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WITH THE FRENCH
IN FRANCE AND SALONIKA

General Sarrail, commanding the Allied armies in Greece,
making his first landing in Salonika.

IN FRANCE AND
SALONIKA

RICHARD HARDING DAVIS

AUTHOR OF " WITH THE AIJAR8 "

ILLUSTRATED

Published April. 1916

TO THE MEMORY

OP
JUSTUS MILES FORMAN

PREFACE

THIS book was written during the three
last months of 1915 and the first month of
this year in the form of letters from France,
Greece, Serbia, and England. The writer
visited ten of the twelve sectors of the
French front, seeing most of them from the
first trench, and was also on the French-
British front in the Balkans. Outside of
Paris the French cities visited were Verdun,
Amiens, St. Die, Arras, Chalons, Nancy, and
Rheims. What he saw served to strengthen
his admiration for the French army and, as
individuals and as a nation, for the French
people, and to increase his confidence in the
ultimate success of their arms.

This success he believes would come sooner
were all the fighting concentrated in Europe.
To scatter the forces of the Allies in expedi-

vii

PREFACE

tions overseas, he submits, only weakens the
main attack and the final victory. At the
present moment, outside of her armies for
defense in England and for offense in Flan-
ders, Great Britain is supporting armies in
Egypt, German East Africa, Salonika, and
Mesopotamia. No one who has seen in
actual being one of these vast expeditions,
any one of which in the past would have
commanded the interest of the entire world,
can appreciate how seriously they cripple
the main offensive. Each robs it of hundreds
of thousands of men needed in the trenches,
of the transports required to carry those
men, of war-ships to convoy them, of hospital
ships to mend them, of medical men, medical
stores, aeroplanes, motor-trucks, ambulances,
machine-guns, field-guns, siege-guns, and mil-
lions upon millions of rounds of ammuni-
tion.

Transports that from neutral ports should
be carrying bully beef, grain, and munitions,
are lying idle at a rent per day of many hun-

viii

PREFACE

dreds of thousands of pounds, in the harbors
of Moudros, Salonika, Aden, Alexandria, in
the Persian Gulf, and scattered along both
coasts of Africa. They are guarded by war-
ships withdrawn from duty in the Channel
and North Sea. What, in lives lost, these
expeditions have cost both France and Great
Britain, we know; what they have cost in
millions of money, it would be impossible
even to guess.

For these excursions far afield it is not
the military who are responsible. There is
the highest authority for believing neither
General Joffre nor Lord Kitchener approves
of them. They are efforts launched for
political effect by loyal and well-meaning,
but possibly mistaken, members of the two
governments. By them these expeditions
were sent forth to seize some place in the
sun already held by Germany, to prevent
other places falling into her hands, or in the
hope of turning some neutral power into an
ally. It was merely dancing to Germany's

PREFACE

music. It postponed and weakened the
main attack. This war should be fought
in France. If it is, Germany will be utterly
defeated; she cannot long survive such an-
other failure as Verdun, or even should she
eventually occupy Verdun could she survive
such a victory. When she no longer is a
military threat all she possessed before the
war, and whatever territory she has taken
since she began the war, will automatically
revert to the Allies. It then will be time
enough to restore to Belgium, Serbia, Poland,
and other rightful owners the possessions of
which Germany has robbed, them. If you
surprise a burglar, his pockets stuffed with
the family jewels, would you first attempt to
recover the jewels, or to subdue the burglar?
Before retrieving your possessions would it
not be better strategy to wait until the
burglar is down and out, and the police are
adjusting the handcuffs?

In the first chapter of this book is re-
printed a letter I wrote from Paris to the

PREFACE

papers of the Wheeler Syndicate, stating
that in no part of Europe was our country
popular. It was a hint given from one
American speaking in confidence to another,
and as from one friend to another. It was
not so received. To my suggestion that in
Europe we are losing friends, the answer in-
variably was: "We should worry!" That
is not a good answer. With a nation it
surely should be as with the individuals who
compose it. If, when an individual is told
he has lost the good opinion of his friends,
he sings, "I don't care, I don't care!" he
exhibits only bad manners.

The other reply made to the warning was
personal abuse. That also is the wrong
answer. To kill the messenger of ill tidings
is an ancient prerogative; but it leads no-
where. If it is true that we are losing our
friends we should try to find out whose
fault it is that we lost them, and our wish
should be to bring our friends back.

Men of different countries of Europe re-

PREFACE

peatedly told me that all of a century must
elapse before America can recover the pres-
tige she has lost since this war began. My
answer was that it was unintelligent to judge
ninety million people by the acts, or lack of
action, of one man, and that to recover our
lost prestige will take us no longer than is re-
quired to get rid of that man. As soon as we
elect a new President and a new Congress,
who are not necessarily looking for trouble,
but who will not crawl under the bed to
avoid it, our lost prestige will return.

In the meantime, that France and her
Allies succeed should be the hope and prayer
of every American. The fight they are wag-
ing is for the things the real, unhyphen-
ated American is supposed to hold most high
and most dear. Incidentally, they are fight-
ing his fight, for their success will later save
him, unprepared as he is to defend himself,
from a humiliating and terrible thrashing.
And every word and act of his now that
helps the Allies is a blow against frightful-

ftfi

PREFACE

ness, against despotism, and in behalf of a
broader civilization, a nobler freedom, and
a much more pleasant world in which to

live.

RICHARD HARDING DAVIS.

April n, 1916.

XUl

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I. PRESIDENT POINCARE THANKS AMERICA ... 3

II. THE MUD TRENCHES OF ARTOIS 35

III. THE ZIGZAG FRONT OF CHAMPAGNE 55

IV. FROM PARIS TO THE PIRJEUS 79

V. WHY KING CONST ANTINE Is NEUTRAL ... 97

VI. WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA in

VII. Two BOYS AGAINST AN ARMY 152

VIII. THE FRENCH-BRITISH FRONT IN SERBIA ... 165

IX. VERDUN AND ST. MIHIEL 188

X. WAR IN THE VOSGES 210

XI. HINTS FOR THOSE WHO WANT TO HELP . . 223

XII. LONDON, A YEAR LATER 245

ILLUSTRATIONS

General Sarrail, commanding the Allied armies in
Greece, making his first landing in Salonika

Frontispiece

FACING PAGE

President Poincar6 on a visit to the front 18

"Of another house the roof only remained, from under

it the rest of the building had been shot away" . . 48

The stone roof over this glass chandelier in the Arras
cathedral was destroyed by shells, and the chan-
delier not touched 50

General Franchet d'Esp6ray 70

King Constantine of Greece and commander-in-chief of

her armies 102

"In Salonika the water-front belongs to everybody" . 122

"On one side of the quay, a moving-picture palace,

. . . on the other a boat unloading fish" 124

Outside the Citadel, which is mediaeval, Salonika is

modern and Turkish . 126

"The quay supplied every spy — German, Bulgarian,

Turk, or Austrian — with an uninterrupted view" 138

"Hills bare of trees, from which the snow that ran
down their slopes had turned the road into a sea

of mud" 154

xvii

ILLUSTRATIONS

FACING PAGE

American war correspondents at the French front in

Serbia 160

Headquarters of the French commander in Grevac,

Serbia 172

After the retreat from Serbia 176

The ruined village of Gerbeviller, destroyed after their

retreat by the Germans 190

" Through these woods ran a toy railroad " 192

A first-line trench outside of Verdun 200

A valley in Argonne showing a forest destroyed by

shells 208

War in the forest 216

A poster inviting the proprietors of restaurants and
hotels and their guests to welcome the soldiers who
have permission to visit Paris, especially those
who come from the districts invaded by the Ger-
mans 228

All over France, on Christmas Day and the day after,
money was collected to send comforts and things
good to eat to the men at the front 232

A poster advertising the fund to bring from the trenches
"permissionaires," those soldiers who obtain per-
mission to return home for six days 236

"Very interestin'. You ought to frame it " 252

"They have women policemen now" 262

xvui

WITH THE FRENCH
IN FRANCE AND SALONIKA

CHAPTER I

PRESIDENT POINCARE THANKS
AMERICA

PARIS, October, 1915.

WHILE still six hundred miles from the
French coast the passengers on the
Chicago of the French line entered what
was supposed to be the war zone.

In those same waters, just as though the
reputation of the Bay of Biscay was not suf-
ficiently scandalous, two ships of the line
had been torpedoed.

So, in preparation for what the captain
tactfully called an "accident," we rehearsed
abandoning ship.

It was like the fire-drills in our public
schools. It seemed a most sensible precau-
tion, and one that in times of peace, as well
as of war, might with advantage be enforced
on all passenger-ships.

PRESIDENT POINCARfc

In his proclamation Commandant Mace
of the Chicago borrowed an idea from the
New York Fire Department. It was the
warning Commissioner Adamson prints on
theatre programmes, and which casts a gloom
over patrons of the drama by instructing
them to look for the nearest fire-escape.

Each passenger on the Chicago was as-
signed to a life-boat. He was advised to find
out how from any part of the ship at which
he might be caught he could soonest reach it.

Women and children were to assemble on
the boat deck by the boat to which they were
assigned. After they had been lowered to
the water, the men — who, meanwhile, were
to be segregated on the deck below them —
would descend by rope ladders.

Entrance to a boat was by ticket only.
The tickets were six inches square and bore
a number. If you lost your ticket you lost
your life. Each of the more imaginative
passengers insured his life by fastening the
ticket to his clothes with a safety-pin.

THANKS AMERICA

Two days from land there was a full-dress
rehearsal, and for the first time we met those
with whom we were expected to put to sea
in an open boat.

Apparently those in each boat were se-
lected by lot. As one young doctor in the
ambulance service put it: "The society in
my boat is not at all congenial."

The only other persons originally in my
boat were Red Cross nurses of the Post unit
and infants. In trampling upon them to
safety I foresaw no difficulty.

But at the dress rehearsal the purser
added six dark and dangerous-looking Span-
iards. It developed later that by profession
they were bull-fighters. Any man who is
not afraid of a bull is entitled to respect.
But being cast adrift with six did not ap-
peal.

One could not help wondering what would
happen if we ran out of provisions and the
bull-fighters grew hungry. I tore up my
ticket and planned to swim.

PRESIDENT POINCARfc

Some of the passengers took the rehearsal
to heart, and, all night, fully dressed, espe-
cially as to boots, tramped the deck. As the
promenade-deck is directly over the cabins,
not only they did not sleep but neither did
any one else.

The next day they began to see periscopes.
For this they were not greatly to be blamed.
The sea approach to Bordeaux is flagged
with black buoys supporting iron masts that
support the lights, and in the rain and fog
they look very much like periscopes.

But after the passengers had been thrilled
by the sight of twenty of them, they became
so bored with false alarms that had a real
submarine appeared they were in a mood to
invite the captain on board and give him a
drink.

While we still were anxiously keeping
watch, a sail appeared upon the horizon.
Even the strongest glasses could make noth-
ing of it. A young, very young Frenchman
ran to the bridge and called to the officers:

THANKS AMERICA

"Gentlemen, will you please tell me what
boat it is that I see?"

Had he asked the same question of an
American captain while that officer was on
the bridge, the captain would have turned
his back. An English captain would have
put him in irons.

But the French captain called down to
him: "She is pilot-boat No. 28. The pilot's
name is Jean Baptiste. He has a wife and
four children in Bordeaux, and others in
Brest and Havre. He is fifty years old and
has a red nose an.d a wart on his chin. Is
there anything else you would like to know?"

At daybreak, as the ship swept up the
Gironde to Bordeaux, we had our first view
of the enemy.

We had passed the vineyards and those
chateaux the names of which every wine-
card in every part of the world helps to keep
famous and familiar, and had reached the
outskirts of the city. Here the banks are
close together, so close that one almost can

PRESIDENT POINCARl

hail those on shore; but there was a heavy
rain and the mist played tricks.

When I saw a man in a black overcoat
with the brass buttons wider apart across
the chest than at the belt line, like those of
our traffic police in summer-time, I thought
it was a trick of the mist. Because the uni-
form that, by a nice adjustment of buttons,
tries to broaden the shoulders and decrease
the waist, is not being worn much in France.
Not if a French sharpshooter sees it first.

But the man in the overcoat was not
carrying a rifle on his shoulder. He was
carrying a bag of cement, and from the hull
of the barge others appeared, each with a
bag upon his shoulder. There was no mis-
taking them. Nor their little round caps,
high boots, and field uniforms of gray-green.

It was strange that the first persons we
should see since we left the wharf at the foot
of Fifteenth Street, North River, the first we
should see in France, should not be French
people, but German soldiers.

THANKS AMERICA

Bordeaux had the good taste to burn down
when the architect who designed the Place
de la Concorde, in Paris, and the buildings *
facing it was still alive; and after his designs,
or those of his pupils, Bordeaux was rebuilt.
So wherever you look you see the best in
what is old and the smartest in what is
modern.

Certainly when to that city President Poin-
care and his cabinet moved the government,
they gave it a resting-place that was both
dignified and charming. To walk the streets
and wharfs is a continual delight. One is
never bored. It is like reading a book in
which there are no dull pages.

Everywhere are the splendid buildings of
Louis XV, statues, parks, monuments,
churches, great arches that once were the
outer gates, and many miles of quays redo-
lent, not of the sea, but of the wine to which
the city gives her name.

But to-day to walk the streets of Bordeaux
saddens as well as delights. There are so

PRESIDENT POINCARfc

many wounded. There are so many women
and children all in black. It is a relief when
you learn that the wounded are from differ-
ent parts of France, that they have been sent
to Bordeaux to recuperate and are greatly
in excess of the proportion of wounded you
would find in other cities.

But the women and children in black are
not convalescents. Their wounds heal slowly,
or not at all.

At the wharfs a white ship with gigantic
American flags painted on her sides and with
an American flag at the stern was unloading
horses. They were for the French artillery
and cavalry, but they were so glad to be free
of the ship that their future state did not
distress them.

Instead, they kicked joyously, scattering
the sentries, who were jet-black Turcos. As
one of them would run from a plunging
horse, the others laughed at him with that
contagious laugh of the darky that is the
same all the world over, whether he hails

THANKS AMERICA

from Mobile or Tangiers, and he would re-
turn sheepishly, with eyes rolling, protesting
the horse was a "boche."

Officers, who looked as though in times of
peace they might be gentlemen jockeys, were
receiving the remounts and identifying the
brands on the hoof and shoulder that had
been made by their agents in America.

If the veterinary passed the horse, he was
again marked, this time with regimental
numbers, on the hoof with a branding-iron,
and on the flanks with white paint. In ten
days he will be given a set of shoes, and in a
month he will be under fire.

Colonel Count Rene de Montjou, who has
been a year in America buying remounts,
and who returned on the Chicago, discovered
that one of the horses was a "substitut,"
and a very bad "substitut" he was. His
teeth had been filed, but the French officers
saw that he was all of eighteen years old.

The young American who, in the interests
of the contractor, was checking off the horses,

PRESIDENT POINCARfc

refused to be shocked. Out of the corner of
his thin lips he whispered confidentially:

"Suppose he is a ringer," he protested;
"suppose he is eighteen years old, what's the
use of their making a holler ? What's it mat-
ter how old he is, if all they're going to do
with him is to get him shot?"

That night at the station, as we waited
for the express to Paris, many recruits were
starting for the front. There seemed to be
thousands of them, all new; new sky-blue uni-
forms, new soup-tureen helmets, new shoes.

They were splendidly young and vigorous
looking, and to the tale that France now is
forced to call out only old men and boys they
gave the lie. With many of them, to say
farewell, came friends and family. There
was one group that was all comedy, a hand-
some young man under thirty, his mother
and a young girl who might have been his
wife or sister.

They had brought him food for the jour-
ney; chocolate, a long loaf, tins of sardines,

THANKS AMERICA

a bottle of wine; and the fun was in trying
to find any pocket, bag, or haversack not al-
ready filled. They were all laughing, the
little, fat mother rather mechanically, when
the whistle blew.

It was one of those shrill, long-drawn
whistles without which in Europe no train
can start. It had a peevish, infantile sound,
like the squeak of a nursery toy. But it was
as ominous as though some one had fired a
siege-gun.

The soldiers raced for the cars, and the
one in front of me, suddenly grown grave,
stooped and kissed the fat, little mother.

She was still laughing; but at his embrace
and at the meaning of it, at the thought that
the son, who to her was always a baby,
might never again embrace her, she tore her-
self from him sobbing and fled — fled blindly
as though to escape from her grief.

Other women, their eyes filled with sud-
den tears, made way, and with their ringers
pressed to their lips turned to watch her.

PRESIDENT POINCARfc

The young soldier kissed the wife, or sister,
or sweetheart, or whatever she was, sketchily
on one ear and shoved her after the fleeing
figure.

"Guardez mama!" he said.

It is the tragedy that will never grow less,
and never grow old.

One who left Paris in October, 1914, and
returned in October, 1915, finds her calm,
confident; her social temperature only a lit-
tle below normal.

A year ago the gray-green tidal wave of
the German armies that threatened to en-
gulf Paris had just been checked. With the
thunder of their advance Paris was still
shaken. The withdrawal of men to the
front, and of women and children to Bor-
deaux and the coast, had left the city unin-
habited. The streets were as deserted as the
Atlantic City board walk in January. For
miles one moved between closed shops.
Along the Aisne the lines had not been dug
in, and hourly from the front ambulances,

THANKS AMERICA

carrying the wounded and French and Brit-
ish officers unwashed from the trenches, in
mud-covered, bullet-scarred cars, raced down
the echoing boulevards. In the few restau-
rants open, you met men who that morning
had left the firing-line, and who after de-
jeuner, and the purchase of soap, cigarettes,
and underclothes, by sunset would be back
on the job. In those days Paris was inside
the "fire-lines." War was in the air; you
smelled it, saw it, heard it.

To-day a man from Mars visiting Paris
might remain here a week, and not know
that this country is waging the greatest war
in history. When you walk the crowded
streets it is impossible to believe that within
forty miles of you millions of men are facing
each other in a death grip. This is so, first,
because a great wall of silence has been
built between Paris and the front, and, sec-
ond, because the spirit of France is too alive,
too resilient, occupied with too many inter-
ests, to allow any one thing, even war, to

PRESIDENT POINCARfi

obsess it. The people of France have ac-
cepted the war as they accept the rigors of
winter. They may not like the sleet and
snow of winter, but they are not going to let
the winter beat them. In consequence, the
shop windows are again dressed in their best,
the kiosks announce comedies, revues, operas;
in the gardens of the Luxembourg the beds
are brilliant with autumn flowers, and the old
gentlemen have resumed their games of cro-
quet, the Champs-Elysees swarms with baby-
carriages, and at the aperitif hour on the
sidewalks there are no empty chairs. At
many of the restaurants it is impossible to
obtain a table.

It is not the Paris of the days before the
war. It is not "gay Paris." But it is a Paris
going about her "business as usual." This
spirit of the people awakens only the most
sincere admiration. It shows great calm-
ness, great courage, and a confidence that,
for the enemy of France, must be disquiet-
ing. Work for the wounded and for the fami-

THANKS AMERICA

lies of those killed in action and who have
been left without support continues. Only
now, after a year of bitter experience, it is
no longer hysterical. It has been systema-
tized, made more efficient. It is no longer
the work of amateurs, but of those who by
daily practise have become experts.

In Paris the signs of war are not nearly
as much in evidence as the activities of
peace. There are many soldiers; but, in
Paris, you always saw soldiers. The only
difference is that now they wear bandages,
or advance on crutches. And, as opposed
to these evidences of the great conflict going
on only forty miles distant, are the flower
markets around the Madeleine, the crowds
of women in front of the jewels, furs, and
manteaux in the Rue de la Paix.

It is not that France is indifferent to the
war. But that she has faith in her armies,
in her generals. She can afford to wait.
She drove the enemy from Paris; she is
teaching French in Alsace; in time, when

PRESIDENT POINCARfc

Joffre is ready, she will drive the enemy
across her borders. In her faith in Joffre,
she opens her shops, markets, schools, thea-
tres. It is not callousness she shows, but
that courage and confidence that are the
forerunners of success.

But the year of war has brought certain
changes. The search-lights have disappeared.
It was found that to the enemy in the air
they were less of a menace than a guide.
So the great shafts of light that with maj-
esty used to sweep the skies or cut a path
into the clouds have disappeared. And nearly
all other lights have disappeared. Those who
drive motor-cars claim the pedestrians are
careless; the pedestrians protest that the
drivers of motor-cars are reckless. In any
case, to cross a street at night is an adven-
ture.

Something else that has disappeared is the
British soldier. A year ago he swarmed,
now he is almost entirely absent. Outside
of the hospital corps, a British officer in Paris

THANKS AMERICA

is an object of interest. In their place are
many Belgians, almost too many Belgians.
Their new khaki uniforms are unsoiled. Un-
like the French soldiers you see, few are
wounded. The answer probably is that as
they cannot return to their own country,
they must make their home in that of their
ally. And the front they defend so valiantly
is not so extended that there is room for all.
Meanwhile, as they wait for their turn in the
trenches, they fill the boulevards and cafes.

This is not true of the French officers.
The few you see are convalescents, or on
leave. It is not as it was last October, when
Paris was part of the war- zone. Up to a few
days ago, until after seven in the evening,
when the work of the day was supposed to
be finished, an officer was not permitted to
sit idle in a cafe. And now when you see
one you may be sure he is recovering from
a wound, or is on the General Staff, and for
a few hours has been released from duty.

It is very different from a year ago when
19

PRESIDENT POINCARfe

every officer was fresh from the trenches —
and, fresh is not quite the word, either — and
he would talk freely to an eager, sympa-
thetic group of the battle of the night before.
Now the wall of silence stretches around

TAISEZ- vous i

vous ecoutent

Reproduction of placard warning France against spies.

Paris. By posters it is even enforced upon
you. Before the late minister of war gave up
his portfolio, by placards he warned all
when in public places to be careful of what
they said. "Taisez-vous! Mefiez-vous. Les
oreilles ennemies vous ecoutent." "Be silent.
Be distrustful. The ears of the enemies are

THANKS AMERICA

listening." This warning against spies was
placed in tramways, railroad-trains, cafes.
A cartoonist refused to take the good advice
seriously. His picture shows one of the
women conductors in a street-car asking a
passenger where he is going. The passenger
points to the warning. "Silence," he says,
"some one may be listening."

There are other changes. A year ago gold
was king. To imagine any time or place
when it is not is difficult. But to-day an
American twenty-dollar bill gives you a
higher rate of exchange than an American
gold double-eagle. A thousand dollars in
bills in Paris is worth thirty dollars more to
you than a thousand dollars in gold. And
to carry it does not make you think you are
concealing a forty-five Colt. The decrease
in value is due to the fact that you cannot
take gold out of the country. That is true
of every country in Europe, and of any kind
of gold. At the border it is taken from you
and in exchange you must accept bills. So,

PRESIDENT POINCARfc

any one in Paris, wishing to travel, had best
turn over his gold to the Bank of France. He
will receive not only a good rate of exchange
but also an engraved certificate testifying that
he has contributed to the national defense.
Another curious vagary of the war that
obtains now is the sudden disappearance of
the copper sou or what ranks with our penny.
Why it is scarce no one seems to know. The
generally accepted explanation is that the
copper has flown to the trenches where mil-
lions of men are dealing in small sums. But
whatever the reason, the fact remains. In
the stores you receive change in postage-
stamps, and, on the underground railroad,
where the people have refused to accept
stamps in lieu of coppers, there are incipient
riots. One night at a restaurant I was given
change in stamps and tried to get even with
the house by unloading them as his tip on
the waiter. He protested eloquently. "Let-
ters I never write," he explained. "To write
letters makes me ennui. And yet if I wrote

THANKS AMERICA

for a hundred years I could not use all the
stamps my patrons have forced upon me."

These differences the year has brought
about are not lasting, and are unimportant.
The change that is important, and which
threatens to last a long time, is the differ-
ence in the sentiment of the French people
toward Americans.

Before the war we were not unduly flat-
tering ourselves if we said the attitude of
the French toward the United States was
friendly. There were reasons why they
should regard us at least with tolerance.
We were very good customers. From dif-
ferent parts of France we imported wines
and silks. In Paris we spent, some of us
spent, millions on jewels and clothes. In
automobiles and on Cook's tours every sum-
mer Americans scattered money from Brit-
tany to Marseilles. They were the natural
prey of Parisian hotel-keepers, restaurants,
milliners, and dressmakers. We were a sis-
ter republic, the two countries swapped stat-

PRESIDENT POINCARfc

ues of their great men — we had not forgot-
ten Lafayette, France honored Paul Jones.
A year ago, in the comic papers, between
John Bull and Uncle Sam, it was not Uncle
Sam who got the worst of it. Then the war
came and with it, in the feeling toward our-
selves, a complete change. A year ago we were
almost one of the Allies, much more popular
than Italians, more sympathetic than the
English. To-day we are regarded, not with
hostility, but with amazed contempt.

This most regrettable change was first
brought about by President Wilson's letter
calling upon Americans to be neutral. The
French could not understand it. From their
point of view it was an unnecessary affront.
It was as unexpected as the cut direct from a
friend; as unwarranted, as gratuitous, as a
slap in the face. The millions that poured
in from America for the Red Cross, the ser-
vices of Americans in hospitals, were ac-
cepted as the offerings of individuals, not as
representing the sentiment of the American

THANKS AMERICA

people. That sentiment, the French still
insist in believing, found expression in the
letter that called upon all Americans to be
neutral, something which to a Frenchman is
neither fish, fowl, nor good red herring.

We lost caste in other ways. We supplied
France with munitions, but, as a purchasing
agent for the government put it to me, we are
not losing much money by it, and, until the
French Government protested, and the pro-
test was printed all over the United States,
some of our manufacturers supplied articles
that were worthless. Doctor Charles W.
Cowan, an American who in winter lives in
Paris and Nice and spends his summers in
America, showed me the half section of a
shoe of which he said sixty thousand pairs
had been ordered, until it was found that
part of each shoe was made of brown paper.
Certainly part of the shoe he showed me was
made of brown paper.

