Courtesy of "L'Illustration."The Endless Line of Motor Convoys.Gasoline is king of that vast stretch of endless energy behind the battle front. Movement of troops, munitions and provisions depend on the unceasing operation of tens of thousands of trucks.
Courtesy of "L'Illustration."The Endless Line of Motor Convoys.Gasoline is king of that vast stretch of endless energy behind the battle front. Movement of troops, munitions and provisions depend on the unceasing operation of tens of thousands of trucks.
Courtesy of "L'Illustration."
The Endless Line of Motor Convoys.
Gasoline is king of that vast stretch of endless energy behind the battle front. Movement of troops, munitions and provisions depend on the unceasing operation of tens of thousands of trucks.
As Horace found out that day, when his course took him south of Foch's triumphant army, the Battle of the Aisne was governed by the old rule of war which declares that the army which chooses the battleground has an advantage of almost two to one. The French had chosen the Valley of the Marne, the Germans chose the ridges commanding the Aisne.
Yet there was a great deal more than that involved. It would be gravely unjust to German strategy to suppose that they had not considered the possible results of a failure in their plan of attack. The German General Staff was fully prepared with its defensive line in case Paris did not fall. The sapping and mining corps, the engineer corps, did not join in the advance on the Marne.For a week they had been working with indomitable energy on the Aisne to prepare what proved to be an invulnerable natural fortress, strong as the Rock of Gibraltar.
Months before the war began, Germany had not only laid out a basis of battle on a favorable terrain, but she had also laid out in detail the manner in which a defensive position was to be taken up, should this prove necessary. She knew that if she failed at Paris, the loss of life would have been fearful. The German system of fighting in massed formations ensured that. It would, therefore, be all the more necessary that the defense should be made with machinery. If the heights were to be taken, let flesh and blood do it. The Germans had been slaughtered in attacking Liége. Let the Allies be slaughtered in attacking the Aisne. Every foot of land had been mapped and studied, the heaviest artillery in the world was available, and the ammunition supply system was in full operation. Let them come!
Germany had prepared a marvelous attack which was within an ace of success and was prevented from the accomplishment of its final and full aim only by three things, each, in its way, a glory to one of the Allied Nations: the valor ofthe defense of the Belgians at Liége; the dogged courage of the British in the fighting retreat from Mons; and the superb dash of the French when they shattered the German line at the Marne. All three were needed to save France.
The battle of the Aisne consisted simply of the efforts of the English and French to gain those forbidding and strongly protected heights. Von Kluck, given all the men and artillery he needed, drove back Manoury in the space of a few hours. The British crossed by a superb frontal attack, which ranks as one of the bravest deeds in modern warfare, and were wiped out. D'Esperey crossed the Aisne east of Bourg, only to find that the Craonne plateau was unassailable. By Friday, September 18, Joffre was compelled to realize that the bluffs above the Aisne had been turned into an impregnable open-air fortress, not to be stormed by flesh and blood.
For Germany one thing was lacking, a strong Line of Communication. The main railroad to Coblentz, with a branch to Metz, passed through Rheims. If Germany were to have the vast supplies she needed, she must take Rheims or content herself with the weeks of delay which the Belgian route required. Rheims was imperative.
But Foch held Rheims!
The keenest strategist of them all, with no natural defenses save two small hills at Pouillion and Verzenay, the great French general had made his line of defense so strong that it had become practically unassailable. Especially it bristled with battery upon battery of "Soixante-Quinze" guns. For four successive nights, waves of men, such as those which were hurled at Liége, drove against Foch, striving by weight of numbers to break through.
It was in vain. The disposition of Foch's troops was deadly. The positions had been chosen by the best strategist in Europe, who had anticipated this very attack, knowing the importance of Rheims to the Germans. There was not a foot of ground that was not covered as with a web by the shrapnel and melinite shells. Only twice did those terrific attacks break through the "Soixante-Quinze" zone into machine-gun fire range and there they fell in heaps.
By the night of September 19, Field Marshal von Heeringen was compelled to realize that Foch's position could not be taken save by the use of heavy artillery. This could not be brought into position without exposing itself to destructive firebefore he would have a chance to fire a shot. Battle was impossible. Savage revenge remained.
On Sunday morning, the German artillerists redoubled their fire on the Cathedral—to France her most sacred building, where all her kings had been crowned and to which Joan of Arc led the Dauphin, and to the art-lovers of the world, a work of transcendent beauty.
The cathedral was not being used as an observation station, as the Germans alleged. It was being used as a hospital for the German wounded and two large Red Cross flags were flying from it. A shell struck the scaffolding which had been erected for restoring the left tower. The scaffolding flamed, and the fire spread to the old arched roof of oak below the roof of stone. The molten lead from the gutters fell on the straw within, where the wounded Germans were lying. The interior became a mass of flames, threatening to burn the wounded men alive.
Swift to the rescue sprang the gray-haired Archbishop Landreux. The aged prelate, together with a young priest, rushed into the flaming fane. Within, the straw was ablaze, overhead the timbers were crackling, glistening drops of molten metal menaced them every few yards and shellswere dropping steadily. The frail archbishop lent his feeble strength to those who were able to stagger, and Abbé Chinot bodily picked up the wounded and carried them out.
