GOLDEN LADS
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Photo. Excelsior. THE PLAYBOYS OF THE WESTERN FRONT.
The famous French Fusiliers Marins. These sailors from Brit- tany are called “Les demoiselles au pompon rouge,” because of their youth and the gay red tassel on their cap.
GOLDEN LADS
BY ARTHUR GLEASON
AND
HELEN HAYES GLEASON
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THEODORE ROOSEVELT
**Golden Lads and Girls all must, As chimney sweepers, come to dust.””
TORONTO McCLELLAND, GOODCHILD & STEWART, Limirep 1916
Copyright, 1916, by THE CENTURY Co. Copyright, 1915, by the Curtis PUBLISHING COMPANY, Copyright, 1916, the ButtTericK PUBLISHING COMPANY.
; Copyright, 1915 and 1916, by the ‘RIBUNE ASSOCIATION.
Published, April, 1916
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a SAILORS OF BRITTANY Pets * t THE BOY SOLDIERS OF THE FRENCH FUSILIERS MARINE 2 55°: foe WHOSE WOUNDED IT WAS OUR PRIVILEGE TO CARRY IN FROM THE
; FIELD OF HONOR AT MELLE, DIXMUDE,
2 AND NIEUPORT
Profits from the sale of this book will go to “The American Committee for Training in Suitable Aedes the Maimed Soldiers of France.” HERENY.
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CONCERNING THIS BOOK
It would be futile to publish one more war- book, unless the writer had been an eye-witness of unusual things. I am an American who saw atrocities which are recorded in the Bryce Report. This book grows out of months of day-by-day living in the war zone. I have been a member of the Hector Munro Ambulance Corps, which was permitted to work at the front because the Prime Minister of Belgium placed his son in mili- tary command of us. That young man, being brave and adventurous, led us along the first line of trenches, and into villages under shell fire, so that we saw the armies in action.
We started at Ghent in September, 1914, came to Furnes, worked in Dixmude, Pervyse, Nieu- port and Ypres, during moments of pressure on those strategic points. In the summer of 1915, we were attached to the French Fusiliers Marins. My wife’s experience covers a period of twelve
vil
CONCERNING THIS BOOK
months in Belgium. My own time at the front was five months.
Observers at long-distance that are neutral sometimes fail to see fundamentals in the present conflict, and talk of ‘‘negotiations” between right and wrong. It is easy for people who have not suffered to be tolerant toward wrong- doing. This war is a long war because of Ger- man methods of frightfulness. These practices have bred an enduring will to conquer in French- man and Briton and Belgian which will not pause till victory is thorough. Because the German military power has sinned against women and children, it will be fought with till it is over- thrown. I wish to make clear this determination of the Allies. They hate the army of Aerschot and Lorraine as a mother hates the defiler of her child.
There are two wars on the Western Front. One is the war of aggression. It was led up to by years of treachery. It was consummated in frightfulness. It is warfare by machine. Of that war, as carried on by the “Conquerors,” the first half of this book tells. On points that have
Vill
CONCERNING THIS BOOK
been in dispute since the outbreak, I am able to say “I saw.” When the Army of Invasion fell on the little people, I witnessed the signs of its passage as it wrote them by flame and bayonet on peasant homes and peasant bodies.
In the second half of the book, I have tried to tell of a people’s uprising—the fight of the living spirit against the war-machine. A righteous de- fensive war, such as Belgium and France are wag- ing, does not brutalize the nation. It reveals a beauty of sacrifice which makes common men into “golden lads.”
Was this struggle forced on an unwilling Ger- many, or was she the aggressor?
I believe we have the answer of history in such evidences as I have seen of her patient ancient spy system that honeycombed Belgium.
Is she waging a “holy war,” ringed around by jealous foes? | |
I believe we have the final answer in such atrocities as I witnessed. A hideous officially or- dered method is proof of unrighteousness in the cause itself.
Are you indicting a nation?
1x
CONCERNING THIS BOOK
No, only a military system that ordered the slow sapping of friendly neighboring powers.
Only the host of “‘tourists,” clerks, waiters, gen- tlemanly officers, that betrayed the hospitality of people of good will.
Only an army that practised mutilation and murder on children, and mothers, and old people, —and that carried it through coldly, systemati- cally, with admirable discipline.
I believe there are multitudes of common sol- diers who are sorry that they have outraged the helpless.
An army of half a million men will return to the home-land with very bitter memories. Many a simple German of this generation will be unable to look into the face of his own child without re- membering some tiny peasant face of pain—the child whom he bayoneted, or whom he saw his comrade bayonet, having failed to put his body between the little one and death.
TABLE OF CONTENTS THE CONQUERORS
THE SPY. .
THE ATROCITY | 6) 6): a)
BALLAD OF THE GERMAN
THE STEAM ROLLER
MY EXPERIENCE WITH BAEDEKER .
GOLDEN LADS
THE PLAY-BOYS OF BRITTANY “ENCHANTED CIGARETTES”
WAS IT REAL? . SY heat ae, he a be “CHANTONS, BELGES! CHANTONS!” FLIES: A FANTASY
WOMEN UNDER FIRE .
HOW WAR SEEMS TO A WOMAN . LES TRAVAILLEURS DE LA GUERRE . REMAKING FRANCE .
PAGE
- 113 : 127 - 152 - 168 - 192 + 234 + 253
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE The Play-boys of the Western Front . . . Frontispiece Peasants’ cottages burned by Germans . 8 The home of a German spy near Coxyde Bains, Belgium . 13 The green pass, used only by soldiers and officers of the Belgian Army . sig ah Sg 33 Church in Termonde which the writer saw . 42 One of the dangerous Belgian franc-tireurs . 51 Fifteenth century Gothic church in Nieuport . 69 Sailors lifting a wounded comrade into the motor-ambu- lance . . 87 Door chalked by ‘he Pigike ; 105 Street fighting in Alost . pie ae oe 123 Belgian officer on the last strip of his country . 134 A Belgian boy soldier in the uniform of the first army which served at Liége and Namur . Mi a Belgians in their new Khaki uniform, in Lapite of which they wrote a song . ‘ - 145 Breton sailors ready for their noon cdl a ina oithoas saliey daily shell fire . : : . 187 Sleeping quarters for Belgian lings : ii Day pa ae Belgian soldiers telephoning to an anti-aircraft gun the approach of a German taube . . 215
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INTRODUCTION
By Tueopore RoosrEve.t
On August 4, 1914, the issue of this war for the conscience of the world was Belgium. Now, in the spring of 1916, the issue remains Belgium. For eighteen months, our people were bidden by their representative at Washington to feel no resentment against a hideous wrong. They were taught to tame their human feelings by polished phrases of neutrality. Because they lacked the proper outlet of expression, they grew indifferent to a supreme injustice. They temporarily lost the capacity to react powerfully against wrongdoing.
But today they are at last becoming alive to the iniquity of the crushing of Belgium. Belgium is the battleground of the war on the western front. But Belgium is also the battleground of the struggle in our country between the forces of good and of evil. In the ranks of evil are ranged all the pacifist sentimentalists, the cowards who possess the gift of clothing their cowardice in soothing and attractive words, the materialists whose souls have been rotted by exclusive devo- tion to the things of the body, the sincere persons
XV
Xv1 INTRODUCTION
who are cursed with a deficient sense of reality, and all who lack foresight or who are uninformed. Against them stand the great mass of loyal Ameri- cans, who, when they see the right, and receive moral leadership, show that they have in their souls as much of the valor of righteousness as the men of 1860 and of 1776. The literary bureau at Washington has acted as a soporific on the mind and conscience of the American people. Fine words, designed to work confusion between right and wrong, have put them to sleep. But they now stir in their sleep.
The proceeds from the sale of this book are to be used for a charity in which every intelligent American feels a personal interest. The training of maimed soldiers in suitable trades is making possible the reconstruction of an entire nation. It is work carried on by citizens of the neutral nations. The cause itself is so admirable that it deserves wide support. It gives an outlet for the ethical feelings of our people, feelings that have been unnaturally dammed for nearly two years by the cold and timid policy of our Government.
The testimony of the book is the first-hand witness of an American citizen who was present when the Army of Invasion blotted out a little
INTRODUCTION XVil
nation. This is an eye-witness report on the dis- puted points of this war. The author saw the wrongs perpetrated on helpless non-combatants by direct military orders. He shows that the fright- fulness practiced on peasant women and children was the carrying out of a Government policy, planned in advance, ordered from above. It was not the product of irresponsible individual drunken soldiers. His testimony is clear on this point. He goes still further, and shows that individual sol- diers resented their orders, and most unwillingly carried through the cruelty that was forced on them from Berlin. In his testimony he is kindlier to the German race, to the hosts of peasants, clerks and simple soldiers, than the defenders of Bel- gium’s obliteration have been. ‘They seek to ex- cuse acts of infamy. But the author shows that the average German is sorry for those acts.
It is fair to remember in reading Mr. Gleason’s testimony concerning these deeds of the German Army that he has never received a dollar of money for anything he has spoken or written on the sub- ject. He gave without payment the articles on the Spy, the Atrocity, and the Steam Roller to the New York Tribune. The profits from the lectures he has delivered on the same subject have
XVili INTRODUCTION
been used for well-known public charities. The book itself is a gift to a war fund.
Of Mr. Gleason’s testimony on atrocities I have already written (see page 38).
What he saw was reported to the Bryce Com- mittee by the young British subject who accom- panied him, and these atrocities, which Mr. Gleason witnessed, appear in the Bryce Report under the heading of Alost. It is of value to know that an American witnessed atrocities recorded in the Bryce Report, as it disposes of the German rejoinders that the Report is ex-parte and of second-hand rumor.
His chapter on the Spy System answers the charge that it was Belgium who violated her own neutrality, and forced an unwilling Germany, threatened by a ring of foes, to defend herself.
The chapter on the Steam Roller shows that the same policy of injustice that was responsible for the original atrocities is today operating to flatten out what is left of a free nation. ,
The entire book is a protest against the craven attitude of our Government.
‘ THEODORE ROOSEVELT. March 28, 1916.
a
GOLDEN LADS
THE SPY
ERMANY uses three methods in turning a free nation into a vassal state. By a spy system, operated through years, she saps the na- tional strength. By sudden invasion, accom- panied by atrocity, she conquers the territory, al- ready prepared. By continuing occupation, she flattens out what is left of a once independent people. In England and North America, she has used her first method. France has experienced both the spy and the atrocity. It has been re- served for Belgium to be submitted to the three- fold process. I shall tell what I have seen of the spy system, the use of frightfulness, and the en- forced occupation. It is a mistake for us to think that the worst thing Germany has done is to torture and kill many thousands of women and children. She
3
GOLDEN LADS
undermines a country with her secret agents be- fore she lays it waste. In time of peace, with her spy system, she works like a mole through a wide area till the ground is ready to cave in. She plays on the good will and trustfulness of other peoples till she has tapped the available informa- tion. That betrayal of hospitality, that taking advantage of human feeling, is a baser thing than her unique savagery in war time.
During my months in Belgium I have been sur- rounded by evidences of this spy system, the long, slow preparedness which Germany makes in an- other country ahead of her deadly pounce. It is a silent, peaceful invasion, as destructive as the house-to-house burning and the killing of babies and mothers to which it later leads.
The German military power, which is the mod- ern Germany, is able to obtain agents to carry out this policy, and make its will prevail, by dissemi- nating a new ethic, a philosophy of life, which came to expression with Bismarck and has gone on extending its influence since the victories of 1870-71. The German people believe they serve a higher God than the rest of us. We serve (very
4
THE SPY
imperfectly and only part of the time) such ideals as mercy, pity, and loyalty to the giver of the bread we eat. The Germans serve (efficiently and all the time) the State, a supreme deity, who sends them to spy out a land in peace time, to build gun foundations in innocent-looking houses, buy up poverty-stricken peasants, measure distances, win friendship, and worm out secrets. With that in- formation digested and those preparations com- pleted, the State (an entity beyond good and evil) calls on its citizens to make war, and, in making it, to practise frightfulness. It orders its serv- ants to lay aside pity and burn peasants in their homes, to bayonet women and children, to shoot old men. Of course, there are exceptions to this. There are Germans of the vintage of ’48, and later, many of them honest and peaceable dwell- ers in the country which shelters them. But the imperial system has little use for them. They do not serve its purpose.
The issue of the war, as Belgium and France see it, is this: Are they to live or die? Are they to be charted out once again through years till their hidden weakness is accurately located, and then is
5
GOLDEN LADS
an army to be let loose on them that will visit a universal outrage on their children and wives? Peace will be intolerable till this menace is re- moved. The restoration of territory in Belgium and Northern France and the return to the status quo before the war, are not sufficient guarantees for the future. The status quo before the war means another insidious invasion, carried on unre- mittingly month by month by business agents, commercial travelers, genial tourists, and studious gentlemen in villas. A crippled, broken Teu- tonic military power is the only guarantee that a new army of spies will not take the road to Brus- sels and Paris on the day that peace is signed. No simple solution like, “Call it all off, well start in fresh; bygones are bygones,” meets the real situation. The Allied nations have been in- fested with a cloud of witnesses for many years. Are they to submit once again to that secret proc- ess of the Germans?
The French, for instance, want to clear their country of a cloud which has been thick and black for forty-three years. They always said the Ger- mans would come again with the looting and the
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PEASANTS’ COTTAGES: BURNED BY GERMANS.
The separate flame in each cottage is clearly visible, proving that each
house was separately set on fire. Radclyffe Dugmore took this photograph at Melle, where he and the writer were made prisoners,
THE SPY
torture and the foulness. This time they will their fight to a finish. They are sick of hate, so they are fighting to end war. But it is not an empty peace that they want—peace, with a new drive when the Krupp howitzers are big enough, and the spies in Paris thick enough, to make the death of France a six weeks’ picnic. They wanta lasting peace, that will take fear from the wife’s heart, and make it a happiness to have a child, not ahorror. They want to blow the ashes off of Lor- raine. Peace, as preached by our Woman’s Peace Party and by our pacifist clergy and by the sign- ers of the plea for an embargo on the ammuni- tions that are freeing France from her invaders, is a German peace. If successfully consummated, it will grant Germany just time enough to rest and breed and lay the traps, and then release another universal massacre. How can the AI- lies state their terms of peace in other than a militant way? There is nothing here to be ar- bitrated. Pleasant sentiments of brotherhood evade the point at issue. The way of just peace is by “converting” Germany. There is only one cure for long-continued treachery, and that is
9
GOLDEN LADS
to demonstrate its failure. To pause short of a thorough victory over the deep, inset habits and methods of Germany is to destroy the spirit of France. It will not be well for a premier race of the world to go down in defeat. We need her thrifty Lorraine peasants and Brittany sailors, her unfailing gift to the light of the world, more than we need a thorough German spy system and a sol- diery obedient to commands of vileness.
Very much more slowly England, too, is learn- ing what the fight is about.
It is German violation of the fundamental de- cencies that makes it difficult to find common ground to build on for the future. It is at this point that the spy system of slow-seeping treach- ery and the atrocity program of dramatic fright- fulness overlap. It is in part out of the habit of betraying hospitality that the atrocities have emerged. It isn’t as if they were extemporized —a sudden flare, with no background. They are the logical result of doing secretly for years that which humanity has agreed not to do.
Some of the members of our Red Cross unit— the Hector Munro Ambulance Corps—worked for
10
THE SPY
a full year with the French Fusiliers Marins, per- haps the most famous 6000 fighting men in the western line. They were sailor boys. They cov- ered the retreat of the Belgian army. They con- solidated the Yser position by holding Dixmude for three weeks against a German force that out- numbered them. Then for a year, up to a few months ago, they helped to hold the Nieuport sec- tion, the last northern point of the Allied line. When they entered the fight at Melle in October, 1914, our corps worked with one of their doctors, and came to know him. Later he took charge of a dressing station near St. George. Here one day the Germans made a sudden sortie, drove back the Fusiliers for a few minutes, and killed the Red Cross roomful, bayoneting the wounded men. The Fusiliers shortly won back their position, found their favorite doctor dead, and in a fury wiped out the Germans who had murdered him and his patients, saving one man alive. They sent him back to the enemy’s lines to say:
“Tell your men how we fight when you bayonet our wounded.”
That sudden act of German falseness was the
11
GOLDEN LADS
product of slow, careful undermining of moral values.
One of the best known women in Belgium, whose name I dare not give, told me of her friends, the G ROU ae (she gave me name and address). When the first German rush came down on Belgium the household was asked to shel- ter German officers, one of whom the lady had known socially in peace days. The next morn- ing soldiers went through the house, destroying paintings with the bayonet and wrecking furni- ture. The lady appealed to the officer. > she said. ‘We have met as equals and friends. How can you let this be done ?”
“This is war,” he replied.
No call of chivalry, of the loyalties of guest and host, is to be listened to. And for the perpetrat- ing of this cold program years of silent spy treach- ery were a perfect preparation. It was no sudden unrelated horror to which Germans had to force themselves. It was an astonishing thing to sim- ple Belgian gentlemen and gentlewomen to see the old friendly German faces of tourists and social
12
“T know you,’
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THE SPY
guests show up, on horseback, riding into the cities as conquerors where they had so often been en- tertained as friends. Ltt me give you the testi- mony of a Belgian lady whom we know. She is now inside the German lines, so I cannot give her name.
‘When the German troops entered Brussels,” she states, ““we suddenly discovered that our good friends had been secret agents and were now offi- cers in charge of the invasion. As the army came in, with their trumpets and flags and goose-step- ping, we picked out our friends entertained by us in our salons—dinner guests for years. They had originally come with every recommendation pos- sible—letters from friends, themselves men of good birth. They had worked their way into the social-political life of Brussels. They had won their place in our friendly feeling. And here they had returned to us at the head of troops to conquer us, after having served as secret agents through the years of friendly social intercourse.”
After becoming proficient in that kind of be- trayal the officers found it only a slight wrench to pass on to the wholesale murder of the people
15
GOLDEN LADS
whose bread they had eaten and whom they had tricked. The treachery explains the atrocity. It is worth while to repeat and emphasize this point. Many persons have asked me, “How do you ac- count for these terrible acts of mutilation?’ The answer is, what the Germans did suddenly by flame and bayonet is only a continuation of what they have done for years by poison.
Here follows the testimony of a man whom I know, Doctor George Sarton, of the University of Ghent:
“Each year more Germans came to Belgian sum- mer resorts; Blankenberghe, for instance, was full of them. They were all very well received and had plenty of friends in Belgian families, from the court down. When the war broke out, it im- mediately became evident that many of these wel- comed guests had been spying, measuring dis- tances, preparing foundations for heavy guns in their villas located at strategical points, and so on. It is noteworthy that this spying was not simply done by poor devils who had not been able to make money in a cleaner way—but by very successful German business men, sometimes men
16
SS
THE SPY
of great wealth and whose wealth had been almost entirely built up in Belgium. These men were extremely courteous and serviceable, they spent much money upon social functions and in the pro- motion of charities, German schools, churches and the like; they had numerous friends, in some cases they had married Belgian girls and their boys were members of the special corps of our ‘National Guard.’ ... Yet at the same time, they were prying into everything, spying everywhere.
‘When the Germans entered into Belgium, they were guided wherever they went by some one of their officers or men who knew all about each place. Directors of factories were startled to rec- ognize some of their work people transformed into Uhlans. A man who had been a professor at the University of Brussels had the impudence to call upon his former ‘friends’ in the uniform of a German officer.
