“Hills bare of trees, from which the snow that ran down their slopes had turned the road into a sea of mud.”
From a photograph copyright by Medem Photo Service.“Hills bare of trees, from which the snow that ran down their slopes had turned the road into a sea of mud.”
Except for some fishermen, the Serbianshad abandoned these villages, and they were occupied by English army service men and infantry. The “front,” which was hidden away among the jumble of hills, seemed, when we reached it, to consist entirely of artillery. All along the road the Tommies were waging a hopeless war against the mud, shovelling it off the stone road to keep the many motor-trucks from skidding over a precipice, or against the cold making shelters of it, or washing it out of their uniforms and off their persons.
Shivering from ears to heels and with teeth rattling, for they had come from the Dardanelles, they stood stripped to the waist scrubbing their sun-tanned chests and shoulders with ice-water. It was a spectacle that inspired confidence. When a man is so keen after water to wash in that he will kick the top off a frozen lake to get it, a little thing like a barb-wire entanglement will not halt him.
The cold of those hills was like no cold I had ever felt. Officers who had hunted in northern Russia, in the Himalayas, in Alaska, assured us that never had they so suffered. The men we passed, who were in the ambulances, were down either with pneumonia or frost-bite. Many had lost toes and fingers. And it was not because they were not warmly clad.[B]
Last winter in France had taught the war office how to dress the part; but nothing had prepared them for the cold of the Balkans. And to add to their distress, for it was all of that, there was no fire-wood. The hills were bare of trees, and such cold as they endured could not be fought with green twigs.
It was not the brisk, invigorating cold that invites you out of doors. It had no cheery, healthful appeal to skates, toboggans, and the jangling bells of a cutter. It was the damp, clammy, penetrating cold of a dungeon, of an unventilated ice-chest, of a morgue. Your clothes did not warm you, the heat of your body had to warm your clothes. And warm, also, all of the surrounding hills.
Between the road and the margin of the lake were bamboo reeds as tall as lances, and at the edge of these were gathered myriads of ducks. The fishermen were engaged in bombarding the ducks with rocks. They went about this in a methodical fashion. All around the lake, concealed in the reeds and lifted a few feet above the water they had raised huts on piles. In front of these huts was a ledge or balcony. They looked like overgrown bird-houses on stilts.
One fisherman waited in a boat to pick up the dead ducks, and the otherhurled stones from a sling. It was the same kind of a sling as the one with which David slew Goliath. In Athens I saw small boys using it to throw stones at an electric-light pole. The one the fisherman used was about eight feet long. To get the momentum he whirled it swiftly above his head as a cowboy swings a lariat, and then let one end fly loose, and the stone, escaping, smashed into the mass of ducks. If it stunned or killed a duck the human water-spaniel in the boat would row out and retrieve it. To duck hunters at home the sport would chiefly recommend itself through the cheapness of the ammunition.
On the road we met relays of water-carts and wagons that had been up the hills with food for the gunners at the front; and engineers were at work repairing the stone bridges or digging détours to avoid those that had disappeared. They had been built to support no greater burden than a flock of sheep, an ox-cart, or what a donkey can carry on his back, andthe assault of the British motor-trucks and French six-inch guns had driven them deep into the mud.
After ten miles we came to what a staff officer would call an “advanced base,” but which was locally designated the “Dump.” At the side of the road, much of it uncovered to the snow, were stores of ammunition, “bully beef,” and barb-wire. The camp bore all the signs of a temporary halting place. It was just what the Tommies called it, a dump. We had not been told then that the Allies were withdrawing, but one did not have to be a military expert to see that there was excellent reason why they should.
They were so few. Whatever the force was against them, the force I saw was not strong enough to hold the ground, not that it covered, but over which it was sprinkled. There were outposts without supports, supports without reserves. A squad was expected to perform the duties of a company. Where a brigade was needed there was less than a battalion.Against the white masses of the mountains and the desolate landscape without trees, houses, huts, without any sign of human habitation, the scattered groups of khaki only accented the bleak loneliness.
At the dump we had exchanged for the impromptu motor-truck, automobiles of the French staff, and as “Jimmie” Hare and I were alone in one of them we could stop where we liked. So we halted where an English battery was going into action. It had dug itself into the side of a hill and covered itself with snow and pine branches. Somewhere on one of the neighboring hills the “spotter” was telephoning the range. The gunners could not see at what they were firing. They could see only the high hill of rock and snow, at the base of which they stood shoulder high in their mud cellars. Ten yards to the rear of them was what looked like a newly made grave reverently covered with pine boughs. Through these a rat-faced young man, with the receivers of a telephone clamped to his ears, pushed his head.