A revulsion of mob fury seized the people. They saw their Cathedral in flames, they saw the shells deliberately aimed for it, they saw their inoffensive dead in the bombarded streets and they saw a just vengeance in allowing the German wounded to burn alive in the pyre of their own making. The mob, hoarse with rage and growing wilder every minute, raised its rifles to fire at the wounded men who had been carried out.
The gray-haired archbishop, a Prince of Men as well as a Prince of the Church, stepped quietly between them.
"Very well, my children," he said, "but you will fire on me first."
The demon-shriek of the shells continued, the drumming of gunfire continued, but in the crowd there was silence. Then, with that sudden response to greatness which lies hid in the hearts of all men, the crowd leaped forward as one man to save the wounded men for whom, a moment before, they had been clamoring to see burned alive.
And, through the whole scene, the statue of Joanof Arc looked on at the brave act of a prelate she would have delighted to honor and the recognition of courage by the people she herself gave her own life to save.
FOOTNOTES:[19]By order of numbering, this was the 7th Army. Just why it was officially designated the 9th is still unknown.
[19]By order of numbering, this was the 7th Army. Just why it was officially designated the 9th is still unknown.
[19]By order of numbering, this was the 7th Army. Just why it was officially designated the 9th is still unknown.
DIGGING IN
A winter compounded of rain and fire had settled down heavily over the Aisne Valley and the plain of Champagne, from Rheims to Verdun. The chalky soil oozed gray and—red.
Deadlocked, their grip at each other's throats, German and Frenchman watched each other across a narrow, noisome waste, now and forever to become the symbol of all that is most horrible, most deadly, most pitiable:
No Man's Land!
Tens of thousands of men waited for the word of command which should bid them expose themselves to the unsated appetite of hungry slaughter, tens of thousands of men waited inactive while death and mutilation chose them, one by one.
A gray soil, a gray sky, and a gray doom.
The only thing that moved was the shuddering skin of the earth as the bullets flayed it in streaks or the shells dug deep holes like the festering soresof a foul disease. Not a blade of grass, not a weed, not a shrub remained; where leafy woods once had been, now only a few scarred and slivered stumps pointed accusing fingers upward. It was Chaos come again.
Where were the shouting hosts charged with valor, such as those who had driven forward at La Fère Champenoise, when Foch's army saved France?
Gone!
Where were the gallant fights to save the guns, when men met in open combat under the open sky?
Gone!
Where were the cavalry charges when squadrons with saber or with lance clashed in a deadly but glorious shock?
Gone!
Where were the armies that had fought hand to hand in the streets of Charleroi; that had snatched at and escaped from death alternately in the great retreat; that had hurled themselves at each other with equal fury in the attack or the defense of Paris; that had charged up the slopes of Le Grand Couronne and the bluffs of the Aisne with equal gallantry, and, dying, still had shaken their fists in the face of Slaughter?
Gone, all gone!
Aye, gone indeed, but where?
Dug in!
Horace, off duty for a few hours from his post as military telephonist, for which he had fitted himself to qualify when his work as a motor cyclist was done, looked at the smitten world. He tried to compare the war before him with the war to which for one brief, wild month he had been so close. There was no comparison.
To nothing that the world has ever seen could the War of the Trenches be compared.
It was a cold, invisible inferno, which, every morning and evening, spewed up its ghastly tale of dead and wounded; which, every evening and morning, yielded up its line of staggering, weary, war-dulled figures, glad to exchange the peril of death for the miserable existence which was all that was possible behind the trenches in the plain of Champagne that first fearful winter.
The war of men was over, only a war of murderous moles remained.
In a rickety hovel behind the lines, which, as Horace's companion in the telephone work declared, was "weather-proof only when there wasn't any weather to put it to the proof," the boyhad puzzled over this new warfare. At last, one day, the opportunity serving, he hunted up his friend the veteran—now a sergeant-major—and learned the causes and the methods of the ditch-born strife.
Courtesy of "Le Miroir."The Valley of the Dead.Bombardment of shrapnel and high explosive shell, forming a barrage fire through which the men seen in the trench are about to plunge.
Courtesy of "Le Miroir."The Valley of the Dead.Bombardment of shrapnel and high explosive shell, forming a barrage fire through which the men seen in the trench are about to plunge.
Courtesy of "Le Miroir."
The Valley of the Dead.
Bombardment of shrapnel and high explosive shell, forming a barrage fire through which the men seen in the trench are about to plunge.
"Modern fighting," said the veteran, as he cleaned his rifle, a daily task in that rust-devouring atmosphere, "is the result of modern weapons. Whereas a musket would take two minutes to load and had a range of only a couple of hundred yards, a modern rifle will fire thirty shots a minute and over, and has a good killing range at an almost flat trajectory of a thousand yards. Suppose it takes a charging force of infantry six minutes to run a thousand yards, where a musket would get in three shots a modern rifle would put in from 180 to 300 shots, and would be firing almost continuously."
"Men would have to be under cover to face that fire," agreed Horace.
"More murderous than the rifle," the veteran continued, "is the machine-gun, which fires 600 shots a minute and can be operated by two men. It is estimated as being equal to fifty men, but, in reality, its destructiveness in the hands of a good gunner is far higher. It's easy to handle,too, the Maxims weighing sixty pounds and our Hotchkiss fifty-three pounds, because the English weapon is water-cooled and ours is air-cooled."
