Five fronts on the firing-lines with English-French, Austrian, German and Russian troops

Foreword

Hungarian is an Asiatic language using Roman letters. So last November in Budapest William G. Shepherd of the United Press and I were puzzled by placards on dead walls headed: hirdetmeny!

" Sounds like some kind of crime," I said. " But what crime ? " (To this day I do not know what the word means.)

" Murder, perhaps," said Shep. " They're advertising the finish of ' War Correspondents,' old style."

Maybe the reporter is harder to kill. He is apt to care little for messing with generals, or to pose as a tactician. He knows that one comes closer to the realities of war by mingling afoot with peasantry and troopers, than when convoyed by staff officers and allowed to see only what they permit, to learn what they want him to know. He smiles at the pretensions of " War Correspondents," who ape military dress, soldiers' ways of conduct, and collect decorations. He wonders over the hullabaloo about making dodos of them, since they have existed chiefly in their own or x FOREWORD

their newspapers' imaginations. And I ask, have those who mourn the halcyon days of Archibald Forbes ever read him without thinking of Blackstone and the Lucy Books in one?

In this inane war many doors lay open to the various fronts. The reporter needed only personal credentials, initiative, candour, and a sense of locality. I found no military official who did not treat me civilly, in doing his duty as he saw it; and this whether I was his involuntary guest, under arrest, or a mere intruder between the lines. If any of those doors are now shut to me I harbour neither grief nor resentment. Each belligerent demands that you be partisan in what you write from the lines; that you conceal what he wants hidden, tell what he wants told. In the febrile political state of the capitals of Europe this policy of " He who is not for me is against me " is only natural. There you may be told that the whole truth will be welcomed, only to learn later that you have been fooled, and that a non-partisan whose job is to report and write life as he sees it cannot stay persona grata nowadays with any fighting government.

Poor old Mister Truth — Herr, Monsieur, or Gospadeen — who never is belligerent! I know that to prate of one's honesty opens it to suspicion. I cannot and I do not. I want only to plead for that personal sincerity in reporting with-

FOREWORD xi

out which recorded history is worthless; which democracies hold to be one safeguard of civilisation. This war is putting it to the test; reporters, too, are " fighting for life " now. And yet the blindness, the official sophistries which often impeded me, seem in retrospect appealing, sometimes pathetic, in their humanity. One loves far less, judging from what I saw upon certain fronts, the authors of much that is written from such places, and marvels how some of them can sleep at night. And if ever after this war I see a " correspondent " wearing a military decoration! . . .

This book tries to be a detached report of concrete, human scenes in five zones of fighting. I believe that I saw or participated in them in the spirit of a true neutral. But full detachment is a cold-blooded virtue, and it is as barren to act or write with the feelings of a lizard as of a sentimentalist. Moments come in the thick of things when one is carried off his feet, in sympathy, in scorn, in recklessness; which these pages, as fairly immediate transcripts, must reflect. Thus I have excuse to make and apology to offer no more for scoring the Austrians in Servia and reverencing the Lilleois of German France, than for homage to the British at St. Quentin, fellowship with the Russian invaders of Bukowina, or for firing two aimless shots from the Bavarian trenches. I think that in each instance I acted and have writxii FOREWORD

ten naturally, honestly, as a reporter and a human being.

No army nor foreign office in this war recognises as such reporters in the fullest and most serious sense of their aims. Therefore, since being free agents is the prime condition of their existence, they must provide their own standards of right and wrong, follow them at their own risk. Personally I hold it dishonourable to transmit from one enemy to another information of tactical value. But I would not hesitate to break any censorship upon social and political facts, or deeds violating the decencies of war. Personal conduct is to be governed by the orders and permissions of the officers whom you are with, a matter which cares for itself, because no real neutral when he is among men sacrificing their lives — no matter how mistakenly — can fail to feel his heart leap and to bow in admiration for them. Just as they feel no venom against the enemy facing them, it is never they who hamper the reporter. Peace, if it comes before all Europe has made a Mexico of herself (as appears to me she very well may), will have its roots in that sublime brotherhood of all fighters which reigns along every front.

