ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI

A Year of the War on Many Fronts--and Behind Them

by Arthur Ruhl


with Illustrations from Photographs




Contents

Chapters

I.    "The Germans Are Coming!"
II.    Paris at Bay
III.   After the Marne
IV.    The Fall of Antwerp I
V.     Paris Again-and Bordeaux: Journal of a Flight from a London Fog
VI.   "The Great Days"
VII.   Two German Prison Camps
VIII.  In the German Trenches at La Bassée
IX.    The Road to Constantinople: Rumania and Bulgaria
X.     The Adventure of the Fifty Hostages
XI.    With the Turks at the Dardanelles
XII.   Soghan-Dere and the Flier of Ak-Bash
XIII.  A War Correspondents' Village
XIV.   Cannon Fodder
XV.    East of Lemberg: Through Austria-Hungary to the Galician Front
XVI.   In the Dust of the Russian Retreat



Chapter I

The Germans Are Coming!



The Germans had already entered Brussels, their scouts were reported on
the outskirts of Ghent; a little farther now, over behind the horizon
wind-mills, and we might at any moment come on them.

For more than a fortnight we had been hurrying eastward, hearing,
through cable despatches and wireless, the far-off thunder of that vast
gray tide rumbling down to France.  The first news had come drifting in,
four thousand miles away, to the little Wisconsin lake where I was
fishing.  A strange herd of us, all drawn in one way or another by the
war, had caught the first American ship, the old St. Paul, and, with
decks crowded with trunks and mail-bags from half a dozen ships, steamed
eastward on the all but empty ocean.  There were reservists hurrying to
the colors, correspondents, men going to rescue wives and sisters. Some
were hit through their pocketbooks, some through their imaginations--
like the young women hoping to be Red Cross nurses, or to help in some
way, they weren't sure how.

One had a steamer chair next mine--a pale, Broadway tomboy sort of girl
in a boyish sailor suit, who looked as if she needed sleep.  Without
exactly being on the stage, she yet appeared to live on the fringe of
it, and combined the slangy freedoms of a chorus girl with a certain
quick wisdom and hard sense.  It was she who discovered a steerage
passenger, on the Liverpool dock, who had lost his wife and was bringing
his four little children back to Ireland from Chicago, and, while the
other cabin passengers fumed over their luggage, took up a collection
for him then and there.

"Listen here!" she would say, grabbing my arm.  "I want to tell you
something.  I'm going to see this thing--d'you know what I mean?--for
what it'll do to me--you know--for its effect on my mind! I didn't say
anything about it to anybody--they'd only laugh at me--d'you know what I
mean? They don't think I've got any serious side to me.  Now, I don't
mind things--I mean blood--you know--they don't affect me, and I've read
about nursing--I've prepared for this! Now, I don't know how to go about
it, but it seems to me that a woman who can--you know--go right with
'em--jolly 'em along--might be just what they'd want--d'you know what I
mean?"

One Russian had said good-by to a friend at the dock, he to try to get
through this way, the other by the Pacific and Trans-Siberian.  The
Englishman who shared my stateroom was an advertising man.  "I've got
contracts worth fifty thousand pounds," he said, "and I don't suppose
they're worth the paper they're written on." There were several Belgians
and a quartet of young Frenchmen who played cards every night and
gravely drank bottle after bottle of champagne to the glory of France.

Even the Balkans were with us, in the shape of a tall, soldier-like
Bulgarian with a heavy mustache and the eyes of a kindly and highly
intelligent hawk.  He was going back home--"to fight?" "Yes, to fight."

"With Servia?" asked some one politely, with the usual vague American
notion of the Balkan states.  The Bulgarian's eyes shone curiously.

"You have a sense of humor!" he said.

This man had done newspaper work in Russia and America, studied at
Harvard, and he talked about our politics, theatres, universities,
society generally.  It was a pity, he said, and the result of the
comparative lack of critical spirit in America that Mr. Roosevelt had
been a hero so long. There were party papers mechanically printing their
praise or blame--"and then, of course, the New York Evening Post and the
Springfield Republican"--but no general intelligent criticism of ideas
for a popular idol to meet and answer.  "On the whole, he's a good
influence--but in place of something better.  It isn't good for a man to
stand so long in the bright sunshine."

That it was impossible for the Mexicans to work out their own salvation
he doubted.  "I think of Bulgaria--surely our inheritance of Turkish
rule was almost as bad, and of how the nation has responded, and of the
intensive culture we had at a time when we were only a name to most
western Europeans." He was but one of those new potentialities which
every whisper from the now cloud-wrapped Continent seemed to be opening
--this tall, scholar-fighter from the comic-opera land where Mr. Shaw
placed his chocolate soldiers.

In a steamer chair a frail-looking young woman in a white polo coat
looked nervously out on the sea.  She was Irish and came of a fighting
line--father, uncles, and brothers in army and navy, her husband in
command of a British cruiser, scouting the very steamship lane through
which we were steaming.  Frail-looking, but not frail in spirit--a
fighter born, with Irish keenness and wit, she was ready to prick any
balloon in sight.  She had chased about the world too long after a
fighting family to care much about settling down now.  They couldn't
afford to keep a place in England and live somewhere else half the time
--"and, after all, what is there in being a cabbage?" She talked little.
"You can learn more about people merely watching them," and she lay in
her steamer chair and watched.

She could tell, merely by looking at them in their civilian's clothes,
which were army and which navy men, which "R.N.s" and which merchant-
service men.  We spoke of a young lieutenant from an India artillery
regiment.  "Yes--'garrison-gunner,'" she said.  She was sorry for the
German people, but the Kaiser was "quite off his rocker and had to be
licked."

War suddenly reached out for us as we came up to Mersey Bar, and an
officer in khaki bellowed from the pilot-boat: "Take down your
wireless!" Down it came, and there the ship stayed for the night, while
the passengers crowded about a volunteer town-crier who read from the
papers that had come aboard, and, in the strange quiet that descends on
an anchored steamship, asked each other how true it was that the German
military bubble--a magazine article with that title had been much read
on the way over--had burst.

Slowly next morning we crept up the Mersey, past a rusty tramp outward
bound, crowded with khaki-clad men.  All the shipping was tooting as she
swept by, and the men cheering and waving their hats at the land they
might never come back to.  The regular landing-stages were taken by
transports, tracks were held for troop-trains, and it was night before
we got down to London, where crowds and buses stormed along as usual and
barytone soloists in every music-hall were roaring defiance to the
Kaiser and reiterating that Britannia ruled the waves.

Into the fog of war that covered the Continent an army of Englishmen had
vanished, none knew where.  Out of it came rumors of victories, but as I
crossed the Strand that morning on the way to Charing Cross, a newsboy
pushed an extra into the cab window--the Germans were entering Brussels!
Yet we fought into the boat train just as if thousands of people weren't
fighting to get away from the very places we hoped to reach.

There were two business men in our coupe going to France, an elderly
Irish lady, an intransigent Unionist, with black goggles and umbrella,
hoping to get through to her invalid brother in Diest, and a bright,
sweet-faced little Englishwoman, in nurse's dark-blue uniform and
bonnet, bound for Antwerp, where her sister's convent had been turned
into a hospital.  She told about her little east-coast town as we
crossed the sunny Channel; we trailed together into the great empty
station at Ostend and, after an hour or two, found a few cars getting
away, so to speak, of their own accord.

The low checker-board Belgian fields drifted quickly past; then Bruges,
with a wounded soldier leaning on the shoulders of two companions; then
Ghent.  There was a great crowd about the station--men thrown out of
work, men in flat cloth caps smoking pipes--the town just recovering
from the panic of that afternoon.  Flags had been hauled down--the
American consul was even asked if he didn't think it would be safer to
take down his flag--some of the civic guards, fearing they would be shot
on sight if the Germans saw them in uniform, tore off their coats and
threw them in the canal.  Others threw in cartridges, thousands of
gallons of gasolene were poured on the ground, and everybody watched the
church tower for the red flag which would signal that firing was about
to begin.  Le Bien Public of Ghent, however, protested stoutly because
its mail edition had been refused at the station:

It is not alone on the field of battle that one must be brave.  For us
civilians real courage consists in doing our ordinary duty up to the
last. In Limburg postmen made their rounds while Prussians inundated the
region, and peasants went right along with their sowing while down the
road troops were falling back from the firing-line.

Let us think of our sons sleeping forever down there in the trenches of
Haelen and Tirlemont and Aerschot; of those brave artillerymen who, for
twenty days, have been waiting in the forts at Liege the help so many
times promised from the allies; of our lancers charging into
mitrailleuse-fire as if they were in a tournament; let us remember that
our heroic little infantrymen, crouched behind a hedge or in a trench,
keeping up their fire for ten hours running until their ammunition was
exhausted, and forced at last to retire, wounded and worn out, without a
chief to take orders from, have had no other thought than that of
finding some burgomaster or commissioner of police, in order not to be
taken for deserters.  Let us think a little of all these brave men and
be worthy of them.

There were no music-halls in Belgium and there were posters on the blank
walla, even of little villages, reminding bands and hurdy-gurdy players
and the proprietors of dance-halls that this was no time for unnecessary
noise.  There were no soldiers going gayly off to war; the Belgians were
coming back from war.  They had been asked to hold out for three days,
and they had held for three weeks.  All their little country was a
battle-field, and Belgium open to the invader.

It was too late to get to Brussels, but there was still a train to
Antwerp.  At Puers soldiers were digging trenches and stringing
approaches with barbed wire.  The dikes had been opened and part of the
country flooded.  Farther on we passed the Antwerp forts, then comely
suburbs where houses had been torn down and acres of trees and shrubs--
precious, as may be imagined, to a people who line their country roads
with elms and lindens like avenues in parks, and build monuments to
benevolent-looking old horticulturists--chopped down and burned.  And
go, presently, into the old city itself, dull-flaming with the scarlet,
gold, and black, of the Belgian flag, and with something that seemed to
radiate from the life itself of this hearty, happy people, after all
their centuries of trade and war, and good food, and good art--like
their own Rubenses and Van Dycks.

There was no business, not a ship moving in the Scheldt.  All who worked
at all were helping prepare for the possible siege; those who didn't
crowded the sidewalk cafes, listening to tales from the front, guessing
by the aid of maps whither, across the silent, screened southwest, the
German avalanche was spreading.

"Treason," "betrayal," "savagery," were on everybody's lips.  For
Antwerp, you might say, had been "half German"; many of its rich and
influential men were of German origin, although they had lived in
Belgium for years.  And now the Belgians felt they had lived there as
spies, and the seizure of Belgium was an act long and carefully planned.
One was told of the finding of rifles in German cellars, marked
"Preserves," of German consuls authorized to give prizes for the most
complete inventories of their neighborhoods turned in by amateur spies.


Speaking to one man about the Rubens "Descent from the Cross" still
hanging in the cathedral, I suggested that such a place was safe from
bombardment.  He looked up at the lace-like old tower, whose chimes,
jangling down through leaping shafts and jets of Gothic stone, have so
long been Antwerp's voice.  "They wouldn't stop a minute," he said.

All eastern Belgium was cut off.  Brussels, to which people run over for
dinner and the theatre, might have been in China.  Meanwhile Antwerp
seemed safe for the time and I returned to Ghent, got a train next day
as far south as Deynze, where the owner of a two-wheeled Belgian cart
was induced to take me another thirty kilometres on down to Courtrai.
It was rumored that there had been a battle at Courtrai--it was, at any
rate, close to the border and the German right wing and in the general
line of their advance.

We rattled along the hard highroad, paved with Belgian blocks, with a
well-pounded dirt path at the side for bicycles, between almost
uninterrupted rows of low houses and tiny fields in which men and women
both were working.  Other carts like ours passed by, occasional heavy
wagons drawn by one of the handsome Belgian draft-horses, and now and
then a small loaded cart, owner perched on top, zipping along behind a
jolly Belgian work dog--pulling as if his soul depended on it and
apparently having the time of his life.  Every one was busy, not a foot
of ground wasted; a more incongruous place into which to force the waste
and lawlessness of war it would be hard to imagine.

Past an old chateau, with its lake and pheasant-preserve; along the
River Lys, with its miles of flax, soaked in this peculiarly potent
water, now drying in countless little cones, like the tents of some vast
Lilliputian army, and so at last into Courtrai.

It was like hundreds of other quaint old towns along the French and
Flemish border, not yet raked by war, but motionless, with workmen idle,
young men gone to the front, and nothing for people to do but exchange
rumors and wait for the clash to come.  I strolled round the old square
and through some of the winding streets.  One window was filled with
tricolor sashes carrying the phrase: "Long live our dear Belgium! May
God preserve her!"

On blank walls was this proclamation in parallel columns of French and
Flemish:


Ville De Courtrai Avis Important a la Population Courtraisienne Stad
Kortrijk Belangrijk Bericht aan de Kortrijksche Bevolking

I am about to make an appeal to your reason and your sentiments of
humanity.

If, in the course of the unjust war which we are now enduring, it
happens that French or Belgian troops bring German prisoners to our
city, I beseech you to maintain your calm and dignity.  These prisoners,
wounded or not, I shall take under my protection, became I say that they
are not really to blame for acts which they have been ordered to do
under threat of cruel punishment.

Yes, I say I shall take them under my protection because my heart bleeds
to think that they, too, have left behind those dear to them--an aged
father, an old mother, a wife, children, sisters, or sweethearts whom
separation has plunged into deepest anguish.  Do not forget when you see
these prisoners passing by, I beg of you, and permit yourself to shout
at and insult them.  Keep, on the contrary, the respectful silence
appropriate to thinking men.  Fellow citizens, if, in these grave and
painful circumstances, you will listen to my advice, if you will recall
that it is now thirty years that I have been your burgomaster and during
all that time of hard work I have never asked a favor of you, I feel
sure that you will obey my request and, on your side, you may be sure
that my gratitude will not be wanting.

A.  REYNAEKT, Burgomaster.


Although war had not touched Courtrai as yet, the rumor of it, more
terrifying often than the thing itself, had swept through all Flanders.
Along the level highways leading into Courtrai trooped whole families
carrying babies and what few household things they could fling together
in blankets.  Covered wagons overflowed with men, women, and children.
The speed with which rumor spread was incredible.  In one village a
group of half-drunken men, who insisted on jeering the Germans were put
at the head of a column and compelled to march several miles before they
were released.  The word at once ran the length of dozens of highroads
that the Germans "were taking with them every one between fifteen and
fifty." I heard the same warning repeated on several of the roads about
Courtrai by men and women, panting, red-faced, stumbling blindly on from
they knew not what.  Later, I met the same people, straggling back to
their villages, good-naturedly accepting the jibes of those who had
stayed behind.

A linen manufacturer who lived in the village of Deerlyck, not far from
Courtrai, where German scouts had been reported, kindly asked me to come
out and spend the night.  For several miles we drove through the densely
populated countryside, past rows of houses whose occupants all seemed to
know him.

Women ran out to stop him and rattled away in Flemish; there were
excited knots of people every few steps, and the heads kept turning this
way and that, as if we were all likely to be shot any minute.  We drove
into the courtyard of the solid old Flemish house--a house in which he
and his father before him had lived, with tiny rooms full of old
paintings, garden, stable, and hothouse packed close in the saving
Belgian fashion, and all as spick and span and shining as if built
yesterday--and then into the street again.  It was interesting to watch
this square little man roll sturdily along, throwing out his stout arms
impatiently and flinging at the nervous villagers--who treated him
almost as a sort of feudal lord--guttural Flemish commands to keep cool
and not make fools of themselves.

All at once, coming out of nowhere, a wave of panic swept down the
street like a squall across a still pond.

"Bing--Bang!" went wooden shutters over windows, the stout housewives
flinging the bars home and gathering up their children.  Doors slammed,
windows closed--it was like something in a play--and almost as soon as
it takes to tell it there was not a head, not a sound; the low houses
were one blank wall, and we stood in the street alone.

Just such scenes as this people must have known in the days when Europe
was a general battle-ground--when the French or the Spanish came into
Flanders; just such villages, just such housewives slamming shutters
close--you can see them now in old Flemish pictures.

Slowly doors and windows opened, heads poked out.  The little street
filled, the knots of people gathered again.  We walked up and down, the
linen merchant flinging out his arms and his reassurances more and more
vigorously.  Half an hour passed, and then, all at once, it came again.
And this time it was real.  The Germans were coming!

Down the straight, paved highway, a mile or so away, at the farther end
of an avenue of elms which framed them like a tunnel, was a band of
horsemen.  They were coming at an easy trot, half a dozen in single file
on either side of the road.  We could see their lances, held rakishly
upstanding across the saddle, then the tail of the near horse whisking
to and fro.  One, crossing over, was outlined against the sky, and those
who could see whispered: "One is standing sidewise!" as if this were
somehow important.  Tears rolled down the cheeks of the women huddled
inside the door before which we stood.

Coming nearer and nearer up that long tunnel of trees, like one of those
unescapable things seen in dreams, the little gray spot of moving
figures grew to strange proportions--"the Germans!"--front of that
frightful avalanche.  A few hundred yards away they pulled down to a
walk, and slowly, peering sharply out from under their helmets, entered
the silent street.  Another moment and the leader was alongside, and we
found ourselves looking up at a boy, not more than twenty he seemed,
with blue eyes and a clean-cut, gentle face.  He passed without a look
or word, but behind him a young officer, soldier-like and smart in the
Prussian fashion, with a half-opened map in his hand, asked the way to a
near-by village.  He took the linen merchant's direction without pausing
and the horses swung down the side street.  "Do you speak English?" he
called back, as if, in happier times, we might have been friends, and,
without waiting for an answer, trotted on into the growing dusk.

They were but one of hundreds of such squads of light cavalry--uhlans
for the most part--ranging all over western Belgium as far as Ostend, a
dozen or so men in hostile country, prepared to be cut to pieces if they
found the enemy they were looking for, or to be caught from ambush at
any time by some squad of civic guards.  But as one watched them
disappear down their long road to France they grew into something more
than that.  And in the twilight of the quiet countryside these stern
shapes that rode on without turning, lances upstanding from tired
shoulders, became strange, grotesque, pathetic--again the Germans,
legions of the War Lord, come too late into a world which must crush
them at last, Knights of the Frightful Adventure, riding to their death.




Chapter II

Paris At Bay



The Calais and Boulogne routes were already closed.  Dieppe and Havre
might at any moment follow.  You must go now, people said in London, if
you want to get there at all.

And yet the boat was crowded as it left Folkstone.  In bright afternoon
sunshine we hurried over the Channel, empty of any sign of war, unless
war showed in its very emptiness.  Next to me sat a young Frenchman,
different from those we had met before hurrying home to fight.
Good-looking, tall, and rather languid in manner, he spoke English with
an English accent, and you would have taken him for an Englishman.  A
big canvas bag full of golf-clubs leaned against the wall behind him,
and he had been trying to play golf at one of the east-coast seaside
places in England.  But one couldn't play in a time like this, and the
young man sighed and waved his hands rather desperately--one couldn't
settle down to anything.  So he was going home.  To fight ?--I
suggested.  Possibly, he said--the army had refused him several years
ago--maybe they would take him now.  Very politely, in his quiet manner,
he asked me down to tea.  When he stood by the rail watching the tawny
French cliffs draw nearer, one noticed a certain weary droop to his
shoulders, in contrast to his well-tanned, rather athletic-looking,
face--born a little tired, perhaps, like the young nobleman in
Bernstein's "Whirlwind." His baggage was addressed to a Norman chateau.

On the other side was a pink-cheeked boy of seventeen, all French,
though he spoke English and divided his time between writing post-cards
to the boys he had been visiting in England and reading General von
Bernhardi.  "The first chapter, 'The Right to Make War,'" he said, "I
understand that--yes! But the second chapter--'The Duty to Make War'"
--he laughed and shook his head.

"No--no--no!" He was the son of an insurance agent who was already at
the front, and, although under age, he hoped to enlist. We drew nearer
Dieppe--tall French houses leaning inward with tricolors in the windows,
a quay with the baggy red breeches of French soldiers showing here and
there--just such a scene as they paint on theatre curtains at home.  A
smoky tug whistled uproariously, there was a patter of wooden shoes as
children clattered along the stone jetty, and from all over the crowd
that had come down to greet us came brave shouts of "Eep-eep Hoorah!
Eep-eep Hoorah!"

No news, or at least no reliable news.  A lot of wounded had been
brought in, business was stopped, the great beach deserted; some thought
the Germans would be in Dieppe in a day or two.  Our train was supposed
to start as soon as the boat arrived and reach Paris before ten that
night.  It was after dark before we got away and another day before we
crawled into St. Lazare.

There was a wild rush for places as soon as the gates opened; one took
what one could, and nine of us, including three little children, were
glad enough to crowd into a third-class compartment.  Two ladies, with
the three little children, were hurrying away from the battle that their
husbands .thought was going to be fought near Dieppe within a day or
two.  From Paris they hoped to get to the south of France.  Over and
over again the husbands said good-by, then the guards whistled for the
last time.

"Albaire!" ... and a boy of about six went to the door of the
compartment to receive his father's embrace.  "Don't let the Germans get
you!" cried the father, with a great air of gayety, and kissed the boy
again and again. He returned to his corner, rubbed his fists into his
eyes, and the tears rolled out under them.  Then the two little girls--
twins, it seemed, about four years old, in little mushroom hats--took
their turns, and they put their fists into their eyes and cried, and
then the two mothers began to cry, and the men, dabbing their eyes and
puffing vigorously at their cigars, cried good-by over and over, and so
at last we moved out of the station.

The long train crept, stopped, backed, crept on again.  Through the open
windows one caught glimpses of rows of poplar-trees and the countryside
lying cool and white in the moonlight.  Then came stations with
sentries, stray soldiers hunting for a place to squeeze in, and now and
then empty troop-trains jolted by, smelling of horses.  In the confusion
at Dieppe we had had no time to get anything to eat, and several hours
went by before, at a station lunchroom, already supposed to be closed, I
got part of a loaf of bread.  One of the young mothers brought out a bit
of chocolate, the other a bottle of wine, and so we had supper--a souper
de luxe, as one of them laughed--all, by this time, old friends.

Eleven o'clock--midnight--the gas, intended for a short journey, grew
dimmer and dimmer, presently flickered out.  We were in darkness--all
the train was in darkness--we were alone in France, wrapped in war and
moonlight, half real beings who had been adventuring together, not for
hours, but for years.  The dim figure on the left sighed, tried one
position and another uneasily, and suddenly said that if it would not
derange monsieur too much, she would try to sleep on his shoulder.  It
would not derange monsieur in the least.  On the contrary...

"You must make yourself at home in France," laughed the mother of the
two little girls.  But the other was even more polite.

"Nous sommes en Amerique!" she murmured.  The train jolted slowly on. An
hour or two after midnight it stopped and a strange figure in turban and
white robe peered in.  "Complet! Complet!" cried the lady with the
little girls.  But the figure kept staring in, and, turning, chattered
to others like him.  There was a crowd of them, men from France's
African colonies, from Algeria or Morocco, who had been working in the
French mines and were now going back to take the places of trained
soldiers--the daredevil "Turcos"--sent north to fight the Germans.

They did not get into our compartment, but into the one next to it, and
as there was no place to sit down, stood in patient Arab fashion, and
after a time gradually edged into ours, where they squatted on the
floor.  They talked broken French or Italian or their native speech and
now and then broke into snatches of a wild sort of song.  In Paris girls
ran into the street and threw their arms about the brave "Marocs" as
they marched by, but the lady with the little girls felt that they were
a trifle smelly, and, fishing out a bottle of scent, she wet a
handkerchief with it and passed it round.

The young Frenchman lit a match--three-twenty.  The little boy, rousing
from his corner, suddenly announced, apropos of nothing, that the
Germans ought to be dropped into kettles of boiling water; at once came
the voice of one of the little girls, sound asleep apparently before
this, warning him that he must not talk like that or the Germans might
hear and shoot them.  We jolted on, backed, and suddenly one became
aware that the gray light was not that of the moon.  The lady at my left
sat upright.  "The day comes!" she said briskly.  It grew lighter.  We
passed sentries, rifles stacked on station platforms, woods--the forest
of St. Germain.  These woods were misty blue in the cool autumn morning,
there were bivouac fires, coffee-pots on the coals, and standing beside
these fires soldiers in kepis and red trousers and heavy blue coats with
the flaps pinned back.  Just such soldiers and scenes you have seen in
the war pictures of Detaille and De Neuville.  Bridges, more houses, the
rectangular grass-covered faces of forts at last; just as Paris was
getting up for breakfast, into St. Lazare station, heaped with trunks
and boiling with people, Parisians, belated American tourists, refugees
from northeast villages, going somewhere, anywhere, to get away.  It was
September 2.

There were miles of closed shops with placards on the shutters:
"Proprietor and personnel have been called to the colors"; no buses or
trams, the few 'cabs piled with the luggage of those trying to get away,
almost no way to traverse the splendid distances but to walk.  Papers
could not be cried aloud on the streets, and the only news was the
official communiqué and a word about some Servian or Russian victory in
some un-pronounceable region of the East.

"France is a history, a life, an idea which has taken its place in the
world, and the bit of earth from which that history, that life, that
thought, has radiated, we cannot sacrifice without sealing the stone of
the tomb over ourselves and our children and the generations to follow
us." Thus George Clemenceau was writing in L'Homme Libre, and people
knew that this was true.  And yet in that ghastly silence of Paris,
broken only by the constant flight of military automobiles, screaming
through the streets on missions nobody understood, those left behind did
not even know where the enemy was, where the defenders were, or what was
being done to save Paris.  And it gradually, and not unnaturally, seemed
to the more nervous that nothing had been done--the forts were paper,
the government faithless, revolution imminent--one heard the wildest
things.

Late that afternoon I walked down from the Madeleine toward the river.
It was the "hour of the aperitif"--there were still enough people to
fill cafe tables--and since Sunday it had been the hour of the German
aeroplane. It had come that afternoon, dropped a few bombs--"quelques
ordures"--and sailed away to return next day at the same hour.  "You
have remarked," explained one of the papers, "that people who are
without wit always repeat their jokes." And just as I came into the
Place de la Concorde, "Mr. Taube" came up out of the north.

You must imagine that vast open space, with the bridge and river and
Invalides behind it, and beyond the light tracery of the Eiffel Tower,
covered with little specks of people, all looking upward.  Back along
the boulevards, on roofs on both banks, all Paris, in fact, was
similarly staring--"Le nez en l'air." And straight overhead, so far up
that even the murmur of the motor was unheard, no more than a bird,
indeed, against the pale sky, "Mr. Taube," circling indolently about,
picking his moment, plotting our death.

I thought of the shudder of outraged horror that ran over Antwerp when
the first Zeppelin came.  It seemed the last unnecessary blow to a
heroic people who had already stood so much.  Very different was "Mr.
Taube's" reception here.  He might have been a holiday balloon or some
particularly fancy piece of fireworks.  Everywhere people were staring
upward, looking through their closed fists, through opera-glasses.  Out
of the arcades of the Hotel de Crillon one man in a bath-robe and
another in a suit of purple underclothes came running, to gaze calmly
into the zenith until the "von" had gone.

As the little speck drew straight overhead, these human specks scattered
over the Place de la Concorde suddenly realized that they were in the
line of fire, and scattered just as people run from a sudden shower.
This was the most interesting thing--these helpless little humans
scrambling away like ants or beetles to shelter, and that tiny insolent
bird sailing slowly far overhead.  This was a bit of the modern war one
reads about--it was a picture from some fanciful story of Mr. H.  G.
Wells.  They scattered for the arcades, and some, quaintly enough, ran
under the trees in the near-by Champs-Elysées.  There was a "Bang!" at
which everybody shouted "There!" but it was not a bomb, only part of the
absurd fusillade that now began.  They were firing from the Eiffel
Tower, whence they might possibly have hit something, and from roofs
with ordinary guns and revolvers which could not possibly have hit
anything at all.  In the gray haze that hung over Paris the next
morning, I wandered through empty streets and finally, with some vague
notion of looking out, up the hill of Montmartre.  All Paris lay below,
mysterious in the mist, with that strange, poignant beauty of something
trembling on the verge.  One could follow the line of the Seine and see
the dome of the Invalides, but nothing beyond.  I went down a little way
from the summit and, still on the hill, turned into the Rue des
Abbesses, crowded with vegetable carts and thrifty housewives.  The gray
air was filled with their bargaining, with the smell of vegetables and
fruit, and there, in front of two men playing violins, a girl in black,
with a white handkerchief loosely knotted about her throat, was singing
of the little Alsatian boy, shot by the Prussians because he cried "Vive
la France!" and threatened them with his wooden gun.

True or not, it was one of those things that get believed.  Verses were
written about it and pictures made of it all over Paris--presently it
would be history.  And this girl, true child of the asphalt, was
flinging it at them, holding the hearts of these broad-faced mothers in
the hollow of her hand.  She would sing one verse, pause, and sell
copies of the song, then put a hand to her hoarse throat and sing again.
The music was not sold with the song, and it was rather difficult--a
mournful sort of recitative with sudden shifts into marching rhythm--and
so the people sang the words over and over with her until they had
almost learned the tune. You can imagine how a Frenchman--he was a young
fellow, who lived in a rear tenement over on the other side of
Montmartre--would write that song.  The little boy, who was going to
"free his brothers back there in Alsace" when he grew up, playing
soldier--"Joyeux, il murmurait: Je suis petit, en somme, Mais viendra
bien le jour, ou je serai un homme, Ardeat! Vaillanti..."--the
Prussians--monstres odieux--smashing into the village, the cry "Maman!
Maman!"--and after each verse a pause, and slowly and lower down, with
the crowd joining in, "Petit--enfant" ("Little boy, close your big blue
eyes, for the bandits are hideous and cruel, and they will kill you if
they read your brave thoughts") "ferme tes grands yeux bleus."

The violins mixed with the voices of the market-women, crying their
artichokes and haricots, and above them rang--"Ardent! Vaillant! ..."
Audit might have been the voice of Paris itself, lying down there in her
mist, Paris of lost Alsace and hopeless revanche, of ardor and charm
crushed once, as they might be again, as the voice of that pale girl in
black, with her air of coming from lights and cigarette smoke, and of
these simple mothers rose above the noise of the street, half dirge,
half battle-cry, while out beyond somewhere the little soldiers in red
breeches were fighting, and the fate of France hung in the balance, that
morning.




Chapter III

After The Marne



At the end of the village the road climbed again from the ravine and
emerged on open fields.  A wall of timber, dark and impenetrable as the
woods round an old chateau, rose at the farther end of these fields--the
road cutting through it like a tunnel--and on the brow of the ravine,
commanding the road and the little plain, was a line of trenches.  Here
evidently they had fought.

We walked on down the road.  Below the northern horizon, where they were
fighting now along the Aisne, rolled the sullen thunder of artillery, as
it had been rolling since daylight.  And the autumn wind, cold with the
week of equinoctial rain, puffing out of thickets and across ravines,
brought, every now and then, the horrible odor of death.

Ahead, to the right, one caught the glint of a French infantry's red
trousers.  A man was lying there, face downward, on the field.  Then
across the open space appeared another--and another--they were scattered
all over that field, bright as the red poppies which were growing in the
stubble and as still.  They were in various positions.  One lay on his
back, with one knee raised like a man day-dreaming and looking up at the
sky.  Another was stretched stiff, with both hands clinched over his
chest.  One lay in the ditch close beside us, his head jammed into the
muddy bank just as he had dived there in falling; another gripped a cup
in one hand and a spoon in the other, as if, perhaps, he might have
tried to feed himself in the long hours after the battle rolled on and
left them there.

All these were French, but just at the edge of the thick timber was a
heap--one could scarcely say of Germans, so utterly did the gray, sodden
faces and sodden, gray uniforms merge into anonymity.  A squad of French
soldiers appeared at a turn in the road.  Two officers rode beside them,
and they were just moving off across the fields carrying shovels instead
of rifles.  Looking after them, beyond the belt of timber, one could see
other parties like theirs on the distant slopes to the left, and here
and there smoke.  Two more French soldiers appeared pushing a
wheelbarrow filled with cast-off arms.  With the boyish good nature
which never seems to desert these little men in red and blue, they
stopped and offered us a few clips of German cartridges.  They were
burying their own men, they said, burning the Germans.  The dead had
been lying here for nearly a fortnight now while the battle line rolled
northward, clear across France.

We turned back toward Crepy, passing again through the shattered village
of Betz.  For three days it had been the centre of a battle, the two
forces lying outside it and shelling each other across the town.  The
main street, now full of French soldiers, was in ruins, the church on
the edge of the ravine smashed and gaping, and a few peasant women stood
about, arms folded patiently, telling each other over and over again
what they had seen.

Past fields, where the wheat still waited to be stacked and thrashed,
past the carcasses of horses sprawled stiff-legged in the ditch or in
the stubble, we tramped on to Crepy-en-Valois.  The country was empty,
scoured by the flood that had swept across it, rolled back again, and
now was thundering, foot by foot, farther and farther below the horizon
to the north.  The little hotel across from the railroad station in
Crepy had kept open through it all.  It was the typical Hotel de la Gare
of these little old towns--a bar and coffee-room down-stairs, where the
proprietor and his wife and daughters served their fleeting guests, a
few chambers up-stairs, where one slept between heavy homespun sheets
and under a feather bed.  They were used to change, and the mere coming
of armies could not be permitted to derange them.

Within a fortnight that little coffee-room of theirs had been crowded
with English soldiers in retreat; then with Germans--stern, on edge,
sure of being in Paris in a few days; then with the same Germans falling
back, a trifle dismayed but in good order, and then the pursuing French.
And now they were serving the men from the troop-trains that kept
pouring up toward the Aisne, or those of the wounded who could hobble
over from the hospital trains that as steadily kept pouring down.

Sometimes they coined money, and, again, when the locomotive
unexpectedly whistled, saw a roomful of noisy men go galloping away,
leaving a laugh and a few sous behind.  Madame would come in from the
kitchen, raise her arms and sigh something about closing their doors,
but, after all, they knew they should keep right on giving as long as
they had anything to give.  One of their daughters, a strapping,
light-hearted colt of a girl, told us some of the things they had seen
as she paused in the hall after preparing our rooms.  Her sister stood
beside her, and together they declaimed in an inimitable sort of
recitative.

How the English soldiers had come in, all laughing, and the young
officers so handsome; but the German soldiers were all like this--and
the young woman gave a quick gesture as of one taking nose and mouth in
her hand and pulling it stiffly down a bit.  The French officers and
their men were like fathers and sons, but the Germans had a discipline
you would not believe--she had seen one officer strike a man with his
whip, she said, because he was not marching fast enough, and another,
when a soldier had come too near, had kicked him.  And they all thought
surely they were going into Paris--"Two days more," they had laughed as
they drank down-stairs, "Paris, and then--kaput!"

You can imagine that gray horde rolling through the streets--narrow,
cobblestoned streets, with steep-roofed stone houses and queer little
courts, and the air over all of having been lived in for generations on
generations.  There is the remnant in Crepy of one of the houses that
used to belong to the Dukes of Valois, and at the end of one winding
street you find yourself unexpectedly looking through a grilled iron
gateway into the ordered stateliness of an old-time chateau.  On the
outward side the walls of the chateau garden drop a sheer thirty or
forty feet to the edge of the ravine.  What a place to wait for an
approaching enemy, one thinks, walking underneath; and the Germans
evidently thought so too, for from this part of town they carefully kept
away.  They burned one house, that of a dressmaker so unfortunate as to
live next door to a shop in which arms were sold, they pillaged the
houses whose owners had run away, and they ordered the town to pay them
one hundred thousand francs, but those townspeople who had the fortitude
to stay behind were not molested.  The enemy were even polite, one woman
told us--"Pas peur!" said the officer who visited her house, taking off
his hat.  On the gate of another house was scrawled in German script,
"Sick Woman--keep away!" and as we passed the open windows, sure enough
there was the pale young mother lying propped up in bed just as she had
been when the Germans came.

On another door we read, also in German script, "Good people--they give
everything!" and on several were orders to leave those within alone. And
there was a curious and touching irony in that phrase: "Gute Leute--
Schoenen!" chalked in stiff script by those now fighting for their lives
to the north of us and likely never to see their fatherland again.

Crepy-en-Valois, more fortunate than some of the towns, whose mayors
were dismissed for revealing "a lamentable absence of sang-froid," had a
mayor who stuck to his post. He was there when three-fourths of the
village had fled and, getting up from a sick-bed to receive the German
commander, he saw that the latter's orders were carried out, and signed
the order for the town's ransom while his daughter held smelling-salts
under his nose.

Whether the mayor of the old town of Senlis, a few miles west of Crepy,
was in any way tactless is scarcely of importance now, in so far as it
concerns him for he and the other hostages were shot, and, however
little good it may have done anybody, he at least gave France his life.
It is said that his order to the townspeople to turn in their arms was
not completely obeyed.  It was also said--and this several people of
Senlis told us--that a few Senegalese, lagging behind as the French
left, fired on the Germans as they approached, and that it was possible
that one or two excited civilians had joined in.

Granting that civilians did fire after hostages had been given, there
remains the question of reprisal.  It was the German commander's idea
that Senlis should be taught a lesson, and this consisted of shooting
the mayor and the hostages, and sacking and burning the main street--a
half mile, perhaps--from end to end.  The idea was carried out with
thoroughness, and men ran along from house to house feeding the flames
with petroleum and even burning a handsome new country house which stood
apart at one end.

A nice-looking, elderly gentleman whom we met in front of the ruined
Hotel du Nord said that the Germans came there and, finding champagne in
the cellar after the maitre d'hotel had told them there wasn't any, set
fire to the hotel, and, as I recall it, shot him.  How true such stories
are I cannot say, but there was no doubt that Senlis had been punished.
At least half of the old city on the banks of the wistful Nonette--it is
a much larger place than Crepy, with a cathedral of some consequence--
was smashed as utterly as it might have been by a cyclone or an
earthquake.  The systematic manner in which this was done was suggested
by the fact that, in the long street running parallel to the one picked
for destruction, nearly every door still carried its chalked order to
"Schoenen." One house spared was that of a town fireman.  "I've got five
little children," he told the German soldiers.  "They're one, two,
three, four, five years old, and I'm expecting another." And they went
on.

These were common sights and sounds of that gracious country north of
Paris--deserted, perhaps demolished, villages; the silent countryside,
with dead horses, bits of broken shell, smashed bicycles or artillery
wagons along the road; and the tainted autumn wind.  Along the level
French roads, under their arches of elms or poplars, covered carts on
tall wheels, drawn by two big farm horses harnessed one behind another,
and loaded with women, children, and household goods, were beginning to
move northward as they had moved south three weeks before.  Trains,
similarly packed, were creeping up to within ear-shot of the constant
cannonading, and it was on one of these trains that we had come.

In Paris, recovered now from the dismay of three weeks before, keen
French imaginations were daily turning the war into terms of heroism and
sacrifice and military glory.  Even editors and play-writers fighting at
the front were able to send back impressions now and then, and these,
stripped by the censorship of names and dates, became almost as
impersonal as pages torn from fiction.  Sitting comfortably at some cafe
table, reading the papers with morning coffee, one saw the dawn coming
up over the Oise and Aisne, heard the French "seventy-fives" and the
heavy German siege-guns resume their roar; saw again, for the hundredth
time, some hitherto unheard-of little man flinging away his life in one
brief burst of glory.  And these thrills, repeated over and over again,
without sight or sound of the concrete facts, in that strange, still
city whose usual life had stopped, produced at last a curious sense of
unreality.  Meaux became as far away as Waterloo, and one read words
that had been spoken yesterday exactly as one reads that the old guard
dies but never surrenders.

A man could leave the Café de la Paix and in two hours be under fire,
where killing was as matter of fact as driving tacks.  And in between
these two zones--the zone where war was at once a highly organized
business and a splendid, terrible game, and that in which its
disjointed, horrible surfaces were being turned into abstractions, into
ideas, poetry, rhetoric--was this middle ground through which we were
now tramping, where one saw only its silence and ruin and desolation.

We returned to Crepy.  All that night the trains went clanking through
the station, pouring more men--Frenchmen, Englishmen--into the sodden
trenches along the Aisne.  For a week it had rained, cold shower
following cold shower.  In Paris shivering concierges closed their doors
in the middle of the day in mournful attempts to keep warm--autumn's
quick sequel to the almost torrid heat in which the armies had fought
across this same country a fortnight before.  It was into trenches half
filled with water that the new men were going--Frenchmen trundling over
to the bar in big overcoats, with their air of good little boy, to go
galloping back with a bottle of red wine and a long loaf of bread;
Englishmen, noisy, laughing, trying to talk French with their fingers
and wanting a nip of brandy or hot water for their tea.

There were Highlanders among them, men with necks like towers and
straight, flat backs and a swing of the shoulders--like band music going
past.  One watched them stride back to their cars with a sort of pang.
What grotesque irony that men like these, who in times when war was
man's normal business might have fought their way through, must now,
with all the diseased and hopeless bodies encumbering the earth, be cut
off by a mere wad of unthinking lead!

All that night it rained, and, through the rain and dark, trains kept
pouring on up into the terrible north.  Once I heard cattle lowing as
their cars clanked past, and again, in the gloomy clairvoyance of night,
saw the faces on the field at Betz, beaten on by the rain that had
beaten them for days.  And just before a feeble daylight returned again,
the steady rumble of artillery.

After noon there was a break in the clouds, and we started on foot for
Villers-Cotterets, some fifteen kilometres away.  The hard macadam road
was no more than dampened, and ambulances and motor-trucks went scooting
by as on a city street.  Occasionally there was an abandoned trench,
once a broken caisson, and the wreck of an aeroplane, but the wheat was
harvested and stacked.  Beyond Vaumoise the country grew more hilly, and
the caves and quarries, which the Germans were making such effective use
of along the Aisne, began to appear.

And all this time the cannon were thundering--so close that it seemed
each hilltop would bring them into view, and as the detonation puffed
across the landscape, one even fancied one could feel the concussion in
one's ear.  Up from a field ahead of us an aeroplane rose and, in a wide
spiral, went climbing up the sky, now almost cleared, and presently
disappeared in the north.  Then, after satisfying a sentry that our
papers were correct--such things could be done in those first days--we
got into Villers-Cotterets.  Instead of deserted houses we found that
nearly every house was quartering soldiers.  There were infantrymen,
dragoons, flyers, Senegalese, Algerians in white turbans and burnooses
on their desert horses, and everywhere officers.  We had stumbled into a
headquarters!

With somewhat the sensation of walking a tight rope, we sought the mayor
to ask for permission to stay in town--finally to ask for safe-conducts
to Soissons.  The charming old gentleman, undisturbed by war's alarms,
politely made them out.

Presently in a hotel full of officers we came on three civilians calmly
eating dinner.  They had arrived by train, although there were no trains
for civilians; they were now dining at a long table set for officers
from which we had a moment before been turned away; and we were rescued
by a mysterious being at the head of the table--a dark, bald,
bright-eyed, smiling, sanguine gentleman, who might have been an
impresario or a press agent, and continually had the air of saying, as
from time to time he actually said: "Ssst! Leave it all to me!"

He was an American, he said, but spoke vernacular French.  The other two
civilians were a London chartered accountant and a Canadian volunteer--a
young Oxford man--waiting for his regiment.  Across the table, a big
French dragoon, just in from the firing-line, his horsetail helmet on
the chair beside him, was also dining.  This man was as different from
the little infantrymen we had so often seen as the air of that town was
different from deserted Paris.  Just as he was, he might have stepped--
or ridden, rather--from some cavalry charge by Meissonier or Détaille; a
splendid fellow--head to spurs, all soldier.

After weeks of newspaper rhetoric and windy civilian partisanship, it
was like water in the desert to listen to him--straight talk from a
professional fighting man, modest, level-headed, and, like most fighting
men, as contrasted with those who stay at home and write about fighting,
ready to give a brave enemy his due.  The German retirement was not at
all a rout.  When an army is in flight it leaves baggage and equipment
behind, guns in the mud.  The Germans had left very little; they were
falling back in good order.  Their soldiers were good fighters,
especially when well led.  They might lack the individual initiative of
Frenchmen, the nervous energy with which Frenchmen would keep on
fighting after mere bone and muscle had had enough, but they had plenty
of courage.  Their officers--the dragoon paused.  Yesterday, he said,
they had run into a troop of cavalry.  The German officer ordered his
men to charge, and instead they wavered and started to fall back.  He
turned on them. "Schweinhunde!" he shouted after them, and, flinging his
horse about, charged alone, straight at the French lances.

"Kill him?" asked the man at the head of the table.

The dragoon nodded.  "It was a pity.  Joli garçon he was"--he ran a hand
round a weather-beaten cheek as if to suggest the other's well-made
face--"monocle in his eye--and he never let go of it until it fell off--
a lance through his heart."

As we talked two secret-service-men entered, demanded our papers,
examined them, and directed us to call at the Maine for them next
morning at eight o'clock.  Now, indeed, we were walking a tight rope.
Following the genius who had got us our suppers, we emerged into the
dark street, walked down it a few doors, entered a courtyard full of
cavalry horses, where men in spurred boots were clanking up and down
stairs.  He thrust a heavy key into a lock, opened a door and ushered us
into an empty and elegantly furnished house.

Here was a sombre dining-room with decanters and glasses, bedrooms with
satin down quilts spread over the foot of the bed, and adjoining one of
them a dressing-room with pomades and perfumes and rows of boots just as
its owner had left it.  Who he might be, why we should be here, how our
mysterious, conductor--who knew no one in Villers-Cotteret and had but
landed there himself that night--had arranged this occupation, was
beyond finding out.  At the moment, with military motor-trucks rumbling
past outside, soldiers coming and going in the court and tramping about
in the room overhead--an extension of the adjoining house--one scarcely
thought of trying to find out.  One merely accepted it, enchained by
that uplifted finger and "Leave it to me!" For a time we talked under
the dining-room light, with doors bolted and wooden shutters on street
and courtyard closed, as if we were conspirators in Russian melodrama,
and then we slept.