“When the war is over, when Belgium is free again, it will not be many years before the Ger- mans come back, at least their peaceful and ‘friendly’ vanguard. How will they be received this time? It is certain that it will be extremely
17
GOLDEN LADS
difficult for them to make friends again. As to myself, when I meet them again in my country— I shall ask myself: ‘Is he a friend, or is he a spy? And the business men will think: ‘Are — they coming as faithful partners, or simply to steal and rob? ‘That will be their well deserved re- ward.”
One mile from where we were billeted on the Belgian coast stood a villa owned by a German. It lay between St. Idesbald and Coxyde Bains, on a sand dune, commanding the Channel. After the war broke out the Belgians examined it and found it was a fortification. Its walls were of six-foot thickness, of heavy blocks of stone and concrete. Its massive flooring was cleverly dis- guised by a layer of fancy tiling. Its interior was fitted with little compartments for hydraulic apparatus for raising weights, and there was a tangle of wires and pipes. Dynamite cleared away the upper stories. Workmen hacked away the lower story, piece by piece, during several weeks of our stay. Two members of our corps inspected the interior. It lay just off the excellent road that runs from St. Idesbald to Coxyde Bains,
18 |
THE SPY
up which ammunition could be fed to it for its coast defense work. The Germans expected an easy march down the coast, with these safety sta- tions ready for them at points of need.*
A Belgian soldier rode into a Belgian village one evening at twilight during the early days of
1 When I first published these statements the following letter appeared in the “New York Tribune” :—
GERMANY’S SPY SYSTEM
To the Editor of “The Tribune.”
Sir: I was particularly interested in the article by Mr. Glea- son in this morning’s “Tribune” because, having spent several months in this region in ambulance work, I am able to support several of his statements from persona! observation.
The house he mentions on the beach near Coxyde Bains was beyond doubt intended for the purpose he describes. I visited it several times before it was completely destroyed, and have now in my possession photographs which show the nature of the building, besides a tile from the flooring. ;
Two instances in which spies were detected came to my knowledge; in one case the person in question was the mayor of the town, in the other a peasant woman. One other time I know of information was given undetected which resulted in the shelling of a road at a time when a convoy of motors was about to pass.
The high esteem in which the Red Cross flag is held by Ger- man gunners (as a target) is only too forcibly impressed upon one in that service.
MaAtcoLm T. ROBERTSON.
Mr. Robertson is a member of the Junior Class in Princeton University.
19
GOLDEN LADS
the war. An old peasant woman, deceived be- cause of the darkness, and thinking him to be a German Uhlan, rushed up to him and said, ‘‘Look out—the Belgians are here.” It was the work of these spies to give information to the marauding Uhlans as to whether any hostile garrison was sta- tioned in the town. If no troops were there to re- sist, a band of a dozen Uhlans could easily take an entire village. But if the village had a protect- ing garrison the Germans must be forewarned. Three days after arriving in Belgium, in the early fall of 1914, a friend and I met a German
outpost, one of the Hussars. We fell into con-
versation with him and became quite friendly. He had no cigarettes and we shared ours with him. He could speak good English, and he let us walk beside him as he rode slowly along on his way to the main body of his troops. The Germans had won the day and there seemed to be nothing at stake, or perhaps he did not expect our little group would be long-lived, nor should we have been if the German plans had gone through. It was their custom to use civilian prisoners as a protective screen for their advancing troops. Whatever his 20
THE SPY
motive, after we had walked along beside his horse for a little distance, he pointed out to us the house of the spy whom the Germans had in that village of Melle. This man was a “half- breed’ Englishman, who came out of his house and walked over to the Hussar and said:
“You want to keep up your English, for you ’Il soon be in London.”
In a loud voice, for the benefit of his Belgian neighbors, he shouted out:
“Look out! Those fellows shoot! The Ger- mans are devils!”
He brought out wine for the troops. We fol- lowed him into his house, where he, supposing us to be friends of the Germans, asked us to partake of his hospitality. That man was a resident of the village, a friend of the people, but “fixed” for just this job of supplying information to the invaders when the time came.
During my five weeks in Ghent I used to eat frequently at the Café Gambrinus, where the pro- prietor assured us that he was a Swiss and in deep sympathy with Belgians and Allies. He had a large custom. When the Germans captured
21
GOLDEN LADS
Ghent he altered into a simon pure German and friend of the invaders. His place now is the nightly resort of German officers.
In the hotel where I stayed in Ghent the pro- prietor, after a couple of days, believing me to be one more neutral American, told me he was a Ger- man. He went on to say what a mistake the Bel- gians made to oppose the Germans, who were ir- resistible. That was his return to the city and country that had given him his livelihood. A few hours later a gendarme friend of mine told me to move out quickly, as we were in the house of a Spy.
Three members of our corps in Pervyse had evi- dence many nights of a spy within our lines. It was part of the routine for a convoy of motor trucks to bring ammunition forward to the trenches. The enemy during the day would get the range of the road over which this train had to pass. Of course, each night the time of ammu- nition moving was changed in an attempt to foil the German fire. But this was of no avail, for when the train of trucks moved along the road to the trenches a bright flash of light would go up
22
THE SPY
somewhere within our lines, telling the enemy that it was time to fire upon the convoy.
Such evidences kept reaching us of German gold at work on the very country we were occupying. Sometimes the money itself. |
My wife, when stationed by the Belgian trenches at Pervyse, asked the orderly to purchase potatoes, giving him a five-franc piece. He brought back the potatoes and a handful of change that included a French franc, a French copper, a Dutch small coin, a Belgian ten-centime bit, and a German two-mark piece with its imperial eagle. This meant that some one in the ranks or among the refugees was peddling information to the enemy.
In early October my wife and I were captured by the Uhlans at Zele. Our Flemish driver, a Ghent man, began expressing his friendliness for them in fluent German. After weeks of that sort of thing we became suspicious of almost every one, so thorough and widespread had been the bribery of certain of the poorer element. The Germans had sowed their seed for years against the day when they would release their troops and have
23
GOLDEN LADS
need of traitors scattered through the invaded country.
The thoroughness of this bribery differed at different villages. In one burned town of 1500 houses we found approximately 100 houses stand- ing intact, with German script in chalk on their doors; the order of the officer not to burn. ‘This meant the dwellers had been friendly to the enemy in certain instances, and in other instances that they were spies for the Germans. We have the photographs of those chalked houses in safe-keep- ing, against such time as there is a direct challenge on the facts of German methods. But there has come no challenge of facts—we that have seen have given names, dates and places—only a blan- ket denial and counter charges of franc-tireur warfare, as carried on by babies in arms, white- haired grandmothers and sick women.
In October, 1914, two miles outside Ostend, I was arrested as a spy by the Belgians and marched through the streets in front of a gun in the hands of a very young and very nervous soldier. The Etat Major told me that German officers had been using American passports to enter the Allied lines
24.
THE SPY
and learn the numbers and disposition of troops. They had to arrest Americans on sight and find out if they were masqueraders. A little later one of our American ambassadors verified this by say- ing to me that American passports had been fla- grantly abused for German purposes.
All this devious inside work, misusing the hos- pitality of friendly, trustful nations, this buying up of weak individuals, this laying the traps on neutral ground—all this treachery in peace times —deserves a second Bryce report. The atrocities are the product of the treachery. ‘This patient, insidious spy system, eating away at the vitality of the Allied powers, results in such horrors as I have witnessed.
25
THE ATROCITY
HEN the very terrible accounts of fright- fulness visited on peasants by the invad-
ing German army crossed the Channel to London, I believed that we had one more “formula” story. I was fortified against unproved allegations by thirteen years of newspaper and magazine inves- tigation and by professional experience in social work. A few months previously I had investi- gated the “poison needle” stories of how a girl, rendered insensible by a drug, was borne away in a taxicab to a house of ill fame. The cases proved to be victims of hysteria. At another time, I had looked up certain incidents of ‘“‘white slavery,” where young and innocent victims were suddenly and dramatically ruined. I had found the cases to be more complex than the picturesque state- ments of fiction writers implied. Again, by the courtesy of the United States Government, De-
partment of Justice, I had studied investigations 26
tn le ~ ——_————— — oe a.
Pe
i i Sahee oe oe
THE ATROCITY
into the relation of a low wage to the life of ‘im- morality. These had shown me that many factors in the home, in the training, in the mental condi- tion, often contributed to the result. I had grown sceptical of the “plain” statement of a complex matter, and peculiarly hesitant in accepting ac- counts of outrage and cruelty. It was in this spirit that I crossed to Belgium. To this extent, I had a pro-German leaning.
On September 7, 1914, with two companions, I was present at the skirmish between Germans and Belgians at Melle, a couple of miles east of Ghent. We walked to the German line, where a blue-eyed young Hussar officer, Rhinebeck, of Stramm, Holstein, led us into a trap by permitting us to walk along after him and his men as they rode back to camp beyond Melle. We walked for a quarter mile. At our right a barn was burn- ing brightly. On our left the homes of the peas- ants of Melle were burning, twenty-six little yel- low brick houses, each with a separate fire. It was not a conflagration, by one house burning and gradually lighting the next. The fires were well started and at equal intensity in each house. The
27
GOLDEN LADS
walls between the houses were still intact. The twenty-six fires burned slowly and thoroughly through the night.
These three thousand German soldiers and their officers were neither drunk nor riotous. The dis- cipline was excellent. The burning was a clean- cut, cold-blooded piece of work. It was a piece of punishment. Belgian soldiers had resisted the German army. If Belgian soldiers resist, peasant non-combatants must be killed. That inspires terror. That teaches the lesson: “Do not op- pose Germany. It is death to oppose her—death to your wife and child.”
We were surrounded by soldiers and four sen- tries put over us. Peasants who walked too close to the camp were brought in and added to our group of prisoners, till, all told, we numbered thirty. A peasant lying next to me watched his own house burn to pieces.
Another of the peasants was an old man, of weak mind. He kept babbling to himself. It would have been obvious to a child that he was foolish. ‘The German sentry ordered silence. The old fellow muttered on in unconsciousness
28
ne,
THE ATROCITY
of his surroundings. The sentry drew back his bayonet to run him through. A couple of the peasants pulled the old man flat to the ground and stifled his talking.
At five o’clock in the morning German stretcher bearers marched behind the burned houses. Out of the house of the peasant lying next to me three bodies were carried. He broke into a long, slow sobbing.
At six o’clock a monoplane sailed overhead, bringing orders to our detachment. The troops intended for Ghent were turned toward Brussels. The field artillery, which had been rolled toward the west, was swung about to the east. An offi- cer headed us toward Ghent and let us go. If the Germans had marched into Ghent we would have been of value as a cover for the troops. But for the return to Brussels we were only a nuisance. We hurried away toward Ghent. As we walked through a farmyard we saw a farmer lying at full length dead in his dooryard. We passed the convent school of Melle, where Catholic sisters live. The front yard was strewed with furniture, with bedding, with the contents of the rooms.
29
GOLDEN LADS
The yard was about four hundred feet long and two hundred feet deep. It was dotted with this intimate household stuff for the full area. I made inquiry and found that no sister had been violated or bayoneted. The soldiers had merely ransacked the place.
One of my companions in this Melle experience was A. Radclyffe Dugmore, formerly of the Play- ers Club, New York, a well-known naturalist, au- thor of books on big game in Africa, the beaver, and the caribou. For many years he was con- nected with Doubleday, Page & Co. His present address is Crete Hill, South Nutfield, Surrey.
At other times and places, German troops have not rested content with the mere terrorization and humiliation of religious sisters. On February 12, 1916, the German Wireless from Berlin states that Cardinal Mercier was urged to investigate the allegation of German soldiers attacking Belgian nuns, and that he declined. As long as the Ger- man Government has seen fit to revive the record of their own brutality, I present what follows.
A New York physician whom I know sends me this statement:
30
THE ATROCITY
“T was dining in London in the middle of last April with a friend, a medical man, and I ex- pressed doubt as to the truth of the stories of atrocity. I said I had combatted such stories often in America. In reply, he asked me to visit a house which had been made over into an ob- stetrical hospital for Belgian nuns. I went with him to the hospital. Here over a hundred nuns had been and were being cared for.”
On a later Sunday in September I visited the Municipal Hospital of Ghent. In Salle (Hall) 17, I met and talked with Martha Tas, a peasant girl of St. Gilles (near Termonde). As she was escaping by train from the district, and when she was between Alost and Audeghem, she told me that German soldiers aimed rifle fire at the train of peasants. She was wounded by a bullet in the thigh. My companion on this visit was William R. Renton, at one time a resident of Andover, Massachusetts. His present address is the Cov- entry Ordnance Works, Coventry.
A friend of mine has been lieutenant in a bat- tery of 75’s stationed near Pervyse. His summer home is a little distance out from Liege. His
31
GOLDEN LADS
wife, sister-in-law, and his three children were in ~ the house when the Germans came. Peasants, driven from their village, hid in the cellar. His sister took one child and hid ina closet. His wife took the two-year-old baby and the older child and hid in another closet. The troops entered the house, looted it and set it on fire. As they left they fired into the cellar. The mother rushed from her hiding place, went to her desk and found that her money and the family jewels, one a gift from the husband’s family and handed down gen- eration by generation, had been stolen. With the sister, the baby in arms, the two other children and the peasants, she ran out of the garden. They were fired on. They hid in a wood. Then, for two days, they walked. The raw potatoes which they gathered by the way were unfit for the little one. Without money, and ill and weakened, they reached Holland. This lady is in a safe place now, and her testimony in person is available. The apologists of the widespread reign of frightfulness say that war is always “like that,” that individual drunken soldiers have always broken loose and committed terrible acts. This
32
Gea
Feta, ee i oS? ne Le Gu B
* oy tee = Le Canite. 28:
THE GREEN It gives passa
ARMEE BELGE
LAISSEZ PASSER -Z% 4 Cosa. ae
<a Ai ee et ae ge pe A bere
— A a OER Le GRAND mo thea
$?_._£).
Imp. ‘Mores-Dnoroo, Furnes.
Ss —
THE GREEN PASS, USED ONLY BY SOLDIERS AND OFFICERS OF THE BELGIAN ARMY.
It gives passage to the trenches at any hour. The writer, by holding this, and working under the Prime Minister’s son, became stretcher-bearer in the Belgian Army.
THE ATROCITY
defense does not meet the facts. It meets neither the official orders, nor the cold method, nor the immense number of proved murders. The Ger- man policy was ordered from the top. It was carried out by officers and men systematically, un- der discipline. The German War Book, issued by the General Staff, and used by officers, cleverly justifies these acts. They are recorded by the German soldiers themselves in their diaries, of which photographic reproductions are obtainable in any large library. The diaries were found on the persons of dead and wounded Germans. The name of the man and his company are given.
On Sunday, September 27, I was present at the battle of Alost, where peasants came running into our lines from the German side of the canal. In spite of shell, shrapnel, rifle, and machine fire, these peasants crossed to us. The reason they had for running into fire was that the Germans were torturing their neighbors with the bayonet. One peasant, on the other side of the canal, hurried toward us under the fire, with a little girl on his right shoulder.
On Tuesday, September 29, I visited Wetteren
33
GOLDEN LADS
Hospital. I went in company with the Prince L. de Croy, the Duc D’Ursel, a senator; the Count de Briey, Intendant de la Liste Civile du Roy, and the Count Retz la Barre (all of the Garde du General de Wette, Divisions de Cava- lerie). One at least of these gentlemen is as well and as favorably known in this country as in his own. I took a young linguist, who was kind enough to act as secretary for me. In the hospi- tal I found eleven peasants with bayonet wounds upon them—men, women and a child—who had been marched in front of the Germans at Alost as a cover for the troops, and cut with bayonets when they tried to dodge the firing. A priest was ministering to them, bed by bed. Sisters were in attendance. The priest led us to the cot of one of the men. On Sunday morning, Septem- ber 27, the peasant, Leopold de Man, of No. go, Hovenier-Straat, Alost, was hiding in the house with his sister, in the cellar. The Germans made a fire of the table and chairs in the upper room. Then, catching sight of Leopold, they struck him with the butts of their guns and forced him to pass through the fire. Then, taking him
34
THE ATROCITY
outside, they struck him to the ground and gave him a blow over the head with a gunstock and a cut of the bayonet, which pierced his thigh all the way through.
“In spite of my wound,” said he, “they made me pass between their lines, giving me still more blows of the gun-butt in the back in order to make me march. ‘There were seventeen or eighteen per- sons with me. They placed us in front of their lines and menaced us with their revolvers, crying out that they will make us pay for the losses they have suffered at Alost. So we march in front of the troops.
“When the battle began we threw ourselves on our faces to the ground, but they forced us to rise again. At a certain moment, when the Germans - were obliged to retire, we succeeded in escaping down side streets.”
The priest led the way to the cot of a peasant whose cheeks had the spot of fever. He was Frans Meulebroeck, of No. 62, Drie Sleutelstraat, Alost. Sometimes in loud bursts of terror, and then falling back into a monotone, he talked with us.
35
GOLDEN LADS
“They broke open the door of my home,” he said, “they seized me and knocked me down. In front of my door the corpse of a German lay stretched out. The Germans said tome: ‘You are going to pay for that to us.’ A few moments later they gave me a bayonet cut in my leg. They sprinkled naphtha in my house and set it afire. My son was struck down in the street and I was marched in front of the German troops. I do not know even yet the fate of my son.”
Gradually as the peasant talked the time of his suffering came on him. His eyes began to see it again in front of him. ‘They became fixed and wild, the white of them visible. His voice was shrill and broken with sobs.
“My boy,” he said, “I have n’t seen him.” His body shook with sobbing.
At my request the young man with me took down the statements of these two peasants, turn- ing them into French from the Flemish, with the aid of the priest. In the presence of the priest and one of the sisters the two peasants signed, each man, his statement, making his mark.
Our group passed into the next room, where the
36
THE ATROCITY
wounded women were gathered. A sister led us to the bedside of a very. old woman, perhaps eighty years old. She had thin white hair, that straggled across the pillow. There was no motion to the body, except for faint breathing. She was cut through the thigh with a bayonet.
I went across the room and found a little girl, twelve years old. She was propped up in bed and half bent over, as if she had been broken at the breast bone. Her body whistled with each breath. One of our ambulance corps went out next day to the hospital—Dr. Donald Renton. He writes me:
“T went out with Davidson, the American sculp- tor, and Yates, the cinema man, and there had been brought into the hospital the previous day the little girl you speak of. She had a gaping wound on, I think, the right side of her back, and died the next day.”
Dr. Renton’s address is 110 Hill Street, Garnet Hill, Glasgow.
The young man who took down the record is named E. de Niemira, a British subject. He made the report of what we had seen to the Bryce Com-
37
GOLDEN LADS
mittee. These cases which I witnessed appear in the Bryce Report under the heading of “Alost.” *
1'When this record was first made public the “New York Tribune” stated editorially :—
“The writer of the foregoing communication was for several years a member of “The Tribune’ staff. For the utter trust- worthiness of any statement made by Mr. Gleason, this news- paper is willing to vouch. Mr. Gleason was at the front car- ing for the Belgian wounded. He speaks with full knowledge and complete authority and ‘The Tribune’ is glad to be able to submit to its readers a first-hand, eyewitness account of atrocities written by an American. It calls attention again to the fact, cited by Mr. Gleason, that his testimony is included in the Bryce Report, which should give Americans new insight into the value of this document.”