When an entire people, men, women, and
children, are fighting for their national exis-

PRESIDENT POINCARfc

tence, and their individual home and life,
to have such evidences of Yankee smartness
foisted upon them does not make for friend-
ship. It inspired contempt. This unpleas-
ant sentiment was strengthened by our fail-
ure to demand satisfaction for the lives lost
on the Lusitania, while at the same time
our losses in dollars seemed to distress us so
deeply. But more harmful and more un-
fortunate than any other word or act was the
statement of President Wilson that we might
be "too proud to fight." This struck the
French not only as proclaiming us a cow-
ardly nation, but as assuming superiority
over the man who not only would fight, but
who was fighting. And as at that moment
several million Frenchmen were fighting, it
was natural that they should laugh. Every
nation in Europe laughed. In an Italian
cartoon Uncle Sam is shown, hat in hand,
offering a "note" to the German Emperor
and in another shooting Haitians.
The legend reads: "He is too proud to
26

THANKS AMERICA

fight the Kaiser, but not too proud to kill
niggers." In London, "Too Proud to Fight"
is in the music-halls the line surest of rais-
ing a laugh, and the recruiting-stations show
pictures of fat men, effeminates, degenerates,
and cripples labelled: "These Are Too Proud
to Fight! Are You?"

The change of sentiment toward us in
France is shown in many ways. To retail
them would not help matters. But as one
hears of them from Americans who, since
the war began, have been working in the hos-
pitals, on distributing committees, in the
banking-houses, and as diplomats and con-
suls, that our country is most unpopular is
only too evident.

It is the greater pity because the real feel-
ing of our people toward France in this war
is one of enthusiastic admiration. Of all the
Allies, Americans probably hold for the
French the most hearty good-feeling, affec-
tion, and good-will. Through the govern-
ment at Washington this feeling has been

PRESIDENT POINCARfc

ill-expressed, if not entirely concealed. It is
unfortunate. Mr. Kipling, whose manners
are his own, has given as a toast: "Damn
all neutrals." The French are more polite.
But when this war is over we may find that
in twelve months we have lost friends of
many years. That over all the world we have
lost them.

That does not mean that for the help
Americans have given France and her Allies,
the Allies are ungrateful. That the French
certainly are not ungrateful I was given as-
surance by no less an authority than the
President of the republic. His assurance
was conveyed to the American people in a
message of thanks. It is also a message of
good-will.

It recognizes and appreciates the sympathy
shown to France in her present fight for lib-
erty and civilization by those Americans
who remember that when we fought for our
liberty France was not neutral, but sent us
Lafayette and Rochambeau, ships and sol-

THANKS AMERICA

diers. It is a message of thanks from Presi-
dent Poincare to those Americans who found
it less easy to be neutral than to be grateful.

It was my good fortune to be presented
by Paul Benazet, a close personal friend of
the President, and both an officer of the army
and a deputy. As a deputy before the war
he helped largely in passing the bills that
called for three years of military service and
for heavier artillery. As an officer he won
the Legion of Honor and the Cross of War.
Besides being a brilliant writer, M. Benazet
is also an accomplished linguist, and as
President Poincare does not express himself
readily in English, and as my French is bet-
ter suited to restaurants than palaces, he
acted as our interpreter.

The arrival of important visitors, M. Cam-
bon, the former ambassador to the United
States, and the new prime minister, M.
Briand, delayed our reception, and while we
waited we were escorted through the official
rooms of the Elysee. It was a half-hour of

PRESIDENT POINCARfi

most fascinating interest, not only because
the vast salons were filled with what, in art, is
most beautiful, but because we were brought
back to the ghosts of other days.

What we actually saw were the best of
Gobelin tapestries, the best of Sevres china,
the best of mural paintings. We walked on
silken carpets, bearing the fleur-de-lis. We
sat on sofas of embroidery as fine as an en-
graving and as rich in color as a painting by
Morland. The bright autumn sunshine il-
luminated the ormulu brass of the First Em-
pire, gilt eagles, crowns, cupids, and the only
letter of the alphabet that always suggest
one name.

Those which we brought back to the
rooms in which once they lived, planned, and
plotted were the ghosts of Mme. de Pom-
padour, Louis XVI, Murat, Napoleon I, and
Napoleon III. We could imagine the first
Emperor standing with his hands clasped be-
hind him in front of the marble fireplace, his
figure reflected in the full-length mirrors, his

THANKS AMERICA

features in gold looking down at him from
the walls and ceilings. We intruded even
into the little room opening on the rose
garden, where for hours he would pace the
floor.

But, perhaps, what was of greatest inter-
est was the remarkable adjustment of these
surroundings, royal and imperial, to the sim-
ple and dignified needs of a republic.

France is a military nation and at war,
but the evidences of militarism were entirely
absent. Our own White House is not more
empty of uniforms. One got the impression
that he was entering the house of a private
gentleman — a gentleman of great wealth and
taste.

We passed at last through four rooms, in
which were the secretaries of the President,
and as we passed, the majordomo spoke our
names, and the different gentlemen half rose
and bowed. It was all so quiet, so calm, so
free from telephones and typewriters, that
you felt that, by mistake, you had been

PRESIDENT POINCARfc

ushered into the library of a student or a
Cabinet minister.

Then in the fourth room was the President.
Outside this room we were presented to M.
Sainsere, the personal secretary of the Presi-
dent, and without further ceremony M.
Benazet opened the door, and in the smallest
room of all, introduced me to M. Poincare.
His portraits have rendered his features fa-
miliar, but they do not give sufficiently the
impression I received of kindness, firmness,
and dignity.

He returned to his desk and spoke in a
low voice of peculiar charm. As though the
better to have the stranger understand, he
spoke slowly, selecting his words.

"I have a great admiration," he said, "for
the effectiveness with which Americans have
shown their sympathy with France. They
have sent doctors, nurses, and volunteers to
drive the ambulances to carry the wounded.
I have visited the hospitals at Neuilly and
other places; they are admirable.

THANKS AMERICA

"The one at Juilly was formerly a college,
but with ingenuity they have converted it
into a hospital, most complete and most val-
uable. The American colony in Paris has
shown a friendship we greatly appreciate.
Your ambassador I have met several times.
Our relations are most pleasant, most sym-
pathetic."

I asked if I might repeat what he had said.
The President gave his assent, and, after a
pause, as though, now that he knew he
would be quoted, he wished to emphasize
what he had said, continued:

"My wife, who distributes articles of com-
fort, sent to the wounded and to families in
need, tells me that Americans are among the
most generous contributors. Many articles
come anonymously — money, clothing, and
comforts for the soldiers, and layettes for
their babies. We recognize and appreciate
the manner in which, while preserving a
strict neutrality, your country men and
women have shown their sympathy."

PRESIDENT POINCARE

The President rose and on leaving I pre-
sented a letter from ex-President Roosevelt.
It was explained that this was the second
letter for him I had had from Colonel Roose-
velt, but that when I was a prisoner with the
Germans, I had judged it wise to swallow
the first one, and that I had requested Colo-
nel Roosevelt to write the second one on
thin paper. The President smiled and passed
the letter critically between his thumb and
forefinger.

"This one," he said, "is quite digestible."
I carried away the impression of a kind
and distinguished gentleman, who, in the
midst of the greatest crisis in history, could
find time to dictate a message of thanks to
those he knew were neutrals only in name.

CHAPTER II

THE MUD TRENCHES OF ARTOIS

AMIENS, October, 1915.

IN England it is "business as usual"; in
France it is "war as usual." The Eng-
lish tradesman can assure his customers that
with such an "old-established" firm as his
not even war can interfere; but France, with
war actually on her soil, has gone further
and has accepted war as part of her daily
life. She has not merely swallowed, but di-
gested it. It is like the line in Pinero's play,
where one woman says she cannot go to the
opera because of her neuralgia. Her friend
replies: "You can have neuralgia in my box
as well as anywhere else." In that spirit
France has accepted the war. The neuralgia
may hurt, but she does not take to her bed
and groan. Instead, she smiles cheerfully

THE MUD TRENCHES OF ARTOIS

and goes about her duties — even sits in her
box at the opera.

As we approached the front this was even
more evident than in Paris, where signs of
war are all but invisible. Outside of Amiens
we met a regiment of Scots with the pipes
playing and the cold rain splashing their
bare legs. To watch them we leaned from
the car window. That we should be inter-
ested seemed to surprise them; no one else
was interested. A year ago when they passed
it was "Roses, roses, all the way" — or at
least cigarettes, chocolate, and red wine.
Now, in spite of the skirling bagpipes, no one
turned his head; to the French they had be-
come a part of the landscape.
1 A year ago the roads at every two hundred
yards were barricaded. It was a continual
hurdle-race. Now, except at distances of
four or five miles, the barricades have disap-
peared. One side of the road is reserved for
troops, the other for vehicles. The vehi-
cles we met — for the most part two-wheeled

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hooded carts — no longer contained peas-
ants flying from dismantled villages. In-
stead, they were on the way to market
with garden-truck, pigs, and calves. On the
drivers' seat the peasant whistled cheerily
and cracked his whip. The long lines of
London buses, that last year advertised soap,
mustard, milk, and music-halls, and which
now are a decorous gray; the ambulances;
the great guns drawn by motor-trucks with
caterpillar wheels, no longer surprise him.

The English ally has ceased to be a stranger,
and in the towns and villages of Artois is a
"paying guest." It is for him the shop-win-
dows are dressed. The names of the towns
are Flemish; the names of the streets are
Flemish; the names over the shops are Flem-
ish; but the goods for sale are marmalade,
tinned kippers, The Daily Mail, and the
Pink 'Un.

"Is it your people who are selling these
things?" I asked an English officer.

The question amused him.
37

THE MUD TRENCHES OF ARTOIS

"Our people won't think of it until the
war is over," he said, "but the French are
different.

"They are capable, adaptable, and oblig-
ing. If one of our men asks these shop-
keepers for anything they haven't got they
don't say, 'We don't keep it'; they get him
to write down what it is he wants, and send
for it."

It is the better way. The Frenchman does
not say, "War is ruining me"; he makes
the war help to support him, and at the same
time gives comfort to his ally.

A year ago in the villages the old men
stood in disconsolate groups with their hands
in their pockets. Now they are briskly at
work. They are working in the fields, in the
vegetable-gardens, helping the Territorials
mend the roads. On every side of them
were the evidences of war — in the fields
abandoned trenches, barbed-wire entangle-
ments, shelters for fodder and ammunition,
hangars for repairing aeroplanes, vast slaugh-

THE MUD TRENCHES OF ARTOIS

ter-houses, parks of artillery; and on the
roads endless lines of lorries, hooded ambu-
lances, marching soldiers.

To us those were of vivid interest, but to
the French peasant they are in the routine
of his existence. After a year of it war
neither greatly distresses nor greatly inter-
ests him. With one hand he fights; with
the other he ploughs.

We had made a bet as to which would see
the first sign of real war, and the sign of it
that won and that gave general satisfaction,
even to the man who lost, was a group of
German soldiers sweeping the streets of St.
Pol. They were guarded only by one of their
own number, and they looked fat, sleek, and
contented. When, on our return from the
trenches, we saw them again, we knew they
were to be greatly envied. Between stand-
ing waist-high in mud in a trench and being
drowned in it, buried in it, blown up or as-
phyxiated, the post of crossing-sweeper be-
comes a sinecure.

THE MUD TRENCHES OF ARTOIS

The next sign of war was more thrilling.
It was a race between a French aeroplane
and German shrapnel. To us the bursting
shells looked like five little cotton balls.
Since this war began shrapnel, when it
bursts, has invariably been compared to balls
of cotton, and as that is exactly what it
looks like, it is again so described. The balls
of cotton did not seem to rise from the earth,
but to pop suddenly out of the sky.

A moment later five more cotton balls
popped out of the sky. They were much
nearer the aeroplane. Others followed, leap-
ing after it like the spray of succeeding
waves. But the aeroplane steadily and
swiftly conveyed itself out of range and out
of sight.

To say where the trenches began and
where they ended is difficult. We were pass-
ing through land that had been retrieved
from the enemy. It has been fought for inch
by inch, foot by foot. To win it back thou-
sands of lives had been thrown like dice upon

THE MUD TRENCHES OF ARTOIS

a table. There were vast stretches of mud,
of fields once cultivated, but now scarred
with pits, trenches, rusty barbed wires. The
roads were rivers of clay. They were lined
with dugouts, cellars, and caves. These bur-
rows in the earth were supported by beams,
and suggested a shaft in a disused mine.
They looked like the tunnels to coal-pits.
They were inhabited by a race of French
unknown to the boulevards — men, bearded,
deeply tanned, and caked with clay. Their
uniforms were like those of football players
on a rainy day at the end of the first half.
We were entering what had been the village
of Ablain, and before us rose the famous
heights of Mont de Lorette. To scale these
heights seemed a feat as incredible as scaling
our Palisades or the sheer cliff of Gibraltar.
But they had been scaled, and the side to-
ward us was crawling with French soldiers,
climbing to the trenches, descending from
the trenches, carrying to the trenches food,
ammunition, and fuel for the fires.

THE MUD TRENCHES OF ARTOIS

A cold rain was falling and had turned the
streets of Ablain and all the roads to it into
swamps. In these were islands of bricks
and lakes of water of the solidity and color
of melted chocolate. Whatever you touched
clung to you. It was a land of mud, clay,
liquid earth. A cold wind whipped the rain
against your face and chilled you to the
bone. All you saw depressed and chilled
your spirit.

To the "poilus," who, in the face of such
desolation, joked and laughed with the civil-
ians, you felt you owed an apology, for your
automobile was waiting to whisk you back
to a warm dinner, electric lights, red wine,
and a dry bed. The men we met were cave-
men. When night came they would sleep
in a hole in the hill fit for a mud-turtle or a
muskrat.

They moved in streets of clay two feet
across. They were as far removed from civili-
zation, as in the past they have known it, as
though they had been cast adrift upon an

THE MUD TRENCHES OF ARTOIS

island of liquid mud. Wherever they looked
was desolation, ruins, and broken walls, jum-
bles of bricks, tunnels in mud, caves in mud,
graves in mud.

In other wars the "front" was something
almost human. It advanced, wavered, and
withdrew. At a single bugle-call it was elec-
trified. It remained in no fixed place, but,
like a wave, enveloped a hill, or with gallop-
ing horses and cheering men overwhelmed a
valley. In comparison, this trench work did
not suggest war. Rather it reminded you of
a mining-camp during the spring freshet,
and for all the attention the cavemen paid
to them, the reports of their "seventy-fives"
and the "Jack Johnsons" of the enemy
bursting on Mont de Lorette might have
come from miners blasting rock.

What we saw of these cave-dwellers was
only a few feet of a moat that for three hun-
dred miles like a miniature canal is cut across
France. Where we stood we could see of the
three hundred miles only mud walls, so close

THE MUD TRENCHES OF ARTOIS

that we brushed one with each elbow. By
looking up we could see the black, leaden
sky. Ahead of us the trench twisted, and an
arrow pointed to a first-aid dressing-station.
Behind us was the winding entrance to a shel-
ter deep in the earth, reinforced by cement
and corrugated iron, and lit by a candle.

From a trench that was all we could see of
the war, and that is all millions of fighting
men see of it — wet walls of clay as narrow as
a grave, an arrow pointing to a hospital,
earthen steps leading to a shelter from sud-
den death, and overhead the rain-soaked sky
and perhaps a great bird at which the enemy
is shooting snowballs.

In northern France there are many buried
towns and villages. They are buried in their
own cellars. Arras is still uninterred. She
is the corpse of a city that waits for burial,
and day by day the German shells are try-
ing to dig her grave. They were at it yes-
terday when we visited Arras, and this morn-
ing they will be hammering her again.

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Seven centuries before this war Arras was
famous for her tapestries, so famous that in
England a piece of tapestry was called an
arras. Now she has given her name to a bat-
tle— to different battles — that began with
the great bombardment of October a year
ago, and each day since then have continued.
On one single day, June 26, the Germans
threw into the city shells in all sizes, from
three to sixteen inches, and to the number
of ten thousand. That was about one for
each house.

This bombardment drove 2,700 inhabitants
into exile, of whom 1,200 have now returned.
The army feeds them, and in response they
have opened shops that the shells have not
already opened, and supply the soldiers with
tobacco, post-cards, and from those gardens
not hidden under bricks and cement, fruit
and vegetables. In the deserted city these
civilians form an inconspicuous element.
You can walk for great distances and see
none of them. When they do appear in the

THE MUD TRENCHES OF ARTOIS

empty streets they are like ghosts. Every
day the shells change one or two of them into
real ghosts. But the others still stay on.
With the dogs nosing among the fallen bricks,
and the pigeons on the ruins of the cathe-
dral, they know no other home.

As we entered Arras the silence fell like a
sudden change of temperature. It was actual
and menacing. Every corner seemed to
threaten an ambush. Our voices echoed so
loudly that unconsciously we spoke in lower
tones. The tap of the captain's walking-
stick resounded like the blow of a hammer.
The emptiness and stillness was like that of a
vast cemetery, and the grass that had grown
through the paving-stones deadened the
sound of our steps. This silence was broken
only by the barking of the French seventy-
fives, in parts of the city hidden to us, the
boom of the German guns in answer, and
from overhead by the aeroplanes. In the ab-
solute stillness the whirl of their engines came
to us with the steady vibrations of a loom.

THE MUD TRENCHES OF ARTOIS

In the streets were shell holes that had been
recently filled and covered over with bricks
and fresh earth. It was like walking upon
newly made graves. On either side of us
were gaping cellars into which the houses had
dumped themselves or, still balancing above
them, were walls prettily papered, hung with
engravings, paintings, mirrors, quite intact.
These walls were roofless and defenseless
against the rain and snow. Other houses
were like those toy ones built for children,
with the front open. They showed a bed with
pillows, shelves supporting candles, books, a
washstand with basin and pitcher, a piano,
and a reading-lamp.

In one house four stories had been torn
away, leaving only the attic sheltered by
the peaked roof. To that height no one
could climb, and exposed to view were the
collection of trunks and boxes familiar to
all attics. As a warning against rough han-
dling, one of these, a woman's hat-box, had
been marked "Fragile." Secure and serene,

THE MUD TRENCHES OF ARTOIS

it smiled down sixty feet upon the mass of
iron and bricks it had survived.

Of another house the roof only remained;
from under it the rest of the building had
been shot away. It was as though after a
soldier had been blown to pieces, his helmet
still hung suspended in mid-air.

In other streets it was the front that was
intact, but when our captain opened the
street door we faced a cellar. Nothing be-
side remained. Or else we stepped upon
creaky floors that sagged, through rooms
swept by the iron brooms into vast dust
heaps. From these protruded wounded furni-
ture — the leg of a table, the broken arm of a
chair, a headless statue.

From the debris we picked the many little
heirlooms, souvenirs, possessions that make
a home. Photographs with written inscrip-
tions, post-cards bearing good wishes, orna-
ments for the centre-table, ornaments for
the person, images of the church, all crushed,
broken, and stained. Many shop-vindows
were still dressed invitingly as they were

From a photograph by R. H. Davis.

" Of another house the roof only remained, from under it the rest of
the building had been shot away."

THE MUD TRENCHES OF ARTOIS

when the shell burst, but beyond the goods
exposed for sale was only a deep hole.

The pure deviltry of a shell no one can
explain. Nor why it spares a looking-glass
and wrecks a wall that has been standing
since the twelfth century.

In the cathedral the stone roof weighing
hundreds of tons had fallen, and directly be-
neath where it had been hung an enormous
glass chandelier untouched. A shell loves
a shining mark. To what is most beautiful
it is most cruel. The Hotel de Ville, which
was counted among the most presentable
in the north of France, that once rose in seven
arches in the style of the Renaissance, the
shells marked for their own.

And all the houses approaching it from
the German side they destroyed. Not even
those who once lived in them could say
where they stood. There is left only a mess
of bricks, tiles, and plaster. They suggest
the homes of human beings as little as does
a brickyard.

We visited what had been the head-
49

THE MUD TRENCHES OF ARTOIS

quarters of General de Wignacourt. They
were in the garden of a house that opened
upon one of the principal thoroughfares,
and the floor level was twelve feet under
the level of the flower-beds. To this sub-
terranean office there are two entrances, one
through the cellar of the house, the other
down steps from the garden. The steps
were beams the size of a railroad-tie. Had
they not been whitewashed they would look
like the shaft leading to a coal-pit.

A soldier who was an artist in plaster had
decorated the entrance to the shaft with an
ornamental fagade worthy of any public
building. Here, secure from the falling walls
and explosive shells, the general by tele-
phone directed his attack. The place was
as dry, as clean, and as compact as the ad-
miral's quarters on a ship of war. The
switchboard connected with batteries buried
from sight in every part of the unburied
city, and in an adjoining room a soldier cook
was preparing a most appetizing luncheon.

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Above us was three yards of cement,
rafters, and earth, and crowning them grass
and flowers. When the owner of the house
returns he will find this addition to his resi-
dence an excellent refuge from burglars or
creditors.

Personally we were glad to escape into
the open street. Between being hit by a
shell and buried under twelve feet of cement
the choice was difficult.

We lunched in a charming house, where
the table was spread in the front hall. The
bed of the officer temporarily occupying the
house also was spread in the hall, and we were
curious to know, but too proud to ask, why
he limited himself to such narrow quarters.
Our captain rewarded our reticence. He
threw back the heavy curtain that con-
cealed the rest of the house, and showed us
that there was no house. It had been deftly
removed by a shell.

The owner of the house had run away, but
before he fled, fearing the Germans might

THE MUD TRENCHES OF ARTOIS

enter Arras and take his money, he had with-
drawn it and hidden it in his garden. The
money amounted to two hundred and fifty
thousand dollars. He placed it in a lead
box, soldered up the opening, and buried the
box under a tree. Then he went away and
carelessly forgot which tree.

During a lull in the bombardment, he re-
. turned, and until two o'clock in the morn-
ing dug frantically for his buried treasure.
The soldier who guarded the house told me
the difference in the way the soldiers dig a
trench and the way our absent host dug for
his lost money was greatly marked. I found
the leaden box cast aside in the dog-kennel.
It was the exact size of a suitcase. As none
of us knows when he may not have to bury
a quarter of a million dollars hurriedly, it
is a fact worth remembering. Any ordinary
suitcase will do. The soldier and I examined
the leaden box carefully. But the owner
had not overlooked anything.

When we reached the ruins of the cathedral,
5*

THE MUD TRENCHES OF ARTOIS

we did not need darkness and falling rain to
depress us further, or to make the scene
more desolate. One lacking in all reverence
would have been shocked. The wanton
waste, the senseless brutality in such de-
struction would have moved a statue. Walls
as thick as the ramparts of a fort had been
blown into powdered chalk. There were
great breaches in them through which you
could drive an omnibus. In one place the
stone roof and supporting arches had fallen,
and upon the floor, where for two hundred
years the people of Arras had knelt in prayer,
was a mighty barricade of stone blocks,
twisted candelabra, broken praying-chairs,
torn vestments, shattered glass. Exposed
to the elements, the chapels were open to
the sky. The rain fell on sacred emblems
of the Holy Family, the saints, and apostles.
Upon the altars the dust of the crushed
walls lay inches deep.

The destruction is too great for present
repair. They can fill the excavations in the

THE MUD TRENCHES OF ARTOIS

streets and board up the shattered show-
windows, but the cathedral is too vast, the
destruction of it too nearly complete. The
sacrilege must stand. Until the war is over,
until Arras is free from shells, the ruins must
remain uncared for and uncovered. And
the cathedral, by those who once came to
it for help and guidance, will be deserted.

But not entirely deserted. The pigeons
that built their nests under the eaves have
descended to the empty chapels, and in
swift, graceful circles sweep under the ruined
arches. Above the dripping of the rain,
and the surly booming of the cannon, their
contented cooing was the only sound of
comfort. It seemed to hold out a promise
for the better days of peace.

CHAPTER III

THE ZIGZAG FRONT OF CHAMPAGNE

PARIS, October, 1915.

IN Artois we were "personally conducted/'
In a way, we were the guests of the war
department; in any case, we tried to behave
as such. It was no more proper for us to
see what we were not invited to see than to
bring our own wine to another man's dinner.
In Champagne it was entirely different.
I was alone with a car and a chauffeur and
a blue slip of paper. It permitted me to re-
main in a "certain place" inside the war,
zone for ten days. I did not believe it was
true. I recalled other trips over the same
roads a year before which finally led to the
Cherche-Midi prison, and each time I showed
the blue slip to the gendarmes I shivered.
But the gendarmes seemed satisfied, and as
they permitted us to pass farther and farther

THE ZIGZAG FRONT

into the forbidden land, the chauffeur began
to treat me almost as an equal. And so,
with as little incident as one taxis from
Madison Square to Central Park, we mo-
tored from Paris into the sound of the guns.

At the "certain place" the general was
absent in the trenches, but the chief of staff
asked what I most wanted to see. It was as
though the fairy godmother had given you
one wish. I chose Rheims, and to spend
the night there. The chief of staff waved a
wand in the shape of a second piece of pa-
per, and we were in Rheims. To a colonel
we presented the two slips of paper, and, in
turn, he asked what was wanted. A year
before I had seen the cathedral when it was
being bombarded, when it still was burning.
I asked if I might revisit it.

"And after that?" said the colonel.

It was much too good to be real.

I would wake and find myself again in
Cherche-Midi prison.

Outside, the sounds of the guns were now
56

OF CHAMPAGNE

very close. They seemed to be just around
the corner, on the roof of the next house.

"Of course, what I really want is to visit
the first trench."

It was like asking a Mason to reveal the
mysteries of his order, a priest to tell the
secrets of the confessional. The colonel com-
manded the presence of Lieutenant Blank.
With alarm I awaited his coming. Did a
military prison yawn, and was he to act as
my escort? I had been too bold. , I should
have asked to see only the third trench.