The Germans were evidently much nearer than Paris had supposed, and we
should not have been greatly surprised to find them in the streets next
morning.  It was an Algerian horseman, however, muffled up in his dingy
white and looking rather chilly, who was riding past the window as I
first looked out.

We went to the Mairie--not the grandfatherly old mayor this time, but a
sharp-eyed special commissioner of police.

"After all," said he, when we had put our case, "you want to get as near
the front as possible."

True, I answered, we did.

"Well," he said, with a gesture at once final and wholly French, "you
are already farther than that.  You are inside the lines." He crossed
out the safe-conduct and on the laissez-passer wrote: "Good for
immediate return to Paris," and carefully set down the date.  Half an
hour later we were well on the road to Crepy, with the thunder which had
drawn us hither rolling fainter and fainter in the north.




Chapter IV

The Fall Of Antwerp



The storm which was to burst over Antwerp the following night was
gathering fast when we arrived on Tuesday morning.  Army motor-trucks
loaded with dismantled aeroplanes, and the less essential impedimenta
screamed through the streets bound away from, not toward, the front. The
Queen, that afternoon, was seen in the Hotel St. Antoine receiving the
good-bys of various friends.  Consuls suddenly locked their doors and
fled.  And the cannon rumbling along the eastern horizon as they had
rumbled, nearer and nearer, for a fortnight, were now beyond the outer
line of forts and within striking distance of the town.  That night, an
hour or two after midnight, in my hotel by the water-front, I awoke to
the steady clatter of hoofs on cobblestones and the rumble of wheels.  I
went to the window, on the narrow side street, black as all streets had
been in Antwerp since the night that the Zeppelin threw its first bombs,
and looked out.  It was a moonlight night, clear and cold, and there
along the Quai St. Michael, at the end of the street, was an army in
retreat.  They were Belgians, battered and worn out with their unbroken
weeks of hopeless fighting; cavalrymen on their tired horses,
artillerymen, heads sunk on their chests, drowsing on their lurching
caissons; the patient little foot-soldiers, rifles slung across their
shoulders, scuffling along in their heavy overcoats.

In the dark shadow of the tall old houses a few people came out and
stood there watching silently, and, as one felt, in a sort of despair.
All night long men were marching by--and in London they were still
reading that it was but a "demonstration" the Germans were engaged in--
down the quay and across the pontoon bridge--the only way over the
Scheldt--over to the Tete-de-Flandres and the road to Ghent.  They were
strung along the street next morning, boots mud-covered, mud-stained,
intrenching shovels hanging to their belts, faces unshaven for weeks,
just as they had come from the trenches; yet still patient and cheerful,
with that unshakable Flemish good cheer.  Perhaps, after all, it was not
a retreat; they might be swinging round to the south and St. Nicholas to
attack the German flank...

But before they had crossed, another army, a civilian army, flowed down
on and over the quay.  For a week people had been leaving Antwerp, now
the general flight began.  From villages to the east and southeast, from
the city itself, people came pouring down.  In wagons drawn by huge
Belgian draft-horses, in carts pulled by the captivating Belgian work
dogs, panting mightily and digging their paws into the slippery cobbles;
on foot, leading little children and carrying babies and dolls and
canaries and great bundles of clothes and household things wrapped in
sheets, they surged toward that one narrow bridge and the crowded
ferry-boats. I saw one old woman, gray-haired and tanned like an Indian
squaw with work in the fields, yet with a fine, well-made face, pushing
a groaning wheelbarrow.  A strap went from the handles over her
shoulders, and, stopping now and then to ask the news, she would slip
off this harness, gossip for a time, then push on again.  That afternoon
under my window there was a tall wagon, a sort of hay wagon, in which
there were twenty-two little tow-headed children, none more than eight
or ten and several almost babies in arms.  By the side of the wagon a
man, evidently father of some of them, stood buttering the end of a huge
round loaf of bread and cutting off slice after slice, which the older
children broke and distributed to the little ones.  Two cows were tied
to the back of the wagon and the man's wife squatted there milking them.
All along the quay and in the streets leading into it were people like
this--harmless, helpless, hard-working people, going they knew not
where.  The entrance to the bridge was soon choked.  One went away and
returned an hour later and found the same people waiting almost in the
same spot, and, with that wonderful calm and patience of theirs, feeding
their children or giving a little of their precious hay to the horses,
quietly waiting their turn while the cannon which had driven them from
their homes kept on thundering behind them.

That afternoon I walked up-town through the shuttered, silent streets--
silent but for that incessant rumbling in the southeast and the
occasional honking flight of some military automobile--to two of the
hospitals.  In one, a British hospital on the Boulevard Leopold, the
doctor in charge was absent for the moment, and there was no one to
answer my offer of occasional help if an outsider could be of use.  As I
sat waiting a tall, brisk Englishwoman, in nurse's uniform, came up and
asked what I wanted.  I told her.

"Oh," she said, and in her crisp, English voice, without further ado,
"will you help me with a leg?"

She led the way into her ward, and there we contrived between us to
bandage and slip a board and pillow under a fractured thigh.  Between
whispers of "Courage! Courage!" to the Belgian soldier, she said that
she was the wife of a British general and had two sons in the army, and
a third--"Poor boy!" she murmured, more to him than to me--on one of the
ships in the North Sea.  I arranged to come back next morning to help
with the lifting, and went on to another hospital in the Rue Nerviens,
to find that little English lady who crossed with me in the Ostend boat
in August on the way to her sister's hospital in Antwerp.

Here in the quiet wards she had been working while the Germans swept
down on Paris and were rolled back again, and while the little nation
which she and her sister loved so well was being clubbed to its knees.

Louvain, Liege, Malines, Namur--chapters in all the long, pitiless story
were lying there in the narrow iron beds.  There were men with faces
chewed by shrapnel, men burned in the explosion of the powder magazine
at Fort Waelhem, when the attack on Antwerp began--dragged out from the
underground passage in which the garrison had sought momentary refuge
and where most of them were killed, burned, and blackened.  One strong,
good-looking young fellow, able to eat and live apparently, was shot
through the temples and blind in both eyes.  It was the hour for
carrying those well enough to stand it out into the court and giving
them their afternoon's airing and smoke.  One had lost an arm, another,
a whimsical young Belgian, had only the stump of a left leg. When we
started to lift him back into his bed, he said he had a better way than
that.  So he put his arms round my neck and showed me how to take him by
the back and the well leg.

"Bon!" he said, and again "Bon!" when I let him down, and then, reaching
out and patting me on the back, "Bon!" he smiled again.

That night, behind drawn curtains which admitted no light to the street,
we dined peacefully and well, and, except for this unwonted seclusion,
just outside which were the black streets and still the endless
procession of carts and wagons and shivering people, one might have
forgotten, in that cheerfully lighted room, that we were not in times of
peace.  We even loitered over a grate fire before going to bed, and
talked in drowsy and almost indifferent fashion of whether it was
absolutely sure that the Germans were trying to take the town.

It was almost exactly midnight that I found myself listening, half
awake, to the familiar sound of distant cannon.  One had come to think
of it, almost, as nothing but a sound; and to listen with a detached and
not unpleasant interest as a man tucked comfortably in bed follows a
roll of thunder to its end or listens to the fall of rain.

It struck me suddenly that there was something new about this sound; I
sat up in bed to listen, and at that instant a far-off, sullen "Boom !"
was followed by a crash as if lightning had struck a house a little way
down the street.  As I hurried to the window there came another far-off
detonation, a curious wailing whistle swept across the sky, and over
behind the roofs to the left there was another crash.

One after another they came, at intervals of half a minute, or screaming
on each other's heels as if racing to their goal.  And then the crash
or, if farther away, muffled explosion as another roof toppled in or
cornice dropped off, as a house made of canvas drops to pieces in a
play.

The effect of those unearthly wails, suddenly singing in across country
in the dead of night from six--eight--ten miles away--Heaven knows
where--was, as the Germans intended it to be, tremendous.  It is not
easy to describe nor to be imagined by those who had not lived in that
threatened city--the last Belgian stronghold--and felt that vast, unseen
power rolling nearer and nearer.  And now, all at once, it was here,
materialized, demoniacal, a flying death, swooping across the dark into
your very room.

It was like one of those dreams in which you cannot stir from your
tracks, and meanwhile "Boom...  Tzee-ee-ee-ee !"--is this one meant for
you?

Already there was a patter of feet in the dark, and people with white
bundles on their backs went stumbling by toward the river and the
bridge.  Motors came honking down from the inner streets, and the quay,
which had begun to clear by this time, was again jammed.  I threw on
some clothes, hurried to the street.  A rank smell of kerosene hung in
the air; presently a petrol shell burst to the southward, lighting up
the sky for an instant like the flare from a blast-furnace, and a few
moments later there showed over the roofs the flames of the first fire.

Although we could hear the wail of shells flying across their wide
parabola both into the town and out from the first ring of forts, few
burst in our part of the city that night, and we walked up as far as the
cathedral without seeing anything but black and silent streets.  Every
one in the hotel was up and dressed by this time.  Some were for leaving
at once; one family, piloted by the comfortable Belgian servants--far
cooler than any one else--went to the cellar, some gathered about the
grate in the writing-room to watch the night out; the rest of us went
back to bed.

There wasn't much sleep for any one that night.  The bombardment kept on
until morning, lulled slightly, as if the enemy might be taking
breakfast, then it continued into the, next day.  And now the city--a
busy city of nearly four hundred thousand people--emptied itself in
earnest. Citizens and soldiers, field-guns, motor-trucks, wheelbarrows,
dog-carts, hay-ricks, baby-carriages, droves of people on foot, all
flowing down to the Scheldt, the ferries, and the bridge.  They poured
into coal barges, filling the yawning black holes as Africans used to
fill slave-ships, into launches and tugs, and along the roads leading
down the river and southwestward toward Ostend.

One thought with a shudder of what would happen if the Germans dropped a
few of their shells into that helpless mob, and it is only fair to
remember that they did not, although retreating Belgian soldiers were a
part of it, and one of the German aeroplanes, a mere speck against the
blue, was looking calmly down overhead.  Nor did they touch the
cathedral, and their agreement not to shell any of the buildings
previously pointed out on a map delivered to them through the American
Legation seemed to be observed.

Down through that mass of fugitives pushed a London motor-bus ambulance
with several wounded British soldiers, one of them sitting upright,
supporting with his right hand a left arm, the biceps, bound in a
blood-soaked tourniquet, half torn away.  They had come in from the
trenches, where their comrades were now waiting, with their helpless
little rifles, for an enemy, miles away, who lay back at his ease and
pounded them with his big guns.  I asked them how things were going, and
they said not very well.  They could only wait until the German
aeroplanes had given the range and the trenches became too hot, then
fall back, dig themselves in, and play the same game over again.

Following them was a hospital-service motor-car, driven by a Belgian
soldier and in charge of a young British officer.  It was his present
duty to motor from trench to trench across the zone of fire, with the
London bus trailing behind, and pick up wounded.  It wasn't a
particularly pleasant job, he said, jerking his head toward the distant
firing, and frankly he wasn't keen about it.  We talked for some time,
every one talked to every one else in Antwerp that morning, and when he
started out again I asked him to give me a lift to the edge of town.

Quickly we raced through the Place de Meir and the deserted streets of
the politer part of Antwerp, where, the night before, most of the shells
had fallen.  We went crackling over broken glass, past gaping cornices
and holes in the pavement, five feet across and three feet deep, and
once passed a house quietly burning away with none to so much as watch
the fire.  The city wall, along which are the first line of forts, drew
near, then the tunnel passing under it, and we went through without
pausing and on down the road to Malines.  We were beyond the town now,
bowling rapidly out into the flat Belgian country, and, clinging there
to the running-board with the October wind blowing quite through a thin
flannel suit, it suddenly came over me that things had moved very fast
in the last five minutes, and that all at once, in some unexpected
fashion, all that elaborate barrier of laissez-passers, sauf-conduits,
and so on, had been swept aside, and, quite as if it were the most
ordinary thing in the world, I was spinning out to that almost mythical
"front."

Front, indeed! It was two fronts.  There was an explosion just behind
us, a hideous noise overhead, as if the whole zenith had somehow been
ripped across like a tightly stretched piece of silk, and a shell from
the Belgian fort under which we had just passed went hurtling down long
aisles of air--farther--farther--to end in a faint detonation miles
away.

Out of sight in front of us, there was an answering thud, and--
"Tzee-ee-ee-er-r-r-ong!"--a German shell had gone over us and burst
behind the Belgian fort.  Under this gigantic antiphony the motor-car
raced along, curiously small and irrelevant on that empty country road.

We passed great holes freshly made, neatly blown out of the macadam,
then a dead horse.  There were plenty of dead horses along the roads in
France, but they had been so for days.  This one's blood was not yet
dry, and the shell that had torn the great rip in its chest must have
struck here this morning.

We turned into the avenue of trees leading up to an empty chateau, a
field-hospital until a few hours before.  Mattresses and bandages
littered the deserted room, and an electric chandelier was still
burning.  The young officer pointed to some trenches in the garden.  "I
had those dug to put the wounded in in case we had to hold the place,"
he said.  "It was getting pretty hot."

There was nothing here now, however, and, followed by the London bus
with its obedient enlisted men doing duty as ambulance orderlies, we
motored a mile or so farther on to the nearest trench.  It was in an
orchard beside a brick farmhouse with a vista in front of barbed-wire
entanglement and a carefully cleaned firing field stretching out to a
village and trees about half a mile away.  They had looked very
interesting and difficult, those barbed-wire mazes and suburbs,
ruthlessly swept of trees and houses, when I had seen the Belgians
preparing for the siege six weeks before, and they were to be of about
as much practical use now as pictures on a wall.

There are, it will be recalled, three lines of forts about Antwerp--the
inner one, corresponding to the city's wall; a middle one a few miles
farther out, where the British now were; and the outer line, which the
enemy had already passed.  Their artillery was hidden far over behind
the horizon trees, and the British marines and naval-reserve men who
manned these trenches could only wait there, rifle in hand, for an enemy
that would not come, while a captive balloon a mile or two away to the
eastward and an aeroplane sailing far overhead gave the ranges, and they
waited for the shrapnel to burst. The trenches were hasty affairs,
narrow and shoulder-deep, very like trenches for gas or water pipes, and
reasonably safe except when a shell burst directly overhead.  One had
struck that morning just on the inner rim of the trench, blown out one
of those crater-like holes, and discharged all its shrapnel backward
across the trench and into one of the heavy timbers supporting a
bombproof roof.  A raincoat hanging to a nail in this timber was
literally shot to shreds. "That's where I was standing," said the young
lieutenant in command, pointing with a dry smile to a spot not more than
a yard from where the shell had burst.

Half a dozen young fellows, crouched there in the bomb-proof, looked out
at us and grinned.  They were brand-new soldiers, some of them, boys
from the London streets who had answered the thrilling posters and
signs, "Your King and Country Need You," and been sent on this ill-fated
expedition for their first sight of war.  The London papers are talking
about it as I am writing this--how this handful of nine thousand men,
part of them recruits who scarcely knew one end of a rifle from another,
were flung across the Channel on Sunday night and rushed up to the front
to be shot at and rushed back again.  I did not know this then, but
wondered if this was what they had dreamed of--squatting helplessly in a
ditch until another order came to retire--when they swung through the
London streets singing "It's a long, long way to Tipperary" two months
before.

Yet not one of the youngest and the greenest showed the least
nervousness as they waited there in that melancholy little orchard under
the incessant scream of shells.  That unshakable British coolness, part
sheer pluck, part a sort of lack of imagination, perhaps, or at least of
"nerves," left them as calm and casual as if they were but drilling on
the turf of Hyde Park.  And with it persisted that almost equally
unshakable sense of class, that touching confidence in one's superiors--
the young clerk's or mechanic's inborn conviction that whatever that
smart, clean-cut, imperturbable young officer does and says must
inevitably be right--at least, that if he is cool and serene you must,
if the skies fall, be cool and serene too.

We met one young fellow as we walked through an empty lateral leading to
a bomb-proof prepared for wounded, and the ambulance officer asked him
sharply how things had been going that morning.

"Oh, very well, sir," he said with the most respectful good humor,
though a shell bursting just then a stone's throw beyond the orchard
made both of us duck our heads.  "A bit hot, sir, about nine o'clock,
but only one man hurt.  They do seem to know just where we are, sir; but
wait till their infantry comes up--we'll clean them out right enough,
sir."

And, if he had been ordered to stay there and hold the trench alone, one
could imagine him saying, in that same tone of deference and chipper
good humor, "Yes, sir; thank you, sir," and staying, too, till the cows
came home.

We motored down the line to another trench--this one along a road with
fields in front and, about a couple of hundred yards behind, a clump of
trees which masked a Belgian battery.  The officer here, a tall,
upstanding, gravely handsome young man, with a deep, strong, slightly
humorous voice, and the air of one both born to and used to command--the
best type of navy man--came over to meet us, rather glad, it seemed, to
see some one.  The ambulance officer had just started to speak when
there was a roar from the clump of trees, at the same instant an
explosion directly overhead, and an ugly chunk of iron--a bit of broken
casing from a shrapnel shell--plunged at our very feet.  The shell had
been wrongly timed and exploded prematurely.

"I say!" the lieutenant called out to a Belgian officer standing not far
away, "can't you telephone over to your people to stop that? That's the
third time we've been nearly hit by their shrapnel this morning.  After
all"--he turned to us with the air of apologizing somewhat for his
display of irritation--"it's quite annoying enough here without that,
you know."

It was, indeed, annoying--very.  The trenches were not under fire in the
sense that the enemy were making a persistent effort to clear them out,
but they were in the zone of fire, their range was known, and there was
no telling, when that distant boom thudded across the fields, whether
that particular shell might be intended for them or for somebody's house
in town.

We could see in the distance their captive balloon, and there were a
couple of scouts, the officer said, in a tower in the village, not much
more than half a mile away.  He pointed to the spot across the barbed
wire. "We've been trying to get them for the last half-hour."

We left them engaged in this interesting distraction, the little
rifle-snaps in all that mighty thundering seeming only to accent the
loneliness and helplessness of their position, and spun on down the
transverse road, toward another trench.  The progress of the motor
seemed slow and disappointing.  Not that the spot a quarter of a mile
off was at all less likely to be hit, yet one felt conscious of a
growing desire to be somewhere else.  And, though I took off my hat to
keep it from blowing off, I found that every time a shell went over I
promptly put it on again, indicating, one suspected, a decline in what
the military experts call morale.

As we bowled down the road toward a group of brick houses on the left, a
shell passed not more than fifty yards in front of us and through the
side of one of these houses as easily as a circus rider pops through a
tissue-paper hoop.  Almost at the same instant another exploded--where,
I haven't the least idea, except that the dust from it hit us in the
face. The motor rolled smoothly along meanwhile, and the Belgian soldier
driving it stared as imperturbably ahead of him as if he were back at
Antwerp on the seat of his taxicab.

You get used to shells in time, it seems, and, deciding that you either
are or are not going to be hit, dismiss responsibility and leave it all
to fate.  I must admit that in my brief experience I was not able to
arrive at this restful state.  We reached at last the city gate through
which we had left Antwerp, and the motor came to a stop just at the
inner edge of the passage under the fort, and I said good-by to the
young Englishman ere he started back for the trenches again.

"Well," he called after me as I started across the open space between
the gate and the houses, a stone's throw away, "you've had an experience
anyway."

I was just about to answer that undoubtedly I had when--
"Tzee-ee-ee-er-r"--a shell just cleared the ramparts over our heads and
disappeared in the side of a house directly in front of us with a roar
and a geyser of dust. Neither the motor nor a guest's duty now detained
me, and, waving him good-by, I turned at right angles and made with true
civilian speed for the shelter of a side street.

The shells all appeared to be coming from a southeast direction, and in
the lee of houses on the south side of the street one was reasonably
protected.  Keeping close to the house-fronts and dodging--rather
absurdly, no doubt--into doorways when that wailing whistle came up from
behind, I went zigzagging through the deserted city toward the hotel on
the other side of town.

It was such a progress as one might make in some fantastic nightmare--as
the hero of some eerie piece of fiction about the Last Man in the World.
Street after street, with doors locked, shutters closed, sandbags,
mattresses, or little heaps of earth piled over cellar windows; streets
in which the only sound was that of one's own feet, where the loneliness
was made more lonely by some forgotten dog cringing against the closed
door and barking nervously as one hurried past.

Here, where most of the shells had fallen the preceding night, nearly
all the houses were empty.  Yet occasionally one caught sight of faces
peering up from basement windows or of some stubborn householder
standing in his southern doorway staring into space.  Once I passed a
woman bound away from, instead of toward, the river with her big bundle;
and once an open carriage with a family in it driving, with peculiarly
Flemish composure, toward the quay, and as I hurried past the park,
along the Avenue Van Dyck--where fresh craters made by exploding shells
had been dug in the turf--the swans, still floating on the little lake,
placidly dipped their white necks under water as if it were a quiet
morning in May.

Now and then, as the shell's wail swung over its long parabola, there
came with the detonation, across the roofs, the rumble of falling
masonry.  Once I passed a house quietly burning, and on the pavement
were lopped-off trees.  The impartiality with which those far-off
gunners distributed their attentions was disconcerting.  Peering down
one of the up-and-down streets before crossing it, as if a shell were an
automobile which you might see and dodge, you would shoot across and,
turning into a cosey little side street, think to yourself that here at
least they had not come, and then promptly see, squarely in front,
another of those craters blown down through the Belgian blocks.

Presently I found myself under the trees of the Boulevard Leopold, not
far from the British hospital, and recalled that it was about time that
promise was made good.  It was time indeed, and help with lifting they
needed very literally.  The order had just come to leave the building,
bringing the wounded and such equipment as they could pack into half a
dozen motor-buses and retire--just where, I did not hear--in the
direction of Ghent.  As I entered the porte-cochere two poor wrecks of
war were being led out by their nurses--more men burned in the powder
explosion at Waelhem, their seared faces and hands covered with oil and
cotton just as they had been lifted from bed.

The phrase "whistle of shells" had taken on a new reality since
midnight. Now one was to learn something of the meaning of those equally
familiar words, "they succeeded in saving their wounded, although under
heavy fire."

None of the wounded could walk, none dress himself; most of them in
ordinary times would have lain where they were for weeks.  There were
fractured legs not yet set, men with faces half shot away, men half out
of their heads, and all these had to be dressed somehow, covered up,
crowded into or on top of the buses, and started off through a city
under bombardment toward open country which might already be occupied by
the enemy.

Bundles of uniforms, mud-stained, blood-stained, just as they had come
from the trenches, were dumped out of the storeroom and distributed, hit
or miss.

British "Tommies" went out as Belgians, Belgians in British khaki; the
man whose broken leg I had lifted the day before we simply bundled in
his bed blankets and set up in the corner of a bus.  One healthy-looking
Belgian boy, on whom I was trying to pull a pair of British trousers,
seemed to have nothing at all the matter with him, until it presently
appeared that he was speechless and paralyzed in both left arm and left
leg.  And while we were working, an English soldier, shot through the
jaw and throat, sat on the edge of his bed, shaking with a hideous,
rattling cough.

The hospital was in a handsome stone building, in ordinary times a club,
perhaps, or a school; a wide, stone stairway led up the centre, and
above it was a glass skylight.  This central well would have been a
charming place for a shell to drop into, and one did drop not more than
fifty feet or so away, in or close to the rear court.  A few yards down
the avenue another shell hit a cornice and sent a ton or so of masonry
crashing down on the sidewalk.  Under conditions like these the nurses
kept running up and down that staircase during the endless hour or two
in which the wounded were being dressed and carried on stretchers to the
street.  They stood by the buses making their men comfortable, and when
the first buses were filled they sat in the open street on top of them,
patiently waiting, as calm and smiling as circus queens on their gilt
chariots.  The behavior of the men in the trenches was cool enough, but
they at least were fighting men and but taking the chance of war.  These
were civilian volunteers, they had not even trenches to shelter them,
and it took a rather unforeseen and difficult sort of courage to leave
that fairly safe masonry building and sit smiling and helpful on top of
a motor-bus during a wait of half an hour or so, any second of which
might be one's last.  There was an American nurse there, a tall, radiant
girl, whom they called, and rightly, "Morning Glory," who had been
introduced to me the day before because we both belonged to that curious
foreign race of Americans.  What her name was I haven't the least idea,
and if we were to meet to-morrow, doubtless we should have to be
carefully presented over again, but I remember calling out to her,
"Good-by, American girl!" as we passed in the hall during the last
minute or two, and she said good-by, and suddenly reached out and put
her hand on my shoulder and added, "Good luck!" or "God bless you!" or
something like that.  And these seemed at the moment quite the usual
things to do and say.  The doctor in charge and the general's wife
apologized for running away, as they called it, and the last I saw of
the latter was as she waved back to me from the top of a bus, with just
that look of concern over the desperate ride they were beginning which a
slightly preoccupied hostess casts over a dinner-table about which are
seated a number of oddly assorted guests.

The strange procession got away safely at last, and safely, too, so I
was told later, across the river; but where they finally spent the night
I never heard.  I hurried down the street and into the Rue Nerviens.  It
must have been about four o'clock by that time.  The bright October
morning had changed to a chill and dismal afternoon, and up the western
sky in the direction of the river a vast curtain of greasy, black smoke
was rolling. The petrol-tanks along the Scheldt had been set afire.  It
looked at the moment as if the whole city might be going, but there was
no time then to think of possibilities, and I slipped down the lee side
of the street to the door with the Red Cross flag.  The front of the
hospital was shut tight.  It took several pulls at the bell to bring any
one, and inside I found a Belgian family who had left their own house
for the thicker ceilings of the hospital, and the nuns back in the wards
with their nervous men.  Their servants had left that morning, the three
or four sisters in charge had had to do all the cooking and housework as
well as look after their patients, and now they were keeping calm and
smiling, to subdue as best they could the fears of the Belgian wounded,
who were ready to jump out of bed, whatever their condition, rather than
fall into the hands of the enemy.  Each had no doubt that if he were not
murdered outright he would be taken to Germany and forced to fight in
the east against the Russians.  Several, who knew very well what was
going on outside, had been found by the nurses that morning out of bed
and all ready to take to the street.

Lest they should hear that their comrades in the Boulevard Leopold had
been moved, the lay sister--the English lady--and I withdrew to the
operating-room, closed the door, and in that curious retreat talked over
the situation.  No orders had come to leave; in fact, they had been told
to stay.  They did have a man now in the shape of the Belgian gentleman,
and from the same source an able-bodied servant, but how long these
would stay, where food was to be found in that desolate city, when the
bombardment would cease, and what the Germans would do with them--well,
it was not a pleasant situation for a handful of women.  But it was not
of themselves she was thinking, but of their wounded and of Belgium, and
of what both had suffered already and of what might yet be in store. It
was of that this frail little sister talked that hopeless afternoon,
while the smoke in the west spread farther up the sky, and she would now
and then pause in the middle of a syllable while a shell sang overhead,
then take it up again.

Meanwhile the light was going, and before it became quite dark and my
hotel deserted, perhaps, as the rest of Antwerp, it seemed best to be
getting across town.  I could not believe that the Germans could treat
such a place and people with anything but consideration and told the
little nurse so.  She came to the edge of the glass-covered court,
laughingly saying I had best run across it, and wondering where we, who
had met twice now under such curious circumstances, would meet again.
Then she turned back to the ward--to wait with that roomful of more or
less panicky men for the tramp of German soldiers and the knock on the
door which meant that they were prisoners.

Hurrying across town, I passed, not far from the Hotel St. Antoine, a
blazing four-story building.  The cathedral was not touched, and indeed,
in spite of the noise and terror, the material damage was comparatively
slight.  Soldiers were clearing the quay and setting a guard directly in
front of our hotel--one of the few places in Antwerp that night where
one could get so much as a crust of bread--and behind drawn curtains we
made what cheer we could.  There were two American photographers and a
correspondent who had spent the night before in the cellar of a house,
the upper story of which had been wrecked by a shell; a British
intelligence officer, with the most bewildering way of hopping back and
forth between a brown civilian suit and a spick-and-span new uniform;
and several Belgian families hoping to get a boat down-stream in the
morning.

We sat round the great fire in the hall, above which the architect,
building for happier times, had had the bad grace to place a skylight,
and discussed the time and means of getting away.  The intelligence
officer, not wishing to be made a prisoner, was for getting a boat of
some sort at the first crack of dawn, and the photographers, who had had
the roof blown off over their heads, heartily agreed with him.  I did
not like to leave without at least a glimpse of those spiked helmets nor
to desert my friends in the Rue Nerviens, and yet there was the
likelihood, if one remained, of being marooned indefinitely in the midst
of the conquering army.

Meanwhile the flight of shells continued, a dozen or more fires could be
seen from the upper windows of the hotel, and billows of red flame from
the burning petrol-tanks rolled up the southern sky.  It had been what
might be called a rather full day, and the wail of approaching
projectiles began to get on one's nerves.  One started at the slamming
of a door, took every dull thump for a distant explosion; and when we
finally turned in I carried the mattress from my room, which faced the
south, over to the other side of the building, and laid it on the floor
beside another man's bed.  Before a shell could reach me it would have
to traverse at least three partitions and possibly him as well.

After midnight the bombardment quieted, but shells continued to visit us
from time to time all night.  All night the Belgians were retreating
across the pontoon bridge, and once--it must have been about two or
three o'clock--I heard a sound which meant that all was over.  It was
the crisp tramp--different from the Belgian shuffle--of British
soldiers, and up from the street came an English voice, "Best foot
forward, boys!" and a little farther on: "Look alive, men; they've just
picked up our range!"

I went to the window and watched them tramp by--the same men we had seen
that morning.  The petrol fire was still flaming across the south, a
steamer of some sort was burning at her wharf beside the bridge--
Napoleon's veterans retreating from Moscow could scarcely have left
behind a more complete picture of war than did those young recruits.

Morning came dragging up out of that dreadful night, smoky, damp, and
chill.  It was almost a London fog that lay over the abandoned town.  I
had just packed up and was walking through one of the upper halls when
there was a crash that shook the whole building, the sound of falling
glass, and out in the river a geyser of water shot up, timbers and
boards flew from the bridge, and there were dozens of smaller splashes
as if from a shower of shot.  I thought that the hotel was hit at last
and that the Germans, having let civilians escape over the bridge, were
turning everything loose, determined to make an end of the business.  It
was, as a matter of fact, the Belgians blowing up the bridge to cover
their retreat. In any case it seemed useless to stay longer, and within
an hour, on a tug jammed with the last refugees, we were starting
down-stream.

Behind us, up the river, a vast curtain of lead-colored smoke from the
petrol-tanks had climbed up the sky and spread out mushroomwise, as
smoke and ashes sometimes spread out from a volcano.  This smoke,
merging with the fog and the smoke from the Antwerp fires, seemed to
cover the whole sky.  And under that sullen mantle the dark flames of
the petrol still glowed; to the right, as we looked back, was the
blazing skeleton of the ship, and on the left Antwerp itself, the rich,
old, beautiful, comfortable city, all but hidden, and now and then
sending forth the boom of an exploding shell like a groan.

A large empty German steamer, the Gneisenau, marooned here since the
war, came swinging slowly out into the river, pushed by two or three
nervous little tugs--to be sunk there, apparently, in midstream.  From
the pontoon bridge, which stubbornly refused to yield, came explosion
after explosion, and up and down the river fires sprang up, and there
were other explosions, as the crushed Belgians, in a sort of rage of
devastation, became their own destroyers.

By following the adventures of one individual I have endeavored to
suggest what the bombardment of a modern city was like--what you might
expect if an invading army came to-morrow to New York or Chicago or San
Francisco.  I have only coasted along the edges of Belgium's tragedy,
and the rest of the story, of which we were a part for the next two
days--the flight of those hundreds of thousands of homeless people--is
something that can scarcely be told--you must follow it out in
imagination into its countless uprooted, disorganized lives.  You must
imagine old people struggling along over miles and miles of country
roads; young girls, under burdens a man might not care to bear, tramping
until they had to carry their shoes in their hands and go barefoot to
rest their unaccustomed feet.  You must imagine the pathetic efforts of
hundreds of people to keep clean by washing in wayside streams or
ditches; imagine babies going without milk because there was no milk to
be had; families shivering in damp hedgerows or against haystacks where
darkness overtook them; and you must imagine this not on one road, but
on every road, for mile after mile over a whole countryside. What was to
become of these people when their little supply of food was exhausted?
Where could they go? Even if back to their homes, it would be but to
lift their hats to their conquerors, never knowing but that the next
week or month would sweep the tide of war back over them again.

Never in modern times, not in our generation at least, had Europe seen
anything like that flight--nothing so strange, so overwhelming, so
pitiful. And when I say pitiful, you must not think of hysterical women,
desperate, trampling men, tears and screams.  In all those miles one saw
neither complaining nor protestation--at times one might almost have
thought it some vast, eccentric picnic.  No, it was their orderliness,
their thrift and kindness, their unmistakable usefulness, which made the
waste and irony of it all so colossal and hideous.  Each family had its
big, round loaves of bread and its pile of hay for the horses, the bags
of pears and potatoes; the children had their little dolls, and you
would see some tired mother with her big bundle under one arm and some
fluffy little puppy in the other.  You could not associate them with
forty-centimetre shells or burned churches and libraries or anything but
quiet homes and peaceable, helpful lives.  You could not be swept along
by that endless stream of exiles and retain at the end of the day any
particular enthusiasm for the red glory of war.  And when we crossed the
Dutch border that afternoon and came on a village street full of Belgian
soldiers cut off and forced to cross the line, to be interned here,
presumably until the war was over, one could not mourn very deeply their
lost chances of martial glory as they unslung their rifles and turned
them over to the good-natured Dutch guard.  They had held back that
avalanche long enough, these Belgians, and one felt as one would to see
lost children get home again or some one dragged from under the wheels.




Chapter V

Paris Again--And Bordeaux: Journal of a Flight from a London Fogs



These notes began in a London fog and ended in the south of France.  I
had hoped, on reaching Calais, to work in toward the fighting along the
Yser, but, finding it impossible, decided to turn about and travel away
from the front instead of toward it--down to see Bordeaux while it was
still the temporary capital, and to see what life might be like in the
French provincial towns in war time.

It was not, so the young woman at the hotel desk in London said, what
you would call a fog, because she could still see the porter at the
street-door--yet day after day the same rain, smoky mist, and unbroken
gloom.

One breakfasted and tramped the streets by lamplight, as if there were
no such thing as sun---recalled vaguely a world in which it used to be--
woods with the leaves turning, New York on a bright autumn morning,
enchanted tropical dawns.

Through this viscous envelope--a sort of fungi thrown off by it--
newspapers kept appearing--slaughter and more slaughter, hatred, the
hunt for spies, more hysterical and shrill.  One looked for fairness
almost as for the sun, and, merely by blackguarding long enough men who
could not answer back and, after all, were flinging their lives away
bravely over there in France, one ended by giving them the very
qualities they were denied.

They faded out as one picture on a stereopticon screen fades into
another--even as one read "Huns" for the thousandth time the Huns turned
into kindly burghers smoking pipes and singing songs.  In the same way
the England of tradition--Shakespeare, Dickens, Meredith, jolly old
rumbling London, rides 'cross country, rows on the river--faded into
this nightmare of hate and smoky lamplight.  The psychology was very
simple, but too much, it seems, for censors and even editors.  And,
unfortunately, at a time like this not the light-hearted, sportsmanlike
fighting men at the front, nor sober people left behind in homes, but
newspapers are likely to be an outsider's most constant companions.

A sort of spiritual asphyxiation overtook one at last, in which the mere
stony Briticism of the London hotel seemed to have a part.  If you awoke
again into that taste of soft-coal smoke, went down to another of those
staggering lamp-lit breakfasts.  But why staggering? "Can you not take
coffee and rolls in London as well as in some Paris café"? It would seem
so, yet it cannot be done.  The mere sight and sound--or lack of sound--
of that warm, softly carpeted breakfast-room, moving like some gloomy,
inevitable mechanism as it has moved for countless years, attacks the
already weakened will like an opiate.  At the first bewildering '"Q?"
from that steely-fronted maid the ritual overpowers you and you bow
before porridge, kippers, bacon and eggs, stewed fruit, marmalade,
toast, more toast, more marmalade, as helpless as the rabbit before the
proverbial boa--except that in this case the rabbit swallows its own
asphyxiator.

Another breakfast like this, another day of rain and fog, another '"Q?"
--it was in some such state of mind as this that I packed up one night
and took the early train for Folkestone.

Folkestone, Friday.

Sunshine at last--a delicious autumn afternoon--clean air, quiet, and
the sea.  Far below the cliff walk, trawlers crawling slowly in; along
the horizon a streak of smoke from some patrolling destroyer or
battleship. And all along this cliff walk, Belgians--strolling with
their children, sitting on the benches, looking out to sea.  Just beyond
that hazy white wall to the east--the cliffs of France--the fight for
Calais is being fought--they can almost hear the cannon.

In the stillness, as they drift by, you catch bits of their talk:

"It was two o'clock in the morning when we left Antwerp."

"And imagine--it was not three metres from our doorstep that the shell
burst."

"We walked forty kilometres that night and in the morning-------"

On the balcony of some one's summer-house, now turned into a hospital,
four Belgian soldiers, one with his head bandaged, are playing cards--
jolly, blond youngsters, caps rakishly tipped over one ear, slamming the
cards down as if that were the only thing in the world.  In the garden
others taking the sunshine, some with their wheel-chairs pushed through
the shrubbery close to the high iron fence, to be petted by nurse-maids
and children as if they were animals in a sort of zoo.

The Belgians strolling by on the cliff walk smile at this quaint
picture, for sun and space and quiet seem to have wiped out their
terror--that passed through is as far away as that now hidden in the
east.  Is it merely quiet and sun? Perhaps it is the look of a "nice
little people" who know that now they have a history.  "Refugees," to be
sure, yet one can fancy them looking back some day from their tight
little villages, canals, and beet-fields, on afternoons like this, as on
the days of their great adventure--when they could sit in the sun above
the sea at Folkestone and look across the Channel to the haze under
which their sons and husbands and brothers and King were fighting for
the last corner of their country.

Calais, Saturday.

Belgian officers, parks of Belgian military automobiles; up-country a
little way the Germans going down in tens of thousands to win their
"gate to England"--yet we came across on the Channel boat last evening
as usual and had little trouble finding a room.  There were tons of Red
Cross supplies on board--cotton, chloroform, peroxide; Belgian soldiers
patched up and going back to fight; and various volunteer nurses,
including two handsome young Englishwomen of the very modern aviatrix
type--coming over to drive motor-cycle ambulances--and so smartly gotten
up in boots and khaki that a little way off you might have taken them
for British officers.  At the wharf were other nurses, some of whom I
had last seen that Thursday afternoon in Antwerp as they and their
wounded rolled away in London buses from the hospital in the Boulevard
Leopold.

This morning, strolling round the town, I ran into a couple of English
correspondents.  There were yet several hours before they need address
themselves to the arduous task of describing fighting they had not seen,
and they talked, with a good humor one sometimes misses in their
correspondence, of German collectivism and similar things.  One had
spent a good deal of time in Germany.

"They're the only people who have solved the problem of industrial
cities without slums--you must say that for them.  Of course, in those
model towns of theirs, you've got to brush your teeth at six minutes
past eight and sleep on your left side if the police say so--they're
astonishing people for doing what they're told.

"One day in Dresden I walked across a bit of grass the public weren't
supposed to cross.  An old gentleman fairly roared the instant he saw
me.  He was ready to explode at the mere suggestion that any one could
think of disobeying a rule made for all of them.

"'Das kann man nicht thun! Es ist verboten!'"

The other quoted the answer of an English factory-owner to some of his
employees who did not want to enlist.  "They've done a lot for working
men over there," the man said.  "Accident-insurance, old-age pensions,
and all that--what do we want to fight the Kaiser for? We'd just about
as soon be under Billy as George." And X------said to them: "If you were
under Kaiser Billy, you'd enlist right enough, there's no doubt of
that!"

Boulogne, Saturday.

He sat in the corner of our compartment coming down from Calais this
afternoon, an old Algerian soldier, homeward bound, with a big, round
loaf of bread and a military pass.  He had a blue robe, bright-red, soft
boots, a white turban wound with a sort of scarf of brown cord and baggy
corduroy underneath, concealing various mysterious pockets.

"Paris? To-night?" he grunted in his queer French.  The big Frenchman
next him, who had served in Africa in his youth and understood the
dialect, shook his head.  "To-morrow morning!" he said.  He laid his
head on his hand to suggest a man sleeping, and held up three fingers.
"Three days--Marseilles!" The old goumier's dark eyes blazed curiously,
and he opened and shut his mouth in a dry yawn--like a tiger yawning.

Wounded? No--he pointed to his eyes, which were bloodshot, patted his
forehead to suggest that it was throbbing, rubbed his legs, and scowled.
"Rheumatism!" said the Frenchman.  The Algerian pressed his palms
together six times, then held up two fingers.  "He's sixty-two years
old!" said the Frenchman, and the old warrior obligingly opened his jaws
and pointed to two or three lone brown fangs to prove it.  They talked
for a moment in the vernacular, and the Frenchman explained again,
"Volunteer!" and then, "Scout!"

The old Arab made the motion of sighting along a rifle, then of brushing
something over, and tapped himself on the chest.

"Deux!" he said.  "Two Germans--me!" Evidently he was going back to the
desert satisfied.

Train after train passed us, northward bound, some from Boulogne, some
from the trenches north of Paris evidently, bringing artillery caked
with mud--all packed with British soldiers leaning from doors of their
cattle-cars, hats pushed back, pipes in their faces, singing and joking.
At the end of each train, in passenger-coaches, their officers--tall,
slim-legged young Olympians in leather puttees and short tan greatcoats,
with their air of elegant amateurs embarking on some rather superior
sort of sport.

The same cars filled with French soldiers equally brave, efficient,
light-hearted would be as different as Corneille and Shakespeare, as
Dickens and Dumas--and in the same ways!

An Englishman had been telling me in a London club a few nights before
of the "extraordinary detachment" of Tommy Atkins.

"Take almost any of those little French soldiers--they've got a pretty
good idea what the war is about--at any rate, they've got a sentiment
about it perfectly clear and conscious, and they'll go to their death
shouting for la patrie.  Now, Tommy Atkins isn't the least like that.
He doesn't fight--and you know how he does fight--for patriotism or
glory, at least not in the same conscious way.  He'd fight just as well
against another of his own regiments--if you know what I mean.  He's
just--well, look at the soldiers' letters.  The Germans are sentimental
--they are all martyrs.  The Frenchmen are all heroes.  But Tommy Atkins
--well, he's just playing football!"

The idea this Englishman was trying to express was put in another way by
a British sailor at the time of the sinking of the Aboukir, Cressy, and
Rogue.

Imagine, for a moment, that scene--the three great ships going over like
stricken whales, men slipping down their slimy flanks into the sea,
boats overturned and smashed, in the thick of it the wet nose of the
German submarine coming up for a look round, and then, out of that
hideous welter, the voice of a sailor, the unalterable Briton in the
face of all this modern science and sea magic, grabbing an anchor or
whatever it was he saw first, and bellowing:

"Smash the blighter's head!"

There are phrases like these which could only have been said by the
people who say them; they are like windows suddenly opening down cycles
of racial history and difference.  At a Regent Street moving-picture
show a few evenings ago two young Frenchwomen sat behind us, girls
driven off the Paris boulevards by the same impartial force which has
driven grubbing peasant women from the Belgian beet-fields.  One spoke a
little English, and as the pictures changed she translated for her
companion.

There were pictures of the silk industry in Japan--moths emerging from
cocoons, the breeding process, the hatching of the eggs, the life
history of these anonymous little specks magnified until for the moment
they almost had a sort of personality.  And one murmured:

"Comme c'est drole, la nature!"

Sunday.

It was dusk when we reached Boulogne last night--frosty dusk, with the
distant moan of a fog-horn, and under the mist hilly streets busy with
soldiers and bright with lights.  It made one think of a college town at
home on the eve of the great game, so keen and happy seemed all these
fit young men--officers swinging by with their walking-sticks, soldiers
spinning yarns in smoky cafes--for the great game of war.

The hotels were full of wounded or officers--to Boulogne comes the
steady procession of British transports--but an amiable porter led me to
a little side street and a place kept by a retired English
merchant-marine officer who had married a Frenchwoman.  Paintings, such
as sailor-artists make, of the ships he had served in were on the walls,
a photograph of himself and his mates taken in the sunshine of some
tropical port; and with its cheerful hot stove, the place combined the
air of a French cafe with the cosiness of an English inn.

Very comfortable, indeed, I leaned over one of the tables that ran along
the wall, while two British soldiers alongside gossiped and sipped their
beer, and ran over the columns of La Boulonnaise.  Here, too, war seemed
a jolly man's game, and I came to "Military Court Sitting at Boulogne,"
and beneath it the following:

Seventh, eighth, and ninth cases.  Thefts by German prisoners of war.
The accused are Antoine Michels, twenty-five years, native of Treves,
Twenty-seventh German Chasseurs, made prisoner at Lens.  Henriede Falk,
twenty-seven years, native of Landenheissen (Grand Duchy of Hesse),
Fourth Regiment Dragoons, made prisoner at Lille.  Max Benninghoven,
twenty-two years, Seventh German Chasseurs, made prisoner at Bailleul.

"The three had in their possession at the moment of their capture:
Michels, two pairs of earrings, a steel watch, two medals representing
the town of Arras, and a cigar-holder; Falk, a woman's watch and chain
in addition to his own; Benninghoven, a pocketbook, a pack of cards, and
money that did not belong to him.