When Theodore Roosevelt read this record of German atroc- ity, he made the following public statement:
“Remember, there is not the slightest room for honest ques- tion either as to the dreadful, the unspeakably hideous, out- rages committed on the Belgians, or as to the fact that these outrages were methodically committed by the express command of the German Government in order to terrorize both the Bel- gians and among neutrals those men who are as cold and timid and selfish as our governmental leaders have shown themselves to be. Let any man who doubts read the statement of an American eyewitness of these fearful atrocities, Mr. Arthur H. Gleason, in the ‘New York Tribune’ of November 25, 1915.”
From the Bryce Report, English edition, Page 167.
British subject:—
“The girl was at the point of deathh Mr. G—— was with me and can corroborate me as to this and also as to the other facts mentioned below. On the same day at the same place
38
THE ATROCITY
Of such is the Bryce Report made: first-hand witness by men like myself, who know what they know, who are ready for any test to be applied, who made careful notes, who had witnesses.
‘Why do the Germans do these things? It is not war. It is cruel and wrong,” that is a remark I heard from noblemen and common soldiers alike. Such acts are beyond the understanding of the Belgian people. Their soldiers are kindly, good- humored, fearless. Alien women and children would be safe in their hands. They do not see why the Germans bring suffering to the innocent.
A few understand. They know it is a scientific panic which the German army was seeking to cul- tivate. They see that these acts are not done in
I saw one L. de M I took this statement from him... He signed his statement in my pocket book, and I hold my pocket book at the disposal of the Belgian and English authorities.
“T also saw at the hospital an old woman of eighty who was run clean through by a bayonet thrust.
“T next went up to another wounded Belgian in the same ward. His name was F. M——. I wrote his statement in my pocket book and he signed it after having read it.”
The full statement in the Bryce Report of the atrocities which I witnessed covers a page. The above sentences are extracts. Mr. Niemira had neglected to make a note of the exact date in his pocket book, and calls it “about the 15th of September.” It was September 29.
39
GOLDEN LADS
the wilful abandon of a few drunken soldiers, be- yond discipline, but that they belong to a cool, careful method by means of which the German staff hoped to reduce a population to servi- tude. The Germans regard these mutilations as pieces of necessary surgery. The young blond barmaid of the Quatrecht Inn told us on October 4 that a German captain came and cried like a baby in the taproom on the evening of September 7, after he had laid waste Quatrecht and Melle. To her fanciful, untrained mind he was thinking of his own wife and children. So, at least, she thought as she watched him, after serving him in his thirst.
One of the sentries patted the shoulder of the peasant at Melle when he learned that the man had had the three members of his family done to death. Personally, he was sorry for the man, but orders were orders.
I spent September 13 and September 23 in Ter- monde. Ten days before my first visit Termonde was a pretty town of 11,000 inhabitants. On their first visit the Germans burned eleven hun- dred of the fifteen hundred houses. They burned
Ke)
“UOT NAS IP [PIpPOYJIUt oY} SSouyIM 0} “Id}TIM dy} potuedutos.e oyM ‘Qtowsn qd syAppey £q_ usxe} sem ydessojoyd styy, ‘Autry ueulsar oy} payeqasit Seyoinys pue sunu ‘sjsatiq ‘asnoy Aq osnoy ‘souloy OOI‘r pue ‘aseurydio ue ‘[eyidsoy eB ‘s19y}0 Ino} pue yoinyo siq} pauingq sueultor) sy
‘MVS MALINM AHL HOIHM AGCNOWMAL NI HOWNHD
THE ATROCITY
the Church of St. Benedict, the Church of St. Ro- cus, three other churches, a hospital, and an or- phanage. They burned that town not by acci- dent of shell fire and general conflagration, but methodically, house by house. In the midst of charred ruins I came on single houses standing, many of them, and on their doors was German writing in chalk—‘‘Nicht Verbrennen. Gute Leute wohnen hier.” Sometimes it would be simply “Nicht Verbrennen,” sometimes only “Gute Leute,”’ but always that piece of German script was enough to save that house, though to the right and left of it were ruins. On several of the saved houses the name of the German offi- cer was scribbled who gave the order to spare. About one hundred houses were chalked in the way I have described. All these were unscathed | by the fire, though they stood in streets otherwise devastated. The remaining three hundred houses had the good luck to stand at the outskirts and on streets unvisited by the house-to-house incen- diaries.
Four days after my first visit the Germans burned again the already wrecked town, turning
43
GOLDEN LADS
their attention to the neglected three hundred houses. I went in as soon as I could safely enter the town, and that was on the Wednesday after.
As companions in Termonde I had Tennyson Jesse, Radclyffe Dugmore, and William R. Ren- ton. Mr. Dugmore took photographs of the chalked houses.
“Build a fence around Termonde,” suggested a Ghent manufacturer, “leave the ruins untouched. Let the place stand there, with its burned houses, churches, orphanage, hospital, factories, to show the world what German culture is. It will bea monument to their methods of conducting war. There will be no need of saying anything. That is all the proof we need. Then throw open the place to visitors from all the world, as soon as this war is over. Let them draw their own conclu- sions,”
BALLAD OF THE GERMANS
N Wetteren Hospital, Flanders, the writer saw
a little peasant girl dying from the bayonet
wounds in her back which the German soldiers had given her. :
Cain slew only a brother, A lad who was fair and strong, His murder was careless and honest, A heated and sudden wrong.
And Judas was kindly and pleasant, For he snared an invincible man.
But you—you have spitted the children, As they toddled and stumbled and ran.
She heard you sing on the high-road, She thought you were gallant and gay; Such men as the peasants of Flanders: The friends of a child at play.
A5
GOLDEN LADS
She saw the sun on your helmets, The sparkle of glancing light. She saw your bayonets flashing, And she laughed at your Prussian might.
Then you gave her death for her laughter, As you looked on her mischievous face. You hated the tiny peasant, With the hate of your famous race.
You were not frenzied and angry; You were cold and efficient and keen. Your thrust was as thorough and deadly As the stroke of a faithful machine.
You stabbed her deep with your rifle: You had good reason to sing,
As you footed it on through Flanders Past the broken and quivering thing.
Something impedes your advancing, A dragging has come on your hosts. And Paris grows dim now, and dimmer,
Through the blur of your raucous boasts.
46
a aos ee eS
BALLAD OF THE GERMANS
Your singing is sometimes broken By guttural German groans.
Your ankles are wet with her bleeding, Your pike is blunt from her bones.
The little peasant has tripped you. She hangs to your bloody stride.
And the dimpled hands are fastened Where they fumbled before she died.
47
THE STEAM ROLLER
HE Steam Roller, the final method, now op- erating in Belgium to flatten her for all
time, is the most deadly and universal of the three. It is a calculated process to break the hu- man spirit. People speak as if the injury done Belgium was a thing of the past. It is at its height now. The spy system with its clerks, wait- ers, tourists, business managers, reached directly only some thousands of persons. The atrocities wounded and killed many thousands of old men, women, and children. But the German occupa- tion and sovereignty at the present moment are denationalizing more than six million people. The German conquerors operate their Steam Roller by clever lies, thus separating Belgium from her real friends; by taxation, thus breaking Belgium economically; by enforced work on food supplies, railways, and ammunition, thus forcing Belgian peasants to feed their enemy’s army and
48
ee -"
THE STEAM ROLLER
destroy their own army, and so making unwilling traitors out of patriots; by fines and imprisonment that harass the individual Belgian who retains any sense of nationality; by official slander from Ber- lin that the Belgians are the guilty causes of their own destruction; and finally by the fact of sov- ereignty itself, that at one stroke breaks the in- most spirit of a free nation.
I was still in Ghent when the Germans moved up to the suburbs.
“T can put my artillery on Ghent,”’ said the Ger- man officer to the American vice-consul.
That talk is typical of the tone of voice used to Belgians: threat backed by murder.
The whole policy of the Germans of late is to treat the Belgian matter as a thing accomplished.
“It is over. Let bygones be bygones.”
It is a process like the trapping of an innocent woman, and when she is trapped, saying,
“Now you are compromised, anyway, so you had better submit.”
A friend of mine who remained in Ghent after the German occupation, had German officers bil- letted in his home. Daily, industriously, they
49
GOLDEN LADS
said to him that the English had been poor friends of his country, that they had been late in coming to the rescue. Germany was the friend, not Eng- land. In the homes throughout Belgium, these unbidden guests are claiming slavery is a bene- ficent institution, that it is better to be ruled by the German military, and made efficient for Ger- man ends, than to continue a free people.
For a year, our Red Cross Corps worked under the direction and authority of the Belgian prime minister, Baron de Broqueville. The prime min- ister in the name of his government has sent to this country an official protest against the new tax levied by the Germans on his people. The total tax for the German occupation amounts to $192,- 000,000. He writes:
“The German military occupation during the last fifteen months has entirely prevented all for- eign trade, has paralyzed industrial activity, and has reduced the majority of the laboring classes to enforced idleness. Upon the impoverished Belgian population whom Germany has unjustly attacked, upon whom she has brought want and distress, who have been barely saved from starva-
5O
One of the dangero who made it necessar to burn and bayonet His name is Gaspar.
BB
oa
us Belgian franc-tireurs, y for the German Army babies and old women. He is three years eld.
THE STEAM ROLLER
tion by the importation of food which Germany should have provided—upon this population, Ger- many now imposes a new tax, equal in amount to the enormous tax she has already imposed and is regularly collecting.”
The Belgian Legation has protested unavail- ingly to our Government that Germany, in viola- tion of The Hague Conventions, has forced Bel- gian workmen to perform labor for the German army. Belgian Railway employees at Malines, Luttre and elsewhere refused to perform work which would have released from the transporta- tion service and made available for the trenches an entire German Army Corps. These Belgian workmen were subjected to coersive measures, which included starvation and cruel punishments. Because of these penalties on Belgians refusing to be traitors, many went to hospitals in Germany, and others returned broken in health to Bel- gium.
After reading the chapter on the German spy system, a Belgian wrote me:
“That spying business is not yet the worst. Since then, the Germans have succeeded in outdo-
53
GOLDEN LADS
ing all that. The basest and the worst that one can dream of is it not that campaign of slander and blackmail which they originated after their violation of Belgium’s neutrality? Of course they did it—as a murderer who slanders his vic- tim—in the hope to justify their crime.”
It is evil to murder non-combatants. It is more evil to “rationalize” the act—to invent a moral reason for doing an infamous thing. First, Bel- gium suffered a vivisection, a veritable martyr- dom. Now, she is officially informed by her exe- cutioners that she was the guilty party. She is not allowed to protest. She must sit quietly un- der the charge that her sacrifice was not a sacrifice at all, but the penalty paid for her own misbe- havior. ‘This is a more cruel thing than the spy- ing that sapped her and the atrocities practised upon her, because it is more cruel to take a man’s honor than his property and his life.
“If the peasants had stayed in their houses, they would have been safe.”
When they stayed in their houses they were burned along with the houses. I saw this done on September 7, 1914, at Melle.
54
THE STEAM ROLLER
“The peasants shot from their houses at the ad- vancing German army.”
I saw German atrocities. The peasants did not shoot. It is the old familiar formula of the franc-tireur. That means that the peasant, not a soldier, dressed in the clothing of a civilian, takes advantage of his immunity as a noncombatant, to secrete a rifle, and from some shelter shoot at the enemy army. ‘The Bishop of Namur writes:
“It is evident that the German army trod the Belgian soil and carried out the invasion with the preconceived idea that it would meet with bands of this sort, a reminiscence of the war of 1870. But German imagination will not suffice to create that which does not exist.
“There never existed a single body of francs- tireurs in Belgium.
“No ‘isolated instance’ even is known of civil- ians having fired upon the troops, although there would have been no occasion for surprise if any individual person had committed an excess. In several of our villages the population was exter- minated because, as the military authorities al- leged, a major had been killed or a young girl had
55
GOLDEN LADS
attempted to kill an officer, and so forth. . . . In no case has an alleged culprit been discovered and designated by name.”
This lie—that the peasants brought their own death on themselves—was rehearsed before the war, as a carefully learned lesson. The army came prepared to find the excuse for the methodi- cal outrages which they practised. In the fight in the Dixmude district, a German officer of the 202 © Infantry had a letter with this sentence on his body:
“There are a lot of francs-tireurs with the enemy.”
There were none. He had found what he had been drilled to find, in the years of preparedness. The front lines of the Yser were raked clear by shell, rifle, and machine-gun fire. The district was in ruins. I know, because I worked there with our Red Cross Corps through those three weeks. The humorous explanation of this is given by one of the Fusilier Marin Lieutenants —that the blue cap and the red pompon of the famous fighting sailors of France looked strangely to the Germans, who took the wearers for francs-
56
THE STEAM ROLLER
tireurs, terror suggesting the idea. But this is the kindly humor of Brittany. The saucy sailor caps could not have looked strangely to German eyes, because a few weeks earlier those ‘‘Girls with the red pompon”’ had held the German army corps at Melle, and not even terror could have made them look other than terribly familiar. No. The offi- cers had been faithfully trained to find militant peasants under arms, and to send back letters and reports of their discovery, which could later be used in official excuses for frightfulness. This letter is one that did not get back to Berlin, later to appear in a White Paper, as justification for official murder of noncombatants.
The picture projected by the Great German Lit- erary Staff is too imaginative. Think of that Army of the Invasion with its army corps rid- ing down through village streets—the Uhlan cav- alry, the innumerable artillery, the dense end- less infantry, the deadly power and swing of it all—and then see the girl-child of Alost, and the white-haired woman, eighty years old—aiming their rifles at that cavalcade. It is a literary crea- tion, not a statement of fact. I have been in
57
GOLDEN LADS
villages when German troops were entering, had entered, and were about to enter. I saw helpless, terror-stricken women huddled against the wall, children hiding in their skirts, old men dazed and vague.
Then, as the blue-gray uniforms appeared at the head of the street, with sunlight on the pikes and helmets, came the cry—half a sob, “Les Alle- mands.”
The German fabrications are unworthy. Let the little slain children, and the violated women, sleep in honor. Your race was stern enough in doing them to death. Let them alone, now that you have cleared them from your path to Paris.
Doctor George Sarton, of the University of Ghent writes me:
“During the last months, the Germans have launched new slanders against Belgium. Their present tactics are more discreet and seem to be successful. Many ‘neutral’ travelers—especially Americans and Swiss—have been to Belgium to see the battlefields or, perhaps, to get an idea of what such an occupation by foreign soldiers ex- actly amounts to. Of course, these men can see
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nothing without the assistance of the German authorities, and they can but see what is shown to them. The greater their curiosity, the more cour- tesy extended to them, the more also they feel in- debted to their German hosts. These are well aware of it: the sightseers are taken in their net, and with a very few exceptions, their critical sense is quickly obliterated. We have recently been shown one of the finest specimens of these Ameri- can tourists: Mr. George B. McCellan, professor of History at Princeton, who made himself ridicu- lous by writing a most superficial and inaccurate article for the “Sunday Times Magazine.”
‘When the good folks of Belgium recollect the spying business that was carried on at their ex- pense by their German ‘friends,’ they are not likely to trust much their German enemies. They know that the Germans are quite incapable of keeping to themselves any fact that they may learn —in whatever confidential and intimate circum- stances—if this fact is of the smallest use to their own country. As it is perfectly impossible to trust them, the best is to avoid them, and that is what most Belgians are doing.
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“American tourists seeing Belgium through German courtesy are considered by the Belgians just as untrustworthy as: the Germans themselves. This is the right attitude, as there is no possi- bility left to the Belgians (in Belgium) of test- ing the morality and the neutrality of their visi- tors. The result of which is that these visitors are entirely given up to their German advisers; ail their knowledge ts of German origin. Of course, the Germans take advantage of this situation and make a show of German efficiency and organiza- tion.—‘Don’t you know: the Germans have done so much for Belgium! Why, everybody knows that this country was very inefficient, very badly managed . . . a poor little country without in- fluence. . . . See what the Germans have made of it. . . . There was no compulsory education, and the number of illiterates was scandalously high.’ (I am sorry to say that this at least is true.) “They are introducing compulsory and free education. In the big towns, sexual moral- ity was rather loose, but the Germans are now regulating all that.’ (You should hear German officers speak of prostitution in Antwerp and
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THE STEAM ROLLER
Brussels.) ‘The evil was great, but fortunately the Germans came and are cleaning up the coun- try.— That is their way of doing and talking. It does not take them long to convince ingenuous and uncritical Americans that everything is splen- didly regulated by German efficiency, and that if only the Belgians were complying, everything would be all right in Belgium. Are not the Bel- gians very ungrateful ?
“The Belgians do appreciate American gener- osity; they realize that almost the only rays of happiness that reach their country come from America. They will never forget it; that disin- terested help coming from over the seas has a touch of romance; it is great and comforting; it is the bright and hopeful side of the war. The Belgians know how to value this. But, as to what the Germans are doing, good or not, they will never appreciate that—what does it matter? The Belgians do not care one bit for German re- forms; they do not even deign to consider them; they simply ignore them. There is one—only one—reform that they will appreciate; the Ger- man evacuation. All the rest does not count.
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When the Germans speak of cleaning the country, the Belgians do not understand. From their point of view, there is only one way to clean it— and that is for the Germans to clear out.
“The Germans are very disappointed that a certain number of Belgians have been able to es- cape, either to enlist in the Belgian army or to live abroad. Of course, the more Belgians are in their hands, the more pressure they can exert. They are now slandering the Belgians who have left their country—all the ‘rich’ people who are ‘feasting’ abroad while their countrymen are starv- ing.
“The fewer Belgians there are in German hands, the better it is. The Belgians whose ability is the most useful, are considered useful by the Ger- mans for the latter’s sake. Must it not be a ter- rible source of anxiety for these Belgians to think that all the work they manage to do is directly or indirectly done for Germany? It is not aston- ishing that she wants to restore ‘business, as usual’ in Belgium, and that in many cases she has tried to force the Belgian workers to earn for her. Let
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me simply refer to the protest recently published by the Belgian Legation. But for the American Commission for Relief, the Belgians would have had to choose between starvation and work—work for Germany—starvation or treason. Nothing shows better the greatness and moment of the American work. Without the material and moral presence of the United States, Belgium would have simply been turned into a nation of slaves— starvation or treason.
“If I were in Belgium, I could say nothing; I would have to choose between silence and prison, or silence and death. Remember Edith Cavell. An enthusiastic, courageous man is running as many risks in Belgium now, as he would have in the sixteenth century under the Spanish domina- tion. The hundred eyes of the Spanish Inquisi- tion were then continually prying into everything —bodies and souls; one felt them even while one was sleeping. The German Secret Service is not less pitiless and it is more efficient.
“The process of slander and lie carried on by the Germans to ‘flatten’ Belgium is, to my judg-
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ment, the worst of their war practices. It is very efficient indeed. But, however efficient it may be, it will be unsuccessful as to its main purpose. The Germans will not be able to bow Belgian heads. As long as the Belgians do not admit that they have been conquered, they are not conquered, and in the meanwhile the Germans are merely ag- gravating their infamy. It was an easy thing to over-run the unprepared Belgian soil—but the Belgian spirit is unconquerable.
“Belgium may slumber, but die—never.”’
