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GOLDEN LADS
Plwto. EzeeMor.
THE PLAYBOYS OF THE WESTERN FRONT.
The famous French Fusiliers Marins. These sailors from Brit-
tany are called "Les demoiselles au pompon rouge," because of
their youth and the gay red tassel on their cap.
GOLDEN LADS
A Thrilling Account of how the invading
War Machine crushed Belgium
By Arthur H. Gleason and Helen Hayes Gleason
With an Introduction by Theodore Roosevelt
With Illustrations from Photographs
A. L. BURT COMPANY
Publishers New York
Published by Arrangements with THE CENTURY COMPANY
Copyright, 1916, by
THE CENTURY Co.
Copyright, 1915, by the
CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY.
Copyright, 1916, by the
BUTTERICK PUBLISHING COMPANY.
Copyright, 1915 and 1916, by the
TRIBUNE ASSOCIATION.
Published, April, 1916
Stack
f.nnex
0
SHI
TO THE
SAILORS OF BRITTANY
THE BOY SOLDIERS OF THE FRENCH FUSILIERS MARINS
WHOSE WOUNDED IT WAS OUR PRIVILEGE TO CARRY IN FROM THE
FIELD OF HONOR AT MELLE, DIXMUDE,
AND NIEUPORT
Profits from the sale of this book will go to "The
American Committee for Training in Suitable Trades
the Maimed Soldiers of France."
CONCERNING THIS BOOK
It would be futile to publish one more war-
book, unless the writer had been an eye-witness
of unusual things. I am an American who saw
atrocities which are recorded in the Bryce Report.
This book grows out of months of day-by-day
living in the war zone. I have been a member
of the Hector Munro Ambulance Corps, which
was permitted to work at the front because the
Prime Minister of Belgium placed his son in mili-
tary command of us. That young man, being
brave and adventurous, led us along the first line
of trenches, and into villages under shell fire, so
that we saw the armies in action.
We started at Ghent in September, 1914, came
to Fumes, worked in Dixmude, Pervyse, Nieu-
port and Ypres, during moments of pressure on
those strategic points. In the summer of 1915,
we were attached to the French Fusiliers Marins.
My wife's experience covers a period of twelve
vii
CONCERNING THIS BOOK
months in Belgium. My own time at the front
was five months.
Observers at long-distance that are neutral
sometimes fail to see fundamentals in the present
conflict, and talk of "negotiations" between
right and wrong. It is easy for people who
have not suffered to be tolerant toward wrong-
doing. This war is a long war because of Ger-
man methods of frightfulness. These practices
have bred an enduring will to conquer in French-
man and Briton and Belgian which will not pause
till victory is thorough. Because the German
military power has sinned against women and
children, it will be fought with till it is over-
thrown. I wish to make clear this determination
of the Allies. They hate the army of Aerschot
and Lorraine as a mother hates the defiler of her
child.
There are two wars on the Western Front.
One is the war of aggression. It was led up to
by years of treachery. It was consummated in
frightfulness. It is warfare by machine. Of
that war, as carried on by the "Conquerors," the
first half of this book tells. On points that have
viii
CONCERNING THIS BOOK
been in dispute since the outbreak, I am able to
say "I saw.'* When the Army of Invasion fell
on the little people, I witnessed the signs of its
passage as it wrote them by flame and bayonet on
peasant homes and peasant bodies.
In the second half of the book, I have tried to
tell of a people's uprising — the fight of the living
spirit against the war-machine. A righteous de-
fensive war, such as Belgium and France are wag-
ing, does not brutalize the nation. It reveals a
beauty of sacrifice which makes common men into
"golden lads."
Was this struggle forced on an unwilling Ger-
many, or was she the aggressor*?
I believe we have the answer of history in such
evidences as I have seen of her patient ancient spy
system that honeycombed Belgium.
Is she waging a "holy war," ringed around by
jealous foes'?
I believe we have the final answer in such
atrocities as I witnessed. A hideous officially or-
dered method is proof of unrighteousness in the
cause itself.
Are you indicting a nation*?
ix
CONCERNING THIS BOOK
No, only a military system that ordered the
slow sapping of friendly neighboring powers.
Only the host of "tourists," clerks, waiters, gen-
tlemanly officers, that betrayed the hospitality of
people of good will.
Only an army that practised mutilation and
murder on children, and mothers, and old people,
— and that carried it through coldly, systemati-
cally, with admirable discipline.
I believe there are multitudes of common sol-
diers who are sorry that they have outraged the
helpless.
An army of half a million men will return to
the home-land with very bitter memories. Many
a simple German of this generation will be unable
to look into the face of his own child without re-
membering some tiny peasant face of pain — the
child whom he bayoneted, or whom he saw his
comrade bayonet, having failed to put his body
between the little one and death.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
THE CONQUERORS
FACE
THE SPY 3
THE ATROCITY 26
BALLAD OF THE GERMANS 45
THE STEAM ROLLER 48
MY EXPERIENCE WITH BAEDEKER 66
GOLDEN LADS
THE PLAY-BOYS OF BRITTANY 79
"ENCHANTED CIGARETTES" 95
WAS IT REAL? jI3
"CHANTONS, BELGES! CHANTONS!" 127
FLIES: A FANTASY I52
WOMEN UNDER FIRE T68
HOW WAR SEEMS TO A WOMAN !92
LES TRAVAILLEURS DE LA GUERRE 234
REMAKING FRANCE 253
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
The Play-boys of the Western Front . . . Frontispiece
Peasants' cottages burned by Germans 8
The home of a German spy near Coxyde Bains, Belgium . 13
Church in Termonde which the writer saw 42
One of the dangerous Belgian franc-tireurs .... 51
Fifteenth century Gothic church in Nieuport .... 69
Sailors lifting a wounded comrade into the motor-ambu-
lance 87
Door chalked by the Germans 105
Street fighting in Alost 123
Belgian officer on the last strip of his country .... 134
A Belgian boy soldier in the uniform of the first army
which served at Liege and Namur 139
Belgians in their new Khaki uniform, in praise of which
they wrote a song 145
Breton sailors ready for their noon meal in a village under
daily shell fire 187
Sleeping quarters for Belgian soldiers 206
Belgian soldiers telephoning to an anti-aircraft gun the
approach of a German taube 215
Postcards sketched and blocked by a Belgian workman,
A. Van Doorne ............. 229
INTRODUCTION
BY THEODORE ROOSEVELT
On August 4, 1914, the issue of this war for
the conscience of the world was Belgium. Now,
in the spring of 1916, the issue remains Belgium.
For eighteen months, our people were bidden by
their representative at Washington to feel no
resentment against a hideous wrong. They were
taught to tame their human feelings by polished
phrases of neutrality. Because they lacked the
proper outlet of expression, they grew indifferent
to a supreme injustice. They temporarily lost the
capacity to react powerfully against wrongdoing.
But today they are at last becoming alive to
the iniquity of the crushing of Belgium. Belgium
is the battleground of the war on the western
front. But Belgium is also the battleground of
the struggle in our country between the forces of
good and of evil. In the ranks of evil are ranged
all the pacifist sentimentalists, the cowards who
possess the gift of clothing their cowardice in
soothing and attractive words, the materialists
whose souls have been rotted by exclusive devo-
tion to the things of the body, the sincere persons
xv
xvi INTRODUCTION
who are cursed with a deficient sense of reality,
and all who lack foresight or who are uninformed.
Against them stand the great mass of loyal Ameri-
cans, who, when they see the right, and receive
moral leadership, show that they have in their
souls as much of the valor of righteousness as the
men of 1860 and of 1776. The literary bureau
at Washington has acted as a soporific on the mind
and conscience of the American people. Fine
words, designed to work confusion between right
and wrong, have put them to sleep. But they
now stir in their sleep.
The proceeds from the sale of this book are to
be used for a charity in which every intelligent
American feels a personal interest. The training
of maimed soldiers in suitable trades is making
possible the reconstruction of an entire nation.
It is work carried on by citizens of the neutral
nations. The cause itself is so admirable that it
deserves wide support. It gives an outlet for the
ethical feelings of our people, feelings that have
been unnaturally dammed for nearly two years
by the cold and timid policy of our Government.
The testimony of the book is the first-hand
witness of an American citizen who was present
when the Army of Invasion blotted out a little
INTRODUCTION xvii
nation. This is an eye-witness report on the dis-
puted points of this war. The author saw the
wrongs perpetrated on helpless non-combatants by
direct military orders. He shows that the fright-
fulness practiced on peasant women and children
was the carrying out of a Government policy,
planned in advance, ordered from above. It was
not the product of irresponsible individual drunken
soldiers. His testimony is clear on this point. He
goes still further, and shows that individual sol-
diers resented their orders, and most unwillingly
carried through the cruelty that was forced on
them from Berlin. In his testimony he is kindlier
to the German race, to the hosts of peasants, clerks
and simple soldiers, than the defenders of Bel-
gium's obliteration have been. They seek to ex-
cuse acts of infamy. But the author shows that
the average German is sorry for those acts.
It is fair to remember in reading Mr. Gleason's
testimony concerning these deeds of the German
Army that he has never received a dollar of money
for anything he has spoken or written on the sub-
ject. He gave without payment the articles on
the Spy, the Atrocity, and the Steam Roller to
the New York Tribune. The profits from the
lectures he has delivered on the same subject have
xviii INTRODUCTION
been used for well-known public charities. The
book itself is a gift to a war fund.
Of Mr. Gleason's testimony on atrocities I have
already written (see page 38).
What he saw was reported to the Bryce Com-
mittee by the young British subject who accom-
panied him, and these atrocities, which Mr.
Gleason witnessed, appear in the Bryce Report
under the heading of Alost. It is of value to know
that an American witnessed atrocities recorded in
the Bryce Report, as it disposes of the German
rejoinders that the Report is ex-parte and of
second-hand rumor.
His chapter on the Spy System answers the
charge that it was Belgium who violated her own
neutrality, and forced an unwilling Germany,
threatened by a ring of foes, to defend herself.
The chapter on the Steam Roller shows that the
same policy of injustice that was responsible for
the original atrocities is today operating to flatten,
out what is left of a free nation.
The entire book is a protest against the craven
attitude of our Government.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT.
March 28, 1916.
THE CONQUERORS
GOLDEN LADS
THE SPY
GERMANY uses three methods in turning a
free nation into a vassal state. By a spy
system, operated through years, she saps the na-
tional strength. By sudden invasion, accom-
panied by atrocity, she conquers the territory, al-
ready prepared. By continuing occupation, she
flattens out what is left of a once independent
people. In England and North America, she has
used her first method. France has experienced
both the spy and the atrocity. It has been re-
served for Belgium to be submitted to the three-
fold process. I shall tell what I have seen of the
spy system, the use of frightfulness, and the en-
forced occupation.
It is a mistake for us to think that the worst
thing Germany has done is to torture and kill
many thousands of women and children. She
3
GOLDEN LADS
undermines a country with her secret agents be-
fore she lays it waste. In time of peace, with
her spy system, she works like a mole through a
wide area till the ground is ready to cave in. She
plays on the good will and trustfulness of other
peoples till she has tapped the available informa-
tion. That betrayal of hospitality, that taking
advantage of human feeling, is a baser thing than
her unique savagery in war time.
During my months in Belgium I have been sur-
rounded by evidences of this spy system, the long,
slow preparedness which Germany makes in an-
other country ahead of her deadly pounce. It is
a silent, peaceful invasion, as destructive as the
house-to-house burning and the killing of babies
and mothers to which it later leads.
The German military power, which is the mod-
ern Germany, is able to obtain agents to carry out
this policy, and make its will prevail, by dissemi-
nating a new ethic, a philosophy of life, which
came to expression with Bismarck and has gone
on extending its influence since the victories of
1 870— '7 1 . The German people believe they serve
a higher God than the rest of us. We serve (very
4
THE SPY
imperfectly and only part of the time) such ideals
as mercy, pity, and loyalty to the giver of the
bread we eat. The Germans serve (efficiently and
all the time) the State, a supreme deity, who sends
them to spy out a land in peace time, to build gun
foundations in innocent-looking houses, buy up
poverty-stricken peasants, measure distances, win
friendship, and worm out secrets. With that in-
formation digested and those preparations com-
pleted, the State (an entity beyond good and evil)
calls on its citizens to make war, and, in making
it, to practise frightfulness. It orders its serv-
ants to lay aside pity and burn peasants in their
homes, to bayonet women and children, to shoot
old men. Of course, there are exceptions to this.
There are Germans of the vintage of '48, and
later, many of them honest and peaceable dwell-
ers in the country which shelters them. But the
imperial system has little use for them. They do
not serve its purpose.
The issue of the war, as Belgium and France see
it, is this: Are they to live or die? Are they to
be charted out once again through years till their
hidden weakness is accurately located, and then is
5
GOLDEN LADS
an army to be let loose on them that will visit a
universal outrage on their children and wives?
Peace will be intolerable till this menace is re-
moved. The restoration of territory in Belgium
and Northern France and the return to the status
quo before the war, are not sufficient guarantees
for the future. The status quo before the war
means another insidious invasion, carried on unre-
mittingly month by month by business agents,
commercial travelers, genial tourists, and studious
gentlemen in villas. A crippled, broken Teu-
tonic military power is the only guarantee that a
new army of spies will not take the road to Brus-
sels and Paris on the day that peace is signed.
No simple solution like, "Call it all off, we '11
start in fresh; bygones are bygones," meets the
real situation. The Allied nations have been in-
fested with a cloud of witnesses for many years.
Are they to submit once again to that secret proc-
ess of the Germans?
The French, for instance, want to clear their
country of a cloud which has been thick and black
for forty- three years. They always said the Ger-
mans would come again with the looting and the
6
PEASANTS' COTTAGES BURNED BY GERMANS.
The separate flame in each cottage is clearly visible, proving that each
house was separately set on fire. RadclyfTe Dugmore took this photograph
at Melle, where he and the writer were made prisoners.
THE SPY
torture and the foulness. This time they will
their fight to a finish. They are sick of hate, so
they are fighting to end war. But it is not an
empty peace that they want — peace, with a new
drive when the Krupp howitzers are big enough,
and the spies in Paris thick enough, to make the
death of France a six weeks' picnic. They want a
lasting peace, that will take fear from the wife's
heart, and make it a happiness to have a child, not
a horror. They want to blow the ashes off of Lor-
raine. Peace, as preached by our Woman's Peace
Party and by our pacifist clergy and by the sign-
ers of the plea for an embargo on the ammuni-
tions that are freeing France from her invaders,
is a German peace. If successfully consummated,
it will grant Germany just time enough to rest
and breed and lay the traps, and then release
another universal massacre. How can the Al-
lies state their terms of peace in other than a
militant way*? There is nothing here to be ar-
bitrated. Pleasant sentiments of brotherhood
evade the point at issue. The way of just peace
is by "converting" Germany. There is only one
cure for long-continued treachery, and that is
9
GOLDEN LADS
to demonstrate its failure. To pause short of a
thorough victory over the deep, inset habits and
methods of Germany is to destroy the spirit of
France. It will not be well for a premier race
of the world to go down in defeat. We need her
thrifty Lorraine peasants and Brittany sailors, her
unfailing gift to the light of the world, more than
we need a thorough German spy system and a sol-
diery obedient to commands of vileness.
Very much more slowly England, too, is learn-
ing what the fight is about.
It is German violation of the fundamental de-
cencies that makes it difficult to find common
ground to build on for the future. It is at this
point that the spy system of slow-seeping treach-
ery and the atrocity program of dramatic fright-
fulness overlap. It is in part out of the habit of
betraying hospitality that the atrocities have
emerged. It is n't as if they were extemporized
— a sudden flare, with no background. They are
the logical result of doing secretly for years that
which humanity has agreed not to do.
Some of the members of our Red Cross unit —
the Hector Munro Ambulance Corps — worked for
10
THE SPY
a full year with the French Fusiliers Marins, per-
haps the most famous 6000 righting men in the
western line. They were sailor boys. They cov-
ered the retreat of the Belgian army. They con-
solidated the Yser position by holding Dixmude
for three weeks against a German force that out-
numbered them. Then for a year, up to a few
months ago, they helped to hold the Nieuport sec-
tion, the last northern point of the Allied line.
When they entered the fight at Melle in October,
1914, our corps worked with one of their doctors,
and came to know him. Later he took charge of
a dressing station near St. George. Here one day
the Germans made a sudden sortie, drove back the
Fusiliers for a few minutes, and killed the Red
Cross roomful, bayoneting the wounded men.
The Fusiliers shortly won back their position,
found their favorite doctor dead, and in a fury
wiped out the Germans who had murdered him
and his patients, saving one man alive. They
sent him back to the enemy's lines to say :
"Tell your men how we fight when you bayonet
our wounded."
That sudden act of German falseness was the
11
GOLDEN LADS
product of slow, careful undermining of moral
values.
One of the best known women in Belgium,
whose name I dare not give, told me of her friends,
the G 's, at L (she gave me name and
address). When the first German rush came
down on Belgium the household was asked to shel-
ter German officers, one of whom the lady had
known socially in peace days. The next morn-
ing soldiers went through the house, destroying
paintings with the bayonet and wrecking furni-
ture. The lady appealed to the officer.
"I know you," she said. "We have met as
equals and friends. How can you let this be
done?"
"This is war," he replied.
No call of chivalry, of the loyalties of guest and
host, is to be listened to. And for the perpetrat-
ing of this cold program years of silent spy treach-
ery were a perfect preparation. It was no sudden
unrelated horror to which Germans had to force
themselves. It was an astonishing thing to sim-
ple Belgian gentlemen and gentlewomen to see the
old friendly German faces of tourists and social
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THE SPY
guests show up, on horseback, riding into the cities
as conquerors where they had so often been en-
tertained as friends. Let me give you the testi-
mony of a Belgian lady whom we know. She is
now inside the German lines, so I cannot give her
name.
"When the German troops entered Brussels,"
she states, "we suddenly discovered that our good
friends had been secret agents and were now offi-
cers in charge of the invasion. As the army came
in, with their trumpets and flags and goose-step-
ping, we picked out our friends entertained by us
in our salons — dinner guests for years. They had
originally come with every recommendation pos-
sible— letters from friends, themselves men of
good birth. They had worked their way into the
social-political life of Brussels. They had won
their place in our friendly feeling. And here
they had returned to us at the head of troops to
conquer us, after having served as secret agents
through the years of friendly social intercourse."
After becoming proficient in that kind of be-
trayal the officers found it only a slight wrench
to pass on to the wholesale murder of the people
15
GOLDEN LADS
whose bread they had eaten and whom they had
tricked. The treachery explains the atrocity. It
is worth while to repeat and emphasize this point.
Many persons have asked me, "How do you ac-
count for these terrible acts of mutilation*?" The
answer is, what the Germans did suddenly by
flame and bayonet is only a continuation of what
they have done for years by poison.
Here follows the testimony of a man whom I
know, Doctor George Sarton, of the University
of Ghent:
"Each year more Germans came to Belgian sum-
mer resorts; Blankenberghe, for instance, was full
of them. They were all very well received and
had plenty of friends in Belgian families, from the
court down. When the war broke out, it im-
mediately became evident that many of these wel-
comed guests had been spying, measuring dis-
tances, preparing foundations for heavy guns in
their villas located at strategical points, and so
on. It is noteworthy that this spying was not
simply done by poor devils who had not been able
to make money in a cleaner way — but by very
successful German business men, sometimes men
16
THE SPY
of great wealth and whose wealth had been almost
entirely built up in Belgium. These men were
extremely courteous and serviceable, they spent
much money upon social functions and in the pro-
motion of charities, German schools, churches and
the like ; they had numerous friends, in some cases
they had married Belgian girls and their boys were
members of the special corps of our 'National
Guard.' . . . Yet at the same time, they were
prying into everything, spying everywhere.
"When the Germans entered into Belgium, they
were guided wherever they went by some one of
their « officers or men who knew all about each
place. Directors of factories were startled to rec-
ognize some of their work people transformed into
Uhlans. A man who had been a professor at the
University of Brussels had the impudence to call
upon his former 'friends' in the uniform of a
German officer.
"When the war is over, when Belgium is free
again, it will not be many years before the Ger-
mans come back, at least their peaceful and
'friendly5 vanguard. How will they be received
this time? It is certain that it will be extremely
GOLDEN LADS
difficult for them to make friends again. As to
myself, when I meet them again in my country —
I shall ask myself: 'Is he a friend, or is he a
spy1?' And the business men will think: 'Are
they coming as faithful partners, or simply to steal
and rob?' That will be their well deserved re-
ward."
One mile from where we were billeted on the
Belgian coast stood a villa owned by a German.
It lay between St. Idesbald and Coxyde Bains, on
a sand dune, commanding the Channel. After
the war broke out the Belgians examined it and
found it was a fortification. Its walls were of
six-foot thickness, of heavy blocks of stone and
concrete. Its massive flooring was cleverly dis-
guised by a layer of fancy tiling. Its interior
was fitted with little compartments for hydraulic
apparatus for raising weights, and there was a
tangle of wires and pipes. Dynamite cleared
away the upper stories. Workmen hacked away
the lower story, piece by piece, during several
weeks of our stay. Two members of our corps
inspected the interior. It lay just off the excellent
road that runs from St. Idesbald to Coxyde Bains,
18
THE SPY
up which ammunition could be fed to it for its
coast defense work. The Germans expected an
easy march down the coast, with these safety sta-
tions ready for them at points of need.1
A Belgian soldier rode into a Belgian village
one evening at twilight during the early days of
1 When I first published these statements the following letter
appeared in the "New York Tribune": —
GERMANY'S SPY SYSTEM
To the Editor of "The Tribune."
Sir: I was particularly interested in the article by Mr. Glea-
son in this morning's "Tribune" because, having spent several
months in this region in ambulance work, I am able to support
several of his statements from personal observation.
The house he mentions on the beach near Coxyde Bains was
beyond doubt intended for the purpose he describes. I visited
it several times before it was completely destroyed, and have
now in my possession photographs which show the nature of the
building, besides a tile from the flooring.
Two instances in which spies were detected came to my
knowledge; in one case the person in question was the mayor of
the town, in the other a peasant woman. One other time I
know of information was given undetected which resulted in
the shelling of a road at a time when a convoy of motors was
about to pass.
The high esteem in which the Red Cross flag is held by Ger-
man gunners (as a target) is only too forcibly impressed upon
one in that service.
MALCOLM T.
Mr. Robertson is a member of the Junior Class in Princeton
University.
19
GOLDEN LADS
the war. An old peasant woman, deceived be-
cause of the darkness, and thinking him to be a
German Uhlan, rushed up to him and said, "Look
out — the Belgians are here." It was the work of
these spies to give information to the marauding
Uhlans as to whether any hostile garrison was sta-
tioned in the town. If no troops were there to re-
sist, a band of a dozen Uhlans could easily take an
entire village. But if the village had a protect-
ing garrison the Germans must be forewarned.
Three days after arriving in Belgium, in the
early fall of 1914, a friend and I met a German
outpost, one of the Hussars. We fell into con-
versation with him and became quite friendly.
He had no cigarettes and we shared ours with him.
He could speak good English, and he let us walk
beside him as he rode slowly along on his way to
the main body of his troops. The Germans had
won the day and there seemed to be nothing at
stake, or perhaps he did not expect our little group
would be long-lived, nor should we have been if
the German plans had gone through. It was their
custom to use civilian prisoners as a protective
screen for their advancing troops. Whatever his
20
THE SPY
motive, after we had walked along beside his
horse for a little distance, he pointed out to us
the house of the spy whom the Germans had in
that village of Melle. This man was a "half-
breed" Englishman, who came out of his house
and walked over to the Hussar and said :
"You want to keep up your English, for you '11
soon be in London."
In a loud voice, for the benefit of his Belgian
neighbors, he shouted out :
"Look out! Those fellows shoot! The Ger-
mans are devils!"
He brought out wine for the troops. We fol-
lowed him into his house, where he, supposing us
to be friends of the Germans, asked us to partake
of his hospitality. That man was a resident of
the village, a friend of the people, but "fixed"
for just this job of supplying information to the
invaders when the time came.
During my five weeks in Ghent I used to eat
frequently at the Cafe Gambrinus, where the pro-
prietor assured us that he was a Swiss and in deep
sympathy with Belgians and Allies. He had
a large custom. When the Germans captured
21
GOLDEN LADS
Ghent he altered into a simon pure German and
friend of the invaders. His place now is the
nightly resort of German officers.
In the hotel where I stayed in Ghent the pro-
prietor, after a couple of days, believing me to be
one more neutral American, told me he was a Ger-
man. He went on to say what a mistake the Bel-
gians made to oppose the Germans, who were ir-
resistible. That was his return to the city and
country that had given him his livelihood. A few
hours later a gendarme friend of mine told me to
move out quickly, as we were in the house of a
spy.
Three members of our corps in Pervyse had evi-
dence many nights of a spy within our lines. It
was part of the routine for a convoy of motor
trucks to bring ammunition forward to the
trenches. The enemy during the day would get
the range of the road over which this train had to
pass. Of course, each night the time of ammu-
nition moving was changed in an attempt to foil
the German fire. But this was of no avail, for
when the train of trucks moved along the road to
the trenches a bright flash of light would go up
22
THE SPY
somewhere within our lines, telling the enemy that
it was time to fire upon the convoy.
Such evidences kept reaching us of German gold
at work on the very country we were occupying.
Sometimes the money itself.
My wife, when stationed by the Belgian
trenches at Pervyse, asked the orderly to purchase
potatoes, giving him a five-franc piece. He
brought back the potatoes and a handful of change
that included a French franc, a French copper,
a Dutch small coin, a Belgian ten-centime bit, and
a German two-mark piece with its imperial eagle.
This meant that some one in the ranks or among
the refugees was peddling information to the
enemy.
In early October my wife and I were captured
by the Uhlans at Zele. Our Flemish driver,' a
Ghent man, began expressing his friendliness for
them in fluent German. After weeks of that sort
of thing we became suspicious of almost every one,
so thorough and widespread had been the bribery
of certain of the poorer element. The Germans
had sowed their seed for years against the day
when they would release their troops and have
23
GOLDEN LADS
need of traitors scattered through the invaded
country.
The thoroughness of this bribery differed at
different villages. In one burned town of 1500
houses we found approximately 100 houses stand-
ing intact, with German script in chalk on their
doors; the order of the officer not to burn. This
meant the dwellers had been friendly to the enemy
in certain instances, and in other instances that
they were spies for the Germans. We have the
photographs of those chalked houses in safe-keep-
ing, against such time as there is a direct challenge
on the facts of German methods. But there has
come no challenge of facts — we that have seen
have given names, dates and places — only a blan-
ket denial and counter charges of franc-tireur
warfare, as carried on by babies in arms, white-
haired grandmothers and sick women.
In October, 1914, two miles outside Ostend, I
was arrested as a spy by the Belgians and marched
through the streets in front of a gun in the hands
of a very young and very nervous soldier. The
Etat Major told me that German officers had been
using American passports to enter the Allied lines
24
THE SPY
and learn the numbers and disposition of troops.
They had to arrest Americans on sight and find
out if they were masqueraders. A little later one
of our American ambassadors verified this by say-
ing to me that American passports had been fla-
grantly abused for German purposes.
All this devious inside work, misusing the hos-
pitality of friendly, trustful nations, this buying
up of weak individuals, this laying the traps on
neutral ground — all this treachery in peace times
— deserves a second Bryce report. The atrocities
are the product of the treachery. This patient,
insidious spy system, eating away at the vitality
of the Allied powers, results in such horrors as I
have witnessed.
THE ATROCITY
WHEN the very terrible accounts of fright-
fulness visited on peasants by the invad-
ing German army crossed the Channel to London,
I believed that we had one more "formula" story.
I was fortified against unproved allegations by
thirteen years of newspaper and magazine inves-
tigation and by professional experience in social
work. A few months previously I had investi-
gated the "poison needle" stories of how a girl,
rendered insensible by a drug, was borne away in a
taxicab to a house of ill fame. The cases proved
to be victims of hysteria. At another time, I had
looked up certain incidents of "white slavery,"
where young and innocent victims were suddenly
and dramatically ruined. I had found the cases
to be more complex than the picturesque state-
ments of fiction writers implied. Again, by the
courtesy of the United States Government, De-
partment of Justice, I had studied investigations
26
THE ATROCITY
into the relation of a low wage to the life of im-
morality. These had shown me that many factors
in the home, in the training, in the mental condi-
tion, often contributed to the result. I had grown
sceptical of the "plain" statement of a complex
matter, and peculiarly hesitant in accepting ac-
counts of outrage and cruelty. It was in this
spirit that I crossed to Belgium. To this extent,
I had a pro-German leaning.
