"It is better," suggests Tzschirner, "that we leave the auto." And as the motor bounces over the lashed saplings and takes the bridge, a company hurrying to Tauroggen comes swinging on its heels; for we are getting into Russia now, and near the line of battle, and there can be no delay. We hurry after the car.
"Please, that bridge," and Tzschirner indicates the charred piles; "it saved the Russians. By burning it, they delayed our advance an hour."
"Your engineers changed the course of the road, bending it around that burning bridge, in one hour?"
"Oh, yes," and Tzschirner is almost apologetic; "our pioneers would have finished the work in much less than an hour, but the Russians fired on them with shrapnel," and then as if remarking the weather, he added, "Fifteen were killed."
The car chugs on. A great blue bulbed cupola shows above the trees and we rattle across the Jura.
"The Russians tried to destroy this bridge, too," Tzschirner is explaining, "but we came too fast for them and drove them up into Tauroggen, where they endeavored to stand." ... Our motor is panting up the hill past the Russian church and turns into the village of Tauroggen.
"We put the artillery on them," continues Tzschirner, and we pass rows of narrow, squalid houses, chipped with shrapnel, "and they took Tauroggen by storm. There was street fighting and then, picking up their dead, they ran with them through the village,across the field to the woods," and Tzschirner waves his hand down the road toward a patch of pines, "and they're in the woods now."
We turn into a muddy street where the fighting must have been hot, for the way is littered with cartridge belts and guns and on a pale blue picket fence Russian accouterments dangle like unclean things hung out in the sun.
"If you will excuse me," says the Rittmeister, "I shall speak with Ober-Lieutenant Hoffman."
We find Ober-Lieutenant Hoffman quartered in a clean looking hut, distinguished by a shingle, hand-lettered with that official looking KOMMANDO. After he has conversed with the Ober-Lieutenant, Tzschirner brings him into the motor and we drive through Tauroggen in the direction the Russians have fled. We have put the last outlying house behind us and at a suggestion from Ober-Lieutenant Hoffman the motor is stopped. "It is better," explains Tzschirner, "that the auto remain here. It gives too large a target."
With a strange feeling, almost of superiority, for not thirty feet ahead, what appears to be a first line trench is filled with soldiers, we walk towards them down the road. Over there, a quarter of a mile, across the barren field where the Russians dragged their dead, are the woods, and skulking there are the Russians—the soldiers maintain a nervous vigil. Not a sound breaks the strain, only the clatter of axes, as far to the right the soldiers are clearing a zone for the enfilading fire of the machine guns. And as wewalk past the trench and approach the last outpost this tension is communicated to us. We walk through the barricade—a ladder tangled with wire, that slides between two broken carts on either side of the road. We scarcely notice the two sentries who walk twenty paces from the barricade toward the woods, wheel and return. We are watching the woods—that great green semicircle across the field where the Russians are hiding.
Apparently that thought never occurs to Tzschirner. Being a good soldier, he does not indulge his imagination when he is in uniform. He and Ober-Lieutenant Hoffman are walking along, chatting easily as they might on some fine February day along the Linden. As the sentries stride by I catch the words, "Wagner ist mehr wichtig," and a little excited, the sentry with the beard cries: "Quatch! Strauss ist wunderbar!" Apparently to decide the merits of Wagner and Strauss is more absorbing than the Russians.
A little bewildered, I walk on. Down where the road divides the woods into a limitless vista of green, I think I see something move. It is about 600 meters away and I focus my glass. Four Russian soldiers sitting on a log, a little fire, and in the middle of the road something that, while indistinguishable, suggests a menace. And even as I watch I see a tree sway and I canhearit fall as it crashes across the road, falling like a barricade.
"Look! Look! The Russians!"
Andthe Rittmeister turns with an amused smile. How commonplace are the Russians, anyway! How incidental to those officers who have seen so many dead that even the living are not to be feared.
"In the middle of the road," I announced, "there is a machine gun. It is pointed this way."
Tzschirner and Ober-Lieutenant Hoffman are discussing some military problem. Tzschirner begins to trace in the road with his sword some formation that is beyond my pen.
"Those Russians," I am saying without putting down the glasses, "appear to be leaving their seats on the log. I think they are showing sudden interest in the gun."
Demonstrating his problem in the mud, Tzschirner turns to me.
"This is the road to Riga. Follow it and we reach that fortress. As we are now midway between the German and Russian lines, I do not think it wise that we go further. Of course, if you would care to storm the Russians in the woods, we shall go on. Do you wish?"
I donotwish. Nervy little Tzschirner, one of the gamest men to straddle a horse in this war, has taken us quite far enough. We begin our walk back to the German lines, turning our backs with difficulty upon those silent woods.
"If the Russians should fire," Tzschirner says seriously, "throw yourself at once on the road. The balls will pass over you."
Asimple remedy, indeed!
"Strauss," the passing sentry is objecting, "is all chaos."
"Why not?" his bearded comrade defends. "Salome is the music of destruction."
Glancing back toward the woods, I see a flock of black birds fly leisurely across the field, and alighting, wait. Wait for what? Had the Ober-Lieutenant told them that darkness would bring the Russian attack?
"And now, if you like, we shall go to my quarters," says the Ober-Lieutenant, to whom Tzschirner has delivered me. "I am sorry you will not find them very comfortable."
It is as ever, the diffidence of these Prussian officers, putting you a little ill at ease. Self-consciously assuring the Ober-Lieutenant that to be comfortable is my last desire, we walk down a lane of the bluish walled cottages, turning in at the frame structure which is denoted headquarters. As we enter a rather barren room, three orderlies, who appear to be transcribing reports, briefly stiffen in their chairs and go on writing. The gray, iron-bound officers' chest by the window makes a good seat and the Ober-Lieutenant in telling me that having had conscience, many of the natives of Tauroggen fled with the coming of the Germans, leaving their loot behind.
"Loot!" I interrupted. "I do not understand."
"Pardon me, but I forgot," and the Ober-Lieutenant called an orderly. "Here in Tauroggen," he said after consulting the report, "we recovered householdbelonging to the German frontier villages of Laugszargen, Meddiglauken and Augswilken."
"No matter how fast his flight," I observe, "the Russian soldier still has time to transport his loot."
The Ober-Lieutenant smiles. "But in this time it was not the soldiers. We have learned that the civilians of Tauroggen followed the Russian soldiers across the frontier, stealing from houses, and then sneaking back with their booty to Tauroggen."
Clicking his heels in a salute a young lieutenant comes in. He and the Ober-Lieutenant begin speaking; such hurried German is too much for me. I note the monocle the young lieutenant is wearing. What affectation on the firing line! Clicking his heels to the Lieutenant, bowing to me, the young lieutenant hurries out. The Ober-Lieutenant is drumming his fingers on the table top.
"Ober-Lieutenant," I remark with a smile, "will that young lieutenant wear his monocle if there's a battle?"
The Ober-Lieutenant's gravity dispels a jest. "I imagine he will always wear that monocle," he says. "The Lieutenant had his eye shot out in Belgium." He reaches for a map. "Please pardon me," he smiles. Quite distinctly now I can hear the shots.
