"The Great Days"
They were playing "The Categorical Imperative" that evening at the Little Theatre in Unter den Linden. It is an old-fashioned comedy laid in the Vienna of 1815—two love-stories, lightly and quaintly told, across which, through the chatter of a little Viennese salon, we dimly see Napoleon return from Elba and hear the thunder of Waterloo. A young cub of a Saxon schoolmaster, full of simple-hearted enthusiasm and philosophy, comes down to the Austrian capital, and, taken up by a kindly, coquettish young countess, becomes the tutor of her cousin, a girl as simple as he. The older woman with her knowing charm, the younger with her freshness, present a dualism more bewildering than any he has ever read about in his philosophy books, and part of the fun consists in seeing him fall in love with the younger in terms of pure reason, and finally, when the motherly young countess has quietly got him a professorship at Konigsberg, present to his delighted Elise his "categorical imperative."
You can imagine that thoroughly German mixture of sentiment and philosophy, the quaint references to a Prussia not yet, in its present sense, begun to exist; how to that audience—nearly every one of whom had a son or husband or brother at the front—the century suddenly seemed to close up and the Napoleonic days became part of their own "grosse Zeit." You can imagine the young schoolmaster and the frivolous older man going off to war, and the two women consoling each other, and with what strange eloquence the words of that girl of 1815, watching them from the window, come down across the years:
"Why is it that from time to time men must go and kill each other? There it stands in the paper—two thousand more men—it writes itself so easily! But that every one of them has a wife or mother or sister or a— … And when they cry their eyes out that means that it is a victory, and when some brave young fellow has fallen, he is only one of the 'forces'—so and so many men—and nobody even knows his name…"
You must imagine them coming back from the war, and pale, benign, leaning on their canes as returning heroes do in plays, talk across the footlights to real young soldiers you have just seen limping in with real wounds—pink-cheeked boys with heads and feet bandaged and Iron Crosses on black-and-white ribbons tucked into their coats, home from East Prussia or the Aisne. Then between the acts you must imagine them pouring out to the refreshment-room for a look at each other and something to eat—will they never stop eating?—fathers and mothers and daughters with their Butterbrod and Schinken and big glasses of beer in the genial German fashion, beaming on the young heroes limping by or, with heads bandaged like schoolboys with mumps, grinning in spite of their scars.
And when they drift out into the street at last, softened and brought together by the play—the street with its lights and flags, officers in long, blue-gray overcoats and soldiers everywhere, and a military automobile shooting by, perhaps, with its gay "Ta-tee! Ta-td!"—the extras are out with another Russian army smashed and two more ships sunk in the Channel. The old newspaper woman at the Friedrichsstrasse corner is chanting it hoarsely, "Zwei englische Dampfer gesunken!"—and they read that "the sands have run, the prologue is spoken, the curtain risen on the tragedy of England's destiny."
Great days, indeed! Days of achievement, of utter sacrifice, and flinging all into the common cause. Round the corner from Unter den Linden, under the dark windows of the Information Bureau, you may see part of the price. It is still and deserted there, except for a lone woman with a shawl over her head, trying to read, by the light of the street-lamp, the casualty lists. You must imagine a building like the Post Office in New York, for instance, or the Auditorium Hotel in Chicago, with a band of white paper, like newspapers, spread out and pasted end to end, running along one side, round the corner, and down the other. Not inches, but yards, rods, two city blocks almost, of microscopic type; columns of names, arranged in the systematic German way—lightly wounded, badly wounded—schwer verwundet—gefallen. Some have died of wounds—tot—some dead in the enemy's country—in Feindesland gefallen. Rank on rank, blurring off into nothingness, endless files of type, pale as if the souls of the dead were crowding here.
One tried to think of the "Categorical Imperative" in a New York playhouse—of the desperate endeavor to make the young schoolmaster really look simple and boyish, and yet as if he might have heard of Kant, and of convincing the two ladies that they lost their sweet comfortableness by dressing like professional manikins; how the piece might succeed with luck, or if it could somehow be made fashionable; and how here, with all the unaffected and affectionate intelligence with which it was played—and watched—it was but part of the week's work.
And, in spite of the desperation of the time, you might have seen a dozen such audiences in Berlin, that night—and yet tourists generally speak of Berlin, compared with some of the German provincial cities, as a rather graceless, new sort of place, full of bad sculpture and Prussian arrogance. You might have seen them at the opera or symphony concerts, at Shakespeare, Strindberg, or the German classics we used to read in college, or standing in line at six o'clock, sandwiches in hand, so that they might sit through a performance of "Peer Gynt," with the Grieg music, beginning at seven and lasting till after eleven. A wonderful night, with poetry and music and splendid scenes and acting, and a man's very soul developing before you all the time—sandwiches and beer and more music and poetry, until that tragedy of the egoist is no longer a play but a part of you, so many years of living, almost, added to one's life. Yes, it is all here, along with the forty-two-centimetre shells—good music and good beer and good love of both; simplicity, homely kindness, and Gemutlichkeit.
Mere talk about plays would not be much encouraged in Germany nowadays. In one of the Cologne papers the other day there were two imaginary letters—one signed "One Who Means Well," asking that there be a little relief from war poems, war articles, and the like; and the other signed "One Who Means Better," demanding if it were possible for any German to waste time in artistic hair-splitting when the Germanic peoples, in greater danger than in their entire history, stood with their back to the wall, facing and holding back the world. A Berlin dramatic critic, going through the motions of reviewing a new performance of "Hedda Gabler" the other morning, finally dismissed the matter as "Women's troubles—if anybody can be interested in that nowadays!" Yet a woman, asking at the same time that the "finer and sweeter voices of peaceful society" be not forgotten, concluded her letter with "East and west the cannon thunder, but in men's souls sound many bells, and it is not necessary that they should always and forever be drowned out."
I mention the theatre only as an easy illustration of that many-sided vitality one feels at once on entering Germany, that development of all a people's capabilities, material and spiritual, which is summed up, I suppose, in that hapless word Kultur.
You may not like German learning or German art, and consider the one pedantic and the other heavy and uninspired. A Frenchman wrote very feelingly the other day, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, about a return to the old French culture, an escape from what he described as the German habit of accumulating mere facts to something that, in addition to feeding the brain, nourished the taste as well—carried with it, so to speak, a certain spiritual fragrance.
You may be of this persuasion. The thing one cannot escape, however, in Germany, whether one likes its manifestations or not, is the vitality, the moral and intellectual force, everywhere apparent, whether it be applied to smashing forts or staging a play. When a people can hold back England and France with one hand and the Russian avalanche with the other, and, cut off from oversea trade and living on rations almost, yet, to take but one of the first examples, maintain the art of the theatre at a level which makes that of New York or London in the most spacious time of peace seem crude and infantile, one is confronted with a fact which a reporter in his travels must record—a force which, as the saying goes, "must be reckoned with."
So far as the special business of keeping the war going is concerned, this vitality, after seven months of fighting, in spite of those lists in Dorotheenstrasse, seems ample. Here in Berlin, which is an all day's express journey from either front, you see thousands of fit young men marching through the streets, singing and whistling; you are told of millions ready and waiting to go. Every one seems confident that Germany will win—indeed, with a unity and resolution which could scarcely be more complete if they were defending their last foot of territory, determined that Germany must win.