"All were subjected to a severe examination and condemned: Michels, to
five years in prison and a fine of five hundred francs; Falk, to twenty
years at forced labor..."

And these few words of newspaper type, which nobody else seemed to be
noticing, somehow--as if one had stubbed one's toe--disturbed the
picture.  They did not fit in with the rakish gray motor-car, labelled
"Australia," I saw after dinner, nor the young infantryman I ran across
on a street corner who had been in the fighting ever since Mons and was
but down "for a rest" before jumping in again, nor the busy streets and
buzzing cafes.  But across them, for some reason, all evening, one
couldn't help seeing Henriede Falk, twenty-seven years old, of
Landenheissen, starting down toward Paris last August, singing
"Deutschland uber Alles!" and wondering what he might be thinking about
the great game of war fifteen years from now.

While I was taking coffee this morning my mariner-host walked up and
down the cafe, delivering himself on the subject of mines in the North
Sea.  The Germans began it, now the English must take it up; but as for
him, speaking as one who had followed the sea, it was poor business. Why
couldn't people knock each other out in a stand-up fight like men in a
ring, instead of strewing the open road with explosives?

Walking about town after breakfast, I ran into a young man whom I had
last seen in a white linen uniform, waiting patiently on the orderlies'
bench of the American Ambulance at Neuilly.  The ambulance is as hard to
get into as an exclusive club, for the woods are full these days of
volunteers who, leading rather decorative lives in times of peace, have
been shaken awake by the war into helping out overtaxed embassies,
making beds in hospitals, doing whatever comes along with a childlike
delight in the novelty of work.  This young man wore a Red Cross button
now and paused long enough to impart the following--characteristic of
the things we non-combatants hear daily, and which, authentic or not,
help to "make life interesting":

1. An English general just down from the front had told him that four
thousand soldiers had been sent out as a burial party after the fighting
along the Yser, and had buried, by actual count, thirty-nine thousand
Germans.

2. In a temporary hospital near the front some fifty German and Indian
wounded were put in the same ward.  In the night the Indians got up and
cut the Germans' throats.

I climbed up through narrow, cobblestoned streets to the higher part of
the town.  It was pleasant up here in the frosty morning--old houses,
archways, and courts, and the bells tolling people to church.

Up the long hill, as I went down, came three hearses in black and
silver, after the French fashion, with drivers in black coats and
black-and-silver cocked hats.  People stopped as they passed, a woman
crossed herself, men took off their hats--farther up the hill a French
sentry suddenly straightened and presented arms.

The three caskets were draped in flags--not the tricolor, but the Union
Jack.  No mourners followed them, and as the ancient vehicles climbed
over the brow of the hill the people kept looking, feeling, perhaps,
that something was lacking, wondering who the strangers might be who had
given their lives to France.

Monday.

Paris again--a gray Paris, with bare tree-trunks, dead leaves on the
sidewalk, and in the air the chill of approaching winter.

Across the gray distances one fancies now and then to have seen the
first stray flakes of snow, and in some old street, between tall, gray
houses leaning backward, sidewise, each after its fashion--as some girl,
pale, with shawl wrapped about her shoulders, hurries past with a quick
upcasting of dark eyes, one thinks of Mimi and the third act of "La
Boheme."

Old sentiments, old songs and verses return in this strange, gray
stillness--that spirit so gracious, delicate, penetrating, and personal,
which has drawn so many through the years, becomes more moving and real.
There is more animation in the streets now: shops are opening, cabs
tooting down the Avenue de l'Opera the greater part of the night; but
most of the house-fronts are still shuttered and still.  Tourists,
pleasure-seekers, and the banalities they bring are gone--every thought
and energy is with the men fighting on that long line across the north.
It is a Paris of the French--of a France united as never before,
perhaps, purified by fire, ardent, resolute, defending her life and her
precious inheritance.



The Temporary Capital



Tuesday.

A journalist actually protests in print against the big loaves of coarse
bread, long as half a stick of cord-wood and almost as hard--remember
the almost carnivorous joy with which a Frenchman devours bread!--to
which the military government, at the beginning of the war, condemned
Paris.

The explanation was that rolls and fancy bread took too much time and
there were not enough bakers left to do the work--and inspectors see
that the law is obeyed, whether amiable bakers think they have time or
not.  And people want light bread, curly rolls, "pain de fantaisie." All
very well for General Gallieni! says the journalist; he likes hard
bread; but why must several million people go on cracking their teeth
because of that idiosyncrasy?

The government is obdurate.  If fancy bread were made, only the big
bakers would have time to make it, little ones would be without clients,
and that this highly centralized, paternal government cannot allow.
Hard bread it is, then, for another while at least--"C'est la guerre!"

Thursday.

We have a dining-car on our Bordeaux express to-day, the first since war
was declared.  To-morrow night sleeping-cars go back again--more
significant than one might think who had not seen the France of a few
months ago, when everything was turned over to the army and people sat
up all night in day coaches to cover the usual three hours from Dieppe
to Paris.

Down through the heart of France--Tours, Poitiers, Angouleme--past trim
little French rivers, narrow, winding, still, and deep, with rows of
poplars close to the water's edge, and still a certain air of coquetry,
in spite of bare branches and fallen leaves--past brown fields across
which teams of oxen, one sedate old farm horse in the lead, are drawing
the furrow for next spring's wheat.  It's the old men who are ploughing
--except for those in uniform, there is scarce a young man in sight.  And
everywhere soldiers--wounded ones bound for southern France, reserves
not yet sent up.

Vines begin to appear, low brown lines across stony fields; then, just
after dark, across the Garonne and into Bordeaux, where the civil
government obligingly fled when the enemy was rolling down on Paris in
the first week of September.

Bordeaux, Monday.

Bordeaux is a day's railroad ride from Paris--twelve hours away from the
German cannon, which even now are only fifty miles north of the
boulevards, twelve hours nearer Spain and Africa.  And you feel both
these things.

All about you is the wine country--the names of towns and villages round
about read like a wine-card--and, as you are lunching in some little
side-street restaurant, a table is moved away, a trap-door opens, and
monsieur the proprietor looks on while the big casks of claret are
rolled in from the street and lowered to the cellar and the old casks
hauled up again.  You are close to the wine country and close to the
sea--to oysters and crabs and ships--and to the hot sun and more
exuberant spirits of the Midi.  The pretty, black-eyed Bordelaise--there
are pretty girls in Bordeaux--often seems closer to Madrid than to
Paris; even the Bordelais accent has a touch of the Mediterranean, and
the crisp words of Paris are broken up and even an extra vowel added now
and then, until they ripple like Spanish or Italian.  "Pe-tite-a ma-
dame-a !" rattles some little newsboy, ingratiating himself with an
indifferent lady of uncertain age; and the porter will bring your boots
in no time-in "une-a pe-tite-a mi-nute-a."

The war is in everybody's mind, of course--no one in France thinks of
anything else--but there is none of that silence and tenseness, that
emotional tremor, one feels in Paris.  The Germans will never come here,
one feels, no matter what happens, and as you read the communiqués in La
Petite Gironde and La Liberté du Sud-Ouest the war seems farther away, I
feel pretty sure, than it does in front of the newspaper bill-boards in
New York.

In fact, one of the first and abiding impressions of Bordeaux is that it
is a great place for things to eat--oysters from Marennes, lobsters and
langoustes, pears big as cantaloupes, pomegranates, mushrooms--the
little ones and the big cepes of Bordeaux--yellow dates just up from
Tunis.  The fruiterers' shops not only make you hungry, but into some of
them you may enter and find a quiet little room up-stairs, where the
proprietor and his wife and daughter, in the genial French fashion, will
serve you with a cosey little dinner with wine for three francs, in
front of the family grate fire, and the privilege of ordering up
anything you want from the shop-window below.

There are attractive little chocolate and pastry shops and cheerful
semi-pension restaurants where whole families, including, in these days,
minor politicians with axes to grind and occasional young women from the
boulevards, all dine together in a warm bustle of talk, smoke, the
gurgle of claret, and tear off chunks of hard French bread, while madame
the proprietress, a handsome, dark-eyed, rather Spanish-looking
Bordelaise, sails round, subduing the impatient, smiling at those who
wish to be smiled at, and ordering her faithful waiters about like a
drill-sergeant.

And then there is the Chapon fin.  When you speak to some elderly
gentleman with fastidious gastronomical tastes and an acquaintance with
southern France of your intention of going to Bordeaux, he murmurs
reminiscently: "Ah, yes!  There is a restaurant there..." He means the
Chapon fin.  It was famous in '70 when the government came here before,
and to-day when the young King of Spain motors over from Biarritz he
dines there.  Coming down on the train, I read in the Revue des Deux
Mondes the recollections of a gentleman who was here in '70-'71 and is
here again now.  He was inclined to be sarcastic about the present
Chapon fin.  In his day one had good food and did not pay exorbitantly;
now "one needs a quasi-official introduction to penetrate, and the
stylish servants, guarding the door like impassable dragons, ask with a
discreet air if monsieur has taken care to warn the management of his
intention of taking lunch."

We penetrated without apparent difficulty--possibly owing to the exalted
position of the two amiable young attaches who entertained me--and the
food was very good.  There were diplomats of all sorts to be seen, a
meridional head waiter, and an interesting restaurant cat.  One end of
the room is an artificial grotto, and into and out of the canvas rocks
this enormous cat kept creeping, thrusting his round face and blazing
eyes out of unexpected holes in the manner of the true carnivora, as if
he had been trained by the management as an entertainer.  The head
waiter would have lured an anchorite into temporary abandon.  Toward the
end of the evening we discussed the probable character of a certain
dessert, suggesting some doubt of taking it.  You might as well have
doubted his honor.  "Mais, monsieur!" He waved his arms.  "C'est
delicieux! ...  C'est merveilleux! ...  C'est quelque chose"--slowly,
with thumb and first finger pressed together--"de r-r-raf-fi-we!"...

It is to this genial provincial city that the President and his
ministers have come.  They distributed themselves about town in various
public and private buildings; the Senate chose one theatre for its
future meeting-place and the Chamber of Deputies another.  And from
these places, sometimes the most incongruous--one hears, for instance,
of M. Delcasse maintaining his dignity in a bedroom now used as the
office for the minister of foreign affairs--the red tape is unwound
which eventually sends the life-blood of the remotest province flowing
up to its appointed place at the front.

There must be plenty of real work, for an army like that of France,
stretching clear across the country from Switzerland to the Channel,
could not live unless it had a smoothly running civil machine in the
quiet country behind.  Neither of the chambers is in session, and except
that the main streets are busy--one is told that one hundred thousand
extra people are in town--you might almost never know that anything out
of the ordinary had occurred.  Things must be very different, of course,
from '71, when, beaten to her knees and threatened with revolution,
France had to decide between surrendering Alsace and Lorraine and going
on with the war.

The theatres are closed, but there are moving-picture shows, an
occasional concert, and twice a week, under the auspices of one of the
newspapers, a conference.  I went to one of these, given by a French
professor of English literature in the University of Bordeaux, on the
timely subject: "Kipling and Greater England."

You can imagine the piquant interest of the scene--the polite matinee
audience, the row of erudite Frenchmen sitting behind the speaker, the
table, the shaded lamp, and the professor himself, a slender, dark
gentleman with a fine, grave face, pointed black beard, and penetrating
eyes--suggesting vaguely a prestidigitateur--trying, by sheer
intelligence and delicate, critical skill, to bridge the gaps of race
and instinctive thought and feeling and make his audience understand
Kipling.

Said the reporter of one of the Bordeaux papers next day: "Through the
Kipling evoked by M. Cestre we admired the English and those who fight,
in the great winds of the North Sea, that combat rude and brave.  We
admired the faithful indigenes, gathering from all her dominions, to put
their muscular arms at the service of the empire..."

It would, indeed, have been difficult to pay a more graceful compliment
to the entente cordiale than to try to run the author of "Soldiers
Three" and the "Barrack Room Ballads," and with him the nation behind
him, into the smooth mould of a conference--that mixture, so curiously
French, of clear thinking and graceful expression, of sensitive
definition and personal charm, all blended into a whole so
intellectually neat and modulated that an audience like this may take it
with the same sense of being cheered, yet not inebriated, with which
their allies across the Channel take their afternoon tea.

A Frenchman of a generation ago would scarcely have recognized the
England pictured by the amiable Bordeaux professor, and I am not sure
that in this entirely altruistic big brother of little nations the
English would have recognized themselves.  But, at any rate, polite
flutters of applause punctuated the talk, and at the end M.  Cestre
asked his audience to rise as he paid his final tribute to the people
now fighting the common battle with France.  They all stood up and,
smiling up at the left-hand proscenium-box, saluted the British
ambassador, Sir Francis Bertie, with long and enthusiastic applause.  A
man in the gallery even ventured a "Heep! heep!" and every one drifted
out very content, indeed.

In the foyer I saw one lady carefully spelling out with her lorgnette
one of the words on the list posted there of the subjects for
conferences.

"Ah!" she said, considerably reassured apparently, "Keepling!" But then
she may have come in late.

Thursday.

The war has been hard on the main business of the neighborhood, of
course--Germany was the heaviest buyer of Bordeaux wine, Russia next,
and not as much as usual is going to England.  The vintage this year,
like that of 70, is said to be good, however, and, though the young men
have gone, and the wine-making was not as gay as usual, there were
enough old men and women left to do the work.  I visited one of the
older wine houses--nearly two centuries old--and tramped through cellars
which burrow on two levels under a whole city block.  There were some
two million bottles down there in the dark and dust.

There is something patriarchal and princely about such a house, almost
unknown in our businesses at home--from the portraits of the founders,
from the caskmakers, at lunch-time, broiling their own fish over a huge
fireplace and drawing wine from the common cask as they have done for
generations; the stencils in the shipping-room--"Baltimore," "Bogota,"
"Buenos Aires," "Chicago," "Calcutta," "Christiania," "Caracas"--from
things like these to the personality and point of view of the men who
have the business in charge.

"Now, wine," began the charming gentleman who showed us round, "is a
living thing."  And though you could see that he had showed many people
about in his day--and was not unaware of what might interest them--that
he was, in short, an advertiser of the most accomplished kind, yet one
could also see that he liked his work and believed in it, and grew wine
as an amateur grows fancy tulips and not as a mere salesman.

To be sure, he was inclined to slur over the importance of white wine,
while champagne and its perfidious makers didn't interest him in the
least; but of the red wine of Bordeaux, its lightness, bouquet, and
general beneficence, and the delicate and affectionate care with which
it was handled, one could have heard him talk all day.  Now and then
younger houses discovered things that were going to revolutionize the
wine trade.

"Of course," he said, "we examine such things.  We look in our books,
where records of all our experiments are kept, and there we find that we
tried that new thing in 1856--or 1756, perhaps."

Far underground we came on some of the huge majorums, big as nine
ordinary bottles.  "The King of Spain ran over to Bordeaux one day, and
came to us and said: 'I've got two hours; what can you show me?' We
said: 'We can show you our cellars.' 'Very well,' said he; 'go ahead.'
When he came to the majorums he said: 'What on earth do you do with
those ?' 'They are used when there is a christening or a wedding or some
great event, and when a king visits us we give him two.'"

So they sent the majorums to the young King, and the King sent back a
polite note, just as if he were anybody else, and that is all of that
story.

Most of the newspapers which followed the government to Bordeaux have
returned to the capital, but that intransigeant government-baiter, the
venerable Georges Clemenceau, still continues his bombardment from close
range.  His paper was formerly L'Homme Libre--The Free Man--but on being
suppressed this fall by the censor its octogenarian editor gayly changed
its name to The Chained Man--L'Homme Enchainé--and continued fire.

The mayor of a Paris commune in '71, prime minister from 1906-9, the
editor of various papers, and senator now, Clemenceau is properly
feared; and he was offered, it is said, a place in the present
government, but would accept no post but the highest.  He preferred his
role of political realist and critical privateer, a sort of Mr. Shaw of
French politics, hitting a head wherever he sees one.

The imperfections of the French army sanitary service, the censorship,
and the demoralization of the postal service since the war have been
favorite targets recently.  There has been much complaint of the
difficulty of getting news from men at the front.  M.  Viviani, the
premier, in an address at Reims, ventured to say that it was his duty to
"organize, administer, and intensify the national defense." On this
innocent phrase the eye of M.  Clemenceau fell the other day, and he now
flings off a characteristic three-and-a-half-column front-page salvo so
adroitly combining the premier's remark with the actual, pitiful facts
that the reader almost feels that "intensifying" the suffering of
parents and friends of men fighting for their country is something in
which the present government takes delight.

I wish there was space to quote the editorial.  I may, at any rate,
quote from one or two of the letters written to M. Clemenceau, to
suggest a stay-at-home aspect of the war of which we do not hear much.
This is from the mayor of Pont-en-Royans:

"Officially," he writes, "on September 29 I was asked to notify the
family of the soldier Regnier of his death.  In the midst of their cries
and tears, the family showed me the last letter, received that very
morning, and dated the 27th September, two days before.  Now, the notice
of his death was dated September 7, and I said to the father:

"'I would not give you too much hope; your son probably died the 27th,
suddenly, perhaps, and the secretary charged with writing the letter I
have received forgot a figure--instead of 27 he put 7.  Meanwhile, as a
doubt exists, I will do what I can to clear the matter up.'

"The Administrative Counsel replied to me: 'There has been no error. The
notice of decease is dated September 27.  If, then, the soldier wrote
the 27th, he is not dead.  We shall inform the ministry, and you, on
your side, should write to the hospital where he is being treated.'

"I wrote to the chief doctor at Besancon.  No response.  I sent him a
telegram with the reply prepaid.  No response.  I wrote him a third
letter, this time a trifle sarcastic.  I received finally a despatch:
'Regnier is not known at this hospital.'

"I still had the telegram in my hand when to my house came the sister of
the dead soldier, in mourning, and beaming, and gave me a letter.  'It
is my brother who has written us.' So there was no mistake.  The dead
man wrote on the 2d October.

"'Very well,' said I to the family.  'Are you sufficiently reassured
now?'

"Some days after I received from the Red Cross hospital at Besancon a
letter giving me news of Regnier and explaining that there were several
hospitals in the town, that they had only just received my letter, etc.,
etc.

"I did not think more of the matter until October 23, when I received a
circular from the prefecture of Isere, asking me to advise the Regnier
family that the soldier Regnier, wounded, was being treated at the
hospital of Besancon.

"At last I thought the affair was closed, when, to-day, October 30, I
received the enclosed despatch, sent by I know not whom, informing me
that the soldier Regnier is unknown in the hospital of Besancon!

"Oh, my head, my head!"

You can imagine what this slashing old privateer would do with a letter
like this.  The censor will not permit him to make any comment.  Very
well--he wishes to make none.  "You see, Mr. Viviani, it isn't one of
those execrable parliamentarians who makes these complaints.  It is a
mayor, a humble mayor, officially designated by you to transmit to his
people the striking results of your 'organization,' of your
'administration,' of your 'intensification' in the cruelly delicate
matter of giving news to families. He supplies the picture, and you see
in plain daylight your 'intensification' at work.  What do you think of
it? What can you say about it? Do you believe that because you have
given to your censor the right--pardon me, the power--to make white
spaces in the columns of newspapers that that is going to suppress the
fact? Do you believe," etc., etc.

In the same editorial was a letter from a father whose two sons, on the
firing-line, had received none of the family letters since the beginning
of the war and wrote pathetically asking if their parents and little
sister were ill, or how they had offended.  A wife enclosed a letter
from her husband, telling how he was suffering from the cold because of
insufficient clothing; a doctor wrote protesting because there was not a
single bottle of antitetanic serum in his field-hospital.

We found M. Clemenceau in his lodgings late one afternoon--a leonine old
gentleman bundled up in cap and overcoat before a little grate fire,
while a secretary ran through the big heap of letters piled on the bed.
In the corner of the room was a roll-top desk--the sanctum, evidently,
of The Chained Man.

As M. Clemenceau was insistent that he should not be interviewed, I may
not repeat the exceedingly lively talk on all sorts of people and things
with which he regaled us once--and it didn't take long--he "got going."

One purely personal little bit of information may be passed on, however,
in the hope that it may be as interesting to other practitioners of a
laborious trade as it was to me.

We were talking of the facility with which he reeled off, day after day,
columns of lively, finished prose, and I asked whether he wrote in
longhand, dictated, or used a typewriter.

This question seemed to amuse and interest the old war-horse greatly. He
went to his desk and brought back a sheet of paper, half of which was
covered with a small, firm handwriting.  It was his next day's
broadside, not yet finished.

"There is nothing mysterious about it," he said.  "I get up at half past
three every morning.  I am at that desk most of the day; I go to bed at
nine o'clock.  If I had to write a banal note, it might take time, but
there are certain ideas which I have worked with all my life.  I worked
a good many years without expressing them; they are all in my head, and
when I want them I've only got to take them out.  I am eighty-three
years old, and if I couldn't express myself by this time"--the old
gentleman lifted his eyebrows, smiled whimsically, and, with a quick
movement of shoulders and hands, concluded--"it would be a public
calamity--a malheur public!"

I thought of the padded lives of some of our literary charlatans and
editorial gold bricks at home, of the clever young artists ruined as
painters by becoming popular illustrators, the young writers content to
substitute overpaid banality and bathos for honest work, and I must
confess that the sight of this indomitable old fighter, who had known
great men and held high place in his day, and now at eighty-three got up
before daylight to pound out in longhand his columns of vivid prose,
stirred every drop of what you might call one's intellectual sporting
blood. Of his opinions I know little, of the justice of his attacks
less, and, to be quite frank, I suspect he is something of a
trouble-maker.  But as he stood there, bundled up in his overcoat and
cap, in that chilly lodging-house room, witty, unsubdued, full of fight
and of charm, he seemed to stand for that wonderful French spirit--for
its ardor and penetration, its fusion of sense and sensibility, its
tireless intelligence and unquenchable fire.

Monday.

The consul of Cognac! It sounded like a musical comedy when we met on
the steamer last August; not quite so odd when we bumped into each other
in Bordeaux; and now it turns out to mean, in addition to being a young
University of Virginia man, thoroughly acquainted with the people he has
to deal with, living in a town where the towers of Francis I's castle
still stand, rowing on a charming old river in the summer, and in these
days hearing a charming old French gentleman, vice-consul, tell how he
fought against the Prussians in '70.  Cognac is a real place, it
appears--an old town of twenty thousand people or so, and it is really
where cognac comes from, all other brandies being, of course, as one
will learn here, mere upstart eaux-de-vie.  We went through some of the
cellars to-day, as venerable and vast as the claret cellars in Bordeaux,
although not quite as interesting, perhaps, because not so "alive." For
wine is a living thing, as the man said in Bordeaux, and it must be
ignobly boiled and destroyed before turning into a distilled spirit.  To
some this pale spiritual essence may possess a finer poetry--the cellars
are more fragrant, at any rate.

All the young men had gone to the front--their wages continued as usual
--and the work was carried on by women and old servitors, scarcely one
of the latter under seventy.  They were pointed out as examples of the
beneficent effect of the true cognac--these old boys who had inhaled the
slightly pungent fragrance of the cellars and bottling-rooms all their
lives. You get this perfume all over Cognac.  It comes wandering down
old alleyways, out from under dark arches, people live literally in a
fine mist of it.  The very stones are turned black by the faint fumes.

There must be scores of towns south of Paris which look more or less
like this--the young men gone or drilling in the neighborhood, the
schools turned into hospitals, the little old provincial hotels
sheltering families fled from Paris.  There are several such at our
hotel, nice, comfortable people--you might think you were in some
semi-summer-resort hotel at home--Ridgefield, Conn., for instance,
in winter time.

The making of cognac occupies nearly every one, one way or another, and
it has made the place next to the richest town of its size in France.
They make the cognac, and they make the bottles for it in a glass
factory on a hill overlooking the town--about as airy and pleasant a
place for a factory as one could imagine.  The molten glass is poured
into moulds, the moulds closed--psst! a stream of compressed air turned
in, the bottles blown, and there you are--a score or so of them turned
out every minute.  As we came out of the furnace-room into the chilly
afternoon a regiment of reservists tramped in from a practise march in
the country. Some were young fellows, wearing uniforms for the first
time, apparently; some looked like convalescents drafted back into the
army.  They took one road and we another, and half an hour later swung
down the main street of Cognac behind a chorus of shrilling bugles.  All
over France, south of Paris, they must be marching like this these
frosty afternoons.

Coming up from Bordeaux the other night we missed the regular connection
and had to spend the night at Saintes.  The tall, quizzical, rather grim
old landlady of the neat little Hotel de la Gare--characteristic of that
rugged France which tourists who only see a few streets in Paris know
little about--was plainly puzzled.  There we were, two able-bodied men,
and P------, saying nothing about being consul, merely remarked that he
lived in Cognac.  "In Cognac!" the old woman repeated, looking from one
to the other, and then added, as one putting an unanswerable question:
"But you are not soldiers?"

We went out for a walk in the frosty air before turning in.  There was
scarce a soul in the streets, but at the other end of the town a handful
of young fellows passed on the other side singing.  They were boys of
the 1915 class who had been called out and in a few days would be
getting ready for war.  In Paris you will see young fellows just like
them, decorated with flags and feathers, driving round town in
rattle-trap wagons like picnic parties returning on a summer night at
home. Arm in arm and keeping step, these boys of Saintes were singing
as they marched:

"Il est rouge et noir et blanc, Et fendu au derriere--d."

"He's red, white, and black, And split up the back!"

They saw themselves, doubtless, marching down the streets of Berlin as
now they were marching down the streets of Saintes--and they kept
flinging back through the frosty dark:

"Il est rouge--et noir--et blanc--Et fendu--au derriere--d..."




Chapter VI

"The Great Days"



They were playing "The Categorical Imperative" that evening at the
Little Theatre in Unter den Linden.  It is an old-fashioned comedy laid
in the Vienna of 1815--two love-stories, lightly and quaintly told,
across which, through the chatter of a little Viennese salon, we dimly
see Napoleon return from Elba and hear the thunder of Waterloo.  A young
cub of a Saxon schoolmaster, full of simple-hearted enthusiasm and
philosophy, comes down to the Austrian capital, and, taken up by a
kindly, coquettish young countess, becomes the tutor of her cousin, a
girl as simple as he. The older woman with her knowing charm, the
younger with her freshness, present a dualism more bewildering than any
he has ever read about in his philosophy books, and part of the fun
consists in seeing him fall in love with the younger in terms of pure
reason, and finally, when the motherly young countess has quietly got
him a professorship at Konigsberg, present to his delighted Elise his
"categorical imperative."

You can imagine that thoroughly German mixture of sentiment and
philosophy, the quaint references to a Prussia not yet, in its present
sense, begun to exist; how to that audience--nearly every one of whom
had a son or husband or brother at the front--the century suddenly
seemed to close up and the Napoleonic days became part of their own
"grosse Zeit." You can imagine the young schoolmaster and the frivolous
older man going off to war, and the two women consoling each other, and
with what strange eloquence the words of that girl of 1815, watching
them from the window, come down across the years:

"Why is it that from time to time men must go and kill each other?
There it stands in the paper--two thousand more men--it writes itself so
easily! But that every one of them has a wife or mother or sister or a--
...  And when they cry their eyes out that means that it is a victory,
and when some brave young fellow has fallen, he is only one of the
'forces'--so and so many men--and nobody even knows his name..."

You must imagine them coming back from the war, and pale, benign,
leaning on their canes as returning heroes do in plays, talk across the
footlights to real young soldiers you have just seen limping in with
real wounds--pink-cheeked boys with heads and feet bandaged and Iron
Crosses on black-and-white ribbons tucked into their coats, home from
East Prussia or the Aisne.  Then between the acts you must imagine them
pouring out to the refreshment-room for a look at each other and
something to eat--will they never stop eating?--fathers and mothers and
daughters with their Butterbrod and Schinken and big glasses of beer in
the genial German fashion, beaming on the young heroes limping by or,
with heads bandaged like schoolboys with mumps, grinning in spite of
their scars.

And when they drift out into the street at last, softened and brought
together by the play--the street with its lights and flags, officers in
long, blue-gray overcoats and soldiers everywhere, and a military
automobile shooting by, perhaps, with its gay "Ta-tee! Ta-td!"--the
extras are out with another Russian army smashed and two more ships sunk
in the Channel.  The old newspaper woman at the Friedrichsstrasse corner
is chanting it hoarsely, "Zwei englische Dampfer gesunken!"--and they
read that "the sands have run, the prologue is spoken, the curtain risen
on the tragedy of England's destiny."

Great days, indeed! Days of achievement, of utter sacrifice, and
flinging all into the common cause.  Round the corner from Unter den
Linden, under the dark windows of the Information Bureau, you may see
part of the price.  It is still and deserted there, except for a lone
woman with a shawl over her head, trying to read, by the light of the
street-lamp, the casualty lists.  You must imagine a building like the
Post Office in New York, for instance, or the Auditorium Hotel in
Chicago, with a band of white paper, like newspapers, spread out and
pasted end to end, running along one side, round the corner, and down
the other.  Not inches, but yards, rods, two city blocks almost, of
microscopic type; columns of names, arranged in the systematic German
way--lightly wounded, badly wounded--schwer verwundet--gefallen.  Some
have died of wounds--tot--some dead in the enemy's country--in
Feindesland gefallen.  Rank on rank, blurring off into nothingness,
endless files of type, pale as if the souls of the dead were crowding
here.

One tried to think of the "Categorical Imperative" in a New York
playhouse--of the desperate endeavor to make the young schoolmaster
really look simple and boyish, and yet as if he might have heard of
Kant, and of convincing the two ladies that they lost their sweet
comfortableness by dressing like professional manikins; how the piece
might succeed with luck, or if it could somehow be made fashionable; and
how here, with all the unaffected and affectionate intelligence with
which it was played--and watched--it was but part of the week's work.

And, in spite of the desperation of the time, you might have seen a
dozen such audiences in Berlin, that night--and yet tourists generally
speak of Berlin, compared with some of the German provincial cities, as
a rather graceless, new sort of place, full of bad sculpture and
Prussian arrogance.  You might have seen them at the opera or symphony
concerts, at Shakespeare, Strindberg, or the German classics we used to
read in college, or standing in line at six o'clock, sandwiches in hand,
so that they might sit through a performance of "Peer Gynt," with the
Grieg music, beginning at seven and lasting till after eleven.  A
wonderful night, with poetry and music and splendid scenes and acting,
and a man's very soul developing before you all the time--sandwiches and
beer and more music and poetry, until that tragedy of the egoist is no
longer a play but a part of you, so many years of living, almost, added
to one's life.  Yes, it is all here, along with the forty-two-centimetre
shells--good music and good beer and good love of both; simplicity,
homely kindness, and Gemutlichkeit.

Mere talk about plays would not be much encouraged in Germany nowadays.
In one of the Cologne papers the other day there were two imaginary
letters--one signed "One Who Means Well," asking that there be a little
relief from war poems, war articles, and the like; and the other signed
"One Who Means Better," demanding if it were possible for any German to
waste time in artistic hair-splitting when the Germanic peoples, in
greater danger than in their entire history, stood with their back to
the wall, facing and holding back the world.  A Berlin dramatic critic,
going through the motions of reviewing a new performance of "Hedda
Gabler" the other morning, finally dismissed the matter as "Women's
troubles--if anybody can be interested in that nowadays!" Yet a woman,
asking at the same time that the "finer and sweeter voices of peaceful
society" be not forgotten, concluded her letter with "East and west the
cannon thunder, but in men's souls sound many bells, and it is not
necessary that they should always and forever be drowned out."

I mention the theatre only as an easy illustration of that many-sided
vitality one feels at once on entering Germany, that development of all
a people's capabilities, material and spiritual, which is summed up, I
suppose, in that hapless word Kultur.

You may not like German learning or German art, and consider the one
pedantic and the other heavy and uninspired.  A Frenchman wrote very
feelingly the other day, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, about a return to
the old French culture, an escape from what he described as the German
habit of accumulating mere facts to something that, in addition to
feeding the brain, nourished the taste as well--carried with it, so to
speak, a certain spiritual fragrance.

You may be of this persuasion.  The thing one cannot escape, however, in
Germany, whether one likes its manifestations or not, is the vitality,
the moral and intellectual force, everywhere apparent, whether it be
applied to smashing forts or staging a play.  When a people can hold
back England and France with one hand and the Russian avalanche with the
other, and, cut off from oversea trade and living on rations almost,
yet, to take but one of the first examples, maintain the art of the
theatre at a level which makes that of New York or London in the most
spacious time of peace seem crude and infantile, one is confronted with
a fact which a reporter in his travels must record--a force which, as
the saying goes, "must be reckoned with."

So far as the special business of keeping the war going is concerned,
this vitality, after seven months of fighting, in spite of those lists
in Dorotheenstrasse, seems ample.  Here in Berlin, which is an all day's
express journey from either front, you see thousands of fit young men
marching through the streets, singing and whistling; you are told of
millions ready and waiting to go.  Every one seems confident that
Germany will win--indeed, with a unity and resolution which could
scarcely be more complete if they were defending their last foot of
territory, determined that Germany must win.

When I was in London in the autumn a man who had made a flying trip to
Berlin said that the German capital made him think of a man with his
feet on the table smoking a cigar and pretending to be unconcerned
although he knew all the time in his heart that he was doomed.  I find
little to suggest such a picture.  The thing that at once impresses the
stranger, along with the apparent reserve strength, is the moral
earnestness behind that strength, the passionate conviction that they
are fighting a defensive fight, that they are right.  I shall not
attempt to explain this here, but merely record it as a fact.  Possibly
all people in all great wars believe they are right--and that is why
there are great wars.

Crossing the frontier from Rotterdam, I stopped for a day or two at
Cologne.  The proprietor of the hotel, a typical, big, hearty German of
the commercial class, such as you might expect to find running a brewery
at home or a bank or coffee plantation in South America, came out of his
office when he heard English spoken.  There are no "loose Englishmen" in
Germany nowadays.

"I suppose you are surprised to see the Dom, yes?" he laughed, pointing
toward the cathedral towers in whose shadow we stood.  And then--"What
do you think about the war?" I asked him what he thought.

"Well," he said, and with the air of brushing aside what was taken for
granted before considering more doubtful issues, "of course we win!"

He showed me a photograph of his son, just made an officer.  "In a few
weeks," he said, "maybe I volunteer myself." He was fifty-five years
old, but thoroughly fit.  He doubled up a big right arm and laughingly
gripped it.  "Like iron!" he boomed.  "And there are five million men
like me.  Not men--soldiers!"

I found myself the other evening, after zigzagging all over Berlin with
an address given me at a typewriter agency, in a little apartment on the
outskirts of the town.  The woman who lived there had been a
stenographer in the city until the war cut off her business, and she was
now supporting herself with the six marks (one dollar and fifty cents)
weekly war benefit given by the municipality and by making soldiers'
shirts for the War Department at fifty pfennigs (twelve and one-half
cents) a shirt.  She was glad to get typewriting, and without words on
either side at once got to work.  So we proceeded for a page or two
until something was said about an Iron Cross stuck inside a soldier's
coat.

"That is the Iron Cross of the second class," she interrupted; "they put
that inside.  The first class they wear outside," and, as if she could
keep still no longer, she suddenly flung out, almost without a pause:

"My brother has the Iron Cross.  I have seven brothers in the army.
Three are in the east and three are in the west, and one is in the
hospital.  He was shot three times in the leg--here--and here--and here.
They hope to save his leg, but he will always be lame.  He got the Iron
Cross.  He was at Dixmude.  They marched up singing 'Deutschland ueber
Alles.' They were all shot down.  There were three hundred of them, and
every one fell.  They knew they must all be shot, but they marched on
just the same, singing 'Deutschland ueber Alles.' They knew they were
going against the English, and nothing could stop them."

Her brother would go back if he had to crawl back--if only she could go
and not have to sit here and wait!

"I told you," she said, "when you first came in, that I was German.  And
I asked you if you were an American, because I know that dreadful things
have been said in America about our Kaiser, and I will not have such
things said to me.  Our Kaiser did not want the war--he did everything
he could to prevent the war--no ruler in the world ever did more for his
people than our Kaiser has done, and there is not a man, woman, or child
in Germany who would not fight for him." And this, you must remember,
was from a woman whose support was cut off by the war and who was making
a living by sewing shirts at twelve and a half cents a shirt.

I walked down the busy High Street that night in Cologne, and the bright
shop-windows with their chocolates and fruit--apples from Canada and
Hood River--crowded cafes, people overflowing sidewalks into the narrow
streets somehow reminded me of the cheerful Bordeaux I tramped through
in November.  There are, indeed, many French suggestions in Cologne, and
in the shops they still sometimes call an umbrella a parapluie.

An American who lives in Cologne told me that the decrease in the number
of young men was noticeable, and that eleven sons of his friends had
been killed.  To a stranger the city looked normal, with the usual
crowds.  One did notice the people about the war bulletin-boards.  They
were not boys and street loungers, but grave-looking citizens and their
wives and daughters, people who looked as if they might have sons or
brothers at the front.

The express from Cologne to Berlin passed through Essen, where the Krupp
guns are made, the coal and iron country of Westphalia, and the plains
of the west.  It is a country of large cities whose borders often almost
touch, where some tall factory chimney is almost always on the horizon.
All these chimneys were pouring out smoke; there is a reason, of course,
why iron-works should be busy and manufacturing going on--if not as
usual, at any rate going on.

The muddy plains between the factory towns were green with winter wheat,
the crop which is to carry the country through another year. Meanwhile,
one was told, the railroad rights of way would be planted, and land not
needed for beets--for with no sugar going out Germany can produce more
now than she needs--also be seeded to wheat.

Here in Berlin we are, it seems, being starved out, but in the complex
web of a modern city it is rather hard to tell just what that means: In
ordinary times, for instance, Germany imports thirty-five million
dollars' worth of butter and eggs from Russia, which, of course, is not
coming in now, yet butter seems to appear, and at a central place like
the Victoria Cafe, at the corner of Unter den Linden and
Friedrichsstrasse, two soft-boiled eggs cost fifty pfennigs, or twelve
and a half cents, which is but two and a half cents more than they cost
before the war, and that includes a morning paper and a window from
which to see Berlin going by.  Even were Berlin, in a journalistic
sense, "starving," one presumes the cosmopolitans in the tea-rooms of
the Kaiserhof or Adlon or Esplanade would still have their trays of
fancy cakes to choose from and find no difficulty in getting plenty to
eat at a--for them--not unreasonable price.

For weeks white bread has had to contain a certain amount of rye flour
and rye bread a certain amount of potato--the so-called war bread--and,
except in the better hotels, one was served, unless one ordered
specially, with only two or three little wisps of this "Kriegsbrod." For
Frenchmen this would mean a real privation, but Germans eat so little
bread, comparatively speaking, that one believes the average person
scarcely noticed the difference.  Every one must have his bread-card
now, with coupons entitling him to so many grams a day--about four
pounds a week--which the waiter or baker tears off when the customer
gets his bread.  Without these cards not so much as a crumb can be had
for love or money.  Yet with all this stiff and not unamusing red tape
your morning coffee and bread and butter costs from thirty pfennigs
(seven and one-half cents) in one of the Berlin "automats" to one mark
fifty pfennigs (thirty-seven cents) in the quiet of the best hotels.

Meat is plentiful and cheap, particularly beef, and in any of the big,
popular "beer restaurants," so common in Berlin, an ordinary steak for
one person costs from thirty-five to fifty cents.  Pork, the mainstay of
the poorer people, is comparatively expensive, because hogs have been
made into durable hard sausages for the army, and potatoes, also
expensive, have been bought up in large quantities by the government, to
be sold in the public markets to the poor, a few pounds to each person,
at a moderate price.  There are said to be eight hundred thousand
prisoners now in Germany, and the not entirely frivolous suggestion has
been made that the hordes of hungry Russians captured in the east are
more dangerous now than they were with guns in their hands.  Yet there
are no visible signs of such poverty as one will see in certain parts of
London or Chicago in times of peace, and a woman in charge of one of the
soup-kitchens where people pinched by the war get one substantial meal a
day at ten pfennigs told me there was no reason for any one in Berlin
going hungry.  Meanwhile, the scarcity of flour only adds fuel to the
people's patriotism, and they are told everywhere on red placards that
England never can starve them out if every German does his economical
duty.  Where so much thinking is done for the people, and done so
efficiently, it is difficult not to feel that everything is somehow
"arranged," and one finds it difficult to become acutely anxious while
the hundreds of crowded cafes are running full blast until one o'clock
every morning and the seal in the Tiergarten has the bottom of his tank
covered with fresh fish he is too indolent to eat.

"Society," in its more visible, decorative sense, is as forgotten as it
is in France, as it must be in such a time.  There are no dances or
formal parties; every one who is not going about his civil business has
in one way or another "gone to the war." The gay young men are at the
front, the idle young women knitting or nursing or helping the poor, and
it is an adventure uncommon enough to be remembered to meet on the
street a pretty young lady merely out to take the air, with hands in her
muff and trotting in front of her the timorous dachshund, muzzled like a
ravening tiger and looking at the world askance with his rueful eyes.

The apparent quietness and gravity is partially due to the lack of a
"yellow" or, in the British or American sense of the word, popular
press. There is none of that noisy hate continually dinned into one's
ears in London by papers which, to be sure, represent neither the
better-class English civilians nor the light-hearted fighting man at the
front, yet which are entertainingly written, do contain the news, and
get themselves read.

The German papers print comparatively little of what we call "news."
They hide unpleasant truths and accent pleasant ones, and are working
all the time to create a definite public opinion; but their partisanship
is that of official proclamation rather than that of overworked and
underpaid reporters striving to please their employers with all the
desperation of servants working for a tip.  The yelping after spies, the
heaping of adjectives on every trifling achievement of British arms, the
ill-timed talk of snatching the enemy's trade in a war theoretically
fought for a high principle, all that journalistic vulgarity--which
might be as characteristic of our own papers under similar
circumstances--one is mercifully spared.

This taciturnity is astonishing toward the work of the men at the front.
A few days ago flags were flung out all over Berlin at the news of
Hindenburg's victory; military attaches were saying that there had been
nothing like this since Napoleon; up and down the streets the newswomen
were croaking: "Sechsund-zwanzig tausend Russen gefangen... Hindenburg
zahlt noch immer..." ("Twenty-six thousand Russians captured... and
Hindenburg's still counting...").  And all you could find in the papers
was the General Staff report that "at one place the fighting has been
very severe; up to the present we have made some twenty-six thousand
prisoners," etc., and even this laconic sentence lost in the middle of
the regular communiqué beginning: "Yesterday on the Belgian coast, after
a period of inactivity..."

The picturesqueness and personalities of the war are left to the stage
and the innumerable weeklies and humorous papers, yet even here there is
little or no tendency to group achievements around individual
commanders--it is "our army," not the man, although even German
collectivism cannot keep Hindenburg's dependable old face off the
post-cards nor regiments of young ladies from sending him letters and
Liebesgaben.

In the theatre you see the Feldgrau heroes in dugouts in Flanders or in
Galician trenches; see the audience weep when the German mother sends
off her seven sons or the bearded father meets his youngest boy, schwer
verwundet, on the battle-field; or cheer when the curtain goes down on
noble blond giants in spiked helmets dangling miniature Frenchmen by the
scruff of the neck and forcing craven Highlanders to bite the dust.

You may even see a submarine dive down into green water, see the torpedo
slid into the tube, breech-block closed, and--"Now--for Kaiser and
fatherland!"--by means of an image thrown on a screen from the
periscope, see the English cruiser go up in a tower of water and
founder.

In all this comment there is a very different feeling for each of the
three allies.  The Russians "don't count," so to speak.  They are
dangerous because of their numbers and must be flung back, but the
feeling toward them is not unlike that toward a herd of stampeded range
cattle.

Toward the French there is no bitterness either, rather a sort of pity
and the wish to be thought well of.  One is reminded now and then of the
German captain quartered at Sedan, in Zola's "Debacle," who, while
conscious of the strength behind him, yet wanted his involuntary hosts
to know that he, too, had been to Paris and knew how to be a galant
homme.  Men tell you "they've put up a mighty good fight, say!" or
speaking of the young French sculptor allowed to go on with his work in
the prison camp at Zossen, or the flower-beds in front of the French
barracks there--"but, of course, the French are an artistic people.  You
can allow them liberties like that." Every now and then in the papers
one runs across some anecdote from France in which the Frenchman is
permitted to make the retort at the expense of the English.

Toward John Bull there is no mercy.  He is shown naked, trying to hide
himself with neutral flags; he is sprawled in his mill with a river of
French blood flowing by from the battle-fields of France, while the
cartoonist asks France if she cannot see that she is doing his grinding
for him; he is hobnobbing cheek by jowl with cannibals and black men,
and he is seriously discussed as a traitor to the Germanic peoples and
the white race.

A German woman told me the other day that in her house it was the custom
to fine everybody in the family ten pfennigs if they came down to
breakfast without saying: "Gott strafe die Englander!" ("God punish the
English!") In a recent Ulk there is a cartoon of a young mother holding
up her baby to his proud father with the announcement that he has spoken
his first words.  "And what did he say?" "Gott strafe England!"

America is criticised for supplying the Allies with arms--shades of
South American revolutions and the old "Ypiranga"!--while permitting
itself, without sufficient protest, to be shut off from sending food to
Germany. Yet, in spite of this and the extremely difficult situation
created by the submarine blockade, the individual American is not
embarrassed unless mistaken for an Englishman or unless he finds some
supersensitive patriot in a restaurant or theatre who objects even to
hearing English.

At the frontier the honest customs inspector landed, first thing, on a
copy of "Tartarin sur les Alpes," which I had picked up at the railroad
news-stand in the Hague.