"I had hoped," says the Ober-Lieutenant, studying the greenish black dotted patch that means on his map, the woods, "that there would be no engagement here until to-morrow. I wanted to finish our entanglements to-day."
I wonder if our going past the outposts has broughtforth the Russians' nervous fire. That seems also to have occurred to the Ober-Lieutenant.
"They might have thought that we were reconnoitering for a night attack," and then abruptly, "Let us go out."
As we pass between the houses a bullet goes snaggering off a roof. It would seem to be a last wild shot for as we turn up the road to the outpost, everything is still. In the little cemetery to the left of the barricade, I see soldiers, squatting behind the tombstones; the great wooden cross suggests an incongruous peace. Calling the sentries who but a time ago, we heard discussing Wagner and Strauss, the Ober-Lieutenant taxes them with questions. They salute and hurry behind the cart, which they have turned blocking the road. "Any wounded?" calls the Ober-Lieutenant down the trench.
"Nur Russlanders!" The soldiers laugh and slip fresh clips into their guns.
"Alles ruhig," the Ober-Lieutenant is saying as we walk along the line, apparently scornful of the Russians that the pines will not let him see. "Only nervousness, that shooting."
"You do not believe there will be an attack?"
He shakes his head. "I think not."
But across the belt to the woods, I see the black winged birds, slowly flying and waddling over the ground.
7:30P. M.During dinner the Ober-Lieutenant has avoided all shop talk. No such food as in the West,here—just a stew of white beans and beef and thick bread, carved off a big black loaf. The thoughtful looking Colonel produces a flask of cognac, and we are finishing with cigarettes, when an under officer reports.
"Both lights are in position," I heard the Colonel say and dismissing the under officer, he seems absorbed in the end of his cigarette. In this barren room, where the candles are scattering strange shadows on the unpainted walls you become conscious of an unspoken army. The Ober-Lieutenant who is talking Nietzsche with me; seems not to have his mind upon it; when appealed to, the Colonel joins in with monosyllables. The orderlies who this afternoon were making reports, are gone but in the corner by the window, a soldier sits with a field telephone in his lap; slowly he writes upon a pad.
"In America," the Ober-Lieutenant is saying, "you have taken too seriously our academic thinkers. Will you believe it, that until we heard about the book from England, not a thousand of my countrymen had read Bernhardi. Suppose we were to judge America by some of the things published there?"
I can see his point. A mad buzz from the telephone jerks us up with a start. With the air, of something expected, fulfilled, the Colonel rubs the fire off his cigarettes.
"What is it?" he calls.
The soldier's manner is decisive. "Patrols report men massing from the woods in the road."
Gulping down the cognac, the Colonel gives a detailedorder; the soldier telephones it to some one at the outpost. The Ober-Lieutenant looks inquiring. "You would like to see?" he asks. As we hurry out of the room, a soldier with a rifle, runs down the street. It is dark. The low roofed houses are smothered in a thickening loom of woods and sky. In a window a candle burns but to the end of the street it is dark. The door of the last house is open and I hear a mumbling monotone of prayer. The flash of a pocket torch shows an ancient Hebrew kneeling in the open door. From his shoulders hang a brown vestment of prayer and caught full, his patriarchal, wrinkled face seems almost divine in the halo of the torch. On the heavy air a rifle cracks.
We are running forward. From the woods come a scattered sound, as of monstrous frogs croaking in the night; a bullet sucks in a whistle as it passes by. To the left of the road, behind the little cemetery, is a hut where we will be reasonably safe. Leaving the road and running along the edge of the trees, so as to keep the hut between us and the direct fire we press on. I never knew the sound of bullets could so aid one's speed....
The firing has become general now and as we peer around the edges of the hut ahead and to our right, I can hear the soldiers moving in the trench. It is too dark to see much. Nearby I can discern crouched shadows running through the night and above the place of graves, the great brown cross makes its stiff gesture of peace.
Where are the Russians? Way down among thetrees, I see the occasional flashes of their fire. But this is only an exchange of shots. The Germans are not bothering to reply, only with spasmodic shots, I think of the black winged birds; has the noise frightened them away?
Still there is a tension that seems to be tightening. Down in the trench I see the flash of an officer's lamp; it is like a firefly. Other fireflies, glimmer toward the right of the line, flashing and going out. Somewhere in the darkness a young voice laughs nervously.
Where are the Russians? They may be crossing the open field for from the woods the shots no longer come. Everything is silent, everything but the orders that are being given in hushed but distinct tones—almost you think, as though the damp wind might pick up some secret and bear it to the Russian hordes. Where are they? This silence seems interminable.
And then one hears the faint scuffling of their feet; and out of the silence of the night comes a roar as of animals let loose, and across the fields we can see a vague moving mass. They are firing now but they are making as much noise with their voices as with their guns. To hoarse throaty yells they storm up the road. It occurs to me that they are like the Chinese whose idea of war is making a noise. Their bullets are raining through the pines and falling like hail on the houses beyond.
"Why don't your men open fire?"
"It is too soon," whispers the Ober-Lieutenant. Why did he have to whisper?
Andthen I see the Russians. I see them in the great blinding flash of dusty light. I see them revealed as pausing, blinking things, to whom the searchlights point with fingers of pitiless white. I see them—while all about me becomes the clamor of guns—stumble and fall; they stagger and crawl as if the long dusty flashes were lightning, striking them down; and wherever the white fingers point, there death comes; and their hoarse throaty shouts, become the wails of death; and that open belt between the pines becomes lumpy with men, while the night grows horrid with the rattle of rifles and the quick croaking beat of the guns.
They are being slaughtered out there; they are as bewildered as animals, blinking, then dying, in the glare of the lights that they knew not could come. And now the lights are throwing their dusty glimmer on the distant trees.
"They are retreating!" The Ober-Lieutenant still talks in a whisper.
And, as sweeping this way and that, making their monstrous gestures over the moaning field, the searchlights hold up as targets the scattering Russian retreat; as one after another shadowy form I see cross a beam of light only to fall, and the crash of the rifles seems to have become an unceasing din and in the sweeping flashes of white I see the piles upon the field.
The Ober-Lieutenant gives his opinion of it. "Very fine," he says. "There are many dead." And then, as if after all, this were the important thing, he adds:"To-morrow, I think we can build our entanglements."
7:00A. M.I have slept little. All night I thought I heard groans from afar. Toward dawn I imagine I hear a screech, but of course it cannot be that.... When we take coffee in the candlelight, the Colonel seems to have lost the distraction he showed at dinner. He laughs and jokes.... It is rapidly growing light when I climb up on the transport that is to take me to Tilsit.... Down over the pines, the black winged birds are flying—a screech? One wonders.
Field Marshal von Hindenburg
To the accompaniment of heels clicking in salute we passed the Saxonian sentries and hurrying through the darkened gateway were met by an orderly. Field Marshal von Hindenburg was expecting us. Down the corridors of the castle into a great hall into which opened many doors ever opening and closing to the passage of hurrying soldier clerks; here a telegraph was chattering, there a telephone buzzing, messengers coming and going, staff officers gliding from one room to another, the warm stuffy air vitalized with magic import—this was my first impression of the headquarters of the commander in chief of the German armies of the East.
