere over
in Lambeth, and with the crash of an exploding powder-mill
transformed Whiteley's into a heap of pulverized stone and concrete?
Well, that is precisely what happened to me one beautiful spring
morning in Dunkirk. To be quite frank, I didn't like Dunkirk from the
first. Its empty streets, the shuttered windows of its shops, and the
inky blackness into which the city was plunged at night from fear of
aeroplanes, combined to give me a feeling of uneasiness and
depression. The place was about as cheerful as a country cemetery
on a rainy evening. From the time I set foot in it I had the feeling that
something was going to happen. I found that a room had been
reserved for me on the upper floor of the local hostelry, known as the
Htel des Arcades--presumably because there are none. I did not
particularly relish the idea of sleeping on the upper floor, with nothing
save the roof to ward off a bomb from a marauding aeroplane, for,
ever since I was under the fire of Zeppelins in Antwerp, I have made
it a point to put as many floors as possible between me and the sky.

It must have been about six o'clock in the morning when I was
awakened by a splitting crash which made my bedroom windows
rattle. A moment later came another and then another, each louder
and therefore nearer than the one preceding. All down the corridor
doors began to open, and I heard voices excitedly inquiring what was
happening. I didn't have to inquire. I knew from previous experience.
A German Taube was raining death upon the city. Throwing open my
shutters I could see the machine quite plainly, its armour-plated body
gleaming in the morning sun like polished silver as it swept in ever-
widening circles across the sky. Somewhere to the east a pom-pom
began its infernal trip-hammerlike clatter. An armoured-car, evidently
British from the "R.N." painted on its turret, tore into the square in
front of the hotel, the lean barrel of its quick-firing gun sweeping the
sky, and began to send shell after shell at the aerial intruder. From
down near the water front came the raucous wail of a steam-siren
warning the people to get under cover. A church bell began to clang
hastily, insistently, imperatively. It seemed to say, "To your cellars! To
your cellars! Hurry! ... Hurry! ... HURRY!" From the belfry of the church
of St. Eloi a flag with blue and white stripes was run up as a warning
to the townspeople that death was abroad. Suddenly, above the
tumult of the bells and horns and hurrying footsteps, came a new and
inconceivably terrifying sound: a low, deep-toned roar rapidly rising
into a thunderous crescendo like an express train approaching from
far down the subway. As it passed above our heads it sounded as
though a giant in the sky were tearing mighty strips of linen. Then an
explosion which was brother to an earthquake. The housetops
seemed to rock and sway. The hotel shook to its foundations. The
pictures on the wall threatened to come down. The glass in the
windows rattled until I thought that it would break. From beyond the
housetops in the direction of the receiving hospital and the railway
station a mushroom-shaped cloud of green-brown smoke shot
suddenly high into the air. Out in the corridor a woman screamed
hysterically: "My God! My God! They've begun again with the big
cannon!" I heard the clatter of footsteps on the stairs as the guests
rushed for the cellar. I began to dress. No fireman responding to a
third alarm ever dressed quicker. Just as I was struggling with my
boots there came another whistling roar and another terrific
detonation. High in the air above the quivering city still circled the
German aeroplane, informing by wireless the German gunners, more
than a score of miles away across the Belgian border, where their
shells were hitting. Think of it! Think of bombarding a city at a range
of twenty-three miles and every shot a hit! That is the marvel of this
modern warfare. Imagine the Great Western Station, the Albert Hall,
the Crystal Palace and the London Hospital being blown to
smithereens by shells fired from Windsor. And it was not a 42-
centimetre siege-gun either, but a 15-inch naval gun which the
Germans had brought from Kiel and mounted behind their lines in
Flanders. Though French and British aviators made repeated flights
over the German lines for the purpose of locating the gun and putting
it out of business, their efforts met with no success, as the ingenious
Teutons, it seems, had dug a sort of tunnel into which the gun was
run back after each shot and there it stayed, in perfect security, until it
was fired again. Is it any wonder that the Germans are so desperately
anxious to reach Calais, with the fort-crowned cliffs of Dover rising
across the channel less than twenty miles away?

Descending to the cellars of the hotel, I found that there was
standing-room only. Guests, porters, cooks, waiters, chambermaids,
English Red Cross nurses, and a French colonel wearing the Legion
of Honour were shivering in the dampness amid the cobwebs and the
wine-bottles. Every time a shell exploded the wine-bottles in their bins
shook and quivered as though they, too, were alive and frightened. I
lay no claim to bravery, but in other bombarded cities I have seen
what happens to the people in the cellar when a shell strikes that
particular building, and I had no desire to end my career like a rat in a
trap. Should you ever, by any chance, find yourself in a city which is
being bombarded, take my advice, I beg of you, and go out into the
middle of the nearest open square and stay there until the
bombardment is over. I believe that far more people are killed during
bombardment by falling masonry and timbers than by the shells
themselves. As I went upstairs I heard a Frenchwoman angrily
demanding of the chambermaid why she had not brought her hot
water. "But, madame," pleaded the terrified girl, "the city is being
bombarded." "Is that any reason why I should not wash?" cried the
irate lady. "Bring my hot water instantly."

At eight o'clock the officer commanding the garrison hurried in. He
had invited me to lunch with him. "I am desolated that I cannot have
the pleasure of your company at djeuner, Monsieur Powell," said he,
"but it is not wise for you to remain in the city. I am responsible to the
Government for your safety, and it would make things easier for me if
you would go. I have taken the liberty of sending for your car." You
can call it cowardice or timidity or anything you please, but I am not at
all ashamed to admit that I was never so glad to have an invitation
cancelled. I have had a somewhat extensive acquaintance with
bombardments, and I have always found that those who speak lightly
of them are those who have never seen one.

In order to get out of range of the German shells my driver, acting
under the orders of the commandant, turned the bonnet of the car
toward Bergues, five miles to the southward. But we found that
Bergues had not been overlooked by the German gunners, having,
indeed, suffered more severely than Dunkirk. When we arrived the
bombardment was just over and the dust was still rising from the
shattered houses. Twelve 38-centimetre shells had landed in the very
heart of the little town, sending a score or more of its inhabitants,
men, women, and children, to the hospital and a like number to the
cemetery.

A few hours before Bergues had been as quaint and peaceful and
contented a town of five thousand people as you could have found in
France. Because of its quaint and simple charm touring motorists
used to go out of their way to see it. It is fortified in theory but not in
fact, for its moss-grown ramparts, which date from the Crusaders,
have about as much military significance as the Tower of London. But
the guide-books describe it as a fortified town, and that was all the
excuse the Germans needed to turn loose upon it sudden death. To-
day that little town is an empty, broken shell, its streets piled high with
the brick and plaster of its ruined homes. One has to see the ruin
produced by a 38-centimetre shell to believe it. If one hits a building
that building simply ceases to exist. It crumbles, disintegrates,
disappears. I do not mean to say that its roof is ripped off or that one
of its walls is blown away. I mean to say that the whole building
crashes to the ground as though flattened by the hand of God. The
Germans sent only twelve of their shells into Bergues, but the central
part of the town looked like Market Street in San Francisco after the
earthquake. One of the shells struck a hospital and exploded in a
ward filled with wounded soldiers. They are not wounded any longer.
Another shell completely demolished a three-story brick house. In the
cellar of that house a man, his wife, and their three children had taken
refuge. There was no need to dig graves for them in the local
cemetery.

Throughout the bombardment a Taube hung over the doomed town
to observe the effect of the shots, and to direct by wireless the distant
gunners. I wonder what the German observer, peering down through
his glasses upon the wrecked hospital and the shell-torn houses and
the mangled bodies of the women and children, thought about it all. It
would be interesting to know, wouldn't it?



II. On The British Battle-Line

Along a road in the outskirts of that French town which is the British
Headquarters, a youth was running. He was of considerably less than
medium height, and fair-haired and very slender. One would have
described him as a nice-looking boy. He wore a jersey and white
running-shorts which left his knees bare, and he was bare-headed.
Shoulders, back and chest well out, he jogged along at the steady
dog-trot adopted by athletes and prize-fighters who are in training.
Now, in ordinary times there is not anything particularly remarkable in
seeing a scantily clad youth dog-trotting along a country road. You
assume that he is training for a cross-country event, or for a seat in a
varsity shell, or for the feather-weight championship, and you let it go
at that. But these are not ordinary times in France, and ordinary
young men in running-shorts are not permitted to trot along the roads
as they list in the immediate vicinity of British Headquarters. Even if
you travel, as I did, in a large grey car, with an officer of the French
General Staff for companion, you are halted every few minutes by a
sentry who turns the business end of a rifle in your direction and
demands to see your papers. But no one challenged the young man
in the running-shorts or asked to see his papers. Instead, whenever a
soldier caught sight of him that soldier clicked his heels together and
stood rigidly at attention. After you had observed the curious effect
which the appearance of this young man produced on the military of
all ranks it suddenly struck you that his face was strangely familiar.
Then you all at once remembered that you had seen it hundreds of
times in the magazines and the illustrated papers. Under it was the
caption, "His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales." That young man
will some day, if he lives, sit in an ancient chair in Westminster Abbey,
and the Archbishop of Canterbury will place a crown upon his head,
and his picture will appear on coins and postage-stamps in use over
half the globe.

Now, the future King 'of England--Edward VIII they will doubtless call
him--is not getting up at daybreak and reeling off half a dozen miles
or so because he particularly enjoys it. He is doing it with an end in
view. He is doing it for precisely the same reason that the prize-fighter
does it--he is training for a battle. To me there was something
wonderfully suggestive and characteristic in the sight of that young
man plugging doggedly along the country road. He seemed to
epitomize the spirit which I found to exist along the whole length of the
British battle-line. Every British soldier in France has come to
appreciate that he is engaged in a struggle without parallel in history--
a struggle in which he is confronted by formidable, ferocious,
resourceful, and utterly unscrupulous opponents, and from which he
is by no means certain to emerge a victor--and he is, therefore,
methodically and systematically preparing to win that struggle just as
a pugilist prepares himself for a battle in a prize-ring.

The British soldier has at last come to a realization of the terrible
gravity of the situation which faces him. You don't hear him singing
"Tipperary" any more or boasting about what he is going to do when
he gets to Berlin. He has come to have a most profound respect for
the fighting qualities of the men in the spiked helmets. He knows that
he, an amateur boxer as it were, is up against the world's heavy-
weight professional champion, and he perfectly appreciates that he
has, to use his own expression, "a hell of a job" in front of him. He
has already found out, to his cost and to his very great disgust, that
his opponent has no intention of being hampered by the rules laid
down by the late Marquis of Queensberry, having missed no
opportunity to gouge or kick or hit below the belt. But the British
soldier has now become familiar with his opponent's tactics, and one
of these days, when he gets quite ready, he is going to give that
opponent the surprise of his life by landing on him with both feet,
spikes on his shoes, and brass knuckles on his fingers. Meanwhile
like the young Prince in the running-shorts, he has buckled down with
grim determination to the task of getting himself into condition.

I suppose that if I were really politic and far-sighted I would cuddle up
to the War Office and make myself solid with the General Staff by
confidently asserting that the British Army is the most efficient killing-
machine in existence, and that its complete and early triumph is as
certain as that the sparks fly upward; neither of which assertions
would be true. It should be kept in mind, however, that the British did
not begin the building of their war-machine until after the outbreak of
hostilities, while the German organization is the result of upward of
half a century of unceasing thought, experiment, and endeavour. But
what the British have accomplished since the war began is one of the
marvels of military history. Lord Kitchener came to a War Office which
had long been in the hands of lawyers and politicians. Not only was
he expected to remodel an institution which had become a national
joke, but at the same time to raise a huge volunteer army. In order to
raise this army he had to have recourse to American business
methods. He employed a clever advertising specialist to cover the
walls and newspapers of the United Kingdom with all manner of
striking advertisements, some pleading, some bullying, some caustic
in tone, by which he has proved that, given patriotic impulse,
advertising for people to go to war is just like advertising for people to
buy automobiles or shaving soap or smoking tobacco. It was not
soothing to British pride--but it got the men.

Late in the spring of 1915, after half a year or more of training, during
which they were worked as a negro teamster works a mule, those
men were marched abroad transports and sent across the Channel.
So admirably executed were the plans of the War Office and so
complete the precautions taken by the Admiralty, that this great force
was landed on the Continent without the loss of a single life from
German mines or submarines. That, in itself, is one of the greatest
accomplishments of the war. England now (November 1915) has in
France an army of approximately a million men. But it is a new army.
The bulk of it is without experience and without experienced
regiments to stiffen it and give it confidence, for the army of British
regulars which landed in France at the outbreak of the war has
ceased to exist. The old regimental names remain, but the officers
and men who composed those regiments are, to-day, in the hospitals
or the cemeteries. The losses suffered by the British Army in Flanders
are appalling. The West Kent Regiment, for example, has been three
times wiped out and three times reconstituted. Of the Black Watch,
the Rifle Brigade, the Infantry of the Household, scarcely a vestige of
the original establishments remains. Hardly less terrible are the
losses which have been suffered by the Canadian Contingent. The
Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry landed in France 1400
strong. To-day only 140 remain. The present colonel was a private in
the ranks when the regiment sailed from Quebec.

The machine that the British have knocked together, though still a
trifle wobbly and somewhat creaky in its joints, is, I am convinced,
eventually going to succeed. But you cannot appreciate what it is like
or what it is accomplishing by reading about it; you have to see it for
yourself as I did. That corner of France lying between the forty miles
of British front and the sea is, to-day, I suppose, the busiest region in
the world. It reminded me of the Panama Canal Zone during the rush
period of the Canal's construction. It is as busy as the lot where the
Greatest Show on Earth is getting ready for the afternoon
performance. Down the roads, far as the eye can see, stretch long
lines of London motor-buses, sombre war-coats of elephant grey
replacing the staring advertisements of teas, tobaccos, whiskeys, and
theatrical attractions, crowded no longer with pale-faced clerks
hurrying toward the City, but with sun-tanned men in khaki hurrying
toward the trenches. Interminable processions of motor-lorries go
lumbering past, piled high with the supplies required to feed and
clothe the army, practically all of which are moved from the coast to
the front by road, the railways being reserved for the transport of men
and ammunition; and the ambulances, hundreds and hundreds of
them, hurrying their blood-soaked cargoes to the hospitals so that
they may go back to the front for more. So crowded are the highways
behind the British front that at the cross-roads in the country and at
the street crossings in the towns are posted military policemen as if
they were Bobbies at the Bank or at Piccadilly Circus. The roads are
never permitted to fall into disrepair, for on their condition depends
the rapidity with which the army can be supplied with food and
ammunition. Hence road gangs and steam-rollers and sprinkling-
carts are at work constantly. When the war is over, France will have
better roads and more of them than she ever had before. There are
speed-limit signs everywhere--heretofore practically unknown in
France, where anyone who was careless enough to get run over was
liable to arrest for obstructing the traffic. At frequent intervals along
the roads are blacksmiths' shops and motor-car repair stations, to
say nothing of the repair cars, veritable garages on wheels, which,
when news of an accident or breakdown is received, go tearing
toward the scene of trouble as a fire-engine responds to an alarm of
fire. At night all cars must run without lights, as a result of which many
camions and motor-buses have met with disaster by running off the
roads in the darkness and tipping over in the deep ditches. To
provide for this particular form of mishap the Army Service Corps has
designed a most ingenious contrivance which yanks the huge
machines out of the ditch and sets them on the road again as easily
as though they were stubborn mules.

