It had been planned to show me first a detail map of the places I was to visit, and with this map before me to explain the present position of the Belgian line along the embankment of the railroad from Nieuport to Dixmude. The map was ready on a table in the officers' mess, a bare room with three long tables of planks, to which a flight of half a dozen steps led from the headquarters room below.
Twilight had fallen by that time. It had commenced to rain. I could see through the window heavy drops that stirred the green surface of the moat at one side of the old building. On the wall hung the advertisement of an American harvester, a reminder of more peaceful days. The beating of the rain kept time to the story Captain F—— told that night, bending over the map and tracing his country's ruin with his forefinger.
Much of it is already history. The surprise and fury of the Germans on discovering that what they had considered a contemptible military force was successfully holding them back until the English and French Armies could get into the field; the policy of systematic terrorism that followed this discovery; the unpreparedness of Belgium's allies, which left this heroic little army practically unsupported for so long against the German tidal wave.
The great battle of the Yser is also history. I shall not repeat the dramatic recital of the Belgian retreat to this point, fighting a rear-guard engagement as they fell back before three times their number; of the fury of the German onslaught, which engaged the entire Belgian front, so that there was no rest, not a moment's cessation. In one night at Dixmude the Germans made fifteen attacks. Is it any wonder that two-thirds of Belgium's Army is gone?
They had fought since the third of August. It was on the twenty-first of October that they at last retired across the Yser and two days later took up their present position at the railway embankment. On that day, the twenty-third of October, the first French troops arrived to assist them, some eighty-five hundred reaching Nieuport.
It was the hope of the Belgians that, the French taking their places on the line, they could retire for a time as reserves and get a little rest. But the German attack continuing fiercely against the combined armies of the Allies, the Belgians were forced to go into action again, weary as they were, at the historic curve of the Yser, where was fought the great battle of the war. At British Headquarters later on I was given the casualties of that battle, when the invading German Army flung itself again and again, for nineteen days, against the forces of the Allies: The English casualties for that period were forty-five thousand; the French, seventy thousand; the German, by figures given out at Berlin, two hundred and fifty thousand. The Belgian I do not know.
"It was after that battle," said Captain F——, "that the German dead were taken back and burned, to avoid pestilence."
The Belgians had by this time reached the limit of their resources. It was then that the sluices were opened and their fertile lowlands flooded.
On the thirty-first of October the water stopped the German advance along the Belgian lines. As soon as they discovered what had been done the Germans made terrific and furious efforts to get forward ahead of it. They got into the towns of Ramscappelle and Pervyse, where furious street fighting occurred.
Pervyse was taken five times and lost five times. But all their efforts failed. The remnant of the Belgian Army had retired to the railroad embankment. The English and French lines held firm.
For the time, at least, the German advance was checked.
That was Captain F——'s story of the battle of the Yser.
When he had finished he drew out of his pocket the diary of a German officer killed at the Yser during the first days of the fighting, and read it aloud. It is a great human document. I give here as nearly as possible a literal translation.
It was written during the first days of the great battle. For fifteen days after he was killed the German offensive kept up. General Foch, who commanded the French Army of the North during that time, described their method to me. "The Germans came," he said, "like the waves of the sea!"
* * * * *
The diary of a German officer, killed at the Yser:—
Twenty-fourth of October, 1914:
"The battle goes on—we are trying to effect a crossing of the Yser. Beginning at 5:45 P.M. the engineers go on preparing their bridging materials. Marching quickly over the country, crossing fields and ditches, we are exposed to continuous heavy fire. A spent bullet strikes me in the back, just below the coat collar, but I am not wounded.
"Taking up a position near Vandewonde farm, we are able to obtain a little shelter from the devastating fire of the enemy's artillery. How terrible is our situation! By taking advantage of all available cover we arrive at the fifth trench, where the artillery is in action and rifle fire is incessant. We know nothing of the general situation. I do not know where the enemy is, or what numbers are opposed to us, and there seems no way of getting the desired information.
"Everywhere along the line we are suffering heavy losses, altogether out of proportion to the results obtained. The enemy's artillery is too well sheltered, too strong; and as our own guns, fewer in number, have not been able to silence those of the enemy, our infantry is unable to make any advance. We are suffering heavy and useless losses.
"The medical service on the field has been found very wanting. At Dixmude, in one place, no less than forty frightfully wounded men were left lying uncared, for. The medical corps is kept back on the other side of the Yser without necessity. It is equally impossible to receive water and rations in any regular way.
"For several days now we have not tasted a warm meal; bread and other things are lacking; our reserve rations are exhausted. The water is bad, quite green, indeed; but all the same we drink it—we can get nothing else. Man is brought down to the level of the brute beast. Myself, I have nothing left to eat; I left what I had with me in the saddlebags on my horse. In fact, we were not told what we should have to do on this side of the Yser, and we did not know that our horses would have to be left on the other side. That is why we could not arrange things.
"I am living on what other people, like true comrades, are willing to give me, but even then my share is only very small. There is no thought of changing our linen or our clothes in any way. It is an incredible situation! On every hand farms and villages are burning. How sad a spectacle, indeed, to see this magnificent region all in ruins, wounded and dead lying everywhere all round."
Twenty-fifth of October, 1914:
"A relatively undisturbed night. The safety of the bridge over the Yser has been assured for a time. The battle has gone on the whole day long. We have not been given any definite orders. One would not think this is Sunday. The infantry and artillery combat is incessant, but no definite result is achieved. Nothing but losses in wounded and killed. We shall try to get into touch with the sixth division of the Third Reserve Army Corps on our right."
Twenty-sixth of October, 1914:
"What a frightful night has gone by! There was a terrible rainstorm. I felt frozen. I remained standing knee-deep in water. To-day an uninterrupted fusillade meets us in front. We shall throw a bridge across the Yser, for the enemy's artillery has again destroyed one we had previously constructed.