At the order the colonel gave, Lieutenant
Blank expressed surprise. But his colonel,
with a shrug, as though ridding himself of
all responsibility, showed the blue slip. It
was a pantomime, with which by repeti-
tion, we became familiar. In turn each offi-
cer would express surprise; the other officer
would shrug, point to the blue slip, and we
would pass forward.

The cathedral did not long detain us.
Outside, for protection, it was boarded up,

THE ZIGZAG FRONT

packed tightly in sand-bags; inside, it had
been swept of broken glass, and the paint-
ings, tapestries, and the carved images on
the altars had been removed. A professional
sacristan spoke a set speech, telling me of
things I had seen with my own eyes — of
burning rafters that spared the Gobelin
tapestries, of the priceless glass trampled
underfoot, of the dead and wounded Ger-
mans lying in the straw that had given the
floor the look of a barn. Now it is as empty
of decoration as the Pennsylvania railroad-
station in New York. It is a beautiful shell
waiting for the day to come when the candles
will be relit, when the incense will toss before
the altar, and the gray walls glow again with
the colors of tapestries and paintings. The
windows only will not bloom as before. The
glass destroyed by the Emperor's shells, all
the king's horses and all the king's men can-
not restore.

The professional guide, who is already so
professional that he is exchanging German

OF CHAMPAGNE

cartridges for tips, supplied a morbid detail
of impossible bad taste. Among the German
wounded there was a major (I remember de-
scribing him a year ago as looking like a
college professor) who, when the fire came,
was one of these the priests could not save,
and who was burned alive. Marks on the
gray surface of a pillar against which he re-
clined and grease spots on the stones of the
floor are supposed to be evidences of his
end, a torture brought upon him by the
shells of his own people. Mr. Kipling has
written that there are many who "hope and
pray these signs will be respected by our
children's children." Mr. Kipling's hope
shows an imperfect conception of the pur-
poses of a cathedral. It is a house dedicated
to God, and on earth to peace and good-will
among men. It is not erected to teach gen-
erations of little children to gloat over the
fact that an enemy, even a German officer,
was by accident burned alive.
Personally, I feel the sooner those who
59

THE ZIGZAG FRONT

introduced "frightfulness" to France, Bel-
gium, and the coasts of England are hunted
down and destroyed the better. But the
stone-mason should get to work, and remove
those stains from the Rheims cathedral.
Instead, for our children's children, would
not a tablet to Edith Cavell be better, or
one to the French priest, Abbe Thinot, who
carried the wounded Germans from the burn-
ing cathedral, and who later, while carrying
French wounded from the field of battle, was
himself hit three times, and of his wounds
died?

I hinted to the lieutenant that the cathe-
dral would remain for some time, but that
the trenches would soon be ploughed into
turnip-beds.

So, we moved toward the trenches. The
officer commanding them lived in what he
described as the deck of a battleship sunk
underground. It was a happy simile. He
had his conning-tower, in which, with a tele-
scope through a slit in a steel plate, he could

OF CHAMPAGNE

sweep the countryside. He had a fire-control
station, executive offices, wardroom, cook's
galley, his own cabin, equipped with tele-
phones, electric lights, and running water.
There was a carpet on the floor, a gay cover-
let on the four-poster bed, photographs on his
dressing-table, and flowers. All of these were
buried deep underground. A puzzling detail
was a perfectly good brass lock and key on
his door. I asked if it were to keep out shells
or burglars. And he explained that the door
with the lock in tact had been blown off its
hinges in a house of which no part was now
standing. He had borrowed it, as he had
borrowed everything else in the subterranean
war-ship, from the near-by ruins.

He was an extremely light-hearted and
courteous host, but he frowned suspiciously
when he asked if I knew a correspondent
named Senator Albert Beveridge. I hastily
repudiated Beveridge. I knew him not, I
said, as a correspondent, but as a politician
who possibly had high hopes of the German

THE ZIGZAG FRONT

vote. "He dined with us," said the colonel,
"and then wrote against France/* I sug-
gested it was at their own risk if they wel-
comed those who already had been with the
Germans, and who had been received by the
German Emperor. This is no war for neutrals.

Then began a walk of over a mile through
an open drain. The walls were of chalk as
hard as flint. Unlike the mud trenches in
Artois, there were no slides to block the
miniature canal. It was as firm and compact
as a whitewashed stone cell. From the main
drain on either side ran other drains, cul-de-
sacs, cellars, trap-doors, and ambushes. Over-
head hung balls of barbed wire that, should
the French troops withdraw, could be dropped
and so block the trench behind them. If you
raised your head they playfully snatched off
your cap. It was like ducking under innu-
merable bridges of live wires.

The drain opened at last into a wrecked
town. Its ruins were complete. It made
Pompeii look like a furnished flat. The

OF CHAMPAGNE

officer of the day joined us here, and to him
the lieutenant resigned the post of guide.
My new host wore a steel helmet, and at his
belt dangled a mask against gas. He led us
to the end of what had been a street, and
which was now barricaded with huge tim-
bers, steel doors, like those to a gambling
house, intricate cat's cradles of wire, and
solid steel plates.

To go back seemed the only way open.
But the officer in the steel cap dived through
a slit in the iron girders, and as he disap-
peared, beckoned. I followed down a well
that dropped straight into the very bowels
of the earth. It was very dark, and only
crosspieces of wood offered a slippery foot-
ing. Into the darkness, with hands pressed
against the well, and with feet groping for the
log steps, we tobogganed down, down, down.
We turned into a tunnel, and, by the slant
of the ground, knew we were now mounting.
There was a square of sunshine, and we walked
out, and into a graveyard. It was like a dark

THE ZIGZAG FRONT

change in a theatre. The last scene had been
the ruins of a town, a gate like those of the
Middle Ages, studded with bolts, reinforced
with steel plates, guarded by men-at-arms
in steel casques, and then the dark change
into a graveyard, with grass and growing
flowers, gravel walks, and hedges.

The graves were old, the monuments and
urns above them moss-covered, but one was
quite new, and the cross above it said that
it was the grave of a German aviator. As
they passed it the French officers saluted.
We entered a trench as straight as the let-
ter Z. And at each twist and turn we were
covered by an eye in a steel door. An at-
tacking party advancing would have had as
much room in which to dodge that eye as
in a bath-tub. One man with his magazine
rifle could have halted a dozen. And when
in the newspapers you read that one man
has captured twenty prisoners, he probably
was looking at them through the peep-hole
in one of those steel doors.

OF CHAMPAGNE

We zigzagged into a cellar, and below the
threshold of some one's front door. The
trench led directly under it. The house into
which the door had opened was destroyed;
possibly those who once had entered by it
also were destroyed, and it now swung in
air with men crawling like rats below it, its
half-doors banging and groaning; the wind,
with ghostly fingers, opening them to no one,
closing them on nothing. The trench wriggled
through a garden, and we could see flung
across the narrow strip of sky above us, the
branch of an apple-tree, and with one shoulder
brushed the severed roots of the same tree.
Then the trench led outward, and we passed
beneath railroad tracks, the ties reposing on
air, and supported by, instead of supporting,
the iron rails.

We had been moving between garden
walls, cellar walls; sometimes hidden by
ruins, sometimes diving like moles into tun-
nels. We remained on no one level, or for
any time continued in any one direction.

THE ZIGZAG FRONT

It was entirely fantastic, entirely unreal.
It was like visiting a new race of beings, who
turn day into night; who, like bats, mo-
lochs, and wolves, hide in caves and shun
the sunlight.

By the ray of an electric torch we saw
where these underground people store their
food. Where, against siege, are great casks
of water, dungeons packed with ammuni-
tion, more dungeons, more ammunition. We
saw, always by the shifting, pointing finger
of the electric torch, sleeping quarters under-
ground, dressing stations for the wounded
underground. In niches at every turn were
gas-extinguishers. They were as many, as
much as a matter of course, as fire-extin-
guishers in a modern hotel. They were ex-
actly like those machines advertised in seed
catalogues for spraying fruit-trees. They
are worn on the back like a knapsack.
Through a short rubber hose a fluid attacks
and dissipates the poison gases.

The sun set, and we proceeded in the light
66

OF CHAMPAGNE

of a full moon. It needed only this to give
to our journey the unreality of a nightmare.
Long since I had lost all sense of direction.
It was not only a maze and labyrinth, but
it held to no level. At times, concealed by
walls of chalk, we walked erect, and then,
like woodchucks, dived into earthen bur-
rows. For a long distance we crawled, bend-
ing double through a tunnel. At intervals
lamps, as yet unlit, protruded from either
side, and to warn us of these from the dark-
ness a voice would call, "attention d gauche,"
"attention a droite." The air grew foul and
the pressure on the ear-drums like that of
the subway under the North River. We
came out and drew deep breaths as though
we had been long under water.

We were in the first trench. It was, at
places, from three hundred to forty yards
distant from the Germans. No one spoke,
or only in whispers. The moonlight turned
the men at arms into ghosts. Their silence
added to their unreality. I felt like Rip

THE ZIGZAG FRONT

Van Winkle hemmed in by the goblin crew
of Hendrik Hudson. From somewhere near
us, above or below, to the right or left the
"seventy-fives," as though aroused by the
moon, began like terriers to bark viciously.
The officer in the steel casque paused to
listen, fixed their position, and named them.
How he knew where they were, how he knew
where he was himself, was all part of the
mystery. Rats, jet black in the moonlight,
scurried across the open places, scrambled
over our feet, ran boldly between them.
We had scared them, perhaps, but not half
so badly as they scared me.

We pushed on past sentinels, motionless,
silent, fatefully awake. The moonlight had
turned their blue uniforms white and flashed
on their steel helmets. They were like men
in armor, and so still that only when you
brushed against them, cautiously as men
change places in a canoe, did you feel they
were alive. At times, one of them thinking
something in the gardens of barb wire had

OF CHAMPAGNE

moved, would loosen his rifle, and there
would be a flame and flare of red, and then
again silence, the silence of the hunter stalk-
ing a wild beast, of the officer of the law,
gun in hand, waiting for the breathing of
the burglar to betray his presence.

The next morning I called to make my
compliments to General Franchet d'Esperay.
He was a splendid person — as alert as a
steel lance. He demanded what I had seen.

"Nothing!" he protested. "You have
seen nothing. When you return from Serbia,
come to Champagne again and I myself
will show you something of interest."

I am curious to see what he calls "some-
thing of interest."

"I wonder what's happening in Buffalo?"

There promised to be a story for some one
to write a year after the war. It would tell
how quickly Champagne recovered from the
invasion of the Germans. But one need not
wait until after the war. The story can be
written now.

THE ZIGZAG FRONT

We know that the enemy was thrown back
across the Aisne.

We know that the enemy drove the French
and English before him until at the Forest
of Montmorency, the Hun was within ten and
at Claye within fifteen miles of Paris.

But to-day, by any outward evidence, he
would have a hard time to prove it. And
that is not because when he advanced he
was careful not to tramp on the grass or to
pick the flowers. He did not obey even the
warnings to automobilists: "Attention Us
en} ants!"

On the contrary, as he came, he threw
before him thousands of tons of steel and
iron. Like a cyclone he uprooted trees,
unroofed houses; like a tidal wave he ex-
cavated roads that had been built by the
Romans, swept away walls, and broke the
backs of stone bridges that for hundreds of
years had held their own against swollen
rivers.

A year ago I followed the German in his
70

OF CHAMPAGNE

retreat from Claye through Meaux, Chateau
Thierry to Soissons, where, on the east bank
of the Aisne, I watched the French artillery
shell his guns on the hills opposite. The
French then were hot upon his heels. In one
place they had not had time to remove even
their own dead, and to avoid the bodies in
the open road the car had to twist and turn.

Yesterday, coming back to Paris from the
trenches that guard Rheims, I covered the
same road. But it was not the same. It
seemed that I must surely have lost the
way. Only the iron signs at the crossroads,
and the map used the year before and scarred
with my own pencil marks, were evidences
that again I was following mile by mile and
foot by foot the route of that swift advance
and riotous retreat.

A year before the signs of the retreat were
the road itself, the houses facing it, and a
devastated countryside. You knew then,
that, of these signs, some would at once be
effaced. They had to be effaced, for they

THE ZIGZAG FRONT

were polluting the air. But until the vil-
lagers returned to their homes, or to what
remained of their homes, the bloated car-
casses of horses blocked the road, the bodies
of German soldiers, in death mercifully un-
like anything human and as unreal as fallen
scarecrows, sprawled in the fields.

But while you knew these signs of the
German raid would be removed, other signs
were scars that you thought would be long
in healing. These were the stone arches
and buttresses of the bridges, dynamited
and dumped into the mud of the Marne and
Ourcq, chateaux and villas with the roof
torn away as deftly as with one hand you
could rip off the lid of a cigar-box, or with
a wall blown in, or out, in either case ex-
posing indecently the owner's bedroom, his
wife's boudoir, the children's nursery.

Other signs of the German were villages
with houses wrecked, the humble shops
sacked, garden walls levelled, fields of beets
and turnips uprooted by his shells, or where

OF CHAMPAGNE

he had snatched sleep in the trampled mud,
strewn with demolished haystacks, vast trees
split clean in half as though by lightning,
or with nothing remaining but the splintered
stump. That was the picture of the roads
and countryside in the triangle of Soissons,
Rheims, and Meaux, as it was a year ago.

And I expected to see the wake of that
great retreat still marked by ruins and dev-
astation.

But I had not sufficiently trusted to the
indomitable spirit of the French, in their
intolerance of waste, their fierce, yet or-
dered energy.

To-day the fields are cultivated up to the
very butts of the French batteries. They
are being put to bed, and tucked in for the
long winter sleep. For miles the furrows
stretch over the fields in unbroken lines.
Ploughs, not shells, have drawn them.

They are gray with fertilizers, strewn
with manure; the swiftly dug trenches of a
year ago have given way to the peaked

THE ZIGZAG FRONT

mounds in which turnips wait transplanting.
Where there were vast stretches of mud,
scarred with intrenchments, with the wheel
tracks of guns and ammunition carts, with
stale, ill-smelling straw, the carcasses of oxen
and horses, and the bodies of men, is now a
smiling landscape, with miles of growing
grain, green vegetables, green turf.

In Champagne the French spirit and na-
ture, working together, have wiped out the
signs of the German raid. It is as though
it had never been. You begin to believe it
was only a bad dream, an old wife's tale to
frighten children.

The car moved slowly, but, look no matter
how carefully, it was most difficult to find
the landfalls I remembered.

Near Feret Milton there was a chateau
with a lawn that ran to meet the Paris road.
It had been used as a German emergency
hospital, and previously by them as an out-
post. The long windows to the terrace had
been wrecked, the terrace was piled high with

OF CHAMPAGNE

blood-stained uniforms, hundreds of boots
had been tossed from an upper story that
had been used as an operating-room, and
mixed with these evidences of disaster were
monuments of empty champagne-bottles.

That was the picture I remembered. Yes-
terday, like a mantle of moss, the lawn swept
to the road, the long windows had been re-
placed and hung with yellow silk, and, on
the terrace, where I had seen the blood-
stained uniforms, a small boy, maybe the
son and heir of the chateau, with hair flying
and bare legs showing, was joyfully riding a
tricycle.

Neufchelles I remembered as a village
completely wrecked and inhabited only by
a very old man, and a cat, that, as though
for company, stalked behind him.

But to-day Neufchelles is a thriving, con-
tented, commonplace town. Splashes of
plaster, less weather-stained than the plaster
surrounding them, are the only signs remain-
ing of the explosive shells. The stone-mason

THE ZIGZAG FRONT

and the plasterer have obliterated the work
of the guns, the tiny shops have been refilled,
the tide of life has flowed back, and in the
streets the bareheaded women, their shoul-
ders wrapped in black woollen shawls, gather
to gossip, or, with knitting in hand, call to
each other from the doorways.

There was the stable of a large villa in
which I had seen five fine riding-horses
lying on the stones, each with a bullet-hole
over his temple. In the retreat they had
been destroyed to prevent the French using
them as remounts.

This time, as we passed the same stable-
yard, fresh horses looked over the half -doors,
the lofts were stuffed with hay; in the corner,
against the coming of winter, were piled
many cords of wood, and rival chanticleers,
with their harems, were stalking proudly
around the stable-yard, pecking at the scat-
tered grain. It was a picture of comfort
and content. It continued like that all the
way.

OF CHAMPAGNE

Even the giant poplars that line the road
for four miles out of Meaux to the west,
and that had been split and shattered, are
now covered with autumn foliage, the scars
are overgrown and by doctor nature the raw
spots have been cauterized and have healed.

The stone bridges, that at Meaux and be-
yond the Chateau Thierry sprawled in the
river, again have been reared in air. People
have already forgotten that a year ago to
reach Soissons from Meaux the broken bridges
forced them to make a detour of fifty miles.

The lesson of it is that the French people
have no time to waste upon post mortems.
With us, fifty years after the event, there
are those who still talk of Sherman's raid
through Columbia, who are so old that they
hum hymns of hate about it. How much
wiser, how much more proud, is the village
of Neufchelles !

Not fifty, but only one year has passed
since the Germans wrecked Neufchelles, and
already it has been rebuilt and repopulated

THE ZIGZAG FRONT OF CHAMPAGNE

— not after the war has for half a century
been at an end, but while war still endures,
while it is but twenty miles distant! What
better could illustrate the spirit of France
or better foretell her final victory?

CHAPTER IV
FROM PARIS TO THE PIR^US

ATHENS, November, 1915.

AT home we talk glibly of a world war.
But beyond speculating in munitions
and as to how many Americans will be killed
by the next submarine, and how many notes
the President will write about it, we hardly
appreciate that this actually is a war of the
world, that all over the globe, every ship
of state, even though it may be trying to
steer a straight course, is being violently
rocked by it. Even the individual, as he
moves from country to country, is rocked
by it, not violently, but continuously. It is
in loss of time and money he feels it most.
And as he travels, he learns, as he cannot
learn from a map, how far-reaching are the
ramifications of this war, in how many dif-
ferent ways it affects every one. He soon

FROM PARIS TO THE PIR^US

comes to accept whatever happens as directly
due to the war — even when the deck stew-
ard tells him he cannot play shuffle-board be-
cause, owing to the war, there is no chalk.

In times of peace to get to this city from
Paris did not require more than six days,
but now, owing to the war, in making the
distance we wasted fifteen. That is not
counting the time in Paris required by the
police to issue the passport, without which
no one can leave France. At the prefecture
of police I found a line of people — French,
Italians, Americans, English — in columns of
four and winding through gloomy halls, down
dark stairways, and out into the street. I
took one look at the line and fled to Mr.
Thackara, our consul-general, and, thanks
to him, was not more than an hour in obtain-
ing my laisser-passer. The police assured
me I might consider myself fortunate, as
the time they usually spent in preparing a
passport was two days. It was still neces-
sary to obtain a vise from the Italian con-

FROM PARIS TO THE PIRAEUS

sulate permitting me to enter Italy, from
the Greek consulate to enter Greece, and, as
my American passport said nothing of Ser-
bia, from Mr. Thackara two more vises,
one to get out of France, and another to in-
vade Serbia. Thanks to the war, in obtain-
ing all these autographs two more days
were wasted. In peace times one had only
to go to Cook's and buy a ticket. In those
days there was no more delay than in reserv-
ing a seat for the theatre.

War followed us south. The windows of
the wagon-lit were plastered with warnings
to be careful, to talk to no strangers; that
the enemy was listening. War had invaded
even Aix-les-Bains, most lovely of summer
pleasure-grounds. As we passed, it was
wrapped in snow; the Cat's Tooth, that
towers between Aixe and Chambery, and
that lifts into the sky a great cross two hun-
dred feet in height, was all white, the pine-
trees around the lake were white, the streets
were white, the Casino des Fleurs, the Cercle,

FROM PARIS TO THE PIR^US

the hotels. And above each of them, where
once was only good music, good wines, beau-
tiful flowers, and baccarat, now droop innu-
merable Red Cross flags. Against the snow-
covered hills they were like little splashes of
blood.

War followed us into Italy. But from the
war as one finds it in England and France it
differed. Perhaps we were too far west, but
except for the field uniforms of green and
the new scabbards of gun-metal, and, at
Turin, four aeroplanes in the air at the same
time, you might not have known that Italy
was one of the Allies. For one thing, you
saw no wounded. Again, perhaps, it was
because we were too far south and west, and
that the fighting in Tyrol is concentrated.
But Bordeaux is farther from the battle-line
of France than is Naples from the Italian
front, and the multitudes of wounded in
Bordeaux, the multitudes of women in black
in Bordeaux, make one of the most appalling,
most significant pictures of this war. In

FROM PARIS TO THE PIR^US

two days in Naples I did not see one wounded
man. But I saw many Germans and Ger-
man signs, and no one had scratched Mumm
off the wine-card. A country that is one of
the Allies, and yet not at war with Germany,
cannot be taken very seriously. Indeed, in
England the War Office staff speak of the
Italian communiques as the "weather re-
ports."

In Naples the foreigners accuse Italy of
running with the hare and the hounds.
They asked what is her object in keeping on
friendly terms with the bitterest enemy of
the Allies. Is there an understanding that
after the war she and Germany will together
carve slices off of Austria? Whatever her
ulterior object may be, her present war
spirit does not impress the visitor. It is not
the spirit of France and England. One man
said to me: "Why can't you keep the Italian-
Americans in America? Over there they
earn money, and send millions of it to Italy.
When they come here to fight, not only that

FROM PARIS TO THE PIR^US

money stops, but we have to feed and pay
them."

It did not sound grateful. Nor as though
Italy were seriously at war. You do not find
France and England, or Germany, grudging
the man who returns to fight for his country
his rations and pay. And Italy pays her
soldiers five cents a day. Many of the
reservists and volunteers from America who
answered the call to arms are bitterly disap-
pointed. It was their hope to be led at once
to the firing-line. Instead, after six months,
they are still in camp. The families some
brought with them are in great need. They
are not used to living on five cents a day.
An Italian told me the heaviest drain upon
the war-relief funds came from the families
of these Italian-Americans, stranded in their
own country. He also told me his chief duty
was to meet them on their arrival.

"But haven't they money when they ar-
rive from America?" I asked.

"That's it," he said naively. "I'm at the
84

FROM PARIS TO THE PIR^US

wharf to keep their countrymen from rob-
bing them of it."

At present in Europe you cannot take
gold out of any country that is at war. As
a result, gold is less valuable than paper,
and when I exchanged my double-eagles for
paper I lost.

On the advice of the wisest young banker
in France I changed, again at a loss, the
French paper into Bank of England notes.
But when I arrived in Salonika I found that
with the Greeks English bank-notes were
about as popular as English troops, and
that had I changed my American gold into
American notes, as was my plan, I would
have been passing rich. That is what comes
of associating with bankers.

At the Italian frontier, a French gentle-
man had come to the door of the compart-
ment, raised his hat to the inmates, and
asked if we had any gold. Forewarned, we
had not; and, taking our word for it, he
again raised his hat and disappeared. But,

FROM PARIS TO THE PIRAEUS

on leaving Naples, it was not like that. In
these piping times of war your baggage is
examined when you depart as well as when
you arrive. You get it coming and going.
But the Greek steamer was to weigh anchor
at noon, and at noon all the port officials
were at dejeuner; so, sooner than wait a
week for another boat, the passengers went
on board and carried their bags with them.
It was unpardonable. It was an affront the
port officials could not brook. They had
been disregarded. Their dignity had been
flouted. What was worse, they had not been
tipped. Into the dining-saloon of the Greek
steamer, where we were at luncheon, they
burst like Barbary pirates. They shrieked,
they yelled. Nobody knew who they were,
or what they wanted. Nor did they en-
lighten us. They only beat upon the tables,
clanked their swords, and spoiled our lunch.
Why we were abused, or of what we were
accused, we could not determine. We
vaguely recognized our names, and stood
up, and, while they continued to beat upon

FROM PARIS TO THE PIR^US

the tables, a Greek steward explained they
wanted our gold. I showed them my bank-
notes, and was allowed to return to my
garlic and veal. But the English cigarette
king, who each week sends some millions of
cigarettes to the Tommies in the trenches,
proposed to make a test case of it.

"I have on me," he whispered, "four
English sovereigns. I am not taking them
out of Italy, because until they crossed the
border in my pocket, they were not in Italy,
and as I am now leaving Italy, one might
say they have never been in Italy. It's as
though they were in bond. I am a British
subject, and this is not Italian, but British,
gold. I shall refuse to surrender my four
sovereigns. I will make it a test case."

The untipped port officials were still jan-
gling their swords, so I advised the cigarette
king to turn in his gold. Even a Greek
steamer is better than an Italian jail.

"I will make of it a test case," he re-
peated.

"Let George do it," I suggested.
87

FROM PARIS TO THE PIRAEUS

At that moment, in the presence of all
the passengers, they were searching the per-
son of another British subject, and an Ally.
He was one of Lady Paget's units. He was
in uniform, and, as they ran itching fingers
over his body, he turned crimson, and the
rest of us, pretending not to witness his hu-
miliation, ate ravenously of goat's cheese.

The cigarette king, breathing defiance,
repeated: "I will make of it a test case."

"Better let George do it," I urged.

And when his name was called, a name
that is as well known from Ka valla to Smyrna
in tobacco-fields, sweetmeat shops, palaces,
and mosques, as at the Ritz and the Gaiety,
the cigarette king wisely accepted for his
four sovereigns Italian lire. At their rate of
exchange, too.

Later, off Capri, he asked: "When you
advised me to let George make a test case
of it, to which of our fellow passengers did
you refer?"

In the morning the Adriaticus picked up
88

FROM PARIS TO THE PIRAEUS

the landfall of Messina, but, instead of mak-
ing fast to the quay, anchored her length
from it. This appeared to be a port regula-
tion. It enables the boatman to earn a liv-
ing by charging passengers two francs for a
round trip of fifty yards. As the wrecked
city seems to be populated only by boatmen,
rowing passengers ashore is the chief in-
dustry.

