There were autos with knife-blades attachedPage 32"THERE WERE AUTOS WITH ... RAZOR-EDGED KNIFE-BLADES ATTACHED"
Page 32"THERE WERE AUTOS WITH ... RAZOR-EDGED KNIFE-BLADES ATTACHED"
Page 32
"THERE WERE AUTOS WITH ... RAZOR-EDGED KNIFE-BLADES ATTACHED"
The author and his escorting officer starting for the frontPage 32CAPTAIN D'A—— AND THE AUTHOR. (STARTING FOR THEFRONT FROM THE FRONT OF THE HOTEL AT EPERNAY)
Page 32CAPTAIN D'A—— AND THE AUTHOR. (STARTING FOR THEFRONT FROM THE FRONT OF THE HOTEL AT EPERNAY)
Page 32
CAPTAIN D'A—— AND THE AUTHOR. (STARTING FOR THE
FRONT FROM THE FRONT OF THE HOTEL AT EPERNAY)
We climbed rapidly out of Epernay, up a long very steep grade, flanked as far as the eye could reach by vineyards, in which peasant women, old men and boys were busily harvesting the raw material for future "Secs," "Extra drys," and "Bruts." Our bellowing military motor-siren drove most of the heavy two-wheeled peasant's carts hastily toward the gutter to give us passage. Every now and then some cart's fantastic creakings would drown our clamor, and then as we finally forced our way past, the soldier-chauffeur would launch some terse but terrific imprecations at the driver. At the end of the ascent we cutloose along the broad turnpike which ran through a forest across the top of a wide plateau. Sprinkled all along the highway were uniformed "territorials" working at road repair.
"It is of extreme military importance to keep all these lines of communication in first-class condition," explained Captain F——. "It is not so romantic to mend a road as to mend a trench, but it is just as necessary."
By rights we ought now to have started our routine of courtesies by calling on General Franchet d'Esperey, commanding the 5th Army, the first of whose five army corps we were about to visit. For the amenities of a trip to the front require that in theory the stranger should pay his prearranged respects to all those in command from the General of the Army, through the General of the Army Corps, down through the General of Division, to the Colonel of the Regiment he happens to be visiting. Andpracticein this matter sticks uncommonly close to theory. Charming though it is to meet these courteous, highly intelligent and often illustrious men, it is impossible not to feel that the amount of time devoted to such visits ofceremony is quite out of proportion to the very limited time allowed the average visitor to the front. It is not the actual ten or fifteen minutes spent in conversation with these hospitable gentlemen which eats up the time, but the fact that meetings with some of the busiest men in the world are necessarily definite appointments which must be very punctually kept. And four or five such appointments in the course of a day at places scores of miles apart necessarily tear that day to pieces.
However, General Franchet d'Esperey had suddenly been called out to an inspection of a certain part of the front, so we skipped the engagement which had been made with him, and motored on to call on the General in command of the Army Corps with which we found ourselves. In thesalonof a small château we were introduced, and conversed pleasantly for a few minutes. Then he assigned one of his staff-officers to accompany us to an observation point on the edge of the plateau from which he could give us a sweeping view of many miles of the front, and point out the interesting topographical features and the course of the trenches.
I was thus simultaneously accompanied by Captain d'A——, the staff-officer from the Paris War Office, by Captain F——, the staff-officer from the 5th Army, and by the staff-officer of the Army Corps.
Having explained to us the "lay of the land" and incidentally pointed out to us the sizable crater of a shell which a few days earlier had come within twenty yards of putting a definite end to this particular observation point, the last officer bade us good-bye. We climbed back into our motors, and made the steep, winding descent from the plateau, and raced over the long, straight road so well known to motor tourists of peaceful days, which leads to where in the distance the low roofs of Rheims can be seen, like some muddy tide washing the foot of the craglike cathedral. In Rheims, which the enemy had considerately stopped shelling an hour or so before our arrival, we had to go to the headquarters of the Colonel in Command. He was out, but had left a Major with instructions to show us to X——, a village about a kilometre from the outskirts of Rheims and immediately touching on the front trenches. We left our motors near theedge of the city and walked to where down the street ran a deep narrow ditch lying open, waiting for its sewer-pipes. "Climb in," said the Major. "Here's where the communicating trench begins." In we climbed and were led by the Major along a zigzag kilometre of trench until, fifteen minutes later, we climbed out again in the main street of X——. There the Major introduced us to the Captain at the moment in command of the battalion occupying the village. He became our guide through the rest of the afternoon, which we spent in the front trenches, and which is described in the following chapter.
