had held it for two weeks. In 1870 they bombarded it for four days, and there is, or was, in Soissons, in the Place de la Republique, a monument to those citizens of Soissons whom after that siege the Germans shot. The town lies in the valley of the River Aisne, which is formed by two long ridges running south and north.
The Germans occupied the hills to the south, but when attacked offered only slight resistance and withdrew to the hills opposite. In Soissons they left a rear-guard to protect their supplies, who were destroying all bridges leading into the town. At the time I arrived a force of Turcos had been ordered forward to clean Soissons of the Germans, and the French artillery was endeavoring to disclose their positions on the hills. The loss of the bridges did not embarrass the black men. In rowboats they crossed to Soissons and were warmly greeted. Soissons was drawing no color-line. The Turcos were followed by engineers, who endeavored to repair one bridge and in consequence were heavily shelled with shrapnel, while, with the intent to destroy the road and retard the French advance, the hills where the French had halted were being pounded by German siege-guns.
This was at a point four kilometres from Chaudun, between the villages of Breuil and Courtelles. From this height you could see almost to Compiegne, and thirty miles in front in the direction of Saint- Quentin. It was a panorama of wooded hills, gray villages in fields of yellow grain, miles of poplars marking the roads, and below us the flashing waters of the Aisne and the canal, with at our feet the steeples of the cathedral of Soissons and the gate to the old abbey of Thomas a Becket. Across these steeples the shells sang, and on both sides of the Aisne Valley the artillery was engaged. The wind was blowing forty knots, which prevented the use of the French aeroplanes, but it cleared the air, and, helped by brilliant sunshine, it was possible to follow the smoke of the battle for fifteen miles. The wind was blowing toward our right, where we were told were the English, and though as their shrapnel burst we could see the flash of guns and rings of smoke, the report of the guns did not reach us. It gave the curious impression of a bombardment conducted in utter silence.
From our left the wind carried the sounds clearly. The jar and roar of the cannon were insistent, and on both sides of the valley the hilltops were wrapped with white clouds. Back of us in the wheat-fields shells were setting fire to the giant haystacks and piles of grain, which in the clear sunshine burned a blatant red. At times shells would strike in the villages of Breuil and Vauxbain, and houses would burst into flames, the gale fanning the fire to great height and hiding the village in smoke. Some three hundred yards ahead of us the shells of German siege-guns were trying to destroy the road, which the poplars clearly betrayed. But their practice was at fault, and the shells fell only on either side. When they struck they burst with a roar, casting up black fumes and digging a grave twenty yards in circumference.
But the French soldiers disregarded them entirely. In the trenches which the Germans had made and abandoned they hid from the wind and slept peacefully. Others slept in the lee of the haystacks, their red breeches and blue coats making wonderful splashes of color against the yellow grain. For seven days these same men had been fighting without pause, and battles bore them.
Late in the afternoon, all along the fifteen miles of battle, firing ceased, for the Germans were falling back, and once more Soissons, freed of them as fifteen hundred years ago she had freed herself of the Romans, held out her arms to the Allies.
Chapter VI
The Bombardment of Rheims
In several ways the city of Rheims is celebrated. Some know her only through her cathedral, where were crowned all but six of the kings of France, and where the stained-glass windows, with those in the cathedrals of Chartres and Burgos, Spain, are the most beautiful in all the world. Children know Rheims through the wicked magpie which the archbishop excommunicated, and to their elders, if they are rich, Rheims is the place from which comes all their champagne.
On September 4th the Germans entered Rheims, and occupied it until the 12th, when they retreated across the Vesle to the hills north of the city.
On the 18th the French forces, having entered Rheims, the Germans bombarded the city with field-guns and howitzers.
Rheims is fifty-six miles from Paris, but, though I started at an early hour, so many bridges had been destroyed that I did not reach the city until three o’clock in the afternoon. At that hour the French artillery, to the east at Nogent and immediately outside the northern edge of the town, were firing on the German positions, and the Germans were replying, their shells falling in the heart of the city.
The proportion of those that struck the cathedral or houses within a hundred yards of it to those falling on other buildings was about six to one. So what damage the cathedral suffered was from blows delivered not by accident but with intent. As the priests put it, firing on the church was “expres.”
The cathedral dominates not only the city but the countryside. It rises from the plain as Gibraltar rises from the sea, as the pyramids rise from the desert. And at a distance of six miles, as you approach from Paris along the valley of the Marne, it has more the appearance of a fortress than a church. But when you stand in the square beneath and look up, it is entirely ecclesiastic, of noble and magnificent proportions, in design inspired, much too sublime for the kings it has crowned, and almost worthy of the king in whose honor, seven hundred years ago, it was reared. It has been called “perhaps the most beautiful structure produced in the Middle Ages.” On the west facade, rising tier upon tier, are five hundred and sixty statues and carvings. The statues are of angels, martyrs, patriarchs, apostles, the vices and virtues, the Virgin and Child. In the centre of these is the famous rose window; on either side giant towers.
At my feet down the steps leading to the three portals were pools of blood. There was a priest in the square, a young man with white hair and with a face as strong as one of those of the saints carved in stone, and as gentle. He was cure doyen of the Church of St. Jacques, M. Chanoine Frezet, and he explained the pools of blood. After the Germans retreated, the priests had carried the German wounded up the steps into the nave of the cathedral and for them had spread straw upon the stone flagging.
The cure guided me to the side door, unlocked it, and led the way into the cathedral. It is built in the form of a crucifix, and so vast is the edifice that many chapels are lost in it, and the lower half is in a shadow. But from high above the stained windows of the thirteenth century, or what was left of them, was cast a glow so gorgeous, so wonderful, so pure that it seemed to come direct from the other world.
From north and south the windows shed a radiance of deep blue, like the blue of the sky by moonlight on the coldest night of winter, and from the west the great rose window glowed with the warmth and beauty of a thousand rubies. Beneath it, bathed in crimson light, where for generations French men and women have knelt in prayer, where Joan of Arc helped place the crown on Charles VII, was piled three feet of dirty straw, and on the straw were gray-coated Germans, covered with the mud of the fields, caked with blood, white and haggard from the loss of it, from the lack of sleep, rest, and food. The entire west end of the cathedral looked like a stable, and in the blue and purple rays from the gorgeous windows the wounded were as unreal as ghosts. Already two of them had passed into the world of ghosts. They had not died from their wounds, but from a shell sent by their own people.
It had come screaming into this backwater of war, and, tearing out leaded window-panes as you would destroy cobwebs, had burst among those who already had paid the penalty. And so two of them, done with pack-drill, goose-step, half rations and forced marches, lay under the straw the priests had heaped upon them. The toes of their boots were pointed grotesquely upward. Their gray hands were clasped rigidly as though in prayer.
Half hidden in the straw, the others were as silent and almost as still. Since they had been dropped upon the stone floor they had not moved, but lay in twisted, unnatural attitudes. Only their eyes showed that they lived. These were turned beseechingly upon the French Red Cross doctors, kneeling waist-high in the straw and unreeling long white bandages. The wounded watched them drawing slowly nearer, until they came, fighting off death, clinging to life as shipwrecked sailors cling to a raft and watch the boats pulling toward them.
A young German officer, his smart cavalry cloak torn and slashed, and filthy with dried mud and blood and with his eyes in bandages, groped toward a pail of water, feeling his way with his foot, his arms outstretched, clutching the air. To guide him a priest took his arm, and the officer turned and stumbled against him. Thinking the priest was one of his own men, he swore at him, and then, to learn if he wore shoulder-straps, ran his fingers over the priest’s shoulders, and, finding a silk cassock, said quickly in French: “Pardon me, my father; I am blind.”
As the young cure guided me through the wrecked cathedral his indignation and his fear of being unjust waged a fine battle. “Every summer,” he said, “thousands of your fellow countrymen visit the cathedral. They come again and again. They love these beautiful windows. They will not permit them to be destroyed. Will you tell them what you saw?”
It is no pleasure to tell what I saw. Shells had torn out some of the windows, the entire sash, glass, and stone frame–all was gone; only a jagged hole was left. On the floor lay broken carvings, pieces of stone from flying buttresses outside that had been hurled through the embrasures, tangled masses of leaden window-sashes, like twisted coils of barbed wire, and great brass candelabra. The steel ropes that supported them had been shot away, and they had plunged to the flagging below, carrying with them their scarlet silk tassels heavy with the dust of centuries. And everywhere was broken glass. Not one of the famous blue windows was intact. None had been totally destroyed, but each had been shattered, and through the apertures the sun blazed blatantly.
We walked upon glass more precious than precious stones. It was beyond price. No one can replace it. Seven hundred years ago the secret of the glass died. Diamonds can be bought anywhere, pearls can be matched, but not the stained glass of Rheims. And under our feet, with straw and caked blood, it lay crushed into tiny fragments. When you held a piece of it between your eye and the sun it glowed with a light that never was on land or sea.
War is only waste. The German Emperor thinks it is thousands of men in flashing breastplates at manoeuvres, galloping past him, shouting “Hoch der Kaiser!” Until this year that is all of war he has ever seen.
I have seen a lot of it, and real war is his high-born officer with his eyes shot out, his peasant soldiers with their toes sticking stiffly through the straw, and the windows of Rheims, that for centuries with their beauty glorified the Lord, swept into a dust heap.
Outside the cathedral I found the bombardment of the city was still going forward and that the French batteries to the north and east were answering gun for gun. How people will act under unusual conditions no one can guess. Many of the citizens of Rheims were abandoning their homes and running through the streets leading west, trembling, weeping, incoherent with terror, carrying nothing with them. Others were continuing the routine of life with anxious faces but making no other sign. The great majority had moved to the west of the city to the Paris gate, and for miles lined the road, but had taken little or nothing with them, apparently intending to return at nightfall. They were all of the poorer class. The houses of the rich were closed, as were all the shops, except a few cafes and those that offered for sale bread, meat, and medicine.
During the morning the bombardment destroyed many houses. One to each block was the average, except around the cathedral, where two hotels that face it and the Palace of Justice had been pounded but not destroyed. Other shops and residences facing the cathedral had been ripped open from roof to cellar. In one a fire was burning briskly, and firemen were playing on it with hose. I was their only audience. A sight that at other times would have collected half of Rheims and blocked traffic, in the excitement of the bombardment failed to attract. The Germans were using howitzers. Where shells hit in the street they tore up the Belgian blocks for a radius of five yards, and made a hole as though a water-main had burst. When they hit a house, that house had to be rebuilt. Before they struck it was possible to follow the direction of the shells by the sound. It was like the jangling of many telegraph-wires.
A hundred yards north of the cathedral I saw a house hit at the third story. The roof was of gray slate, high and sloping, with tall chimneys. When the shell exploded the roof and chimneys disappeared. You did not see them sink and tumble; they merely vanished. They had been a part of the sky-line of Rheims; then a shell removed them and another roof fifteen feet lower down became the sky-line.
