Facing the Hindenburg line; personal observations at the fronts and in the camps of the British, French, Americans, and Italians, during the campaigns of 1917

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FACING THE
HINDENBURG LINE

Personal Observations at the Fronts

and in the Camps of the British,

French, Americans, and

Italians, during the

Campaigns of 1917

BY
BURRIS A. JENKINS

Author of
" The Man in the Street, " etc.

NEW YORK CHICAGO TORONTO

Fleming H. Revell Company

LONDON AND EDINBURGH

Copyright, J9»7. ^y
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY

New York : 1 58 Fifth Avenue
Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave.
Toronto: 25 Richmond Street, W.
London : 21 Paternoster Square
Edinburgh : 100 Princes Street

To

My Son in Aviation

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Digitized by tine Internet Arciiive

in 2007 witii funding from

IVIicrosoft Corporation

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PREFACE

IN the double capacity of war correspondent
and Y. M. C. A. lecturer, I had unusual
opportunities of seeing the war, on all
the fronts of western Europe, as it was in
191 7. As a correspondent, I could go where,
as a Y. M. C. A. man, I could not; and as a
Y. M. C. A. worker my duty called me where
as a newspaper man I could not have gone.
The observations of most military men are
confined to their own particular sector or
sphere. My commission was a roving one.

I do not say these things to boast. No man
can come into close contact with this world
misfortune and, if he have any imagination or
any soul, come away with egoism accentuated.
When many of the choicest men of earth:
artists, scholars, musicians, men of letters, are
dying — common soldiers in trenches, — one can
only feel the insignificance of self. I say these
things, then, only to give confidence in the
statements made, when, in these days, one can-
not always be sure what to believe, I have
written down what I saw and heard.

B. A. J.

Kansas City, Mo.

5

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAOa

I. Dodging the Submarine 9

II. The Folkestone Air-raid... 17

III. Tommy Atkins in an Audi-

ence 23

IV. The British Front in France 33
V. Great Britain Just Begin-
ning TO Fight 43

VI. '* Gentlemen, Once More

INTO THE Breach." 53

VII. The British Officer 63

VIII. Tommy Atkins Up to Date.. 76
IX. Two Undecorated Heroes. . 89
X. The British Are Brave in

Sorrow 100

XI. Verdun is Mighty 112

XII. Champagne and Camouflage 123

XIII. The Red Triangle OF War. . . 131

XIV. With the Poilu and His Offi-

cer 141

XV. The Airman iS3

XVI. Up in a Biplane 164

XVII. Our Army Overseas 177

7

8 Contents

XVIII. Americans Sitting in the

Shadow 189

XIX. American Boys and French

Chasseurs 200

XX. Americans Must Learn the

Game 210

XXI. The Spectacular Italian

Front 223

XXII. The Italian Commando Su-
premo 233

XXIII. The Indefatigable Italian . . 244

DODGING THE SUBMARINE

THE Trans- Atlantic journey in submersi-
ble days differs from one in ordinary
times mainly, though not entirely, in
psychology. Your friends at the port of sail-
ing— if you are unfortunate enough to have
any — shake their heads and look at you com-
miseratingly as if you had double pneumonia
or were in the last stages of typhoid, tubercu-
losis or insanity. They tell you how they ad-
vised So-and-so, who came all the way from
Denver or Dodge City, that he ought to go
back home and not sail; and he did so. Then
all the way across the submarine keeps bob-
bing up from beneath the surface of — con-
versation and exploding either in shudders or
in laughter.

There are, however, some concrete re-
minders that these are not the placid seas of
peace. For example, your first glimpse of
the slender liner reveals not the former beauti-
ful contrast between black hull, red funnels
and white upper works, but one dead level of

9

10 Facing the Hindenburg Line

lead colored war paint. There is a small gun
forward and a larger one aft. Notices are
on the bulletin boards instructing you how to
comport yourself "in case it becomes neces-
sary to abandon ship" — delicate euphemism!
Lifebelts are brazenly obtrusive; and the
passenger list is cut up into groups and as-
signed to various lifeboats. A few days out
to sea and there is a drill, in which each one
arrays himself in his cork necklace and water-
proof coat and scrambles up to the upper deck
to assemble with his grotesque mates beside
his boat, feeling uncommonly corpulent and
sheepish.

There are eight or ten passengers equipped
with new fangled rubber suits, filled imder
the arms and about the body with some sub-
stance lighter than cork, with compartments
for food, water bottle, alarm whistle and all
the conveniences of a solitary journey in the
sea, except furnaces and propeller. An obese
woman of fifty in one of these looks like
a huge bifurcated tadpole, and walks, with
her leaden soles, like a thousand of brick.
There is merriment at her expense, but she
looks desperately determined and superior.
She has paid between sixty and one hundred
dollars for her marine costume, and all that
she hath will she give in exchange for her

Dodging the Submarine 11

life. What a pity if she does not get an op-
portunity to use her bathing suit! There is
only one defect about these elaborate con-
trivances, and that is that the driving spray
on the crests of the waves is what drowns one,
after all. The rest of us, in envy, perhaps,
look upon the chosen ten and mutter the
Calvinistic sentiment: "A man who is bom
to be hanged is not going to be drowned."

Strangely enough the most real source of
danger is ignored by all the passengers, how-
ever sensible of it are the captain and his
crew, and that is the running through the
nights without "riding lights." Twenty knots
an hour we go plunging forward into the
blackness, when any moment we may crash
into some other craft, of which there are
thousands on the seas. The ocean is not so
big a place after all. Fancy driving a motor
car along a country road at like speed without
headlights! To be sure the cases are not
parallel, although fairly so. It is strange that
there are not more collisions, but old sailors
predict that there will be. I have heard of
only one, when two transports in the Mediter-
ranean came together. We pass other ships
daily, sometimes several in a day, but at
night not a glim is shown either by us or
by our neighbors. Our windows and ports

12 Facing the Hindenburg Line

are covered with sheetiron screens. The last
two or three nights we are forbidden to light
cigars or cigarettes on deck. At all times the
showing of an electric flashlight is "defendu."
One evening I stepped out into the Stygian
darkness on the promenade deck and stood
gazing or trying to gaze into the blackness,
when bump! I thought a submarine had hit
me on the chin! "Pardon, Monsieur!" and
I could tell by the clatter of the wooden shoes
upon the deck that a sailor had unconsciously
assaulted me.

Many of the nights some passengers, life
preservers on them or beside them, spent the
livelong night in their steamer chairs upon
the deck. They usually declared that they
desired the fresh air — the rooms are so stuffy,
don't you know. After all, most sane people
refuse to forego pajamas and the delightful
early morning salt bath, and cold shower, as
in peace times. A few of us realized that
we had ahead of us a shorter channel voyage
more dangerous than the Atlantic; and the
wise ambulance drivers on board knew that
at times a single mile at the French front
would prove far more hazardous from shells
than the whole ten days at sea from sub-
marines. Nevertheless, there was a sigh of
relief from the whole two hundred and thirty-
seven of us when we had made the harbor

Dodging the Submarine 13

mouth and the police and customs officials came
aboard. These functionaries never appeared so
welcome before.

There was a pair of French private soldiers
in the second cabin, one of them young and
smooth faced, like an American, the bronze
cross of war upon his breast. These men came
swinging aboard, in their tourquoise-blue uni-
forms, their kits on their shoulders, crying
farewells, shouting Vivas and all but singing
La Marseillaise. They had been "blesses"
wounded reservists, and were American
citizens.

There was a young woman, a trained nurse,
one would guess, gay, apparently thoughtless,
always promenading. Guess again, and you
will miss it again. She is at the head of one
of the largest international relief agencies, and
is admitted to every front.

There was a professor in the Harvard Medi-
cal Faculty. He is engaged in an experiment
of incalculable value. He seeks to overcome
shock, whatever that is. He nor any other
surgeon will define it. He must get to a man
within a few minutes after the soldier is hit ; so
he must sit in the front trenches under shell
fire, waiting his opportunities. Like all other
occupants of these trenches, he declares that
the monotony is the deadly thing. His method
is extremely simple when he explains it. It is

14 Facing the Hindenburg Line

a wonder nobody ever thought of it before ; but
that is to be said of all great inventions and dis-
coveries.

There was the impressario of the greatest
grand opera company in America. There was
the French art dealer, who has sold some of
the world's greatest treasures to American
millionaires. There was the Italian consul
general to a great city in Canada, who had
been called home to take his place in the war
office, who uttered to me this well put maxim :
"Egotism in a man is bad; in a nation, it is
necessary." There was the French manufac-
turer of automobiles and airplanes, who had
been to America purchasing supplies. He and
his pretty little wife were inseparable com-
panions and evidently had been deeply in love
with each other these twenty years.

There was a big husky western American
surgeon on his way as a pioneer to study
hospital administration at the front, against
the arrival of American troops. There were
several young ambulance men, in their uni-
forms of the American Red Cross, in France,
with the little fore-and-aft fatigue caps worn
alike by Tommies and poilus.

To me, however, the most striking figure
on board was the young American in the Red
Cross uniform, with the Medaille Militaire
and the Croix de Guerre both upon his breast

Dodging the Submarine 15

and the two red scars upon his forehead and
the hole in his cheek. Handsome? Of
course he is handsome, with patrician face,
clear, brown eye, high color and little mus-
tache and the lithe figure of an Indian. Ten
months at the front; then one day a shell;
given up to die, or worse; his father sum-
moned across the sea by a cable which stated
that his son, if he survived at all, must be
paralytic, or totally blind, or insane ; but home
for six months and back now to have certain
pieces of steel taken out of forehead and face
bones; then, if he survives, into the aviation
corps, where the first plane he destroys will
bring him, he thinks, the Legion d'Honneur.
Let him tell the story in his own words, as
he told it so modestly to me:

"It was about eight miles northwest of
Verdun, last September. The Bosches knew
of our motor lorries bringing supplies into the
village and kept their guns trained on a cer-
tain comer. When they heard a motor coming
they dropped a shell at that corner. They
heard our ambulance and dropped one on us.
It was a hundred to one shot and we got the
hundredth. Kelly was killed. I did not lose
consciousness, but was blinded and deafened.
One eardrum is gone. See, I can stop this
side of my nose and blow out of my ear. I
was afraid to shout, as the Germans weren't

16 Facing the Hindenburg Line

three hundred yards away. I called Kelly,
but he did not reply. Then I set out to crawl.
I bumped into barbed wire and struck my
shoulder, drew back and bumped again. At
last I yelled and they turned a machine gun
on me, but I lay flat and yelled some more.
Then two Frenchmen from the poste de secours
came out and got me. That's all."

They sighted a floating mine one day from
the bridge, when we were nearing land. The
usual method is to fire upon any strange cask,
and, if it is a mine, explode it; but this mine
was seen so early in the morning that our
gallant French captain refused to disturb his
passengers with a shot. When I told this
afterwards to an English sergeant, he merely
remarked: "Well, I'll be damned!" Our
captain, however, sent his pilot-boat back to
shoot the mine.

Our return across the Atlantic, from a port
in England, was singularly fortunate. An
American rear-admiral and his staff were
upon our ship, returning from a mission
abroad. Five destroyers, therefore, accom-
panied us the first three hundred and fifty
miles; then three dropped back, and two re-
mained with us until we were seven hundred
and fifty miles out and quite beyond the
danger line.

n

THE FOLKESTONE AIR-RAID

WHEN I rushed out of our house by
the seaside I found crowds gazing
upward in the direction of the sun.
I could see nothing for the glare, neither ap-
parently could others.

Suddenly two little girls cried: "There they
are!" Then I saw them, two airplanes, not
Zeppelins, emerging from the disc of the sun
almost overhead. Then four more, or five,
in a line; and others, all like bright silver in-
sects hovering against the blue of the sky.
The heavens seemed full of them. There
were about a score in all and we were charmed
with the beauty of the sight. I am sure few
of us thought seriously of danger.

Then the air was split by the whistle and
rush of the first bomb, which sounded like
the shrill siren of a car. This was followed
at once by a detonation that shook the earth.
I heard nobody shriek, weep, or cry aloud.
The people were marvelously controlled.

I glanced in the direction of the shell-burst,

17

18 Facing the Hindenburg Line

100 yards away, and the debris was still going
up like a column of smoke. Then came two
more strokes, apparently in the same spot.
Then three other bombs fell. I afterwards
found the missiles wrecked the Osmond hotel
and wounded our motor driver.

Then another bomb demolished the manor
house by the sea. Two others fell in the
water behind me and the gravel and mud and
water spouted up in a geyser to the top of the
cliffs where I stood. Later I learned that one
of these shots tore off the legs of a little boy
playing with his sister. The mother lay in
a faint and the little sister, driven mad, rushed
blindly into the water. She was rescued by
a wounded soldier.

Other shots fell, but I could count no
further. They came thick and fast, like
crackling, rolling blasts of our western light-
ning and thunder. Nobody has reported the
number of shells so far as I know. There
were 200 or more casualties, nearly icx) of
them fatalities. Anti-craft shells were now
bursting on the fringes of the air fleet. Then
followed in the distance the purr of the
machine guns and we knew that our own
planes were up in pursuit. We were later in-
formed that three of the hostile fleet were
brought down in the channel.

The Folkestone Air-Raid 19

Most people took to the cellars. Had I
known there was a cellar handy, or that it is
considered good form in the circumstances, I
should have followed, for soon I found myself
alone on the leas overlooking the sea, where
I had gone at the first cry of "Zepps."

It was our first time under fire and reminded
me of a Missouri cyclone. The only draw-
back to this comparison is that the sun was
shining in a clear blue sky over a placid sea.

As the bombs were crashing around us and
houses were caving in, before I knew it I was
humming a long- forgotten tune, doubtless
sub-consciously associated with those old days.
Two other men in our party independently
testified that they also began singing softly.

Perhaps this tendency to sing or whistle
is a manifestation of nerves and explains why
troops always do so when we see them em-
barking for France; they know that next day
they will be in the trenches — maybe over the
parapet. At all events we confessed to nerves
and fear.

When I reached the spot where the first
three bombs had fallen, glass strewed the
street for a block. In the middle of the
macadam road was a shell hole six or eight
feet across and three deep. Here lay two
men in uniform, who looked to me to be dead;

20 Facing the Hindenburg Line

there was a civilian, white-haired, who I knew
had been killed.

Yonder was a little girl, half her face gone,
yonder a young woman, both feet gone. Our
young lieutenant, a Y. M. C. A. man from
Canada, our host of those days, himself wear-
ing the gold stripe on his arm, which betokens
a wound, and no longer fit for service in the
field, was bending over the wounded. I heard
one of the stricken soldiers moaning, now,
"Mother, O, mother!" Yonder lay two little
babies already covered with sacking.

We rushed into a nearby basement, where
they said was a wounded woman. Her hip
was gashed. A Red Cross nurse appeared
from nowhere. They were carrying an old
lady, shaking with palsy, from a shell of a
house. She was 80 years old, if a day. She
had on bonnet and gloves. How she man-
aged thus to array herself for departure from
her home or to live at all in her demolished
house is beyond me.

Down the slope of the lower and busier
section of the town a narrow street crowded
with afternoon shoppers was strewn with
scores of dead, mostly girls and women. The
old shoemaker who had been in his little shop
was never found. Legs and arms and heads,
detached, were scattered about. The draper's

The Folkestone Air-Raid 21

shop was a mass of brick and stone and every
girl in it was dead.

The remarkable thing was that I heard no
shrieking and saw no weeping nor wringing
of hands. All faces were white; teeth were
clenched, lips compressed, women clutched at
their garments or spasmodically smote their
breasts. But not a moan nor a loud word
escaped any lip in my hearing. The English
are a marvelous people.

The young lieutenant in the Y. M. C. A.
service already referred to, was formerly in
the Princess Patricia's regiment. Of that gal-
lant unit not more than a half dozen or so are
in active service. Our lieutenant had not
sufficiently recovered from wounds to take the
field. On this day at Folkestone his hands
were bloody to the wrists from his activity
in first aid to the wounded.

Our little driver, Frank, was due to come
for us at six-thirty, detailed by the Army
Service Corps, to drive us out for a meeting
at Otterpool. The raid took place at six and
lasted until six-ten. When the time for us
to start came, and no Frank appeared, I began
to look about for a car; since, raid or no
raid, the boys at Otterpool would be expecting
us, and ought not to be disappointed. Of

£2 Facing the Hindenburg Line

course all cars were busy with the dead and
wounded.

At last, at six- forty-five, here came Frank,
his head bandaged, and no cap on. He had
driven his car out of the garage at six o'clock,
and stood beside the Osmond hotel. One
bomb wrecked the hotel; another fell in the
street thirty yards in front of him; another,
a like distance behind him. Debris or a bit
of a bomb laid open his head. They took him
into the hospital, and the surgeon sewed him
up and said:

"Now, Frank, you lie there," indicating a
cot.

"But," objected Frank, "I've got to drive
those Americans out to Otterpool !"

"Frank, lie there!" repeated the surgeon.
"You're in hospital."

When the surgeon's back was turned, little
Frank, nineteen or twenty, slipped out at a
side door and appeared at our pension only
fifteen minutes late and his hand as steady as
mine now as I write. He drove us thirty
miles an hour in his little "Tin Lizzie," upon
which the bits of brick and mortar were still
lying, out to Otterpool. We made him lie
down during our meeting, then he drove us
home again with the greatest steadiness.

Ill

TOMMY ATKINS IN AN AUDIENCE

"^^OME on, boys, let's have a sing-song!
y. What shall it be?"

"Arizona! Tennessee! At my
home in Kentucky! Pack up your troubles
in your old kit bag!'* There are a score of
different suggestions. Then Jack selects what
he pleases; he meant to, all along, anyway.
He sits down to the piano; he is the only
song leader in the Y. M. C. A. who doesn't
look around for an accompanist; then he
shouts :

"Come on! Let's go!" That's all that is
necessary. The Tommies do the rest. The
dust comes down off the rafters.

After a half hour of uproarious choruses,
varied by solos from Jack, and one or two
hymns or home songs, to lead up to the spoken
word. Jack turns the meeting over to me. By
this time the hut is jammed, men are standing
crowded all around the windows. Sometimes
they sit all over the platform and on the floor
in the aisles.

28

24 Facing the Hindenburg Line

Now when a speaker has a slippery audience
like this delivered into his hand, it is like
manipulating an eel. Fancy giving out a text

and saying: "Now, brethren " One

might deliver a moving sermon ; it would move
Tommy out of the door. No, no, all our
American men have made a conscientious
study of their opening sentences; for they
know that with Tommies the whole thing is
won or lost in the first two minutes. Hold
that audience for five minutes in any way,
by hook or crook, and you can swing into a
moral or religious drive and make it as strong
as you like; you couldn't shoo your audience
away. They'll stay with you, glued to the
benches, for an hour.

One of our men begins:

"If there's a man here homesicker than I
am, he'd better beat it! I want to see my
little kid at home!" Tommy yells with
laughter and sympathy.

Another throws out this, like a shot from
a 6-inch gun:

"Up till the other day you and I were
cousins ; now we are brothers-in-the-blood !"

For myself, I have evolved out of old bor-
rowed witticisms something like this:

"Tell me, men, honor bright and on the
square, if we hadn't been introduced as

Tommy Atkins in an Audience 25

Americans you wouldn't have known it, would
you?"

Groans, yells, catcalls and "Oh, no! Sure!
G'wan!''

Then I add:

"A fellow said to me the other day: *You
can always tell an American, but you can't
tell him much!'"

More groans, and an inquiring frame of
mind. They don't know whether this is
proverbial American boasting or not. Then:
"I have heard, too, that the difference be-
tween an Englishman and an American is
about this : An Englishman walks into a house
as if he owned the whole damn place. An
American walks in as if he didn't give a damn
who owned the place."

We are now getting on. Tommy feels sure
there is no firstly, secondly and thirdly coming
along. I usually consult the secretary or the
chaplain before introducing this unexpurgated,
old thread-bare comparison which, I believe,
was first made between a Harvard man and
a Yale man; but I find it usually unnecessary
to consult long at a time.

"Anyway, I hope that some day Englishman
and American may walk, each in his own
v.ay, into certain houses in Potsdam and Ber-
lin "

26 Facing the Hindenburg Line

And the trick is done. I now have Tommy
by the ear; and better audience one need not
desire on this earth, more appreciative, sensi-
tive, quick to any appeal of humor, emotion,
moral motive or spiritual idealism. You can
talk about this war driving the people who
are in it to atheism; it does, a few, but the
vast majority are driven to their knees. The
huts do not gather in simply the religious;
they gather in, with their tea and cakes, old
scarred veterans and soft-cheeked lads indis-
criminately, all sorts and conditions, excellent
cross-sections they are, of the entire British
army.

In the first five minutes I generally drag in
a reference to "Teddy" Roosevelt. It always
takes fire. One night a man arose in the
middle of the house and tossed a bronze cap-
badge upon the platform at my feet. I have
it before me now. It is the colonel's face sur-
round with the words, "First Illinois, Chicago
Rough Riders." I meet scores and scores of
Americans, mostly in the Canadian battalions,
but some in the other Imperials.

Then shortly I refer to President Woodrow
Wilson and there is a hearty, generous round
of applause. The average Englishman now
looks upon our President as a very wise, care-
ful, conservative man. An officer told me the

Tommy Atkins in an Audience 27

past week that Lloyd George had said to him
sometime ago that America ought not to have
come in any sooner than she did; she was of
more use as a neutral than as a belligerent
until just now.

Viewed from outside, a Red Triangle hut
in the British camps presents very much the
appearance of a ranch house on our western
plains. It is long, low, rectangular; built of
rough boards and stained brown. There is a
counter at one end where are sold cigarettes,
chocolate, coffee, stamps and the various neces-
sities and luxuries of Tommy Atkins' life.
There are tables where tea, coffee, malted
milk and soft bottled drinks are dispensed, to-
gether with biscuits and cakes. In some huts
there are billiard tables; in all, checkers, chess
and dominoes. At the other end of the room
is a stage, with piano and an auditorium.

In the late afternoon, when drill is done,
and the Tommies are tired, hungry and
thirsty, the huts fairly swarm, like bee hives;
and business is brisk. Your Englishman prizes
his tea beyond measure ; and the United King-
dom consumes more sugar than any other
nation in the world. One day a Canadian
Y. M. C. A. secretary was decorated by King
George in Hyde Park with the Military
Cross because, at Vimy Ridge, he kept up with

28 Facing the Hindenburg Line

the advancing line, and served chocolate and
biscuits to the men, under shell fire.

The Canadian secretaries who first came out
were commissioned as captains, later ones as
lieutenants, and are under military orders; but
as the authorities are distinctly favorable to
the organization, these officers have wide dis-
cretion. The English secretaries are civilians,
independent of military discipline, for the most
part are dressed in "civies," and consider that
they have an advantage in not being officers.
The Canadians, too, prefer their own regime.
In general, the Canadian huts are better
manned and managed, and, so far as one can
see, their secretaries get as close to the men
as do the civilian secretaries among the English
troops. Still it may be added, all Canadian
officers are much more democratic with their
men than are the English.

The huts furnish tons and tons of writing
paper, free, to the men ; and, as a consequence,
the tables are full, in off hours, of busy
writers. The Y. M. C. A. makes money in
some of its canteens and loses in others; but,
on the whole, does not pay expenses. Private
subscriptions make up the deficit. Canadian
secretaries are paid as officers; English are
practically unpaid.

Certain Canadian officers are authority for

Tommy Atkins in an Audience 29

the story that the other day all the officers in
a certain command having fallen, the Y. M.
secretary took charge, led the men, and was
killed; he was blown to bits; he was not even
found. The English secretaries are under-
sized, or over thin, or crippled, or too old
for service. Some men, fairly fit, have been
taken from the huts and hurried to the
trenches. I met a little thin rector in a hut
at Aldershot one day who has asked for and
received an appointment in France to go
right into the dugout huts in the trenches.
He starts next week.

One of our favorite song leaders in the
huts is a Canadian, Captain Pequegnot, fa-
miliarly known everywhere here as "Captain
Peg," who was gassed in the very first gas
attack in France. He has never entirely re-
covered, as the puffed look about the eyes
indicates; but his singing voice is unimpaired,
also his jovial smile, that made him once a
successful commercial traveler all over the
American continent. He understands all the
Tommies, and they, him; he can make them
roar like bulls of Bashan and render them wild
with joy, like March hares, whatever they
are. He "carries on" for half an hour before
introducing a speaker. "Carry on" is a favor-

30 Facing the Hindenburg Line

ite word here for "perform," and is constantly
in use.

My own steady sidepartner — for we usually
travel in pairs, a singer and a speaker — is
young Jack Barker, who hails from Girard,
Kas., and who has been the last five years in
Chicago. He has just been graduated from
Northwestern, president of his class, leader
of the glee club, an athlete of great success,
runs a hundred yards in ten seconds flat, has
a barytone that gives him a steady job in a
Chicago quartet choir, and a smile that draws
young men to him like submarines to a net —
blindly. He can play and sing more kinds of
ragtime than even an Englishman ever
dreamed of.

We go into a hut at about 7 p.m., usually;
Jack goes to the piano on the platform, beats
out a storm of pseudo-negro melody that sets
shoulders to wriggling, feet to shuffling, eyes
to dancing; and when he finishes with a bang
like a bomb from a German aircraft, the Tom-
mies yell. Then Jack just looks at them and
grins, and they yell some more.

At the close of our meetings we sometimes
give the men a chance to sign pledge cards
of religious confession and allegiance — a card
indorsed by the archbishop of Canterbury as
well as by Free Church leaders. Any man

Tommy Atkins in an Audience 31

may conscientiously sign it, no matter what
his Christian denomination or predilection;
and from thirty to a hundred and thirty
usually sign every night. Some ask us to
write and tell their wives or families what they
have done.

The other night a Kansas City lad, in a
Canadian battalion, whose parents did not
know where he was, promised to write next
day to his mother, while I wrote to his father.

Then, the last thing of all, comes the hand-
shaking— Tommy loves to shake hands and
Jack usually announces after we sing "The
King," which closes every public meeting in the
British army, that we shall be glad to shake
hands with every man in the room. "Please
come down this side and go out that side."
And they come ! It was hard on our muscles at
first, but now we're used to it, for Tommy
shakes hands as if he meant it. Then it's:
"Thank you. Jack," "Glad you came, captain,"
"Come again," "God bless you."

And we answer as they file by: "Thanks,
old man," "Mighty glad to be here," "God
keep you, my lad," "Good luck to you all the
way," and so on.

Sometimes one pauses and asks a question
or presents a problem; then it is a word of
quick answer and a hasty "God take care of

32 Facing the Hindenburg Line

you"; for they know and we know they havt
need enough of God*s care; to-morrow they
may be in the trenches; the day after, over
the parapet; maybe over the dark river.

Then Jack stands by the piano and they
gather round him like flies on a sugar lumpj
and I take a chair on the auditorium floor,
and there are several files deep all around me,
their faces pressed almost against my own,
eager eyes straining and tongues going. Ques-
tions and comments come quick and fast.
The American navy, the submarines, the air
craft, the merits and possibilities of cavalry,
and the old, old question, "How long do you
think it will last, captain?" pour forth in a
torrent.

"Yes, sir, this wound came from 'La Bas-
see.* " "I got mine at Vimy Ridge." "Yes,
sir, wounded twice, and back to France next
week." "How can I get a transfer to the
American army?" "I got mine in the thigh.
I can walk three miles as good as any man,
but not thirty. I'm done. But I could teach
bayonet work and bomb throwin', sir."

Sometimes your throat is full and choked.

ly

THE BRITISH FRONT IN FRANCE

I HAVE pretty well traveled Northern
France and the British front from the
sea to the Somme. For about eighty
miles of that one hundred and twenty, I have
been close up to the front lines and have seen
the activities there. All those battlefields so
famous, embraced within that eighty miles I
have explored. I have driven over registered
roads, that is, roads that the Germans keep
carefully mapped and can shell at any place
or time. I have picked up pathetic relics upon
three of the greatest battlefields of the world,
still fresh with the awful scars of conflict —
Messines, Vimy Ridge and the Somme. I have
been in the most advanced line of the British
and have looked over the top and down on
the Hindenburg line. I have listened to the
shrilling of our own shells over my head, felt
the trembling of the earth when our great
guns spoke and watched the black bursts of
the Boche high explosives on either side of
me within our own lines.
This is written in the lovely old chateau of

8S

34 Facing the Hindenburg Line

Count de , rented to the British gov-
ernment for the war. The count has his room
reserved, which he occupies occasionally. We
drove up a beautiful avenue of elms, four
rows x)f them, shading the driveway in and
out. Four British Tommies serving as but-
lers met us at the doorway and took our lug-
gage to our rooms. Mine overlooks the
driveway, and the large court in front of the
chateau, where motor-lorries now are being
unloaded with fresh gravel for court and
drives. I find hot water provided in my
private lavatory in a little pewter jug; a huge
tub, ready for my morning bath; an electric
reading lamp and a candle on the stand be-
side my Napoleon bed ; and I am writing upon
a beautiful walnut table of the time of Louis
XVI. Is this war? I can listen and hear
the guns.

There are four of us entertained at this
chateau, an English member of the diplomatic
service, an Italian literary man, and a widely
known English novelist. There are other
visitors as well; but these constitute our par-
ticular contingent.

It was fairly lively along the line, but on
the whole not what it can be when it is de-
sired.

We saw the desolate villages; a beautiful

The British Front in France 35

city — Arras — that once held some forty thou-
sand people, now a vast wilderness of ruined
cathedral, town hall and station, with street
after street that looked worse than the wake
of a western cyclone. In these streets are
still the trenches facing each other. They run
across the Grand Place, into and through
houses and railway station. There are masses
of tangled and broken barbed wire and blasted
trench; adjacent are miles and miles of battle-
fields that were once smiling farms and are
now the floors of craters.

Yet of all this destruction, even the noble
cathedral, like a broken widow, disheveled
and mourning, held nothing like the fascina-
tion for us that yonder line of living flashes,
bursting shells and upheaved earth possessed.
English observation balloons were strung out
for miles along the line. We stood under one
as it went up ; and from that spot counted nine
in the air. German planes came over us as
we stood there; and soon from their signals,
no doubt, the Boche batteries opened upon us.
You should have seen our captain hustle us
into our motor-car and hurry us away, while
the sound of our own "big stuff" rumbled over
our heads, replying to the German.

Finally a German sausage balloon appeared.
It was while we were at luncheon on the grassy

36 Facing the Hindenburg Line

bank beside the road. We all gazed at the
balloon through our glasses. Then we glanced
away, and in ten seconds, someone cried:
"There, it's gone!"

It was true. There was nothing left but a
puff of smoke, slowly enlarging in the air.
One of our planes had brought it down.

Look, there are three German planes, very
high, directly over our heads. Our anti-aircraft
guns opened almost as rapidly as machine
guns; and little dots of white shrapnel smoke
encircled the silver insects in the sky. They
turned tail and sailed away home, with two
of our machines mounting rapidly toward
them. Then followed the rattle of the
machine guns from the sky overhead; and so
the aerial duels kept up all the day. There is
no doubt the cavalry of the future is the
cavalry of the air; and that the most useful
contribution our nation can make to the cause
of our allies is thousands of planes and tens
of thousands of airmen to drive them.

We ate our lunches on the east side of a
road over a commanding ridge; and as we
lay there on the grass we saw the results of
the scouting done by those three planes. The
German guns, which had been strafing a
village on an opposite ridge, turned their aim
nearer, on a green spot on the slope. Shell

The British Front in France 37

after shell was planted in a space that seemed
to us not over a hundred yards in diameter.