Thus the War Department from Paris had notified the General Staff of the 5th Army that I was to make a three-day visit to that army. That General Staff had arranged a complete programme and had notified the staffs of the various Army Corps which I was to visit. The first of these Army Corps Staffs had decided that I was to visit the front before Rheims, and had so notified the Colonel. The Colonel had decided which particular portion of the front I was to visit before Rheims and had so notified the Captain. And the Captain in turnhad made up his mind which specific trenches I was to visit, and conducted me through them.
Thus far my programme had been more interesting but just as rigid as that of any of the correspondents' tours.
At the end of the afternoon in the trenches a minor example arose of the advantages which my special trip conferred.
As we returned to our motors in the outskirts of Rheims, I told d'A—— how keenly I wished to see the Rheims Cathedral.
"It is not on the programme," he answered; "but if you want to see it you certainly shall. It will get you back to Epernay pretty late, instead of at the hour arranged for, but that will not matter."
So we rolled through the streets of Rheims, where of the 110,000 original population 20,000 still live and carry on their daily life. The greater part of the city showed no signs whatever of the constantly repeated bombardments which it has sustained, save for the blocks on blocks of houses closed and with windows boarded up. But when we entered that portion lying to the east of the cathedral and toward the enemy, we passed through the fleshlessskeleton of a city. The house walls generally stood intact, but through the gaping windows one could see the nothingness that lay behind, where great shells had plunged downward through the roof, sweeping the whole interior, floor by floor, down into the cellar; or where smaller shells had gutted the interior by fire. Every now and then we would see a street completely blocked by a great barrier of rubble, where a whole house had been plucked out bodily from between its neighbors by some monstrous explosion and smashed to pieces on the pavement as you would smash an egg on the ground.
Then we came out into the great square before the cathedral, and looked up at its cliff-like façade.
I heaved a sigh of relief. I seemed to be looking at the same incredible beauty that I had looked at just over a year ago, when the world was still at peace. It is true that half the great rose window was empty of glass; that here and there stood statues headless or with chipped and mutilated limbs. But in the vast profusion of carvings on the façade these were almost lost. Gradually, however, the full tragedy bore in on me.
Have you ever seen an exquisite cameo face congested by drunkenness or disease so that it remains but a blurred and subtly bloated semblance of its former loveliness? If you have, you will know what has befallen the façade at Rheims. It stood away from the German guns so that not a shell hit it. But Fate and inefficiency left it covered with scaffolding which caught fire, and the towering blaze licked and licked so furiously at every sculptured angle, line and curve that in a few hours all those keenly chiselled outlines which the centuries themselves had only faintly mellowed, became flabby, blunt and indeterminate. One used at times to gaze at the façade through half-closed lids, so that no exquisite detail should distract from the swimming, hazy glory of the whole. That glory it still possesses, but to those who knew it in its earlier unmarred splendor it seems to stand, straining aloft, in patient martyrdom. A heavy barricade, built at a distance of some twenty yards, prevented entrance or even a close approach. As we stood counting the shrapnel scars on the horse of Jeanne d'Arc, which ended the myth that this statue had come through the whole bombardment miraculouslyuntouched, a little girl approached with a basket full of pieces of colored glass. These she offered for sale as fragments of the priceless stained glass of the cathedral. It required no expert to see that they were pitifully spurious. Thus huckstering makes pennies out of tragedy.
We departed silently, and leaving Captain F—— to return to his headquarters for the night, we were quickly speeding through the twilight on our way back to Epernay.
With the 5th French Army,Aug. 3(via Paris).
On the anniversary of the last day of the world's peace, the 365th day of the war, I stood in the darkness of a very advanced front trench.
A short section where I stood was roofed and bomb-proofed. Through a row of very narrow rifle-slits came little beams of daylight that rested in flecks on the white, chalky back of the trenches and were thrown up very faintly against the logs of the trench roof.
Very dimly, I could gradually make out a narrow plank standing-platform running along below the slits. A card was tacked to the wooden frame of each opening, bearing the name of the particular soldier to whom that opening belonged. Above each slit hung (or could hang) its owner's rifle in slings from the roof.
Every few yards, set in little recesses dug out from the back of the trench, stood fat bottles. They contained chemicals with which to soak the soldiers' mouth-coverings if attacked by poisoned gas.
The trench was nearly empty of men. But at the loophole nearest me stood the rigid figure of a soldier. His legs were invisible in the darkness. His body showed up vaguely. His face was brilliantly lighted by the thin blade of light through the rifle-slit. He stood silent and motionless, his eyes intently focussed out into the sunlight.