Upon the door of every house we passed, whether chteau or
cottage, was marked the number of men who could be billeted upon
it. There are signs indicating where water can be obtained and fodder
and pasturage and petrol. In every town and village are to be found
military interpreters, known by a distinctive cap and brassard, who are
always ready to straighten out a misunderstanding between a
Highlander from the north of the Tweed and a tirailleur from Tunisia,
who will assist a Ghurka from the Indian hill country in bargaining for
poultry with a Flemish-speaking peasant, or instruct a lost
Senegalese how to get back to his command. An officers' training-
school has been established at St. Omer, which is the British
Headquarters, where those men in the ranks who possess the
necessary education are fitted to receive commissions. After this war
is over the British Army will no longer be officered by the British
aristocracy. The wholesale promotions of enlisted men made
necessary by the appalling losses among the officers will result in
completely changing the complexion of the British military
establishment. Provided he has the necessary educational
qualifications, the son of a day labourer will hereafter stand as much
chance as the son of a duke. Did you know, by the way, that the
present Chief of the General Staff entered the army as a private in
the ranks?

The wonderful thoroughness of the British is exemplified by the
bulletins which are issued every morning by the Intelligence
Department for the information of the brigade and regimental
commanders. They resemble ordinary handbills and contain a
summary of all the information which the Intelligence Department has
been able to collect during the preceding twenty-four hours as to what
is going on behind the German lines--movements of troops,
construction of new trenches, changes in the location of batteries,
shortage of ammunition, condition of the roads; everything, in short,
which might be of any conceivable value to the British to know. For
example, the report might contain a sentence something like this: "At
five o'clock to-morrow morning the Prussian Guard, which has been
holding position No.--, to the south of Ypres, will be relieved by the
47th Bavarian Landsturm"--which, by the way, would probably result
in the British attacking the position mentioned. The information
contained in these bulletins comes from many sources--from spies in
the pay of the Intelligence Department, from aviators who make
reconnaissance flights over the German lines, and particularly from
the inhabitants of the invaded regions, who, by various ingenious
expedients, succeed in communicating to the Allies much important
information--often at the cost of their lives.

The great base camps which the British have established at Calais
and Havre and Boulogne and Rouen are marvels of organization,
efficiency, and cleanliness. Cities whose macadamized streets are
lined with portable houses of wood or metal which have been brought
to the Continent in sections, and which have sewers and telephone
systems and electric lights, and accommodation for a hundred
thousand men apiece, have sprung up on the sand dunes of the
French coast as though by the wave of a magician's wand. Here,
where the fresh, healing wind blows in from the sea, have been
established hospitals, each with a thousand beds. Huge warehouses
have been built of concrete to hold the vast quantity of stores which
are being rushed across the Channel by an endless procession of
transports and cargo steamers. So efficient is the British field-post
system, which is operated by the Army Post Office Division of the
Royal Engineers, that within forty-eight hours after a wife or mother or
sweetheart drops a letter into a post-box in England that letter has
been delivered in the trenches to the man to whom it was addressed.

In order to prevent military information leaking out through the letters
which are written by the soldiers to the folks at home, one in every
five is opened by the regimental censor, it being obviously out of the
question to peruse them all. If, however, the writer is able to get hold
of one of the precious green envelopes, whose colour is a guarantee
of private and family matters only, he is reasonably certain that his
letter will not be read by other eyes than those for which it is intended.
Nor does the field-post confine itself to the transmission of letters, but
transmits delicacies and comforts of every sort to the boys in the
trenches, and the boys in the trenches use the same medium to send
shell fragments, German helmets, and other souvenirs to their friends
at home.

I know a lady who sent her son in Flanders a box of fresh asparagus
from their Devonshire garden on a Friday, and he had it for his
Sunday dinner. And this reminds me of an interesting little incident
which is worth the telling and might as well be told here as elsewhere.
A well-known American business man, the president of one of New
York's street railway systems, has a son who is a second lieutenant in
the Royal Artillery. The father was called back to America at a time
when his son's battery was stationed in a particularly hot corner to the
south of Ypres. The father was desperately anxious to see his son
before he sailed, but he knew that the chances of his being permitted
to do so were almost infinitesimal. Nevertheless, he wrote a note to
Lord Kitchener explaining the circumstances and adding that he
realized that it was probably quite impossible to grant such a request.
He left the note himself at York House. Before he had been back in
his hotel an hour he was called to the telephone. "This is the
secretary of Lord Kitchener speaking," said the voice. "He desires me
to say that you shall certainly see your son before returning to
America, and that you are to hold yourself in readiness to go to the
Continent at a moment's notice." A few days later he received
another message from the War Office: "Take to-morrow morning's
boat from Folkestone to Boulogne. Your son will be waiting for you on
the quay." The long arm of the great War Minister had reached out
across the English Channel and had picked that obscure second
lieutenant out from that little Flemish village, and had brought him by
motor-car to the coast, with a twenty-four hours leave of absence in
his pocket, that he might say goodbye to his father.

The maxim that "an army marches on its belly" is as true to-day as
when Napoleon uttered it, and the Army Service Corps is seeing to it
that the belly of the British soldier is never empty. Of all the fighting
men in the field, the British soldier is far and away the best fed. He is,
indeed, almost overfed, particularly as regards jams, marmalades,
puddings, and other articles containing large quantities of sugar,
which, so the army surgeons assert, is the greatest restorer of the
muscular tissues. Though the sale of spirits is strictly prohibited in the
military zone, a ration of rum is served out at daybreak each morning
to the men in the trenches.

To Miss Jane Addams has been attributed the following assertion:
"We heard in all countries similar statements in regard to the
necessity for the use of stimulants before men would engage in
bayonet charges, that they have a regular formula in Germany, that
they give them rum in England and absinthe in France; that they all
have to give them the 'dope' before the bayonet charge is possible."
Now, Miss Addams, or whoever is responsible for this statement, has
never, so far as I am aware, been in the trenches. Of the conditions
which exist there she knows only by hearsay. Miss Addams says that
rum is given to the British soldier. That is perfectly true. In pursuance
of orders issued by the Army Medical Corps, every man who has
spent the night in the trenches is given a ration (about a gill) of rum at
daybreak, not to render him reckless, as Miss Addams would have us
believe, but to counteract the effects of the mud and water in which
he has been standing for many hours.

But when the author of the paragraph asserts that the French soldiers
are given absinthe she or he makes an assertion that is without
foundation of fact. Not only have I never seen a glass of absinthe
served in France since the law was passed which made its sale
illegal, but I have never seen spirits of any kind in use in the zone of
operations. More than once, coming back, chilled and weary, from the
trenches, I have attempted to obtain either whiskey or brandy only to
be told that its sale is rigidly prohibited in the zone of the armies. The
regular ration of the French soldier includes now, just as in time of
peace, a pint of vin ordinaire--the cheap wine of the country--this
being, I might add, considerably less than the man would drink with
his meals were he in civil life. As regards the conditions which exist in
the German armies I cannot speak with the same assurance,
because I have not been with them since the autumn of 1914. During
the march across Belgium there was, I am perfectly willing to admit,
considerable drunkenness among the German soldiers, but this was
due to the men looting the wine-cellars in the towns through which
they passed and not, as we are asked to believe, to their officers
having systematically "doped" them. I have heard it stated, on various
occasions, that German troops are given a mixture of rum and ether
before going into action. Whether this is true I cannot say. Personally,
I doubt it. If a man's life ever depends upon a clear brain and a cool
head it is when he is going into battle. Everything considered,
therefore, I am convinced that intemperance virtually does not exist
among the armies in the field. I feel that this accusation does grave
injustice to brave and sober men and that its author owes them an
apology.

The British troops are not permitted to drink unboiled or unfiltered
water, each regiment having two steel water-carts fitted with Birken-
feldt filters from which the men fill their water-bottles. As a result of
this precaution, dysentery and diarrhoea, the curse of armies in
previous wars, have practically disappeared, while, thanks to
compulsory inoculation, typhoid is unknown. Perhaps the most
important of all the sanitary devices which have been brought into
existence by this war, and without which it would not be possible for
the men to remain in the trenches at all, is the great force-pump that
is operated at night and which throws lime and carbolic acid on the
unburied dead. It is, indeed, impossible to overpraise the work being
done by the Royal Army Medical Corps, which has, among its many
other activities, so improved and speeded up the system of getting
the wounded from the firing-line to the hospitals that, as one Tommy
remarked, "You 'ears a 'ell of a noise, and then the nurse says: 'Sit
hup and tike this broth.' "

Though in this war the work of the cavalry is almost negligible; though
cartridges and marmalade are hurried to the front on motortrucks and
the wounded are hurried from the front back to the hospital in motor-
ambulances; though dispatch riders bestride panting motorcycles
instead of panting steeds; though scouting is done by airmen instead
of horsemen, the day of the horse in warfare has by no means
passed. Without the horse, indeed, the guns could not go into action,
for no form of tractor has yet been devised for hauling batteries over
broken country. In fact, all of the belligerent nations are experiencing
great difficulty in providing a sufficient supply of horses, for the
average life of a war-horse is very short; ten days assert some
authorities, sixteen say others. For the first time in the history of
warfare, therefore, the horse is treated as a creature which must be
cared for when sick or wounded as well as when in health, and this
not merely from motives of sentiment or humanity but as a detail of
military efficiency. "For want of a nail," runs the old ditty, "the shoe
was lost; for want of a shoe the horse was lost; for want of a horse
the rider was lost; for want of a rider the battle was lost"--and the
Royal Army Veterinary Corps is seeing to it that no battles are lost for
lack of either horses or horseshoes. The Army Veterinary Corps now
has on the British sector 700 officers and 8000 men, whose business
it is to conserve the lives of the horses. The last report that I have
seen places the total number of horses treated in the various hospital
units (each of which accommodates 1000 animals) as approximately
81,000, of which some 47,000 had been returned to the Remount
Department as again fit for active service; 30,000 were still under
treatment; the balance having died, been destroyed, or sold.

The horses in use by the British Army in France are the very pick of
England, the Colonies, and foreign countries; thoroughbred and
three-quarter bred hunters from the hunting counties and from
Ireland; hackneys, draught and farm animals; Walers from Australia;
wire-jumpers from New Zealand; hardy stock from Alberta and
Saskatchewan; sturdy ponies from the hill country of India; thousands
upon thousands of animals from the American South-West, and from
the Argentine; to say nothing of the great sixteen-hand mules from
Missouri and Spain.

Animals suffering from wounds or sickness are shipped back to the
hospital bases on the coast in herds, each being provided with a
separate covered stall, or, in case of pneumonia, with a box-stall. The
spotless buildings, with their exercise tracks and acres of green
paddocks, suggest a racecourse rather than a hospital for horses
injured in war. Each hospital has its operating-sheds, its X-ray
department, its wards for special ailments, its laboratories for
preventive research work, a pharmacy, a museum which affords
opportunity for the study of the effects of sabre, shell, and bullet
wounds, and a staff of three hundred trained veterinarians. Schools
have also been established in connexion with the hospitals in which
the grooms and attendants are taught the elements of anatomy,
dentistry, farriery, stabling, feeding, sanitation, and, most important of
all, the care of hoofs. All the methods and equipment employed are
the best that science can suggest and money can obtain, everything
having passed the inspection of the Duke of Portland and the Earl of
Lonsdale, the two greatest horse-breeders in England. Attached to
each division of troops in the field is a mobile veterinary section,
consisting of an officer and twenty-two men, who are equipped to
render first-aid service to wounded horses and whose duty it is to
decide which animals shall be sent to the hospitals for treatment,
which are fit to return to the front for further service, and which cases
are hopeless and must be destroyed. The enormous economic value
of this system is conclusively proved by the fact that it has reduced
sickness among horses in the British Army 50 per cent., and mortality
47 per cent.

The question that has been asked me more frequently than any other
is why the British, with upwards of a million men in the field, are
holding only fifty miles of battle-front, as compared with seventeen
miles held by the Belgians and nearly four hundred by the French.
There are several reasons for this. It should be remembered, in the
first place, that the British Army is composed of green troops, while
the French ranks, thanks to the universal service law, are filled with
men all of whom have spent at least three years with the colours. In
the second place, the British sector is by far the most difficult portion
of the Western battle-front to hold, not only because of the
configuration of the country, which offers little natural protection, but
because it lies squarely athwart the road to the Channel ports--and it
is to the Channel ports that the Germans are going if men and shells
can get them there. The fighting along the British sector is, moreover,
of a more desperate and relentless nature than elsewhere on the
Allied line, because the Germans nourish a deeper hatred for the
English than for all their other enemies put together.

It was against the British, remember, that the Germans first used their
poison-gas. The first engagement of importance in which gas played
a part was the second battle of Ypres, lasting from April 22 until May
13, which will probably take rank in history as one of the greatest
battles of all time. In it the Germans, owing to the surprise and
confusion created by their introduction of poison-gas, came within a
hair's breadth of breaking through the Allied line, and would certainly
have done so had it not been for the gallantry and self-sacrifice of the
Canadian Division, which, at the cost of appalling losses, won
imperishable fame.

The German bombardment of Ypres began on April 20 and in forty-
eight hours, so terrible was the rain of heavy projectiles which poured
down upon it, the quaint old city, with its exquisite Cloth Hall, was but
a heap of blackened, smoking ruins. That portion of the Allied line to
the north of the city was held, along a front of some four miles, by a
French division composed of Colonials, Algerians, and Senegalese,
stiffened by several line regiments. Late in the afternoon of the 22nd,
peering above their trenches, they saw, rolling toward them across
the Flemish plain, an impalpable cloud of yellowish-green, which,
fanned by a brisk wind, moved forward at the speed of a trotting
horse. It came on with the remorselessness of Fate. It blotted out
what was happening behind it as the smoke screen from a destroyer
masks the manuvres of a Dreadnought. The spring vegetation
shrivelled up before it as papers shrivel when thrown into a fire. It
blasted everything it touched as with a hand of death. No one knew
what it was or whence it came. Nearer it surged and nearer. It was
within a hundred metres of the French position... fifty... thirty...
ten... and then the silent horror was upon them. Men began to
cough and hack and strangle. Their eyes smarted and burned with
the pungent, acrid fumes. Soldiers staggered and fell before it in twos
and fours and dozens as miners succumb to fire-damp. Men, strained
and twisted into grotesque, horrid attitudes, were sobbing their lives
out on the floors of the trenches. The fire of rifles and machine guns
weakened, died down, ceased. The whole line swayed, wavered,
trembled on the verge of panic. Just then a giant Algerian shouted,
"The Boches have turned loose evil spirits upon us! We can fight
men, but we cannot fight afrits! Run, brothers! Run for your lives!"

That was all that was needed to precipitate the disaster. The
superstitious Africans, men from the West Coast where voodooism
still holds sway, men of the desert steeped in the traditions and
mysteries of Islam, broke and ran. The French white troops, carried
off their feet by the sudden rush, were swept along in the mad
debacle. And as they ran the yellow cloud pursued them remorselessly,
like a great hand reaching out for their throats.