"They must be searching for an ammuni-
tion dump," said the captain. "Those three
Hun planes must have observed it."

That luncheon on the ridge was the most
interesting one I ever ate. That is to say,
the entertainment provided for eyes and ears,
was beyond all shows ever spread before ab-
sorbed humanity. No doubt other men have
eaten with perhaps vaster scenes before them,
but I never had. There was the wide French
valley, most of which had been fought over,
inch by inch, already covering its yellow clay
nakedness with verdure, with poppies and dog
daisies; there were our convoys in approach-
ing roads, troops marching. Red Cross wagons
moving, horses and mules and motor lorries
by the hundreds, all doing something to con-
tribute to the show. There were our own big
guns betraying their location to our eyes by
occasional flashes and the whistle and rush of
the "big stuff" going like chain lightning over
our heads; and there was, most picturesque
of all, the beautiful battle in the air.

Half way through luncheon our captain told
us we were really violating the law, being
without helmet and gas mask. We had left
ours in the car standing in the cut in the road

38 Facing the Hindenburg Line

behind us. We all smiled, however, and went
on with our luncheon; knowing how careful
British officers are of the safety of their
visitors, and knowing if the danger were im-
minent he would insist upon every precaution.
Two days later, we never got out of touch with
our helmets and gas masks, but wore them
almost the entire day. We kept our heads
down, too, when told that we should; for
only a week ago a French correspondent was
killed about where we stood. A German
sniper picked him off.

What fascinated me, almost as much as the
air battles, was a dawning appreciation of the
subterranean fights, the deadly game of hide-
and-seek all the time going on. Of course,
I had read of the mining and counter mining;
and heard of the mine craters; but one can
form no conception of these things until he
walks the underground galleries and stands
beside and in such a yawning punch bowl as
that of Messines. It is impossible to put the
picture in words. It was not these things,
however, that overwhelmed me with a sense
of the battle of the cave men ; but it was when,
with a candle in hand, thirty feet under
ground, damp dripping all over me, and my
feet covered with the white chalk mud, I met
face to face and talked for half an hour with

The British Front in France 39

a sergeant major who had lived and dug and
fought for more than a year in the veins of the
earth under Messines.

He was a Durham miner, and he was "some
man.'* All the time, he knew, and all his
comrades knew, that German miners were
digging towards him, above him, beneath him.
Each side knew the others' activities, and were
springing mines, closing each others' galleries,
blocking one anothers' parties off from air and
food. It takes brains and ingenuity as well
as daring and science to win underground.
The Teuton is not lacking in theory, system,
science and a certain practical precision; but
when it comes to intellectual self-reliance and
inventiveness, he goes down before the Anglo-
Saxon, or else, as at Messines, he goes up.

In a dugout in these same galleries, I came
upon a group of ten or a dozen Tommies,
standing up munching their dejeuner. One of
them stuck out his hand to me in the semi-
darkness, saying:

"Hi, there, America, I'm from Ohio. I
knew as soon as I saw the gold cord on that
field hat you were from the States. I was in
the Fourth Ohio at the Mexican border. This
is an American bunch in here, five or six of
us are Americans. Let me see, here's one,
here's another."

40 Facing the Hindenburg Line

That lad was surely loquacious; a little
touch of home made him feel the whole world
kin. That was not a Canadian battalion,
either. Next day, the man highest up on
Vimy, and nearest the enemy, said, as soon as
he saw me: "I'm from Frisco." He was in a
Canadian unit; for, of course, the Canadians
have earned the right to Vimy Ridge.

One more little incident. It was late after-
noon, and we had paused for tea in a shat-
tered town. We had been there earlier in the
day and saw very few soldiers; now there
seemed thousands in the streets. They had
been in the cellars sleeping during the day.
Falling in with the stream of them now, we
soon arrived at the Ace of Spades theater.
A section of the army has improvised this
theater and puts on its own performances ; and
very creditable they are, too.

I stood at the rear, jammed into the big old
hall of a half crumbled stone structure, with
fifteen hundred Tommies from all quarters of
the earth, and watched a blond young beauty,
handsomely begowned, with plenty of silk
stocking and plenty of daring eyeflashes, sing,
dance and flirt with three harlequins on the
stage, and three rows of officers in the front.
A most careful inspection could find no flaw

The British Front in France 41

in the figure except, perhaps, the rather liberal
dimension of feet and hands.

Here, I decided quickly, was an excellent
place to get rid of the large importation of
Virginia cigarettes, which the generosity of
certain friends at home had made it possible
for me to bring over from London. Here at
the front tobacco is hard to come by, especially
American tobacco, dear to the heart of the
British army. And nobody in England or her
army smokes cigars, except an occasional duke
or earl or wandering American nabob like
myself. Comparatively few smoke pipes.
Everybody smokes cigarettes, including padres
and Y. M. C. A. secretaries. Nobody drinks,
even in officers' messes, so far as my observa-
tion has thus far gone, half so deeply as the
average American clubman. The king's ex-
ample seems to count. Crossing the Channel,
in the restaurant on the boat, where nearly
every English gentleman a few years ago
would have had his scotch and soda, I heard,
the other day, officer after officer call for soft
drinks. Whisky was the rare exception.

Well, anyway, in the Ace of Spades theater,
the cigarettes were turned over to the corporal
in charge of the show; and one of the harle-
quins, at the end of a song, came out smoking
one, and, announcing that here were the com-

42 Facing the Hindenburg Line

pliments of friends in America, began tossing
out the boxes. Such a yelling, howling, happy
bunch of Tommies I never saw together be-
fore. That same afternoon, on a road leading
up to the trenches, we stopped a line of hot,
grim- faced men, bearing each his sixty pounds
of kit on his back, and gave a package to each
man. It was a study to see their faces light
up. We paused, too, at a dressing station,
where wounded had been brought in the last
night from one of those little raids which are
of such regular occurrence nowadays on our
side of the line; and, passing among the
stretchers a package and a greeting from
friends across the sea, went to each man. All
who could smile did smile.

GREAT BRITAIN JUST BEGINNING
TO FIGHT

IF I were asked what is the mood which,
more than any other, marked the British
army at the front and the British nation
back of it, at this time, I should reply, "Con-
fidence." From all I can hear, this could not
have been said four or five months previous
to the summer of 191 7. Then there was pro-
found uneasiness lest the submarine should
starve the island kingdom, lest the mighty ring
of steel about the central empires should fly
into a hundred shattered bits and the face of
the world be changed. Why has confidence
succeeded this apprehension? The answer I
get on all sides is: "America has come in!"
From what I learned at the front, if any
still cherish the fond hope that a great gap
will one day be made in the Hindenburg line,
and the sides of that gap rolled up upon them-
selves in a swift turning movement of cavalry,
as in the old warfare, let him reconsider it at
once. You need only to glimpse the modern

48

44 Facing the Hindenburg Line

enginery of war ; walk over, or rather clamber,
slip, slide and jump over the field across which
it has rolled, to become instantly aware of
how utterly impossible it is that light troops
should here ever again, with flying banners,
dash after a routed foe. War is no longer a
**blue racer'* that speeds over ground; it is a
huge caterpillar that crawls, a measuring
worm that humps itself up and inches pain-
fully and slowly along. War has always gone
forward on its belly, and now its numbers have
become so huge, its necessary equipment so
multitudinous, that to supply its wants a whole
industrial system must accompany it forward.
Railways, telegraphs, depots, shops, stores,
buildings, offices, all must crawl forward with
it, and that, too, over volcanic surfaces that
must be remade and rendered traversable.

To be sure, I met officers in a machine gim
school who are experimenting and expecting
"a more liquid state of warfare" ; but I thought
I could see that they were not sanguine of
such a consummation in the very near future.
No s)anptoms of liquefaction are discernible
at present; gelatinous is the adjective that best
characterizes the existing state; mud, putty-
like, tenacious mud, unromantic, sordid, ugly
mud — that conveys the impression of the
whole glorious field of war to any man who

Great Britain Beginning to Fight 45

has seen it or had a hand in it. No, it is only
by pushing the heavy motor truck of war for-
ward through the mud, inch by inch, that
the English hope to win; and they know that
we Americans have got to get our backs, and
hands, and feet, and faces into the mud with
them and push and bite and sweat and bleed,
in order that civilization may be saved.

There are still a few left of the old type of
cavalry officers who feel that some day their
horsemen will come into. use on the western
front. But for the most part these horsemen
are grooming their mounts and kicking their
spurs and going on parade many miles behind
the big guns; and the officers close up in the
line smile as they allude to an occasional press
dispatch which tells how a hole was made and
the cavalry came dashing up. Besides, little
triangular bits of steel, so made with three
spines that one of them always points up, can
be strewn by the handful across any road ; and
a few strands of barbed wire — omnipresent in
this war — ^will play havoc with any troop of
horse that dared to dash anywhere. Very
circumspect and gingerly must be the advance
of horsemen over these fields.

"But," you say, "is the German not con-
fident, too, these days?"

If so, his confidence is not founded on facts,

46 Facing the Hindenburg Line

but upon government dictated reports. The
government allows the newspapers to print
only what suits it. There is no doubt on this
point. The average soldier or officer, on either
side, knows from personal experience only a
very small bit of the line, his own salient, or
strip of trench, or what he can discern from
a neighboring hilltop. We, however, are
privileged to see, with our own eyes, the con-
ditions covering nearly a hundred miles of
British front. The ordinary fighting man
must take his knowledge from what the press
contains, or his fellows, close at hand, can
tell him. So German prisoners, when told
they will be taken to London, begin to laugh:

"Why, London is destroyed!"

"You'll see,*' comes the quiet answer.

"Besides, no prison ship, nor any other, can
cross the seas. Our submarines destroy all
British ships."

They do cross; they do see London; they
realize, when it is too late to communicate
their knowledge, that England looks just as she
has always done except for her men in khaki
and her factories pouring out gun and shell.
There is no mistake at all that the German
people are deceived — systematically deceived —
by the men that rule her. Of course I could
not approach German prisoners, although I

Great Britain Beginning to Fight 47

saw many; but I could talk to the sergeant
majors and commissioned officers who handle
them. The prisoners are all cheerful, happy,
hard-working. They delight in their tasks, as
Germans always do. If they had kept on at
work instead of going to war they might have
conquered the world.

By the way, I talked all one evening to a
delightful Scotch major, an attorney from the
Highlands. When we asked him if there was
any fraternizing between his troops and the
Germans he replied:

"Fd like to see the Hieland mon that would
fraternize wi' onybody!"

Furthermore, the German confidence is ooz-
ing. The Boche is like a cask, the seams of
which have been sprung by the British artil-
lery. He is leaking out his spirit. Slowly,
in spite of his inspired press and his menda-
cious government, he is becoming aware that
his case is hopeless. If his psychology is such
that ax and crowbar are needed, at times, to
get ideas in, ax and crowbar have certainly
been used. He no longer fights downhill. He
is fighting an uphill fight. He no longer pos-
sesses superior artillery. Even an amateur
can see for himself where the major hand is
at the front. He no longer scouts in the air
unimpeded; he does precious little scouting at

48 Facing the Hindenburg Line

all, although he does some and always has to
fight his way.

It is just a question, then, of constant pres-
sure and biting. How long that process must
continue before the Boche caves in no man
can tell. There are signs of cracking here
and there. You can hear the great structure
groan and creak clear across the Atlantic al-
most as well as one can here. When it will
collapse is hidden from all but the gods alone;
but that it will collapse, unless something en-
tirely unforeseen occurs, nobody in England
any longer doubts.

Confidence, therefore, is in the heart of the
British nation. It cheers them immensely to
realize that as long as the British bulldog is
hanging on to the throat of the Hohenzollems
so long will Uncle Sam be hanging on to the
ear, the hind leg, the flank, or wherever he
can get a hold. I asked one of the leading
British war correspondents one day what he
believed America could best do for the general
cause. His jaws snapped like Roosevelt's as
he spat out :

"Give the death blow !"

A dozen other officers, in reply to the same
question, and the head of a department at the
foreign office, and twenty men on the street,
all reply:

Great Britain Beginning to Fight 49

"Come to us in the air! Bring on war-
planes by the thousands! Finish them from
above ! That is the only fluid warfare !"

Perhaps the press dispatches give America
some idea of the heartening effect of Ameri-
can entrance to the war. But I doubt if
the length and breadth and depth of that effect
can be conveyed in the printed word. But this
is certain: We have come at the instant of
the greatest need to stand beside France, to
take part of her load, to revive the drooping
lilies, to repay in a beautiful fashion the debt
we have owed her throughout our young life.

When all is said and done, however, it
grows plainer and plainer every day that it is
with our motherland that our future destiny
is to be cast. England is our natural ally.
For France, we have a sentimental, grateful
regard; but with England the tie is one of
interest, business and political interest, as well
as blood and common speech and common
ideals. There has existed between the two
nations, British and American, a quiet under-
standing for nearly a hundred years. To prove
it we have only to look to the three thousand
miles of undefended Canadian border. We
have only to remember that at Subig Bay on
the famous day when Dewey dumped the
Philippines in our lap, there were two other;

50 Facing the Hindenburg Line

fleets at hand, a German and a British. Said
the German admiral to the British:

"What are you going to do about it?"

Said the British admiral to the German:

"That is known only to Admiral Dewey and
myself."

We have only to remember the words of
Admiral Sims some seven years ago in Lon-
don, words for which, if I remember, he was
called home and publicly rebuked and privately
patted on the back:

"If ever the British Empire is seriously
threatened from without, she will find the
United States ready with every ship, every
dollar and every drop of blood, to come to her
defenrc."

Those words are not only fulfilled in seven
years, but the author of them is promoted and
in command of our naval forces on this side
at the present moment. We have only to re-
member, further, that when we fixed the tolls
for the Panama Canal England remonstrated
with us, and we gave in to her ; that her navy
makes possible our Monroe Doctrine; that she
accepted our mandate gracefully in the Vene-
zuela matter, when she knew and we knew
she could have blown us out of the water.

Britannia rules the waves. Without a doubt
she must continue to rule them. And it is to

Great Britain Beginning to Fight 51

our interest that she should. Why should we
ever try to rule it, when it is so much cheaper
to have her do it for us? Nor is it likely
that we shall ever build such a merchant
marine as to compete with her. Why create
a new express company when there is a line
already in existence that we may ultilize on
equitable terms? We may build some ships,
doubtless will; but economic conditions are
such that America will not be likely ever to
attempt competition with the natural common
carrier of the world. Great Britain.

No, it is to our interest, as well as in har-
mony with our cardinal principles of democ-
racy, freedom of the seas, open ports, rights
of peoples to choose their own governments,
freedom of conscience; all these and more
that we should stand shoulder to shoulder
with Great Britain. It is little odds whether
the alliance is a tacit one, as in the past, or
an articulated one in the future. A quiet un-
derstanding with Great Britain is more lasting
and more binding than a treaty, signed, sealed
and delivered at Berlin. These two great
English speaking peoples may and please God
they will, together with such allies as they can
gather around them, into a league for peace,
a federation of states, what you please, for the

52 Facing the Hindenburg Line

next thousand years, keep the peace of the
world.

We can, in other and far finer words, fulfill
the dream of the English poet laureate — no,
not English any more than our own — the poet
laureate of English speaking people every-
where, when he sang:

"I dipped into the future far as human eye could

see,
Saw the vision of the world and all the wonder that

would be;
Saw the heavens filled with commerce, argosies of

golden sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight drooping down with costly

bales ;
Heard the heavens filled with shouting, and there

rain'd a ghastly dew,
From the nations* airy navies, grappling in the central

blue,
Till the war drums beat no longer, and the battle

flags were furled
In the parliament of man, the federation of the world."

VI

"GENTLEMEN, ONCE MORE INTO
THE BREACH"

ASKED by a friend at the visitors' cha-
teau, British headquarters in France,
what is my most outstanding impres-
sion after examining most of the western front,
my reply was and is: "The power and calm
precision of Great Britain."

This power and precision at the front is
apparent even to a military tyro like myself.
For a strip of at least thirty miles back of the
fighting line England's great orgahization
ceaselessly moves, wheel within wheel, cog
upon cog, without haste, without creaking and
screaming, without generating unnecessary
heat. We saw a lorry in the ditch once or
twice, but others were calmly pulling it out.
We- saw huge guns patiently standing under
poplar trees, while men and traction engines
paused for breath. We saw the field where the
tanks stood in their stalls, to be groomed like
— war horses, I started to say ; war mastodons
is better. We saw two tanks stranded on the

53

54 Facing the Hindenburg Line

field of Messines. We saw the airplanes in
their hangars, the only things that looked im-
patient, as if they were caged falcons; but the
young lieutenants who drive them are the calm-
est of the calm, with all the devil-may-care
way they have about them. It was all impres-
sive, stopped your breath at times and made
your heart go fast.

As for headquarters, it is always the quietest
place in the war zone. There are a few motor
cars, but not so many as at a field hospital.
As for the men about headquarters, the calm
and the reserve cannot be said to increase with
the rank of the officers, but it certainly does
not diminish. These men drive or walk in ex-
posed positions as calmly as they attend to any
other parts of their concerns.

We passed through a little village where are
many French people living their accustomed
lives, and where British Tommies are billeted.
As we drove through it we noted children going
home from school. One British soldier lay on
the grass by the side of the road playing with
three or four little girls. I particularly marked
him for his apparent love of little children.
Five minutes later, from the shoulder of a hill,
we looked back and saw three German shells
explode in that little hamlet, throwing up
masses of brick, dirt, dust and smoke. How

" Once More into the Breach " 55

many lives either of soldiers or non-combatants
were taken in toll we never learned, but I have
been unable to forget that soldier and those
little ones.

Weeks after, when I mentioned the village
and the circumstances, a British officer replied:
"Yes, nobody goes there often, who does not
expect sooner or later to get hit. It is a hot
spot."

It is significant to observe, in these frontier
villages, the number of commingled races en-
gaged in the death grapple with the Hun. As
we sat waiting for a bridge across a canal to
close and let us by, we noted English, Portu-
guese, French, Algerian and Hindu allies
standing about and trying to communicate.
The Portuguese are neat, light built, swarthy
little fellows, very smart in their light blue
uniforms, quite similar to the French. We saw
columns of them going to and coming from the
front, their transports, consisting largely of
animal drawn vehicles, and their air partaking
somewhat of the jauntiness of the Japanese.
They seem to have made a very favorable im-
pression upon their British comrades, of whom,
I am told, they are very fond. Portugal, the
brand new republic, is likely to make a place of
value for herself in international affairs by her
conduct in this war.

56 Facing the Hindenburg Line

There is evident eagerness along the front
to welcome and discuss America and her en-
trance into the game. If nothing more than
her moral support and the increased confidence
which she has engendered in the breasts of the
Allies, were to result, her part has not been
played in vain; but there is much more that
she is already doing over here. She has com-
panies of foresters and railway men at work
in England. Altogether, she is surprising her
allies by the rapidity of her action. But the
hope I hear expressed on all sides is that she
will speed up the manufacture of war planes
and the training of her young men to drive
them. There is no other way so quickly and
adequately to put an end to the air raids on de-
fenceless women and children, as by filling the
air with cavalry. The vexed question of repri-
sals, which is disturbing the British press and
public, will then take care of itself.

A few hasty pictures of interesting spots
must suffice for this chapter. Our car stops
in the rain, at the foot of a steep and muddy
path between dripping hedges. We dig in our
sticks, and slip and slide and crawl, up, through
paths and trenches, past dugouts and sandbag
cottages, to a dizzy wooded hill, high over
fighting ground. Here we look down from a
perfect observatory, fitted with telescopes, tele-

" Once More into the Breach " 57

phones, and wireless, upon the ground below,
held by the Boches.

It was a point of wild beauty and grandeur,
commanding view and an air of romance, fif-
teen hundred feet, it seemed above the plain,
approached only by naturally and artifically
screened ways, impregnable to attack.

Suicide Corner is the name given to a bend
in a certain village street. The houses had all
died of spinal meningitis, paralysis and small-
pox. Such battered and punctured stucco, still
to stand in the shape of walls, it is difficult to
conceive. Of course the tide of battle has rolled
on beyond now, but to make the scene real, a
"walking wounded" man turned the corner as
we drove by, his arm hanging in a blood-
stained sling and his face ghastly pale. He
stood, however, and chatted awhile with the
military policeman who was there to direct
traffic. I shall never forget that face, as he
strove hard, by puffing a cigarette, to keep his
features from working with pain. Several am-
bulances came along just at this time, filled
with recumbent and sitting forms, red band-
ages visible, on the way from the advanced
dressing station to the field hospital. There
had been a bit of a raid somewhere near last
night or a shellburst in a bad spot to-day.

We alighted one afternoon to view the ruins

58 Facing the Hindenburg Line

of a handsome chateau that the retreating Ger-
mans had blown up as they left. The gates and
winding walks were there, the cement fish-pond
and even some of the flowering plants and
shrubs ; but the house itself was the best illus-
tration of the phrase "not one stone left upon
another," that I ever saw. Literally there were
not two bricks or stones still fastened together.
Even the cement, which had remained set for
centuries, was crumbled into the general sand
heap. It was a house left desolate, and Nature
was doing her best to cover it with weeds and
wild flowers that the place thereof should
know it no more forever.

Leading down the slope from that chateau
for half-a-mile or so, is a deep cut road, — the
famous sunken road — ^bordered by Boche dug-
outs. It is like a street of tenements, once in-
habited by rabbits. When the English took it
over Tommy refused to burrow and to-day he
lives in tents where the Germans once lived
under ground. I saw football and cricket, a
rifle range and a practicing band, — the band
made up largely of boys of twelve to sixteen —
the bath houses with scores of naked bathers,
the laundries and disinfecting plants all out
above ground, and Tommy strolls about whistl-
ing, unmindful of occasional shells. Such is
the difference between the two foes.

" Once More into the Breach " 59

They told me of a football game that was
going on one day in a certain field. The Huns
got wind of it and dropped a few Jack John-
sons into the game. Tommy stood it a while,
and then, moving to the other end of the field,
calmly finished his game.

The bands play the columns up to the
trenches and back again. It puts "Cheery-oh"
into them. I saw a band of Highland pipers
playing a column of Kilties up toward the
front line, and I should not like to get in the
way of a rush from these rawboned, bronzed
bare-legged Scots. Some talk of the Cana-
dians as the finest troops in Europe; some, of
the French chasseurs; but who that has seen
these various units of splendid fighting men,
whether Irishmen, Welsh, Scotch, Lancashire,
French, or territorial, can use any such expres-
sion of comparison as "the finest fighting
men?"

What is to be done with all the ravaged ter-
ritory when the war is over, is now engaging
the attention of the French government. Ex-
pert foresters have been looking over the battle
grounds of late; and it is likely that they will
be planted with trees. They could not safely
be farmed, on account of unexploded bombs
and shells, even if the surface could be leveled

60 Facing the Hindenburg Line

to anything like a manageable area and the soil
be restored.

There is a ridge back of Vimy where thous-
ands of Frenchmen bravely died, and where
you see boots with fleshless legs in them; but
what is yet more problematical for the future,
there are "duds," or unexploded shells and
bombs. I picked up a little bomb the size of
a turkey egg and said to the captain: "Is this
dangerous ?"

"I should say it is dangerous. Put it down.
Last week I saw a doctor in the hospital. He
had one finger left on one hand and two on the
other because he picked up a bomb like that."

So I gingerly laid it down. A few days
later, as we entered another field, the captain
reminded us: "I shall have to ask you not to
touch anything without permission." We, by
this time, needed no warning. On Vimy
Ridge I saw a whole box of unexploded hand
bombs, the size and shape of a turkey egg,
while ten yards away were five or six live
aerial torpedoes as big as a six-inch short shell,
with flanges to guide their flight. Needless to
say, I walked well around the exhibition and
touched none of the works of art.

As we entered upon the shell area at a cer-
tain point, officers crossing it advised us to
keep moving; for said they, "The Boche

" Once More into the Breach " 61

knows that the King is somewhere hereabouts,
and if the enemy see any party, they are sure
to do a bit of strafing."

The King was at our chateau that day, in
our absence. We saw the bandstand erected
on the lawn, and we noted the absence of the
Count's September-morn type of art on the
grand staircase. When we came in at night,
the most delicate and chaste porcelains and
plaques adorned the walls.

No officer told us the King had been there.
We simply felt it. Next day, about noon, my
curiosity got the better of my discretion, and
being alone with our captain, I said : "I under-
stand royalty is somewhere in the neighbor-
hood." A full minute of silence followed.
Then he said: "I believe there is a story of
that kind around." I was sorry I spoke. The
English papers next week had long stories
about the King at the front and pictures ; but
my article, written a week or two later, was
censored of all mention of his majesty. Such
is the intelligence and personal equation of cen-
sorship. It is all luck, after all.

It now merely remains to add that the water
journey between England and the British front
is admirably managed. Destroyers deploy on
either side of the troop ships, and well in
front, forming a triangle. As soon as we

62 Facing the Hindenburg Line

moved off from the dock, we were all ordered
to put on lifebelts. The boats poured forth a
thick black screen of smoke behind, blocking
the open end of the triangle. Then we steam
ahead as fast as we can go.

What a pity that all this genius of Great
Britain, this man power, administration, skill
and science, invention and ingenuity is forced,
by the madness of the Hun, into destruction,
smoke, wholesale death and mud ! If all that
power were turned into construction, what
could it not accomplish? Splendid as is Lon-
don, with its massive buildings and monu-
ments, the British army and the organization
back of it could build, in a few years, a finer
and more perfect city than London. God grant
that it soon be given a chance to build and
never again be compelled to tear down!

VII

THE BRITISH OFFICER— A NEW
TYPE

THE old idea of the British officer must
be changed, even as the old idea of
the British Tommy. Time was when
we used to think of the typical officer, espe-
cially the subaltern, as a titled, monocled
young slip of a fop who had little or nothing
in the way of equipment and training except
social position, pull or even the money neces-
sary to purchase a commission, who leaned on
the breast of a "wet nurse" in the shape of an
old bronze sergeant-major, put there to tell
him what to do. That day has gone, ra-a-ther !
I remember a verse of an old poem about
those times:

The sand of the desert is sodden red,

Red with the wreck of a square that broke;
The gatling*s jammed and the colonel dead;

And the regiment's blind with dust and smoke,
The river of death has brimmed its banks;

England's far and honor's a name;
Yet the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks.
Play up, play up, and play the game I
63

64 Facing the Hindenburg Line

Now, the old Rugby and Eton notion of the
officered class must be revised. Echoes of
the old time, however, still come to us in
stories like this, which is a favorite over here :

A young subaltern was sitting in judgment
upon a Tommy who had overstayed his leave.
His sergeant-major was at the officer's elbow
to prompt him.

"You should be ashamed, an old soldier like
you," lectured the young cub. *'I ought to
be especially severe with you. I think I'll give
you six months C. B."

Now C. B. means confined to barracks.
Everything is condensed to letters in the army.

"Sh-sh-h!" said the sergeant-major. "You
can't do that, sir. That's altogether too
much."

"Well, make it a month then."

"No, no, sir. You can't confine a man to
barr'^ -'- for a month for such a petty offense."

"No?" said the young lieutenant. "Then
what do you suggest?"

"A week's pay, sir; that would be quite
enough."

"Very well, then, I give you a week's pay,"
said the young man, and reaching into his
pocket, he drew out a handful of silver, count-
ing out the seven shillings, gave them to the
offender, muttering severely, "See that you

The British Officer— A New Type 65

don't let it occur again!" No, sir, those good
old days are gone.

Yet an incident happened to us that showed
us some remnants of that helplessness in offi-
cial position. We, with entire innocence, had
gone into a forbidden area without a pass.
Nobody challenged us. We spent two days
going all over that area, riding round like
kings in a motor car — which, by the way, was
also unlawful — ^and seeing all the sights.
When it was time to leave we went to the
police station as usual to be checked out.

"Americans," cried the police sergeant.
"Where's your pass? How'd you get here?
What' re you doing here?" He was plainly
flabbergasted.

"We just came!" said we blandly, smiling
sweetly.

It developed that no civilian had a right to
go on the boat by which we had gone. Per-
haps the fact we were in khaki accounted for
our easy entrance; but we were perfectly in-
nocent. The sergeant took us to the chief at
the chief's residence, for it was after hours.
The chief called in his clerk. Then all held
a serious, perplexed consultation. They had
us on their hands; they were not responsible
for our coming; they did not know what to
do with us. At first they insisted we were

66 Facing the Hindenburg Line

not five feet ten as our identity books de-
scribed us. We drew ourselves up and swore
we were. They scrutinized our photos and
our faces. Satisfied at last that we were the
very chaps we claimed to be, they once again
went into committee of the whole and decided
to let us out of the area, provided we went
by the proper boat line, and reported ourselves
upon arrival to the O. C. (commanding officer)
of the military district. They stamped our
books and wrote in the proviso, and then,
evidently relieved, thawed out and we had a
lovely half hour's chat.

Next day, upon reaching the mainland, we
went promptly to the O. C.*s office. Of
course, they were expecting us. Of course we
did not see the O. C. in person. But we saw
a young subaltern and an old clerk. They
evidently had formed no plan as to what to
do with us. The subaltern consulted the old
hand; and the old hand shook his head and
bad nothing to suggest. The whole history
of our movements was told and retold and
they looked blank and swore it was impos-
sible. But there we were, serene flesh and
blood evidence that it was even so. At last
they decided to send us on to the civil police,
with our thumbs in our mouths. Then, seeing

The British Officer— A New Type 67

the old clerk could suggest nothing definite,
the Yankee asserted himself.

"No you don't," I said, "we are not going
to chase over to the police and be sent back
here, or somewhere else. You are going to
write a writing of some kind, put some kind
of a rubber stamp on it — we don't care what —
or else we are going to spend the rest of the
day quietly in these delightful chambers." So
in two minutes it was done and the perplexed
young cub had taken instructions from an out
and out greenhorn. That is a remnant of old
days.

The British officer of to-day has been
through the mill. No man is supposed to buy
a commission any longer. Who am I that I
should say it is not, in rare instances, even
yet done? But taken for all in all, officers to-
day have come up through every degree of
training and actual service in the ranks.
Many have got their stripes for bravery or
efficiency and all have passed certain set ex-
aminations. There are no good old days nor
good old ways left in the army. To be sure,
likely men are seized upon, college men, spe-
cialists, even labor contractors and foremen,
and are prepared for commissions, but they
must first be common Tommies, in training
for months, then cadets, with a white band

68 Facing the Hindenburg Line

round their caps to indicate that they are
blossoming into command; then, after ex-
aminations, full-fledged officers.

I have not found British officers reserved.
I have found them modest, sometimes even to
bashfulness; and about military matters, close
mouthed as oysters. But, as someone has said,
Englishmen, if they once open up, are per-
fectly willing to tell you all about themselves.
If they like you they will easily open up. If
they don't like you you might as well talk to
a bronze statue. To-day the American, if he
shows himself even halfway modest, is ace
high among the Allies and they are eager to
like him and talk to him.

As for myself I want no more charming
companion and friend than a cultivated Eng-
lish officer. They are tact personified in spite
of certain old American preconceptions.

One of the most attractive was a Highland
major, next to whom I sat at dinner one night
at the chateau in France. He was an attorney
before the war and wondered how he was ever
going to settle down to routine office work
when all was done. He was forty or there-
abouts, had just married in 191 4, and had in-
flammatory rheumatism twice in his life, which
left him with a bad heart. But he volunteered
on the first day of war through sense of duty

The British Officer— A New Type 69

— ^and got by the doctors undetected. He
told me how he lay night after night in
his trench dugout in mud and water, and
cursed himself for a fool, when all he had to
do was to go to a surgeon and be transferred
to base. But he was absurdly healthy all the
time and seemed to bear a charmed life. Men
were killed all round him, one night one on
each side of him, and he was unscathed. He
had developed a sort of fatalism, as so many-
do in the front lines, which he would admit
only as a sort of Calvinism.