"The situation is practically unchanged. No progress has been made in spite of incessant fighting, in spite of the barking of the guns and the cries of alarm of those human beings so uselessly killed. The infantry is worthless until our artillery has silenced the enemy's guns. Everywhere we must be losing heavily; our own company has suffered greatly so far. The colonel, the major, and, indeed, many other officers are already wounded; several are dead.
"There has not yet been any chance of taking off our boots and washing ourselves. The Sixth Division is ready, but its help is insufficient. The situation is no clearer than before; we can learn nothing of what is going on. Again we are setting off for wet trenches. Our regiment is mixed up with other regiments in an inextricable fashion. No battalion, no company, knows anything about where the other units of the regiment are to be found. Everything is jumbled under this terrible fire which enfilades from all sides.
"There are numbers of francs-tireurs. Our second battalion is going to be placed under the order of the Cyckortz Regiment, made up of quite diverse units. Our old regiment is totally broken up. The situation is terrible. To be under a hail of shot and shell, without any respite, and know nothing whatever of one's own troops!
"It is to be hoped that soon the situation will be improved. These conditions cannot be borne very much longer. I am hopeless. The battalion is under the command of Captain May, and I am reduced to acting as Fourier. It is not at all an easy thing to do in our present frightful situation. In the black night soldiers must be sent some distance in order to get and bring back the food so much needed by their comrades. They have brought back, too, cards and letters from those we love. What a consolation in our cheerless situation! We cannot have a light, however, so we are forced to put into our pockets, unread, the words of comfort sent by our dear ones—we have to wait till the following morning.
"So we spend the night again on straw, huddled up close one to another in order to keep warm. It is horribly cold and damp. All at once a violent rattle of rifle fire raises us for the combat; hastily we get ready, shivering, almost frozen."
Twenty-seventh of October, 1914:
"At dawn I take advantage of a few moments' respite to read over the kind wishes which have come from home. What happiness! Soon, however, the illusion leaves me. The situation here is still all confusion; we cannot think of advancing—"
The last sentence is a broken one. For he died.
* * * * *
Morning came and he read his letters from home. They cheered him a little; we can be glad of that, at least. And then he died.
That record is a great human document. It is absolutely genuine. He was starving and cold. As fast as they built a bridge to get back it was destroyed. From three sides he and the others with him were being shelled. He must have known what the inevitable end would be. But he said very little. And then he died.
There were other journels taken from the bodies of other German officers at that terrible battle of the Yser. They speak of it as a "hell"—a place of torment and agony impossible to describe. Some of them I have seen. There is nowhere in the world a more pitiful or tragic or thought-compelling literature than these diaries of German officers thrust forward without hope and waiting for the end.
At six o'clock it was already entirely dark and raining hard. Even in the little town the machine was deep in mud. I got in and we started off again, moving steadily toward the front. Captain F—— had brought with him a box of biscuits, large, square, flaky crackers, which were to be my dinner until some time in the night. He had an electric flash and a map. The roads were horrible; it was impossible to move rapidly. Here and there a sentry's lantern would show him standing on the edge of a flooded field. The car careened, righted itself and kept on. As the roads became narrower it was impossible to pass another vehicle. The car drew out at crossroads here and there to allow transports to get by.
CHAPTER X
THE IRON DIVISION
It was bitterly cold, and the dead officer's diary weighed on my spirit. The two officers in the machine pored over the map; I sat huddled in my corner. I had come a long distance to do the thing I was doing. But my enthusiasm for it had died. I wished I had not heard the diary.
"At dawn I take advantage of a few moments' respite to read over the kind wishes which have come from home. What happiness!" And then he died.
The car jolted on.
The soldier and the military chauffeur out in front were drenched. The wind hurled the rain at them like bullets. We were getting close to the front. There were shellholes now, great ruts into which the car dropped and pulled out again with a jerk.
Then at last a huddle of dark houses and a sentry's challenge. The car stopped and we got out. Again there were seas of mud, deeper even than before. I had reached the headquarters of the Third Division of the Belgian Army, commonly known as the Iron Division, so nicknamed for its heroic work in this war.
The headquarters building was ironically called the "château." It had been built by officers and men, of fresh boards and lined neatly inside with newspapers. Some of them were illustrated French papers. It had much the appearance of a Western shack during the early days of the gold fever. On one of the walls was a war map of the Eastern front, the line a cord fastened into place with flag pins. The last time I had seen such a map of the Eastern front was in the Cabinet Room at Washington.
A large stove in the centre of the room heated the building, which was both light and warm. Some fifteen officers received us. I was the only woman who had been so near the front, for out here there are no nurses. One by one they were introduced and bowed. There were fifteen hosts and extremely few guests!
Having had telephone notice of our arrival, they showed me how carefully they had prepared for it. The long desk was in beautiful order; floors gleamed snow white; the lamp chimneys were polished. There were sandwiches and tea ready to be served.
In one room was the telephone exchange, which connected the headquarters with every part of the line. In another, a long line of American typewriters and mimeographing machines wrote out and copied the orders which were regularly distributed to the front.
"Will you see our museum?" said a tall officer, who spoke beautiful English. His mother was an Englishwoman. So I was taken into another room and shown various relics of the battlefield—pieces of shells, rifles and bullets.
"Early German shells," said the officer who spoke English, "were like this. You see how finely they splintered. The later ones are not so good; the material is inferior, and here is an aluminum nose which shows how scarce copper is becoming in Germany to-day."
I have often thought of that visit to the "château," of the beautiful courtesy of those Belgian officers, their hospitality, their eagerness to make an American woman comfortable and at home. And I was to have still further proof of their kindly feeling, for when toward daylight I came back from the trenches they were still up, the lamps were still burning brightly, the stove was red hot and cheerful, and they had provided food for us against the chill of the winter dawn. Out through the mud and into the machine again. And now we were very near the trenches. The car went without lights and slowly. A foot off the centre of the road would have made an end to the excursion.
We began to pass men, long lines of them standing in the drenching rain to let us by. They crowded close against the car to avoid the seas of mud. Sometimes they grumbled a little, but mostly they were entirely silent. That is the thing that impressed me always about the lines of soldiers I saw going to and from the trenches—their silence. Even their feet made no noise. They loomed up like black shadows which the night swallowed immediately.