An eye-witness of the rout that followed told me that he never expects
to see its like this side of the gates of hell. The fields were dotted with
blue-clad figures wearing kepis, and brown-clad ones wearing
turbans and tarbooshes, who stumbled and fell and rose again and
staggered along a few paces and fell to rise no more. The highways
leading from the trenches were choked with maddened, fear-crazed
white and black and brown men who had thrown away their rifles,
their cartridge pouches, their knapsacks, in some cases even their
coats and shirts. Some were calling on Christ and some on Allah and
some on their strange pagan gods. Their eyes were starting from
their sockets, on their foreheads stood glistening beads of sweat,
they slavered at the mouth like dogs, their cheeks and breasts were
flecked with foam. "We're not afraid of the Boches!" screamed a giant
sergeant of Zouaves on whose breast were the ribbons of a dozen
wars. "We can fight them until hell turns cold. But this we cannot fight.
Le Bon Dieu does not expect us to stay and die like rats in a sewer."
Guns and gun-caissons passed at a gallop, Turcos and tirailleurs
clinging to them, the fear-crazed gunners flogging their reeking
horses frantically. The ditches bordering the roads were filled with
overturned waggons and abandoned equipment. Giant negroes,
naked to the waist, tore by shrieking that the spirits had been loosed
upon them and slashing with their bayonets at all who got in their
path. Mounted officers, frantic with anger and mortification, using their
swords and pistols indiscriminately, vainly tried to check the human
stream. And through the four-mile breach which the poison-gas had
made the Germans were pouring in their thousands. The roar of their
artillery sounded like unceasing thunder. The scarlet rays of the
setting sun lighted up such a scene as Flanders had never before
beheld in all its bloody history. Then darkness came and the sky was
streaked across with the fiery trails of rockets and the sudden
splotches of bursting shrapnel. The tumult was beyond all
imagination--the crackle of musketry, the rattle of machine guns, the
crash of high explosive, the thunder of falling walls, the clank of
harness and the rumble of wheels, the screams of the wounded and
the groans of the dying, the harsh commands of the officers, the
murmur of many voices, and the shuffle, shuffle, shuffle of countless
hurrying feet.

And through the breach still poured the helmeted legions like water
bursting through a broken dam. Into that breach were thrown the
Canadians. The story of how, overwhelmed by superior numbers of
both men and guns, choked by poison-fumes, reeling from
exhaustion, sometimes without food, for it was impossible to get it to
them, under such a rain of shells as the world had never before seen
the brawny men from the oversea Dominion fought on for a solid
week, and thereby saved the army from annihilation, needs no re-
telling here. Brigade after brigade of fresh troops, division after
division, was hurled against them but still they battled on. So closely
were they pressed at times that they fought in little groups; men from
Ontario and Quebec shoulder to shoulder with blood-stained heroes
from Alberta and Saskatchewan. At last, when it seemed as though
human endurance could stand the strain no longer, up went the cry,
"Here come the guns!" and the Canadian batteries, splashed with 
sweat and mud, tore into action on the run. "Action front!" screamed
the officers, and the guns whirled like polo ponies so that their
muzzles faced the oncoming wave of grey. "With shrapnel! Load!"
The lean and polished projectiles slipped in and the breechblocks
snapped home. "Fire at will!" and the blast of steel tore bloody
avenues in the German ranks. But fresh battalions filled the gaps--
the German reserves seemed inexhaustible--and they still came on.
At one period of the battle the Germans were so close to the guns
that the order was given, "Set your fuses at zero!" which means that
a shell bursts almost the moment it leaves the muzzle of the gun. It
was not until early on Friday morning that reinforcements reached the
shattered Canadians and enabled them to hold their ground. Later
the Northumbrian Division--Territorials arrived only three days before
from the English training-camps--were sent to aid them and proved
themselves as good soldiers as the veterans beside whom they
fought. For days the fate of the army hung in the balance, for there
seemed no end to the German reserves, who were wiped out by
whole divisions only to be replaced by more, but against the stone
wall of the Canadian resistance the men in the spiked helmets threw
themselves in vain. On May 13, 1915, after three weeks of
continuous fighting, ended the Second Battle of Ypres, not in a terrific
and decisive climax, but slowly, sullenly, like two prize-fighters who
have fought to the very limit of their strength.

According to the present British system, the soldiers spend three
weeks at the front and one week in the rear--if possible, out of sound
of the guns. The entire three weeks at the front is, to all intents and
purposes, spent in the trenches, though every third day the men are
given a breathing spell. Three weeks in the trenches! I wonder if you
of the sheltered life have any but the haziest notion of what that
means. I wonder if you, Mr. Lawyer; you, Mr. Doctor; you, Mr.
Business Man, can conceive of spending your summer vacation in a
ditch 4 feet wide and 8 feet deep, sometimes with mud and water to
your knees, sometimes faint from heat and lack of air, in your nostrils
the stench of bodies long months dead, rotting amid the wire
entanglements a few yards in front of you, and over your head steel
death whining angrily, ceaselessly. I wonder if you can imagine what it
must be like to sleep--when the roar of the guns dies down sufficiently
to make sleep possible--on foul straw in a hole hollowed in the earth,
into which you have to crawl on all fours, like an animal into its lair. I
wonder if you can picture yourself as wearing a uniform so stiff with
sweat and dirt that it would stand alone, and underclothes so rotten
with filth that they would fall apart were you to take them off, your
body so crawling with vermin and so long unwashed that you are an
offence to all whom you approach--yet with no chance to bathe or to
change your clothes or sometimes even to wash your hands and
face for weeks on end. I wonder how your nerves would stand the
strain if you knew that at any moment a favourable wind might bring a
gas cloud rolling down upon you to kill you by slow strangulation, or
that a shell might drop into the trench in which you were standing in
water to your knees and leave you floating about in a bloody mess
which turned that water red, or that a Taube might let loose upon you
a shower of steel arrows which would pass through you as a needle
passes through a piece of cloth, or that a mine might be exploded
beneath your feet and distribute you over the landscape in fragments
too small to be worth burying, or, worse still, to leave you alive amid a
litter of heads and arms and legs which a moment before had
belonged to your comrades, the horror of it all turning you into a
maniac who alternately shrieks and gibbers and rocks with insane
mirth at the horror of it all. I am perfectly aware that this makes
anything but pleasant reading, my friends, but if men of gentle birth,
men with university educations, men who are accustomed to the
same refinements and luxuries that you are, can endure these things,
why, it seems to me that you ought to be able to endure reading
about them.

The effect of some of the newer types of high-explosive shells is
almost beyond belief. For sheer horror and destruction those from the
Austrian-made Skoda howitzer, known as "Pilseners," make the
famous 42-centimetre shells seem almost kind. The Skoda shells
weigh 2800 lb., and their usual curve is 4 1/2 miles high. In soft ground
they penetrate 20 feet before exploding. The explosion, which occurs
two seconds after impact, kills every living thing within 150 yards,
while scores of men who escape the flying metal are killed, lacerated,
or blinded by the mere pressure of the gas. This gas pressure is so
terrific that it breaks in the roofs and partitions of bombproof shelters.
Of men close by not a fragment remains. The gas gets into the body
cavities and expands, literally tearing them to pieces. Occasionally
the clothes are stripped off leaving only the boots. Rifle-barrels near
by are melted as though struck by lightning. These mammoth shells
travel comparatively slowly, however, usually giving enough warning
of their approach so that the men have time to dodge them. Their
progress is so slow, indeed, that sometimes they can be seen. Far
more terrifying is the smaller shell which, because of its shrill,
plaintive whine, has been nicknamed "Weary Willie," or those from
the new "noiseless" field-gun recently introduced by the Germans,
which gives no intimation of its approach until it explodes with a
shattering crash above the trenches. Is it any wonder that hundreds
of officers and men are going insane from the strain that they are
under, and that hundreds more are in the hospitals suffering from
neuritis and nervous breakdown? Is it any wonder that, when their
term in the trenches is over, they have to be taken out of sight and
sound of battle and their shattered nerves restored by means of
a carefully planned routine of sports and games, as though they
were children in a kindergarten?

The breweries, mills, and factories immediately behind the British
lines have, wherever practicable, been converted into bath-houses to
which the men are marched as soon as they leave the trenches. The
soldiers strip and, retaining nothing but their boots, which they deposit
beside the bath-tub, they go in, soap in one hand and scrubbing-
brush in the other, the hot bath being followed by a cold shower. The
underclothes which they have taken off are promptly burned and
fresh sets given to them, as are also clean uniforms, the discarded
ones, after passing through a fumigating machine, being washed,
pressed, and repaired by the numerous Frenchwomen who are
employed for the purpose, so as to be ready for their owners the next
time they return from the trenches. At one of these improvised bath-
houses thirteen hundred men pass through each day.

"What do the French think of the English?"

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 technique 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 labour 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 behaviour 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
Travellers' 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 anyone 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 a 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 unfavourable 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 bull-dog
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 neighbours, 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.

"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-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.

"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 out little reunion. Had they done so they
would have received a very warm reception.

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."

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 berets 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 grey town of Grardner. 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 tat-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 armour-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 anti-aircraft 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 favourable
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.
Die we stopped for lunch at the Htel Terminus, which is just opposite
the railway station. St. Di 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. Di to Le Rudlin, where the road ends, is in the
neighbourhood 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 shell or 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 running speed-trials at Brooklands. 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.

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 be-
tween Germany and France. Each mule was led by a soldier, whose
short blue tunic, scarlet breeches, blue puttees, rakish blue bret, 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 on to 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.

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 communiqu 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 at the Oval. 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 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.

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 whole-heartedly 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 tricolour 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 "Libert, Egalit, Fraternit," 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,
neverthelesss, 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-flamed 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 grey 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.

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 neighbourhood 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 arbours; 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.

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 bret, or cap, of the French Alps, a fiat-topped,
jaunty head-dress which is brother to the tam-o'-shanter. The frontier
of Alsace, from a point opposite Strasburg to a point opposite
Mulhausen, 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, dragged 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 labour 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-bye 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 grey
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 skyline was the Black Forest; I knew that
somewhere up that mysterious, alluring valley, Strasburg sat, 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 coloured
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 West End 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 half a crown, 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 extremly 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.

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,
blacksmiths' and carpenters' 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's shop--all with board floors, free from
dampness, and surprisingly clean. The trenches and passage-ways
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 lighted by electricity. 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 passage-way 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."

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 offence 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 kpi 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, "depend 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, always
to keep 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.

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-grey, 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 anyone
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-bell. When the men come rushing out
of the shelters they have, in the earth 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 always to
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 porthole 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 got
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,
/ 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 armour-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 armour-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. "Vorwrts!
Vorwrts!" 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 pistolled 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 advance 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.

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 Wurtemberg 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 grey 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 braces of the Boches," was the answer. "Their
trousers are made very large around the waist so that if their braces
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.

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 when 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 deterioriation 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.

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 practice 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 in America,
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-barrels 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.

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 tell-tale cloud of
dust. The stalk-ing-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 colours 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 colours 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.

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.

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 September 25, 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
battlefield. 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 colourless 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.

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 manuvre 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 calibre, from the light mountain guns to
the monster weapons which the workers of Le Creusot and Bourges
and 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 defences 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 armour-plate and every fifteen
yards was placed 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 defence, 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. One, connecting with the line from Challerang 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 defences 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 armour-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 or 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."

When the rveill rang out along the French lines at five-thirty on the
morning of September 25, the whole world seemed grey; lead-
coloured clouds hung low overhead, and a drizzling rain was falling.
But the men refused to be depressed. They drank their morning
coffee and then, the roar of the artillery making conversation out of
the question, they sat down to smoke and wait. Through the
loopholes they could watch the effect of the fire of the French
batteries, could see the fountains of earth and smoke thrown up by
the bursting shells, could even see arms and legs flying in the air.
Each man wore between his shoulders, pinned to his coat, a patch of
white calico, in order to avoid the possibility of the French gunners
firing into their own men. Several men in each company carried small,
coloured signal-flags for the same purpose. The watches of the
officers had been carefully synchronized, and at nine o'clock the
order to fall in was given, and there formed up in the advance
trenches long rows of strange fighting figures in their "invisible" pale-
blue uniforms, their grim, set faces peering from beneath steel
helmets plastered with chalk and mud. The company rolls were
called. The drummers and buglers took up their positions, for orders
had been issued that the troops were to be played into action. Nine-
five! The regimental battle-flags were brought from the dug-outs, the
water-proof covers were slipped off, and the sacred colours, on
whose faded silk were embroidered "Les Pyramides," "Wagram,"
"Jena," "Austerlitz," "Marengo," were reverently unrolled. For the first
time in this war French troops were to go into action with their colours
flying. Nine-ten! The officers, endeavouring to make their voices
heard above the din of cannon, told the men in a few shouted
sentences what France and the regiment expected of them. Nine-
fourteen! The officers, having jerked loose their automatics, stood
with their watches in their hands. The men were like sprinters on their
marks, waiting with tense nerves and muscles for the starter's pistol.
Nine-fifteen! Above the roar of the artillery the whistles of the officers
shrilled loud and clear. The bugles pealed the charge. "En avant, mes
enfants!" screamed the officers.

"En avant! Vaincre ou mourir!" and over the tops of the trenches, with
a roar like an angry sea breaking on a rock-bound coast, surged a
fifteen-mile-long human wave tipped with glistening steel. As the blue
billows of men burst into the open, hoarsely cheering, the French
batteries which had been shelling the German first-line trenches
ceased firing with an abruptness that was startling. In the
comparative quiet thus suddenly created could be plainly heard the
orders of the officers and the cheering of the men, some of whom
shouted "Vive la France!" while others sang snatches of the
Marseillaise and the Carmagnole. Though every foot of ground over
which they were advancing had for three days been systematically
flooded with shell, though the German trenches had been pounded
until they were little more than heaps of dirt and dbris, the German
artillery was still on the job, and the ranks of the advancing French
were swept by a hurricane of fire. General Marchand, the hero of the
famous incident at Fashoda, who was in command of the Colonials,
led his men to the assault, but fell wounded at the very beginning of
the engagement, as surrounded by his staff, he stood on the crest of
a trench, cane in hand, smoking his pipe and encouraging the
succeeding waves of men racing forward into battle. His two brigade-
commanders fell close beside him. Three minutes after the first of the
Colonials had scrambled over the top of their trenches they had
reached the German first line. After them came the First and Second
Regiments of the Foreign Legion and the Moroccan division. As they
ran they broke out from columns of two (advancing in twos with fifty
paces between each pair) into columns of squad (each man alone,
twenty-five paces from his neighbour) as prettily and perfectly as
though on a parade-ground.

Great as was the destruction wrought by the bombardment, the
French infantry had no easy task before them, for stretches of wire
entanglements still remained in front of portions of the German
trenches, while at frequent intervals the Germans had left behind
them machine-gun sections, who from their sunken positions poured
in a deadly fire, until the oncoming wave overwhelmed and blotted
them out. It was these death-traps that brought out in the French
soldier those same heroic qualities which had enabled him, under the
leadership of Napoleon, to enter as a conqueror every capital in
Europe. A man who was shot while cutting a way for his company
through the wire entanglements, turned and gave the cutters to a
comrade before he fell. A wounded soldier lying on the ground called
out to an officer who was stepping aside to avoid him: "Go on. Don't
mind stepping on me. I'm wounded. It's only you who are whole who
matter now." A man with his abdomen ripped open by a shell
appealed to an officer to be moved to a dressing-station. "The first
thing to move are the guns to advanced positions, my friend," was
the answer. "That's right," said the man; "I can wait." Said a wounded
soldier afterward in describing the onslaught: "When the bugle
sounded the charge and the trumpets played the Marseillaise, we
were no longer mere men marching to the assault. We were a living
torrent which drives all before it. The colours were flying at our side. It
was splendid. Ay, my friend, when one has seen that one is proud to
be alive."