"Ah," said he, "it is in the trenches you
come to see the bottom of men's hearts !"

That remark gave me my opening. I asked
him what he meant by seeing to the bot-
tom of men's hearts. He started, looked me
between the eyes, and opened up. I thought
he was hungry for religion, and my surmise
was correct. He was a man of the world,
but a churchman. He had not been to church
for three years; had been to a parade service
once or twice; expressed disappointment with
the padre, and had had no religious conversa-
tion in all that time.

"Britishers do not talk much about such
things, although they think much," he ex-
plained. When he found I was willing to talk
of religion he would not let go of me all that

70 Facing the Hindenburg Line

evening, but led me out under the trees on the
great lawn, and kept me till late bedtime. I
shall never forget that splendid Highland
"mon," and that night.

War has shaken English conservatism to its
foundations. It will be long, I hope it will
be centuries, and so do the English, before
they relapse again into the satisfaction with
old things and old ways that if Germany had
only been wise enough to keep on in her
conquering commercial path, might have led
to the peaceful absorption of the British Em-
pire. These men are now eager for new
things, new ideas, new speed and efficiency,
new precedents, or none at all. They are
actually growing impatient of the old formula :
"This is good enough for us, because it was
good enough for our fathers. It always has
been done this way; it always must be done
just so."

Something of the new attitude may be
found in the contrast of two padres, whom
one sees to be typical of two classes. One of
them riding on a bicycle passed a soldier of
his own regiment who did not salute. The
padre got down off his wheel, reprimanded
the man, and made him salute. Of course
the man did so ; and, of course, he told all his
mates and, of course, it went through the bat-

The British Officer— A New Type 71

talion; and that padre never had any more
influence among those men. Another big raw-
boned Scotch chaplain, just back from France,
had not heard of the new order that all officers
in public must carry or wear kid gloves. He
was swinging along, when a little subaltern
stopped him and cried :

"I say padre! an officer must wear kid
gloves, don't you know!"

"Now look here, sonny," came the rich
growl from the Highland breast, "you toddle
along, will you! there's been too much kid
glove about this war, anyhow !"

I bet my bottom dollar that padre is not
without influence in his own battalion.

The coolness and nonchalance of British
officers is proverbial. We all have mental
pictures of them leading their men over the
parapets. They go with cigarettes in their
mouths, no weapon in hand but a swagger
stick, and their lawn tennis manners on. If
you have such a picture in your mind you
need not change it. After the early days of
the war the general staff became more eco-
nomical of officers. The mortality had been
far too high, and bravery is now more tem-
pered with discretion. But there is no dis-
counting the elegant and easy sang froid of
these highly mannered Englishmen. I have

72 Facing the Hindenburg Line

seen them at it and I know. Particular about
trifles of conduct? Well, I should say! One
of them told me without realizing how typical
he was, how he sat one day in a tram in
Liverpool and became conscious of the man
across the aisle gazing at him:

"You know how some people will do; they
begin at your boots, travel all the way up and
finish off at your hat! Beastly annoying,
don't y'know! Well, I decided to give him
as good as he sent. So I just laid down my
paper and I met him with an eye volley
straight in the nose. A few days later I met
a naval officer face to face, and although a
stranger to me, he said he had seen me a few
days before and had annoyed me by gazing
at me, that he did not mean to be impertinent,
that he was only envious. His own uniform
was not to be done until late in the week.
Then he told me with great glee that he had
joined his ship, which was a destroyer, on a
Wednesday, had put to sea on Friday, got
in among a nest of U-boats, bagged three, and
was back on Saturday. I never saw a man
so happy."

Nobody knows all the stories of coolness
and heroism among the naval men. We shall
not learn them till the war is over, but here
is one that perhaps the censors will allow to

The British Officei-— A New Type 73

go by. It was told me by a medical officer
who was aboard the Franconia when she was
sunk while acting as a transport.

"We had five or six naval officers aboard.
They were sitting in the smoking room — re-
member the smoking lounge in the old Fran-
conia ? It was very long, as long as this dining
room, and twice as broad. They had just
ordered whisky sodas. Suddenly there was an
explosion and the steel floor of that smoking
room just buckled up and burst apart in the
middle, spilling the whisky sodas into the
bottom of the ship. One of those officers
called the steward and said:

" *I ask you to witness, steward, that we
have paid for these whisky sodas and have not
had time to drink them.*

"Then the rascals went below, got on their
lifebelts, came back again, asked the steward
for a big sheet of foolscap, wrote out a long,
'we the undersigned,' setting forth that they
had ordered six whisky sodas, for which they
had paid nine shillings, with a sixpence tip,
and had not been allowed to drink them.
Therefore they entered a claim against the
British government for the nine shillings and
sixpence with accrued interest from date.
Then they walked in a body up to the bridge
and handed it to the skipper. The old man

74 Facing the Hindenburg Line

told me afterwards he never was so grateful
to anybody as to these cool young devils for
the steadying and bucking up influence of their
impudence.''

It was the same medical officer who told
me he was on duty at one of the entry ports,
where the American medical units were com-
ing through. It was his function among other
things to welcome arrivals from our country,
see them through the customs and start them
on the way to the war office in London. It
came to be a habit to bring the American
doctors to the police authorities, and, with the
assurance that these men were all right, hustle
them by in a herd. One day he noticed that
one of these American arrivals could speak
only poor English. Except, however, for
wondering a bit, he thought little of the cir-
cumstance, but sent the man on to London.
A short time after, word came that the doctor
with the lame English had not appeared at the
war office. Then, in about six weeks came
further word that the man had been caught
and shot as a spy.

"Yes," cut in a colonel, sitting near, an
old stager. "They are daring devils, some of
these Boches. I have seen them in staff
officers' uniforms, going about our lines in
France, giving orders like any brass hat of

The British Officer— A New Type 75

them all, and then shot next day at sunrise for
German spies."

These officers get "fed up" on war talk.
They unbend like a loosened bow if an op-
portunity comes to discuss late art, music or
old architecture. Some of them, of course,
have read little, or only in certain lines, but
when you come to the men of culture among
them, you have to keep your memory working
lively to keep pace with the rich flow of
literary reference that ornaments their con-
versation. Then, after a season of this de-
tached refreshment, before you are aware, the
bow is bent again, the old look of thoughtful
strain comes back, and you know that these
are the men who have bent their shoulders to
the task, and will not relax until they have
seen it through, who are saying to themselves,
consciously or unconsciously, "This one thing
I do."

VIII
TOMMY ATKINS UP TO DATE

TO ask what do you think of Tommy
Atkins is Hke asking what do you think
of the Democratic party, or the in-
dustrial classes, or the late subjects of the
Czar. It might have been possible, before the
war, to lump Tommy Atkins in a type, as
Kipling could do — the type of the British
regular, just as you could formerly classify
the American soldier. But that time is now
gone. There is really no such thing as Tommy
any more, although we continue to refer to
him as if there were. The private British
soldier of to-day is a highly variegated and
diverse individual.

If you come into anything like close touch
with him, get acquainted with large numbers
of him — ^you see one will speak as if he were
a type — you learn from what different origins
he comes, or more properly they come.

They may be reduced to outward similarity
by the unvarying khaki; just as men would
be so reduced if they were stripped of all

76

Tommy Atkins up to Date 77

clothing; but, within, by birth, training, en-
vironment, they differ all up and down the
gamut of British society.

An incident, told me by an officer, will ad-
mirably illustrate this. A woman in a certain
town in the south was told by a sergeant-
major that three men were to be billeted in
her house.

"But I will not have them!" indignantly
cried the "lady of the house."

"You'll have to, madam," softly responded
the sergeant.

"What, three common Tommies in my
house ! It's an outrage ; I'll not have it !"

"It's orders, madam, and the men will be
here at 5 o'clock to-day."

The sergeant left her, fuming and fussing.
At the appointed hour the men came; but the
"lady" would have nothing personally to do
with them. They were turned over to the
maids, ate in the kitchen, slept in the attic or
the barn; they "jolly well" enjoyed them-
selves, too, for the several days of their stay
in the company of the maids.

When the time came to depart they asked
to see their hostess, as they had not glimpsed
her face and were desirous of thanking her
for her hospitality. She grudgingly consented
to tell them good-by, although she would not

78 Facing the Hindenburg Line

tell them how do you do. When they were
shown into the presence of the graven image,
one handed her his card, while expressing his
gratitude, and it read: "Sir James Blank."
Another did the like, and it was: "Rufus
MacDonald, Bart," we'll say. The third was
the sixth son of Lord So-and-So, and wore
the title of "Hon." To say that the rank-
loving woman ate her bread in tears for weeks
to come is to put it mildly.

Here's another good illustration of the di-
versities of soldierly origin, told me by the
padre who had had part in the conversation.

"How do you like your hutmates, me mon ?"
says the padre. "Me mon" in this case hap-
pened to be Sir Angus MacAngus of Angus,
let us say.

"O, they'll do," answered the Scotch noble-
man, for this nobleman was a real one.
"Let's see, there's the barrister from Glasgo*,
he's keen, sir. There's the costermonger from
Edinboro', he's no bad sort. There's the pro-
fessor from Aberdeen; the merchant, the
chartered accountant, and the cotter from up
Inverness way. They'll do, sir, fair enough;
they'll do."

There were a whole string of others, but I
have exhausted my knowledge of Scotch towns
and localities, as well as occupations; and I

Tommy Atkins up to Date 79

do not write shorthand, so could not take
down the padre's words as he told me the
story. My geography of a Scottish battalion
is no doubt badly upset, as it is. Anyway,
some notion is given you of the pull made
upon all the men of the empire to supply the
rank and file.

Many men entirely capable of becoming
officers prefer to remain privates for a variety
of reasons. Thus, a private takes no respon-
sibility. He is looked after, instead of being
compelled to look after anybody. His danger
is not so great as that of an officer who must
be the first over the top in a charge. Perhaps
not many men of the highest grade of hero-
ism, you say, would be actuated by this latter
motive, and yet, after all, a man who be-
comes a soldier of any rank has made the
supreme sacrifice. He offers his life, whether
it is taken or not; he gives his all; it is not
needful to expect all of them to go beyond.

I sat for some days at table with a fine,
square built Canadian officer. At last I
learned his history. He was a theological
graduate of McGill University. He enlisted
as a stretcher bearer in a medical unit, thinking
he could there do the most good and the least
harm.

He did nothing but carry stretchers, which

80 Facing the Hindenburg Line

requires tremendous physical vigor and endur-
ance, men having to hurry at times to escape
shell fire. They must often set a heavy car
on rails, double quick. They must go up
through the barrage. Men's legs finally give
way in this work, with a sort of rheumatism.
There is intense pain for two weeks, then
they can hardly walk. They often hugged
walls in shell fire, so a shell would have to
pierce two or three walls before reaching
them. He asked for some work that would
give him a chance for study. The colonel
said "Chaplain?'' "No, I'd rather be in a
combatant unit." He felt that he could do
more good there.

He was assigned to the Royal Garrison
Artillery School for Officers and has been in
London ten months studying. He was never
wounded. He thinks war deepens religious
life and sobers men.

"Men who've been out to France don't
laugh easily. Jokes must be good to make
them laugh," said he. I know this to be true
from sad experience with some of my own.

There is scarcely a battalion but has a cor-
poral or a private who was organist of a
great church, an artist of distinction, a singer
or a writer, and none without men who in
private life had known the great universities,

Tommy Atkins up to Date 81

or the great commercial houses, or the big
politics of the nation.

I could name you several deathless books
that have fallen from the hands of young men
who now sleep beside the Somme, or Vimy
Ridge, or Ypres ; and I have shaken the hands
that will yet pen great poetry and plays, or
paint great pictures, or compose great sym-
phonies if they live, which may God grant.

Perhaps among the Colonials, that is the
troops from Canada, Australia, New Zealand
and the overseas dominions of Great Britain
in general, are to be found the strangest tricks
of fate in upsetting ante-bellum social condi-
tions. Thus an Australian officer told me of
a young subaltern who was compelled to fix
a penalty for a private soldier under him.
The soldier had stayed out of barracks beyond
his allotted leave. Said the young man:

"I don't know what to do except to dock
you a month's pay. A month's pay, then, it
is!"

In private life that common soldier is the em-
ployer of the young subaltern and is holding
the job for him until the war is done.

Another story is on everybody's lips here
about an Australian colonel who addressed his
battalion before a certain famous review and
said, among other things:

82 Facing the Hindenburg Line

"Now, men, do try and behave well to-day
and do yourselves and me credit, and, for
God's sake, don't let anybody forget and call
me Bill!"

This democratic spirit of the Colonials is
a great scandal to the ideas of discipline
cherished by the English army. No private
in England may speak to an officer, in any
circumstances; and I saw in a daily paper
where a certain officer had been court-mar-
tialed for dining with one of his men. The
plea was guilty and the defense was that in
private life the common soldier was a man
of good social position, but this fact will not
avert the penalty.

Officers can only travel first class on rail-
ways and privates only third. A young! jnan
complained to me that he and his brother, who
was an officer, could not travel together when
coming home from France on leave, and could
not speak to each other in public. This
rigidity is somewhat relaxed in the stress of
the immediate front; but tightens again as the
danger passes; and it is beyond doubt also
wise, for a variety of reasons which cannot
here be set forth. It is enough to say that
only iron discipline can avoid terrible loss of
life when men are charging slowly forward
behiod a barrage of fire. Colonial lack of

Tommy Atkins up to Date 83

discipline at first cost more than one trench,
more than one gun, and thousands of lives;
but all that has now been remedied, and the
men of Canada and of Australia have won
undying fame at Vimy and Messines not only
for bravery but for disciplined self control.

No doubt our American militia will be
found to err on the democratic side when they
come across; and one who has seen something
of the war can only exhort them to fall in
as soon as possible with the rigid ideas of
discipline in the British army. To obey, and
obey rigidly and to the letter, will save losses
in the long run. It is not needful to lose one's
personality and become an automaton like the
boche, as the individual initiative and heroism
of the British has shown, times out of mind;
but it is needful to obey, not to do more than
one is told and never to go further than one
is ordered.

I am here reminded of the word of an old
French poilu who was guarding German
prisoners when we passed the spot, where they
were at work upon the roads. We said:

"Do any of them ever escape?"

"Never," said the old soldier. "They are
afraid to escape. They know the French
women would cut their throats. Oh, they are
much afraid of our French women."

84 Facing the Hindenburg Line

And is there not cause?

"Are they contented ? Are they good work-
ers?" asked we.

"Contented? To be sure," said he. "Are
they not slaves?"

Concerning the free democracy of the
Colonial troops I heard a good story the other
night at the chateau, which the officer who
told it said he had from General Bird wood,
himself, commander-in-chief of the Australian
forces. It was a rainy night, and the general,
his insignia all covered with waterproofs,
came upon one of his men leaning against a
wall, his rifle ten or twelve feet away. Said
the general:

"What are you doing here, my man ?'*

"Fm the bally sentinel, sir," said the man.
"And who the hell are you?"

"Fm the bally general," answered Bird-
wood.

"Well," said the soldier gathering his great
length and breadth together leisurely. "Wait
till I get me gun and 111 salute a bally gen-
eral!"

"Birdie," as his men fondly term him, was
very gleeful over the story. I give it not on
my own authority, but that of the officer.

The Australian Tommy reminds me of the
Texas or Colorado cowpuncher of a genera-

Tommy Atkins up to Date 85

tion ago, long, brown, angular, more or less
loose jointed and careless of gait, appearance
and manner. His field hat, jauntily turned up
at the side, and pinned with a bronze sun-
burst, is made, I am told, of rabbits' fur, re-
duced to felt by a certain pneumatic pressure.
I closely examined the texture, and it seemed
as fine and tough as the felt in an American
army Stetson. The cavalry carry ostrich
plumes in the turned up side of the hat brim.

The New Zealand troops, wearing field hats
just like our own, peaked at the top, and with
a red hat band instead of our cord, seem to
me to possess a certain lithe grace of carriage
and distinction of countenance, all their own.
They, too, are tall, slender fellows, without
the awkwardness of the Australian, or the
beef of the English. They remind me of
Harvard and Yale track teams done up in
khaki. You would think them born aristo-
crats, from their cleanly chiseled features and
well-set-up forms. I find, too, that others have
received the same impression of them.

As for the Canadians, they are our close
neighbors, and we know them well in America.
Their discipline and their democracy are pretty
much like our own. One of their generals
was a wholesale grocer before the war; an-
other was a young attorney, who came up

86 Facing the Hindenburg Line

through the ranks. Their officers were largely
business and professional men, commercial
travelers and clerks. They are the type of
men in our American militia; and what the
Canadians did, like the Princess Pat's, at
Ypres — there are only six or seven of them
now left in active service— or the long sweep-
ing line of them at Vimy Ridge, that can our
own lads do in — well, never mind the place
to which the railway is a-building in France.

So, you see, the British Tommy, like woman,
has an infinite variety. And his spirit ! Well,
it is like that of John Brown, which goes
marching on, with a song. How they sing!
Grave faced fellows they are at times; pain
of wounds is written upon their countenances,
in wheel-chairs, on crutches; the burden of
a great task reveals itself in a set look in the
eyes of perfectly healthy men on march, or
looking out from trench or high observatory;
but start them singing in a hut or by a road-
side, or on the way down to the transport at
the quay and — ^how they sing !

The German used to sing. "Deutschland
Ueber Alles" once rang over these fields and
through these woods, and "Die Wacht am
Rhein" and "Ein Feste Burg"; but now, sad
to relate, because of the heartlessness of their
rulers, the disregard of humble human life,

Tommy Atkins up to Date 87

the song is crushed out of the heart of song-
loving Germany.

The London cockney is the most amusing
man in the service, always witty and bright,
effervescent, bubbling with repartee ; and when
the cockney is quite young and gathered to-
gether by the hundreds in a hut, as at a certain
camp I know, he is like a storm of mirth.
One such fellow, a costermonger, was selling
strawberries in the streets the other day, dur-
ing the air raid. He never stopped ciying his
wares, but we heard him add a line to his
song:

Strawberries! Strawberries! Fresh and red!

May as well die with a sweet tooth in your head!

At a certain convalescent camp in France,
where are thousands of men, I saw them work-
ing at their trades. Some were bootmakers,
mending what we call shoes ; tailors were over-
hauling clothing; one fine featured young
chap, who looked to me like an artist or a
Greek scholar of Cambridge, blushed when
he saw me watching how he darned socks,
then grinned back at me; tinners were making
things out of old biscuit cans; carpenters,
making furniture out of packing cases; others
were melting down the solder from waste tins.
I saw a poster in the theater dining room—

88 Facing the Hindenburg Line

"The Bijou" — which from memory I repro-
duce:

Competition Friday night. Every man do the thing
he does best, as well as he can do it. Here is a chance
for artists, artistes and would be artists. Do your
best for the sake of Yourself.

On the least encouragement, Tommy brings
out the photographs of wife, children or sweet-
heart to show you. A man cannot be all
wrong, so long as he does this. Take him for
all in all, the British Tommy is surely a man !
There is no great bin of apples but has its
speckled ones; yet, by and large, I mean, the
British army compels admiration in any ob-
server who delights in looking upon real men.
We shall not see its like again, you and I;
for when this war is done, completely done,
that vast army will melt back into a nation
once more, a nation of clerks and shopkeepers,
scholars and artists, manufacturers and sailors,
parliamentarians and colonizers, while there is
rung in, let us trust, the thousand years of
peace.

IX

TWO UNDECORATED HEROES

I TALKED for hours, recently, with two
heroes who will never wear a decora-
tion! Indeed, I talk with heroes every
day. Some are lads of eighteen and twenty,
who tell me how they went over the top ; how
they felt when their bayonets first pierced
German breasts — "a bit shaky, sir, yes, sir*';
how they got "theirs" from a bit of shell,
shrapnel, or machine gun ball; how they lay
three days and nights in a shell hole, or
crawled back far enough for comrades to find
them ; how they are "quite all right now, sir,"
and eager to get back to France, or "unfit for
active service" and are set to guarding German
prisoners.

A young Virginian named Burke, red
headed and eighteen, carried two gold stripes
on his arm. The first is for a wound through
the shoulder and the second through the
thigh.

"I'm going back next week, sir," he said,
"and is there any way I could get transferred
to the American army?"

89

90 Facing the Hindenburg Line

The handsomest woman we have met in
England opened conversation with three of us
the other day, in a railway carriage, and bit
by bit we learned her story.

"My husband was killed three years ago.
All the men I know have been killed. Nobody
in our sphere of life is left. My little boy
is the last of his name; he will inherit that
great place yonder. But we can no longer
bear it in England. We shall go to the colo-
nies. I am under thirty, but life to me is
done."

She is a superb woman, a Juno. There was
no tear, no heroics, no melodramatics. It
tugged at our hearts.

Another incident I would not have believed,
if told to me by another. Some of us went
with "Captain Peg*' to a cinema.

"Ah, there are friends of mine,'* said he.
"How do you do?" bowing to them. "That

is Mrs. , and her daughter. She lost

three sons in France, and has another at the
front."

They were showing war films — the siege of
Antwerp. It was said the films had been taken
at great risk, by the consent of the military
authorities. By and by, a young officer in a
trench turned toward the camera and smiled.
He was life size, and very handsome.

Two Undecorated Heroes 91
'Herbert, oh, my Herbert!" Mrs.

behind us, was standing, her hands out-
stretched towards the screen. Then a shell
came, or a mine, and Herbert was blown
into bits. The mother fell fainting. She had
known her son was dead, but never how he
died. Captain Peg gathered her in his arms
and bore her out.

Now, for the two heroes. The first, we

met in an officers' training camp at G

Park — the beautiful private grounds of an
English mansion. There were lads with down
on their chins, the flush of youth and health
on their cheeks. They were college men for
the most part. Some were fine musicians.
Some were men over thirty who had been
making as much as $25,000 and $30,000 a
year as managers in "the city." All now were
in the rough khaki ! There was a viscount or
two, sons of dukes and earls, and of M. P.'s,
double honor men at Oxford or Cambridge.

"Yes, my father," said one, modestly, yet
with pride, "was with Mr. Balfour's commis-
sion to America. He is a member of Parlia-
ment and quite a speaker. You see, sir, Mr.
Balfour is no longer young, and must have
someone to help him with the talking."

It was the best audience I had spoken to
in England, and I enjoyed my address im-

92 Facing the Hindenburg Line

mensely, whether anybody else had a good
time or not. I could imagine myself talking
to Missouri University cadets, my own lads
among them.

All this time I paid little heed to a small
man in civilian dress in a dim comer. Then
the secretary, Mr. Bull, informed me that Mr
Dyer was going back to town by our train.

"He is a great Y. M. man. He heard I
was perplexed about my lighting system for
this hut and came out to help me. He has a
hut of his own in Camberwell — the finest in
England. You will enjoy talking with him.*'

"Ay, ay," thought I. "He will bore me all
the way in. He must be one of the unco*
guid."

He was in reality, a heavily charged car-
bonated bottle. I lazily pulled the cork when
we were in the compartment and he effer-
vesced. We sat up and took notice, interject-
ing a question here and there.

"Yes, sir, I'm a business man. I work
twelve hours a day. Furniture is my line.
Thirty-three years in Camberwell Road.
When the war came I built a hut o* me own
on Camberwell Green, just across from my
place. Oh, yes, it took some work to get the
consent of the council ; it took eighteen months.
I gathered twelve thousand signatures and

Two Undecorated Heroes 93

addressed many public meetings. Yes, I work
three nights a week at Victoria Station."

"Three nights — you mean all night, and then
back to business "

"Yes, sir, all night, and a bite of break-
fast, then back to business."

"But, man, you'll kill yourself!"

"What's the odds? Didn't ye say in your
address, a few years more or a few years less,
what odds?"

Here he ran his hands through his thick,
snow-white hair.

"Three years ago this was black as the
crow; and I'm fifty-five. But the lads are
dying for me and mine. I've a lad at the
front now — flying corps. Once I had three.
Now only the one."

"What do you do all the night?"

"I go after the lads. There are twenty
thousand a night that come into the town,
straight from the trenches or elsewhere. The
same people are waiting to get them, sharks,
they are, and I can pick one out of their
clutches now and again. When I see a woman
of the town nab one I go up and say, *Bad
company, old chap.* Then he may say, What
the hell is it to you?' I've been knocked
down three times; but sometimes I get him,
give the girl some money and take him to my

94 Facing the Hindenburg Line

hut, a bath and a clean, nice bed. Sometimes
I get a drunk one — the police turn him over
to me. There was a mine sweeper, and his
wife and children waitin' for him'* — ^but the
Story is too long. Enough to say the mine
sweeper went home sober for his holiday,
stayed sober and came back with a great
bouquet of coarse flowers from the "missus."
He was lost at sea next trip.

"Then there was a lad dog-tired, so tired
he could hardly speak, straight from the
trenches. He was filthy. He came with me
half asleep. I took off his clothes m'self.
His feet were blistered. I gave him his bath
and put him in clean night-clothes and between
clean sheets. I took his wallet and found
ninety-five pounds in it!

"Then I found his father's address and rang
him up on the telephone. It was past mid-
night, and he cursed me when he came to the
'phone. I told him I had his son. Then there
was a pause. He said he'd be there in half
an hour. The big motor rolled up, and the
man came in. He was a stock broker, and
he and his lad had not spoken for some years.
The boy had run through half his fortune.
He came in and stood by the little bed, and
cried; then he bent down and kissed the sleep-
ing boy, and went away. I arranged for them
to meet next morning at ten."

Two Undecorated Heroes 95

There is more to the story, but the lad is
an officer now in France, an honor to his
father.

Story after story poured from the lips of
the little white-haired man, as we rolled up
to London. Our throats were drawn and
ached.

"Good night, gentlemen, and will you come
and see my hut, some time, in Camberwell?"

"By Jove, old man, you can't shake us.
We're going straight to your darned old hut,
if it takes all night."

We drove through the dark streets, the
little man beaming and pointing out all the
spots immortalized by Dickens, such as Mar-
shalsea Prison, Blackman's Road and Shake-
speare's first dwelling in London and the like.
He was certainly up on old London.

We had expected disappointment in the hut ;
but there it stood, flashing out in the night,
like an officers' club. Indeed it looked like an
officers' club within.

"This is the lady manageress," said Mr.
Dyer, introducing us, and a handsome lady
smiled and bowed. "This is Alderman So-
and-so." Then beneath his breath, "Yonder

is the Duchess of ." The little man

was all swelled up with innocent pride. There
were four handsome billiard tables in apple
pie order, in a room all to themselves. There

96 Facing the Hindenburg Line

was a writing room that would do credit to a
seaside hotel. There were great easy chairs,
dainty hangings and tasty crockery.

There were well chosen pictures everywhere.
It was midnight, and the place was full of
Tommies. I tell you, it was as handsome as an
officers' club. Then there were the lavatories
and showers. We tiptoed into the dormitory
— a hundred and seventy-five beds, as clean
and artistic as your boy's bed at home, the
linen all changed every day and the price six-
pence a night. For a little more a lad may
have a neat little room alone.

Then we walked out in the "tea garden" in
Camberwell Green, under the moon.

"It's fine to serve tea in, in summer, now,
isn't it, sir? There is but one thing more
I want to make the place complete. I shall
build a room just here, with a bow window
full of glass, for the sun to come in; where
husbands and wives, fathers and sons may
meet, to talk alone. You know they do get
estranged, when separated in the war, and they
must talk it out alone to get set right, you
know, sir."

"Have you brought husbands and wives to-
gether again?"

"Oh, time and again sir. Now there
was "

Two Undecorated Heroes 97

"Look here, Mr. Dyer, is this the night
you're to stay up all night?"

"No, to-morrow night."

"Then, you go home and go to bed. You
shan't stand 'gassing' to us all night."

He will never wear a decoration — in this
life, at least.

The other hero is a Scotch Presbyterian
chaplain. Captain Robertson. He stands six
feet and an inch in his stockings, is built like
a North American Indian, with a face by
Phidias or Praxiteles. He is just from a hos-
pital, convalescent from wounds received in
France. It was dim twilight in the corner of
the hut where we sat very close, eye to eye,
and I got his story out of him, in the clean-
cut English, almost American English, char-
acteristic of the cultivated Scot.

"Ah, 'tis great experience ! I am almost fit
to go back — breathing is still a bit bad. I
don't know if they will let me go back. Yes,
I was in a transverse, coming back from the
front line trenches — yes, I was in the front
line every day — when the shell got me.

"I did not think at first I was hurt, but felt
a strange sense of exhilaration. My left arm,
though, was twisted clear around in front of
me and quite useless. Still I thought it was
but shock. I walked on, feeling no pain, to the

98 Facing the Hindenburg Line

dressing dugout. The doctor asked me what
was the matter, as I looked pale. I told him
I supposed I was hit. They cut off my tunic,
and I was bleeding profusely in the chest and
under the arm, which was broken here and
here.

"A large piece of shell had cut through my
check book, which was just beneath my heart,
and penetrated the side. If the check book had
not been there it might really have been seri-
ous. I fainted by the by. They operated.
I had ever so long in the hospital. Ah, yes;
you never know brotherhood except in the
danger and in the hospital. Brotherhood —
that is the great discovery of this war.

"Another time, in the town of A , in

the ruins of the cathedral, I had a marvelous
escape. I took refuge from the shelling, as
I was passing on the street, and one burst
fifteen yards away; they kill at thirty. Frag-
ments whizzed past my ears and I was covered
with debris. It was the Almighty. We had
called a service for that day and had sung
only a few hymns, prayed, and I had begun
to preach when the major stepped up to me
saying:

" Tt is too dangerous, captain. We must
disperse the men.*

" *Righto !' said I, though I had begun to

Two Undecorated Heroes 99

forget to be afraid in the interest in my
sermon. Wonderful how interesting a man's
sermon becomes to himself!

"Oh, yes, in the trenches every day and all
day, visiting the men. One night an officer
said to me:

" 'Let's crawl across No Man's Land, only
ninety yards, and see the Hun at home.'

" 'What's the good of being a fool?' said
I. But we went. We peeped down into the
trench, but never a Boche was in sight.

"I was saying the burial service once in a
cemetery — just a passage or two from the
Good Book, d'ye know, and a prayer. A few
soldier lads were there. Shells were whizzing
over all the time. Suddenly we heard the loud
whirr of aircraft and machine guns. The lads
scattered crying: 'She's coming down in
flames. Run ! Run !'

"I opened my eyes and looked up. There
was a plane, all afire, coming straight down
at my head. I was glued to the spot. Then,
just above me, she veered off with the wind,
and fell fifty yards away. Ah, yes, it was the
Almighty! It burned a long time; yes, it
was our own. When the flames had done,
there was naught of the two brave lads but
two shriveled mummies. It is a great experi-
ence, a great life. I hope to go back."

. BRITISH ARE BRAVE IN SORROW

THE iron has certainly pierce4 the heart
of British homes, and is entering
deeper and deeper every day; but
braver and more determined people do not
live. The time is at hand when American
homes may look forward to the same destiny.
Daily, almost hourly, I have been brought into
touch with the sorrows of British hearts, and
the heroism. Perhaps some of their stories
may strike responsive chords in American
breasts and tune them for the same high cour-
age.

He was a tall bearded Australian. We were
sitting together, after breakfast, in the
"lounge" of a London hotel. He was in the
uniform of an officer of the Red Cross. We
fell into conversation, and I naturally called
him "doctor.''