I was looking at a placard written with a pen and fastened to one of the unpretentious doors, opening into little ante rooms from the great hall, which read—"Commander in Chief." On the other side of that door was the sixty-eight-year-old warrior who has become the national hero of Germany. To name the town where this took place would be a breach of military etiquette. I am, however, permitted to say that the Field Marshal has had his headquarters at Posen,Allenstein, Insterburg, and another place south of Insterburg about one hundred and fifty kilometers which the officers of General von Eichorn's Tenth Army spoke of as "a place unnamed." The reason for this secrecy was reflected in "the town." Plunged in total darkness, save for a few lanterns, it was impossible to locate from the sky. Russian aviators could not steal over it by night and drop bombs to kill the man who is so utterly a master of the armies that the Czar sends against Germany.
There came Captain Cammerer, first adjutant of Hindenburg, a Prussian officer of artillery, who said that the Field Marshal would soon receive us. One gleaned that although the Captain appreciated the distinction, he longed for the battlefield; one heard him talk eagerly of Tannenberg where he had made some Russian prisoners. "But now my fingers are covered with corns," and Cammerer smiled in a melancholy way. "I have to write much." And then the door that bore the sign, "Commander in Chief," opened, and the officer bowed us in. Field Marshal von Hindenburg had risen to meet us.
My first impression was that Von Hindenburg's pictures have done him an injustice. There is no denying that his photographs create the impression of a tremendously strong face ruthless almost to the point of cruelty. But the camera fails utterly to catch the real Hindenburg. His is a face tremendously strong, with a chin that is like a buttress and a forehead of the width that means power and there is a firmness to his little blue eyes; all these thingsthe camera shows. It does not show the twinkle in these eyes; nor does it show the kindness that lurks in the wrinkles of his warty weather-beaten skin. It fails utterly to depict the pleasant smile that his small sharply cut mouth can show. Sixty-eight years you are thinking in amazement. This man does not look more than fifty. All his faculties seem at their zenith. His nose is the nose of the eagle and it impresses you with wonderful alertness. There is much color in his mustache, a tawny shade, a large curving but rather peaceful looking mustache that has not the aggressive angle of the Emperor's. So massive are his shoulders that I thought at first that his close cropped gray head was perhaps a little small. But it is a typically round German head of the strong mold that you see in the pictures of Durer and Holbein.
Von Hindenburg impressed me as being a big man, physically and mentally big, the embodiment of what the conqueror of the Russian armies should be, though I had heard of his suffering with the gout and every known ill; that he was a decrepid invalid who was called from a sick bed to save East Prussia. But simply dressed in field gray, wearing only the order Pour le Merite bestowed upon him by the Emperor for his marvelous skill in the Russian drive, Paul von Beneokendorff und Von Hindenburg has the directness and simplicity of men of real greatness. He is wholly without ostentation, and easier to engage in conversation than many a younger officer who only sports the second class of the Iron Cross.
Heeats simply and he works hard. Dinner at Von Hindenburg's headquarters consists of soup and one course around an undecorated table with ten officers. He likes a good wine; when he is drinking a toast he takes his glass of champagne at one gulp to the despair of some of his younger officers. The dinner hour showed him to be very lively. He likes stories where the wit is keen; also he is not a Puritan. He avoids talking military matters and seems at dinner to have thrown off all responsibilities. This light inconsequential converse sounds almost incongruous when you can hear the ta ta of the horns of military automobiles outside. Indeed it is with difficulty that Von Hindenburg can be induced to say anything about the war. His very able assistants, the silent Ludendorff, Chief of Generality, and the lively gesturing brilliant Hoffman, also avoid talking shop. After he has agreed with you that the French are fighting bravely, better than one expected them to, and that everybody in Germany is sorry for them; after he has urged with exaggerated seriousness that the Austrian officers are efficient; after he has uttered his contempt of Belgium and echoed the curse of the German nation for England, he will discuss the Russians.
"The Russians are good soldiers," he says. "They are well disciplined. But there is a difference between their discipline and ours. The discipline of the German army is the result of education and moral. In the Russian army it is the dumb obedience of an animal. The Russian soldier stands becausehe is told to; but he stands like one transfixed. Napoleon was right when he said 'it does not do to kill a Russian; he must also be thrown down.' The Russians have learned a good deal since the Japanese war. They are very strong in fortifying their positions on the battlefield and understand excellently how to dig trenches and holes. As soon as they have chosen their position they disappear under the ground like moles. Our soldiers had to learn how to do that too. Our soldiers did not like it. They like to fight in the open, to storm and have it over with. But I had to make them wait in position until I was ready. We are not afraid of the Russian superiority of numbers. Russia is vast, but not as dangerous as it looks. The modern war is not decided by numbers. In East Prussia we have broken two Russian invasions. Each time they are outnumbered as three to one. An army is not a horde of uniformed men. An army must have good guns, ammunition, and brains."
The lively Hoffman, a wonderful strategist, adds, "We have absolute confidence in our superiority to the Russians. We have to win and therefore we will win. It is very simple."
And the silent Lieutenant General Ludendorff, a hero of Liége, says shortly, "We will manage it."
When the dinner is over and it is drawing near to eleven o'clock, you get ready to go, for you have heard that around midnight Von Hindenburg generally has "something to do." It is said that he works hardest at that hour. And as you leave the quiet house, it dawns upon you that the little threads of wiresleading out from the windows connect with different army corps headquarters and that somewhere to the east under the Russian night gigantic armies are advancing and that the officers with whom you have been talking so peacefully, are the leaders of these armies and that the thing they are making is called The History of the World.
I have seen the likeness of Hindenburg a thousand times. In Houthem, which is a little shell torn village where the Bavarians come to from the firing line in front of Ypres and get a few days' rest, I saw Von Hindenburg's photograph pasted on the window of the canteen. I have seen it in every big city in Germany; I dare say, it is in most houses. I was in the Winter Garden one night when a Berlin crowd went mad over an impersonation of the Field Marshal by one of the actors. The crowd thumped its beer steins on the backs of chairs and got up and cheered.
An American "movie man" finally induced Von Hindenburg to stand before a camera. He did it in a way that made you think of the old J. P. Morgan who wanted to smash every camera he saw. For only a few seconds did Hindenburg walk in front of the movie machine but when that picture was shown in a Berlin theater the audience broke into wild applause. Von Hindenburg is the big man in Germany to-day. As a popular idol he rivals the Kaiser. The Germans have a new war poem that you hear recited in the music halls. It tells of different German generals, heroes of the war, and it ends "but there is only one Hindenburg."
Idolof the people, colossus of the battlefield, Von Hindenburg goes quietly about his work, unconcerned with any of the popular clamor. It is said that one of his staff officers was in great indignation because a high order of war had been conferred upon a general who had not done any actual fighting or big battle-direction in the West. The loyal officer mentioned this to Hindenburg and the old warrior said, "I don't care how many orders they give out, so long as they let me alone out here."