The car stopped again. We had made another leg of the journey. And this time our destination was a church. We were close behind the trenches now and our movements were made with extreme caution. Captain F—— piloted me through the mud.
"We will go quietly," he said. "Many of them are doubtless sleeping; they are but just out of the trenches and very tired."
Now and then one encounters in this war a picture that cannot be painted. Such a picture is that little church just behind the Belgian lines at L——. There are no pews, of course, in Continental churches. The chairs had been piled up in a corner near the altar, and on the stone floor thus left vacant had been spread quantities of straw. Lying on the straw and covered by their overcoats were perhaps two hundred Belgian soldiers. They lay huddled close together for warmth; the mud of the trenches still clung to them. The air was heavy with the odour of damp straw.
The high vaulted room was a cave of darkness. The only lights were small flat candles here and there, stuck in saucers or on haversacks just above the straw. These low lights, so close to the floor, fell on the weary faces of sleeping men, accentuating the shadows, bringing pinched nostrils into relief, showing lines of utter fatigue and exhaustion.
But the picture was not all sombre. Here were four men playing cards under an image of Our Lady, which was just overhead. They were muffled against the cold and speaking in whispers. In a far corner a soldier sat alone, cross-legged, writing by the light of a candle. His letter rested on a flat loaf of bread, which was his writing table. Another soldier had taken a loaf of bread for his pillow and was comfortably asleep on it.
Captain F—— led the way through the church. He stepped over the men carefully. When they roused and looked up they would have risen to salute, but he told them to lie still.
It was clear that the relationship between the Belgian officers and their troops was most friendly. Not only in that little church at midnight, but again and again I have seen the same thing. The officers call their men their "little soldiers," and eye them with affection.
One boy insisted on rising and saluting. He was very young, and on his chin was the straggly beard of his years. The Captain stooped, and lifting a candle held it to his face.
"The handsomest beard in the Belgian Army!" he said, and the men round chuckled.
And so it went, a word here, a nod there, an apology when we disturbed one of the sleepers.
"They are but boys," said the Captain, and sighed. For each day there were fewer of them who returned to the little church to sleep.
On the way back to the car, making our way by means of the Captain's electric flash through the crowded graveyard, he turned to me.
"When you write of this, madame," he said, "you will please not mention the location of this church. So far it has escaped—perhaps because it is small. But the churches always suffer."
I regretted this. So many of the churches are old and have the interest of extreme age, even when they are architecturally insignificant. But I found these officers very fair, just as I had found the King of the Belgians disinclined to condemn the entire German Army for the brutalities of a part of it.
"There is no reason why churches should not be destroyed if they are serving military purposes," one of them said. "When a church tower shelters a gun, or is used for observations, it is quite legitimate that it be subject to artillery fire. That is a necessity of war."
We moved cautiously. Behind the church was a tiny cluster of small houses. The rain had ceased, but the electric flashlight showed great pools of water, through which we were obliged to walk. The hamlet was very silent—not a dog barked. There were no dogs.
I do not recall seeing any dogs at any time along the front, except at La Panne. What has become of them? There were cats in the destroyed towns, cats even in the trenches. But there were no dogs. It is not because the people are not fond of dogs. Dunkirk was full of them when I was there. The public square resounded with their quarrels and noisy playing. They lay there in the sun and slept, and ambulances turned aside in their headlong career to avoid running them down. But the villages along the front were silent.
I once asked an officer what had become of the dogs.
"The soldiers eat them!" he said soberly.
I heard the real explanation later. The strongest dogs had been commandeered for the army, and these brave dogs of Flanders, who have always laboured, are now drawing mitrailleuses, as I saw them at L——. The little dogs must be fed, and there is no food to spare. And so the children, over whose heads passes unheeded the real significance of this drama that is playing about them, have their own small tragedies these days.
We got into the car again and it moved off. With every revolution of the engine we were advancing toward that sinister line that borders No Man's Land. We were very close. The road paralleled the trenches, and shelling had begun again.
It was not close, and no shells dropped in our vicinity. But the low, horizontal red streaks of the German guns were plainly visible.
With the cessation of the rain had begun again the throwing over the Belgian trenches of the German magnesium flares, which the British call starlights. The French call them fusées. Under any name I do not like them. One moment one is advancing in a comfortable obscurity. The next instant it is the Fourth of July, with a white rocket bursting overhead. There is no noise, however. The thing is miraculously beautiful, silent and horrible. I believe the light floats on a sort of tiny parachute. For perhaps sixty seconds it hangs low in the air, throwing all the flat landscape into clear relief.
I do not know if one may read print under these fusées. I never had either the courage or the print for the experiment. But these eyes of the night open and close silently all through the hours of darkness. They hang over the trenches, reveal the movements of troops on the roads behind, shine on ammunition trains and ambulances, on the righteous and the unrighteous. All along the German lines these fusées go up steadily. I have seen a dozen in the air at once. Their silence and the eternal vigilance which they reveal are most impressive. On the quietest night, with only an occasional shot being fired, the horizon is ringed with them.
And on the horizon they are beautiful. Overhead they are distinctly unpleasant.
"They are very uncomfortable," I said to Captain F——. "The Germans can see us plainly, can't they?"
"But that is what they are for," he explained. "All movements of troops and ammunition trains to and from the trenches are made during the night, so they watch us very carefully."
"How near are we to the trenches?" I asked.
"Very near, indeed."
"To the first line?"
For I had heard that there were other lines behind, and with the cessation of the rain my courage was rising. Nothing less than the first line was to satisfy me.
"To the first line," he said, and smiled.
The wind which had driven the rain in sheets against the car had blown the storm away. The moon came out, a full moon. From the car I could see here and there the gleam of the inundation. The road was increasingly bad, with shell holes everywhere. Buildings loomed out of the night, roofless and destroyed. The fusées rose and burst silently overhead; the entire horizon seemed encircled with them. We were so close to the German lines that we could see an electric signal sending its message of long and short flashes, could even see the reply. It seemed to me most unmilitary.