When. men act as part of an implacable ma- chine, they act apart from their humanity. They commit unbelievable horrors, because the thing that moves them is raw force, untouched by fine purpose and the elements of mercy. When I think of Germans, man by man, as they lay wounded, waiting for us to bring them in and care for them as faithfully as for our own, I know that they have become human in their defeat. We are their friends as we break them. In spite of their treachery and cruelty and cold hatred, we shall save them yet. Cleared of their evil dream and restored to our common humanity, they will have
64
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a more profound sorrow growing out of this war than any other people, for Belgium and France only suffered these things, but the great German race committed them.
65
MY EXPERIENCE WITH BAEDEKER
HEN I went to Belgium, friends said to me,
“You must take ‘Baedeker’s Belgium’ with
you; it is the best thing on the country.” So I did. I used it as I went around. The author does n’t give much about himself, and that is a good feature in any book, but I gathered he was a German, a widely traveled man, and he seems to have spent much time in Belgium, for I found intimate records of the smallest things. I used his guide for five months over there. I must say right here I was disappointed in it. And that is n’t just the word, either. I was an- noyed by it. It gave all the effect of accuracy, and then when I got there it wasn’t so. He kept speaking of buildings as “beautiful,” ‘‘one of the loveliest unspoiled pieces of thirteenth century architecture in Europe,” and when I took a lot of trouble and visited the building, I found it half down, or a butt-end, or sometimes ashes. I
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———
MY EXPERIENCE WITH BAEDEKER
could n’t make his book tally up. It doesn’t agree with the landscape and the look of things. He will take a perfectly good detail and stick it in where it does n’t belong, and leave it there. And he does it all in a painstaking way and with evi- dent sincerity.
His volume had been so popular back in his own country that it had brought a lot of Germans into Belgium. I saw them everywhere. They were doing the same thing I was doing, checking up what they saw with the map and text and things. Some of them looked puzzled and angry, as they went around. I feel sure they will go home and give Baedeker a warm time, when they tell him they did n’t find things as he had represented.
For one thing, he makes out Belgium a lively country, full of busy, contented people, innocent peasants, and sturdy workmen and that sort of thing. Why, it’s the saddest place in the world. The people are not cheery at all. They are de- pressed. It’s the last place I should think of for a holiday, now that I have seen it. And that’s the way it goes, all through his work. Things are the opposite of what he says with so much
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meticulous care. He would speak of ‘‘gay café life” in a place that looked as if an earthquake had hit it, and where the only people were some cripples and a few half-starved old folks. If he finds that sort of thing gay as he travels around, he is an easy man to please. It was so wherever I went. It isn’t as if he were wrong at some one detail. He is wrong all over the place, all over Belgium. It’s all different from the way he says it is. I know his fellow-countrymen who are there now will bear me out in this.
Let me show one place. I took his book with me and used it on Nieuport. That’s a perfectly fair test, because Nieuport is like a couple of hun- dred other towns.
“Nieuport,” says Herr Baedeker, “ a small and quiet place on the Yser.”’
It is one of the noisiest places I have ever been in. There was a day and a half in May when shells dropped into the streets and houses, every minute. Every day at least a few screaming three-inch shells fall on the village. Aéroplanes buzz overhead, shrapnel pings in the sky. Rifle bullets sing like excited telegraph wires. If
68
Baedeker, the distinguished German _ writer, states that this ‘
Fifteenth Century Gothic church in Nieuport has ‘fa modern timber roof.” We looked for it.
MY EXPERIENCE WITH BAEDEKER
Baedeker found Nieuport a quiet place, he was brought up in a boiler factory.
His very next phrase puzzled me—‘“‘with 3500 inhabitants,” he says.
And I did n’t see one. There were dead people in the ruins of the houses. The soldiers used to unearth them from time to time. I remember that the poet speaks of “the poor inhabitant be- low,” when he is writing of a body ina grave. It must be in that sense that Baedeker specifies those 3500 inhabitants. But he should n’t do that kind of imaginative touch. It isn’t in his line. And it might mislead people.
Think of a stranger getting into Nieuport after dark on a wet night, with his mind all set on the three hotels Baedeker gives him a choice of.
“All unpretending,” he says.
Just the wrong word. Why, those hotels are brick dust. They’re flat on the ground. There isn’t aroom left. He means “demolished.” He does n’t use our language easily. I can see that. It is true they are unpretending, but that is n’t the first word you would use about them, not if you were fluent.
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Then he gives a detail that is unnecessary. He says you can sleep or eat there for a “franc and a half.” That exactitude is out of place. It is labored. I ask you what a traveler would make of the “114 fr. pour diner,” when he came on that rubbish heap which is the Hotel of Hope— “Hotel de l’Espérance.” That is like Baedeker, all through his volume. He will give a detail, like the precise cost of this dinner, when there is n’t any food in the neighborhood. It would n’t be so bad if he ’d sketch things in general terms. That I could forgive. But it is too much when he makes a word-picture of a Flemish table d’héte for a franc and a half in a section of country where even the cats are starving.
His next statement is plain twisted. ‘‘Nieu- port is noted for its obstinate resistance to the French.”
I saw French soldiers there every day. They were defending the place. His way of putting it stands the facts on their head.
‘And (is noted) for the ‘Battle of the Dunes’ in 1600.”
That is where the printer falls down. I was
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MY EXPERIENCE WITH BAEDEKER
there during the Battle of the Dunes. The nine is upside down in the date as given.
I would n’t object so much if he were careless with facts that were harmless, like his hotels and his dinner and his dates. But when he gives bad advice that would lead people into trouble, I think he ought to be jacked up. Listen to this:
“We may turn to the left to inspect the locks on the canals to Ostend.”
Baedeker’s proposal here means sure death to the reader who tries it. That section is lined with machine guns. If a man began turning and in- specting, he would be shot. Baedeker’s statement is too casual. It sounds like a suggestion for a leisurely walk. It isn’t a sufficient warning against doing something which shortens life. The word “inspect” is unfortunate. It gives the reader the idea he is invited to nose around those locks, when he had really better quiet down and keep away. The sentries don’t want him there. I should have written that sentence differently. His kind of unconsidered advice leads to a lot of sadness.
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“The Rue Longue contains a few quaint old houses.”’
It does n’t contain any houses at all. ‘There are some heaps of scorched rubble. “Quaint” is word painting.
“On the south side of this square rises the dig- nified Cloth Hall.”
There is nothing dignified about a shattered, burned, tottering old building. Why will he use these literary words?
“With a lately restored belfry.”
It seems as if this writer could n’t help saying the wrong thing. A Zouave gave us a piece of bronze from the big bell. It wasn’t restored at all. It was on the ground, broken.
“The church has a modern timber roof.”
There he goes again—the exact opposite of what even a child could see were the facts. And yet in his methodical, earnest way, he has tried to get these things right. That church, for in- stance, has no roof at all. It has a few pillars standing. It looks like a skeleton. I have a good photograph of it, which the reader can see on page 69. If Baedeker would stand under
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MY EXPERIENCE WITH BAEDEKER
that ‘modern timber roof” in a rainstorm, he would n’t think so much of it.
“The Hotel de Ville contains a small collection of paintings.”
I don’t like to keep picking on what he says, but this sentence is irritating. There aren’t any paintings there, because things are scattered. You can see torn bits strewed around on the floor of the place, but nothing like a collection.
I could go on like that, and take him up ona lot more details. But it sounds as if I were criti- cising. And I don’t mean it that way, because I believe the man is doing his best. But I do think he ought to get out another edition of his book, and set these points straight.
He puts a little poem on his title page:
Go, little book, God send thee good passage, And specially let this be thy prayer Unto them all that thee will read or hear,
Where thou art wrong, after their help to call, Thee to correct in any part or all.
That sounds fair enough. So I am going to send him these notes. But it isn’t in “parts” he is “wrong.” There is a big mistake somewhere.
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“Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.”
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THE PLAY-BOYS OF BRITTANY
LES FUSILIERS MARINS
T times in my five months at the front I have been puzzled by the sacrifice of so much young life; and most I have wondered about the Belgians. I had seen their first army wiped out; there came a time when IJ no longer met the faces I had learned to know at Termonde and Antwerp and Alost. A new army of boys has dug itself in at the Yser, and the same wastage by gun-fire and disease is at work on them. One wonders with the Belgians if the price they pay for honor is not too high. There is a sadness in the eyes of Belgian boy soldiers that is not easy to face. Are we quite worthy of their sacrifice? Why should the son of Ysaye die for me? Are you, comfortable reader, altogether sure that Pierre Depage and André Simont are called on to spill their blood for your good name?
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Then one turns with relief to the Fusiliers Mar- ins—the sailors with a rifle. Here are young men at play. They know they are the incomparable soldiers. ‘The guns have been on them for fifteen months, but they remain unbroken. Twice in the year, if they had yielded, this might have been a short war. But that is only saying that if Brit- tany had a different breed of men the world and its future would contain less hope. They carry the fine liquor of France, and something of their own added for bouquet. They are happy soldiers —happy in their brief life, with its flash of dar- ing, and happy in their death. It is still sweet to die for one’s country, and that at no far-flung out- post over the seas and sands, but just at the home border. As we carried our wounded sailors down from Nieuport to the great hospital of Zuydcoote on the Dunkirk highway, there is a sign-board, a bridge, and a custom-house that mark the point where we pass from Belgium into France. We drove our ambulance with the rear curtain raised, so that the wounded men, lying on the stretchers, could be cheered by the flow of scenery. Some- times, as we crossed that border-line, one of the
So
THE PLAY-BOYS OF BRITTANY
men would pick it up with his eye, and would say to his comrade: “France! Now we are in France, the beautiful country.”
‘What do you mean?” I asked one lad, who had brightened visibly.
“The other countries,” he said, “are flat and dirty. The people are of mixed races. France is not so.”
It has been my fortune to watch the sailors at work from the start of the war. I was in Ghent when they came there, late, to a hopeless situation. Here were youngsters scooped up from the decks, untrained in trenches, and rushed to the front; but the sea-daring was on them, and they knew obedi- ence and the hazards. They helped to cover the retreat of the Belgians and save that army from annihilation by banging away at the German mass at Melle. Man after man developed a fatalism of war, and expressed it to us.
“Nothing can hit you till your time,” was often their way of saying it; “it’s no use dodging or be- ing afraid. You won’t be hit till your shell comes.” And another favorite belief of theirs that brought them cheer was this: ‘The shell
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that will kill you you won’t hear coming. So you ’Il never know.”
These sailor lads thrive on lost causes, and it was at Ghent they won from the Germans their nickname of ‘‘Les demoiselles au pompon rouge.” The saucy French of that has a touch beyond any English rendering of ‘‘the girls with the red pom- pon.” “Les demoiselles au pompon rouge” paints ‘their picture at one stroke, for they thrust out the face of a youngster from under a rakish blue sailor hat, crowned with a fluffy red button, like a blue flower with a red bloom at its heart. I rarely saw an aging marin. ‘There are no seasoned troops so boyish. They wear open dickies, which expose the neck, full, hard, well-rounded. The older troops, who go laggard to the spading, have beards that extend down the collar; but a boy has a smooth, clean neck, and these sailors -have the throat of youth. We must once have had such a race in our cow-boys and Texas rangers—level- eyed, careless men who know no masters, only equals. The force of gravity is heavy on an old man. But marins are not weighted down by equipment nor muffled with clothing. They go
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bobbing like corks, as though they would always stay on the crest of things. And riding on top of their lightness is that absurd bright-red button in their cap. The armies for five hundred miles are sober, grown-up people, but here are the play-boys of the western front.
From Ghent they trooped south to Dixmude, and were shot to pieces in that ““Thermopyle of the North.”
“Hold for four days,” was their order.
They held for three weeks, till the sea came down and took charge. During those three weeks we motored in and out to get their wounded. Nothing of orderly impression of those days re- mains to me. I have only flashes of the sailor- soldiers curved over and snaking along the bat- tered streets behind slivers of wall, handfuls of them in the Hotel de Ville standing around wait- ing in a roar of noise and a bright blaze of burn- ing houses—waiting till the shelling fades away.’
1If any one wants a history of them, and the world ought to want it, the book of their acts, is it not written in singing prose in Le Goffic’s “Dixmude, un Chapitre de l’histoire des Fusiliers Marins’? Le Goffic is a Breton and his own son is with the fighting sailors. He deals with their autumn ex-
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Then for over twelve months they held wrecked Nieuport, and I have watched them there week after week. There is no drearier post on earth. One day in the pile of masonry thirty feet from our cellar refuge the sailors began throwing out the bricks, and in a few minutes they uncov- ered the body of a comrade. All the village has the smell of desolation. That smell is com- pounded of green ditch-water, damp plaster, wet clothing, blood, straw, and antiseptics. The nose took it as we crossed the canal, and held it till we shook ourselves on the run home. Thirty minutes a day in that soggy wreck pulled at my spirits for hours afterward. But those chaps stood up to it for twenty-four hours a day, lifting
ploits in Dixmude on the Yser, that butt-end of wreck. Legends will spring out of them and the soil they have reddened. We have heard little of the French in this war—and almost nothing at all from them. And yet it is the French that have held the decisive battle line. Unprepared and peace-loving, they have stood the shock of a perfectly equipped and war-loving army.
Monsieur Le Goffic is the official historian of the Fusiliers Marins. His book has gone through forty-nine editions. He is a poet, novelist and critic. That American sympathy is ap- preciated is proved by this sentence from a letter of Le Goffic to an American who had expressed admiration for the Breton sailors:— “Merci, Monsieur, au nom de mon pays, merci pour nos marins, et merci pour moi meme.”
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a cheery face from a stinking cellar, hopping about in the tangle, sleeping quietly when their “night off’ comes. As our chauffeur drew his camera, one of them sprang into a bush entanglement, aimed his rifle, and posed.
I recollect an afternoon when we had word of an attack. We were grave, because the Germans are strong and fearless.
‘Are they coming?” grinned a sailor. “Let them come. We are ready.”
We learned to know many of the Fusiliers Marins and to grow fond of them. How else could it be when we-went and got them, sick and wounded, dying and dead, two, six, ten of them a day, for many weeks, and brought them in to the Red Cross post for a dressing, and then on to the hospital? I remember a young man in our ambulance. His right foot was shot away, and the leg above was wounded. He lay un- murmuring for all the tossing of the road over the long miles of the ride. We lifted him from the stretcher, which he had wet with his blood, into the white cot in “Hall 15” of Zuydcoote Hospital. The wound and the journey had gone deeply into
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his vitality. As he touched the bed, his control ebbed, and he became violently sick at the stomach. I stooped to carry back the empty stretcher. He saw I was going away, and said, “Thank you.” I knew I should not see him again, not even if I came early next day.
There is one unfading impression made on me by those wounded. If I call it good nature, I have given only one element in it. It is more than that: it is a dash of fun. They smile, they wink, they accept a light for their cigarette. It is not stoicism at all. Stoicism is a grim holding on, the jaws clenched, the spirit dark, but endur- ing. This is a thing of wings. They will know I-am not. making light of their pain in writing these words. I am only saying that they make light of it. The judgment of men who are soon to die is like the judgment of little children. It does not tolerate foolish words. Of all the ways of showing you care that they suffer there is nothing half so good as the gift of tobacco. As long as I had any money to spend, I spent it on packages of cigarettes.
When the Marin officers found out we were the
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AONVINANVYOLOW AHL OLNI AGCVUYNWOD GAGNOOM V DONILAIT SYOTIVS
THE PLAY-BOYS OF BRITTANY
same people that had worked with them at Melle five months before, they invited my wife and three other nurses to luncheon in a Nieuport cellar. Their eye brightens at sight of a woman, but she is as safe with them as with a cowboy or a Quaker. The guests were led down into a basement, an eighteen foot room, six feet high. The sailors had covered the floor and papered the walls with red carpet. A tiny oil stove added to the warmth of that blazing carpet. More than twenty officers and doctors crowded into the room, and took seats at the table, lighted by two lamps. There were a dozen plates of patisserie, a choice of tea, coffee, or chocolate, all hot, white and red wine, and then champagne. An orderly lifted in a little wooden yacht, bark-rigged, fourteen inches long, with white painted sails. A nurse spilled champagne over the tiny ship, till it was drenched, and christened. The chief doctor made a speech of thanks. Then the ship went around the table, and each guest wrote her name on the sails. The party climbed out into the garden, where the shells were going high overhead like snowballs. In amongst the blackened flowers, a 16-inch shell had
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left a hole of fifty feet diameter. One could have dropped two motor cars into the cavity.
Who but Marins would have devised a celebra- tion for us on July 4%? The commandant, the captain, and a brace of lieutenants opened eleven bottles of champagne in the Café du Sport at Coxyde in honor of our violation of neutrality. It was little enough we were doing for those men, but they were moved to graceful speech. We were hard put to it, because one had to tell them that much of the giving for a hundred years had been from France to us, and our showing in this war is hardly the equal of the aid they sent us when we were invaded by Hessian troops and a German king.
Marins whom we know have the swift grati- tude of simple natures, not too highly civilized to show when they are pleased. After we had sent a batch of their wounded by hospital train from Adinkerke, the two sailors, who had helped us, in- vited my American friend and me into the estami- net across the road from the station, and bought us drinks for an hour. We had been good to their mates, so they wanted to be good to us.
go
THE PLAY-BOYS OF BRITTANY
When we lived in barraquement, just back of the admiral’s house, our cock was a Marin with a knack at omelettes. If we had to work through the night, going into black Nieuport, and down the ten-mile road to Zuydcoote, returning weary at midnight, a brave supper was laid out for us of canned meats, wines, and jellies—all set with the touch of one who cared. It was no hasty, slapped- down affair. We were carrying his comrades, and he was helping us to do it.
It was an officer of a quite other regiment who, one time when we were off duty, asked us to carry him to his post in the Dunes. We made the run for him, and, as he jumped from the car, he of- fered us a franc. Marins pay back in friendship. The Red Cross station to which we reported, Poste de Secours des Marins, was conducted by Monsieur le Docteur Rolland, and Monsieur Le Doze. Our workers were standing guests at their officers’ mess. The little sawed-off sailor in the Villa Marie where I was billetted made coffee for two of us each morning.
Our friends have the faults of young men,
flushed with life. They are scornful of feeble Ql
GOLDEN LADS
folk, of men who grow tired, who think twice be- fore dying. They laugh at middle age. The sentries amuse them, the elderly chaps who duck into their caves when a few shells are sailing over- head. They have no charity for frail nerves. They hate races who don’t rally to a man when the enemy is hitting the trail. They must wait for age to gain pity, and the Bretons will never grow old. They are killed too fast. And yet, as soon as | say that, I remember their rough pity for their hurt comrades. They are as busy as a hospital nurse in laying a blanket and swinging the stretcher for one of their own who has been “pinked.” They have a hovering concern. I have had twenty come to the ambulance to help shove in a “‘blessé,” and say good-by to him, and
wave to him as long as the road left him in their —
sight. The wounded man, unless his back bound him down, would lift his head from the stretcher, to give back their greetings. It was an eager ex- change between the whole men and the injured one. They don’t believe they can be broken till the thing comes, and there is curiosity to see just what has befallen one like themselves.