I looked through the next slit, through a spider's web of barbed wire, between stunted black posts, across two hundred yards of green grass and wild flowers, at another tangle of posts and barbed wire with a narrow furrow of white chalky soil running along just behind it—the German trenches.
Not a living thing was in sight in the sunny loneliness. There was silence except for the crack, crack, crack of striking bullets from inaudible German rifles. I looked back at the face of the "guetteur," the watcher. His eyes, fixed on the narrow white line, were puckeredwith intentness, but his lips were parted in an easy, good-humored smile, brightening a face young, clean-cut, alert, calm and very patient.
He seemed to symbolize the spirit of the new France, the France of endurance, of determination, of buoyancy, of patience, the stoic France that can keep silent and motionless, the France that can stand in the darkness undismayed, watching and waiting till the moment comes to leap up and out into the light.
Early that morning, from the window of a château on the edge of a high plateau, a young staff-officer had shown me the great plain of Champagne stretching away to the low hills on the horizon. Miles away lay Rheims, made to seem squatty by the cathedral which towered in its midst.
Across the green fields of the panorama, over swelling hills, disappearing into dark woods, reappearing at the other end, I saw two tiny lines of white like the aimless tracing of a child's slate-pencil on a slate. They ran on across the landscape, now drawn boldly forward, now swerving with indecision, now zigzagging with perplexity. Sometimes the child's pencil hadslipped and made short little lines at right angles. Sometimes the pencil had made three or four short starts parallel with each other before it finally got under way. Sometimes it had made a regular little maze of lines. But always the two white scratchings on the slate were drawn on and on till, wavering but always close abreast, the trenches of the two armies disappeared into the far distance.
Through powerful glasses the officer showed me little puffs of smoke floating up from the sunny, silent, peaceful landscape. They were from the exploding shells. To the right I saw a high cloud of smoke rising lazily into the air out of some woods. It was a house in the German lines fired by French shells. And, though the little puffs of smoke were only here and there on the landscape, everywhere I could see through the glasses the microscopic figures of peasants working busily in their fields, bringing in the harvest. Many were soldiers helping out, but very many were old men, boys and women. Again the scene seemed symbolical.
Behind the soldier watching in the bomb-proof were the innumerable tiny plodding figures, undaunted by the abrupt little puffs ofsmoke, doing their patient share toward bringing in the harvest.
In the château itself as I went down-stairs I passed a bedroom door with "Seine Koenigliche Hoheit" written across it in white chalk. The Duke of Brunswick had slept there at the high tide of the German advance. His staff had had their names chalked across various other doors, but few of them remained.
One by one they were being gradually scrubbed off. It was explained to me that these chalk marks were particularly hard to remove from wooden doors. But with patience it is being done.
The trip which I was taking to the French front had been most kindly arranged for me by the French Government as a special trip for my particular benefit. It had the advantage of enabling us to go into portions of the advanced trenches, where the larger parties could not go for fear of precipitating shelling by the Germans.
Our party consisted of a staff-officer from Paris, a staff-officer from army headquarters, Lincoln Eyre, whom the authorities had allowed me to ask along—and myself.
After leaving the château we got into two elephant-gray army motors with Remington carbines swung on their dashboards. The military chauffeurs tore along the road, which was in easy range of the German artillery, but which for some reason never was shelled.
As we whirled along we passed a variegated procession of vehicles. Now a high peasant cart carrying home the harvest; now a military motor-cyclist; now a motor-ambulance, with a pair of white feet showing through the back, and the wounded man lying on a stretcher slung from the roof by four straps to reduce jolts to a minimum; now a motor full of officers smoking cigarettes; now a cavalryman exercising an officer's mount.
Finally we stopped about a kilometre from a little village, which must be nameless. On leaving our motors we walked a little further along the road and then climbed down into a trench. This was about six feet deep and three feet wide, the bottom and sides of white, chalky soil. We pursued a serpentine course, but there was method in its meandering, for a straight vista of trench leading toward the enemy would be a splendid hunting-ground for bullets.
We had not gone far when I heard a sound like a boy cracking a toy whip. "A bullet striking near us," explained an officer ahead of me.
I found it almost impossible to tell the difference between the report of the French guns and the explosions of German shells. An officer told me that their time-table nickname for French gun reports was "départs" (departures), while that for the German shell explosions was "arrivées" (arrivals).
Of course if either gun or shell explosion or both is very near to you you can easily tell the difference, if there is enough of you left to tell anything.
