My year of the great war

Front matter

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Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I Who Started It? i

II "Le Brave Belge!" 20

II " Le Brave Belge! ''

The stampede to Europe — Early days in Belgium — Characteristics of the Allies' armies — Rumours — First skirmishes — When would the English come? — Shipperke spirit — Pathos of the Belgian defence — A Taube and a Belgian cyclist patrol — Brussels before its fall — A momentous decision.

The rush from Monterey, In Mexico, when a telegram said that general European war was inevitable; the run and jump aboard the Liisitania at New York the night that war was declared by England against Germany; the Atlantic passage on the liner of ineffaceable memory, a suspense broken by fragments of war news by wireless; the arrival in an England before the war was a week old; the journey to Belgium in the hope of reaching the scene of action! — as I write, all seem to have the perspective of history, so final are the processes of war, so swift their execution, and so eager Is every one for each day's developments. As one grows older the years seem shorter; but the first year of the Great War is the longest year I have known.

Le brave Beige! One must be honest about him. If one lets his heart run away with his judgment he does his mind an Injustice. A fellow-countryman who was in London and fresh from home In the eighth month of the war, asked me for my views of the relative efficiency of the different armies engaged.

" Do you mean that I am to speak without regard to personal sympathies?" I asked.

" Certainly," he replied.

"LE BRAVE BELGEI^' 21

When he had my opinion he exclaimed:

" You have mentioned them all except the Belgian army. I thought It was the bravest and best of all."

" Is that what they think at home? " I asked.

" Yes, of course."

" The Atlantic is broad," I suggested.

This man of affairs, an exponent of the efficiency of business, was a sentimentalist when it came to war, as Anglo-Saxons usually are. The side which they favour — that Is the efficient side. When I ventured to suggest that the Belgian army, in a professional sense, was hardly to be considered as an army. It was clear that he had ceased to associate my experience with any real knowledge.

In business he was one who saw his rivals, their abilities, the organisation of their concerns, and their resources of competition with a clear eye. He could say of his best personal friend : " I like him, but he has a poor head for affairs." Yet he was the type who, if he had been a trained soldier, would have been a business man of war, who would have wanted a sharp, ready sword In a well-trained hand and to leave nothing to chance In a battle for the right. In Germany, where some of the best brains of the country are given to making war a business, he might have been a soldier who would rise to a position on the staff. In America he was the employer of three thousand men — a general of civil life.

'* But look how the Belgians have fought! " he exclaimed. " They stopped the whole German army for two weeks."

The best army was best because It had his sympathy. His view was the popular view In America : the view of the heart. America saw the pigmy fighting the giant rather than let him pass over Belgian soil. On that day when a gallant young king cried, " To arms ! '* all his people became gallant to the imagination.

When I think of Belgium's part in the war I always think of the little Belgian dog, the shipperke, who lives on the canal boats. He is a home-staying dog, loyal, affectionate, domestic, who never goes out on the towpath to pick quarrels with other dogs ; but let anything on two or four feet try to go on board when his master is away and he will fight with every ounce of strength in him. The King had the shipperke spirit. All the Belgians who had the shipperke spirit tried to sink their teeth in the calves of the invader.

One's heart was with the Belgians on that eighteenth day of August, 19 14, when one set out toward the front in an automobile from a Brussels rejoicing over bulletins of victory, its streets walled with bunting; but there was something brewing in one's mind which was as treason to one's desires. Let Brussels enjoy its flags and its capture of German cavalry patrols while it might !

On the hills back of Louvain we came upon some Belgian troops in their long, cumbersome coats, dark silhouettes against the field, digging shallow trenches in an uncertain sort of way. Whether it was them or the Belgian staff officers hurrying by in their cars, I had the Impression of the will and not the way and a parallel of raw militia in uniforms taken from grandfather's trunk facing the trained antagonists of an Austerlitz, or a Waterloo, or a Gettysburg.

Le brave Beige! The question on that day was not. Are you brave? but. Do you know how to fight? Also, Would the French and the British arrive in time to help you? Of a thousand rumours about the

"LE BRAVE BELGE!'' 23

positions of the French and the British armies, one was as good as another. All the observer knew was that he was an atom in a motor and all he saw for the defence of Belgium was a regiment of Belgians digging trenches. He need not have been in Belgium before to realise that here were an unwarlike people, living by intensive thrift and caution — a most domesticated civilisation in the most thickly populated workshop in Europe, counting every blade of grass and every kernel of wheat and making its pleasures go a long way at small cost; a hothouse of a land, with the door about to be opened to the withering blast of war.