American war correspondents at the French front in Serbia.
From a photograph by William G. Shepherd.John T. McCutcheon.John F. Bass.Richard Harding Davis.James H. Hare.American war correspondents at the French front in Serbia.
“Eight degrees to the left, sir,” he barked, “four thousand yards.”
The men behind the guns were extremely young, but, like most artillerymen, alert, sinewy, springing to their appointed tasks with swift, catlike certainty. The sight of the two strangers seemed to surprise them as much as the man in the grave had startled us.
There were two boy officers in command, one certainly not yet eighteen, his superior officer still under twenty.
“I suppose you’re all right,” said the younger one. “You couldn’t have got this far if you weren’t all right.”
He tried to scowl upon us, but he was not successful. He was too lonely, too honestly glad to see any one from beyond the mountains that hemmed him in. They stretched on either side of him to vast distances, massed barriers of white against a gray, sombresky; in front of him, to be exact, just four thousand yards in front of him, were Bulgarians he had never seen, but who were always with their shells ordering to “move on,” and behind him lay a muddy road that led to a rail-head, that led to transports, that led to France, to the Channel, and England. It was a long, long way to England. I felt like taking one of the boy officers under each arm, and smuggling him safely home to his mother.
“You don’t seem to have any supports,” I ventured.
The child gazed around him. It was growing dark and gloomier, and the hollows of the white hills were filled with shadows. His men were listening, so he said bravely, with a vague sweep of the hand at the encircling darkness, “Oh, they’re about—somewhere. You might call this,” he added, with pride, “an independent command.”
You well might.
“Report when ready!” chanted his superior officer, aged nineteen.
He reported, and then the guns spoke, making a great flash in the twilight.
In spite of the light, Jimmie Hare was trying to make a photograph of the guns.
“Take it on the recoil,” advised the child officer. “It’s sure to stick. It always does stick.”
The men laughed, not slavishly, because the officer had made a joke, but as companions in trouble, and because when you are abandoned on a mountainside with a lame gun that jams, you must not take it lying down, but make a joke of it.
The French chauffeur was pumping his horn for us to return, and I went, shamefacedly, as must the robbers who deserted the babes in the wood.
In farewell I offered the boy officer the best cigars for sale in Greece, which is the worse thing one can say of any cigar. I apologized for them, but explained he must take them because they were called the “King of England.”
“I would take them,” said the infant, “if they were called the ‘German Emperor.’”
At the door of the car we turned and waved, and the two infants waved back. I felt I had meanly deserted them—that for his life the mother of each could hold me to account.
But as we drove away from the cellars of mud, the gun that stuck, and the “independent command,” I could see in the twilight the flashes of the guns and two lonely specks of light.
They were the “King of England” cigars burning bravely.
Salonika,December, 1915.
The chauffeur of an army automobile must make his way against cavalry, artillery, motor-trucks, motor-cycles, men marching, and ambulances filled with wounded, over a road torn by thousand-ton lorries and excavated by washouts and Jack Johnsons. It is therefore necessary for him to drive with care. So he drives at sixty miles an hour, and tries to scrape the mud from every wheel he meets.
In these days of his downfall the greatest danger to the life of the war correspondent is that he must move about in automobiles driven by military chauffeurs. The one who drove me from the extreme left of the English front up to hill 516, which was the highestpoint of the French front, told me that in peace times he drove a car to amuse himself. His idea of amusing himself was to sweep around a corner on one wheel, exclaim with horror, and throw on all the brakes with the nose of the car projecting over a precipice a thousand yards deep. He knew perfectly well the precipice was there, but he leaped at it exactly as though it were the finish line of the Vanderbilt cup race. If his idea of amusing himself was to make me sick with terror he must have spent a thoroughly enjoyable afternoon.
The approaches to hill 516, the base of the hill on the side hidden from the Bulgarians, and the trenches dug into it were crowded with the French. At that point of the line they greatly outnumbered the English. But it was not the elbow touch of numbers that explained their cheerfulness; it was because they knew it was expected of them. The famous scholar who wrote in our school geographies, “The French are agay people, fond of dancing and light wines,” established a tradition. And on hill 516, although it was to keep from freezing that they danced, and though the light wines were melted snow, they still kept up that tradition and were “gay.”