For the rest, reporting is much a trick of observing and interpreting; a problem of selection, like any art. Sometimes a particular scene, or

FOREWORD xiii

emotion, or personality, obtrudes as a keynote. Walker, the English bicycle scout at the battle of Le Cateau, was one. Such a being becomes the shaft of light between the inexpressible before your eyes, and the credulous darkness of the reader's mind. I hope that I have conveyed as flesh and blood protagonists equally revealing men like the Bavarian Lieutenant Riegel, Captain Shechin the Russian Hussar, Ivan Tornich the American serb, and the soldier of Przemysl in the death-throes of cholera.

Discretion has place in reporting, but deception none. Luck is far less an element than good after-results may seem to imply. In the flush of success one forgets his planning and hard thinking. Seeing clearly, like facing bullets, is a test of temperament, name it courage or any other quality more or less resounding. And war, for all its horror, may also be beautiful. I hold that the good reporter, like the good soldier, must look upon war as the supreme adventure in the great drama called Life.

Part I With The British In France

Paris, August 28, 19 14. — For two nights and most of three days the writer has been within the Allies' lines. All of Wednesday morning — the terrible August 26th — I was directly under the German fire. I can thus give the first eye-witness account of British operations on French soil against the principal invading German force.

That, as the world now knows, was the masterful retreat of the Expeditionary Force from the region of Mons, in Belgium, to Noyon, some sixtyfive miles inside the French border. Foremost in this unique experience stands the glorious cheer, coolness, and morale of the English troops, under the most desperate conditions that even this untried modern warfare can impose: one to three they fought against Von Kluck's army, inflicting and receiving tremendous losses. In various places of the world I have stood before danger and suffering, but never in the past have I been so on the point of yielding in feeling to them as in these last seventy hours on the white roads and in the stacked wheat fields of the Nord.

Prudence alone for my own safety — and not from the arms of the Uhlans — made me return. In that forbidden military region, where any foreigner is remarked in peace times, I was becoming altogether too conspicuous. The peasantry were spy-mad, and yet I was only once arrested as a spy, and that by the civil authorities, to whom I proved innocence easily enough. It was the military who were to be feared, and, openly associating with both officers and men along the firing line, the danger of being caught as I was without permits from the staff grew ever more exciting and imminent. But it was rather a shameful luxury to have been for this time without my boots off, without sleep, and with little more than bread and cheese to eat, beside soldiers who had received no rations for three days, and who as they shuffled and dozed along would tell you of regiments 1,200 strong that at roll-call after battle mustered but two officers and ioo men.

Paris newspapers of August 25 declared the northern railways open as far as the village of Aulnoye, some nine miles south of the fortified border city of Maubeuge. In the same way the War Office announced that the Allies' lines in this region had fallen back to the main position north of that city and extending beyond the Belgian frontier near Valenciennes. At the commissariat of police in my Paris arrondissement, I got permission on my " permis de sejour " to leave the city, and a " sauf-conduit " to and from Aulnoye. These, my passport, and the policy of absolute frankness to all questioners saved me. Had that commissary known the location of Aulnoye, I doubt whether he would have issued me the papers. A crowd was waiting in his office, and I vaguely assented to his vaguer question whether the village was not in the district of the North. But Aulnoye I never saw.

I caught a noon train from the Gare du Nord, in khaki trousers, blue serge coat, golf cap, and the shirt of an American marine. All along the line France wrote the index of her life-struggle. Dusty soldiers in their scarlet bags of trousers and blue frock-like coats with tails buttoned back crowded the station platforms, singing, smoking, filling canvas w :er buckets for their horses at the platform taps. Boxcar troop trains packed with them and their womenfolk slid along the adjoining track. Every siding was jammed by flatcars loaded with grey artillery pieces, with ammunition wagons; with black, dome-roofed cars bearing the ominous " 40 hommes — 8 chevaux." Every station yard was a-litter from hay bales shipped north.

