WAR DE LUXE "I THINK," said a colonel of the ordnance department as we came out into the open after a good but a hurried and fly-ridden breakfast—"I think," he said in his excellent Saxonized English, "that it would be as well to look at our telephone exchange first of all. It perhaps might prove of some small interest to you." With that he led the way through a jumble of corridors to a far corner of the Prefecture of Laon, perching high on the Hill of Laon and forming for the moment the keystone of the arch of the German center.
So that was how the most crowded day in a reasonably well-crowded newspaperman's life began for me—with a visit to a room which had in other days been somebody's reception parlor. We came upon twelve soldier-operators sitting before portable switchboards with metal transmitters clamped upon their heads, giving and taking messages to and from all the corners and[Pg 263] crannies of the mid-battle-front. This little room was the solar plexus of the army. To it all the tingling nerves of the mighty organism ran and in it all the ganglia centered. At two sides of the room the walls were laced with silk-covered wires appliquéd as thickly and as closely and as intricately as the threads in old point lace, and over these wires the gray-coated operators could talk—and did talk pretty constantly—with all the trenches and all the batteries and all the supply camps and with the generals of brigades and of divisions and of corps.
One wire ran upstairs to the Over-General's sleeping quarters and ended, so we were told, in a receiver that hung upon the headboard of his bed. Another stretched, by relay points, to Berlin, and still another ran to the headquarters of the General Staff where the Kaiser was, somewhere down the right wing; and so on and so forth. If war is a business these times instead of a chivalric calling, then surely this was the main office and clearing house of the business.
To our novice eyes the wires seemed snarled—snarled inextricably, hopelessly, eternally—and we said as much, but the ordnance colonel said behind this apparent disorder a most careful and particular orderliness was hidden away. Given an hour's notice, these busy men who wore those steel vises clamped upon their ears could disconnect the lines, pull down and reel in the wires, pack the batteries and the[Pg 264] exchanges, and have the entire outfit loaded upon automobiles for speedy transmission elsewhere. Having seen what I had seen of the German military system, I could not find it in my heart to doubt this. Miracles had already become commonplaces; what might have been epic once was incidental now. I hearkened and believed.
At his command a sergeant plugged in certain stops upon a keyboard and then when the Colonel, taking a hand telephone up from a table, had talked into it in German he passed it into my hands.
"The captain at the other end of the line knows English," he said. "I've just told him you wish to speak with him for a minute."
I pressed the rubber disk to my ear.
"Hello!" I said.
"Hello!" came back the thin-strained answer. "This is such and such a trench"—giving the number—"in front of Cerny. What do you want to know?"
"What's the news there?" I stammered fatuously.
A pleasant little laugh tinkled through the strainer.
"Oh, it's fairly quiet now," said the voice. "Yesterday afternoon shrapnel fire rather mussed us up, but to-day nothing has happened. We're just lying quiet and enjoying the fine weather. We've had much rain lately and my men are enjoying the change."
[Pg 265]
So that was all the talk I had with a man who had for weeks been living in a hole in the ground with a ditch for an exercise ground and the brilliant prospects of a violent death for his hourly and daily entertainment. Afterward when it was too late I thought of a number of leading questions which I should have put to that captain. Undoubtedly there was a good story in him could you get it out.
We came through a courtyard at the north ride of the building, and the courtyard was crowded with automobiles of all the known European sizes and patterns and shapes—automobiles for scout duty, with saw-edged steel prows curving up over the drivers' seats to catch and cut dangling wires; automobiles fitted as traveling pharmacies and needing only red-and-green lights to be regular prescription drug stores; automobile-ambulances rigged with stretchers and first-aid kits; automobiles for carrying ammunition and capable of moving at tremendous speed for tremendous distances; automobile machine guns or machine-gun automobiles, just as suits you; automobile cannon; and an automobile mail wagon, all holed inside, like honeycomb, with two field-postmen standing up in it, back to back, sorting out the contents of snugly packed pouches; and every third letter was not a letter, strictly speaking, at all, but a small flat parcel containing chocolate or cigars or handkerchiefs or socks or even light sweaters—[Pg 266]such gifts as might be sent to the soldiers, stamp-free, from any part of the German Empire. I wonder how men managed to wage war in the days before the automobile.