They laughed at us in welcome, crawling out of their igloos on all fours like bears out of a cave; they laughed when we photographed them crowding to get in front of the camera, when we scattered among them copies ofL’Opinion, when up the snow-clad hillside we skidded and slipped and fell. And if we peered into the gloom of the shelters, where they crouched on the frozen ground with snow dripping from above, with shoulders pressed against walls of icy mud, they waved spoons at us and invited us to share their soup. Even the dark-skinned, sombre-eyed men of the desert, the tall Moors and Algerians, showed their white teeth and laughed when a “seventy-five” exploded from an unsuspicious bush, and wejumped. It was like a camp of Boy Scouts, picnicking for one day, and sure the same night of a warm supper and bed. But the best thesepoilusmight hope for was months of ice, snow, and mud, of discomfort, colds, long marches carrying heavy burdens, the pain of frost-bite, and, worst of all, homesickness. They were sure of nothing: not even of the next minute. For hill 516 was dotted with oblong rows of stones with, at one end, a cross of green twigs and a soldier’s cap.
The hill was the highest point of a ridge that looked down into the valleys of the Vardar and of Bodjinia. Toward the Bulgarians we could see the one village of Kosturino, almost indistinguishable against the snow, and for fifty miles, even with glasses, no other sign of life. Nothing but hills, rocks, bushes, and snow. When the “seventy-fives” spoke with their smart, sharp crack that always seems to say, “Take that!” and to add, with aristocratic insolence, “and be damned toyou!” one could not guess what they were firing at. In Champagne, where the Germans were as near as from a hundred to forty yards; in Artois, where they were a mile distant, but where their trench was as clearly in sight as the butts of a rifle-range, you could understand. You knew that “that dark line over there” was the enemy.
A year before at Soissons you had seen the smoke of the German guns in a line fifteen miles long. In other little wars you had watched the shells destroy a blockhouse, a village, or burst upon a column of men. But from hill 516 you could see no enemy; only mountains draped in snow, silent, empty, inscrutable. It seemed ridiculous to be attacking fifty miles of landscape with tiny pills of steel. But although we could not see the Bulgars, they could see the flashes on hill 516, and from somewhere out of the inscrutable mountains shells burst and fell. They fell very close, within forty feet of us, and, like children being sent to bed just atdessert time, our hosts hurried us out of the trenches and drove us away.
While on “516” we had been in Bulgaria; now we returned to Serbia, and were halted at the village of Valandova. There had been a ceremony that afternoon. A general, whose name we may not mention, had received themedaille militaire. One of the French correspondents asked him in recognition of which of his victories it had been bestowed. The general possessed a snappy temper.
“The medal was given me,” he said, “because I was the only general without it, and I was becoming conspicuous.”
It had long been dark when we reached Strumnitza station, where we were to spend the night in a hospital tent. The tent was as big as a barn, with a stove, a cot for each, and fresh linen sheets. All these good things belong to the men we had left on hill 516 awake in the mud and snow. I felt like a burglar, who, while the owner is away, sleepsin his bed. There was another tent with a passageway filled with medical supplies connecting it with ours. It was in darkness, and we thought it empty until some one exploring found it crowded with wounded and men with frozen legs and hands. For half an hour they had been watching us through the passageway, making no sign, certainly making no complaint. John Bass collected all our newspapers, candles, and boxes of cigarettes, which the hospital stewards distributed, and when we returned from dinner our neighbors were still wide awake and holding a smoking concert. But when in the morning the bugles woke us we found that during the night the wounded had been spirited away, and by rail transferred to the hospital ships. We should have known then that the army was in retreat. But it was all so orderly, so leisurely, that it seemed like merely a shifting from one point of the front to another.
We dined with the officers and they certainly gave no suggestion of men contemplatingretreat, for the mess-hall in which dinner was served had been completed only that afternoon. It was of rough stones and cement, and the interior walls were covered with whitewash. The cement was not yet dry, nor, as John McCutcheon later discovered when he drew caricatures on it, neither was the whitewash. There were twenty men around the dinner-table, seated on ammunition-boxes and Standard Oil cans, and so close together you could use only one hand. So, you gave up trying to cut your food, and used the free hand solely in drinking toasts to the army, to France, and the Allies. Then, to each Ally individually. You were glad there were so many Allies. For it was not Greek, but French wine, of the kind that comes from Rheims. And the army was retreating. What the French army offers its guests to drink when it is advancing is difficult to imagine.