"Franzosisch!" he declared, flapping over the pages.  Next it was a
bundle of letters of introduction, the top one of which happened to be
in English.  "Englische Briefe!" and forthwith he bellowed for help.  A
young officer sauntered out from the near-by office, saluted, and said,
"Good morning!" glanced at "Tartarin" with a smile, and tossed it back
into the bag, at letters and passport, said it must be very interesting
to see both sides, and so, after a question or two, to the train for
Koln.

On the way to Berlin from Koln, that rainy afternoon, I went into the
dining-car toward five o'clock attired in a pepper-and-salt tweed suit
and heavy tan boots, and, speaking German with evident pain, tactfully
asked--everybody else drinking beer--for tea.  The man across the way
whispered to his companion and stared; a middle-aged man farther up the
aisle stood stock-still and stared; a young woman at the other end of
the car turned round and, gazing over the back of her chair, whispered
aghast to her companion: "Englaender!"

Not particularly enlivened by the cup that cheers, I regained my
compartment presently and glared out at the sodden landscape, with now
and then a shot at the other occupant who had got on at Essen or one of
the western stations and sat the day out without a word.  One of those
disagreeable Prussians evidently--until, actually needing to know, I
broke the silence by asking which station we arrived at in Berlin.  He
answered with perfect good humor, and we began to talk.  I mentioned the
tea incident.

"Ignorant people!" he said, dismissing them with a wave of the hand.
They ought to have seen my little flag--he had--and, anyhow, a gentleman
was a gentleman, and they were fighting England, not individual
Englishmen.  Then, reverting to my apologies for my German, he amiably
shifted into French, and so we talked until reaching Berlin, when,
hoping that I would get what I came for, he shook hands and wished me
"Bon voyage!" So you never can tell.

The militarism which any man in the street-car at home can tell you all
about, and which Cramb and Bernhardi make so interesting and
understandable, is here on the spot not so easy to put one's finger on.
Apparently nobody ever heard of Bernhardi, and you might talk with every
man you meet for a fortnight without finding any one who could tell you
--as any young girl who happens to sit next you at dinner can tell you at
home--about the German belief in war as a great blessing, because it is
the only way of asserting your own superior ideas over the other man's
inferior ideas, and thus getting a world ahead.

People want to smash England, of course, because, as they explain, she
brought on the war and is trying to starve them, and they roar with the
applause when the lightning-change man at the Wintergarten impersonates
Hindenburg, because Hindenburg is a grand old scout who is keeping those
millions of slovenly Russians from overrunning our tidy, busy,
well-ordered Germany.  But Treitschke--who was he?

And then, of course, it is not always easy to put one's finger on just
what people mean by militarism.  Some have objected to militarism
because they didn't like the manners of the German waiters at the Savoy,
and some because--"Well, those people somehow rub you the wrong way!" It
is not universal conscription, because many nations have that, nor the
amount spent per capita on soldiers and ships, for we ourselves spend
almost as much as the Germans, and the French even more.

One of our old-school cattlemen, used to shooting all the game, cutting
all the timber, and using all the water he wanted to, would doubtless
say, without seeing a soldier, that it was "their damned police!" No,
when people think they are talking about German militarism, they are
quite as likely to be talking about the way German faces are made or
about German collectivism--the uncanny ability Germans have for taking
orders, for team-work, for turning every individual energy into the
common end.

One may, however, run across a certain feeling toward war, quite local
and unconscious, yet very different from the French love of "gloire" and
the English keenness for war as a sort of superior fox-hunting or
football. You are, let us say, watching one of the musical comedies
which the war has inspired.

The curtain rises on a darkened stage, through whose blackness you
presently discover, twinkling far below, as if you were looking down
from an aeroplane, the lights of Paris, the silver thread of the Seine
and its bridges.  There is a faint whirring, and two faces emerge
vaguely from the dark--the hero and heroine swinging along in a Taube.
And as they fly they sing a wistful little waltz song, a sort of cradle
song:

"Ich glau-u-be... Ich glau-u-be Da oben fliegt... 'ne Taube..."

They are thinking, so the song runs, that there is a Taube overhead; it
has flown here out of its German nest, and let's hope it will not let
anything fall on them.  And, as they sing, the young man makes a motion
with his hand, there is a sort of glowworm flash, and a few seconds
later, away down there among the Paris roofs a puff of red smoke and
fire. The illusion is perfect, and the audience is enchanted--that ride
through the velvet night, so still, so quaint, so roguish in its way,
and the flash far below, that has flung some unsuspecting citizen on the
cobblestones like a bundle of old rags.

And, whirring gently, the Taube sails on through the night:

'Ich glaube.. Da oben fliegt Ich glaube.. 'ne Taube'

Again the glowworm flash, and a moment later, over on the left bank, not
far from the Luxembourg, apparently, another of those eloquent little
puffs of fire.  The crowd is as delighted as children would be with
bursting soap-bubbles.

Or we are, let us say, at "Woran Wir Denken" ("What We're Thinking Of")
with delightful music and such verses as we rarely enough hear in
musical comedies at home.  In the spotlight there is a square young man
dressed in a metallic coat and conical helmet, so as to suggest the
famous forty-two-centimetre shell--the shell which makes a hole like a
cellar and smashed the Belgian forts as if an earthquake had struck
them.  And singing with him an exquisite, nun-like creature in a
dove-colored robe, typifying the Taube.  They are singing to each other:

"I am delicate and slender And made for the salon..." "And I am the
biggest smasher In all the present season..." "High up above the clouds
I fly at heart's desire..." "And I'm a child of Krupp's, Whom nobody
knew about..." "I fly, trackless as a breath..." "I slash on with smoke
and roar..."

They are in love with each other, you see, the Taube and the
forty-two-centimetre shell, the "Brummer," or "Grumbler," as they call
it in Germany--could anything be more piquant? You should hear them--the
chaste, chic, nun-like Taube and the thick-chested old Brummer, singing
that he is her dear old Grumbler and she his soft, swift Dove:

"Suesser, dicker Brummer... Du mein Taubchen, zart und flink..."

There is a sort of poetry about this--a new sort of poetry about a new
sort of war.  And it might possibly be proved that such poetry could
only come from a people so bred to arms that they do not shrink, even in
imagination, from the uses to which arms must be put--a people in love
with war, having a mystical feeling for its instruments, such as their
remote ancestors had for their battle-axes and double-edged swords.

I shall not attempt to do this--heaven preserve Americans from being
judged by their musical comedies !--and doubtless the children even of
our most devoted advocates of universal peace have played with lead
cannon and toy soldiers.  I merely speak of it, this curious mixture of
refinement and brutality, as something which, it struck me, we
Americans--who always do everything exactly right--would not have
thought of doing in just that way.

Many of the ways of this people are not our ways.  You have heard, let
us say, of the German parade step, sometimes laughed at as the "goose
step" in England and at home.  I was lunching the other day with an
American military observer, and he spoke of the parade step and the
effect it had on him.

"Did you ever see it?" he demanded.  "Have you any idea of the moral
effect of that step? You see those men marching by, every muscle in
their bodies taut and tingling as steel wire, every eye on the Emperor,
and when they bring those feet down--bing! bang!--the physical fitness
it stands for, the unity, determination--why, it's the whole German
idea--nothing can stop 'em!"

"Did you ever see one of these soldiers salute?" Yes, I had seen
hundreds of them, and I had been made extremely ill at ease one day in
my hotel when a young officer with whom I had started, in the American
fashion, comfortably to shake hands suddenly whacked his heels together
like a couple of Indian clubs and, stiff as a ramrod, snapped his hand
to his cap.

"Did you ever see them salute? They don't do it like a baggage porter--
there's nothing servile about it.  They square off and bring that hand
to their heads and look that officer square in the eyes as if to say:
'Now, damn you, salute me!' And he gets his salute, too--like a man!"

You may not like this salute or you may not like the parade step, but
you can be very sure of one thing--that it is not the militarism that
pushes civilians off the sidewalk nor permits an officer to strike his
subordinate--though these things have happened in Germany--that is
holding back England and France and driving the Russian millions out of
East Prussia. It is something bigger than that.  Peasants and princes,
these men are dying gladly, backed up by fitness, discipline, and a
passionate unity such as the world has not often seen.  This, and not
the futile nurses' tales with which the American public permitted itself
to be diverted during the early weeks of the war, is what strikes one in
Germany.  It is a fact, like the Germans being in Belgium, which you
have got to face and think about, whether you like it or not.  Berlin,
February, 1915.




Chapter VII

Two German Prison Camps



Visiting a prison camp is somewhat like touching at an island in the
night--one of those tropical islands, for instance, whose curious and
crowded life shows for an instant as your steamer leaves the mail or
takes on a load of deck-hands, and then fades away into a few twinkling
lights and the sound of a bell across the water.  You may get permission
to see a prison camp, but may not stay there, and you are not expected,
generally, to talk to the prisoners.  You can but walk past those rows
of eyes, with all their untold stories, much as you might go into a
theatre in the midst of a performance, tramp through the audience and
out again.

It is a strange experience and leaves one hoping that somebody--some
German shut away in the south of France, one of those quick-eyed
Frenchmen in the human zoo at Zossen--is keeping a diary.  For while
there have always been prison camps, have there ever been--at least,
since Rome--such menageries as these! Behind the barbed-wire fence at
Zossen--Zossen is one of the prisons near Berlin--there are some fifteen
thousand men.  The greater number are Frenchmen, droves of those long
blue turned-back overcoats and red trousers, flowing sluggishly between
the rows of low barracks, Frenchmen of every sort of training and
temperament, swept here like dust by the war into common anonymity.  I
do not remember any picture of the war more curious, and, as it were,
uncanny than the first sight of Zossen as our motor came lurching down
the muddy road from Berlin--that huge, forgotten eddy, that slough of
idle, aimless human beings against the gray March sky, milling slowly
round and round in the mud.

But the French are only part of Zossen.  There are Russians--shaggy
peasants such as we see in cartoons or plays at home, and Mongol
Russians with flat faces and almond eyes, who might pass for Chinamen.
There are wild-eyed "Turcos" from the French African provinces,
chattering untamed Arabs playing leap-frog in front of their German
commandant as impudently as street boys back in their native bazaars.
There are all the tribes and castes of British Indians--"I've got twenty
different kinds of people in my Mohammedan camp," said the lieutenant
who was showing me about--squat Gurkhas from the Himalayas, minus their
famous knives--tall, black-bearded Sikhs, with the faces of princes.
There are even a few lone Englishmen, though most of the British
soldiers in this part of Germany are at Doberitz.  Whether or not Zossen
could be called a "show" camp, it seemed, at any rate, about as well
managed as such a place could be.  The prisoners were housed in new,
clean, one-story barracks; well fed, so far as one could tell from their
appearance and that of the kitchens and storerooms; they could write and
be written to, and they were compelled to take exercise.  The Roman
Catholics had one chapel and the Greek Catholics another, and there was
an effort to permit Indian prisoners to observe their rules of caste.

As we tramped through barracks where chilly Indians, Russians with
broad, high cheek-bones, sensitive-looking Frenchmen with quick, liquid
eyes, jumped to their feet and stiffened at attention as the commandant
passed, a young officer, who had lived in England before the war and was
now acting as interpreter, volunteered his guileless impressions. The
Turcos were a bad lot--fighting, gambling, and stealing from each other
--there was trouble with some of, them every day.  The Russians were
dirty, good-natured, and stupid.

The English--well, frankly, he was surprised at their lack of discipline
and general unruliness--all except some of the Indians, and those, he
must say, were well-trained--fine fellows and good soldiers.  One could
surmise the workings of his mind as one thought of the average
happy-go-lucky Tommy Atkins, and then came across one of those tall,
straight, hawk-eyed Sikhs and saw him snap his heels together and his
arms to his sides and stand there like a bronze statue.

It was a dreadful job getting the Frenchmen to take exercise--"they
can't understand why any one should want to work, merely to keep himself
fit!" Aside from this idiosyncrasy they were, of course, the pleasantest
sort of people to get along with.  We saw Frenchmen sorting mail in the
post-office, painting signs for streets, making blankets out of pasted-
together newspapers--everywhere they were treated as intelligent men to
whom favors could be granted.  And, of course, there was this difference
between the French and English of the early weeks of the war--the French
army is one of universal conscription like the German, and business men
and farmers, writers, singers, and painters were lumped in together.
There was one particularly good-looking young man, a medical officer,
who flung up his head to attention as we came up.

"He helped us a lot--this man!" said the commandant, and laid his hand
on the young man's shoulder.  The Frenchman's eyes dilated a trifle and
a smile flashed behind rather than across his face--one could not know
whether it was gratitude or defiance.

A sculptor who had won a prize at Rome and several other artists had had
a room set aside for them to work in.  Some were making post-cards, some
more ambitious drawings, and in the sculptor's studio was the head of
the young doctor we had just seen and an unfinished plaster group for a
camp monument.  On the wall was a sign in Latin and French--"Unhappy the
spirit which worries about the future," a facetious warning that any one
who loafed there longer than three minutes was likely to be killed, and
the following artistic creed from "La Fontaine:"

"Ne for fans point noire talent. Nous ne ferions rien avec grace. Jamais
un lourdaud quoiqu'il fosse, ne saurait passer pour gallant."

("Don't strain your talent or you'll do nothing gracefully.  The boor
won't pass for a gallant gentleman, no matter what he does.")

The Germans, at different times in their history, have conquered the
French and humbly looked up to and imitated them.  Generally speaking,
they study and try to understand the French, and their own
intellectuality and idealism are things French-men might be expected to
like or, at any rate, be interested in.  Yet it is one of history's or
geography's ironies that the Frenchman goes on his way, neither knowing
nor wanting to know the blond beasts over the Rhine--"Jamais un lourdaud
quoiqu'il fasse" .  . the young sculptor must have smiled when he tacked
that verse on the wall of his prison!

Ruhleben is a race-track on the outskirts of Berlin, and a detention
camp for English civilians.  This is quite another sort of menagerie.
You can imagine the different kinds of Englishmen who would be caught in
Germany by the storm--luxurious invalids taking the waters at
Baden-Baden; Gold Coast negro roust-abouts from rusty British tramps at
Hamburg; agents, manufacturers, professors, librarians, officers from
Channel boats, students of music and philosophy.

All these luckless civilians--four thousand of them--had been herded
together in the stables, paddock, and stands of the Ruhleben track.  The
place was not as suited for a prison as the high land of Zossen, the
stalls with their four bunks were dismal enough, and the lofts overhead,
with little light and ventilation, still worse.

Some had suffered, semi-invalids, for instance, unable to get along with
the prison rations, but the interesting thing about Ruhleben was not its
discomfort, but the remarkable fashion in which the prisoners had
contrived to make the best of a bad matter.

The musicians had their instruments sent in and organized an orchestra.
The professors began to lecture and teach until now there was a sort of
university, with some fifty different classes in the long room under the
grand stand.  And on the evening when we had the privilege of visiting
Ruhleben it was to see a dramatic society present Bernard Shaw's
"Androcles and the Lion."

The play began at six o'clock, for the camp lights are out at nine, and
it was in the dusk of another one of Berlin's rainy days, after
slithering through the Tiergarten and past the endless concrete
apartment-houses of Charlottenburg, that our taxicab swung to the right,
lurched down the lane of mud, and stopped at the gate of Ruhleben.
Inside was a sort of mild morass, overspread with Englishmen--
professional-looking men with months-old beards, pink-cheeked young
fellows as fresh as if they had just stepped off Piccadilly, men in
faded knicker-bockers and puttees, men in sailor blue and brass buttons,
men with flat caps and cockney accent, one with a Thermos bottle, and
crisp "Right you are!"--a good-natured, half-humorous, half-tragic
cross-section of the London streets, drifting about here in the German
mud.

There were still a few minutes before the play began, and we walked
through some of the barracks with the commandant, a tall, bronzed
officer of middle age, with gracious manners, one of those Olympian
Germans who resemble their English cousins of the same class.  Each
barrack had its captain, and over these was a camp-captain--formerly an
English merchant of Berlin--who went with us on our rounds.

The stables were crowded with bunks and men--like a cattleship
forecastle.  One young man, fulfilling doubtless his English ritual of
"dressing for dinner," was punctiliously shaving, although it was now
practically dark; in another corner the devotee of some system of how to
get strong and how to stay so, stripped to the skin, was slowly and with
solemn precision raising and lowering a pair of light dumb-bells.  Some
saluted as private soldiers would; some bowed almost as to a friend,
with a cheery "Guten Abend, Herr Baron!" There seemed, indeed, to be a
very pleasant relation between this gentleman soldier and his gentlemen
prisoners, and the camp-captain, lagging behind, told how one evening
when they had sung "Elijah," the men had stood up and given three
English cheers for the commandant, while his wife, who had come to hear
the performance, stood beside him laughing and wiping her eyes.

As you get closer to war you more frequently run across such things. The
fighting men kill ruthlessly, because that, they think, is the way to
get their business over.  But for the most part they kill without hate.
For that, in its noisier and more acrid forms you must go back to the
men who are not fighting, to the overdriven and underexercised
journalists, sizzling and thundering in their swivel-chairs.

The dimly lit hall under the grand stand was already crowded as we were
led to our seats on a rostrum facing the stage with the commandant and
one of his officers.  There was a red draw curtain, footlights made with
candles and biscuit tins, and so strung on a wire that at a pull,
between the acts, they could be turned on the spectators.  A programme
had been printed on the camp mimeograph, the camp orchestra was tuning
up, and a special overture had been composed by a young gentleman with
the beautiful name of "Quentin Morvaren."

You will doubtless recall Mr. Shaw's comedy, and the characteristic
"realistic" fun he has with his Romans and Christian martyrs, and the
lion who, remembering the mild-mannered Androcles, who had once pulled a
sliver from his foot, danced out of the arena with him instead of eating
him.  And you can imagine the peculiarly piquant eloquence given to the
dialogue between Mr. Shaw's meek but witty Christians and their
might-is-right Roman captors, spoken by British prisoners in the spring
of 1915, in a German prison camp before a German commandant sitting up
like a statue with his hands on his sword!

The Roman captain was a writer, the centurion a manufacturer, Androcles
a teacher of some sort, the call-boy for the fights in the arena a
cabin-boy from a British merchant ship, and the tender-hearted lion some
genius from the "halls." Even after months of this sodden camp it was
possible to find a youth to play Lavinia, with so pretty a face, such a
velvet voice, such a pensive womanliness that the flat-capped, ribald
young cockneys in the front row blushed with embarrassment.  A professor
of archaeology, or something, said that he had never seen more accurate
reproductions of armor, though this was made but of gilded and silvered
cardboard--in short, if Mr. Shaw's fun was ever better brought out by
professional players, they must have been very good indeed.

It was an island within an island that night, there under the Ruhleben
grand stand--English speech and Irish wit in that German sea.  You
should have seen the two young patricians drifting in, with the
regulation drawl of the Piccadilly "nut"--"I say! He-ah's some
Christians--let's chaff them!" The crowd was laughing, the commandant
was laughing, the curtain closed in a whirl of applause, one had
forgotten there was a war. The applause continued, the players straggled
out, faltering back from the parts in which they had forgotten
themselves into normal, self-conscious Englishmen.  There was a moment's
embarrassed pause, then the rattle of a sabre as the tall man in
gray-blue rose to his feet.

"Danke Ihnen, meine Herren! Aeusserst nett!" he said briskly.  ("Thanks,
gentlemen! Very clever indeed!") He turned to us, nodded in stiff
soldierly fashion.  "Sehr nett! Sehr nett!" he said, and led the way out
between a lane of Englishmen suddenly become prisoners again.




Chapter VIII

In The German Trenches At La Bassée



We had come down from Berlin on-one of those excursions which the German
General Staff arranges for the military observers and correspondents of
neutral countries.  You go out, a sort of zoo--our party included four
or five Americans, a Greek, an Italian, a diminutive Spaniard, and a
tall, preoccupied Swede--under the direction of some hapless officer of
the General Staff.  For a week, perhaps, you go hurtling through a
closely articulated programme almost as personally helpless as a package
in a pneumatic tube--night expresses, racing military motors, snap-shots
at this and that, down a bewildering vista of long gray capes, heel
clickings, stiff bows from the waist, and military salutes.  You are
under fire one minute, the next shooting through some captured palace or
barracks or museum of antiques.  At noon the guard is turned out in your
honor; at four you are watching distant shell-fire from the Belgian
dunes; at eleven, crawling under a down quilt in some French hotel,
where the prices of food and wines are fixed by the local German
commandant.  Everything is done for you--more, of course, than one would
wish--the gifted young captain-conductor speaks English one minute,
French or Italian the next, gets you up in the morning, to bed at night,
past countless sentries and thick-headed guards demanding an Ausweis,
contrives never to cease looking as if he had stepped from a band-box,
and presently pops you into your hotel in Berlin with the curious
feeling of never having been away at all.

It isn't, of course, an ideal way of working--not like putting on a hat
and strolling out to war, as one sometimes could do in the early weeks
in Belgium and France.  The front is a big and rather accidental place,
however--you can scarcely touch it anywhere without bringing back
something to help complete the civilian's puzzle picture of the war.
Our moment came in the German trenches before La Bassée, when, with the
English so near that you could have thrown a baseball into their
trenches, both sides began to toss dynamite bombs at each other.

We had come across to Cologne on the regular night express, shifted to a
military train, and so on through Aix, Louvain, Brussels, and by the
next morning's train down to Lille.  Armentieres was only eight miles
away, Ypres fifteen, and a little way to the south Neuve Chapelle, where
the English offensive had first succeeded, then been thrown back only a
few days before.

Spring had come over night, the country was green, sparkling with canals
and little streams, and the few Belgian peasants left were trying to put
it in shape for summer.  A few were ploughing with horses, others
laboriously going over their fields, foot by foot, with a spade; once we
passed half a dozen men dragging a harrow.  Every tree in this country,
where wood is grown like any other crop, was speckled with white spots
where branches had been trimmed away, and below the timber was piled--
heavy logs for lumber, smaller ones cut into firewood--the very twigs
piled as carefully as so many stacks of celery.

So fresh and neat and clean-swept did it seem .in that soft sunshine
that one forgot how empty it was--so empty and repressed that one awoke
startled to see three shaggy farm horses galloping off as the train
rolled by, kicking up their heels as if they never had heard of war.  It
seemed frivolous, almost impertinent, and the landsturm officer, leaning
in the open window beside me in the passageway, thinking perhaps of his
own home across the Rhine, laughed and breathed a deep-chested
"Kolossal!" We passed Enghien, Leuze, Tournai, all with that curious
look of a run-down clock.  On the outskirts of one town, half a dozen
little children stopped spinning tops in the road to demand tribute from
the train.  They were pinched little children, with the worried,
prematurely old faces of factory children, and they begged insistently,
almost irritably, as if payment was long overdue.  Good-natured soldiers
tossed them chocolate and sausage and slices of buttered Kriegsbrod,
which they took without thanks, still repeating in a curious jumble of
German and French, "Pfennig venir! Pfennig--Pfennig--Pfennig venir!"'

Two officers from division headquarters were waiting for us in the
station at Lille--one, a tall, easy-going young fellow in black
motor-gauntlets, who looked as if he might, a few years before, have
rowed on some American college crew; the other, in the officers'
gray-blue frock overcoat with fur collar, a softer type, with quick,
dark eyes and smile, and the pleasant, slightly languid manners of a
young legation secretary.

We had just time to glance at the broken windows in the station roof,
the two or three smashed blocks around it, and be hurried to that most
empty of places--a modern city hotel without any guests--when three gray
military motor-cars, with the imperial double eagle in black on their
sides, whirled up.  The officers took the lead, our happy family
distributed itself in the others, and with cut-outs drumming, a soldier
beside each chauffeur blowing a warning, and an occasional gay "Ta-ta
ta-ta!" on a silver horn, we whirled out into the open country.

We passed a church with a roof smashed by an aeroplane a few days
before--and caught at the same time the first "B-r-r-rurm!" from the
cannonading to the west--a supply-train, an overturned motor-van, and
here and there packed ammunition wagons and guns.  Presently, in the lee
of a little brick farmhouse a short distance from the village of Aubers,
we alighted, and, with warnings that it was better not to keep too close
together, walked a little farther down the road.  Not a man was in
sight, nor a house, nor gun, not even a trench, yet we were, as a matter
of fact, in the middle of a battle-field.  From where we stood it was
not more than a mile to the English trenches and only two miles to Neuve
Chapelle; and even as we stood there, from behind us, from a battery we
had passed without seeing, came a crash and then the long spinning roar
of something milling down aisles of air, and a far-off detonation from
the direction of Neuve Chapelle.

Tssee-ee-rr... Bong! over our heads from the British lines came an
answering wail, and in the field, a quarter of a mile beyond us, there
was a geyser of earth, and slowly floating away a greenish-yellow cloud
of smoke.  From all over the horizon came the wail and crash of shells--
an "artillery duel," as the official reports call it, the sort of thing
that goes on day after day.

Somebody wanted to walk on to the desolate village which raised its
smashed walls a few hundred yards down the road.  The tall young officer
said that this might not be done--it would draw the enemy's fire, and as
if to accent this advice there was a sudden Bang! and the corner of one
of the houses we were looking at collapsed in a cloud of dust.

Under these wailing parabolas, swinging invisibly across from horizon to
horizon, we withdrew behind the farmhouse for lunch--sandwiches,
frankfurters kept hot in a fireless cooker, and red wine--when far
overhead a double-decker English aeroplane suddenly sailed over us.  It
seemed to be about six thousand feet above us, so high that the sound of
its motors was lost, and its speed seemed but a lazy, level drifting
across the blue.  Did it take those three motor-cars and those little
dots for some reconnoitring division commander and his staff? Aeroplanes
not only drop bombs, but signal to their friends; there was an
uncomfortable amount of artillery scattered about the country, and we
watched with peculiar interest the movements of this tiny hawk.

But already other guns, as hidden as those that might be threatening us,
had come, as it were, to the rescue.  A little ball of black smoke
suddenly puffed out behind that sailing bird, and presently a sharp
crack of a bursting shrapnel shell came down to our ears.  Another puff
of smoke, closer, one in front, above, below.  They chased round him
like swallows. In all the drab hideousness of modern warfare there is
nothing so airy, so piquant, so pretty as this.

Our bird and his pursuers disappeared in the north; over the level
country to the south floated a German observation balloon, and presently
we rumbled over a canal and through the shattered village of La Bassée.
La Bassée had been in the war despatches for months, and looked it.  Its
church, used as a range-finder, apparently, was a gray honeycomb from
which each day a few shells took another bite.  Roofs were torn off,
streets strewn with broken glass and brick; yet it is in such houses and
their cellars that soldiers fighting in the trenches in a neighborhood
like this come back for a rest, dismal little islands which mask the
armies one does not see at the front.

The custom of billeting soldiers in houses--possible in territory so
closely built up--adds to the vagueness of modern warfare.  Americans
associate armies with tents.  When we mobilized ten thousand men at San
Antonio, you were in a city of soldiers.  Ten thousand men in this war
disappear like water in sand.  Some of them are in the trenches, some in
villages like this, out of the zone of heavier fire, but within a few
minutes' walk of their work, so to speak.  Others are distributed
farther back, over a zone perhaps ten miles deep, crisscrossed with
telephone-wires, and so arranged with assembling stations, reserves, and
sub-reserves that the whole is a closely knit organism all the way up to
the front.  There is continual movement in this body--the men in the
trenches go back after forty-eight hours to the near-by village, after
days or weeks of this service, back clear out of the zone of fire; fresh
men come up to take their places, and so on.  All you see as you whirl
through is a sentry here, a soldier's head there at a second-story
window, a company shuffling along a country road.

Women watched us from the doors of La Bassée--still going on living
here, somehow, as human beings will on the volcano's very edge--and
children were playing in the street.  Husbands gone, food gone, the
country swept bare--why did they not go, too? But where? Here, at any
rate, there was a roof overhead--until a shell smashed it--and food
soldiers were glad to share.  There must be strange stories to tell of
these little islands on the edge of the battle, where the soldiers who
are going out to be killed, and the women whose husbands, perhaps, are
going to help kill them, huddle together for a time, victims of a common
storm.

We whirled past them down the road a bit, then walked up a gentle slope
to the right.  Over this low ridge, from the English trenches,
rifle-bullets whistled above our heads.  In the shelter of a brick
farmhouse a dozen or so German soldiers were waiting, after trench
service, to go back to La Bassée.  They were smallish, mild-looking men,
dusted with the yellow clay in which they had burrowed--clothes, boots,
faces, and hands---until they looked like millers.

"How are the English?" some one asked.  "Do they know how to shoot?"
A weary sort of hoot chorused out from the dust-covered men.

"Gut genug!" they said.  The house was strewn with rusty cartridge clips
and smashed brick.  We waited while our chaperon brought the battalion
commander--a mild-faced little man, more like a school-teacher than a
soldier--and it was decided that, as the trenches were not under fire at
the moment, we might go into them.  He led the way into the
communication trench--a straight-sided winding ditch, shoulder-deep, and
just wide enough to walk in comfortably.  Yellow clay was piled up
overhead on either side, and there was a wooden sidewalk.  The ditch
twisted constantly as the trenches themselves do, so as not to be swept
by enfilading fire, and after some hundreds of yards of this twisting,
we came to the: first-line trench and the men's dugouts.

It was really a series of little caves, with walls of solid earth and
roofs of timber and sand-bags, proof against almost anything but the
plunging flight of heavy high-explosive shells.  The floors of these
caves were higher than the bottom of the trench, so that an ordinary
rain would not flood them, and covered with straw.  And they were full
of men, asleep, working over this and that--from one came the smell of
frying ham.  The trench twisted snakelike in a general north and south
direction, and was fitted every few feet with metal firing-shields,
loopholed for rifles and machine guns.  In each outer curve facing the
enemy a firing platform, about waist-high, had been cut in the earth,
with similar armored port-holes.

The Germans had been holding this trench for three months, and its whole
outer surface was frosted a sulphurous yellow from the smoke of exploded
shells.  Shrapnel-casings and rusted shell-noses were sticking
everywhere in the clay, and each curve exposing a bit of surface to
the enemy was honeycombed with bullet holes.  In one or two places
sand-bags, caves, and all had been torn out.

Except for an occasional far-off detonation and the more or less
constant and, so to speak, absent-minded cracking of rifles, a mere
keeping awake, apparently, and letting the men in the opposite trenches
know you are awake, the afternoon was peaceful.  Pink-cheeked youngsters
in dusty Feldgrau, stiffened and clapped their hands to their sides as
officers came in sight, heard English with an amazement not difficult to
imagine, and doubtless were as anxious to talk to these strange beings
from a world they'd said good-by to, as we were to talk to them.

At one of the salient angles, where a platform had been cut, we stopped
to look through a periscope: one cannot show head or hand above the
trench, of course, without drawing fire, and looks out of this curious
shut-in world as men do in a submarine--just as the lady in the
old-fashioned house across from us in New York sits at her front window
and sees in a slanting mirror everything that happens between her and
the Avenue.

We had not been told just where we were going (in that shut-in ditch one
had no idea), and there in the mirror, beyond some straggling barbed
wire and perhaps seventy-five yards of ordinary grass, was another clay
bank--the trenches of the enemy! Highlanders, Gurkhas, Heaven knows
what--you could see nothing--but--over there was England!

So this was what these young soldiers had come to--here was the real
thing.  Drums beat, trumpets blare, the Klingelspiel jingles at the
regiment's head, and with flowers in your helmet, and your wife or
sweetheart shouldering your rifle as far as the station--and you should
see these German women marching out with their men!--you go marching out
to war.  You look out of the windows of various railway trains, then
they lead you through a ditch into another ditch, and there, across a
stretch of mud which might be your own back yard, is a clay bank, which
is your enemy.  And one morning at dawn you climb over your ditch and
run forward until you are cut down.  And when you have, so to speak,
been thrown in the stream for the others to cross over, and the trench
is taken, and you are put out of the way under a few inches of French
earth, then, perhaps, inasmuch as experience shows that it isn't worth
while to try to keep a trench unless you have captured more than three
hundred yards of it, the battalion retires and starts all over again.

We had walked on down the trenches, turned a bend where two trees had
been blown up and flung across it, when there was a dull report near by,
followed a moment later by a tremendous explosion out toward the enemy's
trench.  "Unsere Minen!" ("One of our bombs!") laughed a young soldier
beside me, and a crackle of excitement ran along the trench.  These
bombs were cylinders, about the size of two baking-powder tins joined
together, filled with dynamite and exploded by a fuse. They were thrown
from a small mortar with a light charge of powder, just sufficient to
toss them over into the opposite trench.  The Germans knew what was
coming, and they were laughing and watching in the direction of the
English trenches.

"Vorsicht! Vorsicht!"

There was a dull report and at the same moment something shot up from
the English trenches and, very clear against the western sky, came
flopping over and over toward us like a bottle thrown over a barn.

"Vorsicht! Vorsicht!" It sailed over our heads behind the trench, there
was an instant's silence, and then "Whong!" and a pile of dirt and black
smoke was flung in the air.  Again there was a dull report, and we sent
a second back--this time behind their trench--and again--"Vorsicht!
Vorsicht!"--they sent an answer back.  Four times this was repeated.  A
quainter way of making war it would be hard to imagine.  They might have
been boys playing "anty-over" over the old house at home.

Bombs of this sort have little penetrating power.  If thrown in the open
they go off on the surface much like a gigantic firecracker.  They are
easy to dodge by daylight, when you can see them coming, but thrown at
night as part of a general bombardment, including shrapnel and heavy
explosive shells, or exploding directly in the trench, they must be
decidedly unpleasant.

The bomb episode had divided us, two officers and myself waiting on one
side of the bend in the trench toward which the bombs were thrown, the
others going ahead.  It was several minutes before I rejoined them, and
I did not learn until we were outside that they had been taken to
another periscope through which they saw a space covered with English
dead.  There were, perhaps, two hundred men in khaki lying there, they
said, some hanging across the barbed-wire entanglements at the very foot
of the German trench, just as they had been thrown back in the attack
which had succeeded at Neuve Chapelle.  Several Englishmen had got clear
into the German trench before they were killed.  Here was another
example of the curious localness of this dug-in warfare, that one could
pass within a yard or two of such a battle-field and not know even that
it was there.

By another communication trench we returned to the little house.  The
sun was low by this time and the line of figures walking down the-road
toward the automobiles in its full light.  Perhaps the glasses of some
British lookout picked us up--at any rate the whisper of bullets became
uncomfortably frequent and near, and we had just got to the motors when
--Tssee--ee--rr... BONG! a shell crashed into the church of La Bassée,
only three hundred yards in front of us.

Before ours had started, another, flying on a lower trajectory, it
seemed, shrieked over our heads and burst beside the road so close to
the first motor that it threw mud into it.  Apparently we were both
observed and sought after, and as the range of these main highways, up
and down which troops and munitions pass, is perfectly known, there was
a rather uncomfortable few minutes ere we had whirled through La Bassée,
with the women watching from their doors--no racing motors for them to
run away in!--and down the tree-arched road to ordinary life again.

No, not exactly ordinary, though we ourselves went back to a comfortable
hotel, for the big city of Lille, which had shown trolley-cars and a
certain amount of animation earlier in the day, was now, at dusk, like a
city of the dead.  The chambermaid shrugged her shoulders with something
about a "punition" and, when asked why they were punished, said that
some French prisoners had been brought through Lille a week or two
before, and "naturally, the people shouted 'Vive la France!'"

So the military governor, as we observed next morning in a proclamation
posted on the blank wall across the street, informing the inhabitants
that they "apparently did not, as yet, understand the seriousness of the
situation," ordered the city to pay a 'fine of five hundred thousand
francs, and the citizens for two weeks to go within doors at sundown and
not stir abroad before seven next morning.  Another poster warned people
that two English aviators had been obliged to come down within the city,
that they were still at large, and that any one who hid them or helped
them escape would be punished with death, in addition to which the
commune would be punished, too.

It was through black and silent streets, therefore, that our troop was
led from the hotel in which we were lodged to one in which we dined.
Here everything was warm and light and cheerful enough.  Boyish
lieutenants, with close-clipped heads after the German fashion, were
telling each other their adventures, and here and there were older
officers, who looked as if war had worn them a bit, and they had come
here to forget for a moment over a bottle of champagne and the talk of
some old friend. The bread was black and hard, but the other food as
usual in France, with wine plenty and cheap, and even some of the
round-shelled, coppery oysters--captured somehow, in spite of blockades
and bombardments--just up from Ostend.  It was bedtime when we emerged
into the black streets again, to discover, with something like surprise,
a sky full of stars and a pale new moon.

The rest of that civilian tour was very civil, indeed--a sort of
loop-the-loop of Belgium, with scarce a pause for breath.  You can
imagine _that cosmopolitan menagerie trooping next morning up the stone
stairs of the castle of the Counts of Flanders in Ghent; at noon
inspecting old lace in Bruges, and people coming home from church, the
German guard changing, and the German band playing in the central
square; at two o'clock lunching in one of the Ostend summer hotels, now
full of German officers; at four pausing for a tantalizing moment in
Middelkerk, while the German guns we were not allowed to see on the edge
of the town were banging away at the British at Nieuport down the beach.
Next day Brussels--out to Waterloo, in a cloud of dust--the Congo
Museum--the King's palace at Laaken, an old servitor with a beard like
the tall King Leopold's leading these vandals through it, and looking
unutterable things--a word with the civil governor, here--a charming
lunch at a barracks, there--in short, a wild flight behind the man with
the precious "Ausweis."

We saw and sometimes met a good many German officers in a rather
familiar way.  Many of the younger men reminded one of our university
men at home; several of the older men resembled their well-set-up
English cousins.  This seemed particularly true of the navy, which has
acquired a type--lean, keen, firm-lipped young men, with a sense of
humor--entirely different from the German often seen in cafes, with no
back to his head, and a neck overflowing his collar.  Particularly
interesting were those who, called back 'into uniform from responsible
positions in civil life, were attacking, as if building for all time,
the appallingly difficult and delicate task of improvising a government
for a complex modern state, and winning the tolerance, if not the
co-operation, of a conquered people confident that their subjection
was but for the day.

Our progress everywhere was down a continuous aisle of heel-clickings
and salutes.  Sometimes, when we had to pass through three rows of
passport examiners between platform and gate, these formalities seemed
rather excessive.  In the grenadier barracks in Brussels we had been
taken through sleeping-rooms, cool storerooms with their beer barrels
and loops of sausages--"all made by the regiment"--and were just
entering the kitchen when a giant of a man, seeing his superior
officers, snapped stiff as a ramrod and, as it is every German
subordinate's duty to do, bellowed out his "Meldung"--who and what the
men in his room were, and that they were going to have meat and noodle
soup for dinner.

No Frenchman, Englishman, or American could be taught, let alone achieve
of his own free will, the utter self-forgetfulness with which this vast
creature, every muscle tense, breathing like a race-horse, roared, or
rather exploded: "Herr Hauptmann! Mannschafts-Kuche-desten-Landwehr-
Regiments! Belegt-mit-einem-Unter-offizier-und-zehn-Mann! Wir essen
heute Suppe mit Nudeln und Fleisch! Zu Befehl!"

He had stepped down a century and a half from the grenadiers of the
Great Frederic, and even our hosts may have smiled.  It was different
with the soldiers' salute, or the ordinary coming to attention, which we
saw repeated scores of times a day.  Whatever men might be doing,
however awkward or inconvenient it might be, whether any one saw them or
not, they stopped short at the sight of these long, gray-blue coats and
stiffened, chin up, eyes on their superior, hands at their sides.  If
they were talking, they became silent; if laughing, their faces smoothed
out, and into their eyes came an expression which, when you have seen it
repeated hundreds of times, you will not forget.  It is a look of
seriousness, self-forgetfulness, of almost religious devotion, not to
the individual, but to the idea for which he stands.  I saw a soldier
half-dressed, through a barracks window under which we passed, sending
after his officer, who did not even see him, that same look, the look of
a man who has just volunteered to charge the enemy's trench, or who sees
nothing absurd in saying the Germans fear God and nothing else in the
world!

One seemed to see the soul of Germany, at least of this "great time," in
these men's eyes.  The Belgian soul we did not see much of, but there
came glimpses of it now and then.

In Antwerp we stopped in a little café for a cup of chocolate.  It was a
raw, cheerless morning, with occasional snowflakes whipping by on the
damp north wind, the streets were all but deserted, and in the room that
used to be full of smoke and talk there were only empty tables, and you
could see your breath.

A man was scrubbing behind the bar, and a pale girl in black came out
from behind the cashier's counter to make our chocolate.  It was good
chocolate, as Antwerp chocolate is likely to be, and as we were getting
ready to go out again I asked her how things were.  She glanced around
the room and answered that they used to have a good business here, but
the good times were gone--"les beaux jours sont partis." Two others
drifted over and asked questions about the bombardment.  She answered
politely enough, with the air of one to whom it was an old story now--
she had left on the second day, when the building across the way was
smashed, and walking, catching rides, stumbling along with the other
thousands, had got into Holland.  As to why the city fell so quickly--
she pulled her shawl about her shoulders and murmured that there were
things people did not know, if they did they did not talk about them.

And the Germans--how were they? They had no complaints to make, the girl
said; the Germans were well behaved--"tres correct." Possibly, then--it
was our young Italian who put the question--the Belgians would just as
soon...  I did not catch the whole sentence, but all at once something
flashed behind that non-committal cafe proprietress's mask.  "Moi, je
suis fiere d'etre Belge!" said the girl, and as she spoke you could see
the color slowly burning through her pale face and neck--she was proud
to be a Belgian--they hoped, that one could keep, and there would come a
day, we could be sure of that--"un jour de revanche!"

But business is business, and people who run cafes must, as every one
knows, not long indulge in the luxury of personal feelings.  The
officers turned up their fur collars, and we buttoned up our coats, and
she was sitting behind the counter, the usual little woman in black at
the cafe desk, as we filed out.  Our captain paused as we passed, gave a
stiff little bow from the waist, touched his cap gallantly, and said:
"Bon jour, mademoiselle!" And the girl nodded politely, as café
proprietresses should, and murmured, blank as the walls in the Antwerp
streets: "Bon jour, monsieur!"




Chapter IX

The Road To Constantinople



Rumania and Bulgaria

The express left Budapest in the evening, all night and all next day
rolled eastward across the Hungarian plain, and toward dusk climbed up
through the cool Carpathian pines and over the pass into Rumania.

Vienna and the waltzes they still were playing there, Berlin and its
iron exaltation, slow-rumbling London--all the West and the war as we
had thought of it for months was, so to speak, on the other side of the
earth. We were on the edge of the East now, rolling down into the
Balkans, into that tangle of races and revenges out of which the first
spark of the war was flung.

Since coffee that morning the lonely train had offered nothing more
nourishing than the endless Hungarian wheat-fields, with their rows of
peasants, men and women, working comfortably together, and rows of
ploughs creeping with almost incredible leisure behind black
water-buffalo cattle; but as we rolled down into Predeal through the
rain, there, at last, in the dim station lamps, glittered the brass
letters and brown paint of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons
Lits--and something to eat.

The cars of this beneficent institution--survivors of a Europe that once
seemed divided between tourists and hotel-keepers--outdash the most
dashing war correspondents, insinuate themselves wherever civilians are
found at all, and once aboard you carry your oasis with you as you do in
a Pullman through our own alkali and sage-brush.  The steward (his
culture is intensive, though it may not extend beyond the telegraph-
poles, and includes the words for food in every dialect between Ostend
and the Golden Horn) had just brought soup and a bottle of thin
Hungarian claret, when the other three chairs at my table were taken by
a Rumanian family returning from a holiday in Budapest--an urbane
gentleman of middle age, a shy little daughter, and a dark-eyed wife,
glittering with diamonds, who looked a little like Nazimova.

"Monsieur is a stranger?" said the Rumanian presently, speaking in
French as Rumanians are likely to do, and we began to talk war.  I
asked--a question the papers had been asking for weeks--if Rumania would
be drawn into it.

"Within ten days we shall be in," he said.

"And on which side?"

"Oh!" he smiled, "against Austria, of course!"

That was in April.  When I came through Rumania three months later
soldiers were training everywhere in the hot fields; Bucarest was full
of officers, the papers and cafes still buzzing with war talk.  Rumania
was still going in, but since the recapture of Lemberg and the Russian
retreat the time was not so sure--not, it seemed, "until after the
harvest" at any rate.

I asked the Rumanian what he thought about Italy.  "Italy began as a
coquette.  She will end"--he made the gesture of counting money into his
hand--"she will end as a cocotte." He waved a forefinger in front of his
face.

"Elle n'est plus vierge!" he said.

The wife demurred.  Italy was poor and little, she must needs coquette.
After all, il faut vivre--one must live.

Something was said of America and the feeling there, and the wife
announced that she would like of all things to see America, but--she did
not wish to go there with her husband.  I suggested that she come with
me--an endeavor to rise to the Rumanian mood which was received with
tolerant urbanity by her husband, and by the lady who looked like
Nazimova with very cheering expressions of assent.

"When you return from Constantinople," she flashed back as they left the
table, "don't forget!"

These were the first Rumanians I had met.  They were amiable, they spoke
French--it almost seemed as if they had heard the tales that are usually
told of their little capital, and were trying to play the appropriate
introduction to Bucarest.