We walked on with the toy whip cracking at every other step and "départs" and "arrivées" inviting guesswork as to which was which. We passed soldiers in shirt-sleeves, deepening and widening a communication trench. It was rather difficult to squeeze past them, but this very definitely emphasized the wonderful terms of discipline, yet the democratic friendliness, existing between the French officers and the men. The officers talked to the men intimately and placed their hands on the men'sshoulders affectionately in squeezing by. The men answered the officers easily, without restraint, but all stood at attention and smartly gave the salute, which they regarded as a dignity and not a degradation—a marvellous combination of discipline and democracy.
We finally climbed out of the trench at the first house of the little village, or rather of what had been a little village, for it was, on close view, nothing more than the aftermath of an earthquake. In actual fact it reminded me vividly of the walk I had taken through the remains of Messina after the last great earthquake.
Before entering the village I stood in the road looking through my field-glasses at a German war-balloon to my left. "Come along, come along," shouted one of the officers. "If you stand there you'll start the Germans shelling. You're in plain sight of them." Needless to say I came along.
There mass is still held eevry SundayPage 49"THERE MASS IS STILL HELD EVERY SUNDAY FOR THE BENEFITOF THE SIXTEEN INHABITANTS WHO STILL PERSISTED INSTAYING IN THE VILLAGE"
Page 49"THERE MASS IS STILL HELD EVERY SUNDAY FOR THE BENEFITOF THE SIXTEEN INHABITANTS WHO STILL PERSISTED INSTAYING IN THE VILLAGE"
Page 49
"THERE MASS IS STILL HELD EVERY SUNDAY FOR THE BENEFIT
OF THE SIXTEEN INHABITANTS WHO STILL PERSISTED IN
STAYING IN THE VILLAGE"
We walked through the shattered village, which the Germans shelled religiously every day, until we came to the remains of a church. Climbing in over the ruins we saw that there was one corner where miraculously enough afew yards of floor and a few yards of roof had escaped being shelled to pieces. There the altar had been set with about ten chairs crowded in front of it. There mass is still held every Sunday for the benefit of the sixteen inhabitants who still persisted in staying in the village.
These must indeed be solemn little services, for the Germans are far from being Sabbatarians when it comes to shelling this particular church.
Going on, we stopped in front of what was a house for one story and a skeleton from there up. It looked as if nothing less than a squirrel could get up to its rooftree, and nothing larger than a cat could conceal itself behind any of the shreds and tatters of its roof. Nevertheless, up there was the observation-post which I was about to visit. We entered and found some soldiers cooking meat and potatoes on a smokeless stove. One of them was amusing himself prancing around the place on a pair of child's stilts.
Following instructions, I climbed up a long ladder, which led to two rafters—the sole survivors of the second floor. A few planks hadbeen stretched between these. From them another ladder ran up to a small patch of attic floor which, marvellously intact, nestled around three sides of a brick chimney under the fragment of the roof. Arrived there, I carefully lifted a little leather curtain, hung over a hole in the roof, and squinted cautiously down upon the German lines.
The French trenches were practically hidden by the houses of the little village, so that the first thing I saw was a belt of barbed wire, and an unostentatious little white line, which marked the advanced German position. Look as closely as one could, it was impossible to detect the slightest movement, yet it was from this innocent-looking little line that the bullets were imitating toy whips. I wedged myself into the chimney to get a view of another side and then climbed down.
We now left the village and walked into the open advanced trenches. The most remarkable thing was their utter desolation. We walked for a hundred yards at a time, past scores and scores of rifle-slits, without seeing a man. An officer explained that troops are not permitted in the open trenches during thedaytime, to save them needless loss from the shells, which each side all day long, in a desultory way, threw into the open trenches of the other.
The men stayed down in the shell-proof shelters all the day and manned the trenches at night, when attacks are most feared.
It seemed as if the Germans could easily rush these trenches before the men could be called out to meet them, but along the sides of every trench ran one or two telephone wires. Apparently one quick order would have these front trenches lined with men. We came to one of the points nearest the German lines, from where the German trenches seemed a mere stone's-throw. From there French soldiers used to crawl out and fraternize with the Germans, between the lines, but that is now forbidden.
We next came through a covered trench to a covered grenade section. Here a table stood against the outer wall. It had three lines of sockets in it, one ahead of the other. The soldiers fastened grenades to the muzzles of their rifles, shoved the muzzles up through the protected slit in the roof, rested the butts in one of the three sockets, which gave threedifferent ranges, and pulled the trigger. If there is a premature explosion they are saved from its effects by the muzzle being above the roof.
We continued on into a long section of the covered front trench, where the rifle-slits have wires stretched across them about three inches from the bottom. The soldiers must stick their rifles out under the wire, which prevents their overshooting in the night. These covered trenches are roofed with logs and covered with two or three feet of earth. They are proof against ordinary shells, but not against heavy artillery.