Headquarters of the French commander in Gravec, Serbia.
From a photograph by R. H. Davis.Headquarters of the French commander in Gravec, Serbia.
We were waited upon by an enormous negro from Senegal with a fez as tall as agiant firecracker. Waiting single-handed on twenty men is a serious matter. And because the officers laughed when he served the soup in a tin basin used for washing dishes his feelings were hurt. It was explained that “Chocolat” in his own country was a prince, and that unless treated with tact he might get the idea that waiting on a table is not a royal prerogative. One of the officers was a genius at writing impromptu verses. During one course he would write them, and while Chocolat was collecting the plates would sing them. Then by the light of a candle on the back of a scrap of paper he would write another and sing that. He was rivalled in entertaining us by the officers who told anecdotes of war fronts from the Marne to Smyrna, who proposed toasts, and made speeches in response, especially by the officer who that day had received the Croix de Guerre and a wound.
I sat next to a young man who had been talking learnedly of dumdum bullets andParisian restaurants. They asked him to recite, and to my horror he rose. Until that moment he had been a serious young officer, talking boulevard French. In an instant he was transformed. He was a clown. To look at him was to laugh. He was an old roué, senile, pitiable, a bourgeois, an apache, a lover, and his voice was so beautiful that each sentence sang. He used words so difficult that to avoid them even Frenchmen will cross the street. He mastered them, played with them, caressed them, sipped of them as a connoisseur sips Madeira: he tossed them into the air like radiant bubbles, or flung them at us with the rattle of a mitrailleuse. When in triumph he sat down, I asked him, when not in uniform, who the devil he happened to be.
Again he was the bored young man. In a low tone, so as not to expose my ignorance to others, he said.
“I? I am Barrielles of the Theatre Odeon.”
We were receiving so much that to make no return seemed ungracious, and we insisted that John T. McCutcheon should decorate the wall of the new mess-room with the caricatures that make the ChicagoTribunefamous. Our hosts were delighted, but it was hardly fair to McCutcheon. Instead of his own choice of weapons he was asked to prove his genius on wet whitewash with a stick of charred wood. It was like asking McLaughlin to make good on a ploughed field. But in spite of the fact that the whitewash fell off in flakes, there grew upon the wall a tall, gaunt figure with gleaming eyes and teeth. Chocolat paid it the highest compliment. He gave a wild howl and fled into the night. Then in quick succession, while the Frenchmen applauded each swift stroke, appeared the faces of the song writer, the comedian, the wounded man, and the commanding officer. It was a real triumph, but the surprises of the evening were not at an end. McCutcheon had butjust resumed his seat when the newly finished rear wall of the mess-hall crashed into the room. Where had been rocks and cement was a gaping void, and a view of a garden white with snow.
While we were rescuing the song writer from the débris McCutcheon regarded the fallen wall thoughtfully.
“They feared,” he said, “I was going to decorate that wall also, and they sent Chocolat outside to push it in.”
After the retreat from Serbia.
From a photograph, copyright by American Press Association.After the retreat from Serbia.English Tommies intrenched in the ten-mile plain outside Salonika. “Are they downhearted? No!”
The next day we walked along the bank of the Vardar River to Gravec, about five miles north of Strumnitza station. Five miles farther was Demir-Kapu, the Gate of Iron, and between these two towns is a high and narrow pass famous for its wild and magnificent beauty. Fifteen miles beyond that was Krivolak, the most advanced French position. On the hills above Gravec were many guns, but in the town itself only a few infantrymen. It was a town entirely of mud; the houses, the roads, and the peoplewere covered with it. Gravec is proud only of its church, on the walls of which in colors still rich are painted many devils with pitchforks driving the wicked ones into the flames.
One of thepoilusput his finger on the mass of wicked ones.
“Les Boches,” he explained.
Whether the devils were the French or the English he did not say, possibly because at the moment they were more driven against than driving.
Major Merse, the commanding officer, invited us to his headquarters. They were in a house of stone and mud, from which projected a wooden platform. When any one appeared upon it he had the look of being about to make a speech. The major asked us to take photographs of Gravec and send them to his wife. He wanted her to see in what sort of a place he was condemned to exist during the winter. He did not wish her to think of him as sitting in front of a café on the sidewalk, and the snap-shotswould show her that Gravec has no cafés, no sidewalks and no streets.