Noyon swarmed with officers in pale blue coats and caps, with silver epaulettes, and a few cuirassiers' brass helmets, from which long hair dangles behind. The uncut wheat lay in the fields flattened from rain, the stacked mildewing; once I saw four old women unloading a rick into a barn. All that luxuriant country in the rich crisis of harvest was empty, rotting. Engines linked together by the half-dozen rushed south, " from Belgium," as the stout, bearded man opposite in the carriage informed. " From Belgium," too, came the boxcars glutted with refugees; at the time he fooled me into believing that. The platform at St. Quentin swarmed with the British, in their flat caps and olive drab, so exactly like our army uniform.

It was getting dark and had been raining. The refugees now rode on open flat-cars, the distracted mothers in black holding umbrellas over the baby carriages. At Bohain my firstclass compartment, long empty, filled with eight railway guards, who inspected me in a suspicious silence, and then promptly fell asleep. We were due at Aulnoye at eight o'clock, but it was past that now. The train halted at a town called Le Cateau, fifteen miles south of my destination. A being thrust his head into the window and muttered something rapidly, which woke the guards as if a rifle had gone off. The youngster in the next seat turned to me and said :

" The Germans are all about Maubeuge. The train goes no further."

I stepped out into the darkness of that strange place, Le Cateau, and into such a spectacle as no man can forget. I knew that then; it hardly would have heightened the feeling to know also that in twelve hours I should see the town ablaze. The guards dissolved into the noisy platform crowd, which carried paste-board bundles, baskets, babies. No one at the gate asked for my ticket or my papers. A half-visible squad of troops on the road passed rapidly, whistling a queer lively tune in unison. It was only when they broke feebly into the Marseillaise that I was sure they were French. And they were marching south.

I made for a light, through an iron gateway in a high brick wall. In the middle of the enclosure a woman outlined in the doorway demanded shrilly who I was and what I wanted. I asked for a hotel, and she directed on up the street, as two dogs broke forth furiously. Outside, French troops were marching so densely that I had to brace and wait against the lightless brick houses of the narrow street, as it curved north, down into the hollow where the heart of Le Cateau lay. Suddenly I caught the impatient panting and the blinding shimmer of blocked automobiles. In them as they followed south were British uniforms, with the meagre scarlet facings of staff officers. Then an immense clatter of hoofs, the jolt of heavy wheels — artillery, supply wagons, cavalry, the gleam on lances from more motors. It was the British in retreat — the British/

The town square was filled with them, already spreading their kits on the stone paving; with horses, motor-cars. It was half an hour after I had inquired at every lighted house for lodging before I found the Hotel du Mouton Blanc. At a long table in a windowless room behind the cafe I sat down to dinner with a dozen British officers, and gave those around me the two Paris newspapers printed in English of that morning. They read them with an eager disdain, and their comments first realised to me the grim drama into which I had stumbled, and their wonderful spirit under reverse.

"The Earl of Leven wounded, eh?" said the young lieutenant of a Dorsetshire regiment on my right; "is that all they have?" (Leven's was for days the only casualty made public.) " We're rather well cut up, too. Five officers and 240 men alive out of a thousand in that business around Vicq."

It was the first bald chapter of the decimations that for the next two days officers and men repeated to me, and always thus, as if they were but remembering from a book of statistics; with never a quiver of the voice or eye; not as if they might betray down-heartedness or sorrow, but actually as if such things, in their sublime assurance, were inconceivable. That saying as old as history, that the Englishman never knows when he is beaten, may have appealed to me before as a figure of speech. In a flash I read its literalness.

A comrade of the lieutenant's came in. The pair had not met since the battle began three days before, and they named over in the same matterof-fact way brother officers — dead.