"Any one who knew telegraphy and German could read that message," I protested.
"It is not so simple as that. It is a cipher code, and is probably changed daily."
Nevertheless, the officers in the car watched the signalling closely, and turning, surveyed the country behind us. In so flat a region, with trees and shrubbery cut down and houses razed, even a pocket flash can send a signal to the lines of the enemy. And such signals are sent. The German spy system is thorough and far-reaching.
I have gone through Flanders near the lines at various times at night. It is a dead country apparently. There are destroyed houses, sodden fields, ditches lipful of water. But in the most amazing fashion lights spring up and disappear. Follow one of these lights and you find nothing but a deserted farm, or a ruined barn, or perhaps nothing but a field of sugar beets dying in the ground.
Who are these spies? Are they Belgians and French, driven by the ruin of everything they possess to selling out to the enemy? I think not. It is much more probable that they are Germans who slip through the lines in some uncanny fashion, wading and swimming across the inundation, crawling flat where necessary, and working, an inch at a time, toward the openings between the trenches. Frightful work, of course. Impossible work, too, if the popular idea of the trenches were correct—that is, that they form one long, communicating ditch from the North Sea to Switzerland! They do not, of course. There are blank spaces here and there, fully controlled by the trenches on either side, and reënforced by further trenches behind. But with a knowledge of where these openings lie it is possible to work through.
Possible, not easy. And there is no mercy for a captured spy.
The troops who had been relieved were moving out of the trenches. Our progress became extremely slow. The road was lined with men. They pressed their faces close to the glass of the car and laughed and talked a little among themselves. Some of them were bandaged. Their white bandages gleamed in the moonlight. Here and there, as they passed, one blew on his fingers, for the wind was bitterly cold.
"In a few moments we must get out and walk," I was told. "Is madame a good walker?"
I said I was a good walker. I had a strong feeling that two or three people might walk along that road under those starlights much more safely and inconspicuously than an automobile could move. For automobiles at the front mean generals as a rule, and are always subject to attack.
Suddenly the car stopped and a voice called to us sharply. There were soldiers coming up a side road. I was convinced that we had surprised an attack, and were in the midst of the German advance. One of the officers flung the door open and looked out.
But we were only on the wrong road, and must get into reverse and turn the machine even closer to the front. I know now that there was no chance of a German attack at that point, that my fears were absurd. Nevertheless, so keen was the tension that for quite ten minutes my heart raced madly.
On again. The officers in the car consulted the map and, having decided on the route, fell into conversation. The officer of the Third Division, whose mother had been English, had joined the party. He had been on the staff of General Leman at the time of the capture of Liège, and he told me of the sensational attempt made by the Germans to capture the General.
"I was upstairs with him at headquarters," he said, "when word came up that eight Englishmen had just entered the building with a request to see him. I was suspicious and we started down the staircase together. The 'Englishmen' were in the hallway below. As we appeared on the stairs the man in advance put his hand in his pocket and drew a revolver. They were dressed in civilians' clothes, but I saw at once that they were German.
"I was fortunate in getting my revolver out first, and shot down the man in advance. There was a struggle, in which the General made his escape and all of the eight were either killed or taken prisoners. They were uhlans, two officers and six privates."
"It was very brave," I said. "A remarkable exploit."
"Very brave indeed," he agreed with me. "They are all very brave, the
Germans."
Captain F—— had been again consulting his map. Now he put it away.
"Brave but brutal," he said briefly. "I am of the Third Division. I have watched the German advance protected by women and children. In the fighting the civilians fell first. They had no weapons. It was terrible. It is the German system," he went on, "which makes everything of the end, and nothing at all of the means. It is seen in the way they have sacrificed their own troops."
"They think you are equally brutal," I said. "The German soldiers believe that they will have their eyes torn out if they are captured."
I cited a case I knew of, where a wounded German had hidden in the inundation for five days rather than surrender to the horrors he thought were waiting for him. When he was found and taken to a hospital his long days in the water had brought on gangrene and he could not be saved.
"They have been told that to make them fight more savagely," was the comment. "What about the official German order for a campaign of 'frightfulness' in Belgium?"
And here, even while the car is crawling along toward the trenches, perhaps it is allowable to explain the word "frightfulness," which now so permeates the literature of the war. Following the scenes of the German invasion into Belgium, where here and there some maddened civilian fired on the German troops and precipitated the deaths of his townsmen,[C] Berlin issued, on August twenty-seventh, a declaration, of which this paragraph is a part:
[Footnote C: The Belgians contend that, in almost every case, such firing by civilians was the result of attack on their women.]
"The only means of preventing surprise attacks from the civil population has been to interfere with unrelenting severity and to create examples which, by their frightfulness, would be a warning to the whole country."
A Belgian officer once quoted it to me, with a comment.
"This is not an order to the army. It is an attempt at justification for the very acts which Berlin is now attempting to deny!"
That is how "frightfulness" came into the literature of the war.
Captain F—— stopped the car. Near the road was a ruin of an old church.
"In that church," he said, "our soldiers were sleeping when the Germans, evidently informed by a spy, began to shell it. The first shot smashed that house there, twenty-five yards away; the second shot came through the roof and struck one of the supporting pillars, bringing the roof down. Forty-six men were killed and one hundred and nine wounded."
He showed me the grave from a window of the car, a great grave in front of the church, with a wooden cross on it. It was too dark to read the inscription, but he told me what it said:
"Here lie forty-six chasseurs." Beneath are the names, one below the other in two columns, and underneath all: "Morts pour la Patrie."
We continued to advance. Our lamps were out, but the fusées made progress easy. And there was the moon. We had left behind us the lines of the silent men. The scene was empty, desolate. Suddenly we stopped by a low brick house, a one-story building with overhanging eaves. Sentries with carbines stood under the eaves, flattened against the wall for shelter from the biting wind.