When that starts bombarding, the men climb down into excavations, fifteen feet below the level of the trenches, and wait there until the storm is over.
The author in a front trench near RheimsPage 51THE AUTHOR IN A FRONT TRENCH NEAR RHEIMS.(THE GERMANS ARE ABOUT THREE HUNDRED YARDSBEYOND THE WIRE ENTANGLEMENTS)
Page 51THE AUTHOR IN A FRONT TRENCH NEAR RHEIMS.(THE GERMANS ARE ABOUT THREE HUNDRED YARDSBEYOND THE WIRE ENTANGLEMENTS)
Page 51
THE AUTHOR IN A FRONT TRENCH NEAR RHEIMS.
(THE GERMANS ARE ABOUT THREE HUNDRED YARDS
BEYOND THE WIRE ENTANGLEMENTS)
Soon we came to a black little underground chamber. An officer gave an order and a brilliant ray of light shot in through an aperture in the wall, near the low roof. This aperture was some three feet from one side to the other, and only about six or eight inches from top to bottom. It had been opened by dropping a hinged steel shutter which was worked by awire running over a pulley. The aperture was just above the surface of the ground outside. In the little room stood a machine-gun with its wicked-looking muzzle just flush with the opening. The gunner showed us how, by swinging the gun from side to side, he could play a stream of bullets through the wire entanglements, a foot or two from the ground.
At regular intervals we passed watchers, some standing in the covered trenches gazing through the slits, some lying out above the open trenches behind steel shields, and some using periscopes—all depending on the location of the trench.
Looking into such a periscope one would swear that he was looking straight out through a loophole. There is not the slightest sign of looking at a reflection in a mirror. We walked bent double through an extremely long pitch-black tunnel in an advanced position where some of the officers themselves had never been, and then started back through the open trenches.
At one point a lot of Germans had been buried. Sometimes a shell explosion does aghastly bit of disinterment, but I saw nothing unpleasant on this occasion. At another point above the heads of each side of the trench stood two shattered ammunition-carts. The Germans shelled this place pertinaciously, believing that the carts were guns.
At another point we walked under a framework of wood, covered with barb wire resting on two transverse timbers stretching across the top of the trench. A rope hung down from one of the transverses. If the enemy broke into the trench the defenders, by pulling this rope, could drop the barb-wire contrivance into the trench, thus blocking it.
Finally we got back to the village. I had asked how the sixteen inhabitants made a living. An officer replied that they sold eggs and milk to the troops. I asked out of what they produced the milk and he replied, "Very certainly out of a cow." As an answer to my polite scepticism I was taken to see the cow. We walked down a little street where I was told that the Germans were directing most of their shells. They fortunately were napping while we walked through. We suddenly turned into a gateway, and there in the middle of this wreck of avillage was a barnyard with chickens clucking, a horse tied to the wall, and three cows.
And on a stool by one of the cows sat an aged woman making the milk hiss down into a tin pail. There she sat, shells sailing to and fro over her head, with the "départs" starting and the "arrivées" bursting. There she sat and rocked with hearty laughter at the story of my scepticism, and went on effectively proving her existence by her cow by the extraction of that very milk which was sold to the soldiers. We left the old lady surrounded by what seemed to her to be all the comforts of home, and a few steps further were introduced to the Mayor of X——.
It was a smiling, bland old man who greeted us most genially. Apparently he had not a care in the world as he stood courteously making conversation. It seemed to me that the humble old woman milking her cow, and the Mayor entertaining visitors to what was no longer his village, were further symbols of the spirit of a nation which was not easily destined to decadence and downfall. Leaving the Mayor, we entered the cemetery. There we were looking at the graves of two German officers, twoFrench officers and seventy French soldiers when an "arrivée" burst with a louder report than we had as yet heard, followed by a deep noise.
"What's that?" I asked.
An officer replied, "That's the metal fuse which at the moment of explosion flies off through the air. You can only hear that when the explosion is pretty close. You can certainly say now that you have been under shell fire."
We went back to the end of the village furthest from the Germans and entered the headquarters in one of the few houses still in fair preservation. There the officers in command of the village opened a bottle of champagne in our honor and we stood around drinking each other's health. At that precise moment an unusually loud salvo of French artillery went off by way of a salute to the toast.
On the way back through the communicating trenches, we saw an attempt by the German guns to bring down a French aviator, who was flying above us. The latest development of fire regulation by aviation is that the Captain of the battery himself goes up in an aeroplane and sends his corrections on aim down to hisbattery by wireless. This Captain had his four "seventy-fives" hidden near our communication trench. Every time they went off their report was so violent that I could not help jumping.