But he was not condemned to spend the winter in Gravec.
Within the week great stores of ammunition and supplies began to pour into it from Krivolak, and the Gate of Iron became the advanced position, and Gravec suddenly found herself of importance as the French base.
To understand this withdrawal, find on the map Krivolak, and follow the railroad and River Vardar southeast to Gravec.
The cause of the retreat was the inability of the Serbians to hold Monastir and their withdrawal west, which left a gap in the former line of Serbians, French, and British. The enemy thus was south and west of Sarrail, and his left flank was exposed.
On December 3, finding the advanced position at Krivolak threatened by four divisions, 100,000 men, General Sarrail began the withdrawal, sending south by rail without lossall ammunition and stores. He destroyed the tunnel at Krivolak and all the bridges across the Vardar, and on his left at the Cerna River. The fighting was heavy at Prevedo and Biserence, but the French losses were small. He withdrew slowly, twenty miles in one week. The British also withdrew from their first line to their second line of defense.
Demir-Kapu, meaning the Gate of Iron, is the entrance to a valley celebrated for its wild and magnificent beauty. Starting at Demir-Kapu, it ends two kilometres north of Gravec. It rises on either side of the Vardar River and railroad line, and in places is less than a hundred yards wide. It is formed of sheer hills of rock, treeless and exposed.
But the fame of Gravec as the French base was short-lived. For the Serbians at Monastir and Gevgeli, though fighting bravely, were forced toward Albania, leaving the left flank of Sarrail still more exposed.And the Gate of Iron belied her ancient title.
With 100,000 Bulgars crowding down upon him General Sarrail wasted no lives, either French or English, but again withdrew. He was outnumbered, some say five to one. In any event, he was outnumbered as inevitably as three of a kind beat two pair. A good poker player does not waste chips backing two pair. Neither should a good general, when his chips are human lives. As it was, in the retreat seven hundred French were killed or wounded, and of the British, who were more directly in the path of the Bulgars, one thousand.
At Gevgeli the French delayed two days to allow the Serbian troops to get away, and then themselves withdrew. There now no longer were any Serbian soldiers in Serbia. So both armies fell back toward Salonika on a line between Kilindir and Doiran railroad-station, and all the places we visited a week before were occupied by the enemy. AtGravec a Bulgarian is pointing at the wicked ones who are being driven into the flames and saying: “The Allies,” and at Strumnitza station in the mess-hall Bulgar officers are framing John McCutcheon’s sketches.
And here at Salonika from sunrise to sunset the English are disembarking reinforcements, and the French building barracks of stone and brick. It looks as though the French were here to stay, and as though the retreating habit was broken.
The same team that, to put it politely, drew the enemy after them to the gates of Paris, have been drawing the same enemy after them to Salonika. That they will throw him back from Salonika, as they threw him back from Paris, is assured.
General Sarrail was one of those who commanded in front of Paris, and General de Castelnau, who also commanded at the battle of the Marne, and is now chief of staff of General Joffre, has just visited him here. General de Castelnau was sent to “go, look,see.” He reports that the position now held by the Allies is impregnable.
The perimeter held by them is fifty miles in length and stretches from the Vardar River on the west to the Gulf of Orplanos on the east. There are three lines of defense. To assist the first two on the east are Lakes Beshik and Langaza, on the west the Vardar River. Should the enemy penetrate the first lines they will be confronted ten miles from Salonika by a natural barrier of hills, and ten miles of intrenchments and barb-wire. Should the enemy surmount these hills the Allies war-ships in the harbor can sweep him off them as a fire-hose rips the shingles off a roof.
The man who tells you he understands the situation in Salonika is of the same mental caliber as the one who understands a system for beating the game at Monte Carlo. But there are certain rumors as to the situation in the future that can be eliminated. First, Greece will not turn against the Allies.Second, the Allies will not withdraw from Salonika. They now are agreed it is better to resist an attack or stand a siege, even if they lose 200,000 men, than to withdraw from the Balkans without a fight.
The Briand government believes that had the Millerand government, which it overthrew, sent troops to aid the Serbian army in August this war would have been made shorter by six months. It now is trying to repair the mistake of the government it ousted. Among other reasons it has for remaining in the Balkans, is that the presence of 200,000 men at Salonika will hold Roumania from any aggressive movement on Russia.