CHAPTER XI
AT THE HOUSE OF THE BARRIER
A narrow path led up to the house. It was flanked on both sides by barbed wire, and progress through it was slow. The wind caught my rain cape and tore it against the barbs. I had to be disentangled. The sentries saluted, and the low door, through which the officers were obliged to stoop to enter, was opened by an orderly from within.
We entered The House of the Mill of Saint ——.
The House of the Mill of Saint —— was less pretentious than its name. Even at its best it could not have been imposing. Now, partially destroyed and with its windows carefully screened inside by grain sacks nailed to the frames for fear of a betraying ray of light, it was not beautiful. But it was hospitable. A hanging lamp in its one livable room, a great iron stove, red and comforting, and a large round table under the lamp made it habitable and inviting. It was Belgian artillery headquarters, and I was to meet here Colonel Jacques, one of the military idols of Belgium, the hero of the Congo, and now in charge of Belgian batteries. In addition, since it was midnight, we were to sup here.
We were expected, and Colonel Jacques himself waited inside the living-room door. A tall man, as are almost all the Belgian officers—which is curious, considering that the troops seem to be rather under average size—he greeted us cordially. I fancied that behind his urbanity there was the glimmer of an amused smile. But his courtesy was beautiful. He put me near the fire and took the next chair himself.
I had a good chance to observe him. He is no longer a young man, and beyond a certain military erectness and precision in his movements there is nothing to mark him the great soldier he has shown himself to be.
"We are to have supper," he said smilingly in French. "Provided you have brought something to eat with you!"
"We have brought it," said Captain F——.
The officers of the staff came in and were formally presented. There was much clicking of heels, much deep and courteous bowing. Then Captain F—— produced his box of biscuits, and from a capacious pocket of his army overcoat a tin of bully beef. The House of the Mill of Saint —— contributed a bottle of thin white native wine and, triumphantly, a glass. There are not many glasses along the front.
There was cheese too. And at the end of the meal Colonel Jacques, with great empressement, laid before me a cake of sweet chocolate.
I had to be shown the way to use the bully beef. One of the hard flat biscuits was split open, spread with butter and then with the beef in a deep layer. It was quite good, but what with excitement and fatigue I was not hungry. Everybody ate; everybody talked; and, after asking my permission, everybody smoked. I sat near the stove and dried my steaming boots.
Afterward I remembered that with all the conversation there was very little noise. Our voices were subdued. Probably we might have cheered in that closed and barricaded house without danger. But the sense of the nearness of the enemy was over us all, and the business of war was not forgotten. There were men who came, took orders and went away. There were maps on the walls and weapons in every corner. Even the sacking that covered the windows bespoke caution and danger.
Here it was too near the front for the usual peasant family huddled round its stove in the kitchen, and looking with resignation on these strange occupants of their house. The humble farm buildings outside were destroyed.
I looked round the room; a picture or two still hung on the walls, and a crucifix. There is always a crucifix in these houses. There was a carbine just beneath this one.
Inside of one of the picture frames one of the Colonel's medals had been placed, as if for safety.
Colonel Jacques sat at the head of the table and beamed at us all. He has behind him many years of military service. He has been decorated again and again for bravery. But, perhaps, when this war is over and he has time to look back he will smile over that night supper with the first woman he had seen for months, under the rumble of his own and the German batteries.
It was time to go to the advance trenches. But before we left one of the officers who had accompanied me rose and took a folded paper from a pocket of his tunic. He was smiling.
"I shall read," he said, "a little tribute from one of Colonel
Jacques' soldiers to him."
So we listened. Colonel Jacques sat and smiled; but he is a modest man, and his fingers were beating a nervous tattoo on the table. The young officer stood and read, glancing up now and then to smile at his chief's embarrassment. The wind howled outside, setting the sacks at the windows to vibrating.
This is a part of the poem:
III
"Comme chef nous avons l'homme à la hauteur
Un homme aimé et adoré de tous
L'Colonel Jacques; de lui les hommes sont fous
En lui nous voyons l'emblème de l'honneur.
Des compagnes il en a des tas: En Afrique
Haecht et Dixmude, Ramsdonck et Sart-Tilmau
Et toujours premier et toujours en avant
Toujours en têt' de son beau régiment,
Toujours railleur
Chef au grand coeur.
REFRAIN
"L'Colo du 12me passe
Regardez ce vaillant
Quand il crie dans l'espace
Joyeus'ment 'En avant!'
Ses hommes, la mine heureuse
Gaîment suivent sa trace
Sur la route glorieuse.
Saluez-le, l'Colo du 12me passe.
"AD. DAUVISTER, "SOUS-LIEUTENANT."
We applauded. It is curious to remember how cheerful we were, how warm and comfortable, there at the House of the Mill of Saint ——, with war only a step away now. Curious, until we think that, of all the created world, man is the most adaptable. Men and horses! Which is as it should be now, with both men and horses finding themselves in strange places, indeed, and somehow making the best of it.
The copy of the poem, which had been printed at the front, probably on an American hand press, was given to me with Colonel Jacques' signature on the back, and we prepared to go. There was much donning of heavy wraps, much bowing and handshaking. Colonel Jacques saw us out into the wind-swept night. Then the door of the little house closed again, and we were on our way through the barricade.
Until now our excursion to the trenches, aside from the discomfort of the weather and the mud, had been fairly safe, although there was always the chance of a shell. To that now was to be added a fresh hazard—the sniping that goes on all night long.
Our car moved quietly for a mile, paralleling the trenches. Then it stopped. The rest of the journey was to be on foot.
All traces of the storm had passed, except for the pools of mud, which, gleaming like small lakes, filled shell holes in the road. An ammunition lorry had drawn up in the shadow of a hedge and was cautiously unloading. Evidently the night's movement of troops was over, for the roads were empty.
A few feet beyond the lorry we came up to the trenches. We were behind them, only head and shoulders above.
