Part 10 (1/2)
The French marquis who escorted ”Mon Capitaine” of the Grand Quartier General des Armees, who was my ”guide philosopher and friend,” to the trenches either had built this railroad, or owned a controlling interest in it, for he always spoke of it proudly as ”my express,” ”my special train,” ”my pet.i.te vitesse.” He had lately been in America buying cavalry horses.
[Ill.u.s.tration: _From a photograph, copyright by Medem Photo Service._
”Through these woods ran a toy railroad.”
This picture shows President Poincare on the toy railroad en route to the trenches.]
As for years he has owned one of the famous racing stables in France, his knowledge of them is exceptional.
When last I had seen him he was in silk, on one of his own thoroughbreds, and the crowd, or that part of it that had backed his horse, was applauding, and, while he waited for permission to dismount, he was smiling and laughing. Yesterday, when the plough horses pulled his express-train off the rails, he descended and pushed it back, and, in consequence, was splashed, not by the mud of the race-track but of the trenches. Nor in the misty, dripping, rain-soaked forest was there any one to applaud. But he was still laughing, even more happily.
The trenches were dug around what had been a chalk mine, and it was difficult to tell where the mining for profit had stopped and the excavations for defense began. When you can see only chalk at your feet, and chalk on either hand, and overhead the empty sky, this ignorance may be excused. In the boyaux, which began where the railroad stopped, that was our position. We walked through an endless grave with walls of clay, on top of which was a scant foot of earth. It looked like a layer of chocolate on the top of a cake.
In some places, underfoot was a corduroy path of sticks, like the false bottom of a rowboat; in others, we splashed through open sluices of clay and rain-water. You slid and skidded, and to hold yourself erect pressed with each hand against the wet walls of the endless grave.
We came out upon the ”hauts de Meuse.” They are called also the ”Sh.o.r.es of Lorraine,” because to that province, as are the cliffs of Dover to the county of Kent, they form a natural barrier. We were in the quarry that had been cut into the top of the heights on the side that now faces other heights held by the enemy. Behind us rose a sheer wall of chalk as high as a five-story building. The face of it had been pounded by sh.e.l.ls. It was as undismayed as the whitewashed wall of a schoolroom at which generations of small boys have flung impertinent spit-b.a.l.l.s. At the edge of the quarry the floor was dug deeper, leaving a wall between it and the enemy, and behind this wall were the posts of observation, the nests of the machine-guns, the raised step to which the men spring when repulsing an attack. Below and back of them were the shelters into which, during a bombardment, they disappear. They were roofed with great beams, on top of which were bags of cement piled three and four yards high.
Not on account of the sleet and fog, but in spite of them, the aspect of the place was grim and forbidding. You did not see, as at some of the other fronts, on the sign-boards that guide the men through the maze, jokes and nicknames. The mess-huts and sleeping-caves bore no such ironic t.i.tles as the Pet.i.t Cafe, the Anti-Boche, Chez Maxim. They were designated only by numerals, businesslike and brief. It was no place for humor. The monuments to the dead were too much in evidence. On every front the men rise and lie down with death, but on no other front had I found them living so close to the graves of their former comrades. Where a man had fallen, there had he been buried, and on every hand you saw between the chalk huts, at the mouths of the pits or raised high in a niche, a pile of stones, a cross, and a soldier's cap. Where one officer had fallen his men had built to his memory a mausoleum. It is also a shelter into which, when the sh.e.l.ls come, they dive for safety. So that even in death he protects them.
I was invited into a post of observation, and told to make my entrance quickly. In order to exist, a post of observation must continue to look to the enemy only like part of the wall of earth that faces him. If through its apparently solid front there flashes, even for an instant, a ray of sunlight, he knows that the ray comes through a peep-hole, and that behind the peep-hole men with field-gla.s.ses are watching him. And with his sh.e.l.ls he hammers the post of observation into a shambles.
Accordingly, when you enter one, it is etiquette not to keep the door open any longer than is necessary to squeeze past it. As a rule, the door is a curtain of sacking, but hands and bodies coated with clay, by brus.h.i.+ng against it, have made it quite opaque.