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THE PLAY-BOYS OF BRITTANY
When it came my time to say good-by, my sailor friend, who had often stopped by my car to tell me that all was going well, ran over to share in the excitement. I told him I was leaving, and he gave me a smile of deep-understanding amuse- ment. Tired so soon? ‘That smile carried a live consciousness of untapped power, of the record he and his comrades had made. It showed a disre- gard of my personal feelings, of all adult human weakness. That was the picture I carried away from the Nieuport line—the smiling boy with his wounded arm, alert after his year of war, and more than a little scornful of one who had grown weary in conditions so prosperous for young men.
I rode away from him, past the Coxyde en- campment of his comrades. ‘There they were as I had often seen them, with the peddlers cluttering their camp—candy men, banana women; a fringe of basket merchants about their grim barracks; a dozen peasants squatting with baskets of ciga- rettes, fruit, vegetables, foolish, bright trinkets. And over them bent the boys, dozens of them in blue blouses, stooping down to pick up trays, fingering red apples and shining charms, chaffing,
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dickering, shoving one another, the old loves of their childhood still tangled their being.
So when I am talking about the sailors as if they were heroes, suddenly something gay comes romping in. I see them again, as I have so often seen them in the dunes of Flanders, and what I see is a race of children.
“Don’t forget we are only little ones,” they say. “We don’t die; we are just at play.”
“ENCHANTED CIGARETTES”
HERE does the comfort of the trenches lie?
What solace do the soldiers find for a
weary life of unemployment and for sudden death? Of course, they find it in the age-old things that have always sufficed, or, if these things do not here altogether suffice, at least they help. For a certain few out of every hundred men, reli- gion avails. Some of our dying men were glad of the last rites. Some wore their Catholic emblems. The quiet devout men continued faithful as they had been at home. Art is playing the true part it plays at all times of fundamental need. The men busy themselves with music, with carving, and drawing. Security and luxury destroy art, for it is no longer a necessity when a man is stuffed with foods, and his fat body whirled in hot com- partments from point to point of a tame world. But when he tumbles in from a gusty night out of a trenchful of mud, with the patter from slivers of shell, then he turns to song and color, odd tricks
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with the knife, and the tales of an ancient adven- ture. After our group had brought food and clothing to a regiment, I remember the pride with which one of the privates presented to our head nurse a sculptured group, done in mud of the Yser.
But the greatest thing in the world to soldiers is plain comradeship. That is where they take their comfort. And the expression of that comrade- ship is most often found in the social smoke. The meager happiness of fighting-men is more closely interwoven with tobacco than with any other single thing. To rob them of that would be to leave them poor indeed. It would reduce their morale. It would depress their cheery patience. The wonder of tobacco is that it fits itself to each one of several needs. It is the medium by which the average man maintains normality at an abnor- mal time. It is a device to soothe jumping nerves, to deaden pain, to chase away brooding. Tobacco connects a man with the human race, and his own past life. It gives him a little thing to do in a big danger, in seeping loneliness, and the grip of sharp pain. It brings back his café evenings, when black horror is reaching out for him.
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{f you have weathered around the world a bit, you know how everywhere strange situations turn into places for plain men to feel at home. Sailors on a Nova Scotia freight schooner, five days out, sit around in the evening glow and take a pipe and a chat with the same homely accustomedness, as if they were at a tavern. It is so in the jungle and at a lumber camp. Now, that is what the millions of average men have done to war. ‘They have taken a raw, disordered, muddied, horrible thing, and given it a monotony and regularity of its own. They have smoked away its fighting tension, its hideous expectancy. They refuse to let mangling and murder put crimps in their spirit. Apparently there is nothing hellish enough to flat- ten the human spirit. Not all the sprinkled shells and caravans of bleeding victims can cow the boys of the front line. In this work of lifting clear of horror, tobacco has been a friend to the soldiers of the Great War.
“T would n’t know a good cigarette if I saw it,” said Geoffrey Gilling, after a year of ambulance work at Furnes and Coxyde. He had given up all that makes the life of an upper-class English-
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man pleasant, and I think that the deprivation of high-grade smoking material was a severe item in his sacrifice.
Four of us in Red Cross work spent weary hours each day in a filthy room in a noisy wine-shop, waiting for fresh trouble to break loose. The dreariness of it made B—— petulant and T mournfully silent, and finally left me melancholy. But sturdy Andrew MacEwan, the Scotchman with the forty-inch barrel chest, would reach out for his big can of naval tobacco, slipped to him by the sailors at Dunkirk when the commissariat offi- cer wasn’t looking, and would light his short stocky pipe, shaped very much like himself, and then we were all off together on a jaunt around the world. He had driven nearly all known ‘“‘makes” of motor-car over most of the map, apparently about one car to each country. Twelve months of bad roads in a shelled district had left him full of talk, as soon as he was well lit.
Up at Nieuport, last northern stand of the Al- lied line, a walking merchant would call each day, a basket around his throat, and in the hamper chocolate, fruit, and tobacco. A muddy, un-
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shaven Brittany sailor, out of his few sous a week, bought us cigars. The less men have, the more generous they are. That is an old saying, but it drove home to me when I had poor men do me courtesy day by day for five months. As we mo- tored in and out of Nieuport in the dark of the night, we passed hundreds of silent men trudging through the mud of the gutter. They were troops that had been relieved who were marching back for a rest. As soon as they came out of the zone where no sound can be made and no light shown, we saw here and there down the invisible ranks the sudden flare of a match, and then the glow in the cup of the hand, as the man prepared to cheer himself.
A more somber and lonely watch even than that of these French sailors was the vigil kept by our good Belgian friend, Commandant Gilson, in the shattered village of Pervyse. With his old Mal- tese cat, he prowled through the wrecked place till two and three of the morning, waiting for Ger- mans to cross the flooded fields. For him ciga- rettes were an endless chain that went through his life. From the expiring stub he lit his fresh
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smoke, as if he were maintaining a vestal flame. He kept puffing till the live butt singed his up- turned mustache. He squinted his eyes to escape the ascending smoke.
Always the cigarette for him and for the other men. Our cellar of nurses in Pervyse kept a stock of pipes and of cigarettes ready for tired soldiers off duty. The pipes remained as intact as a col- lection in a museum. The cigarettes never equaled the demand. We once took out a carful of supplies to 300 Belgian soldiers. We gave them their choice of cigarettes or smoking tobacco, and about 250 of them selected cigarettes. That barrack vote gives the popularity of the cigarette among men of French blood. Some cigars, some pipes, but everywhere the shorter smoke. To- bacco and pipe exhaust precious pocket room. The cigarette is portable. Cigars break and peel in the kneading motion of walking and crouching. But the cigarette is protected in its little box. And yet, rather than lose a smoke, a soldier will carry one lonesome cigarette, rained on and limp and fraying at the end, drag it from the depths of akit, dry it out, and have ago. For, after all,
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it isn’t for theoretical advantages over larger, longer smokes he likes it, but because it is fitted to his temperament. It is a French and Belgian smoke, short-lived and of a light touch, as dear to memory and liking as the wines of La Champagne.
Twice, in dramatic setting, I have seen tobacco intervene to give men a release from overstrained nerves. Once it was at a skirmish. Behind a street defense, crouched thirty Belgian soldiers. Shrapnel began to burst over us, and the bullets tumbled on the cobbles. With each puff of the shrapnel, like a paper bag exploding, releasing a handful of white smoke, the men flattened against the walls and dove into the open doors. ‘The sound of shrapnel is the same sound as hailstones, a crisp crackle as they strike and bounce. We ran and picked them up. ‘They were blunted by smiting on the paving. Any one of them would have plowed into soft flesh and found the bone and shattered it. They seem harmless because they make so little noise. They don’t scream and wail and thunder. Our guns, back on the hillocks of the Ghent road, grew louder and more frequent. Each minute now was cut into by a roar or a
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fainter rumble. The battle was on. Our bar- ricaded street was a pocket in the storm, like the center of a typhoon.
Yonder we could see the canal, fifty feet away, at the foot of our street. On the farther side be- hind the river front houses lay the Germans, ready to sally out and charge. It would be all right if they came quickly. But a few hours of waiting for them on an empty stomach, and having them disappoint us, was wearing. We wished they would hurry and have it over with, or else go away for good. Civilians stumbling and bleeding went past us.
And that was how the morning went by, heavy footed, unrelieved, with a sense of waiting for a sudden crash and horror. It was peaceful, in a way, but, at the heart of the calm, a menace. So we overlaid the tension with casual petty acts. We made an informal pool of our resources in tobacco, each man sharing with his neighbor, till nearly every one of us was puffing away, and de- ciding there was nothing to this German attack, after all. A smoke makes just the difference be- tween sticking it out or acting the coward’s part.
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EEE ee
“ENCHANTED CIGARETTES”
Each one of us in a lifetime has a day of days, when external event is lively, and our inner mood dances to the tune. Some of us will perhaps al- ways feel that we spent our day on October 21, 1914. For we were allowed to go into a town that fell in that one afternoon and to come out again alive. It was the afternoon when Dixmude was leveled from a fair upstanding city to a heap of scorched brick and crumbled plaster. The enemy guns from over the Yser were accurate on its houses.
We received our first taste of the dread to come, while we were yet a little way out. In the road ahead of us, a shell had just splashed an artillery convoy. Four horses, the driver, and the splin- tered wood of the wagon were all worked together into one pulp, so that our car skidded on it. We entered the falling town of Dixmude. It was a thick mess into which we rode, with hot smoke and fine masonry dust blowing into the eyes. Houses around us crumpled up at one blast, and then shot a thick brown cloud of dust, and out of the cloud a high central flame that leaped and spread. With the wailing of shells in the
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air, every few seconds, the thud and thunder of their impact, the scattering of the shattered metal, it was one of the hot, thorough bombardments of the war. It cleared the town of troops, after tearing their ranks. But it left wounded men in the cellar of the Hotel de Ville. The Grand Place and the Hotel were the center of the fire. Here we had to wait fifteen minutes, while the wounded were made ready for our two cars. It was then we turned to tobacco as to a friend. I remember the easement that came when I found I had cigars in my waistcoat pocket. The act of lighting a cigar, and pulling at it briskly, was a relief. | . There was a second of time when we could hear a shell, about to burst close, before it struck. It came, sharpening its nose on the air, making a shrill whistle with a moan in it, that gathered vol- ume as it neared. There was a menace in the sound. It seemed to approach in a vast envelop- ing mass that can’t be escaped, filling all out-doors, and sure to find you. It was as if the all-includ- ing sound were the missile itself, with no hiding place offered. And yet the shell is generally a 104.
| 1
DOOR CHALKED BY THE GERMANS.
One of the too houses in Termonde with the direction ‘‘Do not 3urn’”’ written in German. One thousand one hundred houses were burned, house by house. Photogranh by Radclyffe Dugmore.
“ENCHANTED CIGARETTES”
little three-or-four inch thing, like a flower-pot, hurtling through the scenery. But bruised nerves refuse to listen to reason, and again and again I ducked as I heard that high wail, believing I was about to be struck.
In that second of tension, it was a pleasant thing to draw in on a butt—to discharge the smoke, a second later, carelessly, as who should say, “It is nothing.” The little cylinder was a lightning conductor to lead away the danger from a vital part. It let the nervousness leak off into biting and puffing, and making a play of fingering the stub, instead of striking into the stomach and the courage. It gave the troubled face something to do, and let the writhing hand busy itself. It saved me from knowing just how frightened I was.
But what of the wounded themselves? They have to endure all that dreariness of long waiting, and the pressure of danger, and then, for good measure, a burden of pain. SoI come to the men who are revealing human nature at a higher pitch than any others in the war. The trench-digging, elderly chaps are patient and long-enduring, and
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the fighting men are as gallant as any the ballad- mongers used to rime about.
But it is of the wounded that one would like to speak in a way to win respect for them rather than pity. I think some American observers have missed the truth about the wounded. They have told of the groaning and screaming, the heavy smells, the delays and neglect. It is a picture of vivid horror. But the final impression left on me by caring for many hundred wounded men is that of their patience and cheeriness. I think they would resent having a sordid pen picture made of their suffering and letting it go at that. After all, it is their wound: they suffered it for a purpose, and they conquer their bodily pain by will power and the Gallic touch of humor. Suf- fering borne nobly merits something more than an emphasis on the blood and the moan. To speak of these wounded men as of a heap of futile misery is like missing the worthiness of mother- hood in the details of obstetrics.
It was thought we moderns had gone soft, but it seems we were storing up reserves of stoic strength and courage. This war has drawn on
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them more heavily than any former test, and they have met all its demands. Sometimes, being tired, I would drop my corner of the stretcher, a few inches suddenly. This would draw a quick intake of the breath from the hurt man and an “aahh’’—but not once a word of blame. I should want to curse the careless hand that wrenched my wound, but these soldiers of France and Belgium whom [I carried had passed beyond littleness.
Once we had a French Zouave officer on the stretcher. He was wounded in the right arm and the stomach. Every careen of the ambulance over cobble and into shell-hole was a thrust into his hurt. We had to carry him all the way from the Nieuport cellar to Zuydcoote Hospital, ten miles. The driver was one more of the American young men who have gone over into France to pay back a little of what we owe her. I want to give his name, Robert Cardell Toms, because it is good for us to know that we have brave and tender gen- tlemen. On this long haul, as always, he drove with extreme care, changing his speed without the staccato jerk, avoiding bumps and holes of the try- ing road. When we reached the hospital, he ran
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ahead into the ward to prepare the bed. The officer beckoned me to him. He spoke with some difficulty, as the effort caught him in the wound of his stomach.
“Please be good enough,” he said, ‘“‘to give my thanks to the chauffeur. He has driven me down with much consideration. He cares for wounded men.”
Where other races are grateful and inarticulate, the French are able to put into speech the last fine touch of feeling.
My friend kept a supply of cigarettes for his ambulance cases, and as soon as the hour-long drive began we dealt them out to the bandaged men. How often we have started with a groaning man for the ride to Zuydcoote, and how well the trip went, when we had lighted his cigarette for him. It brought back a little of the conversation and the merriment which it had called out in bet- ter days. Itissucharelief tobe wounded. You have done your duty, and now you are to have a little rest. With a clear conscience, you can sink back into laziness, far away from noise and filth. Luck has come along and pulled the pack off your
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back, and the responsibility from your sick mind. No weary city clerk ever went to his seashore holi- day with more blitheness than some of our wounded showed as they came riding in from the Nieuport trenches at full length on the stretcher, and singing all the way. What is a splintered forehead or a damaged leg compared to the happi- ness of an honorable discharge? Nothing to do for a month but lie quietly, and watch the wholesome, clean-clad nurse. I am not forgetting the sadness of many men, nor the men hurt to death, who lay motionless and did not sing, and some of whom died while we were on the road to help. I am only trying to tell of the one man in every four who was glad of his enforced rest, and who didn’t let a little thing like agony conquer his gaiety. Those men were the Joyous Wounded. I have seldom seen men more light hearted.
Word came to my wife one day that several hundred wounded were side-tracked at Furnes railway station. With two nurses she hurried to them, carrying hot soup. The women went through the train, feeding the soldiers, giving
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them a drink of cold water, and bringing some of them hot water for washing. Then, being fed, they were ready for a smoke, and my wife began walking down the foul-smelling ambulance car with boxes of supplies, letting each man take out a cigarette and a match. The car was slung with double layers of stretcher bunks. Some men were freshly wounded, others were convalescent. A few lay in a stupor. She provided ten or a dozen soldiers with their pleasure, and they lighted up and were well under way. She had so many patients that day that she was not watching the individual man in her general distribution. She came half way down the car, and held out her store to a soldier without looking at him. He glanced up and grinned. ‘The men in the bunks around him laughed heartily. Then she looked down at him. He was flapping the two stumps of his arms and was smiling. His hands had been blown off. She put the cigarette in his mouth and lit it for him. Only his hands were gone. Comradeship was left for him, and here was the lighted cigarette expressing that comradeship.
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—~
ae ee eee eee ——
WAS IT REAL?
HE man was an old-time friend. In the days of our youth, we had often worked to- gether. He was small and nervous, with a quick eye. He always wore me down after a few hours, because he was restless and untiring. He was named Romeyn Rossiter—one of those well-born names. We had met in times before the advent of the telescopic lens, and he used a box camera, tuned to a fiftieth of a second. Together we snapped polo ponies, coming at full tilt after the ball, riding each other off, while he would stand between the goal-posts, as they zigzagged down on him. I had to shove him out of the way, at the last tick, when the hoofs were loud. I often won- dered if those ponies did n’t look suddenly large and imminent on the little glass rectangle into which he was peering. ‘That was the kind of per-. son he was. He was glued to his work. He was a curious man, because that nerve of fear, which is well developed in most of us, was left out of his
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make-up. No credit to him. It merely wasn’t there. He was color-blind to danger. He had spent his life everywhere by bits, so he had the languages. I used to admire that in him, the way he could career along with a Frenchman, and exchange talk with a German waiter: high speed, and a kind of racy quality.
I used to write the text around his pictures, captions underneath them, and then words spilled out over the white paper between his six by tens. We published in the country life magazines. They gave generous big display pages. In those days people used to read what I wrote, because they wanted to find out about the pictures, and the pictures were fine. You must have seen Ros- siter’s work—caribou, beavers, Walter Travis com- ing through with a stroke, and Holcombe Ward giving a twist delivery. We had the field to our- selves for two or three years, before the other fellows caught the idea, and broke our partner- ship. I turned to literature, and he began drift- ing around the world for long shots. He’d be gone six months, and then turn up with big game night pictures out of Africa—a lion drinking un-
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WAS IT REAL?
der a tropical moon. Two more years, and I had lost him entirely. But I knew we should meet. He was one of those chaps that, once in your life, is like the motif in an opera, or like the high-class story, which starts with an insignificant loose brick on a coping and ends with that brick smiting the hero’s head.
It was London where I ran into him at last.
“Happy days?” I said, with a rising inflection.
“So, so,”’ he answered.
He was doing the free-lance game. He had drifted over to England with his $750 moving- picture machine to see what he could harvest with a quiet eye, and they had rung in the war on him. He was n’t going to be happy till he could get the boys in action. Would I go to Belgium with him? I would.
Next day, we took the Channel ferry from Dover to Ostend, went by train to Ghent, and trudged out on foot to the battle of Alost.
Those were the early days of the war when you could go anywhere, if you did it nicely. The Belgians are a friendly people. They can’t bear to say No, and if they saw a hard-working man
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come. along with his eye on his job, they didn’t like to turn him back, even if he was mussing up an infantry formation or exposing a trench. They ’d rather share the risk, as long as it brought him in returns.
When we footed it out that morning, we did n’t know we were in for one of the Famous Days of history. You never can tell in this war. Some- times you’ll trot out to the front, all keyed up, and then sit around among the ‘‘Set-Sanks” for a month playing pinochle, and watching the flies chase each other across the marmalade. And then a sultry dull day will suddenly show you thames... )s5
Out from the Grand Place of Alost radiate nar- row little streets that run down to the canal, like spokes of a wheel. Each little street had its earth- works and group of defenders. Out over the canal stretched footbridges, and these were thickly sown with barbed wire.
“Great luck,” said Rossiter. ‘They ’re making an old-time barricade. It’s as good as the days of the Commune. Do you remember your street- fighting in Les Miserables?”
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WAS IT REAL?
“IT surely do,” I replied. “Breast high earth- works, and the ‘citizens’ crouched behind under the rattle of bullets.”