Two waiting cars received our party and our guides and our drivers, and we went corkscrewing down the hill, traversing crooked ways that were astonishingly full of German soldiers and astonishingly free of French townspeople. Either the citizens kept to their closed-up houses or, having run away at the coming of the enemy, they had not yet dared to return, although so far as I might tell there was no danger of their being mistreated by the gray-backs. Reaching the plain which is below the city we streaked westward, our destination being the field wireless station.
Nothing happened on the way except that we over-took a file of slightly wounded prisoners who, having been treated at the front, were now bound for a prison in a convent yard, where they would stay until a train carried them off to Münster or Düsseldorf for confinement until the end of the war. I counted them.—two English Tommies, two French officers, one lone Belgian—how he got that far down into France nobody could guess—and twenty-eight French cannoneers and infantrymen, including some North Africans. Every man Jack of them was bandaged either about the head or about the arms, or else he favored an injured leg as he hobbled slowly on. Eight guards[Pg 267] were nursing them along; their bayonets were socketed in their carbine barrels. No doubt the magazines of the carbines were packed with those neat brass capsules which carry doses of potential death; but the guards, except for the moral effect of the thing, might just as well have been bare-handed. None of the prisoners could have run away even had he been so minded. The poor devils were almost past walking, let alone running. They wouldn't even look up as we went by them.
The day is done of the courier who rode horseback with orders in his belt and was winged in mid-flight; and the day of the secret messenger who tried to creep through the hostile picket lines with cipher dispatches in his shoe, and was captured and ordered shot at sunrise, is gone, too, except in Civil War melodramas. Modern military science has wiped them out along with most of the other picturesque fol-de-rols of the old game of war. Bands no longer play the forces into the fight—indeed I have seen no more bands afield with the dun-colored files of the Germans than I might count on the fingers of my two hands; and flags, except on rare show-off occasions, do not float above the heads of the columns; and officers dress as nearly as possible like common soldiers; and the courier's work is done with much less glamour but with infinitely greater dispatch and certainty by the telephone, and by the a?roplane man, and[Pg 268] most of all by the air currents of the wireless equipment. We missed the gallant courier, but then the wireless was worth seeing too.
It stood in a trampled turnip field not very far beyond the ruined Porte St. Martin at the end of the Rue St. Martin, and before we came to it we passed the Monument des Instituteurs, erected in 1899—as the inscription upon it told us—by a grateful populace to the memory of three school teachers of Laon who, for having raised a revolt of students and civilians against the invader in the Franco-Prussian War, were taken and bound and shot against a wall, in accordance with the system of dealing with ununiformed enemies which the Germans developed hereabouts in 1870 and perfected hereabouts in 1914. A faded wreath, which evidently was weeks old, lay at the bronze feet of the three figures. But the institute behind the monument was an institute no longer. It had become, over night as it were, a lazaret for the wounded. Above its doors the Red Cross flag and the German flag were crossed—emblems of present uses and present proprietorship. Also many convalescent German soldiers sunned themselves upon the railing about the statue. They seemed entirely at home. When the Germans take a town they mark it with their own mark, as cattlemen in Texas used to mark a captured maverick; after which to all intents it becomes German. We halted a moment here.
[Pg 269]
"That's French enough for you," said the young officer who was riding with us, turning in his seat to speak—"putting up a monument to glorify three franc-tireurs. In Germany the people would not be allowed to do such a thing. But it is not humanly conceivable that they would have such a wish. We revere soldiers who die for the Fatherland, not men who refuse to enlist when the call comes and yet take up arms to make a guerrilla warfare."
Which remark, considering the circumstances and other things, was sufficiently typical for all purposes, as I thought at the time and still think. You see I had come to the place where I could understand a German soldier's national and racial point of view, though I doubt his ability ever of understanding mine. To him, now, old John Burns of Gettysburg, going out in his high, high hat and his long, long coat to fight with the boys would never, could never be the heroic figure which he is in the American imagination; he would have been a meddlesome malefactor deserving of immediate death. For 1778 write it 1914, and Molly Pitcher serving at the guns would have been in no better case before a German court-martial. I doubt whether a Prussian Stonewall Jackson would give orders to kill a French Barbara Frietchie, but assuredly he would lock that venturesome old person up in a fortress where she could not hoist her coun[Pg 270]try's flag nor invite anybody to shoot her gray head. For you must know that the German who ordinarily brims over with that emotion which, lacking a better name for it, we call sentiment, drains all the sentiment out of his soul when he takes his gun in his hand and goes to war.