The stricken seaport looks as though as
recently as last week the German army
had visited it. In France, although war
still continues, towns wrecked by the Ger-
mans are already rebuilt. But Messina,
after four years of peace, is still a ruin. But
little effort has been made to restore it.
The post-cards that were printed at the
moment of the earthquake show her ex-
actly as she is to-day. With, in the streets,
no sign of life, with the inhabitants standing
idle along the quay, shivering in the rain
and snow, with for a background crumbling
walls, gaping cellars, and hills buried under

FROM PARIS TO THE PIRAEUS

acres of fallen masonry, the picture was one
of terrible desolation, of neglect and inef-
ficiency. The only structures that had ob-
viously been erected since the earthquake
were the "ready-to-wear" shacks sent as
a stop-gap from America. One should not
look critically at a gift-house, but they are
certainly very ugly. In Italy, where every
spot is a "location" for moving-pictures,
where the street corners are backgrounds
for lovers' trysts and assassinations, where
even poverty is picturesque, and each land-
scape "composes" into a beautiful and won-
drous painting, the zinc shacks, in rigid
lines, like the barracks of a mining-camp,
came as a shock.

Sympathetic Americans sent them as only
a temporary shelter until Messina rose again.
But it was explained, as there is no rent to
pay, the Italians, instead of rebuilding, prefer
to inhabit the ready-to-wear houses. How
many tourists the mere view of them will
drive away no one can guess.

FROM PARIS TO THE PIR^US

People who linger in Naples, and by train
to Reggio join the boat at Messina, never
admit that they followed that route to
avoid being seasick. Seasickness is an illness
of which no one ever boasts. He may take
pride in saying: "I've an awful cold!" or
"I've such a headache I can't see!" and
will expect you to feel sorry. But he knows,
no matter how horribly he suffers from mal
de mer, he will receive no sympathy. In
a Puck and Punch way he will be merely
comic. So, the passengers who come over
the side at Messina always have an excuse
other than that they were dodging the sea.
It is usually that they lost their luggage at
Naples and had to search for it. As the
Italian railroads, which are operated by the
government, always lose your luggage, it is
an admirable excuse. So, also, is the one that
you delayed in order to visit the ruins of Pom-
peii. The number of people who have visited
Pompeii solely because the Bay of Naples
was in an ugly mood will never be counted.

FROM PARIS TO THE PIR^US

Among those who joined at Messina were
the French princess, who talked American
much too well to be French, and French far
too well to be an American, two military
attaches, the King's messenger, and the
Armenian, who was by profession an olive
merchant, and by choice a manufacturer
and purveyor of rumors. He was at once
given an opportunity to exhibit his genius.
The Italians held up our ship, and would
not explain why. So the rumor man ex-
plained. It was because Greece had joined
the Germans, and Italy had made a prize of
her. Ten minutes later, he said Greece had
joined the Allies, and the Italians were hold-
ing our ship until they could obtain a convoy
of torpedo-boats. Then it was because two
submarines were waiting for us outside the
harbor. Later, it was because the Allies had
blockaded Greece, and our Greek captain
would not proceed, not because he was de-
tained by Italians, but by fear.

Every time the rumor man appeared in
92

FROM PARIS TO THE PIRAEUS

the door of the smoking-room he was wel-
comed with ironic cheers. But he was not
discouraged. He would go outside and stand
in the rain while he hatched a new rumor,
and then, in great excitement, dash back to
share it. War levels all ranks, and the pas-
sengers gathered in the smoking-room play-
ing solitaire, sipping muddy Turkish coffee,
and discussing the war in seven languages, and
everybody smoked — especially the women.
Finally the military attaches, Sir Thomas
Cunningham and Lieutenant Boulanger, put
on the uniforms of their respective countries
and were rowed ashore to protest. The
rest of us paced the snow-swept decks and
gazed gloomily at the wrecked city. Out
of the fog a boat brought two Sisters of the
Poor, wrapped in the black cloaks of their
order. They were petitioners for the poor
of Messina, and everybody in the smoking-
room gave them a franc. Because one of
them was Irish and because it was her fate
to live in Messina, I gave her ten francs.

FROM PARIS TO THE PIR^US

Meaning to be amiable, she said: "Ah, it
takes the English to be generous!"

I said I was Irish.

The King's messenger looked up from his
solitaire and, also wishing to be amiable,
asked: "What's the difference?"

The Irish sister answered him.

"Nine francs," she said.

After we had been prisoners of war for
twenty-four hours John Bass of the Chicago
Daily News suggested that if we remained
longer at Messina our papers would say we
thought the earthquake was news, and had
stopped to write a story about it. So, we
sent a telegram to our consul.

The American consul nearest was George
Emerson Haven at Catania, by train three
hours distant. We told him for twenty-
four hours we had been prisoners, and that
unless we were set free he was to declare
war on Italy. The telegram was written
not for the consul to read, but for the bene-
fit of the port authorities. We hoped it might

FROM PARIS TO THE PIR^US

impress them. We certainly never supposed
they would permit our ultimatum to reach
Mr. Haven. In any case, the ship was al-
lowed to depart. But whether the com-
mandant of the port was alarmed by our
declaration of war, or the unusual spectacle
of the British attache, "Tommy" Cunning-
ham, in khaki while three hundred miles
distant from any firing-line, we will never
know.* But the rumor man knew, and ex-
plained.

"We had been delayed," he said, "because
Italy had declared war on Greece, and did
not want the food on board our ship to enter
that country."

The cigarette king told him if the food on
board was the same food we had been eat-
ing, to bring it into any country was a
proper cause for war.

* Later we were sorry we had not been held longer in
captivity. The telegram reached our consul, and that gentle-
man at once journeyed to Messina not only to rescue us, but
to invite us to a Thanksgiving Day dinner. A consul like
that is wasted on the Island of Sicily. The State Depart-
ment is respectfully urged to promote him to the mainland.

FROM PARIS TO THE PIRAEUS

At noon we passed safely between Scylla
and Charybdis, and the following morning
were in Athens.

CHAPTER V

WHY KING CONSTANTINE IS NEUTRAL

ATHENS, November, 1915.

WE are not allowed to tell what the
situation is here. But, in spite of the
censor, I am going to tell what the situation
is. It is involved. That is not because no
one will explain it. In Greece at present, ex-
plaining the situation is the national pastime.
Since arriving yesterday I have had the sit-
uation explained to me by members of the
Cabinet, guides to the Acropolis, generals in
the army, Teofani, the cigarette king, three
ministers plenipotentiary, the man from St.
Louis who is over here to sell aeroplanes, the
man from Cook's, and "extra people," like
soldiers in cafes, brigands in petticoats, and
peasants in peaked shoes with tassels. They
asked me not to print their names, which
was just as well, as I cannot spell them.

WHY KING CONSTANTINE

They each explained the situation differently,
but all agree it is involved.

To understand it, you must go back to
Helen of Troy, take a running jump from the
Greek war for independence and Lord Byron
to Mr. Gladstone and the Bulgarian atroci-
ties, note the influence of the German Em-
peror at Corfu, appreciate the intricacies of
Russian diplomacy in Belgrade, the rise of
Enver Pasha and the Young Turks, what
Constantine said to Venizelos about giving
up Kavalla, and the cablegram Prince Danilo,
of "Merry Widow" fame, sent to his cousin
of Italy. By following these events, the sit-
uation is as easy to grasp as an eel that has
swallowed the hook and cannot digest it.

For instance, Mr. Poneropolous, the well-
known contractor who sells shoes to the
army, informs me the Greeks as one man
want war. They are even prepared to fight
for it. On the other hand, Axon Skiadas,
the popular barber of the Hotel Grande
Bretagne, who has just been called to the

IS NEUTRAL

colors, assures me no patriot would again
plunge this country into conflict.

The diplomats also disagree, especially
as to which of them is responsible for the
failure of Greece to join the Allies. The
one who is to blame for that never is the
one who is talking to you. The one who is
talking is always the one who, had they
followed his advice, could have saved the
"situation." They did not, and now it is
involved, not to say addled. The military
attache of Great Britain volunteered to set
the situation before me in a few words.
After explaining for two hours, he asked me
to promise not to repeat what he had said.
I promised. Another diplomat, who was pro-
jected into the service by William Jennings
Bryan, said if he told all he knew about the
situation "the world would burst." Those
are his exact words. It would have been
an event of undoubted news value, and as
a news-gatherer I should have coaxed his
secret from him, but it seemed as though

WHY KING CONSTANTINE

the world is in trouble enough as it is, and if
it must burst I want it to burst when I am
nearer home. So I switched him off to the
St. Louis convention, where he was prob-
ably more useful than he will ever be in the
Balkans.

While every one is guessing, the writer
ventures to make a guess. It is that Greece
will remain neutral, or will join the Allies.
Without starving to death she cannot join
the Germans. Greece is non-supporting.
What she eats comes in the shape of wheat
from outside her borders, from the grain-
fields of Russia, Egypt, Bulgaria, France,
and America. When Denys Cochin, the
French minister to Athens, had his inter-
view with the King, the latter became angry
and said, "We can get along without France's
money," and Cochin said: "That is true,
but you cannot get along without France's
wheat."

The Allies are not going to bombard
Greek ports or shell the Acropolis. They

100

IS NEUTRAL

will not even blockade the ports. But their
fleets — French, Italian, English — will stop
all ships taking foodstuffs to Greece. They
have just released seven grain ships from
America, that were held up at Malta, and
ships carrying food to Greece have been
stopped at points as far away as Gibraltar.
As related in the last chapter, the Greek
steamer on which we sailed from Naples
was held up at Messina for twenty-four
hours until her cargo was overhauled. As
we had nothing in the hold more health-
sustaining than hides and barbed wire, we
were allowed to proceed.

Whatever course Greece follows, her de-
pendence upon others for food explains her
act. To-day (November 29) there is not
enough wheat in the country to feed the
people for, some say three — the most op-
timistic, ten — days. Should she decide to
join Germany she would starve. It would
be deliberate suicide. The French and Ital-
ian fleets are at Malta, less than a day dis-

IOI

WHY KING CONSTANTINE

tant; the English fleet is off the Gallipoli
peninsula. Fifteen hours' steaming could
bring it to Salonika. Greece is especially
vulnerable from the sea. She is all islands,
coast towns, and seaports. The German
navy could not help her. It will not leave
the Kiel Canal. The Austrian navy cannot
leave the Adriatic. Should Greece decide
against the Allies, their combined war-ships
would pick up her islands and blockade her
ports. In a week she would be starving.
The railroad from Bulgaria to Salonika, over
which in peace times comes much wheat
from Roumania, would be closed to her.
Even if the Germans and Bulgarians suc-
ceeded in winning it to the coast, they could
get no food for Greece farther than that.
They have no war-ships, and the Gulf of
Salonika is full of those of the Allies.

The position of King Constantine is very
difficult. He is supposed to be strongly pro-
German, and the reason for his sympathy
that is given here is the same as is accepted

1 02

From a photograph by Underwood and Underwood.

King Constantine of Greece and commander-in-chief of her
armies.

In two years he led his people to victory in two wars. If now they desire
peace and in this big war the right to remain neutral, he thinks they have
earned that right.

IS NEUTRAL

in America. Every act of his is supposed
to be inspired by family influences, when,
as he has stated publicly through his friend
Walter Harris of the London Times, he is
pro-English, and has been actuated solely
by what he thought was best for his own
people. Indeed, there are many who believe
if the terms upon which Greece might join
the Allies had been left to the King instead
of to Venizelos, Greece now would be with
the Entente.

Or, if Greece remained neutral, no one
could better judge whether neutrality was
or was not best for her than Constantine.
In the three years before the World War,
he had led his countrymen through two
wars, and if both, as King and commander
of her armies, he thought they needed rest
and peace, he was entitled to that opinion.
Instead, he was misrepresented and abused.
His motives were assailed; he was accused
of being dominated by his Imperial brother-
in-law. At no time since the present war

103

WHY KING CONSTANTINE

began has he been given what we would
call a "square deal." The writer has followed
the career of Constantine since the Greek-
Turkish war of 1897, when they "drank
from the same canteen," and as Kings go, or
until they all do go, respects him as a good
King. To his people he is generous, kind,
and considerate; as a general he has added
to the territory of Greece many miles and
seaports; he is fond of his home and family,
and in his reign there has been no scandal,
no Knights of the Round Table, such as
disgraced the German court, no Tripoli mas-
sacre, no Congo atrocities, no Winter Garden
or La Scala favorites. Venizelos may or
may not be as unselfish a patriot. But
justly or not, it is difficult to disassociate
what Venizelos wants for Greece with what
he wants for Venizelos. The King is re-
moved from any such suspicion. He is
already a King, and except in continuing
to be a good King, he can go no higher.
How Venizelos came so prominently into
104

IS NEUTRAL

the game is not without interest. As long
ago as when the two German cruisers escaped
from Messina and were sold to Turkey, the
diplomatic representatives of the Allies in the
Balkans were instructed to see that Turkey
and Germany did not get together, and that,
as a balance of power in case of such a
union, the Balkan States were kept in line.
Instead of themselves attending to this, the
diplomats placed the delicate job in the hands
of one man. At the framing of the Treaty
of London, of all the representatives from the
Balkans, the one who most deeply impressed
the other powers was M. Venizelos. And the
task of keeping the Balkans neutral or with
the Allies was left to him.

He has a dream of a Balkan "band," a
union of all the Balkan principalities. It
obsesses him. And to bring that dream true
he was willing to make concessions which
King Constantine, who considered only what
was good for Greece, and was not concerned
with a Balkan alliance, thought most un-

105

WHY KING CONSTANTINE

wise. Venizelos also was working for the
good of Greece, but he was convinced it
could come to her only through the union.
He was willing to give Kavalla to Bulgaria
in exchange for Asia Minor, from the Dar-
danelles to Smyrna. But the King would
not consent. As a buffer against Turkey,
he considered Kavalla of the greatest stra-
tegic value, and he had the natural pride of
a soldier in holding on to land he himself
had added to his country. But in his op-
position to Venizelos in this particular, credit
was not given him for acting in the interests
of Greece, but of playing into the hands of
Germany.

Another step he refused to take, which
refusal the Allies attributed to his pro-
German leanings, was to attack the Dar-
danelles. In the wars of 1912-13 the King
showed he was an able general. With his
staff he had carefully considered an at-
tack upon the Dardanelles. He submitted
this plan to the Allies, and was willing to

106

IS NEUTRAL

aid them if they brought to the assault
400,000 men. They claim he failed them.
He did fail them, but not until after they
had failed him by bringing thousands of
men instead of the tens of thousands he
knew were needed.

The Dardanelles expedition was not re-
quired to prove the courage of the French
and British. Beyond furnishing fresh evi-
dence of that, it has been a failure. And in
refusing to sacrifice the lives of his subjects
the military judgment of Constantine has
been vindicated. He was willing to attack
Turkey through Kavalla and Thrace, be-
cause by that route he presented an armed
front to Bulgaria. But, as he pointed out,
if he sent his army to the Dardanelles, he
left Kavalla at the mercy of his enemy.
In his mistrust of Bulgaria he has certainly
been justified.

Greece is not at war, but in outward ap-
pearance she is as firmly on a war footing
as is France or Italy. A man out of uniform

107

WHY KING CONSTANTINE

is conspicuous, and all day regiments pass
through the streets carrying the campaign kit
and followed by the medical corps, the moun-
tain batteries, and the transport wagons.
In the streets the crowds are cheering Denys
Cochin, the special ambassador from France.
He makes speeches to them from the bal-
cony of our hotel, and the mob wave flags
and shout "Zito! Zito!"

In a play Colonel Savage produced, I
once wrote the same scene and placed it in
the same hotel in Athens. In Athens the
local color was superior to ours, but George
Marion stage-managed the mob better than
did the Athens police.

Athens is in a perplexed state of mind.
She does not know if she wants to go to war
or wants peace. She does not know if she
should go to war, on which side she wants
to fight. People tell you frankly that their
heart-beats are with France, but that they
are afraid of Germany.

"If Germany wins," they asked, "what
1 08

IS NEUTRAL

will become of us? The Germans already
are in Monastir, twenty miles from our
border. They have driven the Serbians, the
French, and the British out of Serbia, and
they will make our King a German vassal."

"Then, why don't you go out and fight for
your King?" I asked.

"He won't let us," they said.

When the army of a country is mobilized,
it is hard to understand that that country
is neutral. You expect to see evidences of
her partisanship for one cause or the other.
But in Athens, from a shop-window point
of view, both the Allies and the Germans are
equally supported. There are just as many
pictures of the German generals as of Joffre,
as many post-cards of the German Emperor
as of King George and King Albert. After
Paris, it is a shock to see German books,
portraits of German statesmen, composers,
and musicians. In one shop-window con-
spicuously featured, evidently with intent,
is an engraving showing Napoleon III sur-

109

WHY KING CONSTANTINE IS NEUTRAL

rendering to Bismarck. In the principal
bookstore, books in German on German vic-
tories, and English and French pamphlets on
German atrocities stand shoulder to shoul-
der. The choice is with you.

Meanwhile, on every hand are the signs
of a nation on the brink of war; of armies
of men withdrawn from trades, professions,
homes; of men marching and drilling in
squads, companies, brigades. At times the
columns are so long that in passing the win-
dows of the hotel they take an hour. All
these fighting men must be fed, clothed,
paid, and while they are waiting to fight,
whether they are goatherds or piano-tuners
or shopkeepers, their business is going to
the devil.

CHAPTER VI
WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA

SALONIKA, December, 1915.

WE left Athens on the first ship that was
listed for Salonika. She was a strange
ship. During many years on various vessels
in various seas, she was the most remarkable.
Every Greek loves to gamble; but for 'some
reason, or for that very reason, for him to
gamble on shore is by law made difficult.
In consequence, as soon as the Hermoupolis
raised anchor she became a floating gambling-
hell. There were twenty-four first-class pas-
sengers who were in every way first class;
Greek officers, bankers, merchants, and dep-
uties, and their time on the steamer from
eleven each morning until four the next
morning was spent in dealing baccarat.

When the stewards, who were among the
few persons on board who did not play,

WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA

tried to spread a table-cloth and serve food,
they were indignantly rebuked. The most
untiring players were the captain and the
ship's officers. Whenever they found that
navigating their ship interfered with their
baccarat we came to anchor. We should
have reached Salonika in a day and a half.
We arrived after four days. And all of each
day and half of each night we were anchored
in midstream while the captain took the
bank. The hills of Eubcea and the main-
land formed a giant funnel of snow, through
which the wind roared. It swept the ship
from bow to stern, turning to ice the wood-
work, the velvet cushions, even the blankets.
Fortunately, it was not the kind of a ship
that supplied sheets, or we would have frozen
in our berths. Outside of the engine-room,
which was aft, there was no heat of any
sort, but undaunted, the gamblers, in caps
and fur coats, their breath rising in icy clouds,
crouched around the table, their frozen fin-
gers fumbling with the cards.

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There were two charming Italians on board,
a father and son — the father absurdly youth-
ful, the boy incredibly wise. They operate a
chain of banks through the Levant. They
watched the game but did not play. The
father explained this to me. "My dear son
is a born gambler," he said. "So, in order
that I may set him an example, I will not
play until after he has gone to sleep."

Later, the son also explained. "My dear
father," he whispered, "is an inveterate
gambler. So, in order that I may reprove
him, I do not gamble. At least not until he
has gone to bed." At midnight I left them
still watching each other. The next day the
son said: "I got no sleep last night. For
some reason, my dear father was wakeful,
and it was four o'clock before he went to his
cabin."

When we reached Volo the sun was shin-
ing, and as the day was so beautiful, the
gamblers remained on board and played bac-
carat. The rest of us explored Volo. On

WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA

the mountains above it the Twenty-Four
Villages were in sight, nestling on the knees
of the hills. Their red-tiled houses rose one
above the other, the roof of one on a line
with the door-step of the neighbor just over-
head. Their white walls, for Volo is a sum-
mer resort, were merged in the masses of
snow, but in Volo itself roses were still bloom-
ing, and in every garden the trees were heavy
with oranges. They were so many that they
hid the green leaves, and against the walls of
purple, blue, and Pompeian red, made won-
derful splashes of a gorgeous gold.

Apparently the captain was winning, for he
sent word he would not sail until midnight,
and nine of his passengers dined ashore.
We were so long at table, not because the
dinner was good, but because there was a
charcoal brazier in the room, that we missed
the moving-pictures. So the young Italian
banker was sent to bargain for a second and
special performance. In the Levant there
always is one man who works, and one man

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WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA

who manages him. A sort of impresario.
Even the boatmen and bootblacks have a
manager who arranges the financial details.
It is difficult to buy a newspaper without
dealing through a third party. The moving-
picture show, being of importance, had seven
managers. The young Italian, undismayed,
faced all of them. He wrangled in Greek,
Turkish, French, and Italian, and they all
talked to him at the same time. Finally
the negotiations came to an end, but our
ambassador was not satisfied.

"They got the best of me," he reported
to us. "They are going to give the show over
again, and we are to have the services of the
pianist, the orchestra of five, and the lady
vocalist. But I had to agree to pay for the
combined entertainment entirely too much."

"How much?" I asked.

"Eight drachmas," he said apologetically,
"or, in your money, one dollar and fifty-
two cents."

"Each?" I said.

WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA

He exclaimed in horror: "No, divided
among the nine of us !"

No wonder Volo is a popular summer re-
sort, even in December.

The next day, after sunset, we saw the
snow-capped peak of Mount Olympus and
the lamps of a curving water-front, the long
rows of green air ports that mark the French
hospital ships, the cargo lights turned on the
red crosses painted on their sides, the gray,
grim battleships of England, France, Italy,
and Greece, and a bustling torpedo-boat
took us in tow, and guided us through the
floating mines and into the harbor of Sa-
lonika.

If it is true that happy are the people
without a history, then Salonika should be
thoroughly miserable. Some people make
history; others have history thrust upon
them. Ever since the world began Salonika
has had history thrust upon her. She aspired
only to be a great trading seaport. She was
content to be the place where the caravans

116

WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA

from the Balkans met the ships from the
shores of the Mediterranean, Egypt, and
Asia Minor. Her wharfs were counters across
which they could swap merchandise. All
she asked was to be allowed to change their
money. Instead of which, when any two
nations of the Near East went to the mat to
settle their troubles, Salonika was the mat.
If any country within a thousand-mile ra-
dius declared war on any other country in
any direction whatsoever, the armies of both
belligerents clashed at Salonika. They not
only used her as a door-mat, but they used
her hills to the north of the city for their
battle-field. In the fighting, Salonika took
no part. She merely loaned the hills. But
she knew, whichever side won, two things
would happen to her: She would pay a
forced loan and subscribe to an entirely
new religion. Three hundred years before
Christ, the people of Salonika worshipped
the mysterious gods who had their earthly
habitation on the island of Thasos. The

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WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA

Greeks ejected them, and erected altars to
Apollo and Aphrodite, the Egyptians fol-
lowed and taught Salonika to fear Serapis;
then came Roman gods and Roman gen-
erals; and then St. Paul. The Jews set up
synagogues, the Mohammedans reared min-
arets, the Crusaders restored the cross, the
Tripolitans restored the crescent, the Vene-
tians re-restored Christianity. Romans,
Greeks, Byzantines, Persians, Franks, Egyp-
tians, and Barbary pirates, all, at one time
or another, invaded Salonika. She was the
butcher's block upon which they carved
history. Some ruled her only for months,
others for years. Of the monuments to the
religions forced upon her, the most numerous
to-day are the synagogues of the Jews and
the mosques of the Mohammedans. It was
not only fighting men who invaded Salonika.
Italy can count her great earthquakes on
one hand; the United States on one finger.
But a resident of Salonika does not speak
of the "year of the earthquake." For him,

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WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA

it saves time to name the years when there
was no earthquake. Each of those years
was generally "the year of the great fire."
If it wasn't one thing, it was another. If
it was not a tidal wave, it was an epidemic;
if it was not a war, it was a blizzard. The
trade of Asia Minor flows into Salonika and
with it carries all the plagues of Egypt.
Epidemics of cholera in Salonika used to
be as common as yellow fever in Guayaquil.
Those years the cholera came the people
abandoned the seaport and lived on the
plains north of Salonika, in tents. If the
cholera spared them, the city was swept by
fire; if there was no fire, there came a great
frost. Salonika is on the same latitude as
Naples, Madrid, and New York; and New
York is not unacquainted with blizzards.
Since the seventeenth century, last winter
was said to be the coldest Salonika has ever
known. I was not there in the seventeenth
century, but am willing to believe that last
winter was the coldest since then; not

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WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA

only to believe it, but to swear to it. Of
the frost in 1657 the Salonikans boast the
cold was so severe that to get wood the
people destroyed their houses. This Decem-
ber, when on the English and French front
in Serbia, I saw soldiers using the same kind
of fire-wood. They knew a mud house that
is held together with beams and rafters can
be rebuilt, but that you cannot rebuild fro-
zen toes and ringers.

In thrusting history upon Salonika, the
last few years have been especially busy.
They gave her a fire that destroyed a great
part of the city, and between 1911 and 1914
two cholera epidemics, the Italian-Turkish
War, which, as Salonika was then Turkish,
robbed her of hundreds of her best men, the
Balkan-Turkish War, and the Second Bal-
kan War. In this Salonika was part of the
spoils, and Greece and Bulgaria fought to
possess her. The Greeks won, and during
one year she was at peace. Then, in 1914,
the Great War came, and Serbia sent out an

1 20

WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA

S. O. S. call to her Allies. At the Darda-
nelles, not eighteen hours away, the French
and English heard the call. But to reach
Serbia by the shortest route they must dis-
embark at Salonika, a port belonging to
Greece, a neutral power; and in moving north
from Salonika into Serbia they must, pass
over fifty miles of neutral Greek territory.
Venizelos, prime minister of Greece, gave
them permission. King Constantine, to pre-
serve his neutrality, disavowed the act of
his representative, and Venizelos resigned.
From the point of view of the Allies, the
disavowal came too late. As soon as they
had received permission from the recognized
Greek Government, they started, and, leav-
ing the King and Venizelos to fight it out
between them, landed at Salonika. The in-
habitants received them calmly. The Greek
officials, the colonel commanding the Greek
troops, the Greek captain of the port, and
the Greek collector of customs may have
been upset; but the people of Salonika re-

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WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA

mained calm. They were used to it. For-
eign troops were always landing at Salonika.
The oldest inhabitant could remember, among
others, those of Alexander the Great, Mark
Antony, Constantine, the Sultan Murad,
and several hundred thousand French and
English who over their armor wore a red
cross. So he was not surprised when, after
seven hundred years, the French and Eng-
lish returned, still wearing the red cross.