Out of the Hotel de Ville at Louvain, as our car halted by the cathedral door, came an elderly French officer, walking with a light, quick step, his cloak thrown back over his shoulders, and hurriedly entered a car; and after him came a tall British officer, walking more slowly, imperturbably, as a man who meant to let nothing disturb him or beat him — both characteristic types of race. This was the break-up of the last military conference held at Louvain, which had now ceased to be Belgian Headquarters.

How little you knew and how much they knew! The sight of them was helpful. One was the representative of a force of millions of Frenchmen; of the army. I had always believed in the French army, and have more reason now than ever before to believe in it. There was no doubt that if a French corps and a German corps were set the task of marching a hundred miles to a strategic position, the French would arrive first and win the day in a pitched battle. But no one knew this better than that German staff whose superiority, as von Moltke said, would always ensure victory. Was the French army ready? Could it bring fulness of its strength Into the first and perhaps the deciding shock of arms ? Where was the French army?

The other officer who came out of the Hotel de Vllle was the representative of a little army — a handful of regulars — hard as nails and ready to the last button. Where was the British army? The restaurant keeper where we had luncheon at Louvain — he knew. He whispered his military secret to me. The British army was toward Antwerp, waiting to crush the Germans In the flank should they advance on Brussels. We were "drawing them on!" Most cheerful, most confident, mine host! When I went back to Louvain under German rule his restaurant was In ruins.

We were on our way to as near the front as we would go, with a pass which was written for us by a Belgian reservist In Brussels between sips of beer brought him by a boy scout. It was a unique, a most accommodating, pass; the only one I have received from the Allies' side which would have taken me into the German lines.

The front which we saw was In the square of the little town of Haelen, where some dogs of a dog machine gun battery lay panting In their traces. A Belgian officer in command there I recollect for his passionate repetition of, "Assassins! The barbarians ! '* which seemed to choke out any other words whenever he spoke of the Germans. His was a fresh, livid hate, born of recent fighting. We could go where we pleased, he said; and the Germans were " out there," not far away. Very tired he was, except for the flash of hate in his eyes; as tired as the dogs of the mitrailleuse battery.

"LE BRAVE BELGE!" 25

We went outside to see the scene of " the battle," as It was called In the despatches; a field in the first flush of the war, where the headless lances of Belgian and German cavalrymen were still scattered about. The peasants had broken off the lance-heads for the steel, which was something to pay for the grain smouldering In the barn which had been shelled and burned.

A battle I It was a battle because the reporters could get some account of it and the fighting In Alsace was hidden under the cloud of secrecy. A superficial survey was enough to show that It had been only a reconnaissance by the Germans with some infantry and guns as well as cavalry. Their defeat had been an incident to the thrust of a tiny feeling finger of the German octopus for Information. The scouting of the German cavalry patrols here and there had the same object. Waiting behind hedges or sweeping around In the rear of a patrol with their own cavalry when the word came by telephone, the Belgians bagged many a German, man and horse, dead and alive.

Brussels and London and New York, too, thrilled over these exploits supplied to eager readers. It was the Uhlan week of the war ; for every German cavalrym.an was an Uhlan, according to popular conception. These Uhlans seemed to have more temerity than sense from the accounts that one read. But If one out of a dozen of these mounted youth, with horses fresh and a trooper's zest In the first flush of war, returned to say that he had ridden to such and such points without finding any signs of British or French forces, he had paid for the loss of the others. The Germans had plenty of cavalry. They used It as the eyes of the army, in co-operation with the aerial eyes of the planes.

A peasant woman came out of the house beside the battlefield with her children around her; a flat-chested, thin woman, prematurely old with toil. '^ Les Anglais! '' she cried at sight of us. Seeing that we had some lances In the car, she rushed into her house and brought out half a dozen more. If the English wanted lances they should have them. She knew only a few words of French, not enough to express the question which she made understood by gestures. Her eyes were burning with appeal to us and flashing with hate as she shook her fist toward the Germans.

When were the English coming? All her trust was In the English, the invincible English, to save her country. Probably the average European would have passed her by as an excited peasant woman. But pitiful she was to me, more pitiful than the raging officer and his dog battery, or the infantry awkwardly entrenching back of Louvain, or flag-decked Brussels believing in victory: one of the Belgians with the true shipperke spirit. She was shaking her fist at a dam which was about to burst in a flood.