Among the frowzy turnip tops two big dull gray automobiles were stranded, like large hulks in a small green sea. Alongside them a devil's darning-needle of a wireless mast stuck up, one hundred and odd feet, toward the sky. It was stayed with many steel guy ropes, like the center pole of a circus top. It was of the collapsible model and might therefore be telescoped into itself and taken down in twenty minutes, so we were informed pridefully by the captain in charge; and from its needle-pointed tip the messages caught out of the ether came down by wire conductors to the interior of one of the stalled automobiles and there were noted down and, whenever possible, translated by two soldier-operators, who perched on wooden stools among batteries and things, for which I know not the technical names. The spitty snarl of the apparatus filled the air for rods roundabout. It made you think of a million gritty slate pencils squeaking over a million slates all together. We were permitted to take up the receivers and listen to a faint scratching sound which must have come from a long way off.[Pg 271] Indeed the officer told us that it was a message from the enemy that we heard.
"Our men just picked it up," he explained; "we think it must come from a French wireless station across the river. Naturally we cannot understand it, any more than they can understand our messages—they're all in code, you know. Every day or two we change our code, and I presume they do too."
Two of our party had unshipped their cameras by now, for the pass which we carried entitled us, among other important things, to commandeer that precious fluid, gasoline, whenever needed, and to take photographs; but we were asked to make no snapshots here. We gathered that there were certain reasons not unconnected with secret military usage why we might not take away with us plates bearing pictures of the field wireless. In the main, though, remarkably few restrictions were laid upon us that day. Once or twice, very casually, somebody asked us to refrain from writing about this thing or that thing which we had seen; but that was all.
In a corner of the turnip field close up to the road were mounds of fresh-turned clay, and so many of them were there and so closely were they spaced and for so considerable a distance did they stretch along, they made two long yellow ribs above the herbage. At close intervals small wooden crosses were stuck up in the rounded combs of earth so that the[Pg 272] crosses formed a sort of irregular fence. A squad of soldiers were digging more holes in the tough earth. Their shovel blades flashed in the sunlight and the clods flew up in showers.
"We have many buried over there," said an artillery captain, seeing that I watched the grave diggers, "a general among them and other officers. It is there we bury those who die in the Institute hospital. Every day more die, and so each morning trenches are made ready for those who will die during that day. A good friend of mine is over there; he was buried day before yesterday. I sat up late last night writing to his wife—or perhaps I should say his widow. They had been married only a few weeks when the call came. It will be very hard on her."
He did not name the general who lay over yonder, nor did we ask him the name. To ask would not have been etiquette, and for him to answer would have been worse. Rarely in our wanderings did we find a German soldier of whatsoever rank who referred to his superior officer by name. He merely said "My captain" or "Our colonel." And this was of a piece with the plan—not entirely confined to the Germans—of making a secret of losses of commanders and movements of commands.
We went thence then, the distance bring perhaps three miles by road and not above eight minutes by automobile at the rate we traveled to an aviation camp at the back[Pg 273] side of the town. Here was very much to see, including many a?roplanes of sorts domiciled under canvas hangars and a cheerful, chatty, hospitable group of the most famous aviators in the German army—lean, keen young men all of them—and a sample specimen of the radish-shaped bomb which these gentlemen carry aloft with the intent of dropping it upon their enemies when occasion shall offer. Each of us in turn solemnly hefted the bomb to feel its weight. I should guess it weighed thirty pounds—say, ten pounds for the case and twenty pounds for its load of fearsome ingredients. Finally, yet foremost, we were invited to inspect that thing which is the pride and the brag of this particular arm of the German Army—a balloon-cannon, so called.
The balloon-gun of this size is—or was at the date when I saw it—an exclusively German institution. I believe the Allies have balloon-guns too, but theirs are smaller, according to what the Germans say. This one was mounted on a squatty half-turret at the tail end of an armored-steel truck. It had a mechanism as daintily adjusted as a lady's watch and much more accurate, and when being towed by its attendant automobile, which has harnessed within it the power of a hundred and odd draft horses, it has been known to cover sixty English miles in an hour, for all that its weight is that of very many loaded vans.