One of the greatest assets of those who
live in a seaport city is a view of their har-
bor. As a rule, that view is hidden from
them by zinc sheds on the wharfs and ware-
houses. But in Salonika the water-front
belongs to everybody. To the north it en-
closes the harbor in a great half-moon that
from tip to tip measures three miles. At
the western tip of this crescent are tucked
away the wharfs for the big steamers, the
bonded warehouses, the customs, the goods-
sheds. The rest of the water-front is open
to the people and to the small sailing vessels.

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WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA

For over a mile it is bordered by a stone
quay, with stone steps leading down to the
rowboats. Along this quay runs the principal
street, and on the side of it that faces the
harbor, in an unbroken row, are the hotels,
the houses of the rich Turks and Jews, clubs,
restaurants, cafes, and moving-picture thea-
tres. At night, when these places are blazing
with electric lights, the curving water-front
is as bright as Broadway — but Broadway
with one-half of the street in darkness. On
the dark side of the street, to the quay, are
moored hundreds of sailing vessels. Except
that they are painted and gilded differently,
they look like sisters. They are fat, squat
sisters with the lines of half a cantaloupe.
Each has a single mast and a lateen-sail,
like the Italian felucca and the sailing boats
of the Nile. When they are moored to the
quay and the sail is furled, each yard-arm,
in a graceful, sweeping curve, slants down-
ward. Against the sky, in wonderful con-
fusion, they follow the edge of the half -moon;

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WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA

the masts a forest of dead tree trunks, the
slanting yards giant quill pens dipping into
an ink-well. Their hulls are rich in gilding
and in colors — green, red, pink, and blue.
At night the electric signs of a moving-pic-
ture palace on the opposite side of the street
illuminate them from bow to stern. It is
one of those bizarre contrasts you find in
the Near East. On one side of the quay a
perfectly modern hotel, on the other a boat
unloading fish, and in the street itself, with
French automobiles and trolley-cars, men
who still are beasts of burden, who know no
other way of carrying a bale or a box than
upon their shoulders. In Salonika even the
trolley-car is not without its contrast. One
of our "Jim Crow" street-cars would puzzle
a Turk. He would not understand why we
separate the white and the black man. But
his own street-car is also subdivided. In
each there are four seats that can be hidden
by a curtain. They are for the women of
his harem.

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WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA

From the water-front Salonika climbs
steadily up-hill to the row of hills that form
her third and last line of defense. On the
hill upon which the city stands are the walls
and citadel built in the fifteenth century by
the Turks, and in which, when the city was
invaded, the inhabitants sought refuge. In
aspect it is mediaeval; the rest of the city is
modern and Turkish. The streets are very
narrow; in many the second stories overhang
them and almost touch, and against the sky-
line rise many minarets. But the Turks do
not predominate. They have their quarter,
and so, too, have the French and the Jews.
In numbers the Jews exceed all the others.
They form fifty-six per cent of a population
composed of Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Bul-
garians, Egyptians, French, and Italians.
The Jews came to Salonika the year America
was discovered. To avoid the Inquisition
they fled from Spain and Portugal and brought
their language with them; and after five hun-
dred years it still obtains. It has been called

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WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA

the Esperanto of the Salonikans. For the
small shopkeeper, the cabman, the waiter, it
is the common tongue. In such an environ-
ment it sounds most curious. When, in a
Turkish restaurant, you order a dinner in
the same words you last used in Vera Cruz,
and the dinner arrives, it seems uncanny.
But, in Salonika, the language most gen-
erally spoken is French. Among so many
different races they found, if they hoped to
talk business — and a Greek, an Armenian,
and a Jew are not averse to talking busi-
ness — a common tongue was necessary. So,
all those who are educated, even most sketch-
ily, speak French. The greater number of
newspapers are in French; and notices, ad-
vertisements, and official announcements are
printed in that language. It makes life in
Salonika difficult. When a man attacks you
in Turkish, Yiddish, or Greek, and you can-
not understand him, there is some excuse,
but when he instantly renews the attack in
both French and Spanish, it is disheartening.

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WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA

It makes you regret that when you were in
college the only foreign language you studied
was football signals.

At any time, without the added presence of
100,000 Greeks and 170,000 French and Eng-
lish, Salonika appears overpopulated. This
is partly because the streets are narrow and
because in the streets everybody gathers
to talk, eat, and trade. As in all Turkish
cities, nearly every shop is an "open shop."
The counter is where the window ought to
be, and opens directly upon the sidewalk.
A man does not enter the door of a shop, he
stands on the sidewalk, which is only thirty-
six inches wide, and makes his purchase
through the window. This causes a crowd to
collect. Partly because the man is blocking
the sidewalk, but chiefly because there is a
chance that something may be bought and
paid for. In normal times, if Salonika is
ever normal, she has a population of 120,000,
and every one of those 120,000 is personally
interested in any one else who engages, or

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WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA

may be about to engage, in a money trans-
action. In New York, if a horse falls down
there is at once an audience of a dozen per-
sons; in Salonika the downfall of a horse is
nobody's business, but a copper coin chang-
ing hands is everybody's. Of this local
characteristic, John T. McCutcheon and I
made a careful study; and the result of our
investigations produced certain statistics. If
in Salonika you buy a newspaper from a news-
boy, of the persons passing, two will stop; if
at an open shop you buy a package of ciga-
rettes, five people will look over your shoul-
der; if you pay your cab-driver his fare, you
block the sidewalk; and if you try to change
a hundred-franc note, you cause a riot. In
each block there are nearly a half dozen
money-changers; they sit in little shops as
narrow as a doorway, and in front of them is
a show-case filled with all the moneys of the
world. It is not alone the sight of your hun-
dred-franc note that enchants the crowd.
That collects the crowd; but what holds the

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WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA

crowd is that it knows there are twenty dif-
ferent kinds of money, all current in Sa-
lonika, into which your note can be changed.
And they know the money-changer knows
that and that you do not. So each man ad-
vises you. Not because he does not want to
see you cheated — between you and the
money-changer he is neutral — but because
he can no more keep out of a money deal
than can a fly pass a sugar-bowl.

The men on the outskirts of the crowd
ask: "What does he offer?"

The lucky ones in the front-row seats
call back: "A hundred and eighteen drach-
mas." The rear ranks shout with indigna-
tion. "It is robbery!" "It is because he
changes his money in Venizelos Street."
"He is paying the money-changer's rent."
"In the Jewish quarter they are giving
nineteen." "He is too lazy to walk two
miles for a drachma." "Then let him go
to the Greek, Papanastassion."

A man in a fez whispers to you impres-
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WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA

sively: "La livre turque est encore d'un
usage fort courant. La valeur au pair est
de francs vingt-deux." But at this the
Armenian shrieks violently. He scorns Turk-
ish money and advises Italian lire. At the
idea of lire the crowd howl. They hurl at
you instead francs, piastres, paras, drachmas,
lepta, metalliks, mejidis, centimes, and Eng-
lish shillings. The money-changer argues
with them gravely. He does not send for
the police to drive them away. He does not
tell them: "This is none of your business."
He knows better. In Salonika, it is their
business.

In Salonika, after money, the thing of
most consequence is conversation. Men who
are talking always have the right of way.
When two men of Salonika are seized with a
craving for conversation, they feel, until
that craving is satisfied, that nothing else is
important. So, when the ruling passion grips
them, no matter where they may meet, they
stop dead in their tracks and talk. If possible

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WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA

they select the spot, where by standing still
they can cause the greatest amount of in-
convenience to the largest number of people.
They do not withdraw from the sidewalk.
On the contrary, as best suited for conversa-
tion, they prefer the middle of it, the door-
way of a cafe, or the centre aisle of a res-
taurant. Of the people who wish to pass they
are as unconscious as a Chinaman smoking
opium is unconscious of the sightseers from
up-town. That they are talking is all that
counts. They feel every one else should ap-
preciate that. Because the Allies failed to
appreciate it, they gained a reputation for
rudeness. A French car, flying the flag of
the general, a squad of Tommies under arms,
a motor-cyclist carrying despatches could
not understand that a conversation on a
street crossing was a sacred ceremony. So
they shouldered the conversationalists aside
or splashed them with mud. It was in-
tolerable. Had they stamped into a mosque
in their hobnailed boots, on account of their

WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA

faulty religious training, the Salonikans might
have excused them. But that a man driving
an ambulance full of wounded should think
he had the right to disturb a conversation
that was blocking the traffic of only the
entire water-front was a discourtesy no Sa-
lonikan could comprehend.

The wonder was that among so many
mixed races the clashes were so few. In
one place seldom have people of so many
different nationalities met, and with in-
terests so absolutely opposed. It was a
situation that would have been serious had
it not been comic. For causing it, for per-
mitting it to continue, Greece was respon-
sible. Her position was not happy. She was
between the Allies and the Kaiser. Than
Greece, no country is more vulnerable from
an attack by sea; and if she offended the
Allies, their combined fleets at Malta and
Lemnos could seize all her little islands and
seaports. If she offended the Kaiser, he
would send the Bulgarians into eastern

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WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA

Thrace and take Salonika, from which only
two years before Greece had dispossessed
them. Her position was indeed most difficult.
As the barber at the Grande Bretange in
Athens told me: "It makes me a head-
ache."

On many a better head than his it had
the same effect. King Constantine, be-
cause he believed it was best for Greece,
wanted to keep his country neutral. But
after Venizelos had invited the Allies to
make a landing-place and a base for their
armies at Salonika, Greece was no longer
neutral. If our government invited 170,-
000 German troops to land at Portland,
and through Maine invade Canada, our
neutrality would be lost. The neutrality
of Greece was lost, but Constantine would
not see that. He hoped, although 170,000
fighting men are not easy to hide, that the
Kaiser also would not see it. It was a very
forlorn hope. The Allies also cherished a
hope. It was that Constantine not only

WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA

would look the other way while they slipped
across his country, but would cast off all
pretense of neutrality and join them. So,
as far as was possible, they avoided giving
offense. They assisted him in his pretense
of neutrality. And that was what caused
the situation. It was worthy of a comic
opera. Before the return of the allied troops
to Salonika, there were on the neutral soil
of Greece, divided between Salonika and the
front in Serbia, 110,000 French soldiers and
60,000 British. Of these, 100,000 were in
Salonika. The advanced British base was
at Doiran and the French advanced base at
Strumnitza railroad-station. In both places
martial law existed. But at the main base,
at Salonika, both armies were under the local
authority of the Greeks. They submitted to
the authority of the Greeks because they
wanted to keep up the superstition that Sa-
lonika was a neutral port, when the mere
fact that they were there proved she was
not. It was a situation almost unparalleled

WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA

in military history. At the base of a French
and of a British army, numbering together
170,000 men, the generals who commanded
them possessed less local authority than one
Greek policeman. They were guests. They
were invited guests of the Greek, and they
had no more right to object to his other guests
or to rearrange his house rules than would
you have the right, when a guest in a strange
club, to reprimand the servants. The Allies
had in the streets military police; but they
held authority over only soldiers of their
own country; they could not interfere with
a Greek soldier, or with a civilian of any
nation, and even the provost guard sent out
at night was composed not alone of French
and English but of an equal number of Greeks.
I often wondered in what language they is-
sued commands. As an instance of how
strictly the Allies recognized the authority
of the neutral Greek, and how jealously he
guarded it, there was the case of the Entente
Cafe. The proprietor of the Entente Cafe

WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA

was a Greek. A British soldier was ill-
treated in his cafe, and by the British com-
manding officer the place, so far as British
soldiers and sailors were concerned, was
declared "out of bounds." A notice to that
effect was hung in the window. But it was
a Greek policeman who placed it there.

In matters much more important, the
fact that the Allies were in a neutral seaport
greatly embarrassed them. They were not
allowed to censor news despatches nor to
examine the passports of those who arrived
and departed. The question of the censor-
ship was not so serious as it might appear.
General Sarrail explained to the correspon-
dents what might and what might not be
sent, and though what we wrote was not
read in Salonika by a French or British cen-
sor, General Sarrail knew it would be read
by censors of the Allies at Malta, Rome,
Paris, and London. Any news despatch
that, unscathed, ran that gantlet, while it
might not help the Allies certainly would

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WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA

not harm them. One cablegram of three
hundred words, sent by an American corre-
spondent, after it had been blue-pencilled
by the Greek censors in Salonika and Athens,
and by the four allied censors, arrived at
his London office consisting entirely of
"ands" and "thes." So, if not from their
censors, at least from the correspondents,
the Allies were protected. But against the
really serious danger of spies they were help-
less. In New York the water-fronts are
guarded. Unless he is known, no one can
set foot upon a wharf. Night and day,
against spies and German military attaches
bearing explosive bombs, steamers loading
munitions are surrounded by police, watch-
men, and detectives. But in Salonika the
wharfs were as free to any one as a park
bench, and the quay supplied every spy, Ger-
man, Bulgarian, Turk or Austrian, with an
uninterrupted view. To suppose spies did
not avail themselves of this opportunity is to
insult their intelligence. They swarmed. In

WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA

solid formation spies lined the quay. For
every landing-party of bluejackets they formed
a committee of welcome. Of every man, gun,
horse, and box of ammunition that came
ashore they kept tally. On one side of the
wharf stood "P. N. T. O.," principal naval
transport officer, in gold braid, ribbons,
and armlet, keeping an eye on every box of
shell, gun-carriage, and caisson that was
swung from a transport, and twenty feet
from him, and keeping count with him,
would be two dozen spies. And, to make it
worse, the P. N. T. O. knew they were Spies.
The cold was intense and wood so scarce
that to obtain it men used to row out two
miles and collect the boxes thrown over-
board from the transports and battleships.
Half of these men had but the slightest in-
terest in kindling-wood; they were learning
the position of each battleship, counting her
guns, noting their caliber, counting the men
crowding the rails of the transports, reading
the insignia on their shoulder-straps, and,

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WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA

as commands and orders were wigwagged
from ship to ship, writing them down. Other
spies took the trouble to disguise themselves
in rags and turbans, and, mixing with the
Tommies, sold them sweetmeats, fruit, and
cigarettes. The spy told the Tommy he was
his ally, a Serbian refugee; and Tommy, or
the poilu, to whom Bulgarians, Turks, and
Serbians all look alike, received him as a
comrade.

"You had a rough passage from Mar-
seilles," ventures the spy. "We come from
the peninsula," says Tommy. "Three thou-
sand of you on such a little ship!" exclaims
the sympathetic Serbian. "You must have
been crowded!" "Crowded as hell," cor-
rects Tommy, "because there are five thou-
sand of us." Over these common spies were
master spies, Turkish and German officers
from Berlin and Constantinople. They sat
in the same restaurants with the French and
English officers. They were in mufti, but
had they appeared in uniform, while it might

WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA

have led to a riot, in this neutral port they
would have been entirely within their rights.
The clearing-houses for the spies were the
consulates of Austria, Turkey, and Ger-
many. From there what information the
spies turned in was forwarded to the front.
The Allies were helpless to prevent. How
helpless may be judged from these quota-
tions that are translated from Phos, a Greek
newspaper published daily in Salonika, and
which any one could buy in the streets.
"The English and French forces mean to
retreat. Yesterday six trains of two hun-
dred and forty wagons came from the front
with munitions." "The Allies' first line of
defense will be at Soulowo, Doiran, Goume-
nitz. At Topsin and Zachouna intrenchments
have not yet been started, but strong posi-
tions have been taken up at Chortiatis and
Nihor." "Yesterday the landing of British
reinforcements continued, amounting to 15,-
000. The guns and munitions were out of
date. The position of the Allies' battleships

140

WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA

has been changed. They are now inside the
harbor." The most exacting German Gen-
eral Staff could not ask for better service
than that! When the Allies retreated from
Serbia into Salonika every one expected the
enemy would pursue; and thousands fled
from the city. But the Germans did not
pursue, and the reason may have been be-
cause their spies kept them so well informed.
If you hold four knaves and, by stealing a
look at your opponent's hand, see he has
four kings, to attempt to fight him would
be suicide. So, in the end, the very freedom
with which the spies moved about Salonika
may have been for good. They may have
prevented the loss of many lives.

During these strenuous days the position
of the Greek army in Salonika was most
difficult. There were of their soldiers nearly
as many as there were French and British
combined, and they resented the presence
of the foreigners in their new city and they
showed it. But they could not show it in

141

WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA

such a way as to give offense, because they
did not know but that on the morrow with
the Allies they would be fighting shoulder
to shoulder. And then, again, they did not
know but that on the morrow they might be
with the Germans and fighting against the
Allies, gun to gun.

Not knowing just how they stood with
anybody, and to show they resented the
invasion of their newly won country by the
Allies, the Greeks tried to keep proudly
aloof. In this they failed. For any one to
flock by himself in Salonika was impossible.
In a long experience of cities swamped by
conventions, inaugurations, and coronations,
of all I ever saw, Salonika was the most deeply
submerged. During the Japanese-Russian
War the Japanese told the correspondents
there were no horses in Corea, and that be-
fore leaving Japan each should supply him-
self with one. Dinwiddie refused to obey.
The Japanese warned him if he did not take
a pony with him he would be forced to ac-
company the army on foot.

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WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA

"There will always," replied Dinwiddie,
"be a pony in Corea for Dinwiddie." It
became a famous saying. When the alarmist
tells you all the rooms in all the hotels are
engaged; that people are sleeping on cots
and billiard-tables; that there are no front-
row seats for the Follies, no berths in any
cabin of any steamer, remind yourself that
there is always a pony in Corea for Dinwid-
die. The rule is that the hotel clerk discovers
a vacant room, a ticket speculator disgorges
a front-row seat, and the ship's doctor sells
you a berth in the sick bay. But in Salonika
the rule failed. As already explained, Sa-
lonika always is overcrowded. Suddenly,
added to her 120,000 peoples, came 110,000
Greek soldiers, their officers, and with many
of them their families, 60,000 British soldiers
and sailors, 110,000 French soldiers and
sailors, and no one knows how many thou-
sand Serbian soldiers and refugees, both the
rich and the destitute. The population was
quadrupled; and four into one you can't.
Four men cannot with comfort occupy a

WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA

cot built for one, four men at the same time
cannot sit on the same chair in a restaurant,

•

four men cannot stand on that spot in the
street where previously there was not room
enough for one. Still less possible is it for
three military motor-trucks to occupy the
space in the street originally intended for
one small donkey. Of Salonika, a local
French author has written: "When one en-
ters the city he is conscious of a cry, con-
tinuous and piercing. A cry unique and
monotonous, always resembling itself. It is
the clamor of Salonika/'

Every one who has visited the East, where
every one lives in the streets, knows the
sound. It is like the murmur of a stage mob.
Imagine, then, that "clamor of Salonika"
increased by the rumble and roar over the
huge paving-stones of thousands of giant
motor-trucks; by the beat of the iron-shod
hoofs of cavalry, the iron-shod boots of
men marching in squads, companies, regi-
ments, the shrieks of peasants herding flocks

144

WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA

of sheep, goats, turkeys, cattle; the shouts
of bootblacks, boatmen, sweetmeat venders;
newsboys crying the names of Greek papers
that sound like "Hi hippi hippi hi," "Teyang
Teyang Teyah"; by the tin horns of the
trolley-cars, the sirens of automobiles, the
warning whistles of steamers, of steam-
launches, of donkey-engines; the creaking
of cordage and chains on cargo-hoists, and
by the voices of 300,000 men speaking dif-
ferent languages, and each, that he may be
heard above it, adding to the tumult. For
once the alarmist was right. There were
no rooms in any hotel. Early in the rush
John McCutcheon, William G. Shepherd,
John Bass, and James Hare had taken the
quarters left vacant by the Austrian Club in
the Hotel Olympus. The room was vast
and overlooked the principal square of the
city, where every Salonikan met to talk, and
the only landing-place on the quay. From
the balcony you could photograph, as it
made fast, not forty feet from you, every

WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA

cutter, gig, and launch of every war-ship.
The late Austrian Club became the head-
quarters for lost and strayed Americans.
For four nights, before I secured a room to
myself by buying the hotel, I slept on the
sofa. It was two feet too short, but I was
very fortunate.

Outside, in the open halls on cots, were
English, French, Greek, and Serbian officers.
The place looked like a military hospital.
The main salon, gilded and bemirrored, had
lost its identity. At the end overlooking the
water-front were Serbian ladies taking tea;
in the centre of the salon at the piano a little
Greek girl taking a music lesson; and at the
other end, on cots, British officers from the
trenches and Serbian officers who had escaped
through the snows of Albania, their muddy
boots, uniforms, and swords flung on the
floor, slept the drugged sleep of exhaustion.

Meals were a continuous performance and
interlocked. Except at midnight, dining-
rooms, cafes, and restaurants were never

146

WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA

aired, never swept, never empty. The dishes
were seldom washed; the waiters — never.
People succeeded each other at table in re-
lays, one group giving their order while the
other was paying the bill. To prepare a
table, a waiter with a napkin swept every-
thing on it to the floor. War prices prevailed.
Even the necessities of life were taxed. For
a sixpenny tin of English pipe tobacco I paid
two dollars, and Scotch whiskey rose from
four francs a bottle to fifteen. On even a
letter of credit it was next to impossible to
obtain money, and the man who arrived
without money in his belt walked the water-
front. The refugees from Serbia who were
glad they had escaped with their lives were
able to sleep and eat only through the charity
of others. Not only the peasants, but young
girls and women of the rich, and more care-
fully nurtured class of Serbians were glad to
sleep on the ground under tents.

The scenes in the streets presented the
most curious contrasts. It was the East

WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA

clashing with the West, and the uniforms of
four armies — British, French, Greek, and
Serbian — and of the navies of Italy, Russia,
Greece, England, and France contrasted with
the dress of civilians of every nation. There
were the officers of Greece and Serbia in
smart uniforms of many colors — blue, green,
gray — with much gold and silver braid, and
wearing swords which in this war are ob-
solete; there were English officers, generals
of many wars, and red-cheeked boys from
Eton, clad in businesslike khaki, with huge,
cape-like collars of red fox or wolf skin, and
carrying, in place of the sword, a hunting-
crop or a walking-stick; there were English
bluejackets and marines, Scotch Highlanders,
who were as much intrigued over the petti-
coats of the Evzones as were the Greeks as-
tonished at their bare legs; there were French
poilus wearing the steel casque, French avia-
tors in short, shaggy fur coats that gave them
the look of a grizzly bear balancing on his
hind legs; there were Jews in gabardines,

148

WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA

old men with the noble faces of Sargent's
apostles, robed exactly as was Irving as
Shylock; there were the Jewish married
women in sleeveless cloaks of green silk
trimmed with rich fur, and each wearing on
her head a cushion of green that hung below
her shoulders; there were Greek priests with
matted hair reaching to the waist, and Turk-
ish women, their faces hidden in yashmaks,
who looked through them with horror, or
envy, at the English, Scotch, and American
nurses, with their cheeks bronzed by snow,
sleet, and sun, wearing men's hobnailed boots,
men's blouses, and, across their breasts, war
medals for valor.

All day long these people of all races, with
conflicting purposes, speaking, or shrieking,
in a dozen different tongues, pushed, shoved,
and shouldered. At night, while the bedlam
of sounds grew less, the picture became
more wonderful. The lamps of automobiles
would suddenly pierce the blackness, or the
blazing doors of a cinema would show in

149

WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA

the dark street, the vast crowd pushing,
slipping, struggling for a foothold on the
muddy stones. In the circle of light cast by
the automobiles, out of the mass a single
face would flash — a face burned by the sun
of the Dardanelles or frost-bitten by the
snows of the Balkans. Above it might be
the gold visor and scarlet band of a "Brass
Hat," staff-officer, the fur kepi of a Serbian
refugee, the steel helmet of a French soldier,
the "bonnet" of a Highlander, the white
cap of a navy officer, the tassel of an Evzone,
a red fez, a turban of rags.

This lasted until the Allies retreated upon
Salonika, and the Greek army, to give them
a clear field in which to fight, withdrew,
100,000 of them in two days, carrying with
them tens of thousands of civilians — those
who were pro-Germans, and Greeks, Jews,
and Serbians. The civilians were flying be-
fore the expected advance of the Bulgar-
German forces. But the Central Powers,
possibly well informed by their spies, did not

150

WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA

attack. That was several months ago, and
at this writing they have not yet attacked.
What one man saw of the approaches to
Salonika from the north leads him to think
that the longer the attack of the Bulgar-
Germans is postponed the better it will be —
for the Bulgar-Germans.

CHAPTER VII
TWO BOYS AGAINST AN ARMY

SALONIKA, December, 1915.

ON the day the retreat began from Kri-
volak, General Sarrail, commanding the
Allies in Serbia, gave us permission to visit
the French and English front. The French
advanced position, and a large amount of
ammunition, six hundred shells to each gun,
were then at Krivolak, and the English base
at Doiran. We left the train at Doiran, but
our French "guide" had not informed the
English a "mission militaire" was descend-
ing upon them, and in consequence at Doiran
there were no conveyances to meet us. So,
a charming English captain commandeered
for us a vast motor-truck. Stretched above
it were ribs to support a canvas top, and by
clinging to these, as at home on the Elevated

152

TWO BOYS AGAINST AN ARMY

we hang to a strap, we managed to avoid
being bumped out into the road.

The English captain, who -seemed to have
nothing else on his hands, volunteered to
act as our escort, and on a splendid hunter
galloped ahead of and at the side of the
lorry, and, much like a conductor on a sight-
seeing car, pointed out the objects of interest.
When not explaining he was absent-mindedly
jumping his horse over swollen streams,
ravines, and fallen walls. We found him
much more interesting to watch than the
scenery.