I walked to the edge of the city, to the northeast, but at the outskirts all the streets were barricaded with carts and paving-stones, and when I wanted to pass forward to the French batteries the officers in charge of the barricades refused permission. At this end of the town, held in reserve in case of a German advance, the streets were packed with infantry. The men were going from shop to shop trying to find one the Germans had not emptied. Tobacco was what they sought.
They told me they had been all the way to Belgium and back, but I never have seen men more fit. Where Germans are haggard and show need of food and sleep, the French were hard and moved quickly and were smiling.
One reason for this is that even if the commissariat is slow they are fed by their own people, and when in Belgium by the Allies. But when the Germans pass the people hide everything eatable and bolt the doors. And so, when the German supply wagons fail to come up the men starve.
I went in search of the American consul, William Bardel. Everybody seemed to know him, and all men spoke well of him. They liked him because he stuck to his post, but the mayor had sent for him, and I could find neither him nor the mayor.
When I left the cathedral I had told my chauffeur to wait near by it, not believing the Germans would continue to make it their point of attack. He waited until two houses within a hundred yards of him were knocked down, and then went away from there, leaving word with the sentry that I could find him outside the gate to Paris. When I found him he was well outside and refused to return, saying he would sleep in his car.
On the way back I met a steady stream of women and old men fleeing before the shells. Their state was very pitiful. Some of them seemed quite dazed with fear and ran, dodging, from one sidewalk to the other, and as shells burst above them prayed aloud and crossed themselves. Others were busy behind the counters of their shops serving customers, and others stood in doorways holding in their hands their knitting. Frenchwomen of a certain class always knit. If they were waiting to be electrocuted they would continue knitting.
The bombardment had grown sharper and the rumble of guns was uninterrupted, growling like thunder after a summer storm or as the shells passed shrieking and then bursting with jarring detonations. Underfoot the pavements were inch-deep with fallen glass, and as you walked it tinkled musically. With inborn sense of order, some of the housewives abandoned their knitting and calmly swept up the glass into neat piles. Habit is often so much stronger than fear. So is curiosity. All the boys and many young men and maidens were in the middle of the street watching to see where the shells struck and on the lookout for aeroplanes. When about five o’clock one sailed over the city, no one knew whether it was German or French, but every one followed it, apparently intending if it launched a bomb to be in at the death.
I found all the hotels closed and on their doors I pounded in vain, and was planning to go back to my car when I stumbled upon the Hotel du Nord. It was open and the proprietress, who was knitting, told me the table-d’hote dinner was ready. Not wishing to miss dinner, I halted an aged citizen who was fleeing from the city and asked him to carry a note to the American consul inviting him to dine. But the aged man said the consulate was close to where the shells were falling and that to approach it was as much as his life was worth. I asked him how much his life was worth in money, and he said two francs.
He did not find the consul, and I shared the table d’hote with three tearful old French ladies, each of whom had husband or son at the front. That would seem to have been enough without being shelled at home. It is a commonplace, but it is nevertheless true that in war it is the women who suffer. The proprietress walked around the table, still knitting, and told us tales of German officers who until the day before had occupied her hotel, and her anecdotes were not intended to make German officers popular.
The bombardment ceased at eight o’clock, but at four the next morning it woke me, and as I departed for Paris salvoes of French artillery were returning the German fire.
Before leaving I revisited the cathedral to see if during the night it had been further mutilated. Around it shells were still falling, and the square in front was deserted. In the rain the roofless houses, shattered windows, and broken carvings that littered the street presented a picture of melancholy and useless desolation. Around three sides of the square not a building was intact. But facing the wreckage the bronze statue of Joan of Arc sat on her bronze charger, uninjured and untouched. In her right hand, lifted high above her as though defying the German shells, some one overnight had lashed the flag of France.
The next morning the newspapers announced that the cathedral was in flames, and I returned to Rheims. The papers also gave the two official excuses offered by the Germans for the destruction of the church. One was that the French batteries were so placed that in replying to them it was impossible to avoid shelling the city.
I know where the French batteries were, and if the German guns aimed at them by error missed them and hit the cathedral, the German marksmanship is deteriorating. To find the range the artillery sends what in the American army are called brace shots–one aimed at a point beyond the mark and one short of it. From the explosions of these two shells the gunner is able to determine how far he is off the target and accordingly regulates his sights. Not more, at the most, than three of these experimental brace shots should be necessary, and, as one of each brace is purposely aimed to fall short of the target, only three German shells, or, as there were two French positions, six German shells should have fallen beyond the batteries and into the city. And yet for four days the city was bombarded!
To make sure, I asked French, English, and American army officers what margin of error they thought excusable after the range was determined. They all agreed that after his range was found an artillery officer who missed it by from fifty to one hundred yards ought to be court-martialled. The Germans “missed” by one mile.
The other excuse given by the Germans for the destruction of the cathedral was that the towers had been used by the French for military purposes. On arriving at Rheims the question I first asked was whether this was true. The abbe Chinot, cure of the chapel of the cathedral, assured me most solemnly and earnestly it was not. The French and the German staffs, he said, had mutually agreed that on the towers of the cathedral no quick-firing guns should be placed, and by both sides this agreement was observed. After entering Rheims the French, to protect the innocent citizens against bombs dropped by German air-ships, for two nights placed a search-light on the towers, but, fearing this might be considered a breach of agreement as to the mitrailleuses, the abbe Chinot ordered the search-light withdrawn. Five days later, during which time the towers were not occupied and the cathedral had been converted into a hospital for the German wounded and Red Cross flags were hanging from both towers, the Germans opened fire upon it. Had it been the search-light to which the Germans objected, they would have fired upon it when it was in evidence, not five days after it had disappeared.
When, with the abbe Chinot, I spent the day in what is left of the cathedral, the Germans still were shelling it. Two shells fell within twenty-five yards of us. It was at that time that the photographs that illustrate this chapter were taken.
The fire started in this way. For some months the northeast tower of the cathedral had been under repair and surrounded by scaffolding. On September 19th a shell set fire to the outer roof of the cathedral, which is of lead and oak. The fire spread to the scaffolding and from the scaffolding to the wooden beams of the portals, hundred of years old. The abbe Chinot, young/alert, and daring, ran out upon the scaffolding and tried to cut the cords that bound it.
In other parts of the city the fire department was engaged with fire lit by the bombardment, and unaided, the flames gained upon him. Seeing this, he called for volunteers, and, under the direction of the Archbishop of Rheims, they carried on stretchers from the burning building the wounded Germans. The rescuing parties were not a minute too soon. Already from the roofs molten lead, as deadly as bullets, was falling among the wounded. The blazing doors had turned the straw on which they lay into a prairie fire.
Splashed by the molten lead and threatened by falling timbers, the priests, at the risk of their lives and limbs, carried out the wounded Germans, sixty in all.
But, after bearing them to safety, their charges were confronted with a new danger. Inflamed by the sight of their own dead, four hundred citizens having been killed by the bombardment, and by the loss of their cathedral, the people of Rheims who were gathered about the burning building called for the lives of the German prisoners. “They are barbarians,” they cried. “Kill them!” Archbishop Landreaux and Abbe Chinot placed themselves in front of the wounded.
“Before you kill them,” they cried, “you must first kill us.”
This is not highly colored fiction, but fact. It is more than fact. It is history, for the picture of the venerable archbishop, with his cathedral blazing behind him, facing a mob of his own people in defence of their enemies, will always live in the annals of this war and in the annals of the church.
There were other features of this fire and bombardment which the Catholic Church will not allow to be forgotten. The leaden roofs were destroyed, the oak timbers that for several hundred years had supported them were destroyed, stone statues and flying buttresses weighing many tons were smashed into atoms, but not a single crucifix was touched, not one waxen or wooden image of the Virgin disturbed, not one painting of the Holy Family marred.
I saw the Gobelin tapestries, more precious than spun gold, intact, while sparks fell about them, and lying beneath them were iron bolts twisted by fire, broken rooftrees and beams still smouldering.
But the special Providence that saved the altars was not omnipotent. The windows that were the glory of the cathedral were wrecked. Through some the shells had passed, others the explosions had blown into tiny fragments. Where, on my first visit, I saw in the stained glass gaping holes, now the whole window had been torn from the walls. Statues of saints and crusader and cherubim lay in mangled fragments. The great bells, each of which is as large as the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, that for hundreds of years for Rheims have sounded the angelus, were torn from their oak girders and melted into black masses of silver and copper, without shape and without sound. Never have I looked upon a picture of such pathos, of such wanton and wicked destruction.
The towers still stand, the walls still stand, for beneath the roofs of lead the roof of stone remained, but what is intact is a pitiful, distorted mass where once were exquisite and noble features. It is like the face of a beautiful saint scarred with vitriol.
Two days before, when I walked through the cathedral, the scene was the same as when kings were crowned. You stood where Joan of Arc received the homage of France. When I returned I walked upon charred ashes, broken stone, and shattered glass. Where once the light was dim and holy, now through great breaches in the walls rain splashed. The spirit of the place was gone.
Outside the cathedral, in the direction from which the shells came, for three city blocks every house was destroyed. The palace of the archbishop was gutted, the chapel and the robing-room of the kings were cellars filled with rubbish. Of them only crumbling walls remain. And on the south and west the facades of the cathedral and flying buttresses and statues of kings, angels, and saints were mangled and shapeless.
I walked over the district that had been destroyed by these accidental shots, and it stretched from the northeastern outskirts of Rheims in a straight line to the cathedral. Shells that fell short of the cathedral for a quarter of a mile destroyed entirely three city blocks. The heart of this district is the Place Godinot. In every direction at a distance of a mile from the Place Godinot I passed houses wrecked by shells –south at the Paris gate, north at the railroad station.
There is no part of Rheims that these shells the Germans claim were aimed at French batteries did not hit. If Rheims accepts the German excuse she might suggest to them that the next time they bombard, if they aim at the city they may hit the batteries.
The Germans claim also that the damage done was from fires, not shells. But that is not the case; destruction by fire was slight. Houses wrecked by shells where there was no fire outnumbered those that were burned ten to one. In no house was there probably any other fire than that in the kitchen stove, and that had been smothered by falling masonry and tiles.
Outside the wrecked area were many shops belonging to American firms, but each of them had escaped injury. They were filled with American typewriters, sewing-machines, and cameras. A number of cafes bearing the sign “American Bar” testified to the nationality and tastes of many tourists.
I found our consul, William Bardel, at the consulate. He is a fine type of the German-American citizen, and, since the war began, with his wife and son has held the fort and tactfully looked after the interests of both Americans and Germans. On both sides of him shells had damaged the houses immediately adjoining. The one across the street had been destroyed and two neighbors killed.
The street in front of the consulate is a mass of fallen stone, and the morning I called on Mr. Bardel a shell had hit his neighbor’s chestnut- tree, filled his garden with chestnut burrs, and blown out the glass of his windows. He was patching the holes with brown wrapping-paper, but was chiefly concerned because in his own garden the dahlias were broken. During the first part of the bombardment, when firing became too hot for him, he had retreated with his family to the corner of the street, where are the cellars of the Roderers, the champagne people. There are worse places in which to hide in than a champagne cellar.