"No," said he, "I am not a physician, but
a plain business man." Then he told me how
it all came about. His son was in the army,
had been wounded at the Dardanelles ; and the

100

British are Brave in Sorrow 101

father had come all the way to watch over
him. The lad recovered, rejoined his bat-
talion and was killed at the Somme. "Then,"
said the father, "there was nothing for me to
do but to stay here. Oh, yes, I have another
son, and a daughter, but why should I go
back? He was all in all to me, my comrade,
my best friend. He was such a cheery, ami-
able boy, and he loved me as a companion
better than any other. We were more like
brothers. So I joined up, in the medical
corps, to do what I could among the wounded
lads in the hospitals." Then we compared
photographs of our sons, a very common pro-
cedure over here.

I fell to thinking, though I did not tell him
of it, about two Australian boys I had seen
on the battlefield of the Somme, about a
quarter of a mile from the famous sugar
factory. They were busy about something at
the side of the crater filled road. They hailed
us and told us it was no good trying to get
through with our motor, so we alighted and
went over to talk with them. Then we saw
what they were engaged upon. It was a slab
of sandstone ; and they were carving with their
jack-knives, in beautiful regular letters an
"in memoriam" for a comrade whose young
head lay somewhere in the storm-tossed earth

102 Facing the Hindenburg Line

close at hand. Officers and all, we stood there
silent, rather awestruck; and, though we said
nothing, afterwards our thoughts all went back
to that far away shore where only a few
months before, no doubt, for these soldiers
were beardless boys, they had played in field
and forest, in country lane, or rolling surf,
or city street, with that other boy hero, who
lay asleep under the fast greening earth. Yes,
birds sing over those battlefields. I heard
skylark and thrush above that young lad's
grave. I heard them and saw them, even, in
the smoke and thunder of the guns.

There was a young lad at work in the
kitchen of the Y. M. C. A. canteen. He was
in "civies," but there were gold stripes on his
sleeve, the little gold stripes that tell the story
of deep danger and suffering. They are not
given unless the wound puts one into hospital
for a prolonged stay. A closer glance betrayed
the scars in face and neck; but he was such
a slip of a boy to be a veteran, disabled, unfit.
I made inquiries and found he was not yet
seventeen. He had enlisted in the navy, expect-
ing, of course, to be sent to sea ; but in the press
of affairs and the shortage of men, marines
were sent into the trenches and he was among
them. He got his, and got it badly. He was
recovering, however, and, anxious to serve,

British are Brave in Sorrow 103

was at work washing cups and cooking until
the time came when he could go back. They
will not, of course, let him go again into
trench work until he is nineteen.

"They need such a lot of loving," said a
fat, middle aged matron in a hospital to me,
half apologetically, the other evening as she
came bustling a bit late into the canteen.
"You see, some of these lads have never been
away from home before; and there is a world
of love in their homes; we don't realize, I
think, how, in the poorer homes, there is so
much love. I sometimes think the poorer they
are the more there is. Anyway, they need a
lot, and I try to give it to them."

Most of these had come back from Salonika,
Egypty East Africa, with fevers, especially
malaria. Some had been in hospitals months,
nearly or quite a year. They did their best
to sing and cheer, but their faces were drawn
and yellow and their brows damp. One lad
looked infinitely sad in the second row. I
could not make him out. Then they told me
that he was deaf from fever, and had been
so for months. Of course, he could not sing
and he would shake his head now and then
and wrinkle his forehead. One fine young
Canadian, with hollow cheeks, I was talking
to, and asked him to come and sit nearer the

104 Facing the Hindenburg Line

front. He shook his head and smiled and
pointed to the window. His heart goes back
on him and he needed air.

One night, in a hospital, while the singing
was most uproarious, I noticed a big, burly
patient take a smaller comrade on his back
and carry him out. Afterwards the nurses
said the smaller one had had all the fun he
could stand for the present. He was going hot
and cold by turns, and chilling. Was he shot
through the legs or spine? Oh, no, no wound
at all, only shell-shock ; but he could not walk,
hardly speak. Months some of them are like
that, no wound, but loss of memory, speech,
hearing, even motion of any kind sometimes.

On a Sunday night I was speaking in a
suburban chapel, in London, when I saw a
young soldier lying flat in a long basket upon
wheels rolled up beside the pulpit. By and
by it was announced that Private So-and-So
would sing. A little plain woman, his wife,
they told me, stepped up to the recumbent
boy — he was no more than a boy — raised him
to a sitting posture, put pillows at his back and
sat down at the piano. Then he sang in a
sweet, clear tenor an old gospel song, simple
and unostentatious, "And I shall See Him
Face to Face.*' They afterwards told me a
machine gun ball had lodged in his spine;

British are Brave in Sorrow 105

surgeons all feared to operate. He was para-
lyzed from the waist down. One surgeon said
if the boy was willing he would take a chance.
When he talked with the patient the latter
said, "Well, doctor, I am not in your hands,
but the good God's. Do as you think best."
The bullet was removed, but whether the lad
will ever walk again nobody knows except
Him in whose hands he is.

An old dock laborer, his hair white as snow,
took me aside the other day after a meeting
at a certain port. I had made some reference
to our sons. He only wanted to tell me about
his own, his only boy, who lay out yonder
at Bethune. "His grave is marked, too. My
nephew saw it. I shall go there, of course,
when the war is done. Vd sl great deal rather
be lying there now in his place if I could.
Reconciled? Oh, yes, sir, I*m growing recon-
ciled. After all, it was a noble death for the
boy, and he'll miss all the trouble of this world.
He went away so happy and brave." Every-
where I see something of that father love that
would rather take the son's place if it could.
Much is said about mother love, and it is quite
the most beautiful thing in the world, but
there is something to be said, too, for father
love, for it has little to say for itself.

In a home of wealth and luxury, we sat

106 Facing the Hindenburg Line

talking, when a man of sixty made the first
reference to his boy. I was wondering if
there were any sons. I saw two daughters.
When it came it was about like this: "That
was before Harry was killed." There was an
involuntary movement of hand to forehead,
and a wrinkling across the brow, then the con-
versation went on.

Another little short Scotchman with white
mustache, a manager in a great shell factory,
was showing us through. By and by, when
he and I were alone, some reference to sons
fell from my lips. "Ay," said he quickly, "I
have a son out there, he is under the ground —
this way, gentlemen!"

Do not think, however, that they are all
under the ground. One lovely white-haired
woman in a canteen hut told me of five sons
she has given to her country. All have been
in the service. One, the youngest, lost his
right arm, the eldest is a mighty pilot in the
flying corps. "Oh, yes, I'm proud of him.
He is a flight commander, yes, captain is his
rank. He was home on leave last week. He
has just shot down his sixth plane and killed
the eighth Hun. He is a fine lad!"

Another woman in a neighboring hut told
how her son had had his twenty-second opera-
tion, and she felt sure he would now get well.

British are Brave in Sorrow 107

She had just been to see him in the hospital,
on the South Coast. "He was an officer, you
see; and was hit in the leg below the knee.
His servant tried to carry him back to the
trenches, when the Germans saw them and
turned a machine gun on them. The servant
was killed and my son received nine bullets
in his back. Then he lay out five days and
five nights in a shell hole." I have known of
wounded men lying out six days, subsisting
on their emergency rations of hard tack and
bully beef and a canteen of water. These long
waits for help are not at all uncommon. Then
she continued: "Oh, no, it was not the
wounds in his back that gave all the trouble.
They easily got those bullets out, but it was
the leg. Gangrene set in and they have been
amputating a little more and a little more, and
it seemed as if they could never check it.
Really, I believe a little American nurse saved
him, for after the last operation, as the doctors
stood about, she said, Tf this was out in
France they'd use so and so.* 'What's that?'
said the chief surgeon, sharply. She repeated
her remark. The surgeon said he'd never
heard of it, asked if she had the formula and
knew how to use it. She did, 'and my son has
been improving right along.' "

I'm sure I don't know whose conduct was

108 Facing the Hindenburg Line

the finer in this case, the nurse's or the doc-
tor's.

All the heroes are not in the army, either.
I saw one four years old, or thereabouts,
standing by the trainside with his mother the
other day. Dad was already in his seat and
his kit was in the rack, and the train was about
to bear him back to the front. The mother
was tearless and brave, as every one of these
English women are, but it was just a bit too
much for the little four-year-old. He would
look at his dad, then look away and choke
and swallow, and catch the sob half-way be-
tween breast and throat. He would make be-
lieve to be interested in baggage trucks and
passing people, and his hand worked con-
vulsively in his mother's, but he simply could
not look into that compartment and play the
man, so he did not trust himself to look. I
have seen no finer bravery and self-control in
this brave island.

A tall, red-headed, freckled, angular young
fellow whispered in my ear the other night as
the men filed by to shake hands. The gold
stripes were on his arm, two of them, though
evidently he was fit again, built like a race
horse. This is what he whispered:

"I had made up my mind, sir, to pop off"
— ^vernacular for suicide — "I've been out to

British are Brave in Sorrow 109

France twice, and hit twice; now I'm about
ready to go again, and I thought I couldn't
stand it; but after this meeting Fve decided
to stick. Good-night!"

He hurried away in the crowd. You cannot
tell by the faces of these men where the sen-
sitive spots are. Some that look most unre-
sponsive have the livest and most quivering
hearts, so it never does to run the risk of a
cold and formal greeting ; better give every one
of them a God bless you, and God be with
you, or good luck, my son. You never know
which one needs it most.

Now the last little story of this kind is the
tale of a twilight in a little room back of a
hut. The old man, leader of that hut, was
seventy-five if a day. Twilights come late in
England in the summertime, even as they come
late in life, sometimes. We two were alone,
and he brought out his little treasures, all he
has. One was a photograph in a frame of
a fair-haired, open faced, handsome youth.
"My son," said he. Someone else told me
the mother had died from the shock when the
boy was killed. "My only son. Nothing was
ever found of him, except the pocket of his
tunic, and the Testament that was in it. See
where the shell cut the book and marked this
passage ?"

110 Facing the Hindenburg Line

Then he drew out his spectacles to examine
it again. *'You see, I only got this pocket
and Testament last week." Sure enough, the
fragment of shell had torn through and
marked, "Henceforth there is laid up for you
a crown of righteousness which the King, the
righteous judge, shall give you." I saw those
same words in the window of a great cathedral
to-day, under the figure of Chinese Gordon,
the most daring and most selfless Englishman
in modern history.

It was little that the shell should have
marked this one particular passage or any one
of a hundred others. The old man would
have found something significant somewhere.
He couldn't help it. It gave him comfort in
the twilight alone with his treasures, alone.
Absolutely alone in the world in his last years
as he sought with the feeble remnant of his
days to lend aid to other people's boys, he
who no longer had a boy of his own.

It is not all so dark, however, for many
go through unscathed. I wish, for instance,
I could give you a picture of the young flying
corps sergeant, just going up for his lieuten-
ancy, whom I talked with last night. This
is considered the most dangerous but most
enviable branch of the service. Smooth,
slender and supple, he stood there, flicking his

British are Brave in Sorrow 111

puttees with his swagger stick; his little fore-
and-aft cap that gives such a dare-devil look
to these lads of the air, not hiding at all, but
rather emphasizing, the sleek and shining
brightness of his hair. He was scarcely twenty-
one, yet he said, "I have been flying, sir, for
two years and a half all up and down the lines
and never had a scratch. Oh, yes, machine
gun bullets have pierced my planes. I counted
two hundred holes once. And one day a shell
passed through the body of the plane and
ripped off the back of my seat, but I scarcely
knew it had happened, felt the plane lunge
and vibrate, that was all. You see the shell
was on its upward trajectory, and going very
fast. I saw one of our boys fighting a Hun
when his plane took fire. He knew he was
gone, so he just took a plunge at the Hun and
rammed him and both of them went whirling
down in a stream of fire. They have taken
me off the firing line, though I'm perfectly
fit, and put me on home defense. They say
that two years is long enough, though I have
not lost my nerve and my heart is unaffected.
I'm sorry, I wish I were back at the front.
People in England don't take the war half
seriously enough. I'd rather be out there/'

XI

VERDUN IS MIGHTY

OF all places in France that I would
have desired most to visit, the chief est
is Verdun. So it was with a sense
of deep obligation that I learned we were
going thither. No name will come out of this
war more famous, no matter what other fields
are yet to be fought.

As we drove up to the gates of the old
fortress town, the colonel in command of the
garrison stood there talking with the sentries.
He acknowledged our salutes brusquely, as if
thinking of something else. I learned in a
few minutes that two shells had just fallen
near these gates and the colonel had come out
to see if we could get in.

Soon he joined us at the citadel; white-
haired and white-mustached, he was, large and
fatherly. He is one of those men who, at
first sight, fill you with confidence, respect,
admiration — I had almost said affection.

These old soldiers of France are impressive
men, all of them, from the general in com-
mand, on down through the colonel in com-
mand of the citadel, to the majors who hold

112

Verdun is Mighty 113

the outlying forts. They are toughened, and
hardened, swarthy veterans. Indeed, I do not
know when I have encountered a body of
men quite so impressive.

There is first of all, General GiuUiamat, in
command of the fourth army, whom we had
met earlier in the day at headquarters. He
it was who led the push at Verdun in the
summer of 19 17, which was so successful. He
is a small, tight-knit, quiet-spoken man, evi-
dently of nervous force and energy and of
great kindliness and courtesy.

Then, besides our colonel, our immediate
host, stationed in the city of Verdun, there
are various majors, one in each of the out-
lying posts that ray out like the spokes of
a fan from the handle at Verdun. These
majors either came in to mess to visit, or we
met them at their posts. Every one of them
had had his wound — some of them several.
I saw one French officer with six gold stripes,
each indicating a wound received at a time
different from the others. More than one of
the staff of officers had lost a son in the war.
The colonel himself had had frozen feet,
along with twelve hundred men in his divi-
sion, one night on the snowy, windy slopes
about the impregnable town.

There are no civilians in Verdun; and pre-
cious few soldiers are seen upon its streets, as

114 Facing the Hindenburg Line

the Boche keeps dropping his souvenirs into the
place which he could not storm. The last day
we were there, as we drove in to luncheon at
the citadel, we had intended to go up on the
hill above, to have a look at the cemetery
there; but the Hims took a notion to shell
us a while, and five "Ja-ck Johnsons" came
howling over and exploded around us. Yon-
der lay a fresh killed horse, somehow more
pitiful, if possible, than a fresh killed man.

So the colonel changed his mind and took
us to the safety of the citadel. During three
days along this front we were under shell fire
all the time; but our nights were spent in
peace, as we slept ninety feet underground.
Indeed, in that deep security, one could not
even hear the smaller artillery.

I awoke at four o'clock one morning to
hear the distant reverberations of shells over-
head, and upon inquiry at breakfast learned,
from a British major-general of artillery there
on liaison duty, that nothing less than a
three-twenty or three-forty could penetrate
our ears in our fastness.

It is perfectly futile for the Boche to waste
his ammunition upon Verdun, as a whole
division could lodge in the citadel as safely
as in their homes in the middle of France.
Indeed, we all voted the citadel of Verdun as
the best and safest hotel in Europe. If it

Verdun is Mighty 115

were in London it would soon make a fortune
for its owners.

In other hotels there is always the possibility
of injury from air raids; in this citadel none.
We dined there one evening with thirteen at
table, and scattered next morning toward all
points of the front lines.

They were interesting occasions, those meals
of ours in the officers* dining room deep un-
derground. The ceiling alone, arched like a
roof of the subway, or the tube, betrayed that
we were imderground.

Mirrors glittered upon the walls ; old armor
graced them; and huge models of the Croix-de-
guerre, the medaille militaire, and the Legion
d' Honneur, made of bayonets and bits of
glittering ammunition, hung upon them. Silver
and cut glass sparkled, wine and champagne
bubbled, and great smoking tureens and plat-
ters betrayed no food shortage.

What was finer still than all of these was
the confident, cheery, even if grim, determina-
tion written upon the faces of the French
officers about that board. These are the men,
who, in the darkest days of the war, for
France, inscribed with their blood upon the
banners of their country, that motto, born no-
body knows how and destined never to die,
''On ne passe pas" (they shall not pass).

What a change in the fortunes of France

116 Facing the Hindenburg Line

since that motto came first through clenched
teeth, out of parched dry mouths, rattled in
the throat of the dying, came screaming
through the air with the seventy-fives, and
burned itself in fire and blood upon the
memory of France! They did not pass; they
shall never pass; they can no longer so much
as try to pass; and France now knows that
she is safe.

We journeyed out to the front lines from
Verdun, journeyed as far as we could by
motor, and then threaded the communication
trenches the rest of the way. We stood in
those old forts that protected the approaches
to the town, until the walls of the forts, the
embankments, the moats, became heaps of
formless dust and dirt, sand and gravel. I
never stood upon ground that thrilled me more
than that at Fort Vaux, where, for days with-
out water, without food, with swollen black-
ened tongues, in caverns of the earth filled
with poisonous gases and the fumes of their
own artillery, that little band, under the
dauntless Major Reynal, stood to the end,
loosed their last carrier-dove to their com-
rades behind, imploring aid which could not
be sent them, received message after message
begging them to hold on, until the mighty
catacylsm burst open the earth in which they
stood and engulfed them every one.

Verdun is Mighty 117

The last message Reynal received was from
the commander-in-chief: "I create you com-
mander of the Legion of Honor!"

In those communication trenches we paused
at convenient points to listen to the interlacing
shells overhead. Our own shells, departing,
sang encouragingly above us, with a very dif-
ferent and far more inspiriting note than that
of the German arrivals. We listened to these
last approaching, a wicked sound they have,
and then watched to see their effect upon their
objectives behind and around us.

I had never been conyinced, until an Italian
officer recently proved it to me, that you
never can hear the shell that gets you. The
soldiers in all armies always seek to encourage
new comers with this information. I had sup-
posed it merely a superstition, kindly spread,
to cheer up the timid; but I am sure now it
is true. It is simply a matter of the compara-
tive velocity of the shell and its sound. The
shell travels faster than the sound; and the
only shell you ever hear is really already past
you, before you hear its whistle.

If it comes directly at you, it explodes be-
fore the sound of the whistling reaches you.
In other words, you can't hear the whistle
until after you are dead.

Nevertheless, old tried campaigners will
dodge at the rush of a shell. I saw our

118 Facing the Hindenburg Line

French captain, our cicerone, duck time and
again; I never saw the colonel or any com-
mander or soldier of Verdun duck. I have
seen old war correspondents who have been
in battles from Antwerp to Monte Santo,
jump and duck as if it were their first time
under fire.

We watched an aviation battle one afternoon
from the trenches. The air was balmy, sunny
and filled with the hum of planes, as it always
is during favorable weather at the front, that
sounded for all the world like the hum of
a perplexed and wandering swarm of bees, or
like an orchard in midsummer, where honey
bees and bumble bees are drowsily luxuriating.

Suddenly, over our heads, came the sharp
rat-a-tat of machine guns; and in the fleecy,
golden mistiness above we saw the planes.
Three of them there were, two evidently
Hun from the darkness of their coloring, and
one — what was he? Surely, he must be
French, else why the firing. The colonel fo-
cused his glasses, as all of us did; then the
colonel cried excitedly — it was the only time
I ever saw him excited — "il est Frangais!"
(He is French!)

The daring knight of the air was dashing
at them, one against two! Again came the
rattle of the guns; shrapnel was now dotting
the sky all about them, from the archies,

Verdun is Mighty 119

or anti-aircraft guns, on either side down
below.

The black puffs of German shrapnel en-
circled the Frenchman, and the white puffs of
the French encircled the Boches. They ducked,
dived, mounted, spat out streams of smoke
behind, like noisome insects trying to poison
the air in their wake, and wheeling past each
other, let go from their noses the still more
deadly darts of fire at each other.

We, below, held our breath while the lone
Frenchman writhed and maneuvered up above.
Rat-a-tat — r-r-r-rat-tat ! Suddenly the tri-
color plane pitched, fluttered like a dead leaf,
came twisting and whirling slowly down; and
we cried out. The colonel fairly shouted:
"0,mon dieu. II est malade!" (He is hurt.)

I had so often seen this winding, fluttering
dive that I cried in response : "No. No. He
is only maneuvering! He is only escaping!'*

''Non, non!" cried the colonel. "Malade!
II est maladeT (He is hit. He is wounded.
He is sick.)

I was reluctantly convinced ; for the French-
man, righting at last, a thousand feet or so
above our heads, went brokenly, like a wild
fowl wounded, toward the rear, and quickly
faded from our sight.

Next day we saw his plane, lying like a
huge broken butterfly, crushed by a storm, with

120 Facing the Hindenburg Line

outspread, helpless wings, not far back of our
own front lines. We were happy to learn,
however, that the pilot was uninjured.

That same afternoon we saw a queer thing.
K dark colored flier hung almost motionless
above us, as if anchored there. We all made
him out to be a Boche; for the Hun planes,
with the black cross painted upon them give
an effect of darkness, in the sky, as compared
with the brighter allied planes. Other planes
were higher up, for we could see the shrapnel,
bursting, with long-time fuses, way above him
in the sky. He seemed to pay no attention
to all the furore in the air, but hung there,
poised tranquilly.

Then, great Scott! All of a sudden we
saw his planes flap like the wings of a bird —
they were the wings of a bird — ^he was no
airplane at all, or rather he was an airplane
of the oldest and most perfect type. King of
the air was he!

A huge brown and black master of all
storms he was, that eagle. And in his royal
self-possession he could afford to ignore the
anger and the clashings of puny men trying
to dispute with him the sovereignty of the
blue ! On my word, the gunfire and the planes
had no more effect upon his highness than
would have had so many sparrows or sky-larks.

Verdun is Mighty 121

They tell me this is true of most of the
birds, which, unless actually hit, or their nests
and perches destroyed, go on about their busi-
ness of mating, singing, home-making, all un-
mindful of the crazy strife of man.

Under the hill, in a safe spot, comparatively,
we paused to greet the Englishmen of a certain
Red Cross station. Oh, yes, their post was
pretty safe, they said. To be sure, the roads
to the front lines were bad, were always bad,
for Fritz had them all registered, and could
plant his shells wherever he liked. Yes, their
cars had all been hit. He who supposes all
the danger, or even the worst danger, at times,
to be in the front line trenches, does not know
the front.

They looked it, too, those cars scarred and
worn. Fritz was no respecter of cars of any
kind. The Red Cross meant little or nothing
to him. Haven't you seen the hospitals
bombed by his planes? Yes, we had seen
them; pitiful wrecks they were! As pitiful
as the helpless men crushed in their helpless-
ness and doubly done in.

Yes, there had formerly been American
drivers on this post. In fact they had left
only last week, and the English had taken
over from them. Those Americans had left
a record! The French say they are regular

122 Facing the Hindenburg Line

devils, and afraid of nothing. These lads
seem to love the sound of shellfire and a bar-
rage ; and the worse the road the more anxions
seem these young daredevils to travel it. So
said these Englishmen to us.

Yonder, beneath the hill, lay the cemetery
with its two thousand or more of new graves,
part of the price paid for the brilliant push
of 191 7. Yonder, still nearer Verdun, was the
larger cemetery, where five thousand French
sleep in an acre or so of ground. You would
not believe men could lie so close together,
or little wooden crosses stand so thick without
elbowing each other.

And all these are only part, a very small
part, of the vast army of Frenchmen who
have given their lives to make good the motto,
"On ne passe pas"

One must count by tens of thousands, scores
of thousands, up into the hundreds of thou-
sands before the tale is told. Yonder on the
Somme I had seen a hillside where they told
me two hundred thousand French had paid
the uttermost farthing; but they are not
greater in their numbers than this ghostly but
glorious army that, at Verdun, now and for-
ever, breathe and will continue to breathe,
"On ne passe pas** — They shall not, they shall
not pass I

XII
CHAMPAGNE AND CAMOUFLAGE

IT was on the Champagne front. We stood
talking, a group of us, in the offices of
a half -destroyed factory upon a hill.
The Boche lines were a few kilometers away.
We had just been looking down upon them.
Thank God, we can look down upon them at
most places now. We had been talking with
the manager of the factory about his difficulties
in keeping employees.

No wonder. Shells come there every day;
he pointed out the spot where a man had been
killed a few days before in the courtyard.
He showed us the damage done on such a
day and on such a day. Even rifle balls came
whizzing through the court. A car drove into
the yard while we talked and its hood was
cut through in places by shrapnel.

Now, in the second story of the office build-
ing that evidently had once been so beautiful,
but every room of which had received a shell,
we were standing upon sandbags placed there
to keep falling shells from dropping upon the
heads of workmen beneath. I noticed that

123

124 Facing the Hindenburg Line

where the sacks had contained bits of earth
and seed the green shoots of grass were spring-
ing up. Perhaps there will be a lawn there in
that office some day.

While we were talking thus, there came
the sound of firing from our battery down
the hillside, and our French captain cried:
"Come, they have an objective," and we hur-
ried after him and ran down to the battery.

It was carefully hidden in the cliff side, in
caves and dens, and we approached it through
trenches. It does not do for men to be seen
coming and going to batteries, as this would
reveal the location of guns to enemy observers.
For this reason the commanders and men of
artillery units do not care to receive visitors.

The visitors may come and stay an hour
and nothing happen; then as soon as they are
gone the enemy may receive the report of an
airman, may select the little square on the map
indicated by him and may drop a few shells
into it by way of search for the battery.

So the poor fellows at the guns may suffer
for the curiosity or friendliness of their
visitors. Furthermore, the gunners do not like
to open up their guns without a definite ob-
jective, just to show them off; as fire draws
fire.

The shells of our seventy-fives, however,

Champagne and Camouflage 125

were ripping across the road above our heads,
sailing out of the wood and starting for some
point on the plain three or four miles away;
so we took the chance of being welcomed in
the chambers where the dainty little guns live,
and went ahead. We received a most cordial
welcome, stood in the narrow little stall behind
one of these thoroughbreds of ordnance,
jammed our fingers into our ears and felt
compressed air kick us in the face. Then I
picked up one of the brass shells that fell
automatically from the chamber and dropped
it again quickly. When it had cooled I made
its closer acquaintance, begged to adopt it and
received a smiling assent. The empty shell
will make a fine dinner gong.

We had scarcely departed, after leaving
boxes of cigarettes for the poilus, when the
inevitable happened; the enemy got to work
upon that hill and we saw a great shell fall
and throw up dust, smoke and earth from the
factory where we had lately been. We hoped
that none of our kind friends up there had
paid for our visit. Then we remembered that
the battery had had its objective anyhow and
our consciences were at rest.

We were driving over screened roads all
the time; that is, roads hung with matting,
because they are easily discernible from the

126 Facing the Hindenburg Line

sausage balloons of the enemy and are regis-
tered upon his charts for fire. Practically all
the roads we drove over those days along the
front are of this character, except those which
run behind natural screens, Hke hills or woods.

And yet, exposed as these highways are and
shot to pieces as are the villages along them,
the peasant population is living quietly ahead
as if nothing out of the ordinary were occur-
ring and no shells or bombs were likely any
time to drop upon their heads. For example,
I observed, in one such village, groups of
French soldiers taking their evening mess in
the streets, while side by side with them were
a group of little girls playing keep house
under a cart, with dolls and a tiny bed.

Of all the sad sights along the French
frontier, there is nothing sadder than the once
beautiful city of Rheims. Somehow Arras did
not tug at my heartstrings as did Rheims. I
don't know why, unless it be that a few people
were still trying to live and do business in
Arras, while almost none are in Rheims. From
a city of 150,000 it has gone down to less
than five thousand. Besides, in Arras the
numbers of British Tommies give life to the
place, while in Rheims there is scarcely a foot-
fall in the grass-grown streets.

Yet, again, the Cathedral of Arras is a ruin

Champagne and Camouflage 127

out and out, while that of Rheims, where Joan
saw the Dauphin crowned, has resisted the
most pitiless onslaughts and still rears its proud
walls and columns in perfect outline, although
all its beauty of ornamentation has been
stripped away. These old stones of the
Twelfth Century are all dovetailed and mor-
tised.

So that noble cathedral, refusing to bow its
head before the storm, although all its win-
dows, statuary, and painting had been withered
from its walls as it were a beautiful woman
whose draperies had been scorched by fire,
pelted by hail and soaked by a deluge, seemed
to me an image of fair France, whose beauty
and richness had been despoiled by the bar-
barian, but whose spirit is unconquerable and
proud. It was pitiful to see the piles of sand-
bags before the choice carvings of the lower
f agade, placed there in an attempt to preserve
them.

Most pitiful of all was the great rose win-
dow to the west, with its incomparable colors
in the evening light, gaping now in hollow
caverns. It is all too sorrowful to think about ;
and there is absolutely no excuse for the Hun,
since we ourselves had stood only half an
hour before upon heights far greater than the
towers of the cathedral; the French had ob-

128 Facing the Hindenburg Line

servatories enough without using the twin
spires of this precious church and so endanger-
ing it.

Anywhere in Rheims one can look down at
his feet and see bits of shell and shrapnel
bullets still remaining after all the masses of
metal that passing soldiers have long ago
picked up and carried away. We saw huge
fragments, bases and fuses of shells piled up
in the cathedral itself. Six hundred shells
have fallen in the church and each of us car-
ried away in his pocket some such souvenir
of the imspeakable tragedy of Rheims.

There is nothing more beautiful on earth
than this Champagne country, with its south-
ern, sunny slopes covered with vines, with its
women and children working feverishly to
supply the places of the men in gathering the
vintage. They say they will be able to get in
all the grapes; and we saw wagon load after
wagon load driven along the gently sloping
roads by little boys, women, old men and an
occasional soldier.

Crowning many of the crests of these hills,
and clothing all the northern slopes of them,
are deep forests, where the wild boar was
hunted in the days of Caesar and Charle-
magne, and is hunted to-day, or would be, if
men were not too busy hunting each other.

Champagne and Camouflage 129

The courtly captain of the staff, who con-
ducted us on this tour of the Champagne and
Verdun fronts, was, before the war, a gentle-
man of leisure and an ardent sportsman.
When, years ago, he retired from active
service in the army, he told me he hunted in
various parts of the world for much of his
time; and for the rest, "Ah, well," said he,
"there was Paris — and art — ^and music!"
And his face glowed.

Once I said to him: "This is a most
beautiful country. It is worth fighting for!"

I never heard a man speak with deeper con-
viction and more vibrant enthusiasm when he
made this reply :

"Ah, yes ! France has everything heart can
desire. It is washed by three seas. It has
the cool north and the warm south, mountain
and plain. It has color, light, soft rain; the
best wines in the world. It knows how to
live, to create literature, music, art; it loves
the beautiful; its people are gentle, tender,
kind, but brave. Yes, it is worth fighting for."

Then another time, when I expressed some
astonishment and admiration over the fact
that France had loaned of her strength to
Italy in these days, after all these years of
exhausting war, he answered:

"Do you remember that picture of Sir Ed-

I
130 Facing the Hindenburg Line

ward Landseer's, in which the old hound that
everybody thought was worn out clutches at
the throat of the stag at bay? Do you re-
member the title of that picture: 'There's Life
in the Old Dog Yet7"

Germany never made a greater mistake
than when she thought France defenseless,
unless it was when she thought Britain de-
cadent and America negligible. These three
mistakes form a necklace of millstones round
the throat of the Prussian military autocracy;
they will drown the beast deeper than the
Lusitania.

But of all the inspiring exhibitions of this
war there is none more chivalrous, more cour-
ageous, more hopeful for democracy on earth
than that of France, invaded, shelled, bombed,
burned — like the glorious cathedral of Jeanne
d*Arc at Rheims — a people loving peace and
seeking peace and pursuing peace, set upon by
a ruthless savage war power, yet rising un-
shaken, invincible, wounded, but fair and
strong. ''On ne passe pas! (they shall not
pass)" — the immortal motto of Verdun, are
the words done in blood from the thorns upon
her brow, that speak the spirit of France.