On September 7, 1914, with two companions,
I was present at the skirmish between Germans
and Belgians at Melle, a couple of miles east of
Ghent. We walked to the German line, where
a blue-eyed young Hussar officer, Rhinebeck, of
Stramm, Holstein, led us into a trap by permitting
us to walk along after him and his men as they
rode back to camp beyond Melle. We walked
for a quarter mile. At our right a barn was burn-
ing brightly. On our left the homes of the peas-
ants of Melle were burning, twenty-six little yel-
low brick houses, each with a separate fire. It
was not a conflagration, by one house burning and
gradually lighting the next. The fires were well
started and at equal intensity in each house. The
2?
GOLDEN LADS
walls between the houses were still intact. The
twenty-six fires burned slowly and thoroughly
through the night.
These three thousand German soldiers and their
officers were neither drunk nor riotous. The dis-
cipline was excellent. The burning was a clean-
cut, cold-blooded piece of work. It was a piece
of punishment. Belgian soldiers had resisted the
German army. If Belgian soldiers resist, peasant
non-combatants must be killed. That inspires
terror. That teaches the lesson: "Do not op-
pose Germany. It is death to oppose her — death
to your wife and child."
We were surrounded by soldiers and four sen-
tries put over us. Peasants who walked too close
to the camp were brought in and added to our
group of prisoners, till, all told, we numbered
thirty. A peasant lying next to me watched his
own house burn to pieces.
Another of the peasants was an old man, of
weak mind. He kept babbling to himself. It
would have been obvious to a child that he was
foolish. The German sentry ordered silence.
The old fellow muttered on in unconsciousness
28
THE ATROCITY
of his surroundings. The sentry drew back his
bayonet to run him through. A couple of the
peasants pulled the old man flat to the ground and
stifled his talking.
At five o'clock in the morning German stretcher
bearers marched behind the burned houses. Out
of the house of the peasant lying next to me three
bodies were carried. He broke into a long, slow
sobbing.
At six o'clock a monoplane sailed overhead,
bringing orders to our detachment. The troops
intended for Ghent were turned toward Brussels.
The field artillery, which had been rolled toward
the west, was swung about to the east. An offi-
cer headed us toward Ghent and let us go. If
the Germans had marched into Ghent we would
have been of value as a cover for the troops. But
for the return to Brussels we were only a nuisance.
We hurried away toward Ghent. As we walked
through a farmyard we saw a farmer lying at
full length dead in his dooryard. We passed the
convent school of Melle, where Catholic sisters
live. The front yard was strewed with furniture,
with bedding, with the contents of the rooms.
29
GOLDEN LADS
The yard was about four hundred feet long and
two hundred feet deep. It was dotted with this
intimate household stuff for the full area. I made
inquiry and found that no sister had been violated
or bayoneted. The soldiers had merely ransacked
the place.
One of my companions in this Melle experience
was A. Radclyffe Dugmore, formerly of the Play-
ers Club, New York, a well-known naturalist, au-
thor of books on big game in Africa, the beaver,
and the caribou. For many years he was con-
nected with Doubleday, Page & Co. His present
address is Crete Hill, South Nutfield, Surrey.
At other times and places, German troops have
not rested content with the mere terrorization and
humiliation of religious sisters. On February 12,
1916, the German Wireless from Berlin states
that Cardinal Mercier was urged to investigate the
allegation of German soldiers attacking Belgian
nuns, and that he declined. As long as the Ger-
man Government has seen fit to revive the record
of their own brutality, I present what follows.
A New York physician whom I know sends me
this statement:
30
THE ATROCITY
"I was dining in London in the middle of last
April with a friend, a medical man, and I ex-
pressed doubt as to the truth of the stories of
atrocity. I said I had combatted such stories
often in America. In reply, he asked me to visit
a house which had been made over into an ob-
stetrical hospital for Belgian nuns. I went with
him to the hospital. Here over a hundred nuns
had been and were being cared for."
On a later Sunday in September I visited the
Municipal Hospital of Ghent. In Salle (Hall)
17, I met and talked with Martha Tas, a peasant
girl of St. Gilles (near Termonde). As she was
escaping by train from the district, and when she
was between Alost and Audeghem, she told me
that German soldiers aimed rifle fire at the train
of peasants. She was wounded by a bullet in the
thigh. My companion on this visit was William
R. Renton, at one time a resident of Andover,
Massachusetts. His present address is the Cov-
entry Ordnance Works, Coventry.
A friend of mine has been lieutenant in a bat-
tery of 75's stationed near Pervyse. His summer
home is a little distance out from Liege. His
31
GOLDEN LADS
wife, sister-in-law, and his three children were in
the house when the Germans came. Peasants,
driven from their village, hid in the cellar. His
sister took one child and hid in a closet. His wife
took the two-year-old baby and the older child
and hid in another closet. The troops entered
the house, looted it and set it on fire. As they
left they fired into the cellar. The mother rushed
from her hiding place, went to her desk and found
that her money and the family jewels, one a gift
from the husband's family and handed down gen-
eration by generation, had been stolen. With the
sister, the baby in arms, the two other children and
the peasants, she ran out of the garden. They
were fired on. They hid in a wood. Then, for
two days, they walked. The raw potatoes which
they gathered by the way were unfit for the little
one. Without money, and ill and weakened, they
reached Holland. This lady is in a safe place
now, and her testimony in person is available.
The apologists of the widespread reign of
frightfulness say that war is always "like that,"
that individual drunken soldiers have always
broken loose and committed terrible acts. This
32
THE ATROCITY
defense does not meet the facts. It meets neither
the official orders, nor the cold method, nor the
immense number of proved murders. The Ger-
man policy was ordered from the top. It was
carried out by officers and men systematically, un-
der discipline. The German War Book, issued
by the General Staff, and used by officers, cleverly
justifies these acts. They are recorded by the
German soldiers themselves in their diaries, of
which photographic reproductions are obtainable
in any large library. The diaries were found on
the persons of dead and wounded Germans. The
name of the man and his company are given.
On Sunday, September 27, I was present at the
battle of Alost, where peasants came running into
our lines from the German side of the canal. In
spite of shell, shrapnel, rifle, and machine fire,
these peasants crossed to us. The reason they had
for running into fire was that the Germans were
torturing their neighbors with the bayonet. One
peasant, on the other side of the canal, hurried
toward us under the fire, with a little girl on his
right shoulder.
On Tuesday, September 29, I visited Wetteren
33
GOLDEN LADS
Hospital. I went in company with the Prince
L. de Croy, the Due D'Ursel, a senator; the
Count de Briey, Intendant de la Liste Civile du
Roy, and the Count Retz la Barre (all of the
Garde du General de Wette, Divisions de Cava-
lerie). One at least of these gentlemen is as well
and as favorably known in this country as in his
own. I took a young linguist, who was kind
enough to act as secretary for me. In the hospi-
tal I found eleven peasants with bayonet wounds
upon them — men, women and a child — who had
been marched in front of the Germans at Alost
as a cover for the troops, and cut with bayonets
when they tried to dodge the firing. A priest was
ministering to them, bed by bed. Sisters were
in attendance. The priest led us to the cot of
one of the men. On Sunday morning, Septem-
ber 27, the peasant, Leopold de Man, of No.
90, Hovenier-Straat, Alost, was hiding in the
house with his sister, in the cellar. The Germans
made a fire of the table and chairs in the upper
room. Then, catching sight of Leopold, they
struck him with the butts of their guns and forced
him to pass through the fire. Then, taking him
34
THE ATROCITY
outside, they struck him to the ground and gave
him a blow over the head with a gunstock and a
cut of the bayonet, which pierced his thigh all the
way through.
"In spite of my wound," said he, "they made
me pass between their lines, giving me still more
blows of the gun-butt in the back in order to make
me march. There were seventeen or eighteen per-
sons with me. They placed us in front of their
lines and menaced us with their revolvers, crying
out that they will make us pay for the losses they
have suffered at Alost. So we march in front of
the troops.
"When the battle began we threw ourselves on
our faces to the ground, but they forced us to rise
again. At a certain moment, when the Germans
were obliged to retire, we succeeded in escaping
down side streets."
The priest led the way to the cot of a peasant
whose cheeks had the spot of fever. He was
Frans Meulebroeck, of No. 62, Drie Sleutelstraat,
Alost. Sometimes in loud bursts of terror, and
then falling back into a monotone, he talked with
us.
35
GOLDEN LADS
"They broke open the door of my home," he
said, "they seized me and knocked me down. In
front of my door the corpse of a German lay
stretched out. The Germans said to me: 'You
are going to pay for that to us.' A few moments
later they gave me a bayonet cut in my leg. They
sprinkled naphtha in my house and set it afire.
My son was struck down in the street and I was
marched in front of the German troops. I do not
know even yet the fate of my son."
Gradually as the peasant talked the time of his
suffering came on him. His eyes began to see it
again in front of him. They became fixed and
wild, the white of them visible. His voice was
shrill and broken with sobs.
"My boy," he said, "I have n't seen him." His
body shook with sobbing.
At my request the young man with me took
down the statements of these two peasants, turn-
ing them into French from the Flemish, with the
aid of the priest. In the presence of the priest
and one of the sisters the two peasants signed, each
man, his statement, making his mark.
Our group passed into the next room, where the
36
THE ATROCITY
wounded women were gathered. A sister led us
to the bedside of a very old woman, perhaps
eighty years old. She had thin white hair, that
straggled across the pillow. There was no motion
to the body, except for faint breathing. She was
cut through the thigh with a bayonet.
I went across the room and found a little girl,
twelve years old. She was propped up in bed
and half bent over, as if she had been broken at
the breast bone. Her body whistled with each
breath. One of our ambulance corps went out
next day to the hospital — Dr. Donald Renton.
He writes me:
"I went out with Davidson, the American sculp-
tor, and Yates, the cinema man, and there had
been brought into the hospital the previous day
the little girl you speak of. She had a gaping
wound on, I think, the right side of her back,
and died the next day."
Dr. Ren ton's address is 1 10 Hill Street, Garnet
Hill, Glasgow.
The young man who took down the record is
named E. de Niemira, a British subject. He made
the report of what we had seen to the Bryce Com-
37
GOLDEN LADS
mittee. These cases which I witnessed appear in
the Brycc Report under the heading of "Alost." *
1When this record was first made public the "New York
Tribune" stated editorially: —
"The writer of the foregoing communication was for several
years a member of 'The Tribune' staff. For the utter trust-
worthiness of any statement made by Mr. Gleason, this news-
paper is willing to vouch. Mr. Gleason was at the front car-
ing for the Belgian wounded. He speaks with full knowledge
and complete authority and 'The Tribune' is glad to be able
to submit to its readers a first-hand, eyewitness account of
atrocities written by an American. It calls attention again to
the fact, cited by Mr. Gleason, that his testimony is included in
the Bryce Report, which should give Americans new insight
into the value of this document."
When Theodore Roosevelt read this record of German atroc-
ity, he made the following public statement:
"Remember, there is not the slightest room for honest ques-
tion either as to the dreadful, the unspeakably hideous, out-
rages committed on the Belgians, or as to the fact that these
outrages were methodically committed by the express command
of the German Government in order to terrorize both the Bel-
gians and among neutrals those men who are as cold and timid
and selfish as our governmental leaders have shown themselves
to be. Let any man who doubts read the statement of an
American eyewitness of these fearful atrocities, Mr. Arthur H.
Gleason, in the 'New York Tribune' of November 25, 1915."
From the Bryce Report, English edition, Page 167.
British subject: —
"The girl was at the point of death. Mr. G was with
me and can corroborate me as to this and also as to the other
facts mentioned below. On the same day at the same place
38
THE ATROCITY
Of such is the Bryce Report made: first-hand
witness by men like myself, who know what they
know, who are ready for any test to be applied,
who made careful notes, who had witnesses.
"Why do the Germans do these things'? It is
not war. It is cruel and wrong," that is a remark
I heard from noblemen and common soldiers alike.
Such acts are beyond the understanding of the
Belgian people. Their soldiers are kindly, good-
humored, fearless. Alien women and children
would be safe in their hands. They do not see
why the Germans bring suffering to the innocent.
A few understand. They know it is a scientific
panic which the German army was seeking to cul-
tivate. They see that these acts are not done in
I saw one L. de M . I took this statement from him. . . .
He signed his statement in my pocket book, and I hold my pocket
book at the disposal of the Belgian and English authorities.
"I also saw at the hospital an old woman of eighty who was
run clean through by a bayonet thrust.
"I next went up to another wounded Belgian in the same
ward. His name was F. M . I wrote his statement in my
pocket book and he signed it after having read it."
The full statement in the Bryce Report of the- atrocities which
I witnessed covers a page. The above sentences are extracts.
Mr. Niemira had neglected to make a note of the exact date in
his pocket book, and calls it "about the xsth of September." It
was September 29.
39
GOLDEN LADS
the wilful abandon of a few drunken soldiers, be-
yond discipline, but that they belong to a cool,
careful method by means of which the German
staff hoped to reduce a population to servi-
tude. The Germans regard these mutilations as
pieces of necessary surgery. The young blond
barmaid of the Quatrecht Inn told us on October
4 that a German captain came and cried like a
baby in the taproom on the evening of September
7, after he had laid waste Quatrecht and Melle.
To her fanciful, untrained mind he was thinking
of his own wife and children. So, at least, she
thought as she watched him, after serving him in
his thirst.
One of the sentries patted the shoulder of the
peasant at Melle when he learned that the man
had had the three members of his family done to
death. Personally, he was sorry for the man, but
orders were orders.
I spent September 13 and September 23 in Ter-
monde. Ten days before my first visit Termonde
was a pretty town of 11,000 inhabitants. On
their first visit the Germans burned eleven hun-
dred of the fifteen hundred houses. They burned
40
THE ATROCITY
the Church of St. Benedict, the Church of St. Ro-
cus, three other churches, a hospital, and an or-
phanage. They burned that town not by acci-
dent of shell fire and general conflagration, but
methodically, house by house. In the midst of
charred ruins I came on single houses standing,
many of them, and on their doors was German
writing in chalk — "Nicht Verbrennen. Gute
Leute wohnen hier." Sometimes it would be
simply "Nicht Verbrennen," sometimes only
"Gute Leute," but always that piece of German
script was enough to save that house, though to
the right and left of it were ruins. On several
of the saved houses the name of the German offi-
cer was scribbled who gave the order to spare.
About one hundred houses were chalked in the
way I have described. All these were unscathed
by the fire, though they stood in streets otherwise
devastated. The remaining three hundred houses
had the good luck to stand at the outskirts and
on streets unvisited by the house-to-house incen-
diaries.
Four days after my first visit the Germans
burned again the already wrecked town, turning
43
GOLDEN LADS
their attention to the neglected three hundred
houses. I went in as soon as I could safely enter
the town, and that was on the Wednesday after.
As companions in Termonde I had Tennyson
Jesse, Radclyffe Dugmore, and William R. Ren-
ton. Mr. Dugmore took photographs of the
chalked houses.
"Build a fence around Termonde," suggested
a Ghent manufacturer, "leave the ruins untouched.
Let the place stand there, with its burned houses,
churches, orphanage, hospital, factories, to show
the world what German culture is. It will be a
monument to their methods of conducting war.
There will be no need of saying anything. That
is all the proof we need. Then throw open the
place to visitors from all the world, as soon as this
war is over. Let them draw their own conclu-
sions."
44
BALLAD OF THE GERMANS
IN Wetteren Hospital, Flanders, the writer saw
a little peasant girl dying from the bayonet
wounds in her back which the German soldiers
had given her.
Cain slew only a brother,
A lad who was fair and strong,
His murder was careless and honest,
A heated and sudden wrong.
And Judas was kindly and pleasant,
For he snared an invincible man.
But you — you have spitted the children,
As they toddled and stumbled and ran.
She heard you sing on the high-road,
She thought you were gallant and gay;
Such men as the peasants of Flanders :
The friends of a child at play.
45
GOLDEN LADS
She saw the sun on your helmets,
The sparkle of glancing light.
She saw your bayonets flashing,
And she laughed at your Prussian might.
Then you gave her death for her laughter,
As you looked on her mischievous face.
You hated the tiny peasant,
With the hate of your famous race.
You were not frenzied and angry;
You were cold and efficient and keen.
Your thrust was as thorough and deadly
As the stroke of a faithful machine.
You stabbed her deep with your rifle :
You had good reason to sing,
As you footed it on through Flanders
Past the broken and quivering thing.
Something impedes your advancing,
A dragging has come on your hosts.
And Paris grows dim now, and dimmer,
Through the blur of your raucous boasts.
BALLAD OF THE GERMANS
Your singing is sometimes broken
By guttural German groans.
Your ankles are wet with her bleeding,
Your pike is blunt from her bones.
The little peasant has tripped you.
She hangs to your bloody stride.
And the dimpled hands are fastened
Where they fumbled before she died.
47
THE STEAM ROLLER
THE Steam Roller, the final method, now op-
erating in Belgium to flatten her for all
time, is the most deadly and universal of the
three. It is a calculated process to break the hu-
man spirit. People speak as if the injury done
Belgium was a thing of the past. It is at its
height now. The spy system with its clerks, wait-
ers, tourists, business managers, reached directly
only some thousands of persons. The atrocities
wounded and killed many thousands of old men,
women, and children. But the German occupa-
tion and sovereignty at the present moment are
denationalizing more than six million people.
The German conquerors operate their Steam
Roller by clever lies, thus separating Belgium
from her real friends; by taxation, thus breaking
Belgium economically; by enforced work on food
supplies, railways, and ammunition, thus forcing
Belgian peasants to feed their enemy's army and
THE STEAM ROLLER
destroy their own army, and so making unwilling
traitors out of patriots ; by fines and imprisonment
that harass the individual Belgian who retains any
sense of nationality; by official slander from Ber-
lin that the Belgians are the guilty causes of their
own destruction; and finally by the fact of sov-
ereignty itself, that at one stroke breaks the in-
most spirit of a free nation.
I was still in Ghent when the Germans moved
up to the suburbs.
"I can put my artillery on Ghent," said the Ger-
man officer to the American vice-consul.
That talk is typical of the tone of voice used
to Belgians : threat backed by murder.
The whole policy of the Germans of late is to
treat the Belgian matter as a thing accomplished.
"It is over. Let bygones be bygones."
It is a process like the trapping of an innocent
woman, and when she is trapped, saying,
"Now you are compromised, anyway, so you
had better submit."
A friend of mine who remained hi Ghent after
the German occupation, had German officers bil-
letted in his home. Daily, industriously, they
49
GOLDEN LADS
said to him that the English had been poor friends
of his country, that they had been late in coming
to the rescue. Germany was the friend, not Eng-
land. In the homes throughout Belgium, these
unbidden guests are claiming slavery is a bene-
ficent institution, that it is better to be ruled by
the German military, and made efficient for Ger-
man ends, than to continue a free people.
For a year, our Red Cross Corps worked under
the direction and authority of the Belgian prime
minister, Baron de Broqueville. The prime min-
ister in the name of his government has sent to
this country an official protest against the new tax
levied by the Germans on his people. The total
tax for the German occupation amounts to $192,-
000,000. He writes :
"The German military occupation during the
last fifteen months has entirely prevented all for-
eign trade, has paralyzed industrial activity, and
has reduced the majority of the laboring classes
to enforced idleness. Upon the impoverished
Belgian population whom Germany has unjustly
attacked, upon whom she has brought want and
distress, who have been barely saved from starva-
50
One of the dangerous Belgian franc-tireurs,
who made it necessary for the German Army
to burn and bayonet babies and old women.
His name is Caspar. He is three years eld.
THE STEAM ROLLER
tion by the importation of food which Germany
should have provided — upon this population, Ger-
many now imposes a new tax, equal in amount to
the enormous tax she has already imposed and is
regularly collecting."
The Belgian Legation has protested unavail-
ingly to our Government that Germany, in viola-
tion of The Hague Conventions, has forced Bel-
gian workmen to perform labor for the German
army. Belgian Railway employees at Malines,
Luttre and elsewhere refused to perform work
which would have released from the transporta-
tion service and made available for the trenches
an entire German Army Corps. These Belgian
workmen were subjected to coersive measures,
which included starvation and cruel punishments.
Because of these penalties on Belgians refusing to
be traitors, many went to hospitals in Germany,
and others returned broken in health to Bel-
gium.
After reading the chapter on the German spy
system, a Belgian wrote me :
"That spying business is not yet the worst.
Since then, the Germans have succeeded in outdo-
53
GOLDEN LADS
ing all that. The basest and the worst that one
can dream of is it not that campaign of slander
and blackmail which they originated after their
violation of Belgium's neutrality? Of course
they did it — as a murderer who slanders his vic-
tim— in the hope to justify their crime."
It is evil to murder non-combatants. It is more
evil to "rationalize" the act — to invent a moral
reason for doing an infamous thing. First, Bel-
gium suffered a vivisection, a veritable martyr-
dom. Now, she is officially informed by her exe-
cutioners that she was the guilty party. She is
not allowed to protest. She must sit quietly un-
der the charge that her sacrifice was not a sacrifice
at all, but the penalty paid for her own misbe-
havior. This is a more cruel thing than the spy-
ing that sapped her and the atrocities practised
upon her, because it is more cruel to take a man's
honor than his property and his life.
"If the peasants had stayed in their houses, they
would have been safe."
When they stayed in their houses they were
burned along with the houses. I saw this done
on September 7, 1914, at Melle.
54
THE STEAM ROLLER
"The peasants shot from their houses at the ad-
vancing German army."
I saw German atrocities. The peasants did
not shoot. It is the old familiar formula of the
franc-tireur. That means that the peasant, not
a soldier, dressed in the clothing of a civilian, takes
advantage of his immunity as a noncombatant, to
secrete a rifle, and from some shelter shoot at the
enemy army. The Bishop of Namur writes :
"It is evident that the German army trod the
Belgian soil and carried out the invasion with the
preconceived idea that it would meet with bands
of this sort, a reminiscence of the war of 1870.
But German imagination will not suffice to create
that which does not exist.
"There never existed a single body of francs-
tireurs in Belgium.
"No 'isolated instance' even is known of civil-
ians having fired upon the troops, although there
would have been no occasion for surprise if any
individual person had committed an excess. In
several of our villages the population was exter-
minated because, as the military authorities al-
leged, a major had been killed or a young girl had
55
GOLDEN LADS
attempted to kill an officer, and so forth. ... In
no case has an alleged culprit been discovered and
designated by name."
This lie — that the peasants brought their own
death on themselves — was rehearsed before the
war, as a carefully learned lesson. The army
came prepared to find the excuse for the methodi-
cal outrages which they practised. In the fight
in the Dixmude district, a German officer of the
202 e Infantry had a letter with this sentence on
his body :
"There are a lot of francs-tireurs with the
enemy."
There were none. He had found what he had
been drilled to find, in the years of preparedness.
The front lines of the Yser were raked clear by
shell, rifle, and machine-gun fire. The district
was in ruins. I know, because I worked there
with our Red Cross Corps through those three
weeks. The humorous explanation of this is
given by one of the Fusilier Marin Lieutenants
— that the blue cap and the red pompon of the
famous fighting sailors of France looked strangely
to the Germans, who took the wearers for francs-
56
THE STEAM ROLLER
tireurs, terror suggesting the idea. But this is the
kindly humor of Brittany. The saucy sailor caps
could not have looked strangely to German eyes,
because a few weeks earlier those "Girls with the
red pompon" had held the German army corps at
Melle, and not even terror could have made them
look other than terribly familiar. No. The offi-
cers had been faithfully trained to find militant
peasants under arms, and to send back letters and
reports of their discovery, which could later be
used in official excuses for frightfulness. This
letter is one that did not get back to Berlin, later
to appear in a White Paper, as justification for
official murder of noncombatants.
The picture projected by the Great German Lit-
erary Staff is too imaginative. Think of that
Army of the Invasion with its army corps rid-
ing down through village streets — the Uhlan cav-
alry, the innumerable artillery, the dense end-
less infantry, the deadly power and swing of it
all — and then see the girl-child of Alost, and the
white-haired woman, eighty years old — aiming
their rifles at that cavalcade. It is a literary crea-
tion, not a statement of fact. I have been in
57
GOLDEN LADS
villages when German troops were entering, had
entered, and were about to enter. I saw helpless,
terror-stricken women huddled against the wall,
children hiding in their skirts, old men dazed and
vague.
Then, as the blue-gray uniforms appeared at the
head of the street, with sunlight on the pikes and
helmets, came the cry — half a sob, "Les Alle-
mands."
The German, fabrications are unworthy. Let
the little slain children, and the violated women,
sleep in honor. Your race was stern enough in
doing them to death. Let them alone, now that
you have cleared them from your path to Paris.
Doctor George Sarton, of the University of
Ghent writes me :
"During the last months, the Germans have
launched new slanders against Belgium. Their
present tactics are more discreet and seem to be
successful. Many 'neutral' travelers — especially
Americans and Swiss — have been to Belgium to
see the battlefields or, perhaps, to get an idea of
what such an occupation by foreign soldiers ex-
actly amounts to. Of course, these men can see
58
THE STEAM ROLLER
nothing without the assistance of the German
authorities, and they can but see what is shown to
them. The greater their curiosity, the more cour-
tesy extended to them, the more also they feel in-
debted to their German hosts. These are well
aware of it: the sightseers are taken in their net,
and with a very few exceptions, their critical sense
is quickly obliterated. We have recently been
shown one of the finest specimens of these Ameri-
can tourists: Mr. George B. McCellan, professor
of History at Princeton, who made himself ridicu-
lous by writing a most superficial and inaccurate
article for the "Sunday Times Magazine."
"When the good folks of Belgium recollect the
spying business that was carried on at their ex-
pense by their German 'friends,' they are not
likely to trust much their German enemies. They
know that the Germans are quite incapable of
keeping to themselves any fact that they may learn
— in whatever confidential and intimate circum-
stances— if this fact is of the smallest use to their
own country. As it is perfectly impossible to
trust them, the best is to avoid them, and that is
what most Belgians are doing.
59
GOLDEN LADS
"American tourists seeing Belgium through
German courtesy are considered by the Belgians
just as untrustworthy as the Germans themselves.
This is the right attitude, as there is no possi-
bility left to the Belgians (in Belgium) of test-
ing the morality and the neutrality of their visi-
tors. The result of which is that these visitors are
entirely given up to their German advisers; all
their knowledge is of German origin. Of course,
the Germans take advantage of this situation and
make a show of German efficiency and organiza-
tion.— 'Don't you know: the Germans have done
so much for Belgium! Why, everybody knows
that this country was very inefficient, very badly
managed ... a poor little country without in-
fluence. . . . See what the Germans have made
of it. ... There was no compulsory education,
and the number of illiterates was scandalously
high.' (I am sorry to say that this at least is
true.) 'They are introducing compulsory and
free education. In the big towns, sexual moral-
ity was rather loose, but the Germans are now
regulating all that.' (You should hear German
officers speak of prostitution in Antwerp and
60
THE STEAM ROLLER
Brussels.) 'The evil was great, but fortunately
the Germans came and are cleaning up the coun-
try.'— That is their way of doing and talking.
It does not take them long to convince ingenuous
and uncritical Americans that everything is splen-
didly regulated by German efficiency, and that if
only the Belgians were complying, everything
would be all right in Belgium. Are not the Bel-
gians very ungrateful?
"The Belgians do appreciate American gener-
osity; they realize that almost the only rays of
happiness that reach their country come from
America. They will never forget it; that disin-
terested help coming from over the seas has a
touch of romance; it is great and comforting; it
is the bright and hopeful side of the war. The
Belgians know how to value this. But, as to
what the Germans are doing, good or not, they
will never appreciate that — what does it matter?
The Belgians do not care one bit for German re-
forms; they do not even deign to consider them;
they simply ignore them. There is one — only
one — reform that they will appreciate; the Ger-
man evacuation. All the rest does not count.