Mr. Bardel has lived six years in Rheims and estimated the damage done to property by shells at thirty millions of dollars, and said that unless the seat of military operations was removed the champagne crop for this year would be entirely wasted. It promised to be an especially good year. The seasons were propitious, being dry when sun was needed and wet when rain was needed, but unless the grapes were gathered by the end of September the crops would be lost.
Of interest to Broadway is the fact that in Rheims, or rather in her cellars, are stored nearly fifty million bottles of champagne belonging to six of the best-known houses. Should shells reach these bottles, the high price of living in the lobster palaces will be proportionately increased.
Except for Red Cross volunteers seeking among the ruins for wounded, I found that part of the city that had suffered completely deserted. Shells still were falling and houses as yet intact, and those partly destroyed were empty. You saw pitiful attempts to save the pieces. In places, as though evictions were going forward, chairs, pictures, cooking-pans, bedding were piled in heaps. There was none to guard them; certainly there was no one so unfeeling as to disturb them.
I saw neither looting nor any effort to guard against it. In their common danger and horror the citizens of Rheims of all classes seemed drawn closely together. The manner of all was subdued and gentle, like those who stand at an open grave.
The shells played the most inconceivable pranks. In some streets the houses and shops along one side were entirely wiped out and on the other untouched. In the Rue du Cardinal du Lorraine every house was gone. Where they once stood were cellars filled with powdered stone. Tall chimneys that one would have thought a strong wind might dislodge were holding themselves erect, while the surrounding walls, three feet thick, had been crumpled into rubbish.
In some houses a shell had removed one room only, and as neatly as though it were the work of masons and carpenters. It was as though the shell had a grievance against the lodger in that particular room. The waste was appalling.
Among the ruins I saw good paintings in rags and in gardens statues covered with the moss of centuries smashed. In many places, still on the pedestal, you would see a headless Venus, or a flying Mercury chopped off at the waist.
Long streamers of ivy that during a century had crept higher and higher up the wall of some noble mansion, until they were part of it, still clung to it, although it was divided into a thousand fragments. Of one house all that was left standing was a slice of the front wall just wide enough to bear a sign reading: “This house is for sale; elegantly furnished.” Nothing else of that house remained.
In some streets of the destroyed area I met not one living person. The noise made by my feet kicking the broken glass was the only sound. The silence, the gaping holes in the sidewalk, the ghastly tributes to the power of the shells, and the complete desolation, made more desolate by the bright sunshine, gave you a curious feeling that the end of the world had come and you were the only survivor.
This-impression was aided by the sight of many rare and valuable articles with no one guarding them. They were things of price that one may not carry into the next world but which in this are kept under lock and key.
In the Rue de l’Universite, at my leisure, I could have ransacked shop after shop or from the shattered drawing-rooms filled my pockets. Shopkeepers had gone without waiting to lock their doors, and in houses the fronts of which were down you could see that, in order to save their lives, the inmates had fled at a moment’s warning.
In one street a high wall extended an entire block, but in the centre a howitzer shell had made a breach as large as a barn door. Through this I had a view of an old and beautiful garden, on which oasis nothing had been disturbed. Hanging from the walls, on diamond- shaped lattices, roses were still in bloom, and along the gravel walks flowers of every color raised their petals to the sunshine. On the terrace was spread a tea-service of silver and on the grass were children’s toys–hoops, tennis-balls, and flat on its back, staring up wide-eyed at the shells, a large, fashionably dressed doll.
In another house everything was destroyed except the mantel over the fireplace in the drawing-room. On this stood a terra-cotta statuette of Harlequin. It is one you have often seen. The legs are wide apart, the arms folded, the head thrown back in an ecstasy of laughter. It looked exactly as though it were laughing at the wreckage with which it was surrounded. No one could have placed it where it was after the house fell, for the approach to it was still on fire. Of all the fantastic tricks played by the bursting shells it was the most curious.
Chapter VII
The Spirit Of The English
When I left England for home I had just returned from France and had motored many miles in both countries. Everywhere in this greatest crisis of the century I found the people of England showing the most undaunted and splendid spirit. To their common enemy they are presenting an unbroken front. The civilian is playing his part just as loyally as the soldier, the women as bravely as the men.
They appreciate that not only their own existence is threatened, but the future peace and welfare of the world require that the military party of Germany must be wiped out. That is their burden, and with the heroic Belgians to inspire them, without a whimper or a whine of self-pity, they are bearing their burden.
Every one in England is making sacrifices great and small. As long ago as the middle of September it was so cold along the Aisne that I have seen the French, sooner than move away from the open fires they had made, risk the falling shells. Since then it has grown much colder, and Kitchener issued an invitation to the English people to send in what blankets they could spare for the army in the field and in reserve. The idea was to dye the blankets khaki and then turn them over to the supply department. In one week, so eagerly did the people respond to this appeal, Kitchener had to publish a card stating that no more blankets were needed. He had received over half a million.
The reply to Kitchener’s appeal for recruits was as prompt and generous. The men came so rapidly that the standard for enlistment was raised. That is, I believe, in the history of warfare without precedent. Nations often have lowered their requirements for enlistment, but after war was once well under way to make recruiting more difficult is new. The sacrifices are made by every class.
There is no business enterprise of any sort that has not shown itself unselfish. This is true of the greengrocery, the bank, the department store, the Cotton Exchange. Each of these has sent employees to the front, and while they are away is paying their wages and, on the chance of their return, holding their places open. Men who are not accepted as recruits are enrolled as special constables. They are those who could not, without facing ruin, neglect their business. They have signed on as policemen, and each night for four hours patrol the posts of the regular bobbies who have gone to the front.
The ingenuity shown in finding ways in which to help the army is equalled only by the enthusiasm with which these suggestions are met. Just before his death at the front, Lord Roberts called upon all racing-men, yachtsmen, and big-game shots to send him, for the use of the officers in the field, their field-glasses. The response was amazingly generous.
Other people gave their pens. The men whose names are best known to you in British literature are at the service of the government and at this moment are writing exclusively for the Foreign Office. They are engaged in answering the special pleading of the Germans and in writing monographs, appeals for recruits, explanations of why England is at war. They do not sign what they write. They are, of course, not paid for what they write. They have their reward in knowing that to direct public opinion fairly will be as effective in bringing this war to a close as is sticking bayonets into Uhlans.
The stage, as well as literature, has found many ways in which it can serve the army. One theatre is giving all the money taken in at the door to the Red Cross; all of them admit men in uniform free, or at half price, and a long list of actors have gone to the front. Among them are several who are well known in America. Robert Lorraine has received an officer’s commission in the Royal Flying Corps, and Guy Standing in the navy. The former is reported among the wounded. Gerald du Maurier has organized a reserve battalion of actors, artists, and musicians.
There is not a day passes that the most prominent members of the theatrical world are not giving their services free to benefit performances in aid of Belgian refugees, Red Cross societies, or to some one of the funds under royal patronage. Whether their talent is to act or dance, they are using it to help along the army. Seymour Hicks and Edward Knoblauch in one week wrote a play called “England Expects,” which was an appeal in dramatic form for recruits, and each night the play was produced recruits crowded over the footlights.
The old sergeants are needed to drill the new material and cannot be spared for recruiting. And so members of Parliament and members of the cabinet travel all over the United Kingdom–and certainly these days it is united–on that service. Even the prime minister and the first lord of the admiralty, Winston Churchill, work overtime in addressing public meetings and making stirring appeals to the young men. And wherever you go you see the young men by the thousands marching, drilling, going through setting-up exercises. The public parks, golf- links, even private parks like Bedford Square, are filled with them, and in Green Park, facing the long beds of geraniums, are lines of cavalry horses and the khaki tents of the troopers.
Every one is helping. Each day the King and Queen and Princess Mary review troops or visit the wounded in some hospital; and the day before sailing, while passing Buckingham Palace, I watched the young Prince of Wales change the guard. In a businesslike manner he was listening to the sentries repeat their orders; and in turn a young sergeant, also in a most businesslike manner, was in whispers coaching the boy officer in the proper manner to guard the home of his royal parents. Since then the young prince has gone to the front and is fighting for his country. And the King is in France with his soldiers.
As the song says, all the heroes do not go to war, and the warriors at the front are not the only ones this war has turned out-of-doors. The number of Englishwomen who have left their homes that the Red Cross may have the use of them for the wounded would fill a long roll of honor. Some give an entire house, like Mrs. Waldorf Astor, who has loaned to the wounded Cliveden, one of the best-known and most beautiful places on the Thames. Others can give only a room. But all over England the convalescents have been billeted in private houses and made nobly welcome.
Even the children of England are helping. The Boy Scouts, one of the most remarkable developments of this decade, has in this war scored a triumph of organization. This is equally true of the Boy Scouts in Belgium and France. In England military duties of the most serious nature have been intrusted to them. On the east coast they have taken the place of the coast guards, and all over England they are patrolling railroad junctions, guarding bridges, and carrying despatches. Even if the young men who are now drilling in the parks and the Boy Scouts never reach Berlin nor cross the Channel, the training and sense of responsibility that they are now enjoying are all for their future good.
They are coming out of this war better men, not because they have been taught the manual of arms, but in spite of that fact. What they have learned is much more than that. Each of them has, for an ideal, whether you call it a flag, or a king, or a geographical position on the map, offered his life, and for that ideal has trained his body and sacrificed his pleasures, and each of them is the better for it. And when peace comes his country will be the richer and the more powerful.
Chapter VIII
Our Diplomats In The War Zone
When the war broke loose those persons in Europe it concerned the least were the most upset about it. They were our fellow countrymen. Even to-day, above the roar of shells, the crash of falling walls, forts, forests, cathedrals, above the scream of shrapnel, the sobs of widows and orphans, the cries of the wounded and dying, all over Europe, you still can hear the shrieks of the Americans calling for their lost suit-cases.
For some of the American women caught by the war on the wrong side of the Atlantic the situation was serious and distressing. There were thousands of them travelling alone, chaperoned only by a man from Cook’s or a letter of credit. For years they had been saving to make this trip, and had allowed themselves only sufficient money after the trip was completed to pay the ship’s stewards. Suddenly they found themselves facing the difficulties of existence in a foreign land without money, friends, or credit. During the first days of mobilization they could not realize on their checks or letters. American bank-notes and Bank of England notes were refused. Save gold, nothing was of value, and every one who possessed a gold piece, especially if he happened to be a banker, was clinging to it with the desperation of a dope fiend clutching his last pill of cocaine. We can imagine what it was like in Europe when we recall the conditions at home.
In New York, when I started for the seat of war, three banks in which for years I had kept a modest balance refused me a hundred dollars in gold, or a check, or a letter of credit. They simply put up the shutters and crawled under the bed. So in Europe, where there actually was war, the women tourists, with nothing but a worthless letter of credit between them and sleeping in a park, had every reason to be panic-stricken. But to explain the hysteria of the hundred thousand other Americans is difficult–so difficult that while they live they will still be explaining. The worst that could have happened to them was temporary discomfort offset by adventures. Of those they experienced they have not yet ceased boasting.