“This is going to be good,” he went on in high enthusiasm. ‘The soldiers were rolling heavy barrels to the gutter, and knocking off the heads. The barrels were packed with fish, about six inches long, with scales that went blue and white in the fresh morning light. The fish slithered over the cobbles, and the soldiers stumbled on their slip- pery bodies. They set the barrels on end, side by side, and heaped the cracks between and the face with sods of earth, thick-packed clods, with grass growing. ‘The grass was bright green, unwilted. A couple of peasant hand-carts were tilted on end, and the flooring sodded like the barrels.
“Look who ’s coming,” pointed Rossiter, swivel- ing his lens sharply around.
Steaming gently into our narrow street from the Grand Place came a great Sava mitrailleuse—big steel turret, painted lead blue, three men sitting behind the swinging turret. One of the men, taller by a head than his fellows, had a white rag bound round his head, where a bullet had clipped
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off a piece of his forehead the week before. His face was set and pale. Sitting on high, in the grim machine, with his bandage worn as a plume, he looked like the presiding spirit of the fra- cas.
“It’s worth the trip,” muttered Romeyn, grind- ing away on his crank.
There was something silent and efficient in the look of the big man and the big car, with its slim- waisted, bright brass gun shoving through.
“Here, have a cigarette,”’ said Rossiter, as the powerful thing glided by.
He passed up a box to the three gunners.
“Bonne chance,” said the big man, as he puffed out rings and fondled the trim bronze body of his Lady of Death. They let the car slide down the street to the left end of the barricade, where it came to rest.
Over the canal, out from the smoke-misted houses, came a peasant running. In his arms he carried a little girl. Her hair was light as flax, and crested with a knot of very bright red rib- bon. Hair and gay ribbon caught the eye, as soon as they were borne out of the doomed houses.
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WAS IT REAL?
The father carried the little one to the bridge at the foot of our street, and began crossing towards us. The barbed wire looked angry in the morning sun. He had to weave his way patiently, with the child held flat to his shoulder. Any hasty motion would have torn her face on the barbs. Shrapnel was sailing high overhead between the two forces, and there, thirty feet under the cross- fire, this man and his child squirmed their way through the barrier. ‘They won through, and were lifted over the barricade. As the father went stumbling past me, I looked into the face of the girl. Her eyes were tightly closed. She nestled contentedly.
“Did you get it, man? Did you get it?’ I asked Rossiter.
“Too far,” he replied, mournfully, “only a dot at that distance.”
Now, all the parts had fitted into the pattern, the gay green grass growing out of the stacked barrels and carts, and the sullen, silent, waiting mitrailleuse which can spit death in a wide swathe as it revolves from side to side, like the full stroke of a scythe on nodding daisies. The bark of it is
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as alarming as its bite—an incredibly rapid rat- tat that makes men fall on their faces when they hear, like worshipers at the bell of the Transub- stantiation.
“She talks three hundred words to the minute,” said Romeyn to me.
“How are you coming?’ I asked.
“Great,” he answered, “great stuff. Now, if only something happens.”
He had planted his tripod fifty feet back of the barricade, plumb against a red-brick, three-story house, so that the lens raked the street and its de- fenses diagonally. Thirty minutes we waited, with shell fire far to the right of us, falling into the center of the town with a rumble, like a train of cars heard in the night, when one is half asleep. That was the sense of things to me, as I stood in the street, waiting for hell to blow off its lid. It was a dream world, and I was the dreamer, in the center of the strange unfolding sight, seeing it all out of a muffled consciousness. .
Another quarter hour, and Rossiter began to fidget.
“Do you call this a battle?” he asked.
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WAS IT REAL?
“The liveliest thing in a month,” replied the lieutenant.
“We’ve got to brisk it up,” Rossiter said. “Now, I tell you what we’ll do. Let’s have a battle that looks something like. These real things have n’t got speed enough for a five-cent house.”
In a moment, all was action. Those amazing Belgians, as responsive as children in a game, fell to furiously to create confusion and swift event out of the trance of peace. The battered giant in the Sava released a cloud of steam from his car. The men aimed their rifles in swift staccato. The lieutenant dashed back and forth from curb to curb, plunging to the barricade, and then to the half dozen boys who were falling back, crouching on one knee, firing, and then retreating. He cheered them with pats on the shoulder, pointed out new unsuspected enemies. Then, man by man, the thirty perspiring fighters began to tum- ble. They fell forward on their faces, lay stricken on their backs, heaved against the walls of houses, wherever the deadly fire had caught them. The street was littered with Belgian bodies. There
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stood Rossiter grinding away on his handle, snick- ering green-clad Belgians lying strewn on the cob- bles, a half dozen of them tense and set behind the barricade, leveling rifles at the piles of fish. Every one was laughing, and all of them intent on working out a picture with thrills.
The enemy guns had been growing menacing, but Rossiter and the Belgians were very busy.
“The shells are dropping just back of us,” I called to him.
“Good, good,” he said, “but. I have n’t time for them just yet. They must wait. You can’t crowd a film.”
Ten minutes passed.
“Tt is immense,”’ began he, wiping his face and lighting a smoke, and turning his handle. ‘Gen- tlemen, I thank you.”
“Gentlemen, we thank you,” I said.
‘“‘There ’s been nothing like it,” he went on. “Those Liége pictures of Wilson’s at the Hippo- drome were tame.”
He ’d got it all in, and was wasting a few feet for good measure. Sometimes you need a fringe in order to bring out the big minute in your action.
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“LSOTV NI ONILHOIA LAAALS
WAS IT REAL?
Suddenly, we heard the wailing overhead and louder than any of the other shells. Louder meant closer. It lasted a second of time, and then crashed into the second story of the red house, six feet over Rossiter’s head. A shower of brown brick dust, and a puff of gray-black smoke settled down over the machine and man, and blotted him out of sight for a couple of seconds. Then we all coughed and spat, and the air cleared. The tripod had careened in the fierce rush of air, but Rossiter had caught it and was righting it. He went on turning. His face was streaked with black, and his clothes were brown with dust.
“Trying to get the smoke,” he called, “but I’m afraid it won’t register.”’
Maybe you want to know how that film took. We hustled it back to London, and it went with a whizz. One hundred and twenty-six picture houses produced “Street FIGHTING In ALosT.” The daily illustrated papers ran it front page. The only criticism of it that I heard was another movie man, who was sore—a chap named Wilson.
“That picture is faked,” he asserted.
“Tl bet you,” I retorted, “‘that picture was
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taken under shell fire during the bombardment of Alost. That barricade is the straight goods. The fellow that took it was shot full of gas while he was taking it. What’s your idea of the real thing?”
“That ’s all right,” he said; “the ruins are good, and the smoke is there. But I’ve seen that reel three times, and every time the dead man in the gutter laughed.”
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NS _ ™
“CHANTONS, BELGES! CHANTONS””’
ERE at home I am in a land where the wholesale martyrdom of Belgium is re- garded as of doubtful authenticity. We who have witnessed widespread atrocities are subjected to a critical process as cold as if we were advanc- ing a new program of social reform. I begin to wonder if anything took place in Flanders. Is n’t the wreck of Termonde, where I thought I spent two days, perhaps a figment of the fancy? Was the bayoneted girl child of Alost a pleasant dream creation? My people are busy and indifferent, generous and neutral, but yonder several races are living at a deeper level. In a time when be- liefs are held lightly, with tricky words tearing at old values, they have recovered the ancient faiths of the race. Their lot, with all its pain, is choicer than ours. They at least have felt greatly and thrown themselves into action. It is a stern fight that is on in Europe, and few of our coun- 127
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trymen realize it is our fight that the Allies are making.
Europe has made an old discovery. The Greek Anthology has it, and the ballads, but our busy little merchants and our clever talkers have never known it. The best discovery a man can make is that there is something inside him bigger than his fear, a belief in something more lasting than his — individual life. When he discovers that, he knows he, too, is a man. It is as real for him as the experience of motherhood for a woman. He comes out of it with self-respect and gladness.
The Belgians were a soft people, pleasure-lov- ing little chaps, social and cheery, fond of com- fort and the café brightness. They lacked the in- tensity of blood of unmixed single strains. They
were cosmopolitan, often with a command over .
three languages and snatches of several dialects. They were easy in their likes. They “made friends” lightly. They did not have the reserve of the English, the spiritual pride of the Ger- mans. Some of them have German blood, some French, some Dutch. Part of the race is gay and volatile, many are heavy and inarticulate;
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“CHANTONS, BELGES! CHANTONS?””’
it is a mixed race of which any iron-clad gen- eralization is false. But I have seen many thou- sands of them under crisis, seen them hungry, dy- ing, men from every class and every region; and the mass impression is that they are affectionate, easy to blend with, open-handed, trusting.
This kindly, haphazard, unformed folk were suddenly lifted to a national self-sacrifice. By one act of defiance Albert made Belgium a nation. It had been a mixed race of many tongues, selling itself little by little, all unconsciously, to the Ger- man bondage. I saw the marks of this spiritual invasion on the inner life of the Belgians—marks of a destruction more thorough than the shelling of a city. The ruins of Termonde are only the outward and visible sign of what Germany has attempted on Belgium for more than a genera- tion.
Perhaps it was better that people should perish by the villageful in honest physical death through the agony of the bayonet and the flame than that they should go on bartering away their nationality by piece-meal. Who knows but Albert saw in his silent heart that the only thing to weld his
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people together, honeycombed as they were, was the shedding of blood? Perhaps nothing short of a supreme sacrifice, amounting to a martyrdom, could restore a people so tangled in German in- trigue, so netted into an ever-encroaching system of commerce, carrying with it a habit of thought and a mouthful of guttural phrases. Let no one underestimate that power of language. If the idiom has passed into one, it has brought with it molds of thought, leanings of sympathy. Who that can even stumble through the “Marchons! Marchons!” of the ‘‘Marseillaise” but is a sharer for a moment in the rush of glory that every now and again has made France the light of the world? So, when the German phrase rings out, ““Was wir haben bleibt Deutsch’”—‘‘What we are now hold- ing by force of arms shall remain forever German’’ —there is an answering thrill in the heart of every Antwerp clerk who for years has been leaking Bel- gian government gossip into German ears in re- turn for a piece of money. Secret sin was eat- ing away Belgium’s vitality—the sin of being bought by German money, bought in little ways, for small bits of service, amiable passages destroy- 130
“CHANTONS, BELGES! CHANTONS!”’
ing nationality. By one act of full sacrifice Al- bert has cleared his people from a poison that might have sapped them in a few more years with- out the firing of one gun.
That sacrifice to which they are called is an utter one, of which they have experienced only the prelude. I have seen this growing sadness of Belgium almost from the beginning. I have seen thirty thousand refugees, the inhabitants of Alost, come shuffling down the road past me. They came by families, the father with a bag of clothes and bread, the mother with a baby in arms, and one, two, or three children trotting along. Aged women were walking, Sisters of Charity, religious brothers. A cartful of stricken old women lay patiently at full length while the wagon bumped on. They were so nearly drowned by suffering that one more wave made little difference. All that was sad and helpless was dragged that morn- ing into the daylight. All that had been decently cared for in quiet rooms was of a sudden tumbled out upon the pavement and jolted along in farm- wagons past sixteen miles of curious eyes. But even with the sick and the very old there was
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no lamentation. In this procession of the dispos- sessed that passed us on the country road there was no one crying, no one angry.
I have seen 5000 of these refugees at night in the Halle des Fétes of Ghent, huddled in the straw, their faces bleached white under the glare of the huge municipal lights. On the wall, I read the names of the children whose parents had been lost, and the names of the parents who re- ported a lost baby, a boy, a girl, and sometimes all the children lost.
A little later came the time when the people learned their last stronghold was tottering. I re- member sitting at dinner in the home of Monsieur Caron, a citizen of Ghent. I had spent that day in Antwerp, and the soldiers had told me of the destruction of the outer rim of forts. So I be- gan to say to the dinner guests that the city was doomed. As I spoke, I glanced at Madame Caron. Her eyes filled with tears. I turned to another Belgian lady, and had to look away. Not a sound came from them.
When the handful of British were sent to the rescue of Antwerp, we went up the road with
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“AULNONOD SIH AO
diulsS LSV1I AHL NO WaAOITAO NVIDINE
“CHANTONS, BELGES! CHANTONS!”
them. There was joy on the Antwerp road that day. Little cottages fluttered flags at lintel and window. The sidewalks were thronged with peasants, who believed they were now to be saved. We rode in glory from Ghent to the outer works of Antwerp. Each village on all the line turned out its full population to cheer us ecstatically. A bitter month had passed, and now salvation had come. It is seldom in a lifetime one is present at a perfect piece of irony like that of those shout- ing Flemish peasants.
As Antwerp was falling, a letter was given to me by a friend. It was written by Aloysius Coen of the artillery, Fort St. Catherine Wavre, Ant- werp. He died in the bombardment, thirty-four years old. He wrote:
Dear wife and children:
At the moment that I am writing you this the enemy is before us, and the moment has come for us to do our duty for our country. When you will have received this I shall have changed the temporary life for the eternal life. As I loved you all dearly, my last breath will be directed toward you and my darling children, and with a last smile as a farewell from my beloved family am I undertaking the eternal journey.
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I hope, whatever may be your later call, you will take good care of my dear children, and always keep them in mind of the straight road, always ask them to pray for their father, who in sadness, though doing his duty for his country, has had to leave them so young.
Say good-by for me to my dear brothers and sisters, from whom I also carry with me a great love.
Farewell, dear wife, children, and family.
Your always remaining husband, father, and brother.
ALoys.
Then Antwerp fell, and a people that had for the first time in memory found itself an indi- visible and self-conscious state broke into sullen flight, and its merry, friendly army came heavy- footed down the road to another country. Grieved and embittered, they served under new leaders of another race. Those tired soldiers were like spirited children who had been playing an exciting game which they thought would be applauded. And suddenly the best turned out the worst.
Sing, Belgians, sing, though our wounds are bleeding,
writes the poet of Flanders; but the song is no earthly song. It is the voice of a lost cause that
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“CHANTONS, BELGES! CHANTONS!”
cries out of the trampled dust as it prepares to make its flight beyond the place of betrayal.
For the Belgian soldiers no longer sang, or made merry in the evening. A young Brussels corporal in our party suddenly broke into sob- bing when he heard the chorus of “Tipperary” float over the channel from a transport of un- tried British lads. The Belgians are a race of children whose feelings have been hurt. The pathos of the Belgian army is like the pathos of an orphan-asylum: it is unconscious.
They are very lonely, the loneliest men I have known. Back of the fighting Frenchman, you sense the gardens and fields of France, the strong, victorious national will. In a year, in two years, having made his peace with honor, he will return to a happiness richer than any that France has known in fifty years. And the Englishman car- ries with him to the stresses of the first line an unbroken calm which he has inherited from a thousand years of his island peace. His little moment of pain and death cannot trouble that consciousness of the eternal process in which his people have been permitted to play a continu-
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ing part. For him the present turmoil is only a ripple on the vast sea of his racial history. Be- hind the Tommy is his Devonshire village, still se- cure. His mother and his wife are waiting for him, unmolested, as when he left them. But the Belgian, schooled in horror, faces a fuller horror yet when the guns of his friends are put on his bell-towers and birthplace, held by the invaders.
“My father and mother are inside the enemy lines,’ said a Belgian officer to me as we were talking of the final victory. That is the ever- present thought of an army of boys whose parents are living in doomed houses back of German trenches. It is louder than the near guns, the ~ noise of the guns to come that will tear at Bruges and level the Tower of St. Nicholas. That is what the future holds for the Belgian. He is only at the beginning of his loss. The victory of his cause is the death of his people. It is a sacri- fice almost without a parallel.
And now a famous newspaper correspondent has returned to us from his motor trips to the front and his conversations with officers to tell us that he does not highly regard the fighting qual-
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A BELGIAN BOY SOLDIFR IN THE UNIFORM OF THE FIRST ARMY WHICH SERVED AT LIEGE AND NAMUR.
In the summer of rors _ this costume was exchanged for khaki (see page 148). The present Belgian Army is largely made up of boys like this.
Ve SO hee
£ =P) oe er
“CHANTONS, BELGES! CHANTONS!”
ities of the Belgians. I think that statement is not the full truth, and J do not think it will be the estimate of history on the resistance of the Belgians. If the resistance had been regarded by the Germans as half-hearted, I do not believe their reprisals on villages and towns and on the civilian population would have been so bitter. The burning and the murder that I saw them com- mit throughout the month of September, 1914, was the answer to a resistance unexpectedly firm and telling. At a skirmish in September, when fifteen hundred Belgians stood off three thousand Germans for several hours, I counted more dead Germans than dead Belgians. The German offi- cer in whose hands we were as captives asked us with great particularity as to how many Belgians he had killed and wounded. While he was talk- ing with us, his stretcher-bearers were moving up and down the road for his own casualties. At Alost the street fighting by Belgian troops behind fish-barrels, with sods of earth for barricade, was so stubborn that the Germans felt it to be nec- essary to mutilate civilian men, women, and chil- dren with the bayonet to express in terms at all
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_ adequate their resentment. I am of course speak- ing of what I know. Around Termonde, three times in September, the fighting of Belgians was vigorous enough to induce the Germans on enter- ing the town to burn more than eleven hundred homes, house by house. If the Germans through- out their army had not possessed a high opinion of Belgian bravery and power of retardation, I doubt if they would have released so wide-spread and unique a savagery.
At Termonde, Alost, Baliére, and a dozen other points in the Ghent sector, and, later, at Dixmude, Ramscappelle, Pervyse, Caeskerke, and the rest of the line of the Yser, my sight of Belgians has been that of troops as gallant as any. The cowards have been occasional, the brave men many. [I still have flashes of them as when [ knew them. I saw a Belgian officer ride across a field within rifle range of the enemy to point out to us a market-cart in which lay three wounded. On his horse, he was a high figure, well silhouetted. Another day, I met a Belgian sergeant, with a tousled red head of hair, and with three medals for valor on his left breast. He kept
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“CHANTONS, BELGES! CHANTONS!”
going out into the middle of the road during the times when Germans were reported approaching, keeping his men under cover. If there was risk to be taken, he wanted first chance. My friend Dr. van der Ghinst, of Cabour Hospital, cap- tain in the Belgian army, remained three days in Dixmude under steady bombardment, caring un- aided for his wounded in the Hospital of St. Jean, just at the Yser, and finally brought out thirty old men and women who had been frightened into helplessness by the flames and noise. Because he was needed in that direction, I saw him continue his walk past the point where fifty feet ahead of him a shell had just exploded. I watched him walk erect where even the renowned fighting men of an allied race were stooping and hiding, be- cause he held his life as nothing when there were wounded to be rescued. I saw Lieutenant Robert de Broqueville, son of the prime minister of Bel- gium, go into Dixmude on the afternoon when the town was leveled by German guns. He remained there under one of the heaviest bombardments of the war for three hours, picking up the wounded who lay on curbs and in cellars and under debris.
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The troops had been ordered to evacuate the town, and it was a lonely job that this youngster of twenty-seven years carried on through that day.