There was no sign of life or movement, except for the silent fusées that burst occasionally a little to our right. Walking was bad. The Belgian blocks of the road were coated with slippery mud, and from long use and erosion the stones themselves were rounded, so that our feet slipped over them. At the right was a shallow ditch three or four feet wide. Immediately beyond that was the railway embankment where, as Captain F—— had explained, the Belgian Army had taken up its position after being driven back across the Yser.
The embankment loomed shoulder high, and between it and the ditch were the trenches. There was no sound from them, but sentries halted us frequently. On such occasions the party stopped abruptly—for here sentries are apt to fire first and investigate afterward—and one officer advanced with the password.
There is always something grim and menacing about the attitude of the sentry as he waits on such occasions. His carbine is not over his shoulder, but in his hands, ready for use. The bayonet gleams. His eyes are fixed watchfully on the advance. A false move, and his overstrained nerves may send the carbine to his shoulder.
We walked just behind the trenches in the moonlight for a mile. No one said anything. The wind was icy. Across the railroad embankment it chopped the inundation into small crested waves. Only by putting one's head down was it possible to battle ahead. From Dixmude came the intermittent red flashes of guns. But the trenches beside us were entirely silent.
At the end of a mile we stopped. The road turned abruptly to the right and crossed the railroad embankment, and at this crossing was the ruin of what had been the House of the Barrier, where in peaceful times the crossing tender lived.
It had been almost destroyed. The side toward the German lines was indeed a ruin, but one room was fairly whole. However, the door had been shot away. To enter, it was necessary to lift away an extemporised one of planks roughly nailed together, which leaned against the aperture.
The moving of the door showed more firelight, and a very small, shaded and smoky lamp on a stand. There were officers here again. The little house is slightly in front of the advanced trenches, and once inside it was possible to realise its exposed position. Standing as it does on the elevation of the railroad, it is constantly under fire. It is surrounded by barbed wire and flanked by trenches in which are mitrailleuses.
The walls were full of shell holes, stuffed with sacks of straw or boarded over. What had been windows were now jagged openings, similarly closed. The wind came through steadily, smoking the chimney of the lamp and making the flame flicker.
There was one chair.
I wish I could go farther. I wish I could say that shells were bursting overhead, and that I sat calmly in the one chair and made notes. I sat, true enough, but I sat because I was tired and my feet were wet. And instead of making notes I examined my new six-guinea silk rubber rain cape for barbed-wire tears. Not a shell came near. The German battery across had ceased firing at dusk that evening, and was playing pinochle four hundred yards away across the inundation. The snipers were writing letters home.
It is true that any time an artilleryman might lose a game and go out and fire a gun to vent his spleen or to keep his hand in. And the snipers might begin to notice that the rain was over, and that there was suspicious activity at the House of the Barrier. And, to take away the impression of perfect peace, big guns were busy just north and south of us. Also, just where we were the Germans had made a terrific charge three nights before to capture an outpost. But the fact remains that I brought away not even a bullet hole through the crown of my soft felt hat.
CHAPTER XII
NIGHT IN THE TRENCHES
When I had been thawed out they took me into the trenches. Because of the inundation directly in front, they are rather shallow, and at this point were built against the railroad embankment with earth, boards, and here and there a steel rail from the track. Some of them were covered, too, but not with bombproof material. The tops were merely shelters from the rain and biting wind.
The men lay or sat in them—it was impossible to stand. Some of them were like tiny houses into which the men crawled from the rear, and by placing a board, which served as a door, managed to keep out at least a part of the bitter wind.
In the first trench I was presented to a bearded major. He was lying flat and apologised for not being able to rise. There was a machine gun beside him. He told me with some pride that it was an American gun, and that it never jammed. When a machine gun jams the man in charge of it dies and his comrades die, and things happen with great rapidity. On the other side of him was a cat, curled up and sound asleep. There was a telephone instrument there. It was necessary to step over the wire that was stretched along the ground.
All night long he lies there with his gun, watching for the first movement in the trenches across. For here, at the House of the Barrier, has taken place some of the most furious fighting of this part of the line.
In the next division of the trench were three men. They were cleaning and oiling their rifles round a candle.
The surprise of all of these men at seeing a woman was almost absurd. Word went down the trenches that a woman was visiting. Heads popped out and cautious comments were made. It was concluded that I was visiting royalty, but the excitement died when it was discovered that I was not the Queen. Now and then, when a trench looked clean and dry, I was invited in. It was necessary to get down and crawl in on hands and knees.
Here was a man warming his hands over a tiny fire kindled in a tin pail. He had bored holes in the bottom of the pail for air, and was shielding the glow carefully with his overcoat.
Many people have written about the trenches—the mud, the odours, the inhumanity of compelling men to live under such foul conditions. Nothing that they have said can be too strong. Under the best conditions the life is ghastly, horrible, impossible.
That night, when from a semi-shielded position I could look across to the German line, the contrast between the condition of the men in the trenches and the beauty of the scenery was appalling. In each direction, as far as one could see, lay a gleaming lagoon of water. The moon made a silver path across it, and here and there on its borders were broken and twisted winter trees.
"It is beautiful," said Captain F——, beside me, in a low voice. "But it is full of the dead. They are taken out whenever it is possible; but it is not often possible."
"And when there is an attack the attacking side must go through the water?"
"Not always, but in many places."
"What will happen if it freezes over?"
He explained that it was salt water, and would not freeze easily. And the cold of that part of the country is not the cold of America in the same latitude. It is not a cold of low temperature; it is a damp, penetrating cold that goes through garments of every weight and seems to chill the very blood in a man's body.
"How deep is the water?" I asked.
"It varies—from two to eight feet. Here it is shallow."
"I should think they would come over."
"The water is full of barbed wire," he said grimly. "And some, a great many, have tried—and failed."
As of the trenches, many have written of the stenches of this war. But the odour of that beautiful lagoon was horrible. I do not care to emphasize it. It is one of the things best forgotten. But any lingering belief I may have had in the grandeur and glory of war died that night beside that silver lake—died of an odour, and will never live again.
And now came a discussion.
The road crossing the railroad embankment turned sharply to the left and proceeded in front of the trenches. There was no shelter on that side of the embankment. The inundation bordered the road, and just beyond the inundation were the German trenches.