XIII
THE RED TRIANGLE OF WAR

THERE came a day when I had to do
with a very different red triangle from
that with which I had been concerned
all summer. This was the red triangle of war
and destruction, fire and flaming sword, the
triangle from which the German fell back to
the Hindenburg line, leaving to beautiful
France the heritage of blackened, dismantled,
unrestorable cities, towns and villages.

One hundred and fifty kilometers our
speedometer registered when we had threaded
in and out among these ruins of a once pros-
perous, happy and rich country; had looked
down into Saint Quentin and the German lines
and had returned to the French general head-
quarters at night.

Sherman in his march to the sea never
dreamed of destruction like that. The only
parallel I have seen is the total abolition of
Wytschaete, at Messines Ridge, and that was
the result of bombardment, not of deliberate
dynamiting and burning. It is one thing for

181

132 Facing the Hindenburg Line

a town to be wiped out between the hammer
and the anvil of two opposing armies and
another for it to suffer no bullet wound, but
only bombs-

We were in Joan of Arc's country; and we
met a little Joan of to-day. Even her name
was Jeanne; and she sat on my knee, gazed a
while at the photo of a little American lad
then gravely kissed him and smiled the quiet-
est, most adorable of smiles into my face.
Her eyes were deep and dark with the mystery
of a childhood spent between the waves of two
great armies; her features were perfect,
beautiful to a degree ; and, later, when I stood
in Joan's chapel, where she took the holy
communion in armor before setting off to
Orleans, the child's face was reflected to me
in the white marble of Joan's effigy. For
months this little girl's home had been in the
hands of the Hun, and now it was left to
her desolate.

A Spanish senator was of our party, a
quick moving, springy, courtly gentleman of
Andalusia, with his Sancho Panza by his side,
his secretary. They seemed to me strange
modern remnants of a day when their own
land took the lead in all such titanic strug-
gles as this. Not being able to speak their
tongue, nor to understand much of their

The Red Triangle of War 133

French, I could not pierce deeply into their
state of mind; but we stood side by side at
general headquarters, and gazed upon the
beautiful structure that had often held the
greatest warrior of all time — Napoleon — and
each thought our own thoughts. Strange how
much less one hears the name of Napoleon
these days in France, than ever before. After
all, even his battles have paled into compara-
tive insignificance.

We went mile after mile over roads, once
the most perfect in the world, now broken and
patched, from town to town and village to
village, whose names have been pathetically
prominent in the dispatches. Noyon, Chauny,
Ham, Roye, Lassigny. One can understand
a part of the destruction as intended to de-
prive the French of their resources; for ex-
ample, the wilderness of blackened, twisted
iron in what were once the factories, sugar
factories, mirror factories and the like. But
one cannot understand the destruction of
cathedrals, too far from the Hindenburg line
to serve as observatories.

We stepped into what was left of one beauti-
ful church. Designedly or not, a bit of the
roof was left over the altar, the choir and the
organ console; and on the door was printed
a list of stated services. . We heard the organ

134 Facing the HIndenburg Line

rolling and found a poilu with bowed head
and closed eyes playing in deep-throated minor
tones the sorrows of the souls of men. All
the metal of the great pipes had been stripped
away by the Boche to supply his need of
copper, and the organ itself, under the roof-
less portion of the ruined transept grinned
hollow and black as a skull. I could scarcely
bear the music of desolation, and the bowed
head of France.

There were acres and acres of interlaced
barbed wire in the fields along all our roads,
miles and miles of trenches that had been first
lines, second lines, transverse and communica-
tion systems. It seemed horribly confused,
and yet once it was all part of a definite plan.
Poppies, dog daisies, wild flowers and weeds
of all kinds were now taking these trenches
gently and peacefully and covering up, as if
ashamed, the violent toil of men.

Sometimes the trenches were on each side
of our road, and here the foes had faced each
other across thirty yards of paved No Man's
Land. Again the ditches would coil and un-
coil through a village or group of farmhouses,
and once the yawning serpent writhed into the
cellar windows of a mansion and out on the
other side. Chateaux that had once been
beautiful, well nigh perfect, crowning lovely

The Red Triangle of War 135

wooded heights, now stood, if they could be
said to stand, so lamely did they lean and
totter, blackened, windowless, shattered.

One can understand the destruction of forest
trees for lumbering purposes ; but when giants
of forty years are thrown down and left to
rot, and when fruit trees are girdled, that
could not have borne for some years to come,
so young were they, one wonders whether any
plan except utter ruthlessness lay back of it
all. The towns may be rebuilt — though it
would be easier to begin elsewhere and build
all over anew — but the trees cannot be re-
placed under two generations. And as for
the lives of the young girls, the young mothers,
the youths, driven away into practical slavery,
and starved into debauchery and prostitution,
they can never be restored except somewhere
in a beyond.

Most of this red triangle was never fought
over. There are few wooden crosses to tell the
tale of struggle between man and man. It was
simply wrecked, burned, crimsoned with the
unshed blood of hearts bleeding internally;
and how the heart of France drips, drips,
drips ! With the sad-eyed, feature-drawn cap-
tain beside me, a man who had spent two
years and nine months in trench and firing
line, since the sixth of August, I9i4» and,

136 Facing the Hindenburg Line

unwounded outwardly, but physically some-
what broken, had been taken out for lighter
staff duties, I could do nothing but murmur:
"Je ne comprend pas — I cannot understand.**
He grimly muttered in reply: ''Non! Npn!
Je ne comprend pas/'

We paused at Prince Eitel Friedrich's
pleasure ground — the lodge he established and
held for months and even years, for cham-
pagne parties, cards and carousals. And I
recalled what I had been told in the Isle of
Wight, where this young princeling had been
a-pleasuring when the war came on. He was
suddenly called home, near the end of July,
19 1 4. Somebody knew what was coming.
The young barbarian, according to the natives
of the isle, smashed up the furniture in his
rooms, tore the hangings, soiled the linens
and upholsteries in unspeakable ways, and
stole away very unlike the Arabs. There are
other such tales told of the Hohenzollerns in
Europe; they seem to have this sort of way
about them.

Standing near the prince's famous abris,
or dug-out, we could see the Saint Quentin
Cathedral clearly; and we could see the shells
falling and exploding in the ground between.
Then we passed into the zone of fire. Here
everything was covered with camouflage.

The Red Triangle of War 137

Every cameon or motor truck, every tent,
every camp object, was ringstreaked with
paint to look like the ground. The roads, at
exposed points were, of course, hung with
screens of grass or colored fibers to hide pass-
ing motors and men from enemy eyes. We
knew now we could be reached at any time
by German fire.

The poilu, however, went about in this
realm of fire, with less apparent care for his
safety than Tommy Atkins; for, whereas, the
latter always dons his steel helmet and keeps
his gas protector handy when near the line,
the former comes and goes, and even walks
along the roads and fields in his cap. We
saw engineers building telephone lines — and
such neat, natty work they were doing, too,
within three or four miles of the German lines
— entirely without helmets. Our car gathered
a ground telephone wire around its front
axle at one place and ran away with it. Sig-
nal corps men at the instrument must have
been startled. Our chauffeur took his wire
cutters and clipped it calmly and left the end
to be found by the searching engineers.

While this delay took place, I heard the
hum of planes and stepped out of the car
to look up. There he was, the little silver
insect; he must have been sixteen thousand

138 Facing the Hindenburg Line

feet above us. I was trying to make him out,
when he darted into a cloud and disappeared.
Then came two planes that I knew were
French, lower down, but climbing, and I was
satisfied of the nationality of the first one.
He must have borne the black cross, while the
two with the tri-color circles must have been
after him.

Closer and closer we came to the lines,
until we dismounted at last and took the rest
of the way afoot. Through fields of clover,
along hedge rows, over ditches, we made our
way about a mile up the ridge until we crept
into a well concealed outlook and could gaze
straight away down to the lines and the be-
leaguered city beneath. It was a quiet day,
although some artillery activity was going on.
Our own guns were playing on each side of us
and occasionally some of our "big stuflF" went
rumbling like a train of cars over our heads.
We could hear the Boche gun speak, wait a
few minutes and then hear the explosion of
the shell to right or left. One quickly gets
accustomed to the difference in language of
the batteries, friend or foe.

Just beside us, on the hillside, poilus were
quietly digging and building. We asked them
what they were engaged upon, another ob-
servatory? No, it was a telephone station.

The Red Triangle of War 139

Then we retraced our steps and thought of
the city lying yonder that the French could,
at any moment, blow to kingdom come, and
capture. Only they prefer, if possible, to
spare its beauty; and squeeze the Boche out.

On the route that we passed was the town
where Miss Morgan was faithfully at work,
and had been for many months, ministering
to the hungry, needy, refugee people of the
district. We saw ambulances, too, with the
Stars and Stripes upon them, and young
Americans in the drivers' seats.

At one point we passed a single grave —
McConnell's it was — within ten feet of the
roadside. It will ever be a sacred spot to
French and Americans alike. The tricolor
circle of the French air service marks it;
flowers are kept fresh on it; the flags of both
nations float in the winds above it. It is
the lovely resting place of a man who fought,
alone in the clouds, fell to his death alone,
resolutely went to his great renunciation like
him who trod the wine press alone; but who,
to-day, please God, is not alone, but is with
the hundreds of the heroic who confer to-
gether over the feeble little struggles of that
distant little planet where once they lived and
strove.

XIV

WITH THE POILU AND HIS OFFICER

FRENCH officers are, most of them, men
of education and refinement. Some
notable literature is coming out of the
trenches.

For example, we spent a couple of days
in the company of a lieutenant, with gray
streaked beard, full lips and eye-glasses, and
a surprised, inquiring manner, who seemed to
us all quite childlike and naive. When we
bade him good-by he gave each of us a copy
of his book, "Les Bienfaits de la Guerre,"
which showed not only an unusual and original
mastery of the French tongue, but also a
wealth of experience drawn from the front
line trenches and the nearness of death.

Before reading his book he struck me as a
gold laced staff officer who had probably never
smelt powder nearer than a mile and a half.
After reading I knew that his soft, white
hands had known the grime and the slime, the
battle and the blood of the life struggle of
France.

140

With the Poilu and his Officer 141

The captain who had us in charge, a most
courtly officer, to whom I have alluded in an-
other chapter as a gentleman of wealth, leisure
and sportsmanship, we learned afterwards,
was a nobleman of an old line. A baron he
was; but no titles are worn by French officers
unless their grade is general or higher.

He told us also that another captain with
whom we had been associated was, in civil
life. Count So-and-so. Our captain was a
graduate of the West Point of France, had
served a number of years, and was retired
when the war broke out. He immediately
volunteered, but was not called in time to be
in the battle of the Marne.

"Being among the first to volunteer," he
smiled, "my papers were no doubt near the
bottom of the pile, and so, near the last to
be reached."

And here he put his finger on the weakness
of democracies — ours as well as his — in mat-
ters of administration. While he seemed far
from criticizing anybody or any system, we
learned afterwards that he is a royalist and,
with others of his class, would like to see the
throne re-established in France, and the Bour-
bons upon it.

Other officers we met. — for example, the
colonel commanding Verdun, — who seemed to

142 Facing the Hindenburg Line

us like gruff, matter-of-fact American business
men ; others, like the officers of chasseurs, with
their natty blue uniforms and slender supple-
ness, recalled the heroes of Dumas and the
leaders surrounding Napoleon. Still others,
like the fighting majors in charge of the de-
fenses of Verdun, were rough, hairy fellows,
with dark faces, lined and scarred, who looked
as if they might be the product of the
peasantry of France, risen by sheer force and
devotion and courage to their stations of com-
mand.

There may be officers in the French army,
as there are in all armies, who remain behind
in safety and send their men up to the lines
of fire and of death; but they were not the
type of men we met in the front lines at
Verdun.

Furthermore, though there are those who
complain of official France, the bunglesome
administration, the interminable red tape, I
was not one of those who suffered any great
inconvenience from these obstacles to progress.
I found more intricacies in our own American
administration than in that of France.

The only insolence or even gruffness that
I encountered in French bureaus was at the
hands of little underlings, clerks, factotums.
It is always so, in every nation.

With the Poilu and his Officer 143

The only thing to do is to elbow them aside,
get to the men higher up; and in France, at
least, you can meet with unfailing courtesy.
You cannot always get what you want for
the first asking; but **no" in France does not
mean so much as in England.

You can ask in a different way; you can
come back on the morrow with the same
request made from a different angle; you can
suavely insist; and, like the judge who dealt
with the importunate widow, they give you
what you want to get rid of you.

Undoubtedly official France likes to write
things. There are more blanks to be filled
up, more particulars to be given, more dates,
figures, ages, pounds-weight, meters-height, to
be registered, more photographs of yourself
to furnish, than in any country in Europe.

Some American ambulance drivers have
complained to me that they have brought in
severely wounded men to the pastes de
secours, who had to lie and wait until official
France could write down in blank forms all
about them, before their wounds could be
dressed. Others have denied the charge.
Anyway, it is altogether in character with
French administration that pads and plenty of
pads must be much written upon in all emer-
gencies.

144 Facing the Hindenburg Line

Another way to get what you want from
a Frenchman is to tell him all about yourself,
your wife, your children, your mother-in-law,
your hopes, and aspirations. Not being a
silent race themselves, they do not appreciate
silence and reticence on the part of others.
They are vitally interested in everything that
concerns you. Once get their interest thor-
oughly enlisted and they will find some way
through the mazes of official waitings and
tabulations.

Is this a childlike characteristic? If so, it
is an admirable one. It is the bond of human
interest. Especially is it true of the French-
man, as indeed it is to a degree of everybody
else, that if he has once done you a favor
he is your friend forever, looks upon you as
his property and his very special charge. This
is, after all — is it not? — a testimony to the in-
herent kindness of the himian race, and its
desire to serve.

Now to hark back to the French soldier.
He is called the poilu, the hairy one. I think
he is rightly called. Some say the reference
is to his Samsonic strength; others to his
usually unkempt condition. Whichever is the
true interpretation, he is a poilu.

He certainly is not so neat, clean shaven,
so anxious for shined buttons and polished

With the Poilu and his OflScer 145

boots as Tommy Atkins. Neither is the
American Sammy. Nobody can approach
Tommy in these regards. The faded blue of
the French private soldier lends to the air of
negligence that enfolds his personality. Then
when he is wounded, the old imiform adds to
the pathos of his appearance.

I never can forget the sight, by one of the
shell-swept roads of Verdun, when I encoun-
tered two "walking wounded," in charge of
a single Red Cross man. One of the wounded
men could seemingly go no further; or else
his bandages had slipped. He was lying on
the grass beyond the camouflage of the road
along which we drove.

The Red Cross man was bending over him
ministering to him. It was the other poilu,
however, who looked most pitiful. He stood
at an opening in the camouflage, blinded, and
with red bandages across his eyes, his head
bowed already in the patient helplessness of
the blind.

Of course we wanted to stop and help the
little group, but of course the exigencies of
war would not permit. How much the colonel
was moved by the sight, or how much he had
been calloused by the accustomed character of
it, I could not tell, as I glanced at his granite
face; but certain it is, he did not turn his

146 Facing the Hindenburg Line

head nor stop the car; to pause would have
been only to draw fire.

The poilutS are drawn from all classes of the
people, though naturally they are mostly from
the common folks, since God made so many
of them. There are a few from among
scholars, artists and musicians; but, for the
most part, they are peasant farmers, Paris
apaches, Lille and Lens miners and factory
operatives. They have the common charac-
teristics of the common soldiers in all armies ;
the grumbling at their supply trains, and
cooks, the cursing of the powers that grip
them in the inexorable mailed hand of war,
the living only for letters and leave, the sing-
ing of old songs and the crazed dash to death
over the top.

During the long, tedious hours of waiting
in trench or garrison or hospital the poilu
takes refuge in the fashioning of little objects
for sale as souvenirs of the war. He will
take a shell casing of brass or an old cartridge
or any bit of metal that comes his way and
make from it the most wonderful cigar lighters
or bricquets; a bit of flint and a small saw-
toothed wheel of steel, a few drops of benzine
essence and a little wick and the instrument
is made. Everybody wants one made by a
poilu.

With the Poilu and his Officer 147

Then there are the aluminum buttons of the
Boche. These are curiously wrought into
finger rings, sometimes with a copper or brass
seal; and everybody in France or near France
is wearing one of these. There are also the
big brasses of the seventy-fives, which are
polished and then chased in patterns, to form
vases for flowers or gongs for the dining
room.

All these things, not to mention the knitted
oddities or commodities of wool, zephyr or
silk, which soldiers of all nations make to
while away their hours of idleness and to add
to their revenues; but the poilu is the most
ingenious of any soldier I have seen in these
pursuits. In fact, the French are an inventive
race.

Many soldiers till the soil, gather the crops
for the vintage, work in the factories back of
the lines in their rest days away from the
front. We visited a certain chateau in the
Champagne country with a world-famous
name, where one hundred and twenty feet
under ground a large force of soldiers and
women were at work in the wine vaults, turn-
ing the bottles to clear the champagne of sedi-
ment, corking and uncorking the valuable
stuff to bring it to its golden perfection.

Twelve million quarts, they told us, were

148 Facing the Hindenburg Line

ripening in these cavernous corridors, only
three kilometers, less than two miles, from the
German first lines. Shells fall all around and
upon the chateau itself, all the time; even
rifle balls whistle over it. In the yard a man
was killed last week.

Two thousand bottles of champagne were
smashed here two days ago by a shell; yet
four thousand bottles a week are exported
steadily to America, England, Russia. When
the Hun overran this country and took this
chateau, he extracted only a thousand bottles
from the vaults, though there are miles and
miles of them. Doubtless he was afraid he
himself might be bottled if he penetrated too
far underground.

No wonder the manager has difficulty in
holding his employees ; for while they are safe
by day, when at work, they can find no safe
place to live by night, under constant fire. We
had scarcely driven away from the place
when, over our shoulders we saw the black
debris and smoke go up from a "J^^k John-
son" that fell in the premises. Hundreds of
poilus are quartered in the wine vaults. We
saw their beds, and we saw the men them-
selves, and we smelled their smell.

Then we drove away to a town where one
of the noblest cathedrals in the world stands.

With the Poilu and his Officer 149

a wreck inside and out. Not a foot of the
square before it but is littered with the frag-
ments of shell. Iron shards are as the sand
upon the shore. All over the floor of the
church itself, bits of shrapnel, bullets, shell
fuses are strewn among the debris; and, most
pitiful it was to see old decrepit workmen
searching the floors for the pieces of priceless
glass and seeking to restore them to the leads
spread out upon benches under the gaping
nave.

How any soul in France can cry "Peace,
peace," with her beauty all ravaged, her rich-
ness despoiled, her head bowed in the ashes
and the dust, is more than I, for one, can
understand. Nothing but the humiliated ex-
pulsion of the Hun can ever even half atone,
let alone restore. Yet even in France are to
be found some false friends of France, as in
other nations, too, who cry "Peace, peace, when
there is no peace V*

These are only the few in France, please
God. The great French people as a whole,
though the hoarse voice rattles huskily in
battle-parched throats, cries for no peace with-
out victory, no rest until assurance of age-
long peace, no surcease for this generation
until the next and the next and the next are
all safe from the ravages of the Hun.

150 Facing the Hindenburg Line

The French front does not give you the
impression of being so thickly strewn with
men and convoys and multifarious life as do
the British and Italian fronts. For thirty
miles or so back of the lines on these two
others there curls a very swollen, writhing
serpent of human effort, like a cordon of
power.

The blue line of France seems thinner, but
doubtless the impression is due only to dif-
ferent methods of transportation and under-
ground living. And yet it would not be
strange if it were true, for France has thus
far borne most of the brunt of the war. It
is wonderful to see how she has kept up her
roads. She has sent away to her far Eastern
possssions for aid, and to-day you can see
along all these white ways the almond eyes
of the Mongols looking slantwise from be-
neath steel helmets.

Some still wear their Oriental blouses or
robes, and some their queer, wide, cane hats.
They are not fighters, these mild, little men,
but they are good hewers of wood and drawers
of water and menders of roads for the poilu
to travel upon, who is himself a "fighter
right." I saw some of the Mongolians at
work even in the airdromes, grooming the
falcons of the fight.

With the Poilu and his Officer 151

With all his gruffness the French soldier
is a tender and romantic fellow. The memory
of his women supports him. The women of
France have been perfectly fine. To be sure,
they are not so much employed in factories
as English women.

One French officer remarked: "Our women
are made to love, not to work." Yet it is
the women of France who have tilled the
ground and kept the home fires burning.

A factory manager in Italy told me they
could not, in that country, employ women to
any great extent.

"For," said he, "the men and the women
would flirt all the time."

Indeed, among the few women I saw in
Italian factories, his words were justified.

It is of a woman, though, that the poilu
thinks and speaks in his hour of need. He
calls upon a woman when wounded, not usually
his wife or sweetheart, but a friend more
tried than either. His semi-conscious cry is
for "Maman, Maman." Indeed this seems
true of all men. I heard an English soldier,
struck by an air bomb, in a town where I
was one day, as he was borne away uncon-
scious, groaning: "Mother, oh, mother!"

XV

THE AIRMAN

IF D'Artagnan were alive in France to-
day he would not be in the Chasseurs,
gallant and dashing as they are. Neither
would he be in the Foreign Legion, that
terrible body of men who give no quarter nor
take any, and who have dwindled from some
sixty thousand to less than eight thousand;
who set out at each attack to collect some
particular souvenir from the enemy — now it
is helmets, now bayonets, now buttons; the
last time it was officers' field glasses, a very
good type of souvenir, indeed.

Nor would D'Artagnan have stood behind
that aristocratic little gun, the seventy-five,
the thoroughbred of the artillery. Athos,
Porthos and the rest, they might have been
zouaves. Chasseurs a pied, light field artil-
lerymen, bombers or bayonet pliers, but not
D'Artagnan. If he were alive to-day he
would undoubtedly be an airman. He could
be nothing else and nothing less.

The airman is the adventurer, the explorer,
the nonpariel of the modern army. When he

152

The Airman 153

is in Paris on leave, in London at the theater,
in Milan at the Arcade, everybody turns
around to observe him. When you mention
that So-and-So is in aviation, other soldiers
say:

"Ah, that is the service! If only my eyes
if my heart "

There is a spell about the airman. The
mystery of a new element and the mastery of
it is woven around him. When you see him
strolling along in the aristocratic way he can-
not help but have with his perfect nerves,
his perfect respiration, his perfect heart and
his loo per cent of eye-sight, hearing, touch
and all the senses, he seems to tread the earth
only with the tips of winged feet, like Mercury.
Of course D'Artagnan, if alive, would be a
flier.

To tell the truth, I believe that he is alive.
I believe I saw him, not once nor twice. I
saw him in command of the great first flying
school of France, where all the airmen of that
nation go for their elementary training. I
watched him out of the corner of my eye as
he walked beside me to the great stalls where
the racers of the air are kept and groomed.

I noted the wound stripes on his arm, the
quick gestures with which he tapped his boots
with his swagger stick; I watched his bright

154 Facing the Hindenburg Line

black eyes darting from side to side over his
beaklike nose — I have seen a number of air-
men with noses like hawks. And more than
once I thought of those lithe little fellows who
used to be so famous in Kentucky, because
they took their lives in their hands every
time they put on colors and mounted the bony
racers, and I remembered one, also, that I
had seen years ago as he lay in the dust of
the track, his bones broken, his head thrown
back, his eyes closed.

I saw D'Artagnan, too, not far behind the
lines of Verdun. He was commandant of
the artillery observers* section, and he looked
like a hundred-yard man at Yale — except that
he was probably 26 — and wore two little black
streaks, one on each side of his upper lip.

I saw him, too, in England, doing the flut-
tering leaf dive, his plane falling helpless,
circling and winding, hundreds of feet down,
only to right itself and climb again, doing
leap after leap, flying upside down for min-
utes on end. I heard him tell calmly that
seven men had lost their lives learning to fly
at this field last week, two this week so far,
five the week before last.

I talked with him, too, in a London hotel,
just back from the front, where his machine
had been repeatedly riddled, the back of his

The Airman 155

seat carried away by a shell, and when I asked
him what advice he would give to a young
airman, for his care of himself, he replied:

"Tell him not to try any tricks under a
thousand feet from the ground, and he will
be quite all right."

Another bit of advice from an old flier to
a new one is: "Never fly out of your turn.
If there is a call to fill some other fellow's
time, let the next man in order take it." Nor
is this advice based solely upon superstition.

There is good psychology back of it, for
he explained: "If you are out of your turn
you no more than get up into the air than you
begin to say to yourself : This is not my turn,
now I wonder if I am going to get it, when
I should not?' and in spite of yourself you
will become obsessed by the thought and lose
coolness and efliciency. You may become
reckless and desperate."

I saw the same gallant, adventurous spirit
of D'Artagnan in Italy in the young marquis
who made the record flight to London a few
days later. I stood with him beside the won-
derful car in which he was to make the trial,
and looked her over. He touched her rever-
ently with his hand and looked into my eyes
and smiled, for this was the only way we
could converse.

156 Facing the Hindenburg Line

I met, also, the dauntless young Italian cap-
tain who had made the altitude record of over
23,000 feet, a week or two ago, with an ob-
server. He had reached 25,000 feet alone
before that; but of course it could not be of
record.

Then if ever I saw D'Artagnan in the flesh,
it was at dinner in Milan, with Signor Caproni,
"Engineer" Caproni, they all call him, the lead-
ing inventor in aviation in Italy whose name is
a household word. Caproni had just told me
the story of this Roman young captain, at
the end of the table ; how he had been the first
to bomb Pola, the Austrian submarine base on
the Adriatic; how the government had said
it was impossible to bomb Pola, and the com-
mands were that no airman should attempt to
reach Pola; how this Roman captain had
violated the commands, had gone off one night
all alone, had done the thing that bureaucracy
had said was impossible ; and how the Austrian
communique next day had borne witness to
the feat.

"The result?" I asked.

The result was two months* imprisonment
for the captain and his removal from aviation
to the cavalry, which has little or nothing to
do.

The captain knew that Signor Caproni was

The Airman 157

telling me the story, for he glanced over once
and smiled. Then, being unable to tell him
what I thought of him, and his achievement,
and bureaucracy in all countries and ages, I
just lifted my glass to him and pledged him.

After all, I think I told him; for he soon
remarked to a neighbor, and the remark was
translated for me, that the only way to win
a war was to have no government behind it.
He was different from other airmen; he was
heavier about the jaw, thicker in the neck and
nose, and sternly determined in the mouth.

I delighted in hearing him talk, for his
voice was deep, strong, coarse, but soft and
low. Perhaps you believe that a contradic-
tion, but you should have heard the voice. I
could imagine him in a purple bordered tunic
and gold laced sandals on the Via Sacra, or
in greaves and plumed helmet on the plains
of Philippi.

At the same table that night sat a young
fair-haired lieutenant — there are many fair-
haired and blue-eyed Italians — who had been
over Pola many times since the impossible be-
came possible, and he smiled at our colloquy.
I observed that his eyes were very bloodshot,
and I knew it was not from drink. Italians
are abstemious.

Perhaps, however, the most adventurous

158 Facing the Hindenburg Line

spirit at that board was the engineer himself,
Caproni. Not merely during this war, but for
the last eight or nine years has this young
dreamer been flying and building fliers. Since
his country went to war with the central
powers, he has cherished a plan for killing
the war, which he has dinned into the ears
of officialdom, until at last they are beginning
to listen. At first his friends said:

"Caproni, you are a fool, a dreamer. You
are a professorial sort of being."

To-day they have come his way, and he can-
not work fast enough to help the allied gov-
ernments carry out his plan. It is very simple,
this plan, as he explained it to me:

"To win the war, we must have an over-
whelming superiority in artillery and muni-
tions. To accomplish that we must not merely
increase our own stock, we must diminish the
enemy's. If we can demolish his sources of
supply, and interrupt his flow of guns and
shells, even for a short time, a few weeks,
we can break his lines.

"We know where his factories are, just as
we know where his submarine bases are. How
can we reach and disorganize them? With
heavy planes in the air, carrying large sup-
plies of bombs."

Certainly; plain as the beak on a birdman's

The Airman 159

face! That is the way the war will finish.
D'Artagnan will do it in the air. It is a
matter of mathematics.

War is an industry. The man who has the
most planes will win the war. Everybody
sees it now, and the governments, our own
among them, are buying Caproni's big biplanes
and triplanes, triple engined, 6oo-horsepower,
capable of carrying three men and a ton or
so of explosives and of coming home with
one engine disabled or two engines disabled.

Furthermore, other nations are building the
same sort of planes and adopting Caproni's
idea. Italy cannot meet the demand for
planes. She cannot get the raw materials,
which she must import. The ships are not
sailing fast enough for Italy. The world,
however, is moving fast enough Caproni's
way, and the patrician face of this young en-
gineer of thirty-four or thirty-five wears the
quiet smile of the man who has, with the aid
of circumstances, conquered the stubbornness
of governments; and his big, dark eyes look
away absently, as if dreaming still more for
the future.

"Oh, yes, it can be done," he said to me.
"And after the war, when we have time, it
will be done. It will take about four stages
to cross the Atlantic; the first from Milan to

160 Facing the Hindenburg Line

Portugal, the second to the Azores, the third
to New Iceland, the fourth to New York. We
are preparing for it now. The triplane will
do it with mail and passengers."

At the time I thought I would look up "New
Iceland." I supposed my geography was at
fault. I think now it was his English. He
could not have meant Iceland, nor Newfound-
land. I think he was feeling for some name
in the Bermudas. At all events, the four
stages will be found, and the "nations' airy
navies, grappling in the central blue," will give
way to the "argosies of magic sails, pilots of
the purple twilight dropping down with costly
bales."

Neither need it be so expensive a mode of
travel, nor take many years to develop. Be-
fore I die I expect to sail to Europe high over
the waves of the Atlantic, where seasickness
cannot corrupt, nor censorship officials break
through and steal my notes and photographs,
as they did the other day.

Italy began this war, as we have done,
practically without knowledge of aviation.
To-day she holds the Austrian airmen in the
hollow of her hand, is making airships for
us and for England, and is teaching some hun-
dreds of our young Americans to fly. She
has inventive genius.

The Airman 161

I saw Marconi, one day, driving along the
streets of Turin, looking very young and
handsome in his naval uniform. Italy has
also administrative genius to a degree that has
astonished the world. She has made good in
this war, and not least in aviation.

Among all these nations it is taken for
granted that the young American boy who
undertakes to fly will succeed. Quite a per-
centage of their own young men, it seems,
could never learn, and they try to weed out
these by rigid nerve tests and the like. But
the sports and the outdoor life of the Ameri-
can lad, like those of the English, only to a
greater degree, seem to fit him for flying.

In France they do not take an American
through the slow degrees of patient training
through which they take their own lads. They,
in a way, toss him up into the air and let
him try his wings. The English are inclined
to do the same with their own boys, and one
wonders if this is not the reason for so many
casualties in British flying schools.

The French and the Italians are very care-
ful in their training of new fliers; every
school machine is fitted with two sets of con-
trols, identical, and coupled; every move of
the teacher is felt and imitated by the pupil
through a long continued course. The com-

162 Facing the Hindenburg Line

manders of these stations informed me that
they very seldom have accidents.

The physical examinations, too, have elim-
inated many of the unfit and reduced casual-
ties. The candidates are tested not only
as to soundness of eyes, ears, heart, lungs, all
the evident neccessities, but also as to mental
reactions, sense of location, nerve control.