"Which is best?"
"Ours," replied the veteran promptly, "because a Maxim, when it's firing steadily, gets so hot that it boils the water and the enemy can see the steam. Then he knows where you are and concentrates his fire and—you tuck in your toes and no one will ever wake you up."
"Invisibility counts," said the boy.
"It's the difference between life and death!" was the reply. "That's where the value of the trenches becomes evident. Since both rifles and machine-guns have a flat trajectory, when they do strike the ground, they do it at a very slight angle. If your head is ten inches below the level of the ground, a thousand men can fire at you with rifles and machine-guns a hundred yards away, and you can smoke a pipe comfortably and listen to the song of the bullets overhead.
"Shrapnel, especially when handled by the 'Soixante-Quinze,' which, in addition to being the best field-gun in the world, has the best shell with the best time-fuse, is more destructive against advancing troops than machine-gun and rifle-firecombined, when it is rightly timed. Of course, it is far harder to aim exactly and to time to the second. A shrapnel shell holds 300 bullets and a 'Soixante-Quinze' can fire fifteen shells a minute. That means that one gun can send 4500 bullets a minute into an advancing enemy, the bullets scattering in a fan shape from the burst of the shell. The Boches, by the way, waste a tremendous amount of ammunition in bursting their shrapnel too high. I got hit, myself, with three balls from a shell which had burst too far away and they didn't even make a hole in my trousers; bruised me a bit, that was all.
"But you can see, my boy, when you've got rifle fire, machine-gun fire and shrapnel all looking for a different place to put a hole through you, a trench is the loveliest thing in the world, no matter if it's wet and slimy, full of smells and black with dried blood. The worst pool of filth would be a haven of refuge if only you could drop your body in it a few inches below the zone of certain death. If one gets caught once in the open, one never grumbles again about the labor of digging a trench."
"But why are trenches so twisty?" asked Horace. "One misty day, when it was safe, anaviator took me up a little way, and I had a chance to look down on our trenches. I was only in the air a few minutes and we didn't go very high, but, although I know this section pretty well, I couldn't make head or tail out of our lines. They looked like a sort of scrawly writing, or a spider's web stretched out and tangled up."
"That's not a bad description," said the veteran thoughtfully, "they do look a little like that, with the communication trenches for the cross-threads. But there are a good many reasons why the trenches are made 'twisty' as you call it.
"In the first place, a trench is made zigzag, so that, if the enemy should make a sudden raid and seize a section of the trench, he can't fire along it and enfilade you. Then a trench that wavers in long uneven lines is much safer against shell-fire, for, supposing that the enemy does get the range of a piece of trench, his range will be wrong for the same trench ten yards farther on, the shells falling harmlessly in the ground before it or behind it.
"Besides that, a thin wavy line is much more difficult to see from an aëroplane than a straight line, because there are no straight lines in nature. That's why we've had to stop putting straw inthe trenches, the line of yellow was too easy to see from overhead."
"Is that why trenches are made so narrow?" the boy asked. "I've often thought it silly to make them so that two people can hardly squeeze past each other. The stretcher-bearers growl about it all the time."
"The ideal fire-trench," the veteran answered, "should be only about eighteen inches wide and not quite four feet deep, the upthrown earth forming a parapet. It should be recessed here and there, and traversed. To pass a man, you have to slide sideways. The communicating trench should be about fifteen yards to the rear. It should be seven feet deep and about three feet wide.
"Twenty-five yards in the rear is the cover trench, sixteen feet deep, and wide enough to allow troops to march in single file. The communication trenches from one line to another are always best as tunnels, though sometimes they are open. Our trenches here are open, but," the veteran nodded sagely, "I don't think they ought to be. This is a chalk soil, and the whitish soil underneath shows too clearly when you throw it up."
"The trenches wouldn't be so bad," said the lad, "if they weren't always wet."
"You can't change that," the veteran responded grimly, "unless you can find some way to make water run up-hill. It stands to reason that if you dig holes in the ground and it rains—as it does nearly all the time in this wretched northern country—the water is going to run into those holes. If you bale it out by day, the Boches see you, and if you pump at night, they hear you. If it rains, the trenches are going to be knee-deep in water and you can't help it."
"But how can you find your way, when one trench looks exactly like another and they're all twisting and turning like so many snakes trying to get warm?"
"You can't, unless you know the plans," the sergeant-major answered. "You've no idea of the amount of work that our draughtsmen have to do, in mapping out these underground cities and thousands of miles of ditch-streets. I know my little section, of course, and each officer has learned the tangle of trenches in which his command is likely to operate. But the officers have to know the tangle of the enemy's trenches, too, and, what's more, when we attack, they have to be in the frontand guide us. An assault isn't just a blind drive over the top, it must have a definite goal and has to be reached a certain way. The officers have got to know the Boche roads as well as our own."
"But how can they find that out?"
"Aeroplanes with photographers and draughtsmen," came the reply. "You've heard the story of the tattooed draughtsman?"
"No," answered Horace, "I haven't."