61
GOLDEN LADS
When the Germans speak of cleaning the country,
the Belgians do not understand. From their
point of view, there is only one way to clean it —
and that is for the Germans to clear out.
"The Germans are very disappointed that a
certain number of Belgians have been able to es-
cape, either to enlist in the Belgian army or to
live abroad. Of course, the more Belgians are in
their hands, the more pressure they can exert.
They are now slandering the Belgians who have
left their country — all the 'rich' people who are
'feasting' abroad while their countrymen are starv-
ing.
"The fewer Belgians there are in German hands,
the better it is. The Belgians whose ability is the
most useful, are considered useful by the Ger-
mans for the latter's sake. Must it not be a ter-
rible source of anxiety for these Belgians to think
that all the work they manage to do is directly
or indirectly done for Germany1? It is not aston-
ishing that she wants to restore 'business, as usual'
in Belgium, and that in many cases she has tried
to force the Belgian workers to earn for her. Let
62
THE STEAM ROLLER
me simply refer to the protest recently published
by the Belgian Legation. But for the American
Commission for Relief, the Belgians would have
had to choose between starvation and work — work
for Germany — starvation or treason. Nothing
shows better the greatness and moment of the
American work. Without the material and moral
presence of the United States, Belgium would
have simply been turned into a nation of slaves —
starvation or treason.
"If I were in Belgium, I could say nothing; I
would have to choose between silence and prison,
or silence and death. Remember Edith Cavell.
An enthusiastic, courageous man is running as
many risks in Belgium now, as he would have in
the sixteenth century under the Spanish domina-
tion. The hundred eyes of the Spanish Inquisi-
tion were then continually prying into everything
— bodies and souls; one felt them even while one
was sleeping. The German Secret Service is not
less pitiless and it is more efficient.
"The process of slander and lie carried on by
the Germans to 'flatten' Belgium is, to my judg-
63
GOLDEN LADS
ment, the worst of their war practices. It is very
efficient indeed. But, however efficient it may be,
it will be unsuccessful as to its main purpose.
The Germans will not be able to bow Belgian
heads. As long as the Belgians do not admit that
they have been conquered, they are not conquered,
and in the meanwhile the Germans are merely ag-
gravating their infamy. It was an easy thing to
over-run the unprepared Belgian soil — but the
Belgian spirit is unconquerable.
"Belgium may slumber, but die — never."
When men act as part of an implacable ma-
chine, they act apart from their humanity. They
commit unbelievable horrors, because the thing
that moves them is raw force, untouched by fine
purpose and the elements of mercy. When I
think of Germans, man by man, as they lay
wounded, waiting for us to bring them in and care
for them as faithfully as for our own, I know that
they have become human in their defeat. We are
their friends as we break them. In spite of their
treachery and cruelty and cold hatred, we shall
save them yet. Cleared of their evil dream and
restored to our common humanity, they will have
THE STEAM ROLLER
a more profound sorrow growing out of this war
than any other people, for Belgium and France
only suffered these things, but the great German
race committed them.
MY EXPERIENCE WITH BAEDEKER
w
HEN I went to Belgium, friends said to me,
"You must take 'Baedeker's Belgium' with
you; it is the best thing on the country." So I
did. I used it as I went around. The author
does n't give much about himself, and that is
a good feature in any book, but I gathered he
was a German, a widely traveled man, and he
seems to have spent much time in Belgium, for
I found intimate records of the smallest things.
I used his guide for five months over there. I
must say right here I was disappointed in it.
And that is n't just the word, either. I was an-
noyed by it. It gave all the effect of accuracy,
and then when I got there it was n't so. He kept
speaking of buildings as "beautiful," "one of the
loveliest unspoiled pieces of thirteenth century
architecture in Europe," and when I took a lot
of trouble and visited the building, I found it
half down, or a butt-end, or sometimes ashes. I
66
MY EXPERIENCE WITH BAEDEKER
could n't make his book tally up. It does n't
agree with the landscape and the look of things.
He will take a perfectly good detail and stick it in
where it does n't belong, and leave it there. And
he does it all in a painstaking way and with evi-
dent sincerity.
His volume had been so popular back in his own
country that it had brought a lot of Germans into
Belgium. I saw them everywhere. They were
doing the same thing I was doing, checking up
what they saw with the map and text and things.
Some of them looked puzzled and angry, as they
went around. I feel sure they will go home and
give Baedeker a warm time, when they tell him
they did n't find things as he had represented.
For one thing, he makes out Belgium a lively
country, full of busy, contented people, innocent
peasants, and sturdy workmen and that sort of
thing. Why, it 3s the saddest place in the world.
The people are not cheery at all. They are de-
pressed. It 's the last place I should think of for
a holiday, now that I have seen it. And that 's
the way it goes, all through his work. Things
are the opposite of what he says with so much
67
GOLDEN LADS
meticulous care. He would speak of "gay cafe
life" in a place that looked as if an earthquake had
hit it, and where the only people were some
cripples and a few half-starved old folks. If he
finds that sort of thing gay as he travels around,
he is an easy man to please. It was so wherever
I went. It is n't as if he were wrong at some one
detail. He is wrong all over the place, all over
Belgium. It 's all different from the way he says
it is. I know his fellow-countrymen who are
there now will bear me out in this.
Let me show one place. I took his book with
me and used it on Nieuport. That 's a perfectly
fair test, because Nieuport is like a couple of hun-
dred other towns.
"Nieuport," says Herr Baedeker, " a small and
quiet place on the Yser."
It is one of the noisiest places I have ever been
in. There was a day and a half in May when
shells dropped into the streets and houses, every
minute. Every day at least a few screaming
three-inch shells fall on the village. Aeroplanes
buzz overhead, shrapnel pings in the sky. Rifle
bullets sing like excited telegraph wires. If
68
Baedeker, the distinguished German writer, states that this
Fifteenth Century Gothic church in Nieuport has "a modern
timber roof." We looked for it.
MY EXPERIENCE WITH BAEDEKER
Baedeker found Nieuport a quiet place, he was
brought up in a boiler factory.
His very next phrase puzzled me — "with 3500
inhabitants," he says.
And I did n't see one. There were dead people
in the ruins of the houses. The soldiers used to
unearth them from time to time. I remember
that the poet speaks of "the poor inhabitant be-
low," when he is writing of a body in a grave. It
must be in that sense that Baedeker specifies those
3500 inhabitants. But he should n't do that kind
of imaginative touch. It is n't in his line. And
it might mislead people.
Think of a stranger getting into Nieuport after
dark on a wet night, with his mind all set on the
three hotels Baedeker gives him a choice of.
"All unpretending," he says.
Just the wrong word. Why, those hotels are
brick dust. They 're flat on the ground. There
is n't a room left. He means "demolished." He
does n't use our language easily. I can see that.
It is true they are unpretending, but that is n't
the first word you would use about them, not if
you were fluent.
71
GOLDEN LADS
Then he gives a detail that is unnecessary. He
says you can sleep or eat there for a "franc and a
half." That exactitude is out of place. It is
labored. I ask you what a traveler would make
of the "\]/2 fr. pour diner" when he came on
that rubbish heap which is the Hotel of Hope—
"Hotel de 1'Esperance." That is like Baedeker,
all through his volume. He will give a detail,
like the precise cost of this dinner, when there is n't
any food in the neighborhood. It would n't be so
bad if he 'd sketch things in general terms. That
I could forgive. But it is too much when he
makes a word-picture of a Flemish table d'hote for
a franc and a half in a section of country where
even the cats are starving.
His next statement is plain twisted. "Nieu-
port is noted for its obstinate resistance to the
French."
I saw French soldiers there every day. They
were defending the place. His way of putting it
stands the facts on their head.
"And (is noted) for the 'Battle of the Dunes'
in 1600."
That is where the printer falls down. I was
72
MY EXPERIENCE WITH BAEDEKER
there during the Battle of the Dunes. The nine
is upside down in the date as given.
I would n't object so much if he were careless
with facts that were harmless, like his hotels and
his dinner and his dates. But when he gives bad
advice that would lead people into trouble,
I think he ought to be jacked up. Listen to
this:
"We may turn to the left to inspect the locks
on the canals to Ostend."
Baedeker's proposal here means sure death to
the reader who tries it. That section is lined with
machine guns. If a man began turning and in-
specting, he would be shot. Baedeker's, statement
is too casual. It sounds like a suggestion for a
leisurely walk. It is n't a sufficient warning
against doing something which shortens life. The
word "inspect" is unfortunate. It gives the
reader the idea he is invited to nose around those
locks, when he had really better quiet down and
keep away. The sentries don't want him there.
I should have written that sentence differently.
His kind of unconsidered advice leads to a lot of
sadness.
73
GOLDEN LADS
"The Rue Longue contains a few quaint old
houses."
It does n't contain any houses at all. There
are some heaps of scorched rubble. "Quaint"
is word painting.
"On the south side of this square rises the dig-
nified Cloth Hall."
There is nothing dignified about a shattered,
burned, tottering old building. Why will he use
these literary words'?
"With a lately restored belfry."
It seems as if this writer could n't help saying
the wrong thing. A Zouave gave us a piece of
bronze from the big bell. It was n't restored at
all. It was on the ground, broken.
"The church has a modern timber roof."
There he goes again — the exact opposite of
what even a child could see were the facts. And
yet in his methodical, earnest way, he has tried
to get these things right. That church, for in-
stance, has no roof at all. It has a few pillars
standing. It looks like a skeleton. I have a
good photograph of it, which the reader can
see on page 69. If Baedeker would stand under
74
MY EXPERIENCE WITH BAEDEKER
that "modern timber roof" in a rainstorm, he
would n't think so much of it.
"The Hotel de Ville contains a small collection
of paintings."
I don't like to keep picking on what he says, but
this sentence is irritating. There are n't any
paintings there, because things are scattered. You
can see torn bits strewed around on the floor of the
place, but nothing like a collection.
I could go on like that, and take him up on a
lot more details. But it sounds as if I were criti-
cising. And I don't mean it that way, because I
believe the man is doing his best. But I do think
he ought to get out another edition of his book,
and set these points straight.
He puts a little poem on his title page :
Go, little book, God send thee good passage,
And specially let this be thy prayer
Unto them all that thee will read or hear,
Where thou art wrong, after their help to call,
Thee to correct in any part or all.
That sounds fair enough. So I am going to
send him these notes. But it is n't in "parts" he
is "wrong." There is a big mistake somewhere.
75
GOLDEN LADS
"Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
77
THE PLAY-BOYS OF BRITTANY
LES FUSILIERS MARINS
AT times in my five months at the front I have
been puzzled by the sacrifice of so much
young life; and most I have wondered about the
Belgians. I had seen their first army wiped out;
there came a time when I no longer met the faces
I had learned to know at Termonde and Antwerp
and Alost. A new army of boys has dug itself in
at the Yser, and the same wastage by gun-fire and
disease is at work on them. One wonders with the
Belgians if the price they pay for honor is not too
high. There is a sadness in the eyes of Belgian
boy soldiers that is not easy to face. Are we quite
worthy of their sacrifice? Why should the son
of Ysaye die for me1? Are you, comfortable
reader, altogether sure that Pierre Depage and
Andre Simont are called on to spill their blood for
your good name?
79
Then one turns with relief to the Fusiliers Mar-
ins — the sailors with a rifle. Here are young men
at play. They know they are the incomparable
soldiers. The guns have been on them for fifteen
months, but they remain unbroken. Twice in the
year, if they had yielded, this might have been a
short war. But that is only saying that if Brit-
tany had a different breed of men the world and
its future would contain less hope. They carry
the fine liquor of France, and something of their
own added for bouquet. They are happy soldiers
— happy in their brief life, with its flash of dar-
ing, and happy in their death. It is still sweet to
die for one's country, and that at no far-flung out-
post over the seas and sands, but just at the home
border. As we carried our wounded sailors down
from Nieuport to the great hospital of Zuydcoote
on the Dunkirk highway, there is a sign-board, a
bridge, and a custom-house that mark the point
where we pass from Belgium into France. We
drove our ambulance with the rear curtain raised,
so that the wounded men, lying on the stretchers,
could be cheered by the flow of scenery. Some-
times, as we crossed that border-line, one of the
80
THE PLAY-BOYS OF BRITTANY
men would pick it up with his eye, and would say
to his comrade: "France! Now we are in
France, the beautiful country."
"What do you mean*?" I asked one lad, who had
brightened visibly.
"The other countries," he said, "are flat and
dirty. The people are of mixed races. France is
not so."
It has been my fortune to watch the sailors at
work from the start of the war. I was in Ghent
when they came there, late, to a hopeless situation.
Here were youngsters scooped up from the decks,
untrained in trenches, and rushed to the front ; but
the sea-daring was on them, and they knew obedi-
ence and the hazards. They helped to cover the
retreat of the Belgians and save that army from
annihilation by banging away at the German mass
at Melle. Man after man developed a fatalism
of war, and expressed it to us.
"Nothing can hit you till your time," was often
their way of saying it; "it 's no use dodging or be-
ing afraid. You won't be hit till your shell
comes." And another favorite belief of theirs
that brought them cheer was this: "The shell
8l
GOLDEN LADS
that will kill you you won't hear coming. So
you '11 never know."
These sailor lads thrive on lost causes, and
it was at Ghent they won from the Germans their
nickname of "Les demoiselles au pompon rouge."
The saucy French of that has a touch beyond any
English rendering of "the girls with the red pom-
pon." "Les demoiselles au pompon rouge" paints
their picture at one stroke, for they thrust out the
face of a youngster from under a rakish blue sailor
hat, crowned with a fluffy red button, like a blue
flower with a red bloom at its heart. I rarely saw
an aging marin. There are no seasoned troops so
boyish. They wear open dickies, which expose
the neck, full, hard, well-rounded. The older
troops, who go laggard to the spading, have beards
that extend down the collar; but a boy has a
smooth, clean neck, and these sailors have the
throat of youth. We must once have had such a
race in our cow-boys and Texas rangers — level-
eyed, careless men who know no masters, only
equals. The force of gravity is heavy on an old
man. But marins are not weighted down by
equipment nor muffled with clothing. They go
82
THE PLAY-BOYS OF BRITTANY
bobbing like corks, as though they would always
stay on the crest of things. And riding on top of
their lightness is that absurd bright-red button in
their cap. The armies for five hundred miles are
sober, grown-up people, but here are the play-boys
of the western front.
From Ghent they trooped south to Dixmude,
and were shot to pieces in that "Thermopylae of
the North."
"Hold for four days," was their order.
They held for three weeks, till the sea came
down and took charge. During those three weeks
we motored in and out to get their wounded.
Nothing of orderly impression of those days re-
mains to me. I have only flashes of the sailor-
soldiers curved over and snaking along the bat-
tered streets behind slivers of wall, handfuls of
them in the Hotel de Ville standing around wait-
ing in a roar of noise and a bright blaze of burn-
ing houses — waiting till the shelling fades away.1
1If any one wants a history of them, and the world ought
to want it, the book of their acts, is it not written in singing
prose in Le Goffic's "Dixmude, un Chapitre de Phistoire des
Fusiliers Marins"? Le Goffic is a Breton and his own son
is with the fighting sailors. He deals with their autumn ex-
83
GOLDEN LADS
Then for over twelve months they held wrecked
Nieuport, and I have watched them there week
after week. There is no drearier post on earth.
One day in the pile of masonry thirty feet from
our cellar refuge the sailors began throwing out
the bricks, and in a few minutes they uncov-
ered the body of a comrade. All the village has
the smell of desolation. That smell is com-
pounded of green ditch-water, damp plaster, wet
clothing, blood, straw, and antiseptics. The nose
took it as we crossed the canal, and held it till
we shook ourselves on the run home. Thirty
minutes a day in that soggy wreck pulled at my
spirits for hours afterward. But those chaps
stood up to it for twenty-four hours a day, lifting
ploits in Dixmude on the Yser, that butt-end of wreck. Legends
will spring out of them and the soil they have reddened. We
have heard little of the French in this war — and almost nothing
at all from them. And yet it is the French that have held the
decisive battle line. Unprepared and peace-loving, they have
stood the shock of a perfectly equipped and war-loving army.
Monsieur Le Goffic is the official historian of the Fusiliers
Marins. His book has gone through forty-nine editions. He is
a poet, novelist and critic. That American sympathy is ap-
preciated is proved by this sentence from a letter of Le Goffic
to an American who had expressed admiration for the Breton
sailors: — "Merci, Monsieur, au nom de mon pays, merci pour
nos marins, et merci pour moi meme."
84
THE PLAY-BOYS OF BRITTANY
a cheery face from a stinking cellar, hopping about
in the tangle, sleeping quietly when their "night
off" comes. As our chauffeur drew his camera,
one of them sprang into a bush entanglement,
aimed his rifle, and posed.
I recollect an afternoon when we had word of
an attack. We were grave, because the Germans
are strong and fearless.
"Are they coming?" grinned a sailor. "Let
them come. We are ready."
We learned to know many of the Fusiliers
Marins and to grow fond of them. How else
could it be when we went and got them, sick and
wounded, dying and dead, two, six, ten of them
a day, for many weeks, and brought them in to
the Red Cross post for a dressing, and then on
to the hospital*? I remember a young man in
our ambulance. His right foot was shot away,
and the leg above was wounded. He lay un-
murmuring for all the tossing of the road over the
long miles of the ride. We lifted him from the
stretcher, which he had wet with his blood, into
the white cot in "Hall 15" of Zuydcoote Hospital.
The wound and the journey had gone deeply into
85
GOLDEN LADS
his vitality. As he touched the bed, his control
ebbed, and he became violently sick at the stomach.
I stooped to carry back the empty stretcher. He
saw I was going away, and said, "Thank you." I
knew I should not see him again, not even if I
came early next day.
There is one unfading impression made on me
by those wounded. If I call it good nature, I
have given only one element in it. It is more
than that: it is a dash of fun. They smile, they
wink, they accept a light for their cigarette. It
is not stoicism at all. Stoicism is a grim holding
on, the jaws clenched, the spirit dark, but endur-
ing. This is a thing of wings. They will know
I am not making light of their pain in writing
these words. I am only saying that they make
light of it. The judgment of men who are soon to
die is like the judgment of little children. It does
not tolerate foolish words. Of all the ways of
showing you care that they suffer there is nothing
half so good as the gift of tobacco. As long as I
had any money to spend, I spent it on packages
of cigarettes.
When the Marin officers found out we were the
86
THE PLAY-BOYS OF BRITTANY
same people that had worked with them at Melle
five months before, they invited my wife and three
other nurses to luncheon in a Nieuport cellar.
Their eye brightens at sight of a woman, but she
is as safe with them as with a cowboy or a Quaker.
The guests were led down into a basement, an
eighteen foot room, six feet high. The sailors
had covered the floor and papered the walls with
red carpet. A tiny oil stove added to the warmth
of that blazing carpet. More than twenty officers
and doctors crowded into the room, and took seats
at the table, lighted by two lamps. There were
a dozen plates of patisserie, a choice of tea, coffee,
or chocolate, all hot, white and red wine, and then
champagne. An orderly lifted in a little wooden
yacht, bark-rigged, fourteen inches long, with
white painted sails. A nurse spilled champagne
over the tiny ship, till it was drenched, and
.christened. The chief doctor made a speech of
thanks. Then the ship went around the table,
and each guest wrote her name on the sails. The
party climbed out into the garden, where the shells
were going high overhead like snowballs. In
amongst the blackened flowers, a 1 6-inch shell had
89
GOLDEN LADS
left a hole of fifty feet diameter. One could have
dropped two motor cars into the cavity.
Who but Marins would have devised a celebra-
tion for us on July 4*? The commandant, the
captain, and a brace of lieutenants opened eleven
bottles of champagne in the Cafe du Sport at
Coxyde in honor of our violation of neutrality.
It was little enough we were doing for those men,
but they were moved to graceful speech. We
were hard put to it, because one had to tell them
that much of the giving for a hundred years had
been from France to us, and our showing in this
war is hardly the equal of the aid they sent us
when we were invaded by Hessian troops and a
German king.
Marins whom we know have the swift grati-
tude of simple natures, not too highly civilized to
show when they are pleased. After we had sent
a batch of their wounded by hospital train from
Adinkerke, the two sailors, who had helped us, in-
vited my American friend and me into the estami-
net across the road from the station, and bought
us drinks for an hour. We had been good to their
mates, so they wanted to be good to us.
90
THE PLAY-BOYS OF BRITTANY
When we lived in barraquement, just back of
the admiral's house, our cook was a Marin with a
knack at omelettes. If we had to work through
the night, going into black Nieuport, and down the
ten-mile road to Zuydcoote, returning weary at
midnight, a brave supper was laid out for us of
canned meats, wines, and jellies — all set with the
touch of one who cared. It was no hasty, slapped-
down affair. We were carrying his comrades, and
he was helping us to do it.
It was an officer of a quite other regiment who,
one time when we were off duty, asked us to carry
him to his post in the Dunes. We made the run
for him, and, as he jumped from the car, he of-
fered us a franc. Marins pay back in friendship.
The Red Cross station to which we reported,
Poste de Secours des Marins, was conducted by
Monsieur le Docteur Rolland, and Monsieur Le
Doze. Our workers were standing guests at their
officers' mess. The little sawed-off sailor in the
Villa Marie where I was billetted made coffee for
two of us each morning.
Our friends have the faults of young men,
flushed with life. They are scornful of feeble
91
GOLDEN LADS
folk, of men who grow tired, who think twice be-
fore dying. They laugh at middle age. The
sentries amuse them, the elderly chaps who duck
into their caves when a few shells are sailing over-
head. They have no charity for frail nerves.
They hate races who don't rally to a man when
the enemy is hitting the trail. They must wait
for age to gain pity, and the Bretons will never
grow old. They are killed too fast. And yet,
as soon as I say that, I remember their rough pity
for their hurt comrades. They are as busy as a
hospital nurse in laying a blanket and swinging
the stretcher for one of their own who has been
"pinked." They have a hovering concern. I
have had twenty come to the ambulance to help
shove in a "blesse," and say good-by to him, and
wave to him as long as the road left him in their
sight. The wounded man, unless his back bound
him down, would lift his head from the stretcher,
to give back their greetings. It was an eager ex-
change between the whole men and the injured
one. They don't believe they can be broken till
the thing comes, and there is curiosity to see just
what has befallen one like themselves.
92
THE PLAY-BOYS OF BRITTANY
When it came my time to say good-by, my
sailor friend, who had often stopped by my car
to tell me that all was going well, ran over to share
in the excitement. I told him I was leaving, and
he gave me a smile of deep-understanding amuse-
ment. Tired so soon? That smile carried a live
consciousness of untapped power, of the record he
and his comrades had made. It showed a disre-
gard of my personal feelings, of all adult human
weakness. That was the picture I carried away
from the Nieuport line — the smiling boy with his
wounded arm, alert after his year of war, and
more than a little scornful of one who had grown
weary in conditions so prosperous for young men.
I rode away from him, past the Coxyde en-
campment of his comrades. There they were as I
had often seen them, with the peddlers cluttering
their camp — candy men, banana women ; a fringe
of basket merchants about their grim barracks;
a dozen peasants squatting with baskets of ciga-
rettes, fruit, vegetables, foolish, bright trinkets.
And over them bent the boys, dozens of them
in blue blouses, stooping down to pick up trays,
fingering red apples and shining charms, chaffing,
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GOLDEN LADS
dickering, shoving one another, the old loves of
their childhood still tangled in their being.
So when I am talking about the sailors as if
they were heroes, suddenly something gay comes
romping in. I see them again, as I have so often
seen them in the dunes of Flanders, and what I see
is a race of children.
"Don't forget we are only little ones," they
say. "We don't die; we are just at play."
"ENCHANTED CIGARETTES"
WHERE does the comfort of the trenches lie?
What solace do the soldiers find for a
weary life of unemployment and for sudden
death? Of course, they find it in the age-old
things that have always sufficed, or, if these things
do not here altogether suffice, at least they help.
For a certain few out of every hundred men, reli-
gion avails. Some of our dying men were glad of
the last rites. Some wore their Catholic emblems.
The quiet devout men continued faithful as they
had been at home. Art is playing the true part
it plays at all times of fundamental need. The
men busy themselves with music, with carving,
and drawing. Security and luxury destroy art,
for it is no longer a necessity when a man is stuffed
with foods, and his fat body whirled in hot com-
partments from point to point of a tame world.
But when he tumbles in from a gusty night out
of a trenchful of mud, with the patter from slivers
of shell, then he turns to song and color, odd tricks
95
GOLDEN LADS
with the knife, and the tales of an ancient adven-
ture. After our group had brought food and
clothing to a regiment, I remember the pride with
which one of the privates presented to our head
nurse a sculptured group, done in mud of the Yser.
But the greatest thing in the world to soldiers is
plain comradeship. That is where they take their
comfort. And the expression of that comrade-
ship is most often found in the social smoke. The
meager happiness of fighting-men is more closely
interwoven with tobacco than with any other
single thing. To rob them of that would be to
leave them poor indeed. It would reduce their
morale. It would depress their cheery patience.
The wonder of tobacco is that it fits itself to each
one of several needs. It is the medium by which
the average man maintains normality at an abnor-
mal time. It is a device to soothe jumping nerves,
to deaden pain, to chase away brooding. Tobacco
connects a man with the human race, and his own
past life. It gives him a little thing to do in a
big danger, in seeping loneliness, and the grip of
sharp pain. It brings back his cafe evenings,
when black horror is reaching out for him.
96
"ENCHANTED CIGARETTES"
If you have weathered around the world a bit,
you know how everywhere strange situations turn
into places for plain men to feel at home. Sailors
on a Nova Scotia freight schooner, five days out,
sit around in the evening glow and take a pipe
and a chat with the same homely accustomedness,
as if they were at a tavern. It is so in the jungle
and at a lumber camp. Now, that is what the
millions of average men have done to war. They
have taken a raw, disordered, muddied, horrible
thing, and given it a monotony and regularity of
its own. They have smoked away its fighting
tension, its hideous expectancy. They refuse to
let mangling and murder put crimps in their spirit.
Apparently there is nothing hellish enough to flat-
ten the human spirit. Not all the sprinkled shells
and caravans of bleeding victims can cow the boys
of the front line. In this work of lifting clear of
horror, tobacco has been a friend to the soldiers
of the Great War.
"I would n't know a good cigarette if I saw it,'*
said Geoffrey Gilling, after a year of ambulance
work at Fumes and Coxyde. He had given up
all that makes the life of an upper-class English-
97
GOLDEN LADS
man pleasant, and I think that the deprivation of
high-grade smoking material was a severe item in
his sacrifice.
Four of us in Red Cross work spent weary hours
each day in a filthy room in a noisy wine-shop,
waiting for fresh trouble to break loose. The
dreariness of it made B petulant and T
mournfully silent, and finally left me melancholy.
But sturdy Andrew MacEwan, the Scotchman
with the forty-inch barrel chest, would reach out
for his big can of naval tobacco, slipped to him by
the sailors at Dunkirk when the commissariat offi-
cer was n't looking, and would light his short
stocky pipe, shaped very much like himself, and
then we were all off together on a jaunt around the
world. He had driven nearly all known "makes"
of motor-car over most of the map, apparently
about one car to each country. Twelve months
of bad roads in a shelled district had left him full
of talk, as soon as he was well lit.
Up at Nieuport, last northern stand of the Al-
lied line, a walking merchant would call each day,
a basket around his throat, and in the hamper
chocolate, fruit, and tobacco. A muddy, un-
"ENCHANTED CIGARETTES"
shaven Brittany sailor, out of his few sous a week,
bought us cigars. The less men have, the more
generous they are. That is an old saying, but it
drove home to me when I had poor men do me
courtesy day by day for five months. As we mo-
tored in and out of Nieuport in the dark of the
night, we passed hundreds of silent men trudging
through the mud of the gutter. They were troops
that had been relieved who were marching back
for a rest. As soon as they came out of the zone
where no sound can be made and no light shown,
we saw here and there down the invisible ranks
the sudden flare of a match, and then the glow in
the cup of the hand, as the man prepared to cheer
himself.
A more somber and lonely watch even than that
of these French sailors was the vigil kept by our
good Belgian friend, Commandant Gilson, in the
shattered village of Pervyse. With his old Mal-
tese cat, he prowled through the wrecked place till
two and three of the morning, waiting for Ger-
mans to cross the flooded fields. For him ciga-
rettes were an endless chain that went through his
life. From the expiring stub he lit his fresh
99
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smoke, as if he were maintaining a vestal flame.