" I say," the newcomer leaned over toward me, " how is that cheese there? "

They asked me no questions, but I was quite frank with them, even gave the Dorsetshire officer, whose name was Burnand, my card. I told the same story that I repeated afterwards to whomever accosted me : that I was an American correspondent, who, having applied in proper form, with the required sworn declaration, to accompany the French army, had come north to look at the country where fighting might occur, and been caught by the British withdrawal.

" Well, if I were you," said the cavalry captain across the table, significantly, " I'd get out of here the first thing in the morning."

"Why?" I demanded. "Are you going to arrest me? "

He simply stared through me and said:

" The Germans aren't five miles north of this bally place now. They'll be shelling it before six o'clock."

In the passage-way a baby was crying with relentless piteousness. The mother, in a huge black picture hat, did her best at soothing, but the shrieks got on Burnand's mind — so he said, at least.

" Oh, choke that youngster," he kept muttering. " I'm nervous as a cat. I think I'd jump if I heard a door slam."

Nervous! After the carnage he had survived, the mess-mates he had seen slaughtered, he drawled this. He was no more nervous than any Englishman of his caste is after a cricket game. I never used to believe in caste; but, if it made that young fellow what he was then, I do.

" To-morrow the row'll be over toward Cambrai, too," said the moustached captain. (Cambrai was a larger town ten miles west-northwest). " They burnt Vertain and Solesmes, just above here, this afternoon."

Here and in the cafe outside, though always refraining from asking directly, I gathered details of the fighting retreat lasting since Monday. Crowded before, the square was a spectacle which only Meissonier could have portrayed. The khaki swarm had tripled, massed around the blaze and crackle of camp fires alone lighting the scene. Unsaddled cavalry horses, automobiles piled with sleepers, infantry hacking open tinned beef, cavalrymen lying down to doze in their long coats, jammed the last inch of space. Opposite, in the ranked windows of the " Ecole des jeunes filles," the staff headquarters, showed the pale blue of mantle gas jets shining all night upon the wounded.

But it was inside the Mouton Blanc that the heroisms and ignominies of war best came into their own. Men of a Welsh regiment, finding I could speak English, crowded about in the exact, pitiful ignorance that Zola insists upon. " Where are we? " they asked. " In France or Belgium? " Le Cateau tongue-tied them, and each produced a little blank-book and made me write the name for him. " There," laughed one of them. " So if they pick me up after the Germans get me, the old lady'll know where it happened." It seemed as if I never stopped giving out cigarettes, lighting them; they had no money, and had not been paid since coming to France. " France " — as a red-haired sergeant said — " a blooming fine country, if the people weren't so oncivilised."

The attack of Sunday was drawn, and the present force, probably the British centre, had retired from around Mons to the vicinity of Vicq, over the border from Valenciennes. On Monday the cavalry were to attack the German artillery, supported by a French column from the east. The enemy, in far greater numbers, had surrounded themselves with barbed wire, and the French failed to show up. It was here that the slaughter was so severe. The infantry, finding it useless to join in, had begun the retirement south on Monday afternoon, the rest at daylight to-day (August 25). All had been on the march ever since, with the Germans close to their heels, and burning every village on the roads.

" Brought down two of their planes this morning, just the same. You ever seen them? Got wings like eagles."

" Remember that shrapnel, right over our heads."

" It was the rain this afternoon saved us."

" Of course, they're mowing us down — 90,- ooo-odd against 24,000." (This moderate estimate likely only included the opposed wings.) " But we're getting more of them. Why, the blighters can't shoot a rifle. All our fellows' wounds are from shrapnel exploding overhead. And they squeal like pigs at bayonets. Can't stand the steel, y' know."

" We're drawing them down into France like a bait, where the Frenchies can fight them on their own ground. The English is on the defensive," explained the red sergeant. " Then the French are to close in on them from both sides, catch them like rats in a trap."

All at once a little corporal at my elbow, who

THE RETREAT FROM MONS n

had been eying me in silence, said, " They've just arrested a spy across the street."