To aid the Allies, Russia at Tannenberg made a sacrifice, and lost 200,000 men. The present French Government now feels bound in honor to help Russia by keeping the French-British armies at Salonika. As a visiting member of the government said to me:
“In this war there is no western line or eastern line. The line of the Allies is wherever a German attacks. France went to the Balkans to help Serbia. She went too late, which is not the fault of the present government. But there remains the task to keep the Germans from Egypt, to menace the railroad at Adrianople, and to prevent Roumania from an attack upon the flank of Russia. The Allies are in Salonika until this war is ended.”
In Salonika you see every evidence that this is the purpose of the Allies; that both England and France are determined to hold fast.
Reinforcements of British troops are arriving daily, and the French are importing large numbers of ready-to-set-up wooden barracks, each capable of holding 250 men. Also along the water-front they are building storehouses of brick and stone. That does not suggest an immediate departure. At the French camp, which covers five squaremiles in the suburbs of Salonika when I visited it to-day, thousands of soldiers were actively engaged in laying stone roads, repairing bridges and erecting new ones. There is no question but that they intend to make this the base until the advance in the spring.
A battalion of Serbians 700 strong has arrived at the French camp. In size and physique they are splendid specimens of fighting men. They are now road building. Each day refugees of the Serbian army add to their number.
At four o’clock in the morning of the 14th of December, the Greek army evacuated Salonika and that strip of Greek territory stretching from it to Doiran.
From before sunrise an unbroken column of Greek regiments passed beneath the windows of our hotel. There were artillery, cavalry, pontoons, ambulances, and thousands of ponies and donkeys, carrying fodder, supplies, and tents. The sidewalks were invaded by long lines of infantry. Thewater-front along which the column passed was blocked with spectators.
As soon as the Greeks had departed sailors from the Allied war-ships were given shore leave, and the city took on the air of a holiday. Thus was a most embarrassing situation brought to an end and the world informed that the Allies had but just begun to fight. It was the clearing of the prize-ring.
The clearing also of the enemy’s consulates ended another embarrassing situation. As suggested in a previous chapter, the consulates of the Central Powers were the hot-beds and clearing-houses for spies. The raid upon them by the French proved that this was true. The enforced departure of the German, Austrian, Bulgarian, and Turkish consuls added to the responsibilities of our own who has now to guard their interests. They will be efficiently served. John E. Kehl has been long in our consular service, and is most admirably fitted to meet the present crisis. He has been ourrepresentative at Salonika for four years, in which time his experience as consul during the Italian-Turkish War, the two Balkan wars, and the present war, have trained him to meet any situation that is likely to arrive.
What that situation may be, whether the Bulgar-Germans will attack Salonika, or the Allies will advance upon Sofia, and as an inevitable sequence draw after them the Greek army of 200,000 veterans, only the spring can tell.
If the Teutons mean to advance, having the shorter distance to go, they may launch their attack in April. The Allies, if Sofia is their objective, will wait for the snow to leave the hills and the roads to dry. That they would move before May is doubtful. Meanwhile, they are accumulating many men, and much ammunition and information. May they make good use of it.
Paris,January, 1916.
It is an old saying that the busiest man always seems to have the most leisure. It is another way of complimenting him on his genius for organization. When you visit a real man of affairs you seldom find him surrounded by secretaries, stenographers, and a battery of telephones. As a rule, there is nothing on his desk save a photograph of his wife and a rose in a glass of water. Outside the headquarters of the general there were no gendarmes, no sentries, no panting automobiles, no mud-flecked chasseurs-à-cheval. Unchallenged the car rolled up an empty avenue of trees and stopped beside an empty terrace of an apparently empty château. At one end of the terrace was a pond, and in it floated seven beautiful swans.They were the only living things in sight. I thought we had stumbled upon the country home of some gentleman of elegant leisure.
When he appeared the manner of the general assisted that impression. His courtesy was so undisturbed, his mind so tranquil, his conversation so entirely that of the polite host, you felt he was masquerading in the uniform of a general only because he knew it was becoming. He glowed with health and vigor. He had the appearance of having just come indoors after a satisfactory round on his private golf-links. Instead, he had been receiving reports from twenty-four different staff-officers. His manner suggested he had no more serious responsibility than feeding bread crumbs to the seven stately swans. Instead he was responsible for the lives of 170,000 men and fifty miles of trenches. His duties were to feed the men three times a day with food, and all day and night with ammunition, to guard them against attacks from gases, burning oil, bullets, shells; andin counter-attack to send them forward with the bayonet across hurdles of barb-wire to distribute death. These were only a few of his responsibilities.