He kept puffing till the live butt singed his up-
turned mustache. He squinted his eyes to escape
the ascending smoke.
Always the cigarette for him and for the other
men. Our cellar of nurses in Pervyse kept a stock
of pipes and of cigarettes ready for tired soldiers
off duty. The pipes remained as intact as a col-
lection in a museum. The cigarettes never
equaled the demand. We once took out a earful
of supplies to 300 Belgian soldiers. We gave
them their choice of cigarettes or smoking tobacco,
and about 250 of them selected cigarettes. That
barrack vote gives the popularity of the cigarette
among men of French blood. Some cigars, some
pipes, but everywhere the shorter smoke. To-
bacco and pipe exhaust precious pocket room.
The cigarette is portable. Cigars break and peel
in the kneading motion of walking and crouching.
But the cigarette is protected in its little box.
And yet, rather than lose a smoke, a soldier will
carry one lonesome cigarette, rained on and limp
and fraying at the end, drag it from the depths
of a kit, dry it out, and have a go. For, after all,
100
"ENCHANTED CIGARETTES"
it isn't for theoretical advantages over larger,
longer smokes he likes it, but because it is fitted to
his temperament. It is a French and Belgian
smoke, short-lived and of a light touch, as dear to
memory and liking as the wines of La Champagne.
Twice, in dramatic setting, I have seen tobacco
intervene to give men a release from overstrained
nerves. Once it was at a skirmish. Behind a
street defense, crouched thirty Belgian soldiers.
Shrapnel began to burst over us, and the bullets
tumbled on the cobbles. With each puff of the
shrapnel, like a paper bag exploding, releasing a
handful of white smoke, the men flattened against
the walls and dove into the open doors. The
sound of shrapnel is the same sound as hailstones,
a crisp crackle as they strike and bounce. We
ran and picked them up. They were blunted by
smiting on the paving. Any one of them would
have plowed into soft flesh and found the bone
and shattered it. They seem harmless because
they make so little noise. They don't scream and
wail and thunder. Our guns, back on the hillocks
of the Ghent road, grew louder and more frequent.
Each minute now was cut into by a roar or a
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fainter rumble. The battle was on. Our bar-
ricaded street was a pocket in the storm, like the
center of a typhoon.
Yonder we could see the canal, fifty feet away,
at the foot of our street. On the farther side be-
hind the river front houses lay the Germans, ready
to sally out and charge. It would be all right if
they came quickly. But a few hours of waiting
for them on an empty stomach, and having them
disappoint us, was wearing. We wished they
would hurry and have it over with, or else go
away for good. Civilians stumbling and bleeding
went past us.
And that was how the morning went by, heavy
footed, unrelieved, with a sense of waiting for a
sudden crash and horror. It was peaceful, in a
way, but, at the heart of the calm, a menace. So
we overlaid the tension with casual petty acts.
We made an informal pool of our resources in
tobacco, each man sharing with his neighbor, till
nearly every one of us was puffing away, and de-
ciding there was nothing to this German attack,
after all. A smoke makes just the difference be-
tween sticking it out or acting the coward's part.
102
"ENCHANTED CIGARETTES"
Each one of us in a lifetime has a day of days,
when external event is lively, and our inner mood
dances to the tune. Some of us will perhaps al-
ways feel that we spent our day on October 21,
1914. For we were allowed to go into a town
that fell in that one afternoon and to come out
again alive. It was the afternoon when Dixmude
was leveled from a fair upstanding city to a heap
of scorched brick and crumbled plaster. The
enemy guns from over the Yser were accurate on
its houses.
We received our first taste of the dread to come,
while we were yet a little way out. In the road
ahead of us, a shell had just splashed an artillery
convoy. Four horses, the driver, and the splin-
tered wood of the wagon were all worked together
into one pulp, so that our car skidded on it. We
entered the falling town of Dixmude. It was a
thick mess into which we rode, with hot smoke
and fine masonry dust blowing into the eyes.
Houses around us crumpled up at one blast,
and then shot a thick brown cloud of dust, and
out of the cloud a high central flame that leaped
and spread. With the wailing of shells in the
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air, every few seconds, the thud and thunder of
their impact, the scattering of the shattered metal,
it was one of the hot, thorough bombardments of
the war. It cleared the town of troops, after
tearing their ranks. But it left wounded men in
the cellar of the Hotel de Ville. The Grand
Place and the Hotel were the center of the fire.
Here we had to wait fifteen minutes, while the
wounded were made ready for our two cars. It
was then we turned to tobacco as to a friend. I
remember the easement that came when I found
I had cigars in my waistcoat pocket. The act of
lighting a cigar, and pulling at it briskly, was a
relief.
There was a second of time when we could hear
a shell, about to burst close, before it struck. It
came, sharpening its nose on the air, making a
shrill whistle with a moan in it, that gathered vol-
ume as it neared. There was a menace in the
sound. It seemed to approach in a vast envelop-
ing mass that can't be escaped, filling all out-doors,
and sure to find you. It was as if the all-includ-
ing sound were the missile itself, with no hiding
place offered. And yet the shell is generally a
104
DOOR CHALKED BY THE GERMANS.
One of the 100 houses in Termonde with the direction "Do not
Burn written in German. One thousand one hundred houses were burned,
jhouse by house. Photograph by Radclyffe Dugmore.
"ENCHANTED CIGARETTES"
little three-or-four inch thing, like a flower-pot,
hurtling through the scenery. But bruised nerves
refuse to listen to reason, and again and again I
ducked as I heard that high wail, believing I was
about to be struck.
In that second of tension, it was a pleasant
thing to draw in on a butt — to discharge the
smoke, a second later, carelessly, as who should
say, "It is nothing." The little cylinder was a
lightning conductor to lead away the danger from
a vital part. It let the nervousness leak off into
biting and puffing, and making a play of fingering
the stub, instead of striking into the stomach and
the courage. It gave the troubled face something
to do, and let the writhing hand busy itself. It
saved me from knowing just how frightened I
was.
But what of the wounded themselves*? They
have to endure all that dreariness of long waiting,
and the pressure of danger, and then, for good
measure, a burden of pain. So I come to the men
who are revealing human nature at a higher pitch
than any others in the war. The trench-digging,
elderly chaps are patient and long-enduring, and
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GOLDEN LADS
the fighting men are as gallant as any the ballad-
mongers used to rime about.
But it is of the wounded that one would like
to speak in a way to win respect for them rather
than pity. I think some American observers have
missed the truth about the wounded. They have
told of the groaning and screaming, the heavy
smells, the delays and neglect. It is a picture of
vivid horror. But the final impression left on
me by caring for many hundred wounded men is
that of their patience and cheeriness. I think
they would resent having a sordid pen picture
made of their suffering and letting it go at that.
After all, it is their wound: they suffered it for a
purpose, and they conquer their bodily pain by
will power and the Gallic touch of humor. Suf-
fering borne nobly merits something more than
an emphasis on the blood and the moan. To
speak of these wounded men as of a heap of futile
misery is like missing the worthiness of mother-
hood in the details of obstetrics.
It was thought we moderns had gone soft, but
it seems we were storing up reserves of stoic
strength and courage. This war has drawn on
108
"ENCHANTED CIGARETTES"
them more heavily than any former test, and they
have met all its demands. Sometimes, being
tired, I would drop my corner of the stretcher, a
few inches suddenly. This would draw a quick
intake of the breath from the hurt man and an
"aahh" — but not once a word of blame. I should
want to curse the careless hand that wrenched my
wound, but these soldiers of France and Belgium
whom I carried had passed beyond littleness.
Once we had a French Zouave officer on the
stretcher. He was wounded in the right arm and
the stomach. Every careen of the ambulance over
cobble and into shell-hole was a thrust into his
hurt. We had to carry him all the way from the
Nieuport cellar to Zuydcoote Hospital, ten miles.
The driver was one more of the American young
men who have gone over into France to pay back
a little of what we owe her. I want to give his
name, Robert Cardell Toms, because it is good for
us to know that we have brave and tender gen-
tlemen. On this long haul, as always, he drove
with extreme care, changing his speed without the
staccato jerk, avoiding bumps and holes of the try-
ing road. When we reached the hospital, he ran
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GOLDEN LADS
ahead into the ward to prepare the bed. The
officer beckoned me to him. He spoke with some
difficulty, as the effort caught him in the wound
of his stomach.
"Please be good enough," he said, "to give my
thanks to the chauffeur. He has driven me down
with much consideration. He cares for wounded
men."
Where other races are grateful and inarticulate,
the French are able to put into speech the last fine
touch of feeling.
My friend kept a supply of cigarettes for his
ambulance cases, and as soon as the hour-long
drive began we dealt them out to the bandaged
men. How often we have started with a groaning
man for the ride to Zuydcoote, and how well the
trip went, when we had lighted his cigarette for
him. It brought back a little of the conversation
and the merriment which it had called out in bet-
ter days. It is such a relief to be wounded. You
have done your duty, and now you are to have a
little rest- With a clear conscience, you can sink
back into laziness, far away from noise and filth.
Luck has come along and pulled the pack off your
no
"ENCHANTED CIGARETTES"
back, and the responsibility from your sick mind.
No weary city clerk ever went to his seashore holi-
day with more blitheness than some of our
wounded showed as they came riding in from the
Nieuport trenches at full length on the stretcher,
and singing all the way. What is a splintered
forehead or a damaged leg compared to the happi-
ness of an honorable discharge? Nothing to
do for a month but lie quietly, and watch the
wholesome, clean-clad nurse. I am not forgetting
the sadness of many men, nor the men hurt to
death, who lay motionless and did not sing, and
some of whom died while we were on the road to
help. I am only trying to tell of the one man in
every four who was glad of his enforced rest, and
who did n't let a little thing like agony conquer
his gaiety. Those men were the Joyous
Wounded. I have seldom seen men more light
hearted.
Word came to my wife one day that several
hundred wounded were side-tracked at Furnes
railway station. With two nurses she hurried
to them, carrying hot soup. The women went
through the train, feeding the soldiers, giving
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GOLDEN LADS
them a drink of cold water, and bringing some of
them hot water for washing. Then, being fed,
they were ready for a smoke, and my wife began
walking down the foul-smelling ambulance car
with boxes of supplies, letting each man take out
a cigarette and a match. The car was slung with
double layers of stretcher bunks. Some men
were freshly wounded, others were convalescent.
A few lay in a stupor. She provided ten or
a dozen soldiers with their pleasure, and they
lighted up and were well under way. She had so
many patients that day that she was not watching
the individual man in her general distribution.
She came half way down the car, and held out
her store to a soldier without looking at him. He
glanced up and grinned. The men in the bunks
around him laughed heartily. Then she looked
down at him. He was flapping the two stumps
of his arms and was smiling. His hands had been
blown off. She put the cigarette in his mouth
and lit it for him. Only his hands were gone.
Comradeship was left for him, and here was the
lighted cigarette expressing that comradeship.
112
WAS IT REAL?
THE man was an old-time friend. In the
days of our youth, we had often worked to-
gether. He was small and nervous, with a quick
eye. He always wore me down after a few hours,
because he was restless and untiring. He was
named Romeyn Rossiter — one of those well-born
names. We had met in times before the advent
of the telescopic lens, and he used a box camera,
tuned to a fiftieth of a second. Together we
snapped polo ponies, coming at full tilt after the
ball, riding each other off, while he would stand
between the goal-posts, as they zigzagged down on
him. I had to shove him out of the way, at the
last tick, when the hoofs were loud. I often won-
dered if those ponies did n't look suddenly large
and imminent on the little glass rectangle into
which he was peering. That was the kind of per-
son he was. He was glued to his work. He was
a curious man, because that nerve of fear, which is
well developed in most of us, was left out of his
GOLDEN LADS
make-up. No credit to him. It merely was n't
there. He was color-blind to danger. He had
spent his life everywhere by bits, so he had the
languages. I used to admire that in him, the way
he could career along with a Frenchman, and
exchange talk with a German waiter : high speed,
and a kind of racy quality.
I used to write the text around his pictures,
captions underneath them, and then words spilled
out over the white paper between his six by tens.
We published in the country life magazines.
They gave generous big display pages. In those
days people used to read what I wrote, because
they wanted to find out about the pictures, and
the pictures were fine. You must have seen Ros-
siter's work — caribou, beavers, Walter Travis com-
ing through with a stroke, and Holcombe Ward
giving a twist delivery. We had the field to our-
selves for two or three years, before the other
fellows caught the idea, and broke our partner-
ship. I turned to literature, and he began drift-
ing around the world for long shots. He 'd be
gone six months, and then turn up with big game
night pictures out of Africa — a lion drinking un-
114
WAS IT REAL?
der a tropical moon. Two more years, and I had
lost him entirely. But I knew we should meet.
He was one of those chaps that, once in your life,
is like the motif in an opera, or like the high-class
story, which starts with an insignificant loose brick
on a coping and ends with that brick smiting the
hero's head.
It was London where I ran into him at last.
"Happy days?" I said, with a rising inflection.
"So, so," he answered.
He was doing the free-lance game. He had
drifted over to England with his $750 moving-
picture machine to see what he could harvest with
a quiet eye, and they had rung in the war on him.
He was n't going to be happy till he could get the
boys in action. Would I go to Belgium with
him? I would.
Next day, we took the Channel ferry from
Dover to Ostend, went by train to Ghent, and
trudged out on foot to the battle of Alost.
Those were the early days of the war when you
could go anywhere, if you did it nicely. The
Belgians are a friendly people. They can't bear
to say No, and if they saw a hard-working man
GOLDEN LADS
come along with his eye on his job, they did n't
like to turn him back, even if he was mussing
up an infantry formation or exposing a trench.
They 'd rather share the risk, as long as it brought
him in returns.
When we footed it out that morning, we did n't
know we were in for one of the Famous Days of
history. You never can tell in this war. Some-
times you'll trot out to the front, all keyed up,
and then sit around among the "Set-Sanks" for a
month playing pinochle, and watching the flies
chase each other across the marmalade. And
then a sultry dull day will suddenly show you
things. . . .
Out from the Grand Place of Alost radiate nar-
row little streets that run down to the canal, like
spokes of a wheel. Each little street had its earth-
works and group of defenders. Out over the
canal stretched footbridges, and these were thickly
sown with barbed wire.
"Great luck," said Rossiter. "They 're making
an old-time barricade. It's as good as the days
of the Commune. Do you remember your street-
fighting in Les Miserables?"
116
WAS IT REAL?
"I surely do," I replied. "Breast high earth-
works, and the 'citizens' crouched behind under
the rattle of bullets."
"This is going to be good," he went on in
high enthusiasm. The soldiers were rolling heavy
barrels to the gutter, and knocking off the heads.
The barrels were packed with fish, about six inches
long, with scales that went blue and white in the
fresh morning light. The fish slithered over the
cobbles, and the soldiers stumbled on their slip-
pery bodies. They set the barrels on end, side by
side, and heaped the cracks between and the face
with sods of earth, thick-packed clods, with grass
growing. The grass was bright green, unwilted.
A couple of peasant hand-carts were tilted on end,
and the flooring sodded like the barrels.
"Look who 's coming," pointed Rossiter, swivel-
ing his lens sharply around.
Steaming gently into our narrow street from the
Grand Place came a great Sava mitrailleuse — big
steel turret, painted lead blue, three men sitting
behind the swinging turret. One of the men,
taller by a head than his fellows, had a white rag
bound round his head, where a bullet had clipped
117
GOLDEN LADS
off a piece of his forehead the week before. His
face was set and pale. Sitting on high, in the
grim machine, with his bandage worn as a plume,
he looked like the presiding spirit of the fra-
cas.
"It 's worth the trip," muttered Romeyn, grind-
ing away on his crank.
There was something silent and efficient in the
look of the big man and the big car, with its slim-
waisted, bright brass gun shoving through.
"Here, have a cigarette," said Rossiter, as the
powerful thing glided by.
He passed up a box to the three gunners.
"Bonne chance" said the big man, as he puffed
out rings and fondled the trim bronze body of his
Lady of Death. They let the car slide down the
street to the left end of the barricade, where it
came to rest.
Over the canal, out from the smoke-misted
houses, came a peasant running. In his arms he
carried a little girl. Her hair was light as flax,
and crested with a knot of very bright red rib-
bon. Hair and gay ribbon caught the eye, as soon
as they were borne out of the doomed houses.
118
WAS IT REAL?
The father carried the little one to the bridge at
the foot of our street, and began crossing towards
us. The barbed wire looked angry in the morning
sun. He had to weave his way patiently, with
the child held flat to his shoulder. Any hasty
motion would have torn her face on the barbs.
Shrapnel was sailing high overhead between the
two forces, and there, thirty feet under the cross-
fire, this man and his child squirmed their way
through the barrier. They won through, and were
lifted over the barricade. As the father went
stumbling past me, I looked into the face of the
girl. Her eyes were tightly closed. She nestled
contentedly.
"Did you get it, man*? Did you get it?" I
asked Rossiter.
"Too far," he replied, mournfully, "only a dot
at that distance."
Now, all the parts had fitted into the pattern,
the gay green grass growing out of the stacked
barrels and carts, and the sullen, silent, waiting
mitrailleuse which can spit death in a wide swathe
as it revolves from side to side, like the full stroke
of a scythe on nodding daisies. The bark of it is
119
GOLDEN LADS
as alarming as its bite — an incredibly rapid rat-
tat that makes men fall on their faces when they
hear, like worshipers at the bell of the Transub-
stantiation.
"She talks three hundred words to the minute,"
said Romeyn to me.
"How are you coming*?" I asked.
"Great," he answered, "great stuff. Now, if
only something happens."
He had planted his tripod fifty feet back of the
barricade, plumb against a red-brick, three-story
house, so that the lens raked the street and its de-
fenses diagonally. Thirty minutes we waited,
with shell fire far to the right of us, falling into
the center of the town with a rumble, like a train
of cars heard in the night, when one is half asleep.
That was the sense of things to me, as I stood in
the street, waiting for hell to blow off its lid. It
was a dream world, and I was the dreamer, in the
center of the strange unfolding sight, seeing it all
out of a muffled consciousness.
Another quarter hour, and Rossiter began to
fidget.
"Do you call this a battle?" he asked.
120
WAS IT REAL?
"The liveliest thing in a month," replied the
lieutenant.
"We 've got to brisk it up," Rossiter said.
"Now, I tell you what we '11 do. Let 's have a
battle that looks something like. These real
things have n't got speed enough for a five-cent
house."
In a moment, all was action. Those amazing
Belgians, as responsive as children in a game, fell
to furiously to create confusion and swift event
out of the trance of peace. The battered giant
in the Sava released a cloud of steam from his
car. The men aimed their rifles in swift staccato.
The lieutenant dashed back and forth from curb
to curb, plunging to the barricade, and then to the
half dozen boys who were falling back, crouching
on one knee, firing, and then retreating. He
cheered them with pats on the shoulder, pointed
out new unsuspected enemies. Then, man by
man, the thirty perspiring fighters began to tum-
ble. They fell forward on their faces, lay stricken
on their backs, heaved against the walls of houses,
wherever the deadly fire had caught them. The
street was littered with Belgian bodies. There
121
GOLDEN LADS
stood Rossiter grinding away on his handle, snick-
ering green-clad Belgians lying strewn on the cob-
bles, a half dozen of them tense and set behind the
barricade, leveling rifles at the piles of fish.
Every one was laughing, and all of them intent on
working out a picture with thrills.
The enemy guns had been growing menacing,
but Rossiter and the Belgians were very busy.
"The shells are dropping just back of us," I
called to him.
"Good, good," he said, "but I have n't time for
them just yet, They must wait. You can't
crowd a film."
Ten minutes passed.
"It is immense," began he, wiping his face and
lighting a smoke, and turning his handle. "Gen-
tlemen, I thank you."
"Gentlemen, we thank you," I said.
"There 's been nothing like it," he went on.
"Those Liege pictures of Wilson's at the Hippo-
drome were tame."
He 'd got it all in, and was wasting a few feet
for good measure. Sometimes you need a fringe
in order to bring out the big minute in your action.
122
WAS IT REAL?
Suddenly, we heard the wailing overhead and
louder than any of the other shells. Louder
meant closer. It lasted a second of time, and
then crashed into the second story of the red house,
six feet over Rossiter's head. A shower of brown
brick dust, and a puff of gray-black smoke settled
down over the machine and man, and blotted him
out of sight for a couple of seconds. Then we
all coughed and spat, and the air cleared. The
tripod had careened in the fierce rush of air, but
Rossiter had caught it and was righting it. He
went on turning. His face was streaked with
black, and his clothes were brown with dust.
"Trying to get the smoke," he called, "but I Jm
afraid it won't register."
Maybe you want to know how that film took.
We hustled it back to London, and it went with
a whizz. One hundred and twenty-six picture
houses produced "STREET FIGHTING IN ALOST."
The daily illustrated papers ran it front page.
The only criticism of it that I heard was another
movie man, who was sore — a chap named Wilson.
"That picture is faked," he asserted.
"I'll bet you," I retorted, "that picture was
125
GOLDEN LADS
taken under shell fire during the bombardment of
Alost. That barricade is the straight goods. The
fellow that took it was shot full of gas while he
was taking it. What's your idea of the real
thing?"
"That 's all right," he said; "the ruins are good,
and the smoke is there. But I 've seen that reel
three times, and every time the dead man in the
gutter laughed."
126
"CHANTONS, BELGES! CHANTONS!"
HERE at home I am in a land where the
wholesale martyrdom of Belgium is re-
garded as of doubtful authenticity. We who
have witnessed widespread atrocities are subjected
to a critical process as cold as if we were advanc-
ing a new program of social reform. I begin to
wonder if anything took place in Flanders. Is n't
the wreck of Termonde, where I thought I spent
two days, perhaps a figment of the fancy? Was
the bayoneted girl child of Alost a pleasant dream
creation1? My people are busy and indifferent,
generous and neutral, but yonder several races
are living at a deeper level. In a time when be-
liefs are held lightly, with tricky words tearing
at old values, they have recovered the ancient
faiths of the race. Their lot, with all its pain, is
choicer than ours. They at least have felt greatly
and thrown themselves into action. It is a stern
fight that is on in Europe, and few of our coun-
127
GOLDEN LADS
trymen realize it is our fight that the Allies are
making.
Europe has made an old discovery. The Greek
Anthology has it, and the ballads, but our busy
little merchants and our clever talkers have never
known it. The best discovery a man can make is
that there is something inside him bigger than his
fear, a belief in something more lasting than his
individual life. When he discovers that, he
knows he, too, is a man. It is as real for him
as the experience of motherhood for a woman.
He comes out of it with self-respect and gladness.
The Belgians were a soft people, pleasure-lov-
ing little chaps, social and cheery, fond of com-
fort and the cafe brightness. They lacked the in-
tensity of blood of unmixed single strains. They
were cosmopolitan, often with a command over
three languages and snatches of several dialects.
They were easy in their likes. They "made
friends" lightly. They did not have the reserve
of the English, the spiritual pride of the Ger-
mans. Some of them have German blood, some
French, some Dutch. Part of the race is gay
and volatile, many are heavy and inarticulate;
128
"CHANTONS, BELGES! CHANTONS!"
it is a mixed race of which any iron-clad gen-
eralization is false. But I have seen many thou-
sands of them under crisis, seen them hungry, dy-
ing, men from every class and every region; and
the mass impression is that they are affectionate,
easy to blend with, open-handed, trusting.
This kindly, haphazard, unformed folk were
suddenly lifted to a national self-sacrifice. By
one act of defiance Albert made Belgium a nation.
It had been a mixed race of many tongues, selling
itself little by little, all unconsciously, to the Ger-
man bondage. I saw the marks of this spiritual
invasion on the inner life of the Belgians — marks
of a destruction more thorough than the shelling
of a city. The ruins of Termonde are only the
outward and visible sign of what Germany has
attempted on Belgium for more than a genera-
tion.
Perhaps it was better that people should perish
by the villageful in honest physical death through
the agony of the bayonet and the flame than that
they should go on bartering away their nationality
by piece-meal. Who knows but Albert saw in
his silent heart that the only thing to weld his
129
GOLDEN LADS
people together, honeycombed as they were, was
the shedding of blood? Perhaps nothing short of
a supreme sacrifice, amounting to a martyrdom,
could restore a people so tangled in German in-
trigue, so netted into an ever-encroaching system
of commerce, carrying with it a habit of thought
and a mouthful of guttural phrases. Let no one
underestimate that power of language. If the
idiom has passed into one, it has brought with it
molds of thought, leanings of sympathy. Who
that can even stumble through the "Marchons!
Marchons!" of the "Marseillaise" but is a sharer
for a moment in the rush of glory that every now
and again has made France the light of the world*?
So, when the German phrase rings out, "Was wir
haben bleibt Deutsch" — "What we are now hold-
ing by force of arms shall remain forever German"
— there is an answering thrill in the heart of every
Antwerp clerk who for years has been leaking Bel-
gian government gossip into German ears in re-
turn for a piece of money. Secret sin was eat-
ing away Belgium's vitality — the sin of being
bought by German money, bought in little ways,
for small bits of service, amiable passages destroy-
130
"CHANTONS, BELGES! CHANTONS!"
ing nationality. By one act of full sacrifice Al-
bert has cleared his people from a poison that
might have sapped them in a few more years with-
out the firing of one gun.
That sacrifice to which they are called is an
utter one, of which they have experienced only
the prelude. I have seen this growing sadness of
Belgium almost from the beginning. I have seen
thirty thousand refugees, the inhabitants of Alost,
come shuffling down the road past me. They
came by families, the father with a bag of clothes
and bread, the mother with a baby in arms, and
one, two, or three children trotting along. Aged
women were walking, Sisters of Charity, religious
brothers. A cartful of stricken old women lay
patiently at full length while the wagon bumped
on. They were so nearly drowned by suffering
that one more wave made little difference. All
that was sad and helpless was dragged that morn-
ing into the daylight. All that had been decently
cared for in quiet rooms was of a sudden tumbled
out upon the pavement and jolted along in farm-
wagons past sixteen miles of curious eyes. But
even with the sick and the very old there was
GOLDEN LADS
no lamentation. In this procession of the dispos-
sessed that passed us on the country road there was
no one crying, no one angry.
I have seen 5000 of these refugees at night
in the Halle des Fetes of Ghent, huddled in the
straw, their faces bleached white under the glare
of the huge municipal lights. On the wall, I
read the names of the children whose parents had
been lost, and the names of the parents who re-
ported a lost baby, a boy, a girl, and sometimes
all the children lost.
A little later came the time when the people
learned their last stronghold was tottering. I re-
member sitting at dinner in the home of Monsieur
Caron, a citizen of Ghent. I had spent that day
in Antwerp, and the soldiers had told me of the
destruction of the outer rim of forts. So I be-
gan to say to the dinner guests that the city was
doomed. As I spoke, I glanced at Madame
Caron. Her eyes filled with tears. I turned to
another Belgian lady, and had to look away.
Not a sound came from them.
When the handful of British were sent to the
rescue of Antwerp, we went up the road with
132
"CHANTONS, BELGES! CHANTONS!"
them. There was joy on the Antwerp road that
day. Little cottages fluttered flags at lintel and
window. The sidewalks were thronged with
peasants, who believed they were now to be saved.
We rode in glory from Ghent to the outer works
of Antwerp. Each village on all the line turned
out its full population to cheer us ecstatically.
A bitter month had passed, and now salvation had
come. It is seldom in a lifetime one is present at
a perfect piece of irony like that of those shout-
ing Flemish peasants.
As Antwerp was falling, a letter was given to
me by a friend. It was written by Aloysius Coen
of the artillery, Fort St. Catherine Wavre, Ant-
werp. He died in the bombardment, thirty-four
years old. He wrote:
Dear wife and children:
At the moment that I am writing you this the enemy
is before us, and the moment has come for us to do our
duty for our country. When you will have received
this I shall have changed the temporary life for the
eternal life. As I loved you all dearly, my last breath
will be directed toward you and my darling children,
and with a last smile as a farewell from my beloved
family am I undertaking the eternal journey.