The person in authority here was a youthful[Pg 274] and blithe lieutenant—an Iron Cross man—with pale, shallow blue eyes and a head of bright blond hair. He spun one small wheel to show how his pet's steel nose might be elevated almost straight upward; then turned another to show how the gun might be swung, as on a pivot, this way and that to command the range of the entire horizon, and he concluded the performance, with the aid of several husky lads in begrimed gray, by going through the pantomime of loading with a long yellow five-inch shell from the magazine behind him, and pretending to fire, meanwhile explaining that he could send one shot aloft every six seconds and with each shot reach a maximum altitude of between seven and eight thousand feet. Altogether it was a very pretty sight to see and most edifying. Likewise it took on an added interest when we learned that the blue-eyed youth and his brother of a twin balloon-cannon at the front of Laon had during the preceding three weeks brought down four of the enemy's airmen, and were exceedingly hopeful of fattening their joint average before the present week had ended.
After that we took photographs ad lib., and McCutcheon had a trip with Ingold, a great aviator, in a biplane, which the Germans call a double-decker, as distinguished from the Taube or monoplane, with its birdlike wings and curved tail rudder-piece. Just as they came down, after a circular spin over the lines, a[Pg 275] strange machine, presumably hostile, appeared far up and far away, but circled off to the south out of target reach before the balloon gunman could get the range of her and the aim. On the heels of this a biplane from another aviation field somewhere down the left wing dropped in quite informally bearing two grease-stained men to pass the time of day and borrow some gasoline. The occasion appeared to demand a drink. We all repaired, therefore, to one of the great canvas houses where the air birds nest nighttimes and where the airmen sleep. There we had noggins of white wine all round, and a pointer dog, which was chained to an officer's trunk, begged me in plain pointer language to cast off his leash so he might go and stalk the covey of pheasants that were taking a dust-bath in the open road not fifty yards away.
The temptation was strong, but our guides said if we meant to get to the battlefront before lunch it was time, and past time, we got started. Being thus warned we did get started.
Of a battle there is this to be said—that the closer you get to it the less do you see of it. Always in my experiences in Belgium and my more recent experiences in France I found this to be true. Take, for example, the present instance. I knew that we were approximately in the middle sworl of the twisting scroll formed by the German center, and[Pg 276] that we were at this moment entering the very tip of the enormous inverted V made by the frontmost German defenses. I knew that stretching away to the southeast of us and to the northwest was a line some two hundred miles long, measuring it from tip to tip, where sundry millions of men in English khaki and French fustian and German shoddy-wools were fighting the biggest fight and the most prolonged fight and the most stubborn fight that historians probably will write down as having been fought in this war or any lesser war. I knew this fight had been going on for weeks now back and forth upon the River Aisne and would certainly go on for weeks and perhaps months more to come. I knew these things because I had been told them; but I shouldn't have known if I hadn't been told. I shouldn't even have guessed it.
I recall that we traveled at a cup-racing dip along a road that first wound like a coiling snake and then straightened like a striking snake, and that always we traveled through dust so thick it made a fog. In this chalky land of northern France the brittle soil dries out after a rain very quickly, and turns into a white powder where there are wheels to churn it up and grit it fine. Here surely there was an abundance of wheels. We passed many marching men and many lumbering supply trains which were going our way, and we met many motor ambulances and many ammuni[Pg 277]tion trucks which were coming back. Always the ambulances were full and the ammunition wagons were empty. I judge an expert in these things might by the fullness of the one and the emptiness of the other gauge the emphasis with which the fight ahead went on. The drivers of the trucks nearly all wore captured French caps and French uniform coats, which adornment the marching men invariably regarded as a quaint jest to be laughed at and cheered for.
We stopped at our appointed place, which was on the top of a ridge where a general of a corps had his headquarters. From here one had a view—a fair view and, roughly, a fan-shaped view—of certain highly important artillery operations. Likewise, the eminence, gentle and gradual as it was, commanded a mile-long stretch of the road, which formed the main line of communication between the front and the base; and these two facts in part explained why the general had made this his abiding place. Even my layman's mind could sense the reasons for establishing headquarters at such a spot.
As for the general, he and his staff, at the moment of our arrival in their midst, were stationed at the edge of a scanty woodland where telescopes stood and a table with maps and charts on it. Quite with the manner of men who had nothing to do except to enjoy the sunshine and breathe the fresh air, they strolled[Pg 278] back and forth in pairs and trios. I............