For example, they are placed upon a re-
volving table, blindfolded, whirled around
several times and asked to indicate the points
of the compass. Water is poured in the ears
to test the resistance of the drums. They stand
barefoot on one leg and are told to hop back-
wards along a line.

They perform various other ludicrous
stunts in a state of nudity. They consider
that much of this is all poppycock; but if it
saves the lives of a few lads here and there it
is well worth while. To be sure, that ace of
aces, Guynemer — the French call an airman
an ace when he has brought down five of the
enemy — could stand none of these tests.

He was physically unfit, according to all the
rules. He was a consumptive, weighed less
than a hundred pounds, and knew he could
only live a year or two at best. He accounted
for more than fifty Hun planes, just because

The Airman 163

he was a man in ten million and was selling
the fag-end of his life as dearly as might be.

What a shudder went up over France — yes,
over allied Europe the other day when he went
down. I heard the news several days before
it was printed, from our own airmen in Paris ;
but we could not believe it, so often had the
rumor of the terrible little man's death gone
out. His father and mother do not believe it
yet, but are waiting for him in the little home
in Compiegne, to which he used always to fly
when he came back from the front, like a
bird to his mountain.

Many other fathers and mothers there are
who will wait and wait in vain. How much
better, though, for Guynemer! He was the
most real D'Artagnan of them all.

America is going into aviation in earnest.
I could tell many things about orders placed
by our government in foreign factories; about
many square miles of territory acquired for
fields and 'dromes ; about the training places of
many of our lads in allied lands; but these
things are best left undiscussed.

XVI

UP IN A BIPLANE

MY first flight in an airplane came quite
by accident, as so many good things
in life seem to have a way of doing.
I had long been seeking such an opportunity,
and once or twice it had been offered me;
but the exigencies of work and other engage-
ments had always prevented. Now this ap-
parent accident carries with it some, to me,
very interesting facts.

The Italian officer is the most courtly mili-
tary man in Europe, and the most kindly.
Nobody so punctilious in etiquette as he; no-
body so careful of his appearance, his ways
and his manners.

If he enters a railway carriage, a restaurant,
or any public place, he stands by the door and
salutes all the occupants. If a high officer
enters a public room where a number of other
officers are sitting they all arise and stand at
attention. If someone enters with a woman,
every man arises, no matter whether he is in
the midst of soup or dessert, and stands until
the woman is seated. It requires a great deal

164

Up in a Biplane 165

of watchfulness and agility on the part of a
stranger to keep up with these forms, although
it all seems easy and second nature to the
courteous Italians.

Furthermore, these southern men of Europe
have a genius for administration and for get-
ting things smoothly done. The rest of official
Europe is bound hand and foot with red tape ;
but if red tape gets in the way of Italian
officers, so much the worse for the red tape.

I found this out on this wise: I was tired
from a long journey and feeling a bit ill. I
decided, therefore, to drop off at a wayside
city and rest; besides, I had heard it was a
beautiful and interesting city and possessed
certain munition and airplane factories and
airdromes. I drove to the hotel in the middle
of the afternoon and went to bed, telling the
porter meantime to call up the office of the
air commandant and make an appointment
for me next day.

Refreshed by an afternoon and night of
rest, I went next morning to see the com-
mandant. He was very sorry, but I must have
authorization from Rome or from the com-
mando supremo, the headquarters of the
army, before I could enter the factories or
the air sheds. I had expected it to be so, and
not greatly disappointed, thought swiftly of

166 Facing the Hindenburg Line

visiting the museum of the town, like tourists
in happier days. So I gathered up my creden-
tials, assured the commandant that I appre-
ciated his courtesy, and was about to back out
of the office, doing plenty of bowing on the
way.

"Stop," said the interpreter, for we talked
through a medium. "The colonel says that
regulations are positive and that he must have
a permission from the headquarters before ad-
mitting visitors; but as you are on your way
to the commando supremo, if you will promise
him to apply for a permission when you get
there he will let you go into the factories and
'dromes right now !"

I call that a masterly way to handle red
tape. I readily gave the promise and later
executed it, too, to the letter.

Then was summoned a young lieutenant
who spoke English, then a motor car, and then
followed the round of the factories and air
sheds, where I saw the newest types of Italian
cars, some of which have not even been
heralded yet, met the men whose names have
become famous through their engines; certain
great fliers, whose achievements the press has
since been trumpeting; and examined planes
which have established records of late. I was
going on to another city that afternoon and

Up in a Biplane 167

as the young officer put me down at my hotel
he said:

"You will find someone to meet you there."

I thought no more about the remark and
ambled out of the station at the second city,
looking for a taxi, but suddenly, just out of
the door, a young, black mustached Apollo
came close up to me and saluted as if I were
a field marshal.

Then he welcomed me, conducted me to a
military car, waiting, bowed me in and drove
me to the best hotel. I was sort of dazed
and felt as if I were obtaining money under
false pretenses, or taking candy from chil-
dren; I was overwhelmed by my own im-
portance; nobody in Europe had ever con-
sidered me so important before; and I was
bowed down by the responsibility of living
up to my own new significance.

Then followed twenty-eight or thirty hours
of most delightful companionship with some
of the ablest men of Italy, visits to more fac-
tories, the examination of more engines, planes
and plans, the meeting and the memorable
dinner with Signor Caproni and his friends
and, to cap all, the flight in the biplane in the
golden afternoon. We shall all of us soon
know that airplaning ordinarily is just as safe
as taxicabing.

168 Facing the Hindenburg Line

I suppose others have written of their sen-
sations during their first flight, but I do not
remember having read anything of this sort.
Perhaps it may not interest others to read
of mine, but it would have interested me to
read of someone else's before my own experi-
ence, so I take the chance.

It was quite warm that afternoon, and, as
I stood by the big Caproni, with overalls above
all my clothing, fur coat on top of that, a
knitted hood over head, ears, neck, and a tough,
thick, heavy helmet over that, the perspiration
began to soak through all these thicknesses.

Then my kind friends remembered, after
getting out the machine, tuning her up, and
swathing me in many piles of wool and fur,
that they must get a permission for me to fly,
so they went oflF to the telephone to unwind
the necessary red tape. I had no uneasiness,
however, as I already knew the fine Italian
hand's ability to unwind red tape; and I felt
sure that Engineer Caproni, standing smJling
and bareheaded near at hand, would manage
somehow, in emergency.

My Turkish bath was going merrily forward
when at last word was given me to climb in.
It is some distance up to the nose of a big
biplane; and the costume is not conducive to
agility; but I managed. Then I found I could

Up in a Biplane 169

not get my legs into the small space in front
of the seat in the bows of the boat which they
pointed out to me; and, if I tried to sit on
the low back of the seat, the strap would
not go around me to buckle me in.

I began to despair; and because of the roar
of the three big engines, two hundred horse-
power each, I could not make known my em-
barrassments, except by signs. The pilot,
however, seemed to understand. He was a
tough, weather-beaten birdman, with assurance
in his eye and the usual beak nose. I had
sized him up long ago; and he had my com-
plete confidence. He motioned to me to climb
over him, and to stand in the middle of the
plane between two tanks. I did so, and found
it an elevated, airy and altogether satisfactory
position. There I stood throughout the
flight.

The birdman opened and closed his throttle
and his spark with a resulting crescendo and
diminuendo, but never a pianissimo; then he
glanced around, grasped my hand, now en-
cased in his own gloves that he had taken off
and loaned me, pointed to the propellers and
cautioned me against trying to stop them with
my fingers. Even a cap flying off can smash
a propeller and bring a plane crashing to
earth.

170 Facing the Hindenburg Line

Then he settled himself in his seat, twisted
his trunk and shoulders as if trying his own
freedom of movement and hooked up some-
thing with his foot or his "joystick" that
started us lightly bumping over the grass.

If anybody expects to be seasick in an air-
plane he has another expectation coming. This
first little spin over the grass is the only thing
approaching the motion of a boat that he will
experience. Indeed, even this is more like the
motion of a rarefied and denatured motor car
than that of a boat. We airily footed it clear
across the field and turned around to get the
light wind in our faces; then we headed for
the airshed, gradually increased our speed as
if bent on bumping into the sheds and half
way across began to rise.

I was watching intently for the moment
of leaving the ground, so as to analyze the
sensation, but there was no sensation to an-
alyze. The light fantastic touch upon the
bumpy greensward just seemed to die away,
that's all. In two seconds the airshed was
passed by, then the telephone poles and wires,
then the trees, then houses.

There was no sensation of giddy height. I
am not cool and keen about sitting in fifth-
story windows or looking down from church
steeples. I would be a dismal failure as a

Up in a Biplane 171

chimney sweep or steeple jack, or even a line-
man; for my head turns at any considerable
height; but, on my word, there was nothing
of this dread of high position in this experi-
ence, though we flew to about six thousand
feet. I had been assured beforehand that this
was true and was not disappointed.

My "innards" did rise once, however, and
that was when the pilot "banked" all of a
sudden, that is leaned way to one side, brought
his plane heeling over to leeward, like a sail-
boat in a sudden squall, and made me feel as
if I were standing, like a fly, on a vertical
wall. I had supposed we would sail straight
away for our objective, and had forgotten
that he would probably circle and climb, like
a wild duck arising from a lake. The next
time he "banked" I was "laying" for him and
the sensation was nothing but enjoyable.
After all, courage, as someone has said, is
only the ability to do over again what you
have done before.

At last the pilot turned to me, pointed to
one of his innumerable gauges, and held up
his fingers, a certain number of them, and
tried to make me understand our height. I
nodded and grinned through my goggles as if
I thoroughly understood. Anything to make

172 Facing the Hindenburg Line

him turn around, get his hands on those con-
trols again and attend to his business.

I'd run my end of the boat all right if he'd
run his, no matter what the height. Then,
as if satisfied, he turned back and set her nose
for the distant point to which we were to sail.
The city came sweeping and streaming under
our feet. I had been told to watch out for
the cathedral, — one of the biggest and grandest
in Europe — but I forgot it for a while; then
when I sought for it all squares looked alike
to me.

I wondered if some day, from a great height,
we may look down and see factories indis-
tinguishable from cathedrals, hovels and
palaces.

I was cold enough now, and the perspiration
had turned to ammonia or something equally
volatile and shivery. The roar of the three
engines, one on each side and one behind me,
was like the roar of Niagara underneath the
falls; and besides that, my ears were bubbling
from the altitude. I was deaf for ten minutes
when we came down, and half afraid I should
never hear again.

The pilot was not; for he conversed with
others, I knew, in even tones. I could see
his lips move. A thousand feet or so on a
railway or a funicular always gives me the

Up in a Biplane 173

bubbles. When I spoke of it afterwards, the
lieutenant, who went up with us, only laughed
and said it was the noise of the engines, but
I knew better.

The rush through the air was the only in-
dication of high speed. Standing as I was,
I had to brace myself, and felt all the time
as if some powerful hand was trying to push
me down by tilting my head back. The
helmet, I was sure, was two or three stories
too high; and I was momentarily afraid it
would fly off and play hob with the propellers ;
though I knew it was strapped under my chin
with a good strong strap. Excellent exercise
this for the muscles of the neck.

The fields looked like little green squares,
as I expected ; and the roads like bits of white
channels all tangled up. Where a straight
piece of roadway ran, it was only a bit of
braid, a sixteenth of an inch wide. Then sud-
denly one roadway looked wider, for there
was a rat running along in it.

My, how that rat did get up and hump
himself! He passed all other vermin and in-
sects on the road, and he ran with wonderful
smoothness and rapidity, parallel with our
course. I knew he was going some, because
we were going some, and he seemed almost
to keep up with us.

174 Facing the Hindenburg Line

Then I reasoned that he was, of course, a
motor car, and I actually laughed out loud,
though I didn't even hear myself. There are
some places in which your nerves are strung
up and you are ready to laugh at anything or
nothing. It's that way in school, in church,
or in an airplane.

"Here, you, pilot, keep your hands on those
joy sticks, and your feet on the soft pedal!"
I had confidence in the captain, yes, but not
too much confidence. I didn't want him to
neglect his business and lean over the side
looking around too much. "Here, boy, quit
monkeying with those levers. She's doing very
well. If you go to changing things she may
balk on us and make us come down before
our journey is over. She's doing tip top, I
say; let well enough alone."

One can^t help thinking impertinent things
the first time one is up; one's mind is too
everlastingly active.

Then we pierced into clouds. They rolled
all around us like mist, like fog; and soon we
emerged into the blue above them. The sky
seemed smaller and closer than I had ever
seen it before. Above the clouds on a moun-
tain gives no such feeling; for there is the
mountain to go by.

Here there is no basis of comparison; and

Up in a Biplane 175

the ring of the horizon seems very constricted,
the blue canopy above, very close to one's head.
I could think of no adequate reason for this,
and decided at last that the impression was
wholly psychological, imaginative. The lieu-
tenant, however, told me afterwards that he
always had the same feeling above the clouds,
and he was sure it was not merely psy-
chological.

By and by the pilot turned around and made
signs that it was a very misty day, and that
the landscape was shut out. I didn't mind, if
he didn't; I was very well pleased with the
skyscape.

Then he did the first impolite thing I ever
saw an Italian officer do. I suppose, after all,
he tried to prepare me for it. He shut off those
three engines and dived. I was sure he was
trying to throw me out of the concern head
foremost.

We pitched nose down, like a ship from the
top of a high comber, when she buries bow-
sprit and forecastle in the brine. It was like
Uncle Ezra's first drop in a high speed ele-
vator; it was like the roller coaster, when you
leave your dining apparatus at the top of the
incline; it was like the times when Uncle Bill
used to "run under" you in the swing when
you were six years old and impressionable.

176 Facing the Hindenburg Line

I was sure that the macaroni of that day's
luncheon was left hanging on the clouds; for
we soon shot out of them, and the green earth
came rushing up to meet us. The silence was
oppressive.

"Here, captain. For heaven's sake turn on
those engines. They may never work again.
Do try them, captain, there's a good fellow!"

He did try them, and they ripped off three
yards of cloth in no time; then he shut them
off again. Then he ripped off nine yards of
calico, and silence again. We circled and
settled leisurely, calmly, floatingly. Other
planes were in our path, beside us, above us,
I counted thirteen in two minutes.

"Can you see 'em, old fellow? Don't let's
bump into them. I'd hate to kill any of these
nice Italian aviators."

We sailed over a field where a family was
loading a hay wagon. We were so close above
them that I could see "pa's" eyes and "ma's"
teeth and "Sal's" bare feet, as they looked up
and waved their hands. I thought we were
going to take the top off that load of hay and
lodge our wheels in the hedge just beyond, but
we cleared both.

Then we tilted our nose sKghtly up, and I
could not record the moment when we touched
earth. Now we polkaed up to the airshed, to
which we were bringing a new machine,

XVII
OUR ARMY OVERSEAS

WE were within sound of the guns once
more, lulled to sleep by their rumble
and awakened in the morning by
American bugles sounding reveille. By the
time I was out on the village street the lads
had had their breakfast and were swinging
along toward their day's work at the training
grounds.

In advance was a pick and shovel outfit,
followed by infantry with steel helmets and
full packs. After all the foreign troops I had
watched, these home huskies looked good to
me. They are slim legged, red and brown
faced, spring heeled lads with a jauntiness of
step all their own.

They show up well on the boulevards of
Paris, along the railways, where they are at
work running trains and studying block sys-
tems and building lines, on station platforms,
in fields and village streets. Perhaps I should
not say "streets"; for I inquired my way to
divisional headquarters from one of them, and

177

178 Facing the Hindenburg Line

he replied in his broad southern drawl: "Up
this first alley — y*all can't miss it!"

He pointed to the principal thoroughfare of
the municipality and called it "alley." It
sounded very much like home. Then his last
phrase, "You can't miss it," sounded very
British; for after the most intricate directions
given you in England by an obliging person,
"third turning on the left, fourth on the right,
bearing all the while north by east," the
Englishman invariably adds, in the cheeriest
of voices: "You cawn't miss it!'*

We had had a never-to-be-forgotten ride.
We followed the winding curve of the clear,
blue Marne; we noted the lines along which
the first great plunge of the German forces
were made; we saw where they were headed
off, pushed back ; we stood where their desper-
ate stand was made and the great battle was
fought upon which hung the fate of civiliza-
tion.

Then we traveled miles of roadway bor-
dered by the scattered and clustered graves
of heroic men, buried where they fell. Here
was one with its wooden cross and its French
flag in the middle of a field all alone; here
was one just inside the wire fencing of the
railway right of way; here were two in a
little grove of trees, sleeping beneath the

Our Army Overseas 179

Union Jack, side by side; here half a dozen
in the corner of a sheep pasture; yonder, three
or four surrounded by plowed ground.

On every road-crossing and on every rail-
way station were printed names that, for three
years, we have read in communiques over and
over until they have become household words.
Here, on the river bank, was a famous
shambles; here, in this village, was fought out
one of the most stubborn small actions; this
railway station is denuded of glass in its
trainshed — the work of aerial bombs — and the
rain pours down as if the platforms were out
of doors, while passengers stand with um-
brellas and waterproofs dripping.

Yonder are walls pitted and scarred with
rifle and shell fire; and in the fields, hobbling
about with tools, or on the roadways stump-
ing along by carts, are the remnants of cannon
fodder chewed up and spat out from the maw
of Mars.

The Americans there seemed to be mostly
southerners. The brogue of Alabama, Ten-
nessee and the Carolinas, anywhere below the
Mason-Dixon line, seemed the predominant
strain in the greeting from the men as they
shook hands with us after the evening meet-
ing at the Y. M. C. A. tent. The officers, too,

180 Facing the Hindenburg Line

that I met seemed to hail largely from the
South.

Our very first experience in this area one
night was a truly southern meeting at the
station gates. It was raining heavily, and the
telegram announcing our arrival from Paris
to the Y. M. officials probably did not arrive
until the week after. So we were a pair of
wet and lost souls, until an American officer,
bundled in waterproofs, drawled out:

"Where y'all goin'? Come, get into my
car. Yes, throw your baggage in. Come
right along."

My seat was beside the sergeant driving the
Cadillac, and I said to him :

"The major is a southerner, isn't he ?**

"Humph!" snorted the sergeant. "He*s a
major general!"

To give still more the atmosphere of Dixie,
there is a big negro cook in a certain company.
Down at the French port, where the boys
landed, he saw another gentleman of color
strolling about, and immediately breezed up
to him as to a brother and opened up, "Boy,
howdy !" The second negro replied in French.
They stood eyeing each other. Then they got
excited, talked rapidly, each in the tongue to
which he was born, and louder all the time,
as they gesticulated wildly. Finally the Dixie

Our Army Overseas 181

cook turned away and, with infinite disgust,
said to the paymaster, standing near:

"Humph! That boy — ^he ain't no nigger
nohow !"

This big cook has a voice like a bass violin
and called out to every lad a half block away,
"Boy, howdy," as nearly as I can make out
and spell the vernacular greeting current in
the American army.

Just outside the tent where I was visiting
was another negro, a chauffeur, tinkering with
a Red Triangle car and explaining its working
to two American girls with Y. M. C. A. badges
upon their arms, who were probably to take
charge of this machine, or to work in some
canteen near by.

Across the road were supply company men
butchering a hog, and a supply officer sitting
on horseback overseeing the job. The cooking
and eating seemed all to be done in the streets
and the rain. The men are billeted in barns,
haymows, anywhere they can find shelter, in
quarters that no British Tommy would long en-
dure. For mine, I drew a luxurious billet in the
estaminet, under the roof, with no window,
but a bit of a skylight open for air.

I saw van loads of portable huts on the
railway sidings as I went along— if they will

182 Facing the Hindenburg Line

only get there some day ! Boats from America
is what is needed, just as Lloyd George said:

"Ships, more ships, and then ships!"

I have reason to believe that American en-
gineers will lay the trackage of our supply
lines fast enough if they can only get the
stuff to lay. But nobody can make railways
without bricks, straw and rails.

I must say, however, that the American
boys bear their discomforts with as little com-
plaining as men could. I looked into a stable
where twenty-eight men were quartered, f oimd
them cleaning their rifles, boots and brass but-
tons.

"Comfortable?" I asked. "Fine, sir," came
the answer. "Lots better than a pup tent in
the cactus!"

"Any sick?"

"I'm the only one, sir," answered one rather
pale. "Just got out of hospital to-day. Not
enough blood and a touch of rheumatism."

I could get no word of complaint out of
them or any man I talked with in the Y. M.
hut. They were anxious only about one thing,
and that was to get up into the line and fight.

"We're ready now!" they cried. "Let us
at 'em!"

We would call out sometimes to a thousand
Sammies in the Y. M. C. A. audience:

Our Army Overseas 183

"Can you fellows sing Tack up your troubles
in your old kit bag?' "

Then there would invariably come back a
roar:

"We ain't got no troubles!"

The Y. M. C. A. was doing its best, with
a few huts, some tents and a limited number
of motor trucks. Much of their material
equipment has been greatly delayed in transit.
In spite of this, however, twelve stations have
been opened in this advanced line, covering a
stretch of some twenty miles.

The huts are overcrowded all the time, and
will soon be replaced with larger and better
ones, the present ones being turned over to the
army for barracks.

There are three or four pianos in the
huts here, and more arriving.

One must remember in estimating the
promptness of the Y. M., that it was informed
last spring that no American troops would be
sent over here until fall; then suddenly, under
urgent requests from the Allies, plans were
changed, and the troops are pouring across
with their supplies as rapidly as ships can be
found to bring them.

Considering all the circumstances, there-
fore, it appears to me that the Red Triangle
is doing wonderfully well; and the soldiers

184 Facing the Hindenburg Line

said to me: "I don*t know what we*d do
without this hut to come to. I guess we'd
dier

The health of the boys was excellent, aside
from injuries by accident in bomb practice and
the like, where the risks are inevitable.

There was practically no illness.

None of them, of course, were in the
trenches ; although the officers go up in batches
to observe. I talked with one of our captains
who was with the Foreign Legion, the other
day, at the big push beyond Verdun. His eyes
glowed as he told of the experience.

Sanitation seemed well looked after, and
certain measures of prophylaxis arc being
rigidly enforced to prevent incapacitation of
men in the fashion in which some of the
armies suffered earlier in the war. The fact,
too, that the camps are rural prevents much
of this danger to our American troops.

It would be better, however, if our men had
less money. The officers feel that these young
lads are too heavily paid, or at least, that they
are allowed to draw too much of their pay.

The French soldiers and the French people
are not accustomed to seeing so much money
flashed about. Prices are shot to pieces.
Farmers* wives, good women, are subjected to

Our Army Overseas 185

a fearful temptation in these days of want for
their families and themselves.

Soldiers do not need much money; there
are very few places in which they can legiti-
mately use it; the officers urge them to put it
in war bonds; the Y. M. C. A. offers to send
any man's money home for him; but neither
can do more than exercise moral suasion.
They are recommending to the government,
I understand, that some adequate measures be
devised for the corrections of these dangers.

They are a lively lot, these boys. They do
not know yet the camp songs that every British
Tommy knows, and that are ringing in the
English music halls, songs even of American
origin, some of them; but they quickly learn
them, and there is nothing that promotes
morale more effectively than good singing.

I have a doggerel rhyme composed by a lad
billeted in a haymow with fourteen others.
He sings the praises of the whole fourteen by
name, and tells of the qualities and exploits
of each in a manner that reminds one of the
rhymes emanating from British trenches.
Here is one verse of it; and it is noteworthy
that the name mentioned is of German origin :

First of all is Corporal Weiss,
He's been with us quite a while;

And when it comes to cracking jokes,
He can make the devil smile.

186 Facing the Hindenburg Line

When we think of the number of German
names that will come over with our army —
a half dozen occur in this barrack rhyme — we
can only wonder what the French police will
do with them all.

We American travelers have consumed time
enough ourselves with our plainly English
patronymics, in consulting and being exam-
ined by officers of the secret service, both
English and French, to render us apprehensive
about our soldiers. Perhaps, after all, the onus
of responsibility will rest upon America her-
self.

One day, one of our boys with a German
name, stood watching a group of Boche pris-
oners file by, when suddenly his eyes met
those of his own brother among the Huns.
The American soldier shouted his brother's
name; and this violated the rule that none but
their captains may communicate with prison-
ers. He found himself, therefore, in diffi-
culties with the French.

When, however, he explained the circum-
stances, an exception was made, and he was
allowed to hold a few minutes' conversation
with his brother. Then the prisoner moved
away with the file, and the great gulf of the
world war yawned again between the two.

Out there in the village street — ^beg pardon,

Our Army Overseas 187

I should say "alley" — was ranged a battery of
machine guns of the crack machine gun com-
pany of our army. I suppose there was a
score of the guns.

I was told that the men of this branch, all
of whom were down on the Mexican border,
were in the best physical condition of any of
our troops, and were ready then, trained to
the point, to go to the front. Our French
neighbors — the populace, I mean — wonder why
we do not start at once for the trenches. They
say that they themselves had to go at once,
why do not we?

They do not realize that it takes more
than men; it takes artillery, commissary, an
elaborate preparation, before we can go for-
ward and take over our part of the line.
When we do go forward, I am told, it will be
in force, and in such a force as to be felt.
Meantime, give us time, and boats, and boats,
and boats.

I saw a number of other machine gun com-
panies and talked with their officers. They
are enthusiastic, both about the discipline of
their men and their marksmanship.

I heard varied reports as to how the men
are behaving themselves. On the whole, how-
ever, after careful listening to evidence, I was
inclined to believe that drinking was not ex-

188 Facing the Hindenburg Line

cessive. Pure water is sometimes scarce, and
the men can hardly be expected to forego the
native wines altogether. A' few men got drimk
at nights, but only a few, and those always
the same ones. A few were laid up in hos-
pital through their own fault, but only a few.

Taken for all in all, I believe our men will
make a record comparable to that of the
British in France, which is a record that will
be an everlasting credit to the British Empire.

One night I strolled into the little cemetery
near one of the camps and found two new
graves, marked with the names, companies and
regiments of two American boys. These are
the first two to lie asleep under French soil.
I learned, upon inquiry, that one of these had
been drowned while bathing in a neighboring
stream, while the other had shot himself, dur-
ing the night, not long ago.

I must confess to a strong tug at the heart
strings as I thought of the hundreds and
thousands of our boys who, in my judgment,
will sleep in this far land before we have done
our utmost duty here.

XVIII

AMERICANS SITTING IN THE
SHADOWS

HE was a homesick looking lad. I sold
him something or other at the can-
teen counter; then he drifted over
and sat down against the wall of the hut. The
place was full of men, but there was a vacant
chair next to him. I watched his downcast
features for a while, and then sat down beside
him.

"Ever get homesick over here?" I asked.

"Me? Homesick? That's the least of my
troubles."

"What are your troubles, then?"

"It's my blankety blank company. If I was
in a decent company I'd never worry."

"What's the matter with 'em?"

"Oh, they think they know it all, and they
don't know nothing. They are most of them
new recruits; if they'd all been down at the
border and seen some service they'd be dif-
ferent."

I was still searching for the real trouble for

189

190 Facing the Hindenburg Line

I was convinced it lay deeper. By and by I
got the facts. The boy was from Wisconsin.
His father had fought for Germany in '70-
His uncle was now a German prisoner in
French hands, and the boy had seen and talked
with him at the seaport

He had also recently received a letter from
his folks back in Wisconsin saying that he need
never come home again, since he had taken up
arms against the fatherland. More than that,
his comrades in the company were none too
cordial with him on account of his German
name.

"It makes no difference. I'm going to stick.
I'm an American, whatever my people were,
and I*m going to see it through. I'm just
waiting until I see whether I get promotion.
The sergeant is recommending me for a stripe.
If I don't get it — well, I can hold my own with
any man in the blank'd company, and the first
one that says anything to me I'm going to biff
him."

Just then three breezy young "Sammies" —
that is the name by which the American sol-
diers are going to be known over here, just as
the English are "Tommies;" there was much
grave editorial discussion in London on this
subject; it would not do to say Yankees, or
Yanks, as this might offend the Americans ; so

Americans Sitting in the Shadows 191

"Sammies" was adopted, from Uncle Sam,
and Sammies they will remain — well, I say,
three young lads came breezing into the hut
and making straight for my friend opened up
on him:

"Hello, Herman; by gosh, I haven't seen
you since we left Brownsville. WhereVe
you "

"Hello, Shorty; hello, Bill; hello, Jim. Fm
sure glad to see you. When*d you land here ?"

"Just now. WeVe been wiring the new
headquarters for General Pershing, about so
many kilometers from here. We landed
at "

"Say, Shorty," said the German lad wist-
fully, "how can I get transferred to your com-
pany ?*'

Then followed a stream of border reminis-
cence, and Herman's face gradually cleared
and brightened. At last I got up, knowing he
was now in good hands, and walked away,
while he waved his hand to me and smiled,
saying, "See you to-morrow."

To-day at mess one boy, who goes by the
nickname of "Dutch," was quietly munching
in a corner when some fellow cried out : "Hey,
Dutch, what are you, German or Holland-
Dutch?" "Tm German! I'm no flat-headed
Dutchman!" growled the lad.

192 Facing the Hindenburg Line

"Got any folks in Germany?"

"Yes, I did have, an)rway. Three or four
uncles and seven cousins. Most of 'em all
killed off, though."

"Too bad, too bad," said somebody con-
ventionally.

"Oh, I don't know," replied Dutch. "Saved
me from having to kill 'em."

Under the apparently flippant words lay a
whole world of grim pathos.

It is rather hard lines for German-American
boys in the army; they are between two mill-
stones. Yet it is a strange fact that many of
the non-commissioned officers are either Ger-
man, Polish, Hungarian or Russian Jews. The
men remark about it and declare that, if the
sergeants and corporals would give their real
names, you would find most of them ending in
"ski" and "off" and the like. "Why," said one
of the boys to me, "they can't give orders in
English!" I myself inquired my way from
one of them one evening, and I could scarcely
understand his reply. These lads of foreign
birth feel that they have to make good, are
devoted to duty, punctilious, ambitious and
anxious for the extra pay.

Much has been written about the ingenuity
of Tommy Atkins in communicating with his
new French neighbors; well, the American is

Americans Sitting in the Shadows 193

not lacking in ingenuity, whatever else he may
lack. I was dining at the officers' mess of a
certain company, one evening, just after the
new steel helmets had been issued. One big
lieutenant, who had evidently come up through
the ranks, a rollicking, black-mustached, hail-
fellow-well-met type of fellow, who smiled per-
petually from ear to ear and showed a mouth
full of fine white teeth — ^by Jove, what a re-
lief it is to see so many beautiful teeth in men's
heads as I see these days! — insisted upon
wearing his helmet at the table.

He had no more than got seated until he
began to roar: "Mam'selle! Gertrude! Eat!
Oui, ouif I talk French. Oui, oui means 'all
gone !' Gertrude V*

When Gertrude appeared — a smiling bru-
nette, an Italian girl, in a French estaminet —
the big lieutenant carried on all the conversa-
tion with her in this lingo and with his ges-
tures in spite of the fact that an interpreter,
a handsome French officer, sat there engaging
in the universal laughter. The lieutenant got
up and moved about the place, thrusting his
nose into the pie — glorious pie it was — tossing
his cigarette stub out the window, and along
with it a string of greetings to women and
children who chanced to pass. Everybody got
a share of his attentions and — ^his French!

194 Facing the Hindenburg Line

I am reminded of a sign once displayed in a
Paris cafe window: "Wanted, American wait-
ers who can speak French."