"He was a young fellow," the veteran began, "who was assigned to the job of making a plan of the enemy's trenches opposite his part of the line. The Boche lines were on a little higher ground than ours at that point, so that nothing could be seen from the fire trench. The young draughtsman went up in a machine several times, but there was a very efficient battery of anti-aircraft guns a little back of their lines and the Archies would not let our Farman aëroplane come down low enough for a photograph to show anything definite.
"This chap got desperate. He was bound to succeed, no matter what happened to him. At last, one night, we caught a Boche patrol on No Man's Land and wiped them out. As soon as the return fire slackened, the draughtsman, who hadbeen in one of the dug-outs, crawled out, and, wriggling flat to where the Boches had fallen, he grabbed one of the dead men by the ankle and dragged him to our trench.
"Then, unobtrusively and to our open-mouthed astonishment, the young draughtsman dressed himself in the dead man's uniform, read carefully all the papers in the pockets, so that he might learn who it was he was counterfeiting and bade us good-bye.
"'There's just about one chance in a million,' he said, 'that I don't get found out right away. If I am, then—' He clicked his tongue like a trigger. 'If I'm not caught and can manage to go back with the relief and return again,' he said, 'as soon as I get to the trench I'll bolt out of it, holding my left arm stretched out straight. You'll know by that, it's me. They'll pot me from behind, of course, but I may get half-way over No Man's Land before they do. If I drop, just smother the place where I fell with bullets so that the Boches don't have a chance to sneak out and get me.'
"'But that'll cut you to ribbons,' I said to him.
"He shrugged his shoulders.
"'I'll be dead, probably,' he said, 'and if I'mnot and you kill me, then it's only five minutes' difference, anyway.
"'Then, when it's night, let some of the fellows go out and drag me in. I've got an indelible pencil, and you'll find a map of the trenches on my chest.'"
"Did he go?"
"He did," the veteran answered. "We watched close all that night, all the next day and all the next night, till we were sure that he had been nabbed.
"Then, suddenly, one of our chaps called,
"'Here he comes!'
"Sure enough, just as it was getting light enough to see, a figure dressed like a Boche came jumping out of the trench holding his left arm stretched out straight and began a bolt across No Man's Land. He was running like a hare, but three or four rifles spoke. He dropped, wounded, and began to crawl, inch by inch, to our lines. Then they got a machine-gun full on him and began to spray him with bullets, like you sprinkle a flower-bed in summer.
"He didn't wriggle very far.
"We answered them hot and heavy. We didn't leave room for a worm to crawl up to him, muchless a man. Then, when night came, some of our fellows drove a sap to where he lay and hooked down the body."
"And the map?"
"Scrawled on his bare chest, the way he said it would be," the veteran answered, "and underneath was written in the same smeared violet marks the word:
"'Victory!'"
"You can't beat France when it comes to heroism!" declared Horace.
"The English are just as nervy," answered the veteran. "Even in the trenches, though, they fight differently. They make far fewer night attacks than we do, and far more mines. There's few nights that the British haven't got a listening patrol out somewhere on the line."
"I hear every one talking of a 'listening patrol,'" put in the lad; "tell me, Sergeant, just what a listening patrol is for."
"To listen," answered the veteran laconically.
"Of course, but for what?"
The answer came, sinister,
"Mines!"
"Ah!" Horace had seen the effects of those most terrible of all weapons of trench warfare.
Courtesy of "Illustrated London News."Listening Patrol Trapped by a Star-Shell.
Courtesy of "Illustrated London News."Listening Patrol Trapped by a Star-Shell.
Courtesy of "Illustrated London News."
Listening Patrol Trapped by a Star-Shell.
Courtesy of "Illustrated London News."Locating Enemy Sappers on a Listening Patrol.
Courtesy of "Illustrated London News."Locating Enemy Sappers on a Listening Patrol.
Courtesy of "Illustrated London News."
Locating Enemy Sappers on a Listening Patrol.
"You see," the veteran explained, "when trenches are well and solidly dug, especially the way the Germans build them; when solid machine-gun emplacements are made and properly manned with plenty of ammunition; when there is a concentration of artillery to support the trenches on both sides, nobody can do much. Of course, they shell us all the time, and we shell them. They send over rifle-bombs and we shoot ammonal and vitriol grenades. Once in a while, if they're lucky, they'll land a 'Minnenwerfer' in one of our trenches and then there's a little work for the doctor and a lot for the grave-digger."
"What's a 'Minnenwerfer'?"
"A pleasant little toy the Germans have invented, which looks like a rubber ball at the end of a stick. Its right name is the 'Krupp trench howitzer.' It weighs only 120 pounds—at least one of them that we captured, weighed that—and can be handled by a couple of men. Although it has a caliber of only 2.1-inch it throws a shell of 16-inch diameter."
"How on earth can it do that?" asked the boy. "You can't squeeze a 16-inch shell down a 2.1-inch muzzle!"
"That's what the stick is for," came the reply."The shell is round, like one of the old-fashioned cannon-balls you see piled up in village squares beside antiquated cannon. It weighs 200 pounds and has a bursting charge of 86 pounds of tri-nitro-toluol. The shell is bored to the center. You shove one end of the iron rod into the gun so that it sticks out about eight inches beyond the muzzle. Then you put the shell on the rod by the hole bored to the center. It looks like a toy balloon at the end of a child's toy cannon. Then you fire it, the iron rod is shot out, driving the bomb ahead of it and off she goes."