When I was in London in the autumn a man who had made a flying trip to Berlin said that the German capital made him think of a man with his feet on the table smoking a cigar and pretending to be unconcerned although he knew all the time in his heart that he was doomed. I find little to suggest such a picture. The thing that at once impresses the stranger, along with the apparent reserve strength, is the moral earnestness behind that strength, the passionate conviction that they are fighting a defensive fight, that they are right. I shall not attempt to explain this here, but merely record it as a fact. Possibly all people in all great wars believe they are right—and that is why there are great wars.
Crossing the frontier from Rotterdam, I stopped for a day or two at Cologne. The proprietor of the hotel, a typical, big, hearty German of the commercial class, such as you might expect to find running a brewery at home or a bank or coffee plantation in South America, came out of his office when he heard English spoken. There are no "loose Englishmen" in Germany nowadays.
"I suppose you are surprised to see the Dom, yes?" he laughed, pointing toward the cathedral towers in whose shadow we stood. And then—"What do you think about the war?" I asked him what he thought.
"Well," he said, and with the air of brushing aside what was taken for granted before considering more doubtful issues, "of course we win!"
He showed me a photograph of his son, just made an officer. "In a few weeks," he said, "maybe I volunteer myself." He was fifty-five years old, but thoroughly fit. He doubled up a big right arm and laughingly gripped it. "Like iron!" he boomed. "And there are five million men like me. Not men—soldiers!"
I found myself the other evening, after zigzagging all over Berlin with an address given me at a typewriter agency, in a little apartment on the outskirts of the town. The woman who lived there had been a stenographer in the city until the war cut off her business, and she was now supporting herself with the six marks (one dollar and fifty cents) weekly war benefit given by the municipality and by making soldiers' shirts for the War Department at fifty pfennigs (twelve and one-half cents) a shirt. She was glad to get typewriting, and without words on either side at once got to work. So we proceeded for a page or two until something was said about an Iron Cross stuck inside a soldier's coat.
"That is the Iron Cross of the second class," she interrupted; "they put that inside. The first class they wear outside," and, as if she could keep still no longer, she suddenly flung out, almost without a pause:
"My brother has the Iron Cross. I have seven brothers in the army. Three are in the east and three are in the west, and one is in the hospital. He was shot three times in the leg—here—and here—and here. They hope to save his leg, but he will always be lame. He got the Iron Cross. He was at Dixmude. They marched up singing 'Deutschland ueber Alles.' They were all shot down. There were three hundred of them, and every one fell. They knew they must all be shot, but they marched on just the same, singing 'Deutschland ueber Alles.' They knew they were going against the English, and nothing could stop them."
Her brother would go back if he had to crawl back—if only she could go and not have to sit here and wait!
"I told you," she said, "when you first came in, that I was German. And I asked you if you were an American, because I know that dreadful things have been said in America about our Kaiser, and I will not have such things said to me. Our Kaiser did not want the war—he did everything he could to prevent the war—no ruler in the world ever did more for his people than our Kaiser has done, and there is not a man, woman, or child in Germany who would not fight for him." And this, you must remember, was from a woman whose support was cut off by the war and who was making a living by sewing shirts at twelve and a half cents a shirt.
I walked down the busy High Street that night in Cologne, and the bright shop-windows with their chocolates and fruit—apples from Canada and Hood River—crowded cafes, people overflowing sidewalks into the narrow streets somehow reminded me of the cheerful Bordeaux I tramped through in November. There are, indeed, many French suggestions in Cologne, and in the shops they still sometimes call an umbrella a parapluie.
An American who lives in Cologne told me that the decrease in the number of young men was noticeable, and that eleven sons of his friends had been killed. To a stranger the city looked normal, with the usual crowds. One did notice the people about the war bulletin-boards. They were not boys and street loungers, but grave-looking citizens and their wives and daughters, people who looked as if they might have sons or brothers at the front.
The express from Cologne to Berlin passed through Essen, where the Krupp guns are made, the coal and iron country of Westphalia, and the plains of the west. It is a country of large cities whose borders often almost touch, where some tall factory chimney is almost always on the horizon. All these chimneys were pouring out smoke; there is a reason, of course, why iron-works should be busy and manufacturing going on—if not as usual, at any rate going on.
The muddy plains between the factory towns were green with winter wheat, the crop which is to carry the country through another year. Meanwhile, one was told, the railroad rights of way would be planted, and land not needed for beets—for with no sugar going out Germany can produce more now than she needs—also be seeded to wheat.
Here in Berlin we are, it seems, being starved out, but in the complex web of a modern city it is rather hard to tell just what that means: In ordinary times, for instance, Germany imports thirty-five million dollars' worth of butter and eggs from Russia, which, of course, is not coming in now, yet butter seems to appear, and at a central place like the Victoria Cafe, at the corner of Unter den Linden and Friedrichsstrasse, two soft-boiled eggs cost fifty pfennigs, or twelve and a half cents, which is but two and a half cents more than they cost before the war, and that includes a morning paper and a window from which to see Berlin going by. Even were Berlin, in a journalistic sense, "starving," one presumes the cosmopolitans in the tea-rooms of the Kaiserhof or Adlon or Esplanade would still have their trays of fancy cakes to choose from and find no difficulty in getting plenty to eat at a—for them—not unreasonable price.
For weeks white bread has had to contain a certain amount of rye flour and rye bread a certain amount of potato—the so-called war bread—and, except in the better hotels, one was served, unless one ordered specially, with only two or three little wisps of this "Kriegsbrod." For Frenchmen this would mean a real privation, but Germans eat so little bread, comparatively speaking, that one believes the average person scarcely noticed the difference. Every one must have his bread-card now, with coupons entitling him to so many grams a day—about four pounds a week—which the waiter or baker tears off when the customer gets his bread. Without these cards not so much as a crumb can be had for love or money. Yet with all this stiff and not unamusing red tape your morning coffee and bread and butter costs from thirty pfennigs (seven and one-half cents) in one of the Berlin "automats" to one mark fifty pfennigs (thirty-seven cents) in the quiet of the best hotels.
Meat is plentiful and cheap, particularly beef, and in any of the big, popular "beer restaurants," so common in Berlin, an ordinary steak for one person costs from thirty-five to fifty cents. Pork, the mainstay of the poorer people, is comparatively expensive, because hogs have been made into durable hard sausages for the army, and potatoes, also expensive, have been bought up in large quantities by the government, to be sold in the public markets to the poor, a few pounds to each person, at a moderate price. There are said to be eight hundred thousand prisoners now in Germany, and the not entirely frivolous suggestion has been made that the hordes of hungry Russians captured in the east are more dangerous now than they were with guns in their hands. Yet there are no visible signs of such poverty as one will see in certain parts of London or Chicago in times of peace, and a woman in charge of one of the soup-kitchens where people pinched by the war get one substantial meal a day at ten pfennigs told me there was no reason for any one in Berlin going hungry. Meanwhile, the scarcity of flour only adds fuel to the people's patriotism, and they are told everywhere on red placards that England never can starve them out if every German does his economical duty. Where so much thinking is done for the people, and done so efficiently, it is difficult not to feel that everything is somehow "arranged," and one finds it difficult to become acutely anxious while the hundreds of crowded cafes are running full blast until one o'clock every morning and the seal in the Tiergarten has the bottom of his tank covered with fresh fish he is too indolent to eat.