Here it is, this little nation, only a trifle larger than the State of
Pennsylvania, a half-Latin island in an ocean of Magyars and Slavs.  On
the north is Russia, on the south the grave and stubborn Bulgars (Slav
at any rate in speech), on the west Hungary, and here, between the
Carpathians and the Black Sea, this Frenchified remnant of the empire of
ancient Rome.  Their speech when it is not French is full of Latin
echoes, and a Rumanian, however mixed his blood, is as fond of thinking
himself a lineal and literal descendant of the Roman colonists as a New
Englander is of ancestors in the Mayflower.  At the Alhambra in Bucarest
next evening, after the cosmopolite artistes had done then-perfunctory
turns and returned to their street clothes and the audience, to begin
the more serious business of the evening, the movie man in the gallery
threw on the screen--no, not some military hero nor the beautiful Queen
whose photograph you will remember, but the head of the Roman Emperor
Trajan! And the listless crowd, drowsing cynically in its tobacco smoke,
broke into obedient applause, just as they would at home at the sight of
the flag or a picture of the President.

Bucarest, like all the capitals of Spanish America, is another "little
Paris," but the Rumanians, possibly because unhampered by sombre Spanish
tradition or perhaps any traditions at all, succeed more completely in
borrowing the vices and escaping the virtues of the great capital they
are supposed to imitate.  It would be more to the point to call Bucarest
a little Buenos Aires.  There is much the same showiness; a similar
curious mixture of crudeness and luxury.  But Buenos Aires is one of the
world's great cities, and always just beyond the asphalt you can somehow
feel the pampa and its endless cattle and wheat.  The Rumanian capital
is a town of some three hundred thousand people in a country you could
lose in the Argentine, and there is nothing, comparatively speaking, to
offset its light-mindedness, to suggest realities behind all this life
of patisserie.

You should see the Calea Vittorei on one of these warm summer evenings
between five and eight.  It is a narrow strip of asphalt winding through
the centre of the town, with a tree-shaded drive at one end, and the
hotels, sidewalk cafes, and fashionable shops at the other, and up and
down this narrow street, in motors, in open victorias driven by Russian
coachmen in dark-blue velvet gowns reaching to their heels, all Bucarest
crowds to gossip, flirt, and see.

Down the centre in the open carriages flows a stream of women--and many
look like Nazimova--social distinctions so ironed out with enamel,
paint, and powder that almost all might be café chantant singers or
dressmakers' marionettes.  Some cities have eagles on their crests, and
some volcanoes.  If you were going to design a postage-stamp for
Bucarest, it struck me that the natural thing would be a woman in the
corner of an open victoria--after seeing scores of them all alike, you
feel as though you could do it in a minute: one slashing line for the
hat, two coal-black holes, and a dash of carmine in a patch of marble
white, and a pair of silk-covered ankles crossed and pointed in a way
that seems Parisian enough after one has become used to the curious
boxes in which women enclose their feet in Berlin.  Coming up from
Bulgaria, which is not unlike coming from Idaho or Montana; or from
Turkey, where women as something to be seen of men in public do not
exist; or even across from the simple plains of Hungary, these enamelled
orchids flowing forever down the asphalt seem at the moment to sum up
the place--they are Bucarest.

Officers in light blue, in mauve and maroon--mincing butterflies, who
look as if an hour's march in the sun would send them to the hospital,
ogle them from the sidewalk.  Along with them are many young bloods out
of uniform, barbered and powdered like chorus men made up for their
work. You will see few young men in Europe with whom the notion of
general conscription and the horrors of war can be associated with less
regret.

Streams of more frugal nymphs, without victorias but with the same
rakish air, push along with the sidewalk crowd, hats pinned like a wafer
over one ear, coiffures drawn trimly up from powdered necks.  Waiters
scurry about; the café tables, crowded in these days with politicians,
amateur diplomats, spies, ammunition agents, Heaven knows what, push out
on the sidewalk.  The people on the sidewalk are crowded into the
street, motors honk, hoofs clatter, the air is filled with automobile
smoke, the smoke carries the smell of cigarettes and coffee and women's
perfumes--it is "Bucarest joyeux!"

Some French music-hall singer--when I came through it was Miss Nita-Jo--
will tell you all about it at one of the open-air theatres in the
evening. All about the people you bump into in this sunset promenade--

"Des gens d'la haute, des petits crevés, Des snobs, des sportsmans, des
coquets, Les noctambules, les vieux noceurs, Les grandes cocottes--oui!
tous en choeur..."--all about Capsa's, which, though but a little pastry
shop and tea-room, is as seriously regarded in Bucarest as Delmonico's
or the Blackstone, which is, of course, with dreadful seriousness (to
see one of the gilded youths of Bucarest enter Capsa's at five-thirty,
solemnly devour a large chocolate eclair, and as solemnly stalk out
again, is an experience itself), and all about the politicians and the
men who are running things.  Everything is in miniature, you see, in a
little nation like this, which, although only as large as one of our
smaller States, has a King and court, diplomats, and army, and foreign
policy. All in the family, so to speak, and the chanteuse will sing
amusing verses about the prime minister as if she really knew what he
was going to do, and, curiously enough--for things are sometimes very
much in the family, indeed, in these little capitals--maybe she does
know!

Of course the Calea Vittorei is not Rumania, though a good deal more so
than Fifth Avenue is America; nor are the officers posing there those
who would have much to do with directing the army if Rumania went to
war. Ten minutes away from the city limits and you might be riding
through the richest farming country in Wisconsin or Illinois: hour after
hour of corn and wheat, orchards, hops, and vineyards, cultivated by
peasants who, though most of them have no land and little education, at
least look care-free, and dress themselves in exceedingly pleasing
homespun linen, hand-embroidered clothes.  Then higher land, and hills
as thick with the towers of oil-wells as western Pennsylvania, and, just
before you cross into Hungary, the cool pines of the Carpathians and the
villas of Sinaia, the summer home of the court, the diplomats, and the
people one does not see very often, perhaps, in the afternoon parade.

It is a pleasant and a rich little country.  You can easily understand
why its ruling class should love it, and, set apart from their Slav and
Magyar neighbors by speech and temperament, want to gather all Rumanians
under one flag and push that, too, into its place in the sun.

And this, of course, is Rumania's time--the time of all these little
Balkan nations, which have been bullied and flattered in turn by the
powers that need them now, and cut up and traded about like so much
small change.

Rumania wants the province of Bessarabia on her eastern border, a strip
of which Russia once took away; she wants the Austrian province of
Bukowina and the Hungarian banat of Temesvar on the west, but most of
all the pine forests and the people of Transylvania, just over the
divide--you cross it coming from Budapest--largely Rumanian in speech
and sympathy, though a province of Hungary.  As the Rumanians figure it
out, they once stood astride the Carpathians--"a cheval" ("on
horseback"), as they say--and so, they feel, they must and should stand
now.

We are a nation of fourteen million souls--six less than Hungary, but a
homogeneous state, solidly based.  Our soil gives us minerals and fuel
and almost suffices for our needs.  Our people are one of the most
prolific in the world and certainly not the least intelligent.  We have
behind us a continuity of national existence lacking in other nations in
this quarter of the globe.  In our modern epoch we have assimilated
French culture with indisputable success, and have given in every field
proof of a great faculty of adaptability and progress.  We can become
the most important second-class power in Europe the day after the war
stops; in fifty years, when our population will have passed twenty-five
millions, a great power.  We shall be a nation content with our lot, and
for that reason a factor for peace.  A greater Rumania responds not only
to our ideas but to the interests of Europe.  The Magyars have had every
chance, and they have lost. It is now our turn.

This is a characteristic editorial paragraph from La Roumanie, which is
the voice of Mr. Take Ionesco, who, more than anybody else, is the voice
of those who want war.  Once in the government, but at the moment out of
it, Mr. Ionesco keeps up a continuous bombardment of editorials and
speeches, and with his-vigor, verve, and facility reminds one a bit,
though a younger man, of Clemenceau and his L'Homme Enchainé. Rich,
well-informed, daring, and clever, with a really fascinating gift of
expression, he will talk to you in French, English (his wife is
English), Rumanian--I don't know how many other languages--about
anything you wish, always with the air of one who knows.  We have no
such adventurous statesmen, or statesmen-adventurers, at home--men who
have all the wires of European diplomacy at their finger ends; look at
people, including their own, in the aggregate, without any worry over
the "folks at home"; know what they want much better than they do, and
to get it for them are quite ready to send a few hundred thousand to
their death.

Mr. Ionesco writes a long, double-leaded editorial every day, and very
often he prints with it the speech, or speeches, he made the night
before. In a time like this, he says, those of his way of thinking can't
say too much; they must be "like the French Academicians, who never stop
writing." Now and then, in the intervals of fanning the sparks of war,
he takes his readers behind the scenes of European politics, of which he
knows about as much, perhaps, as any one.

I arrived in Paris the 31st of December, 1912, in the evening.  M.
Poincaré received me the 1st of January, at half past eight o'clock in
the morning--an absurd hour in Paris.  But I had to go to London in the
afternoon, and M. Poincaré to the Elysee at ten o'clock for the
felicitations of the New Year.  I asked M. Poincaré for the support of
France in our difficulties with Bulgaria.  M. Poincaré said...  I
said... and later events proved that I was right.

He is always sure of himself, like this--no doubts, no half-truths,
everything clear and irresistible.  I went to see Mr. Ionesco one
evening in Bucarest--a porte-cochere opening into a big stone city
house, an anteroom with a political secretary and several lieutenants,
and presently a quiet, richly furnished library, and Mr. Ionesco
himself, a polished gentleman of continental type, full of animation and
sophisticated charm, bowing from behind a heavy library table.

The room, the man, the facile, syllogistic sentences in which it was
established that Austria-Hungary was already moribund, that Germany
could never win, that Rumania must go in with the Entente--it was like
the first scene from some play of European society and politics: one of
those smooth, hard, swiftly moving things the Parisian Bernstein might
have written.

Across it I couldn't help seeing the Berlin I had just left, and people
standing in line with their sandwiches at six o'clock to get into the
opera or theatre--the live human beings behind that abstraction
"Germany." And I said that it seemed unfortunate that two peoples with
so many apparent grounds of contact as the Germans and French must so
misunderstand each other.  Their temperament and culture were different,
to be sure, but they were both idealistic, sentimental people, to whom
things of the mind and spirit were important.  It seemed particularly
unfortunate that everything should be done to force them apart instead
of bringing them together.

Mr. Ionesco listened with some impatience.  Unfortunate, no doubt, but
what do you wish? War itself is unfortunate--we must take the world as
it is.  No, they were with France and down with the Germans.  France
conquered meant the end of Rumania, subservience to Austria; France
victorious, freedom, fresh air.

He gave me a copy of a speech in which he gladly admitted that he was a
"responsible factor." People talked of going slow and sparing blood.
Well, they might get something by sitting still, even become a great
country, but they could never become a great nation.  It was not
territory and population they wanted, but the sword of Rumania to join
in remaking the map of Europe.  When the delegates gathered around the
green table, they did not want the one from Rumania, as he was at the
Congress of Berlin, only able to make visits to chancelleries.  He must
go in the same door with them, and say: "In proportion to my population,
I have shed as much blood as you."

He had always regretted not having children, never so much as to-day;
but if he had a dozen sons, and knew that all of them would fall in the
war, he would not be cast down.  Even if the territory they wished could
be occupied by a simple act of gendarmerie--he would say no--they must
enter Budapest itself (it is only twenty-four hours' railway journey
from Bucarest!)--not till then would Austria admit Rumania's
superiority. People accused him of working for himself.  Who was Take
Ionesco in comparison with the fate of a race? As for ambition, well, he
had one, and only one--he wanted to see the Rumanian tricolor floating
from Buda palace, and before he died to know the moment in which he
could pass before his eyes the eighteen hundred years of Rumanian
history from the arrival of Trajan at Severin to the entry of Ferdinand
at Budapest, and cry: "Now, Lord, let thy servant go in peace, for mine
eyes have seen the saving of my race!"

The Rumanian tricolor was no nearer Buda palace when I returned several
months later, but Mr. Ionesco was no less hot for war.  Even if Germany
won, he said, they still should go in, because they would at least keep
their own and Germany's respect.  "Go to war?"--the phrase was inexact.
"We have been at war for eleven months, only others are firing at us,
but we are not firing at them.  We are in a war that will decide our
existence, but the soldiers dying to defend our rights, instead of being
our soldiers, are soldiers of the Allies.  The Allies will win, but if
any one thinks that, having won without us, they will have won for us,
he must be mad.  Their victory without us may preserve our material
life, but it will never save our moral life nor that of future
generations."

Mr. Ionesco and those who agree with him belong, it will be observed,
with the romanticists--they are for the bright face of danger, great
stakes, and, win or lose, putting all to the touch.  Those who did not
agree with them were men without souls, hagglers and traders, as if a
nation could figure out the number of cannon-shots and prisoners, and go
where the going's good! It made interesting reading as you sat at one of
the café tables, with the crowd flowing by and the five-o'clock papers
coming fresh from the press.  The other side--and it included the King
and most of the government, inasmuch as Rumania had not yet gone to war
--had the more difficult task of making caution interesting.  In their
editorials and speeches Ionesco and his followers were jingoes trying to
drive the nation to a Rumanian Sedan.

"A people is great, not only for its numbers of soldiers, but for its
civilization, its artists, and intellectuals.  A nation militarized is
marked for eternal death, for a people lives by its thought and not by
force." There was an amusing retort, the afternoon I returned to
Bucarest, to one of the fire-eating retired generals, picturing the
quaint old fellow as thinking that people were born only to die bravely,
and knowing nothing of Rumania's rule as the "defender of Latinism" in
the Balkans, "tooting the funereal flute and showing us the mountains--
there is to be your tomb!"

There was a time, when the Russians were taking Przemysl, when Rumania's
tide seemed to be at the flood--if ever it was going to be. That chance
was lost, and Rumania found herself standing squarely in the track of
the stream of ammunition which used to flow down from Duesseldorf to the
Turks--when I was at the front with the Turks, practically all the
ammunition boxes I saw, and there were hundreds of them, were marked
"Gut uber Rumanien"--and, later, in Russia's path to Bulgaria and
Servia.

One of these days a hot thrill might run down the Calea Vittorei, and
all at once Capsa's and the other little booths in this miniature Vanity
Fair would seem strange and far-away.  But until that day one could
fancy the romanticists and realists lambasting each other in the papers,
the soldiers grinding away in their dusty camps, the pretty ladies
rolling gayly down the sprinkled asphalt, and the chanteuse singing over
the footlights:

"Que pense le Premier Ministre? On n'sait pas--"

("What thinks the Prime Minister? Nobody knows--")

"Is he for the Germans? Has he made a convention With perfidious Albion?
Nobody knows..."



The Gate to Constantinople



Only the Danube separates Rumania from Bulgaria, yet the people--of the
two capitals, at least--are as different as the French and Scotch.  The
train leaves Bucarest after breakfast; you are ferried over the river at
Rustchuk at noon, and, after trailing over the shoulders of long,
rolling plateaus, are up in the mountains in Sofia that evening.  The
change is almost as sharp as that between Ostend and Folkestone.

You leave French, or the half-Latin Rumanian language, for a Slavic
speech, and the Cyrillic, or Russian, alphabet; names ending in "sco" or
"ano" (Ionesco, Filipesco, Bratiano) for names ending in "off"
(Radoslavoff, Malinoff, Ghenadieff, Antinoff, and the like), and all the
show and vivacity, the cafes and cocottes of Bucarest, for a clean
little mountain capital as determined and serious as some new town out
West.

It seemed, though of course such impressions are mostly chance, that the
difference began at the border.  In Rumania, at the Hungarian border,
they took away my passport, which in times like these is like taking
away one's clothes, and, though I assured the customs inspector that I
was on my way to Constantinople, and in a hurry, it required four days'
wait in Bucarest, and innumerable visits to the police before the paper
was returned.  Every one, apparently, on the train had the same
experience--the Austrian drummers looked wise and muttered "baksheesh,"
and in Bucarest an evil-eyed hotel porter kept pulling me into corners,
saying that this taking of passports was a regular "commerce," and that
for five francs he would have it back again.

There is a popular legend that the clerks in Bucarest hotels are
supposed to offer incoming guests all the choices of a Mohammedan
paradise, and the occasional misogynist, who prefers a room to himself,
is received with sympathy, and the wish politely expressed that monsieur
will soon be himself again.  My own experience was less ornate, but
prices were absurdly high, the waiter's check frequently needed
revision, and one had a vague but more or less continual sense of
swimming among sharks.

These symptoms were absent in Bulgaria.  The border officials seemed
sensible men who would "listen to reason"; the porters, coachmen,
waiters, and the like, crude rather than cleverly depraved, and the air
of Sofia clear and clean, in more senses than one.

Modern Bulgaria is only a couple of generations old, and though all this
part of the world has been invaded and reinvaded and fought over since
the beginning of things, the little kingdom (it seems more like a
republic) has the air of a new country.

The aristocracy had been wiped out before Bulgaria got her autonomy in
1878, and, unlike Rumania, where the greater portion of the land is in
the hand of large proprietors, Bulgaria is a country of small farmers,
of shepherds, peasants, each with his little piece of land.  The men who
now direct its fortunes are the sons and grandsons of very simple
people.  Possibly it is because we Americans are also a new people, with
still some of the prejudices of pioneers, that we are likely to feel
something in common with the people of this "peasant state." They seemed
to me, at any rate, the most "American" of the Balkan peoples.

There is, of course, one concrete reason for this: Robert College and
the American School for Girls (Constantinople College) at
Constantinople.  It was men educated at Robert College who became the
leaders of modern Bulgaria.  The only Bulgarian I had known before--I
met him on the steamer--had gone from a little village near Sofia to
Harvard.  His married sister had learned English at the American School
for Girls; her husband, a Macedonian Bulgar, had worked his way through
Yale.  The amiable old general, who was always in the library at the
Sofia Club at tea time, ready to tell how the Dardanelles and
Constantinople could be taken, had learned English at Robert College and
had a son there; the photographer who developed my films also had a son
there--and so on.

Snow-capped mountains rise just behind Sofia, and the brown hills
thereabout, like the rolling plateaus along the shoulders of which the
train crawls on the way down from Rumania, are speckled with sheep.
Sometimes even in Sofia you will meet a shepherd patiently urging his
little flock up a modern concrete sidewalk and stopping now and then for
some passer-by to pick up a lamb, "heft" it, poke it, and feel its wool
before deciding whether or not he should take it home for dinner.

These shepherds wear roomy, short box-coats of sheepskin, with the
leather outside and the wool turned in, like a motor-coat; homespun
breeches embroidered, very likely in blue, and laced from the knee down,
and a sort of moccasin or laced soft shoe.  They are as common in the
streets of Sofia as are the over-barbered young snipes in the streets of
Bucarest. On market days the main down-town street is filled with them--
long-limbed, slow-moving old fellows, with eyes and foreheads wrinkled
from years of squinting in the bright plateau sun, faces bronzed and
weathered like an old farmhouse, shuffling down the pavement and into
and out of shops with the slow, soft-footed gait of so many elk.  And if
you were designing a stamp for Bulgaria you might well put one of these
hard-headed old countrymen on it, just as in the other capital you would
put the girl in the victoria pattering down the asphalt.

Two newspaper correspondents of the more or less continuous string that
were filing from one Bulgarian leader to another to find out what
Bulgaria was going to do, amiably permitted me to trail about with them,
and thus to see and talk a little with some of those who are steering
Bulgaria's exceedingly delicate course--men whose grandfathers very
likely wore those sheepskin coats with the wool turned in.

None had the peculiar verve and dash of Take Ionesco, but one or two
were decidedly "smooth" in a grave, slightly heavy way, and all
suggested stubbornness, intense patriotism, and a keen eye for the main
chance.

There is little "society" or formal entertaining in Sofia, little
display and little, apparently, of that state of mind which, in
Bucarest, is suggested by the handsome, two-horse public carriages
at a time when there are not enough horses and carriages to go round.
One-horse carriages are impracticable, because the Rumanian, or at least
the Bucareiio, thinks one horse beneath his dignity, while a trolley-
car--although there are trolley-cars--is, of course, not to be thought
of.

People on the streets and in the parks were "nice"-looking rather than
smart, and the young officers from the military school, who were
everywhere, as fine and soldier-like young men as I had seen anywhere in
Europe.  They and the common soldiers, with their fine shoulders and
chests and wiry torsos, looked as though they were made for their work,
and took to it like ducks to water.

The palace is on the central square--an unpretentious building in the
trees, with a driveway leading up from two gates, at which stand two
motionless sentries, each with one stiff feather in his cap.  It is such
an entrance as you might expect to find at any comfortable country place
at home, and one day, when some student volunteers went by on a practise
march, and cheered as they passed, I saw the King, with the Queen and
one or two others, stroll down the drive and bow just as if he, too,
were some comfortable country gentleman.

There is a music-hall in Sofia, but on the two nights I went to it there
were scarce twenty in the audience.  There are various beer gardens with
music, and, of course, moving pictures, but it was interesting, in
contrast with Bucarest to find the crowd going to the National Theatre
to see Tolstoi's "Living Corpse." The stock company, moderately
subsidized by the government, gives drama and opera on alternate nights.
I barely got a seat for the Tolstoi play, and the doorkeeper said that
the house was always sold out.

The Bulgarians, in short, are simple, and what the Rumanians would call
"serieux"--you must abandon all notion of finding here anything like the
little comic-opera kingdoms invented by some of our novelists.  It was
in Bulgaria, as I recall it, that Mr. Shaw put "Arms and the Man," and
the fun lay, as you will remember, in the contrast between the outworn,
feudal notions of the natives and the intense matter-of-factness of the
modern Swiss professional soldier.

You will recall the doubts of the heroine's male relatives as to whether
Bluntschli was good enough for her, their ingenuous attempts to impress
him, by describing the style in which she was accustomed to live, and
his unimpressed response that his father had so and so many
table-cloths, so many horses, so many hundreds of plates, etc.  Who was
he, then--king of his country? Oh, no, indeed--he ran a hotel.  Mr.
Shaw's fun is all right of itself, but has about as much application to
Bulgaria or Sofia as to Wyoming or Denver.

By one of those frequently fascinating chances of geography, this little
nation, which has a territory about as big as Ohio, is set squarely in
front of the main gate to Constantinople, and saw, in consequence, the
powers which ruthlessly bullied it yesterday now almost at its feet.

Rumania stands in Russia's path, on the one hand, and, with its railway,
in Germany's on the other; but Bulgaria does both, and, in addition,
blocks the whole western frontier of Turkey and the only feasible chance
to land an army from the Aegean.

After their disastrous attempt to run the Dardanelles in March, the
English and French had been somewhat in the position of an army trying
to capture Jacksonville, Florida, for instance, and instead of marching
over from Georgia, compelled to go away down to Key West, and fight
their way up through the Everglades.  They had in front of them hills
behind hills and an intrenched enemy whom they could not see generally
and who could always see them.  Behind them was only a strip of beach,
the sea, and the more or less uncertain support of their ships.  So
narrow was their foothold that even if they had had more men, they could
scarce find place to use them.

Could they but land in Bulgaria, they might cut off the Turks from
Europe at once, accumulate at their leisure a sufficient force, and push
down methodically from a proper base to the Chatalja line, fighting like
men instead of amphibious ducks.  The thing looks easy, and the twisted
hills and hidden batteries of Gal-lipoli Peninsula were so
heart-breaking a maze to fling good men into that you can well imagine
the Allies used what pressure they could.  But if it was important to
them that the gate be opened--let alone that Bulgaria come in herself--
it was just as important to the Germans and Austrians that it be closed.
And who was to say that if Bulgaria threw in her lot with the Allies and
attacked the Turks the Central Powers might not even start a grand
offensive down through Serbia--and people talked of this in Sofia months
before it actually began--connect up their lines all the way to
Constantinople--and good-by to their little peasant state and her
hard-won independence!

A little state must think of these things.  She hasn't the men nor the
staggering supply of ammunition lightly to go into a world war like
this. And then the Bulgarians had had their fingers burned once--they
were not looking for adventures.

You will remember the Balkan War of 1912-3, and how the Bulgars fought
their way down almost to Constantinople and were everybody's heroes for
a time.  Then came the quarrel between the Balkan allies, and presently
Bulgaria was fighting for her life--Serbia on the west, Greece on the
south, Turkey on the east--and then, when she was quite helpless, the
Rumanians coming down from the north to perform the coup de grace.

It was not a particularly sporting performance on the part of the
Rumanians, nor could the turning over to them of the Bulgarian part of
the province of Dobrudja greatly increase Bulgaria's trust in the powers
which permitted it in the treaty of Bucarest.

"It's our own fault," an Englishman said to me, speaking somewhat
sardonically of the failure of the Rumanians to go in with Italy in
spite of having accepted a timely loan from England.  "We put our money
on the wrong horse! No, they'll keep on talking--they're the chaps who
want to get something for nothing.  Think of the treaty of Bucarest and
the way we patted Rumania on the back--she was the gendarme of Europe
then. 'Gendarme of Europe!' ...  I tell you that any army that would do
what the Rumanians did to Bulgaria has something wrong with its guts!"

An army goes where it is ordered, of course, but it is true,
nevertheless, that the Bulgarians are likely to think of their neighbors
on the north as people who want to get something for nothing, and that
they who had borne the brunt of the war with Turkey lost everything they
had gained. The Turks, "driven from Europe," calmly moved back to
Adrianople; Rumania took the whole of Dobrudja; Bulgarian Macedonia went
to Serbia and Greece.  However much Bulgaria may have been to blame for
the break-up of the Balkan League--and she was stubborn and headstrong
to say the least--there is no denying that the treaty of Bucarest did
not give her a square deal.  It was one of those treaties of peace (and
you might think that the men who sit around the green table and make
such treaties would learn it after a time) that are really treaties of
war.

No, Bulgaria was not looking for adventures, nor accepting promises
unless she had securities that they would be carried out.  You could not
talk to any intelligent Bulgarian five minutes without feeling the
bitterness left by the treaty of Bucarest and the fixed idea that
Bulgarian Macedonia must come under the flag again.  But though this was
true, and the army mobilized, and on a fine day every other man on the
streets of Sofia an officer, the stubborn Bulgars were still sitting
tight.  If they got what they wanted without fighting for it, they were
not anxious to throw away another generation of young men as they had
thrown them away for nothing in the Balkan War.

By this negative policy--the pressure, that is to say, of not going to
war--Bulgaria had induced Turkey, by the time I came through Sofia again
three months later, to turn over enough territory on the east so that
the Bulgars could own the railroad down to Dedeagatch and reach the
Aegean without being obliged to go into Turkey and out again.  It even
seemed that Bulgaria might be able to keep her neutrality to the end.
Her compromise with Turkey was not so odd as it seemed to many at first.
She had fought the Turks, to be sure, but now got what she wanted, and
when you come to think of it, it might well be more comfortable from the
Bulgars' point of view to have the invalid Ottomans in Constantinople
than the healthy and hungry Russians.

Both these small states, in their present hopes, fears, and, dangers,
are an instructive spectacle to those who fancy that in the crowded
arena of Europe a little nation can always do as it wants to, or that
its neutrality is always the simple open-and-shut matter it looked to
be, for instance, in the first weeks of August, 1914.  We are likely, at
home, to look on all this cold-blooded weighing of the chances of war
with little patience, to think of all these "aspirations" as merely
somebody else's land.  Fear or envy of our neighbors, international
hatred, is almost unknown with us. All that was left behind, three
thousand miles away, and the green water in between permits us to
indulge in the rare luxury of altruism.  Yet these hatreds, these fears,
and ambitions, inherited and carefully nourished, are just as real--
particularly in little states like these--as the fact, odd and
apparently unreasonable as it may be, that in a bit of country, which
might be included in one of our larger States, one lot of people should
speak French and think like Latins, and another speak Slavic and think
another way, and that neither wants to be absorbed by the other any more
than we want to be compelled to speak Spanish or be absorbed by the
Mexicans.

The "aspirations" of both these little countries have realities behind
them. It is a fact that one gets a whiff of French clarity and verve in
Rumania, though it comes from a small minority educated in France, and
the Rumanian people may be no more "Latin" than we are.  And it is an
interesting notion--though perhaps only a notion--that Rumania should be
the outpost or rear-guard of Latinism in this part of the world; a bit
of the restless West on the edge of the Orient.

For virility and earnestness like that of the Bulgars there is a place,
not only in the Balkans, but everywhere.  The qualities they have shown
in their short life as an independent nation are those which deserve to
be encouraged and preserved.  And if it were true that this war were
being fought to establish the right of little nations to live, one of
the tasks it ought to accomplish, it seemed then, was to give the
Bulgars back at least part of what was taken from them.




Chapter X

The Adventure Of The Fifty Hostages



Gallipoli lies by the Sea of Marmora, and looks out across it to the
green hills of Asia, just where the blue Marmora narrows into the
Dardanelles. It is one of those crowded little Turkish towns set on a
blazing hillside--tangled streets, unpainted, gray, weather-warped frame
houses, with overhanging latticed windows and roofs of red tiles; little
walled-in gardens with dark cedars or cypresses and a few dusty roses;
fountains with Turkish inscriptions, where the streets fork and women
come to fill their water-jars--a dreamy, smelly, sun-drenched little
town, drowsing on as it has drowsed for hundreds of years.  Nothing ever
happens in Gallipoli--I speak as if the war hadn't happened! The
graceful Greek sloops, with their bellying sails and turned-up stems and
sterns, come sailing in much as they must have come when the Persians,
instead of the English and the French, were battering away at the
Hellespont.  The grave, long-nosed old Turks pull at their bubble pipes
and sip their little cups of sweet, black coffee; the camel trains,
dusty and tinkling, come winding down the narrow streets from the
Thracian wheat country and go back with oversea merchandise done up in
faded carpets and boxes of Standard Oil.  The wind blows from the north,
and it is cold, and the Marmora gray; it blows from the south, and all
at once the world is warm and sea and sky are blue--so soft, so blue, so
alive with lifting radiance that one does not wonder the Turk is content
with a cup of coffee and a view.

Nothing ever happens in Gallipoli--then the war came, and everything
happened at once.  It was a still May morning, a Sunday morning, when
the English and French sent some of their ships up into the Gulf of
Saros, on the Aegean side of the peninsula, over behind Gallipoli.
Eight or ten miles of rolling country shut away the Aegean, and made
people feel safe enough.  They might have been in the other wars which
have touched Gallipoli, but a few miles of country were nothing at all
to the guns of a modern battleship.

An observation-balloon looked up over the western horizon, there was a
sudden thunder, and all at once the sky above Gallipoli rained screaming
shells and death.  You can imagine--at any rate remembering Antwerp, I
could very well imagine--how that hurricane of fire, sweeping in without
warning, from people knew not where, must have seemed like the end of
the world.  You can imagine the people--old men with turbans undone,
veiled women, crying babies--tumbling out of the little bird-cage houses
and down the narrow streets.  Off went the minaret, as you would knock
off an icicle, from the mosque on the hill.  The mosque by the
water-front went down in a cloud of dust, and up from the dust, from a
petrol shell, shot a geyser of fire.  Stones came rumbling down from the
old square tower, which had stood since the days of Bayazid; the faded
gray houses squashed like eggs.  It was all over in an hour--some say
even twenty, minutes--but that was long enough to empty Gallipoli, to
kill some sixty or seventy people, and drive the rest into the caves
under the cliffs by the water, or across the Marmora to Lapsaki.

Now, while the bombardment of Gallipoli may not appear from a merely
human point of view, a particularly sporting performance, yet, as most
of those killed were soldiers, as Gallipoli had been a staff
head-quarters not long before and always has been a natural base for the
defense of the Dardanelles, the attack was doubtless justified by the
rules of war.  It happens, however, that people who live in defenseless,
bombarded towns are never interested in the rules of war.  So a new and
particularly disturbing rumor went flying through the crowded streets of
Constantinople.

It is a city of rumors, this beautiful, bewildering Bagdad of the West,
where all the races of the world jostle each other in the narrow
streets, and you never know how the man who brushes past you lives--let
alone feels and thinks.  The Constantinople trolley-cars are divided by
a curtain, on one side of which sit the men, on the other the veiled
women. When there are several women the conductor slides the curtain
along, so that half the car is a harem; when there are none he slides it
back, and there is no harem at all.

And life is like that.  You are at once in a modern commercial city and
an ancient Mohammedan capital, and never know when the one will fade out
like a picture on a screen and leave you in the Orient, facing its
mystery, its fatalism, its vengeance that comes in a night.

You can imagine what it must become, walled in with war and censorship,
with the English and French banging away at the Dardanelles gate to the
south, the Russian bear growling at the door of the Bosporus, so close
that you can every now and then hear the rumble of cannon above the din
of Constantinople--just as you might hear them in Madison Square if an
enemy were bombarding the forts at Sandy Hook.  You wake up one morning
to hear that all the influential Armenians have been gathered up and
shipped to the interior; you go down to the ordinary-looking hotel
breakfast-room and the three Germans taking coffee in the corner stop
talking at once; at lunch some one stoops to whisper to the man across
the table, there is a moment's silence until the waiter has gone, and
the man across the table mutters: "The G.  V.  says not to worry"--"G.
V." meaning Grand Vizier.  To-morrow the Goeben is to be blown up, or
there will be a revolution, or a massacre--heaven knows what! Into an
atmosphere like this, with wounded pouring back in thousands from the
Dardanelles, there came the news of the bombardment of Gallipoli.  And
with it went the rumor of reprisal--all the English and French left
behind in Constantinople, and there were a good many who had been
permitted to go about their business more or less as usual, were to be
collected, men, women, and children, taken down to the peninsula and
distributed in the "unfortified" towns.  The American ambassador would
notify England and France through Washington, and if then the Allies
chose to bombard, theirs was the risk.

The American ambassador, Mr. Morgenthau, set about to see what could be
done.  Presently the word went round that the women might stay behind,
but the men, high and low, must go.  They came flocking to the embassy,
already besought for weeks by French Sisters of Mercy and Armenians in
distress, some begging for a chance to escape, some ready to go anywhere
as their share of the war.  The Turks were finally induced to include
only those between twenty and forty, and at the last moment this was cut
to an even fifty--twenty-five British subjects, twenty-five French.  The
plan eliminated, naturally, the better-known remnants of the French and
English colonies, and disappointed the chief of police, who had not
unreasonably hoped, as he wistfully put it, "to have some notables." Of
the fifty probably not more than a dozen had been born in England or
France, the others being natives of Malta, Greece--the usual Levantines.
Yet if these young bank clerks and tradesmen were not "important,"
according to newspaper standards, they were, presumably, important to
themselves.  They were very important, indeed, to the wives and mothers
and sisters who fought up to the Galata sea wall that Thursday morning,
weeping and wailing, and waving their wet handkerchiefs through the iron
fence.

The hostages, one or two of whom had been called to their doors during
the night and marched away without time to take anything with them, had
been put aboard a police boat, about the size of a New York revenue
cutter, and herded below in two little cabins, with ten fierce-looking
Constantinople policemen, in gray astrakhan caps, to guard them.  It was
from the water-line port-holes of these cabins that they waved their
farewells.

With them was a sturdy, bearded man in black knickerbockers and clerical
hat, the rector of the Crimean Chapel in Constantinople--a Cambridge and
Church of England man, and a one-time dweller in the wilds of Kurdistan,
who, though not called, had volunteered to go.  The first secretary of
the American embassy, Mr. Hoffman Philip, an adventurous humanitarian,
whose experience includes an English university, the Rough Riders, and
service as American minister to Abyssinia, also volunteered, not, of
course, as hostage, but as friendly assistant both to the Turkish
authorities and to their prisoners.

To him was given the little deck-cabin, large enough for a man to
stretch out on the seat which ran round it; here, also the clergyman
volunteer was presently permitted, and here too, thanks to passports
vouch-safed by the chief of police, the chroniclers of the expedition,
Mr. Suydam of the Brooklyn Eagle, and myself.



The passports, mysterious scratches in Turkish, did not arrive until the
last minute, and with them came the chief, the great Bedri Bey himself--
a strong man and a mysterious one, pale, inscrutable, with dark,
brooding eyes and velvety manners, calculated to envelop even a cup of
coffee and a couple of boiled eggs in an air of sinister romance.

The chief regretted that the craft was not "a serious passenger boat,"
for we should probably have to spend the night aboard.  Arrangements for
the hostages and ourselves would be made at Gallipoli, though just what
they would be it was difficult to say, as there were, he said, no hotels
in the place and the houses were all destroyed.

With this cheerful prospect he bade us farewell, and all being ready, we
waited two hours, and finally, just before noon, with deck-hands hanging
life belts along the rail to be ready for possible English submarines,
churned through the crowded shipping of the Golden Horn, round Stamboul,
and out into the blue Marmora.

The difficulties of the next few days--for which most of the hostages,
city-bred and used to the bake-shop round the corner, were unprepared--
promptly presented themselves.  Lunch-time came, but there was no lunch.
There was not even bread.  Philip and Suydam had tinned things, and the
former some cake, which by tea-time that afternoon--so appallingly soon
does the spoiled child of town get down to fundamentals--seemed an
almost immoral luxury.  But the luckless fifty, already unstrung by the
worry of the last forty-eight hours, fed on salt sea air, and it was not
until sundown that one of the British came to ask what should be done.
Philip dug into his corned beef and what was left of the bread, and so
we curled up for the night, the hostages and policemen below, the rest
of us in the deck-house, rolled up in all the blankets we had, for one
of the Black Sea winds was blowing down the Marmora and it was as cold
as November.

The launch came up to Gallipoli wharf in the night and not long after
daylight we were shaken out of our blankets to receive the call of the
mutessarif, or local governor, a big, slow, saturnine man in
semi-riding-clothes, with the red fez and a riding-whip in his hand, who
spoke only Turkish and limited himself to few words of that.  He was
accompanied by a sort of secretary or political director--a plump little
man, with glasses and a vague, slightly smiling, preoccupied manner, who
acted as interpreter.

The governor and Philip were addressed as "Excellence," the secretary as
"Monsieur Le Directeur," and, considering that all concerned were only
half awake, and we only half dressed, the interview, which included the
exchange of cigarettes and many salutes, was extremely polite.  We
joined the mutessarif and his secretary in a stroll about the town.

It was deserted--closed shutters, empty houses and shops, not so much as
the chance to buy a round, flat loaf of black bread--a shell of a town,
with a few ravenous cats prowling about and forgotten chickens pecking
the bare cobblestones.  We saw the shell hole in the little Mohammedan
cemetery, where four people, "come to visit the tombs of their fathers,"
had been killed, the smashed mosques, yawning house-fronts, and dangling
rafters, and there came over one an indescribable irony as one listened,
in this Eastern world of blazing sun, blue sky, and blue water, to the
same grievances and indignations one had read in London editorials and
heard in the beet-fields of Flanders months ago.

The mutessarif took us to a little white villa on the cliff by the sea,
with a walled garden, flat black cedar, and a view of the Marmora, and
we breakfasted on tea, bread and butter, and eggs.  Meanwhile the
hostages had been marched to an empty frame house on the beach, from the
upper windows of which, while gendarmes guarded the street-door, they
were gloomily peering when we returned to the launch.  Philip, uneasy at
the emptiness of the town and leisurely fashion in which things were
likely to move, started for Lapsaki, across the Marmora, for food and
blankets, and Suydam and I strolled about the town.  We had gone but a
few steps when we observed an aimless-looking individual in fez and
civilian clothes following us.  We tramped up-hill, twisted through
several of the hot little alley-like streets--he followed like our
shadow. We led him all over town, he toiling devotedly behind, and when
we returned to the beach, he sat himself down on a wood-pile behind us,
as might some dismal buzzard awaiting our demise.

He, or some of his fellow sleuths, stuck to us all that day.  Once, for
exercise, I walked briskly out to the edge of the town and back again.
The shadow toddled after.  I went up to the basin beside the ruined
mosque, a sort of sea-water plaza for the town, and, taking a stool
outside a little cafe, which had awakened since morning, took coffee.
The shadow blandly took coffee also, which he consumed silently, as we
had no common tongue, rose as I rose, and followed me back to the beach.

Out in the Marmora, which is but little wider here than the Hudson at
Tappan Zee, transports crammed with soldiers went steaming slowly
southward, a black destroyer on the lookout for submarines hugging their
flanks and breaking trail ahead of them.  Over the hills to the south,
toward Maidos and the Dardanelles, rolled the distant thunder--the
cannon the hapless fifty, looking out of their house on the beach, had
been sent down to stop--and all about us, in the dazzling Turkish
sunshine, were soldiers and supply-trains, landing, disembarking,
pushing toward the front.  Fine-looking men they were, too, these
infantry-men, bronzed, well-built fellows, with heavy, high cheek-bones,
longish noses, black mustaches, and dark eyes, who, whatever their
qualities of initiative might be, looked to have no end of endurance and
ability to stay put.  Bullock-carts dragged by big, black buffalo
cattle, carrying their heads far back, as if their big horns were too
heavy for them, crowded the street leading to the quay, and camels,
strung in groups of five, came swinging in, or kneeling in the dust,
waved their long, bird-like necks, and lifted up a mournful bellow, as
if protesting in a bored, Oriental way, at a fate which compelled them
to bear burdens for the nagging race of men.

It was to an accompaniment of these howls that a young Turkish officer
came over to find out who these strangers might be.  We spoke of the
hostages, and he at once said that it was an excellent idea.  The
English and French were very cruel--if now they chose to bombard.  ...
"If a man throws a penny into the sea," he said, "he loses the penny.
It isn't the pocket-book that's hurt." I did not quite grasp this
proverb, but remarked that after all they were civilians and had done
nothing.  "That is true," he said, "but the English and French have been
very unjust to our civilians. They force us to another injustice--c'est
la guerre."

Toward the end of the afternoon the hostages, closely guarded, were
marched up into the town and lodged in two empty houses--literally
empty, for there was neither bed nor blanket, chair nor table--nothing
but the four walls.  A few had brought mattresses and blankets, but the
greater number, city-bred young fellows, unused to looking after
themselves out of doors, had only the clothes they stood in.  The north
wind held; directly the sun went down it was cold again, and, only half
fed with the provisions Philip brought over from Lapsaki, they spent a
dismal night,' huddled on the bare floor, under their suitcases or
whatever they could get to cover them, and expecting another bombardment
at dawn.

We, on the contrary--that is to say, Philip and his two guests--were
taken to a furnished house over-looking the Marmora--the house, as it
presently appeared, from the pictures of Waterloo on the walls and the
English novels in a bookcase up-stairs, lately occupied by the British
consular agent.  To his excellency a room to himself up-stairs, with a
real bed, was given; the historians were made perhaps even more
comfortable on mattresses on the dining-room floor.  We were all sleepy
enough to drop on them at once, but another diplomatic dinner had been
planned, it appeared, and Turkish politeness can no more be hurried nor
overcome than can that curious impassive resistance which a Turk can
maintain against something he does not wish done.  It was nine o'clock
before we sat down with the mutessarif, his secretary, and the voluble
journalist to a whole roast kid, a rather terrifying but exceedingly
palatable dish, stuffed with nuts, rice, and currants, and accompanied
by some of the wine of Lapsaki, rice pudding, and a huge bowl of raw
eggs, which were eaten by cracking the shell, elevating one's head, and
tossing them down like oysters.

The dinner was served by one Dimitri, a brawny, slow-moving Greek.
Dimitri was dressed in a home-spun braided jacket and homespun Turkish
trousers, shaped like baggy riding-breeches, and his complete
impenetrability to new ideas was only equalled by the solemnity and
touching willingness with which he received them.  It was after he had
served us in the ignoble capacity of dish-washer and burden-carrier for
several days that we were informed one evening by the governor's
secretary, in his vague way, that Dimitri was an "architect."

"Architecte naturel," suggested the urbane Philip, and the governor's
secretary assented.  Slow Dimitri might be, but once he grasped an idea,
no power could drag it from him.  When one asked him where he learned to
build houses of a certain style, he always replied that so they were
built by Pappadopoulos--Pappadopoulos being dead these twenty or thirty
years.  Dimitri, the secretary ventured, had been architect of the
mosque on the water-front, and when he found that we were pleased with
this idea, everything else in Gallipoli became Dimitri's.  The
lighthouse, the hospital, the three white houses by the quay--we had but
to mention a building and he would promptly murmur, in his dreamy,
half-quizzical way;

"Oui-i-i ... c'est Dimitri!"

Early next morning, just after we had discovered that under the cliff
was water like liquid lapis lazuli and flat-topped rocks rising just
above it on which you would not have been in the least surprised to find
mermaids combing their hair, or sirens sitting, and that it was a simple
matter to climb down and be mermen, the clergyman-volunteer arrived
with reports of the first night.  It had been dismal, there were one or
two intransigent kickers, and the aesthetic young Frenchman who spent
his idle time drawing pictures of fashion-plate young ladies, had become
so unstrung that he had regularly "thrown a fit" and been unconscious
for half an hour until they could massage him back to life again.  Humor
was quite gone out of them, and when the clergyman suggested that it was
a compliment to be sent out to be shot at--flattering, at any rate, to
the prowess of the Allies--a Frenchman emphatically denied it.  "Pas du
tout!" he exploded.  While we talked there was a knock at the front
door, and through the grating we saw the red fez and vaguely smiling
visage of the mutessarif's secretary.  It was the first of a series of
visits, which, before we left Gallipoli, were renewed almost every hour,
of dialogues deserving a better immortalization than can be given here.

You must imagine, on one side of the dining-room table, the plump little
bey, with his fez and glasses, quick little salutes each time he took a
match or cigarette; facing him the tall, urbane Philip, in ineffable
flannels or riding-clothes--for the embassy secretary is one of those
who believe that clothes should express rather than blot out the inner
man. Cigarettes--coffee--assurances to his excellency that the house is
his, to Monsieur Le Directeur of our pleasure and profound
consideration. Minutes pass, an hour--the bey knows no such thing as
time, the other is as unhurried as he.  The talk, in somewhat halting
French, is of war, weather, French culture, marriage, those dreadful
Russians, punctuated by delicate but persistently recurring references,
on one side, to mattresses and food for the hostages, by the little
bey's deep sighs and his "Mais ... que fairef"

That "But what can be done?" like the Mexican's "Who knows?" fell like a
curtain on every pause, it was the bey's answer to all life's riddles--
the plight of the hostages, the horrors of war, his own dream of being
governor of a province close to Constantinople.  One can hear him now
through that cloud of cigarette smoke, "Mais--" with a pause and
scarcely perceptible lifting of the shoulders--"que faire..."