It was strange to an American, who comes from a land where every one learns a single language, English, that she and her ancestors, through centuries of living neighbour in a thickly-populated country to people who speak French and to French civilisation, should never have learned to express themselves in any but their own tongue — singular, almost incredible, tenacity in the age of popular education! She would save the lance heads and garner every grain of wheat; she economised in all but racial animosity. This racial stubbornness of Europe — perhaps It keeps Europe powerful In jealous competition of race with race.

" LE BRAVE BELGE ! " 27

The thought that went home was that she did not want the Germans to come ; no Belgian wanted them ; and this was the fact decisive in the scales of justice. She said, as the officer had said, that the Germans were '* out there." Across the fields one saw nothing on that still August day; no sign of war unless a Taube overhead, the first enemy aeroplane I had seen in war. For the last two days the German patrols had ceased to come. Liege, we knew, had fallen. Looking at the map, we prayed that Namur would hold.

" Out there " beyond the quiet fields that mighty force which was to swing through Belgium in flank was massed and ready to move when the German staff opened the throttle. A mile or so away a patrol of Belgian cychsts stopped us as we turned toward Brussels. They were dust-covered and weary; the voice of their captain was faint with fatigue. For over two weeks he had been on the hunt of Uhlan patrols. Another shipperke he, who could not only hate but fight as best he knew how.

*' We had an alarm," he said. '' Have you heard anything? "

When we told him no, he pedalled on more slowly, and oh, how wearily! to the front. Rather pitiful that, too, when you thought of what was " out there."

One had learned enough to know, without the confidential Information that he received, that the Germans could take Brussels if they chose. But the people of Brussels still thronged the streets under the blankets of bunting. If bunting could save Brussels, It was In no danger.

There was a mockery about my dinner that night. The waiter who laid the white cloth on a marble table was unctuously suggestive as to menu. Luscious grapes and crisp salad, which Belgian gardeners grow with meticulous care, I remember of it. One might linger over his coffee, knowing the truth, and look out at the people who did not know it. When they were not iDuying more buttons with the allied colours, or more flags, or dropping nickel pieces in Red Cross boxes, they were thronging to the kiosks for the latest edition of the evening papers, which told them nothing.

And one had to make up his mind. Clearly, he had only to keep in his room in his hotel in order to have a great experience. He might see the German troops enter Belgium. His American passport would protect him as a neutral; Minister Brand Whitlock and Secretary of Legation Hugh Gibson would get him out of trouble.

*' Stick to the army you are with ! " an eminent American had told me.

*' Yes, but I prefer to choose my army," I had replied.

The army I chose was not about to enter Brussels. It was on the side of the shipperke dog mitrailleuse battery which I had seen in the streets of Haelen, and the peasant woman who shook her fist at the invader, and all who had the shipperke spirit.

My empty appointment as the representative of the American press with the British army was, at least, taken seriously by the policeman at the War Office in London when I returned from trips to France. The day came when it was good for British trenches and gun positions; when it was worth all the waiting, if one wished to see the drama of modern war intimately.

Ill

MONS AND PARIS

The English base — Stories of the wounded — The cataclysm /a reality — London after Mons — The call to Englishmen — The " Fog of war " — From Dieppe to Paris — The red trousers of the French — Empty Paris — Can the German machine be held? — *' The French have not had their battle yet! "

Back from Belgium to England ; then across the Channel again to Boulogne, where I saw the last of the French garrison march away, their red trousers a throbbing target along the road. From Boulogne the British had advanced Into Belgium. Now their base was moved on to Havre. Boulogne, which two weeks before had been cheering the advent of " Tommee Atkeens " singing " Why should we be downhearted? " was ominously lifeless. It was a town without soldiers, a town of brick and mortar and pavements whose very defencelessness was Its security should the Germans come.

The only British there were a few stray wounded officers and men who had found their way back from Mons. They had no Idea where the British army was. All they realised were sleepless nights, the shock of combat, overpowering artillery fire, and resisting the onslaught of outnumbering masses.

An officer of Lancers, who had ridden through the German cavalry with his squadron, dwelt on the glory of that moment. What did his wound matter? It had come with the burst of a shell In a village street which killed his horse after the charge. He had hobbled away, reached a railroad train, and got on board. That was all he knew.