His task is to keep Russia from invading Germany. It is obviously a huge undertaking. It is a bigger job than is held by the head of the great corporation in the world. As with all popular figures, writers have romanced about Hindenburg. When the correspondents in Berlin couldn't get out to the front in the early part of this war, they made copy out of the first idea in sight. So they made a Cincinnatus out of Hindenburg. It pleased them to imagine him ill at his home, with the gout, when there came a special telegram from the Emperor ordering him to take charge of the army of East Prussia. They pictured him getting up from a sick bed, limping on a cane to an automobile and saving Germany. When you mention this to Hindenburg, he gets so red in the face that you think the blood vessels are going to burst and when he can speak, he roars, "Do I look like a sick man?"
Graduated from a military academy at sixteen, appointed to the infantry as a lieutenant before 1866, he fought in the war against Austria. He first cameto the attention of the eyes of the German army at the Battle of Königgrätz when with fifty of his men he charged an Austrian battery. A grape shot grazed his skull and he fell stunned. Lifting himself up, he saw that his men had gone on and had captured two of the Austrian guns. The other three field pieces were being dragged away by the Austrians. Staggering to his feet, young Von Hindenburg, his face streaming with blood, rallied his men and with a wave of his sword charged after the fleeing Austrians. On their heels for more than a mile, he finally attacked them, although outnumbered three to one, and captured them. For this he was decorated with the Red Eagle Order.
There came the Franco Prussian war. Von Hindenburg was now an Ober-Lieutenant. He came through the battles of Gravelotte and Sedan; he was in the siege of Paris and when LeBourget was stormed, the young officer led a charge—and they gave him the Iron Cross. From that time on his rise was rapid. A captain on the General Staff, then Major, so up through the grades of the Chief of Staff of the Eighth Army Corps to the Commander of the Fourth Army Corps to a General of Infantry, which high office he held until 1911.
During the period of his retirement which came in 1911, he began to study the farm lands of East Prussia socketed with the lakes and swamps. This was to be the battleground of an inevitable war with Russia. He began to study the region until he knew every square mile by heart from Königsberg on theBaltic down through the network of lakes south of Tannenberg. On paper he fought there a thousand different campaigns. It is said that he became almost fanatical on the subject. In his classes at the War Academy where he was an instructor he became known as The Old Man of the Swamps. He used to go round Berlin with a folder of maps, and any officer whom he could buttonhole, he drew him aside and talked of the Masurian lakes. He became so obsessed with this subject that officers fled at his approach. They began to call him Swampy Hindenburg. But as he rose in rank and as he commanded troops during the maneuvers in East Prussia, the General Staff realized that Hindenburg knew the country.
There came a day when Von Hindenburg was appointed umpire of a big maneuver in East Prussia. The Army of the Red—so the story runs—was commanded by the German Emperor, opposing him was the Army of the Blue. The sham battle ended rather undecisively. The Emperor and all the lesser generals met in the center of the field at the Grosse Kritic to hear the criticisms of umpire Von Hindenburg. Hindenburg was unmerciful. He tore the reputation of the General of the Blues to tatters. He demonstrated that this officer had made the grossest blunders. For half an hour in unsparing language Hindenburg, who had his own ideas about how every battle in East Prussia should be fought, criticized the General. It occurred to the Emperor that Von Hindenburg was concentrating his criticism upon theArmy of the Blue and that he had said nothing whatever about the Army of the Red, which the Kaiser himself commanded. The Kaiser asked Von Hindenburg about this, remarking that it was noticeable that nothing had been said about his army and adding that for the benefit of all the officers the Army of the Red should also be criticized. Von Hindenburg continued to say nothing about it. Again the Emperor asked him.
"Your Majesty," Von Hindenburg said bluntly, "I deliberately refrained from criticizing your army. That is why I took the leader of the Blues so severely to task. For if I had been he, with his opportunities, I would have driven Your Majesty's troops into the Baltic Sea."
The Emperor concealed his displeasure. Presently Von Hindenburg was retired. Though retired, Von Hindenburg managed to obtain a detachment of grumbling troops from Königsberg and led them down into the Masurian swamp region to work out his problems. He would insist upon the cannon being pulled through the muddiest parts of the lake district and when they became mired fast it always seemed to please him. After several days he would bring the exhausted soldiers and horses and muddy guns back to Königsberg where the officers would tell each other that the "old man" was quite mad.
In those few years Von Hindenburg got the reputation for being a bore. All he would talk about was the swamps. They even say in Berlin that he would pour the blackest of beer on a table top to indicateswamp water, and then would work out a military problem during his dinner. Absurd exaggerations obviously, but still there must have been some basis for it. One day one of those members of the Reichstag who believe that all a country has to do is to make money, proposed that the Masurian lakes be filled in, and that the ground be given over to intensive farming. Von Hindenburg read the news that night in Posen and caught a train for Berlin. He was in a rage. Fill in his pet lakes and swamps!Unglaublich!Not to be thought of! They say he went to see the Emperor about it, that he brought with him all his maps and battlelines.
They say that he told the Emperor that if Masurenland was filled in it would be the greatest military crime in the history of the German nation. He did not go away until the Emperor promised that the swamps should remain.
Then came the war. The Russians were mobilized. They were on the frontier. The Old Man of the Swamps offered his services to the Emperor. He was a retired general, though. The Emperor had his regular generals to the army of East Prussia. There was General von Prittwitz, for instance. The Russians got into East Prussia. General von Prittwitz was soon deposed. Everybody in military Germany knows that through the blunders of certain high officers the small army that the Germans had in the field against Russia early in August was very nearly annihilated. I personally know of one atrocious blunderwhen a single unsupported cavalry division was sent from Insterburg to rescue a Landwehr division that was outnumbered eight to one by the Russians. The cavalry knew that there was so few that they could do nothing. Still the orders were to go and they had to go. Such was the campaign of East Prussia.
The Emperor went to Moltke, then his Chief of Staff. The Emperor said that the German troops in East Prussia were not being handled properly. He demanded another general. Moltke named one man after another and the Emperor shook his head. Moltke was at the end of his list. "Is there no one else you can recommend?" asked the Emperor.
"There is one man, Your Majesty, but, knowing your feelings in the matter, I have purposely refrained from mentioning his name."
"Who is he?" asked the Emperor quickly.
"Von Hindenburg," replied Moltke.
"It is not to be thought of," declared the Emperor.
But the Emperor went away to think it over. Like a vast tidal wave the Russians were breaking over his beloved East Prussia. The Emperor turned it over in his mind. There could be no delay. He sent a laconic message to Moltke. "Appoint Von Hindenburg."
So they took Cincinnatus away from the plow.
"I was not sick in bed," says Von Hindenburg in telling about the summons. "I was just sitting at the table having coffee when this important telegramcame. Ludendorff my Chief of Generality had been summoned from Belgium and he came by special train."
And then began the ride to the East Prussian front traveling all the night in one of the high powered army automobiles discussing as he went the position of the troops. Von Hindenburg and Ludendorff arrived at the place that had been chosen as headquarters and he took command of the Army of the East. You know what happened, you know how the Russian invasion poured in across East Prussia, past the Masurian lakes in a semi-circle from Tilsit southwards.