"Society," in its more visible, decorative sense, is as forgotten as it is in France, as it must be in such a time. There are no dances or formal parties; every one who is not going about his civil business has in one way or another "gone to the war." The gay young men are at the front, the idle young women knitting or nursing or helping the poor, and it is an adventure uncommon enough to be remembered to meet on the street a pretty young lady merely out to take the air, with hands in her muff and trotting in front of her the timorous dachshund, muzzled like a ravening tiger and looking at the world askance with his rueful eyes.
The apparent quietness and gravity is partially due to the lack of a "yellow" or, in the British or American sense of the word, popular press. There is none of that noisy hate continually dinned into one's ears in London by papers which, to be sure, represent neither the better-class English civilians nor the light-hearted fighting man at the front, yet which are entertainingly written, do contain the news, and get themselves read.
The German papers print comparatively little of what we call "news." They hide unpleasant truths and accent pleasant ones, and are working all the time to create a definite public opinion; but their partisanship is that of official proclamation rather than that of overworked and underpaid reporters striving to please their employers with all the desperation of servants working for a tip. The yelping after spies, the heaping of adjectives on every trifling achievement of British arms, the ill-timed talk of snatching the enemy's trade in a war theoretically fought for a high principle, all that journalistic vulgarity—which might be as characteristic of our own papers under similar circumstances—one is mercifully spared.
This taciturnity is astonishing toward the work of the men at the front. A few days ago flags were flung out all over Berlin at the news of Hindenburg's victory; military attaches were saying that there had been nothing like this since Napoleon; up and down the streets the newswomen were croaking: "Sechsund-zwanzig tausend Russen gefangen… Hindenburg zahlt noch immer…" ("Twenty-six thousand Russians captured… and Hindenburg's still counting…"). And all you could find in the papers was the General Staff report that "at one place the fighting has been very severe; up to the present we have made some twenty-six thousand prisoners," etc., and even this laconic sentence lost in the middle of the regular communiqué beginning: "Yesterday on the Belgian coast, after a period of inactivity…"
The picturesqueness and personalities of the war are left to the stage and the innumerable weeklies and humorous papers, yet even here there is little or no tendency to group achievements around individual commanders—it is "our army," not the man, although even German collectivism cannot keep Hindenburg's dependable old face off the post-cards nor regiments of young ladies from sending him letters and Liebesgaben.
In the theatre you see the Feldgrau heroes in dugouts in Flanders or in Galician trenches; see the audience weep when the German mother sends off her seven sons or the bearded father meets his youngest boy, schwer verwundet, on the battle-field; or cheer when the curtain goes down on noble blond giants in spiked helmets dangling miniature Frenchmen by the scruff of the neck and forcing craven Highlanders to bite the dust.
You may even see a submarine dive down into green water, see the torpedo slid into the tube, breech-block closed, and—"Now—for Kaiser and fatherland!"—by means of an image thrown on a screen from the periscope, see the English cruiser go up in a tower of water and founder.
In all this comment there is a very different feeling for each of the three allies. The Russians "don't count," so to speak. They are dangerous because of their numbers and must be flung back, but the feeling toward them is not unlike that toward a herd of stampeded range cattle.
Toward the French there is no bitterness either, rather a sort of pity and the wish to be thought well of. One is reminded now and then of the German captain quartered at Sedan, in Zola's "Debacle," who, while conscious of the strength behind him, yet wanted his involuntary hosts to know that he, too, had been to Paris and knew how to be a galant homme. Men tell you "they've put up a mighty good fight, say!" or speaking of the young French sculptor allowed to go on with his work in the prison camp at Zossen, or the flower-beds in front of the French barracks there—"but, of course, the French are an artistic people. You can allow them liberties like that." Every now and then in the papers one runs across some anecdote from France in which the Frenchman is permitted to make the retort at the expense of the English.
Toward John Bull there is no mercy. He is shown naked, trying to hide himself with neutral flags; he is sprawled in his mill with a river of French blood flowing by from the battle-fields of France, while the cartoonist asks France if she cannot see that she is doing his grinding for him; he is hobnobbing cheek by jowl with cannibals and black men, and he is seriously discussed as a traitor to the Germanic peoples and the white race.
A German woman told me the other day that in her house it was the custom to fine everybody in the family ten pfennigs if they came down to breakfast without saying: "Gott strafe die Englander!" ("God punish the English!") In a recent Ulk there is a cartoon of a young mother holding up her baby to his proud father with the announcement that he has spoken his first words. "And what did he say?" "Gott strafe England!"
America is criticised for supplying the Allies with arms—shades of South American revolutions and the old "Ypiranga"!—while permitting itself, without sufficient protest, to be shut off from sending food to Germany. Yet, in spite of this and the extremely difficult situation created by the submarine blockade, the individual American is not embarrassed unless mistaken for an Englishman or unless he finds some supersensitive patriot in a restaurant or theatre who objects even to hearing English.
At the frontier the honest customs inspector landed, first thing, on a copy of "Tartarin sur les Alpes," which I had picked up at the railroad news-stand in the Hague.
"Franzosisch!" he declared, flapping over the pages. Next it was a bundle of letters of introduction, the top one of which happened to be in English. "Englische Briefe!" and forthwith he bellowed for help. A young officer sauntered out from the near-by office, saluted, and said, "Good morning!" glanced at "Tartarin" with a smile, and tossed it back into the bag, at letters and passport, said it must be very interesting to see both sides, and so, after a question or two, to the train for Koln.
On the way to Berlin from Koln, that rainy afternoon, I went into the dining-car toward five o'clock attired in a pepper-and-salt tweed suit and heavy tan boots, and, speaking German with evident pain, tactfully asked—everybody else drinking beer—for tea. The man across the way whispered to his companion and stared; a middle-aged man farther up the aisle stood stock-still and stared; a young woman at the other end of the car turned round and, gazing over the back of her chair, whispered aghast to her companion: "Englaender!"
Not particularly enlivened by the cup that cheers, I regained my compartment presently and glared out at the sodden landscape, with now and then a shot at the other occupant who had got on at Essen or one of the western stations and sat the day out without a word. One of those disagreeable Prussians evidently—until, actually needing to know, I broke the silence by asking which station we arrived at in Berlin. He answered with perfect good humor, and we began to talk. I mentioned the tea incident.
"Ignorant people!" he said, dismissing them with a wave of the hand. They ought to have seen my little flag—he had—and, anyhow, a gentleman was a gentleman, and they were fighting England, not individual Englishmen. Then, reverting to my apologies for my German, he amiably shifted into French, and so we talked until reaching Berlin, when, hoping that I would get what I came for, he shook hands and wished me "Bon voyage!" So you never can tell.
The militarism which any man in the street-car at home can tell you all about, and which Cramb and Bernhardi make so interesting and understandable, is here on the spot not so easy to put one's finger on. Apparently nobody ever heard of Bernhardi, and you might talk with every man you meet for a fortnight without finding any one who could tell you —as any young girl who happens to sit next you at dinner can tell you at home—about the German belief in war as a great blessing, because it is the only way of asserting your own superior ideas over the other man's inferior ideas, and thus getting a world ahead.
People want to smash England, of course, because, as they explain, she brought on the war and is trying to starve them, and they roar with the applause when the lightning-change man at the Wintergarten impersonates Hindenburg, because Hindenburg is a grand old scout who is keeping those millions of slovenly Russians from overrunning our tidy, busy, well-ordered Germany. But Treitschke—who was he?