We went across to Lapsaki again that day to get blankets and buy or
order mattresses, and found it much what Gallipoli must have been a few
days before--sunshine and soldiers, camels loaded with stretchers and
Red Cross supplies, the hot little twisting streets, noisy with traders
and refugees.

You can imagine the excitement over this mysterious stranger with an
unlimited supply of gold lire and big silver medjidies, asking not what
kind of blankets, but how many did they have, how long would it take
them to make not one, but fifty mattresses! Greek traders, Jews from the
Dardanelles, one or two hybrid youths in fez and American clothes, with
recommendations from American Y.  M.  C.  A.'s--it was a great afternoon
for Lapsaki!

A round-faced, jolly German nurse, dropped all alone in the little town
by the chance of war, met us in the street, and later we went to her
hospital. It had been started only a fortnight before, there were no
beds, and the wounded lay on narrow mattresses on the floor.  One man,
whose face was a mere eyes and nose poking through patches of plaster,
had been burned at Gallipoli.  Another, up from the Dardanelles, had a
hideous wound in his cheek, discharging constantly into his mouth.  In
spite of it he took Philip's cigarette and smoked it.  He was dead when
we came back three days later.  On another mattress was a poor little
brown bundle, a boy of twelve or thirteen, hit in the spine and
paralyzed by a fragment of shell at Gallipoli and now delirious.  Philip
later took him back to Constantinople, to the X-ray and care that might
save his life.

It was sundown when we got back to the hostages with our spoils.  The
thing had begun to get on their nerves.  The English said little,
determined evidently to remain Britons to the last, but some of the
Levantines let themselves go completely.  A pale gentleman with a poetic
beard, a barber by profession, was among the most eloquent.  It was not
a jail, it was a mad-house, he cried.  Another declared that without
bedding, doctor, or medicines, shut up here until the end of the war,
probably, they must at least have food--that was a need "primordial!"

Another stood apart, whacking his chest and addressing the empty air,
"C'est moi, c'est moi, qui n'a pas d'argent!"--it was he who had no
money and nothing to cover him, and what did they want him to do? If he
had come down to be shot at, well and good, but if he was to be frozen
and starved by inches...

Philip smoothed them down as best he could and returned to invite the
governor's secretary to stay for dinner, a repast for which Hassan, the
embassy khavass who accompanied the expedition, had procured, as he put
it, "some fresh eggies from a nice little man."

The bey, who, that morning, had leaned toward the French, now warmed to
America.  The French were enlightened, he said, but without morals, the
English civilized but jealous; if he had any sons he would send them to
America, the only place where young men were both civilized and properly
"serieux." In the midst of these amiable speculations it was suggested
that, in view of the difficulty of getting mattresses, the government
might even requisition them.  The suggestion drew a regretful sigh from
the bey, for Turkey was a constitutional country, he said, the shops and
houses were closed and their owners gone, and there was no way in which
such a thing could be done.

In addition to Hassan's eggies, Philip's Man Friday, the incomparable
Levy, had constructed some rice puddings, and it was in despair that he
announced, just before they were to be served, that two had "gone by the
cats"! We had, indeed, by this time attracted most of the cats in
Gallipoli.  They streaked through the rooms like chain lightning, and in
the dead of night went galloping over the piano keyboard with sounds so
blood-curdling that Suydam put his mattress on the sofa and his
sleeping-bag on top of that, and, shutting himself in, defied them.  The
incomparable Levy was Italian by his birth and cheerfulness, Jewish on
his father's side, Turkish by the fez he wore and a life spent in
guiding strangers about Constantinople.  He had the face of a dean of a
diplomatic corps or one of those comfortable old gentlemen in spats who
have become fixtures in some city club.

It was his employer's humor to befriend and defend him in private, but
to his face assume, with the most delicate irony, that this marvel among
men was always late, forgetful, rattle-brained, and credulous.  And it
was Levy's gift to play up to this assumption, to hang on his employer's
words with breathless anxiety, to relax into a paternal smile when safe,
and to support his omelets and his delays with oaths and circumlocutions
stranger even than the dishes themselves.  They were odd enough, those
dinners, sitting in our little oasis of light in that deserted town, not
knowing what the next hour might bring.

Next day we again went to Lapsaki, and, although the entire industrial
resources of the place had apparently been cornered in the meantime by a
Dardanelles Jew, returned with several more mattresses and the promise
of the remainder.  We found the hostages more cheerful.  With the relief
money Philip had distributed the day before, and the food they had been
able to buy, they had shaken themselves together, gifted cooks had
turned up, they had made a baseball out of rags, painted humorous signs
on the doorways of their rooms--they had actually begun to sing.

And now, with that curious subsequentness with which things sometimes
happen in Turkey, the mutesarif discovered half a dozen mattresses
himself, and announced that to-morrow there would be enough for all.
Nay, more--the government would allow each hostage four piasters a day
for food, a cook would be brought down from Constantinople and meals
served in a restaurant, that they might be saved, as his secretary
observed, from the unlovely "odeurs de'cuisine."

Then it was discovered that the men might stroll about town, provided
they were in groups.  They went to the beach and discussed the
feasibility of swimming, they even demurred against the Constantinople
cook as limiting their means of amusing themselves; the aesthetic young
man recovered now, polished his shoes and put a lavender handkerchief in
his breast pocket.  The hostages were in a fair way to annex the
deserted village, when a bombshell burst in the shape of a despatch from
the American ambassador that permission had been obtained for all to
come home.

The changing wind now swung full upon us.  Scarcely had the message
arrived ere the mutessarifs secretary followed it, lamenting that we
must go.  A peacock reposing majestically in the arms of a patient hamal
appeared at the front door, a souvenir for "his excellency."

Appeared also, out of thin air, a neat little horse and phaeton, and a
trooper perched on a high Turkish saddle, with a rifle slung rakishly
across his back, and the bey himself, glasses, fez, and all, astride an
Arab steed.  We were to be taken for a drive.  Toward the end of it we
reached the flour-mill, the only modern edifice in this ancient town, and
were ushered into the office to sit in a constrained circle, with the
slightly ironical-looking young proprietor--accustomed, perhaps, to such
visits--and his associates, while coffee and cigarettes were brought.
The engineer, an Italian, welcomed us in French; the proprietor, who
spoke nothing but Turkish, smiled inscrutably, and overhead, in several
brass cages, canaries sang.

Philip, gazing upward, admired their song, whereat the bey at once
announced that they were his.  The American protested that, much as the
gift delighted his taste and roused his gratitude, it was impossible to
think of carrying a canary back to Constantinople.

"If you please..." insisted the imperturbable bey.  "It is yours!"
Scarcely had we returned, indeed, before another patient hamal knocked,
lugging the hapless bird.

The hostages, not to be outdone, invited Philip, the bey, and ourselves
to lunch.  There was chicken soup and chicken, and salad and native
wine, and, for the corner of the improvised table, where the guests were
seated, the hospitable young men had actually procured several bottles
of Gallipoli champagne.  The barber with the poetic beard leaped to his
feet, as fluent in welcoming us as he had been in protestations a few
evenings before, while the aesthetic young man smiled pensively down at
a long-stemmed fleur-de-lis which he slowly twirled in his fingers.  The
cashier of a Constantinople department store sang from "Tosca."

With him as leader they all sang--a song of the Pyrenees mountaineers,
then a waltz from the cafes chantants: "Bien gentiment l'on se balade.
C'est la premiere promenade--"

In another week we should have had a Gallipoli Glee Club.

And so ended the adventure of the fifty hostages, who went out to be
shot at--the end of the comedy, which had its climax at the beginning.
The next morning we were up at daylight, and after several hours' delay
the mutessarif and his lieutenant came down to permit us to leave. There
were cigarettes and salutes, the secretary scribbled in Turkish
characters on his knee, the governor signed the permit, and we said
good-by to Gallipoli.  Next morning we again threaded the shipping in
the Golden Horn.

The ten policemen who had looked so formidable a week before, expressed
a wish for what was left of the tinned corned beef.  And with hackmen
yelling from the street and caique men shouting from the water, the
fifty hostages were swallowed up in the sunshine and smells and clatter
of Constantinople.




Chapter XI

With The Turks At The Dardanelles



The little side-wheeler--she had been built in Glasgow in 1892, and done
duty as a Bosporus ferry-boat until the war began--was supposed to sail
at four, but night shut down and she still lay at the wharf in Stamboul.
We contrived to get some black bread, hard-boiled eggs, oranges, and
helva from one of the little hole-in-the-wall shops near by, watched
Pera and its ascending roofs turn to purple, and the purple to gray and
black, until Constantinople was but a string of lights across Galata
Bridge, and a lamp here and there on the hills.  Then, toward midnight,
with lights doused and life-belts strung along the rail--for English
submarines were in the Marmora--we churned quietly round the corner of
Stamboul and into the cool sea.

The side-wheeler was bound for the Dardanelles with provisions for the
army--bread in bags, big hampers of green beans, and cigarettes--and
among them we were admitted by grace of the minister of war, and papers
covered with seals and Turkish characters, which neither of us could
read.  We tried to curl up on top of the beans (for the Marmora is cold
at night, and the beans still held some of the warmth of the fields),
but in the end took to blankets and the bare decks.

All night we went chunking southward--it is well over a hundred miles
from Constantinople to the upper entrance to the straits--and shook
ourselves out of our blankets and the cinders into another of those
blue-and-gold mornings which belong to this part of the world.  You must
imagine it behind all this strange fighting at the Dardanelles--sunshine
and blue water, a glare which makes the Westerner squint; moons that
shine like those in the tropics.  One cannot send a photograph of it
home any more than I could photograph the view from my hotel window here
on Pera Hill of Stamboul and the Golden Horn.  You would have the
silhouette, but you could not see the sunshine blazing on white mosques
and minarets, the white mosques blazing against terra-cotta roofs and
dusty green cedars and cypresses, the cypresses lifting dark and pensive
shafts against the blue--all that splendid, exquisite radiance which
bursts through one's window shutters every morning and makes it seem
enough to look and a waste of time to try to think.

It is the air the gods and heroes used to breathe; they fought and
played, indeed, over these very waters and wind-swept hills.  Leander
swam the Dardanelles (or Hellespont) close to where the Irresistible and
Bouvet were sunk; the wind that blew in our faces that morning was the
same that rippled the drapery of the Winged Victory.  As we went
chunking southward with our beans and cigarettes, we could see the snows
of Olympus--the Mysian Olympus, at any rate, if not the one where Jove,
the cloud-compelling, used to live, and white-armed Juno, and Pallas,
Blue-Eyed Maid.  If only our passports had taken us to Troy we could
have looked down the plains of Ilium to the English and French ships,
and Australian and French colonials fighting up the hillside across the
bay.  We got tea from the galley, and-with bread and helva (an
insinuating combination of sugar and oil of sesame, which tastes of
peanuts and is at once a candy and a sort of substitute for butter or
meat) made out a breakfast.

A Turkish soldier, the only other occupant of the deck, surveyed these
preparations impassively; then, taking off his boots, climbed on a
settee and stood there in his big bare feet, with folded hands, facing,
as he thought, toward Mecca.  The boat was headed southwest, and he
looked to starboard, so that he faced, as a matter of fact, nearly due
west. He had knelt and touched his forehead twice to the bench, and was
going on with the Mussulman prayer when the captain, a rather elegant
young man who had served in the navy, murmured something as he passed.
The soldier looked round thoughtfully; without embarrassment, surprise,
or hurry stepped from the settee, pointed it toward the Asiatic shore,
and, stepping up again, resumed his devotions.

Five times that day, as the faithful are commanded, he said his prayer--
a sight that followed us everywhere that week.  One evening after dusk,
on another boat, a fireman came up from below, climbed on a settee, and
began his prayer.  Several passengers, who had not seen him in the dark,
walked in front of him.  He broke off, reviled them in true fire-room
style, then with a wide gesture, as though sweeping the air clear ahead
of him all the way to the holy city, began at the beginning again.
Soldiers up in the Gallipoli hills, the captain on the bridge, a
stevedore working on a lighter in the blaze of noon with the winch
engines squealing round him--you turn round to find a man, busy the
moment before, standing like a statue, hands folded in front of him,
facing the east. Nothing stops him; no one seems to see him; he stands
invisible in the visible world--in a world apart, 'indeed, to which the
curious, self-conscious Westerner is not admitted, where, doubtless, he
is no more than the dust which the other shakes from his feet before he
is fit to address his God.

The Marmora narrowed, we passed Gallipoli on the European side, where
the English and French hostages had had their curious adventure the week
before, and on into the Dardanelles proper and the zone of war.  It was
some forty miles down this salt-water river (four miles wide at its
widest, and between the forts of Chanak Kale and Kilid Bahr, near its
lower end, a fraction over a mile) from the Marmora gateway to the
Aegean.  On the left were Lapsaki and the green hills of Asia,
cultivated to their very tops; on the right Europe and the brown hills
of the peninsula, now filled with guns and horses and men.

Over there, up that narrow strip of Europe, running down between the
Dardanelles and the Aegean, the Allies had been trying for weeks to
force their way to Constantinople.  They had begun in February, you will
recall, when they bombarded the forts at the outer entrance to the
Dardanelles--Sedd ul Bahron the European side, at the tip of the
peninsula, and Kum Kale, across the bay on the Asiatic shore..  These
forts occupy somewhat the relation to Constantinople that Sandy Hook
does to New York, although much farther away--they face, that is to say,
the open sea, and the guns of the fleet, heavier than those of the old
forts, could stand off at a safe distance and demolish them.

When the ships pushed on up the strait toward Kilid Bahr and Chanak
Kale--somewhat like trying to run the Narrows at New York--there was a
different story.  They were now within range of shore batteries and
there were anchored mines and mines sent down on the tide.  On March 18
the Irresistible, Ocean, and Bouvet were sunk, and it began to be
apparent that the Dardanelles could not be forced without the help of a
powerful land force.  So in April landing parties were sent ashore: at
Kum Kale and Sedd ul Bahr, at Kaba Tepe and Art Burnu, some twelve or
fourteen miles farther north on the Aegean side of the peninsula, and at
another point a few miles farther up.  At Sedd ul Bahr and along the
beach between Kaba Tepe and Art Bumu the Allies made their landing good,
dug themselves in, and, reinforced by the fire of the ships, began a
trench warfare not unlike that which has dragged on in the west.

The peninsula is but ten or twelve miles wide at its widest, and the
Dardanelles side is within range of the fleet's great guns, firing clear
overland from the Aegean.  It was by this indirect fire that Maidos was
destroyed and Gallipoli partly smashed and emptied of its people.  There
were places toward the end of the peninsula where Turkish infantrymen
had to huddle in their trenches under fire of this sort coming from
three directions.  Whenever the invaders had it behind they were
naturally at an advantage; whenever it ceased they were likely to be
driven back. The Turks, on the other hand, had the advantage of numbers,
of fighting on an "inside line," and of a country, one hill rising
behind another, on the defense of which depended their existence as a
nation in Europe.

Under these conditions the fighting had been going on for weeks, the
English and French holding their ground at Sedd ul Bahr and Ari Burnu,
but getting no nearer Constantinople.  And as we went chunking down the
strait that night and into Ak-Bash in the dark, two new forces were
coming in.  The next day a German submarine--come all the way round
through the Mediterranean--was to sink the Triumph and the Majestic,
while another American correspondent, who had intended to come with us
but took the transport Nagara instead, saw the head of an English
submarine poke through the Marmora.  A blond young man in overalls and
white jersey climbed out of the conning-tower.  "Will you give us time
to get off?" cried the American, the only one on board who could speak
English.

"Yes," said the young man, "and be damned quick about it." Ten minutes
later, from the boats into which they had tumbled, the passengers saw a
cloud of yellow smoke, and the Nagara simply disintegrated and sank, and
with her the heavy siege-gun she was taking to the Dardanelles.

Pleasantly unaware of what might as well have happened to the bread and
beans, we drew up to a hill-side speckled with lights, a wharf, and a
hospital boat smelling of iodoform, through a cabin window of which a
doctor was peacefully eating dinner.  Boxes and sacks were piled near
the wharf, and from over behind the hills, with startling nearness, came
the nervous Crack... crack...  crack-crack-crack! of rifle and
machine-gun fire.

We went to sleep to the tune of it, moved a few miles down the coast in
the night, and crawled out into a world of dusty brown--brown hillsides
and camels and soldiers and sacks of wheat piled on the flat, immersed
in an amber dawn.  This was the destination of the side-wheeler, and by
sunup we were loaded into a machine with a horse, several goats, three or
four passengers, and four barefooted boatmen, who pushed us over the
strait to Chanak Kale.

We were now at the narrowest part of the Dardanelles, behind us, on the
European side, the old round tower of Kilid Bahr and Medjidie Fort, in
front Fort Hamidie, and on the horizon to the south, where the strait
opened into the sea, the tiny silhouettes of several of the Allies'
ships. Chanak was smashed like the towns in west Belgium, and, but for
the garrison and the Turkish and German commandants tucked away in the
trees, all but deserted, except by flies and half-starved cats.  These
unhappy creatures, left behind in the flight, were everywhere, and in
front of the bake shop they crowded in literal scores--gaunt, mangy,
clawed and battered from constant fights.  It was hot, there was little
to eat, and after hours of wrangling it appeared that our precious
scratches of Turkish took us to the Gallipoli instead of the Asiatic
side.

The two were under different jurisdictions; though the fault was not
ours, the local commandant had the right to ship us back to
Constantinople, and after a sort of delirium of flies, cats, gendarmes,
muggy heat, and debates, night descended to find us going to sleep in
the middle of a vegetable farm, in a house lately inhabited by whirling
dervishes, with two lynx-eyed police-men in gray lamb's-wool caps seated
at the gate. By them we were marched next day to the wharf and suddenly
there translated into the upper ether by the German admiral and his
thoughtful aid, who, on their way to the headquarters of the land forces
across the strait, whirled us over in style in a torpedo-boat.

We landed at the same place at which we had touched in the dark two
nights before--busy and blazing now in the afternoon sun, with gangs of
stevedores shuffling to and from the ships at the brand-new wharfs,
Turkish officers galloping about on their thick-necked, bobtailed, fiery
little stallions, and the dusty flat, half a mile across, perhaps,
between its encircling hills, crowded with ox and horse carts, camel
trains, and piles of ammunition-boxes and sacks of food.

The admiral and his aid were greeted by a smart young German officer
with a monocle, and galloped off into the hills, while we fell into the
hospitable hands of another German, a civilian volunteer in red fez and
the blue and brass buttons of the merchant marine, cast here by the
chance of war.  He was a Hamburg-American captain, lately sailing
between Buenos Aires and Hamburg, and before that on an Atlas Line boat
between the Caribbean and New York.  He talked English and seemed more
than half American, indeed, and when he spoke of the old Chelsea Hotel,
just across the street from the Y.  M.  C.  A.  gymnasium in which I had
played hand-ball, we were almost back in Twenty-third Street.  He took
us up to his tent on the hill, overlooking the men and stores, and, he
explained, reasonably safe from the aeroplanes which flew over several
times a day.  Over his cigarettes and tea and bottled beer we talked of
war and the world.

It was the captain's delicate and arduous duty to impose his tight
German habits of work and ship-shapeness on camel drivers, stevedores,
and officials used to the looser, more leisurely methods of the East.

He could not speak Turkish, was helpless without his interpreter, at
best a civilian among soldiers--men have got Iron Crosses for easier
jobs than that! He talked of the news--great news for his side--of the
Triumph, and, opening his navy list, made a pencil mark.

"She's off!" he said.  The book was full of marks.  In methodical sailor
fashion he had been crossing them off since the war began: British and
German--Blucher, Scharnhorst, Irresistible, Goliath, and the rest--
millions of dollars and hundreds of men at a stroke.

"Where's it going to end?" he demanded.  "There's seven hundred good men
gone, maybe--how many did the Triumph carry? And we think it's good
news! If a man should invent something that would kill a hundred
thousand men at once, he'd be a great man...  Now, what is that?"

The English were hanging on to Sedd ul Bahr--they might try to make
another Gibraltar of it.  Their aeroplanes came up every day.  There was
a French-man with a long tail--he only came to the edge of the camp, and
as soon as the batteries opened up turned back, but the Englishman
didn't stop for anything.  He dropped a bomb or two every time he
passed--one man must have been square under one, for they found pieces
of him, but never did find his head.  It wasn't so much the bomb that
did the damage; it was the stones blown out by the explosion.  If you
were standing anywhere within sixty feet when it went off, you were
likely to be killed.  The captain had had trenches dug all over camp
into which they could jump--had one for himself just outside the tent.
All you hoped for when one of those fellows was overhead and the
shrapnel chasing after him was that the next one would take him fair and
square and bring him down.  Yet that fellow took his life in his hands
every time he flew over.  "He's fighting for his country, too!" the
captain sighed.

It was our first duty to present ourselves to the commandant of the
peninsular forces, Field-Marshal Liman von Sanders--Liman Pasha, as he
is generally called in Turkey--and the captain found a carriage,
presently, and sent us away with a soldier guard.  Our carriage was a
talika, one of those little gondola-like covered wagons common in the
country.  There is a seat for the driver; the occupants lie on the floor
and adjust themselves as best they can to the bumpings of the hilly
roads.

The country reminded one of parts of our own West--brown hills, with
sparse pines and scrub-oaks, meadows ablaze with scarlet poppies, and
over all blue sky, sunshine, and the breeze from the near-by sea.  We
passed camel trains, mule trains, horses, and tents masked with brush.
Here evidently were the men we had seen marching day after day through
the Constantinople streets--marching away to war in the silent Eastern
fashion, without a waving handkerchief, a girl to say good-by to, or a
cheer.  Here they were and yet here they weren't, for the brush and
tangled hills swallowed them up as thoroughly as armies are swallowed up
in the villages of Belgium and France.

We passed even these signs of war and came into pines and open meadows--
we might have been driving to somebody's trout preserve. The wagon
stopped near a sign tacked to a tree, and we walked down a winding path
into a thicket of pines.  There were tents set in the bank and covered
with boughs, and out of one came a tall, square-jawed German officer,
buttoning his coat.  He waved aside our passports with the air of one
not concerned with such details, asked if we spoke German--or perhaps we
would prefer French?--and, motioning down the path to a sort of
summer-house with a table and chairs, told an orderly to bring tea.

This was the headquarters of the Fifth Army, and this the commander-in-
chief.  A bird-man might have flown over the neighborhood a dozen times
without guessing that they were there.  We were hidden in the pines, and
only an occasional far-off Br-r-rum-m! from the cannons in the south
broke the stillness.  Some one had brought up a cask of native claret
from Chanak, and the field-marshal's staff were helping to put it into
the bank in front of the arbor.  A professor of chemistry--until the war
called him back to the colors--was shovelling and showing the Turkish
soldiers how the cask should be slanted; another of the superintendents
had lived for ten years in America, and was enthusiastic over the charms
and future of Davenport, Iowa.  Presently tea came, and thin little
sandwiches and cigars, and over these the commander-in-chief spoke with
complete cheerfulness of the general situation.

The English and French could not force the Dardanelles; no more could
they advance on land, and now that the submarines had arrived, the
fleet, which had been bothersome, would be taken care of.  He spoke with
becoming sorrow of the behavior of Italy, and did not mar this charming
little fete champetre with any remarks about American shipments of arms.
The ex-banker from Davenport also spoke of the Italians, and with a
rather disconcerting vigor, considering that they were recent allies.
The young aide-de-camp whom we had seen at the wharf declared that the
Turkish soldier was the best in the world.  It was a very different army
from that which had been defeated in the Balkan War, and the endurance
and tenacity of the individual soldier were beyond anything he had ever
seen.  A man would see a dozen of his comrades killed alongside him by a
high-explosive shell and only shrug his shoulders and say that now, at
any rate, they were all in paradise.

One continually hears similar comments, and there can be no doubt of the
Turkish soldier's bravery, and his unusual ability to endure hardship.
No one who has wrangled with a minor Turkish official, and experienced
the impassive resistance he is able to interpose to anything he doesn't
want to do, will underestimate what this quality might become,
translated into the rugged physique and impassivity of the common
soldier.

Westerners have heard so long of the Sick Man of Europe and his imminent
decease that they are likely to associate political with physical
weakness, and think that the pale, brooding, official type, familiar in
photographs, is the every-day Turk.  As a matter of fact, the every-day
Turk is tough-bodied and tough-spirited, used to hard living and hard
work.  The soldiers you see swinging up Pera Hill or in from a practice
march, dust-covered and sweating, and sending out through the dusty
cedars a wailing sort of chant as they come--these are as splendid-
looking fellows as you will see in any army in Europe.

They are dressed in businesslike fashion in dust-colored woollen tunics
and snug breeches with puttees, and wear a rather rakish-looking folded
cap--a sort of conventionalized turban not unlike the soldier hats
children make by folding newspapers.  This protects the eyes and the
back of the neck from the sun.  They are strong and well made, with
broad, high cheek-bones, a black mustache generally, and hawk eyes.
Some look as the Tartar warriors who swept over eastern Europe must have
looked; some, with their good-natured faces and vigorous compactness,
remind one of Japanese infantrymen.

During the early fighting on the peninsula the wounded came up to
Constantinople, after days on the way, in wagons, perhaps, over horrible
roads, in commandeered ferry-boats and freighters, yet one scarcely
heard a sound, a murmur of complaint.  Gray and gaunt, with the mud of
the trenches still on them, they would be helped into ambulances and
driven off to the hospitals, silent themselves and through crowds as
silent as those which had watched them march away a few weeks before.

From that little oasis in the pines we drove with a pass, signed by the
field-marshal himself, taking us to the heights above Ari Burnu, to a
point near the south front, a hill in the centre of the peninsula, from
which we could see both the Dardanelles and the Aegean, and to a camp
beneath it, where we were to spend the night.

It was dark when our wagon lurched into this camp, and a full hour
passed before the baffled Turks could convince themselves that our pass
and we were all that they should be, and put us into a tent.
Nevertheless, an orderly poked his head in good-naturedly enough at
seven next morning with tea and goat's cheese and brown bread, and our
captain host, a rather wildish-looking young man from the Asiatic
interior, came to say he had telephoned for permission to take us to the
heights above Kaba Tepe and Ari Burnu.

The camp was the office, so to speak, of the division commander, with
his clerks, telephone operator, commissary machinery, and so on, the
commander himself living at the immediate front.  It was like scores of
other camps hidden away in the hills--brush-covered tents dug into the
hillsides, looking like rather faded summer-houses; arbor-like
horse-sheds, covered with branches, hidden in ravines; every wagon, gun,
or piece of material that might offer a target to an aeroplane covered
with brush.  They were even painting gray horses that morning with a
brown dye.  A big 38-centimeter unexploded shell, dropped into a near-by
village by the Queen Elizabeth, and with difficulty pushed up on end now
by a dozen men, was shown us, and presently we climbed into the carriage
with the captain, and went rocking over the rough road toward the
Aegean.

The country reminded one of the California foot-hills in the dry season,
and me, particularly, of Honduras and the road from the Pacific up to
Tegucigalpa--gravelly brown hills and tangled valleys with sparse pines
and scrub-oaks; rocky slopes down which tinkled brown and white flocks
of sheep and goats; sunshine and scarlet poppies and fresh wind; and
over all a curious, quiet, busy web of war; a long shoulder, sharp
against the blue, with a brown camel train ambling down it; a ravine
with its arbor-like shelters for cavalry; wounded soldiers in carts, or
riding when they were able to ride; now and then an officer on his
cranky little stallion--the whole countryside bristling with defense.

Up one of the hot little valleys we climbed, left the carriage, and,
walking up a trail, cut into the bank, past men and horses hidden away
like bandits, and came at last to the top and several tents dug into the
rim of the hill.  It was the headquarters of Essad Pasha, defender of
Janina in the last war, and division commander in this sector of the
front.  He received us in his tent beside a table littered with maps and
papers--a grizzled, good-natured soldier, who addressed us in German,
and might indeed have passed for a German.  He apologized for the
cramped quarters, explaining that they were likely at any time to be
bombarded, and had to live in what was practically a trench, and then at
once, in the Turkish fashion, appeared an orderly with tiny cups of
sweet coffee.

Things were quiet at the moment, he said.  There was nothing but the
desultory crack-crack of snipers, coming from one knew not just where,
the every-day voice of the trenches--possibly the enemy were dismayed by
the loss of the Triumph.  He had seen it all, he said, from this very
spot--a sight one was not likely to see more than once in a lifetime.
The great ship had rolled over like a stricken whale.  Her torpedo-nets
were out, and as she turned over these nets closed down on the men
struggling in the water, and swept them under.  He, too, expressed
entire confidence in the Turk's ability to stop any farther advance and,
calling an aid, sent us to the periscope, which poked its two eyes
through a screen of pine branches a few yards away, and looked over the
parapet and down on the first-line trenches and the sea.

We were high above the Aegean and opposite the island of Imbros, which
lifted its hazy blue on the western horizon, and was used as a base by
part of the fleet.  To the south rose the promontory of Kaba Tepe,
cleared of the enemy now, our Turkish major said, and, stretching
northward from it past us and Ari Burnu, the curving rim of beach held
by the English.

More than a month had passed since the landing, and the heavy fighting
of the next few days, in which the Australians and New Zealanders, under
a hail of shrapnel churning up the water between ships and shore,
succeeded in getting a foothold; a month and more had passed, and,
though they still held their ground, apparently they could do no more.
The yellow line of their first trench twisted along the rim of the hill
below us, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, and directly behind it lay
the blue sea.  How much elbow-room they might have between their
trenches and the water one could not tell, so completely foreshortened
was the space between.  Cliffs rise from a narrow strip of foreshore
here, however, and apparently they had pushed just over the cliff rim--
the first hill above the sea.  Their tents, stores and landing-places
were out of sight.

Directly in front of the English trenches were the first-line Turkish
trenches, in some places not more than fifteen or twenty feet away, so
close, indeed, that when there was fighting they must have fought with
revolvers, hand-grenades, shovels, anything they could lay their hands
on.  At the moment it was quiet but for the constant Crack...
crack-crack! of snipers.

We could look down on the backs and heads of the Turkish soldiers;
except for a wisp of smoke rising here and there from some hidden camp
cook-stove, there was not a sign of life in the English trenches.
Snipers were attending to that.  Even here, in the second-line trenches
on top of the second hill, no one was allowed to show his head, and it
was all the more curious to see a squad of Turkish soldiers digging away
below as calmly as so many market-gardeners in a potato-field.  They
were running another trench behind the several that already lined the
slope, and must have been hidden by a rise of ground, though looking
down from above they seemed to be out in the open.

The position of the English did not seem enviable.  They had trenches
directly in front of them, and several hundred feet above them a second
line (from which we were looking) dominating the whole neighborhood. The
first-line Turkish trenches were too close to their own to be bombarded
from the ships, so that that preliminary advantage was cut off; the
second-line defenses, in the twisting gullies over the hill, could stand
bombardment about as well as could trenches anywhere--and behind them
was the water.  They were very literally between the devil and the deep
sea.

With the periscope we worked from Kaba Tepe on the left clear across the
ground in front of us to the north.  Over in the west, by hazy Imbros,
were five or six ships; there was another fleet in the north to-ward the
Gulf of Saros, and little black beetles of destroyers crawled here and
there across the blue sea floor.  The major took us into his tent for
cigarettes and another thimbleful of the coffee.  He, too, had been
educated in Germany, spoke German and French, and with his quick, bright
eyes and soft smile, would easily have passed for a Frenchman or
Italian.

They had just had a seven hours' armistice to bury the dead and bring in
the wounded, some of whom had been lying between the trenches for a
week.  The English had proposed the armistice; an officer had come out
from each side, and they had had a long pow-wow and drawn up a written
agreement with meticulous care lest there should be a misunderstanding
or danger of breaking the truce.  Everything, the major said, had been
most good-natured and correct.  The English had sent a "diplomat" in
addition to their military delegate, a civilian whom he had known well
in Constantinople.  It was altogether quaint and interesting, meeting
and talking with this man, with whom he might, so to speak, have been
playing bridge the night before--"Sehr nett! Sehr nett!" he said.  With
his soft smile.

While he was waiting to receive the English delegate, five shrapnel-
shells had been fired at him, he said; but he understood that it was a
mistake and made no protest, and during the truce a wounded Turk had
refused to take the water an English officer had tried to give him,
firing at the Englishman instead.  A little fanatical, perhaps, but
then--and again the major smiled in his charming way--"a little
fanaticism in one's soldiers is a good thing!"

No, one didn't care to be hanging on to that strip of beach with those
Australians and New Zealanders.  We drove back to camp for lunch, which
we had in the captain's little brush-covered balcony, set into the hill.
He did not eat, but showed us his photograph, very smooth and dapper,
compared with his bristling service face, taken with his two children,
one a little girl and the other a grave little boy, with a face like a
miniature pasha.  The captain came from the Asiatic side, near Broussa,
on the slopes of Olympus, and was all Turk, without any foreign frills
or a word of English, German, or French.  He took no lunch, but ate some
of the helva left over from Stamboul, and then started with us up the
hill behind the camp.

This was about midway in the peninsula, and, facing south from the
summit, we looked down over the twisting hills, pockmarked with holes
from shells and aeroplane bombs, to the Marmora on the left, and on the
right to the Aegean and hazy Imbros, and, in front, almost to the end of
the peninsula.  The sun was down in the west, and in its track a cruiser
steamed a mile or two out from the coast, while from under Ari Burnu,
where we had been that morning, a transport put out, rather recklessly
it seemed, and went straight across the open water.  From the south and
west there was the continual Br-r-umr-m... br-r-um-m! of big guns, and
over Kaba Tepe way we could see shells bursting.  We sat there for an
hour or so, waiting for one of the little specks out on the blue sea
floor to fire or sink, and then, as nothing happened, returned to camp.

An orderly brought us supper that night--mutton, bread and cheese,
haricots, stewed fruit, and coffee--and we dined on a little table
outside the tent, with the twilight turning to moonlight and the
sheep-bells tinkling against the opposite hill.  Soldiers were carrying
their suppers from the cook tent--not at all the bread-and-cigarette
diet with which one is always being told the hardy Turk is content.  He
may be content, but whenever I saw him eating he had meat and rice, and
often stewed fresh beans or fruit--certainly better food than most
Turkish peasants or artisans are accustomed to at home.

I sat outside watching the moon rise and listening to the distant
Crack... crack-crack! of rifle and machine-gun fire from over Ari Bumu
way. Evidently they were fighting in the trenches we had seen that
morning. The orderly who had served us, withdrawn a little way, was
standing like a statue in the dusk, hands folded in front of him, saying
his last prayer of the evening.  Beyond, from a bush-covered tent, came
the jingle of a telephone and 'the singsong voice of the young Turkish
operator relaying messages in German--"Ja!... Ja!... Kaba Tepe...
Ousedom Pasha... Morgen frith... Hier Multepe!... Ja!... Ja!"

And to this and the distant rattle of battle we went to sleep.




Chapter XII

Soghan-Dere And The Flier Of Ak-Bash



Next morning, after news had been telephoned in that the submarines had
got another battleship, the Majestic, we climbed again into the covered
wagon and started for the south front.  We drove down to the sea and
along the beach road through Maidos--bombarded several weeks before,
cross-country from the Aegean, and nothing now but bare, burnt walls--on
to Kilid Bahr, jammed with camels and ox-carts and soldiers, and then on
toward the end of the peninsula.

We were now beyond the Narrows and the Dardanelles.  To the left, a bit
farther out, were the waters in which the Irresistible, Ocean, and
Bouvet were sunk, and even now, off the point, ten or twelve miles away,
hung the smoke of sister ships.  We drove past the big guns of the
forts, past field-guns covering the shore, past masked batteries and
search-lights. Beside us, along the shore road, mule trains and ox-carts
and camel trains were toiling along in the blaze and dust with
provisions and ammunition for the front.  Once we passed four soldiers
carrying a comrade, badly wounded, on a stretcher padded with leaves.
After an hour or so of bumping we turned into a transverse valley, as
level almost as if it had been made for a parade-ground.

High hills protected it north and south; a little stream ran down the
centre--it might have been made for a storage base and camp.  More
brush-covered tents and arbors for horses were strung along the
hillside, one above the other sometimes, in half a dozen terraces.
We drove into the valley, got out and followed the orderly to a
brush-covered arbor, closed on every side but one, out of which came a
well set-up, bronzed, bright-eyed man of fifty or thereabout who
welcomed us like long-lost friends.

It was Colonel Shukri Bey, commander of the Fifteenth Division.  We were
the first correspondents who had pushed thus far, and as novel to him
apparently as he was charming to us.  He invited us into the little
arbor; coffee was brought and then tea, and, speaking German to Suydam
and French to me, he talked of the war in general and the operations at
the end of the peninsula with the greatest good humor and apparent
confidence in the ultimate result.

Our talk was continually punctuated by the rumble of the big guns over
the plateau to the south.  "That's ours"...  "That's theirs," he would
explain; and presently, with a young aide-de-camp as guide, we climbed
out of the valley and started down the plateau toward Sedd ul Bahr.  The
Allies' foothold here was much wider than that at An Burnu.  In the
general landing operations of April 25 and 26 (one force was sent ashore
in a large collier, from which, after she was beached, the men poured
across anchored lighters to the shore) the English and French had
established themselves in Sedd ul Bahr itself and along the cliffs on
either side.  This position was strengthened during the weeks of
fighting which followed until they appeared to be pretty firmly fixed on
the end of the peninsula, with a front running clear across it in a
general northwest line, several kilometres in from the point.  The
valley we had just left was Soghan-Dere, about seven miles from Sedd ul
Bahr, and the plateau across which we were walking led, on the right, up
to a ridge from which one could look down on the whole battle-field, or,
to the left, straight down into the battle itself.

The sun was getting down in the west by this time, down the road from
camp men were carrying kettles of soup and rice pilaf to their comrades
in the trenches, and from the end of the plateau came continuous
thundering and the Crack... crack... crack! of infantry fire.  The road
was strewn with fragments of shells from previous bombardments, and our
solicitous young lieutenant, fearing we might draw fire, pulled us
behind a bush for a minute or two, whenever the aeroplane, flying back
and forth in the west, seemed to be squinting at us.  The enemy could
see so little, he said, that whenever they saw anything at all they
fired twenty shots at it on principle.

For two miles, perhaps, we walked, until from the innocent-looking
chaparral behind us there was a roar, and a shell wailed away over our
heads out into the distance.

We could see the end of the peninsula, where the coast curves round from
Eski Hissariik toward Sedd ul Bahr, and two of the enemy's cruisers
steaming slowly back and forth under the cliffs, firing, presumably, as
they steamed.  Now they were hidden under the shore, now they came in
view, and opposite Eski Hissarlik swung round and steamed west again. In
front of us, just over the edge of the plateau which there began to
slope downward, were the trenches of the Turks' left wing, now under
bombardment.  The ridge just hid the shells as they struck, but we could
see the smoke from each, now a tall black column, like the "Jack
Johnsons" of the west, now a yellowish cloud that hung long afterward
like fog--and with it the continuous rattle of infantry fire.  Several
fliers were creeping about far up against the 'blue, looking for just
such hidden batteries as that which kept barking behind us, and out in
front and to the right came the low Br--r--um--m! of heavy guns.

Fighting like this had been going on for weeks, the ships having the
advantage of their big guns by day, the Turks recovering themselves,
apparently, at night.  They were on their own ground--a succession of
ridges, one behind the other--and they could not only always see, but
generally looked down on, an enemy who could not, generally, see them.
And the enemy's men, supplies, perhaps even his water--for this is a dry
country at all times, and after June there are almost no rains--must
come from his ships.  If English submarines were in the Marmora, so,
too, were German submarines off the Dardanelles, and if the Turks were
losing transports the English were losing battleships.

The situation held too many possibilities to make prophecy safe--I
merely record the fact that on the afternoon of May 27 I stood on the
plateau above Sedd ul Bahr, and perhaps five miles from it in an air
line, and still found myself a regrettable distance from the Allies'
front.

The sun was shining level down the road as we returned to camp, and
soldiers were still tramping peacefully up to the front with their
kettles of food.  Meanwhile the colonel had prepared a little exhibition
for us.  Six or eight soldiers stood in line, each with a dish and
spoon, and in the dish a sample of the food for that night.  We started
at the top and tasted each: soup, mutton, stewed green beans, new-baked
bread, stewed plums, and a particularly appetizing pilaf, made out of
boiled whole wheat and raisins.  Everything was good, and the beaming
colonel declared that the first thing in war was to keep your soldiers
well fed. We dined with him in his tent: soup and several meat courses,
and cherry compote, and at the end various kinds of nuts, including the
cracked hazelnuts, commoner in Turkey than bananas and peanuts at home.


He hoped to come to America some day, and thought we must soon develop
the military strength to back our desires for peace, unless there were
to be continual wars.  New York's climate, the cost of fruit in Germany,
and other peaceful subjects were touched on, and the colonel said that
it was an honor to have us with him--ours we brilliantly responded--and
a pleasant change from the constant talk and thought of war.

He had been six years in the field now, what with the Italian and Balkan
campaigns, and that was a good deal of war at a stretch.

After excusing ourselves, though the amiable Turk said that he was in no
hurry, we were led to a sort of tent de luxe, lined in scarlet with
snaky decorations in white, and when the young aid discovered that we
had brought no beds with us, he sent out and in a moment had not only
cots and blankets, but mattresses and sheets and pillows and
pillow-cases. He asked if we had fathers and mothers alive at home, and
brothers and sisters, and if we, too, had been soldiers.  It surprised
and puzzled him that we had not, and that our army was so small.  He was
only twenty-two and a lieutenant, and he had a brother and father also
in the army. With a great air of mystery he had his orderly dig a bottle
of cognac out from his camp chest, and after we had drunk each other's
health, he gave us his card with his name in Turkish and French.  He
brought a table and put on it a night candle in a saucer of water, a
carafe of drinking water, and gave me a pair of slippers--in short, he
did for us in that brush-covered camp in the Gallipoli hills everything
that could be done for a guest in one's own house.

You can scarcely know what this meant without having known the
difficulties of mere existence once you left Constantinople and got into
the war zone, and Colonel Shukri Bey and Lieutenant Ahmed Akif will be
remembered by at least two Americans when any one talks of the terrible
Turk.

I awoke shortly after daylight, thinking I heard an aeroplane strumming
in the distance, and was drowsily wondering whether or not it was fancy,
when a crash echoed up the valley.  We both hurried out.  It was sunup,
a delicious morning, and far up against the southern sky the little
speck was sailing back toward the west. There was a flash of silver just
under the flier--it was an English biplane--and a moment later another
crash farther away.  Neither did any damage.  A few minutes later we
were looking at the remains of the bomb and propeller-like wings, whose
whirling, as it falls, opens a valve that permits it to explode on
striking its mark.  Until it had fallen a certain number of metres, we
were told, mere striking the ground would not explode it--a device to
protect the airman in case of accident to his machine or if he is forced
to make a quick landing.  In the fresh, still morning, with the camp
just waking up and the curious Turkish currycombs clinking away over by
the tethered horses, our aerial visitor added only a pleasant excitement
to this life in the open, and we went on with our dressing with great
satisfaction, little dreaming how soon we were to look at one of those
little flying specks quite differently.

We breakfasted with the colonel in his arbor on bread and ripe olives
and tea, and walked with him round the camp, through a hospital and into
an old farmhouse yard, where the gunsmiths were going over stacks of
captured guns and the damaged rifles of the wounded, while the bees left
behind in some clumsy old box hives buzzed away as of yore.  Wiser than
men, the colonel observed.  There were English Enfields and French
rifles of the early nineties, and a mitrailleuse to which the Turks had
fitted a new wooden base.  There were rifles with smashed barrels, with
stocks bored through by bullets, clean-cut holes that must have gone on
through the men who held them--live men like ourselves; quick choking
instants of terror the ghosts of ---- which we were poking and peering
into there in the warm sunshine!

We said good-by to the colonel, for our passes took us but to the
valley, and he had stretched a point in sending us down the plateau the
evening before, and I bumped back to Kilid Bahr.  We did not want to
leave this part of the world without a sight of Troy, and as we had duly
presented ourselves in Gallipoli, and were now by way of coming from it
rather than Constantinople, and the Turkish official to whom the orderly
took us wrote, without question, a permission to cross to Chanak Kale,
we sailed with no misgivings.  Alas for Troy and looking down on a modern
battle from the heights of Ilium! A truculent major of gendarmes hurried
us from the Asiatic shore as if we had come to capture it.  We might not
land, we might not write a note to the commandant to see if the
permission to stop in Chanak, for which we had wired to Constantinople
the day before, had arrived; we might not telephone--we must go back to
Europe, and write or telephone from there.

So back to Europe, and after consultation and telephoning, back to Asia
again, and this time we succeeded in effecting a landing and an audience
with the commander of the defenses of the Dardanelles, Djevad Pasha.  He
was sitting under a tree in a garden looking out over the sea gate,
which, with the aid of his two German colleagues, Ousedom Pasha and
Merten Pasha, it was his task to keep shut--a trim Young Turk, more
polished and "European" than the major of gendarmes, but no less firm.
An American's wish to see the Troy he might never be so near again bored
him excessively.  We could not stay--we might not even spend the night.
There was a boat that evening, and on it we must go.