"Have they?" I asked, without a quiver, I think, but with a quick burning in my chest. " And what was he doing? "

" Hanging too close around headquarters. One of our men spotted him, and they led him away — blindfolded. You know what that means."

I had not yet been to the police with my papers as I should have done. But now I talked a while longer, and at the first pause leisurely left the cafe, and picked a way through the prone, weary bodies to the office seen in my first round of the square. The official mannikin there simply shrugged his shoulders at the red seal on my passport, and stamped the sauf-conduit with certainly the last impression his little machine has given.

At midnight the two women who ran the White Sheep started to shoo the throng out. It took them half an hour, and it was not until the last private had gone and the door was closed — and the baby and the picture hat abed upstairs — that I realised the pluck of that pair. It is through them, as much as from the blind, contemptuous self-confidence of Tommy Atkins, that Le Cateau becomes unforgettable. One was young and rosycheeked, but the other and head of the house, a sallow, thin being, with lined cheeks and a pointed jaw, began to relate to me how many hundred meals she had served that day, how in her bad health the village doctor had warned her that she must have rest and sleep, though she would be up at four in the morning, making coffee. 1

I wonder — I doubt — if she is alive now.

" Hein ! " she summed up the evening, with the national nod and gesture of both hands to her hips, at all the litter and wreckage on the floor, " C'est la guerre."

In that, and the next few moments, she epitomised the French just as much as Burnand or any of the rest had summed the Briton. When she had helped me lift two of the leather wall benches into the centre of the cafe, and thrown on them a great striped mattress for my bed, I asked whether she would flee south in the morning.

"Go? Go away from Le Cateau — from my village — from the Mouton Blanc? Why should I go? The German pigs will not touch me," she averred with a sublime calm, though her beady eyes flashed. " Come, we will have a bottle of champagne. I have been keeping it for years."

And from somewhere the red-cheeked girl produced that bulging big bottle and three slim

1 British officers seen later in Paris told me that these women were German spies.

glasses. It had no label, but was of some good old vintage, though a bit sweet, and we filled and refilled with the hissing stuff, drinking: " Vive la France ! " and gossiping about les beaux Anglais, and her son who was with the army to the east, until quite two o'clock.

II The Battle Of Le Cateau-cambrai

The thing that toward four o'clock stirred me from the doze I was just falling into strikes the keynote, I think, better than anything else in those vivid three days, of this epochal war. There was no reveille, no sound of a bugle ; only, echoing through the silence and ashen light of that square, the cry:

"Doctor! Doctor! Doctor!" And again, and repeated, " Doctor! "

Over in the girls' school some one — lord or Manchester apprentice — was in his throes. As morning broke I slipped out alone into the square, now nearly empty. The last of the infantry were trailing off westward through the town; the cavalry and artillery up the street I had descended in the night. I followed them.

All along to the railroad station on the hill, which was deserted and locked, the folk of Le Cateau stood in knots upon the curb. Not at their doorsteps, mind, which is the place for gossip, but speechless, drawn-faced, loaded with cloth bundles linked to throw upon their shoulders, turning heads from their homes toward a flight they knew not where. I took up a position on top of the hill, where for an hour the pathetic stream grew and swept southeast toward La Groise, while southward on the St. Quentin road, after the artillery and cavalry, and on the route I had resolved to take, trudged an endless stream of peasants' wagons.

Sunlight began to glance across the rolling fields, yellow with stacked wheat sheaves, through the delicate bosks of willows. Toward six o'clock, suddenly boomed out the heavy staccato of artillery, as yet invisible. Then along the brow of the opposite ridge to the north, not a mile away, appeared long lines of racing heads — cavalry from their undulating motion, the Uhlans, though the summit hid their horses. Puck-puck. . . . Puck-puck-puck, broke out bullets from machine guns on all the roofs around.