You know that Hindenburg elected to give battle on a field that was four times as large as Sedan. Back of the German line Hindenburg and his staff were watching the big maps. Like a great pair of tongs his soldiers were closing in from north and south. When they had surrounded the Russians, Von Hindenburg would order the battle begun, not before. Field telephones buzzed, the telegraph clicked, the staff officers were ever changing the positions on the big maps, the black lines, signifying the German soldiers were ever drawing closer together. Soon the Russians would be surrounded. And then an aeroplane with black iron crosses painted under its wings dropped down out of the clouds and landed in front of Hindenburg's headquarters. And its observer dashed up to report, "The enemy is surrounded!"
"Begin the battle," ordered Hindenburg.
And over the field telephones went the commandsand the awful slaughter of Tannenberg began—that battle of which historians will write as one of the great conflicts of the world. Back into the lakes and swamps that he knew so well, that he had fought so hard to save from the Reichstag, Von Hindenburg drove the Russians. Whole regiments slowly sank in the ooze and disappeared from sight. By regiments the soldiers of the Czar were driven into the soft bottomed lakes and shifting sands of Masurenland. And behind the line, Hindenburg, who knew every square mile of that country and knowing the topography almost to every tree, could tell the German troops exactly what to do. And from his headquarters the command would go by telephone to the General in the field.
I think it will not be until after this war is over that the world will know in detail what happened at Tannenberg. Von Hindenburg's strategy has jealously been hidden by the German General Staff. Not a single military attaché of a neutral country has been able to learn it. All one knows is that the Old Man of the Swamps drove the Russians into the swamps and that they perished by the thousands.
All I know of the battle of Tannenberg is this. I learned it while at dinner with an officer of Von Eichorn's staff.
"Oh, yes," he said quickly, "I was in the battle of Tannenberg. Some of our officers went insane. You see we drove the Russians back into the swamps and as they felt themselves sinking they threw away their guns and put up their hands, clutching at theair in their death throes. We were coming up to make them prisoners when some of them fired on us. So we turned the machine guns on them," he paused. "I guess it is better that we did. For they were in the swamps and slowly sinking to their death. All night you could hear their cries and the horses made worse screams than the men. It was terrible. Four of my brother officers went out of their minds simply from hearing the shrieks."
An intolerant old warrior who cares not what the newspapers say in his praise, who is bored with the thousands of letters and presents that are being sent him from all parts of Germany, who when this war is over has not the slightest desire to become Minister of War—Field Marshal von Hindenburg is a military genius with a kind German heart in spite of his grim exterior, fond of a glass of good wine and a good story, but accomplishing both work and play in the fascination of strategical study.
But what amazed me more than anything else about Von Hindenburg is the way he is regarded by official military circles in Germany. I knew that to the mass of people and soldiers he is a hero; they think him a military genius of almost divine inspiration. I mentioned this fact one night to a captain in the Great General Staff.
"Oh, yes," he said, "Von Hindenburg is a great general. He has had his opportunity. If he were killed to-morrow there is another general ready to step in and carry on the same work. And if that general were to be killed there is still another. Icould mention five or six. You see Von Hindenburg, great man that he is, is simply a cog in a machine. A very great cog, to be sure, but then, don't you see, it is not a single individual that counts but the whole machine. If we lose a part of the machine it is replaced. It is very simple. I know General von Hindenburg and I know that all this talk about him, all this fuss, this idea of asking him, a super man, is very distasteful to him."
Von Hindenburg, only the part of a system! The real hero of Germany then must be the composite of a myriad of remarkably efficient units of which Von Hindenburg is a single element in the war machine of such consummate ability that he seems to stand alone.
A gray morning crept up somewhere beyond the Russian plains and in the half light, the church tower and housetops of Gleiwitz loomed forbiddingly against the dreary sky. A butcher was opening his store as our droschky clattered down the cobbled streets of the old Silesian town. The horses' hoofs echoed loudly; only a few stragglers were on the streets. Coming to a square, massive building of yellowish brick—you instantly had the impression that Gleiwitz had grown up around it. We saw a blue coated soldier standing on the steps.
"Where is the American Hospital?" we asked him.
He stared at us in a puzzled way and, using that German expression which seems to fit any situation: "Ein Augenblick" (in a minute), he proceeded to give our driver elaborate instructions. Off we rattled, down another vista of gray cobbles and squat gray houses, and presently we stopped before a clean-looking house of stucco, before which paced a soldier in the long dark gray coat of theLandsturm.
"Where is the American Hospital?" we asked.
It was too much for the soldier; he called for help. Help came in the person of a stout, florid-faced officerwith flowing gray mustache. To him we put the same question, and his face lighted.
"You want Doctor Sanders,Gut, Gut!"
And climbing into our droschky, his sword hanging over the side, close to the wheel, he told us all about the part Gleiwitz was playing in this war, while the cobbled streets rang to the beat of the horses' hoofs. We learned that we were way down in the southeastern corner of Germany, not far from that frontier point where three empires touch; we learned that every night if the wind was good they could hear in Gleiwitz the distant rumble of cannon.
And he was telling us those things when we saw coming down the sidewalk, a familiar color. It was the olive drab of the United States army, and under a brown, broad-brimmed campaign hat, we saw a round, serious face.
"That looks like our man," Poole said to me. A few nights ago Dr. Sanders had been described to Poole and me, and we had come here to see what he and his American outfit were doing down close to the Russian frontier. It was indeed our man, and when he saw us, the serious face broke into a broad grin.
"They telegraphed me you were coming—mighty glad to see you." And Charles Haddon Sanders, whom, if you went to Georgetown University, you knew as "Sandy," climbed into the droschky.
"Gosh, it's good to see an American. What news have you got?" And Dr. Sanders' merry eyes twinkled. "How about it—come on, loosen up! You must have left the States a month after I did." Alook of concern clouded his chubby face, and I wondered what worrisome thing was on his mind. "Say," he said, "you're a baseball fan, aren't you?" When I told him I was, he seemed relieved. "Tell me," he begged then, "Walter Johnson didn't sign up with the Feds, did he? I have a hospital in Washington, you know, and whenever Griff's boys are home, I am out there at the park, pulling hard."
And this was the first thing one heard in a city of war! The puffy, mustached sanitation officer bid us good day; the droschky moved on. All the way down the old cobbled streets of dreary Gleiwitz, Dr. Sanders kept talking baseball; not once did the subject of the war come up. I wondered if he were avoiding it as long as possible; later when you learned what he had seen, you could not blame him. Presently our droschky drew up in front of a rather shady-looking café. It had all the appearance of being the Maxim's of Gleiwitz, a sordid place, reflecting all the sordid dreariness of the town. Wondering why the doctor was getting out here—he had not seemed that sort—he said that this was as far as we went. I looked again at the place. It was a gray-stoned building, on the corner of a café, then a hotel entrance, then a gateway. I followed him through this gateway and we came into a cobbled inner court facing a wing of the building that appeared to be a theater; at least the sign over the door read, "Victoria Theater." By now I had begun to guess it, and when a blue-coated GermanLandwehropened the theater door, I was quite sure.