135
GOLDEN LADS
I hope, whatever may be your later call, you will take
good care of my dear children, and always keep them
in mind of the straight road, always ask them to pray
for their father, who in sadness, though doing his duty
for his country, has had to leave them so young.
Say good-by for me to my dear brothers and sisters,
from whom I also carry with me a great love.
Farewell, dear wife, children, and family.
Your always remaining husband, father, and brother.
ALOYS.
Then Antwerp fell, and a people that had for
the first time in memory found itself an indi-
visible and self-conscious state broke into sullen
flight, and its merry, friendly army came heavy-
footed down the road to another country.
Grieved and embittered, they served under new
leaders of another race. Those tired soldiers
were like spirited children who had been playing
an exciting game which they thought would be
applauded. And suddenly the best turned out
the worst.
Sing, Belgians, sing, though our wounds are bleeding,
writes the poet of Flanders; but the song is no
earthly song. It is the voice of a lost cause that
136
"CHANTONS, BELGES! CHANTONS!"
cries out of the trampled dust as it prepares to
make its flight beyond the place of betrayal.
For the Belgian soldiers no longer sang, or
made merry in the evening. A young Brussels
corporal in our party suddenly broke into sob-
bing when he heard the chorus of "Tipperary"
float over the channel from a transport of un-
tried British lads. The Belgians are a race of
children whose feelings have been hurt. The
pathos of the Belgian army is like the pathos of
an orphan-asylum : it is unconscious.
They are very lonely, the loneliest men I have
known. Back of the fighting Frenchman, you
sense the gardens and fields of France, the strong,
victorious national will. In a year, in two years,
having made his peace with honor, he will return
to a happiness richer than any that France has
known in fifty years. And the Englishman car-
ries with him to the stresses of the first line an
unbroken calm which he has inherited from a
thousand years of his island peace. His little
moment of pain and death cannot trouble that
consciousness of the eternal process in which his
people have been permitted to play a continu-
137
GOLDEN LADS
ing part. For him the present turmoil is only a
ripple on the vast sea of his racial history. Be-
hind the Tommy is his Devonshire village, still se-
cure. His mother and his wife are waiting for
him, unmolested, as when he left them. But the
Belgian, schooled in horror, faces a fuller horror
yet when the guns of his friends are put on his
bell-towers and birthplace, held by the invaders.
"My father and mother are inside the enemy
lines," said a Belgian officer to me as we were
talking of the final victory. That is the ever-
present thought of an army of boys whose parents
are living in doomed houses back of German
trenches. It is louder than the near guns, the
noise of the guns to come that will tear at Bruges
and level the Tower of St. Nicholas. That is
what the future holds for the Belgian. He is
only at the beginning of his loss. The victory of
his cause is the death of his people. It is a sacri-
fice almost without a parallel.
And now a famous newspaper correspondent
has returned to us from his motor trips to the
front and his conversations with officers to tell
us that he does not highly regard the fighting qual-
138
A BELGIAN BOY SOLDIER IN THE UNIFORM OF THE
FIRST ARMY WHICH SERVED AT LIEGE
AND NAMUR.
it.?" Jhe Sllrnmer °f ^JS this costume was exchanged for
khaki (see pasje 148). The present Belgian Army is largely
made up of boys like this.
"CHANTONS, BELGES! CHANTONS!"
ities of the Belgians. I think that statement is
not the full truth, and I do not think it will be
the estimate of history on the resistance of the
Belgians. If the resistance had been regarded by
the Germans as half-hearted, I do not believe
their reprisals on villages and towns and on the
civilian population would have been so bitter.
The burning and the murder that I saw them com-
mit throughout the month of September, 1914,
was the answer to a resistance unexpectedly firm
and telling. At a skirmish in September, when
fifteen hundred Belgians stood off three thousand
Germans for several hours, I counted more dead
Germans than dead Belgians. The German offi-
cer in whose hands we were as captives asked us
with great particularity as to how many Belgians
he had killed and wounded. While he was talk-
ing with us, his stretcher-bearers were moving up
and down the road for his own casualties. At
Alost the street fighting by Belgian troops behind
fish-barrels, with sods of earth for barricade, was
so stubborn that the Germans felt it to be nec-
essary to mutilate civilian men, women, and chil-
dren with the bayonet to express in terms at all
141
GOLDEN LADS
adequate their resentment. I am of course speak-
ing of what I know. Around Termonde, three
times in September, the fighting of Belgians was
vigorous enough to induce the Germans on enter-
ing the town to burn more than eleven hundred
homes, house by house. If the Germans through-
out their army had not possessed a high opinion
of Belgian bravery and power of retardation, I
doubt if they would have released so wide-spread
and unique a savagery.
At Termonde, Alost, Baliere, and a dozen
other points in the Ghent sector, and, later, at
Dixmude, Ramscappelle, Pervyse, Caeskerke, and
the rest of the line of the Yser, my sight of
Belgians has been that of troops as gallant as
any. The cowards have been occasional, the
brave men many. I still have flashes of them as
when I knew them. I saw a Belgian officer ride
across a field within rifle range of the enemy to
point out to us a market-cart in which lay three
wounded. On his horse, he was a high figure,
well silhouetted. Another day, I met a Belgian
sergeant, with a tousled red head of hair, and with
three medals for valor on his left breast. He kept
142
"CHANTONS, BELGES! CHANTONS!"
going out into the middle of the road during the
times when Germans were reported approaching,
keeping his men under cover. If there was risk
to be taken, he wanted first chance. My friend
Dr. van der Ghinst, of Cabour Hospital, cap-
tain in the Belgian army, remained three days in
Dixmude under steady bombardment, caring un-
aided for his wounded in the Hospital of St. Jean,
just at the Yser, and finally brought out thirty
old men and women who had been frightened into
helplessness by the flames and noise. Because he
was needed in that direction, I saw him continue
his walk past the point where fifty feet ahead of
him a shell had just exploded. I watched him
walk erect where even the renowned fighting men
of an allied race were stooping and hiding, be-
cause he held his life as nothing when there were
wounded to be rescued. I saw Lieutenant Robert
de Broqueville, son of the prime minister of Bel-
gium, go into Dixmude on the afternoon when the
town was leveled by German guns. He remained
there under one of the heaviest bombardments of
the war for three hours, picking up the wounded
who lay on curbs and in cellars and under debris.
H3
GOLDEN LADS
The troops had been ordered to evacuate the town,
and it was a lonely job that this youngster of
twenty-seven years carried on through that day.
I have seen the Belgians every day for several
months. I have seen several skirmishes and bat-
tles and many days of shell-fire, and the im-
pression of watching many thousand Belgians in
action is that of excellent fighting qualities, starred
with bits of sheer daring as astonishing as that of
the other races. With no country left to fight
for, homes either in ruin or soon to be shelled,
relatives under an alien rule, the home Govern-
ment on a foreign soil, still this, second army, the
first having been killed, fights on in good spirit.
Every morning of the summer I have passed boys
between eighteen and twenty-five, clad in fresh
khaki, as they go riding down the poplar lane from
La Panne to the trenches, the first twenty with
bright silver bugles, their cheeks puffed and red
with the blowing. Twelve months of wounds and
wastage, wet trenches and tinned food, and still
they go out with hope.
And the helpers of the army have shown good
heart. Breaking the silence of Rome, the splen-
144
"CHANTONS, BELGES! CHANTONS!"
did priesthood of Belgium, from the cardinal to
the humblest cure, has played the man. On the
front line near Pervyse, where my wife lived for
three months, a soldier-monk has remained
through the daily shell-fire to take artillery obser-
vations and to comfort the fighting men. Just
before leaving Flanders, I called on the sisters in
the convent school of Fumes. They were still
cheery and busy in their care of sick and wounded
civilians. Every few days the Germans shell the
town from seven miles away, but the sisters will
continue there through the coming months as
through the last year. The spirit of the best of
the race is spoken in what King Albert said re-
cently in an unpublished conversation to the gen-
tlemen of the English mission :
"The English will cease fighting before the Bel-
gians. If there is talk of yielding, it will come
from the English, not from us."
That was a playful way of saying that there
will be no yielding by any of the Western Allies.
The truth is still as true as it was at Liege that
the Belgians held up the enemy till France was
ready to receive them. And the price Belgium
H7
GOLDEN LADS
paid for that resistance was the massacre of
women and children and the house-to-house burn-
ing of homes.
Since rendering that service for all time to
France and England, through twenty months of
such a life as exiles know, the Belgians have
fought on doggedly, recovering from the misery
of the Antwerp retreat, and showing a resilience
of spirit equaled only by the Fusiliers Marins of
France. One afternoon in late June my friend
Robert Toms was sitting on the beach at La
Panne, watching the soldiers swimming in the
channel. Suddenly he called to me, and aimed
his camera. There on the sand in the sunlight
the Belgian army was changing its clothes. The
faithful suits of blue, rained on and trench-worn,
were being tossed into great heaps on the beach
and brand-new yellow khaki, clothes and cap, was
buckled on. It was a transformation. We had
learned to know that army, and their uniform had
grown familiar and pleasant to us. The dirt,
ground in till it became part of the texture; the
worn cloth, shapeless, but yet molded to the man
by long association — all was an expression of the
148
"CHANTONS, BELGES! CHANTONS!"
stocky little soldier inside. The new khaki hung
slack. Caps were overlarge for Flemish heads.
To us, watching the change, it was the loss of the
last possession that connected them with their
past; with homes and country gone, now the very
clothing that had covered them through famous
fights was shuffled off. It was as if the Belgian
army had been swallowed up in the sea at our
feet, like Pharaoh's phalanx, and up from the
beach to the barracks scuffled an imitation English
corps.
We went about miserable for a few days. But
not they. They spattered their limp, ill-fitting
garments with jest, and soon they had produced
a poem in praise of the change. These are the
verses which a Belgian soldier, clad in his fresh
yellow, sang to us as we grouped around him on
a sand dune :
EN KHAKI
i
Depuis onze mois que nous sommes partis en guerre,
A tous les militaires,
On a decide de plaire.
149
GOLDEN LADS
Aussi depuis ce temps la, a 1'intendance c'est dit,
De nous mettr' tous en khaki.
Maint'nant voila 1'beau temps qui vient d' paraitre
Aussi repetons tous le coeur en fete.
REFRAIN
Regardez nos p'tits soldats,
Us ont 1'air d'etre un peu la,
Habilles
D'la tete jusqu'aux pieds
En khaki, en khaki,
Us sont contents de servir,
Mais non pas de mourir,
Et cela c'est parce qu' on leur a mis,
En quelque sorte, la t'nue khaki.
II
Maintenant sur toutes les grand's routes vous pouvez voir
Parcourant les trottoirs
Du matin jusqu'au soir
Les defenseurs Beiges, portant tous la meme tenue
Depuis que 1'ancienne a disparue,
Aussi quand on voit l'9e denier
C' n'est plus regiment des panaches.
Meme Refrain.
in
Nous sommes tous heureux d'avoir le costume des Anglais
Seul'ment ce qu'il fallait,
Pour que c,a soit complet.
150
"CHANTONS, BELGES! CHANTONS!"
Et je suis certain si 1'armee veut nous mettre a 1'aisc
C'est d'nous donner la solde Anglaise.
Le jour qu'nous aurions ga, ah! quell' affaire
Nous n' seripns plus jamais dans la misere.
REFRAIN
Vous les verriez nos p'tits soldats,
J'vous assure qu'ils seraient un peu la,
Habilles,
D'la tete jusqu'aux pieds,
En khaki, en khaki,
Us seraient ners de repartir,
Pour le front avec plaisir,
Si les quatre poches etaient bien games
De billets bleus couleur khaki.
FLIES: A FANTASY
OUTSIDE the window stretched the village
street, flat, with bits of dust and dung ris-
ing on the breaths of wind and volleying into
rooms upon the tablecloth and into pages of
books. It was a street of small yellow brick
houses, a shapeless church, a convent school —
freckled buildings, dingy. Up and down the
length of it, it was without one touch of beauty.
It gave back dust in the eyes. It sounded with
thunder of transports, rattle of wagons, soft whirr
of officers' speed cars, yelp of motor horns, and
the tap-tap of wooden shoes on tiny peasants, boys
and girls. A little sick black dog slunk down the
pavement, smelling and staring. A cart bumped
over the cobbles, the horse with a great tumor in
its stomach, the stomach as if blown out on the
left side, and the tumor with a rag upon it where
it touched the harness.
Inside the window, a square room with a
152
FLIES: A FANTASY
litter of six-penny novels in a corner, fifty or sixty
books flung haphazard, some of them open with
the leaves crushed back by the books above. In
another corner, a heap of commissariat stuff, tins
of bully beef, rabbit, sardines, herring, and glasses
of jam, and marmalade. On the center table, a
large jug of marmalade, ants busy in the yellow
trickle at the rim. Filth had worked its way into
the red table-cover. Filth was on every object
in the room, like a soft mist, blurring the color
and outlines of things. In the corners, under
books and tins, insects moved, long, thin, crawl-
ing. A hot noon sun came dimly through the
dirty glass of the closed window, and slowly
baked a sleeping man in the large plush arm-
chair. Around the chair, as if it were a promon-
tory in a heaving sea, were billows of stale
crumpled newspapers, some wadded into a ball,
others torn across the page, all flung aside in
ennui.
The face of the man was weary and weak. It
showed all of his forty-one years, and revealed,
too, a great emptiness. Flies kept rising and set-
tling again on the hands, the face, and the head
153
GOLDEN LADS
of the man — moist flies whose feet felt damp on
the skin. They were slow and languid flies
which wanted to settle and stay. It was his
breathing that made them restless, but not enough
to clear them away, only enough to make a low
buzzing in the sultry room. Across the top of
his head a bald streak ran from the forehead, and
it was here they returned to alight, after each
twitching and heave of the sunken body.
In the early months he had fought a losing fight
with them. The walls and ceiling and panes of
glass were spotted with the marks of his long
battle. But his foes had advanced in ever-fresh
force, clouds and swarms of them beyond num-
ber. He had gone to meet them with a wire-
killer, and tightly rolled newspapers. He had
imported fly paper from Dunkirk. But they
could afford to sacrifice the few hundreds, which
his strokes could reach, and still overwhelm him.
Lately, he had given up the struggle, and let them
take possession of the room. They harassed him
when he read, so he gave up reading. They got
into the food, so he ate less. Between his two
trips to the front daily at 8 A.M. and 2 P.M., he
154
FLIES: A FANTASY
slept. He found he could lose himself in sleep.
Into that kingdom of sleep, they could not enter.
As the weeks rolled on, he was able to let him-
self down more and more easily into silence.
That became his life. A slothfulness, a languor,
even when awake, a half-conscious forcing of him-
self through the routine work, a looking forward
to the droning room, and then the settling deep
into the old plush chair, and the blessed uncon-
sciousness.
He drove a Red Cross ambulance to the
French lines at Nieuport, collected the sick and
wounded soldiers and brought them to the Poste
de Secours, two miles back of the trenches. He
lived a hundred feet from the Poste, always
within call. But the emergency call rarely came.
There were only the set runs, for the war had
settled to its own regularity. A wonderful idle-
ness hung over the lines, where millions of men
were unemployed, waiting with strange patience
for some unseen event. Only the year before,
these men were chatting in cafes, and busy in a
thousand ways. Now, the long hours of the day
were lived without activity in thoughtless routine.
155
GOLDEN LADS
Under the routine there was always the sense of
waiting for a sudden crash and horror.
The man was an English gentleman. It was
his own car he had brought, paid for by him, and
he had offered his car and services to the Fusiliers
Marins. They had been glad of his help, and for
twelve months he had performed his daily duty
and returned to his loneliness. The men under
whom he worked were the French doctors of the
Poste — the chief doctor, Monsieur Claude-Marie
Le Bot, with four stripes on his arm, and the
courteous, grave administrator, Eustache-Emman-
uel Couillandre, a three-stripes man, and a half
dozen others, of three stripes and two. They had
welcomed him to their group when he came to
them from London. They had found him lively
and likable, bringing gossip of the West End with
a dash of Leicester Square. Then slowly a
change had come on him. He went moody and
silent.
"What's the matter with you1?" asked Doctor
Le Bot one day.
"Nothing 's the matter with me," answered the
man. "It 's war that 's the matter."
156
FLIES: A FANTASY
"What do you mean by that*?" put in one of
the younger doctors.
"The trouble with war," began the man slowly,
"is n't that there 's danger and death. They are
easy. The trouble with war is this. It 's dull,
damned deadly dull. It's the slowest thing in
the world. It wears away at your mind, like
water dripping on a rock. The old Indian tor-
ture of letting water fall on your skull, drop by
drop, till you went raving crazy, is nothing to
what war does to the mind of millions of men.
They can't think of anything else but war, and
they have no thoughts about that. They can't
talk of another blessed thing, and the result is they
have nothing to say at all."
As he talked a flush came into his face. He
gathered speed, while he spoke, till his words came
with a rush, as if he were relieving himself of
inner pain.
"Have you ever heard the true inside account
of an Arctic expediton*?" he went on. "There's
a handful of men locked up inside a little ship
for thirteen or fourteen months. Nothing to look
out on but snow and ice, one color and a horizon-
157
GOLDEN LADS
ful of it. Nothing to dream of but arriving at a
Pole — and that is a theoretical point in infinite
space. There 's no such thing. The midnight
sun and the frozen stuff get on their nerves —
same old sun in the same old place, same kind of
weather. What happens4? The natural thing,
of course. They get so they hate each other like
poison. They go around with a mad on. They
carry hate against the commander and the cook
and the fellow whose berth creaks every time he
shifts. Each man thinks the shipload is the rot-
tenest gang ever thrown together. He wonders
why they did n't bring somebody decent along.
He gets to scoring up grudges against the different
people, and waits his chance to get back."
He stopped a minute, and looked around at the
doctors, who were giving him close attention.
Then he went on with the same intensity.
"Now that 's war, only war is more so. Here
you are in one place for sixteen months. You
shovel yourself into a stinking hole in the ground.
At seven in the morning, you boil yourself some
muddy coffee that tastes like the River Thames
at Battersea Bridge. You take a knife that 's had
158
FLIES: A FANTASY
knicks hacked out of it, and cut a hunk of dry
bread that chews like sand. You eat some 'bully
beef out of a tin, same tinned stuff as you 've
been eating ever since your stomach went on strike
a year ago. Once a week for a treat, you cut a
steak off the flank of a dead horse. That tastes
better, because it 's fresh meat. When you 're
sent back a few miles, en 'piquet, you sleep in a
village that looks like Sodom after the sulphur
struck it. Houses singed and tumbled, dead
bodies in the ruins, a broken-legged dog, trailing
its hind foot, in front of the house where you
are. Tobacco — surely. You 'd die if you did n't
have a smoke. But the rotten little cigarettes
with no taste to them that smoke like chopped
hay. And the cigars made out of rags and
shredded toothpicks — "
"Here, have a cigarette," suggested the young-
est doctor.
But the man was too busy in working out his
own thoughts.
"The whole thing," he continued, "is a mix-
ture of a morgue and a hospital — only those
places have running water, and people in white
159
GOLDEN LADS
aprons to tidy things up. And a battle —
Three days under bombardment, living in the cel-
lar. The guns going off five, six times to the min-
ute, and then waiting a couple of hours and drop-
ping one in, next door. The crumpling noise
when a little brick house caves in, like a man
when you hit him in the stomach, just going all
together in a heap. And the sick smell that comes
out of the mess from plaster and brick dust.
"And getting wounded, that's jolly, isn't it*?
Rifle ball through your left biceps. Dick walks
you back to the dressing station. Doctor busy
at luncheon with a couple of visiting officers. Lie
down in the straw. Straw has a pleasant smell
when it 's smeared with iodine and blood. Wait
till the doctor has had his bottle of wine.
" 'Nothing very much,' he says, when he gets
around to you. Drops some juice in, ties the
white rag around, and you go back to your straw.
Three, four hours, and along come the body snatch-
ers — the chauffeur chap does n't know how to
drive, bumps into every shell hole for seven miles.
Every half mile, drive down into the ditch mud,
to get out of the way of some ammunition wagons
160
FLIES: A FANTASY
going to the front. The wheel gets stuck. Put
on power, in jumps, to bump the car out. Every
jerk tears at your open sore, as if the wheel had
got stuck in your arm and was being pulled out.
Two hours to do the seven miles. Get to the
field hospital. No time for you. Lie on your
stretcher in the court, where the flies swarm on
you. Always flies. Flies on the blood of the
wounded, glued to the bandage. Flies on the face
of the dead."
So he had once spoken and left them wonder-
ing. But that whirling burst of words was long
before, in those earlier days of his work. Noth-
ing like that had happened in weeks. No such
vivid pictures lighted him now. The man slept
on.
There was a scratching at the window, then a
steady tapping, then a resounding fist on the case-
ment. Gradually, the sleeping man came up
through the deep waters of unconsciousness. His
eyes were heavy. He sat a moment, brooding,
then turned toward the insistent noise.
"Monsieur Watts!" said a voice.
"Yes," answered the man. He stretched him-
161
GOLDEN LADS
self, and raised the sash. A brisk little French
Marin was at the window.
"The doctors are at luncheon. They are wait-
ing for you," the soldier said in rapid Breton
French; "to-day you are their guest."
"Of course," replied the man, "I had forgotten.
I will come at once."
He stretched his arms over his head — a tall
figure of a man, but bent at the shoulders, as if
all the dreariness of his surroundings had settled
there. He had the stoop of an old man, and the
walk. He stepped out of his room, into the
street, and stood a moment in the midday sun-
shine, blinking. Then he walked down the vil-
lage street to the Poste, and pushed through the
dressing-rooms to the dining-room at the rear.
The doctors looked up as he entered. He nodded,
but gave no speech back for their courteous, their
cordial greeting. In silence he ate the simple rel-
ishes of sardines and olives. Then the treat of
the luncheon was brought in by the orderly. It
was a duckling, taken from a refugee farm, and
done to a brown crisp. The head doctor carved
and served it.
162
FLIES: A FANTASY
"See here," said Watts loudly. He lifted his
wing of the duckling where a dead fly was cooked
in with the gravy. He pushed his chair back. It
grated shrilly on the stone floor. He rose.
"Flies," he said, and left the room.
Watts was the guest at the informal trench
luncheon. The officers showed him little favors
from time to time, for he had served their wounded
faithfully for many months. It is the highest
honor they can pay when they admit a civilian to
the first line of trenches. Shelling from Westend
was mild and inaccurate, going high overhead
and falling with a mutter into the seven-times
wrecked and thoroughly deserted houses of Nieu-
port village. But the sound of it gave a gentle
tingle to the act of eating. There was occasional
rifle fire, the bullet singing close.
"They 're improving," said the Commandant,
"a fellow reached over the trench this morning
for his Billy-can, and they got him in the hand."
Two Marins cleared away the plank on which
bread and coffee and tinned meat had been served.
163
GOLDEN LADS
The hot August sun cooked the loose earth, and
heightened the smells of food. A swarm of flies
poured over the outer rim and dropped down on
squatting men and the scattered commissariat.
Watts was sitting at a little distance from the
group. He closed his eyes, but soon began strik-
ing methodically at the settling flies. He fought
them with the right arm and the left in long
heavy strokes, patiently, without enthusiasm.
The soldiers brought out a pack of cards, and
leaned forward for the deal. Suddenly Watts
rose, lifted his arms above the trench, and delib-
erately stretched. Three faint cracks sounded
from across the hillock, and he tumbled out at
full length, as if some one had flung him away.
The men hastened to him, coming crouched over
but swiftly.
"Got him in the right arm," said the Com-
mandant.
"Thank God," muttered Watts, sleepily
It was the Convent Hospital of Fumes.
There was quiet in the ward of twenty-five beds,
164
FLIES: A FANTASY
where side by side slept the wounded of France
and Germany and Belgium and England. Sud-
denly, a resounding whack rang through the
ward. A German boy jumped up sitting in his
cot. The sound had awakened memories. He
looked over to the tall Englishman in the next cot,
who had struck out at one of the heavy innumer-
able flies, who hover over wounded men, and pry
down under bandages.
"Let me tell you," said the youth eagerly, "I
have a preparation — I 'm a chemist, you know —
I 've worked out a powder that kills flies."
Watts looked up from his pillow. His face
was weary.
"It's sweet, you know, and attracts them,"
went on the boy, "then the least sniff of it finishes
them. They trail away, and die in a few min-
utes. You can clear a room in half an hour.
Then all you have to do is to sweep up."
"See here," he said, "I '11 show you. Sister,"
he called. The nurse hurried to his side.
"Sister? You were kind enough to save my
kit. May I have it a moment1?"
He took out a tin flask, and squeezed it — a
165
GOLDEN LADS
brown powder puffed through the pin-point holes
at the mouth. It settled in a dust on the white
coverlet.
'/Please be very quiet," he said. He settled
back, as if for sleep, but his half -shut eyes were
watchful. A couple of minutes passed, then a fly
circled his head, and made for the spot on the
spread. It nosed its way in, crawled heavily a
few inches up the coverlet, and turned its legs up.
Two more came, alighted, sniffed and died.
"You see," he said.
Next day, the head of the Coxyde Poste mo-
tored over to Fumes for a call on his wounded
helper.
"Where does all that chatter come from?" he
asked.
Sister Teresa smiled.
"It 's your silent friend," she said. "He is the
noisiest old thing in the ward."
"Talking to himself?" inquired the doctor.
"Have a look for yourself," urged the nurse.
They stepped into the ward, and down the stone
166
FLIES: A FANTASY
floor, till they came to the supply table. Here
they pretended to busy themselves with lint.
"Most interesting," Watts was saying. "That
is a new idea to me. Here they 've been telling
me for a year that there 's no way but the slow
push, trench after trench — "
"Let me say to you," interrupted the Saxon lad.
"You will pardon me, if I finish what I am
saying," went on Watts in full tidal flow.
"What was it I was saying*? Oh, yes, I remem-
ber— that slow hard push is not the only way,
after all. You tell me — "
"That 's the way it is all day long," explained
the sister. "Chatter, chatter, chatter. They are
telling each other all they know. You would
think they would get fed up. But as fast as one
of them says something, that seems to be a new
idea to the other. Mr. Watts acts like a man who
has been starved."
Watts caught sight of his friend.
"We 've killed all the flies," he shouted.
167
WOMEN UNDER FIRE
THIS war has been a revelation of woman-
hood. To see one of these cool, friendly
creatures, American and English, shove her motor
car into shell-fire, make her rescue of helpless
crippled men, and steam back to safety, is to
watch a resourceful and disciplined being. They
may be, they are, "ministering angels," but there
is nothing meek in their demeanor. They have
stepped to a vantage from which nothing in man's
contemptuous philosophy will ever dislodge them.
They have always existed to astonish those who
knew them best, and have turned life into a sur-
prise party from Eden to the era of forcible feed-
ing. But assuredly it would make the dogmatists
on the essentially feminine nature, like Kipling,
rub their eyes, to watch modern women at work
under fire. They have n't the slightest fear of
being killed. Give them a job under bombard-
ment, and they unfold the stretcher, place the
pillow and tuck in the blanket, without a quiver
168
WOMEN UNDER FIRE
of apprehension. That, too, when some of the
men are scampering for cover, and ducking
chance pellets from the woolly white cloud that
breaks overhead. The women will eat their
luncheon with relish within three hundred feet of
a French battery in full blaze. Is there a test
left to the pride of man that the modern woman
does not take lightly and skilfully*? Gone are
the Victorian nerves and the eighteenth-century
fainting. All the old false delicacies have been
swamped. She has been held back like a hound
from the hunting, till we really believed we had
a. harmless household pet, who loved security.
We had forgotten the pioneer women who struck
across frontiers with a hardihood that matched
that of their mates. And now the modern woman
emerges from her protected home, and pushes for-
ward, careless and curious.
"What are women going to do about this
war?" That question my wife and I asked
each other at the outbreak of the present con-
flict. There were several attitudes that they
might take. They could deplore war, because it
destroyed their own best products. They could
169
GOLDEN LADS
form peace leagues and pass resolutions against
war. They could return to their ancient job of
humble service, and resume their familiar location
in the background. They did all these things
and did them fervently; but they did something
else in this war — they stepped out into the fore-
ground, where the air was thick with danger, and
demonstrated their courage. The mother no
longer says: "Return, my gallant one, with
your shield or on it," and goes back to her bak-
ing. She packs her kit and jumps into a motor
ambulance headed for the dressing station.