On August 5th, one day after England declared war, the American Government announced that it would send the Tennessee with a cargo of gold. In Rome and in Paris Thomas Nelson Page and Myron T. Herrick were assisting every American who applied to them, and committees of Americans to care for their fellow countrymen had been organized. All that was asked of the stranded Americans was to keep cool and, like true sports, suffer inconvenience. Around them were the French and English, facing the greatest tragedy of centuries, and meeting it calmly and with noble self-sacrifice. The men were marching to meet death, and in the streets, shops, and fields the women were taking up the burden the men had dropped. And in the Rue Scribe and in Cockspur Street thousands of Americans were struggling in panic-stricken groups, bewailing the loss of a hat-box, and protesting at having to return home second-class. Their suffering was something terrible. In London, in the Ritz and Carlton restaurants, American refugees, loaded down with fat pearls and seated at tables loaded with fat food, besought your pity. The imperial suite, which on the fast German liner was always reserved for them, “except when Prince Henry was using it,” was no longer available, and they were subjected to the indignity of returning home on a nine- day boat and in the captain’s cabin. It made their blue blood boil; and the thought that their emigrant ancestors had come over in the steerage did not help a bit.
The experiences of Judge Richard William Irwin, of the Superior Court of Massachusetts, and his party, as related in the Paris Herald, were heartrending. On leaving Switzerland for France they were forced to carry their own luggage, all the porters apparently having selfishly marched off to die for their country, and the train was not lighted, nor did any one collect their tickets. “We have them yet!” says Judge Irwin. He makes no complaint, he does not write to the Public- Service Commission about it, but he states the fact. No one came to collect his ticket, and he has it yet. Something should be done. Merely because France is at war Judge Irwin should not be condemned to go through life clinging to a first-class ticket.
In another interview Judge George A. Carpenter, of the United States Court of Chicago, takes a more cheerful view. “I can’t see anything for Americans to get hysterical about,” he says. “They seem to think their little delays and difficulties are more important than all the troubles of Europe. For my part, I should think these people would be glad to settle down in Paris.” A wise judge!
For the hysterical Americans it was fortunate that in the embassies and consulates of the United States there were fellow country-men who would not allow a war to rattle them. When the representatives of other countries fled our people not only stayed on the job but held down the jobs of those who were forced to move away. At no time in many years have our diplomats and consuls appeared to such advantage. They deserve so much credit that the administration will undoubtedly try to borrow it. Mr. Bryan will point with pride and say: “These men who bore themselves so well were my appointments.” Some of them were. But back of them, and coaching them, were first and second secretaries and consuls-general and consuls who had been long in the service and who knew the language, the short cuts, and what ropes to pull. And they had also the assistance of every lost and strayed, past and present American diplomat who, when the war broke, was caught off his base. These were commandeered and put to work, and volunteers of the American colonies were made honorary attaches, and without pay toiled like fifteen-dollar-a-week bookkeepers.
In our embassy in Paris one of these latter had just finished struggling with two American women. One would not go home by way of England because she would not leave her Pomeranian in quarantine, and the other because she could not carry with her twenty-two trunks. They demanded to be sent back from Havre on a battle-ship. The volunteer diplomat bowed. “Then I must refer you to our naval attache, on the first floor,” he said. “Any tickets for battle-ships must come through him.”
I suggested he was having a hard time.
“If we remained in Paris,” he said, “we all had to help. It was a choice between volunteering to aid Mr. Herrick at the embassy or Mrs. Herrick at the American Ambulance Hospital and tending wounded Turcos. But between soothing terrified Americans and washing niggers, I’m sorry now I didn’t choose the hospital.”
In Paris there were two embassies running overtime; that means from early morning until after midnight, and each with a staff enlarged to six times the usual number. At the residence of Mr. Herrick, in the Rue Francois Ier, there was an impromptu staff composed chiefly of young American bankers, lawyers, and business men. They were men who inherited, or who earned, incomes of from twenty thousand to fifty thousand a year, and all day, and every day, without pay, and certainly without thanks, they assisted their bewildered, penniless, and homesick fellow countrymen. Below them in the cellar was stored part of the two million five hundred thousand dollars voted by Congress to assist the stranded Americans. It was guarded by quick- firing guns, loaned by the French War Office, and by six petty officers from the Tennessee. With one of them I had been a shipmate when the Utah sailed from Vera Cruz. I congratulated him on being in Paris.
“They say Paris is some city,” he assented, “but all I’ve seen of it is this courtyard. Don’t tell anybody, but, on the level, I’d rather be back in Vera Cruz!”
The work of distributing the money was carried on in the chancelleries of the embassy in the Rue de Chaillot. It was entirely in the hands of American army and navy officers, twenty of whom came over on the warship with Assistant Secretary of War Breckinridge. Major Spencer Cosby, the military attache of the embassy, was treasurer of the fund, and every application for aid that had not already been investigated by the civilian committee appointed by the ambassador was decided upon by the officers. Mr. Herrick found them invaluable. He was earnest in their praise. They all wanted to see the fighting; but in other ways they served their country.
As a kind of “king’s messenger” they were sent to our other embassies, to the French Government at Bordeaux, and in command of expeditions to round up and convoy back to Paris stranded Americans in Germany and Switzerland. Their training, their habit of command and of thinking for others, their military titles helped them to success. By the French they were given a free road, and they were not only of great assistance to others, but what they saw of the war and of the French army will be of lasting benefit to themselves. Among them were officers of every branch of the army and navy and of the marine and aviation corps. Their reports to the War Department, if ever they are made public, will be mighty interesting reading.
The regular staff of the embassy was occupied not only with Americans but with English, Germans, and Austrians. These latter stood in a long line outside the embassy, herded by gendarmes. That line never seemed to grow less. Myron T. Herrick, our ambassador, was at the embassy from early in the morning until midnight. He was always smiling, helpful, tactful, optimistic. Before the war came he was already popular, and the manner in which he met the dark days, when the Germans were within fifteen miles of Paris, made him thousands of friends. He never asked any of his staff to work harder than he worked himself, and he never knocked off and called it a day’s job before they did. Nothing seemed to worry or daunt him; neither the departure of the other diplomats, when the government moved to Bordeaux and he was left alone, nor the advancing Germans and threatened siege of Paris, nor even falling bombs.
Herrick was as democratic as he was efficient. For his exclusive use there was a magnificent audience-chamber, full of tapestry, ormolu brass, Sevres china, and sunshine. But of its grandeur the ambassador would grow weary, and every quarter-hour he would come out into the hall crowded with waiting English and Americans. There, assisted by M. Charles, who is as invaluable to our ambassadors to France as are Frank and Edward Hodson to our ambassadors to London, he would hold an impromptu reception. It was interesting to watch the ex-governor of Ohio clear that hall and send everybody away smiling. Having talked to his ambassador instead of to a secretary, each went off content. In the hall one morning I found a noble lord of high degree chuckling with pleasure.
“This is the difference between your ambassadors and ours,” he said. “An English ambassador won’t let you in to see him; your American ambassador comes out to see you.” However true that may be, it was extremely fortunate that when war came we should have had a man at the storm-centre so admirably efficient.
Our embassy was not embarrassed nor was it greatly helped by the presence in Paris of two other American ambassadors: Mr. Sharp, the ambassador-elect, and Mr. Robert Bacon, the ambassador that was. That at such a crisis these gentlemen should have chosen to come to Paris and remain there showed that for an ambassador tact is not absolutely necessary.
Mr. Herrick was exceedingly fortunate in his secretaries, Robert Woods Bliss and Arthur H. Frazier. Their training in the diplomatic service made them most valuable. With him, also, as a volunteer counsellor, was H. Perceval Dodge, who, after serving in diplomatic posts in six countries, was thrown out of the service by Mr. Bryan to make room for a lawyer from Danville, Ky. Dodge was sent over to assist in distributing the money voted by Congress, and Herrick, knowing his record, signed him on to help him in the difficult task of running the affairs of the embassies of four countries, three of which were at war. Dodge, Bliss, and Frazier were able to care for these embassies because, though young in years, in the diplomatic service they have had training and experience. In this crisis they proved the need of it. For the duties they were, and still are, called upon to perform it is not enough that a man should have edited a democratic newspaper or stumped the State for Bryan. A knowledge of languages, of foreign countries, and of foreigners, their likes and their prejudices, good manners, tact, and training may not, in the eyes of the administration, seem necessary, but, in helping the ninety million people in whose interest the diplomat is sent abroad, these qualifications are not insignificant.
One might say that Brand Whitlock, who is so splendidly holding the fort at Brussels, in the very centre of the conflict, is not a trained diplomat. But he started with an excellent knowledge of the French language, and during the eight years in which he was mayor of Toledo he must have learned something of diplomacy, responsibility, and of the way to handle men–even German military governors. He is, in fact, the right man in the right place. In Belgium all men, Belgians, Americans, Germans, speak well of him. In one night he shipped out of Brussels, in safety and comfort, five thousand Germans; and when the German army advanced upon that city it was largely due to him and to the Spanish minister, the Marquis Villalobar, that Brussels did not meet the fate of Antwerp. He has a direct way of going at things. One day, while the Belgian Government still was in Brussels and Whitlock in charge of the German legation, the chief justice called upon him. It was suspected, he said, that on the roof of the German legation, concealed in the chimney, was a wireless outfit. He came to suggest that the American minister, representing the German interests, and the chief justice should appoint a joint commission to investigate the truth of the rumor, to take the testimony of witnesses, and make a report.
“Wouldn’t it be quicker,” said Whitlock, “if you and I went up on the roof and looked down the chimney?”
The chief justice was surprised but delighted. Together they clambered over the roof of the German legation. They found that the wireless outfit was a rusty weather-vane that creaked.
When the government moved to Antwerp Whitlock asked permission to remain at the capital. He believed that in Brussels he could be of greater service to both Americans and Belgians. And while diplomatic corps moved from Antwerp to Ostend, and from Ostend to Havre, he and Villalobar stuck to their posts. What followed showed Whitlock was right. To-day from Brussels he is directing the efforts of the rest of the world to save the people of that city and of Belgium from death by starvation. In this he has the help of his wife, who was Miss Ella Brainerd, of Springfield, 111, M. Gaston de Levai, a Belgian gentleman, and Miss Caroline S. Larner, who was formerly a secretary in the State Department, and who, when the war started, was on a vacation in Belgium. She applied to Whitlock to aid her to return home; instead, much to her delight, he made her one of the legation staff. His right-hand man is Hugh C. Gibson, his first secretary, a diplomat of experience. It is a pity that to the legation in Brussels no military attache was accredited. He need not have gone out to see the war; the war would have come to him. As it was, Gibson saw more of actual warfare than did any or all of our twenty- eight military men in Paris. It was his duty to pass frequently through the firing-lines on his way to Antwerp and London. He was constantly under fire. Three times his automobile was hit by bullets. These trips were so hazardous that Whitlock urged that he should take them. It is said he and his secretary used to toss for it. Gibson told me he was disturbed by the signs the Germans placed between Brussels and Antwerp, stating that “automobiles looking as though they were on reconnoissance” would be fired upon. He asked how an automobile looked when it was on reconnoissance.