I have seen the Belgians every day for several months. I have seen several skirmishes and bat- tles and many days of shell-fire, and the im- pression of watching many thousand Belgians in action is that of excellent fighting qualities, starred with bits of sheer daring as astonishing as that of the other races. With no country left to fight - for, homes either in ruin or soon to be shelled, relatives under an alien rule, the home Govern- ment on a foreign soil, still this.second army, the first having been killed, fights on in good spirit. Every morning of the summer I have passed boys between eighteen and twenty-five, clad in fresh khaki, as they go riding down the poplar lane from La Panne to the trenches, the first twenty with bright silver bugles, their cheeks puffed and red with the blowing. Twelve months of wounds and wastage, wet trenches and tinned food, and still
they go out with hope. _ And the helpers of the army have shown good heart. Breaking the silence of Rome, the splen-
144
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“CHANTONS, BELGES! CHANTONS?”
did priesthood of Belgium, from the cardinal to the humblest curé, has played the man. On the front line near Pervyse, where my wife lived for three months, a _ soldier-emonk has remained through the daily shell-fire to take artillery obser- vations and to comfort the fighting men. Just before leaving Flanders, I called on the sisters in the convent school of Furnes. They were still cheery and busy in their care of sick and wounded civilians. Every few days the Germans shell the town from seven miles away, but the sisters will continue there through the coming months as through the last year. The spirit of the best of the race is spoken in what King Albert said re- cently in an unpublished conversation to the gen- tlemen of the English mission:
“The English will cease fighting before the Bel- gians. If there is talk of yielding, it will come from the English, not from us.”
That was a playful way of saying that there will be no yielding by any of the Western Allies. The truth is still as true as it was at Liége that the Belgians held up the enemy till France was ready to receive them. And the price Belgium
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paid for that resistance was the massacre of women and children and the house-to-house burn- ing of homes.
Since rendering that service for all time to France and England, through twenty months of such a life as exiles know, the Belgians have fought on doggedly, recovering from the misery of the Antwerp retreat, and showing a resilience of spirit equaled only by the Fusiliers Marins of France. One afternoon in late June my friend Robert Toms was sitting on the beach at La Panne, watching the soldiers swimming in the channel. Suddenly he called to me, and aimed his camera. There on the sand in the sunlight the Belgian army was changing its clothes. The faithful suits of blue, rained on and trench-worn, were being tossed into great heaps on the beach and brand-new yellow khaki, clothes and cap, was buckled on. It was a transformation. We had learned to know that army, and their uniform had grown familiar and pleasant to us. The dirt, ground in till it became part of the texture; the worn cloth, shapeless, but yet molded to the man by long association—all was an expression of the
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“CHANTONS, BELGES! CHANTONS”’
stocky little soldier inside. The new khaki hung slack. Caps were overlarge for Flemish heads. To us, watching the change, it was the loss of the last possession that connected them with their past; with homes and country gone, now the very clothing that had covered them through famous fights was shuffled off. It was as if the Belgian army had been swallowed up in the sea at our feet, like Pharaoh’s phalanx, and up from the beach to the barracks scuffled an imitation English corps.
We went about miserable for a few days. But 3 not they. They spattered their limp, ill-fitting garments with jest, and soon they had produced a poem in praise of the change. These are the verses which a Belgian soldier, clad in his fresh yellow, sang to us as we grouped around him on a sand dune:
EN KHAKI
I
Depuis onze mois que nous sommes partis en guerre, A tous les militaires, On a décidé de plaire.
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Aussi depuis ce temps 1a, a l’intendance c’est dit, De nous mettr’ tous en khaki. Maint’nant voila l’beau temps qui vient d’ paren Aussi répétons tous le coeur en féte.
REFRAIN
Regardez nos p’tits soldats, Ils ont l’air d’étre un peu la, Habilles D’la téte jusqu’aux pieds En khaki, en khaki, Ils sont contents de servir, Mais non pas de mourir, Et cela c’est parce qu’ on leur a mis, En quelque sorte, la t’nue khaki.
II
Maintenant sur toutes les grand’s routes vous pouvez voir Parcourant les trottoirs Du matin jusqu’au soir Les défenseurs Belges, portant tous la méme tenue Depuis que l’ancienne a disparue, Aussi quand on voit l’9® défiler C’ n’est plus régiment des panachés. Méme Refrain.
III
Nous sommes tous heureux d’avoir le costume des Anglais Seul’ment ce qu'il fallait, Pour que ¢a soit complet.
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“CHANTONS, BELGES! CHANTONS”’
Et je suis certain si l’armée veut nous mettre a l’aise C’est d’nous donner la solde Anglaise. Le jour qu’nous aurions ¢a, ah! quell’ affaire Nous n’ serions plus jamais dans la misére.
REFRAIN
Vous les verriez nos p’tits soldats, J’vous assure quils seraient un peu la, Habilles, D’la téte jusqu’aux pieds, En khaki, en khaki, Ils seraient fiers de repartir, Pour le front avec plaisir,
Si les quatre poches étaient bien garnes De billets bleus couleur khaki.
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FLIES: A FANTASY
UTSIDE the window stretched the village street, flat, with bits of dust and dung ris- ing on the breaths of wind and volleying into rooms upon the tablecloth and into pages of books. It was a street of small yellow brick houses, a shapeless church, a convent school— freckled buildings, dingy. Up and down the length of it, it was without one touch of beauty. It gave back dust in the eyes. It sounded with thunder of transports, rattle of wagons, soft whirr of officers’ speed cars, yelp of motor horns, and the tap-tap of wooden shoes on tiny peasants, boys and girls. A little sick black dog slunk down the pavement, smelling and staring. A cart bumped over the cobbles, the horse with a great tumor in its stomach, the stomach as if blown out on the left side, and the tumor with a rag upon it where it touched the harness. Inside the window, a square room with a 152
FLIES: A FANTASY
litter of six-penny novels in a corner, fifty or sixty books flung haphazard, some of them open with the leaves crushed back by the books above. In another corner, a heap of commissariat stuff, tins of bully beef, rabbit, sardines, herring, and glasses of jam, and marmalade. On the center table, a large jug of marmalade, ants busy in the yellow trickle at the rim. Filth had worked its way into the red table-cover. Filth was on every object in the room, like a soft mist, blurring the color and outlines of things. In the corners, under books and tins, insects moved, long, thin, crawl- ing. A hot noon sun came dimly through the dirty glass of the closed window, and slowly baked a sleeping man in the large plush arm- chair. Around the chair, as if it were a promon- tory in a heaving sea, were billows of stale crumpled newspapers, some wadded into a ball, others torn across the page, all flung aside in ennue.
The face of the man was weary and weak. It showed all of his forty-one years, and revealed, too, a great emptiness. Flies kept rising and set- tling again on the hands, the face, and the head
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of the man—moist flies whose feet felt damp on the skin. They were slow and languid flies which wanted to settle and stay. It was his breathing that made them restless, but not enough to clear them away, only enough to make a low buzzing in the sultry room. Across the top of his head a bald streak ran from the forehead, and it was here they returned to alight, after each twitching and heave of the sunken body.
In the early months he had fought a losing fight with them. The walls and ceiling and panes of glass were spotted with the marks of his long battle. But his foes had advanced in ever-fresh force, clouds and swarms of them beyond num- ber. He had gone to meet them with a wire- killer, and tightly rolled newspapers. He had imported fly paper from Dunkirk. But they could afford to sacrifice the few hundreds, which his strokes could reach, and still overwhelm him. Lately, he had given up the struggle, and let them take possession of the room. They harassed him when he read, so he gave up reading. They got into the food, so he ate less. Between his two trips to the front daily at 8 a.m. and 2 P.M., he
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slept. He found he could lose himself in sleep. Into that kingdom of sleep, they could not enter. As the weeks rolled on, he was able to let him- self down more and more easily into silence. That became his life. A slothfulness, a languor, even when awake, a half-conscious forcing of him- self through the routine work, a looking forward to the droning room, and then the settling deep into the old plush chair, and the blessed uncon- sciousness.
He drove a Red Cross ambulance to the French lines at Nieuport, collected the sick and wounded soldiers and brought them to the Poste de Secours, two miles back of the trenches. He lived a hundred feet from the Poste, always within call. But the emergency call rarely came. There were only the set runs, for the war had settled to its own regularity. A wonderful idle- ness hung over the lines, where millions of men were unemployed, waiting with strange patience for some unseen event. Only the year before, these men were chatting in cafés, and busy in a thousand ways. Now, the long hours of the day were lived without activity in thoughtless routine.
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Under the routine there was always the sense of waiting for a sudden crash and horror.
The man was an English gentleman. It was his own car he had brought, paid for by him, and he had offered his car and services to the Fusiliers Marins. ‘They had been glad of his help, and for twelve months he had performed his daily duty and returned to his loneliness. The men under _ whom he worked were the French doctors of the Poste—the chief doctor, Monsieur Claude-Marie Le Bot, with four stripes on his arm, and the courteous, grave administrator, Eustache-Emman- uel Couillandre, a three-stripes man, and a half dozen others, of three stripes and two. They had welcomed him to their group when he came to them from London. They had found him lively and likable, bringing gossip of the West End with a dash of Leicester Square. Then slowly a change had come on him. He went moody and silent.
“What ’s the matter with you?” asked Doctor Le Bot one day.
“Nothing ’s the matter with me,” answered the man. “It’s war that’s the matter.”
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“What do you mean by that?” put in one of the younger doctors.
“The trouble with war,’’ began the man slowly, “isn’t that there’s danger and death. ‘They are easy. The trouble with war is this. It’s dull, damned deadly dull. It’s the slowest thing in the world. It wears away at your mind, like water dripping on a rock. The old Indian tor- ture of letting water fall on your skull, drop by drop, till you went raving crazy, is nothing to what war does to the mind of millions of men. They can’t think of anything else but war, and they have no thoughts about that. They can’t talk of another blessed thing, and the result is they have nothing to say at all.”
As he talked a flush came into his face. He gathered speed, while he spoke, till his words came with a rush, as if he were relieving himself of inner pain.
“Have you ever heard the true inside account of an-Arctic expediton?” he went on. ‘“There’s a handful of men locked up inside a little ship for thirteen or fourteen months. Nothing to look out on but snow and ice, one color and a horizon-
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ful of it. Nothing to dream of but arriving at a Pole—and that is a theoretical point in infinite space. There’s no such thing. The midnight sun and the frozen stuff get on their nerves— same old sun in the same old place, same kind of weather. What happens? The natural thing, of course. They get so they hate each other like poison. They go around with a mad on. They carry hate against the commander and the cook and the fellow whose berth creaks every time he shifts. Each man thinks the shipload is the rot- tenest gang ever thrown together. He wonders why they didn’t bring somebody decent along. He gets to scoring up grudges against the different people, and waits his chance to get back.”
He stopped a minute, and looked around at the doctors, who were giving him close attention. Then he went on with the same intensity. ;
“Now that’s war, only war is more so. Here you are in one place for sixteen months. You shovel yourself into a stinking hole in the ground. At seven in the morning, you boil yourself some muddy coffee that tastes like the River Thames at Battersea Bridge. You take a knife that ’s had
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knicks hacked out of it, and cut a hunk of dry bread that chews like sand. You eat some ‘bully beef’ out of a tin, same tinned stuff as you ’ve been eating ever since your stomach went on strike a year ago. Once a week for a treat, you cut a steak off the flank of a dead horse. That tastes better, because it’s fresh meat. When you’re sent back a few miles, en Piguet, you sleep in a village that looks like Sodom after the sulphur struck it. Houses singed and tumbled, dead bodies in the ruins, a broken-legged dog, trailing its hind foot, in front of the house where you are. ‘Tobacco—surely. You’d die if you didn’t have a smoke. But the rotten little cigarettes with no taste to them that smoke like chopped hay. And the cigars made out of rags and shredded toothpicks—”
“Here, have a cigarette,” suggested the young- est doctor.
But the man was too busy in working out his own thoughts.
“The whole thing,” he continued, “is a mix- ture of a morgue and a hospital—only those places have running water, and people in white
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aprons to tidy things up. And a_ battle— Three days under bombardment, living in the cel- lar. The guns going off five, six times to the min- ute, and then waiting a couple of hours and drop- ping one in, next door. The crumpling noise when a little brick house caves in, like a man when you hit him in the stomach, just going all together inaheap. And the sick smell that comes out of the mess from plaster and brick dust.
“And getting wounded, that’s jolly, isn’t it? Rifle ball through your left biceps. Dick walks you back to the dressing station. Doctor busy at luncheon with a couple of visiting officers. Lie down in the straw. Straw has a pleasant smell when it ’s smeared with iodine and blood. Wait till the doctor has had his bottle of wine.
“Nothing very much,’ he says, when he gets around to you. Drops some juice in, ties the white rag around, and you go back to your straw. Three, four hours, and along come the body snatch- ers—the chauffeur chap doesn’t know how to drive, bumps into every shell hole for seven miles. Every half mile, drive down into the ditch mud, to get out of the way of some ammunition wagons
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going to the front. The wheel gets stuck. Put on power, in jumps, to bump the car out. Every jerk tears at your open sore, as if the wheel had got stuck in your arm and was being pulled out. Two hours to do the seven miles. Get to the field hospital. No time for you. Lie on your stretcher in the court, where the flies swarm on you. Always flies. Flies on the blood of the wounded, glued to the bandage. Flies on the face of the dead.”
So he had once spoken and left them wonder- ing. But that whirling burst of words was long before, in those earlier days of his work. Noth- ing like that had happened in weeks. No such vivid pictures lighted him now. The man slept on.
There was a scratching at the window, then a steady tapping, then a resounding fist on the case- ment. Gradually, the sleeping man came up through the deep waters of unconsciousness. His eyes were heavy. He sat a moment, brooding, then turned toward the insistent noise.
“Monsieur Watts!” said a voice.
“Yes,” answered the man. He stretched him-
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self, and raised the sash. A brisk little French Marin was at the window.
“The doctors are at luncheon. They are wait- ing for you,” the soldier said in rapid Breton French; ‘‘to-day you are their guest.”
“Of course,” replied the man, “TI had forgotten. I will come at once.”
He stretched his arms over his head—a tall figure of a man, but bent at the shoulders, as if all the dreariness of his surroundings had settled there. He had the stoop of an old man, and the walk. He stepped out of his room, into the street, and stood a moment in the midday sun- shine, blinking. Then he walked down the vil- lage street to the Poste, and pushed through the dressing-rooms to the dining-room at the rear. The doctors looked up as he entered. He nodded, but gave no speech back for their courteous, their cordial greeting. In silence he ate the simple rel- ishes of sardines and olives. Then the treat of the luncheon was brought in by the orderly. It was a duckling, taken from a refugee farm, and done to a brown crisp. The head doctor carved and served it.
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“See here,’ said Watts loudly. He lifted his wing of the duckling where a dead fly was cooked in with the gravy. He pushed his chair back. It grated shrilly on the stone floor. He rose.
“Flies,” he said, and left the room.
Watts was the guest at the informal trench luncheon. The officers showed him little favors from time to time, for he had served their wounded faithfully for many months. It is the highest honor they can pay when they admit a civilian to the first line of trenches. Shelling from Westend was mild and inaccurate, going high overhead and falling with a mutter into the seven-times wrecked and thoroughly deserted houses of Nieu- port village. But the sound of it gave a gentle tingle to the act of eating. There was occasional rifle fire, the bullet singing close.
“They ’re improving,” said the Commandant, “a fellow reached over the trench this morning for his Billy-can, and they got him in the hand.”
Two Marins cleared away the plank on which bread and coffee and tinned meat had been served.
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The hot August sun cooked the loose earth, and heightened the smells of food. A swarm of flies poured over the outer rim and dropped down on squatting men and the scattered commissariat. Watts was sitting at a little distance from the group. He closed his eyes, but soon began strik- ing methodically at the settling flies. He fought them with the right arm and the left in long heavy strokes, patiently, without enthusiasm. The soldiers brought out a pack of cards, and leaned forward for the deal. Suddenly Watts rose, lifted his arms above the trench, and delib- erately stretched. Three faint cracks sounded from across the hillock, and he tumbled out at full length, as if some one had flung him away. The men hastened to him, coming crouched over but swiftly.
“Got him in the right arm,” said the Com- mandant.
“Thank God,” muttered Watts, sleepily
It was the Convent Hospital of Furnes. There was quiet in the ward of twenty-five beds,
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where side by side slept the wounded of France and Germany and Belgium and England. Sud- denly, a resounding whack rang through the ward. A German boy jumped up sitting in his cot. The sound had awakened memories. He looked over to the tall Englishman in the next cot, who had struck out at one of the heavy innumer- able flies, who hover over wounded men, and pry down under bandages.
“Let me tell you,” said the youth eagerly, “I have a preparation—I ’m a chemist, you know— I ’ve worked out a powder that kills flies.”
Watts looked up from his pillow. His face was weary.
“It’s sweet, you know, and attracts them,” went on the boy, “then the least sniff of it finishes them. They trail away, and die in a few min- utes. You can clear a room in half an hour. Then all you have to do is to sweep up.”
“See here,” he said, “I ’ll show you. Sister,” he called. The nurse hurried to his side.
“Sister? You were kind enough to save my kit. May I have it a moment?”
He took out a tin flask, and squeezed it—a
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brown powder puffed through the pin-point holes at the mouth. It settled in a dust on the white coverlet. |
“Please be very quiet,” he said. He settled back, as if for sleep, but his half-shut eyes were watchful. A couple of minutes passed, then a fly circled his head, and made for the spot on the spread. It nosed its way in, crawled heavily a few inches up the coverlet, and turned its legs up. Two more came, alighted, sniffed and died.
“You see,” he said.
Next day, the head of the Coxyde Poste mo- tored over to Furnes for a call on his wounded helper.
‘Where does all that chatter come from?’ he asked.
Sister Teresa smiled.
“It’s your silent friend,” she said. ‘He is the noisiest old thing in the ward.” |
“Talking to himself?’ inquired the doctor.
“Have a look for yourself,” urged the nurse.
They stepped into the ward, and down the stone 166
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floor, till they came to the supply table. Here they pretended to busy themselves with lint.
“Most interesting,’ Watts was saying. ‘That is a new idea to me. Here they ’ve been telling me for a year that there’s no way but the slow push, trench after trench—”
“Let me say to you,” interrupted the Saxon lad.
“You will pardon me, if I finish what I am saying,’ went on Watts in full tidal flow. ‘What was it I was saying? Oh, yes, I remem- ber—that slow hard push is not the only way, after all. You tell me—”
“That ’s the way it is all day long,” explained the sister. “Chatter, chatter, chatter. They are telling each other all they know. You would think they would get fed up. But as fast as one of them says something, that seems to be a new idea to the other. Mr. Watts acts like a man who has been starved.”
Watts caught sight of his friend.
“We ’ve killed all the flies,”’ he shouted.
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HIS war has been a revelation of woman-
hood. To see one of these cool, friendly creatures, American and English, shove her motor car into shell-fire, make her rescue of helpless crippled men, and steam back to safety, is to watch a resourceful and disciplined being. They may be, they are, “ministering angels,’”’ but there is nothing meek in their demeanor. They have stepped to a vantage from which nothing in man’s contemptuous philosophy will ever dislodge them. They have always existed to astonish those who knew them best, and have turned life into a sur- prise party from Eden to the era of forcible feed- ing. But assuredly it would make the dogmatists on the essentially feminine nature, like Kipling, tub their eyes, to watch modern women at work under fire. They haven’t the slightest fear of being killed. Give them a job under bombard- ment, and they unfold the stretcher, place the pillow and tuck in the blanket, without a quiver
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of apprehension. That, too, when some of the men are scampering for cover, and ducking chance pellets from the woolly white cloud that breaks overhead. The women will eat their luncheon with relish within three hundred feet of a French battery in full blaze. Is there a test left to the pride of man that the modern woman does not take lightly and skilfully? Gone are the Victorian nerves and the eighteenth-century fainting. All the old false delicacies have been swamped. She has been held back like a hound from the hunting, till we really believed we had a harmless household pet, who loved security. We had forgotten the pioneer women who struck across frontiers with a hardihood that matched that of their mates. And now the modern woman emerges from her protected home, and pushes for- ward, careless and curious.