"Will it go far?"
"Far enough," the veteran said. "At an angle of projection of 45 degrees with the low muzzle velocity of 200 feet per second, the range of the bomb is 1244 feet and it takes eight seconds to come. That's the only good thing about it, sometimes you can hear it coming soon enough to dodge into a dug-out. But neither Minnenwerfers, nor the 5.6-inch nor even the 8.4-inch howitzers will win a trench. It takes mines to do that.
"So, in order to gain an advantage, one side or the other burrows deep tunnels in the earth, sometimes 16 feet down, sometimes 60, all depending on the soil and the plan. The men work undergroundlike moles and they drive a long subterranean gallery until they come right below an important point, maybe an officers' dug-out or a grenade depot. Then they burrow upwards a bit, and put in a tremendous charge of explosive, melinite or something like that, and fix an electric wire. The earth is then rammed back into the gallery, an electric contact is made and whiz! bang! about forty tons of mixed heads, legs, bits of bomb-proof and earth go flying into the air, leaving a hole big enough to build a bungalow in and never see the roof.
"Then it's our turn. While the section of the Boche line is in confusion we dash across, while our artillery, behind us, smothers the rest of the line. We settle in the big hole and build our trenches from it and we've gained a hundred yards and can pepper the Boche trenches from their rear. A mine's a great thing, although, sometimes, it costs more men to consolidate and hold a place like that than to take it. The British have beaten us all at that game. They've got small armies of Welsh miners, doing nothing but that all day and all night long. They're used to it, it's their trade and they don't mind.
"Now, a listening patrol, which is what I beganto tell you about, is a patrol generally consisting of four men, under an officer, which creeps out on No Man's Land during the night. By approaching near the enemy trenches, listening with their ears to the ground, the men can hear if there is any one at work under them. The earth—as you ought to know, being a telephonist—is a good conductor of sound, and if there's any tricky business going on, a listening patrol can find it out."
"What good does it do to know that some one is driving a mine under you? Do you desert the trench, then, until they blow it up?"
The veteran almost growled.
"Does a Frenchman desert a trench!" he said. "No, we find out exactly where they're digging, and start a tunnel from our side, right below the other. Then, when they're working busily, a little explosion below them smashes their tunnel into soup and they're all dead—and buried—without troubling any one."
"I shouldn't think a listening patrol would be so dangerous, then," said the boy, "if you've only got to crawl out and listen."
"But there's others listening, too! If they hear a move, or think that they hear a move, up goes a star shell, bright as day, to show you sprawled onthe ground. Your only chance is to lie still, like a dead man. But, lots of times, even if they think you're dead they'll turn a machine-gun on you, just to make sure. You don't have to imitate being dead any more, then. I know of six officers, right in this sector, who have been killed in listening-patrol work, and I couldn't count how many men."
He leaned forward and stared out into space gloomily.
"I don't call this—war," he said in a lower voice. "I can't call it war when a soldier's chief weapons are a pickax and a spade for digging trenches—and graves. And—I wanted to be an officer!" He stared out upon the faded world and repeated slowly, "I wanted to be an officer! I wanted to lead men into—that!"
"You lead men now!" said the boy.
The fire of responsibility and pride flashed back into the dull eyes and involuntarily the veteran stood up.
"I lead men now," he cried, "and I'll lead them till we drive the Germans back from the last foot of the soil of France!"
He strode off to his multifarious duties with swing and determination in his step.
It was three days after that when Horace, who was gradually acclimatizing to the nerve-racking cannonade of the battlefield, became conscious that it was steadily increasing in intensity. The clouds hung low, muffling the resonance and emphasizing the sharp reports of the cannon. The moist, sluggish air, full of unimaginable odors, became pungent with sulphur, powder, the burnt smell of calcined soil and the fumes of charred wool arising from the ignited clothing of the unburied dead on No Man's Land.
Significant, too, that evening, was the appearance of wagon-loads of wire. One of the men groaned aloud as he saw it,
"Zut! That means some dodging of bullets to-night!"
Never, till Time has ceased to be, will any man calculate the number of deaths which have been caused by that entrapment born in the brain of some fiend—wire entanglement.
Wire! The strangler!
Wire! The man-trap!
Wire! That grips a soldier with malicious glee and holds him fast to an immediate or a lingering death.
Wire! Which lies before every heroic effort,which throws its snaky coils around the feet and around the nerves of the bravest.
Embodiment of hate, of diabolic trickery, of malign expectancy, arch-creator of despair—Wire!
For every mile of fighting front, there are a thousand miles of wire, with a weight of 110 tons. For every mile of front, 12,000 standards and 12,000 pickets must be used. Withal, that thousand miles of wire has cost a thousand lives to put it up and keep it in repair, that, when the time may come, it may cost the lives of two thousand of the enemy.
Just as the character of the fighting shows the nature of troops, so does the wire that they use. The German wire is put up by machinery. It is a harder, tougher wire than is used by the Allies, with curved barbs, altogether a more efficient thing in itself. But, by reason of that very solidity, it affords greater resistance to shell-fire, and therefore, under heavy bombardment, funnels of passage can be driven through it, by which troops may assault the trenches it is designed to protect.