And then, of course, it is not always easy to put one's finger on just what people mean by militarism. Some have objected to militarism because they didn't like the manners of the German waiters at the Savoy, and some because—"Well, those people somehow rub you the wrong way!" It is not universal conscription, because many nations have that, nor the amount spent per capita on soldiers and ships, for we ourselves spend almost as much as the Germans, and the French even more.
One of our old-school cattlemen, used to shooting all the game, cutting all the timber, and using all the water he wanted to, would doubtless say, without seeing a soldier, that it was "their damned police!" No, when people think they are talking about German militarism, they are quite as likely to be talking about the way German faces are made or about German collectivism—the uncanny ability Germans have for taking orders, for team-work, for turning every individual energy into the common end.
One may, however, run across a certain feeling toward war, quite local and unconscious, yet very different from the French love of "gloire" and the English keenness for war as a sort of superior fox-hunting or football. You are, let us say, watching one of the musical comedies which the war has inspired.
The curtain rises on a darkened stage, through whose blackness you presently discover, twinkling far below, as if you were looking down from an aeroplane, the lights of Paris, the silver thread of the Seine and its bridges. There is a faint whirring, and two faces emerge vaguely from the dark—the hero and heroine swinging along in a Taube. And as they fly they sing a wistful little waltz song, a sort of cradle song:
"Ich glau-u-be… Ich glau-u-be Da oben fliegt… 'ne Taube…"
They are thinking, so the song runs, that there is a Taube overhead; it has flown here out of its German nest, and let's hope it will not let anything fall on them. And, as they sing, the young man makes a motion with his hand, there is a sort of glowworm flash, and a few seconds later, away down there among the Paris roofs a puff of red smoke and fire. The illusion is perfect, and the audience is enchanted—that ride through the velvet night, so still, so quaint, so roguish in its way, and the flash far below, that has flung some unsuspecting citizen on the cobblestones like a bundle of old rags.
And, whirring gently, the Taube sails on through the night:
'Ich glaube.. Da oben fliegt Ich glaube.. 'ne Taube'
Again the glowworm flash, and a moment later, over on the left bank, not far from the Luxembourg, apparently, another of those eloquent little puffs of fire. The crowd is as delighted as children would be with bursting soap-bubbles.
Or we are, let us say, at "Woran Wir Denken" ("What We're Thinking Of") with delightful music and such verses as we rarely enough hear in musical comedies at home. In the spotlight there is a square young man dressed in a metallic coat and conical helmet, so as to suggest the famous forty-two-centimetre shell—the shell which makes a hole like a cellar and smashed the Belgian forts as if an earthquake had struck them. And singing with him an exquisite, nun-like creature in a dove-colored robe, typifying the Taube. They are singing to each other:
"I am delicate and slender And made for the salon…" "And I am the biggest smasher In all the present season…" "High up above the clouds I fly at heart's desire…" "And I'm a child of Krupp's, Whom nobody knew about…" "I fly, trackless as a breath…" "I slash on with smoke and roar…"
They are in love with each other, you see, the Taube and the forty-two-centimetre shell, the "Brummer," or "Grumbler," as they call it in Germany—could anything be more piquant? You should hear them—the chaste, chic, nun-like Taube and the thick-chested old Brummer, singing that he is her dear old Grumbler and she his soft, swift Dove:
"Suesser, dicker Brummer… Du mein Taubchen, zart und flink…"
There is a sort of poetry about this—a new sort of poetry about a new sort of war. And it might possibly be proved that such poetry could only come from a people so bred to arms that they do not shrink, even in imagination, from the uses to which arms must be put—a people in love with war, having a mystical feeling for its instruments, such as their remote ancestors had for their battle-axes and double-edged swords.
I shall not attempt to do this—heaven preserve Americans from being judged by their musical comedies !—and doubtless the children even of our most devoted advocates of universal peace have played with lead cannon and toy soldiers. I merely speak of it, this curious mixture of refinement and brutality, as something which, it struck me, we Americans—who always do everything exactly right—would not have thought of doing in just that way.
Many of the ways of this people are not our ways. You have heard, let us say, of the German parade step, sometimes laughed at as the "goose step" in England and at home. I was lunching the other day with an American military observer, and he spoke of the parade step and the effect it had on him.
"Did you ever see it?" he demanded. "Have you any idea of the moral effect of that step? You see those men marching by, every muscle in their bodies taut and tingling as steel wire, every eye on the Emperor, and when they bring those feet down—bing! bang!—the physical fitness it stands for, the unity, determination—why, it's the whole German idea—nothing can stop 'em!"
"Did you ever see one of these soldiers salute?" Yes, I had seen hundreds of them, and I had been made extremely ill at ease one day in my hotel when a young officer with whom I had started, in the American fashion, comfortably to shake hands suddenly whacked his heels together like a couple of Indian clubs and, stiff as a ramrod, snapped his hand to his cap.
"Did you ever see them salute? They don't do it like a baggage porter— there's nothing servile about it. They square off and bring that hand to their heads and look that officer square in the eyes as if to say: 'Now, damn you, salute me!' And he gets his salute, too—like a man!"
You may not like this salute or you may not like the parade step, but you can be very sure of one thing—that it is not the militarism that pushes civilians off the sidewalk nor permits an officer to strike his subordinate—though these things have happened in Germany—that is holding back England and France and driving the Russian millions out of East Prussia. It is something bigger than that. Peasants and princes, these men are dying gladly, backed up by fitness, discipline, and a passionate unity such as the world has not often seen. This, and not the futile nurses' tales with which the American public permitted itself to be diverted during the early weeks of the war, is what strikes one in Germany. It is a fact, like the Germans being in Belgium, which you have got to face and think about, whether you like it or not. Berlin, February, 1915.
Two German Prison Camps
Visiting a prison camp is somewhat like touching at an island in the night—one of those tropical islands, for instance, whose curious and crowded life shows for an instant as your steamer leaves the mail or takes on a load of deck-hands, and then fades away into a few twinkling lights and the sound of a bell across the water. You may get permission to see a prison camp, but may not stay there, and you are not expected, generally, to talk to the prisoners. You can but walk past those rows of eyes, with all their untold stories, much as you might go into a theatre in the midst of a performance, tramp through the audience and out again.
It is a strange experience and leaves one hoping that somebody—some German shut away in the south of France, one of those quick-eyed Frenchmen in the human zoo at Zossen—is keeping a diary. For while there have always been prison camps, have there ever been—at least, since Rome—such menageries as these! Behind the barbed-wire fence at Zossen—Zossen is one of the prisons near Berlin—there are some fifteen thousand men. The greater number are Frenchmen, droves of those long blue turned-back overcoats and red trousers, flowing sluggishly between the rows of low barracks, Frenchmen of every sort of training and temperament, swept here like dust by the war into common anonymity. I do not remember any picture of the war more curious, and, as it were, uncanny than the first sight of Zossen as our motor came lurching down the muddy road from Berlin—that huge, forgotten eddy, that slough of idle, aimless human beings against the gray March sky, milling slowly round and round in the mud.
