IV
THE BRITISH FRONT IN FRANCE
I HAVE pretty well traveled Northern France and the British front from the sea to the Somme. For about eighty miles of that one hundred and twenty, I have been close up to the front lines and have seen the activities there. All those battlefields so famous, embraced within that eighty miles I have explored. I have driven over registered roads, that is, roads that the Germans keep carefully mapped and can shell at any place or time. I have picked up pathetic relics upon three of the greatest battlefields of the world, still fresh with the awful scars of conflict—Messines, Vimy Ridge and the Somme. I have been in the most advanced line of the British and have looked over the top and down on the Hindenburg line. I have listened to the shrilling of our own shells over my head, felt the trembling of the earth when our great guns spoke and watched the black bursts of the Roche high explosives on either side of me within our own lines.
This is written in the lovely old chateau of Count de , rented to the British government for the war. The count has his room reserved, which he occupies occasionally. We drove up a beautiful avenue of elms, four rows of them, shading the driveway in and out. Four British Tommies, serving as butlers met us at the doorway and took our luggage to our rooms. Mine overlooks the driveway, and the large court in front of the chateau, where motor-lorries now are being unloaded with fresh gravel for court and drives. I find hot water provided in my private lavatory in a little pewter jug; a huge tub, ready for my morning bath; an electric reading lamp and a candle on the stand beside my Napoleon bed; and I am writing upon a beautiful walnut table of the time of Louis XVI. Is this war? I can listen and hear the guns.
There are four of us entertained at this chateau, an English member of the diplomatic service, an Italian literary man, and a widely known English novelist. There are other visitors as well; but these constitute our particular contingent.
It was fairly lively along the line, but on the whole not what it can be when it is desired.
We saw the desolate villages; a beautiful city—Arras—that once held some forty thousand people, now a vast wilderness of ruined cathedral, town hall and station, with street after street that looked worse than the wake of a western cyclone. In these streets are still the trenches facing each other. They run across the Grand Place, into and through houses and railway station. There are masses of tangled and broken barbed wire and blasted trench; adjacent are miles and miles of battlefields that were once smiling farms and are now the floors of craters.
Yet of all this destruction, even the noble cathedral, like a broken widow, disheveled and mourning, held nothing like the fascination for us that yonder line of living flashes, bursting shells and upheaved earth possessed. English observation balloons were strung out for miles along the line. We stood under one as it went up; and from that spot counted nine in the air. German planes came over us as we stood there; and soon from their signals, no doubt, the Roche batteries opened upon us. You should have seen our captain hustle us into our motor-car and hurry us away, while the sound of our own "big stuff" rumbled over our heads, replying to the German.
Finally a German sausage balloon appeared. It was while we were at luncheon on the grassy bank beside the road. We all gazed at the balloon through our glasses. Then we glanced away, and in ten seconds, someone cried: "There, it's gone!"
It was true. There was nothing left but a puff of smoke, slowly enlarging in the air. One of our planes had brought it down.
Look, there are three German planes, very high, directly over our heads. Our anti-aircraft guns opened almost as rapidly as machine guns; and little dots of white shrapnel smoke encircled the silver insects in the sky. They turned tail and sailed away home, with two of our machines mounting rapidly toward them. Then followed the rattle of the machine guns from the sky overhead; and so the aerial duels kept up all the day. There is no doubt the cavalry of the future is the cavalry of the air; and that the most useful contribution our nation can make to the cause of our allies is thousands of planes and tens of thousands of airmen to drive them.
We ate our lunches on the east side of a road over a commanding ridge; and as we lay there on the grass we saw the results of the scouting done by those three planes. The German guns, which had been strafing a village on an opposite ridge, turned their aim nearer, on a green spot on the slope. Shell after shell was planted in a space that seemed to us not over a hundred yards in diameter.
"They must be searching for an ammunition dump," said the captain. "Those three Hun planes must have observed it."
That luncheon on the ridge was the most interesting one I ever ate. That is to say, the entertainment provided for eyes and ears, was beyond all shows ever spread before absorbed humanity. No doubt other men have eaten with perhaps vaster scenes before them, but I never had. There was the wide French valley, most of which had been fought over, inch by inch, already covering its yellow clay nakedness with verdure, with poppies and dog daisies; there were our convoys in approaching roads, troops marching, Red Cross wagons moving, horses and mules and motor lorries by the hundreds, all doing something to contribute to the show. There were our own big guns betraying their location to our eyes by occasional flashes and the whistle and rush of the "big stuff" going like chain lightning over our heads; and there was, most picturesque of all, the beautiful battle in the air.