Gibson is one of the few men who, after years in the diplomatic service, refuses to take himself seriously. He is always smiling, cheerful, always amusing, but when the dignity of his official position is threatened he can be serious enough. When he was charge d’affaires in Havana a young Cuban journalist assaulted him. That journalist is still in jail. In Brussels a German officer tried to blue-pencil a cable Gibson was sending to the State Department. Those who witnessed the incident say it was like a buzz-saw cutting soft pine.
When the present administration turned out the diplomats it spared the consuls-general and consuls. It was fortunate for the State Department that it showed this self-control, and fortunate for thousands of Americans who, when the war-cloud burst, were scattered all over Europe. Our consuls rose to the crisis and rounded them up, supplied them with funds, special trains, and letters of identification, and when they were arrested rescued them from jail. Under fire from shells and during days of bombardment the American consuls in France and Belgium remained at their posts and protected the people of many nationalities confided to their care. Only one showed the white feather. He first removed himself from his post, and then was removed still farther from it by the State Department. All the other American consuls of whom I heard in Belgium, France, and England were covering themselves with glory and bringing credit to their country. Nothing disturbed their calm, and at no hour could you catch them idle or reluctant to help a fellow countryman. Their office hours were from twelve to twelve, and each consulate had taken out an all-night license and thrown away the key. With four other Americans I was forced to rout one consul out of bed at two in the morning. He was Colonel Albert W. Swalm, of Iowa, but of late years our representative at Southampton. That port was in the military zone, and before an American could leave it for Havre it was necessary that his passport should be viseed in London by the French and Belgian consuls-general and in Southampton by Colonel Swalm. We arrived in Southampton at two in the morning to learn that the boat left at four, and that unless, in the interval, we obtained the autograph and seal of Colonel Swalm she would sail without us.
In the darkness we set forth to seek our consul, and we found that, difficult as it was to leave the docks by sea, it was just as difficult by land. In war time two o’clock in the morning is no hour for honest men to prowl around wharfs. So we were given to understand by very wide-awake sentries with bayonets, policemen, and enthusiastic special constables. But at last we reached the consulate and laid siege. One man pressed the electric button, kicked the door, and pounded with the knocker, others hurled pebbles at the upper windows, and the fifth stood in the road and sang: “Oh, say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light?”
A policeman arrested us for throwing stones at the consular sign. We explained that we had hit the sign by accident while aiming at the windows, and that in any case it was the inalienable right of Americans, if they felt like it, to stone their consul’s sign. He said he always had understood we were a free people, but, “without meaning any disrespect to you, sir, throwing stones at your consul’s coat of arms is almost, as you might say, sir, making too free.” He then told us Colonel Swalm lived in the suburbs, and in a taxicab started us toward him.
Scantily but decorously clad, Colonel Swalm received us, and greeted us as courteously as though we had come to present him with a loving-cup. He acted as though our pulling him out of bed at two in the morning was intended as a compliment. For affixing the seal to our passports he refused any fee. We protested that the consuls-general of other nations were demanding fees. “I know,” he said, “but I have never thought it right to fine a man for being an American.”
Of our ambassadors and representatives in countries in Europe other than France and Belgium I have not written, because during this war I have not visited those countries. But of them, also, all men speak well. At the last election one of them was a candidate for the United States Senate. He was not elected. The reason is obvious.
Our people at home are so well pleased with their ambassadors in Europe that, while the war continues, they would keep them where they are.
Chapter IX
“Under Fire”
One cold day on the Aisne, when the Germans had just withdrawn to the east bank and the Allies held the west, the French soldiers built huge bonfires and huddled around them. When the “Jack Johnsons,” as they call the six-inch howitzer shells that strike with a burst of black smoke, began to fall, sooner than leave the warm fires the soldiers accepted the chance of being hit by the shells. Their officers had to order them back. I saw this and wrote of it. A friend refused to credit it. He said it was against his experience. He did not believe that, for the sake of keeping warm, men would chance being killed.
But the incident was quite characteristic. In times of war you constantly see men, and women, too, who, sooner than suffer discomfort or even inconvenience, risk death. The psychology of the thing is, I think, that a man knows very little about being dead but has a very acute knowledge of what it is to be uncomfortable. His brain is not able to grasp death but it is quite capable of informing him that his fingers are cold. Often men receive credit for showing coolness and courage in times of danger when, in reality, they are not properly aware of the danger and through habit are acting automatically. The girl in Chicago who went back into the Iroquois Theatre fire to rescue her rubber overshoes was not a heroine. She merely lacked imagination. Her mind was capable of appreciating how serious for her would be the loss of her overshoes but not being burned alive. At the battle of Velestinos, in the Greek-Turkish War, John F. Bass, of The Chicago Daily News, and myself got into a trench at the foot of a hill on which later the Greeks placed a battery. All day the Turks bombarded this battery with a cross-fire of shrapnel and rifle-bullets which did not touch our trench but cut off our return to Velestinos. Sooner than pass through this crossfire, all day we crouched in the trench until about sunset, when it came on to rain. We exclaimed with dismay. We had neglected to bring our ponchos. “If we don’t get back to the village at once,” we assured each other, “we will get wet!” So we raced through half a mile of falling shells and bullets and, before the rain fell, got under cover. Then Bass said: “For twelve hours we stuck to that trench because we were afraid if we left it we would be killed. And the only reason we ever did leave it was because we were more afraid of catching cold!”
In the same war I was in a trench with some infantrymen, one of whom never raised his head. Whenever he was ordered to fire he would shove his rifle-barrel over the edge of the trench, shut his eyes, and pull the trigger. He took no chances. His comrades laughed at him and swore at him, but he would only grin sheepishly and burrow deeper. After several hours a friend in another trench held up a bag of tobacco and some cigarette-papers and in pantomime “dared” him to come for them. To the intense surprise of every one he scrambled out of our trench and, exposed against the sky-line, walked to the other trench and, while he rolled a handful of cigarettes, drew the fire of the enemy. It was not that he was brave; he had shown that he was not. He was merely stupid. Between death and cigarettes, his mind could not rise above cigarettes.
Why the same kind of people are so differently affected by danger is very hard to understand. It is almost impossible to get a line on it. I was in the city of Rheims for three days and two nights while it was being bombarded. During that time fifty thousand people remained in the city and, so far as the shells permitted, continued about their business. The other fifty thousand fled from the city and camped out along the road to Paris. For five miles outside Rheims they lined both edges of that road like people waiting for a circus parade. With them they brought rugs, blankets, and loaves of bread, and from daybreak until night fell and the shells ceased to fall they sat in the hay-fields and along the grass gutters of the road. Some of them were most intelligent-looking and had the manner and clothes of the rich. There was one family of five that on four different occasions on our way to and from Paris we saw seated on the ground at a place certainly five miles away from any spot where a shell had fallen. They were all in deep mourning, but as they sat in the hay-field around a wicker tea basket and wrapped in steamer-rugs they were comic. Their lives were no more valuable than those of thousands of their fellow townsfolk who in Rheims were carrying on the daily routine. These kept the shops open or in the streets were assisting the Red Cross.
One elderly gentleman told me how he had been seized by the Germans as a hostage and threatened with death by hanging. With forty other first citizens, from the 4th to the 12th of September he had been in jail. After such an experience one would have thought that between himself and the Germans he would have placed as many miles as possible, but instead he was strolling around the Place du Parvis Notre-Dame, in front of the cathedral. For the French officers who, on sightseeing bent, were motoring into Rheims from the battle line he was acting as a sort of guide. Pointing with his umbrella, he would say: “On the left is the new Palace of Justice, the facade entirely destroyed; on the right you see the palace of the archbishop, completely wrecked. The shells that just passed over us have apparently fallen in the garden of the Hotel Lion d’Or.” He was as cool as the conductor on a “Seeing Rheims” observation-car.
He was matched in coolness by our consul, William Bardel. The American consulate is at No. 14 Rue Kellermann. That morning a shell had hit the chestnut-tree in the garden of his neighbor, at No. 12, and had knocked all the chestnuts into the garden of the consulate. “It’s an ill wind that blows nobody good,” said Mr. Bardel.
In the bombarded city there was no rule as to how any one would act. One house would be closed and barred, and the inmates would be either in their own cellar or in the caves of the nearest champagne company. To those latter they would bring books or playing-cards and, among millions of dust-covered bottles, by candle-light, would wait for the guns to cease. Their neighbors sat in their shops or stood at the doors of their houses or paraded the streets. Past them their friends were hastening, trembling with terror. Many women sat on the front steps, knitting, and with interested eyes watched their acquaintances fleeing toward the Paris gate. When overhead a shell passed they would stroll, still knitting, out into the middle of the street to see where the shell struck.
By the noise it was quite easy to follow the flight of the shells. You were tricked by the sound into almost believing you could see them. The six-inch shells passed with a whistling roar that was quite terrifying. It was as though just above you invisible telegraph-wires had jangled, and their rush through the air was like the roar that rises to the car window when two express-trains going in opposite directions pass at sixty miles an hour. When these sounds assailed them the people flying from the city would scream. Some of them, as though they had been hit, would fall on their knees. Others were sobbing and praying aloud. The tears rolled down their cheeks. In their terror there was nothing ludicrous; they were in as great physical pain as were some of the hundreds in Rheims who had been hit. And yet others of their fellow townsmen living in the same street, and with the same allotment of brains and nerves, were treating the bombardment with the indifference they would show to a summer shower.
We had not expected to spend the night in Rheims, so, with Ashmead Bartlett, the military expert of the London Daily Telegraph, I went into a chemist’s shop to buy some soap. The chemist, seeing I was an American, became very much excited. He was overstocked with an American shaving-soap, and he begged me to take it off his hands. He would let me have it at what it cost him. He did not know where he had placed it, and he was in great alarm lest we would leave his shop before he could unload it on us. From both sides of the town French artillery were firing in salvoes, the shocks shaking the air; over the shop of the chemist shrapnel was whining, and in the street the howitzer shells were opening up subways. But his mind was intent only on finding that American shaving-soap. I was anxious to get on to a more peaceful neighborhood. To French soap, to soap “made in Germany,” to neutral American soap I was indifferent. Had it not been for the presence of Ashmead Bartlett I would have fled. To die, even though clasping a cake of American soap, seemed less attractive than to live unwashed. But the chemist had no time to consider shells. He was intent only on getting rid of surplus stock.
The majority of people who are afraid are those who refuse to consider the doctrine of chances. The chances of their being hit may be one in ten thousand, but they disregard the odds in their favor and fix their minds on that one chance against them. In their imagination it grows larger and larger. It looms red and bloodshot, it hovers over them; wherever they go it follows, menacing, threatening, filling them with terror. In Rheims there were one hundred thousand people, and by shells one thousand were killed or wounded. The chances against were a hundred to one. Those who left the city undoubtedly thought the odds were not good enough.