British wire is thinner, lighter, sharper. It is irregularly constructed, with pitfalls. It is largely put up by knife-rests, afterwards staked to the ground. It stretches over a wide space, asa rule, with the result that while shell-fire beats it down and explosions may uproot the stakes, the ground remains a hideous tangle of treachery for the feet.
A form of wire used on the French front consists of two spiral coils, four feet in diameter, wound loosely in opposite directions and entangled. It is so loose and yields so little resistance that shell-fire, however much it may blow the coils into the air, only entangles it the more. The spiral coils retain their form. Moreover, most important of all, it cannot be crossed by throwing planks upon it, for the coils give way and the plank drops in between. Nothing but a bridge of hurdles—or the bodies of dead men—will serve for passage over it.
Well the soldiers knew what the strengthening of wire under an increased bombardment implied.
The Germans were preparing to assault.
If further assurance were needed, Horace found it in the tramping of feet as reënforcements came rolling up from the rear. What men were these?
These were the unafraid!
These were the terror of the enemy!
The Moroccan Division! Chosen for the moments of danger, picked for occasions when savageferocity is required, the Africans wait for the word of command.
Courtesy of "The Sphere."French Tank Cutting Wire.Note the lower lines and greater speed of the French design compared with the British, more mobile but less powerful.
Courtesy of "The Sphere."French Tank Cutting Wire.Note the lower lines and greater speed of the French design compared with the British, more mobile but less powerful.
Courtesy of "The Sphere."
French Tank Cutting Wire.
Note the lower lines and greater speed of the French design compared with the British, more mobile but less powerful.
"They march past," said Henri Barbusse, describing them at the front, "with faces red brown, yellow or chestnut, their beards scanty and fine, or thick and frizzled, their greatcoats yellowish-green, and their muddy helmets displaying the crescent instead of our grenade. From flat or angular faces, burnished like new coins, one would say that their eyes shine like balls of ivory and onyx. Here and there in the file, towering above the rest, comes the impassive black face of a Senegalese sharpshooter. The red flag with a green hand in the center goes behind the company.
"These demon-men, who seem carved of yellow wood, of bronze or of ebony, are grave and taciturn; their faces are disquieting and secret, like the threat of a snare suddenly found at your feet. These men are drunk with eagerness for the bayonet and from their hands there is no quarter. The German cry of surrender, 'Kamerad!' they answer with a bayonet thrust, waist-high."
Their presence, also, told its story.
A counter-assault was planned.
Rarely do the Moroccans hold the trenches. It is not their kind of fighting, nor would theirbodies, used to the sun of North Africa, endure the cold and wet of the muddy trench. They are the troops of the advance. There are no prisoners, no wounded, after they have leaped into a trench. Their trail is the trail of savage death.
All the next day the bombardment increased in violence, and Horace, at his military switchboard, plugged calls to distant quarters for reënforcements. Everywhere along the line, when the early dusk fell, men were standing to arms or marching to the threatened sector.
One section of trench was wiped out with the concentration of high explosive shells; wire, fire trench, communication trench and their living defenders being blown into an unrecognizable, pockmarked mass. Another trench was hastily dug behind and craftily wired. There the assault would come.
The noise was deafening, maddening. One felt the slow approach of insanity. Men sprang up here and there with frantic cries that the appalling nerve-racking din might cease, even for a second. A few went mad, and their hands were bound by their comrades until the crisis was past.
A gray, evil earth; a gray, evil sky, with bomb-dropping aeroplanes overhead like vultures waitingto swoop down upon their carrion prey. Upon that scene night fell.
On that small section of the trenches not less than 50,000 projectiles had fallen that evening. The shrill whistling of bullets, the baby's wail of falling torpedoes, the spattering "whit" "whit" of ricochetting fuses, the six-fold squall of the 77's, the whine of the small howitzers, and the roar of large shell formed a shrieking arch in the tortured and glutted air.
Nor was the French artillery silent. The batteries of "Soixante-Quinze" replied incessantly. From time to time the bellow as of a prehistoric bull told that the 8.2-inch gun was bodily tearing holes and men in the enemy's trenches. The long thin Rimailho sent its 5.9-inch shell with the swift flight of a vengeful meteor and the new great 10-inch howitzer looped its 240-pound shell upon the dug-outs where the men were sheltering. There is neither shelter nor men after that shell has fallen.
The guards in the advance trenches were redoubled. Extra supplies of bombs and hand-grenades were served out.
Under arms, silent, expectant, grim, stood the Moroccan brigade. Their turn was coming, soon.
The night dragged on. No one went to sleep, for sleep was impossible under the fury of noise.
The Germans, systematic in everything, over-systematic in everything, never commence an assault before midnight. At half-past eleven o'clock, Horace plugged in for the order to be given for the barrage fire to begin.
The whirlwind of vertically-falling flame shut off the German lines in a tawny curtain of annihilation.
Now and then rockets shot up, red, green and white, writing artillery messages on the sky.
The calcium whiteness of star shells illuminated the gruesome zone of No Man's Land, void, deserted and desolate.
On its horrid bleakness, nothing moved. Its pallid stillness intensified the menace.
Officers and men glanced anxiously at the watches fastened on their wrists.
Behind, the Moroccan brigade stood motionless. They even laughed in eagerness. It was a jangling laugh. White men who heard it, shivered.