In many places the attacking columns found themselves abruptly
halted by steel chevaux-de-frise, with German machine guns spitting
death from behind them. The men would pelt them with hand-
grenades until the sappers came up and blew the obstructions away.
Then they would sweep forward again with the bayonet, yelling madly.
The great craters caused by the explosion of the French land mines
were occupied as soon as possible and immediately turned into
defensible positions, thus affording advanced footholds within the
enemy's line of trenches. At a few points in the first line the Germans
held out, but at others they surrendered in large numbers, while many
were shot down as they were running back to the second line. As a
matter of fact, the Germans had no conception of what the French
had in store for them, and it was not until their trenches began to give
way under the terrible hammering of the French artillery that they
realized how desperate was their situation. It was then too late to
strengthen their front, however, as it would have been almost certain
death to send men forward through the curtain of shell-fire which the
French batteries were dropping between the first and second lines.

Nor were the Germans prepared when the infantry attack began, as
was shown by the fact that a number of officers were captured in their
beds. The number of prisoners taken--twenty-one thousand was the
figure announced by the French General Staff--showed clearly that
they had had enough of it. They surrendered by sections and by
companies, hundreds at a time. Most of them had had no food for
several days, and were suffering acutely from thirst, and all of them
seemed completely unstrung and depressed by the terrible nature of
the French bombardment. Choosing the psychological moment
when, the retirement of the Germans showed signs of turning into
panic, the African troops were ordered to go in and finish up the
business with cold steel. Before these dark-skinned, fierce-faced men
from the desert, who came on brandishing their weapons and
shouting "Allah Allah! Allah!" the Germans, already demoralized,
incontinently broke and ran. Hard on the heels of the Africans trotted
the dragoons and the chasseurs  cheval--the first time since the
trench warfare began that cavalry have had a chance to fight from
the saddle--sabring the fleeing Germans or driving them out of their
dug-outs with their long lances. But in the vast maze of
communication trenches and in the underground shelters Germans
still swarmed thickly, so the "trench cleaners," as the Algerian and
Senegalese tirailleurs are called, were ordered to clear them out, a
task which they performed with neatness and despatch, revolver in
one hand and cutlass in the other. Even five days after the trenches
were taken occasional Germans were found in hiding in the labyrinth
of underground shelters.

The thing of which the Champagne battlefield most reminded me was
a garbage-heap. It looked and smelled as though all the garbage
cans in Europe and America had been emptied upon it. This region,
as I have remarked before, is of a chalk formation, and wherever a
trench had been dug, or a shell had burst, or a mine had been
exploded, it left on the face of the earth a livid scar. The destruction
wrought by the French artillery fire is almost beyond imagining. Over
an area as long as from Charing Cross to Hampstead Heath and as
wide as from the Bank to the Marble Arch the earth is pitted with the
craters caused by bursting shells as is pitted the face of a man who
has had the small-pox. Any of these shell-holes was large enough to
hold a barrel; many of them would have held a horse; I saw one,
caused by the explosion of a mine, which we estimated to be seventy
feet deep and twice that in diameter. In the terrific blast that caused it
five hundred German soldiers perished. At another point on what had
been the German first line I saw a yawning hole as large as the cellar
of a good-sized apartment house. It marked the site of a German
blockhouse, but the blockhouse and the men who composed its
garrison had been blown out of existence by a torrent of 370-
millimetre high-explosive shells.

The captured German trenches presented the most horrible sight that
I have ever seen or ever expect to see. This is not rhetoric; this is
fact. Along the whole front of fifteen miles the earth was littered with
torn steel shields and twisted wire, with broken waggons, bits of
harness, cartridge-pouches, dented helmets, belts, bayonets--some
of them bent double--broken rifles, field-gun shells and rifle cartridges,
hand-grenades, aerial torpedoes, knapsacks, bottles, splintered
planks, sheets of corrugated iron which had been turned into sieves
by bursting shrapnel, trench mortars, blood-soaked bandages,
fatigue-caps, entrenching tools, stoves, iron rails, furniture, pots of
jam and marmalade, note-books, water-bottles mattresses, blankets,
shreds of clothing, and-most horrible of all, portions of what had once
been human bodies. Passing through an abandoned German trench,
I stumbled over a mass of grey rags, and they dropped apart to
disclose a headless, armless, legless torso already partially devoured
by insects. I kicked a hobnailed German boot out of my path and from
it fell a rotting foot. A hand with awful, outspread fingers thrust itself
from the earth as though appealing to the passer-by to give decent
burial to its dead owner. I peered inquisitively into a dug-out only to be
driven back by an overpowering stench. A French soldier, more
hardened to the business than I, went in with a candle, and found the
shell-blackened bodies of three Germans. Clasped in the dead
fingers of one of them was a postcard dated from a little town in
Bavaria. It began: "My dearest Heinrich: You went away from us just
a year ago to-day. I miss you terribly, as do the children, and we all
pray hourly for your safe return--" The rest we could not decipher; it
had been blotted out by a horrid crimson stain. Without the war that
man might have been returning, after a day's work in field or factory,
to a neat Bavarian cottage, with geraniums growing in the garden,
and a wife and children waiting for him at the gate.

Though when I visited the battlefield of Champagne the guns were
still roaring--for the Germans were attempting to retake their lost
trenches in a desperate series of counter-attacks--the field was
already dotted with thousands upon thousands of little wooden
crosses planted upon new-made mounds. Above many of the graves
there had been no time to erect crosses or headboards, so into the
soft soil was thrust, neck downward, a bottle, and in the bottle was a
slip of paper giving the name and the regiment of the soldier who lay
beneath. In one place the graves had been dug so as to form a vast
rectangle, and a priest, his cossack tucked up so that it showed his
military boots and trousers, was at work with saw and hammer
building in the centre of that field of graves a little shrine.

Scrawled in pencil on one of the pitiful little crosses I read: "Un brave
--Emile Petit--Mort aux Champ d'Honneur--Priez pour lui." Six feet
away was another cross which marks the spot where sleeps Gottlieb
Zimmerman, of the Wurtemberg Pioneers, and underneath, in
German script, that line from the Bible which reads: "He fought the
good fight." Close by was still another little mound under which
rested, so the headboard told me, Mohammed ben Hassen Bazazou
of the Fourth Algerian Tirailleurs. In life those men had never so much
as heard of one another. Doubtless they must often have wondered
why they were fighting and what the war was all about. Now they rest
there quietly, side by side, Frenchman and German and African,
under the soil of Champagne, while somewhere in France and in
Wurtemberg and in Algeria women are praying for the safety of Emile
and of Gottlieb and of Mohammed.

During the three days that I spent upon the battlefield of Champagne
the roar of the guns never ceased and rarely slackened, yet not a
sign of any human being could I see as I gazed out over that desolate
plain on which was being fought one of the greatest battles of all time.
There were no moving troops, no belching batteries, no flaunting
colours--only a vast slag-heap on which moved no living thing. Yet I
knew that hidden beneath the ground all around me, as well as over
there where the German trenches ran, men were waiting to kill or to
be killed, and that behind the trench-scarred ridges at my back, and
behind the low-lying crests in front of me, sweating men were at work
loading and firing the great guns whose screaming missiles
crisscrossed like invisible express trains overhead to burst miles
away, perhaps, with the crash which scatters death. The French guns
seemed to be literally everywhere. One could not walk a hundred
yards without stumbling on a skilfully concealed battery. In the shelter
of a ridge was posted a battery of 155-milimetre monsters painted
with the markings of a giraffe in order to escape the searching eyes of
the German aviators and named respectively Alice, Fernande,
Charlotte, and Maria. From a square opening, which yawned like a
cellar window in the earth, there protruded the long, lean muzzle of an
eight-inch naval gun, the breech of which was twenty feet below the
lerel of the ground in a gun-pit which was capable of resisting any
high explosive that might chance to fall upon it. This marine monster
was in charge of a crew of sailors who boasted that their pet could
drop two hundred pounds of melinite on any given object thirteen
miles away. But the guns to which the French owe their success in
Champagne, the guns which may well prove the deciding factor in
this war, are not the cumbersome siege pieces or the mammoth
naval cannon, but the mobile, quick-firing, never-tiring, hard-hitting,
"seventy-fives," whose fire, the Germans resentfully exclaim, is not
deadly but murderous.

The battlefield was almost as thickly strewn with unexploded shells,
hand-grenades, bombs, and aerial torpedoes as the ground under a
pine-tree is with cones. One was, in fact, compelled to walk with the
utmost care in order to avoid stepping upon these tubes filled with
sudden death and being blown to kingdom come. I had picked up
and was casually examining what looked like a piece of broom-handle
with a tin tomato-can on the end, when the intelligence officer who
was accompanying me noticed what I was doing. "Don't drop that!"
he exclaimed, "put it down gently. It's a German hand-grenade that
has failed to explode and the least jar may set it off. They're as
dangerous to tamper with as nitroglycerine." I put it down as carefully
as though it were a sleeping baby that I did not wish to waken. As the
French Government has no desire to lose any of its soldiers
unnecessarily, men had been set to work building around the
unexploded shells and torpedoes little fences of barbed wire, just as a
gardener fences in a particularly rare shrub or tree.

Other men were at work carefully rolling up the barbed wire in the
captured German entanglements, in collecting and sorting out the
arms and equipment with which the field was strewn, in stacking up
the thousands upon thousands of empty brass shell-cases to be
shipped back to the factories for reloading, and even in emptying the
bags filled with sand which had lined the German parapets and tying
them in bundles ready to be used over again. They are a thrifty
people, are the French. There was enough spoil of one sort and
another scattered over the battlefield to have stocked all the curio-
shops in Europe and America for years to come, but as everything on
a field of battle is claimed by the Government nothing can be carried
away. This explains why the brass shells that are smuggled back to
Paris readily sell for ten dollars apiece, while for German helmets the
curio dealers can get almost any price that they care to ask. As a matter
of fact, it is against the law to offer any war trophies for sale or,
indeed, to have any in one's possession. What the French intend to
do with the vast quantity of spoil which they have taken from the
battlefields, heaven only knows. It is said that they have great
storehouses filled with German helmets and similar trophies which
they are going to sell after the war to souvenir collectors, thus adding
to the national revenues. If this is so there will certainly be a glut in
the curio market and it will be a poor household indeed that will not
have on the sitting-room mantelshelf a German pickelhaube. After
the war is over hordes of tourists will no doubt make excursions to
these battlefields, just as they used to make excursions to Waterloo
and Gettysburg, and the farmers who own the fields will make their
fortune showing the visitors through the trenches and dug-outs at
five francs a head.

The French officers who accompanied me over the battlefield
particularly called my attention to a steel turret, some six feet high and
eight or nine feet in diameter, which had been mounted on one of the
German trench walls. The turret, which had a revolving top, contained
a 50-millimetre gun served by three men. The French troops who
stormed the German position found that the small steel door giving
access to the interior of the turret was fastened on the outside by a
chain and padlock. When they broke it open they found, so they told
me, the bodies of three Germans who had apparently been locked in
by their officers, and left there to fight and die with no chance of
escape. I have no reason in the world to doubt the good faith of the
officers who showed me the turret and told me the story, and yet--
well, it is one of those things which seems too improbable to be true.
As I have already mentioned when I was in Alsace the French officers
told me that they found in certain of the captured positions German
soldiers chained to their machine guns. There again the inherent
improbability of the incident leads one to question its truth. From what
I have seen of the German soldier, I should say that he was the last
man in the world who had to be chained to his gun in order to make
him fight. Yet in this war so many wildly improbable, wholly incredible
things have actually occurred that one is not justified in denying the
truth of an assertion merely because it sounds unlikely.

One of the things that particularly impressed me during my visit to
Champagne was the feverish activity that prevailed behind the firing-
line. It was the busiest place that I have ever seen; busier than Wall
Street at the noon-hour; busier than the Panama Canal Zone at the
rush period of the Canal's construction. The roads behind the front for
twenty miles were filled with moving troops and transport-trains; long
columns of sturdy infantrymen in mud-stained coats of faded blue
and wearing steel casques which gave them a startling resemblance
to their ancestors, the men-at-arms of the Middle Ages; brown-
skinned men from North Africa in snowy turbans and voluminous
burnouses, and black-skinned men from West Africa, whose khaki
uniforms were brightened by broad red sashes and rakish red
tarbooshes; sun-tanned Colonial soldiery from Annam and Tonquin,
from Somaliland and Madagascar, wearing on their tunics the ribbons
of wars fought in lands of which most people have never so much as
heard; Spahis from Morocco and the Sahara, mounted on horses as
wiry and hardy as themselves; Zouaves in jaunty fezes and braided
jackets and enormous trousers; sailors from the fleet, brought to
handle the big naval guns, swaggering along with the roll of the sea in
their gait; cuirassiers, their steel breastplates and horse-tailed
helmets making them look astonishingly like Roman horsemen;
dragoons so picturesque that .they seemed to be posing for a Dtaille
or a Meissonier; field-batteries, pale blue like everything else in the
French army, rocking and swaying over the stones; cyclists with their
rifles slung across their backs hunter-fashion; leather-jacketed
despatch riders on panting motor-cycles; post-offices on wheels;
telegraph offices on wheels; butchers' shops on wheels; bakers'
shops on wheels; garages on wheels; motor-buses, their tops
covered with wire-netting and filled with carrier-pigeons; giant
searchlights; water-carts drawn by patient Moorish donkeys whose
turbaned drivers cursed them in shrill, harsh Arabic; troop transport
cars like miniature railway-coaches, each carrying fifty men; field-
kitchens with the smoke pouring from their stovepipes and steam
rising from the soup cauldrons; long lines of drinking-water waggons,
the gift of the Touring Club de France; great herds of cattle and woolly
waves of sheep, soon to be converted into beef and mutton, for the
fighting man needs meat, and plenty of it; pontoon-trains; balloon
outfits; machine guns; pack-trains; mountain batteries; ambulances;
world without end, amen. Though the roads were jammed from ditch
to ditch, there was no confusion, no congestion. Everything was as
well regulated as the traffic is in the busiest London streets.

If the roads were crowded, so were the fields. Here a battalion of
Zouaves at bayonet practice was being instructed in the "haymaker's
lift," that terrible upward thrust in which a soldier trained in the use of
the bayonet can, in a single stroke, rip his adversary open from waist
to neck, and toss him over his shoulder as he would a forkful of hay.
Over there a brigade of chasseurs d'Afrique was encamped, the long
lines of horses, the hooded waggons, and the fires with the cooking-
pots steaming over them, suggesting a mammoth encampment of
gypsies. In the next field a regiment of Moroccan tirailleurs had halted
for the night, and the men, kneeling on their blankets, were praying
with their faces turned toward Mecca. Down by the horse-lines a
Moorish barber was at work shaving the heads of the soldiers, but
taking care always to leave the little top-knot by means of which the
faithful when they die, may be jerked to Paradise. A little farther on
the huge yellow bulk of an observation balloon--"les saucisses," the
French call them--was slowly filling preparatory to taking its place aloft
with its fellows, which, at intervals of half a mile, hung above the
French lines, straining at their tethers like horses that were frightened
and wished to break away. In whichever direction I looked, men were
drilling or marching. Where all these hordes of men had come from,
where they were bound, what they were going to do, no one seemed
to know or, indeed, particularly to care. They were merely pawns
which were being moved here and there upon a mighty chessboard
by a stout old man in a general's uniform, sitting at a map-covered
table in a farmhouse many miles away.