The scenery was desolate and bleak. It
consisted of hills that opened into other
hills, from the summit of which more hills
stretched to a horizon entirely of mountains.
They did not form ridges but, like men in
a crowd, shouldered into one another. They
were of a soft rock and covered with snow,
above which to the height of your waist
rose scrub pine-trees and bushes of holly.
The rain and snow that ran down their

TWO BOYS AGAINST AN ARMY

slopes had turned the land into a sea of mud,
and had swamped the stone roads. In walk-
ing, for each step you took forward you
skidded and slid several yards back. If you
had an hour to spare you had time for a ten-
minute walk.

In our motor-truck we circled Lake Doiran,
and a mile from the station came to a stone
obelisk. When we passed it our guide on
horseback shouted to us that we had crossed
the boundary from Greece, and were now
in Serbia. The lake is five miles wide and
landlocked, and the road kept close to the
water's edge. It led us through little mud
villages with houses of mud and wattle, and
some of stone with tiled roofs and rafters,
and beams showing through the cement.
The second story projected like those of
the Spanish blockhouses in Cuba, and the
log forts from which, in the days when there
were no hyphenated Americans, our fore-
fathers fought the Indians.

Except for some fishermen, the Serbians

TWO BOYS AGAINST AN ARMY

had abandoned these villages, and they were
occupied by English army service men and
infantry. The "front," which was hidden
away among the jumble of hills, seemed,
when we reached it, to consist entirely of
artillery. All along the road the Tommies
were waging a hopeless war against the mud,
shovelling it off the stone road to keep the
many motor-trucks from skidding over a
precipice, or against the cold making shelters
of it, or washing it out of their uniforms and
off their persons.

Shivering from ears to heels and with
teeth rattling, for they had come from the
Dardanelles, they stood stripped to the waist
scrubbing their sun-tanned chests and shoul-
ders with ice-water. It was a spectacle that
inspired confidence. When a man is so keen
after water to wash in that he will kick the
top off a frozen lake to get it, a little thing
like a barb-wire entanglement will not halt
him.

The cold of those hills was like no cold I

TWO BOYS AGAINST AN ARMY

had ever felt. Officers who had hunted in
northern Russia, in the Himalayas, in Alaska,
assured us that never had they so suffered.
The men we passed, who were in the am-
bulances, were down either with pneumonia
or frost-bite. Many had lost toes and fingers.
And it was not because they were not warmly
clad.*

Last winter in France had taught the war
office how to dress the part; but nothing
had prepared them for the cold of the Bal-
kans. And to add to their distress, for it
was all of that, there was no fire-wood.
The hills were bare of trees, and such cold
as they endured could not be fought with
green twigs.

It was not the brisk, invigorating cold

* It has been charged that the British troops in the Bal-
kans wore the same tropic uniforms they wore in the Dar-
danelles. This was necessarily true, when first they landed,
but almost at once the winter uniform was issued to all of
them. I saw no British or French soldier who was not
properly and warmly clad, with overcoat, muffler, extra
waistcoat, and gloves. And while all, both officers and men,
cursed the cold, none complained that he had not been ap-
propriately clothed to meet it. R. H. D.

156

TWO BOYS AGAINST AN ARMY

that invites you out of doors. It had no
cheery, healthful appeal to skates, tobog-
gans, and the jangling bells of a cutter. It
was the damp, clammy, penetrating cold of
a dungeon, of an unventilated ice-chest, of
a morgue. Your clothes did not warm you,
the heat of your body had to warm your
clothes. And warm, also, all of the surround-
ing hills.

Between the road and the margin of the
lake were bamboo reeds as tall as lances,
and at the edge of these were gathered
myriads of ducks. The fishermen were en-
gaged in bombarding the ducks with rocks.
They went about this in a methodical fashion.
All around the lake, concealed in the reeds
and lifted a few feet above the water they
had raised huts on piles. In front of these
huts was a ledge or balcony. They looked
like overgrown bird-houses on stilts.

One fisherman waited in a boat to pick
up the dead ducks, and the other hurled
stones from a sling. It was the same kind

TWO BOYS AGAINST AN ARMY

of a sling as the one with which David slew
Goliath. In Athens I saw small .boys using
it to throw stones at an electric-light pole.
The one the fisherman used was about eight
feet long. To get the momentum he whirled
it swiftly above his head as a cowboy swings
a lariat, and then let one end fly loose, and
the stone, escaping, smashed into the mass of
ducks. If it stunned or killed a duck the
human water-spaniel in the boat would row
out and retrieve it. To duck hunters at
home the sport would chiefly recommend
itself through the cheapness of the am-
munition.

On the road we met relays of water-carts
and wagons that had been up the hills with
food for the gunners at the front; and en-
gineers were at work repairing the stone
bridges or digging detours to avoid those
that had disappeared. They had been built
to support no greater burden than a flock of
sheep, an ox-cart, or what a donkey can carry
on his back, and the assault of the British

158

TWO BOYS AGAINST AN ARMY

motor-trucks and French six-inch guns had
driven them deep into the mud.

After ten miles we came to what a staff
officer would call an "advanced base," but
which was locally designated the "Dump."
At the side of the road, much of it uncov-
ered to the snow, were stores of ammuni-
tion, "bully beef," and barb-wire. The camp
bore all the signs of a temporary halting
place. It was just what the Tommies called
it, a dump. We had not been told then that
the Allies were withdrawing, but one did not
have to be a military expert to see that there
was excellent reason why they should.

They were so few. Whatever the force
was against them, the force I saw was not
strong enough to hold the ground, not that
it covered, but over which it was sprinkled.
There were outposts without supports, sup-
ports without reserves. A squad was ex-
pected to perform the duties of a company.
Where a brigade was needed there was less
than a battalion. Against the white masses

TWO BOYS AGAINST AN ARMY

of the mountains and the desolate landscape
without trees, houses, huts, without any
sign of human habitation, the scattered
groups of khaki only accented the bleak
loneliness.

At the dump we had exchanged for the
impromptu motor-truck, automobiles of the
French staff, and as "Jimmie" Hare and I
were alone in one of them we could stop
where we liked. So we halted where an Eng-
lish battery was going into action. It had
dug itself into the side of a hill and covered
itself with snow and pine branches. Some-
where on one of the neighboring hills the
"spotter" was telephoning the range. The
gunners could not see at what they were
firing. They could see only the high hill of
rock and snow, at the base of which they
stood shoulder high in their mud cellars.
Ten yards to the rear of them was what
looked like a newly made grave reverently
covered with pine boughs. Through these a
rat-faced young man, with the receivers of

160

From a photograph by William G. Shepherd.

John T. McCutcheon.

Richard Harding Davis.

John F. Bass.

James H. Hare.

American war correspondents at the French front in Serbia.

TWO BOYS AGAINST AN ARMY

a telephone clamped to his ears, pushed his
head.

"Eight degrees to the left, sir," he barked,
"four thousand yards."

The men behind the guns were extremely
young, but, like most artillerymen, alert,
sinewy, springing to their appointed tasks
with swift, catlike certainty. The sight of
the two strangers seemed to surprise them as
much as the man in the grave had startled
us.

There were two boy officers in command,
one certainly not yet eighteen, his superior
officer still under twenty.

"I suppose you're all right/' said the
younger one. "You couldn't have got this
far if you weren't all right."

He tried to scowl upon us, but he was not
successful. He was too lonely, too honestly
glad to see any one from beyond the moun-
tains that hemmed him in. They stretched
on either side of him to vast distances, massed
barriers of white against a gray, sombre

161

TWO BOYS AGAINST AN ARMY

sky; in front of him, to be exact, just four
thousand yards in front of him, were Bul-
garians he had never seen, but who were al-
ways with their shells ordering to "move on,"
and behind him lay a muddy road that led
to a rail-head, that led to transports, that led
to France, to the Channel, and England. It
was a long, long way to England. I felt like
taking one of the boy officers under each arm,
and smuggling him safely home to his mother.

"You don't seem to have any supports,"
I ventured.

The child gazed around him. It was grow-
ing dark and gloomier, and the hollows of the
white hills were filled with shadows. His
men were listening, so he said bravely, with
a vague sweep of the hand at the encircling
darkness, "Oh, they're about — somewhere.
You might call this," he added, with pride*
"an independent command."

You well might.

"Report when ready!" chanted his supe-
rior officer, aged nineteen.

162

TWO BOYS AGAINST AN ARMY

He reported, and then the guns spoke,
making a great flash in the twilight.

In spite of the light, Jimmie Hare was
trying to make a photograph of the guns.

"Take it on the recoil," advised the child
officer. "It's sure to stick. It always does
stick."

The men laughed, not slavishly, because
the officer had made a joke, but as com-
panions in trouble, and because when you
are abandoned on a mountainside with a
lame gun that jams, you must not take it
lying down, but make a joke of it.

The French chauffeur was pumping his
horn for us to return, and I went, shame-
facedly, as must the robbers who deserted
the babes in the wood.

In farewell I offered the boy officer the
best cigars for sale in Greece, which is the
worse thing one can say of any cigar. I
apologized for them, but explained he must
take them because they were called the
"King of England."

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TWO BOYS AGAINST AN ARMY

"I would take them," said the infant,
"if they were called the 'German Em-
peror. '

At the door of the car we turned and
waved, and the two infants waved back.
I felt I had meanly deserted them — that
for his life the mother of each could hold me
to account.

But as we drove away from the cellars of
mud, the gun that stuck, and the "indepen-
dent command," I could see in the twilight
the flashes of the guns and two lonely specks
of light.

They were the "King of England" cigars
burning bravely.

164

CHAPTER VIII

THE FRENCH-BRITISH FRONT IN
SERBIA

SALONIKA, December, 1915.
npHE chauffeur of an army automobile
A must make his way against cavalry, artil-
lery, motor-trucks, motor-cycles, men march-
ing, and ambulances filled with wounded,
over a road torn by thousand-ton lorries and
excavated by washouts and Jack Johnsons.
It is therefore necessary for him to drive
with care. So he drives at sixty miles an
hour, and tries to scrape the mud from every
wheel he meets.

In these days of his downfall the greatest
danger to the life of the war correspondent
is that he must move about in automobiles
driven by military chauffeurs. The one who
drove me from the extreme left of the Eng-
lish front up to hill 516, which was the highest

165

THE FRENCH-BRITISH FRONT

point of the French front, told me that in
peace times he drove a car to amuse himself.
His idea of amusing himself was to sweep
around a corner on one wheel, exclaim with
horror, and throw on all the brakes with the
nose of the car projecting over a precipice a
thousand yards deep. He knew perfectly
well the precipice was there, but he leaped
at it exactly as though it were the finish line
of the Vanderbilt cup race. If his idea of
amusing himself was to make me sick with
terror he must have spent a thoroughly en-
joyable afternoon.

The approaches to hill 516, the base of
the hill on the side hidden from the Bul-
garians, and the trenches dug into it were
crowded with the French. At that point of
the line they greatly outnumbered the Eng-
lish. But it was not the elbow touch of
numbers that explained their cheerfulness;
it was because they knew it was expected of
them. The famous scholar who wrote in
our school geographies, "The French are a

166

IN SERBIA

gay people, fond of dancing and light wines,"
established a tradition. And on hill 516,
although it was to keep from freezing that
they danced, and though the light wines
were melted snow, they still kept up that
tradition and were "gay."

They laughed at us in welcome, crawling
out of their igloos on all fours like bears out
of a cave; they laughed when we photo-
graphed them crowding to get in front of
the camera, when we scattered among them
copies of L Opinion, when up the snow-clad
hillside we skidded and slipped and fell.
And if we peered into the gloom of the shel-
ters, where they crouched on the frozen
ground with snow dripping from above,
with shoulders pressed against walls of icy
mud, they waved spoons at us and invited
us to share their soup. Even the dark-
skinned, sombre-eyed men of the desert, the
tall Moors and Algerians, showed their white
teeth and laughed when a "seventy-five"
exploded from an unsuspicious bush, and we

167

THE FRENCH-BRITISH FRONT

jumped. It was like a camp of Boy Scouts,
picnicking for one day, and sure the same
night of a warm supper and bed. But the
best these poilus might hope for was months
of ice, snow, and mud, of discomfort, colds,
long marches carrying heavy burdens, the
pain of frost-bite, and, worst of all, home-
sickness. They were sure of nothing: not
even of the next minute. For hill 516 was
dotted with oblong rows of stones with, at
one end, a cross of green twigs and a sol-
dier's cap.

The hill was the highest point of a ridge
that looked down into the valleys of the Var-
dar and of Bodjinia. Toward the Bulgarians
we could see the one village of Kosturino,
almost indistinguishable against the snow,
and for fifty miles, even with glasses, no other
sign of life. Nothing but hills, rocks, bushes,
and snow. When the "seventy-fives" spoke
with their smart, sharp crack that always
seems to say, "Take that!" and to add, with

aristocratic insolence, "and be damned to

168

IN SERBIA

you!" one could not guess what they were
firing at. In Champagne, where the Germans
were as near as from a hundred to forty yards;
in Artois, where they were a mile distant, but
where their trench was as clearly in sight
as the butts of a rifle-range, you could un-
derstand. You knew that "that dark line
over there" was the enemy.

A year before at Soissons you had seen
the smoke of the German guns in a line
fifteen miles long. In other little wars you
had watched the shells destroy a blockhouse,
a village, or burst upon a column of men.
But from hill 516 you could see no enemy;
only mountains draped in snow, silent, empty,
inscrutable. It seemed ridiculous to be at-
tacking fifty miles of landscape with tiny
pills of steel. But although we could not
see the Bulgars, they could see the flashes
on hill 516, and from somewhere out of the
inscrutable mountains shells burst and fell.
They fell very close, within forty feet of us,
and, like children being sent to bed just at

169

THE FRENCH-BRITISH FRONT

dessert time, our hosts hurried us out of the
trenches and drove us away.

While on "516" we had been in Bul-
garia; now we returned to Serbia, and were
halted at the village of Valandova. There
had been a ceremony that afternoon. A
general, whose name we may not mention,
had received the medaille militaire. One
of the French correspondents asked him in
recognition of which of his victories it had
been bestowed. The general possessed a
snappy temper.

"The medal was given me," he said, "be-
cause I was the only general without it, and
I was becoming conspicuous."

It had long been dark when we reached
Strumnitza station, where we were to spend
the night in a hospital tent. The tent was
as big as a barn, with a stove, a cot for each,
and fresh linen sheets. All these good things
belong to the men we had left on hill 516
awake in the mud and snow. I felt like a
burglar, who, while the owner is away, sleeps

170

IN SERBIA

in his bed. There was another tent with a
passageway filled with medical supplies con-
necting it with ours. It was in darkness, and
we thought it empty until some one explor-
ing found it crowded with wounded and men
with frozen legs and hands. For half an
hour they had been watching us through the
passageway, making no sign, certainly mak-
ing no complaint. John Bass collected all
our newspapers, candles, and boxes of ciga-
rettes, which the hospital stewards distrib-
uted, and when we returned from dinner our
neighbors were still wide awake and holding
a smoking concert. But when in the morn-
ing the bugles woke us we found that during
the night the wounded had been spirited
away, and by rail transferred to the hospital
ships. We should have known then that the
army was in retreat. But it was all so orderly,
so leisurely, that it seemed like merely a shift-
ing from one point of the front to another.

We dined with the officers and they cer-
tainly gave no suggestion of men contemplat-

171

THE FRENCH-BRITISH FRONT

ing retreat, for the mess-hall in which dinner
was served had been completed only that
afternoon. It was of rough stones and cement,
and the interior walls were covered with white-
wash. The cement was not yet dry, nor, as
John McCutcheon later discovered when he
drew caricatures on it, neither was the white-
wash. There were twenty men around the
dinner-table, seated on ammunition-boxes
and Standard Oil cans, and so close together
you could use only one hand. So, you gave
up trying to cut your food, and used the
free hand solely in drinking toasts to the
army, to France, and the Allies. Then, to
each Ally individually. You were glad there
were so many Allies. For it was not Greek,
but French wine, of the kind that comes
from Rheims. And the army was retreating.
What the French army offers its guests to
drink when it is advancing is difficult to
imagine.

We were waited upon by an enormous
negro from Senegal with a fez as tall as a

172

From a photograph by R. II. Davis.

Headquarters of the French commander in Grevac, Serbia.

IN SERBIA

giant firecracker. Waiting single-handed on
twenty men is a serious matter. And be-
cause the officers laughed when he served the
soup in a tin basin used for washing dishes
his feelings were hurt. It was explained that
"Chocolat" in his own country was a prince,
and that unless treated with tact he might
get the idea that waiting on a table is not a
royal prerogative. One of the officers was a
genius at writing impromptu verses. During
one course he would write them, and while
Chocolat was collecting the plates would
sing them. Then by the light of a candle on
the back of a scrap of paper he would write
another and sing that. He was rivalled in
entertaining us by the officers who told
anecdotes of war fronts from the Marne to
Smyrna, who proposed toasts, and made
speeches in response, especially by the of-
ficer who that day had received the Croix
de Guerre and a wound.

I sat next to a young man who had been
talking learnedly of dumdum bullets and

i73

THE FRENCH-BRITISH FRONT

Parisian restaurants. They asked him to
recite, and to my horror he rose. Until
that moment he had been a serious young
officer, talking boulevard French. In an
instant he was transformed. He was a
clown. To look at him was to laugh. He
was an old roue, senile, pitiable, a bourgeois,
an apache, a lover, and his voice was so
beautiful that each sentence sang. He used
words so difficult that to avoid them even
Frenchmen will cross the street. He mas-
tered them, played with them, caressed them,
sipped of them as a connoisseur sips Madeira:
he tossed them into the air like radiant
bubbles, or flung them at us with the rattle
of a mitrailleuse. When in triumph he sat
down, I asked him, when not in uniform,
who the devil he happened to be.

Again he was the bored young man. In a
low tone, so as not to expose my ignorance to
others, he said.

"I? I am Barrielles of the Theatre
Odeon."

IN SERBIA

We were receiving so much that to make
no return seemed ungracious, and we in-
sisted that John T. McCutcheon should
decorate the wall of the new mess-room with
the caricatures that make the Chicago Trib-
une famous. Our hosts were delighted,
but it was hardly fair to McCutcheon. In-
stead of his own choice of weapons he was
asked to prove his genius on wet whitewash
with a stick of charred wood. It was like
asking McLaughlin to make good on a
ploughed field. But in spite of the fact
that the whitewash fell off in flakes, there
grew upon the wall a tall, gaunt figure with
gleaming eyes and teeth. Chocolat paid it
the highest compliment. He gave a wild
howl and fled into the night. Then in quick
succession, while the Frenchmen applauded
each swift stroke, appeared the faces of the
song writer, the comedian, the wounded man,
and the commanding officer. It was a real
triumph, but the surprises of the evening
were not at an end. McCutcheon had but

THE FRENCH-BRITISH FRONT

just resumed his seat when the newly finished
rear wall of the mess-hall crashed into the
room. Where had been rocks and cement
was a gaping void, and a view of a garden
white with snow.

While we were rescuing the song writer
from the debris McCutcheon regarded the
fallen wall thoughtfully.

"They feared," he said, " I was going to dec-
orate that wall also, and they sent Chocolat
outside to push it in."

The next day we walked along the bank
of the Vardar River to Gravec, about five
miles north of Strumnitza station. Five
miles farther was Demir-Kapu, the Gate of
Iron, and between these two towns is a high
and narrow pass famous for its wild and mag-
nificent beauty. Fifteen miles beyond that
was Krivolak, the most advanced French
position. On the hills above Gravec were
many guns, but in the town itself only a
few infantrymen. It was a town entirely
of mud; the houses, the roads, and the people

176

CO -a

eS ^
o o

IN SERBIA

were covered with it. Gravec is proud only
of its church, on the walls of which in colors
still rich are painted many devils with pitch-
forks driving the wicked ones into the flames.

One of the poilus put his finger on the
mass of wicked ones.

"Les Bodies," he explained.

Whether the devils were the French or
the English he did not say, possibly because
at the moment they were more driven against
than driving.

Major Merse, the commanding officer, in-
vited us to his headquarters. They were in
a house of stone and mud, from which pro-
jected a wooden platform. When any one
appeared upon it he had the look of being
about to make a speech. The major asked
us to take photographs of Gravec and send
them to his wife. He wanted her to see in
what sort of a place he was condemned to
exist during the winter. He did not wish
her to think of him as sitting in front of a
cafe on the sidewalk, and the snap-shots

THE FRENCH-BRITISH FRONT

would show her that Gravec has no cafes,
no sidewalks and no streets.

But he was not condemned to spend the
winter in Gravec.

Within the week great stores of ammuni-
tion and supplies began to pour into it from
Krivolak, and the Gate of Iron became the
advanced position, and Gravec suddenly
found herself of importance as the French
base.

To understand this withdrawal, find on
the map Krivolak, and follow the railroad
and River Vardar southeast to Gravec.

The cause of the retreat was the inability
of the Serbians to hold Monastir and their
withdrawal west, which left a gap in the
former line of Serbians, French, and British.
The enemy thus was south and west of
Sarrail, and his left flank was exposed.

On December 3, finding the advanced posi-
tion at Krivolak threatened by four divisions,
100,000 men, General Sarrail began the with-
drawal, sending south by rail without loss

178

IN SERBIA

all ammunition and stores. He destroyed
the tunnel at Krivolak and all the bridges
across the Vardar, and on his left at the
Cerna River. The fighting was heavy at
Prevedo and Biserence, but the French losses
were small. He withdrew slowly, twenty
miles in one week. The British also with-
drew from their first line to their second line
of defense.

Demir-Kapu, meaning the Gate of Iron,
is the entrance to a valley celebrated for its
wild and magnificent beauty. Starting at
Demir-Kapu, it ends two kilometres north
of Gravec. It rises on either side of the
Vardar River and railroad line, and in places
is less than a hundred yards wide. It is
formed of sheer hills of rock, treeless and
exposed.

But the fame of Gravec as the French
base was short-lived. For the Serbians at
Monastir and Gevgeli, though fighting
bravely, were forced toward Albania, leav-
ing the left flank of Sarrail still more ex-

179

THE FRENCH-BRITISH FRONT

posed. And the Gate of Iron belied her an-
cient title.

With 100,000 Bulgars crowding down
upon him General Sarrail wasted no lives,
either French or English, but again with-
drew. He was outnumbered, some say five
to one. In any event, he was outnumbered
as inevitably as three of a kind beat two
pair. A good poker player does not waste
chips backing two pair. Neither should a
good general, when his chips are human
lives. As it was, in the retreat seven hundred
French were killed or wounded, and of the
British, who were more directly in the path
of the Bulgars, one thousand.

At Gevgeli the French delayed two days
to allow the Serbian troops to get away, and
then themselves withdrew. There now no
longer were any Serbian soldiers in Serbia.
So both armies fell back toward Salonika on
a line between Kilindir and Doiran railroad-
station, and all the places we visited a week

before were occupied by the enemy. At

1 80

IN SERBIA

Gravec a Bulgarian is pointing at the wicked
ones who are being driven into the flames
and saying: "The Allies," and at Strum-
nitza station in the mess-hall Bulgar officers
are framing John McCutcheon's sketches.

And here at Salonika from sunrise to sun-
set the English are disembarking reinforce-
ments, and the French building barracks of
stone and brick. It looks as though the
French were here to stay, and as though the
retreating habit was broken.

The same team that, to put it politely,
drew the enemy after them to the gates of
Paris, have been drawing the same enemy
after them to Salonika. That they will
throw him back from Salonika, as they
threw him back from Paris, is assured.

General Sarrail was one of those who
commanded in front of Paris, and General
de Castelnau, who also commanded at the
battle of the Marne, and is now chief of staff
of General Joffre, has just visited him here.
General de Castelnau was sent to "go, look,

181

THE FRENCH-BRITISH FRONT

see." He reports that the position now
held by the Allies is impregnable.

The perimeter held by them is fifty miles
in length and stretches from the Vardar
River on the west to the Gulf of Orplanos
on the east. There are three lines of de-
fense. To assist the first two on the east
are Lakes Beshik and Langaza, on the west
the Vardar River. Should the enemy pene-
trate the first lines they will be confronted
ten miles from Salonika by a natural bar-
rier of hills, and ten miles of intrenchments
and barb-wire. Should the enemy surmount
these hills the Allies war-ships in the harbor
can sweep him off them as a fire-hose rips
the shingles off a roof.

The man who tells you he understands the
situation in Salonika is of the same mental
caliber as the one who understands a system
for beating the game at Monte Carlo. But
there are certain rumors as to the situation
in the future that can be eliminated. First,
Greece will not turn against the Allies.

182

IN SERBIA

Second, the Allies will not withdraw from
Salonika. They now are agreed it is better
to resist an attack or stand a siege, even if
they lose 200,000 men, than to withdraw
from the Balkans without a fight.

The Briand government believes that had
the Millerand government, which it over-
threw, sent troops to aid the Serbian army
in August this war would have been made
shorter by six months. It now is trying to
repair the mistake of the government it
ousted. Among other reasons it has for
remaining in the Balkans, is that the pres-
ence of 200,000 men at Salonika will hold
Roumania from any aggressive movement
on Russia.

To aid the Allies, Russia at Tannenberg
made a sacrifice, and lost 200,000 men.
The present French Government now feels
bound in honor to help Russia by keeping
the French-British armies at Salonika. As
a visiting member of the government said
tome:

183

THE FRENCH-BRITISH FRONT

"In this war there is no western line or
eastern line. The line of the Allies is wherever
a German attacks. France went to the Bal-
kans to help Serbia. She went too late,
which is not the fault of the present govern-
ment. But there remains the task to keep
the Germans from Egypt, to menace the rail-
road at Adrianople, and to prevent Rou-
mania from an attack upon the flank of
Russia. The Allies are in Salonika until this
war is ended."

In Salonika you see every evidence that
this is the purpose of the Allies; that both
England and France are determined to hold
fast.

