Part 6 (2/2)

”The next line is the first line. Speak in whispers now, for if the Boches hear us we shall get a shower of hand-grenades.”

I turned into a deep, wide trench whose floor had been trodden into a slop of cheesy, brown mire which clung to the big hobnailed boots of the soldiers. Every foot or so along the parapet there was a rifle slit, made by the insertion of a wedge-shaped wooden box into the wall of brownish sandbags, and the sentries stood about six feet apart. The trench had the hushed quiet of a sickroom.

”Do you want to see the Boches? Here; come, put your eye to this rifle slit.”

A horizontal tangle of barbed wire lay before me, the shapeless gully of an empty trench, and, thirty-five feet away, another blue-gray tangle of barbed wire and a low ripple of the brownish earth. As I looked, one of the random silences of the front stole swiftly into the air. French trench and German trench were perfectly silent; you could have heard the ticking of a watch.

”You never see them?”

”Only when we attack them or they attack us.”

An old poilu, with a friendly smile revealing a jagged reef of yellow teeth, whispered to me amiably:--

”See them? Good Lord, it's bad enough to smell them. You ought to thank the good G.o.d, young man, that the wind is carrying it over our heads.”

”Any wounded to-day?”

”Yes; a corporal had his leg ripped up about half an hour ago.”

At a point a mile or so farther down the moor I looked again out of a rifle box. No Man's Land had widened to some three hundred feet of waving furze, over whose surface gusts of wind pa.s.sed as over the surface of the sea. About fifty feet from the German trenches was a swathe of barbed wire supported on a row of five stout, wooden posts. So thickly was the wire strung that the eye failed to distinguish the individual filaments and saw only the rows of brown-black posts filled with a steely purple mist. Upon this mist hung ma.s.ses of weather-beaten blue rags whose edges waved in the wind.

”Des camarades” (comrades), said my guide very quietly.

A month later I saw the ruined village of Fey-en-Haye by the light of the full golden s.h.i.+eld of the Hunters' Moon. The village had been taken from the Germans in the spring, and was now in the French lines, which crossed the village street and continued right on through the houses.

”The first village on the road to Metz” had tumbled, in piles and mounds of rubbish, out on a street grown high with gra.s.s. Moonlight poured into the roofless cottages, escaping by shattered walls and jagged rents, and the mounds of debris took on fantastic outlines and cast strange shadows. In the middle of the village street stood two wooden crosses marking the graves of soldiers. It was the Biblical ”Abomination of Desolation.”

Looking at Fey from the end of the village street, I slowly realized that it was not without inhabitants. Wandering through the gra.s.s, scurrying over the rubbish heaps, running in and out of the crumbling thresholds were thousands and thousands of rats.

Across the bright sky came a whirring hum, the sound of the motors of aeroplanes on the way to bombard the railroad station at Metz. I looked up, but there was nothing to be seen. The humming died away. The bent signpost at the corner of the deserted moorland road, with its arrow and its directions, somehow seemed a strange, shadowy symbol of the impossibility of the attainment of many human aspirations.

Chapter V

The Trenches In The ”Wood Of Death”

So great has been the interest in the purely military side of the struggle that one is apt to forget that the war is worth study as the supreme occupation of many great nations, whose every energy, physical, moral, and economic, has been put to its service, and relentlessly tested in its fiery furnace. A future historian may find the war more interesting, when considered as the supreme achievement of the industrial civilization of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, than as a mere vortex in the age-old ocean of European political strife.

There is something awe-inspiring in the spectacle of all the continuous and mult.i.tudinous activity of a great nation feeding, by a thousand channels, a thousand rills, to the embattled furrows of the zone of violence.

By a strange decree of fate, a new warfare has come into being, admirably adapted to the use and the testing of all our faculties, organizations, and inventions--trench warfare. The princ.i.p.al element of this modern warfare is lack of mobility.

The lines advance, the lines retreat, but never once, since the establishment of the present trench swathe, have the lines of either combatant been pushed clear out of the normal zone of hostilities. The fierce, invisible combats are limited to the first-line positions, averaging a mile each way behind No Man's Land. This stationary character has made the war a daily battle; it has robbed war of all its ancient panoply, its cavalry, its uniforms brilliant as the sun, and has turned it into the national business. I dislike to use the word ”business,” with its usual atmosphere of orderly bargaining; I intend rather to call up an idea more familiar to American minds--the idea of a great intricate organization with a corporate volition. The war of to-day is a business, the people are the stockholders, and the object of the organization is the wisest application of violence to the enemy.

To this end, in numberless secteurs along the front, special narrow-gauge railroad lines have been built directly from the railroad station at the edge of the sh.e.l.l zone to the artillery positions. To this end the trenches have been gathered into a special telephone system so that General Joffre at Chantilly can talk to any officers or soldiers anywhere along the great swathe. The food, supplies, clothing, and ammunition are delivered every day at the gate of the swathe, and calmly redistributed to the trenches by a sort of military express system.

Only one thing ever disturbs the vast, orderly system. The bony fingers of Death will persist in getting into the cogs of the machine.

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