I sat on a stone at the entrance of an inn-yard. The increasing fire, too high yet by thirty feet to hurt, neither quickened the speed of the procession passing under the railway bridge nor made a single face turn. Behind the inn, a two-horse 'bus which had long been waiting empty, filled with the stout proprietor, his wife in black baize carrying a thrush in a wooden cage, and their three bare-legged boys. They trundled away. All at once not a vehicle or refugee was in sight; and then, up the empty street, came the last of them, a woman. She could not have been less than eighty years old, and was all alone. Clad in her best black, without goods of any sort, she wore a quaint poke bonnet, riding in a small twowheeled rick. Brave, stolid, tearless, perched on her high nest of clean straw, she croaked the cry, that of every driver who had passed, to her stumbling, skinny pony : " Vi ! Vi ! Vi ! " — and vanished.

Of those who quitted it all, I think that I was the last to leave Le Cateau. As the clatter of bullets descended, I edged along this upper road, the bottle of spring water I had taken from the White Sheep in my hand, toward a brick factory with a grotesque tin windshield on its chimney. Suddenly across the valley, and behind where the German cavalry still were passing, appeared a mass of English artillery, and the sight of them sweeping down the slope, swinging to park themselves behind the cover of a grove, was stirring in its perfectness. A bullet — a wild shot — pricked up the dust not ten feet from my stand, and I slipped behind the factory, just as the machine-gun rattle broke out upon its splintering windows.

The shrapnel, too, was growing louder and closer. In modern battles, of course, with the front extending fifteen miles or more — perhaps of only one wing — you cannot pick the site of butchery, especially when only afoot. An old man in a blue jumper came out of a shed, and started dumbly with me down the fields to the now vacant Bohain-St. Quentin road, where the cavalry had passed, and in the direction of the Germans. There was a bridge and stream there, making back toward a mill under the railway embankment, and the fellow headed toward this, as I sat waiting in a ditch for fully half an hour.

Nearby lay a horse, his legs horizontally not touching the ground, as always in the first moments of death. The parked artillery should have been but a rod away, but I could not find them. Only the German shells, passing lower overhead with their peculiar, steely elastic whiffling — like loud invisible ghosts — sent me off again. The peasants along the road, aroused later than the people of the town, were just beginning to emerge from behind their hedges. In about a mile I caught up with an old couple. The man was lame and hobbled on a white stick, his wife carried nothing but a little basket, and when I tried to take it from her, to help her along, she resisted me.

u C'est epouvantable," I said.

" Non, non," she muttered. " J'ai de la douleur — douleur."

Grief — that strange French word. How much it always means, but on her thin lips its force was — universal.

Soon a drab line of bicycle scouts came along, but heading back toward Le Cateau. I told them of the cavalry up on the slope. " Yes," said their freckled leader, " it's a circling movement, to the east around the town." As they wheeled on, the last in line stared with his eyes fixed on the bottle of water, and I heard him mutter to the man ahead something which sounded like " spy." Then came the trundling ammunition wagons, and on the last of them, sprawled on his back, all his limbs bobbing nervelessly, with blanched face and open mouth, lay a youngster wounded. Next cavalry. One fellow with a small moustache beckoned me, for a drink, I thought, but when I offered him the bottle, he shoved it almost angrily aside, and I gave him the cigarette he wanted, for he had seen me smoking.

Two young women, each wheeling a baby carriage, passed.

" Look at those blighters," said the trooper, feelingly. " It's them that's getting it worse than any of us boys. Our business, this. But them — it's they we should collect the account from Kaiser Bill for. Hello, there's one of our 'planes."

A biplane, a Voisin, by its shorter under wing, was clattering up from the south. A motorcycle, with a big scout buried to his ears in a greenish raincoat, zizzed past toward Le Cateau. Pausing, he shouted something, and the squad of cavalry turned and sprang up a lane to the right. Beyond more stood up there. A little village close down the slope swarmed with them, waiting on both sides of the road. But when the first horseman was close, for what reason I cannot now explain, I threw the glass bottle into the ditch. Did they think I was offering them poison, or that the thing was some signal for the watching enemy?