Those who on account of the bombs that fell from the German aeroplanes into Paris left that city had no such excuse. The chance of any one person being hit by a bomb was one in several millions. But even with such generous odds in their favor, during the days the bomb-dropping lasted many thousands fled. They were obsessed by that one chance against them. In my hotel in Paris my landlady had her mind fixed on that one chance, and regularly every afternoon when the aeroplanes were expected she would go to bed. Just as regularly her husband would take a pair of opera-glasses and in the Rue de la Paix hopefully scan the sky.
One afternoon while we waited in front of Cook’s an aeroplane sailed overhead, but so far above us that no one knew whether it was a French air-ship scouting or a German one preparing to launch a bomb. A man from Cook’s, one of the interpreters, with a horrible knowledge of English, said: “Taube or not Taube; that is the question.” He was told he was inviting a worse death than from a bomb. To illustrate the attitude of mind of the Parisian, there is the story of the street gamin who for some time, from the Garden of the Tuileries, had been watching a German aeroplane threatening the city. Finally, he exclaimed impatiently:
“Oh, throw your bomb! You are keeping me from my dinner.”
A soldier under fire furnishes few of the surprises of conduct to which the civilian treats you. The soldier has no choice. He is tied by the leg, and whether the chances are even or ridiculously in his favor he must accept them. The civilian can always say, “This is no place for me,” and get up and walk away. But the soldier cannot say that. He and his officers, the Red Cross nurses, doctors, ambulance-bearers, and even the correspondents have taken some kind of oath or signed some kind of contract that makes it easier for them than for the civilian to stay on the job. For them to go away would require more courage than to remain.
Indeed, although courage is so highly regarded, it seems to be of all virtues the most common. In six wars, among men of nearly every race, color, religion, and training, I have seen but four men who failed to show courage. I have seen men who were scared, sometimes whole regiments, but they still fought on; and that is the highest courage, for they were fighting both a real enemy and an imaginary one.
There is a story of a certain politician general of our army who, under a brisk fire, turned on one of his staff and cried:
“Why, major, you are scared, sir; you are scared!”
“I am,” said the major, with his teeth chattering, “and if you were as scared as I am you’d be twenty miles in the rear.”
In this war the onslaughts have been so terrific and so unceasing, the artillery fire especially has been so entirely beyond human experience, that the men fight in a kind of daze. Instead of arousing fear the tumult acts as an anaesthetic. With forests uprooted, houses smashing about them, and unseen express-trains hurtling through space, they are too stunned to be afraid. And in time they become fed up on battles and to the noise and danger grow callous. On the Aisne I saw an artillery battle that stretched for fifteen miles. Both banks of the river were wrapped in smoke; from the shells villages miles away were in flames, and two hundred yards in front of us the howitzer shells were bursting in black fumes. To this the French soldiers were completely indifferent. The hills they occupied had been held that morning by the Germans, and the trenches and fields were strewn with their accoutrement. So all the French soldiers who were not serving the guns wandered about seeking souvenirs. They had never a glance for the villages burning crimson in the bright sunight or for the falling “Jack Johnsons.”
They were intent only on finding a spiked helmet, and when they came upon one they would give a shout of triumph and hold it up for their comrades to see. And their comrades would laugh delightedly and race toward them, stumbling over the furrows. They were as happy and eager as children picking wild flowers.
It is not good for troops to sup entirely on horrors and also to breakfast and lunch on them. So after in the trenches one regiment has been pounded it is withdrawn for a day or two and kept in reserve. The English Tommies spend this period of recuperating in playing football and cards. When the English learned this they forwarded so many thousands of packs of cards to the distributing depot that the War Office had to request them not to send any more. When the English officers are granted leave of absence they do not waste their energy on football, but motor into Paris for a bath and lunch. At eight they leave the trenches along the Aisne and by noon arrive at Maxim’s, Voisin’s, or La Rue’s. Seldom does warfare present a sharper contrast. From a breakfast of “bully” beef, eaten from a tin plate, with in their nostrils the smell of camp-fires, dead horses, and unwashed bodies, they find themselves seated on red velvet cushions, surrounded by mirrors and walls of white and gold, and spread before them the most immaculate silver, linen, and glass. And the odors that assail them are those of truffles, white wine, and “artechant sauce mousseline.”
It is a delight to hear them talk. The point of view of the English is so sane and fair. In risking their legs or arms, or life itself, they see nothing heroic, dramatic, or extraordinary. They talk of the war as they would of a cricket-match or a day in the hunting-field. If things are going wrong they do not whine or blame, nor when fortune smiles are they unduly jubilant. And they are so appallingly honest and frank. A piece of shrapnel had broken the arm of one of them, and we were helping him to cut up his food and pour out his Scotch and soda. Instead of making a hero or a martyr of himself, he said confidingly: “You know, I had no right to be hit. If I had been minding my own business I wouldn’t have been hit. But Jimmie was having a hell of a time on top of a hill, and I just ran up to have a look in. And the beggars got me. Served me jolly well right. What?”
I met one subaltern at La Rue’s who had been given so many commissions by his brother officers to bring back tobacco, soap, and underclothes that all his money save five francs was gone. He still had two days’ leave of absence, and, as he truly pointed out, in Paris even in war time five francs will not carry you far. I offered to be his banker, but he said he would first try elsewhere. The next day I met him on the boulevards and asked what kind of a riotous existence he found possible on five francs.
“I’ve had the most extraordinary luck,” he said. “After I left you I met my brother. He was just in from the front, and I got all his money.”
“Won’t your brother need it?” I asked.
“Not at all,” said the subaltern cheerfully. “He’s shot in the legs, and they’ve put him to bed. Rotten luck for him, you might say, but how lucky for me!”
Had he been the brother who was shot in both legs he would have treated the matter just as light-heartedly.
One English major, before he reached his own firing-line, was hit by a bursting shell in three places. While he was lying in the American ambulance hospital at Neuilly the doctor said to him:
“This cot next to yours is the only one vacant. Would you object if we put a German in it?”
“By no means,” said the major; “I haven’t seen one yet.”
The stories the English officers told us at La Rue’s and Maxim’s by contrast with the surroundings were all the more grewsome. Seeing them there it did not seem possible that in a few hours these same fit, sun-tanned youths in khaki would be back in the trenches, or scouting in advance of them, or that only the day before they had been dodging death and destroying their fellow men.
Maxim’s, which now reminds one only of the last act of “The Merry Widow,” was the meeting-place for the French and English officers from the front; the American military attaches from our embassy, among whom were soldiers, sailors, aviators, marines; the doctors and volunteer nurses from the American ambulance, and the correspondents who by night dined in Paris and by day dodged arrest and other things on the firing-line, or as near it as they could motor without going to jail. For these Maxim’s was the clearing-house for news of friends and battles. Where once were the supper-girls and the ladies of the gold-mesh vanity-bags now were only men in red and blue uniforms, men in khaki, men in bandages. Among them were English lords and French princes with titles that dated from Agincourt to Waterloo, where their ancestors had met as enemies. Now those who had succeeded them, as allies, were, over a sole Marguery, discussing air-ships, armored automobiles, and mitrailleuses.
At one table Arthur H. Frazier, of the American embassy, would be telling an English officer that a captain of his regiment who was supposed to have been killed at Courtrai had, like a homing pigeon, found his way to the hospital at Neuilly and wanted to be reported “safe” at Lloyds. At another table a French lieutenant would describe a raid made by the son of an American banker in Paris who is in command of an armed automobile. “He swept his gun only once–so,” the Frenchman explained, waving his arm across the champagne and the broiled lobster, “and he caught a general and two staff- officers. He cut them in half.” Or at another table you would listen to a group of English officers talking in wonder of the Germans’ wasteful advance in solid formation.
“They were piled so high,” one of them relates, “that I stopped firing. They looked like gray worms squirming about in a bait-box. I can shoot men coming at me on their feet, but not a mess of arms and legs.”
“I know,” assents another; “when we charged the other day we had to advance over the Germans that fell the night before, and my men were slipping and stumbling all over the place. The bodies didn’t give them any foothold.”
“My sergeant yesterday,” another relates, “turned to me and said: ‘It isn’t cricket. There’s no game in shooting into a target as big as that. It’s just murder.’ I had to order him to continue firing.”
They tell of it without pose or emotion. It is all in the day’s work. Most of them are young men of wealth, of ancient family, cleanly bred gentlemen of England, and as they nod and leave the restaurant we know that in three hours, wrapped in a greatcoat, each will be sleeping in the earth trenches, and that the next morning the shells will wake him.
Chapter X
The Waste of War
In this war, more than in other campaigns, the wastefulness is apparent. In other wars, what to the man at home was most distressing was the destruction of life. He measured the importance of the conflict by the daily lists of killed and wounded. But in those wars, except human life, there was little else to destroy. The war in South Africa was fought among hills of stone, across vacant stretches of prairie. Not even trees were destroyed, because there were no trees. In the district over which the armies passed there were not enough trees to supply the men with fire-wood. In Manchuria, with the Japanese, we marched for miles without seeing even a mud village, and the approaches to Port Arthur were as desolate as our Black Hills. The Italian-Turkish War was fought in the sands of a desert, and in the Balkan War few had heard of the cities bombarded until they read they were in flames. But this war is being waged in that part of the world best known to the rest of the world.
Every summer hundreds of thousands of Americans, on business or on pleasure bent, travelled to the places that now daily are being taken or retaken or are in ruins. At school they had read of these places in their history books and later had visited them. In consequence, in this war they have a personal and an intelligent interest. It is as though of what is being destroyed they were part owners.
Toward Europe they are as absentee landlords. It was their pleasure- ground and their market. And now that it is being laid low the utter wastefulness of war is brought closer to this generation than ever before. Loss of life in war has not been considered entirely wasted, because the self-sacrifice involved ennobled it. And the men who went out to war knew what they might lose. Neither when, in the pursuits of peace, human life is sacrificed is it counted as wasted. The pioneers who were killed by the Indians or who starved to death in what then were deserts helped to carry civilization from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Only ten years ago men were killed in learning to control the “horseless wagons,” and now sixty-horsepower cars are driven by women and young girls. Later the air-ship took its toll of human life. Nor, in view of the possibilities of the air-ships in the future, can it be said those lives were wasted. But, except life, there was no other waste. To perfect the automobile and the air-ship no women were driven from home and the homes destroyed. No churches were bombarded. Men in this country who after many years had built up a trade in Europe were not forced to close their mills and turn into the streets hundreds of working men and women.
It is in the by-products of the war that the waste, cruelty, and stupidity of war are most apparent. It is the most innocent who suffer and those who have the least offended who are the most severely punished. The German Emperor wanted a place in the sun, and, having decided that the right moment to seize it had arrived, declared war. As a direct result, Mary Kelly, a telephone girl at the Wistaria Hotel, in New York, is looking for work. It sounds like an O. Henry story, but, except for the name of the girl and the hotel, it is not fiction. She told me about it one day on my return to New York, on Broadway.