But the French are only part of Zossen. There are Russians—shaggy peasants such as we see in cartoons or plays at home, and Mongol Russians with flat faces and almond eyes, who might pass for Chinamen. There are wild-eyed "Turcos" from the French African provinces, chattering untamed Arabs playing leap-frog in front of their German commandant as impudently as street boys back in their native bazaars. There are all the tribes and castes of British Indians—"I've got twenty different kinds of people in my Mohammedan camp," said the lieutenant who was showing me about—squat Gurkhas from the Himalayas, minus their famous knives—tall, black-bearded Sikhs, with the faces of princes. There are even a few lone Englishmen, though most of the British soldiers in this part of Germany are at Doberitz. Whether or not Zossen could be called a "show" camp, it seemed, at any rate, about as well managed as such a place could be. The prisoners were housed in new, clean, one-story barracks; well fed, so far as one could tell from their appearance and that of the kitchens and storerooms; they could write and be written to, and they were compelled to take exercise. The Roman Catholics had one chapel and the Greek Catholics another, and there was an effort to permit Indian prisoners to observe their rules of caste.
As we tramped through barracks where chilly Indians, Russians with broad, high cheek-bones, sensitive-looking Frenchmen with quick, liquid eyes, jumped to their feet and stiffened at attention as the commandant passed, a young officer, who had lived in England before the war and was now acting as interpreter, volunteered his guileless impressions. The Turcos were a bad lot—fighting, gambling, and stealing from each other —there was trouble with some of, them every day. The Russians were dirty, good-natured, and stupid.
The English—well, frankly, he was surprised at their lack of discipline and general unruliness—all except some of the Indians, and those, he must say, were well-trained—fine fellows and good soldiers. One could surmise the workings of his mind as one thought of the average happy-go-lucky Tommy Atkins, and then came across one of those tall, straight, hawk-eyed Sikhs and saw him snap his heels together and his arms to his sides and stand there like a bronze statue.
It was a dreadful job getting the Frenchmen to take exercise—"they can't understand why any one should want to work, merely to keep himself fit!" Aside from this idiosyncrasy they were, of course, the pleasantest sort of people to get along with. We saw Frenchmen sorting mail in the post-office, painting signs for streets, making blankets out of pasted- together newspapers—everywhere they were treated as intelligent men to whom favors could be granted. And, of course, there was this difference between the French and English of the early weeks of the war—the French army is one of universal conscription like the German, and business men and farmers, writers, singers, and painters were lumped in together. There was one particularly good-looking young man, a medical officer, who flung up his head to attention as we came up.
"He helped us a lot—this man!" said the commandant, and laid his hand on the young man's shoulder. The Frenchman's eyes dilated a trifle and a smile flashed behind rather than across his face—one could not know whether it was gratitude or defiance.
A sculptor who had won a prize at Rome and several other artists had had a room set aside for them to work in. Some were making post-cards, some more ambitious drawings, and in the sculptor's studio was the head of the young doctor we had just seen and an unfinished plaster group for a camp monument. On the wall was a sign in Latin and French—"Unhappy the spirit which worries about the future," a facetious warning that any one who loafed there longer than three minutes was likely to be killed, and the following artistic creed from "La Fontaine:"
"Ne for fans point noire talent. Nous ne ferions rien avec grace. Jamais un lourdaud quoiqu'il fosse, ne saurait passer pour gallant."
("Don't strain your talent or you'll do nothing gracefully. The boor won't pass for a gallant gentleman, no matter what he does.")
The Germans, at different times in their history, have conquered the French and humbly looked up to and imitated them. Generally speaking, they study and try to understand the French, and their own intellectuality and idealism are things French-men might be expected to like or, at any rate, be interested in. Yet it is one of history's or geography's ironies that the Frenchman goes on his way, neither knowing nor wanting to know the blond beasts over the Rhine—"Jamais un lourdaud quoiqu'il fasse" . . the young sculptor must have smiled when he tacked that verse on the wall of his prison!
Ruhleben is a race-track on the outskirts of Berlin, and a detentioncamp for English civilians. This is quite another sort of menagerie.You can imagine the different kinds of Englishmen who would be caught inGermany by the storm—luxurious invalids taking the waters atBaden-Baden; Gold Coast negro roust-abouts from rusty British tramps atHamburg; agents, manufacturers, professors, librarians, officers fromChannel boats, students of music and philosophy.
All these luckless civilians—four thousand of them—had been herded together in the stables, paddock, and stands of the Ruhleben track. The place was not as suited for a prison as the high land of Zossen, the stalls with their four bunks were dismal enough, and the lofts overhead, with little light and ventilation, still worse.
Some had suffered, semi-invalids, for instance, unable to get along with the prison rations, but the interesting thing about Ruhleben was not its discomfort, but the remarkable fashion in which the prisoners had contrived to make the best of a bad matter.
The musicians had their instruments sent in and organized an orchestra. The professors began to lecture and teach until now there was a sort of university, with some fifty different classes in the long room under the grand stand. And on the evening when we had the privilege of visiting Ruhleben it was to see a dramatic society present Bernard Shaw's "Androcles and the Lion."
The play began at six o'clock, for the camp lights are out at nine, and it was in the dusk of another one of Berlin's rainy days, after slithering through the Tiergarten and past the endless concrete apartment-houses of Charlottenburg, that our taxicab swung to the right, lurched down the lane of mud, and stopped at the gate of Ruhleben. Inside was a sort of mild morass, overspread with Englishmen— professional-looking men with months-old beards, pink-cheeked young fellows as fresh as if they had just stepped off Piccadilly, men in faded knicker-bockers and puttees, men in sailor blue and brass buttons, men with flat caps and cockney accent, one with a Thermos bottle, and crisp "Right you are!"—a good-natured, half-humorous, half-tragic cross-section of the London streets, drifting about here in the German mud.
There were still a few minutes before the play began, and we walked through some of the barracks with the commandant, a tall, bronzed officer of middle age, with gracious manners, one of those Olympian Germans who resemble their English cousins of the same class. Each barrack had its captain, and over these was a camp-captain—formerly an English merchant of Berlin—who went with us on our rounds.
The stables were crowded with bunks and men—like a cattleship forecastle. One young man, fulfilling doubtless his English ritual of "dressing for dinner," was punctiliously shaving, although it was now practically dark; in another corner the devotee of some system of how to get strong and how to stay so, stripped to the skin, was slowly and with solemn precision raising and lowering a pair of light dumb-bells. Some saluted as private soldiers would; some bowed almost as to a friend, with a cheery "Guten Abend, Herr Baron!" There seemed, indeed, to be a very pleasant relation between this gentleman soldier and his gentlemen prisoners, and the camp-captain, lagging behind, told how one evening when they had sung "Elijah," the men had stood up and given three English cheers for the commandant, while his wife, who had come to hear the performance, stood beside him laughing and wiping her eyes.
As you get closer to war you more frequently run across such things. The fighting men kill ruthlessly, because that, they think, is the way to get their business over. But for the most part they kill without hate. For that, in its noisier and more acrid forms you must go back to the men who are not fighting, to the overdriven and underexercised journalists, sizzling and thundering in their swivel-chairs.
The dimly lit hall under the grand stand was already crowded as we were led to our seats on a rostrum facing the stage with the commandant and one of his officers. There was a red draw curtain, footlights made with candles and biscuit tins, and so strung on a wire that at a pull, between the acts, they could be turned on the spectators. A programme had been printed on the camp mimeograph, the camp orchestra was tuning up, and a special overture had been composed by a young gentleman with the beautiful name of "Quentin Morvaren."