The post was as small as a chart-room, and the light came only through the peep-holes. You got a glimpse of a rack of rifles, of shadowy figures that made way for you, and of your captain speaking in a whisper. When you put your eyes to the peep-hole it was like looking at a photograph through a stereoscope. But, instead of seeing the lake of Geneva, the Houses of Parliament, or Niagara Falls, you looked across a rain-driven valley of mud, on the opposite side of which was a hill.
Here the reader kindly will imagine a page of printed matter devoted to that hill. It was an extremely interesting hill, but my captain, who also is my censor, decides that what I wrote was too interesting, especially to Germans. So the hill is ”strafed.” He says I can begin again vaguely with ”Over there.”
”Over there,” said his voice in the darkness, ”is St. Mihiel.”
For more than a year you had read of St. Mihiel. Communiques, maps, ill.u.s.trations had made it famous and familiar. It was the town that gave a name to the German salient, to the point thrust in advance of what should be his front. You expected to see an isolated hill, a promontory, some position of such strategic value as would explain why for St.
Mihiel the lives of thousands of Germans had been thrown upon the board.
But except for the obstinacy of the German mind, or, upon the part of the Crown Prince the lack of it, I could find no explanation. Why the German wants to hold St. Mihiel, why he ever tried to hold it, why if it so pleases him he should not continue to hold it until his whole line is driven across the border, is difficult to understand. For him it is certainly an expensive position. It lengthens his lines of communication and increases his need of transport. It eats up men, eats up rations, eats up priceless ammunition, and it leads to nowhere, enfilades no position, threatens no one. It is like an ill-mannered boy sticking out his tongue. And as ineffective.
The physical aspect of St. Mihiel is a broad sweep of meadow-land cut in half by the Meuse flooding her banks; and the shattered houses of the Ferme Mont Meuse, which now form the point of the salient. At this place the opposing trenches are only a hundred yards apart, and all of this low ground is commanded by the French guns on the heights of Les Paroches. On the day of our visit they were being heavily bombarded. On each side of the salient are the French. Across the battle-ground of St. Mihiel I could see their trenches facing those in which we stood.
For, at St. Mihiel, instead of having the line of the enemy only in front, the lines face the German, and surround him on both flanks.
Speaking not as a military strategist but merely as a partisan, if any German commander wants that kind of a position I would certainly make him a present of it.
[Ill.u.s.tration: _From a photograph, copyright by Underwood and Underwood._
A first-line trench outside of Verdun.
The trench enfilades the valley beyond, and the valley is covered with barbed-wire and gun-pits.]
The colonel who commanded the trenches possessed an enthusiasm that was beautiful to see. He was as proud of his chalk quarry as an admiral of his first dreadnaught. He was as isolated as though cast upon a rock in mid-ocean. Behind him was the dripping forest, in front the mud valley filled with floating fogs. At his feet in the chalk floor the sh.e.l.ls had gouged out holes as deep as rain-barrels. Other sh.e.l.ls were liable at any moment to gouge out more holes. Three days before, when Prince Arthur of Connaught had come to tea, a sh.e.l.l had hit outside the colonel's private cave, and smashed all the teacups. It is extremely annoying when English royalty drops in sociably to distribute medals and sip a cup of tea to have German sh.e.l.ls invite themselves to the party. It is a way German sh.e.l.ls have. They push in everywhere. One invited itself to my party and got within ten feet of it. When I complained, the colonel suggested absently that it probably was not a German sh.e.l.l but a French mine that had gone off prematurely. He seemed to think being hit by a French mine rather than by a German sh.e.l.l made all the difference in the world. It nearly did.
At the moment the colonel was greatly interested in the fact that one of his men was not carrying a mask against gases. The colonel argued that the life of the man belonged to France, and that through laziness or indifference he had no right to risk losing it. Until this war the colonel had commanded in Africa the regiment into which criminals are drafted as a punishment. To keep them in hand requires both imagination and the direct methods of a bucko mate on a whaler. When the colonel was promoted to his present command he found the men did not place much confidence in the gas masks, so he filled a shelter with poisoned air, equipped a squad with protectors and ordered them to enter. They went without enthusiasm, but when they found they could move about with impunity the confidence of the entire command in the anti-gas masks was absolute.