Someone asked the restaurateur if he hadn't
plenty of French waiters who could speak
French. He replied, **Mais oui, I want waiters
zat can speak ze kind of French zat ze Ameri-
cans speak!"

One middle-aged corporal, the other after-
noon, hung around the Y. M. canteen counter
until closing time, and the secretary started
away for dinner. The corporal followed, and
then the secretary realized that the man had
something on his mind. "Anything I can do
for you, corporal ?"

"Yes, sir, a very great favor, sir," answered
the corporal, with evident hesitation. "Could
you write out something for me in French
if I tell you what to write?"

"I think I could. What is it?"

"Well, sir, it's this way," hesitated the cor-
poral. "Fm billeted in a house with the nicest
little French woman and her two clean, pretty
little children. Her husband is away at the
front. Well, sir, the other night some French
officers came around and they wanted me to go
and have a good time with them, and I did. I
got a little off, I suppose ; you know this wine
^^well, anyway, I don't exactly know what

Americans Sitting in the Shadows 195

happened, but that nice little woman hasn't been
the same to me any more. I think she must
be mad on me. I want to apologize to her,
tell her Fm sorry, and it won't happen again;
or if she still feels mad on me, and wants me
to change my quarters, Fll go way. If I write
this out, sir, could you put it over into
French?"

"ril do my best, corporal," answered the
secretary. That night the corporal brought his
composition, fearfully and wonderfully con-
structed, to the hut; and it was duly turned
into the vernacular of the vicinity; and the
corporal went away proud and happy. The
secretary never heard directly of the outcome ;
but two days later there was a ball game; the
corporal drifted in and bought two cakes of
chocolate, and a little later the secretary saw
the corporal sitting at the game with two nice,
clean little children beside him munching
chocolate. If that corporal should survive the
war, and the French husband should not, the
chances are the United States would be short
one citizen and France would gain a husband
for one of her widows. Such is the history
of armies in foreign lands. One man in this
division has already married a peasant girl
here.

Another lad brought a letter in French to

196 Facing the Hindenburg Line

one of the secretaries for translation. The
secretary told me what it contained. It was an
answer to a proposal of marriage. The young
woman said: "Your country and my country
are at war. You are over here to do your
part and I am trying to do mine. It is no time
to talk about marriage. When the war is
over, if you are still alive and I am, too, it will
then be time enough to talk about getting mar-
ried."

I call that pretty good horse sense, don't you ?
You may just count upon it, however, that
many a man who comes over here will never
get back, who does not fall in battle. France
will be shy a good many men and have an over
supply of women. Inevitable marriages will
follow.

There are three topics of conversation at
officers' mess, three eternal questions. The
first is women. One officer the other night,
talking about learning French declared the only
way to master this tongue is with "one of these
long haired dictionaries." It goes without say-
ing— which, by the way, is a French idiomatic
phrase — it goes without saying that the eternal
feminine is the first everlasting subject with
men.

Then the second question is "shop," military
discussion. Can we break the Hindenburg

Americans Sitting in the Shadows 197

line? Is there to be open fighting? Will the
war be finished with airplane and machine gun
cooperating with infantry? "Fm for a corps
of cavalry !" cried a colonel.

Says a very bright captain of a machine gun
company, a West Pointer : "Cavalry is a thing
of the past. The machine gun, with indirect
fire, forming the barrage, cooperating, to be
sure, with heavy guns and infantry, is the way
through the German line. Of course, the line
will be broken. It will be costly, but it will be
broken."

Then follows the third subject — death!
They may carry themselves as airily as they
please, but these officers are never free from
the thought of the great tansition. They have
most of them been up the line, or near it, on
observation; and they know, as I know and
have good cause to know, what awaits the
combatant in that line. The enlisted men are
less disturbed by the presence of the overhang-
ing shadow. They are younger and not so well
informed. Besides, responsibility is not rest-
ing upon them. Theirs but to do and die.
One lad bought a safety razor of the very best
kind in the canteen one night and three extra
packages of blades. I sold it to him. Then I
said: "You must expect to do a deal of shav-
ing, my son?" "Well," he replied, "I don^t

198 Facing the Hindenburg Lnne

suppose ril be able to get one of these tilings
again in this country." I could not but wish
that he may live to use up all those blades.

It is the officer, however, who, more sensi-
tively constituted, more cultivated and imagin-
ative, is able to visualize the impending dan-
ger; and when you see him sitting unoccupied
for a few minutes, there comes into his eye
that far-away, absorbed expression that has
grown so familiar to me among British and
French officers and men; and you know, as if
his forehead were plate glass, the thoughts too
deep for words that are living and moving in
his brain.

The enlisted man frankly declares that the
war will be over before he ever sees the line.
The wish is plainly father to the thought. The
officer labors under no such self -bom delusion.
He knows the chances are all for a long, hard
struggle yet before us and one in which Amer-
ica will have to pay her price. If the republic
does not realize this now she will wake up to
it as soon as one division is cut to pieces, one
transport sunk. Then will a flame of fire run
from New York to San Francisco, from Port-
land to Galveston and the great pacific, sleep-
ing people will arouse itself from half-slumber
and really exert its power. Unless something
very unforeseen occurs we shall pay back some

Americans Sitting in the Shadows 199

of our obligation to the land of Lafayette with
rich, young American blood.

But these men, I know, will not falter. As
a young lad said to me, quietly, "There is not
a coward among them." They come of fight-
ing blood. They will go grimly through the
task given them to perform, the task of ren-
dering war impossible and unnecessary for
their sons and their sons' sons, that they, in
turn, may give their fighting qualities to the
causes of freedom and democracy, the solution
of the problems of peace, the betterment of
humanity, the ideals toward which the world
is blindly groping upward through mud and
blood and smoke.

XIX

AMERICAN BOYS AND FRENCH
CHASSEURS

AS we slept, all innocent of harm, last
night, German planes sailed over our
heads and dropped their deadly
freight on each side of us. Accustomed to
alarums and excursions, we slept on; but this
morning we heard of their visit, and went to
see the destruction. A number of civilians
were killed and wounded in a certain town
hard by. Here I saw the first women's tears
I have seen in France. We saw the cars de-
railed and smashed in the Germans' attempt
to blow up the station; but the "gare" itself
was uninjured. Near at hand was a hut,
which had been shattered completely, and
curious soldiers were walking around it and
peering in.

Simultaneously with this expedition the
morning papers report, there was another over
the English coast at Dover. While these
things occur with such frequency we cannot
claim to be masters in the air. It is perfectly

200

American Boys and French Chasseurs 201

evident, therefore, where America can put in
her best licks in preparation. While sending
boats and more boats, let some of them be
airboats. This war is going to hinge upon
supremacy in that element.

I rather suspected that aircraft activity was
going forward last night, for it was a beauti-
ful moonlight night. I stood talking with a
group of Sammies outside the Y. M. hut, after
a meeting a thousand strong, when they sud-
denly observed and pointed out to me what
looked like a new planet in the sky. I soon
saw it change in color from white to blue and
then to yellow. The men thought it a signal,
from the changes in color ; but to me it seemed
an aircraft of some description, so long it re-
mained afloat and moved about ; some thought
it a star-shell; but no star-shell hangs so long
in the sky. Planes come over so often, how-
ever, that we thought comparatively little of
the matter.

I was soon absorbed in the story of how
our boys had trained their guns on one of
our own French planes, a short time since, by
mistake. The men who did the firing, both
with rifles and machine guns, were the men
grouped around me, and each contributed his
part of the tale. Everybody had been nervous
and on the qui vive at that time, for General

202 Facing the Hindenburg Line

Pershing was to come that way in a few
minutes on a tour of inspection. Indeed, his
car had already been sighted coming down
that hill over yonder, and the men pointed
to the spot. Suddenly a plane came shooting
down out of a cloud and hung quite low above
them. They could see no allied markings on
her, and they had several minutes of great
uneasiness and perplexity. It afterwards de-
veloped that the French airman was flying
upside down. I have myself seen them per-
form that stunt many a time. The purpose
is to get their guns in such position as to
shoot upward. A French officer was present
with our soldiers and after a moment's hesita-
tion he advised the major in command of our
troops to open fire. The major gave the order
and the rifles and machine guns did the rest.
Almost instantly the aviator righted his
machine and they saw the allied emblem in
its proper place. I know that the emblems are
painted on top as well as underneath; but, for
some reason, the men failed to discern the
markings.

It was impossible, however, to avoid the
damage to the plane. One wing was broken;
and the aviator tried to land close at hand
but, finding no suitable place, managed with
his crippled craft to effect a landing further

American Boys and French Chasseurs 203

on. He himself was uninjured. He after-
ward signed a written statement, so the men
told me, that it was his own fault for acting
in a suspicious manner.

When the story was all done, the corporal
who had narrated most of it, took me aside
to show me photographs, just received, of his
"ex-wife" in Cripple Creek. He said she had
divorced him because she did not know where
he was. It was his own fault. He had no
reason to complain. It seems he had had
some qualms of conscience, after reaching La
Belle France, or some homesick longings, and
had written her. Then he insisted upon my
reading her reply, which, it appeared had done
much for his amour propre. I rather thought,
myself, from the tone of the letter, that the
wife would be glad to see him "make a man
of himself" and come back to her. Here's
hoping that he does; and from the close re-
lations he seems to have established with the
Y. M. leaders, it would not surprise me, if
he becomes a new man, provided he lives at
all.

That I am not exaggerating the possibilities
of danger to our own men over here was
amply borne out by the words of an American
ambulance driver, who had been in the recent
push at Verdun, Hill 304 and Mort Homme.

204 Facing the Hindenburg Line

He said: "The Boche will have it in for the
first American they can locate. I wouldn't
like to be in the first line that goes up/* Nor
does this young man believe that the Hun is
nearly exhausted, or that he has lost his spirit.
I have seen some 1,200 of the prisoners lately
taken and they are in very fair physical
condition, young, but well fed and therefore
quick to recover from fatigue. Our artil-
lery is undoubtedly superior to the German,
but the supremacy of the air hereabouts is
open to question. As for the vanished morale
of the Germans, the reports are, like the fam-
ous ones concerning Mark Twain's premature
death, somewhat exaggerated.

For example, this young driver told me of a
Boche prisoner whom he himself had brought
into the advanced dressing station wounded ;
how the fellow had been dressed and then wrig-
gled away in a stolen French coat ; how he had
crawled to the French trenches hard by, scram-
bled over them, stole a revolver somewhere
and shot at an officer and how they caught
him, with their machine guns, going over No
Man's Land, and hit him again. This time his
back was riddled, and after two or three days
out in a shell hole he was brought back again;
and they had him in the same dressing station
once more. The man had been without food

American Boys and French Chasseurs 205

for five days straight and part of the time
for five days before that, but he recovered.
There was morale left in this one fellow, any-
how. Do not for a moment believe that the
war is over.

One of the most interesting things about the
battle fronts is the fashion in which batteries
and aircraft guns, great howitzers and even
giant naval guns may be concealed. I have
had the guns to open almost under my feet on
either side of me, and just behind me, when
I was convinced they were within fifty or one
hundred yards of where I stood, and have been
unable to locate them. This has happened as
I walked over a battlefield where not a spear
of grass, a tree or a bush or stump was left
standing, nothing but miles of yellow mud.
How guns and batteries could be so placed
that one could not see them at such close
proximity almost passes comprehension. It is
very clever. On one or two occasions I have
located them, later on, by the flashes from the
muzzles and confirmed the belief that they
were close at hand. Guns are, of course, hid-
den in every wood, shrub or bush along the
front.

After the first time that one of your own
shells goes over your head the sensation is not
unpleasant. The first time you jump, duck,

206 Facing the Hindenburg Line

feel sheepish and altogether miserable. Of the
various kinds of music from these overhead
messengers I prefer the tone and timbre of
the English five-point-nine. It has a fine voice
of its own. The French seventy-five emits
more of a soprano note. For those who care
only for soprano voices — but this is getting
to be more metaphorical than the subject will
stand.

There is no joy at all in listening to the
approach of a hostile shell or air craft bomb.
It is altogether devilish, goose-fleshy, jumpy,
and makes one feel as one does when a Klaxon
sounds suddenly in your ear when crossing a
crowded street. You want to jump and then
turn around and glare at and "cuss" somebody.
Then comes the thump and you breathe again
and are woefully ashamed of yourself.

I think I saw some of the finest men in
the French army to-day — the Algerians and the
Alpin chasseurs. The Algerians were coming
back from Verdun, from a long spell of fight-
ing, to the rest camp. I could not feel, in
looking at them, that they were vastly in need
of help, so all alive did they appear. I was
surprised, too, at the whiteness of skin of
many of them, but the officer with me promptly
explained it by the admixture of French
blood. The men were in a clay-colored khaki

American Boys and French Chasseurs 207

with red fezzes. They were allowed off the
train for a little while in the station ; then the
bugle sounded and before all of them were
on again the train moved slowly away on its
road back from the front.

The wild-looking fellows came scrambling
from all directions, to run and clamber on the
train. Some carried their rifles with bayonets
still fixed, and as they ran, their faces eager
and anxious, I got some notion of how they
would look on charge. I should not care to
meet them.

The French chasseur is the flower of the
French army. These are the boys who, in
Napoleon's day, used to wear the shining
breastplates, the tall boots and the horsetail
plumes. Now they wear the nattiest black or
blue broadcloth, with the most daredevil cut,
and the most attractive little visorless caps,
with big soft crowns, lolling backward over
one ear. One of these lads, with a quarter of
an inch of mustache on each side of his nose,
a raincoat draped carelessly over one shoulder
and high russet boots to his knees, with the
croix de guerre and the medaille militaire upon
his breast, strode up and down the platform
in a fashion to have stolen every feminine
heart, if there had only been some feminine
hearts about. As it was, he was bound for

208 Facing the Hindenburg Line

Paris, where it was easy to see he would cut
a considerably wide swath. I wouldn't blame
the women for having their heads turned by
him; for you may be very sure he is all the
hero he looks.

These people are all heroes here. I don't
believe there are any but heroes left in the
French army. All the rest have been killed
off long ago ; and no man can go through what
these men have gone through without having
been somehow, somewhere heroic. Heroism,
as has been so often said, is the normal, the
common, the every day thing over here.

I met a man this morning who had come
over from America to fight for his beloved
France. He had been through nearly three
years in the trenches. And who do you think
he was? The chef in a famous Michigan
resort hotel. And whom do you think he met
one night in his own regiment in the trenches ?
The chef of a well-known Chicago hotel, to
whom he had been an assistant years before.
Even cooks here must be heroic, for often and
often they do their cooking under shell fire;
but the two here referred to were shouldering
rifles and not ladles.

Nevertheless, France is war weary. The
eternal question is on every lip, "Monsieur,
how long do you think it will last?" The

American Boys and French Chasseurs 209

same expression comes from every heart, "O,
it is terrible, terrible, la guerre!" Two or
three of us are together in my room. The
big, angular femme-de-chamhre enters in her
black dress and Httle white cap. One of the
men, thinking to be French in his manner,
pleasantly says: "Mademoiselle est tres jolie
dans noirT "Ah, monsieur," she replies, and
I would not venture to try and put her French
into writing, "I wear nothing but black now."
"And why?" "For my poor brother — killed
in the war four months ago. Yes ! monsieur,
and a wife and five little children. It is ter-
rible— la guerre — terrible! When will it end,
monsieur?'' So it is, on all sides, and all the
time. And they look to America to put an
end to it all. We are placed under heavy re-
sponsibility.

XX

AMERICANS MUST LEARN THE
GAME

THE French are not, by nature and train-
ing, an athletic nation. One Sunday
afternoon an athletic meet was organ-
ized by the Y. M. at a certain camp in the
American line, where we have been living for
a week. The athletic director, wishing to
promote international relations, went over to
the French chasseurs, who were billeted in the
same village, and asked the officers in charge
if they would not send over men to participate
in the games. A council of war ensued and
finally the major in command, sending for a
sergeant, ordered him to detail a dozen men
to go over to the contest. Twelve chasseurs
were duly called out, drawn up at attention
and gravely marched away to the American
camp. They went with the same look on their
faces with which they would go to clean up
an area, to dig ditches, or perform any other
fatigue duty. Arrived on the field, they stood
gravely at attention and awaited directions.
210

Americans Must Learn the Game 211

When a certain event was about to be pulled
off, the sergeant would indicate a man to par-
ticipate; and the chasseur would step out of
line and "go to it/'

Of course the American lads ran away, or
jumped away, or hurled the shot away, from
their French comrades. At last, however, the
poilus caught the infectious merriment and
before the afternoon was over they were
laughing, shouting and sharing in the fun in
a fashion to do your heart good.

Last event of all was a tug of war. The
whole round dozen of Frenchmen, or the whole
dozen of round Frenchmen, were ranged in
line against a dozen lanky Sammies. The
bit of white cloth fastened to the rope that
ran along between the two groups, represent-
ing two nations, was exactly over a chalk line
boundary between the United States and La
Belle France. A pistol shot, in the language
of the detective stories, rang out upon the
still Sabbath air. Then the Americans or-
ganized spontaneously a series of undulating
jerks like those a terrier perpetrates, when he
has his teeth firmly in a bit of cord or cloth
that his youthful master holds in hand; and
French chasseurs advanced with a rapidity
that even Hill 304 had never witnessed. It
was a case in which the winning army went

212 Facing the Hindenburg Line

backwards, and the losing forwards. It was a
battle, too, punctuated by shouts and laughter,
in place of curses and bursting shells.

It was everybody's regret that Jack was
unable to be present and show his paces. The
race in which he has stood ready to run any-
body in the British army, and now the Ameri-
can or French armies, and for which he pur-
chased a track suit and running shoes, and
devised an emblem of the Chicago Athletic
Club, has never yet been run. Either the
soldiers have always been too busy, or we our-
selves have been sent away to sing and talk
for other groups, so that the event could not
be staged. There is no loafing on the job on
this side of the water. Most men, even past
military age, in England and France, are too
much occupied with war work, even to play
golf, croquet, tennis or so much as cards. The
games are played only by soldiers in rare
moments of relaxation.

If the French do not excel in athletics, they
nevertheless admire any who do. One day
a certain captain of ours was arranging
quarters for our men in a certain village. He
was the first American soldier ever seen there ;
and a crowd followed him about. He was
shown into a stable with a hay loft. The
steps up to the mow were dilapidated and some

Americans Must Learn the Game 213

were missing. There were certain poles pro-
jecting from the walls, however, and the slim
young fellow swung himself up hand over
hand, from one to another. The peasants
broke out into cheering at the feat.

First place of all for a billeting party to
be taken is the schoolhouse, as there is always
space for from thirty to fifty men here.
When our captain entered the village school
the children sprang up, began cheering for
America, and mounted seats and desks in their
enthusiasm for their new ally.

This same captain was driving with a
French general officer along a country road,
when a little boy lying by the roadside threw
a handful of gravel at the car. The missiles
took good effect ; and the general was furious.
He stopped his car, although it took nearly
half a kilometer to do it, went back, and call-
ing the lad's mother, who was now on the
scene, lectured her and the boy roundly, telling
her that this young officer with him repre-
sented the Great American Republic, and the
newest ally; and discourtesy had been offered
not merely to the men, but to Le Grand Na-
tion. He would not leave until the first lesson
in international amenity had been administered
warmly to the base of the young scion of
France; a lesson that doubtless he will never

214 Facing the Hindenburg Line

forget, but hand on to future generations with
keen remembrance and appreciation, beside the
cotter's fire of winter nights in the middle
years of the Twentieth Century.

The French soldiers take kindly to asso-
ciation football and every evening after their
day's work you may see them, red- faced and
perspiring, mingle with our own lads on the
field kicking and chasing the pigskin oval.
They become quite expert, too, with practice,
though I do not believe they have quite the
athletic instinct of the immediate sons of
pioneers. In bombing and trench crawling
and such exercises, our men learn with singu-
lar rapidity to outdo their instructors. At
first the French soldiery were mingled with
our men, company for company, and man for
man. The French would go through a certain
performance, then our men would follow ; and
each American would possess a French critic,
guide, philosopher and friend. In two or
three days it became evident that so many
instructors were not needed; and now there
are only a few French officers left with each
unit.

Bomb throwing comes handy to old base-
ball players. It is done with a different mo-
tion than ball throwing, to be sure ; it is indeed
a stiff-armed side stroke like the English

Americans Must Learn the Game 215

cricket bowling. Nevertheless our men are
quick and adaptable and soon master it. This
peculiar stroke is necessary to avoid striking
the back of the narrow trench. As the prac-
tice goes on with real bombs it is not alto-
gether harmless child's play. One day an
American boy struck the parados, or rear of
the trench, in his back swing and as a result
is now on his way to America minus a
hand. Also a Frenchman on our practice
grounds dropped one on the floor of the
trench, and instead of picking it up quickly
and tossing it before its five seconds' fuse had
time to spark, he lost his head and put his
foot on it. He was killed.

The men are stripped to the waist and
taught to crawl on hands and knees, and to
wriggle along on their stomachs on the surface
or in shallow trenches. They also practice
carrying each other on their backs while in
this cramped position; sometimes two will
carry a very heavy man between them. At
all of this kind of business our men are very
apt and soon surpass their French instructors.

Do not believe, however, that the little
American force has grasped, as yet, these new
methods of warfare, or is anything like pre-
pared to take its share. The grim general in
charge is determined they shall not go into

216 Facing the Hindenburg Line

the mill and shoulder their load until they
are prepared in all points ; first line, supporting
line, third line, supply communications stretch-
ing clear back to America unbroken, artillery
of our own and not somebody else's, and air
fleets manned by Americans and under Ameri-
can command. This is not a matter of na-
tional egotism, but a matter of safety for the
lives of men. An immense amount is necessary
for us both to do and to learn before that
time comes. This warfare is of a type new
to us, and we must study it from the ground
up. Furthermore, just as it takes fifteen men
to care for and to fly one airplane, so it takes
a vast number of people to man a fighting
line, more for us than for anybody else, be-
cause our communications are so much longer.
Every individual in our nation will be neces-
sary before we get through.

I am informed upon the best authority that
we have two regiments now at one of the
allied fronts and that they are so ill-equipped
as to be compelled to borrow shoes, socks,
clothing and such necessary supplies from their
neighbors. If that is the case in the height
of summer, what is to be expected when the
winter comes on, in the way of trench feet,
pneumonia and the like? Unless we can or-
ganize a supply system that will adequately

Americans Must Learn the Game 217

clothe and furnish our men, we shall pay the
price not merely in sickness, but in death.
Our men may be athletic and adaptable, but
they are not immortal.

A heavy per cent of these boys are raw
recruits, outside of the marines. Their
marching in the streets of London and Paris,
while the populace huzzaed and welcomed
them with kindly enthusiasm, was not such
as to fill American military men with over-
weening pride. I have talked with their
leaders and I know how they felt. The
American press had heralded these men as
regulars, as fine a fighting force as there was
in the world. Instead came recent volunteers
mixed with regulars to challenge comparison
with the finest troops this world ever saw. We,
who were there, could not but think of that
small army of British regulars a little over
sixty thousand strong, which began the war
in that wonderful retreat from Belgium, and
left all but about eight thousand scattered
along the way.

We are not "stuck up" over our own first
showing. We have got to retrieve that loss of
prestige, not by more boasting about 100,000
airplanes that we say we are going to build
and cannot build, nor even fifty thousand, nor
twenty-five thousand; but by patient enlisting,

218 Facing the Hindenburg Line

equipping and drilling of an army, while we
keep our mouths grimly shut and do, instead
of talk.

Meantime, there come to us stories over
here of rich men in America exempted be-
cause they have married a wife and needs
must support her, of famous golf players, who
think they can better serve their country,
civilization and God by playing gallery play
for the beflanneled men and beribonned women
who are posing as devoted Red Crossers.
Talk about "muddied oafs at the goal !" Only
two men out of ten who are called to the
colors in New York, we hear, sign up and
take the oath! Thank God, the Middle West,
the much doubted Middle West, is doing far
better than that! I have read somewhere in
history of a man "who married a wife and
therefore could not come." For him the heads
of no gates will be lifted up!

Pardon for breaking into exhortation and
a measure of denunciation. If all America
could see that little group of children at a
French port it would have its effect. Our
boys had just left the transports. They were
in the hastily improvised Y. M. C. A. hut.
They had a wheezy little melodeon and were
squeezing out the Marseillaise — most glorious
of songs. Some little school children wandered

Americans Must Learn the Game 219

in, fingers in mouths. The boys put them up
on a table and commanded them to sing. The
little people, woefully embarrassed, tried to
comply; but fingers and thumbs blocked the
song. By and by they caught the infection
from the little melodeon, the song began to
come, to gather headway. Then the screechy
little organ played out; but that made no
difference now, the children's heads were up,
their mouths open, and their voices rang clear
and strong as the immortal Marseillaise held
the Americans hushed in its grasp.

Another time I heard it sung. The singer
was a dashing young chasseur in an American
hut. The piano was going and hundreds of
Sammies were milling about. Soon the player
drifted into the French national song. Im-
mediately the young ''blue devil" sprang to
attention; his hand went to his forehead in
salute, and he stood like a statue as long as
the music lasted. It would be well for us to
learn this national reverence for our national
songs. Then he leaped upon a table, cap in
hand, and began to sing; the lad at the piano
came on with the accompaniment ; I never saw
a more graceful, handsome, inspiring figure
than this young dare-devil who had been
through many a battle and carried the wound
stripe on his arm. May he live to fight for

220 Facing the Hindenburg Line

France until this war is done, his country free
from the invader and the world made a safe
place for democracy!

The situation is not all depressing for
America, her prestige, her influence and her
future effect. Marshals of France could not
be met with greater respect and affection than
our ambulance drivers during a big push,
where they have taken the worst of shell fire
with the utmost coolness. These boys are
somewhat disgruntled at the taking over of
their corps by the government. It was a nec-
essary measure, no doubt; but they feel that
they should be entitled to something better
than a private's rank. They are, many of
them, college lads, some millionaires, some of
them very strong, mature and unusual men.
Some are going into aviation, some into artil-
lery schools and some into other units. I met
one who had come over on the ship with us,
a man of thirty, who formerly lived in Kansas
City. He told me he had decided for the
Foreign Legion.

I know a surgeon — ^he also came over on
our ship — who is now in charge of the surgical
ward of a big French hospital up near the
front. I met him one day in Paris, and we sat
for an hour in the Cafe de la Paix and talked
it all over. America was about to expend a

Americans Must Learn the Game 221

quarter of a million dollars at that hospital;
but transportation was the problem. The
money could not go in there, unless this prob-
lem could be solved. The surgeon said nothing
about the intentions of his government, but
set about solving the problem. He saw a
river close by. He conceived the plan of
finding a steamer and somebody to run it.
He came to Paris, made the search, found the
boat and an old skipper and was going back
rejoicing on the morrow. The money will
go in.

I fear this chapter will sound to many dis-
couraging. I do not wish it to. If it simply
faces us with the cold facts, and leads us to
arise and arouse, there is no people on the
face of earth whose inventiveness and bound-
less energy can do more and will do more.
After all, our men are very square bodied,
big boned, trimly clad fellows. There are no
bulging pockets in the skirts of their tunics,
as there are in so many others over here.
Their jacket collars may not be comfortable,
tight up about their necks; but they give a
certain neatness and soldierly air. As raw
material one may admire them most heartily
and be justly proud of them; but one has to
remember, and nobody knows it better than
their general, that they are still raw material

222 Facing the Hindenburg Line

with their job to learn. He will not be hur-
ried, either, into throwing their lives away
before they have learned.

None of our enlisted men have thus far
been allowed leave to go to Paris. They are
very anxious for such opportunity. I was
able to cheer them one day with the informa-
tion that leave would be granted them as soon
as the Y. M. C. A. was ready to open its
Paris hotels. Such hotels have been secured
and are in process of renovation. Another
interesting order is one issued by General
Pershing. It is especially so, in view of the
fact that some of the army chaplains have
been inclined to fight the Y. M. The order
reads that the Red Cross is to have charge
of all relief measures, the Y. M. C. A. of all
social and religious matters and chaplains will
render all assistance in their power.

XXI

THE SPECTACULAR ITALIAN FRONT*

ONE of the most important battle fronts
in Europe is the Italian. It has,
however, been regarded, for the most
part, with a lagging interest until, last August,
the tremendously successful offensive on
Monte San Gabriele and the Carso Plateau
was carried out. Then the world sat up and
took notice.

Italy had been quietly working along with
incredible industry against her age-long foe,
Austria, and had broken suddenly loose with
a big push that netted her chunks of important
territory and a full army corps of prisoners.
People began at once to say:

"Shouldn't be surprised if, after all, here is
a vital point to thrust at the central confed-
eracy. Vd like to see this Italian front."

I freely confess that this was my own atti-
tude of mind. So I immediately applied for

♦The writer sees no reason to alter these chap-
ters concerning the Italian front in spite of recent
events. There can be no doubt that a great opportunity
has here been lost through lack of team play on the
part of the Allies,

2^ Facing the Hindenburg Line

permission to visit the battle lines about
Trieste.

Such permission was not difficult to obtain;
for Italy is justly proud of her achievements
and is rightly anxious that the world should
know of them. So long has she prepared and
labored in silence that, now she has begun to
reap the fruits of her labors, she feels she
ought to get the due credit for them. She is
altogether right.

Everybody that knov/s Italy loves Italy;
and she has had the sympathy of the culti-
vated world since the days of Metternich.
Her heroes and patriots, her Garibaldis and her
Cavours, have commanded the heart beats of
all westerners outside of the Teutonic tribes
for more than a century. Our Byrons, and
Brownings, and Shelleys have shared the sor-
rows of Italy; and all who have the faintest
tinge of their spirit are rejoicing to-day in
Italian successes against her particular type
of Huns.

Italy stands to come out of this war far
greater than she went in. She resisted the
Teuton attempts at blackmail, in the beginning
of the conflict. She never once hesitated.
Those who think she did, do not know her
spirit.

Fancy Italians fighting side by side with

The Spectacular Italian Front 225

Austrians! It is enough simply to mention
the two names in the same breath to know
at once where they would align themselves.
I remember thinking, five or six years ago,
that Italy was making an effort, second-class
power that she was, to pose as a first-class
military nation, much to the taxation and
suffering of her poverty stricken common
people.

Time has but proven that I was wrong and
she was right. Somebody in Italy was long
headed enough to see what was coming, and
to prepare for it. Now she will emerge, as
she deserves to do, with her frontiers secured
forever, let us hope, against the Vandal, with
a people richer and stronger, more independent
and happier, than they have been for more
than a century.

We in America have been accustomed to
think of Italians in terms of the Sicilian
banana venders and organ grinders. If, by
chance, we have "toured" the sunny land we
may think a bit in terms of picture galleries
and old crumbling palaces, painted walls and
campaniles.

It is only when we have come into personal
contact with her soldiers, officers, inventors,
writers, administrators, that we begin really
to know her. It is easy to forget that this is

226 Facing the Hindenburg Line

the land which produced such brains and
builders as Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, Giotto,
Lorenzo the Magnificent, Bellini, Savonarola
and a host of others.

The same kind of brains is there to-day, and
is being turned toward construction of a dif-
fent kind — the construction of a state. And,
believe me, the foundations are being laid as
firmly as the foundation of St. Peter's.

To say that one was astonished at the ad-
ministrative and inventive genius of Italy in
these hours of struggle is only to confess one's
own ignorance or thoughtlessness. One ought
to have known beforehand what to expect.
Only, it is possible for others of us, besides
the Germans, to make the mistake of believing
that our neighbors are decadent or lacking
in virility.