You will doubtless recall Mr. Shaw's comedy, and the characteristic "realistic" fun he has with his Romans and Christian martyrs, and the lion who, remembering the mild-mannered Androcles, who had once pulled a sliver from his foot, danced out of the arena with him instead of eating him. And you can imagine the peculiarly piquant eloquence given to the dialogue between Mr. Shaw's meek but witty Christians and their might-is-right Roman captors, spoken by British prisoners in the spring of 1915, in a German prison camp before a German commandant sitting up like a statue with his hands on his sword!
The Roman captain was a writer, the centurion a manufacturer, Androcles a teacher of some sort, the call-boy for the fights in the arena a cabin-boy from a British merchant ship, and the tender-hearted lion some genius from the "halls." Even after months of this sodden camp it was possible to find a youth to play Lavinia, with so pretty a face, such a velvet voice, such a pensive womanliness that the flat-capped, ribald young cockneys in the front row blushed with embarrassment. A professor of archaeology, or something, said that he had never seen more accurate reproductions of armor, though this was made but of gilded and silvered cardboard—in short, if Mr. Shaw's fun was ever better brought out by professional players, they must have been very good indeed.
It was an island within an island that night, there under the Ruhleben grand stand—English speech and Irish wit in that German sea. You should have seen the two young patricians drifting in, with the regulation drawl of the Piccadilly "nut"—"I say! He-ah's some Christians—let's chaff them!" The crowd was laughing, the commandant was laughing, the curtain closed in a whirl of applause, one had forgotten there was a war. The applause continued, the players straggled out, faltering back from the parts in which they had forgotten themselves into normal, self-conscious Englishmen. There was a moment's embarrassed pause, then the rattle of a sabre as the tall man in gray-blue rose to his feet.
"Danke Ihnen, meine Herren! Aeusserst nett!" he said briskly. ("Thanks, gentlemen! Very clever indeed!") He turned to us, nodded in stiff soldierly fashion. "Sehr nett! Sehr nett!" he said, and led the way out between a lane of Englishmen suddenly become prisoners again.
In The German Trenches At La Bassée
We had come down from Berlin on-one of those excursions which the German General Staff arranges for the military observers and correspondents of neutral countries. You go out, a sort of zoo—our party included four or five Americans, a Greek, an Italian, a diminutive Spaniard, and a tall, preoccupied Swede—under the direction of some hapless officer of the General Staff. For a week, perhaps, you go hurtling through a closely articulated programme almost as personally helpless as a package in a pneumatic tube—night expresses, racing military motors, snap-shots at this and that, down a bewildering vista of long gray capes, heel clickings, stiff bows from the waist, and military salutes. You are under fire one minute, the next shooting through some captured palace or barracks or museum of antiques. At noon the guard is turned out in your honor; at four you are watching distant shell-fire from the Belgian dunes; at eleven, crawling under a down quilt in some French hotel, where the prices of food and wines are fixed by the local German commandant. Everything is done for you—more, of course, than one would wish—the gifted young captain-conductor speaks English one minute, French or Italian the next, gets you up in the morning, to bed at night, past countless sentries and thick-headed guards demanding an Ausweis, contrives never to cease looking as if he had stepped from a band-box, and presently pops you into your hotel in Berlin with the curious feeling of never having been away at all.
It isn't, of course, an ideal way of working—not like putting on a hat and strolling out to war, as one sometimes could do in the early weeks in Belgium and France. The front is a big and rather accidental place, however—you can scarcely touch it anywhere without bringing back something to help complete the civilian's puzzle picture of the war. Our moment came in the German trenches before La Bassée, when, with the English so near that you could have thrown a baseball into their trenches, both sides began to toss dynamite bombs at each other.
We had come across to Cologne on the regular night express, shifted to a military train, and so on through Aix, Louvain, Brussels, and by the next morning's train down to Lille. Armentieres was only eight miles away, Ypres fifteen, and a little way to the south Neuve Chapelle, where the English offensive had first succeeded, then been thrown back only a few days before.
Spring had come over night, the country was green, sparkling with canals and little streams, and the few Belgian peasants left were trying to put it in shape for summer. A few were ploughing with horses, others laboriously going over their fields, foot by foot, with a spade; once we passed half a dozen men dragging a harrow. Every tree in this country, where wood is grown like any other crop, was speckled with white spots where branches had been trimmed away, and below the timber was piled— heavy logs for lumber, smaller ones cut into firewood—the very twigs piled as carefully as so many stacks of celery.
So fresh and neat and clean-swept did it seem .in that soft sunshine that one forgot how empty it was—so empty and repressed that one awoke startled to see three shaggy farm horses galloping off as the train rolled by, kicking up their heels as if they never had heard of war. It seemed frivolous, almost impertinent, and the landsturm officer, leaning in the open window beside me in the passageway, thinking perhaps of his own home across the Rhine, laughed and breathed a deep-chested "Kolossal!" We passed Enghien, Leuze, Tournai, all with that curious look of a run-down clock. On the outskirts of one town, half a dozen little children stopped spinning tops in the road to demand tribute from the train. They were pinched little children, with the worried, prematurely old faces of factory children, and they begged insistently, almost irritably, as if payment was long overdue. Good-natured soldiers tossed them chocolate and sausage and slices of buttered Kriegsbrod, which they took without thanks, still repeating in a curious jumble of German and French, "Pfennig venir! Pfennig—Pfennig—Pfennig venir!"'
Two officers from division headquarters were waiting for us in the station at Lille—one, a tall, easy-going young fellow in black motor-gauntlets, who looked as if he might, a few years before, have rowed on some American college crew; the other, in the officers' gray-blue frock overcoat with fur collar, a softer type, with quick, dark eyes and smile, and the pleasant, slightly languid manners of a young legation secretary.
We had just time to glance at the broken windows in the station roof, the two or three smashed blocks around it, and be hurried to that most empty of places—a modern city hotel without any guests—when three gray military motor-cars, with the imperial double eagle in black on their sides, whirled up. The officers took the lead, our happy family distributed itself in the others, and with cut-outs drumming, a soldier beside each chauffeur blowing a warning, and an occasional gay "Ta-ta ta-ta!" on a silver horn, we whirled out into the open country.
We passed a church with a roof smashed by an aeroplane a few days before—and caught at the same time the first "B-r-r-rurm!" from the cannonading to the west—a supply-train, an overturned motor-van, and here and there packed ammunition wagons and guns. Presently, in the lee of a little brick farmhouse a short distance from the village of Aubers, we alighted, and, with warnings that it was better not to keep too close together, walked a little farther down the road. Not a man was in sight, nor a house, nor gun, not even a trench, yet we were, as a matter of fact, in the middle of a battle-field. From where we stood it was not more than a mile to the English trenches and only two miles to Neuve Chapelle; and even as we stood there, from behind us, from a battery we had passed without seeing, came a crash and then the long spinning roar of something milling down aisles of air, and a far-off detonation from the direction of Neuve Chapelle.
Tssee-ee-rr… Bong! over our heads from the British lines came an answering wail, and in the field, a quarter of a mile beyond us, there was a geyser of earth, and slowly floating away a greenish-yellow cloud of smoke. From all over the horizon came the wail and crash of shells— an "artillery duel," as the official reports call it, the sort of thing that goes on day after day.
Somebody wanted to walk on to the desolate village which raised its smashed walls a few hundred yards down the road. The tall young officer said that this might not be done—it would draw the enemy's fire, and as if to accent this advice there was a sudden Bang! and the corner of one of the houses we were looking at collapsed in a cloud of dust.