It was not yet midnight, but, suddenly, a vicious crackle of rifles far to the left suggested that there, the moment was at hand.
Not yet the attack, it was a patrol of Germanwire-cutters, trying to sneak up under cover to make an opening.
"Cr-a-a-a-a-ck!"
A machine-gun spoke. The wire-cutters pitched headlong. The young officer, wounded, tried to crawl back to the lines.
"Crack!"
One rifle spoke. Even at night a sharpshooter does not miss. The figure of the German officer moved no more.
The German bombardment, hitherto directed against the batteries far to the rear, began to draw forward. It approached the rear of the trenches where the dug-out for the telephone was situated.
"Afraid?" the officer asked Horace.
"Yes," the boy answered, "but game!"
A shell fell a dozen yards away. The burst smashed in the roof of the dug-out. A flying piece of concrete grazed the officer's cheek. It bled freely.
"Hit, sir?" the boy asked anxiously.
"Nothing! My cheek!"
He telephoned an order.
The Moroccans, unwillingly, take cover in a shelter-trench. They dislike the underground, but it is no use to stand and be shot down uselessly.
Bombs and grenades fall like a hail of fire.
The telephone bell rings continuously. Every one of the seventeen wires running to the switchboard is working. Horace is on the alert, his fingers as electric as the wires he is handling.
A growing nervousness runs through the lines, making the whole army tingle like a single human organism vibrant with life.
All the world is in activity or in readiness.
Medical troops pass by, carrying out the wounded from the bombardment.
An enemy patrol dashes forward to destroy the wire, knowing that it will never return alive. It is met by a storm of rifle-fire, but those who survive, cut. A hole is made. The last German falls.
A French patrol rushes out to mend the gap, throwing coils here and there and is, in its turn, wiped out by grenadiers.
The hateful eyes of searchlights peer over the zone of destruction. It is deserted—as yet.
What is that—a shout?
Midnight!
There is one last furious burst from trench mortars, howitzers and guns.
The white lights, with all the accusing whiteness of the fingers of a thousand dead, cease theirgroping and point to the farther side of No Man's Land.
They come!
Black in the whiteness of that intense light, the wave rolls up.
The silent plain crawls with running, staggering, falling, crawling men. The gray-white expanse speckles rapidly with its spotting of dead.
Into the barrage of fire the wave plunges. It is the end, surely, nothing can get through.
The miracle of escape is demonstrated again. If the masses be large enough, you cannot kill them all. With two-thirds dead, ten thousand men break through. They plunge forward with lowered heads and bristle of bayonets. Every third man is a bomb-thrower.
"Let them come nearer, boys!"
Every man holds his breath.
"Fire!"
A solid blast of flame outlines the fire trench. In the white glare of searchlights and star-shells illumining the scene as though by a continuous river of lightning, the wave is seen to waver. Some fall flat, others sink down quietly, others, again, drop to hands and knees and crawl on, yet others, clutched by the wounded in their death-grip,free themselves with a bayonet thrust—their brothers, their comrades!—and rush on.
The machine guns claim their prey by scores, by hundreds every minute. It does not stop the wave.
Their eyes fixed and staring, as though they were figures in their own nightmares, they leap into the trench, hurling a last shower of hand grenades as they come.
It is the butt and the steel now.
They have reached the trench but they have not won it.
Around each machine gun a special fight gathers.
Another wave is coming. It passes through the barrage fire again and dashes for the trench, already half taken.
Ah! What is that?
The 75's!
The strident roar of unnumbered batteries, with shells timed to the second, breaks loose behind the French lines. The second wave meets that wall of lead. It does not waver, it collapses.
A third wave—how they are driven on to death, those Germans!
The first wave is nearly gone now, the hand tohand struggle in the trench is nearly over and the reserves are creeping in.
But the third wave?
Four mines explode simultaneously. Scores of bodies are thrown in the air. Dozens are thrown down by the sheer impact of the air.
The moment has come.
"Africans! On!"
There is no shouting as they leap over the parapet, but the glitter of their eyes suffices.
The third wave breaks and flees.
"Forward, my children, forward!"
The cry of the officers runs along the line.
The men do not need to be told. The Germans have failed. Now is the counter-assault. Now they have a taste of their own medicine.
"Forward, my children, forward!"
But they, too, have machine guns; they, too, have rifles; they, too, have shrapnel and their wire entanglements stretch before us. The French fall as their men fall, but the French commanders will not waste life like theirs.
"Fall back, my children, they have had enough!"
Slowly the bombardment dies down to a watchful fire against a repetition of the assault. Withcountless false alarms the hours of the night pass by.
The gray day breaks slowly.
The trenches are full of dead and No Man's Land is a sight of redoubled horror.
Full daylight comes and shows the scene as desolate as ever, the long line of trenches stretching unbroken from Switzerland to the sea.
All the heroism, the courage, the mad endeavor, the agony, the slaughter, what has it brought to either side?
Nothing.
All that the official communiqués can say, whether sent out from Berlin or from Paris, will be:
"The enemy's attack was repulsed."
Has nothing been gained?
Yes! The French trenches are still French. From this much of French soil the foreigner's foot is banished. Aggression, greed, and hate have made another violent effort to win a strip of territory for their befouling and blackening touch, have tried—and the motionless figures on No Man's Land are France's answer.