As we made our way slowly and laboriously toward the front across a
region so littered with scraps of metal and broken iron and twisted
wire that it looked like the ruins of a burned hardware store, we began
to meet the caravans of wounded. Lying with white, drawn faces on
the dripping stretchers were men whose bodies had been ripped
open like the carcasses that hang in front of butchers' shops; men
who had been blinded and will spend the rest of their days groping in
darkness; men smashed out of all resemblance to anything human,
yet still alive; and other men who, with no wound upon them, raved
and laughed and cackled in insane mirth at the frightful humour of the
things that they had seen. Every house and farmyard for miles
around was filled with wounded, and still they came streaming in,
some hobbling, some on stretchers, some assisted by comrades,
some bareheaded, with the dried blood clotted on their heads and
faces, other with their gasmasks and their mud-plastered helmets still
on. Two soldiers came by pushing wheeled stretchers, on which lay
the stiff, stark forms of dead men. The soldiers were whistling and
singing, like men returning from a day's work well done, and
occasionally one of them in sheer exuberance of spirits would send
his helmet spinning into the air. Coming to a little declivity, they raced
down it with their grisly burdens, like delivery boys racing with their
carts. The light vehicles bumped and jounced over the uneven
ground until one of the corpses threatened to fall off, whereupon the
soldiers stopped and, still laughing, tied the dead thing on again.
Such is the callousness begot by war. Their offensive in Champagne
cost the French, I have every reason to believe, very close to
110,000 men. The German casualties, so the French General Staff
asserts, were about 140,000, of whom 21,000 were prisoners. In
addition the Germans lost 121 guns. Despite this appalling cost in
human lives, the distance gained by the French was so small that it
cannot be seen on the ordinary map. Yet to measure the effect of the
French effort by the ground gained would be a serious mistake. Just
as by the Marne victory the French stopped the invasion and ruined
the original German plan, which was first to shatter France and then
turn against Russia; and just as by the victory of the Yser they
effectively prevented the enemy from reaching the Channel ports or
getting a foothold in the Pas-de Calais, so the offensive in
Champagne, costly as it was in human lives, fulfilled its double
mission of holding large German forces on the western front and of
demoralizing and wearing down the German army. It proved,
moreover, that the Allies can pierce the Germans provided they are
willing to pay the cost.

Darkness was falling rapidly when I turned my back on the great
battlefield, and the guns were roaring with redoubled fury in what is
known on the British front as "the Evening Hate" and on the French
lines as "the Evening Prayer." As I emerged from the communication
trench into the high road where my car was waiting I met a long
column of infantry, ghostly figures in the twilight, with huge packs on
their backs and rifles slanting on their shoulders, marching briskly in
the direction of the thundering guns. It was the night-shift going on
duty at the mills--the mills where they turn human beings into carrion.




VI. The Conflict In The Clouds



Dawn was breaking over the Lorraine hills when the French aircraft
were wheeled from their canvas hangars and ranged in squadrilla
formation upon the level surface of the plain. In the dim light of early
morning the machines, with their silver bodies and snowy wings, bore
an amazing resemblance to a flock of great white birds which, having
settled for the night, were about to resume their flight. All through the
night the mechanicians had been busy about them, testing the
motors, tightening the guy-wires, and adjusting the planes, while the
pilots had directed the loading of the explosives, for a whisper had
passed along the line of sheds that a gigantic air-raid, on a scale not
yet attempted, was to be made on some German town. At a signal
from the officer in command of the aviation field the pilots and
observers, unrecognizable in their goggles and leather helmets and
muffled to the ears in leather and fur, climbed into their seats. In the
clips beneath each aeroplane reposed three long, lean messengers
of death, the torpedoes of the sky, ready to be sent hurtling
downward by the pulling of a lever, while smaller projectiles, to be
dropped by hand, filled every square inch in the bodies of the
aeroplanes. From somewhere out on the aviation field a smoke
rocket shot suddenly into the air. It was the signal for departure. With
a deafening roar from their propellers the great biplanes, in rapid
succession, left the ground and, like a flock of wild fowl, winged their
way straight into the rising sun. As they crossed the German lines at
a height of twelve thousand feet the French observers could see, far
below, the decoy aeroplanes which had preceded them rocking
slowly from side to side above the German anti-aircraft guns in such
a manner as to divert their attention from the raiders.

On an occasion like this each man is permitted the widest latitude of
action. He is given an itinerary to which he is expected to adhere as
closely as circumstances will permit, and he is given a set point at
which to aim his bombs, but in all other respects he may use his own
discretion. The raiders flew at first almost straight toward the rising
sun, and it was not until they were well within the enemy's lines that
they altered their course, turning southward only when they were
opposite the town which was their objective. So rapid was the pace at
which they were travelling that it was not yet six o'clock when the
commander of the squadron, peering through his glasses, saw, far
below him, the yellow gridiron which he knew to be the streets, the
splotches of green which he knew to be the parks, and the squares of
red and grey which he knew to be the buildings of Karlsruhe. The first
warning that the townspeople had was when a dynamite shell came
plunging out of nowhere and exploded with a crash that rocked the
city to its foundations. The people of Karlsruhe were being given a
dose of the same medicine which the Zeppelins had given to
Antwerp, to Paris, and to London. As the French airmen reached the
town they swooped down in swift succession out of the grey morning
sky until they were close enough to the ground to distinguish clearly
through the fleecy mist the various objectives which had been given
them. For weeks they had studied maps and bird's-eye photographs
of Karlsruhe until they knew the place as well as though they had
lived in it all their lives. One took the old grey castle on the hill,
another took the Margrave's palace in the valley, others headed for
the railway station, the arms factory, and the barracks. Then hell
broke loose in Karlsruhe.

For nearly an hour it rained bombs. Not incendiary bombs or
shrapnel, but huge 4-inch and 6-inch shells filled with high explosive
which annihilated everything they hit. Holes as large as cellars
suddenly appeared in the stone-paved streets and squares; buildings
of brick and stone and concrete crashed to the ground as though
flattened by the hand of God; fires broke out in various quarters of the
city and raged unchecked; the terrified inhabitants cowered in their
cellars or ran in blind panic for the open country; the noise was terrific,
for bombs were falling at the rate of a dozen to the minute; beneath
that rain of death Karlsruhe rocked and reeled. The artillery was
called out but it was useless; no guns could hit the great white birds
which twisted and turned and swooped and climbed a mile or more
overhead. Each aeroplane, as soon as it had exhausted its cargo of
explosives, turned its nose toward the French lines and went
skimming homeward as fast as its propellers could take it there, but
to the inhabitants of the quivering, shell-torn town it must have
seemed as though the procession of aircraft would never cease. The
return to the French lines was not as free from danger as the outward
trip had been, for the news of the raid had been flashed over the
country by wire and wireless and anti-aircraft guns were on the look-
out for the raiders everywhere. The guarding aeroplanes were on the
alert, however, and themselves attracted the fire of the German
batteries or engaged the German Taubes while the returning raiders
sped by high overhead. Of the four squadrillas of aeroplanes which
set out for Karlsruhe only two machines failed to return. These lost
their bearings and were surprised by the sudden rising of hawk-like
Av atiks which cut them off from home and, after fierce struggles in
the air, forced them to descend into the German lines. But it was not
a heavy price to pay for the destruction that had been wrought and
the moral effect that had been produced, for all that day the roads
leading out of Karlsruhe were choked with frantic fugitives and the
stories which they told spread over all southern Germany a cloud of
despondency and gloom. Since then the news of the Zeppelin raids
on London has brought a thrill of fear to the people of Karlsruhe. They
have learned what it means to have death drop out of the sky.

More progress has been made in the French air service, which has
been placed under the direction of the recently created Subministry of
Aviation, than in any other branch of the Republic's fighting machine.
Though definite information regarding the French air service is
extremely difficult to obtain, there is no doubt that on December I, 
1915, France had more than three thousand aeroplanes in
commission, and this number is being steadily increased. The French
machines, though of many makes and types, are divided into
three classes, according to whether they are to be used for
reconnaissance, for fire control, or for bombardment. The machines
generally used for reconnaissance work are the Moranes, the
Maurice Farmans, and a new type of small machine known as the
"Baby" Nieuport. The last-named, which are but twenty-five feet wide
and can be built in eight days at a cost of only six thousand francs,
might well be termed the Fords of the air. They have an eighty
horsepower motor, carry only the pilot, who operates the machine
gun mounted over his head, and can attain the amazing speed of
one hundred and twenty miles an hour. These tiny machines can
ascend at a sharper angle than any other aeroplane made, it being
claimed for them, and with truth, that they can do things which a large
bird, such as an eagle or a hawk, could not do. The machines
generally used for directing artillery fire are either Voisins or Caudron
biplanes. The Voisin, which carries an observer as well as a pilot, is
armed with a Hotchkiss quick-firer throwing three-pound shells, being
the only machine of its size having sufficient stability to stand the
recoil from so heavy a gun. The Caudron, which likewise has a crew
of two men, has two motors, each acting independently of the other. I
was shown one of these machines which, during an observation flight
over the German lines, was struck by a shell which killed the observer
and demolished one of the motors; the other motor was not
damaged, however, and with it the pilot was able to bring the machine
and his dead companion back to the French lines. For making raids
and bombardments the Voisin and Breguet machines have generally
been used, but they are now being replaced by the giant triplane
which has fittingly been called "the Dreadnought of the skies." This
aerial monster, the last word in aircraft construction, has a sixty-three
foot spread of wing; its four motors generate eight hundred horse-
power; its armament consists of two Hotchkiss quick-firing cannon
and four machine guns; it can carry twelve men--though on a raid the
crew consists of four--and twelve hundred pounds of explosive; its
cost is six hundred thousand francs.

As a result of this extraordinary advance in aviation, France has to-
day a veritable aerial navy, formed in squadrons and divisions, with
battleplanes, cruisers, scouts, and destroyers, all heavily armoured
and carrying both machine guns and cannon firing three-inch shells.
Each squadron, as at present formed, consists of one battleplane,
two battle-cruisers, and six scout-planes, with a complement of
upward of fifty officers and men, which includes not only the pilots and
observers but the mechanics and the drivers of the lorries and trailers
which form part of each outfit. These raiding squadrons are
constantly operating over the enemy's lines, bombarding his bases,
railway lines, and cantonments, hindering the transportation of troops
and ammunition, and creating general demoralization behind the
firing-line. On such forays it is the mission of the smaller and swifter
machines, such as the Nieuports, to convoy and protect the larger
and slower craft exactly as destroyers convoy and protect a
battleship.

Two types of projectiles are carried on raiding aeroplanes; aerial
torpedoes, two, three, or four in number, fitted with fins, like the
feathers on an arrow, in order to guide their course, which are held by
clips under the body of the machine and can be released when over
the point to be bombarded by merely pulling a lever; and large
quantities of smaller bombs, filled with high explosive and fitted with
percussion fuses, which are dropped by hand. It is extremely difficult
to attain any degree of accuracy in dropping bombs from moving
aircraft, for it must be borne in mind that the projectiles, on being
released, do not at once fall in a perfectly straight line to the earth,
like a brick dropped from the top of a skyscraper. When an aeroplane
is travelling forward at a speed of, let us say, sixty miles an hour, the
bombs carried on the machine are also moving through space at the
same rate. Owing to this forward movement combining with the
downward gravitational drop, the path of the bomb is really a curve,
and for this curve the aviator must learn to make allowance. Should 
the aircraft hover over one spot, however, the downward flight of the
bomb is, of course, comparatively vertical.

The most exciting, as well as the most dangerous, work allotted to the
aviators is that of flying over the enemy's lines and, by means of huge
cameras fitted with telephoto lens and fastened beneath the bodies of
the machines taking photographs of the German positions. As soon
as the required exposures have been made, the machine speeds
back to the French lines, usually amid a storm of bursting shrapnel,
and the plates are quickly developed in the dark room, which is a part
of every aerodrome. From the picture thus obtained an enlargement
is made, and within two or three hours at the most the staff knows
every detail of the German position, even to the depth of the wire
entanglements and the number and location of the machine guns.
Should weather conditions or the activity of the enemy's anti-aircraft
batteries make it inadvisable to send a machine on one of these
photographic excursions, the camera is attached to a cerf volant, or
war-kite. The entire equipment is carried on three motorcars built for
the purpose, one carrying the dismounted kite, the second the
cameras and crew, while the third car is a dark room on wheels. I can
recall few more interesting sights along the battle-front than that of
one of these war-kites in operation. Taking shelter behind a
farmhouse or haystack, the staff, in scarcely more time than it takes
to tell about it, have jointed together the bamboo rods which form the
framework of the kite, the linen which forms the planes is stretched
into place, a camera with its shutter controlled by an electric wire is
slung underneath, and the great kite is sent into the air. When it is
over that section of the enemy's trenches of which a photograph is
wanted, the officer at the end of the wire presses a button, the shutter
of the camera swinging a thousand feet above flashes open and
shut, the kite is immediately hauled down, a photographer takes the
holder containing the exposed plate and disappears with it into the
wheeled dark room to appear, five minutes later, with a picture of the
German trenches.

The change that aeroplanes have produced in warfare is strikingly
illustrated by the fact that in the Russo-Japanese War the Japanese
fought for weeks and sacrificed thousands of men in order to capture
203-Metre Hill, not, mind you, because of its strategic importance, but
in order that they might effectively control the fire of their siege
mortars, which were endeavouring to reach the battleships in the
harbour of Port Arthur. To-day that information would be furnished in
an hour by aeroplanes. From dawn to dark aircraft hang over the
enemy's positions, spotting his batteries, mapping his trenches,
noting the movements of troops and trains, yet with a storm of
shrapnel bursting about them constantly. I remember seeing, in
Champagne, a French aeroplane rocking lazily over the German
lines, and of counting sixty shrapnel clouds floating about it at one
time. So thick were the patches of fleecy white that they looked like
the white tufts on a sky-blue coverlet. The shooting of the German
verticals (anti-aircraft guns) has steadily improved as a result of the
constant practice they have had, so that half the time there are
ragged rents in the French planes caused by fragments of exploding
shells. So deafening is the racket of the motor and propeller,
however, that it is impossible to hear a shell unless it bursts at very
close range? so that the aviators, intent on their work, are often utterly
unconscious of how near they are to death. It is very curious how
close shells can explode to a machine and yet not cripple it enough to
bring it down.

A pilot flying over the German lines in Flanders had his leg smashed
by a bursting shell, which, strangely enough, did no damage to the
planes or motor. The wounded man fainted from the pain and shock
and his machine, left uncontrolled, began to plunge earthward.
Recovering consciousness, the aviator, despite the excruciating pain
which he was suffering, retained sufficient strength and presence of
mind to get his machine under control and head it back for the French
lines, though shrapnel was bursting all about him. He came quietly
and gracefully to ground at his home aviation field and then fell over
his steering lever unconscious.

No nervous man is wanted in the air service and the moment that a
flier shows signs that his nerves are becoming affected he is given a
furlough and ordered to take a rest. So great are the mental strain,
the exposure, and the noise, however, that probably twenty-five per
cent, of the aviators lose their nerve completely and have to leave the
service altogether. The great French aviation school at Buc, near
Paris, turns out pilots at the rate of one hundred and sixty a month.
The first lessons are given on a machine with clipped wings, known
as "the penguin," which cannot rise from the ground, and from this
the men are gradually advanced, stage by stage, from machines as
safe and steady and well-mannered as riding-school horses, until
they at last become qualified pilots, capable of handling the quick-
turning, uncertain-tempered broncos of the air.