Under these wailing parabolas, swinging invisibly across from horizon to horizon, we withdrew behind the farmhouse for lunch—sandwiches, frankfurters kept hot in a fireless cooker, and red wine—when far overhead a double-decker English aeroplane suddenly sailed over us. It seemed to be about six thousand feet above us, so high that the sound of its motors was lost, and its speed seemed but a lazy, level drifting across the blue. Did it take those three motor-cars and those little dots for some reconnoitring division commander and his staff? Aeroplanes not only drop bombs, but signal to their friends; there was an uncomfortable amount of artillery scattered about the country, and we watched with peculiar interest the movements of this tiny hawk.
But already other guns, as hidden as those that might be threatening us, had come, as it were, to the rescue. A little ball of black smoke suddenly puffed out behind that sailing bird, and presently a sharp crack of a bursting shrapnel shell came down to our ears. Another puff of smoke, closer, one in front, above, below. They chased round him like swallows. In all the drab hideousness of modern warfare there is nothing so airy, so piquant, so pretty as this.
Our bird and his pursuers disappeared in the north; over the level country to the south floated a German observation balloon, and presently we rumbled over a canal and through the shattered village of La Bassée. La Bassée had been in the war despatches for months, and looked it. Its church, used as a range-finder, apparently, was a gray honeycomb from which each day a few shells took another bite. Roofs were torn off, streets strewn with broken glass and brick; yet it is in such houses and their cellars that soldiers fighting in the trenches in a neighborhood like this come back for a rest, dismal little islands which mask the armies one does not see at the front.
The custom of billeting soldiers in houses—possible in territory so closely built up—adds to the vagueness of modern warfare. Americans associate armies with tents. When we mobilized ten thousand men at San Antonio, you were in a city of soldiers. Ten thousand men in this war disappear like water in sand. Some of them are in the trenches, some in villages like this, out of the zone of heavier fire, but within a few minutes' walk of their work, so to speak. Others are distributed farther back, over a zone perhaps ten miles deep, crisscrossed with telephone-wires, and so arranged with assembling stations, reserves, and sub-reserves that the whole is a closely knit organism all the way up to the front. There is continual movement in this body—the men in the trenches go back after forty-eight hours to the near-by village, after days or weeks of this service, back clear out of the zone of fire; fresh men come up to take their places, and so on. All you see as you whirl through is a sentry here, a soldier's head there at a second-story window, a company shuffling along a country road.
Women watched us from the doors of La Bassée—still going on living here, somehow, as human beings will on the volcano's very edge—and children were playing in the street. Husbands gone, food gone, the country swept bare—why did they not go, too? But where? Here, at any rate, there was a roof overhead—until a shell smashed it—and food soldiers were glad to share. There must be strange stories to tell of these little islands on the edge of the battle, where the soldiers who are going out to be killed, and the women whose husbands, perhaps, are going to help kill them, huddle together for a time, victims of a common storm.
We whirled past them down the road a bit, then walked up a gentle slope to the right. Over this low ridge, from the English trenches, rifle-bullets whistled above our heads. In the shelter of a brick farmhouse a dozen or so German soldiers were waiting, after trench service, to go back to La Bassée. They were smallish, mild-looking men, dusted with the yellow clay in which they had burrowed—clothes, boots, faces, and hands—-until they looked like millers.
"How are the English?" some one asked. "Do they know how to shoot?"A weary sort of hoot chorused out from the dust-covered men.
"Gut genug!" they said. The house was strewn with rusty cartridge clips and smashed brick. We waited while our chaperon brought the battalion commander—a mild-faced little man, more like a school-teacher than a soldier—and it was decided that, as the trenches were not under fire at the moment, we might go into them. He led the way into the communication trench—a straight-sided winding ditch, shoulder-deep, and just wide enough to walk in comfortably. Yellow clay was piled up overhead on either side, and there was a wooden sidewalk. The ditch twisted constantly as the trenches themselves do, so as not to be swept by enfilading fire, and after some hundreds of yards of this twisting, we came to the: first-line trench and the men's dugouts.
It was really a series of little caves, with walls of solid earth and roofs of timber and sand-bags, proof against almost anything but the plunging flight of heavy high-explosive shells. The floors of these caves were higher than the bottom of the trench, so that an ordinary rain would not flood them, and covered with straw. And they were full of men, asleep, working over this and that—from one came the smell of frying ham. The trench twisted snakelike in a general north and south direction, and was fitted every few feet with metal firing-shields, loopholed for rifles and machine guns. In each outer curve facing the enemy a firing platform, about waist-high, had been cut in the earth, with similar armored port-holes.
The Germans had been holding this trench for three months, and its whole outer surface was frosted a sulphurous yellow from the smoke of exploded shells. Shrapnel-casings and rusted shell-noses were sticking everywhere in the clay, and each curve exposing a bit of surface to the enemy was honeycombed with bullet holes. In one or two places sand-bags, caves, and all had been torn out.
Except for an occasional far-off detonation and the more or less constant and, so to speak, absent-minded cracking of rifles, a mere keeping awake, apparently, and letting the men in the opposite trenches know you are awake, the afternoon was peaceful. Pink-cheeked youngsters in dusty Feldgrau, stiffened and clapped their hands to their sides as officers came in sight, heard English with an amazement not difficult to imagine, and doubtless were as anxious to talk to these strange beings from a world they'd said good-by to, as we were to talk to them.
At one of the salient angles, where a platform had been cut, we stopped to look through a periscope: one cannot show head or hand above the trench, of course, without drawing fire, and looks out of this curious shut-in world as men do in a submarine—just as the lady in the old-fashioned house across from us in New York sits at her front window and sees in a slanting mirror everything that happens between her and the Avenue.
We had not been told just where we were going (in that shut-in ditch one had no idea), and there in the mirror, beyond some straggling barbed wire and perhaps seventy-five yards of ordinary grass, was another clay bank—the trenches of the enemy! Highlanders, Gurkhas, Heaven knows what—you could see nothing—but—over there was England!
So this was what these young soldiers had come to—here was the real thing. Drums beat, trumpets blare, the Klingelspiel jingles at the regiment's head, and with flowers in your helmet, and your wife or sweetheart shouldering your rifle as far as the station—and you should see these German women marching out with their men!—you go marching out to war. You look out of the windows of various railway trains, then they lead you through a ditch into another ditch, and there, across a stretch of mud which might be your own back yard, is a clay bank, which is your enemy. And one morning at dawn you climb over your ditch and run forward until you are cut down. And when you have, so to speak, been thrown in the stream for the others to cross over, and the trench is taken, and you are put out of the way under a few inches of French earth, then, perhaps, inasmuch as experience shows that it isn't worth while to try to keep a trench unless you have captured more than three hundred yards of it, the battalion retires and starts all over again.
We had walked on down the trenches, turned a bend where two trees had been blown up and flung across it, when there was a dull report near by, followed a moment later by a tremendous explosion out toward the enemy's trench. "Unsere Minen!" ("One of our bombs!") laughed a young soldier beside me, and a crackle of excitement ran along the trench. These bombs were cylinders, about the size of two baking-powder tins joined together, filled with dynamite and exploded by a fuse. They were thrown from a small mortar with a light charge of powder, just sufficient to toss them over into the opposite trench. The Germans knew what was coming, and they were laughing and watching in the direction of the English trenches.