A Scotch private had been lying with his battalion in a trench when a German aeroplane was sighted. It had hardly passed by when showers of shrapnel descended and the Germans, in that grey-green so hard to see, were coming on as thick as locusts. Then the orders came to fall back, and he was hit as his battahon made another stand. He had crawled a mile across the fields in the night with a bullet in his arm. A medical corps officer told him to find any transportation he could; and he, too, was able to get aboard a train. That was all he knew.

These wounded had been tossed aside Into eddies by the maelstrom of action. They were interesting because they were the first British wounded that I had seen; because the war was young.

Back to London again to catch the mail with an article. One was to *' commute " to the war from London as home. It was a base whence one sallied forth to get peeps through the curtain of military secrecy at the mighty spectacle. One soaked in England at intervals and the war at intervals. Whenever one stepped on the pier at Folkestone it was with a breath of relief, born of a sense of freedom long associated with fields and hedges on the other side of the chalk cliffs which seemed to make the sequestering barrier of the sea complete.

Those days of late August and early September, 19 14, were gripping days to the memory. Eager armies were pressing forward to a cataclysm no longer of dread imagination but of reahty. That ever deepening and spreading stain from Switzerland to the North Sea was as yet only a splash of fresh blood.

MONS AND PARIS 31

One still wondered if one might not wake up in the morning and find the war a nightmare. Pictures that grow clearer with time, which the personal memory chooses for its own, dissociate themselves from a background of detail.

They were very quiet, this pair that sat at the next table in the dining-room of a London hotel. I never spoke to them, but only stole discreet glances as we all will in irresistible temptation at any newly-wedded couple. Neither was of the worldly type. One knew that to this young girl London was strange ; one knew the type of country home which had given her that simple charm which cities cannot breed; one knew, too, that this young officer, her husband, waited for word to go to the front.

Unconsciously she would play with her weddingring. She stole covert glances at it and at him, of the kind that bring a catch in the throat, when he was not looking at her — which he was most of the time, for reasons which were good and sufficient to others than himself. Apprehended in " wool-gathering," she mustered a smile which was so exclusively for him that the neighbour felt that he ought to be forgiven his peeps from the tail of his eye at it because it was so precious.

They would attempt little flights of talk about everything except the war. He was most solicitous that she should have something which she liked to eat, while she was equally solicitous about him. Wasn't he going " out there " ? And out there he would have to live on army fare. It was all appealing to the old traveller. And then the next morning — she was alone, after she had given him that precious smile in parting. The incident was one of the thousands before the war had become an institution, death a matter of routine, and it was a commonplace for young wives to see young husbands away to the front with a smile.

One such incident does for all, whether the war is young or old. There is nothing else to tell, even when you know wife and husband. I was rather glad that I did not know this pair. Then I should be looking at the casualty list in the newspaper each morning and I might not enjoy my faith that he will return alive. These two seemed to me the best of England. I used to think of them when gossip sought the latest turn of Intrigue under the mantle of censorship, when Parliament poured out its oral floods and the newspapers their volumes of words. The man went off to fight ; the woman returned to her country home. It was the hour of war, not of talk.

On that Sunday in London when the truth about Mons appeared stark to all England, another young man happened to buy a special edition at a street corner at the same time as myself. By all criteria, the world and his tailor had treated him well and he deserved well of the world. We spoke together about the news. Already the new democracy which the war had developed was in evidence. Everybody had common thoughts and a common thing at stake, with values reckoned in lives, and this makes for equality.

*' It's clear that we have had a bad knock. Why deny it?" he said. Then he added quietly, after a pause : " This is a personal call for me. Tm going to enlist."

England's answer to that " bad knock " was out of her experience. She had never won at first, but she had always won in the end; she had won the last bat-

MONS AND PARIS 33

tie. The next day's news was worse and the next day's still worse. The Germans seemed to be approaching Paris by forced marches. Paris might fall — no matter ! Though the French army were shattered, one heard Englishmen say that the British would create an army to wrest victory from defeat. The spirit of this was fine, but one realised the enormity of the task; should the mighty German machine crush the French machine, the Allies had lost. To say so then was heresy, when the world was inclined to think poorly of the French army and saw Russian numbers as irresistible.