Provided he has sound nerves, a strong constitution, and average
intelligence, a man who has never been in a machine before can
become a qualified pilot in thirty days. Since the war began the
French air service has attracted the reckless, the daring, and the
adventurous from the four corners of the earth as iron filings are
attracted by a magnet. Wearing on the collars of their silver-blue
uniforms the gold wings of the flying corps are cow-punchers, polo-
players, prize-fighters, professional bicycle riders, big game hunters,
soldiers of fortune, young men who bear famous names, and other
young men whose names are notorious rather than famous. In one
squad-rilla on the Champagne front I found a Texan cowboy and
adventurer named Hall; Elliott Cowdin, the Long Island polo-player;
and Charpentier, the heavyweight champion of France. For
youngsters who are seeking excitement and adventure, no sport in
the world can offer the thrills of the chasse au Taube. To drive with
one hand a machine that travels through space at a speed double
that of the fastest express train and with the other hand to operate a
mitrailleuse that spits death at the rate of a thousand shots a minute;
to twist and turn and loop and circle two miles above the earth in an
endeavour to overcome an adversary as quick-witted and quick-
acting as yourself, knowing that if you are victorious the victory is due
to your skill and courage alone--there you have a game which makes
all other sports appear ladylike and tame.

When an aeroplane armed with a mitrailleuse attacks an enemy
machine the pilot immediately manuvres so as to permit the gunner
observer to bring his gun into action. In order to make the bullets
"spread" and ensure that at least some of the many shots get home,
the gunner swings his weapon up and down, with a kind of chopping
motion, so that, viewed from the front of the machine, the stream of
bullets, were they visible, would be shaped like a fan. At the same
time the gunner swings his weapon gently around, covering with a
stream of lead the space through which his enemy will have to pass.
Should the enemy machine be below the other, then to get clear he
would possibly dive under his opponent in a sweeping turn. By this
manuvre the gunner is placed in a position where he cannot bring
his weapon to bear and he will have to turn in pursuit before his gun
can be brought into action again. From this it will be seen that an
aeroplane gunner does not take deliberate aim, as would a man
armed with a rifle, but instead fills the air in the path of his opponent
with showers of bullets in the hope that some of them will find the
mark. Should both machines be armed with machine guns, as is now
nearly always the case, victory is often a question of quick
manoeuvring combined with a considerable element of luck. To win
out in this aerial warfare, a man has to combine the quickness of a
fencer with the coolness of a big game shot.

One of the greatest dangers the military aviator has to face is landing
after night has fallen. Though every machine has a small motor,
worked by the wind, which generates enough power for a small
searchlight, the light is not sufficiently powerful to be of much
assistance in gauging the distance from the ground. Sunset is,
therefore, always an anxious time on the aviation fields, nor is the
anxiety at an end until all the fliers are accounted for. As the sun
begins to sink into the West the returning aviators one by one appear,
black dots against the crimson sky. One by one they come swooping
down from the heavens and come to rest upon the ground. Twilight
merges into dusk and dusk turns into darkness, but one of the flying
men has not yet come. The four corners of the aviation field are
marked with great flares of kerosene, that the late comer may be
guided home, and down the middle of the field lanterns are laid out in
the form of a huge arrow with the head pointing into the wind, while
searchlights, mounted on motor-cars, alternately sweep field and sky
with their white beams. Anxiety is written plainly on the face of every
one. Have the Boches brought him down? Has he lost his way? Or
has he been forced from engine trouble or lack of petrol to descend
elsewhere? "Hark!" exclaims some one suddenly. "He's coming!" and
in the sudden hush that ensues you hear, from somewhere in the
upper darkness, a motor's deep, low throb. The vertical beams of the
searchlights fall and flood the level plain with yellow radiance. The
hum of the motor rises into a roar and then, when just overhead,
abruptly stops, and down through the darkness slides a great bird
which is darker than the darkness and settles silently upon the plain.

The last of the chickens has come home to roost.

In addition to the aeroplanes kept upon the front for purposes of
bombardment, photography, artillery control, and scouting, several
squadrillas are kept constantly on duty in the vicinity of Paris and
certain other French cities for the purpose of driving off marauding
Taubes or Zeppelins. Just as the streets of Paris are patrolled by
gendarmes, so the air-planes above the city are patrolled, both night
and day, by guarding aeroplanes. To me there was something
wonderfully inspiring in the thought that all through the hours of
darkness these aerial watchers were sweeping in great circles above
the sleeping city, guarding it from the death that comes in the night.
For the benefit of my American readers I may say that the people of
the United States do not fully understand the Zeppelin raid problem
with which those entrusted with the defence of Paris and of London
are confronted. The Zeppelins, it must be remembered, never come
out unless it is a very dark night, and then they pass over the lines at
a height of two miles or more, descending only when they are above
the city which they intend to attack. They slowly, silently settle down
until their officers can get a view of their target and then the bombs
begin to drop. This is usually the first warning that the townspeople
have that Zeppelins are abroad, though it occasionally happens that
they have been seen or heard crossing the lines, in which case the
city is warned by telephone, the anti-aircraft guns prepare for action,
and the lights in the streets and houses are put out. Should the
Zeppelins succeed in getting above the city, the guarding aeroplanes
go up after them and as soon as the searchlights spot them the guns
open fire with shrapnel. The raiders are rarely fired on by the anti-
aircraft guns while they are hovering over the city, however, as
experience has shown that more people are killed by falling shell
splinters than by the enemy's bombs. Nor do the French aeroplanes
dare to make serious attacks until the Zeppelin is clear of the city, for
it is not difficult to imagine the destruction that would result were one
of these monsters, five hundred feet long and weighing thirty-six
thousand pounds, to be destroyed and its flaming dbris to fall upon
the city. The problem that faces the French authorities, therefore, is
stopping the Zeppelins before they reach Paris, and it speaks
volumes for the efficiency of the French air service that there has
been no Zeppelin raid on the French capital for nearly a year.

In order to detect the approach of Zeppelins the French military
authorities have recently adopted the novel expedient of establishing
microphone stations at several points in and about Paris, these
delicately attuned instruments recording with unfailing accuracy the
throb of a Zeppelin's or an aeroplane's propellers long before it can
be heard by the human ear.

For the protection of London the British Government has built an
aerial navy consisting of two types of aircraft--scouts and battle-
planes. Practically the only requirement for the scouting planes is that
they must have a speed of not less than one hundred miles an hour
and a fuel capacity for at least a six-hour flight, thus giving them a
cruising radius of three hundred miles. That is, they will be able to raid
many German ports and cities and return with ease to their base in
England. Their small size--they are only thirty feet across the wings--
and great speed will make them almost impossible to hit and it is
expected that anti-aircraft guns will be practically useless against
them. They will constantly circle in the higher levels, as near the
Zeppelin bases as they can get, and the minute they see the giants
emerging from their hangars they will be off to England to give the
alarm. Their speed being double that of a Zeppelin, they will have
reached England long before the raider arrives. Then the new
"Canada" type, each carrying a ton of bombs, will go out to meet the
Germans. These giant biplanes, one hundred and two feet across the
wings, with two motors developing three hundred and twenty horse-
power, have a speed of more than ninety miles an hour and can
overtake a Zeppelin as a motor-cycle policeman can overhaul a
limousine. They are fitted with the new device for ensuring accuracy
in bomb-dropping and, with their superior speed, will hang above the
monster dirigibles, as a hawk hangs above a hen-roost, plumping
shell after shell into the great silk sausage quivering below them. Both
the French and British Governments now have a considerable
number of hydro-aeroplanes in commission. These amphibious craft,
which are driven by two motors of one hundred and sixty horse-power
each and have a speed of about seventy-five miles an hour, are
designed primarily for the hunting of submarines. Though a
submarine cannot be seen from the deck of a vessel, an aviator can
see it even though it is submerged twenty feet, and a bomb dropped
near it will cave its sides in by the mere force of the explosion,
particularly if that bomb is loaded with two hundred pounds of
melinite, as are those carried by the French hydro-aeroplanes.

But the most novel of all the uses to which the aircraft have been put
in this war is that of dropping spies in the enemy's territory. On
numerous occasions French and British aviators have flown across
the German lines, carrying with them an intelligence officer disguised
as a peasant or a farm-hand, and have landed him at some remote
spot where the descent of an aeroplane is scarcely likely to attract the
attention of the military authorities. As soon as the aviator has landed
his passenger he ascends again, with the understanding, however,
that he will return to the same spot a day, or two days, or a week
later, to pick up the spy and carry him back to the French lines. The
exploits of some of these secret agents thus dropped from the sky
upon enemy soil would make the wildest fiction seem probable and
tame. One French officer, thus landed behind the German front in
Flanders, succeeded in slowly working his way right across Belgium,
gathering information as he went as to the resources of the Germans
and the disposition of their troops, only to be caught just as he was
crossing the frontier into Holland. Though the Germans expressed
unbounded admiration for his coolness, courage, and daring, he was
none the less a spy. He died before the rifles of a firing-party.

It has repeatedly been said that in this war the spirit of chivalry does
not exist, and, so far as the land forces are concerned, this is largely
true. But chivalry still exists among the fighters of the air. If, for
example, a French aviator is forced to descend in the German lines,
either because his machine has been damaged by gun-fire or from
engine trouble, a German aviator will fly over the French lines, often
amid a storm of shrapnel, and drop a little cloth bag which contains a
note recording the name of the missing man, or if not his name the
number of his machine, whether he survived, and if so whether he is
wounded. Attached to the "message bag" are long pennants of
coloured cloth, which flutter out and attract the attention of the men in
the neighbourhood, who run out and pick up the bag when it lands. It
is at once taken to the nearest officer, who opens it and telephones
the message it contains to aviation headquarters, so that it not
infrequently happens that the fate of a flier is known to his comrades
within a few hours after he has set out from the aviation field. Perhaps
the prettiest exhibition of chivalry which the war has produced was
evoked by the death of the famous French aviator, Adolphe Pegoud,
who was killed by a German aviator whom he attacked during a
reconnaissance near Petite Croix, in Alsace.

The next day a German aeroplane, flying at a great height, appeared
over Chavannes, an Alsatian village on the old frontier, where
Pegoud was buried, and dropped a wreath which bore the inscription:
"To Pegoud, who died like a hero, from his adversary."




VII. The Red Badge Of Mercy



Corporal Emile Dupont, having finished a most unappetizing and
unsatisfying breakfast, consisting of a cup of lukewarm chicory and a
half-loaf of soggy bread, emerged on all fours from the hole in the
ground which for many months had been his home and, standing
upright in the trench, lighted a cigarette. At that instant something
came screaming out of nowhere to burst, in a cloud of acrid smoke
and a shower of steel splinters, directly over the trench in which Emile
was standing. Immediately the sky seemed to fall upon Emile and
crush him. When he returned to consciousness a few seconds later
he found himself crumpled up in an angle of the trench like an empty
kit-bag that has been hurled into a corner of a room. He felt curiously
weak and nauseated; he ached in every bone in his body; his head
throbbed and pounded until he thought that the top of his skull was
coming off. Still, he was alive, and that was something. He fumbled
for the cigarette that he had been lighting, but there was a curious
sensation of numbness in his right hand. He did not seem to be able
to move it. Very slowly, very painfully he turned his head so that his
eyes travelled out along his blue-sleeved arm until they reached the
point where his hand ought to be. But the hand wasn't there. It had
quite disappeared. His wrist lay in a pool of something crimson and
warm and sticky which widened rapidly as he looked at it. His hand
was gone, there was no doubting that. Still, it didn't interest him
greatly; in fact, it might have been some other man's hand for all he
cared. His head throbbed like the devil and he was very, very tired.
Rather dimly he heard voices and, as through a haze, saw figures
bending over him. He felt some one tugging at the little first-aid
packet which every soldier carries in the breast of his tunic, he felt
something being tied very tightly around his arm above the elbow,
and finally he had a vague recollection of being dragged into a dug-
out, where he lay for hours while the shell-storm raged and howled
outside.

Toward nightfall when the bombardment had died down, two soldiers,
wearing on their arms white brassards with red crosses, lifted him on
to a stretcher and carried him between interminable walls of brown
earth to another and a larger dug-out which he recognized as a poste
de secours. After an hour of waiting, because there were other
wounded men who had to be attended to first, the stretcher on which
Emile lay was lifted on to a table, over which hung a lantern. A
bearded man, wearing the cap of a medical officer, and with a white
apron up to his neck, briskly unwound the bandages which hid the
place where Emile's right hand should have been. "It'll have to be
taken off a bit further up, mon brave," said the surgeon, in much the
same tone that a tailor would use in discussing the shortening of a
coat. "You seem to be in pretty fair shape, though, so we'll just give
you a new dressing, and send you along to the field ambulance,
where they have more facilities for amputating than we have here."
Despite the pain, which had now become agonizing, Emile watched
with a sort of detached admiration the neatness and despatch with
which the surgeon wound the white bandages around the wound. It
reminded him of a British soldier putting on his puttees. "Just a
moment, my friend," said the surgeon, when the dressing was
completed, "we'll give you a jab of this before you go, to frighten away
the tetanus," and in the muscles of his shoulder Emile felt the prick of
a hypodermic needle. An orderly tied to a button of his coat a pink tag
on which something--he could not see what--had been scrawled by
the surgeon, and two brancardiers lifted the stretcher and carried him
out into the darkness. From the swaying of the stretcher and the
muffled imprecations of the bearers, he gathered that he was being
taken across the ploughed field which separated the trenches from
the highway where the ambulances were waiting. "This cleans 'em up
for to-night," said one of the bearers, as he slipped the handles of the
stretcher into the grooved supports of the ambulance and pushed it
smoothly home. "Thank God for that," said the ambulance driver, as
he viciously cranked his car. "I thought I was going to be kept here all
night. It's time we cleared out anyway. The Boches spotted me with a
rocket they sent up a while back, and they've been dropping shells a
little too close to be pleasant. Well, s'long. When I get this bunch
delivered I'm going to turn in and get a night's sleep."

The road, being paved with cobblestones, was not as smooth as it
should have been for wounded men. Emile, who had been awakened
to full consciousness by the night air and by a drink of brandy one of
the orderlies at the poste de secours had given him, felt something
warm and sticky falling... drip... drip... upon his face. In the dim
light he was at first unable to discover where it came from. Then he
saw. It was dripping through the brown canvas of the stretcher that
hung above him. He tried to call to the ambulance driver, but his
voice was lost in the noise of the machine. The field-hospital was only
three miles behind the trench in which he had been wounded, but by
the time he arrived there, what with the jolting and the pain and the
terrible thirst which comes from loss of blood and that ghastly drip...
drip... drip in his face, Emile was in a state of both mental and
physical collapse. They took him into a large tent, dimly lighted by
lanterns which showed him many other stretchers with silent or
groaning forms, all ticketed like himself, lying upon them. After
considerable delay a young officer came around with a notebook and
looked at the tag they had tied on him at the dressing-station. On it
was scrawled the word "urgent." That admonition didn't prevent
Emile's having to wait two hours before he was taken into a tent so
brilliantly illuminated by an arc-lamp that the glare hurt his eyes.
When they laid him on a narrow white table so that the light fell full
upon him he felt as though he were on the stage of a theatre and the
spot-light had been turned upon him. An orderly with a sharp knife
deftly slashed away the sleeve of Emile's coat, leaving the arm bare
to the shoulder, while another orderly clapped over his mouth and
nose a sort of funnel.