Half way through luncheon our captain told us we were really violating the law, being without helmet and gas mask. We had left ours in the car standing in the cut in the road behind us. We all smiled, however, and went on with our luncheon; knowing how careful British officers are of the safety of their visitors, and knowing if the danger were imminent he would insist upon every precaution. Two days later, we never got out of touch with our helmets and gas masks, but wore them almost the entire day. We kept our heads down, too, when told that we should; for only a week ago a French correspondent was killed about where we stood. A German sniper picked him off.
What fascinated me, almost as much as the air battles, was a dawning appreciation of the subterranean fights, the deadly game of hide-and-seek all the time going on. Of course, I had read of the mining and counter mining; and heard of the mine craters; but one can form no conception of these things until he walks the underground galleries and stands beside and in such a yawning punch bowl as that of Messines. It is impossible to put the picture in words. It was not these things, however, that overwhelmed me with a sense of the battle of the cave men; but it was when, with a candle in hand, thirty feet under ground, damp dripping all over me, and my feet covered with the white chalk mud, I met face to face and talked for half an hour with a sergeant major who had lived and dug and fought for more than a year in the veins of the earth under Messines.
He was a Durham miner, and he was "some man." All the time, he knew, and all his comrades knew, that German miners were digging towards him, above him, beneath him. Each side knew the others' activities, and were springing mines, closing each others' galleries, blocking one anothers' parties off from air and food. It takes brains and ingenuity as well as daring and science to win underground. The Teuton is not lacking in theory, system, science and a certain practical precision; but when it comes to intellectual self-reliance and inventiveness, he goes down before the Anglo-Saxon, or else, as at Messines, he goes up.
In a dugout in these same galleries, I came upon a group of ten or a dozen Tommies, standing up munching their dejeuner. One of them stuck out his hand to me in the semi-darkness, saying:
"Hi, there, America, I'm from Ohio. I knew as soon as I saw the gold cord on that field hat you were from the States. I was in the Fourth Ohio at the Mexican border. This is an American bunch in here, five or six of us are Americans. Let me see, here's one, here's another."
That lad was surely loquacious; a little touch of home made him feel the whole world kin. That was not a Canadian battalion, either. Next day, the man highest up on Vimy, and nearest the enemy, said, as soon as he saw me: "I'm from Frisco." He was in a Canadian unit; for, of course, the Canadians have earned the right to Vimy Ridge.
One more little incident. It was late afternoon, and we had paused for tea in a shattered town. We had been there earlier in the day and saw very few soldiers; now there seemed thousands in the streets. They had been in the cellars sleeping during the day. Falling in with the stream of them now, we soon arrived at the Ace of Spades theater. A section of the army has improvised this theater and puts on its own performances; and very creditable they are, too.
I stood at the rear, jammed into the big old hall of a half crumbled stone structure, with fifteen hundred Tommies from all quarters of the earth, and watched a blond young beauty, handsomely begowned, with plenty of silk stocking and plenty of daring eyeflashes, sing, dance and flirt with three harlequins on the stage, and three rows of officers in the front. A most careful inspection could find no flaw in the figure except, perhaps, the rather liberal dimension of feet and hands.
Here, I decided quickly, was an excellent place to get rid of the large importation of Virginia cigarettes, which the generosity of certain friends at home had made it possible for me to bring over from London. Here at the front tobacco is hard to come by, especially American tobacco, dear to the heart of the British army. And nobody in England or her army smokes cigars, except an occasional duke or earl or wandering American nabob like myself. Comparatively few smoke pipes. Everybody smokes cigarettes, including padres and Y. M. C. A. secretaries. Nobody drinks, even in officers' messes, so far as my observation has thus far gone, half so deeply as the average American clubman. The king's example seems to count. Crossing the Channel, in the restaurant on the boat, where nearly every English gentleman a few years ago would have had his scotch and soda, I heard, the other day, officer after officer call for soft drinks. Whisky was the rare exception.
Well, anyway, in the Ace of Spades theater, the cigarettes were turned over to the corporal in charge of the show; and one of the harlequins, at the end of a song, came out smoking one, and, announcing that here were the compliments of friends in America, began tossing out the boxes. Such a yelling, howling, happy-bunch of Tommies I never saw together before. That same afternoon, on a road leading up to the trenches, we stopped a line of hot, grim-faced men, bearing each his sixty pounds of kit on his back, and gave a package to each man. It was a study to see their faces light up. We paused, too, at a dressing station, where wounded had been brought in the last night from one of those little raids which are of such regular occurrence nowadays on our side of the line; and, passing among the stretchers a package and a greeting from friends across the sea, went to each man. All who could smile did smile.