We have had an excellent chance to watch
women in this war. Our corps have had access
to every line from Nieuport on the sea, down for
twenty miles. We were able to run out to skir-
mishes, to reach the wounded where they had
fallen. We have gone where the fighting had
been at such close range that in one barnyard in
Ramscappelle lay thirteen dead — Germans. French
and Belgians. We brought back three wounded
Germans from the stable. We were in Dixmude
on the afternoon when the Germans destroyed the
town by artillery fire. We were in Ypres on No-
170
WOMEN UNDER FIRE
vember first, the day after the most terrible battle
in history, when fifty thousand English out of a
hundred and twenty thousand fell. For three
months my wife lived in Pervyse, with two Brit-
ish women. Not one house in the town itself
is left untouched by shell-fire. The women lived
in a cellar for the first weeks. Then they moved
into a partially demolished house, and a little
later a shell exploded in the kitchen. The women
were at work in the next room. We have had
opportunity for observing women in war, for
we have seen several hundred of them — nurses,
helpers, chauffeurs, writers — under varying de-
grees of strain and danger.
The women whom I met in Belgium were all
alike. They refused to take "their place."
They were not interested in their personal wel-
fare. There have been individual men, a few of
them — English, French and Belgian, soldiers,
chauffeurs and civilians — who have turned tail
when the danger was acute. But the women we
have watched are strangely lacking in fear. I
asked a famous war writer, whose breast was gay
with the ribbons of half a dozen campaigns, what
171
GOLDEN LADS
was the matter with all these women, that they
did not tremble and go green under fire, as some
of us did. He said:
"They don't belong out here. They have no
business to be under fire. They ought to be back
at the hospitals down at Dunkirk. They don't
appreciate danger. That's the trouble with
them; they have no imagination."
That 's an easy way out. But the real reasons
lie deeper than a mental inferiority. These
women certainly had quite as good an equipment
in mentality as the drivers and stretcher bearers.
They could not bear to let immense numbers of
men lie in pain. They wished to bring their in-
stinct for help to the place where it was needed.
The other reason is a product of their changed
thinking under modern conditions. "I want to
see the shells," said a discontented lady at Dun-
kirk. She was weary of the peace and safety
of a town twenty miles back from the front.
Women suddenly saw their time had come to strip
man of one more of his monopolies. For some
thousand years he had been bragging of his car-
riage and bearing in battle. He had told the
172
WOMEN UNDER FIRE
women folks at home how admirable he had been
under strain, and he went on to claim special priv-
ileges as the reward for his gallant behavior. He
posed as their protector. He assumed the right to
tax them because they did not lend a hand when
invasion came. Now women are campaigning in
France and Belgium to show that man's much-ad-
vertised quality of courage is a race possession.
They had already shown it while peace was
still in the land, but their demonstration met with
disfavor. Just before the war broke out I saw
a woman suffragist thrown into a pond of water
at Denmark Hill. I saw another mauled and
bruised by a crowd of men in Hyde Park. They
were the same sort of women as these hundreds
at the front, who are affirming a new value. The
argument is hotly contended whether women be-
long in the war zone. Conservative Englishmen
deem them a nuisance, and wish them back in
London. Meanwhile, they come and stay.
English officials tried to send home the three of
our women who had been nursing within thirty
yards of the trenches at Pervyse. But the King
of the Belgians, and Baron de Broqueville, prime
173
GOLDEN LADS
minister of Belgium, had been watching their
work, and refused to move them.
One morning we came into the dining-room
of our Convent Hospital at Fumes, and there on
a stretcher on the floor was a girl sleeping pro-
foundly. We thought at first we had one more
of our innumerable wounded who overflowed the
beds and wards during those crowded days. She
rested through the morning and through the noon
meal. The noise about did not disturb her.
She did not stir in her heavy sleep, lying un-
der the window, her face of olive skin, with a
touch of red in the right cheek, turned away from
the light. She awoke after twenty hours. Si-
lently, she had come in the evening before, wearied
to exhaustion after a week of nursing in the Bel-
gian trenches.
That was the thing you were confronted with
— woman after woman hurling herself at the war
till spent. They wished to share with men the
hardship and peril. If risks were right for the
men, then they were right for women. If the
time had come for nations to risk death, these
women refused to claim the exemptions of sex
174
WOMEN UNDER FIRE
difference. If war was unavoidable, then it was
equally proper for women to be present and carry
on the work of salvage.
Of a desire to kill they have none. A cer-
tain type of man under excitement likes to shoot
and reach his mark. I have had soldiers tell me
with pride of the number of enemies they have
potted. It sounds very much like an Indian
score-card of scalps or a grouse hunter's bag of
game. Our women did not talk in these terms,
nor did they act so. They gave the same care
to German wounded as to Belgian, French and
English wounded, and that though they knew they
would not receive mercy if the enemy came
across the fields and stormed the trenches. A
couple of machine guns placed on the trench at
Pervyse could have raked the ruined village and
killed our three nurses. They shared the terms
of peril with the soldiers; but they had no desire
for retaliation, no wish to wreak their will on
human life. Their instinct is to help. The dan-
ger does not excite them to a nervous explosion
where they grab for a gun and shoot the other
fellow.
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GOLDEN LADS
I was with an English physician one day be-
fore he was seasoned. We were under the bank
at Grembergen, just across the river from Ter-
monde. The enemy were putting over shells
about one hundred yards from where we were
crawling toward a machine-shop sheltering
wounded men. The obus were noisy and the dirt
flew high. Scattered bits of metal struck the
bank. As we heard the shell moaning for that
second of time when it draws close, we would
crawl into one of the trenches scooped out in the
green bank, an earthen cave with a roof of boughs.
"Let 's get out of this," said the doctor. "It 's
too hot for our kind of work. If I had a rifle
and could shoot back I should n't mind it. But
this waiting round and doing nothing in return till
you are hit, I don't like it."
But that is the very power that women pos-
sess. They can wait round without wishing to
strike back. Saving life gives them sufficient
spiritual resource to stand up to artillery. They
have no wish to relieve their nervousness by sight-
ing an alien head and cracking it.
One of our corps was the daughter of an earl.
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WOMEN UNDER FIRE
She had all the characteristics of what we like to
think is the typical American girl. She had a
bonhomie that swept class distinctions aside.
Her talk was swift and direct. She was pretty
and executive, swift to act and always on the go.
One day, as we were on the road to the dressing
stations, the noise of guns broke out. The young
Belgian soldier who was driving her stopped his
motor and jumped out.
"I do not care to go farther," he said.
Lady , who is a skilful driver, climbed
to the front seat, drove the car to the dressing sta-
tion and brought back the wounded. I have seen
her drive a touring car, carrying six wounded men,
from Nieuport to Furnes at eight o'clock on a
pitch-dark night, no lights allowed, over a narrow,
muddy road on which the car skidded. She had
to thread her way through silent marching troops,
turn out for artillery wagons, follow after tired
horses.
She was not a trained nurse, but when Dr. Hec-
tor Munro was working over a man with a broken
leg she prepared a splint and held the leg while
he set it and bound it. She drove a motor into
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GOLDEN LADS
Nieuport when the troops were marching out of
it. Her guest for the afternoon was a war cor-
respondent.
"This is a retreat," he said. "It is never safe
to enter a place when the troops are leaving it. I
have had experience."
"We are going in to get the wounded," she re-
plied. They went in.
At Ypres she dodged round the corner because
she saw a captain who does n't believe in women
at the front. A shell fell in the place where she
had been standing a moment before. It blew the
arm from a soldier. Her nerve was unbroken,
and she continued her work through the morn-
ing.
Her notion of courage is that people have a
right to feel frightened, but that they have no
right to fail to do the job even if they are fright-
ened. They are entitled to their feelings, but
they are not entitled to shirk the necessary work
of war. She believes that cowardice is not like
other failings of weakness, which are pretty much
man's own business. Cowardice is dangerous to
the group.
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WOMEN UNDER FIRE
Lady 's attitude at a bombardment was
that of a child seeing a hailstorm — open-eyed
wonder. She was the purest exhibit of careless
fearlessness, carrying a buoyancy in danger. Gen-
erations of riding to hounds and of big game shoot-
ing had educated fear out of her stock. Her an-
cestors had always faced uncertainty as one of the
ingredients of life: they accepted danger in ac-
cepting life. The savage accepted fear because
he had to. With the English upper class, danger
is a fine art, a cult. It is an element in the family
honor. One cannot possibly shrink from the test.
The English have expressed themselves in sport.
People who are good sportsmen are, of course,
honorable fighters. The Germans have allowed
their craving for adventure to seethe inside them-
selves, and then have aimed it seriously at human
life. But the English have taken off their excess
vitality by outdoor contests.
What Lady is the rest of the women
are. Miss Smith, an English girl nurse, jumped
down from the ambulance that was retreating
before the Germans, and walked back into Ghent,
held by the Germans, to nurse an English officer
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till he died. A few days later she escaped, by
going in a peasant's cart full of market vegetables,
and rejoined us at Fumes.
Sally Macnaughtan is a gray-haired gentle-
woman of independent means who writes admir-
able fiction. She has laid aside her art and for
months conducted a soup kitchen in the railway
station at Fumes. She has fed thousands of
weakened wounded men, working till midnight
night after night. She remained until the town
was thoroughly shelled.
The order is strict that no officer's wife must
be near the front. The idea is that she will divert
her husband's mind from the work in hand. He
will worry about her safety. But Mrs. B , a
Belgian, joined our women in Pervyse, and did
useful work, while her husband, a doctor with the
rank of officer, continued his work along the
front. She is a girl of twenty-one years.
Recently the Queen of the Belgians went into
the trenches at a time when there was danger of
artillery and rifle fire breaking loose from the
enemy. She had to be besought to keep back
where the air was quieter, as her life was of more
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WOMEN UNDER FIRE
value to the Belgian troops and the nation than
even a gallant death.
One afternoon most of the corps were out on
the road searching for wounded. Mairi Chis-
holm, a Scotch girl eighteen years old, and a young
American woman had been left behind in the
Furnes Hospital. With them was a stretcher
bearer, a man of twenty-eight. A few shells fell
into Furnes. The civilian population began run-
ning in dismay. The girls climbed up into the
tower of the convent to watch the work of the
shells. The man ordered the women to leave the
town with him and go to Poperinghe. The two
girls refused to go.
For weeks Furnes was under artillery fire from
beyond Nieuport. One of our hospital nurses was
killed as she was walking in the Grand Place.
I saw an American girl covered by the pistol of
an Uhlan officer. She did not change color, but
regarded the incident as a lark. I happened to be
watching her when she was sitting on the front
seat of an ambulance at Oudecappelle, eating
luncheon. A shell fell thirty yards from her in
the road. The roar was loud. The dirt flew
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GOLDEN LADS
high. The metal fragments tinkled on the house
walls. The hole it dug was three feet deep. She
laughed and continued with her luncheon.
I saw the same girl stand out in a field while
this little drama took place: The French artil-
lery in the field were well covered by shrubbery.
They had been pounding away from their covert
till the Germans grew irritated. A German
Taube flew into sight, hovered high overhead and
spied the hidden guns. It dropped three smoke
bombs. These puffed out their little clouds into
the air, and gave the far-away marksmen the
location for firing. Their guns broke out and
shrapnel shells came overhead, burst into trailing
smoke and scattered their hundreds of bullets.
The girl stood on the arena itself. Of concern
for her personal safety she had none. It was all
like a play on the stage to her. You watch the
blow and flash but you are not a part of the action.
Each night the Furnes Hospital was full with
one hundred wounded. In the morning we car-
ried out one or two or one-half dozen dead. The
wounds were severe, the air of the whole country-
side was septic from the sour dead in the fields,
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WOMEN UNDER FIRE
who kept working to the surface from their shal-
low burial. There was a morning when we had
gone early to the front on a hurry call. In our
absence two girl nurses carried out ten dead from
the wards into the convent lot, to the edge of the
hasty graves made ready for their coming.
There is one woman whom we have watched at
work for twelve months. She is a trained nurse,
a certified midwife, a licensed motor-car driver, a
veterinarian and a woman of property. Her
name is Mrs. Elsie Knocker, a widow with one
son. She helped to organize our corps. I was
with her one evening when a corporal ordered her
to go up a difficult road. He was the driver of a
high-power touring car which could rise on occa-
sion to seventy miles an hour. He carried a rifle
in his car, and told us he had killed over fifty
Germans since Liege. He dressed in bottle green,
the uniform of a cyclist, and he looked like a rol-
licking woodlander of the Robin Hood band. It
was seven o'clock of the evening. The night was
dark. He pitched a bag of bandages into the
motor ambulance.
'Take those to the dressing station that lies two
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GOLDEN LADS
miles to the west of Caeskerke," he ordered Mrs.
Knocker. I cranked up the machine; Mrs.
Knocker sat at the wheel. We were at Oudecap-
pelle. The going was halfway decent as far as
the crossroads of Caeskerke. Here we turned
west on a road through the fields which had been
intermittently shelled for several days. The road
had shell holes in it from one to three feet deep.
We could not see them because we carried no
lights and the sky overhead was black. A mile
to our right a village was burning. There were
sheets of flame rising from the lowland, and the
flame revealed the smoke that was thick over the
ruins. We bumped in and out of the holes. All
roads in Belgium were scummy with mud. It is
like butter on bread. The big brown-canopied
ambulance skidded in this paste.
We reached the dressing station and delivered
one bag of bandages. In return we received
three severely wounded men, who lay at length
on the stretched canvas and swung on straps.
Then we started back over the same mean road.
This was the journey that tested Mrs. Knocker's
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WOMEN UNDER FIRE
driving, because now she had helpless men who
must not be jerked by the swaying car. Motion
tore at their wounds. Above all, they must not
be overturned. An overturn would kill a man
who was seriously wounded. Driving meant
drawing all her nervous forces into her directing
brain and her two hands. A village on fire at
night is an eerie sight. A dark road, pitted with
shell holes and slimy with mud, is chancy. The
car with its human freight, swaying, bumping,
sliding, is heavy on the wrist. The whole focused
drive of it falls on the muscles of the forearm.
And when on the skill of that driver depends
the lives of three men the situation is one that
calls for nerve. It was only luck that the artil-
lery from beyond the Yser did not begin tuning
up. The Germans had shelled that road dili-
gently for many days and some evenings. Back
to the crossroads Mrs. Knocker brought her cargo,
and on to Oudecappelle, and so to the hospital at
Fumes, a full ten miles. Safely home in the
convent yard, the journey done, the wounded men
lifted into the ward, she broke down. She had
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GOLDEN LADS
put over her job, and her nerves were tired.
Womanlike she refused to give in till the work
was successfully finished.
How would a man have handled such a strain?
I will tell you how one man acted. Our corporal
drove his touring car toward Dixmude one morn-
ing. He ordered Tom, the cockney driver, to fol-
low with the motor ambulance. In it were Mrs.
Knocker and Miss Chisholm, sitting with Tom
on the front of the car. Things looked thick.
The corporal slowed up, and so did Tom just
behind him. Now there is one sure rule for res-
cue work at the front — when you hear the guns
close, always turn your car toward home, away
from the direction of the enemy. Turn it before
you get your wounded, even though they are at
the point of death, and leave your power on, even
when you are going to stay for a quarter of an
hour. Pointed toward safety, and under power,
the car can carry you out of range of a sudden
shelling or a bayonet charge. The enemy's guns
began to place shrapnel over the road. The cloud
puffs were hovering about a hundred feet overhead
a little farther down the way. The bullets
186
WOMEN UNDER FIRE
clicked on the roadbed. The corporal jumped out
of his touring car.
"Turn my car," he shouted to Tom. Tom
climbed from the ambulance, boarded the touring
car and turned it. The corporal peered out from
his shelter, behind the ambulance, saw the going
was good and ran to his own motor. He jumped
in and sped out of range at full tilt. The two
women sat quietly in the ambulance, watching the
shrapnel. Tom came to them, turned the car
and brought them beyond the range of fire.
But the steadiest and most useful piece of work
done by the women was that at Pervyse. Mrs.
Knocker and two women helpers, one Scotch and
one American, fitted up a miniature hospital in
the cellar of a house in ruined Pervyse. They
were within three minutes of the trenches. Here,
as soon as the soldiers were wounded, they could
be brought for immediate treatment. A young
private had received a severe lip wound. Un-
skilful army medical handling had left it gan-
grened, and it had swollen. His face was on
the way to being marred for life. Mrs. Knocker
treated him every few hours for ten days — and
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brought him back to normal. A man came in
with his hand a pulp from splintered shell. The
glove he had been wearing was driven into the red
flesh. Mrs. Knocker worked over his hand for
half an hour, picking out the shredded glove bit
by bit.
Except for a short walk in the early morning
and another after dark, these women lived im-
mured in their dressing station, which they moved
from the cellar to a half-wrecked house. They
lived in the smell of straw, blood and antiseptic.
The Germans have thrown shells into the wrecked
village almost every day. Some days shelling has
been vigorous. The churchyard is choked with
dead. The fields are dotted with hummocks
where men and horses lie buried. Just as I was
sailing for America in March, 1915, the house
where the women live and work was shelled.
They came to La Panne, but later Mrs. Knocker
and Miss Chisholm returned to Pervyse to go on
with their work, which is famous throughout the
Belgian army.
As regiment after regiment serves its turn in
the trenches of Pervyse it passes under the hands
190
WOMEN UNDER FIRE
of these women. "The women of Pervyse" are
known alike to generals, colonels and privates who
held steady at Liege and who have struggled on
ever since. For many months these nurses have
endured the noise of shell fire and the smells of the
dead and the stricken. The King of the Belgians
has with his own hands pinned upon them the
Order of Leopold II. The King himself wears
the Order of Leopold I. They have eased and
saved many hundreds of his men.
"No place for a woman," remarked a distin-
guished Englishman after a flying visit to their
home.
"By the law of probabilities, your corps will be
wiped out sooner or later," said a war corre-
spondent.
Meantime the women will go on with their cool,
expert work. The only way to stop them is to
stop the war.
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HOW WAR SEEMS TO A WOMAN
(Bv MRS. ARTHUR GLEASON)
LIFE at the front is not organized like a busi-
ness office, with sharply defined duties for
each worker. War is raw and chaotic, and you
take hold wherever you can lock your grip. We
women that joined the Belgian army and spent a
year at the front, did duty as ambulance riders,
"dirty nurses," in a Red Cross rescue station at
the Yser trenches, in relief work for refugees, and
in the commissariat department. We tended
wounded soldiers, sick soldiers, sick peasants,
wounded peasants, mothers, babies, and colonies
of refugees.
This war gave women one more chance to prove
themselves. For the first time in history, a few
of us were allowed through the lines to the front
trenches. We needed a man's costume, steady
masculine nerves, physical strength. But the
work itself became the ancient work of woman —
192
HOW WAR SEEMS TO A WOMAN
nursing suffering, making a home for lonely,
hungry, dirty men. This new thrust of woman-
hood carried her to the heart of war. But, once
arriving there, she resumed her old job, and be-
came the nurse and cook and mother to men.
Woman has been rebelling against being put into
her place by man. But the minute she wins her
freedom in the new dramatic setting, she finds
expression in the old ways as caretaker and home-
maker. Her rebellion ceases as soon as she is
allowed to share the danger. She is willing to
make the fires, carry the water, and do the wash-
ing, because she believes the men are in the right,
and her labor frees them for putting through their
work.
It all began for me in Paris. I was studying
music, and living in the American Art Students'
Club, in the summer of 1914. That war was
declared meant nothing to me. There was I in
a comfortable room with a delightful garden, the
Luxembourg, just over the way. That was the
first flash of war. I went down to the Louvre to
see the Venus, and found the building "Ferme."
I went over to the Luxembourg Galleries —
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"Ferme," again — and the Catacombs. Then it
came into my consciousness that all Paris was
closed to me. The treasures had been taken away
from me. The things planned could n't be done.
War had snatched something from me personally.
Next, I took solace in the streets. I had to
walk. Paris went mad with official speed — com-
mandeered motors flashed officers down the boule-
vards under martial law. They must get a na-
tion ready, and Paris was the capital. War
made itself felt, still more, because we had to go
through endless lines, — permis de sejours at little
police stations — standing on line all day, dis-
missed without your paper, returning next morn-
ing. Friends began to leave Paris for New York.
I was considered queer for wishing to stay on.
The chance to study in Paris was the dream of a
lifetime. But, now, the sound of the piano was
forbidden in the city, and that made the desolation
complete. Work and recreation had been taken
away, and only war was left. And when Marie,
our favorite maid in the club, sent her husband,
our doorkeeper, to the front, that brought war in-
side our household.
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HOW WAR SEEMS TO A WOMAN
As the Germans drew near Paris, many of
the club girls thought that they would be endan-
gered. Every one was talking about the French
Revolution. People expected the horrors of the
Revolution to be repeated. Jaures had just been
shot, the syndicalists were wrecking German milk
shops, and at night the streets had noisy mobs.
People were fearing revolution inside Paris, more
than the enemy outside the city gates. War was
going to let loose that terrible thing which we
believed to be subliminal in the French nature.
Women had to be off the streets before nine
o'clock. By day we went up the block to the
Boulevard, and there were the troops — a band, the
tricolor, the officers, the men in sky blue. Their
sweethearts, their wives and children went march-
ing hand in hand with them, all singing the "Mar-
seillaise." In a time like that, where there is
song, there is weeping. The marching, singing
women were sometimes sobbing without knowing
it, and we that were watching them in the street
crowd were moved like them.
When I crossed to England, I found that I
wanted to go back and have more of the wonder
195
GOLDEN LADS
of war, which I had tasted in Paris. The won-
der was the sparkle of equipment. It was plain
curiosity to see troops line up, to watch the mili-
tary pageant. There I had been seeing great
handsome horses, men in shining helmets with the
horsehair tail of the casque flowing from crest to
shoulder, the scarlet breeches, the glistening boots
with spurs. It was pictures of childhood coming
true. I had hardly ever seen a man in military
uniform, and nothing so startling as those French
cuirassiers. And I knew that gay vivid thing was
not a passing street parade, but an array that was
going into action. What would the action be4?
It is what makes me fond of moving pictures —
variety, color, motion, and mystery. The story
was just beginning. How would the plot come
out?
Those pictures of troops and guns, grouping and
dissolving, during all the twelve months in Flan-
ders, never failed to grip. But rarely again did
I see that display of fine feathers. For the fight-
ing men with whom I lived became mud-covered.
Theirs was a dug-in and blown-out existence, with
the spatterings of storm and black nights on them.
196
HOW WAR SEEMS TO A WOMAN
Their clothing took on the soberer colors and
weather-worn aspect of the life itself which was
no sunny boulevard affair, but an enduring of wet
trenches and slimy roads. Those people in Paris
needed that high key to send them out, and the
early brilliance lifted them to a level which was
able to endure the monotony.
I went to the war because those whom I loved
were in the war. I wished to go where they were.
Finally, there was real appeal in that a little
unprotected lot of people were being trampled.
I crossed in late September to Ostend as a mem-
ber of the Hector Munro Ambulance Corps.
With us were two women, Elsie Knocker, an
English trained nurse, and Mairi Chisholm
Gooden-Chisholm, a Scotch girl. There were a
round dozen of us, doctors, chauffeurs, stretcher
bearers. Our idea of what was to be required
of women at the front was vague. We thought
that we ought to know how to ride horseback, so
that we could catch the first loose horse that gal-
loped by and climb on him. What we were to
do with the wounded was n't clear, even in our
own minds. We bought funny little tents and
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GOLDEN LADS
had tent practice in a vacant yard. The motor
drive from Ostend to Ghent was through autumn
sunshine and beauty of field flowers. It was like
a dream, and the dream continued in Ghent,
where we were tumbled into the Flandria Palace
Hotel with a suite of rooms and bath, and two
convalescing soldiers to care for us. We looked
at ourselves and smiled and wondered if this was
war. My first work was the commissariat for our
corps.
Then came the English Naval Reserves and
Marines en route to Antwerp. They had been
herded into the cars for twelve hours. They were
happy to have great hunks of hot meat, bread, and
cigarettes. Just across the platform, a Belgian
Red Cross train pulled in — nine hundred
wounded men, bandaged heads with only the eyes
showing, stumps of arms flapping a welcome.
The Belgians had been shot to pieces, holding the
line. And, now, here were the English come to
save them.
This looked more like war to us. From the
Palace windows we hung out over the balcony to
see the Taubes. I knew that at last we were on
198
HOW WAR SEEMS TO A WOMAN
the fringes of war. Later, we were to be at the
heart of it. It was at Melle that I learned I was
on the front lines.
We went up the road from Ghent to Melle in
blithe ignorance, we three women. The day
before, the enemy had held the corner with a
machine gun.
"Let 's go on foot, and see where the Germans
were," suggested "Scotch." We came to burned
peasants' houses. Inside the wreckage, soldiers
crouched with rifles ready at the peek-holes. A
Reckitt's bluing factory was burning, and across
the field were the Germans. The cottages with-
out doors and windows were like toothless old
women. Piles of used cartridges were strewed
around. There stood a gray motor-car, a wounded
German in the back seat, his hands riddled, the
car shot through, with blood in the bottom from
two dead Germans. I realized the power of the
bullet, which had penetrated the driver, the
padded seat, the sheet metal and splintered the
wood of the tonneau. We saw a puff of white
smoke over the field from a shrapnel. That was
the first shell I had seen close. It meant nothing
199
GOLDEN LADS
to me. In those early days, the hum of a shell
seemed no more than the chattering of sparrows.
That was the way with all my impressions of war
— first a flash, a spectacle ; later a realization, and
experience.
I went into Alost during a mild bombardment.
The crashing of timbers was fascinating. It is
in human nature to enjoy destruction. I used to
love to jump on strawberry boxes in the woodshed
and hear them crackle. And with the plunge of
the shells, something echoed back to the delight
of my childhood. I enjoyed the crash, for some-
thing barbaric stirred. There was no connection
in my mind between the rumble and wounded
men. The curiosity of ignorance wanted to see
a large crash. Shell-fire to me was a noise.
I still had no idea of war. Of course I knew
that there would be hideous things which I did n't
have in home life. I knew I could stand up to
dirty monotonous work, but I was afraid I should
faint if I saw blood. When very young, I had
seen a dog run over, and I had seen a boy playmate
mutilate a turtle. I was sickened. Years later,
I came on a little child crying, holding up its
200
HOW WAR SEEMS TO A WOMAN
hand. The wrist was bent back double, and the
blood spurting till the little one was drenched.
Those shocks had left a horror in me of seeing
blood. But this thing that I feared most turned
out not to have much importance. I found that
the man who bled most heavily lay quiet. It was
not the bloodshed that unnerved me. It was the
writhing and moaning of men that communicated
their pain to me. I seemed to see those whom I
loved lying there. I transferred the wound to the
ones I love. Sometimes soldiers gave me the ad-
dress of wife and mother, to have me write that
they were well. Then when the wounded came
in, I thought of these wives and mothers. I knew
how they felt, because I felt so. I knew, as the
Belgian and French women know, that the war
must be waged without wavering, and yet I always
see war as hideous. There was no glory in those
stricken men. I had no fear of dying, but I had
a fear of being mangled.
One evening I walked into the Convent Hos-
pital where the wounded lay so thickly that I had
to step over the stretcher loads. The beds were
full, the floor blocked, only one door open. There
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GOLDEN LADS
was a smell of foul blood, medicines, the stench
of trench clothes. It came on an empty stomach,
at the end of a tired day.
"Sister, will you hold this lamp*?" a nurse said
tome.
I held it over a man with a yawning hole in his
abdomen. He lay unmurmuring. When the
doctor pressed, the muscles twitched. I asked
some one to hold the lamp. I went into the court-
yard, and fainted. Hard work would have saved
me.
One other time, there had been a persistent fire
all day. A boy of nineteen was brought in
screaming. He wanted water and he wanted his
mother. In our dressing station room were
crowded two doctors, three women, two stretcher
bearers, a chauffeur, and ten soldiers. They cut
away his uniform and boots. His legs were jelly,
with red mouths of wounds. His leg gave at the
knee, like a piece of limp twine. I went into the
next room, and recovered myself. Then I re-
turned, and stayed with the wounded. The
greatest comfort was a doctor, who said it was a
matter of stomach, not of nerve. A sound woman
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HOW WAR SEEMS TO A WOMAN
does n't faint at the sight of blood any quicker
than a man does. Those two experiences were the
only times when the horror was too much for me.