Yesterday's clouds have fled and the golden sunshine floods the ravaged fields; it pours intothe windows of field hospitals on the French and German sides alike, it blesses with the hope of the future the soldier who will recover and eases the pain of him who looks upon his last sun; it shows the African sharpening his steel for the next charge, and the general planning the next assault; it shines into distant countries whence men are coming to take the places of those that have gone before.
Heroes all!
Yet the communiqué says only:
"The enemy made a violent assault and was repulsed."
THE DEMON FACES
"Croquier!"
"But yes, my boy, it is I!"
The boy ran forward eagerly to greet his old friend, for the moment ignoring the dogs by which he was surrounded, and then stopped and looked fixedly at his comrade.
"Your arm?" he queried.
The hunchback shrugged one shoulder.
"It is gone, as you see," he answered.
"But how?"
"It was my fate, no doubt," the other responded. "Destiny had decided that I should give an arm to the Germans; so, since the military authorities would not give me the opportunity to lose it at the front, I left it behind me in Paris."
"What happened?" Horace persisted.
"It was a little nothing," the hunchback replied. "A German bird dropped a shell out of his beak on the munitions factory where I was working."
"And a splinter hit you?"
"Several."
"Why didn't you dodge?"
"I couldn't. You see," the hunchback continued, "there was a girl there."
"And then?" demanded the lad impatiently. "Don't stammer so, Croquier, tell the story!"
"It was a tiny nothing," his comrade repeated, somewhat shamefacedly. "It was this way. In the factory where I was working, there were many brave girls working also, brave girls, for the work was dangerous. It was especially dangerous, because there was a church on one side and a hospital near by. A Boche aviator always tries to hit a hospital when he can. The Red Cross to him is as it would be to a bull."
"I've noticed that," the boy agreed. "At the front, here, they shell the field hospitals every chance they get. But tell the story!"
"One foggy morning, then," the hunchback went on, "about a week before Christmas, an aviator who had escaped our air-sentries by reason of the mist, let fall a bomb. I feel sure it was meant for the hospital, but it hit us instead. I was working on the top floor. The bomb—it was quite a little one—came through the roof. I happened tobe the one to see it coming and I saw, at once, that it would fall on the stone bench in front of which the girls were working.
"It was not the time for politeness, you understand, so I swept my left arm round, and the girl who was working next to me fell down flat.
"I must have been a little slow in bringing down my arm after I had swung it round, for the shell struck the bench at the same second and the splinters collected in my hand and wrist. The hand was almost quite cut off. The doctors said it was a lovely amputation—they are droll fellows, those doctors—but to make the matter more sure, they cut off my arm a little higher, as you see. It was to prevent infection, they said."
"And the girl?"
The hunchback looked grave.
"She was black and blue for a week," he said. "You see, I am rather strong and perhaps I hit her a little too hard."
"But you saved her life!"
"That, of course," said the Frenchman, simply; "what else would any one do?"
"And were you the only one hurt?"
"Alas, no!" sighed Croquier. "It is there that I was a fool. If I had hit two girls, one on eitherside, it would have been very good. But I had a sharp tool in my right hand and I did not think of it. The brave little one on that side was killed. No one else was hurt. It was a wonderful escape."
"I don't quite see it that way," the boy retorted. "One girl killed and one man crippled, by a small aëroplane bomb, looks to me more like a catastrophe than an escape. What happened to the girl whose life you saved?"
"She was as kind as she was brave," the hunchback answered. "She was very rich, or, rather, she had been so before the war, though she had put on workmen's clothes and was slaving in a munitions factory. She was doing it for France.
"Every day that I was in the hospital she came to see me after working hours. So did other of the operatives. They were all very kind, but she was the kindest. It was she who secured permission for me to have the 'captive Kaiser' on the little table beside my hospital bed. The doctors could refuse her nothing. She had a smile, ah! one to remember!"
Horace smiled at the mental picture of the grim, black eagle with the yellow eyes, iron-caged, inthe white, cool cleanliness of a hospital ward.
"It was Mademoiselle Chandon, too," Croquier continued, "who enabled me to come here to the front. I am a general, no less, my boy, now. I am the General of this army of dogs."
"So I see," the lad agreed. "But I didn't know that you knew anything about dogs."
"Have you forgotten, my boy," the hunchback answered, "that, when I was a small urchin, I traveled with the circus? I am sure I have told you stories of that time. My master was the animal trainer and many were the tricks that he taught me. One does not forget what one has learned in childhood.
"Mademoiselle Chandon, she whose pretty face I was so fortunate as to save with my arm, formerly was rich, as I have said. Before the war, her father had owned magnificent kennels and he was forever lamenting that he could not give his dogs to the army. But they were not trained.
"'But I, Mademoiselle,' I said to her, 'behold, I can train dogs. That does not take two hands!'
"She clapped her little palms together with delight and ran away to her big house in the town, which was being used as a hospital for the blind.
"It was, perhaps, about a week after that, thatthe old nobleman, her grandfather, came to see me in the hospital. It must needs be her grandfather who came. Her father was an officer in the Cuirassiers. The family had given all their automobiles to the army for staff purposes, so the old nobleman came himself through the streets on foot.