“I’m looking for work,” she said, “and I thought if you remembered me you might give me a reference. I used to work at Sherry’s and at the Wistaria Hotel. But I lost my job through the war.” How the war in Europe could strike at a telephone girl in New York was puzzling; but Mary Kelly made it clear. “The Wistaria is very popular with Southerners,” she explained, “They make their money in cotton and blow it in New York. But now they can’t sell their cotton, and so they have no money, and so they can’t come to New York. And the hotel is run at a loss, and the proprietor discharged me and the other girl, and the bellboys are tending the switchboard. I’ve been a month trying to get work. But everybody gives me the same answer. They’re cutting down the staff on account of the war. I’ve walked thirty miles a day looking for a job, and I’m nearly all in. How long do you think this war will last?” This telephone girl looking for work is a tiny by-product of war. She is only one instance of efficiency gone to waste.
The reader can think of a hundred other instances. In his own life he can show where in his pleasures, his business, in his plans for the future the war has struck at him and has caused him inconvenience, loss, or suffering. He can then appreciate how much greater are the loss and suffering to those who live within the zone of fire. In Belgium and France the vacant spaces are very few, and the shells fall among cities and villages lying so close together that they seem to touch hands. For hundreds of years the land has been cultivated, the fields, gardens, orchards tilled and lovingly cared for. The roads date back to the days of Caesar. The stone farmhouses, as well as the stone churches, were built to endure. And for centuries, until this war came, they had endured. After the battle of Waterloo some of these stone farmhouses found themselves famous. In them Napoleon or Wellington had spread his maps or set up his cot, and until this war the farmhouses of Mont-Saint-Jean, of Caillou, of Haie-Sainte, of the Belle-Alliance remained as they were on the day of the great battle a hundred years ago. They have received no special care, the elements have not spared them nor caretakers guarded them. They still were used as dwellings, and it was only when you recognized them by having seen them on the post-cards that you distinguished them from thousands of other houses, just as old and just as well preserved, that stretched from Brussels to Liege.
But a hundred years after this war those other houses will not be shown on picture post-cards. King Albert and his staff may have spent the night in them, but the next day Von Kluck and his army passed, and those houses that had stood for three hundred years were destroyed. In the papers you have seen many pictures of the shattered roofs and the streets piled high with fallen walls and lined with gaping cellars over which once houses stood. The walls can be rebuilt, but what was wasted and which cannot be rebuilt are the labor, the saving, the sacrifices that made those houses not mere walls but homes. A house may be built in a year or rented overnight; it takes longer than that to make it a home. The farmers and peasants in Belgium had spent many hours of many days in keeping their homes beautiful, in making their farms self-supporting. After the work of the day was finished they had planted gardens, had reared fruit- trees, built arbors; under them at mealtime they sat surrounded by those of their own household. To buy the horse and the cow they had pinched and saved; to make the gardens beautiful and the fields fertile they had sweated and slaved, the women as well as the men; even the watch-dog by day was a beast of burden.
When, in August, I reached Belgium between Brussels and Liege, the whole countryside showed the labor of these peasants. Unlike the American farmer, they were too poor to buy machines to work for them, and with scythes and sickles in hand they cut the grain; with heavy flails they beat it. All that you saw on either side of the road that was fertile and beautiful was the result of their hard, unceasing personal effort. Then the war came, like a cyclone, and in three weeks the labor of many years was wasted. The fields were torn with shells, the grain was in flames, torches destroyed the villages, by the roadside were the carcasses of the cows that had been killed to feed the invader, and the horses were carried off harnessed to gray gun- carriages. These were the things you saw on every side, from Brussels to the German border. The peasants themselves were huddled beneath bridges. They were like vast camps of gypsies, except that, less fortunate than the gypsy, they had lost what he neither possesses nor desires, a home. As the enemy advanced the inhabitants of one village would fly for shelter to the next, only by the shells to be whipped farther forward; and so, each hour growing in number, the refugees fled toward Brussels and the coast. They were an army of tramps, of women and children tramps, sleeping in the open fields, beneath the hayricks seeking shelter from the rain, living on the raw turnips and carrots they had plucked from the deserted vegetable gardens. The peasants were not the only ones who suffered. The rich and the noble-born were as unhappy and as homeless. They had credit, and in the banks they had money, but they could not get at the money; and when a chateau and a farmhouse are in flames, between them there is little choice.
Three hours after midnight on the day the Germans began their three days’ march through Brussels I had crossed the Square Rogier to send a despatch by one of the many last trains for Ostend. When I returned to the Palace Hotel, seated on the iron chairs on the sidewalk were a woman, her three children, and two maid servants. The woman was in mourning, which was quite new, for, though the war was only a month old, many had been killed, among them her husband. The day before, at Tirlemont, shells had destroyed her chateau, and she was on her way to England. She had around her neck two long strings of pearls, the maids each held a small hand- bag, her boy clasped in his arms a forlorn and sleepy fox-terrier, and each of the little girls was embracing a bird-cage. In one was a canary, in the other a parrot. That was all they had saved. In their way they were just as pathetic as the peasants sleeping under the hedges. They were just as homeless, friendless, just as much in need of food and sleep, and in their eyes was the same look of fear and horror. Bernhardi tells his countrymen that war is glorious, heroic, and for a nation an economic necessity. Instead, it is stupid, unintelligent. It creates nothing; it only wastes.
If it confined itself to destroying forts and cradles of barbed wire then it would be sufficiently hideous. But it strikes blindly, brutally; it tramples on the innocent and the beautiful. It is the bull in the china shop and the mad dog who snaps at children who are trying only to avoid him. People were incensed at the destruction in Louvain of the library, the Catholic college, the Church of St. Pierre that dated from the thirteenth century. These buildings belonged to the world, and over their loss the world was rightfully indignant, but in Louvain there were also shops and manufactories, hotels and private houses. Each belonged, not to the world, but to one family. These individual families made up a city of forty-five thousand people. In two days there was not a roof left to cover one of them. The trade those people had built up had been destroyed, the “good-will and fixings,” the stock on the shelves and in the storerooms, the goods in the shop-windows, the portraits in the drawing-room, the souvenirs and family heirlooms, the love-letters, the bride’s veil, the baby’s first worsted shoes, and the will by which some one bequeathed to his beloved wife all his worldly goods.
War came and sent all these possessions, including the will and the worldly goods, up into the air in flames. Most of the people of Louvain made their living by manufacturing church ornaments and brewing beer. War was impartial, and destroyed both the beer and the church ornaments. It destroyed also the men who made them, and it drove the women and children into concentration camps. When first I visited Louvain it was a brisk, clean, prosperous city. The streets were spotless, the shop-windows and cafes were modern, rich-looking, inviting, and her great churches and Hotel de Ville gave to the city grace and dignity. Ten days later, when I again saw it, Louvain was in darkness, lit only by burning buildings. Rows and rows of streets were lined with black, empty walls. Louvain was a city of the past, another Pompeii, and her citizens were being led out to be shot. The fate of Louvain was the fate of Vise, of Malines, of Tirlemont, of Liege, of hundreds of villages and towns, and by the time this is printed it will be the fate of hundreds of other towns over all of Europe. In this war the waste of horses is appalling. Those that first entered Brussels with the German army had been bred and trained for the purposes of war, and they were magnificent specimens. Every one who saw them exclaimed ungrudgingly in admiration. But by the time the army reached the approaches of Paris the forced marches had so depleted the stock of horses that for remounts the Germans were seizing all they met. Those that could not keep up were shot. For miles along the road from Meaux to Soissons and Rheims their bodies tainted the air.
They had served their purposes, and after six weeks of campaigning the same animals that in times of peace would have proved faithful servants for many years were destroyed that they might not fall into the hands of the French. Just as an artillery-man spikes his gun, the Germans on their retreat to the Aisne River left in their wake no horse that might assist in their pursuit. As they withdrew they searched each stable yard and killed the horses. In village after village I saw horses lying in the stalls or in the fields still wearing the harness of the plough, or in groups of three or four in the yard of a barn, each with a bullet-hole in its temple. They were killed for fear they might be useful.
Waste can go no further. Another example of waste were the motor- trucks and automobiles. When the war began the motor-trucks of the big department stores and manufacturers and motor-buses of London, Paris, and Berlin were taken over by the different armies. They had cost them from two thousand to three thousand dollars each, and in times of peace, had they been used for the purposes for which they were built, would several times over have paid for themselves. But war gave them no time to pay even for their tires. You saw them by the roadside, cast aside like empty cigarette-boxes. A few hours’ tinkering would have set them right. They were still good for years of service. But an army in retreat or in pursuit has no time to waste in repairing motors. To waste the motor is cheaper.
Between Villers-Cotterets and Soissons the road was strewn with high-power automobiles and motor-trucks that the Germans had been forced to destroy. Something had gone wrong, something that at other times could easily have been mended. But with the French in pursuit there was no time to pause, nor could cars of such value be left to the enemy. So they had been set on fire or blown up, or allowed to drive head-on into a stone wall or over an embankment. From the road above we could see them in the field below, lying like giant turtles on their backs. In one place in the forest of Villers was a line of fifteen trucks, each capable of carrying five tons. The gasolene to feed them had become exhausted, and the whole fifteen had been set on fire. In war this is necessary, but it was none the less waste. When an army takes the field it must consider first its own safety; and to embarrass the enemy everything else must be sacrificed. It cannot consider the feelings or pockets of railroad or telegraph companies. It cannot hesitate to destroy a bridge because that bridge cost five hundred thousand dollars. And it does not hesitate.
Motoring from Paris to the front these days is a question of avoiding roads rendered useless because a broken bridge has cut them in half. All over France are these bridges of iron, of splendid masonry, some decorated with statues, some dating back hundreds of years, but now with a span blown out or entirely destroyed and sprawling in the river. All of these material things–motor-cars, stone bridges, railroad-tracks, telegraph-lines–can be replaced. Money can restore them. But money cannot restore the noble trees of France and Belgium, eighty years old or more, that shaded the roads, that made beautiful the parks and forests. For military purposes they have been cut down or by artillery fire shattered into splinters. They will again grow, but eighty years is a long time to wait.
Nor can money replace the greatest waste of all–the waste in “killed, wounded, and missing.” The waste of human life in this war is so enormous, so far beyond our daily experience, that disasters less appalling are much easier to understand. The loss of three people in an automobile accident comes nearer home than the fact that at the battle of Sezanne thirty thousand men were killed. Few of us are trained to think of men in such numbers–certainly not of dead men in such numbers. We have seen thirty thousand men together only during the world’s series or at the championship football matches. To get an idea of the waste of this war we must imagine all of the spectators at a football match between Yale and Harvard suddenly stricken dead. We must think of all the wives, children, friends affected by the loss of those thirty thousand, and we must multiply those thirty thousand by hundreds, and imagine these hundreds of thousands lying dead in Belgium, in Alsace-Lorraine, and within ten miles of Paris. After the Germans were repulsed at Meaux and at Sezanne the dead of both armies were so many that they lay intermingled in layers three and four deep. They were buried in long pits and piled on top of each other like cigars in a box. Lines of fresh earth so long that you mistook them for trenches intended to conceal regiments were in reality graves. Some bodies lay for days uncovered until they had lost all human semblance. They were so many you ceased to regard them even as corpses. They had become just a part of the waste, a part of the shattered walls, uprooted trees, and fields ploughed by shells. What once had been your fellow men were only bundles of clothes, swollen and shapeless, like scarecrows stuffed with rags, polluting the air.