"Doctor,I suppose you have your office here," I remarked.
He laughed outright. "Office," he said, "this is my hospital."
And I thought of the place, the café, the hotel, the entire building of which this was a part. He must have known what was passing through my mind.
"I know," he remarked, "I felt the same way when I first saw it. It seemed funny, putting a hospital next to a rough house like that. But it was the only place they had left. By the time we got here, every school and public building in the town was filled with the wounded."
As we entered the lobby of the theater I saw that it had been transformed into a corridor for convalescents. The stench of iodoform assailed you. Four German soldiers, their arms or legs bandaged, were sitting at a rough board table drinking beer, which you perceived, as a waiter appeared with a tray full of steins, came by way of a connecting passageway from the café next door.
"Better that they drink the beer here than water," remarked the doctor. "We've had some typhoid and cholera cases in Gleiwitz." Now the utterance of that word cholera has a magical effect. In the war zone it can completely spoil your day; no doubt Dr. Sanders must have noticed my uneasiness, for he hastened to add: "There's no danger; we've got all those patients isolated outside this building, and if you haven't had an injection of cholera toxin, I'll give you one."
Reassured,I ventured further into the building, and pushing back a swinging door, I saw opened up before me a strange picture. Imagine a theater, its walls washed white, its orchestra stripped of chairs and in their places row after row of hospital cots; a curtain of fireproofed steel, hid the stage, from it hanging the white flag with the red cross, and beside it the stars and stripes and the red, white and black; imagine the boxes filled with rough, hastily made wooden tables where nurses sat making out their reports, a theater where instead of an overture, you heard groans and sometimes a shriek from one of the white cots.
"The soldier is only having a nightmare," Dr. Sanders explained. "They come in here sometimes not having slept for three days and they go off asleep for hours and hours—you wonder how long you can put off dressing their wounds to let them sleep—getting these nightmares every once in a while, and yelling out that the Russians are after them. Nearly every soldier who has a nightmare yells that same thing, queer, because none of them fear the Russians at all."
Suggesting that we would come back to see the ward more thoroughly, Dr. Sanders led us through the lobby and into what appeared to be a cloakroom. Only now the coat racks were half concealed by huge packing cases marked "American Red Cross," and leaning against the wall you saw two brown stretchers of the United States army; and on the floor army sterilizer chests, while all around shelves had beenbuilt holding supplies and medical books. You noticed an operating table in the center of the room and in a corner a little stand for anesthetics.
"This is our operating room," smiled the doctor; "you never saw one like it before, did you? Neither did I. But for our purposes it fills the bill."
In the lobby we met two boyish surgeons, one, Spearmin, tall, angular and competent-looking; the other, Stem, a University of Maryland man who was preparing for a surgeonship in the United States army when he got the chance to go to the war zone, and, boy-like, went. Spearmin and Stem handle the wounded. Sanders does the executive work.
"We get plenty of work to do," Doctor Spearmin told me, "and you want to do everything for those fellows that you can. They are the pluckiest lot of men I ever saw. They stand pain better than most of the average hospital cases that I had in Baltimore."
Later we were to learn more of those men stretched their length on the white cots, and the way they stood pain, but Dr. Sanders had a dressing to make upstairs, in a cloakroom once used for the patrons of the balcony. Now it was Antechamber of Death. As we climbed the stairs, the doctor explained: "We keep our most serious cases up here. Whenever we feel we have to put a man in this room, he generally dies. We've only lost six men, though, and we've had five hundred cases, some of them shockingly wounded."
You caught the undernote of pride in the doctor's voice, a sensing of which you had felt at the hospital's very door. Pride seemed to be in the air; you read itin the faces of the nurses; the younger doctors, Stem and Spearmin, showed it, pride because they had turned the one notorious resort of Gleiwitz into an American hospital. And, it is significant—and it was a German officer who told me this—into a hospital of such efficiency that the German Sanitary Authorities always ordered that the worst cases be sent to Dr. Sanders and his assistants; this with thirteen other military hospitals in Gleiwitz.
But I was wondering if the other patients, the men in the orchestra, had come to know what the little room upstairs meant, and if they had heard the cry from that Austrian's bed, and if so, what their thoughts were, if they had all thanked the Almighty for their lesser plights. You felt they had.
"Come on, now," suggested the doctor, "we'll go and talk to some of the patients. Sister Anna can speak German."
Sister Anna you discovered to be a resourceful-looking woman of middle age, dressed in Red Cross gray. She was sitting at a table reading "Alice in Wonderland," and she said that she had spent the last ten years in New York at the Lying-in-hospital. Her capable manner impressed you, and when Dr. Sanders whispered: "She was the best supervisor on the Red Cross boat that brought us all over, and I was mighty lucky to get her," you agreed with him. She was walking on ahead between the rows of blue gingham-covered cots and presently she stopped before one at the end of the line. It is a part of the German hospital system to have a metal sign-board on a postbehind each hospital bed, and upon this we saw printed the soldier's name, a private, Kaiser, of the 148th Infantry. His wife was sitting beside his bed, a rosy-cheeked woman who recalled one of our middle Western farm girls. Quiet and calm, satisfied that her husband was in the best of hands, she smiled thankfully at Sister Anna and the doctor. Her husband was wounded in both the arm and leg and oddly enough by the same bullet, which, with a little smile, he picked up from a bed table to show us.
"It entered his arm above the elbow," explained the doctor, "went clean through, hit an electric torch in his pocket, glanced off that and went into his thigh. It was an interesting case. On the other side of his thigh, I found the wound of exit. Imagine my surprise when in a few days I discovered that the bullet was still in his leg, and that the exit wound had been made by a piece of bone breaking through."
It seemed that Private Kaiser could understand a little English, and he nodded eagerly. We asked him some questions, and it developed he had been a school teacher in Hamburg.
"I was wounded near Brounsberg in East Prussia," he told us. "It was towards evening, almost dark, and not thinking the Russians could see us, we got up to dig a trench. I was alone, way off at the end of the line when I was shot. It did not hurt me much when the bullet hit me. It took me off my feet, though I spun around twice before I fell. No one saw me and I lay on the ground for ten minutes. Then I was able to get up, and I walked away to thehospital. How I did it I can't tell you, but all at once my strength seemed to come back."
"Probably nervous shock made him helpless," explained the doctor in an undertone, "and when that passed he was able to help himself a bit."
We were going down the line of beds, talking to another patient, when the doctor said it was time for lunch, and that we might visit the patients again in the afternoon. Two of the nurses—there are fourteen American girls at Gleiwitz—walked back with us. I asked one of them, a young Boston girl, why she had come to the war.
"I don't know," she said. "I had made my application for a Red Cross nurse, and I was ready to go to Mexico. Then I got word that they wanted nurses in Europe, so I packed up and came along on twenty-four hours' notice.