The battery Captain was sailing around overhead and the German gunner was letting drive at him with what looked to us to be pretty bad shots. I could see the aeroplane wheeling in the air and hear the distant reports of the "départs," wait an appreciable time and then see the burst of white flame high up in the sky, followed by little puffs of smoke.
"That's a wretched shot," said I, as one shell burst over our heads, far behind the aeroplane.
"Yes, a bad shot for an aeroplane, but a good shot for us," Captain F—— replied.
I was standing with my head away back, looking straight overhead. "Come, move on, move on, or you'll catch some of that on your face," warned Captain d'A——. I obediently moved on and, sure enough, a couple of seconds later he picked up a strictly fresh shrapnel ball which had just fallen into our trench out of the sky. In the mean time the Captain upin the air had corrected his guns, so that they were hitting whatever they were shooting at, and he sailed away to the rear, while his battery became really enthusiastic and went off with a series of tearing crashes, which kept me jumping all the way to the end of the communicating trench.
There I climbed out with my ears full of the "seventy-fives'" violent reports, the distant explosion of their shells, the distant reports of the enemy's guns, the "crack, crack, crack" of the rifle bullets and the occasional sharp whistling of one overhead.
But my mind was full of the soldier watching and waiting, of the peasants harvesting between the smoke puffs, the laughing old woman milking the cow, of the genial Mayor extending his ruined hospitality, and of what little things like these should bring to pass in the future of France.
The morning after our trip to the front at Rheims we got up at seven o'clock after a good night's sleep in the comfortable hotel, and by shortly after eight were ready to start.
But here came a hitch in the smoothly running mechanism.
The evening before, on our run back to Epernay, Eyre and I had noticed the exhilarating abandon with which our soldier chauffeur slung his car along. We supposed that was the traditional method in which military cars were run. We christened our driver "Barney Oldfield" and commented jocosely on his various close squeaks. We noticed that Captain d'A——, who in the front trenches had been absolutely imperturbable, did not seem wholly at ease, but kept on leaning forwardand muttering, "Mais doucement! doucement!" through the front window. We thought, however, that this was mere consideration on his part for our inexperienced nervous systems.
On this following morning he declared to us that our chauffeur was evidently a veritable maniac besides being an execrable driver, and that nothing would induce him to ride behind "Barney Oldfield" again. Shells and bullets were all in the day's work, but he'd be switched if he would have his neck quite superfluously broken by an imbecile like that.
He therefore, with our cordial approval, had sent round to the auto-repair department for a sedater driver. But it was apparently against the regulations to keep the same car if we changed chauffeurs, and it was as hard to get another car in this headquarters of cars as it is to get fresh milk on a cattle-ranch.
So we fretted politely for the best part of an hour before the new chauffeur drove up. This delay haunted us for the rest of the day.
We motored over the same road we hadcovered the day before till we got near Rheims again. There, at about ten o'clock, we met Captain F——, who had been cooling his heels for an hour. I transferred myself into his motor and we started off to inspect some batteries.
First, of course, we had to present ourselves to the General in Command of the next Army Corps which we were to visit. We reached his headquarters after half an hour's run and found him an interesting and agreeable man of the world. He was much upset by the death the day before of a Lieutenant of engineers. It appears that this Lieutenant had been in command of a sap that was being run under the German trenches in order to explode a mine. The Germans had counter-sapped, broken into his tunnel, and exploded a mine there. He had recklessly crawled down his sap and had not returned. Then his Colonel crawled down the little tunnel after him, first taking the precaution to have a rope tied on to himself. The soldiers at the French end of the tunnel paid out the rope till it suddenly stopped. Then, as there was no more movement, they became alarmed and, hauling in the rope, draggedthe Colonel back in a senseless condition. The Lieutenant had reached the neighborhood of the exploded mine and had been overcome and killed by the unescaped gases of the explosion. The Colonel in his turn had been overcome, but had been hauled out in time to be revived.
It was strange to see how this loss was taken to heart by a General who must in the past months have had to receive reports of deaths by the thousand.
We motored on and about eleven o'clock were ushered into the headquarters of the General of Division whose batteries we wanted to see.
The other Generals had greeted us in the luxurioussalonsof châteaus, sitting near writing-desks holding a few papers, but without any token of the military work on which they were engaged. This General was housed with his staff in an old shooting-box. The room in which he welcomed us had large-scale maps on its walls, and engineering plans on its tables. The General himself was a splendid type of French officer, remarkably young, wiry, snappy, keen as mustard. When the war began he hadbeen a Lieutenant-Colonel and had gone up the ladder by leaps and bounds.