There were no trees, no shrubbery, no houses; just a flat road, paved with Belgian blocks, that gleamed in the moonlight.
At last the decision was made. We would go along the road, provided I realised from the first that it was dangerous. One or two could walk there with a good chance for safety, but not more. The little group had been augmented. It must break up; two might walk together, and then two a safe distance behind. Four would certainly be fired on.
I wanted to go. It was not a matter of courage. I had simply, parrot-fashion, mimicked the attitude of mind of the officers. One after another I had seen men go into danger with a shrug of the shoulders.
"If it comes it comes!" they said, and went on. So I, too, had become a fatalist. If I was to be shot it would happen, if I had to buy a rifle and try to clean it myself to fulfil my destiny.
So they let me go. I went farther than they expected, as it turned out. There was a great deal of indignation and relief when it was over. But that is later on.
A very tall Belgian officer took me in charge. It was necessary to work through a barbed-wire barricade, twisting and turning through its mazes. The moonlight helped. It was at once a comfort and an anxiety, for it seemed to me that my khaki-coloured suit gleamed in it. The Belgian officers in their dark blue were less conspicuous. I thought they had an unfair advantage of me, and that it was idiotic of the British to wear and advocate anything so absurd as khaki. My cape ballooned like a sail in the wind. I felt at least double my ordinary size, and that even a sniper with a squint could hardly miss me. And, by way of comfort, I had one last instruction before I started:
"If a fusée goes up, stand perfectly still. If you move they will fire."
The entire safety of the excursion depended on a sort of tacit agreement that, in part at least, obtains as to sentries.
This is a new warfare, one of artillery, supported by infantry in trenches. And it has been necessary to make new laws for it. One of the most curious is a sort of modus vivendi by which each side protects its own sentries by leaving the enemy's sentries unmolested so long as there is no active fighting. They are always in plain view before the trenches. In case of a charge they are the first to be shot, of course. But long nights and days have gone by along certain parts of the front where the hostile trenches are close together, and the sentries, keeping their monotonous lookout, have been undisturbed.
No doubt by this time the situation has changed to a certain extent; there has been more active fighting, larger bodies of men are involved. The spring floods south of the inundation will have dried up. No Man's Land will have ceased to be a swamp and the deadlock may be broken.
But on that February night I put my faith in this agreement, and it held.
The tall Belgian officer asked me if I was frightened. I said I was not. This was not exactly the truth; but it was no time for the truth.
"They are not shooting," I said. "It looks perfectly safe."
He shrugged his shoulders and glanced toward the German trenches.
"They have been sleeping during the rain," he said briefly. "But when one of them wakes up, look out!"
After that there was little conversation, and what there was was in whispers.
As we proceeded the stench from the beautiful moonlit water grew overpowering. The officer told me the reason.
A little farther along a path of fascines had been built out over the inundation to an outpost halfway to the German trenches. The building of this narrow roadway had cost many lives.
Half a mile along the road we were sharply challenged by a sentry. When he had received the password he stood back and let us pass. Alone, in that bleak and exposed position in front of the trenches, always in full view as he paced back and forward, carbine on shoulder, with not even a tree trunk or a hedge for shelter, the first to go at the whim of some German sniper or at any indication of an attack, he was a pathetic, almost a tragic, figure. He looked very young too. I stopped and asked him in a whisper how old he was.
He said he was nineteen!
He may have been. I know something about boys, and I think he was seventeen at the most. There are plenty of boys of that age doing just what that lad was doing.
Afterward I learned that it was no part of the original plan to take a woman over the fascine path to the outpost; that Captain F—— ground his teeth in impotent rage when he saw where I was being taken. But it was not possible to call or even to come up to us. So, blithely and unconsciously the tall Belgian officer and I turned to the right, and I was innocently on my way to the German trenches.
After a little I realised that this was rather more war than I had expected. The fascines were slippery; the path only four or five feet wide. On each side was the water, hideous with many secrets.
I stopped, a third of the way out, and looked back. It looked about as dangerous in one direction as another. So we went on. Once I slipped and fell. And now, looming out of the moonlight, I could see the outpost which was the object of our visit.
I have always been grateful to that Belgian lieutenant for his mistake. Just how grateful I might have been had anything untoward happened, I cannot say. But the excursion was worth all the risk, and more.
On a bit of high ground stands what was once the tiny hamlet of Oudstuyvenskerke—the ruins of two small white houses and the tower of the destroyed church—hardly a tower any more, for only three sides of it are standing and they are riddled with great shell holes.
Six hundred feet beyond this tower were the German trenches. The little island was hardly a hundred feet in its greatest dimension.
I wish I could make those people who think that war is good for a country see that Belgian outpost as I saw it that night under the moonlight. Perhaps we were under suspicion; I do not know. Suddenly the fusées, which had ceased for a time, began again, and with their white light added to that of the moon the desolate picture of that tiny island was a picture of the war. There was nothing lacking. There was the beauty of the moonlit waters, there was the tragedy of the destroyed houses and the church, and there was the horror of unburied bodies.
There was heroism, too, of the kind that will make Belgium live in history. For in the top of that church tower for months a Capuchin monk has held his position alone and unrelieved. He has a telephone, and he gains access to his position in the tower by means of a rope ladder which he draws up after him.
Furious fighting has taken place again and again round the base of the tower. The German shells assail it constantly. But when I left Belgium the Capuchin monk, who has become a soldier, was still on duty; still telephoning the ranges of the gun; still notifying headquarters of German preparations for a charge.
Some day the church tower will fall and he will go with it, or it will be captured; one or the other is inevitable. Perhaps it has already happened; for not long ago I saw in the newspapers that furious fighting was taking place at this very spot.
He came down and I talked to him—a little man, regarding his situation as quite ordinary, and looking quaintly unpriestlike in his uniform of a Belgian officer with its tasselled cap. Some day a great story will be written of these priests of Belgium who have left their churches to fight.