The ruined village of Gerbéviller, destroyed after their retreat by the Germans.
The ruined village of Gerbéviller, destroyed after their retreat by the Germans.Captain Gabriel Puaux, of the General-Headquarters Staff, and Mr. Davis.
I knew somewhere in the château there must be the conning-tower from which the general directed his armies, and after luncheon asked to be allowed to visit it. It was filled with maps, in size enormous but rich in tiny details, nailed on frames, pinned to the walls, spread over vast drawing-boards. But to the visitor more marvellous than the maps showing the French lines were those in which were set forth the German positions, marked with the place occupied by each unit, giving the exact situation of the German trenches, the German batteries, giving the numerals of each regiment. With these spread before him, the general has only to lift the hand telephone, and direct that from a spot on a map on one wall several tons of explosive shells shall drop on a spot on another map on the wall opposite. The general does notfight only at long distance from a map. Each morning he visits some part of the fifty miles of trenches. What later he sees on his map only jogs his memory. It is a sort of shorthand note. Where to you are waving lines, dots, and crosses, he beholds valleys, forests, miles of yellow trenches. A week ago, during a bombardment, a brother general advanced into the first trench. His chief of staff tugged at his cloak.
“My men like to see me here,” said the general.
A shell killed him. But who can protest it was a life wasted? He made it possible for everypoiluin a trench of five hundred miles to say: “Our generals do not send us where they will not go themselves.”
We left the white swans smoothing their feathers, and through rain drove to a hill covered closely with small trees. The trees were small, because the soil from which they drew sustenance was only one to three feet deep. Beneath that was chalk. Throughthese woods was cut a runway for a toy railroad. It possessed the narrowest of narrow gauges, and its rolling-stock consisted of flat cars three feet wide, drawn by splendid Percherons. The live stock, the rolling-stock, the tracks, and the trees on either side of the tracks were entirely covered with white clay. Even the brakemen and the locomotive-engineer who walked in advance of the horses were completely painted with it. And before we got out of the woods, so were the passengers. This railroad feeds the trenches, carrying to them water and ammunition, and to the kitchens in the rear uncooked food.
The French marquis who escorted “Mon Capitaine” of the Grand Quartier Général des Armées, who was my “guide philosopher and friend,” to the trenches either had built this railroad, or owned a controlling interest in it, for he always spoke of it proudly as “my express,” “my special train,” “my petite vitesse.” He had lately been in America buying cavalry horses.
“Through these woods ran a toy railroad.”
From a photograph, copyright by Medem Photo Service.“Through these woods ran a toy railroad.”This picture shows President Poincaré on the toy railroad en route to the trenches.
As for years he has owned one of the famous racing stables in France, his knowledge of them is exceptional.
When last I had seen him he was in silk, on one of his own thoroughbreds, and the crowd, or that part of it that had backed his horse, was applauding, and, while he waited for permission to dismount, he was smiling and laughing. Yesterday, when the plough horses pulled his express-train off the rails, he descended and pushed it back, and, in consequence, was splashed, not by the mud of the race-track but of the trenches. Nor in the misty, dripping, rain-soaked forest was there any one to applaud. But he was still laughing, even more happily.
The trenches were dug around what had been a chalk mine, and it was difficult to tell where the mining for profit had stopped and the excavations for defense began. When you can see only chalk at your feet, and chalk on either hand, and overhead the empty sky, this ignorance may be excused. In the boyaux, which began where the railroadstopped, that was our position. We walked through an endless grave with walls of clay, on top of which was a scant foot of earth. It looked like a layer of chocolate on the top of a cake.
In some places, underfoot was a corduroy path of sticks, like the false bottom of a rowboat; in others, we splashed through open sluices of clay and rain-water. You slid and skidded, and to hold yourself erect pressed with each hand against the wet walls of the endless grave.