The wounded were hardly less pitiful. They were so many and so thickly did they fall that the ambulance service at first was not sufficient to handle them. They lay in the fields or forests sometimes for a day before they were picked up, suffering unthinkable agony. And after they were placed in cars and started back toward Paris the tortures continued. Some of the trains of wounded that arrived outside the city had not been opened in two days. The wounded had been without food or water. They had not been able to move from the positions in which in torment they had thrown themselves. The foul air had produced gangrene. And when the cars were opened the stench was so fearful that the Red Cross people fell back as though from a blow. For the wounded Paris is full of hospitals–French, English, and American. And the hospitals are full of splendid men. Each one once had been physically fit or he would not have been passed to the front; and those among them who are officers are finely bred, finely educated, or they would not be officers. But each matched his good health, his good breeding, and knowledge against a broken piece of shell or steel bullet, and the shell or bullet won. They always will win. Stephen Crane called a wound “the red badge of courage.” It is all of that. And the man who wears that badge has all my admiration. But I cannot help feeling also the waste of it. I would have a standing army for the same excellent reason that I insure my house; but, except in self-defence, no war. For war–and I have seen a lot of it–is waste. And waste is unintelligent.
Chapter XI
War Correspondents
The attitude of the newspaper reader toward the war correspondent who tries to supply him with war news has always puzzled me.
One might be pardoned for suggesting that their interests are the same. If the correspondent is successful, the better service he renders the reader. The more he is permitted to see at the front, the more news he is allowed to cable home, the better satisfied should be the man who follows the war through the “extras.”
But what happens is the reverse of that. Never is the “constant reader” so delighted as when the war correspondent gets the worst of it. It is the one sure laugh. The longer he is kept at the base, the more he is bottled up, “deleted,” censored, and made prisoner, the greater is the delight of the man at home. He thinks the joke is on the war correspondent. I think it is on the “constant reader.” If, at breakfast, the correspondent fails to supply the morning paper with news, the reader claims the joke is on the news-gatherer. But if the milkman fails to leave the milk, and the baker the rolls, is the joke on the milkman and the baker or is it on the “constant reader”? Which goes hungry?
The explanation of the attitude of the “constant reader” to the reporters seems to be that he regards the correspondent as a prying busybody, as a sort of spy, and when he is snubbed and suppressed he feels he is properly punished. Perhaps the reader also resents the fact that while the correspondent goes abroad, he stops at home and receives the news at second hand. Possibly he envies the man who has a front seat and who tells him about it. And if you envy a man, when that man comes to grief it is only human nature to laugh.
You have seen unhappy small boys outside a baseball park, and one happy boy inside on the highest seat of the grand stand, who calls down to them why the people are yelling and who has struck out. Do the boys on the ground love the boy in the grand stand and are they grateful to him? No.
Does the fact that they do not love him and are not grateful to him for telling them the news distress the boy in the grand stand? No. For no matter how closely he is bottled up, how strictly censored, “deleted,” arrested, searched, and persecuted, as between the man at home and the correspondent, the correspondent will always be the more fortunate. He is watching the march of great events, he is studying history in the making, and all he sees is of interest. Were it not of interest he would not have been sent to report it. He watches men acting under the stress of all the great emotions. He sees them inspired by noble courage, pity, the spirit of self-sacrifice, of loyalty, and pride of race and country.
In Cuba I saw Captain Robb Church of our army win the Medal of Honor, in South Africa I saw Captain Towse of the Scot Greys win his Victoria Cross. Those of us who watched him knew he had won it just as surely as you know when a runner crosses the home plate and scores. Can the man at home from the crook play or the home run obtain a thrill that can compare with the sight of a man offering up his life that other men may live?
When I returned to New York every second man I knew greeted me sympathetically with: “So, you had to come home, hey? They wouldn’t let you see a thing.” And if I had time I told him all I saw was the German, French, Belgian, and English armies in the field, Belgium in ruins and flames, the Germans sacking Louvain, in the Dover Straits dreadnoughts, cruisers, torpedo destroyers, submarines, hydroplanes; in Paris bombs falling from air-ships and a city put to bed at 9 o’clock; battle-fields covered with dead men; fifteen miles of artillery firing across the Aisne at fifteen miles of artillery; the bombardment of Rheims, with shells lifting the roofs as easily as you would lift the cover of a chafing-dish and digging holes in the streets, and the cathedral on fire; I saw hundreds of thousands of soldiers from India, Senegal, Morocco, Ireland, Australia, Algiers, Bavaria, Prussia, Scotland, saw them at the front in action, saw them marching over the whole northern half of Europe, saw them wounded and helpless, saw thousands of women and children sleeping under hedges and haystacks with on every side of them their homes blazing in flames or crashing in ruins. That was a part of what I saw. What during the same two months did the man at home see? If he were lucky he saw the Braves win the world’s series, or the Vernon Castles dance the fox trot.
The war correspondents who were sent to this war knew it was to sound their death-knell. They knew that because the newspapers that had no correspondents at the front told them so; because the General Staff of each army told them so; because every man they met who stayed at home told them so. Instead of taking their death- blow lying down they went out to meet it. In other wars as rivals they had fought to get the news; in this war they were fighting for their professional existence, for their ancient right to stand on the firing- line, to report the facts, to try to describe the indescribable. If their death-knell sounded they certainly did not hear it. If they were licked they did not know it. In the twenty-five years in which I have followed wars, in no other war have I seen the war correspondents so well prove their right to march with armies. The happy days when they were guests of the army, when news was served to them by the men who made the news, when Archibald Forbes and Frank Millet shared the same mess with the future Czar of Russia, when MacGahan slept in the tent with Skobeleff and Kipling rode with Roberts, have passed. Now, with every army the correspondent is as popular as a floating mine, as welcome as the man dropping bombs from an air-ship. The hand of every one is against him. “Keep out! This means you!” is the way they greet him. Added to the dangers and difficulties they must overcome in any campaign, which are only what give the game its flavor, they are now hunted, harassed, and imprisoned. But the new conditions do not halt them. They, too, are fighting for their place in the sun. I know one man whose name in this war has been signed to despatches as brilliant and as numerous as those of any correspondent, but which for obvious reasons is not given here. He was arrested by one army, kept four days in a cell, and then warned if he was again found within the lines of that army he would go to jail for six months; one month later he was once more arrested, and told if he again came near the front he would go to prison for two years. Two weeks later he was back at the front. Such a story causes the teeth of all the members of the General Staff to gnash with fury. You can hear them exclaiming: “If we caught that man we would treat him as a spy.” And so unintelligent are they on the question of correspondents that they probably would.
When Orville Wright hid himself in South Carolina to perfect his flying- machine he objected to what he called the “spying” of the correspondents. One of them rebuked him. “You have discovered something,” he said, “in which the whole civilized world is interested. If it is true you have made it possible for man to fly, that discovery is more important than your personal wishes. Your secret is too valuable for you to keep to yourself. We are not spies. We are civilization demanding to know if you have something that more concerns the whole world than it can possibly concern you.”
As applied to war, that point of view is equally just. The army calls for your father, husband, son–calls for your money. It enters upon a war that destroys your peace of mind, wrecks your business, kills the men of your family, the man you were going to marry, the son you brought into the world. And to you the army says: “This is our war. We will fight it in our own way, and of it you can learn only what we choose to tell you. We will not let you know whether your country is winning the fight or is in danger, whether we have blundered and the soldiers are starving, whether they gave their lives gloriously or through our lack of preparation or inefficiency are dying of neglected wounds.” And if you answer that you will send with the army men to write letters home and tell you, not the plans for the future and the secrets of the army, but what are already accomplished facts, the army makes reply: “No, those men cannot be trusted. They are spies.”
Not for one moment does the army honestly think those men are spies. But it is the excuse nearest at hand. It is the easiest way out of a situation every army, save our own, has failed to treat with intelligence. Every army knows that there are men to-day acting, or anxious to act, as war correspondents who can be trusted absolutely, whose loyalty and discretion are above question, who no more would rob their army of a military secret than they would rob a till. If the army does not know that, it is unintelligent. That is the only crime I impute to any general staff–lack of intelligence.
When Captain Granville Fortescue, of the Hearst syndicate, told the French general that his word as a war correspondent was as good as that of any general in any army he was indiscreet, but he was merely stating a fact. The answer of the French general was to put him in prison. That was not an intelligent answer.
The last time I was arrested was at Romigny, by General Asebert. I had on me a three-thousand-word story, written that morning in Rheims, telling of the wanton destruction of the cathedral. I asked the General Staff, for their own good, to let the story go through. It stated only facts which I believed were they known to civilized people would cause them to protest against a repetition of such outrages. To get the story on the wire I made to Lieutenant Lucien Frechet and Major Klotz, of the General Staff, a sporting offer. For every word of my despatch they censored I offered to give them for the Red Cross of France five francs. That was an easy way for them to subscribe to the French wounded three thousand dollars. To release his story Gerald Morgan, of the London Daily Telegraph, made them the same offer. It was a perfectly safe offer for Gerald to make, because a great part of his story was an essay on Gothic architecture. Their answer was to put both of us in the Cherche-Midi prison. The next day the censor read my story and said to Lieutenant Frechet and Major Klotz: “But I insist this goes at once. It should have been sent twenty-four hours ago.”
Than the courtesy of the French officers nothing could have been more correct, but I submit that when you earnestly wish to help a man to have him constantly put you in prison is confusing. It was all very well to dissemble your love. But why did you kick me down-stairs?
There was the case of Luigi Barzini. In Italy Barzini is the D’Annunzio of newspaper writers. Of all Italian journalists he is the best known. On September 18, at Romigny, General Asebert arrested Barzini, and for four days kept him in a cow stable. Except what he begged from the gendarmes, he had no food, and he slept on straw. When I saw him at the headquarters of the General Staff under arrest I told them who he was, and that were I in their place I would let him see all there was to see, and let him, as he wished, write to his people of the excellence of the French army and of the inevitable success of the Allies. With Italy balancing on the fence and needing very little urging to cause her to join her fortunes with France, to choose that moment to put Italian journalists in a cow yard struck me as dull.
In this war the foreign offices of the different governments have been willing to allow correspondents to accompany the army. They know that there are other ways of killing a man than by hitting him with a piece of shrapnel. One way is to tell the truth about him. In this entire war nothing hit Germany so hard a blow as the publicity given to a certain remark about a scrap of paper. But from the government the army would not tolerate any interference. It said: “Do you want us to run this war or do you want to run it?” Each army of the Allies treated its own government much as Walter Camp would treat the Yale faculty if it tried to tell him who should play right tackle.