The personal call was to Paris before the fate of Paris was to be decided. My first crossing of the Channel had been to Ostend; the second, farther south to Boulogne; the third was still farther south, to Dieppe. Where next? To Havre! Events were moving with the speed which had been foreseen with myriads of soldiers ready to be thrown into battle by the quick march of the railroad trains.

Every event was hidden under the " fog of war,'* then a current expression — meagre official bulletins which read like hope in their brief lines, while the imagination might read as it chose between the lines. The marvel was that any but troop trains should run. All night in that third-class coach from Dieppe to Paris! Tired and preoccupied passengers; every one's heart heavy; every one's soul wrenched; every one prepared for the worst ! You cared for no other man's views; the one thing you wanted was no bad news. France had known that when the war came it would be to the death. From the first no Frenchman could have had any illusions. England had not realised yet that her fate was with the soldiers of

France, or France that her fate and all the world^s was with the British fleet.

An Italian in our compartment would talk, however, and he would keep the topic down to red trousers, and to the red trousers of a French Territorial opposite with an index finger when his gesticulatory knowledge of the French language, which was excellent, came to the rescue of his verbal knowledge, which was poor. The Frenchman agreed that red trousers were a mistake, but pointed to the blue covering which he had for his cap — which made it all right. The Italian insisted on keeping to the trousers. He talked red trousers till the Frenchman got out at his station and then turned to me to confirm his views on this fatal strategic and tactical error of the French. After all, he was more pertinent than most of the military experts trying to write on the basis of the military bulletins. It was droll to listen to this sartorial discourse, when at least two hundred thousand men lay dead and wounded from that day's fight on the soil of France. Red trousers were responsible for the death of a lot of them.

Dawn, early September dawn, on dew-moist fields, where the harvests lay unfinished as the workers, hastening to the call of war, had left the work. Across Paris, which seemed as silent as the fields, to a hotel with empty rooms ! Five hundred empty rooms, with a clock ticking busily in every room ! War or no war, that old man who wound the clocks was making his rounds softly through the halls from door to door. He was a good soldier, who had heeded Joffre's request that every one should go on with his day's work.

"They're done! " said an American in the foyer. " The French could not stand up against the Germans

MONS AND PARIS 35

— anybody could see that ! It's too bad, but the French are licked. The Germans will be here to-morrow or the next day."

I could not and would not believe It. Such a disaster was against all one's belief In the French army and In the real character of the French people. It meant that autocracy was making sport of democracy; It meant disaster to all one's precepts; a personal disaster.

" Look at that Interior line which the French now hold. Think of the power of the defensive with modern arms. No ! The French have not had their battle yet! " I said.

And the British Expeditionary Force was still intact; still an army, with lots of fight left in It.

IV

The Paris of the boulevards a dead city — How Marianne goes to war — The Germans are coming! — Silence and darkness — Moonlight on the Arc de Triomphe — Trust in Joffre and in the army — Turn of the tide — Joffre's communiques more definite

— Positions regained — The French in pursuit — Paris breathes again — A Sunday of relief — Religious rejoicing at Notre Dame

— Groups in the cafes — The American Embassy "mobilised for war " — " In spite of '70, France still lived."

It was then that people were speaking of Paris as a dead city — a Paris without theatres, without young men, without omnibuses, with the shutters of its shops down and its cafes and restaurants in gloomy emptiness.

The Paris the host of the idler and the traveller, the Paris of the boulevards and the night life provided for the tourist, the Paris that sparkled and smiled in entertainment, the Paris exploited to the average American through Sunday supplements and the reminiscences of smoking-rooms of transatlantic liners, was dead. Those who knew no other Paris and conjectured no other Paris departed as from the tomb of the pleasures which had been the passing extravaganza of relief from dull lives elsewhere. The Parisienne of that Paris spent a thousand francs to get her pet dog safely away to Marseilles. Politicians of a craven type, who are the curse of all democracies, had gone to keep her company, leaving Paris cleaner than ever she was after the streets had had their morning bath on a spring day when the horse chestnuts were in bloom and Madame was arranging her early editions on the table of her kiosk — a spiritually clean Paris.

Monsieur, would you have America judged by the White Way? What has the White Way to do with the New York of Seventy-second Street or Harlem? It serves the same purpose as the boulevards of furnishing scandalous little paragraphs for foreign newspapers. Foreigners visit it and think that they understand how Americans live in Stockbridge, Mass., or Springfield, 111. Empty Its hotels and nobody but sightseers and people Interested In the White Way would know the difference.