He said he would begin by himself taking us to an observation-point at the top of a high hill, whence we could follow the whole sweep of front from about the point where it had yesterday run out of our sight, on for many miles to the Aisne and well beyond it.
Up the hill we went at about as fast a walk as I have ever used on a stiff up-grade. Beside me, setting the pace, went the General in his baggy red riding-breeches, his tight-fitting black tunic, his well-polished black-leather puttees and shapely boots. As we climbed at top speed he talked a steady and most interesting stream. I began to listen for any symptoms of the pace affecting his breath. But not a bit of it; on he walked and on he talked. It was a hot day and the sweat began to drip off of me in spite of my cool khaki clothes. But the General in his black-cloth tunic and red breeches remained as cool as a cucumber. By the time we legged it over the crest of the hill I would have been willing to back him in a walking contest against any one of the twenty thousand men in his division.
Now we walked along a level path through woods till we came to an open space on the hillside.
The General stopped abruptly. "Don't go further here," he snapped out, "the Germans might see us through their glasses. They've got them constantly trained on this hill to try to locate my observation-post. They have not struck it yet, though the other day they happened to drop a shell not far from it which killed two of my officers."
So we retraced our steps a short distance and took another path which avoided the open place on the hillside.
Finally we reached the observation-post, carefully screened by an artificial bower of pine boughs. Maps were tacked on a rude table, while a big telescope stuck its muzzle surreptitiously out between the boughs.
The young General pointed out the two white trench lines pursuing each other league on league across the face of the summer landscape below us, now abruptly approaching, now coyly withdrawing from each other in their deadly courtship. He ran swiftly over the various features of interest: That whitescar on the slope down yonder was where the French had recently exploded a great mine under the Germans. Particularly bloody fighting had been going on at that point. Those roofs in the hollow the other side of that little hill were the village of Bery-au-Bac, which so frequently appeared in the official communiques as the scene of desperate attacks. Over there beyond the canal in that angle between it and the Aisne for perhaps half a kilometre there was a complete gap in the trench lines which were popularly supposed to run uninterruptedly from the North Sea to the Alps. Still further over yonder the hostile trenches approached each other so closely that one of those houses had one end occupied by the French and the other by the Germans.
"Over there," said the General with a sweep of his hand and a shake of his head, "occurred one of the great misfortunes of the battle of the Marne. Our troops there had hurled the Germans back across the Aisne and clear back over those hills. But the French troops over here more to the left had had their advance checked by the retreating Germans. Now those troops to the right were so far aheadthat they had lost touch with the ones to the left. Had they been veteran troops they could easily have manœuvred the backward troops up into line with themselves, and had they done this, with the Germans forced back beyond that line of natural defense, the Craonne plateau positions would have been turned and there is no knowing how far the German retreat might have been compelled to continue. But alas! they were green troops, and when they had waited and found that the troops to their left were not linking up with them they fell back from their precious territory to form a line with their fellows. And that is why we are here to-day."
The General then led the way some little distance to another underground observation-post to be used in case of a bombardment.
A flight of steps led down into it. It had a good many feet of solid earth above it, and consisted of two rooms with two bunks covered with pine boughs in one, and two camp cots in the other for the General himself and his artillery aide. It was well stored with water and provisions, and here the General, in case of a sustained bombardment, could remain in relativesecurity for days on end, observing the effect of his own artillery fire or of any infantry attacks he might direct, and sending his orders out by telephone. It will probably be asked how he could do much observing from a cellar several metres under ground. The answer is that the second of the two rooms had a sort of window about a foot high and running the whole length of the wall, which opened out through the side of the hill. It was covered by a heavy steel shutter which could be partly or entirely swung up by a pulley arrangement, and through this crack in the hillside the whole sector lay in perfect view.
Climbing out again, we ventured a hint or two as to how interested we were in batteries. But the General himself was intensely interested in an intricate system of subterranean passages which his Chief of Engineers was building to connect up the observation-post with other points, and he took the very human view that the technical explanations of the Engineer which were so absorbing to him must necessarily be equally enthralling to us.
Finally we started back across the hilltop toward where my imagination conjured upserried arrays of great guns frowning at the enemy.
On the way we stopped to inspect the telephone central which connected up the observation-posts with all the batteries behind and the trenches in front, and for that matter, with Paris or any other part of France.