"What I've seen of the war here, though," she said, "is not half so terrible as it was in the English Channel. We were on the coast of France one morning when I happened to see a big round thing in the water. I thought it was a mine, and I guess I screamed. Then I thought it was a dummy, but it wasn't that, it was a body, and there were six other bodies, all sailors from those English ships that the submarine blew up. Isn't there some way I could go back home without going through the English Channel? I can't bear thinking of seeing anything like that again."
I told her she could probably take a steamer at Naples or Copenhagen, and she seemed greatly relieved—shewho had seen mangled men without a flicker of her nerves. Presently she left us to cross what was evidently the aristocratic street of the town.
"They are going over to a little club—the city club," explained the doctor; "that's where we take our meals. We'll go to my room first, though, if you like, before dinner."
Modestly the doctor spoke of his room, but to our surprise he stopped in front of one of the few imposing-looking houses in Gleiwitz. It was one of those venerable places which makes you think that the man who lives there must about own the other inhabitants body and soul. Occupying about four hundred feet, corner frontage, towering amid symmetrical lawns and flower beds, guarded by a ten-foot iron fence, the old-fashioned house stood back like a castle.
"Nothing like it," said the doctor with a smile. "It belongs to one of the richest men in Silesia. He's at the front, in France. He's a captain, by the way, just won the Iron Cross. His wife is in Berlin for the winter, so we're here, Spearmin, Stem and myself, with ten servants to wait on us, and the best of everything for the asking. Not bad, eh?"
While we were listening to a baseball story of the doctor's, we took in the luxurious appointments of his room. Then you thought of the makeshift hospital and how topsy-turvy war turns everything. From his valise, the doctor produced a Russian bayonet, hat and cartridge belt.
"They cost me two marks," he said, "for the whole outfit. I bought them from the driver of an Austrianammunition wagon. Have a cartridge?" and he passed the belt as one might pass a box of candy. They were ugly-looking bullets, not as pointed as the Germans'. The bayonet also was uglier, curved like an old-fashioned saber.
"It's no good alongside the German bayonet, though," explained Dr. Sanders; "that's longer and straighter. You ought to hear how some of the wounded over at the hospital talk about their bayonets. One fellow was telling me the other day that he had ripped it through the stomachs of three Russians." And even the doctor, hardened to such things, made a grimace.
After a luncheon, where, like the father of a large family, the doctor sat at the head of a long table with his nurses and assistants around him, everybody asking if the Christmas mail from the States had come, we returned to the hospital. We found great excitement. Two officers had been there, the orderly explaining that one was the sanitation commander of all hospitals at Gleiwitz, and that the other was Captain Hoffman of the garrison. What did they want? The orderly didn't know, but it must have been something very important, for they had told him to say to Dr. Sanders that they would return in half an hour, and for him please to be there, whereupon the orderly, to my amazement, looked at me a little suspiciously; indeed, his eyes followed me into the lobby.
"What's the matter with that chap?" I asked the doctor.
"Oh, he's spy crazy," replied Dr. Sanders; "yousee, they caught two Russians here the other day, and the captain he speaks of presided at the trial. They put the spies up against the wall of that old barn over there. We could hear the shooting."
The doctor's tone was so casual that you concluded spy-killing to be commonplace at Gleiwitz.
"Come down here a second," continued the doctor. "I want you to take a look at a couple of patients."
As you walked between the cots you were conscious of the gaze of the wounded turned hopefully on this business-like American. Of the peasant class nearly all the soldiers seemed to regain hope at the sight of him. So it was with the two boys off in a corner by themselves. They were rather slender fellows, amazingly young, with mischievous faces. "They live next door to each other," said the doctor, "in a little village in Schleswig-Holstein. The one on the left had a bullet in his brain, the other had his arm fractured by a piece of shrapnel."
"How old are they?"
"The boy who had the bullet in his brain," said the doctor, "is not yet seventeen; the other is a few months older."
They met you with a bold smile, fun darting from their mischievous eyes, like American boys might smile at a foreigner. You saw that they wore the clean, light blue jackets that mark every patient of the American Red Cross, but you thought of the dirty, gray-green uniforms and how long these boys had lain before they were picked up. And then, like many youngsters you see in the first classes of a high school,they became self-conscious, giggling like girls at a first party, and you thought of them at war; and a shuddery sensation came over you.
"You think it's terrible, don't you?" he said. "Wait a minute."
He beckoned Sister Anna, and she joined us.
"Sister Anna," he said, "ask that boy with the brain wound to tell the story that he told me the other day."
Sister Anna's manner was reluctant, and you doubt that she wanted to hear that story again. But she put the request in German, and instantly the eyes of the little fellow grew bright.
"We were near Iwangorod," he began. "Max and I were on outpost duty and got cut off from our regiment. Night came and we started back to find them. We were passing through a little village, just five or six houses, when somebody shot at us." He paused, turning, as if for confirmation, to the other bed, where Max, half sitting up, nodded eagerly. "We'll fix them, Max," I said, "and we ran behind a house, so they couldn't shoot again. Then all lights in the windows went out—every light in the village. I was glad there was no moon. We got some wood, a lot of it. We fixed it in piles beside every house. We broke into a cellar and stole some oil. We emptied the oil on the wood, then we lit it, and ran to the next house, and lit it there." His eyes were burning feverishly. "Pretty soon we had the whole village on fire, didn't we, Max?"
"Ja! Ja!" cried Max, from the other bed.
And you realized that they were suddenly boys no longer, that their faces had reddened in a hectic way, and that into their young minds had come the frightful insanity of war. With a sickening feeling you turned from them, and going away, thought that only last July, back in that Holstein village, they doubtless had been playing the games that German boys play; then you heard Max cry out:
"And when we get better, Doctor, we're going back and each kill a hundred Russians!" And with his white hands you saw the boy lunge as though already he could hear the ripping steel.... What if you were his father?
"There are many like that—eager to get out of bed and back to the front," said the doctor. "Not so young, of course, but they all want another chance at the game; that is, all but the older men. You ought to have been here the other day. Count Talleyrand-Perigord was here. He's the nephew of the great diplomat, French descent of course. The Count has an estate near here. He's a young chap. He's been simply splendid to us. I guess he never did very much work before; you can imagine how a young man of his position spends his time. When the war broke out he volunteered for the Red Cross, and they made him a sort of a personal escort for me, to see that everything goes right over here. He spends his entire time with us. He watches all the operations, is intensely interested, asks all sorts of questions about them, and goes with me from bed to bed, asking the men what they want, doing everythinghe can for them. I tell you it quite surprised me, a young man of his position, in the French nobility, bucking right down to things. Count Szechenyi, you know, who married Gladys Vanderbilt; he's stationed over just across the Austrian border. He came up the other day to see Count Talleyrand and they dropped in here in the afternoon to visit the patients. I had expected something different from Count Szechenyi. You know what that Austrian count is. But he was just as democratic as if he had been a private in the ranks."
While talking, the doctor had been crossing the theater until he came to a side wall exit door that opened out on what appeared to be a promenade. It was glassed in, like a sun parlor and looked out on what had been a cheap beer-garden. Along one wall we saw a row of muddy brown and black boots. On the floor were piles of uniforms, German, Russian and Austrian, and knapsacks, drilled and nicked with bullets. Kicking over a filthy bundle of field gray, I saw that it was slashed.