Because the Italian is, like his landscape,
gentle, sunny, kindly, musical, easy going, is
no indication that he cannot set great wheels
to whirling when the need comes. You have
but to see the swarming millions of soldiers
back of her front and watch the smooth work-
ing of her machinery of supply and the in-
calculable industry of her road building, to
awake to the fact that here is a noble and
puissant people, rousing itself like a strong
man.

The Spectacular Italian Front 227

Four million of men under arms! Almost
as many as England and France hold on the
western front. And not a man of them idle.
The common soldiers in other armies may-
suffer from ennui — never the Italian!

The character of her leaders, too, deserves
some thought. The courtliest and the kind-
liest officers in Europe, they are, at the same
time, among the most efficient. General

Then there is the king. Victor Immanuel
challenges comparison with Albert of the
Belgians. I saw him, close up to the lines,
driving back to headquarters, white as a
miller, from the dust.

"What do you think of your king?" I asked
one and another.

"Our king is one of the best," they replied,
modestly. "He is like a president — ^he knows
how far he can go, and no further. As it is,
he goes into the front trenches, is all the time
at the front. Rome never sees him.

"He talks with the common soldiers. He
moves among them and asks, *How goes it?
How fare you?* We are well content with
our king."

The king*s cousin, the Duke of Aosta, is in
command of one of the armies under Cadorna.
We visited that army; and we visited the
headquarters of a string of batteries, one of

228 Facing the Hindenburg Line

which the duke's son commands. We had
tea with the other officers, but the young
nobleman was not present.

"He is with his battery," smiled the brigadier
in command.

We could see that he was well pleased with
his youthful captain, of royal blood; and we
turned an ear of sharpened attention to the
brisk cracking of the seventy-fives out to the
left.

The people, too, seem united as nearly as
any nation ever was that went to war, in sup-
port of their leaders. Oh, there are some
dissatisfied Socialists, some confirmed pacifists,
some corrupted of German gold, as in all the
nations in this war, not forgetting our own;
but the observer sees little sign in Italy to-day
of aught but a determined, industrious and
cheerful prosecution of daily life and of the
war.

There is little or no evidence of the battle
fatigue of France. There are not so many
maimed and stranded, in sight as there are
in England. Everybody has more work than
in normal times, more money and apparently
more food.

There is but one necessity of life that seems
seriously short, and that is fuel. Coal costs
more per pound than bread.

The Spectacular Italian Front 229

"What is bread per kilo ?" I asked a govern-
ment official.

"It is selling at sixty," he replied.

"And coal?"

"Oh !" he cried, throwing up his hands ; for
every Italian is a born orator, or actor, or
comedian ; they are all Salvinis. "Coal is any-
thing! It is eighty, ninety, a hundred, a
hundred and twenty ! I had a friend who, last
week, heard of a quantity of coal and went
to buy it. A hundred and twenty was the
price demanded. After long bargaining he got
it at a hundred."

Almost twice the price of bread. Fancy
running locomotives and factory engines with
bread — no, not bread, but cake ! Where would
industrial Italy be without her Alpine water
power ? I walked through a humming factory
in Milan, and suddenly it occurred to me to
ask where they got their fuel to drive all these
wheels and shaftings.

"Oh, it's electric, of course; water power!"
was the answer.

"Of course," thought I. "If they were de-
pendent upon coal all these wheels would
stop."

Furthermore, Italy must import not only
her fuel, but her raw materials. She cannot

230 Facing the Hindenburg Line

furnish us with all the airplanes we would like
to buy from her unless we send her the lumber
and the steel to make them with. That is
what is the matter with her depreciated lire
to-day.

She imports all the time, and cannot suffi-
ciently export. This state of affairs will right
itself after a while, let us hope. Just as the
presence of the Americans in France has
actually sent up the price of real estate in
Paris because we have needed so many hotels
and other buildings and grounds for our uses ;
just as American money pouring into French
small trades has brought a renewed prosperity
to France; so, in time, will the American de-
mand for supplies aid Italy to rehabilitate her
coinage.

There is still another reason why one cannot
wisely fail to visit the Italian front, and that
is because it is the most dramatic, the most
spectacular battle line in Europe. When you
have seen the Flanders front you have seen
it all, you might say, west of Switzerland.

The desolated villages are all alike. The
smoking trenches, the rooting, grunting, hog-
gish shells, the mud, the dugouts, the camou-
flage, the crowded roads — it is all alike. True,
about Verdun and Alsace there is some broken

The Spectacular Italian Front 231

variation of topography ; and at various other
memorable portions of the line there are out-
standing bits, but in the main, when you have
seen a part you find it but a sample of the
whole.

In Italy it is not so. The Alps lift the
whole line up and hang it in festoons over
their shoulders. You can look down upon the
enemy's guns, watch their fire, trace their
projectiles, hear and see them fall and explode.
You can stand behind your own guns and
see the effect of your fire on a spot four
miles away which, through the clear air, seems
only half a mile.

You can see a whole battlefield tilted up
on edge, hung like a picture on the wall. You
can walk from peak to peak, or ride, and ex-
amine the field from different angles. You
can look down beneath at the gorges where
wind the silver mountain rivers, with their
pontoons yet bloody from recent daring con-
quests. You can look face to face upon
mountain precipices, up which Alpini have
scaled like mountain goats, rifles strapped on
shoulders and knives in teeth, in the fashion
of the old days of chivalry.

Here, too, you can estimate the strength of
a position, forty or fifty miles long, from a
single vantage point. You can look at the

232 Facing the Hindenburg Line

enemy's line and his reserve country and sup-
plies, and his slippery foothold; then you can
see your own, and look behind you at the
crawling millions shoving forward, pushing,
edging, inching toward a goal.

One is overpowered by the thought that
here, on the Italian front, is, after all, the
weak spot in the central empires* defenses.
Here concentration of allied artillery and air-
planes would turn the trick, smash through,
breajc quickly like a mountain torrent out of
the mountains, upon the plateaus, run away to
Vienna and cut the central confederacy in
two. This may be an amateur's estimate, but
it is backed up by much good expert opinion.

The Italians have men enough; they need
only guns and munitions. There must be
reasons, in the jealous councils of the powers,
otherwise this wedge would surely have been
driven. Maybe America can lend a hand, if
not in driving it, at least in promoting a more
unified spirit among the Allies.

XXII
THE ITALIAN COMMANDO SUPREMO

THE approach to the Commando Supremo,
as the Italians call the headquarters of
their army in the field, is over the
plains of Northern Italy and around the foot of
the Alps, past a blue lake here and there —
all country that Browning has painted for us,
even to its grains of dust.

You go by rail and have the feeling that
the Italian government ought not to be wasting
coal on you. The carriages are jammed.
Soldiers and officers everywhere, thickening in
numbers as you approach the front. Civilians
squeeze in and hold standing room by suf-
ferance. If you desire a wagon lit, or sleeping
car, you must take it a week ahead. As to
meals, they come according to the old sport-
ing rules of catch-as-catch-can. On the whole,
however, it is wonderful that the railways get
their trains through at all, crowded as are the
lines with supplies, hospital trains, troop trains,
and burning, as they do, fuel that is as precious
as so much gold.

Be patient, then, if you are shunted off into

233

234 Facing the Hindenburg Line

towns that you never expected to see. And if
you are laid out on sidings while a train bear-
ing the general staff or hurried re-enforcements
goes tearing by, or if you lie in a station
for an hour while a hospital train comes in
and all the long lines of sufferers in the berths,
whose marble white or cadaverous clayey
faces you can see as you walk the platform —
their bloody bandages, their upheld stumps of
arms and legs — are served with tea or wine,
be patient and cheerful, for these people, in
their life and death struggle, are so.

At last you are winding on again, ten hours
late it may be, but winding on through a
country that reminds you a bit of the best
parts of Mexico, with its life in the sun and
the dust, its white walls, its golden fields.
Here and there you sec

"That dry green old aqueduct
Where Charles and I, when boys, have plucked
The fireflies from the roof above,
Bright, creeping through the moss they love."

Now and then you see a band of peasants,
"dear noisy crew," going to work among the
maize. Now and again you see a yoimg
woman standing in

"Our Italy's own attitude.
In which she walked thus far and stood.
Planting each naked foot so firm.
To crush the snake and spare the worm."

The Italian Commando Supremo 235

Then there are the children, shoals of them.
Are there any such children as the Italians
have? Big dark eyes; round, rosy faces;
Raphaels' and Murillos' cherubs and fruit boys.
I am sure such beautiful children, in such pro-
fusion, flourish nowhere else on earth. An
officer said to me: "Our army came. Now
are there plenty of children."

I was surprised at the rice fields. Somehow
I had never gotten it through my head that
Italy grew rice in quantities. But there were
the canals and irrigation ditches cutting the
fields; and there was the crop, gold ripe, and
being cut, acres and acres, miles and miles of
it, and there were the threshing floors — great
circular, hard-beaten spaces on the bare earth,
with the grain in piles around the edges, and
the flails beating, the dust rising in the middle.
Surely Italy cannot be hard put to it for food
this coming winter. She may shiver, but she
cannot starve.

Furthermore, there were the mulberry trees,
great orchards of them, Edens for the silk-
worm, who is pampered and nurtured, cared
for as sedulously as if he were of royal blood;
and royal is his product of Italian silk. But
somehow Italy must turn that silk into wool
for the winter months. We must help her
solve the problem of transportation and lighten

236 Facing the Hindenburg Line

for her, if we can, the burden of the coming
cold.

All along the way are grapes, pears, peaches,
plums, flowers. It is good to be in Italy in
late summer, if only for the delicious fruits
and the glorious flowers. One may live on
fruits at this time of year, a most wholesome
living. What a happy country if it were at
peace! What a sturdy country while at war!
I was not cut to the heart, as in France.
People seemed cheerful, seemed to walk with
a springy step, seemed confident of the out-
come, seemed to have no doubts or disunion
among them. Italian soldiers seemed to go to
the front with a song in their hearts, if not
on their lips; and Italian women seemed to
remain behind and sing.

You think of Italy, anyway, as a singing
land ; and you are not wrong. I heard voices
out of the troop trains which could have done
justice to Mario's song "that could soothe,
with a tenor note, the souls in purgatory." I
heard a woman's voice, somewhere in the
headquarters town, one morning, echoing
through the courts and over the housetops,
that was worthy to ring out in La Scala, at
Milan. I heard duos and trios in the camps
that could have rendered the daintiest bits of
Verdi and that brought back memories of

The Italian Commando Supremo 237

years ago when street boys in a town of South
Italy stood under a window at night and
soothed and serenaded a fevered patient.
Sing? Of course Italy can sing. You can't
keep her from singing. She is the home of
the silk and velvet tone; and, like the fabled
nightingale, she sings all the more sweetly, if
more poignantly, for the needle in her eye.

That town of the Commando Supremo,
Udine, is a dream in the moonlight. The main
"place," or square, or as Mexico would say, the
plaza, is broken in skyline with Venetian shad-
ow almost Oriental in effect. Arch and colon-
nade border it, and great stone fountains and
columns break it. There is no light but the
moon, for bombing airplanes visit it now and
again. Every window is heavily blinded; and
thick wool or leather curtains hang over shop
and cafe doors. The place swarms with life,
and you are lucky to have the services of
obliging Italian officers to find you accom-
modations. Nevertheless, you cannot help
thinking it would be pleasant to spend the
night in the open, under the colonnades.

It is time now, however, to get to the front.
You get there fast enough when you start, I
warrant you. I thought the French and
British soldiers bold practitioners with the
motor car; but they are not one, two, three

238 Facing the Hindenburg Line

with the Italians. Talk about Jehus! But,
then, they have the roads, and they have the
engines, and they have had the experience to
train up a race of daring but skillful chauffeurs.
At first my hair stood on end; then I grew
accustomed to the pace. Dust glasses were
essential. We were the head of a comet, whose
body and tail were one long kilometer of
white dust; and we were charging at other
comets, passing them and merging into their
tenuous tails. Our Klaxon was going all the
time, and so were other Klaxons; nor were
they like any others you have ever heard out-
side of Italy. They were like Brobdignagian
canary birds, with a shrill and insistent chirp
that split your ears as well the wind. They
were not less impudent than the dog bark of
American Klaxons, but far more penetrating
and weird.

We swept past the old Austrian frontier,
past the building that used to be the custom
house, and into the conquered and occupied
ground. It was a delightful sensation to be,
for once, on the other fellow's soil. All other
battlefields and front lines are on the lands
of our Allies. Now to be rolling forward
through towns and villages — some three hun-
dred of them there are in all, with a total
population of several hundred thousand —

The Italian Commando Supreme 239

that used to belong to the enemy, was most
refreshing indeed. We began to understand
the good cheer and the confidence of the
Italians.

"Yonder is our rightful frontier," cried the
captain with us, pointing away to a range of
mountains to the north and east. It was plain
as a pikestaff, too, that he was right. No
nation could be content with those mountains
in the hands of a bullying, hereditary enemy,
forever frowning down upon defenseless
plains.

"Do they hold them now?" we asked.

"Only in part," he answered. "We are win-
ning them. They are half ours already."

We came to a pause at a divisional post,
and strolled through an ex-Austrian town. In
the square was a bronze statue of Maximilian,
with a wonderful inscription. Hang that
British sergeant — that Durham coal miner —
who stole my notes. From memory, the in-
scription runs:

"In honor of Maximilian and the eternal
union of these counties of Gorizia and — •
something else — ^to the House of Hapsburg."

That eternal union is like the eternal union
of Maximilian and Mexico. Eternal union!
Methinks he doth protest too much, said
Shakespeare. The inscription was all plastered

240 Facing the Hindenburg Line

over with General Cadoma's printed notices
to the people, but a friend supplied it to me.

The names of streets in all these towns and
villages were Italian. The old Austrian names
had been torn down, and new and more ap-
propriate ones supplied. Much of the damage
done by bombardment had been repaired; and
these indefatigable swarms of Italian ants
were hard at it, in many places, erecting clean,
white new buildings. Still it was odd to see
Austrian names and advertisements over the
doors of many shops which were open and
doing business.

Soon we began to climb up, up, roimd and
round, doubling on our track, but always up.
The roads were now under camouflage and
the batteries barking around us, under us,
above us. Sausage balloons came into view,
outlining the battle fronts and hanging where
we had never seen them before, over moun-
tain tops. Shells began arriving from the
Austrians; and Italian shells began departing
in exchange. We were again in the thick of
it. But no steel helmets were served out to
us and no gas masks, as on other fronts. The
Alpini go gaily into battle in their woollen
caps; and the batteries are served by Italian
soldiery, at least half of whom were without

The Italian Commando Supremo 241

the "tin hats'* that one expects to see in the
lines.

All kinds of transport were around us,
cameons, carts with horses and mules, pack
asses and even yokes of oxen. They say that
one indication to the Austrian that Italy
meant war was the massing of oxen on the
Gorizia frontier. It seems odd to see great
sleepy white beasts like these in the panoply
of modern machine made war. Repeatedly
the traffic got jammed. We would swing
round a sharp curve with a precipice going
down hundreds of feet on the left and sheer
rock going up hundreds of feet on the right
and butt into a puffing, struggling mass of
vehicles and men trying to go both ways. We
would, with the uncanny skill of our driver,
wind in among them and worm through.

At times we would halt the cameons to let
us by; and then I felt guilty, as doubtless did
the others, that we should stop, for a single
instant, the progress of this war to let by
a bunch of civilian drones. Yet, after all, the
Commando Supremo must have felt that it
was worth while ; that we, in a helpless, feeble
way, with mere words, might do something
to help the good cause along, else they would
not have been at such pains to make a path
for us.

242 Facing the Hindenburg Line

For the most part it was marvelous how
well organized and expedited was all this
traffic. The most crowded front in Europe!
Four millions of fighting men on a line not
over a hundred miles ! Yet we saw no cameons
stalled by the roadside. Yes, we saw two. One
of them had slipped off the road above and
had fallen in a sitting posture upon the other
on the curve of the road beneath. Of course,
the underneath one looked embarrassed,
crushed as it were; but busy little men were
at work engineering it out, and the eternal
stream of the traffic hugged the hillside and
crept around. When, in the early days of
the war, long lines of motor trucks were
speeding with munitions toward the front, no
time was wasted upon any one cameon that
got out of commission. They simply shoved
it into the ditch and sped along, until leisure
could be found to give it first aid. So was it
in the summer's offensive. They are good or-
ganizers, these Italians.

Monte Sabbatino, on the left and Monte
Podgora on the right as you approach Gorizia,
are like two pillars of Hercules that frame
the fighting ground leading up to the Carso.
Between them the eye can sweep over the
valley of the Isonzo with the city of Gorizia
on the banks of the blue river, over Monte

The Italian Commando Supremo 243

Santo, like a Franciscan in a brown cassock
and hood, which the Italians wrested from its
defenders, over San Marco and San Gabriele,
where the trenches of both sides wind, like
yellow snakes and seem almost to intercoil, so
close are they, and on to the Hermada, the
great fortified mountain ridge on which the
Italians have their eyes, as the last bar to the
road to Trieste.

Can they take it? Of course, they can take
it, if we lend them a hand; take it they will,
and with it Trieste, the beautiful prosperous,
more than half Italian city, where Cunarders
used to sail for America, and where in a cer-
tain tower, Richard of the Lion Heart was
once a prisoner, lost to the world, until his
squire, disguised as a troubadour, went through
Europe singing an old song his master knew,
until the song was answered, the king found
and brought to his own again. So also will
Italy sing, and, pounding on the gates of
Trieste, half -troubadour, half-soldier, bring
back to her bosom what belongs to her, many
a son and many a daughter who have long
endured the bitter Austrian rule.

XXIII
THE INDEFATIGABLE ITALIAN

THE most remarkable achievement of the
Italian army is not the driving back
of the Austrians from mountain top to
mountain top, from gorge to gorge, off the
summits of sheer cliffs, across foaming rivers
and rocky plateaus — though all tliat is remark-
able enough in all conscience. The most daring
and indefatigable thing they have done is the
building of good wide roads over all this
impassable terrain. Talk about hairpin curves,
they are hair raising and hair curling, those
curves. My ears bubbled constantly with the
increasing altitude, and my flesh crept as the
skillful drivers rimmed the cliffs with our
tires; and we could look down fifty feet of
rock to where we had been a minute before,
and up fifty more to where we would be in
another minute.

These roads are all new; for the Austrians
had not troubled to build them, having never
dreamed that the Italians would attempt the
impossible, and push them off these heights.
Originally, there was one rough highway, for
example, leading down to the Biansizza

244

The Indefatigable Italian 245

Plateau, and a straggling goat path or two.
In eleven days, the swarming Italians con-
structed a beautiful wide highway, winding
down in the fantastic curves of a cotton
string dropped^ and festooned at random,
apparently, over the heads and shoulders of
the Alps. If Napoleon can wake up in para-
dise— or wherever he is — and look upon these
achievements, he must feel like the man from
Johnstown comparing notes with Noah. If
you could see these roads, you would at once
understand the remark made in a former
chapter, that the Italian soldier is never idle.
When not in the trenches, he rests by building
roads; when he has no other definite and im-
mediate task, he builds roads; when con-
valescent, he builds roads ; and when he wakes
up at night and can't go back to sleep, he just
steps out and builds roads.

Think, too, of the heritage left to this coun-
try, when the war is done — a whole circulating
system, sending life blood and development
into mountain fastnesses that have been locked
up since the glacial period from all but the
tread of goatherds and a few daring vine
dressers. Do not imagine, either, that the
country is barren, desert, lifeless. The most
beautiful silva clothes the hills. I noted
beeches, elms, oaks, maples, chestnuts, cedars
of various kinds; there were buttercups, blue

£46 Facing the Hindenburg Line

harebells, life everlasting, and many dainty
wild flowers new and strange to me; I saw
fields of hay so nearly perpendicular that I
am sure the farmer must have used telegraph
climbing irons when cutting the crop. The
haystacks were stuck on to the hillsides with
gigantic hatpins to keep them from sliding
down; and an Italian told me he had seen a
cow which slipped and rolled out of the farm
into the gorge below and became mincemeat
at once. Nevertheless, these mountain sides
can be and will be lumbered and farmed. The
roads are now there to make development pos-
sible; war leaves some good things in its
wake.

Yonder is the bald face of Monte Nero, or
the black mountain, overlooking Tolmino,
lying in the valley at its foot. The Austrians
still hold Tolmino, and we can look straight
down into it from above; but they no longer
hold Monte Nero. It seemed impossible that
the Italians would ever try to scale it; but
one night a battalion of Alpini, climbing all
the night, the last few hundred yards bare-
footed, came at dawn upon the Austrian
trenches, lightly and sleepily held ; and the gar-
rison surrendered at discretion. It was a feat
more unimaginable than anything Wolfe ever
dreamed of at Quebec. I stood and gazed
at that black mountain, while they told me the

The Indefatigable Italian 247

tale, and felt like the farmer looking at the
camel and saying incredulously: "There ain't
any such thing.'*

We rode into Canale, all shot to pieces, but
still the semblance of a beautiful mountain
city, forever ice bathed by the blue Isonzo.
We crossed on the very pontoon bridge thrown
across under machine gun fire by the indomit-
able Italians. We saw the ford, lower down,
which was too gun-swept to attempt; and we
saw the lower pontoon bridge, the first that
the conquering army succeeded in getting
across. This spot was well guarded with
Austrian machine guns; and at first it seemed
impossible ever to put a bridge over, but a
young colonel of engineers, who had been
manager of a porcelain factory in Milan be-
fore the war, thought out a way. One night
he massed his searchlights in the side of a
cliff overlooking the Isonzo, and focused them
all night upon the Austrian machine gun posi-
tions. The gunners were blinded by the glare,
and the Italian engineers — genii, they are
aptly termed, in their own language — slid their
pontoons down into the river and built their
bridge ; while the Alpini did the rest.

We scaled the face of the Carso, winding
back and forth on the new roads; and, reach-
ing the summit of the cliff, looked away over
the great plateau to where Italian shells were

248 Facing the Hindenburg Line

bursting black in the front lines of the enemy.
The face of this cliff was stormed eleven times
by the persevering infantry of Italy before a
foothold was finally achieved. One particu-
larly sheer precipice of rock I noted, which
to me looked impregnable; but the Austrians
had been driven away from it, for they showed
me a little gash at last, running up through
scrub cedar and oak, where the climbers had
wound their way by night to fall at dawn upon
the Austrian flank. Italy certainly deserves
every foot she has gained, for she has done it
at an immense cost of sweat and blood.

Then we went to the seashore and saw the
ship that had been taken by cavalry. True,
she never had been launched, but she was
really a ship, the only ship in history captured
by a troop of horse. She lay in the dry-dock
where she had been built and was just ready
for her wedding with the sea. Now she is
like a bride dead on her marriage morning,
her veil yellowing around her. She is a mass
of rusty iron, even yet beaten at times by spite-
ful shells.

We looked down into Trieste, on a perfectly
clear, cloudless day, and saw the city, the
Italian objective, lying fair in the afternoon
sun; while, between us and her, frowned
Hermada. That doughty fortress was receiv-
ing blows on the head even then. More blows

The Indefatigable Italian 249

will rain upon it. Italy has men enough. If
only the rest of us could fill those men's hands
with guns and munitions, she could smash her
way through to Vienna and cut the central
Confederacy in two. Why it is not done is
beyond me. Nobody visits this front who
does not see that here is the place to strike a
blow below the belt at Pan-Germanism. Here
is the middle of that broad zone which Ger-
many hoped to stretch from the North Sea to
the Persian Gulf. Cut it in two at this, its
most vulnerable spot, and Pan-Germanism
falls like a house of baby blocks. Says one,
this mountain fighting is impossible for any
but Alpini; and there are only a few regiments
of these, Italian and Hungarian. But Italy
has already fought her way out of the moun-
tains. She is already on the Carso, which is
open plateau. Says another: Transportation
is the difficulty. The powers would pour in
supplies if they could get them there. Well,
they got them somehow to the Dardanelles.
Italians have already overcome difficulties of
transportation, beside which the difficulty of
our supplying her pales into nothing.

Says still another, Italy does not wish to go
to Vienna. She aims at Trieste, and nothing
more. Besides, the other powers are jealous
of Italy. They cannot unite upon a campaign
on this front. Now you are entering upon the

250 Facing the Hindenburg Line

secret domain of high international politics
and intrigue, which has been the curse of the
world, and where I cannot follow you. For
myself, it looks to me as if the time and the
place are ripe for a bit of Uncle Sam's shirt
sleeve diplomacy; it even appears to me that,
having no ax to grind, no private ends to
serve, one of the most valuable functions our
nation can fulfill, without assumption or im-
modesty on our part, is to attempt some uni-
fication in the plans of the Allies, some
mitigation of international jealousies. Our
first move should be to declare war on Austria,
then, with Italy and England, the rest might
be arranged. Still, all this is not in the
province of the reporter; and I beg every-
body's pardon, especially that of the high
diplomats.

Let us go back to reporting. We pause in
front of a field hospital. It is under a cliff,
within easy shell reach of the enemy. Indeed,
it is frequently shelled; and they show us how
they have hollowed out a hospital in the rock,
behind this one, to which, upon need, they
can move. At present it is unoccupied, these
galleries in the living rock, the stony heart of
Mother Nature; but they are ready, provided
with beds, and even electric lights, ready to
receive the refugees who already hang between
life and death. I pass into the ward. Only

The Indefatigable Italian 251

the worst cases are retained at this advanced
post, those who must be operated on at once,
to save life. They are the stillest and the
sickest looking bunch of men I ever saw.
Some look dead. Some are dead. Yonder in
the corner lies one with the sheet pulled over
his head. He was an Austrian prisoner, but
they did all for him that they would have
done for an Italian. There is a dead soldier
of Italy in the middle of the room. He has
just died, but the others are all too ill to pay
any heed. Some lie with open mouth and
half-open eyes; flies crawl over their lips and
faces and even between their parched lips.
Yonder is one just off the table, a bloody
bandage about his head. An orderly slaps
him, not very gently, upon the cheek to
awaken him, but he will not awaken. He
mutters thickly and drowses on. I don't know
why they should disturb him, but I suppose
it is wise; chloroform is used here, and per-
haps that is the reason they disturb him; or
perhaps these brain cases need this method of
procedure.

The worst of the cases here, however, are
abdominal. There is a man shot through the
intestines, operated upon three days ago, and
doing well. He smiles, in a sickly way, as we
approach him, and tries to nod his head. Evi-
dently his fever is still high. There is another

252 Facing the Hindenburg Line

from whom a yard and a half of intestine
was cut away twelve days ago. He will get
well, and he knows it ; you can tell by the sort
of pathetic triumph in his eye; but he is too
weak to speak; his smile, however, is a bit
more assured. We go out into the air. I was
more depressed than ever before in a hospital
ward.

We pass into the operating room. The
black-bearded surgeon is scrubbing his hands
with yellow soap and iodine. He comes to the
door to meet us, and smiles most affably.
How I love these Italians! He cannot shake
hands. He cannot talk English ; but no matter.
A great man's heart shines in his eyes. On
the table lies a soldier, just brought in. He
was shot within the hour, with a rifle. The
ball went through his abdomen, and out at the
back. He lies there, and I see the clean
round wound. He is making no moan; but
his stomach rises and falls with suppressed
excitement and quick breathing. The surgeon
covers his own face with his gauze mask, and
his assistant places the chloroform mask over
the patient's face. I should like to pause and
watch the operation; but they call me away
to look at the X-ray machine, the sterilizing
apparatus and the other up-to-date appoint-
ments.

I learn that about thirty-five per cent of

The Indefatigable Italian 253

these abdominal cases are now saved by this
surgeon. I have heard of forty per cent saved
by the British ; and one French surgeon claims
to save fifty. It is difficult, however, to con-
vince me that any of them can outdo these
Italians. I hear that this surgeon is dissatis-
fied with his ward, wants things more beautiful
and bright. I learn, also, that the Frenchman
who claims fifty per cent drapes the walls of
his ward in red, puts flowers about and
Japanese lanterns, and insists on smiles,
laughter and jests from all his attendants, de-
claring that half the battle is fought in the
emotions. Is he not right ?

Under this same hill, cheek by jowl with
this Italian post, is a British Red Cross station.
They are unloading an ambulance at its door
now. Two, three, four patients are carried in.
The last one is holding his shattered, ban-
daged, bloody leg up off the stretcher with
his own hands, bending upward with head and
shoulders as he does it. God, what pam he
is in! But only his face betrays it, no moan.
I am somewhat benumbed with sights of
blood and wounds; I have seen so much of
it, through the months, but my latent emo-
tions are stirred at the sight of these English-
men here. Unfit, for one reason or another,
to bear arms in their own trenches, they came

254 Facing the Hindenburg Line

way off here into distant mountains to lend a
hand to brothers in arms.

What is the strange chemical quality of this
English blood that it drives men out from
home and native land, away from love and
hedge row, park and country house, to the
ends of all the earth in peace and war? They
go to farm and colonize, to lead the backward
nations, to build and mine, to explore, to
fight, to hunt, to roam. This queer chemical,
it seems to me, is destiny, the power of empire
building, the genius of the management of
men. It is a thing not understood by the
Teuton, not possessed by the Gaul, wholly
baffling and strange to the Latin. It is the
lonely, heroic quality of the pioneer, that set-
tled and subdued our own country, that opened
Africa, that leads jeweled India docilely by
the necklace, that holds the Nile in the soft,
strong hand of a dominion of which the
Egyptian is scarcely aware. I stand and gaze
at these English stretcher bearers, and say to
myself : "Hello, brothers ! After all, none of
these other races are quite like you. We are
sprung from the same stock, you and my
country. I understand the strange compulsion
that brings you here. A thousand years of
health to you and yours! A thousand years
of brotherhood between yours and mine !"

255

ENVOY

There are certain things that it is well to
keep in mind in these war times. Our philoso-
phy must not come tumbling down about our
ears.

No one of us but would rather go out into
France and risk his life, or lose it, than to have
his boy do so. This is true of any father who
is a real father; and if it is true of an earthly
father in his feeling toward his son is it not
doubly true of our heavenly Father in his love
for his children? Let nothing persuade us that
God is a cruel, heartless, or even indifferent
God just because there is a war on in the
world — or pestilence, or famine.

There would have been just as much suffer-
ing without this war as with it, there would
have been just as many deaths for as Shake-
speare said:

"All that live must die
Passing through nature to eternity."

There would have been just as many widows,
just as many orphans; there would have been
just as much physical pain — I rather think
more — only it would have stretched over a
longer period of time, twenty or thirty years
instead of being condensed into four or five
or six short ones.

This does not solve the problem of evil. We
shall never solve it imtil we pass behind the

256 Facing the Hindenburg Line

veil and see eye to eye and face to face. God
could have made a perfect world, an Eden of a
world, with nothing in it but innocent flowers
and song birds and innocent Adams and Eves
who wouldn't know the difference between
right and wrong; but he could not have made
that kind of world and at the same time given
you and me the right to choose, to shape our
conduct for ourselves. And as for me, I
wouldn't care to be an innocent little flower or
bird or Adam or Eve with no sense of responsi-
bility and no freedom of choice. I would
rather be a man, shape my conduct for myself,
make mistakes, sin, fall, hurt myself and cry,
and then get up and go on to struggle, to fight,
and to win out in some sort of battle. I
wouldn't be an innocent.

This does not solve the problem of evil, we
shall never solve it imtil we pass over to the
other side ; but be assured that behind the war-
clouds which lower so heavily over us, and will
grow heavier before we are through, sits God
within the shadow keeping watch above his
own. And there is not a mother's heart torn
and bleeding for her boy, not a father the
chambers of whose soul are empty, echoing,
yearning and void, there is not a soldier who
falls like a sparrow to the ground, without our
heavenly Father.

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