We spoke in whispers. There was after all very little to say. It would have embarrassed him horribly had any one told him that he was a heroic figure. And the ordinary small talk is not currency in such a situation.
We shook hands and I think I wished him luck. Then he went back again to the long hours and days of waiting.
I passed under his telephone wires. Some day he will telephone that a charge is coming. He will give all the particulars calmly, concisely. Then the message will break off abruptly. He will have sent his last warning. For that is the way these men at the advance posts die.
As we started again I was no longer frightened. Something of his courage had communicated itself to me, his courage and his philosophy, perhaps his faith.
The priest had become a soldier; but he was still a priest in his heart. For he had buried the German dead in one great grave before the church, and over them had put the cross of his belief.
It was rather absurd on the way back over the path of death to be escorted by a cat. It led the way over the fascines, treading daintily and cautiously. Perhaps one of the destroyed houses at the outpost had been its home, and with a cat's fondness for places it remained there, though everything it knew had gone; though battle and sudden death had usurped the place of its peaceful fireside, though that very fireside was become a heap of stone and plaster, open to winds and rain.
Again and again in destroyed towns I have seen these forlorn cats stalking about, trying vainly to adjust themselves to new conditions, cold and hungry and homeless.
We were challenged repeatedly on the way back. Coming from the direction we did we were open to suspicion. It was necessary each time to halt some forty feet from the sentry, who stood with his rifle pointed at us. Then the officer advanced with the word.
Back again, then, along the road, past the youthful sentry, past other sentries, winding through the barbed-wire barricade, and at last, quite whole, to the House of the Barrier again. We had walked three miles in front of the Belgian advanced trenches, in full view of the Germans. There had been no protecting hedge or bank or tree between us and that ominous line two hundred yards across. And nothing whatever had happened.
Captain F—— was indignant. The officers in the House of the Barrier held up their hands. For men such a risk was legitimate, necessary. In a woman it was foolhardy. Nevertheless, now that it was safely over, they were keenly interested and rather amused. But I have learned that the gallant captain and the officer with him had arranged, in case shooting began, to jump into the water, and by splashing about draw the fire in their direction!
We went back to the automobile, a long walk over the shell-eaten roads in the teeth of a biting wind. But a glow of exultation kept me warm. I had been to the front. I had been far beyond the front, indeed, and I had seen such a picture of war and its desolation there in the centre of No Man's Land as perhaps no one not connected with an army had seen before; such a picture as would live in my mind forever.
I visited other advanced trenches that night as we followed the
Belgian lines slowly northward toward Nieuport.
Save the varying conditions of discomfort, they were all similar. Always they were behind the railroad embankment. Always they were dirty and cold. Frequently they were full of mud and water. To reach them one waded through swamps and pools. Just beyond them there was always the moonlit stretch of water, now narrow, now wide.
I was to see other trenches later on, French and English. But only along the inundation was there that curious combination of beauty and hideousness, of rippling water with the moonlight across it in a silver path, and in that water things that had been men.
In one place a cow and a pig were standing on ground a little bit raised. They had been there for weeks between the two armies. Neither side would shoot them, in the hope of some time obtaining them for food.
They looked peaceful, rather absurd.
Now so near that one felt like whispering, and now a quarter of a mile away, were the German trenches. We moved under their fusées, passing destroyed towns where shell holes have become vast graves.
One such town was most impressive. It had been a very beautiful town, rather larger than the others. At the foot of the main street ran the railroad embankment and the line of trenches. There was not a house left.
It had been, but a day or two before, the scene of a street fight, when the Germans, swarming across the inundation, had captured the trenches at the railroad and got into the town itself.
At the intersection of two streets, in a shell hole, twenty bodies had been thrown for burial. But that was not novel or new. Shell-hole graves and destroyed houses were nothing. The thing I shall never forget is the cemetery round the great church.
Continental cemeteries are always crowded. They are old, and graves almost touch one another. The crosses which mark them stand like rows of men in close formation.
This cemetery had been shelled. There was not a cross in place; they lay flung about in every grotesque position. The quiet God's Acre had become a hell. Graves were uncovered; the dust of centuries exposed. In one the cross had been lifted up by an explosion and had settled back again upside down, so that the Christ was inverted.
It was curious to stand in that chaos of destruction, that ribald havoc, that desecration of all we think of as sacred, and see, stretched from one broken tombstone to another, the telephone wires that connect the trenches at the foot of the street with headquarters and with the "château."
Ninety-six German soldiers had been buried in one shell hole in that cemetery. Close beside it there was another, a great gaping wound in the earth, half full of water from the evening's rain.
An officer beside me looked down into it.
"See," he said, "they dig their own graves!"
It was almost morning. The automobile left the pathetic ruin of the town and turned back toward the "château." There was no talking; a sort of heaviness of spirit lay on us all. The officers were seeing again the destruction of their country through my shocked eyes. We were tired and cold, and I was heartsick.
A long drive through the dawn, and then the "château."
The officers were still up, waiting. They had prepared, against our arrival, sandwiches and hot drinks.
The American typewriters in the next room clicked and rattled. At the telephone board messages were coming in from the very places we had just left—from the instrument at the major's elbow as he lay in his trench beside the House of the Barrier; from the priest who had left his cell and become a soldier; from that desecrated and ruined graveyard with its gaping shell holes that waited, open-mouthed, for—what?
When we had eaten, Captain F—— rose and made a little speech. It was simply done, in the words of a soldier and a patriot speaking out of a full heart.
"You have seen to-night a part of what is happening to our country," he said. "You have seen what the invading hosts of Germany have made us suffer. But you have seen more than that. You have seen that the Belgian Army still exists; that it is still fighting and will continue to fight. The men in those trenches fought at Liège, at Louvain, at Antwerp, at the Yser. They will fight as long as there is a drop of Belgian blood to shed.
"Beyond the enemy's trenches lies our country, devastated; our national life destroyed; our people under the iron heel of Germany. But Belgium lives. Tell America, tell the world, that destroyed, injured as she is, Belgium lives and will rise again, greater than before!"