Gendarmes guarded us while we waited--we who the night before had slept
in a scarlet-lined tent!--and gendarmes hung at our heels as we and
three patient hamals with the baggage tramped ignominiously through
Chanak Kale's ruined streets.  The boat we went by was the same little
side-wheeler we had come down on, crowded with wounded now, mud-stained,
blood-stained, just as they had come from the trenches across the water,
with no place to lie but the bare deck.  The stifling hold was packed
with them; they curled up about the engine-room gratings--for it was
cold that night--yet there was no complaint.  A tired sigh now and then,
a moan of weariness, and the soldier wrapped his army overcoat a little
closer about him, curled up like a dog on a door-mat, and left the rest
to fate.  A big, round, yellow moon climbed up out of Asia and poured
its silver down on them and on the black hills and water, still as some
inland lake.

The side-wheeler tied up at Ak-Bash for the night, and it was not until
the middle of the next morning that it was decided that she should cross
and leave her wounded at Lapsaki instead of going on up to
Constantinople. We lugged our baggage off and hunted up our old friend,
the Hamburg-American captain, to see what might be done till some other
craft appeared.  He finally put us aboard a sort of enlarged tug which
might be going up that afternoon or evening.

It was about midday.  The sun blazing down on the crowded fiat; on
boxes, sacks, stevedores wrapped up in all the variegated rags of the
East shuffling in and out of the ships; on gangs digging, piling lumber,
boiling water, cooking soup; on officers in brown uniforms and brown
lamb's-wool caps; on horses, ox-teams, and a vast herd of sheep, which
had just poured out of a transport and spread over the plain, when from
the hill came two shots of warning.  An enemy aeroplane was coming!

The gangs scattered like water-bugs when a stone is thrown into the
water.  They ran for the hill, dropped into trenches; to the beach and
threw themselves flat on the sand; into the water--all, as they ran,
looking up over their shoulders to where, far overhead, whirred steadily
nearer that tiny, terrible hawk.

A hidden battery roared and--pop!--a little puff of cotton floated in
the sky under the approaching flier.  Another and another--all the
nervous little batteries in the hills round about were coming to our
rescue.  The bird-man, safely above them, drew on without flinching.  We
had looked up at aeroplanes many times before and watched the pretty
chase of the shrapnel, and we leaned out from under the awning to keep
the thing in view.  "Look," I said to Suydam; "she's coming right over
us!" And then, all at once, there was a crash, a concussion that hit the
ear like a blow, a geyser of smoke and dust and stones out on the flat
in front of us. Through the smoke I saw a horse with its pack undone and
flopping under its belly, trotting round with the wild aimlessness of
horses in the bull-ring after they have been gored.  Men were running,
and, in a tangle of wagons, half a dozen oxen, on the ground, were
giving a few spasmodic kicks.

Men streaked up from the engine-room and across the wharf--after all,
the wharf would be the thing he'd try for--and I found myself out on the
flat with them just as there came another crash, but this time over by
the Barbarossa across the bay.  Black smoke was pouring from the Turkish
cruiser as she got under way, and, with the shrapnel puffs chasing
hopelessly after, the flier swung to the southward and out of right.

Officers were galloping about yelling orders; over in the dust where the
bomb had struck, a man was sawing furiously away at the throats of the
oxen (there were seven of them, and there would be plenty of beef in
camp that night at any rate); there was a dead horse, two badly wounded
men and a hundred feet away a man lying on his face, hatless, just as he
had been blown there: dead, or as good as dead.  It appeared that two
fliers had come from opposite directions and most of the crowd had seen
but the one, while the other dropped the bomb.  It had struck just
outside the busiest part of the camp, aimed very likely at the stores
piled there. It had made a hole only five or six feet wide and two or
three feet deep, but it had blown everything in the neighborhood out
from it, as the captain had said.  Holes you could put your fist in were
torn in the flanks of the oxen by flying stones and chunks of metal, and
the tires of some of the wagons, sixty or seventy feet away, had been
cut through like wax.

The ground was cleared, the men returned to work, and we even went in
swimming, but at every unexpected noise one looked upward, and when
about five o'clock the crowd scattered again, I will confess that I
watched that little speck buzzing nearer, on a line that would bring him
straight overhead, with an interest considerably less casual than any I
had bestowed on these birds before.  There we were, confined in our
little amphitheatre; there was that diabolical bird peering down at us,
and in another minute, somewhere in that space, would come that
earth-shaking explosion--a mingling of crash and vohou'! There was no
escaping it, no dodging it, nothing to get under but empty air.

I had decided that the beach, about a hundred yards away from the
wharfs, was the safest place and hurried there; but the speck overhead,
as if anticipating me, seemed to be aiming for the precise spot.  It is
difficult under such circumstances to sit tight, reasoning calmly that,
after all, the chances of the bomb's not landing exactly there are a
good many to one--you demand at least the ostrich-like satisfaction of
having something overhead.  So I scurried over to the left to get out
from under what seemed his line of flight, when what should he do but
begin to turn!

This was really rubbing it in a bit.  To fly across as he had that
morning was one thing, but to pen one up in a nice little pocket in the
hills, and then on a vertical radius of three or four thousand feet, to
circle round over one's head--anything yet devised by the human
nightmare was crude and immature to this.  But was it overhead? If
behind, and travelling at fifty or sixty miles an hour, the bomb would
carry forward--just enough probably to bring it over; and if apparently
over, still the bomb would have been several seconds in falling--it
might be right on top of us now! Should we run backward or forward: Here
was a place, in between some grain-bags.  But the grain-bags were open
toward the wharf, and the wharf was what he was aiming at, and a plank
blown through you--No, the trench was the thing, but--Quick, he is
overhead!

The beach, the bags, the ditch, all the way round the camp, and Suydam
galloping after.  Somewhere in the middle of it a hideous whiffling wail
came down the sky: Trrou... trrou... trou!--and then a crash! The bomb
had hit the water just off the end of the pier.  I kept on running.
There was another Trrou...  trrou! another geyser of water, and the bird
had flown on.

I was on the edge of the camp by this time and that strange afternoon
ended, when one of a gang of ditch-diggers, swathed in bright-colored
rags, addressed me in English, a Greek-Turk from the island of Marmora,
who, climbing out of the trench in which he and his gang had been
hiding, announced that he had lived in New York for five years, in
Fortieth Street, and worked for the Morgan Line, and begged that I get,
him out of this nerve-racking place and where he belonged, somewhere on
board ship.  There were crowds like him--Greeks, Armenians, Turks, not
wanted as soldiers but impressed for this sort of work.  They were
unloading fire-wood long after dark that night, when our boat at last
got under way.  We paused till sunup at Lapsaki, crept close to shore
through the Marmora, and once through floating wreckage--boards and a
galvanized-iron gasolene tank--apparently from some transport sunk by a
submarine, and after dark, with lights out as we had started, round the
corner of Stamboul.




Chapter XIII

A War Correspondents' Village



The press department of the Foreign Office in Vienna duly presented the
application to the press bureau of the Ministry of War; the latter
conveyed it to the "Kaiserliche und Konigliche Armee-Oberkommando
Kriegs-Presse-Quartier," a day's railroad journey nearer the front; the
commandant made his recommendation to the chief of the General Staff.
The permission itself percolated back to Vienna presently, and early
next morning I took the Teschen express.

It was one of those semi-military trains which run into this region
behind the front--officers and couriers, civilians with military passes,
just before we started a young officer and his orderly saying good-by to
their wives. He was one of those amiable, blue-eyed young Austrians who
seem a sort of cross between German and French, and the orderly was much
such another man, only less neatly made and sensitive, and there were
the same differences in their wives and their good-bys.

The orderly saluted his officer, turned, clicked his heels, and saluted
his officer's lady before he embraced his solid wife.  The latter,
rather proud to be in such company, beamed like a stove as the two men
looked down from the car steps, but the girlish wife of the captain bit
her lips, looked nervously from side to side, winked faster and faster
until the tears began to roll down her cheeks.  Then the train started,
the orderly waving his hand, but the young officer, leaning quickly
forward, drew his wife toward him and kissed her on one of the wet
eyelids.

We crossed into Hungary, rolled northeastward for five or six hours into
the Vag valley, with its green hills and vineyards and ruined castles,
and finally came to a little place consisting almost entirely of
consonants, in the Tatra foot-hills.  Two blond soldiers in blue-gray
saluted, took my luggage, showed me to a carriage, and drove to a
village about a mile away--a little white village with a factory chimney
for the new days, a dingy chateau for the old, and a brook running
diagonally across the square, with geese quacking in it and women
pounding clothes.

It was mid-afternoon, yet lunch had been kept waiting, and the officer
who received me said he was sorry I had bothered to eat on the train. He
told me where lodgings had been made ready, and that an orderly would
take me there and look after my personal needs.  They dined at eight,
and at five, if I felt like it, I would probably find some of them in
the coffee-house by the chateau.  Meanwhile the first thing to do was to
take one's cholera vaccination--for no one could go to the Galician
front without being geimpft--and just as soon as I could take the
second, a week later, we should start for the Russian front.  In this
fashion were strangers welcomed to the "Presse-Quartier," or rather to
that part of it--this little Hungarian village--in which correspondents
lived during the intervals of their trips to the front.  The Austrians
have pleasant manners. Their court is, next to that of Spain, the most
formal in Europe, and ordinary life still retains many of the older
courtesies.  Every time I came into my hotel in Vienna the two little
boys at the door jumped up and extended their caps at arm's length; an
assistant porter, farther in, did the same; the head porter behind the
desk often followed, and occasionally all four executed the manoeuvre at
once, so that it was like a musical comedy but for the music.

The ordinary salutation in Vienna, as common as our "hello!" is "I have
the honor" (Ich habe die Ehre!).  In Hungary--of course one mustn't tell
a Hungarian that he is "Austrian"--people tell you that they are your
humble servants before they say good morning, and those who really are
humble servants not only say "Kiss the hands," but every now and then do
it.  It was natural, therefore, perhaps, that the Austro-Hungarians
should treat war correspondents--often, in these days, supposed to be
extinct--not only seriously but with a certain air.  They had not only
the air but indeed a more elaborate organization than any of the other
belligerents.

At the beginning of the war England permitted no correspondents at all
at the front.  France was less rigid, yet it was months before groups of
observers began to be taken to the trenches.

Germany took correspondents to the front from the first, but these
excursions came at irregular intervals, and admission to them involved a
good deal of competitive wire-pulling between the correspondents
themselves.  The Austro-Hungarians, on the other hand, prepared from the
first for a large number of civilian observers, including news and
special writers, photographers, illustrators, and painters, and, to
handle them satisfactorily, organized a special department of the army,
this Presse-Quartier, once admitted to which--the fakirs and
fly-by-nights were supposed to be weeded out by the preliminary red tape
--they were assumed to be serious workmen and treated as the army's
guests.

The Presse-Quartier was divided into two sections: an executive section,
with a commandant responsible for the arrangement of trips to the
various fronts, and the general business of censorship and publicity;
and an entertainment section, so to speak, also with its commandant,
whose business it was to board, lodge, and otherwise look after
correspondents when they were not on trips to the front.  At the time I
visited the Presse-Quartier, the executive section was in Teschen; the
correspondents lived in Nagybiesce, two or three hours' railroad journey
away.

It was to this village--the most novel part of the scheme--that I had
come that afternoon, and here some thirty or forty correspondents were
living, writing past adventures, setting forth on new ones, or merely
inviting their souls for the moment under a regime which combined the
functions of tourists' bureau, rest-cure, and a sort of military club.

For the time being they were part of the army--fed, lodged, and
transported at the army's expense, and unable to leave without formal
military permission.  They were supposed to "enlist for the whole war,"
so to speak, and most of the Austro-Hungarian and German correspondents
had so remained--some had even written books there--but observers from
neutral countries were permitted to leave when they felt they had seen
enough.

Isolated thus in the country, the only mail the military field post, the
only telegrams those that passed the military censor, correspondents
were as "safe" as in Siberia.  They, on the other hand, had the
advantage of an established position, of living inexpensively in
pleasant surroundings, where their relations with the censor and the
army were less those of policemen and of suspicious character than of
host and guest. To be welcomed here, after the usual fretful dangling
and wire-pulling in War Office anterooms and city hotels--with hills and
ruined castles to walk to, a brook rippling under one's bedroom window,
and all the time in the world--seemed idyllic enough.

We were quartered in private houses, and as there was one man to a
family generally, he was put in the villager's room of honor, with a
tall porcelain stove in the corner, a feather bed under him, and another
on top.  Each man had a soldier servant who looked after boots and
luggage, kept him supplied with cigars and cigarettes from the Quartier
commissariat--for a paternal government included even tobacco!--and
charmed the simple republican heart by whacking his heels together
whenever spoken to and flinging back "Jawohl!"

We breakfasted separately, whenever we felt like it, on the rolls with
the glass of whipped cream and coffee usual in this part of the world;
lunched and dined--officers and correspondents--together.  There were
soldier waiters who with military precision told how many pieces one
might take, and on every table big carafes of Hungarian white wine,
drunk generally instead of water.  For beer one paid extra.

The commandant and his staff, including a doctor, and the officer guides
not on excursions at the moment, sat at the head of the long U-shaped
table.  Any one who came in or went out after the commandant was seated
was supposed to advance a bit into this "U," catch his eye, bow, and
receive his returning nod.  The silver click of spurs, of course,
accompanied this salute when an officer left the room, and the
Austro-Hungarian and German correspondents generally snapped their heels
together in semi-military fashion.  All our goings and comings, indeed,
were accompanied by a good deal of manner.  People who had seen each
other at breakfast shook hands formally half an hour later in the
village square, and one bowed and was bowed to and heard the singsong...
"'habe die Ehre!" a dozen times a day.

Nagybiesce is in northern Hungary, and the peasants round about were
Slovaks--sturdy, solid, blond people with legs the same size all the way
down.  Many of them still reaped with scythes and thrashed on the barn
floor with old-fashioned flails, and one afternoon there was a curious
plaintive singing under my window--a party of harvesters, oldish men and
brown, barefooted peasant girls, who had finished their work on a
neighboring farm, and were crossing our village on their way to their
own.

The Quartier naturally stirred things up a good deal in Nagybiesce.
There was one week when we could not go into the street without being
surrounded by little girls with pencils and cards asking for our
"autogram." The candy shop kept by two girl wives whose husbands were at
the front did a vast business, and the young women had somebody to talk
to all day long.  The evening the news came that Warsaw had fallen,
candles were lighted in all the windows on the square, and the band with
the villagers behind it came to serenade us as we were at dinner.  The
commandant bowed from the window, but a young Hungarian journalist
leaned out and without a moment's hesitation poured forth a torrent for
fully fifteen minutes with scarce a pause for breath.  I told him that
such impromptu oratory seemed marvellous, but he dismissed it as
nothing.  "I'm politiker!" he explained, with a wave of his hand.

One day a man came into lunch with the news that he was off on the best
trip he'd had yet--he was going back to Vienna for his skis, to go down
into the Tyrol and work along the glaciers to the battery positions.
Another man, a Budapest painter, started off for an indefinite stay with
an army corps in Bessarabia.  He was to be, indeed, part of the army for
the time being, and all his work belonged to the army first. As this is
being written a number of painters sent out on similar expeditions have
been giving an exhibition in Vienna--portraits and pencil sketches much
like those Frederic Remington used to make.  Foreigners not intending to
remain in Austria-Hungary could not expect such privileges, naturally;
but if they were admitted to the Quartier at all they were sent on the
ordinary group excursions like the home correspondents themselves.
Indeed, the wonder was--in view of the comparative ease with which
neutral correspondents drifted about Europe: the naivete, to put it
mildly, with which the wildest romances had been printed in American
newspapers, that we were permitted to see as much as we did.

When a group started for the front, it left Nagybiesce in its own car,
which, except when the itinerary included some large city--Lemberg, for
instance--served as a little hotel until they came back again.  The car
was a clean, second-class coach, of the usual European compartment kind,
two men to a compartment, and at night they bunked on the long
transverse seats comfortably enough.  We took one long trip of a
thousand miles or so in this way, taking our own motor, on a separate
flat car, and even an orderly servant for each man.  Each of these
groups was, of course, accompanied by an officer guide--several were
detailed at the Quartier for this special duty--whose complex and
nerve-racking task it was to answer all questions, make all
arrangements, report to each local commandant, pass sentries, and
comfortably waft his flock of civilians through the maze of barriers
which cover every foot, so to speak, of the region near the front.

The things correspondents were permitted to see differed from those seen
on the other fronts less in kind than in quantity.  More trips were
made, but there is and can be little place for a civilian on a "front,"
any spot in which, over a strip several miles wide, from the heavy
artillery positions of one side to the heavy artillery of the other, may
be in absolute quiet one minute and the next the centre of fire.  There
is no time to bother with civilians during an offensive, and, if a
retreat is likely, no commander wishes to have country described which
may presently be in the hands of the enemy.  Hidden batteries in action,
reserves moving up, wounded coming back, fliers, trenches quiet for the
moment--this is about as close to actual fighting as the outsider, under
ordinary circumstances, can expect to get on any front.  The difference
in Austria-Hungary was that correspondents saw these things, and the
battle-fields and captured cities, not as mere outsiders, picked up from
a hotel and presently to be dropped there again, but as, in a sense, a
part of the army itself.  They had their commandant to report to, their
"camp" and "uniform"--the gold-and-black Presse-Quartier arm band--and
when they had finished one excursion they returned to headquarters with
the reasonable certainty that in another ten days or so they would start
out again.




Chapter XIV

Cannon Fodder



At the head of each iron bed hung the nurse's chart and a few words of
"history." These histories had been taken down as the wounded came in,
after their muddy uniforms had been removed, they had been bathed, and
could sink, at last, into the blessed peace and cleanness of the
hospital bed.  And through them, as through the large end of a
telescope, one looked across the hot summer and the Hungarian fields,
now dusty and yellow, to the winter fighting and freezing in the
Carpathians.

"Possibly," the doctor said, "you would like to see one of these cases."
The young fellow was scarce twenty, a strapping boy with fine teeth and
intelligent eyes.  He looked quite well; you could imagine him pitching
hay or dancing the czardas, with his hands on his girl's waist and her
hands on his, as these Hungarian peasants dance, round and round, for
hours together.  But he would not dance again, as both his feet had been
amputated at the ankle and it was from the stumps that the doctor was
unwrapping the bandages.  The history read: While doing sentry duty on
the mountains on March 28, we were left twenty-four hours without being
relieved and during that time my feet were frozen.

The doctor spoke with professional briskness.  He himself would not have
tried to save any of the foot--better amputate at once at the line of
demarcation, get a good flap of healthy tissue and make a proper stump.
"That scar tissue'll never heal--it'll always be tender and break when
he tries to use it; he has been here four months now, and you can see
how tender it is."

The boy scowled and grinned as the doctor touched the scar.  For our
English and those things under the sheet he seemed to have much the same
feeling of strangeness: both were something foreign, rather
uncomfortable.  He looked relieved when the bandages were on again and
the white sheet drawn up.  "We had dozens of them during the winter--one
hundred and sixty-three frozen feet and one hundred frozen hands in this
hospital alone.  They had to be driven back from the front in carts, for
days sometimes.  When they got here their feet were black--literally
rotting away.  Nothing to do but let the flesh slough off and then
amputate."

We strolled on down the sunny, clean-smelling wards.  The windows were
open.  They were playing tennis in the yard below; on a bench under a
tree a young Hungarian soldier, one arm in a sling, and a girl were
reading the same book.  Sunday is a very genial day in Budapest. The
café tables are crowded, orchestras playing everywhere, and in dozens of
pavilions and on the grass and gravel outside them peasants and the
humbler sort of people are dancing.  The Danube--beautiful if not blue
--flows through the town.

Pest is on one bank and Buda on the other, beside a wooded hill climbing
steeply up to the old citadel, somewhat as the west bank of the Hudson
climbs up to Storm King.

I first came on the Danube at Budapest in the evening after dinner and
saw, close in front of me, what looked to be some curious electric-light
sign.  It seemed odd in war time, and I stared for a moment before I saw
that this strange design was really the black, opposite bank with its
zigzag streams of lamps.

Few cities have so naturally beautiful a drop-curtain, and, instead of
spoiling it with gas-works' and grain-elevators as we should do, the
Hungarians have been thoughtful enough to build a tree-covered promenade
between the Danube and the string of hotels which line the river.  In
front of each of these hotels is a double row of tables and a hedge, and
then the trees, under which, while the orchestras play, all Pest comes
to stroll and take the air between coffee-time and the late Hungarian
dinner.

Hundreds of cities have some such promenade, but few so genial and cosey
a one as that of Budapest--not the brittle gayety of some more
sophisticated capitals, but the simpler light-heartedness of a people
full of feeling, fond of music and talk, and ready to share all they
have with a stranger.

The bands play tunes from our musical comedies, but every now and then
--and this is what the people like best--they swing into the strange,
rolling, passionate-melancholy music of the country.  Wherever the
tzigany music comes from, it seems Hungarian, at any rate--fiery and
indolent and haphazard, rolling on without any particular rhyme or
reason, now piling up and now sinking indolently back as the waves roll
up and fall back on the sand.  People will listen to it for hours, and
you can imagine one of those simpler daredevils--a hussar, for instance
--in his blue-braided jacket, red breeches, and big cavalry boots,
listening and drinking, and thinking of the fights he has won and the
girls he has lost, getting sorry for himself at last and breaking his
glass and weeping, and being very happy indeed.

There is a club in Budapest--at once a club and a luxurious villa almost
too crowded with rugs and fine furniture.  When you go to play tennis,
instead of the ordinary locker-room one is ushered into a sort of
boudoir filled with Chippendale furniture.  It is a delightful place to
get exercise, with tea served on a garden table between sets; yet, when
I was in Budapest, the place was almost deserted.  It was not, it
seemed, the season that people came there, although just the season to
use such a place.  For six weeks they came here, and nothing could bring
them back again.  They did things only in spurts, so to speak: "They go
off on hunting trips to the ends of the earth, bring back animals for
the Zoo, then off to their country places and--flop! Then there is a
racing season, and they play polo and race for a while, then--flop!"

I have never seen such interesting photographers' show-windows as there
are in Budapest.  Partly this is because the photographers are good, but
partly it must he in the Hungarians themselves--such vivid, interesting,
unconventional faces.  These people look as if they ought to do the
acting and write the music and novels and plays and paint the pictures
for all the rest of the world.  If they haven't done so, it must be
because, along with their natural talent, they have this indolence and
tendency to flop and not push things through.

It was this Budapest, so easy-going and cheerful, that came drifting
through the hospital windows, with the faint sound of band music that
Sunday afternoon.

On all the park benches and the paths winding up to the citadel, in a
hundred shady corners and walks, soldiers, with canes and bandages, were
sitting with their best girls, laughing with them, holding hands.  The
boys, with miniature flower-gardens in their hats, tinselled grass and
red-white-and-green rosettes, could sit with their arms round their
sweethearts as much as they wanted to, for everybody knew that they had
just been called to the colors and this was their farewell.

I looked over more of the histories--not in the ward, where one was, of
course, more or less a nuisance, but in the room where they were filed
in hundred lots.  Some of the men were still in the hospital, some had
died, most of them gone back to the front.  There were many of these
foot cases: "While on outpost duty in the Carpathians during a
snow-storm I felt the lower part of my body becoming powerless.  Not
being able to walk, was carried back and put on train.  Next day we were
stopped, because Russians were ahead of us, and obliged to leave train.
Waited two days without food or medical attention; then put on train for
Budapest."

"My regiment was in the Carpathians, and on or about January 20 my feet
refused to obey.  I held out for four days and then reported ill.  Toes
amputated, right foot."

"I belong to German Grenadier Regiment No. ----.  On February 6, while
sleeping in open snow, I felt numbed in feet.  Put on light duty, but on
8th reported ill and doctor declared feet frozen."

"March 12, during heavy snowstorm, Russians attacked us.  One of my
comrades was shot in stomach, and I took off my gloves to bandage him.
All at once our regiment sounded 'Storm!' and I had to rush off to
attack, forgetting my gloves.  I had both my hands frozen."

"I am field-cornet of the---German Grenadiers.  I was, since the
beginning of the war, in Belgium and France, and at end of November sent
to Russian Poland and January 1 to Carpathians.  On February 6, while
retiring to prevent the Russians surrounding us, I was shot In thigh at
1,500 yards distance and fell.  Within a few minutes I got two more
shots."

"That's just like a German," commented the nurse.  "They always begin by
telling just who they are and what they were doing.  A Hungarian would
probably just say that he was up in the mountains and it was cold. These
soldiers are like big children, some of them, and they tell us things
sometimes."

"While in Carpathians on January 20 I reported to my lieutenant, feet
frozen.  He said dig a hole and when you are quite frozen we will put
you in.  I stood it another seven days, then we had to retreat.  I went
myself to the doctor; my feet were then black already.  Debreczen
hospital six days, then here.  Both amputated."

The feet were gone, at any rate, whatever the lieutenant may have said.
We returned to the German field-cornet.

"He came in walking--a fine, tall man.  We had only one place to bathe
the men in, then: a big tank--for everything was improvised and there
was no hot-water heater--and one of the doctors told him he could use
his own bath up-stairs, but he said no, he'd stay with his men.  He
seemed to be getting on all right, then one morning the doctor touched
his leg and he heard that crackling sound--it was gas infection.  They
just slit his leg down from hip to knee, but it was no use--he died in
three hours.  Practically all the wounds were infected when the men came
in, but suppose he could have picked up something in that bath?  He came
in walking."

Through most of the German histories one could see the German armies
turning now this way, now that, against their "world of enemies," as
they say: "I belong to---Regiment German Infantry and am stationed since
March 1 in Carpathians.  I am in active service since the start, having
done Belgium, France, and Russia."

"While at battle of Luneville, with troop of about forty men stormed
battery, capturing them, for which decorated with Iron Cross.  Shifted
to Carpathians.  After march in severe cold, fingers and feet frozen."

"While in France attacking I was hit in head by shrapnel.  In hospital
fourteen days, then sent to Carpathians on December 7 with
Austro-Hungarian troops.  Wounded in arm and while creeping back hit
five times in fifteen minutes.  Lay all afternoon in trenches."

"I think those are the three who came in together one night, all singing
'Die Wacht am Rhein'; they all had the Iron Cross.  They were a noisy
lot. They all got well and went back to the front again."

Here were three pictures from the Galician fighting: "Wounded by
shrapnel near Przemysl, bandaged by comrade, and helped to house; only
occupant old woman.  Lay on straw two days, no food.  Called to men
passing; they had me moved in cart seventy miles to hospital. Stayed
eight days; started on train, then taken off for three days, then to
Budapest."

"During fighting at Lupkow Pass I was wounded by two pistol-shots.
First one, fired by Russian officer, hit me in chest. Ran back to my
company and in darkness taken by one of our officers for Russian and
shot in arm."

"While digging trenches struck by a rifle-bullet in two places.  Lay in
trench two hours when found by Russian infantrymen, who hurriedly
dressed me and put me out of firing-range on horse blanket in old
trench.  Later found by our soldiers, carried to base, and dressed
there, then to field-hospital, then in cart to railroad station.  Went
few kilometres by train, but became so ill had to be taken off for two
days, then sent to Budapest. Seventeen days.  Two months in hospital;
returned to front."

"We called that man 'professor,'" said the nurse.  "He was a teacher of
some sort.  There was a boy here at the same time, a Pole, but he could
speak English: just out of the university--Cracow, I think.  He was in
Serbia, and was shot through the temple; he lost the sight of both
eyes."

Several in the Serbian fighting had struck river mines.  One, who had
been ordered to proceed across the River Save near Sabac, remarked that
he was "told afterward" they had struck a floating mine and that seven
were killed and thirteen wounded.  The Serbian campaign was not
pleasant.  The Serbians do not hold up their hands, as the big,
childlike Russians sometimes seem to have done.  They fight as long as
they can stand.  Then there was disease and lack of medical supplies and
service. '"They came in covered with mud and with fractures done up with
twigs--just as they had been dressed on the field.  Sometimes a
fractured hip would be bound with a good-sized limb from a tree reaching
all the way from the man's feet to his waist."

Yet the wonder is what nature and the tough constitutions of these young
men will do with intelligent help.  We came to what they call a "face
case." "Wounded November 4 in Galicia by rifle-fire on right side of
face and right hand; dressed by comrade, then lost consciousness until
arrived here.  ('He probably means,' explained the nurse, 'that he was
delirious and didn't realize the time.') Physical examination--right
side of face blown away; lower jaw broken into several pieces, extending
to left side; teeth on lower jaw loose; part of upper jaw gone, and
tongue exposed.  Infected.  Operated--several pieces of lower jaw
removed and two pieces wired together in front."

From the desk drawer the nurse picked out several photographs--X-ray
pictures of little round shrapnel bullets embedded in flesh, of bone
splintered by rifle-bullets and shot through the surrounding flesh as if
they had been exploded; one or two black feet cut off above the ankles;
one of a group of convalescents standing on the hospital steps.

"There he is," she said, pointing-to a man with a slightly crooked jaw--
the man whose history we had just read.  "We saved it.  It isn't such a
bad face, after all."

The worst wounds, of course, do not come to a hospital so far from the
front as this--they never leave the battle-field at all.  In Turkey, for
instance, where travelling is difficult, very few of those shot through
the trunk of the body ever got as far as Constantinople--nearly all of
the patients were wounded in the head, arms, or legs.  On over a
thousand patients in this Budapest hospital the following statistics are
based: Rifle wounds, 1,095; shrapnel, 138; shell, 2; bayonet, 2; sabre,
1; hand-grenade, 1; frozen feet, 163; frozen hands, 100; rheumatism, 65;
typhoid, 38; pneumonia, 15; tetanus, 5; gas infection, 5.  Deaths, 19--
septicemia, 7; pneumonia, tetanus, typhoid, 1.  It was dark when I
started down-stairs, through that warm, brooding stillness of a hospital
at night.  The ward at the head of the stairs was hushed now, and the
hall lamp, shining across the white trousers of an orderly dozing in his
chair within the shadow of the door and past the screen drawn in front
of it, dimly lit the foot of the line of beds where the men lay
sleeping.

Nothing could happen to them now--until they were sound again and the
order came to go out and fling themselves again under the wheels.  The
doctor on duty for the night, coat off, was stretched on his sofa
peacefully reading under a green lamp.  And, as I went down-stairs past
the three long wards, the only sign of life was in a little circle of
light cast by a single lamp over the bed of one of the new patients,
lighting up the upturned profile of a man and the fair hair of the young
night nurse bending over him and silently changing the cloths on his
chest.

We dined late that evening on an open balcony at the top of the house.
People in Vienna and Budapest like to eat and drink in the open air.
Below us lay the dark velvet of the park, with an occasional lamp, and
beyond, over the roofs of Pest, the lights of Buda across the river.

Up through the trees came the voices of men singing.  I asked what this
might be.  They were men, my friends explained, who had had their legs
amputated.  There were fifty-eight of them, and the people who owned the
big, empty garden across the street had set it aside for them to live
in.  There they could sit in the sun and learn to walk on their
artificial legs--it was a sort of school for them.

I went to see it next morning--this Garden of Legless Men.  They were
scattered about under the trees on benches two by two, some with
bandaged stumps, some with crutches, some with no legs at all.  They
hobbled over willingly enough to have their pictures taken, although one
of them muttered that he had had his taken seventy times and no one had
sent him a.  copy yet.  The matron gathered them about her, arranging
them rather proudly so that their wounds "would show.  One looked to be
quite all right--because he had artificial legs, boots and all, below
the knee.

"Come," said the matron, "show the gentleman how you can walk." And the
obedient man came wabbling toward us in a curious, slightly rickety
progress, like one of those toys which are wound up and set going on the
sidewalk.  At the matron's suggestion he even dropped one of his canes.
He could almost stand alone, indeed, like some of the political
arguments for which millions of healthy young fellows like him
obediently go out to fight.



The Augusta Barracken Hospital is on the outskirts of Budapest--a
characteristic product of the war, wholesale healing for wholesale
maiming--1,000 beds and all the essentials, in what, two months before,
was a vacant lot by the railroad tracks.  The buildings are long,
one-story, pine barracks, just wide enough for two rows of beds with an
aisle down the centre.  The space between the barracks is filled, in
thrifty European fashion, with vegetable-gardens, and they are set on
neat streets through which the patients can be wheeled or carried to and
from the operating and dressing rooms without going up or down stairs.
Trains come in from the observation hospitals near the front, where all
wounded now stay for five days until it is certain they have no
contagious disease, and switch right up to the door of the
receiving-room.

The men give their names, pass at once to another room where their
uniforms are taken away to be disinfected, thence to the bathroom, then
into clean clothes and to bed.  It is a city of the sick--of healing,
rather--and on a bright day, with crowds of convalescents sitting about
in their linen pajamas in the sun, stretcher-bearers going back and
forth, the capable-looking surgeons with their strong, kind faces,
pretty nurses in nun-like white, it all has the brisk, rather jolly air
of any vigorous organism, going full blast ahead.

We had been through it, seen the wards of strapping, handsome, childlike
Russians, as carefully looked after by the Hungarians as if they were
their own, when our officer guide remarked that in an hour or two a
transport of four hundred new wounded would be coming in.  We waited in
the receiving-room, where a young convalescent had been brought out on a
stretcher to see his peasant family--a weather-beaten father, a mother
with a kerchief over her head, two solemn, little, round-faced brothers
with Tyrolean feathers in their caps.  Benches were arranged for those
able to sit up, clerks prepared three writing-desks, orderlies laid a
row of stretchers side by side for fifty yards or so along the railroad
track.

The transport was late, the sun going, and I went down to the other end
of the yard to get a picture of some Russians I had seen two days
before. We had walked through their ward then, and I remembered one very
sick boy, to whom one of the nurses with us had given a flower she was
wearing, and how he had smiled as he put it to his face with his gaunt,
white hand.  "It doesn't take long," she had said, "when they get like
that. They have so little vitality to go on, and some morning between
two and five"--and sure enough his bed was empty now.

A troop-train was rushing by, as I came back, covered with green
branches and flowers.  They went by with a cheer--that cheer which
sounds like a cheer sometimes, and sometimes, when two trains pass on
adjoining tracks so fast that you only catch a blur of faces, like the
windy shriek of lost souls.

Then came a sound of band music, and down the road, outside the high
wire fence, a little procession led by soldiers in gray-blue, playing
Chopin's "Funeral March." Behind them came the hospital hearse, priests,
and a weeping peasant family.  The little procession moved slowly behind
the wailing trumpets--it was an honor given to all who died here, except
the enemy--and must have seemed almost a sort of extravagance to the
convalescents crowding up to the fence who had seen scores of their
comrades buried in a common trench.  Opposite us the drums rolled and
the band began the Austrian national hymn.  Then they stopped; the
soldier escort fired their rules in the air.  That ended the ceremony,
and the hearse moved on alone.

Then the convalescents drifted back toward us.  Most of them would soon
be ready for the front again, and many glad of it, if only to be men in
a man's world again.  One of the nurses spoke of some of the others she
had known.  One man slashed his hand with his knife in the hope of
staying behind.  Even the bravest must gather themselves together before
the leap.  Only those who have seen what modern guns can do know how much
to fear them.

"For a week or so after they come in lots of them are dazed; they just
lie there scarcely stirring.  All that part of it--the shock to their
nerves--we see more of than the doctors do.  When the word comes to go
out again they have all the physical symptoms of intense nervous
excitement, even nausea sometimes." The train came at last--two long
sections of sleeping-cars.  An officer stepped off, clicked his heels,
and saluted, and the orderlies started unloading the men.  Those who
could walk at all were helped from the doors; the others--men with
broken hips, legs in casts, and so on--were passed out of the windows on
stretchers held over the orderlies' heads.  In the receiving-ward they
were set down in rows before the three tables, most of them clutching
their papers as they came.  Each man gave his name and regiment, and
such particulars, and the address of some one of his family to whom
notice could be sent.  It was one clerk's duty to address a post-card
telling his family of his condition and that he was in the hospital.

These cards were already ruled off into columns in each of which the
words "Lightly wounded," "Wounded," "Severely wounded," "Ill," "Very
ill" were printed in nine of the languages spoken in Austria-Hungary.
The clerk merely had to put a cross on the proper word.  Here, for
instance, is the Lightly wounded column, in German, Hungarian, and the
other dialects: "Leicht verwundet, Konnyen megse-besult, Lehce ranen,
Lekko raniony, Lecko ranenki, Leggiermente Jcrzto, Lako ranjen, Lahko
ranjen, Usor ranit."

A number were Russians--fine, big, clear-eyed fellows with whom these
genuine "Huns" chatted and laughed as if they were their own men.  On
one stretcher came a very pale, round-faced, little boy about twelve,
with stubbly blond hair clipped short and an enchanting smile.  He had
been carrying water for the soldiers, somebody said, when a piece of
shrapnel took off one of his feet.  Possibly he was one of those little
adventurers who run away to war as boys used to run away to sea or the
circus.  He seemed entirely at home with these men, at any rate, and
when one of the Hungarians brought him a big tin cup of coffee and a
chunk of black bread, he wriggled himself half upright and went to work
at it like a veteran.

As soon as the men were registered they were hurried out of their
uniforms and into the bathroom.  At the door two nurses in white--so
calm and clean and strong that they must have seemed like goddesses, in
that reek of steam and disinfectants and festering wounds--received
them, asked each man how he was wounded, and quickly, as if he were a
child, snipped off his bandages, unless the leg or arm were in a cast,
and turned him over to the orderlies.  Those who could walk used
showers, the others were bathed on inclined slabs.  Even the worst
wounded scarcely made a sound, and those who could take care of
themselves limped under the showers as if they had been hospital
boarders before, and waited for, and even demanded, with a certain
peremptoriness, their little bundle of belongings before they went on to
the dressing-room.

Discipline, possibly, though one could easily fancy that all this
organized kindness and comfort suddenly enveloping them was enough to
raise them for the moment above thoughts of pain.

As they lifted the man on the dressing-table and loosened the
pillow-like bandage under his drawn-up thigh, a thick, sickening odor
spread through the room.  As the last bit of gauze packing was drawn
from the wound, the greenish pus followed and streamed into the pan.
The jagged chunk of shell had hit him at the top of the thigh and
ploughed down to the knee.  The wound had become infected, and the
connecting tissues had rotted away until the leg was now scarcely more
than a bone and the two flaps of flesh.  The civilian thinks of a wound,
generally, as a comparatively decent sort of hole, more or less the
width of the bullet itself.  There was nothing decent about this wound.
It was such a slash as one might expect in a slaughtered ox.  It had
been slit farther to clean the infection, until you could have thrust
your fist into it, and, as the surgeon worked, the leg, partly from
weakness, partly from the man's nervousness, trembled like a leaf.

First the gauze stuffed into the cavity had to be pulled out.  The man,
of an age that suggested that he might have left at home a peasant wife,
slightly faded and weather-worn like himself, cringed and dug his nails
into the under side of the table, but made no outcry.  The surgeon
squeezed the flesh above and about the wound, the quick-fingered young
nurse flushed the cavity with an antiseptic wash, then clean, dry gauze
was pushed into it and slowly pulled out again.

The man--they had nicknamed him "Pop"--breathed faster.  This panting
went into a moan, which deepened into a hoarse cry, and then, as he lost
hold of himself completely, he began a hideous sort of sharp yelping
like a dog.

This is a part of war that doctors and nurses see; not rarely and in one
hospital, but in all hospitals and every morning, when the long line of
men--'"pus tanks' we called 'em last winter," muttered one of the young
doctors--are brought in to be dressed, There was such a leg that day in
the Barracken Hospital; the case described here was in the American Red
Cross Hospital in Vienna.

Such individual suffering makes no right or wrong, of course.  It is a
part of war.  Yet the more one sees of it and of this cannon fodder, the
people on whom the burden of war really falls, how alike they all are in
their courage, simplicity, patience, and long-suffering, whether
Hungarians or Russians, Belgians or Turks, the less simple is it to be
convinced of the complete righteousness of any of the various general
ideas in whose name these men are tortured.  I suspect that only those
can hate with entire satisfaction and success who stay quietly at home
and read the papers.

I remember riding down into Surrey from London one Sunday last August
and reading an editorial on Louvain--so well written, so quivering with
noble indignation that one's blood boiled, as they say, and one could
scarcely wait to get off the train to begin the work of revenge.
Perhaps the most moving passage in this editorial was about the smoking
ruins of the Town Hall, which I later saw intact.  I have thought
occasionally since of that editorial and of the thousands of sedentary
fire-eaters and hate-mongers like the writer of it--men who live forever
in a cloud of words, bounce from one nervous reaction to another without
ever touching the ground, and, rejoicing in their eloquence, go down
from their comfortable breakfasts to their comfortable offices morning
after morning and demand slaughter, annihilation, heaven knows what not
--men who could not endure for ten minutes that small part of war which
any frail girl of a trained nurse endures hour after hour every morning
as part of the day's work.

If I had stayed in London and continued to read the lies of but one
side, I should doubtless, by this time, be able to loathe and despise
the enemy with an entire lack of doubt, discomfort, or intelligence.
But having been in all the countries and read all the lies, the problem
is less simple.

How many people who talk or write about war would have the courage to
face a minute, fractional part of the reality underlying war's inherited
romance? People speak with pleasant excitement of "flashing sabres"
without the remotest thought of what flashing sabres do.  A sabre does
not stop in mid-air with its flashing, where a Meissonier or a Detaille
would paint it--it goes right on through the cords and veins of a man's
neck.  Sabre wounds are not very common, but there was one in the Vienna
hospital that morning--a V-shaped trench in which you could have laid
four fingers fiat, down through the hair and into the back of the man's
neck, so close to the big blood-vessel that you could see it beat under
its film of tissue--the only thing between him and death.  I thought of
it a day or two later when I was reading a book about the Austrian army
officer's life, written by an English lady, and came across the phrase:
'"Sharpen sabres!' was the joyful cry."

Be joyful if you can, when you know what war is, and, knowing it, know
also that it is the only way to do your necessary work.  The absurd and
disgusting thing is the ignorance and cowardice of those who can
slaughter an army corps every day for lunch, with words, and would not
be able to make so trivial a start toward the "crushing" they are
forever talking about as to fire into another man's open eyes or jam a
bayonet into a single man's stomach.  Among the Utopian steps which one
would most gladly support would be an attempt to send the editors and
politicians of all belligerent countries to serve a week in the enemy's
hospitals.




Chapter XV

East Of Lemberg--Through Austria-Hungary to the Galician Front


We left Nagybiesce in the evening, climbed that night through the high
Tatras, stopped in the morning at Kaschau long enough for coffee and a
sight of the old cathedral, rolled on down through the country of robber
barons' castles and Tokay wine, and came at length, in the evening, to
Munkacs and the foot of the high Carpathians.

This was close to the southernmost point the Russians touched when they
came pouring down through the Carpathian passes, and one of the places
in the long line where Germans and Austro-Hungarians joined forces in
the spring to drive them back again.  Munkacs is where the painter
Munkacsy came from.  It was down to Munkacs, through Silesia and the
Tatras, that the troop-trains came in April while snow was still deep in
the Carpathians.  Now it was a feeding-station for fresh troops going up
and wounded and prisoners coming down.

The officers in charge had no notion we were coming, but no sooner heard
we were strangers in Hungary than we must come in, not only to dinner,
but to dine with them at their table.  We had red-hot stuffed paprika
pods, Liptauer cheese mixed salmon-pink with paprika, and these and
other things washed down with beer and cataracts of hospitable talk.
Some one whispering that a bit of cheese might come in handy in the
breakfastless, cholera-infested country, into which we were going that
night, they insisted we must take, not merely a slice, but a chunk as
big as a small trunk.  We looked at the soup-kitchen, where they could
feed two thousand a day, and tasted the soup.  We saw the
dressing-station and a few wounded waiting there, and all on such a
breeze of talk and eloquent explanation that you might have thought you
had stepped back into a century when suspicion and worry and nerves were
unknown.

The Hungarians are like that--along with their indolence and romantic
melancholy--lively and hospitable and credulous with strangers.  Nearly
all of them are good talkers and by sheer fervor and conviction can make
almost any phrase resemble an idea and a real idea as good as a play.
Hungarians are useful when trenches must be taken by storm, just as the
sober Tyrolean mountaineers are better for sharp-shooting and slow
resistance.

One of the interesting things about the Austro-Hungarian army, as well,
of course, as an inevitable weakness, is the variety of races and
temperaments hidden under these blue-gray uniforms--Hungarians,
Austrians, Croatians, Slovaks, Czechs.  Things in universal use, like
post-cards and paper money, often have their words printed in nine
languages, and an Austro-Hungarian officer may have to know three or
four in order to give the necessary orders to his men.  And his men
cannot fight for the fatherland as the Germans do; they must rally round
a more or less abstract idea of nationality.  And one of the surprises
of the war, doubtless, to many people, has been that its strain, instead
of disintegrating, appears to have beaten this loose mass together.

At the table that evening was a middle-aged officer and his aid on their
way to a new detail at the front.  They were simple and soldier-like
and, after the flashing bosoms of the sedentary hinterland, it was
pleasant to see these men, who had been on active service since the
beginning, without a single medal.  The younger Hungarian was one of
those slumbering daredevils who combine a compact, rugged shape--strong
wrists, hair low on the forehead--with the soft voice and shy manners of
a girl.  He spoke a little German and English in the slow, almost
plaintive Hungarian cadence, but all we could get out of him about the
war was that it had made him so tired--so 'mude'.  He had gone to school
in Zurich but could not tell our Swiss lieutenant the name of his
teacher--he couldn't remember anything, any more, he said, with his
plaintive smile. He had a little factory in Budapest and had gone back
on furlough to see that things were ship-shape, but it was no use, he
couldn't tell them what to do when he got there.  Common enough, our
captain guide observed. He had been in the fighting along the San until
invalided back to the Presse-Quartier, and there were times, then, he
said, when for days it was hard for him to remember his own name.