Reinforcements of British troops are ar-
riving daily, and the French are importing
large numbers of ready-to-set-up wooden
barracks, each capable of holding 250 men.
Also along the water-front they are build-
ing storehouses of brick and stone. That
does not suggest an immediate departure.
At the French camp, which covers five square

184

IN SERBIA

miles in the suburbs of Salonika when I
visited it to-day, thousands of soldiers were
actively engaged in laying stone roads, re-
pairing bridges and erecting new ones. There
is no question but that they intend to make
this the base until the advance in the spring.

A battalion of Serbians 700 strong has
arrived at the French camp. In size and
physique they are splendid specimens of
fighting men. They are now road building.
Each day refugees of the Serbian army add
to their number.

At four o'clock in the morning of the 14th
of December, the Greek army evacuated Sa-
lonika and that strip of Greek territory
stretching from it to Doiran.

From before sunrise an unbroken column
of Greek regiments passed beneath the win-
dows of our hotel. There were artillery,
cavalry, pontoons, ambulances, and thou-
sands of ponies and donkeys, carrying fod-
der, supplies, and tents. The sidewalks were
invaded by long lines of infantry. The

185

THE FRENCH-BRITISH FRONT

water-front along which the column passed
was blocked with spectators.

As soon as the Greeks had departed sailors
from the Allied war-ships were given shore
leave, and the city took on the air of a holi-
day. Thus was a most embarrassing situa-
tion brought to an end and the world in-
formed that the Allies had but just begun to
fight. It was the clearing of the prize-ring.

The clearing also of the enemy's consulates
ended another embarrassing situation. As
suggested in a previous chapter, the con-
sulates of the Central Powers were the hot-
beds and clearing-houses for spies. The
raid upon them by the French proved that
this was true. The enforced departure of
the German, Austrian, Bulgarian, and Turk-
ish consuls added to the responsibilities of
our own who has now to guard their in-
terests. They will be efficiently served.
John E. Kehl has been long in our consular
service, and is most admirably fitted to
meet the present crisis. He has been our

1 86

IN SERBIA

representative at Salonika for four years, in
which time his experience as consul during
the Italian-Turkish War, the two Balkan
wars, and the present war, have trained
him to meet any situation that is likely to
arrive.

What that situation may be, whether the
Bulgar-Germans will attack Salonika, or the
Allies will advance upon Sofia, and as an
inevitable sequence draw after them the
Greek army of 200,000 veterans, only the
spring can tell.

If the Teutons mean to advance, having
the shorter distance to go, they may launch
their attack in April. The Allies, if Sofia
is their objective, will wait for the snow to
leave the hills and the roads to dry. That
they would move before May is doubtful.
Meanwhile, they are accumulating many men,
and much ammunition and information. May
they make good use of it.

187

CHAPTER IX

VERDUN AND ST. MIHIEL

PARIS, January, 1916.

IT is an old saying that the busiest man
always seems to have the most leisure.
It is another way of complimenting him on
his genius for organization. When you visit
a real man of affairs you seldom find him
surrounded by secretaries, stenographers, and
a battery of telephones. As a rule, there is
nothing on his desk save a photograph of
his wife and a rose in a glass of water. Out-
side the headquarters of the general there
were no gendarmes, no sentries, no panting
automobiles, no mud-flecked chasseurs-a-
cheval. Unchallenged the car rolled up an
empty avenue of trees and stopped beside
an empty terrace of an apparently empty
chateau. At one end of the terrace was a
pond, and in it floated seven beautiful swans.

1 88

VERDUN AND ST. MIHIEL

They were the only living things in sight. I
thought we had stumbled upon the country
home of some gentleman of elegant leisure.

When he appeared the manner of the
general assisted that impression. His cour-
tesy was so undisturbed, his mind so tranquil,
his conversation so entirely that of the polite
host, you felt he was masquerading in the
uniform of a general only because he knew it
was becoming. He glowed with health and
vigor. He had the appearance of having
just come indoors after a satisfactory round
on his private golf-links. Instead, he had
been receiving reports from twenty-four dif-
ferent staff-officers. His manner suggested
he had no more serious responsibility than
feeding bread crumbs to the seven stately
swans. Instead he was responsible for the
lives of 170,000 men and fifty miles of trenches.
His duties were to feed the men three times
a day with food, and all day and night with
ammunition, to guard them against attacks
from gases, burning oil, bullets, shells; and

189

VERDUN AND ST. MIHIEL

in counter-attack to send them forward with
the bayonet across hurdles of barb-wire to
distribute death. These were only a few of
his responsiblities.

I knew somewhere in the chateau there
must be the conning-tower from which the
general directed his armies, and after luncheon
asked to be allowed to visit it. It was filled
with maps, in size enormous but rich in tiny
details, nailed on frames, pinned to the walls,
spread over vast drawing-boards. -But to
the visitor more marvellous than the maps
showing the French lines were those in which
were set forth the German positions, marked
with the place occupied by each unit, giving
the exact situation of the German trenches,
the German batteries, giving the numerals
of each regiment. With these spread before
him, the general has only to lift the hand
telephone, and direct that from a spot on
a map on one wall several tons of explosive
shells shall drop on a spot on another map
on the wall opposite. The general does not

190

The ruined village of GerbeViller, destroyed after their retreat

by the Germans.
Captain Gabriel Puaux, of the General-Headquarters Staff, and Mr. Davis.

VERDUN AND ST. MIHIEL

fight only at long distance from a map.
Each morning he visits some part of the
fifty miles of trenches. What later he sees
on his map only jogs his memory. It is a
sort of shorthand note. Where to you are
waving lines, dots, and crosses, he beholds
valleys, forests, miles of yellow trenches. A
week ago, during a bombardment, a brother
general advanced into the first trench. His
chief of staff tugged at his cloak.

"My men like to see me here," said the
general.

A shell killed him. But who can protest
it was a life wasted? He made it possible
for every poilu in a trench of five hundred
miles to say: "Our generals do not send us
where they will not go themselves."

We left the white swans smoothing their
feathers, and through rain drove to a hill
covered closely with small trees. The trees
were small, because the soil from which they
drew sustenance was only one to three feet
deep. Beneath that was chalk. Through

191

VERDUN AND ST. MIHIEL

these woods was cut a runway for a toy
railroad. It possessed the narrowest of nar-
row gauges, and its rolling-stock consisted
of flat cars three feet wide, drawn by splen-
did Percherons. The live stock, the rolling-
stock, the tracks, and the trees on either side
of the tracks were entirely covered with
white clay. Even the brakemen and the
locomotive-engineer who walked in advance
of the horses were completely painted with
it. And before we got out of the woods, so
were the passengers. This railroad feeds
the trenches, carrying to them water and
ammunition, and to the kitchens in the rear
uncooked food.

The French marquis who escorted "Mon
Capitaine" of the Grand Quartier General
des Armees, who was my "guide philosopher
and friend," to the trenches either had built
this railroad, or owned a controlling interest
in it, for he always spoke of it proudly as
"my express," "my special train," "my
petite vitesse." He had lately been in Amer-
ica buying cavalry horses.

192

VERDUN AND ST. MIHIEL

As for years he has owned one of the
famous racing stables in France, his knowl-
edge of them is exceptional.

When last I had seen him he was in silk,
on one of his own thoroughbreds, and the
crowd, or that part of it that had backed his
horse, was applauding, and, while he waited
for permission to dismount, he was smiling
and laughing. Yesterday, when the plough
horses pulled his express-train off the rails,
he descended and pushed it back, and, in
consequence, was splashed, not by the mud
of the race-track but of the trenches. Nor
in the misty, dripping, rain-soaked forest
was there any one to applaud. But he was
still laughing, even more happily.

The trenches were dug around what had
been a chalk mine, and it was difficult to
tell where the mining for profit had stopped
and the excavations for defense began. When
you can see only chalk at your feet, and chalk
on either hand, and overhead the empty
sky, this ignorance may be excused. In
the boyaux, which began where the railroad

VERDUN AND ST. MIHIEL

stopped, that was our position. We walked
through an endless grave with walls of clay,
on top of which was a scant foot of earth.
It looked like a layer of chocolate on the
top of a cake.

In some places, underfoot was a cordu-
roy path of sticks, like the false bottom of
a rowboat; in others, we splashed through
open sluices of clay and rain-water. You
slid and skidded, and to hold yourself erect
pressed with each hand against the wet walls
of the endless grave.

We came out upon the "hauts de Meuse."
They are called also the "Shores of Lor-
raine," because to that province, as are the
cliffs of Dover to the county of Kent, they
form a natural barrier. We were in the quarry
that had been cut into the top of the heights
on the side that now faces other heights held
by the enemy. Behind us rose a sheer wall
of chalk as high as a five-story building.
The face of it had been pounded by shells.
It was as undismayed as the whitewashed

194

VERDUN AND ST. MIHIEL

wall of a schoolroom at which generations
of small boys have flung impertinent spit-
balls. At the edge of the quarry the floor
was dug deeper, leaving a wall between it
and the enemy, and behind this wall were
the posts of observation, the nests of the
machine-guns, the raised step to which the
men spring when repulsing an attack. Be-
low and back of them were the shelters into
which, during a bombardment, they disap-
pear. They were roofed with great beams,
on top of which were bags of cement piled
three and four yards high.

Not on account of the sleet and fog, but
in spite of them, the aspect of the place was
grim and forbidding. You did not see, as
at some of the other fronts, on the sign-
boards that guide the men through the
maze, jokes and nicknames. The mess-huts
and sleeping-caves bore no such ironic titles
as the Petit Cafe, the Anti-Boche, Chez
Maxim. They were designated only by
numerals, businesslike and brief. It was no

VERDUN AND ST. MIHIEL

place for humor. The monuments to the
dead were too much in evidence. On every
front the men rise and lie down with death,
but on no other front had I found them
living so close to the graves of their former
comrades. Where a man had fallen, there
had he been buried, and on every hand you
saw between the chalk huts, at the mouths
of the pits or raised high in a niche, a pile
of stones, a cross, and a soldier's cap. Where
one officer had fallen his men had built to
his memory a mausoleum. It is also a shelter
into which, when the shells come, they dive
for safety. So that even in death he pro-
tects them.

I was invited into a post of observation,
and told to make my entrance quickly.
In order to exist, a post of observation must
continue to look to the enemy only like
part of the wall of earth that faces him. If
through its apparently solid front there flashes,
even for an instant, a ray of sunlight, he
knows that the ray comes through a peep-

196

VERDUN AND ST. MIHIEL

hole, and that behind the peep-hole men
with field-glasses are watching him. And
with his shells he hammers the post of obser-
vation into a shambles. Accordingly, when
you enter one, it is etiquette not to keep the
door open any longer than is necessary to
squeeze past it. As a rule, the door is a
curtain of sacking, but hands and bodies
coated with clay, by brushing against it,
have made it quite opaque.

The post was as small as a chart-room,
and the light came only through the peep-
holes. You got a glimpse of a rack of rifles,
of shadowy figures that made way for you,
and of your captain speaking in a whisper.
When you put your eyes to the peep-hole
it was like looking at a photograph through
a stereoscope. But, instead of seeing the
lake of Geneva, the Houses of Parliament,
or Niagara Falls, you looked across a rain-
driven valley of mud, on the opposite side of
which was a hill.

Here the reader kindly will imagine a
197

VERDUN AND ST. MIHIEL

page of printed matter devoted to that hill.
It was an extremely interesting hill, but my
captain, who also is my censor, decides that
what I wrote was too interesting, especially
to Germans. So the hill is "strafed." He
says I can begin again vaguely with "Over
there."

"Over there," said his voice in the dark-
ness, "is St. Mihiel."

For more than a year you had read of
St. Mihiel. Communiques, maps, illustra-
tions had made it famous and familiar. It
was the town that gave a name to the Ger-
man salient, to the point thrust in advance
of what should be his front. You expected
to see an isolated hill, a promontory, some
position of such strategic value as would
explain why for St. Mihiel the lives of thou-
sands of Germans had been thrown upon
the board. But except for the obstinacy of
the German mind, or, upon the part of the
Crown Prince the lack of it, I could find no
explanation. Why the German wants to

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VERDUN AND ST. MIHIEL

hold St. Mihiel, why he ever tried to hold
it, why if it so pleases him he should not
continue to hold it until his whole line is
driven across the border, is difficult to under-
stand. For him it is certainly an expensive
position. It lengthens his lines of communi-
cation and increases his need of transport.
It eats up men, eats up rations, eats up
priceless ammunition, and it leads to no-
where, enfilades no position, threatens no
one. It is like an ill-mannered boy sticking
out his tongue. And as ineffective.

The physical aspect of St. Mihiel is a
broad sweep of meadow-land cut in half by
the Meuse flooding her banks; and the
shattered houses of the Ferme Mont Meuse,
which now form the point of the salient.
At this place the opposing trenches are only
a hundred yards apart, and all of this low
ground is commanded by the French guns
on the heights of Les Parodies. On the day
of our visit they were being heavily bom-
barded. On each side of the salient are the

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VERDUN AND ST. MIHIEL

French. Across the battle-ground of St.
Mihiel I could see their trenches facing those
in which we stood. For, at St. Mihiel, in-
stead of having the line of the enemy only
in front, the lines face the German, and sur-
round him on both flanks. Speaking not as
a military strategist but merely as a partisan,
if any German commander wants that kind
of a position I would certainly make him a
present of it.

The colonel who commanded the trenches
possessed an enthusiasm that was beautiful
to see. He was as proud of his chalk quarry
as an admiral of his first dreadnaught. He
was as isolated as though cast upon a rock
in mid-ocean. Behind him was the dripping
forest, in front the mud valley filled with
floating fogs. At his feet in the chalk floor
the shells had gouged out holes as deep as
rain-barrels. Other shells were liable at any
moment to gouge out more holes. Three
days before, when Prince Arthur of Con-
naught had come to tea, a shell had hit out-
zoo

From a photograph, copyright by Underwood and Underwood.

A first-line trench outside of Verdun.

The trench enfilades the valley beyond, and the valley is covered with barbed wire
and gun-pits.

VERDUN AND ST. MIHIEL

side the colonel's private cave, and smashed
all the teacups. It is extremely annoying
when English royalty drops in sociably to
distribute medals and sip a cup of tea to
have German shells invite themselves to the
party. It is a way German shells have.
They push in everywhere. One invited itself
to my party and got within ten feet of it.
When I complained, the colonel suggested
absently that it probably was not a German
shell but a French mine that had gone off
prematurely. He seemed to think being hit
by a French mine rather than by a German
shell made all the difference in the world.
It nearly did.

At the moment the colonel was greatly
interested in the fact that one of his men
was not carrying a mask against gases.
The colonel argued that the life of the man
belonged to France, and that through lazi-
ness or indifference he had no right to risk
losing it. Until this war the colonel had com-
manded in Africa the regiment into which

20 1

VERDUN AND ST. MIHIEL

criminals are drafted as a punishment. To
keep them in hand requires both imagina-
tion and the direct methods of a bucko
mate on a whaler. When the colonel was
promoted to his present command he found
the men did not place much confidence in
the gas masks, so he filled a shelter with
poisoned air, equipped a squad with pro-
tectors and ordered them to enter. They
went without enthusiasm, but when they
found they could move about with impunity
the confidence of the entire command in the
anti-gas masks was absolute.

The colonel was very vigilant against
these gas attacks. He had equipped the
only shelter I have seen devoted solely to
the preparation of defenses against them.
We learned several new facts concerning
this hideous form of warfare. One was
that the Germans now launch the gas most
frequently at night when the men cannot
see it approach, and, in consequence, before
they can snap the masks into place, they

202

VERDUN AND ST. MIHIEL

are suffocated, and in great agony die. They
have learned much about the gas, but chiefly
by bitter experience. Two hours after one
of the attacks an officer seeking his field-
glasses descended into his shelter. The gas
that had flooded the trenches and then
floated away still lurked below. And in a
moment the officer was dead. The warn-
ing was instantly flashed along the trenches
from the North Sea to Switzerland, and now
after a gas raid, before any one enters a shel-
ter, it is attacked by counter-irritants, and
the poison driven from ambush.

I have never seen better discipline than
obtained in that chalk quarry, or better
spirit. There was not a single outside ele-
ment to aid discipline or to inspire morale.
It had all to come from within. It had all
to spring from the men themselves and
from the example set by their officers. The
enemy fought against them, the elements
fought against them, the place itself was as
cheerful as a crutch. The clay climbed from

203

VERDUN AND ST. MIHIEL

their feet to their hips, was ground into their
uniforms, clung to their hands and hair.
The rain chilled them, the wind, cold, damp,
and harsh, stabbed through their greatcoats.
Their outlook was upon graves, their resting-
places dark caverns, at which even a wolf
would look with suspicion. And yet they
were all smiling, eager, alert. In the whole
command we saw not one sullen or wistful
face.

It is an old saying: "So the colonel, so the
regiment."

But the splendid spirit I saw on the heights
of the Meuse is true not only of that colonel
and of that regiment, but of the whole five
hundred miles of trenches, and of all France.

February, 1916.

When I was in Verdun, the Germans, from
a distance of twenty miles, had dropped
three shells into Nancy and threatened to
send more. That gave Nancy an interest
which Verdun lacked. So I was intolerant

204

VERDUN AND ST. MIHIEL

of Verdun and anxious to hasten on to
Nancy.

To-day Nancy and her three shells are
forgotten, and to all the world the place of
greatest interest is Verdun. Verdun has
been Roman, Austrian, and not until 1648
did she become a part of France. This is
the fourth time she has been attacked — by
the Prussians in 1792, again by the Germans
in 1870, when, after a gallant defense of three
weeks, she surrendered, and in October of
1914.

She then was more menaced than attacked.
It was the Crown Prince and General von
Strantz with seven army corps who threat-
ened her. General Sarrail, now commanding
the allied forces in Salonika, with three army
corps, and reinforced by part of an army
corps from Toul, directed the defense. The
attack was made upon Fort Troyon, about
twenty miles south of Verdun. The fort was
destroyed, but the Germans were repulsed.
Four days later, September 24, the real at-

205

VERDUN AND ST. MIHIEL

tack was made fifteen miles south of Troyon,
on the village of St. Mihiel. The object of
Von Strantz was to break through the Ver-
dun-Toul line, to inclose Sarrail from the
south and at Revigny link arms with the
Crown Prince. They then would have had
the army of Sarrail surrounded.

For several days it looked as though Von
Strantz would succeed, but, though out-
numbered, San-ail's line held, and he forced
Von Strantz to " dig in " at St. Mihiel. There
he still is, like a dagger that has failed to
reach the heart but remains implanted in the
flesh.

Von Strantz having failed, a week later,
on October 3, the Crown Prince attacked
through the Forest of the Argonne between
Varennes and Verdun. But this assault also
was repulsed by Sarrail, who captured Va-
rennes, and with his left joined up with the
Fourth Army of General Langle. The line
as then formed by that victory remained
much as it is to-day. The present attack
is [directed neither to the north nor south

206

VERDUN AND ST. MIHIEL

of Verdun, but straight at the forts of the
city. These forts form but a part of the
defenses. For twenty miles in front of Ver-
dun have been spread trenches and barb-
wire. In turn, these are covered by artillery
positions in the woods and on every height.
Even were a fort destroyed, to occupy it the
enemy must pass over a terrain, every foot
of which is under fire. As the defense of
Verdun has been arranged, each of the forts
is but a rallying-poirit — a base. The actual
combat that will decide the struggle will be
fought in the open.

Last month I was invited to one of the
Verdun forts. It now lies in' the very path
of the drive, and to describe it would be
improper. But the approaches to it are
now what every German knows. They were
more impressive even than the fort. The
"glacis" of the fort stretched for a mile, and
as we walked in the direction of the German
trenches there was not a moment when from
every side French guns could not have blown
us into fragments. They were mounted on

207

VERDUN AND ST. MIHIEL

the spurs of the hills, sunk in pits, ambushed
in the thick pine woods. Every step forward
was made cautiously between trenches, or
through mazes of barb-wire and iron hurdles
with bayonet-like spikes. Even walking lei-
surely you had to watch your step. Pits
opened suddenly at your feet, and strands
of barbed wire caught at your clothing.
Whichever way you looked trenches flanked
you. They were dug at every angle, and
were not farther than fifty yards apart.

On one side, a half mile distant, was a
hill heavily wooded. At regular intervals the
trees had been cut down and uprooted and,
like a wood-road, a cleared space showed.
These were the nests of the "seventy-fives."
They could sweep the approaches to the fort
as a fire-hose flushes a gutter. That a human
being should be ordered to advance against
such pitfalls and obstructions, and under the
fire from the trenches and batteries, seemed
sheer murder. Not even a cat with nine lives
could survive.

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VERDUN AND ST. MIHIEL

The German papers tell that before the
drive upon Verdun was launched the German
Emperor reproduced the attack in minia-
ture. The whereabouts and approaches to
the positions they were to take were ex-
plained to the men. Their officers were re-
hearsed in the part each was to play. But
no rehearsal would teach a man to avoid
the pitfalls that surround Verdun. The
open places are as treacherous as quicksands,
the forests that seem to him to offer shelter
are a succession of traps. And if he captures
one fort he but brings himself under the fire
of two others.

From what I saw of the defenses of Verdun
from a "certain place" three miles outside
the city to a "certain place" fifteen miles
farther south, from what the general com-
manding the Verdun sector told me, and from
what I know of the French, I believe the
Crown Prince will find this second attack
upon Verdun a hundred per cent more costly
than the first, and equally unsuccessful.

209

CHAPTER X

WAR IN THE VOSGES

PARIS, January, 1916.

WHEN speaking of their five hundred
_ miles of front, the French General
Staff divide it into twelve sectors. The
names of these do not appear on maps.
They are family names and titles, not of
certain places, but of districts with imag-
inary boundaries. These nicknames seem
to thrive best in countries where the same
race of people have lived for many cen-
turies. With us, it is usually when we speak
of mountains, as "in the Rockies," "in the
Adirondacks," that under one name we merge
rivers, valleys, and villages. To know the
French names for the twelve official fronts
may help in deciphering the communiques.
They are these:

Flanders, the first sector, stretches from
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WAR IN THE VOSGES

the North Sea to beyond Ypres; the Artois
sector surrounds Arras; the centre of Picardie
is Amiens; Santerre follows the valley of
the Oise; Soissonais is the sector that ex-
tends from Soissons on the Aisne to the
Champagne sector, which begins with Rheims
and extends southwest to include Chalons;
Argonne is the forest of Argonne; the Hautes
de Meuse, the district around Verdun;
Woevre lies between the heights of the
Meuse and the River Moselle; then come
Lorraine, the Vosges, all hills and forests,
and last, Alsace, the territory won back from
the enemy.

Of these twelve fronts, I was on ten. The
remaining two I missed through leaving
France to visit the French fronts in Serbia
and Salonika. According to which front
you are on, the trench is of mud, clay, chalk,
sand-bags, or cement; it is ambushed in gar-
dens and orchards, it winds through flooded
mud flats, is hidden behind the ruins of
wrecked villages, and is paved and rein-

211

WAR IN THE VOSGES

forced with the stones and bricks from the
smashed houses.

Of all the trenches the most curious were
those of the Vosges. They were the most
curious because, to use the last word one
associates with trenches, they are the most
beautiful.

We started for the trenches of the Vosges
from a certain place close to the German
border. It was so close that in the inn a
rifle-bullet from across the border had bored
a hole in the cafe mirror.

The car climbed steadily. The swollen
rivers flowed far below us, and then disap-
peared, and the slopes that fell away on
one side of the road and rose on the other
became smothered under giant pines. Above
us they reached to the clouds,, below us
swept grandly across great valleys. There
was no sign of human habitation, not even
the hut of a charcoal-burner. Except for
the road we might have been the first ex-
plorers of a primeval forest. We seemed as

212

WAR IN THE VOSGES

far removed from the France of cities, culti-
vated acres, stone bridges, and chateaux as
Rip Van Winkle lost in the Catskills. The
silence was the silence of the ocean.

We halted at what might have been a
lumberman's camp. There were cabins of
huge green logs with the moss still fresh
and clinging, and smoke poured from mud
chimneys. In the air was an enchanting
odor of balsam and boiling coffee. It needed
only a man in a Mackinaw coat with an
axe to persuade us we had motored from a
French village ten hundred years old into
a perfectly new trading-post on the Sas-
katchewan.

But from the lumber camp the colonel ap-
peared, and with him in the lead we started
up a hill as sheer as a church roof. The
freshly cut path reached upward in short,
zigzag lengths. Its outer edge was shored
with the trunks of the trees cut down to
make way for it. They were fastened with
stakes, and against rain and snow helped to

213

WAR IN THE VOSGES

hold it in place. The soil, as the path showed,
was of a pink stone. It cuts easily, and is
the stone from which cathedrals have been
built. That suggests that to an ambitious
young sapling it offers little nutriment, but
the pines, at least, seem to thrive on it.
For centuries they have thrived on it. They
towered over us to the height of eight stories.
The ground beneath was hidden by the most
exquisite moss, and moss climbed far up the
tree trunks and covered the branches. They
looked, as though to guard them from the
cold, they had been swathed in green velvet.
Except for the pink path we were in a world
of green — green moss, green ferns, green
tree trunks, green shadows. The little light
that reached from above was like that which
filters through the glass sides of an aquarium.
It was very beautiful, but was it war?
We might have been in the Adirondacks
in the private camp of one of our men of
millions. You expected to see the fire-war-
den's red poster warning you to stamp out

214

WAR IN THE VOSGES

the ashes, and to be careful where you threw
your matches. Then the path dived into a
trench with pink walls, and, overhead, arches
of green branches rising higher and higher
until they interlocked and shut out the
sky. The trench led to a barrier of logs as
round as a flour-barrel, the openings plugged
with moss, and the whole hidden in fresh
pine boughs. It reminded you of those open
barricades used in boar hunting, and behind
which the German Emperor awaits the on-
slaught of thoroughly terrified pigs.

Like a bird's nest it clung to the side of the
hill, and, across a valley, looked at a sister
hill a quarter of a mile away.

"On that hill," said the colonel, "on a
level with us, are the Germans."