We came out upon the “hauts de Meuse.” They are called also the “Shores of Lorraine,” because to that province, as are the cliffs of Dover to the county of Kent, they form a natural barrier. We were in the quarry that had been cut into the top of the heights on the side that now faces other heights held by the enemy. Behind us rose a sheer wall of chalk as high as a five-story building. The face of it had been pounded by shells. It was as undismayed as the whitewashedwall of a schoolroom at which generations of small boys have flung impertinent spit-balls. At the edge of the quarry the floor was dug deeper, leaving a wall between it and the enemy, and behind this wall were the posts of observation, the nests of the machine-guns, the raised step to which the men spring when repulsing an attack. Below and back of them were the shelters into which, during a bombardment, they disappear. They were roofed with great beams, on top of which were bags of cement piled three and four yards high.
Not on account of the sleet and fog, but in spite of them, the aspect of the place was grim and forbidding. You did not see, as at some of the other fronts, on the sign-boards that guide the men through the maze, jokes and nicknames. The mess-huts and sleeping-caves bore no such ironic titles as the Petit Café, the Anti-Boche, Chez Maxim. They were designated only by numerals, businesslike and brief. It was noplace for humor. The monuments to the dead were too much in evidence. On every front the men rise and lie down with death, but on no other front had I found them living so close to the graves of their former comrades. Where a man had fallen, there had he been buried, and on every hand you saw between the chalk huts, at the mouths of the pits or raised high in a niche, a pile of stones, a cross, and a soldier’s cap. Where one officer had fallen his men had built to his memory a mausoleum. It is also a shelter into which, when the shells come, they dive for safety. So that even in death he protects them.
I was invited into a post of observation, and told to make my entrance quickly. In order to exist, a post of observation must continue to look to the enemy only like part of the wall of earth that faces him. If through its apparently solid front there flashes, even for an instant, a ray of sunlight, he knows that the ray comes through a peep-hole,and that behind the peep-hole men with field-glasses are watching him. And with his shells he hammers the post of observation into a shambles. Accordingly, when you enter one, it is etiquette not to keep the door open any longer than is necessary to squeeze past it. As a rule, the door is a curtain of sacking, but hands and bodies coated with clay, by brushing against it, have made it quite opaque.
The post was as small as a chart-room, and the light came only through the peep-holes. You got a glimpse of a rack of rifles, of shadowy figures that made way for you, and of your captain speaking in a whisper. When you put your eyes to the peep-hole it was like looking at a photograph through a stereoscope. But, instead of seeing the lake of Geneva, the Houses of Parliament, or Niagara Falls, you looked across a rain-driven valley of mud, on the opposite side of which was a hill.
Here the reader kindly will imagine apage of printed matter devoted to that hill. It was an extremely interesting hill, but my captain, who also is my censor, decides that what I wrote was too interesting, especially to Germans. So the hill is “strafed.” He says I can begin again vaguely with “Over there.”
“Over there,” said his voice in the darkness, “is St. Mihiel.”
For more than a year you had read of St. Mihiel. Communiqués, maps, illustrations had made it famous and familiar. It was the town that gave a name to the German salient, to the point thrust in advance of what should be his front. You expected to see an isolated hill, a promontory, some position of such strategic value as would explain why for St. Mihiel the lives of thousands of Germans had been thrown upon the board. But except for the obstinacy of the German mind, or, upon the part of the Crown Prince the lack of it, I could find no explanation. Why the German wants tohold St. Mihiel, why he ever tried to hold it, why if it so pleases him he should not continue to hold it until his whole line is driven across the border, is difficult to understand. For him it is certainly an expensive position. It lengthens his lines of communication and increases his need of transport. It eats up men, eats up rations, eats up priceless ammunition, and it leads to nowhere, enfilades no position, threatens no one. It is like an ill-mannered boy sticking out his tongue. And as ineffective.
The physical aspect of St. Mihiel is a broad sweep of meadow-land cut in half by the Meuse flooding her banks; and the shattered houses of the Ferme Mont Meuse, which now form the point of the salient. At this place the opposing trenches are only a hundred yards apart, and all of this low ground is commanded by the French guns on the heights of Les Paroches. On the day of our visit they were being heavily bombarded. On each side of the salient are theFrench. Across the battle-ground of St. Mihiel I could see their trenches facing those in which we stood. For, at St. Mihiel, instead of having the line of the enemy only in front, the lines face the German, and surround him on both flanks. Speaking not as a military strategist but merely as a partisan, if any German commander wants that kind of a position I would certainly make him a present of it.