I saw terrible things and was able to see them.
With the dead it seems different. They are at
peace. It is motion in the wounded that transfers
suffering to oneself. A red quiver is worse than
a red calm.
Antwerp fell. The retreating Belgian army
swarmed around us, passed us. In the excitement
every one lost her kit and before two days of
actual warfare were over we had completely for-
gotten those little tents that we had practised
pitching so carefully, and that we had meant to
sleep in at night. Little, dirty, unkempt, broken-
hearted men came shuffling in the dust of the road
by day, shambling along the road at night.
Thousands of them passed. No sound, save the
fall of footsteps. No contrast, save where a
huddle of refugees passed, their children beside
them, their household goods, or their old people,
on their backs. We picked up the wounded.
There was no time for the dead. In and out and
among that army of ants, retreating to the edge
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of Belgium and the sea, we went. There seemed
nothing but to return to England.
The war minister of Belgium saw us. He
placed his son, Lieutenant Robert de Broqueville,
in military command of us. We had access to
every line, all the way to the trench and battle-
field. We became a part of the Belgian army.
We made our headquarters at Fumes. Luckily,
a physician's house had been deserted, with china
and silver on the table, apples, jellies and wines
in the cellar. We commandeered it.
Winter came. The soldiers needed a dressing
station somewhere along the front from Nieuport
to Dixmude. Mrs. Knocker established one
thirty yards behind the front line of trenches at
Pervyse. Miss Chisholm and I joined her. In
its cellar we found a rough bedstead of two pieces
of unplaned lumber, with clean straw for a mat-
tress, awaiting us. Any Englishwoman is re-
spected in the Belgian lines. The two soldiers
who had been living in our room had given it up
cheerily. They had searched the village for a
clean sheet, and showed it to us with pride. They
lumped the straw for our pillows, and stood out-
204
side through the night, guarding our home with
fixed bayonets. It was the most moving courtesy
we had in the twelve months of war. The air in
the little room was both foul and chilly. We
took off our boots, and that was the extent of our
undressing.
The dreariness of war never came on us till we
went out there to live behind the trenches. To
me it was getting up before dawn, and washing
in ice-cold water, no time to comb the hair, always
carrying a feeling of personal mussiness, with an
adjustment to dirt. It is hard to sleep in one's
clothes, week after week, to look at hands that
have become permanently filthy. One morning
our chauffeur woke up, feeling grumpy. He had
slept with a visiting doctor. He said the doc-
tor's revolver had poked him all night long in the
back. The doctor had worn his entire equipment
for warmth, like the rest of us. I suffered from
cold wet feet. I hated it that there was never a
moment I could be alone. The toothbrush was
the one article of decency clung to. I seemed
never to go into the back garden to clean my teeth
without bringing on shell-fire. I got a sense of
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there being a connection between brushing the
teeth and the enemy's guns. You find in rough-
ing it that a coating of dirt seems to keep out
chill. We women suffered, but we knew that
the boys in tennis shoes suffered more in that wet
season, and the soldiers without socks, just the
bare feet in boots.
In the late fall, we rooted around in the de-
serted barns for potatoes. Once, creeping into a
farm, which was islanded by water, "Jane Per-
vyse," our homeless dog, led us up to the wrecked
bedroom. A bonnet and best dress were in the
cupboard. A soldier put on the bonnet and
grimaced. Always after that, in passing the
house, "Jane Pervyse" trembled and whined as if
it had been her home till the destruction came.
In our house, we cleaned vegetables. There
was nothing romantic about our work in these
first days. It was mostly cooking, peeling hun-
dreds of potatoes, slicing bushels of onions, cut-
ting up chunks of meat, until our arms were
aching. These bits were boiled together in great
black pots. Our job, when it was n't to cook the
stew, was to take buckets of it to the trenches.
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Here we ladled it out to each soldier. Always
we went early, while mist still hung over the
ground, for we could see the Germans on clear
days. It was an adventure, tramping in the
freezing cold of night to the outposts and in early
morning to the trenches, back to the house to refill
the buckets, back to the trenches. The mornings
were bitterly cold. Very early in my career as a
nurse, I rid myself of skirts. Boots, covered with
rubber boots to the knees in wet weather, or bound
with puttees in warm ; breeches ; a leather coat and
as many jerseys as I could walk in — these were
my clothes. But, as I slept in them, they did n't
keep me very warm in the early morning.
We had one real luxury in the dressing station
— a piano. While we cooked and scrubbed and
pared potatoes, men from the lines played for us.
There were other things, necessities, that we
lacked. Water, except for the stagnant green
liquid that lay in the ditches where dead men and
dead horses rotted, we went without — once for as
long as three days. During that time we boiled
the ditch water and made tea of it. Even then,
it was a deep purplish black and tasted bitter.
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All we could do to help the wounded was to
wash off mud and apply the simplest of first-aids,
iodine and bandages. We burned bloody cloth-
ing and scoured mackintoshes and scrubbed floors.
The odors were bad, a mixture of decaying matter
and raw flesh and cooking food and disinfectant.
Pervyse was one more dear little Flemish vil-
lage,, with yawning holes in the houses, and
through the holes you saw into the home, the
precious intimate things which revealed how the
household lived — the pump, muffled for winter,
the furniture placed for occupancy, a home lately
inhabited. In the burgomaster's house, there were
two old mahogany frames with rare prints, his
store of medicines, the excellent piano which
cheered us, in his attic a skeleton. So you saw
him in his home life as a quiet, scholarly man of
taste and education. You entered another gaping
house, with two or three bits of inherited mahog-
any— clearly, the heirlooms of an old family.
Another house revealed bran new commonplace
trinkets. Always the status of the family was
plain to see — their mental life, their tastes, and
ambitions. You would peek in through a broken
210
HOW WAR SEEMS TO A WOMAN
front and see a cupboard with crotched mahog-
any trimmings, one door splintered, the other per-
fect. You would catch a glimpse of a round cen-
ter table with shapely legs, a sofa drawn up in
front of a fireplace. When we went, Pervyse
was still partly upstanding, but the steady shell-
ing of the winter months slowly flattened it into
a wreck. It is the sense of sight through which
war makes its strongest impression on me.
The year falls into a series of pictures, even-
ings of song when a boy soldier would improvise
verses to our head nurse; a fight between a Bel-
gian corporal and an English nurse with seltzer
bottles; the night when our soldiers were short of
ammunition and we sat up till dawn awaiting the
attack that might send us running for our lives;
the black nights when some spy back of our lines
flashed electric messages to the enemy and directed
their fire on our ammunition wagons.
And deeper than those pictures is the conscious-
ness of how adaptable is the human spirit.
Human nature insists on creating something.
Under hunger and danger, it develops a wealth
of resource — in art and music, and carving, mak-
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ing finger-rings of shrapnel, playing songs of the
Yser. Something artistic and playful comes to
the rescue. Instead of war getting us as Andre-
ieff's "Red Laugh" says it does, making regiments
of men mad, we "got" war, and remained sane.
If we had n't conquered it by spells of laughing
relief, we should n't have had nerve when the time
came. Too much strain would break down the
bravest Belgian and the gayest Fusilier Marin.
I came to feel I would rather get "pinked" in
Pervyse than retire to Fumes, seven miles back
of the trenches. Pervyse seemed home, because
we belonged there with necessary work to do.
Then, too, there was a certain regularity in the
German gunfire. If they started shelling from
the Chateau de Vicoigne, they were likely to con-
tinue shelling from that point. So we lived that
day in the front bedroom. If they shelled from
Ramscappelle, the back kitchen became the better
room, for we had a house in between. We were
so near their guns, that we could plot the arc of
flight. Pervyse seemed to visitors full of death,
simply because it received a daily dose of shell-
fire, like a little child sitting up and gulping its
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HOW WAR SEEMS TO A WOMAN
medicine. With what unconcern in those days
we went out by ambulance to some tight angle,
and waited for something to happen.
"We 're right by a battery." But the battery
was interesting.
"If this is danger, all right. It 's great to be
in danger." I have sat all day writing letters
by our artillery. Every time a gun went off my
pencil slid. The shock was so sudden, my nerves
never took it on. Yet I was able to sleep a few
yards in front of a battery. It would pound
through the night, and I never heard it. The
nervous equipment of an American would ravel
out, if it were not for sound sleep. If shells came
no nearer than four hundred yards, we considered
it a quiet day.
One day I learned the full meaning of fear.
We had had several quiet safe hours. Night
was coming on, and we were putting up the shut-
ters, when a shell fell close by in the trench.
Next, our floor was covered with dripping men,
five of them unbandaged. Shells and wounds
were connected in my mind by that close suc-
cession.
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No one was secure in that wrecked village
of Pervyse. Along the streets, homeless dogs
prowled, pigeons circled, hungry cats howled.
Behind the trenches, the men had buried their
dead and had left great mounds where they had
tried to bury the horses. Shells dropped every
day, some days all day. I have seen men run-
ning along the streets, flattening themselves
against a house whenever they heard the whirr of
a shell.
It is not easy to eat, and sleep, and live together
in close quarters, sometimes with rush work,
sometimes through severer hours of aimless wait-
ing. Again and again, we became weary of one
another, impatient over trifles.
What war does is to reveal human nature. It
does not alter it. It heightens the brutality and
the heroism. Selfishness shines out nakedly and
kindliness is seen clearer than in routine peace
days. War brings out what is inside the person.
Sentimental pacifists sit around three thousand
miles away and say, "War brutalizes men," and
when I hear them I think of the English Tommies
giving me their little stock of cigarettes for the
214
HOW WAR SEEMS TO A WOMAN
Belgian soldiers. Then I read the militarists and
they say, "Be hard. Live dangerously. War is
beneficent," and I see the wrecked villages of
Belgium, with the homeless peasants and the
orphaned babies. War ennobles some men by
sacrifice, by heroism. It debases other men by
handing over the weak to them for torture and
murder. What is in the man comes out under
the supreme test, where there are no courts of
appeal, no public opinion, no social restraint;
only the soldier alone with helpless victims.
You can't share the chances of life and death
with people, without feeling a something in com-
mon with them, that you do not have even with
life-long friends. The high officer and the cock-
ney Tommy have that linking up. There was
one person whom I could n't grow to like. But
with him I have shared a ticklish time, and there
is that cord of connection. Then, too, one is glad
of a record of oneself. There is some one to
verify what you say. You have passed through
an unbelievable thing together, and you have a
witness.
Henri, our Belgian orderly, has that feeling
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for us, and we for him. It is n't respect, nor fond-
ness, alone. Companionship meant for him new
shirts, dry boots, more chocolate, a daily supply
of cigarettes. It meant our seeing the picture of
wife and child in Liege, hearing about his home.
It was the sharing of danger, the facing together
of the horror that underlies life, and which we
try to forget in soft peace days. The friendships
of war are based on a more fundamental thing
than the friendships of safe living. In the su-
preme experience of motherhood, the woman goes
down alone into the place of suffering, leaving the
man, however dear, far away. But in this su-
preme experience of facing death to save life,
you go together. The little Belgian soldier is at
your side. Together you sit tight under fire, put
the bandages on the wounded, and speed back to
a safer place.
Once I went to the farthest outpost. A Bel-
gian soldier stepped out of the darkness.
"Come along, miss, I 've a good gun. I '11 take
you."
Walking up the road, not in the middle where
machine guns could rake us, but huddled up by
2l8
HOW WAR SEEMS TO A WOMAN
the trees at the siding, we went. It will be a dif-
ferent thing to meet him one day in Antwerp, than
it will be to greet again the desk-clerk of the
La Salle Hotel in Chicago. It lies deeper than
doing you favors, and assigning a sunny room.
The men are not impersonal units in an army
machine. They become individuals to us, with
sharply marked traits. It is impossible to see
them as cases. Out of the individuals, we built
our types — we constructed our Belgian soldier,
out of the hundreds who had told us of their work
and home.
"You must have met so many you never came
to know their stories."
It was the opposite. Paul Collaer, who played
beautifully; Gilson, the mystic; Henri of Liege;
the son of Ysaye, they were all clear to us. There
was a splendid fat doctor who felt physical fear,
but never shirked his job. He used to go and
hide behind the barn, with his pipe, till there was
work for him. His was n't the fear that spreads
disaster through a crowd. He was fat and
funny. A fat man is comfortable to have around,
at any time, even when he is unhappy. No one
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lost respect for this man. Every one enjoyed him
thoroughly.
Commandant Gilson of the Belgian army was
one of our firm friends. My introduction to him
was when I heard a bit of a Liszt rhapsody float-
ing into the kitchen from our piano, the fingers
rapid and fluent, and long nails audible on the
keys. I remember the first meal with him, a
luncheon of fried sardines, fruit cake, bread and
cheese. The doctor across the way had sent a bot-
tle of champagne. After luncheon he received
word of an attack. He kissed the hand of each of
us, said good-by, and went out to clean his gun.
We did not think we should see him again. He
retook the outpost and had many more meals with
us. He would rise from broken English into
swift French — stories of the Congo, one night till
2 A.M. Always smoking a cigarette — his mus-
tache sometimes singed from the fire of the dimin-
ishing butt. For orderly, he had a black fat
Congo boy, in dark blue Belgian uniform, flat-
nosed, with wrinkles down the forehead. He
was Gilson's man, never looking at him in speak-
ing, and using an open vowel dialect. Before
220
HOW WAR SEEMS TO A WOMAN
one of the attacks, a soldier came to Gilson with
his wife's picture, watch, ring, and money, and
his home address.
"I 'm not going to come out," said the soldier.
It happened so.
The Commandant's pockets were heavy with
these mementoes of the predestined — the letters
of boys to their mothers. He had that tenderness
and agreeable sentiment which seem to go with
bravery. He filled his uniform with souvenirs
of pleasant times, a china slipper — our dinner
favor to him — a roadside weed, a paper napkin
from a happy luncheon — a score or more little
pieces of sentimental value. When he went into
dangerous action, he never ordered any one to fol-
low him. He called for volunteers, and was
grieved that it was the lads of sixteen and seven-
teen years that were always the first to offer.
We had grown to care for these men. From
the first, soldiers of France and Belgium had
given us courtesy. In Paris, it was a soldier who
stood in line for me, and got the paper. It was
a soldier who shared his food and wine on the
fourteen-hour trip from Paris to Dieppe — four
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hours in peace days, fourteen hours in mobiliza-
tion. It was a soldier who left the car and found
out the change of train and the hour — always a
soldier who did the helpful thing. It did not
require war to create their quality of friendliness
and unselfish courtesy.
How could Red Cross work be impersonal?
No one would go over to be shot at on an imper-
sonal errand of mercy. You risk yourself for
individual men, for men in whose cause you be-
lieve. Surely, the loyal brave German women
feel as we felt. Red Cross work is not only a
service to suffering flesh. It is work to remake a
soldier, who will make right prevail. The Red
Cross worker is aiming her rifle at the enemy by
every bandage she ties on wounded Belgians.
She is rebuilding the army. She is as efficient
and as deadly as the workman that makes the
powder, the chauffeur that drives it to the trench
in transports, and the gunner that shoots it
into the hostile line. The mother does not ex-
tend her motherliness to the destroyer of her
family. There is no hater like the mother when
she faces that which violates her brood. The
222
HOW WAR SEEMS TO A WOMAN
same mother instinct makes you take care of your
own, and fight for your own. We all of us would
go for a Belgian first, and tend to a Belgian first.
We would take one of our own by the roadside in
preference, if there was room only for one. But
if you brought in a German, wounded, he became
an individual in need of help. There was a high
pride in doing well by him. We would show
them of what stuff the Allies were made. Clear
of hate and bitterness, we had nothing but good
will for the gallant little German boys, who
smiled at us from their cots in Fumes hospital.
And who could be anything but kindly for the
patient German fathers of middle age, who lay
in pain and showed pictures of "Frau" and the
home country, where some of them would never
return. Two or three times, the Queen of the
Belgians stopped at our base hospital. She talked
with the wounded Germans exactly as she talked
to her own Belgians — the same modest courtesy
and gift of personal caring.
I think the key to our experience was the mother
instinct in the three women. What we tried to
do was to make a home out of an emergency sta-
223
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GOLDEN LADS
tion at the heart of war. We took hold of a
room knee-high with battered furniture and wet
plaster, cleaned it, spread army blankets on
springs, found a bowl and jug, and made a den for
the chauffeur. In our own room, we arranged an
old lamp, then a shade to soften the light. On a
mantel, were puttees, cold cream and a couple
of books; in the wall, nails for coats and scarfs.
The soldiers, entering, said it was homelike. It
was a rest after the dreariness of the trench.
We brought glass from Furnes, and patched the
windows. We dined, slept, lived, and tended
wounded men in the one room. In another room,
a shell had sprayed the ceiling, so we had to pull
the plaster down to the bare lathing. We com-
mandeered a stove from a ruined house. Night
after night, we carried a sick man there and had a
fire for him. We treated him for a bad throat,
and put him to bed. A man dripping from the
inundations, we dried out. For a soldier with
bruised feet, we prepared a pail of hot water, and
gave a thorough soaking.
In the early morning we took down the shut-
ters, carried our own coal, built our own fires,
224
HOW WAR SEEMS TO A WOMAN
brought water from a ditch, scrubbed table tops
and swept the floor, prepared tincture of iodine,
the bandages, and cotton wool. We went up the
road around 8.30, for the Germans had a habit
of shelling at 9 o'clock. Sometimes they broke
their rule, and began lopping them in at half-
past eight. Then we had to wait till ten. We
kept water hot for sterilizing instruments. We
sat around, reading, thinking, chatting, letter-writ-
ing, waiting for something to happen. There
would be long days of waiting. There were
days when there was no shelling. Besides the
wounded, we had visits from important person-
ages— the Mayor of Paris, the Queen of the Bel-
gians, officers from headquarters, Maxine Elliott.
For a very special supper, we would jug a Bel-
gian hare or cook curry and rice, and add beer,
jam, and black army bread. An officer gave
us an order for one hundred kilos of meat, and
we could send daily for it. On Christmas Day,
1914, for eight of us, we had plum puddings, a
bottle of port, a bottle of champagne, a tiny
pheasant and a small chicken, and a box of
candies. We had a steady stream of shells, and
225
GOLDEN LADS
a few wounded. It was a day of sunshine on a
light fall of snow.
I learned in the Pervyse work that an up-to-
date skirt is no good for a man's work. With
rain five days out of seven, rubber boots, breeches,
raincoat, two pairs of stockings, and three jerseys
are the correct costume. We were criticized for
going to Dunkirk in breeches. So I put on a
skirt one time when I went there for supplies. I
fell in alighting from the motor-car, collecting a
bigger crowd by sprawling than any of us had col-
lected by our uniform. Later, again in a skirt, I
jumped on a military motor-car, and could n't
climb the side. I had to pull my skirt up, and
climb over as a man climbs. If women are doing
the work of a man, they must have the dress of a
man.
That way of dressing and of living released
me from the sense of possession, once and for all.
When I first went to Belgium with a pair of
fleece-lined gloves, I was sure, if I ever lost that
pair, that they were irreplaceable. I lost them.
I lost article after article, and was freed from the
clinging. I lost a pin for the bodice. I left
226
HOW WAR SEEMS TO A WOMAN
my laundry with a washerwoman. Her village
was bombarded, and we had to move on. I lost
my kit. A woman has a tie-in with those mate-
rial things, and the new life brought freedom from
that.
I put on a skirt to return to London for a rest.
I found there people dressed modishly, and it
looked uncomfortable. Styles had been chang-
ing : women were in funny shoes and hats. I went
wondering that they could dress like that.
And then an overpowering desire for pretty
things came on me — for a piece of old lace, a pink
ribbon. After sleeping by night in the clothes
worn through the day, wearing the same two shirts
for four months, no pajamas, no sheets, with spots
of grease and blood on all the costume, I had a
longing for frivolous things, such as a pink tea
gown. Old slippers and a bath and shampoo
seemed good. I had a wholesome delight in a
modest clean blouse and in buying a new frock.
I returned to Pervyse. The Germans changed
their range : an evening, a morning and an after-
noon— three separate bombardments with heavy
shells. The wounded were brought in. Nearly
227
GOLDEN LADS
every one died. We piled them together, any-
where that they wouldn't be tripped over. To
the back kitchen we carried the bodies of two
boys. One of the orderlies knew them. He went
in with us to remove the trinkets from their necks.
Every now and then, he went back again, to look
at them. They were very beautiful, young,
healthy, lying there together in the back kitchen.
It was a quiet half hour for us, after luncheon.
The doctors and nurses were reading or smoking.
I was writing a letter.
A shell drove itself through the back kitchen
wall and exploded over the dead boys, bringing
rafters and splintered glass and bricks down on
them. My pencil slid diagonally across the sheet,
and I got up. Our two orderlies and three
soldiers rushed in, holding their eyes from the
blue fumes of the explosion. When one shell
comes, the chances are that it will be followed by
three more, aimed at the same place. It had
always been my philosophy that it is better to be
"pinked" in the house than on the road, but not
on this particular day. An army ambulance was
standing opposite our door, with its nose turned
228
POSTCARDS SKETCHED AXD BLOCKED BY A BELGIAN
WORKMAN, A. VAN DOORNE.
Belgium suffering, but united, is the idea he brings out in his work.
HOW WAR SEEMS TO A WOMAN
toward the trenches. The Belgian driver rushed
for the door, slammed it shut because of the shells,
opened it again. He ran to the car, cranked it,
turned it around. We stood in the doorway and
waited, watching the shells dropping with a wail,
tearing up the road here, then there. After that
we moved back to La Panne.
There I stayed on with Miss Georgie Fyfe,
who is doing such excellent work among the Bel-
gian refugees. She is chief of the evacuation of
civilians who still remain in the bombarded vil-
lages and farms. She brings the old and the sick
and the children out of shell fire and finds them
safe homes. To the Refugee House she takes the
little ones to be cared for till there are fifty.
Then she sends them to Switzerland, where
brothers and sisters are kept unseparated in family
groups until the war is over. The Queen busies
herself with these children. For the newest gen-
eration of Belgians Miss Fyfe has established a
Maternity Hospital. Nearly one hundred babies
have come to live there.
It was my work to keep track of clothes and
supplies. On a flying trip to Paris, I told the
231
GOLDEN LADS
American Relief Committee the story of this
work, and Geoffrey Dodge sent thirty complete
layettes, bran-new, four big cases, four gunny-
sack bags, full of clothing for men, women, and
children, special brands of milk for young mothers
in our maternity hospital. Later, he sent four
more sacks and four great wooden cases.
We used to tramp through many fields, over a
single plank bridging the ditches, to reach the
lonely shelled farm, and persuade the stubborn,
unimaginative Flemish parents to give up their
children for a safe home. One mother had a yoke
around her neck, and two heavy pails.
"When can I send my child*?" she asked.
She had already sent two and had received
happy letters from them. Other mothers are sus-
picious of us, and flatly refuse, keeping their chil-
dren in the danger zone till death comes. During
a shelling, the cure would telephone for our ambu-
lance. He would collect the little ones and sick
old people. Miss Fyfe could persuade them to
come more easily when the shells were falling.
At the moment of parting, everybody cries. The
children are dressed. The one best thing they
232
HOW WAR SEEMS TO A WOMAN
own is put on — a pair of shoes from the attic, stiff
new shoes, worked on the little feet unused to
shoes. Out of a family of ten children we would
win perhaps three. Back across the fields they
trooped to our car, clean faces, matted dirty hair,
their wee bundle tied up in a colored handker-
chief, no hats, under the loose dark shirt a tiny
Catholic charm. We lifted the little people into
the big yellow ambulance — big brother and sis-
ter, sitting at the end to pin them in. We carried
crackers and chocolate. They are soon happy
with the sweets, chattering, enjoying their first
motor-car ride, and eager for the new life.
233
LES TRAVAILLEURS DE LA GUERRE
The boy soldier is willing to make any day his last if
it is a good day. It is not so with the middle-aged man.
He is puzzled by the war. What he has to struggle with
more than bodily weakness is the malady of thought.
Is the bloody business worth while ?
I SAW him first, my middle-aged man, one
afternoon on the boards of an improvised
stage in the sand-dunes of Belgium. On that last
thin strip of the shattered kingdom English and
French and Belgians were grimly massed. He
was a Frenchman, and he was cheering up his com-
rades. With shining black hair and volatile face,
he played many parts that day. He recited
sprightly verses of Parisian life. He carried on
amazing twenty-minute dialogues with himself,
mimicking the voice of girl and woman, bully and
dandy. His audience had come in stale from
the everlasting spading and marching. They
brightened visibly under his gaiety. If he cared
to make that effort in the saddened place, they
234
LES TRAVAILLEURS DE LA GUERRE
were ready to respond. When he dismissed them,
the last flash of him was of a smiling, rollicking
improvisator, bowing himself over to the applause
till his black hair was level with our eyes.
And then next day as I sat in my ambulance,
waiting orders, he trudged by in his blue, "the
color of heaven" once, but musty now from nights
under the rain. His head of hair, which the
glossy black wig had covered, was gray-white.
The sparkling, pantomimic face had dropped into
wrinkles. He was patient and old and tired.
Perhaps he, too, would have been glad of some
one to cheer him up. He was just one more terri-
torial— trench-digger and sentry and filler-in.
He became for me the type of all those faithful,
plodding soldiers whose first strength is spent. In
him was gathered up all that fatigue and sadness
of men for whom no glamour remains.
They went past me every day, hundreds of
them, padding down the Nieuport road, their feet
tired from service and their boots road-worn —
crowds of men beyond numbering, as far as one
could see into the dry, volleying dust and beyond
the dust; men coming toward me, a nation of
235
GOLDEN LADS
them. They came at a long, uneven jog, a clut-
tered walk. Every figure was sprinkled and en-
circled by dust — dust on their gray temples, and
on their wet, streaming faces, dust coming up in
puffs from their shuffling feet, too tired to lift
clear of the heavy roadbed. There was a hot,
pitiless sun, and every man of them was shrouded
in the long, heavy winter coat, as soggy as a horse
blanket, and with thick leather gaiters, loose, flap-
ping, swathing their legs as if with bandages. On
the man's back was a pack, with the huge swell of
the blanket rising up beyond the neck and gener-
ating heat-waves; a loaf of tough black bread fast-
ened upon the knapsack or tied inside a faded red
handkerchief; and a dingy, scarred tin Billy-can.
At his shapeless, rolling waist his belt hung heavy
with a bayonet in its casing. On the shoulder
rested a dirt-caked spade, with a clanking of
metal where the bayonet and the Billy-can struck
the handle of the spade. Under a peaked cap
showed the bearded face and the white of strained
eyes gleaming through dust and sweat. The man
was too tired to smile and talk. The weight of
the pack, the weight of the clothes, the dust, the
236
LES TRAVAILLEURS DE LA GUERRE
smiting sun — all weighted down the man, leaving
every line in his body sagging and drooping with
weariness.
These are the men that spade the trenches, drive
the food-transports and ammunition-wagons, and
carry through the detail duties of small honor that
the army may prosper. When has it happened
before that the older generation holds up the
hands of the young? At the western front they
stand fast that the youth may go forward. They
fill in the shell-holes to make a straight path for
less-tired feet. They drive up food to give good
heart to boys.
War is easy for the young. The boy soldier
is willing to make any day his last if it is a good
day. It is not so with the middle-aged man. He
is puzzled by the war. What he has to struggle
with more than bodily weakness is the malady of
thought. Is the bloody business worth while?
Is there any far-off divine event which his death
will hasten? The wines of France are good
wines, and his home in fertile Normandy was
pleasant.
As we stood in the street in the sun one hot
237
GOLDEN LADS
afternoon, four men came carrying a wounded
man. The stretcher was growing red under its
burden. The man's face was greenish white, with
a stubble of beard. The flesh of his body was as
white as snow from loss of blood. It was torn
at the chest and sides. They carried him to the
dressing-station, and half an hour later lifted him
into our car. We carried him in for two miles.
Four flies fed on the red rim of his closed left
eye. He lay silent, motionless. Only a slight
flutter of the coverlet, made by his breathing, gave
a sign of life. At the Red Cross post we stopped.