When he returned to consciousness be found himself again in an
ambulance rocking and swaying over those agonizing pav roads.
The throbbing of his head and the pain in his arm and the pitching of
the vehicle made him nauseated. There were three other wounded
men in the ambulance and they had been nauseated too. It was not a
pleasant journey. After what seemed to Emile and his companions in
misery an interminable time, the ambulance came to a stop in front of
a railway station. At least it had once been a railway station, but over
the door between the drooping Red Cross flags, was the sign "Hpital
d'Evacuation No. 31." Two brancardiers lifted out Emile's stretcher--
the same one, by the way, on which he had been carried from the
trenches twenty-four hours before--and set it down in what had been
the station waiting-room. It was still a waiting-room, but all those who
were so patiently and uncomplainingly waiting in it were wounded.
Two women, wearing white smocks and caps and with the ever-
present red cross upon their sleeves, came in carrying trays loaded
with cups of steaming soup. While an orderly supported Emile's head
one of the women held a cup of soup to his lips. He drank it greedily.
It was the best thing he had ever tasted and he said so. Then they
gave him a glass of harsh, red wine. After that he felt much better.
After a time a doctor came in and glanced at the tags which had been
tied on him at the poste de secours and at the field hospital. "You've
a little fever, my lad," said he, "but I guess you can stand the trip to
Paris. You'll be better off there than you would be here."

If Emile lives to be a hundred he will never forget that journey. It was
made in a box-car which had been converted to the use of the
wounded by putting in racks to hold the stretchers and cutting
windows in the sides. In the centre was a small stove on which the
orderly in charge boiled tea. In the car were fifteen other wounded
men. On the journey four of them died. The car, which was without
springs, rolled like a ship in a storm. The jolting was far worse than
that in the ambulances on the pav roads had been. Emile's head
reeled from weariness and exhaustion; his arm felt as though it were
being held in a white-hot flame; he was attacked by the intolerable
thirst which characterizes amputation cases, and begged for water,
and when it was given him pleaded desperately for more, more,
more. Most of the time he was off his head and babbled incoherently
of foolish, inconsequential things. It took twenty hours for the hospital
train to reach Paris, for a great movement of troops was in progress,
and when well men are being rushed to the front the wounded ones
who are coming away from it must wait.

When the train finally pulled under the sooty glass roof of the Paris
station, Emile was hovering between life and death. He had a hazy,
indistinct recollection of being taken from the ill-smelling freight-car to
an ambulance--the third in which he had been in less than forty-eight
hours; of skimming pleasantly, silently over smooth pavements; of the
ambulance entering the porte-cochre of a great white building that
looked like a hotel or school. Here he was not kept waiting. Nurses
with skilful fingers drew off his clothes--the filthy, blood-soaked, mud-
stained, vermin-infested, foul-smelling garments that he had not had
off for many weeks. He was lowered, ever so gently, into a tub filled
with warm water. Bon Dieu, but it felt good! It was the first warm bath
that he had had for more than a year. It was worth being wounded
for. Then a pair of flannel pyjamas, a fresh, soft bed, such as he had
not known since the war began, and pink-cheeked nurses in crisp,
white linen slipping about noiselessly. While Emile lay back on his
pillows and puffed a cigarette a doctor came in and dressed his
wound. "Don't worry about yourself, my man," he said cheerily, "you'll
get along finely. In a week or so we'll be sending you back to your
family." Whereupon Corporal Emile Dupont turned on his pillow with a
great sigh of content. He wondered dimly, as he fell asleep, if it would
be hard to find work which a one-armed man could do.

From the imaginary but wholly typical case just given, in which we
have traced the course of a wounded man from the spot where he fell
to the final hospital, it will be seen that the system of the Service de
Sant Militaire, as the medical service of the French army is
known, though cumbersome and complicated in certain respects,
nevertheless works--and works well. In understanding the French
system it is necessary to bear in mind that the wounded man has to
be shifted through two army zones, front and rear, both of which are
under the direct control of the commander-in-chief, to the interior
zone of the country, with its countless hospitals, which is under the
direction of the Ministry of War.

As soon as a soldier falls he drags himself, if he is able, to some
sheltered spot, or his comrades carry him there, and with the "first-
aid" packet, carried in the breast pocket of the tunic, an endeavour is
made to give the wound temporary treatment. In the British service
this "first-aid" kit consists of a small tin box, not much larger than a
cigarette case, containing a bottle of iodine crystals and a bottle of
alcohol wrapped up in a roll of aseptic bandage gauze. Meanwhile
word has been passed along the line that the services of the surgeon
are needed, for each regiment has one and sometimes two medical
officers on duty in the trenches. It may so happen that the trench
section has its own poste de secours, or first-aid dressing-station, in
which case the man is at once taken there. The medical officer
dresses the man's wound, perhaps gives him a hypodermic injection
to lessen the pain, and otherwise makes him as comfortable as
possible under the circumstances. His wounds temporarily dressed, if
there is a dug-out at hand, he is taken into it. If not, he is laid in such
shelter as the trench affords, and there he usually has to lie until night
comes and he can be removed in comparative safety; for, particularly
in the flat country of Artois and Flanders, it is out of the question to
remove the wounded except under the screen of darkness, and even
then it is frequently an extremely hazardous proceeding, for the
German gunners apparently do their best to drop their shells on the
ambulances and stretcher parties. As soon as night falls a dressing-
station is established at a point as close as possible behind the
trenches, the number of surgeons, dressers, and stretcher-bearers
sent out depending upon the number of casualties as reported by
telephone from the trenches to headquarters. The wounded man is
transported on a stretcher or a wheeled litter to the dressing-station,
where his wounds are examined by the light of electric torches and, if
necessary, redressed. If he has any fractured bones they are made
fast in splints or pieces of zinc or iron wire--anything that will enable
him to stand transportation. Though the dressing-station is, wherever
possible, established in a farmhouse, in a grove, behind a wall, or
such other protection as the region may afford, it is, nevertheless,
often in extreme danger.

I recall one case, in Flanders, where the flashing of the torches
attracted the attention of the German gunners, who dropped a shell
squarely into a dressing-station, killing all the surgeons and stretcher-
bearers, and putting half a dozen of the wounded out of their misery.
As soon as the wounded man has passed through the dressing-
station, he is carried, usually over very rough ground, to the point on
the road where the motor-ambulances are waiting and is whirled off to
the division ambulance, which corresponds to the field-hospital of the
British and American armies. These division ambulances (it should be
borne in mind that the term ambulance in French means "military
hospital") do as complete work as can be expected so near the front.
They are usually set up only four or five miles behind the firing-line,
and have a regular medical and nursing staff, instruments, and, in
some cases, X-ray apparatus for operations. As a rule, only light
emergency operations are performed in these ambulances of the
front--light skull trepanning, removal of splintered bones, disinfection,
and immobilizing of the wounded parts.

At the beginning of the war it was an accepted principle of the French
army surgeons not to operate at the front, but simply to dress the
wounds so as to permit of speedy transportation to the rear, for the
division ambulances, being without heat or light or sterilizing plants of
their own, had no facilities for many urgent operations or for night
work. Hence, though there was no lack of surgical aid at the front,
major operations were not possible, and thousands of men died who,
could they have been operated on immediately, might have been
saved. This grave fault in the French medical service has now been
remedied, however, by the automobile surgical formations created by
Doctor Marcille. Their purpose is to bring within a few miles of the spot
where fighting is in progress and where men are being wounded the
equivalent of a great city emergency hospital, with its own sterilization
plant, and an operating-room heated and lighted powerfully night and
day. This equipment is extremely mobile, ready to begin work even in
the open country within an hour of its arrival, and capable of moving
on with the same rapidity to any point where its services may be
required. The arrangement of these operating-rooms on wheels is as
compact and ingenious as a Pullman sleeping-car. The sterilization
plant, which works by superheated steam, is on an automobile
chassis, the surgeons taking their instruments, compresses, aprons,
and blouses immediately from one of the six iron sheets of the
autoclave as they operate. Six operations can be carried on without
stopping--and during the sixth the iron sheets are resterilized to begin
again. The same boiler heats a smaller autoclave for sterilizing rubber
gloves and water, and also, by means of a powerful radiator, heats
the operating-room. This is an impermeable tent, with a large glass
skylight for day and a 200-candle power electric light for night, the
motor generating the electricity. Another car contains the radiograph
plant, while the regular ambulances provide pharmacy and other
supplies and see to the further transportation of the wounded who
have been operated on. Of seventy operations, which would have all
been impossible without these surgical automobile units, fifty-five
were successful. In cases of abdominal wounds, which have usually
been fatal in previous wars, fifty per cent, of the operations thus
performed saved the lives of the wounded.

Leaving the zone of actual operations, the wounded man now enters
the army rear zone, where, at the heads of the lines of
communication, hospital trains or hospital canal-boats are waiting for
him. The beginning of the war found France wholly unprepared as
regards modernly equipped hospital trains, of which she possessed
only five, while Russia had thirty-two, Austria thirty-three, and
Germany forty. Thanks to the energy of the great French railway
companies, the number has been somewhat increased, but France
still has mainly to rely on improvised sanitary trains for the transport of
her wounded. There are in operation about one hundred and fifty of
these improvised trains, made up, when possible, of the long luggage
vans of what were before the war the international express trains. As
these cars are well hung, are heated, have soft Westinghouse
brakes, and have corridors which permit of the doctors going from car
to car while the train is in motion, they answer the purpose to which
they have been put tolerably well. But when heavy fighting is in
progress, rolling stock of every description has to be utilized for the
transport of the wounded.

Those who can sit up without too much discomfort are put in ordinary
passenger cars. But in addition to these the Service de Sant has
been compelled to use thousands of goods and cattle trucks glassed
up at the sides and with a stove in the middle. The stretchers
containing the most serious cases are, by means of loops into which
the handles of the stretchers fit, laid in two rows, one above the other,
at the ends of each truck, while those who are able to sit up are
gathered in the centre. Each truck is in charge of an orderly who
keeps water and soups constantly heated on the stove. Any one who
has travelled for any distance in a goods or cattle truck will readily
appreciate, however, how great must be the sufferings of the
wounded men thus transported. Taking advantage of the network of
canals and rivers which covers France, the medical authorities of the
army have also utilized canal-boats for the transport of the blesses--a
method of transportation which, though slow, is very easy. Every few
hours these hospital trains or boats come to "infirmary stations,"
established by the Red Cross, where the wounded are given food
and drink, and their dressing is looked after, while at the very end of
the army zones there are "regular stations," where the "evacuation
hospitals" are placed. Here is where the sorting system comes in.
There are wounded whose condition has become so aggravated that
it is out of the question for them to stand a longer journey, and these
remain. There are lightly wounded, who, with proper attention, will be
as well as ever in a few days, and these are sent to a dpt des
clops, or, as the soldiers term it, a "limper's halt." Then there are
the others who, if they are to recover, will require long and careful
treatment and difficult operations. These go on to the final hospitals of
the interior zone: military hospitals, auxiliary hospitals, civil
hospitals militarized, and "benevolent hospitals," such as the
great American Ambulance at Neuilly.

No account of the work of caring for the wounded would be complete
without at least passing mention of the American Ambulance, which,
founded by Americans, with an American staff and an American
equipment, and maintained by American generosity, has come to be
recognized as the highest type of military hospital in existence. At the
beginning of the war, Americans in Paris, inspired by the record of the 
American Ambulance in 1870, and foreseeing the needs of the
enormous number of wounded which would soon come pouring in,
conceived the idea of establishing a military hospital for the treatment
of the wounded, irrespective of nationality. The French Government
placed at their disposal a large and nearly completed school building
in the suburb of Neuilly, just outside the walls of Paris. Before the war
had been in progress a month this building had been transformed into
perhaps the most up-to-the-minute military hospital in Europe,
equipped with X-ray apparatus, ultra violet-ray sterilizing plants, a
giant magnet for removing fragments of shell from wounds, a
pathological laboratory, and the finest department of dental surgery in
the world. The feats of surgical legerdemain performed in this latter
department are, indeed, almost beyond belief. The American dental
surgeons assert--and they have repeatedly made their assertion
good--that, even though a man's entire face has been blown away,
they can construct a new and presentable countenance, provided the
hinges of the jaws remain.

Beginning with 170 beds, by November 1915 the hospital had 600
beds and in addition has organized an "advanced hospital," with 250
beds, known as Hospital B, at Juilly, which is maintained through the
generosity of Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney; a field hospital, of the same
pattern as that used by the United States Army, with 108 beds; and
two convalescent hospitals at St. Cloud; the staff of this remarkable
organization comprising doctors, surgeons, graduate and auxiliary
nurses, orderlies, stretcher-bearers, ambulance drivers, cooks, and
other employees to the number of seven hundred. Perhaps the most
picturesque feature of the American hospital is its remarkable motor-
ambulance service, which consists of 130 cars and 160 drivers. The
ambulances, which are for the most part Ford cars with specially
designed bodies, have proved so extremely practical and efficient
that the type has been widely copied by the Allied armies. They serve
where they are most needed, being sent out in units (each unit
consisting of a staff car, a supply car, and five ambulances) upon the
requisition of the military authorities. The young men who drive the
ambulances and who, with a very few exceptions, not only serve
without pay but even pay their own passage from America and
provide their own uniforms, represent all that is best in American life:
among them are men from the great universities both East and West,
men from the hunt clubs of Long Island and Virginia, lawyers,
novelists, polo-players, big game hunters, cow-punchers, while the
inspector of the ambulance service is a former assistant treasurer of
the United States. American Ambulance units are stationed at many
points on the western battle-line--I have seen them at work in
Flanders, in the Argonne, and in Alsace--the risks taken by the
drivers in their work of bringing in the wounded and their coolness
under fire having won for them among the soldiers the admiring title
of "bullet biters."

The British system of handling the wounded is upon the same
general lines as that of the French, the chief difference being in the
method of sorting, which is the basis of all medical corps work in this
war.

Sorting, as practised by the British, starts at the very first step in the
progress of a wounded man, which is the dressing-station in or
immediately behind the trenches, where only those cases absolutely
demanding it are dressed and where only the most imperative
operations are performed. The second step is the field hospital,
where all but a few of the slight wounds are dressed, and where
operations that must be done before the men can be passed farther
back are performed. The third step is the clearing hospital, at the
head of railway communication. Here the man receives the minimum
of medical attention before being passed on to the hospital train
which conveys him to one of the great base hospitals on the coast,
where every one, whether seriously or slightly wounded, can at last
receive treatment. To the wounded Tommy, the base hospital is the
half-way house to home, where he is cared for until he is able to
stand the journey across the Channel to England.

The real barometer of battle is the clearing hospital, for one can
always tell by the number of cases coming in whether there is heavy
fighting in progress. As both field and clearing hospitals move with the
armies, they must not only always get rid of their wounded at the
earliest possible moment, but they must always be prepared for quick
movements backward or forward. Either a retreat or an offensive
movement necessitates quick action on the part of the Army Medical
Corps, for it is a big job to dismantle a great hospital, pack it up, and
start the motor-transport within an hour after the order to move is
received. It would be a big job without the wounded.