We climbed up into the mountains in the night and he had us up at
daylight to look down from creaking, six-story timber bridges built by
the Austro-Hungarian engineers to replace the steel railroad bridges
blown up by the Russians.  We passed a tunnel or two, a big stockade
full of Russian prisoners milling round in their brown overcoats, and
down from the pass into the village of Skole.  Here we were to climb the
near-by heights of Ostry, which the Hungarians of the Corps Hoffmann
stormed in April when the snow was still on the ground, and "orientiren"
ourselves a bit about this Carpathian fighting.

I had looked back at it through the "histories" and the amputated feet
and hands in the hospital at Budapest--now, in the muggy air of a late
August morning we were to tramp over the ground itself.  There were, in
this party of rather leisurely reporters, a tall, wise, slow-smiling
young Swede who had gone to sea at twelve and been captain of a
destroyer before leaving the navy to manage a newspaper; a young Polish
count, amiably interested in many sorts of learning and nearly all sorts
of ladies--he had seen some of the Carpathian fighting as an officer in
the Polish Legion; one of the Swiss citizen officers--one can hear him
now whacking his heels together whenever he was presented, and fairly
hissing "Oberleutnant W---, aw Schweiz!" and a young Bulgarian
professor, who spoke German and a little French, but, unlike so many of
the Bulgarians of the older generation who were educated at Robert
College, no English.  The Bulgarians are intensely patriotic and there
was nothing under sun, moon, or stars which this young man did not
compare with what they had in Sofia.  German tactics, Russian novels,
sky-scrapers, music, steamships--no matter what--in a moment would come
his "Bei uns in Sofia"--(With us in Sofia) and his characteristic
febrile gesture, thumb and forefinger joined, other fingers extended,
pumping emphatically before his face.

Then there was our captain guide from the regular army, a volunteer
automobile officer, a soldier servant for each man--for the Austrians do
such things in style--and even, on a separate flat car, our own motor.
The Carpathians here are in the neighborhood of three thousand five
hundred feet high--a tangle of pine-covered slopes as steep as a roof
sometimes, and reminding one a bit of our Oregon Cascades on a
much-reduced scale.  You must imagine snow waist-deep, the heights
furrowed with trenches, the frosty balsam stillness split with screaming
shells and shrapnel and the rat-tat-tat of machine guns; imagine
yourself floundering upward with winter overcoat, blanket, pack, rifle,
and cartridge-belt--any one who has snow-shoed in mountains in midwinter
can fancy what fighting meant in a place like this.  Men's feet and
hands were frozen on sentry duty or merely while asleep--for the
soldiers slept as a rule in the open, merely huddled in their blankets
before a fire--the severely wounded simply dropped in the snow, and for
most of them, no doubt, that was the end of it.

Puffing and steaming in our rain-coats, we climbed the fifteen hundred
feet or so to the top of the mountain, up which the Russians had built a
sort of cork-screw series of trenches, twisting one behind the other.
We reached one sky-line only to find another looking down at us.
Barbed-wire entanglements and "Spanish riders" crossed the slopes in
front of them--it was the sort of place that looks to a civilian as if
it could hold out forever.

The difficulty in country like this is, of course, to escape flanking
fire. You fortify yourself against attack from one direction only to be
enfiladed by artillery from some ridge to right or left.  That was what
the Austrians and Germans did and, following their artillery with an
infantry assault, captured one of the upper Russian trenches.  From this
it was only a matter of a few hours to clear out the others.  Except for
the visits of a few peasants the battle-field had scarcely been touched
since the snow melted.  The hillside was peppered with shell holes, the
trenches littered with old hand-grenades, brown Russian over-coats, the
rectangular metal cartridge clip cases---about like biscuit tins--which
the Russians leave everywhere, and some of the brush-covered shelters in
which the Russians had lived, with their spoons and wet papers and here
and there a cigarette box or a tube of tooth-paste, might have almost
been lived in yesterday.

The valley all the way back to Skole was strung with the brush and
timber shelters in which the Russians had camped--the first of thousands
of cut-up pine-trees we were to see before we left Galicia.  All the
drab and dreary side of war was in that little mountain town--smashed
houses; sidewalks, streets, and fences splashed with lime against
cholera; stores closed or just keeping alive, and here and there signs
threatening spies and stating that any one found carrying explosives or
building fires would be shot.  I went into one fairly clean little cafe,
where it seemed one might risk a cup of tea--you are not supposed to
drink unboiled or unbottled water in such neighborhoods--and the dismal
old Jew who kept the place told me that he had been there since the war
began.  He made a sour face when I said he must have seen a good deal.
A lot he could see, he said, six months in a cellar "gesteckt."

There was a certain amount of cholera all through eastern Galicia,
especially among the peasants, not so well housed, often, as the
soldiers, and not nearly so well fed and taken care of.  Every one who
went into Galicia had to be vaccinated for cholera, and in the army this
had all but prevented it.  In a whole division living in a
cholera-infected neighborhood there would be only one or two cases, and
sometimes none at all.  The uncomfortable rumor of it was everywhere,
however, and one was not supposed to eat raw fruit or vegetables, and in
some places hand-shaking, even in an officers' mess, was prohibited.

Russian prisoners were working about the station as they were all over
eastern Austria-Hungary--big, blond, easy-going children, apparently
quite content.  Our Warsaw Pole talked with one of them, who seemed to
mourn only the fact that he didn't have quite so big a ration of bread
as he had had as a soldier.  He had come from Siberia, where he had left
a wife and three children--four, maybe, by this time, he said; some
rascally Austrian might have made another one.

Beyond Skole we left the mountains--looking back at that imposing wall
on the horizon, one could fancy the Russians coming down from the north
and thinking, "There we shall stand!"--and rode northward through a
pleasant, shallow, valley country, past Ruthenian settlements with their
three-domed churches and houses steep-roofed with heavy thatch. Some of
these Ruthenians, following the Little Russians of the south, Gogol's
country, were not enthusiastic when the Russians came through. Among
others, the Russian Government had made great propaganda, given money
for churches and so on, so that the apparently guileless peasants
occasionally revealed artillery positions, the Austrians said, by
driving their cattle past them or by smoke signals from cottage
chimneys. We stopped for dinner at Strij, another of those drab, dusty,
half-Jewish towns filled now with German and Austro-Hungarian soldiers,
officers, proclamations, and all the machinery of a staff headquarters,
and the next morning rolled into Lemberg.  The Russians captured it in
the first week of the war, held it through the winter, and then, after
the Czar had, from a balcony in the town, formally annexed it to the
empire forever and a day, in April, the Austro-Hungarians retook it
again in June.

There were smashed windows in the railroad station, but otherwise, to a
stranger coming in for the first time, Lemberg seemed swinging along, a
big modern city of some-two hundred thousand people, almost as if nothing
had happened.

With an officer from General Bom-Ermolh's staff, and maps, we drove out
to the outlying fortifications, where the real fighting had taken place.
The concrete gun positions, the permanent infantry protections with
loopholes in concrete, and all the trenches and barbed wire, looked
certainly as if the Russians had intended to stay in Lemberg.  The full
explanation of why they did not must be left for the present.  What
happened at one fortified position, a few miles southwest of Lemberg,
was plain enough.

Here, in pleasant open farming country was a concrete and earth fort,
protected by elaborate trenches and entanglements, in front of which,
for nearly a mile across the fields, was an open field of fire.
Infantry might have charged across that open space until the end of the
war without getting any nearer, but the offensive did not, of course,
try that.  Over behind distant clumps of trees and a wooded ridge on the
horizon they planted their heavy batteries.  On a space perhaps three
hundred yards long some sixty of these heavy guns concentrated their
fire.  The infantry pushed up under its protection, the fort fell, and
the garrison was captured with it.

It is by such use of artillery that herds of prisoners are sometimes
gathered in.  Just before the charging infantry reaches the trench, the
cataract of artillery fire, which has been pouring into it, is suddenly
shifted back a few hundred yards, where it hangs like a curtain shutting
off escape.  The success of such tactics demands, of course, finished
work from the artillery-men and perfect co-ordination between artillery
and infantry.  At lunch a few days later in Cracow, a young Austrian
officer was telling me how they had once arranged that the artillery
should fire twenty rounds, and on the twenty-first the infantry, without
waiting for the usual bugle signal to storm, should charge the trenches.
At the same instant the artillery-men were to move up their range a
couple of hundred yards.  The manoeuvre was successful and the Russians
caught, huddled under cover, before they knew what had happened.

Though Lemberg's cafes were gay enough and the old Jews in gaberdines,
with the orthodox curl dangling before each ear, dozed peacefully on the
park benches, still the Russians were only a few hours' motor drive to
the eastward, and next morning we went out to see them. All of the
country through which we drove was, in a way, the "front"--beginning
with the staff head-quarters and going on up through wagon-trains,
reserves, horse camps, ammunition-stations, and so on, to the first-line
trenches themselves.

Sweeping up through this long front on a fine autumn morning is to see
the very glitter and bloom of war.  Wounds and suffering, burned towns,
and broken lives--all that is forgotten in the splendid panorama--men
and motors and fliers and guns, the cheerful smell of hay and coffee and
horses, the clank of heavy trucks and the jangle of chains, all in
beautiful harvest country; in the contagion of pushing on, shoulder to
shoulder, and the devil take the hindmost, toward something vastly
interesting up ahead.

Every one is well and strong, and the least of them lifted up and
glamoured over by the idea that unites them.  All the pettinesses and
smallness of every-day existence seem brushed aside, for no one is
working for money or himself, and every man of them may be riding to his
death.

Flippant young city butterflies jump to their feet and gravely salute
when their elders enter, the loutish peasant flings up his chin as if he
would defy the universe.  What a strange and magic thing is this
discipline or team-work or whatever you choose to call it, by which some
impudent waiter, for instance, who yesterday would have growled at his
tips, will to-day fling his chin up and his hands to his sides and beam
like a boy, merely because his captain, showing guests through the camp,
deigns to peer into his mess-can and, slapping him affectionately on the
cheek, ask him if the food is all right!

We whizzed into the village of Kamionka, on the upper Bug, across which
the Russians had been driven only a few days before.  Their trenches
were just within the woods a scant mile away, and the smoke of their
camp-fires curled up through the trees.  Across the much-talked-of Bug,
which resembles here a tide-water river split with swampy flats, were
the trenches they had left.  They trailed along the river bank, bent
with it almost at a right angle, and the Austro-Hungarian batteries had
been so placed that a crisscross fire enfiladed each trench.  From the
attic observation station into which we climbed, the officers directing
the attack could look down the line of one of the trenches and see their
own shells ripping it to pieces.  "It was a sight you could see once in
a lifetime," said one of the young artillery-men, still strung up with
the excitement of the fight--exactly what was said to me at Ari Bumu by
a Turkish officer who had seen the Triumph go down.

That attic was like a scene in some military melodrama, with its
tattered roof, its tripod binoculars peering at the enemy, the
businesslike officers dusty and unshaven, the field-telegraph operator
squatting in one corner, with a receiver strapped to his ear.  We walked
across the rafters to an adjoining room, where there were two or three
chairs and an old sofa, had schnapps all round, and then went out to
walk over the position.

In front was the wabbly foot-bridge run across by the pioneers, and on
the swampy flats the little heaps of sod thrown up by the first line as
they pushed across--wading up to their necks part of the way--under
fire.

On the near bank the Austro-Hungarian trenches had run between the tombs
of an old Jewish burying-ground, and from the earth walls, here and
there, projected a bone or a crumbling skull.  The Russian trenches on
the other bank wound through a farmyard in the same impersonal way--
pig-pens, orchard, chicken-coops, all thought of merely as shelter. It
was just to the left of a pig-pen that a Russian officer had held his
machine gun until the last minute, pouring in a flank fire.  "He did his
work!" was the young officer's comment.

We lunched with a corps commander and dined with a genial old colonel
and his staff, and between times motored through level farming country
to a position to the northward on the Rata, a tributary of the Bug.
Both sides were watching each other here from their sausage-shaped
captive balloons, and a few aeroplanes were snooping about but at the
moment all was quiet.  The Austro-Hungarians had been waiting here for
over a fortnight, and the artillery-men had polished up their battery
positions as artillery-men like to do when they have time.  Two were in
a pasture, so neatly roofed over with sod that a birdman might fly over
the place until the cows came home without knowing guns were there.
Another, hidden just within the shadow of a pine forest, was as
attractive as some rich man's mountain camp, the gun positions as snug
as yacht cabins, the officer's lodges made of fresh, sweet-smelling pine
logs, and in a little recess in the trees a shrine had been built to St.
Barbara, who looks out for artillery-men.

The infantry trenches along the river, cut in the clean sand and neatly
timbered and loopholed, were like model trenches on some exposition
ground.  Through these loopholes one could see the Russian trenches,
perhaps a mile away, and in between the peasant women, bright red and
white splashes in the yellow wheat, were calmly going ahead with their
harvest. All along the Galician front we saw peasants working thus and
regarding this elaborate game of war very much apparently as busy
farmers regard a draghunt or a party of city fishermen.  At one point we
had to come out in the open and cross a foot-bridge.  "Please--
Lieutenant," one of the soldiers protested as the officer with us
stepped out, standing erect, "it is not safe!" The officer crouched and
hurried across and so did we, but just before we did so, up out of the
field where they had been mowing, straight through this gap, came a
little company of barefooted peasant women with their bundles of
gleanings on their heads, and talking in that singsong monotone of
theirs, as detached as so many birds, they went pat-patting across the
bridge.  If one of these women could but write her impressions of war!

They had done their part, these peasant women and old men and children.
All over Galicia, round the burned villages, right through barbed-wire
entanglements up to the very trenches, stretched the yellow wheat.
Somehow they had ploughed and sowed and brought it to harvest, and now
with scythes, with knives even, sometimes, they were getting it under
cover.  At home we know gleaners generally only in rather sentimental
pictures; here we saw them day after day, barefooted women and children
going over the stubble and picking up the forgotten wheat heads and
arranging them in one hand as if they were a bouquet. There will be no
wheat wasted this year.

And with them everywhere were the Russian prisoners, swinging scythes,
binding grain, sometimes coming down the road, without even a guard,
sprawled in the sun on a load of straw.  It would be hard to find a
place where war seemed more a vast theatricalism than in some of these
Hungarian and Galician neighborhoods.  There seemed to be no enmity
whatever between captors and prisoners.  Everywhere the latter were
making themselves useful in the fields, in road-making, about railroad
yards, and several officers told me that it was surprising how many good
artisans, carpenters, iron-workers, and so on, there were among them.
The Russians got exactly the same food as the Hungarian soldiers, and
were paid a few cents a day for their work.  You would see men in the
two uniforms hobnobbing in the open freight-cars as the work-trains
rolled up the line, and sometimes a score or so of husky Russians
working in the wheat, guarded by some miniature, lone, Landsturm man. Of
all the various war victims I had seen, these struck me as the most
lucky--they could not even, like the wounded, be sent back again.

We drove back through the dark that night, and in the bright, waving
circle of an automobile search-light, with the cool breath from the
pines in our faces, saw that long "front" roll back again.  Now and then
a soldier would step into the white circle and, holding up his arm,
struggle between his awe of this snorting motor with its imperial
double-eagle flag and its sharp-voiced officers muffled in gray coats--
between his peasant's habit of taking off his hat and letting such
people blow by, and his soldier's orders to stop every-thing that
passed.  He stopped us, nevertheless, and the pass was laboriously read
in the light of his electric lamp before we went on again.

In the dark and quiet all the countless joints and wheels of the vast
organism were still mysteriously turning.  Once, in a cloud of dust, we
passed troops marching toward the front--tired faces, laughing faces--
the shout "Man in the road !" and then the glimpse of a couple of Red
Cross men kneeling by a soldier who had given out on the way; once, in
the black pines, cows driven by two little frightened peasant children;
once a long line of bearded Jews, bound, with packs on their backs, for
what was left of their homes; a supply-train, a clanking battery, and
now and then other motors like ours with shrouded gray figures,
streaking by in a flashing mist of dust.

Next day, swinging southward into another sector of the front, over
beautiful rolling hills, rather like the Genesee Valley, we drummed up a
hill and came out at the top in a village square.  It had once been a
white little village clinging to the skirts of an old chateau--the
village of Swirz and Count Lavasan's chateau--and both were now black
and tumbled walls.

In the centre of the square people were singing--a strange little crowd
and strange, mournful singing.  We thought at first it was a funeral
service, for the women were weeping as they sang, but as the auto-mobile
swept up beside them, we saw that it was men the women were crowding
round--live men, going away to war.

They were men who had not been called out because the Russians held the
country, and by one of fate's ironies, now that the enemy had been
beaten and driven home, they must go out and fight.  At a little table
by the side of the square sat the recruiting officer with his pen and
ledger, and the village school-master, a grave, intelligent-looking
young man, who must have held such a place in this half-feudal village
as he would have done a hundred years ago, was doing his best to glamour
over the very realistic loss of these wives and sweethearts with
patriotism's romance.  He sang and obediently they all wailed after him
the old song of scattered Poland--"Poland is not lost" "Yeszcze Polska
me Zginela Poki my zygemy..."

The song stopped, there was a word of command, and the little squad
started away.  The women clung to their men and cried aloud.  The
children hanging to their skirts began to wail, too.  There was
something creepy and horrible, like the cries of tortured animals, in
that uncontrolled crying there in the bright morning sunshine.  The
schoolmaster spoke to them bluntly, told them to go back to their homes
and their work, and obedient, and a little quieter now, they drifted
away, with aprons to their faces and their little children clinging to
their skirts--back to their cottages and the winter ahead.

This picture did not fit in very well with our rollicking military
panorama, but we were soon over the hills, and half an hour later were
breakfasting on pate-de-foie-gras sandwiches and champagne, with a
charming old corps commandant, at a round table set outdoors in a circle
of trees that must have been planted for that very purpose.  Cheered and
stiffened by many bows and heel clickings and warming hospitality, we
hurried off to an artillery position near the village of Olszanica.

Just under the brow of a hill we were stopped and told that it was
dangerous to go farther, and we skirted off to the right under cover, to
the observation station itself.  More little Swiss chalets, more
hospitable officers, and out in front, across a mile of open country,
the Russian trenches.  Through a periscope one could see Russians
exercising their horses by riding them round the circle--as silent and
remote and of another world as a picture on a biograph screen.

"You see that clump of trees," said the young officer, "one of their
batteries is just behind there.  Those aren't real trees, they were put
there by the Russians." I swung the glass to the left, picked up a
company of men marching.  "Hello, hello," he whispered, then after a
moment's scrutiny: "No--they're our men." After all, war isn't always so
different from the old days, when men had a time for fighting and a time
for going in to powder their wigs! The division commander, standing a
little behind us, remarked: "We shall fire from the right-hand battery
over behind the hill and then from the left--the one you passed near the
road." Then turning to an officer at the field telephone he said; "You
may fire now."

There was a moment's pause, from over the woods behind us came a
"Whr-r-rong !" and out over the sunny fields a shell went milling away
to send back a faint report and show a puff of cotton above the trenches
to the right.  It was a bit short--the next fell better.  Another nod,
another "Whr-r-row?/" from somewhere behind us, and this time the
cottony puff was just short of the clump of trees where the Russians had
concealed their battery.  I picked up the spot through the glass and--
one might have known !--there was One of those eternal peasants calmly
swinging his scythe about fifty yards short of the spot where the
shrapnel had exploded.  I could see him straighten up, glance at it,
then go on with his mowing again.

There was a certain elegance, a fine spaciousness about these
artillery-men and their work which made one more content with war again.
No huddling in muddy trenches here, waiting to be smashed by jagged
chunks of iron--everything clean, aloof, scientific, exact, a matter of
fine wires crossing on a periscope lens, of elevation, wind pressure,
and so on, and everything in the wide outdoors, and done, so to say,
with a magnificent gesture.

People drive high-power motor-cars and ride strong horses because of the
sense of power it gives them--how about standing on a hill, looking over
miles of splendid country to where a huddle of ants and hobby-horse
specks--say a battalion or two--are just crawling around a hill or
jammed on a narrow bridge, and then to scatter them, herd them, chase
them from one horizon to another with a mere, "Mr. Jones, you may fire
now," and a wave of the hand!

The division commander took us back a mile or so to his headquarters for
lunch, the Russians slowly waking up and sending a few perfunctory
shells after us as we went over the hill, and here was another genial
party, with three "Hochs" for the guests at the end.  Even out here in
empty Galicia the soldiers got their beer.  "We're not quite so
temperate as the Russians," the general smiled.  "A little alcohol--not
too much--does 'em good."

A young lieutenant who sat next me regaled me with his impression of
things in general.  The Russians had squandered ammunition, he said, in
the early days of the war--they would fire twenty rounds or so at a
single cavalryman or anything that showed itself.  They were short now,
but a supply would come evidently every now and then, for they would
blaze away for a day or so, then there would be a lull again.  They were
short on officers, too, but not so much as you might think, because they
kept their officers well back of the line, generally.  Their artillery
was better than the infantry, as a rule; the latter shot carelessly and
generally too high.

Both he and the officer at my left--a big, farmer-like commissary man--
spoke most amiably of the Russians.  The latter told of one place where
both sides had to get water out of the same well.  And there was no
trouble.  "No," he said, in his deep voice, "they're not hose," using
the same word "bad" one would apply to a naughty boy.  They were a
particularly chipper lot, these artillerymen, and when I told the young
lieutenant, who had been assigned to speak French to me under the notion
that I was more at home in that language, that I had stopped at Queens
Hotel instead of the St. Antoine in Antwerp, and that the Belgian army
had crossed the Scheldt, and the pontoon bridge had been blown up
directly in front of the hotel, he said that he would "certainly engage
rooms there for the next bombardment," as he waved good-by.

We were presented, while in Lemberg, to General Bom-Ermolli, and lunched
at the headquarters mess.  We also met Major-General Bardolf, his chief
of staff, and chief of staff of the assassinated Crown Prince. The
latter described to us the campaign about Lemberg, and it was
interesting to hear the rasping accent he gave to a word like
"Durchbrechung," for instance, as if he were a Prussian instead of an
Austrian, and to observe the frankness with which he ascribed the
difference that had come over the spirit of the Austro-Hungarian army to
the coming of Mackensen and the Germans.

West of Lemberg the pleasant country lost its war-time air and in
Przemysl the two or three lonely Landsturm men guarding the wrecked
fortifications, twice taken and twice blown up by retreating armies, lit
candles to take us through the smashed galleries, and accepted a few
Hellers when we came out, with quite the bored air of professional
museum guides.

The town of Przemysl itself was untouched.  The greater part of the
visible damage to the forts, some distance outside the town, was done by
the dynamite of the retreating army.  In one place, however, we saw the
crater of one of the 42-centimetre shells which have been talked about
oftener than they have been used.  The Austrian "thirty-point-fives"
have done much of the smashing ascribed to the "forty-twos," and
ordinary work, like that of bombarding a city or infantry trenches, by
cannon of smaller caliber.  A genuine forty-two had been dropped here,
however, we were told, on a building used by the Russians to store
ammunition, and the building had simply disappeared.  There was nothing
left but a crater sixty or seventy feet across and eighteen to twenty
feet deep.

We trailed westward, through Tarnow, where the great drive first broke
through, and on to the pleasant old university city of Cracow on the
frontier of the Poland of which it was once the capital, and to which it
belonged until the partition of 1795.  It was toward Cracow that the
Russians were driving when they first started for Berlin, and they were
but a stone's throw away most of the winter.  We got to Cracow on the
Emperor's birthday and saw a military mass on the great parade-ground
with the commandant of the fort standing uncovered and alone facing the
altar, behind him his staff, and perhaps a hundred yards behind them and
stretching for a quarter of a mile down the field, the garrison.  At the
intervals in the mass the whole garrison fired salutes, the volleys
going down the field, a battalion at a time, now and then reinforced by
the cannon on Kosciusko Hill.

Cracow is Polish in atmosphere and feeling, and even in the few hours we
were there one heard a good deal of Polish hopes and ambitions. The
independence which Russia was to grant must come now, it would appear,
from some one else.  The Poles want a king of their own, but apparently
they preferred to be under the wing of Austria rather than of Germany.
The Germans, who had laid rather a firm hand on the parts of Poland they
had occupied, might not fall in with this notion and one could detect
here one of those clouds, "no bigger than a man's hand," which
dramatists put in the first act, and which often swell to interesting
proportions before the final curtain goes down.




Chapter XVI

In The Dust Of The Russian Retreat



Warsaw had fallen, and Ivangorod, and the centre of the German and
Austro-Hungarian armies, sweeping across eastern Europe like beaters
across a prairie, was now before Brest-Litovsk.  This was the apex of
this central triangle of Russian forts, a city and a rail-road centre as
well as a fortress, and the last strongly fortified place on the direct
road to Moscow.  It seemed as if the Russians must make a stand here,
and even though we were four or five days getting there, the heavy
artillery was not yet up, and there might still be time.

We wound through the green hills and under the ruined castles of
northern Hungary in the afternoon, rolled slowly up across Silesia and
into Russian Poland in the night, and came at noon to Radom, only
sixty-five miles south of Warsaw.  Hindenburg had been here in October,
1914, when he invaded Poland to draw off the Russians from Galicia, then
the Russian offensive had rolled over the place.  The Russians had held
it all the winter; now they were a hundred and fifty miles eastward--
beyond the Vistula and the Bug--"boog," not "bug," by the way--and just
hanging to the edge of Poland.

The war had scarcely touched Budapest and Vienna--scarcely touched the
ordinary city surfaces, that is to say.  In hotels and cafes, streets
and parks, life flowed on almost as brightly as ever.  Farther north, in
the Hungarian towns and villages, life still went on as usual, but one
felt the grip of war--you might not go there nor move about without a
military pass.  Beyond Radom, where now in the pleasant park the very
literary Polish young people were strolling, reading as they walked,
there was, so to speak, no ordinary life at all--only the desert of war
and the curious, intense, and complicated life of those who made it.
Our car was hitched to a long transport-train--for it would be another
two days before the automobiles would come back for us from the front--
and we rode into this deserted Polish country toward Ivangorod.

It had all been fought over at least twice--railroad stations and farm
buildings burned, bridges dynamited, telegraph-poles cut down.  The
stations now were mere board shelters for a commandant and a soldiers'
lunch-room; the bridges, timber bridges flung across by the pioneers;
and the sawed-off telegraph-poles, spliced between railroad rails to
save cutting new ones, were stuck back into the ground like forks.  The
Russians had a rather odd way of burning stations and leaving the rails,
the important thing, intact, but here and there they had neatly
destroyed them for miles by exploding a cartridge under the end of each.

The country is level here--fields interspersed with dark pine forests,
planted in the European fashion, to be grown and harvested like any
other crop--parks of living telephone-posts, thick as the quills of a
porcupine.  And through these pines and across the fields were the
eternal Russian trenches, carefully built, timber-lined, sometimes
roofed and sodded over, with rifle holes under the eaves.  Barbed-wire
entanglements, seven rows deep sometimes, trailed in front of them,
through timber, through the long grass and flowers of marsh-land, a
wicked foggy band against the green as far as one could see.  Along the
Galician front and in the Carpathians I had seen mile after mile of such
trenches, timber-work, wires, and Spanish riders left behind, good as
new, until it began to seem as if war were a peculiarly absurd game,
consisting principally in chopping down good trees and digging ditches,
and then going somewhere else.

In front of Ivangorod great preparations had been made.  There was no
town here, but the great fortress, with its citadel, barracks,
machine-shops, gardens, church, and protecting forts, was almost a city
in itself. It had a garrison of twenty thousand, and its gigantic
concrete walls, covered over with earth and grass, its, moat and barbed
wire, looked formidable enough.  It had no modern heavy artillery,
however, and even if it had, artillery in a fixed, known spot is
comparatively helpless against the mobile guns, screened by hills and
timber, besiegers can bring against it.  Elaborate earthworks had,
therefore, been thrown up several miles to the west of the fortress, but
these became useless when the enemy, crossing the Vistula to north and
south, swung round to cut off the one way out--the railroad to
Brest-Litovsk.

The Russians might have shut themselves in and waited--not very long,
probably--until the big "thirty-point-fives" smashed the fort to pieces.
They chose to get out in time, blew up the railroad bridge across the
Bug, burned the barracks, and, with enough dynamite to give a good
imitation of an earthquake, tumbled the walls and galleries of the
fortress into melancholy heaps of rock.

It was dusk when we rolled into Ivangorod and into the thick of that
vast and complicated labor which goes on in the rear of an advancing
army--all that laborious building up which follows the retreating army's
orgy of tearing down--bridge builders, an acre or two of transport
horses, blacksmiths and iron-workers, a semi-permanent bakery, the
ovens, on wheels, like thrashing-machine engines, dropping sparks and
sending out a sweet, warm, steamy smell of corn and wheat.  It never
stopped, this bakery, night or day, and the bread was piled up in a big
tent near by like cord-wood.

And here you could see the amount of trouble that can be made by blowing
up a railroad bridge.  First, of course, a new timber bridge has to be
flung across, and the Vistula is a good two hundred yards wide here and
the river was high.  Up ahead the army was fighting forward, dependent,
for the moment, on what came across that bridge.  A train arrives,
hundreds of tons of freight which normally would roll across the river
in a few puffs of a cigarette.  The cars must be opened, each box and
sack taken out by hand, carried down a bank, loaded into a wagon; the
wagons creep over the pontoons, struggle through the sand on the other
side, then each piece must be unloaded and put on a train again.

An axle breaks, the returning line waits an hour for the other to cross,
a sixty-foot pine log for the new railway bridge wedges fast in turning
a corner and stops everything--you must imagine them at it all day,
sweating and swearing in all the dialects of the dual monarchy--all
night, with fagged horses and drivers dazed with sleep, in the blaze of
a search-light reaching out over the river.  Meanwhile a tall timber
railroad bridge was creeping across.  There was no pile-driver engine,
and at each cluster of piles fifteen or twenty Russian prisoners, in
their brown service uniforms, hung to as many ropes--"Heave... whack!
Heave... whack!"--in quaint retribution for what a few sticks of
dynamite had done a fortnight before.

A thousand fresh Hungarian troops had just come in next morning, and
were waiting for their coffee, when the word came by field-telephone
that a Russian flier was dropping bombs about twenty kilometres away.
It was fine hunting-ground--men, horses, stores, and the new bridge--but
he sailed away, and we drove a dozen miles up the Vistula to New
Alexandria, burned during the enveloping movement on Ivangorod.

All along the way were trenches, telltale yellow lines of sand winding
among the pines, gun positions, barbed wire, and every now and then a
big plane-tree, with ladders running up to an artillery observation
platform.  I climbed up one of them on cleats worn by Russian boots for
a look at the Vistula and the string of Red Cross barges, filled with
wounded, going up the river.  The children hereabout, at any rate, will
revere the Russians, for their pioneers had carried that winding
stairway up to the very tip-top of the tree in a manner only seen in
dreams or picture-books.

All the farmhouses had been burned, and the peasants were just
returning.  We passed several tired mothers with babies in shawls
hanging from their shoulders and little boys trudging behind with some
rusty kettle or coffee-pot, and once a woman, standing in the ruins of
her house, of which only the chimney was left, calmly cooking her
dinner.

New Alexandria, a pleasant little town, grown up round an old chateau,
and used as a sort of summer resort by Warsaw people, was nothing but
blackened chimneys and heaps of brick.  The Russians had burned
everything, and the inhabitants, who had fled into the pines, were just
now beginning to straggle back.  Some had set up little stands in front
of their burned houses and were trying to sell apples, plums, pears,
about the only marketable thing left; some were cleaning brick and
trying to rebuild, some contented themselves with roofing over their
cellars.  And while we were observing these domestic scenes, the army,
which had taken the outer forts by assault the preceding night, was
marching into burning Brest-Litovsk.

It was another day before the motors came and we could get under way and
whirl through such a cross-section of a modern army's life as one could
scarcely have seen in the west of Europe since the Germans first came
rolling down on Paris.  No suburban warfare this; none of that hideous,
burrowing, blowing up, methodically squashing out yard after yard of
trenches and men.  This was war in the grand old style--an army on the
march, literally, down roads smoky with dust and sunshine, across
bridges their own pioneers had built, a river of men and horses, wagons
and guns, from one hazy blue horizon to another.

And all these men had come from victory and knew they were marching to
it.  How far they were going none could tell, but the gods were with
them--so might the Grand Army have looked when it started eastward a
hundred years ago.  Men and horses had been pouring down that road for
weeks--on each side of the macadam highway the level, unfenced fields
were trampled flat.  It was fully one hundred and twenty miles, as the
motor road ran, to Brest-Litovsk, and there was scarce a moment when, if
we were not in the thick of them, we were not at least in sight of
wagons, motors, horses, and men.  And, of course, this was but the rear
of the army; the fighting men proper were up in front.  The dust hung
like fog in the autumn sunshine.  Drivers were black with it; in the
distance, on parallel roads, it climbed high in the still air like smoke
from burning villages.  And out of this dust, as we whizzed on, our
soldier chauffeur, whistle in mouth, shrieking for room, appeared
pontoon trains--big steel scows on top, beams underneath, cut, numbered,
and ready to put together; trains of light farm wagons, wide at the top,
slanting toward the middle, commandeered from all over Austria-Hungary
at the beginning of the war and driven, some by soldiers, but oftener by
civilians with the yellow Austrian bands on their arms; heavy ammunition
wagons drawn by four horse; with a soldier outrider astride one of the
leaders, and from time to time columns of reserves, older men for the
most part, bound for guard duty, probably, shuffling along in loose
order.  Round and through these wagon-trains, in a swirl of dust,
rumbled and swayed big motor-trucks, and once or twice, scattering
everything with a lilting "Ta-te... Ta-da" the gray motor, the flash of
scarlet, pale blue, and gold, and the bronzed, begoggled, imperial
visage of some one high in command.

Once we passed a big Austrian mortar, covered with tarpaulin, by the
side of the road, and again two big 20-centimetre guns, which had not
had time to get up to Brest-Litovsk.  This is where you find the heavy
artillery nowadays, quite as likely as in a fort, on some hard highway,
where it can easily be moved and sheltered, not behind concrete, but
some innocent-looking apple-tree.  Each fence corner was chalked with
letters and numbers intelligible to the drivers, who passed that way;
each bridge, down to the few boards across a ditch, had been examined by
the pioneers, rebuilt if necessary, and a neat little sign set up on it,
telling whether or not the heavy artillery could safely cross.  Flowing
back toward this huge, confident, onrushing organism, the peasants--
timid, halting, weary, and dust-covered, with wagons heaped with
furniture, beds, hay for the horses, with the littlest children and
those too old to walk--were returning to the charred ruins of their
homes.  They, too--like the grass--had their unconquerable strength.

The same patience and quiet courage which had struck me in Antwerp as
peculiarly Belgian, was here again in these Poles, Slovaks, and
Ruthenians, whose boys, perhaps, were fighting with the armies which had
driven the Belgians out.  You would see peasant mothers with their
children hanging from their shoulders--women who had been tramping for
days, perhaps, and might have days yet to tramp before they reached the
heap of charred bricks that had once been a home.  Nearly all had a cow,
sometimes pulling back on its halter and filling the air with
lamentation, sometimes harnessed with the horse to the family wagon.
They had their pet dogs and birds, the little girls their kittens; from
the front of one wagon poked the foolish head of a colt.  Babies
scarcely big enough to sit up crammed their little fingers into their
eyes to shut out the dust; bigger children, to whom the ride would be,
no doubt, the event of their lives, laughed and clapped their hands, and
old men on foot took off their caps, after the fashion of the country,
and bowed gravely as we whirled past. It seemed as if it were we who
should do the saluting.

From the fields, as we whirled into and out of layers of air, sharply,
as one does in a motor, came now the odor of ripe straw, now a whiff of
coffee from a "goulash cannon," steaming away behind its troop like the
calliope in the old-fashioned circus, and now and then, from some
thicket or across a clover field, the sharp, dismaying smell of rotting
flesh.  The countryside lay so tranquil under the August sun that it was
only when one saw a dead animal lying in an open field that one recalled
the fire that, a few days before, must have crisscrossed this whole
country, as now, doubtless, in constant cavalry fights and rear-guard
skirmishes, it was crisscrossing the country up ahead.

Half an hour short of Brest-Litovsk an unfinished bridge turned us off
into a potato field.  The soft ground had long since been pounded flat,
as the army, swinging round to the north, had crossed on a pontoon a
mile or two lower down.  The motor plunged, snarled, and stopped, and
again, as we shovelled in front and pushed behind, we knew why armies
burn bridges behind them.

Past us, as we sweated there, the slow but surer wagon-trains ploughed
forward.  One, a German train, stopped beside us to bait their horses--
officers of the Landwehr or Landsturm type, who looked as if they might
be, as doubtless they were, lawyers, professors, or successful business
men at home.  They were from a class who, with us, would generally be
helpless in the field, yet these bronzed, bearded, thoughtful-looking
men seemed just as familiar with the details of their present job as
with the work they had left behind.

Ever since we had crossed into Poland this sober, steel-gray stream had
been mingling with and stiffening our lighter-hearted, more boyish,
blue-gray stream of Austrians and Hungarians.  Here were men who knew
what they were doing, believed in it, and had the will to put it
through. One thought of Emerson's "Earnest of the North Wind" whenever
they came in sight.

Those who talk of "frightfulness" and get their notions of German
soldiers from the vaporings of sedentary publicists, who know no more of
them than may be seen through the pipe smoke of their own editorial
rooms, are destined to a melancholy awakening.  You may prefer your own
ways, but you cannot make them prevail by blackguarding the other man's
weaknesses; you must beat him where he is strong.

Lies and the snobbish ridicule with which our magazines and papers have
been full, run off men like these like water off a duck.  These men are
in earnest. They have work to do.  No one who has heard them singing the
"Wacht am Rhein" through the starlight of garrisoned towns all the way
from the Channel to the Carpathians, will talk of their being "stolid";
but they have, it is true, no coltishness.  They are grown up. And this
discipline of theirs does not mean, as so many people seem to think it
does, being compelled to do what you don't want to do.  It means doing
what you are told to do as well as it possibly can be done, no matter
how small it is nor who is looking on--a sense of duty which makes every
switchman behind the lines act as if he were Von Hindenburg.  The thing
of theirs, this will-power and moral earnestness, is one of the things
that last--something before which the merely frivolous has always gone
down and always will.

The road down which we were going was, in a general way, the path
already taken by the Austrian and Hungarian troops which had stormed the
outer works at Kobilany two days before and been the first to enter the
town.  What happened was much like what had happened at Ivangorod.  A
German corps crossed the Bug to north and south and closed in on the
rail-road, the Sixth Austro-Hungarian Corps under Corps General of
Infantry Arz attacked the centre.  The Russians sent the entire civil
population eastward, removed their artillery and everything of value
they could take, and set fire to the city.  There was a brief artillery
preparation to which the Russians, who all through this retreat appeared
to be short in ammunition and artillery, replied for a time; then the
outer forts were stormed, and when the Sixth Corps entered the burning
city the Russians, except for the rear-guard prisoners, were gone.

We swung past a freight yard littered with over-turned cars, through a
tangle of wagons--army wagons pushing one way and distracted peasants
the other--over a pontoon across the narrow Bug and on into the town.

A city of sixty-five thousand people, with the exception of a church or
two and houses that could almost be counted on one's fingers, was a
waste of gaping windows and blackened chimneys.  The Russians' purpose
was not altogether clear, for the town was their town, and its
destruction at this time of the year could not seriously embarrass a
well-provisioned, confident enemy, but they had, at any rate, wiped it
off the map.  Not a woman, a child, a glimmer of peaceful life; only
smouldering ruins, the occasional abandoned rifles and cartridge-boxes
of the army that had retired, and the endless wagon-trains of the army
pursuing them.

All the dust through which we had ridden since morning seemed to have
gathered over that dismal wreck.  It was a fog in the streets, on which
darkness was already settling--streets without a lamp or a sound except
that from the onflowing trains.  Through this dust we tried to find the
headquarters of the Sixth Army Corps.  To its commander our passes took
us and without him we had no reason for being in Brest-Litovsk. Nobody
knew where the Sixth was.  Two Hungarian officers, hurrying by in a
commandeered carriage, shouted back something about the "church with a
blue cupola"; somebody else said "near the schnapps factory"; a beaming
young lieutenant, helping to disentangle wagon-trains at the main street
comers, said that the Sixth had marched at three that morning.  We had
driven all day with nothing to eat but a bit of war bread and chocolate,
we were black with dust, there was not a crumb in the place that did not
belong to the army, and we sat there in the thickening dusk, almost as
much adrift as a raft in mid-ocean,

The two armies--wagon-trains, that is to say--were crossing each other
at that corner.  The Germans were going one way, the Austro-Hungarians
the other--tired, dust-covered horses and men, anonymous cogs in the
vast machine, which had been following the man ahead since the day
before, like enough, and might go on into another day before they could
make camp.

Young Hungarian officers greeted one another gayly, and exchanged the
day's adventures and news; young Germans rode by, slim, serious, and
self-contained.  Now the stream would stop as one line tried to break
through the other, puzzled drivers would yank their horses back, then
some determined section commander would come charging back, fling his
horse into the tangle--wagon tongues jammed into the canopy in front,
protestations in German, Hungarian, Polish, Slovak, goodness knows what,
until at last one line gave way and the other shot forward through the
dust again.

I had been in another captured city, with the besieged then, and when I
think of Antwerp it is of the creepy, bright stillness during the
bombardment--the autumn sun, the smell of dead leaves, the shuttered
streets, without a sound except when a shell came screaming in from the
country or, a block or so away, there was a detonation and some facade
came rumbling down.  But when I think of Brest-Litovsk it will be of
dust--dust like fog and thickened with the smoke and twilight--and that
strange, wild, creaking stream of wagons fighting through it as they
might have fought in the days when Europe was young and whole races of
men came pouring over the frontiers.

We started off finally on foot through streets silent as the grave--not
a person, not a lamp, not so much as a barking dog, as queer and as
creepy as some made-up thing in a theatre.  Once we stumbled past a
naked and dismembered trunk set up beside a doorway--a physician's
manikin that chance or some sinister clown had left there.  Once--and
one of the strangest sounds I ever heard--behind the closed up-stair
shutters of an apothecary's shop, whose powders and poisons were strewn
over the sidewalk, a piano haltingly played with one finger.

At last a light, an open door, a sentry--and this was, indeed,
theatrical--a lighted room and a long table set with candles, flowers,
and wine.  The commander of the Sixth Corps had just been decorated with
the order "Pour le mérite" and he and his officers were dining before
taking up the march.  He welcomed us in the true Hungarian style,
grabbed me by the arms and asked if I was hungry, apologized for their
frugal war-time fare, told how splendidly his men had behaved, had a
word and a place for every-body, as if we were all old friends.

There were three rooms full of officers, and every-one half rose and
bowed in military fashion as we made our way between the tables to our
seats at the end of the third.  An amiable young signal-officer who had
been at his telephone some thirty kilometres away when the city was
taken and was off at three next morning, sat opposite me and told with
great spirit how the only common language between him and some of his
polyglot men was the English he had learned in school and they had
picked up in America.

We slept on commandeered mattresses that night on the floor of a vacant
house, with a few Hungarian hussars still singing over the victory in
the back yard, and got up to find the crowded town of the night before
as empty as the old camp-ground the day after the circus.

We strolled through some of the empty streets and into the citadel,
where a handful of German soldiers were guarding a placid, tan-colored
little herd of Russian prisoners; recrossed the pontoon bridge, as
crowded as it had been the afternoon before, and then stopped at
Kobilany fort on the way back to Ivangorod.

The brief Austrian fire had been accurate.  There were shell holes
inside the fort, along the parapet, and one frightful bull's-eye, which
had struck square on the inner concrete rim and blown chunks of
concrete, as well as its own steel, all over the place.  The rifle-men
left in this embrasure were killed at a stroke, and their blood remained
freshly dried on the stones.  Of various uncomfortable places I have
seen in the war this was one--left behind in an open concrete fort to
cover the retreat of artillery, and wait with a pop-gun rifle until the
enemy decided that his artillery had "silenced" you and that it was time
to storm.

One outer angle of the fort had been blown up and the rest was to have
been dynamited, but a nimble Pole, fearing that he might be blown up,
too, before the order came to retire, had, so we were told, cut the
electric wire.  Just why Brest-Litovsk was given up must be left for
those who have had a more comprehensive view of all the causes behind
the Russian retreat.  It was plain to any one, however, that although
this outer fortress had been taken by storm and a certain amount of
damage done to the attacking force by mines laid in front of it,
scarcely more than nominal resistance, considering the original
preparations, had been made.

Again we whirled down the Ivangorod road, through a stream of wagons and
peasants' carts almost as thick as the day before.  We took a new road
this time, but the deserted trenches still crossed the fields, and
creeping up toward them, behind trees, through the greasy, black mud of
pasture-land, were those eloquent little shelters, scarcely more than a
basketful of earth, thrown up by the skirmishers as they ran forward,
dropped and dug themselves in.

We came to Radom and turned southward again.  There were people, smoke
coming from cottage chimneys, goose-girls with their spotless and
absurdly peaceful geese, once a group of peasants--young men and
barefooted girls--sitting on the grass resting from their work in the
fields. As the train passed one of the boys flung his arm round the neck
of the tanned young nymph beside him, and over they rolled, fighting
like good-natured puppies.  They were the very peasants we had seen
dragging through the dust of the Brest-Litovsk road and this the same
country, though it looked so strangely bright and warm and full of
people.  War had blown over it, that was all, and life, which is so much
stronger than the strongest field-marshal, which can be bent, beaten
down, and crushed some-times, like the grass, was growing back again.


The End