“What are women going to do about this war?’ That question my wife and I asked each other at the outbreak of the present con- flict. There were several attitudes that they might take. They could deplore war, because it destroyed their own best products. They could
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form peace leagues and pass resolutions against war. They could return to their ancient job of humble service, and resume their familiar location in the background. They did all these things and did them fervently; but they did something else in this war—they stepped out into the fore- ground, where the air was thick with danger, and demonstrated their courage. The mother no longer says: “Return, my gallant one, with your shield or on it,’ and goes back to her bak- ing. She packs her kit and jumps into a motor ambulance headed for the dressing station.
We have had an excellent chance to watch women in this war. Our corps have had access to every line from Nieuport on the sea, down for twenty miles. We were able to run out to skir- mishes, to reach the wounded where they had fallen. We have gone where the fighting had been at such close range that in one barnyard in Ramscappelle lay thirteen dead—Germans, French and Belgians. We brought back three wounded Germans from the stable. We were in Dixmude on the afternoon when the Germans destroyed the town by artillery fire. We were in Ypres on No-
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vember first, the day after the most terrible battle in history, when fifty thousand English out of a hundred and twenty thousand fell. For three months my wife lived in Pervyse, with two Brit- ish women. Not one house in the town itself is left untouched by shell-fire. The women lived in a cellar for the first weeks. Then they moved into a partially demolished house, and a little later a shell exploded in the kitchen. The women were at work in the next room. We have had opportunity for observing women in war, for we have seen several hundred of them—nurses, helpers, chauffeurs, writers—under varying de- grees of strain and danger.
The women whom I met in Belgium were all alike. They refused to take “their place.” They were not interested in their personal wel- fare. There have been individual men, a few of them—English, French and Belgian, soldiers, chauffeurs and civilians—who have turned tail when the danger was acute. But the women we have watched are strangely lacking in fear. I asked a famous war writer, whose breast was gay with the ribbons of half a dozen campaigns, what
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was the matter with all these women, that they did not tremble and go green under fire, as some of us did. He said:
“They don’t belong out here. They have no business to be under fire. They ought to be back at the hospitals down at Dunkirk. They don’t appreciate danger. That’s the trouble with them; they have no imagination.”
That ’s an easy way out. But the real reasons lie deeper than a mental inferiority. These women certainly had quite as good an equipment in mentality as the drivers and stretcher bearers. They could not bear to let immense numbers of men lie in pain. They wished to bring their in- stinct for help to the place where it was needed.
The other reason is a product of their changed thinking under modern conditions. “I want to see the shells,” said a discontented lady at Dun- kirk. She was weary of the peace and safety of a town twenty miles back from the front. Women suddenly saw their time had come to strip man of one more of his monopolies. For some thousand years he had been bragging of his car- riage and bearing in battle. He had told the 172
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women folks at home how admirable he had been under strain, and he went on to claim special priv- ileges as the reward for his gallant behavior. He posed as their protector. He assumed the right to tax them because they did not lend a hand when invasion came. Now women are campaigning in France and Belgium to show that man’s much-ad- vertised quality of courage is a race possession. They had already shown it while peace was still in the land, but their demonstration met with disfavor. Just before the war broke out I saw a woman suffragist thrown into a pond of water at Denmark Hill. I saw another mauled and bruised by a crowd of men in Hyde Park. They were the same sort of women as these hundreds at the front, who are affirming a new value. The argument is hotly contended whether women be- long in the war zone. Conservative Englishmen deem them a nuisance, and wish them back in London. Meanwhile, they come and _ stay. English officials tried to send home the three of our women who had been nursing within thirty yards of the trenches at Pervyse. But the King of the Belgians, and Baron de Broqueville, prime
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minister of Belgium, had been watching their work, and refused to move them.
One morning we came into the dining-room of our Convent Hospital at Furnes, and there on a stretcher on the floor was a girl sleeping pro- foundly. We thought at first we had one more of our innumerable wounded who overflowed the beds and wards during those crowded days. She rested through the morning and through the noon meal. The noise about did not disturb her. She did not stir in her heavy sleep, lying un- der the window, her face of olive skin, with a touch of red in the right cheek, turned away from the light. She awoke after twenty hours. Si- lently, she had come in the evening before, wearied to exhaustion after a week of nursing in the Bel- gian trenches.
That was the thing you were confronted with —woman after woman hurling herself at the war till spent. They wished to share with men the hardship and peril. If risks were right for the men, then they were right for women. If the time had come for nations to risk death, these women refused to claim the exemptions of sex
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difference. If war was unavoidable, then it was equally proper for women to be present and carry on the work of salvage.
Of a desire to kill they have none. A cer- tain type of man under excitement likes to shoot and reach his mark. I have had soldiers tell me with pride of the number of enemies they have potted. It sounds very much like an Indian score-card of scalps or a grouse hunter’s bag of game. Our women did not talk in these terms, nor did they act so. They gave the same care to German wounded as to Belgian, French and English wounded, and that though they knew they would not receive mercy if the enemy came across the fields and stormed the trenches. A couple of machine guns placed on the trench at Pervyse could have raked the ruined village and killed our three nurses. They shared the terms of peril with the soldiers; but they had no desire for retaliation, no wish to wreak their will on human life. Their instinct is to help. The dan- ger does not excite them to a nervous explosion where they grab for a gun and shoot the other fellow.
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I was with an English physician one day be- fore he was seasoned. We were under the bank at Grembergen, just across the river from Ter- monde. The enemy were putting over shells about one hundred yards from where we were crawling toward a _ machine-shop sheltering wounded men. The obus were noisy and the dirt flew high. Scattered bits of metal struck the bank. As we heard the shell moaning for that second of time when it draws close, we would crawl into one of the trenches scooped out in the green bank, an earthen cave with a roof of boughs.
“Let ’s get out of this,” said the doctor. “It’s too hot for our kind of work. If I had a rifle and could shoot back I should n’t mind it. But this waiting round and doing nothing in return till you are hit, I don’t like it.”’
But that is the very power that women pos- sess. They can wait round without wishing to strike back. Saving life gives them sufficient spiritual resource to stand up to artillery. They have no wish to relieve their nervousness by sight- ing an alien head and cracking it. ,
One of our corps was the daughter of an earl.
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She had all the characteristics of what we like to think is the typical American girl. She had a bonhomie that swept class distinctions aside. Her talk was swift and direct. She was pretty and executive, swift to act and always on the go.
One day, as we were on the road to the dressing stations, the noise of guns broke out. The young Belgian soldier who was driving her stopped his motor and jumped out.
“T do not care to go farther,” he said.
Lady , who is a skilful driver, climbed to the front seat, drove the car to the dressing sta- tion and brought back the wounded. I have seen her drive a touring car, carrying six wounded men, from Nieuport to Furnes at eight o’clock on a pitch-dark night, no lights allowed, over a narrow, muddy road on which the car skidded. She had to thread her way through silent marching troops, turn out for artillery wagons, follow after tired horses.
She was not a trained nurse, but when Dr. Hec- tor Munro was working over a man with a broken leg she prepared a splint and held the leg while he set it and bound it. She drove a motor into
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Nieuport when the troops were marching out of it. Her guest for the afternoon was a war cor- respondent.
‘This is a retreat,” he said. “It is never safe to enter a place when the troops are leaving it. I have had experience.”
“We are going in to get the wounded,” she re- plied. They went in.
At Ypres she dodged round the corner because she saw a captain who does n’t believe in women at the front. A shell fell in the place where she had been standing a moment before. It blew the arm from a soldier. Her nerve was unbroken, and she continued her work through the morn- ing.
Her notion of courage is that people have a right to feel frightened, but that they have no tight to fail to do the job even if they are fright- ened. ‘They are entitled to their feelings, but they are not entitled to shirk the necessary work of war. She believes that cowardice is not like other failings of weakness, which are pretty much man’s own business. Cowardice is dangerous to the group.
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Lady ’s attitude at a bombardment was that of a child seeing a hailstorm—open-eyed wonder. She was the purest exhibit of careless fearlessness, carrying a buoyancy in danger. Gen- erations of riding to hounds and of big game shoot- ing had educated fear out of her stock. Her an- cestors had always faced uncertainty as one of the
ingredients of life: they accepted danger in ac- cepting life. The savage accepted fear because he had to. With the English upper class, danger isa fine art, acult. It is an element in the family honor. One cannot possibly shrink from the test. The English have expressed themselves in sport. People who are good sportsmen are, of course, honorable fighters. The Germans have allowed their craving for adventure to seethe inside them- selves, and then have aimed it seriously at human life. But the English have taken off their excess vitality by outdoor contests.
What Lady is the rest of the women are. Miss Smith, an English girl nurse, jumped down from the ambulance that was retreating before the Germans, and walked back into Ghent, held by the Germans, to nurse an English officer
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till he died. A few days later she escaped, by going in a peasant’s cart full of market vegetables, and rejoined us at Furnes.
Sally Macnaughtan is a gray-haired gentle-
woman of independent means who writes admir- —
able fiction. She has laid aside her art and for months conducted a soup kitchen in the railway station at Furnes. She has fed thousands of weakened wounded men, working till midnight night after night. She remained until the town was thoroughly shelled.
The order is strict that no officer’s wife must be near the front. The idea is that she will divert her husband’s mind from the work in hand. He will worry about her safety. But Mrs. B ,a Belgian, joined our women in Pervyse, and did useful work, while her husband, a doctor with the rank of officer, continued his work along the front. She is a girl of twenty-one years.
Recently the Queen of the Belgians went into the trenches at a time when there was danger of artillery and rifle fire breaking loose from the enemy. She had to be besought to keep back where the air was quieter, as her life was of more
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value to the Belgian troops and the nation than even a gallant death.
One afternoon most of the corps were out on the road searching for wounded. Mairi Chis- holm, a Scotch girl eighteen years old, and a young American woman had been left behind in the Furnes Hospital. With them was a stretcher bearer, a man of twenty-eight. A few shells fell into Furnes. The civilian population began run- ning in dismay. The girls climbed up into the tower of the convent to watch the work of the shells. ‘The man ordered the women to leave the town with him and go to Poperinghe. The two girls refused to go.
For weeks Furnes was under artillery fire from beyond Nieuport. One of our hospital nurses was killed as she was walking in the Grand Place.
I saw an American girl covered by the pistol of an Uhlan officer. She did not change color, but regarded the incident as a lark. I happened to be watching her when she was sitting on the front seat of an ambulance at Oudecappelle, eating luncheon. A shell fell thirty yards from her in the road. The roar was loud. The dirt flew
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high. The metal fragments tinkled on the house walls. The hole it dug was three feet deep. She laughed and continued with her luncheon.
I saw the same girl stand out in a field while this little drama took place: The French artil- lery in the field were well covered by shrubbery. They had been pounding away from their covert till the Germans grew irritated. A German Taube flew into sight, hovered high overhead and spied the hidden guns. It dropped three smoke bombs. These puffed out their little clouds into the air, and gave the far-away marksmen the location for firing. Their guns broke out and shrapnel shells came overhead, burst into trailing smoke and scattered their hundreds of bullets. The girl stood on the arena itself. Of concern for her personal safety she had none. It was all like a play on the stage to her. You watch the blow and flash but you are not a part of the action.
Each night the Furnes Hospital was full with one hundred wounded. In the morning we car- ried out one or two or one-half dozen dead. The wounds were severe, the air of the whole country- side was septic from the sour dead in the fields,
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who kept working to the surface from their shal- low burial. There was a morning when we had gone early to the front on a hurry call. In our absence two girl nurses carried out ten dead from the wards into the convent lot, to the edge of the hasty graves made ready for their coming.
There is one woman whom we have watched at work for twelve months. She is a trained nurse, a certified midwife, a licensed motor-car driver, a veterinarian and a woman of property. Her name is Mrs. Elsie Knocker, a widow with one son. She helped to organize our corps. I was with her one evening when a corporal ordered her to go up a difficult road. He was the driver of a high-power touring car which could rise on occa- sion to seventy miles an hour. He carried a rifle in his car, and told us he had killed over fifty Germans since Liége. He dressed in bottle green, the uniform of a cyclist, and he looked like a rol- ‘icking woodlander of the Robin Hood band. It was seven o’clock of the evening. The night was dark. He pitched a bag of bandages into the motor ambulance.
‘Take those to the dressing station that lies two
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miles to the west of Caeskerke,’’ he ordered Mrs. Knocker. I cranked up the machine; Mrs. Knocker sat at the wheel. We were at Oudecap- pelle. The going was halfway decent as far as the crossroads of Caeskerke. Here we turned west on a road through the fields which had been intermittently shelled for several days. The road had shell holes in it from one to three feet deep. We could not see them because we carried no lights and the sky overhead was black. A mile to our right a village was burning. There were sheets of flame rising from the lowland, and the flame revealed the smoke that was thick over the ruins. We bumped in and out of the holes. All roads in Belgium were scummy with mud. It is like butter on bread. The big brown-canopied ambulance skidded in this paste.
We reached the dressing station and delivered one bag of bandages. In return we received three severely wounded men, who lay at length on the stretched canvas and swung on straps. Then we started back over the same mean road. This was the journey that tested Mrs. Knocker’s
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driving, because now she had helpless men who must not be jerked by the swaying car. Motion tore at their wounds. Above all, they must not be overturned. An overturn would kill a man who was seriously wounded. Driving meant drawing all her nervous forces into her directing brain and her two hands. A village on fire at night is an eerie sight. A dark road, pitted with shell holes and slimy with mud, is chancy. The car with its human freight, swaying, bumping, sliding, is heavy on the wrist. The whole focused drive of it falls on the muscles of the forearm. And when on the skill of that driver depends the lives of three men the situation is one that calls for nerve. It was only luck that the artil- lery from beyond the Yser did not begin tuning up. The Germans had shelled that road dili- gently for many days and some evenings. Back to the crossroads Mrs. Knocker brought her cargo, and on to Oudecappelle, and so to the hospital at Furnes, a full ten miles. Safely home in the convent yard, the journey done, the wounded men lifted into the ward, she broke down. She had 185
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put over her job, and her nerves were tired. Womanlike she refused to give in till the work was successfully finished.
How would a man have handled such a strain? I will tell you how one man acted. Our corporal drove his touring car toward Dixmude one morn- ing. He ordered Tom, the cockney driver, to fol- low with the motor ambulance. In it were Mrs. Knocker and Miss Chisholm, sitting with Tom on the front of the car. Things looked thick. The corporal slowed up, and so did Tom just behind him. Now there is one sure rule for res- cue work at the front—when you hear the guns close, always turn your car toward home, away from the direction of the enemy. Turn it before you get your wounded, even though they are at the point of death, and leave your power on, even when you are going to stay for a quarter of an hour. Pointed toward safety, and under power, the car can carry you out of range of a sudden shelling or a bayonet charge. The enemy’s guns began to place shrapnel over the road. The cloud puffs were hovering about a hundred feet overhead a little farther down the way. The bullets
186
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WOMEN UNDER FIRE
clicked on the roadbed. The corporal jumped out of his touring car.
“Turn my car,” he shouted to Tom. Tom climbed from the ambulance, boarded the touring car and turned it. The corporal peered out from his shelter, behind the ambulance, saw the going was good and ran to his own motor. He jumped in and sped out of range at full tilt. The two women sat quietly in the ambulance, watching the shrapnel. Tom came to them, turned the car and brought them beyond the range of fire.
But the steadiest and most useful piece of work done by the women was that at Pervyse. Mrs. Knocker and two women helpers, one Scotch and one American, fitted up a miniature hospital in the cellar of a house in ruined Pervyse. They were within three minutes of the trenches. Here, as soon as the soldiers were wounded, they could be brought for immediate treatment. A young private had received a severe lip wound. Un- skilful army medical handling had left it gan- grened, and it had swollen. His face was on the way to being marred for life. Mrs. Knocker treated him every few hours for ten days—and
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brought him back to normal. A man came in with his hand a pulp from splintered shell. The glove he had been wearing was driven into the red | flesh. Mrs. Knocker worked over his hand for half an hour, picking out the shredded glove bit by bit.
Except for a short walk in the early morning and another after dark, these women lived im- mured in their dressing station, which they moved | from the cellar to a half-wrecked house. They | lived in the smell of straw, blood and antiseptic. | The Germans have thrown shells into the wrecked | village almost every day. Some days shelling has been vigorous. The churchyard is choked with dead. The fields are dotted with hummocks where men and horses lie buried. Just as I was sailing for America in March, 1915, the house where the women live and work was shelled. They came to La Panne, but later Mrs. Knocker and Miss Chisholm returned to Pervyse to go on with their work, which is famous throughout the Belgian army.
As regiment after regiment serves its turn in the trenches of Pervyse it passes under the hands
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of these women. “The women of Pervyse” are known alike to generals, colonels and privates who held steady at Li¢ge and who have struggled on ever since. For many months these nurses have endured the noise of shell fire and the smells of the dead and the stricken. The King of the Belgians has with his own hands pinned upon them the Order of Leopold II. The King himself wears the Order of Leopold I. They have eased and saved many hundreds of his men.
“No place for a woman,” remarked a distin- guished Englishman after a flying visit to their home.
“By the law of probabilities, your corps will be wiped out sooner or later,” said a war corre- spondent.
Meantime the women will go on with their cool, expert work. The only way to stop them is to stop the war.
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HOW WAR SEEMS TO A WOMAN
(By Mrs. ArtHUR GLEAsoN)
IFE at the front is not organized like a busi- ness office, with sharply defined duties for each worker. War is raw and chaotic, and you take hold wherever you can lock your grip. We women that joined the Belgian army and spent a year at the front, did duty as ambulance riders, “dirty nurses,” in a Red Cross rescue station at the Yser trenches, in relief work for refugees, and in the commissariat department. We _ tended wounded soldiers, sick soldiers, sick peasants, wounded peasants, mothers, babies, and colonies of refugees.
This war gave women one more chance to prove themselves. For the first time in history, a few of us were allowed through the lines to the front trenches. We needed a man’s costume, steady masculine nerves, physical strength. But the work itself became the ancient work of woman—
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HOW WAR SEEMS TO A WOMAN
nursing suffering, making a home for lonely, hungry, dirty men. This new thrust of woman- hood carried her to the heart of war. But, once arriving there, she resumed her old job, and be- came the nurse and cook and mother to men. Woman has been rebelling against being put into her place by man. But the minute she wins her freedom in the new dramatic setting, she finds expression in the old ways as caretaker and home- maker. Her rebellion ceases as soon as she is allowed to share the danger. She is willing to make the fires, carry the water, and do the wash- ing, because she believes the men are in the right, and her labor frees them for putting through their work.
It all began for me in Paris. I was studying music, and living in the American Art Students’ Club, in the summer of 1914. That war was declared meant nothing to me. There was I in a comfortable room with a delightful garden, the Luxembourg, just over the