"Vorsicht! Vorsicht!"
There was a dull report and at the same moment something shot up from the English trenches and, very clear against the western sky, came flopping over and over toward us like a bottle thrown over a barn.
"Vorsicht! Vorsicht!" It sailed over our heads behind the trench, there was an instant's silence, and then "Whong!" and a pile of dirt and black smoke was flung in the air. Again there was a dull report, and we sent a second back—this time behind their trench—and again—"Vorsicht! Vorsicht!"—they sent an answer back. Four times this was repeated. A quainter way of making war it would be hard to imagine. They might have been boys playing "anty-over" over the old house at home.
Bombs of this sort have little penetrating power. If thrown in the open they go off on the surface much like a gigantic firecracker. They are easy to dodge by daylight, when you can see them coming, but thrown at night as part of a general bombardment, including shrapnel and heavy explosive shells, or exploding directly in the trench, they must be decidedly unpleasant.
The bomb episode had divided us, two officers and myself waiting on one side of the bend in the trench toward which the bombs were thrown, the others going ahead. It was several minutes before I rejoined them, and I did not learn until we were outside that they had been taken to another periscope through which they saw a space covered with English dead. There were, perhaps, two hundred men in khaki lying there, they said, some hanging across the barbed-wire entanglements at the very foot of the German trench, just as they had been thrown back in the attack which had succeeded at Neuve Chapelle. Several Englishmen had got clear into the German trench before they were killed. Here was another example of the curious localness of this dug-in warfare, that one could pass within a yard or two of such a battle-field and not know even that it was there.
By another communication trench we returned to the little house. The sun was low by this time and the line of figures walking down the-road toward the automobiles in its full light. Perhaps the glasses of some British lookout picked us up—at any rate the whisper of bullets became uncomfortably frequent and near, and we had just got to the motors when —Tssee—ee—rr… BONG! a shell crashed into the church of La Bassée, only three hundred yards in front of us.
Before ours had started, another, flying on a lower trajectory, it seemed, shrieked over our heads and burst beside the road so close to the first motor that it threw mud into it. Apparently we were both observed and sought after, and as the range of these main highways, up and down which troops and munitions pass, is perfectly known, there was a rather uncomfortable few minutes ere we had whirled through La Bassée, with the women watching from their doors—no racing motors for them to run away in!—and down the tree-arched road to ordinary life again.
No, not exactly ordinary, though we ourselves went back to a comfortable hotel, for the big city of Lille, which had shown trolley-cars and a certain amount of animation earlier in the day, was now, at dusk, like a city of the dead. The chambermaid shrugged her shoulders with something about a "punition" and, when asked why they were punished, said that some French prisoners had been brought through Lille a week or two before, and "naturally, the people shouted 'Vive la France!'"
So the military governor, as we observed next morning in a proclamation posted on the blank wall across the street, informing the inhabitants that they "apparently did not, as yet, understand the seriousness of the situation," ordered the city to pay a 'fine of five hundred thousand francs, and the citizens for two weeks to go within doors at sundown and not stir abroad before seven next morning. Another poster warned people that two English aviators had been obliged to come down within the city, that they were still at large, and that any one who hid them or helped them escape would be punished with death, in addition to which the commune would be punished, too.
It was through black and silent streets, therefore, that our troop was led from the hotel in which we were lodged to one in which we dined. Here everything was warm and light and cheerful enough. Boyish lieutenants, with close-clipped heads after the German fashion, were telling each other their adventures, and here and there were older officers, who looked as if war had worn them a bit, and they had come here to forget for a moment over a bottle of champagne and the talk of some old friend. The bread was black and hard, but the other food as usual in France, with wine plenty and cheap, and even some of the round-shelled, coppery oysters—captured somehow, in spite of blockades and bombardments—just up from Ostend. It was bedtime when we emerged into the black streets again, to discover, with something like surprise, a sky full of stars and a pale new moon.
The rest of that civilian tour was very civil, indeed—a sort of loop-the-loop of Belgium, with scarce a pause for breath. You can imagine _that cosmopolitan menagerie trooping next morning up the stone stairs of the castle of the Counts of Flanders in Ghent; at noon inspecting old lace in Bruges, and people coming home from church, the German guard changing, and the German band playing in the central square; at two o'clock lunching in one of the Ostend summer hotels, now full of German officers; at four pausing for a tantalizing moment in Middelkerk, while the German guns we were not allowed to see on the edge of the town were banging away at the British at Nieuport down the beach. Next day Brussels—out to Waterloo, in a cloud of dust—the Congo Museum—the King's palace at Laaken, an old servitor with a beard like the tall King Leopold's leading these vandals through it, and looking unutterable things—a word with the civil governor, here—a charming lunch at a barracks, there—in short, a wild flight behind the man with the precious "Ausweis."
We saw and sometimes met a good many German officers in a rather familiar way. Many of the younger men reminded one of our university men at home; several of the older men resembled their well-set-up English cousins. This seemed particularly true of the navy, which has acquired a type—lean, keen, firm-lipped young men, with a sense of humor—entirely different from the German often seen in cafes, with no back to his head, and a neck overflowing his collar. Particularly interesting were those who, called back 'into uniform from responsible positions in civil life, were attacking, as if building for all time, the appallingly difficult and delicate task of improvising a government for a complex modern state, and winning the tolerance, if not the co-operation, of a conquered people confident that their subjection was but for the day.
Our progress everywhere was down a continuous aisle of heel-clickings and salutes. Sometimes, when we had to pass through three rows of passport examiners between platform and gate, these formalities seemed rather excessive. In the grenadier barracks in Brussels we had been taken through sleeping-rooms, cool storerooms with their beer barrels and loops of sausages—"all made by the regiment"—and were just entering the kitchen when a giant of a man, seeing his superior officers, snapped stiff as a ramrod and, as it is every German subordinate's duty to do, bellowed out his "Meldung"—who and what the men in his room were, and that they were going to have meat and noodle soup for dinner.
No Frenchman, Englishman, or American could be taught, let alone achieve of his own free will, the utter self-forgetfulness with which this vast creature, every muscle tense, breathing like a race-horse, roared, or rather exploded: "Herr Hauptmann! Mannschafts-Kuche-desten-Landwehr- Regiments! Belegt-mit-einem-Unter-offizier-und-zehn-Mann! Wir essen heute Suppe mit Nudeln und Fleisch! Zu Befehl!"
He had stepped down a century and a half from the grenadiers of the Great Frederic, and even our hosts may have smiled. It was different with the soldiers' salute, or the ordinary coming to attention, which we saw repeated scores of times a day. Whatever men might be doing, however awkward or inconvenient it might be, whether any one saw them or not, they stopped short at the sight of these long, gray-blue coats and stiffened, chin up, eyes on their superior, hands at their sides. If they were talking, they became silent; if laughing, their faces smoothed out, and into their eyes came an expression which, when you have seen it repeated hundreds of times, you will not forget. It is a look of seriousness, self-forgetfulness, of almost religious devotion, not to the individual, but to the idea for which he stands. I saw a soldier half-dressed, through a barracks window under which we passed, sending after his officer, who did not even see him, that same look, the look of a man who has just volunteered to charge the enemy's trench, or who sees nothing absurd in saying the Germans fear God and nothing else in the world!