In a low log hut, its roof and walls protected by several feet of sand-bags, a soldier sat at a large switchboard with a telephone receiver strapped to his head. As we stood for a moment watching him a bell tinkled. He stuck the small peg into one of the multitudinous little holes.
"Allo! This is Number 15," he said in a low voice, then listened intently to some message.
"All right," he said at its conclusion. Then turning half round on his stool he saluted and reported:
"Mon General, Number 19 reports that a Boche aeroplane has passed them and is coming over us."
We were completely absorbed in watching the lazily drifting aeroplanePage 70"WE WERE COMPLETELY ABSORBED IN WATCHING THE SOFTLITTLE CLOUDS PLAYFULLY DANCING ALONG AHEAD OFTHE LAZILY DRIFTING AEROPLANE"
Page 70"WE WERE COMPLETELY ABSORBED IN WATCHING THE SOFTLITTLE CLOUDS PLAYFULLY DANCING ALONG AHEAD OFTHE LAZILY DRIFTING AEROPLANE"
Page 70
"WE WERE COMPLETELY ABSORBED IN WATCHING THE SOFT
LITTLE CLOUDS PLAYFULLY DANCING ALONG AHEAD OF
THE LAZILY DRIFTING AEROPLANE"
"Telephone our guns to fire at him, and warn Numbers 11 and 12 to prepare for his coming," ordered the General, and as the soldier stuck his pegs in and gave his telephone messageswe hustled out to see the excitement. Sure enough, we had hardly got out when we heard a distant whirring, and high up in the air saw an aeroplane floating our way.
"Keep under the tree! Keep under the tree!" warned the General sharply. "If he sees us all standing here, and gets away, he will report this as an important point and it will rain 'marmites' for days to come."
So he, his staff-officers, Eyre and I grouped ourselves under a big tree and stared up at the approaching aeroplane through the gaps in its branches.
"Whang!" A "soixante-quinze" exploded violently in the woods close by, and I jumped equally violently.
"Whang! Whang! Whang!" came three more shots in extremely close succession.
"You've got a whole battery shooting, haven't you?" I remarked.
"Oh, no! There is only one gun located just there. It does not waste time in firing, does it?" smiled the General. "Our 'soixante-quinze' field-guns can shoot twenty-five shots a minute."
Other guns in the immediate neighborhoodtook up the chorus, and, looking through our glasses, we could see little soft white cloudlets puff into being all around the aeroplane.
But he kept sailing calmly on.
A little further off in the woods came a staccato rat! tat! tat! tat! tat! like a boy drawing a stick along a picket fence.
"There goes one of our mitrailleuses at work on him."
We were completely absorbed in watching the soft little clouds playfully dancing along ahead of the lazily drifting aeroplane, when the General's voice brought us back to earth.
"Come! Come! We must hurry or we shall be late for lunch. I did not realize how late it was."
I looked at him in horror. What! Forsake the sensations of this moment for such a thing as a lunch! Any one of those gentle little white puffs might transform the aeroplane into a hurtling mass of flame. Lunch!
But the General was entirely sincere and very positive. From his point of view Boche aeroplanes could be shot at any hour of the day, but lunch was an event which took place only once in the twenty-four hours. Lunch was the recognizedsymbol of hospitality; aeroplane shellings decidedly were not.
As we reluctantly followed him through the woods he may have noticed my disappointment, for he remarked:
"It is highly improbable that you would see anything more than you already have seen. They are very difficult things to hit, you know. As a matter of fact, we were doing most of our shooting in front of him rather than at him, so as to head him back. But he evidently has his nerve with him, for he has kept right on and got away from us. Listen! Our guns have stopped, and there are the guns I telephoned to at Number 12 taking a shy at him."
As we hiked along at the General's favorite pace Captain F—— diffidently suggested:
"And the batteries, mon General, in which this gentleman was much interested. I suppose there will be no opportunity to see them?"
"Oh, there is really nothing interesting about them, as they are not firing to-day. The pieces are scattered all over the hillside in the woods, and the crews are having their lunch. But as a matter of fact our route home takes us rightby one 120-millimetre gun and we can have a look at that."
Walking down the rear slope of the hill, we came upon a party of soldiers, apparently out for a picnic, eating their lunch on a rustic table, with pine branches over their heads and fragrant pine needles under their feet.
They jumped to attention.
"Show us the piece," said the General to their non-commissioned officer.
The groups of soldiers hustled over to a big object bundled up in tarpaulins, which stood a few yards off. Stripping off the coverings, they showed us a heavy field-piece standing on treadled wheels with its muzzle pointed apparently aimlessly up the green-wooded hillside at some clouds which floated in the blue sky just above the hill-crest.