The coverlet still slightly rose and fell. The
doctor, brown-bearded, in white linen, stepped
into the car, tapped the man's wrist, tested his
pulse, put a hand over his heart. Then the doc-
tor muttered, drew the coverlet over the greenish-
white face, and ordered the marines to remove
him. In the moment of arrival the wounded man
had died.
In the courtyard next our post two men were
carrying in long strips of wood. This wood was
for coffins, and one of them would be his.
A funeral passes our car, one every day, some-
238
LES TRAVAILLEURS DE LA GUERRE
times two: a wooden cross in front, carried by a
soldier; the white-robed chaplain chanting; the
box of light wood, on a frame of black ; the coffin
draped in the tricolor, a squad of twenty soldiers
following the dead. That is the funeral of the
middle-aged man. There is no time wasted on
him in the brisk business of war ; but his comrades
bury him. One in particular faithful at funerals
I had learned to know — M. Le Doze. War itself
is so little the respecter of persons that this man
had found himself of value in paying the last
small honor to the obscure dead as they were
carried from his Red Cross post to the burial-
ground. One hopes that he will receive no hasty
trench burial when his own time comes.
I cannot write of the middle-aged man of the
Belgians because he has been killed. That first
mixed army, which in thin line opposed its body
to an immense machine, was crushed by weight
and momentum. Little is left but a memory.
But I shall not forget the veteran officer of the
first army, near Lokeren, who kept his men under
cover while he ran out into the middle of the road
to see if the Uhlans were coming. The only Bel-
239
GOLDEN LADS
gian army to-day is an army of boys. Recently
we had a letter from Andre Simon t, of the "Obu-
siers Lourdes, Beiges," and he wrote :
If you promise me you will come back for next sum-
mer, I won't get pinked. If I ever do, it does n't matter.
I have had twenty years of very happy life.
If he were forty-five, he would say, as a French
officer at Coxyde said to me :
"Four months, and I have n't heard from my
wife and children. We had a pleasant home. I
was well to do. I miss the good wines of my
cellar. This beer is sour. We have done our
best, we French, our utmost, and it is n't quite
enough. We have made a supreme effort, but it
has n't cleared the enemy from our country. La
guerre — c'est triste"
He, too, fights on, but that overflow of vitality
does not visit him, as it comes to the youngsters
of the first line. It is easy for the boys of Brit-
tany to die, those sailors with a rifle, the stanch
Fusiliers Marins, who, outnumbered, held fast at
Melle and Dixmude, and for twelve months made
Nieuport, the extreme end of the western battle-
240
LES TRAVAILLEURS DE LA GUERRE
line, a great rock. It is easy, because there is a
glory in the eyes of boys. But the older man lives
with second thoughts, with a subdued philosophy,
a love of security. He is married, with a child
or two; his garden is warm in the afternoon sun.
He turns wistfully to the young, who are so sure,
to cheer him. With him it is bloodshed, the
moaning of shell-fire, and harsh command.
One afternoon at Coxyde, in the camp of the
middle-aged — the territorials — an open-air enter-
tainment was given. Massed up the side of a
sand-dune, row on row, were the bearded men, two
thousand of them. There were flashes of youth,
of course — marines in dark blue, with jaunty
round hat with fluffy red centerpiece; Zouaves
with dusky Algerian skin, yellow-sorrel jacket,
and baggy harem trousers ; Belgians in fresh khaki
uniform; and Red Cross British Quakers. But
the mass of the men were middle-aged — terri-
torials, with the light-blue long-coat, good for all
weathers and the sharp night, and the peaked
cap. Over the top of the dune where the soldiers
sat an observation balloon was suspended in a
cloudless blue sky, like a huge yellow caterpillar.
241
GOLDEN LADS
Beyond the pasteboard stage, high on a western
dune, two sentries stood with their bayonets
touched by sunlight. To the south rose a monu-
ment to the territorial dead. To the north an
aeroplane flashed along the line, full speed, while
gun after gun threw shrapnel at it.
As I looked on the people, suddenly I thought
of the Sermon on the Mount, with the multitude
spread about, tier on tier, hungry for more than
bread. It was a scene of summer beauty, with
the glory of the sky thrown in, and every now
and then the music of the heart. Half the songs
of the afternoon were gay, and half were sad
with long enduring, and the memory of the dear
ones distant and of the many dead. Not in light-
ness or ignorance were these men making war.
When I saw the multitude and how they hun-
gered, I wished that Bernhardt could come to
them in the dunes and express in power what is
only hinted at by humble voices. I thought how
everywhere we wait for some supreme one to
gather up the hope of the nations and the anguish
of the individual, and make a music that will send
us forward to the Rhine.
242
LES TRAVAILLEURS DE LA GUERRE
But a better thing than that took place. One
of their own came and shaped their suffering into
song. And together, he and they, they made a
song that is close to the great experience of war.
A Belgian, one of the boy soldiers, came forward
to sing to the bearded men. And the song that
he sang was "La valse des obus" — "The Dance of
the Shells."
"Dear friends, I'm going to sing you some
rhymes on the war at the Yser."
The men to whom he was singing had been
holding the Yser for ten months.
"I want you to know that life in the trenches,
night by night, is n't gay."
Two thousand men, unshaved and tousled, with
pain in their joints from those trench nights, were
listening.
"As soon as you get there, you must set to work.
It does n't matter whether it 's a black night or a
full moon; without making a sound, close to the
enemy, you must fill the sand-bags for the fortifi-
cations."
Every man on the hill had been doing just that
thing for a year.
243
GOLDEN LADS
Then came his chorus:
"Every time we are in the trenches, Crack!
There breaks the shell."
But his French has a verve that no literal trans-
lation will give. Let us take it as he sang it :
"Crack! II tombe des obus," sang the slight
young Belgian, leaning out toward the two thou-
sand men of many colors, many nations ; and soon
the sky in the north was spotted with white clouds
of shrapnel-smoke.
"There we are, all of us, crouching with bent
back — Crack! Once more an obus. The shrap-
nel, which try to stop us at our job, drive us out;
but the things that bore us still more — Crack! —
are just those obus."
With each "Crack! II tombe des obus," the
big bass-drum boomed like the shell he sang of.
His voice was as tense and metallic as a taut
string, and he snapped out the lilting line in swift
staccato as if he were flaying his audience with
a whip. Man after man on the hillside took up
the irresistible rhythm in an undertone, and
"Cracked" with the singer. In front of me was
being created a folk-song. The bitterness and
244
LES TRAVAILLEURS DE LA GUERRE
glory of their life were being told to them, and
they were hearing the singer gladly. Their
leader was lifting the dreary trench night and
death itself into a surmounting and joyous thing.
"When you 've made your entrenchment, then
you must go and guard it without preliminaries.
All right; go ahead. But just as you're mov-
ing, you have to squat down for a day and a night
— yes, for a full twenty-four hours — because
things are hot. Somebody gives you half a drop
of coffee. Thirst torments you. The powder-
fumes choke you."
Here and there in the crowd, listening intently,
men were stirring. The lad was speaking to the
exact intimate detail of their experience. This
was the life they knew. What would he make
of it?
"Despite our sufferings, we cherish the hope
some day of returning and finding our parents,
our wives, and our little ones. Yes, that is my
hope, my joyous hope. But to come to that day,
so like a dream, we must be of good cheer. It
is only by enduring patience, full of confidence,
that we shall force back our oppressors. To chase
245
GOLDEN LADS
away those cursed Prussians — Crack! We need
the obus. My captain calling, 'Crack! More,
still more of those obus!' Giving them the
bayonet in the bowels, we shall chase them clean
beyond the Rhine. And our victory will be won
to the waltz of the obus."
It was a song out of the heart of an uncon-
querable boy. It climbed the hillock to the top.
The response was the answer of men moved.
His song told them why they fought on. There
is a Belgium, not under an alien rule, which the
shells have not shattered, and that dear kingdom
is still uninvaded. The mother would rather
lose her husband and her son than lose the France
that made them. Their earthly presence is less
precious than the spirit that passed into them out
of France. That is why these weary men con-
tinue their fight. The issue will rest in something
more than a matter of mathematics. It is the last
stand of the human spirit.
What is this idea of country, so passionately
held, that the women walk to the city gates with
son and husband and send them out to die? It
is the aspect of nature shared in by folk of one
246
LES TRAVAILLEURS DE LA GUERRE
blood, an arrangement of hill and pasture which
grew dear from early years, sounds and echoes
of sound that come from remembered places. It
is the look of a land that is your land, the light
that flickers in an English lane, the bells that used
to ring in Bruges.
LA VALSE DES OBUS
Chers amis, je vais
Vous chanter des couplets,
Sur la guerre,
A 1'Yser.
Pour vous faire savoir,
Que la vie, tous les soirs,
Aux tranchees,
N'est pas gaie.
A peine arrive,
'1 Faut aller travailler.
Qu'il fasse noir' ou qu'il y ait clair de lune,
Et sans fair' du bruit,
Nous aliens pres de 1'ennemi,
Remplir des sacs pour fair' des abris.
IT £T IJe REFRAIN
Chaqu' fois que nous sommes aux tranchees,
Crack! II tombe des obus.
247
GOLDEN LADS
Nous sommes tous la, le dos courbee
Crack! Encore un obus.
Les shrapnels pour nous divetir,
Au travail, nous font deguerpir.
Mais, et qui nous ennuie le plus,
Crack ! se sont les obus.
II
L'abri termine,
'1 Faut aller 1'occuper,
Sans fagons.
Allez-donc.
Pas moyen d' se bouger
Done, on doit y tester
Accroupi,
Jour et nuit,
Pendant la chaleur,
Pour passer vingt-quatr' heures.
On nous donn' une d'mi gourde de cafe.
La soif nous tourmente,
Et la poudre asphyxiante,
Nous etouffe au dessus du marche.
in
Malgre nos souffrances,
Nous gardons 1'esperance
D' voir le jour,
De notr' retour
De r'trouver nos parents,
248
LES TRAVAILLEURS DE LA GUERRE
Nos femmes et nos enfants.
Plein de joie,
Oui ma foi,
Mais pour arriver,
A ce jour tant reve,
Nous devons tous y mettre du coeur,
C'est avec patience,
Et plein de confiance,
Que nous repouss'rons les oppresseurs.
REFRAIN
Pour chasser ces maudits All'mands
Crack ! II faut des obus.
En plein dedans mon commandant,
Crack! Encore des obus.
Et la baionnett' dans les reins,
Nous les chass'rons au dela du Rhin.
La victoire des Allies s'ra due
A la valse des obus.
249
There is little value in telling of suffering un-
less something can be done about it. So I close
this book with an appeal for help in a worthy
work.
251
REMAKING FRANCE
THERE was a young peasant farmer who
went out with his fellows, and stopped the
most powerful and perfectly equipped army of
history. He saved France, and the cause of gen-
tleness and liberty. He did it by the French
blood in him — in gay courage and endurance^
He was happy in doing it, or, if not happy, yet
glorious. But he paid the price. The enemy
artillery sent a splinter of shell that mangled his
arm. He lay out through the long night on the
rich infected soil. Then the stretcher bearers
found him and lifted him to the car, and car-
ried him to the field hospital. There they had to-
operate swiftly, for infection was spreading. So
he was no longer a whole man, but he was still
of good spirit, for he had done his bit for France.
Then they bore him to a base hospital, where he
had white sheets and a wholesome nurse. He
lay there weak and content. Every one was good
to him. But there came a day when they told
253
GOLDEN LADS
him he must leave to make room for the fresher
cases of need. So he was turned loose into a
world that had no further use for him. A crip-
ple, he could n't fight and he could n't work, for
his job needed two arms, and he had given one,
up yonder on the Marne. He drifted from shop
to shop in Paris. But he did n't know a trade.
Life was through with him, so one day, he shot
himself.
That, we learn from authoritative sources, is
the story of more than one broken soldier of
Joffre's army.
To be shot clean dead is an easier fate than to
be turned loose into life, a cripple, who must beg
his way about. Shall these men who have de-
fended France be left to rot*? All they ask
is to be allowed to work. It is gallant and
stirring to fight, and when wounded the soldier
is tenderly cared for. But when he comes out,
broken, he faces the bitterest thing in war. After
the hospital — what1? Too bad, he 's hurt — but
there is no room in the trades for any but a trained
man.
Why not train him1? Why not teach him a
254
REMAKING FRANCE
trade? Build a bridge that will lead him from
the hospital over into normal life. That is bet-
ter than throwing him out among the derelicts.
Pauperism is an ill reward for the service that
shattered him, and it is poor business for a world
that needs workers. If these crippled ones are not
permitted to reconstruct their working life, the
French nation will be dragged down by the multi-
tude of maimed unemployable men, who are be-
ing turned loose from the hospitals — unfit to
fight, untrained to work: a new and ever-increas-
ing Army of The Miserable. The stout back-
bone and stanch spirit of even France will be
snapped by this dead-weight of suffering.
In our field hospital at Furnes, we had one
ward where a wave of gaiety swept the twenty
beds each morning. It came when the leg of the
bearded man was dressed by the nurse. He
thrust it out from under the covering: a raw
stump, off above the ankle. It was an old wound,
gone sallow with the skin lapped over. The
men in the cots close by shouted with laughter
at the look of it, and the man himself laughed
till he brought pain to the wound. Then he
255
GOLDEN LADS
would lay hold of the sides of the bed to control
his merriment. The dressing proceeded, with
brisk comment from the wardful of men, and swift
answers from the patient under treatment. The
grim wound had so obviously made an end of the
activity of that particular member and, as is war's
way, had done it so evilly, with such absence of
beauty, that only the human spirit could cover
that hurt. So he and his comrades had made it
the object of gaiety.
For legless men, there are a dozen trades open,
if they are trained. They can be made into tail-
ors, typists, mechanicians. The soldiers' schools,
already established, report success in shoemaking,
for instance. The director sends us this word : —
"From the first we had foreseen for this the
greatest success — the results have surpassed our
hopes. We are obliged to double the size of the
building, and increase the number of professors.
"Why?
"Because, more than any other profession, that
of shoemaking is the most feasible in the country,
in the village, in the small hamlet. This is the
one desire of most of these wounded soldiers:
256
REMAKING FRANCE
before everything, they wish to be able to re-
turn to their homes. And all the more if a wife
and children wait them there, in a little house
with a patch of garden. Out of our fifty men
now learning shoemaking, twenty-nine were once
sturdy farm laborers. The profession is not fa-
tiguing and, in spite of our fears, not one of our
leg-amputated men has given up his apprentice-
ship on account of fatigue or physical inability.'*
Very many of the soldiers are maimed in hand
or arm. On the broad beach of La Panne, in
front of the Ocean Hospital of Dr. Depage, a
young soldier talked with my wife one afternoon.
Early in the war his right arm had been shot
through the bicep muscle. He had been sent to
London, where a specialist with infinite care linked
the nerves together. Daily the wounded boy
willed strength into the broken member, till at last
he found he could move the little finger. It was
his hope to bring action back to the entire hand,
finger by finger.
"You can't do anything — you can't even write,"
they said to him. So he met that, by schooling
his left hand to write.
257
GOLDEN LADS
"Your fighting days are over," they said. He
went to a shooting gallery, and with his left arm
learned how to hold a rifle and aim it. Through
the four months of his convalescence he practised
to be worthy of the front line. The military au-
thorities could not put up an objection that he did
not meet. So he won his way back to the Yser
trenches. And there he had received his second
hurt and this time the enemy wounded him thor-
oughly. And now he was sitting on the sands
wondering what the future held for him.
Spirit like that does not deserve to be broken
by despair. Apparatus has been devised to sup-
ply the missing section of the arm, and such a
trade as toy-making offers a livelihood. It is car-
ried on with a sense of fun even in the absence
of all previous education. One-armed men are
largely employed in it. Let us enter the training
shop at Lyon, and watch the work. The wood is
being shot out from the sawing-machine in thin
strips and planed on both sides. This is being
done by a man, who used to earn his living
as a packer, and suffered an amputation of his
right leg. The boards are assembled in thick-
258
REMAKING FRANCE
nesses of twenty, and cut out by a "ribbon saw."
This is the occupation of a former tile layer, with
his left leg gone. Others employed in the process
are one-armed men.
Of carpentry the report from the men is this :
"This work seems to generate good humor and
liveliness. For this profession two arms are al-
most necessary. It can be practised by a man
whose leg has been amputated, preferably the
right leg, for the resting point, in handling the
plane, is on the left leg. However, we cannot
forget that one-armed men have achieved wonder-
ful results."
The profits of the work are divided in full
among the pupils as soon as they have reached
the period of production. Each section has its in-
dividual fund box. The older members divide
among themselves two thirds of the gain. The
more recently trained take the remainder. The
new apprentices have nothing, because they make
no finished product as yet. That was the rule of
the shop. But certain sections petitioned that the
profits should be equally divided among all, with-
out distinction. They said that among the new-
259
GOLDEN LADS
comers there were many as needy as the older ap-
prentices.
The director says:
"This request came from too noble a sentiment
not to be granted, especially as in this way we
are certain that our pupils will see to the discipline
of the workshops, being the first concerned that no
one shall shirk."
He adds:
"I wish to cite an incident. One of the pu-
pils of the group of shoemakers, having been
obliged to remain over a month in the hospital,
had his share fall to nothing. His comrades got
together and raised among themselves a sum equal
to their earnings, so that his enforced absence
would not cause him to suffer any loss. These
are features one is happy to note, because they
reveal qualities of heart in our pupils, much to be
appreciated in those who have suffered, and be-
cause they show that our efforts have contributed
to keep around them an atmosphere where these
qualities can develop."
The war has been ingenious in devising cruel
hurts, robbing the painter of his hand, the mu-
260
REMAKING FRANCE
sician of his arm, the horseman of his leg. It has
taken the peasant from his farm, and the mason
from his building. Their suffering has enriched
them with the very quality that will make them
useful citizens, if they can be set to work, if only
some one will show them what to do. For each
of these men there is an answer for his wrecked
life, and the answer is found in these workshops
where disabled soldiers can learn- the new trade
fitted to their crippled condition.
It costs only four to five francs a day to sup-
port the man during his period of education.
The length of time of his tuition depends on the
man and his trade — sometimes three months,
sometimes six months. One hundred dollars will
meet the average of all cases. The Americans in
Paris raised $20,000 immediately on learning of
this need. In our country we are starting the
"American Committee for Training in Suitable
Trades the Maimed Soldiers of France." Mrs.
Edmund Lincoln Baylies is chairman for the
United States. Her address is Room B, Plaza
Hotel, New York.
We have been owing France through a hun-
261
GOLDEN LADS
dred years for that little matter of first aid in our
American Revolution. Here is an admirable
chance to show we are still warmed by the love
and succor she rendered us then.
At this moment 30,000 maimed soldiers are
asking for work; 30,000 jobs are ready for them.
The employers of France are holding the positions
open, because they need these workers. Only the
training is lacking. This society to train maimed
soldiers is not in competiton with any existing
form of relief work: it supplements all the others
— ambulances and hospitals and dressing stations.
They are temporary, bridging the month of calam-
ity. This gives back to the men the ten, twenty,
thirty years of life still remaining. They must
not remain the victims of their own heroism.
They ask only to be permitted to go on with their
work for France. They will serve in the shop
and the factory as they have served at the Aisne
and the Yser. This is a charity to do away with
the need of charity. It is help that leads directly
to self-help.
THE END
262
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Butterfly Man, The George Ban McCutcheon
By Right of Purchase. . „ Harold Bindloss
Cabbages and Kings O. Henry
Cab No. 44 /?. P. Foster
Calling of Dan Matthews, The Harold Bell Wright
Cape Cod Stories Joseph C Lincoln
Cap'n Eri Joseph C. Lincoln
Cap'n Warren's Wards Joseph C. Lincoln
Carayaners. .Author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden
Cardigan Robert W. Chambers
Carmen {Ceraldine Farrar Edition)
Carpet From Bagdad, The Harold MacGratk
Cash Intrigue, The George Randolph Chester
Castle by the Sea, The H. B. M. Watson
Claw, The Cynthia Stockley
C. O. D Natalie Sumner Lincoln
Colonial Free Lance, A Chauncey O. Hotchkiss
Coming of the Law, The Chas. A. Seltzer
Conquest of Canaan, The Booth Tarkington
Conspirators, The Robert W. Chambers
Counsel for the Defense Leroy Scott
Crime Doctor, The E. W. Hornung
Cry in the Wilderness, A Mary E. Waller
Cynthia of the Minute Louis Joseph Vance
Dark Hollow, The Anna Katharine Green
Dave's Daughter Patience Bevier Cole
Day of Days, The Louis Joseph Vance
Day of the Dog, The George Barr McCutcheon
Depot Master, The r Joseph C. Lincoln
Des|r?d '7^man, The Will N. Harben
Destroying Angel, The Louis Joseph Vance
Diamond Master, The Jacques Futrelle
Sixie Hart Will N. tfarben
El Dorado Baroness Orczy
Elusive Lsabel Jacques Futrelle
Popular Copyright Novels
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Empty Pockets Rupert Hughes
Enchanted Hat, The Harold MacGrath
Eye of Dread, The Payne Erskine
Eyes of the World, The Harold Bell Wright
Far Horizon, The Lucas Malet
54-40 or Fight Emerson Hough
Fighting Chance, The Robert W. Chambers
Financier, The Theodore Dreiser
Flamsted Quarries Mary E. Waller
Flying Mercury, The Eleanor M. Ingram
For a Maiden Brave Chauncey C. Hotchkiss
Four Million, The O. Henry
Four Pool's Mystery, The Jean Webster
Fruitful Vine, The Robert Hichens
Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford G. R. Chester
Gilbert Neal Will N. Harben
Girl From His Town, The Marie Van Vorst
Girl of the Blue Ridge, A Payne Erskine
Girl Who Lived in the Woods, The M. B. Cooke
Girl Who Won, The Beth Ellis
Glory ef Clementina, The Wm. J. Locke
Glory of the Conquered, The Susan Glaspell
God's Country and the Woman /. O. Cunvood
God's Good Man Marie Corelli
Going Some Rex Beach
Gold Bag, The Carolyn Wells
Golden Web, The Anthony Partridge
Gordon Craig Randall Parrish
Grey friars Bobby Eleanor Atkinson
Guests of Hercules C. N. and A. M. Williamson
Halcyone Elinor Glyn
Happy Island (Sequel to Uncle William) /. Lee
Havoc E. Phillips Oppenheim
Heart of the Desert, The Honore Willsie
Heart of the Hills, The John Fox, Jr.
Heart of Philura Florence Morse Kingsley
Heather-Moon, The C. N. and A. M. Williamson
Her Infinite Variety Brand Whitlock
Her Weight in Gold George Barr McCutcheon
Herb of Grace Rosa Nouchette Carey
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Hidden Children, The Robert W. Chambers
Highway of Fate, The Rosa N. Carey
Homesteaders, The Kate and Virgil D, Boyles
Hoosier Volunteer, The Kate and Virgil D. Boyles
Hopalong Cassidy Clarence E. Mulford
House of Happiness, The Kate Langley Bosher
House of the Whispering Pines A. K. Green
Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker 5. W. Mitchell, M.D.
Husbands of Edith, The George Barr McCutcheon
Illustrious Prince, The E Phillips Oppenheim
Imposter, The John Reed Scott
In Defiance of the King ,Chauncey C. Hotchkiss
Indifference of Juliet, The Grace S. Richmond
Inez (111. Ed.) Augusta J. Evans
Infelice Augusta Evans Wilson
Initials Only Anna Katharine Green
Innocent Marie Corelli
Intriguers, The Harold Bindloss
Iron Trail, The Rex Beach
Iron Woman, The Margaret Deland
Ishmael (111.) Mrs. Soathworth
Island of Regeneration, The Cyrus Townsend Brady
Island of the Stairs, The Cyrus Townsend Brady
Japonette Robert W. Chambers
Jane Cable George Barr McCutcheon
Jeanne of the Marshes E. Phillips Oppenheim
Jennie Gerhardt Theodore Dreiser
Joyful Heatherby Payne Erskine
Jude the Obscure Thomas Hardy
Judgment House, The Gilbert Parker
Keith of the Border Randall Parrish
Kent Knowles: "Quahaug" Joseph C. Lincoln
Kingsmead Bettina Von Hutten
Knave of Diamonds, The Ethel M. Dell
Ladder of Swords, A Gilbert Parker
Lady and the Pirate, The Emerson Hough
Lady Betty Across the Water C. N. and A. M. Williamson
Lady Merton, Colonist Mrs. Humphry Ward
Land of Long Ago, The Eliza Calvert Hall
Last Shot, The Frederick N, Palmer,
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Last Trail, The (new edition) Zane Grey
Last Voyage of the Donna Isabel Randall Parrish
Laughing Cavalier, The Baroness Orczy
Life Mask, The Author of "To M. L. G."
Lighted Way, The E. Phillips Oppenheim
Lin McLean Owen Wister
Little Brown Jug at Kildare Meredith Nicholson
Lone Wolf, The Louis Joseph Vance
Lonesome Land B M. Bower
Lord Loveland Discovers America.
C. N. and A. M. Williamson
Lorraine Robert W. Chambers
Lost Ambassador E. Phillips Oppenheim
Lost Road, The Richard Harding Davis
Lost World, The A. Conan Doyle
Loves of Lady Arabella Mollie Elliott Seawett
Loves of Miss Anne, The S. R. Crockett
Love Under Fire Randall Parrish
Macaria (111. Ed.) Augusta J. Evans
Mademoisel'e Celeste Adele F. Knight
Maids of Paradise, The Robert W. Chambers
Maid of the Forest, The Randall Parrish
Maid of the Whispering Hills Vingie E. Roe
Mam' Linda Will N. Harben
Man Outside, The Wyndham Martyn
Marriage H. G. Wells
Marriage a la Mode Mrs. Humphry Ward
Marriage of Theodora, The Mollie Elliott Seawell
Mary Moreland Marie Van Vorst
Master Mummer, The E. Phillips Oppenheim
Max Katherine Cecil Thurston
Maxwell Mystery, The 0 . . . . Carolyn Wells
Mediator, The Roy Norton
Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes A. Conan Doyle
Mischief Maker, The , E. Phillips Oppenheim
Miss Gibbie Gault Kate Langley Bosher
Miss Philura's Wedding Gown F. M. Kingsley
Miss Selina Lue Maria Thompson Daviess
Molly McDonald Randall Parrish
Money Moon, The Jeffery Farnol
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Motor Maid, The C. N. and A. M. Williamson
Moth, The William Dana Orcatt
Mountain Girl, The Payne Erskine
Mr. Bingle George Ban McCutcheon
Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo E. Phillips Oppenheim
Mr. Pratt Joseph C. Lincoln
Mr. Pratt's Patients Joseph C. Lincoln
Mrs. Red Pepper Grace S. Richmond
My Demon Motor Boat George Fitch.
My Friend the Chauffeur. . . .C. N. and A. M. Williamson
My Lady Caprice Jeffrey Farnol
My Lady of Doubt Randall Parrish
My Lady of the North Randall Parrish
My Lady of the South Randall Parrish
Mystery Tales Edgar Allan Poe
Ne'er-Do-Well, The Rex Beach
Net, The Rex Beach
New Clarion, The Will N. Harben
Night Riders, The Ridgwell Cullum
Night Watches W. W. Jacobs
Officer 666 B. W. Currie and A. McHugh
Once Upon a Time Richard Harding Davis
One Braver Thing Richard Dehan
One Way Trail, The Ridgwell Cullum
Otherwise Phyllis Meredith Nicholson
Out of the Primitive .Robert Ames Bennet
Pair of Silk Stockings Cyril Harcourt
Palace of Darkened Windows M. H. Bradley
Pardners Rex Beach
Parrot & Co Harold MacGrath
Partners of the Tide Joseph C. Lincoln
Passionate Friends, The H. G. Wells
Patience of John Moreland, The Mary Dillon
Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail Ralph Connor
Paul Anthony, Christian Hiram W Hayes
People's Man, A E. Phillips Oppenheim
Perch of the Devil Gertrude Atherton
Peter Ruff E. Phillips Oppenheim
PhilHp Steele James Oliver Curwood
Phra the Phoenician Edwin L. Arnold
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