In the French lines the hpital d''vacuation is frequently established
in a goods station or warehouse in the midst of the railway yards, so
as to facilitate the loading of the hospital trains. This arrangement has
its drawbacks, however, for the hospital is liable to be bombarded by
aeroplanes or artillery without warning, as it is a principle recognized--
and practised--by all the belligerent nations that it is perfectly
legitimate to shell a station or railway base in order to interfere with
the troops, supplies, and ammunition going forward to the armies in
the field. That a hospital is quartered in the station is unfortunate but
must be disregarded. At Dunkirk, for example, which is a fortified town
and a base of the very first importance, there was nothing unethical,
from a military view-point, in the Germans shelling the railway yards,
even though a number of wounded in the hospital there lost their
lives. The British avoid this danger by establishing their clearing
hospitals in the outskirts of the terminus towns, and as far from the
station as possible, which, however, necessitates one more transfer
for the wounded man.

In this war the progress made in the science of healing has kept pace
with, if indeed it has not outdistanced, the progress made in the
science of destruction. There is, for example, the solution of
hypochlorite of soda, introduced by Doctor Dakin and Doctor Alexis
Carrel, which, though not a new invention, is being used with
marvellous results for the irrigation of wounds and the prevention of
suppuration. There is the spinal anaesthesia, used mainly in the
difficult abdominal cases, a minute quantity of which, injected into the
spine of the patient, causes all sensation to disappear up to the arms,
so that, provided he is prevented by a screen from seeing what is
going on, an operation below that level may be performed while the
patient, wholly unconscious of what is happening, is reading a paper
or smoking a cigarette.

Owing to failure to disinfect the wounds at the front, many of the
cases reaching the hospitals in the early days of the war were found
to be badly septic, the infection being due, curiously enough, to the
nature of the soil of the country, the region of the Aisne, for example,
apparently being saturated with the tetanus germ. So the doctors
invented an anti-tetanus serum, with which a soldier can inoculate
himself, and as a result, the cases of tetanus have been reduced by
half. It was found that many wounded men failed to recover because
of the minute pieces of shell remaining in their bodies, so there was
introduced the giant magnet which, when connected with the probe in
the surgeon's hand, unerringly attracts and draws out any fragments
of metal that may remain in the wound. Still another ingenious
invention produced by the war is the bell, or buzzer, which rings when
the surgeon's probe approaches a foreign substance.

Though before the war began European army surgeons were
thoroughly conversant with the best methods of treating shell, sabre,
and bullet wounds and the innumerable diseases peculiar to armies,
the war has produced one weapon of which they had never so much
as heard before, and the effects of which they were at first wholly
unable to combat. I refer to the asphyxiating gas. If you fail to
understand what "gassing" means, just listen to this description by a
British army surgeon:

"In a typical 'gassed' case the idea of impending suffocation
predominates. Every muscle of respiration is called upon to do its
utmost to avert the threatened doom. The imperfect aeration of the
blood arising from obstructed respiration causes oftentimes intense
blueness and clamminess of the face, while froth and expectoration
blow from the mouth impelled by a choking cough. The poor fighting
man tosses and turns himself into every position in search of relief.
But his efforts are unavailing; he feels that his power of breathing is
failing; that asphyxiation is gradually becoming complete. The slow
strangling of his respiration, of which he is fully conscious, at last
enfeebles his strength. No longer is it possible for him to expel the
profuse expectoration; the air tubes of his lungs become distended
with it, and with a few gasps he dies.

"If the 'gassed' man survives the first stage of his agony, some sleep
may follow the gradual decline of the urgent symptoms, and after
such sleep he feels refreshed and better. But further trouble is in
store for him, for the intense irritation to which the respiratory
passages have been exposed by the inhalation of the suffocating gas
is quickly followed by the supervention of acute bronchitis. In such
attacks death may come, owing to the severity of the inflammation. In
mild cases of 'gassing,' on the other hand, the resulting bronchitis
develops in a modified form with the result that recovery now
generally follows. Time, however, can only show to what extent
permanent damage to the lungs is inflicted. Possibly chronic
bronchitis may be the lot of such 'gassed' men in after life or some
pulmonary trouble equally disturbing. It is difficult to believe that they
can wholly escape some evil effects."

As soon as it was found that the immediate cause of death in the fatal
gas cases was acute congestion of the lungs, the surgeons were
able to treat it upon special and definite lines. Means were devised for
ensuring the expulsion of the excessive secretion from the lungs,
thus affording much relief and making it possible to avert
asphyxiation. In some apparently hopeless cases the lives of the men
were saved by artificial respiration. The inhalation of oxygen was also
tried with favourable results, and in cases where the restlessness of
the patient was more mental than physical, opium was successfully
used. So that even the poison-gas, perhaps the most dreadful death-
dealing device which the war has produced, neither dismayed nor
defeated the men whose task it is to save life instead of to take it.

To the surgeons and nurses at the front the people of France and
England owe a debt of gratitude which they can never wholly repay.
The soldiers in the trenches are waging no more desperate or heroic
battle than these quiet, efficient, energetic men and women who wear
the red badge of mercy. Their courage is shown by the enormous
losses they have suffered under fire, the proportion of military doctors
and hospital attendants killed, wounded, or taken prisoner, equalling
the proportion of infantry losses. They have no sleep save such as
they can snatch between the tides of wounded or when they drop on
the floor from sheer exhaustion. They are working under as trying
conditions as doctors and nurses were ever called upon to face. They
treat daily hundreds of cases, any one of which would cause a town
physician to call a consultation. They are in constant peril from
marauding Taubes, for the German airmen seem to take delight in
choosing buildings flying the Red Cross flag as targets for their
bombs. In their ears, both day and night, sounds the din of near-by
battle. Their organization is a marvel of efficiency. That of the
Germans may be as good but it can be no better.

In order that I may bring home to you in England and America the
realities of this thing called war, I want to tell you what I saw one day
in a little town called Bailleul. Bailleul is only two or three miles on
the French side of the Franco-Belgian frontier, and it is so close to
the firing-line that its windows continually rattle. The noise along that
portion of the battle-front never ceases. It sounds for all the world like
the clatter of a gigantic harvester. And that is precisely what it is--the
harvester of death.

As we entered Bailleul they were bringing in the harvest. They were
bringing it in motor-cars, many, many, many of them, stretching in
endless procession down the yellow roads which lead to Lille and
Neuve Chapelle and Poperinghe and Ypres. Over the grey bodies of
the motor-cars were grey canvas hoods, and painted on the hoods
were staring scarlet crosses. The curtain at the back of each car was
rolled up, and protruding from the dim interior were four pairs of feet.
Sometimes those feet were wrapped in bandages, and on the fresh
white linen were bright-red splotches, but more often they were
encased in worn and muddied boots. I shall never forget those poor,
broken, mud-encrusted boots, for they spoke so eloquently of utter
weariness and pain. There was something about them that was the
very essence of pathos. The owners of those boots were lying on
stretchers which were made to slide into the ambulances as drawers
slide into a bureau, and most of them were suffering agony such as
only a woman in childbirth knows.

This was the reaping of the grim harvester which was at its work of
mowing down human beings not five miles away. Sometimes, as the
ambulances went rocking by, I would catch a fleeting glimpse of
some poor fellow whose wounds would not permit of his lying down. I
remember one of these in particular--a clean-cut, fair-haired
youngster who looked as if he were still in his teens. He was sitting on
the floor of the ambulance leaning for support against the rail. He held
his arms straight out in front of him. Both his hands had been blown
away at the wrists. The head of another was so swathed in bandages
that my first impression was that he was wearing a huge red-and-
white turban. The jolting of the car had caused the bandages to slip. If
that man lives little children will run from him in terror, and women will
turn aside when they meet him in the street. And still that caravan of
agony kept rolling by, rolling by. The floors of the cars were sieves
leaking blood. The dusty road over which they had passed no longer
needed sprinkling.

Tearing over the rough cobbles of Bailleul, the ambulances came to a
halt before some one of the many doorways over which droop the
Red Cross flags, for every suitable building in the little town has been
converted into a hospital. The one of which I am going to tell you had
been a school until the war began. It is officially known as Clearing
Hospital Number Eight, but I shall always think of it as hell's
antechamber. In the afternoon that I was there eight hundred
wounded were brought into the building between the hours of two and
four, and this, mind you, was but one of many hospitals in the same
little town. As I entered the door I had to stand aside to let a stretcher
carried by two orderlies pass out. Through the rough brown blanket
which covered the stretcher showed the vague outlines of a human
form, but the face was covered, and it was very still. A week or two
weeks or a month later, when the casualty lists were published, there
appeared the name of the still form under the brown blanket, and
there was anguish in some English home. In the hall of the hospital a
man was sitting upright on a bench, and two surgeons were working
over him. He was sitting there because the operating-rooms were
filled. I hope that that man is unmarried, for he no longer has a face.
What a few hours before had been the honest countenance of an
English lad was now a horrid welter of blood and splintered bone and
mangled flesh.

The surgeon in charge took me upstairs to the ward which contained
the more serious cases. On a cot beside the door was stretched a
young Canadian. His face looked as though a giant in spiked shoes
had stepped upon it. "Look," said the surgeon, and lifted the woollen
blanket. That man's body was like a field which has been gone over
with a disk harrow. His feet, his legs, his abdomen, his chest, his
arms, his face were furrowed with gaping, angry wounds. "He was
shot through the hand," explained the surgeon. "He made his way
back to the dressing-station in the reserve trenches, but just as he
reached it a shell exploded at his feet." I patted him on the shoulder
and told him that I too knew the land of the great forests and the
rolling prairies, and that before long he was going back to it. And,
though he could not speak, he turned that poor, torn face of his and
smiled at me. He must have been suffering the torments of the
damned, but he smiled at me, I tell you--he smiled at me.

In the next bed, not two feet away--for the hospitals in Bailleul are
very crowded--a great, brawny fellow from a Highland regiment was
sitting propped against his pillows. He could not lie down, the surgeon
told me, because he had been shot through the lungs. He held a tin
cup in his hand, and quite regularly, about once a minute, he would
hold it to his lips and spit out blood. Over by the window lay a boy with
a face as white as the pillow-cover. He was quite conscious, and
stared at the ceiling with wide, unseeing eyes. "Another shrapnel
case," remarked a hospital attendant. "Both legs amputated, but he'll
recover." I wonder what he will do for a living when he gets back to
England. Perhaps he will sell pencils or boot-laces on the flags of
Piccadilly, and hold out his cap for coppers. A man with his head all
swathed in strips of linen lay so motionless that I asked if he was
living. "A head wound," was the answer. "We've tried trepanning, and
he'll probably pull through, but he'll never recover his reason." Can't
you see him in the years to come, this splendid specimen of
manhood, his mind a blank, wandering, helpless as a little child,
about some English village?

I doubt if any four walls in all the world contain more human suffering
than those of Hospital Number Eight at Bailleul, yet of all those
shattered, broken, mangled men I heard only one utter a complaint or
groan. He was a fair-haired giant, as are so many of these English
fighting men. A bullet had splintered his spine, and with his hours
numbered, he was suffering the most awful torment that a human
being can endure. The sweat stood in beads upon his forehead. The
muscles of his neck and arms were so corded and knotted that it
seemed as though they were about to burst their way through the
sun-tanned skin. His naked breast rose and fell in great sobs of
agony. "Oh God! Oh God!" he moaned, "be merciful and take me--it
hurts, it hurts--it hurts me so--my wife--the kiddies--for the love of
Christ, doctor, give me an injection and stop the pain--say good-bye
to them for me--tell them--oh, I can't stand it any longer--I'm not afraid
to die, doctor, but I just can't stand this pain--oh God, dear God, won't
you please let me die?"

When I went out of that room the beads of sweat were standing on
my forehead.

They took me downstairs to show me what they call the "evacuation
ward." It is a big, barnlike room, perhaps a hundred feet long by fifty
wide, and the floor was so thickly covered with blanketed forms on
stretchers that there was no room to walk about among them. These
were the men whose wounds had been treated, and who, it was
believed, were able to survive the journey by hospital train to one of
the base hospitals on the coast. It is a very grave case indeed that is
permitted to remain for even a single night in the hospitals in Bailleul,
for Bailleul is but a clearinghouse for the mangled, and its hospitals
must always be ready to receive that unceasing scarlet stream which,
day and night, night and day, comes pouring in, pouring in, pouring in.

Those of the wounded in the evacuation ward who were conscious
were for the most part cheerful--as cheerful, that is, as men can be
whose bodies have been ripped and drilled and torn by shot and
shell, who have been strangled by poisonous gases, who are aflame
with fever, who are faint with loss of blood, and who have before them
a railway journey of many hours. This railway journey to the coast is
as comfortable as human ingenuity can make it, the trains with their
white enamelled interiors and swinging berths being literally hospitals
on wheels, but to these weakened, wearied men it is a terribly trying
experience, even though they know that at the end of it clean beds
and cool pillows and soft-footed, low-voiced nurses await them.

The men awaiting transfer still wore the clothes in which they had
been carried from the trenches, though in many cases they had been
slashed open so that the surgeons might get at the wounds. They
were plastered with mud. Many of them had had no opportunity to
bathe for weeks and were crawling with vermin. Their underclothes
were in such a loathsome condition that when they were removed
they fell apart. The canvas stretchers on which they lay so patiently
and uncomplainingly were splotched with what looked like wet brown
paint, and on this horrid sticky substance were swarms of hungry
flies. The air was heavy with the mingled smells of anti-septics,
perspiration, and fresh blood. In that room was to be found every
form of wound which can be inflicted by the most hellish weapons the
brain of man has been able to devise. The wounded were covered
with coarse woollen blankets, but some of the men in their torment
had kicked their coverings off, and I saw things which I have no
words to tell about and which I wish with all my heart that I could
forget. There were men whose legs had been amputated up to the
thighs; whose arms had been cut off at the shoulder; there were men
who had lost their eyesight and all their days must grope in darkness;
and there were other men who had been ripped open from waist to
neck so that they looked like the carcasses that hang in front of
butcher's shops; while, most horrible of all, were those who, without a
wound on them, raved and cackled with insane mirth at the horror of
the things they had seen.

We went out from that place of unforgettable horrors into the sunlight
and the clean fresh air again. It was late afternoon, the birds were
singing, a gentle breeze was whispering in the tree-tops; but from
over there, on the other side of that green and smiling valley, still
came the unceasing clatter of that grim harvester garnering its crop of
death. On the ground, in the shade of a spreading chestnut-tree, had
been laid a stretcher, and on it was still another of those silent,
bandaged forms. "He is badly wounded," said the surgeon, following
the direction of my glance, "fairly shot to pieces. But he begged us to
leave him in the open air. We are sending him on by train to
Boulogne tonight, and then by hospital ship to England."

I walked over and looked down at him. He could not have been more
than eighteen--just such a clean-limbed, open-faced lad as any girl
would have been proud to call sweetheart, any mother son. He was
lying very still. About his face there was a peculiar greyish pallor, and
on his half-parted lips had gathered many flies. I beckoned to the
doctor. "He's not going to England," I whispered; "he's going to sleep
in France." The surgeon, after a quick glance, gave an order, and two
bearers came and lifted the stretcher and, bore it to a ramshackle
outhouse which they call the mortuary, and gently set it down at the
end of a long row of other silent forms.

As I passed out through the gateway in the wall which surrounds
Hospital Number Eight, I saw a group of children playing in the street.
"Come on," shrilled one of them, "let's play soldier!"