"We had to cut most of the uniforms off the wounded," explained the doctor. "Most of them we have thrown out—we had to. If you could only have seen what those men looked like when they were brought in! We get them from the field hospital. This is the first hospital behind the lines, and when they are well enough to be moved, they are sent on to better quarters, further into Germany, but the way those fellows looked. Think of it, some of them had not had their uniforms off for three months. Whenwe took off one man's boot, we found a blood clot two inches thick on the sole of his foot. It had run down from a wound on his leg. Why, some of those men were five days on the battlefield before they were found. One or two were out of their minds. You cannot conceive the horror of it! Later, I'm going to get one of those fellows to tell you his story."
The time had swiftly passed and as we came back into the theater, we saw two gray-cloaked German officers, and at their heels the orderly. They seemed very much excited, and I was sure now that they were going to ask the doctor if he was positive that I was not an English spy. It was something more exciting, though. They conversed in German, and I caught the words, "Eisener Kreuz."
"What a piece of luck!" the doctor exclaimed; "one of my patients has been awarded the Iron Cross, and Captain Hoffman of the Gleiwitz garrison has come to make the presentation."
We walked then to the bedside of a mild-looking man, who, you learned, wasLandwehr, private Grabbe of the second Stralsund. A bulkiness to his leg under the covers showed where he had been wounded, and when he saw the gray-coated officers, a question leaped in his quiet eyes. You wondered if he knew and how many days he had lain there doubting and dreaming if ever they would come. The Captain strode towards him, held out his hand, and said, "I congratulate you." You followed the soldier's eyes as they watched the Captain's hands reach into his coat pocket and draw from it the band of black andwhite ribbon from which dangled the coveted cross. Without a word the Captain fastened it to the second button of the man's hospital jacket and stepping back, saluted him. You saw the soldier pick up the cross in both hands, stare at it a moment, while his eyes filled a little, and then his mild face turning wonderfully happy, he awkwardly expressed his thanks. As the last stammered word was spoken there burst from all the wounded a huzza. The nurses applauded and, overwrought, the soldier tried to sit upright in bed and bow his thanks. He had half succeeded when we saw him wince, and Dr. Sanders made him lie down. The congratulations over, we left him calling for pencil and paper, for at once he must write home about it. And you wondered how much you would have given could that one minute of this soldier's life be included in your own.
"Wait till I tell you what the fellow did," said the doctor, after the officers had bowed themselves away, "It is one of the duties of theLandwehr, you know, to guard the railroads. Late in October, when the Germans were retreating from their lines outside Warsaw, they had to hold the railroads to the last. This man's commander was ordered to hold back the Russians from a little railroad depot. Private Grabbe was given ten men and a machine gun and posted by a little house near the station. He had to keep back an overwhelming number of Russians until an entire battalion was on the train, and then with the little detail make a run for it, Well, as the Russianscame in great force, his comrades retreated and left him there alone.
"As I told you, men get crazy in battle. Grabbe did not know that he was alone. He stuck by that machine gun, wounded and alone, mowing down the Russians until the whole German battalion—twelve hundred men—had withdrawn. Still he stuck to that machine gun, slaughtering them so, that by George! the Russians retreated. Grabbe's commander came up presently and asked him where the other men were. Grabbe said he didn't know and then the Commander saw that he was wounded."
Outside a violin began to play, and Dr. Sanders explained that often the local talent dropped in to entertain the wounded. The music continued and we went from bed to bed hearing the different stories; then the music stopped, and in a clear, though childishly quavering voice, a girl began a recitation in the lobby outside. Before he came to Gleiwitz, Dr. Sanders didn't know two German words. Now, as he told me, he knows three. Consequently, as the girl spoke on and the faces of all the wounded suddenly became grim, the doctor wondered why. Then here and there a man began repeating the girl's words, others, too weak to speak, following her words with moving lips. Higher and higher quavered her voice; and suddenly I recognized what she was saying. Before I could tell the doctor, though, she swept into a climax, to fierce "Jawohls" from the lips of the wounded.
"I don't know what you're saying," shouted Dr. Sanders, rushing into the lobby, "but stop it. It excites these patients."
He saw that I was grinning, and asked what the joke was. "It's on me, what was that girl speaking?"
"A new poem," I told him. "The name is: 'Murderous England.'"
"So that's it, eh?" And he went up to the girl, whose hair was braided down her back and whose cheap, bright pattern dress came barely below her knees.
"Now, little girl," he said, "when you want to come round to the hospital to entertain the prisoners, you learn how to speak 'Mary Had a Little Lamb' or something. Get Sister Anna to teach it to you!" And patting the child on the head, Dr. Sanders gave her a ten-pfennig piece, and asked her who had taught her the poem.
"Meine Mutter," replied the child.
We then sat in the lobby for two hours, buying beer for the convalescents and listening to their stories. One man told us how, with two hundred soldiers, he had hid in a Russian barn, and that a shrapnel shell flying through the window had exploded, killing and wounding nearly every one in his company. Another told how he had been on outpost duty with seven other men, and that the Russians had begun machine gun fire at night. All his comrades were either killed or wounded, and he said that although he was only wounded in the arm, he did not dare to get up becausethe Russians maintained a steady fire for four hours, and that all he could do was to hug the ground with the bullets whizzing over him, knowing that he was growing weaker and weaker every moment. Another had a most interesting experience. While in a shallow trench, he had been hit in the arm and in the leg. The hospital corps got him. The stretcher bearers were taking him back, when suddenly it got too hot for them, and they had to drop him and run for cover. The firing ceased, and, seeing he was alone, the soldier crawled over to a dead German and picked up his rifle. He was half sitting with this in his lap, when he saw some Russians coming. He raised the gun and they ran, and then he discovered they were hospital men. He was cursing his luck, when one of his comrades, a little fellow, who had come back to find him, discovered him. They traveled back to the German lines at intervals of ten minutes, the little fellow having to put him down to rest every so often. Then the doctor began to tell me something about the wounds he had seen as the result of this war.
"What I marvel at is," said Dr. Sanders, "that a man can go into the battleline and come out alive. The amount of lead and steel that is sent flying through the air is appalling. Of course we will not have any statistics on it until after the war is over, but everything I can learn from the wounded, and from the nature of their wounds—and I have men here hit five times—they must be using far, far more ammunition, proportionately of course, than in any war in the world's history. By the way, judgingfrom my patients, the Russians cannot be using dum-dums. I have yet to find one in a man. For every three rifle ball wounds, we get two caused by shrapnel and about one quarter by fragments of bursting shells. We had a man who was hit by a piece of shell—and those fragments are terribly hot. It cut his throat to his ear, but it just stopped at the sheath of the artery. His life was saved by the minute distance. The Germans have the greatest confidence in us here. We have one man here who might have been sent on to another hospital five weeks ago. We didn't send him, though. It was almost a form of paranoia and honestly I dreaded sending that man away. I feared the nervous shock. Doctors who come from the front tell me that they have actually seen cases of men being killed, who only had a bullet wound in their hand. It was the nervous shock that killed them.