Had he told me that among the pine-trees
across the valley Santa Claus manufactured
his toys and stabled his reindeer I would
have believed him. Had humpbacked dwarfs
with beards peeped from behind the velvet
tree trunks and doffed red nightcaps, had we

215

WAR IN THE VOSGES

discovered fairies dancing on the moss carpet,
the surprised ones would have been the fairies.

In this enchanted forest to talk of Ger-
mans and war was ridiculous. We were
speaking in ordinary tones, but in the still-
ness of the woods our voices carried, and
from just below us a dog barked.

"Do you allow the men to bring dogs into
the trenches?" I asked. "Don't they give
away your position?"

"That is not one of our dogs," said the
colonel. "That is a German sentry dog.
He has heard us talking."

"But that dog is not across that valley,"
I objected. "He's on this hill. He's not
two hundred yards below us."

"But, yes, certainly," said the colonel.
Of the man on duty behind the log barrier
he asked:

"How near are they?"

"Two hundred yards," said the soldier.
He grinned and, leaning over the top log,
pointed directly beneath us.

216

o —
o "8

WAR IN THE VOSGES

It was as though we were on the roof of a
house looking over the edge at some one on
the front steps. I stared down through the
giant pine-trees towering like masts, mys-
terious, motionless, silent with the silence of
centuries. Through the interlacing boughs
I saw only shifting shadows or, where a shaft
of sunlight fell upon the moss, a flash of vivid
green. Unable to believe, I shook my head.
Even the boche watchdog, now thoroughly
annoyed, did not convince me. As though
reading my doubts, an officer beckoned,
and we stepped outside the breastworks and
into an intricate cat's-cradle of barbed wire.
It was lashed to heavy stakes and wound
around the tree trunks, and, had the officer
not led the way, it would have been impossible
for me to get either in or out. At intervals,
like clothes on a line, on the wires were strung
empty tin cans, pans and pots, and glass
bottles. To attempt to cross the entangle-
ment would have made a noise like a ped-
dler's cart bumping over cobbles.

217

WAR IN THE VOSGES

We came to the edge of the barb-wire,
and what looked like part of a tree trunk
turned into a man-sized bird's nest. The
sentry in the nest had his back to us, and
was peering intently down through the
branches of the tree tops. He remained so
long motionless that I thought he was not
aware of our approach. But he had heard us.
Only it was no part of his orders to make ab-
rupt movements. With infinite caution, with
the most considerate slowness, he turned,
scowled, and waved us back. It was the care
with which he made even so slight a ges-
ture that persuaded me the Germans were as
close as the colonel had said. My curiosity
concerning them was satisfied. The sentry
did not need to wave me back. I was al-
ready on my way.

At the post of observation I saw a dog-
kennel.

"There are watchdogs on our side, also?"
I said.

"Yes," the officer assented doubtfully.
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WAR IN THE VOSGES

"The idea is that their hearing is better than
that of the men, and in case of night attacks
they will warn us. But during the day they
get so excited barking at the boche dogs
that when darkness comes, and we need
them, they are worn-out and fall asleep."

We continued through the forest, and
wherever we went found men at work re-
pairing the path and pushing the barb-wire
and trenches nearer the enemy. In some
places they worked with great caution as,
hidden by the ferns, they dragged behind
them the coils of wire; sometimes they were
able to work openly, and the forest resounded
with the blows of axes and the crash of a
falling tree. But an axe in a forest does not
suggest war, and the scene was still one of
peace and beauty.

For miles the men had lined the path
with borders of moss six inches wide, and
with strips of bark had decorated the huts
and shelters. Across the tiny ravines they
had thrown what in seed catalogues are

219

WAR IN THE VOSGES

called "rustic" bridges. As we walked in
single file between these carefully laid bor-
ders of moss and past the shelters that sug-
gested only a gamekeeper's lodge, we might
have been on a walking tour in the Alps.
You expected at every turn to come upon a
chalet like a Swiss clock, and a patient cow
and a young woman in a velvet bodice who
would offer you warm milk.

Instead, from overhead, there burst sud-
denly the barking of shrapnel, and through
an opening in the tree-tops we saw a French
biplane pursued by German shells. It was
late in the afternoon, but the sun was still
shining and, entirely out of her turn, the
moon also was shining. In the blue sky she
hung like a silver shield, and toward her,
it seemed almost to her level, rose the bi-
plane.

She also was all silver. She shone and
glistened. Like a great bird, she flung out
tilting wings. The sun kissed them and
turned them into flashing mirrors. Behind

220

WAR IN THE VOSGES

her the German shells burst in white puffs
of smoke, feathery, delicate, as innocent-
looking as the tips of ostrich-plumes. The
biplane ran before them and seemed to play
with them as children race up the beach
laughing at the pursuing waves. The bi-
plane darted left, darted right, climbed un-
seen aerial trails, tobogganed down vast im-
aginary mountains, or, as a gull skims the
crests of the waves, dived into a cloud and
appeared again, her wings dripping, glis-
tening and radiant. As she turned and
winged her way back to France you felt no
fear for her. She seemed beyond the power
of man to harm, something supreme, super-
human— a sister to the sun and moon, the
princess royal of the air.

After you have been in the trenches it
seems so selfish to be feasting and drinking
that you have no appetite for dinner.

But after a visit to the defenders of the
forests of the Vosges you cannot feel selfish.
Visits to their trenches do not take away

221

WAR IN THE VOSGES

the appetite. They increase it. The air
they breathe tastes like brut champagne,
and gases cannot reach them. They sleep
on pillows of pine boughs. They look out
only on what in nature is most beautiful.
And their surgeon told me there was not
a single man on the sick-list. That does
not mean there are no killed or wounded.
For even in the enchanted forest there is
no enchantment strong enough to ward off
the death that approaches crawling on the
velvet moss, or hurtling through the tree-
tops.

War has no knowledge of sectors. It is
just as hateful in the Vosges as in Flanders,
only in the Vosges it masks its hideousness
with what is beautiful. In Flanders death
hides in a trench of mud like an open grave.
In the forest of the Vosges it lurks in a nest
of moss, fern, and clean, sweet-smelling pine.

222

CHAPTER XI

HINTS FOR THOSE WHO WANT TO
HELP

PARIS, January, 1916.

AT home people who read of some splen-
did act of courage or self-sacrifice on
the part of the Allies, are often moved to ex-
claim: "I wish I could help! I wish I could
do something!"

This is to tell them how easily, at what
bargain prices, at what little cost to them-
selves that wish can be gratified.

In the United States, owing to the war,
many have grown suddenly rich; those al-
ready wealthy are increasing their fortunes.
Here in France the war has robbed every
one; the rich are less rich, the poor more
destitute. Every franc any one can spare
is given to the government, to the Bank of
France, to fight the enemy and to preserve
the country.

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HINTS FOR THOSE

The calls made upon the purses of the
people never cease, and each appeal is so
worthy that it cannot be denied. In con-
sequence, for the war charities there is not
so much money as there was. People are
not less willing, but have less to give. So,
in order to obtain money, those who ask
must appeal to the imagination, must show
why the cause for which they plead is the
most pressing. They advertise just which
men will benefit, and in what way, whether
in blankets, gloves, tobacco, masks, or leaves
of absence.

Those in charge of the relief organizations
have learned that those who have money
to give like to pick and choose. A tale of
suffering that appeals to one, leaves another
cold. One gives less for the wounded because
he thinks those injured in battle are wards
of the state. But for the children orphaned
by the war he will give largely. So the
petitioners dress their shop-windows.

To the charitably disposed, and over here
224

WHO WANT TO HELP

that means every Frenchman, they offer
bargains. They have "white sales/' "fire
sales." As, at our expositions, we have spe-
cial days named after the different States,
they have special days for the Belgians,
Poles, and Serbians.

For these days they prepare long in ad-
vance. Their approach is heralded, adver-
tised; all Paris, or it may be the whole of
France, knows they are coming.

Christmas Day and the day after were de-
voted exclusively to the man in the trenches,
to obtain money to bring him home on leave.
Those days were les journees du poilu.

The services of the best black-and-white
artists in France were commandeered. For
advertising purposes they designed the most
appealing posters. Unlike those issued by
our suffragettes, calling attention to the im-
portance of November 2, they gave some
idea of what was wanted.

They did not show Burne- Jones young
women blowing trumpets. They were not

225

HINTS FOR THOSE

symbolical, or allegorical; they were homely,
pathetic, humorous, human. They were
aimed straight at the heart and pocketbook.

They showed the poilu returning home on
leave, and on surprising his wife or his sweet-
heart with her hands helpless in the wash-
tub, kissing her on the back of the neck. In
the corner the dog danced on his hind legs,
barking joyfully.

They showed the men in the trenches, and
while one stood at the periscope the other
opened their Christmas boxes; they showed
father and son shoulder to shoulder march-
ing through the snow, mud, and sleet; they
showed the old couple at home with no fire
in the grate, saying: "It is cold for us, but
not so cold as for our son in the trench."

For every contribution to this Christmas
fund those who gave received a decoration.
According to the sum, these ran from paper
badges on a pin to silver and gold medals.

The whole of France contributed to this
fund. The proudest shops filled their win-

226

WHO WANT TO HELP

dows with the paper badges, and so well was
the fund organized that in every town and
city petitioners in the streets waylaid every
pedestrian.

Even in Modena, on the boundary-line
of Italy, when I was returning to France,
and sharing a lonely Christmas with the
conductor of the wagon-lit, we were held up
by train-robbers, who took our money and
then pinned medals on us.

Until we reached Paris we did not know
why. It was only later we learned that in
the two days' campaign the poilus was bene-
fited to the sum of many millions of francs.

In Paris and over all France, for every
one is suffering through the war, there is
some individual or organization at work to
relieve that suffering. Every one helps, and
the spirit in which they help is most won-
derful and most beautiful. No one is for-
gotten.

When the French artists were called to
the front, the artists' models of the Place

227

HINTS FOR THOSE

Pigalle and Montmartre were left destitute.
They had not "put by." They were butter-
flies.

So some women of the industrious, busy-
bee order formed a society to look after the
artists' models. They gave them dolls to
dress, and on the sale of dolls the human
manikins now live.

Nor is any one who wants to help allowed
to feel that he or she is too poor; that for his
sou or her handiwork there is no need.
The midinettes, the "cash" girls of the great
department stores and millinery shops, had
no money to contribute, so some one thought
of giving them a chance to help the soldiers
with their needles.

It was purposed they should make cock-
ades in the national colors. Every French
girl is taught to sew; each is born with good
taste. They were invited to show their good
taste in the designing of cockades, which
people would buy for a franc, which franc
would be sent to some soldier.

228

L'Oeuvre ._ ^ .
cle lg permission du toilu

des Regions envawies

t Us iS^estaurateups . jimonac/i
et [jotelicrs parisiens

iers

A poster inviting the proprietors of restaurants and hotels and their
guests to welcome the soldiers who have permission to visit
Paris, especially those who come from the districts invaded by
the Germans.

WHO WANT TO HELP

The French did not go about this in a
hole-in-a-corner way in a back street. They
did not let the "cash" girl feel her artistic
effort was only a blind to help her help
others. They held a "salon" for the cock-
ades.

And they held it in the same Palace of
Art, where at the annual salon are hung
the paintings of the great French artists.
The cockades are exhibited in one hall, and
next to them is an exhibition of the precious
tapestries rescued from the Rheims cathedral.

In the hall beyond that is an exhibition
of lace. To this, museums, duchesses, and
queens have sent laces that for centuries
have been family heirlooms. But the cock-
ades of Mimi Pinson by the thousands and
thousands are given just as much space, are
arranged with the same taste and by the
same artist who grouped and catalogued the
queens' lace handkerchiefs.

And each little Mimi Pinson can go to
the palace and point to the cockade she

229

HINTS FOR THOSE

made with her own fingers, or point to the
spot where it was, and know she has sent a
franc to a soldier of France.

These days the streets of Paris are filled
with soldiers, each of whom has given to
France some part of his physical self. That
his country may endure, that she may con-
tinue to enjoy and teach liberty, he has
seen his arm or his leg, or both, blown off,
or cut off. But when on the boulevards you
meet him walking with crutches or with an
empty sleeve pinned beneath his Cross of
War, and he thinks your glance is one of
pity, he resents it. He holds his head more
stiffly erect. He seems to say: "I know how
greatly you envy me !"

And who would dispute him? Long after
the war is ended, so long as he lives, men
and women of France will honor him, and in
their eyes he will read their thanks. But
there is one soldier who cannot read their
thanks, who is spared the sight of their
pity. He is the one who has made all but

230

WHO WANT TO HELP

the supreme sacrifice. He is the one who is
blind. He sits in perpetual darkness. You
can remember certain nights that seemed to
stretch to doomsday, when sleep was with-
held and you tossed and lashed upon the
pillow, praying for the dawn. Imagine a
night of such torture dragged out over many
years, with the dreadful knowledge that
the dawn will never come. Imagine Paris
with her bridges, palaces, parks, with the
Seine, the Tuileries, the boulevards, the
glittering shop-windows conveyed to you
only through noise. Only through the shrieks
of motor-horns and the shuffling of feet.

The men who have been blinded in battle
have lost more than sight. They have been
robbed of their independence. They feel
they are a burden. It is not only the physical
loss they suffer, but the thought that no
longer are they of use, that they are a care,
that in the scheme of things — even in their
own little circles of family and friends —
there is for them no place. It is not unfair

231

HINTS FOR THOSE

to the poilu to say that the officer who is
blinded suffers more than the private. As
a rule, he is more highly strung, more widely
educated; he has seen more; his experience
of the world is broader; he has more to lose.
Before the war he may have been a lawyer,
doctor, man of many affairs. For him it
is harder than, for example, the peasant to
accept a future of unending blackness spent
in plaiting straw or weaving rag carpets.
Under such conditions life no longer tempts
him. Instead, death tempts him, and the
pistol seems very near at hand.

It was to save men of the officer class
from despair and from suicide, to make them
know that for them there still was a life of
usefulness, work, and accomplishment, that
there was organized in France the Com-
mittee for Men Blinded in Battle. The
idea was to bring back to officers who had
lost their sight, courage, hope, and a sense
of independence, to give them work not
merely mechanical but more in keeping with

232

26> 26
Dece mbre
.19

All over France, on Christmas Day and the day after, money was
collected to send comforts and things good to eat to the men
at the front.

WHO WANT TO HELP

their education and intelligence. The Presi-
dent of France is patron of the society, and
on its committees in Paris and New York
are many distinguished names. The French
Government has promised a house near Paris
where the blind soldiers may be educated.
When I saw them they were in temporary
quarters in the Hotel de Crillon, lent to them
by the proprietor. They had been gathered
from hospitals in different parts of France
by Miss Winifred Holt, who for years has
been working for the blind in her Lighthouse
in New York. She is assisted in the work
in Paris by Mrs. Peter Cooper Hewitt. The
officers were brought to the Crillon by French
ladies, whose duty it was to guide them
through the streets. Some of them also
were their instructors, and in order to teach
them to read and write with their fingers
had themselves learned the Braille alphabet.
This requires weeks of very close and patient
study. And no nurse's uniform goes with
it. But the reward was great.

233

HINTS FOR THOSE

It was evident in the alert and eager in-
terest of the men who, perhaps, only a week
before had wished to "curse God, and die."
But since then hope had returned to each
of them, and he had found a door open, and
a new life.

And he was facing it with the same or
with even a greater courage than that with
which he had led his men into the battle
that blinded him. Some of the officers were
modelling in clay, others were learning type-
writing, one with a drawing-board was study-
ing to be an architect, others were pressing
their finger-tips over the raised letters of
the Braille alphabet.

Opposite each officer, on the other side of
the table, sat a woman he could not see.
She might be young and beautiful, as many
of them were. She might be white-haired
and a great lady bearing an ancient title,
from the faubourg across the bridges, but he
heard only a voice.

The voice encouraged his progress, or
234

WHO WANT TO HELP

corrected his mistakes, and a hand, de-
tached and descending from nowhere, guided
his hand, gently, as one guides the fingers
of a child. The officer was again a child.
In life for the second time he was beginning
with A, B, and C. The officer was tall,
handsome, and deeply sunburned. In his
uniform of a chasseur d'Afrique he was a
splendid figure. On his chest were the
medals of the campaigns in Morocco and
Algiers, and the crimson ribbon of the Legion
of Honor. The officer placed his forefinger
on a card covered with raised hieroglyphics.

"N," he announced.

"No," the voice answered him.

"M?" His tone did not carry convic-
tion.

"You are guessing," accused the voice.
The officer was greatly confused.

"No, no, mademoiselle!" he protested.
"Truly, I thought it was an 'M.' "

He laughed guiltily. The laugh shook
you. You saw all that he could never see:

235

HINTS FOR THOSE

inside the room the great ladies and latest
American countesses, eager to help, forget-
ful of self, full of wonderful, womanly sym-
pathy; and outside, the Place de la Concorde,
the gardens of the Tuileries, the trees of the
Champs Elysees, the sun setting behind the
gilded dome of the Invalides. All these were
lost to him, and yet as he sat in the darkness,
because he could not tell an N from an M,
he laughed, and laughed happily. From
where did he draw his strength and courage ?
Was it the instinct for life that makes a
drowning man fight against an ocean? Was
it his training as an officer of the Grande
Armee? Was it that spirit of the French
that is the one thing no German knows,
and no German can ever break? Or was it
the sound of a woman's voice and the touch
of a woman's hand? If the reader wants to
contribute something to help teach a new
profession to these gentlemen, who in the
fight for civilization have contributed their
eyesight, write to the secretary of the com-

236

JOURNEEouPOILU

irNOVEMBRE

ORGAN ISEE PAR LE PARLEM ENT

A poster advertising the fund to bring from the trenches "permSs-
sionaires," those soldiers who obtain permission to return home
for six days.

WHO WANT TO HELP

mittee, Mrs. Peter Cooper Hewitt, Hotel
Ritz, Paris.

There are some other very good bargains.
Are you a lover of art, and would you be-
come a patron of art? If that is your wish,
you can buy an original water-color for fifty
cents, and so help an art student who is fight-
ing at the front, and assist in keeping alive his
family in Paris. Is not that a good bargain ?

As everybody knows, the Ecole des Beaux-
Arts in Paris is free to students from all
the world. It is the alma mater of some of
the best-known American artists and archi-
tects. On its rolls are the names of Sargent,
St. Gaudens, Stanford White, Whitney War-
ren, Beckwith, Coffin, MacMonnies.

Certain schools and colleges are so for-
tunate as to inspire great devotion on the
part of their students, as, in the story told
of every college, of the student being led
from the football field, who struggles in
front of the grand stand and shouts: "Let

me go back. I'd die for dear old "

237

HINTS FOR THOSE

But the affection of the students of the
Beaux-Arts for their masters, their fellow
students and the institution is very genuine.

They do not speak of the distinguished
artists, architects, engravers, and sculptors
who instruct them as "Doc," or "Prof."
Instead they call him "master," and no
matter how often they say it, they say it
each time as though they meant it.

The American students, even when they
return to Paris rich and famous, go at once
to call upon the former master of their atelier,
who, it may be, is not at all famous or rich,
and pay their respects.

And, no matter if his school of art has
passed, and the torch he carried is in the
hands of younger Frenchmen, his former
pupils still salute him as master, and with
much the same awe as the village cure shows
for the cardinal.

When the war came 3,000 of the French
students of the Beaux-Arts, past and pres-
ent, were sent to the front, and there was

238

WHO WANT TO HELP

no one to look after their parents, families,
or themselves, it seemed a chance for Ameri-
cans to try to pay back some of the debt so
many generations of American artists, ar-
chitects, and sculptors owed to the art of
France.

Whitney Warren, the American architect,
is one of the few Americans who, in spite of
the extreme unpopularity of our people, is
still regarded by the French with genuine
affection. And in every way possible he
tries to show the French that it is not the
American people who are neutral, but the
American Government.

One of the ways he offers to Americans
to prove their friendship for France is in
helping the students of the Beaux-Arts. He
has organized a committee of French and
American students which works twelve hours
a day in the palace of the Beaux- Arts itself,
on the left bank of the Seine.

It is hard to understand how in such sur-
roundings they work, not all day, but at

239

HINTS FOR THOSE

all. The rooms were decorated in the time
of the first Napoleon; the ceilings and walls
are white and gold, and in them are inserted
paintings and panels. The windows look
into formal gardens and courts filled with
marble statues and busts, bronze medallions
and copies of frescoes brought from Athens
and Rome. In this atmosphere the students
bang typewriters, fold blankets, nail boxes,
sort out woollen gloves, cigarettes, loaves of
bread, and masks against asphyxiating gas.
The mask they send to the front was in-
vented by Francis Jacques, of Harvard, one
of the committee, and has been approved
by the French Government.

There is a department which sends out
packages to the soldiers in the trenches, to
those who are prisoners, and to the soldiers
in the hospitals. There is a system of de-
mand cards on which is a list of what the
committee is able to supply. In the trenches
the men mark the particular thing they want
and return the card. The things most in de-

240

WHO WANT TO HELP

mand seem to be corn-cob pipes and tobacco
from America, sketch-books, and small boxes
of water-colors.

The committee also edits and prints a
monthly magazine. It is sent to those at
the front, and gives them news of their fellow
students, and is illustrated, it is not neces-
sary to add, with remarkable talent and
humor. It is printed by hand. The com-
mittee also supplies the students with post-
cards on which the students paint pictures
in water-colors and sign them. Every student
and ex-student, even the masters paint these
pictures. Some of them are very valuable.
At two francs fifty centimes the autograph
alone is a bargain. In many cases your
fifty cents will not only make you a patron
of art, but it may feed a very hungry family.
Write to Ronald Simmons or Cyrus Thomas,

Ecole des Beaux-Arts, 17 Quai Malaquais.

There is another very good bargain, and
extremely cheap. Would you like to lift a
man bodily out of the trenches, and for six

241

HINTS FOR THOSE

days not only remove him from the imme-
diate proximity of asphyxiating gas, shells,
and bullets, but land him, of all places to a
French soldier the most desired, in Paris?
Not only land him there, but for six days
feed and lodge him, and give him a present
to take away? It will cost you fifteen francs,
or three dollars. If so, write to Journal des
Restaurateurs, 24 Rue Richelieu, Paris.

In Paris, we hear that on Wall Street there
are some very fine bargains. We hear that
in gambling in war brides and ammunition
everybody is making money. Very little of
that money finds its way to France. Some
day I may print a list of the names of those
men in America who are making enormous
fortunes out of this war, and who have not
contributed to any charity or fund for the
relief of the wounded or of their families.
If you don't want your name on that list
you might send money to the American
Ambulance at Neuilly, or to any of the
6,300 hospitals in France, to the clearing-

242

WHO WANT TO HELP

house, through H. H. Harjes, 31 Boulevard
Haussman, or direct to the American Red
Cross.

Or if you want to help the orphans of
soldiers killed in battle write to August F.
Jaccaci, Hotel de Crillon; if you want to
help the families of soldiers rendered home-
less by this war, to the Secours National
through Mrs. Whitney Warren, 16 West
Forty-Seventh Street, New York; if you
want to clothe a French soldier against the
snows of the Vosges send him a Lafayette
kit. In the clearing-house in Paris I have
seen on file 20,000 letters from French soldiers
asking for this kit. Some of them were ad-
dressed to the Marquis de Lafayette, but the
clothes will get to the front sooner if you
forward two dollars to the Lafayette Kit
Fund, Hotel Vanderbilt, New York. If you
want to help the Belgian refugees, address
Mrs. Herman Harjes, Hotel de Crillon, Paris;
if the Serbian refugees, address Monsieur
Vesnitch, the Serbian minister to France.

243

HINTS FOR THOSE WHO WANT TO HELP

If among these bargains you cannot find
one to suit you, you should consult your
doctor. Tell him there is something wrong
with your heart.

244

CHAPTER XII

LONDON, A YEAR LATER

February, 1916.

A YEAR ago you could leave the Conti-
nent and enter England by showing a
passport and a : steamer ticket. To-day it
is as hard to leave Paris, and no one ever
wants to leave Paris, as to get out of jail;
as difficult to invade England as for a rich
man to enter the kingdom of heaven. To
leave Paris for London you must obtain the
permission of the police, the English consul-
general, and the American consul-general.
That gets you only to Havre. The Paris
train arrives at Havre at nine o'clock at
night, and while the would-be passengers
for the Channel boat to Southampton are
waiting to be examined, they are kept on
the wharf in a goods-shed. An English ser-
geant hands each of them a ticket with a

245

LONDON, A YEAR LATER

number, and when the number is called the
passenger enters a room on the shed where
French and English officials put him, or her,
through a third degree. The examination is
more or less severe, and sometimes the pas-
senger is searched.

There is nothing on the wharf to eat or
drink, and except trunks nothing on which
to sit. If you prefer to be haughty and
stand, there is no law against that. Should
you leave the shed for a stroll, you would
gain nothing, for, as it is war-time, at nine
o'clock every restaurant and cafe in Havre
closes, and the town is so dark you would
probably stroll into the harbor.

So, like emigrants on our own Ellis Island,
English and French army and navy officers,
despatch bearers, American ambulance driv-
ers, Red Cross nurses, and all the other
picturesque travellers of these interesting
times, shiver, yawn, and swear from nine
o'clock until midnight. To make it harder,
the big steamer that is to carry you across

246

LONDON, A YEAR LATER

the Channel is drawn up to the wharf not
forty feet way, all lights and warmth and
cleanliness. At least ten men assured me
they would return to Havre and across the
street from the examination-shed start an
all-night restaurant. After a very few min-
utes of standing around in the rain it was a
plan to get rich quick that would have oc-
curred to almost any one.

My number was forty-three. After seeing
only five people in one hour pass through the
examination-room, I approached a man of
proud bearing, told him I was a detective,
and that I had detected he was from Scot-
land Yard. He looked anxiously at his feet.

"How did you detect that?" he asked.

"Your boots are all right," I assured him.
"It's the way you stand with your hands
behind your back."

By shoving his hands into his pockets he
disguised himself, and asked what I wanted.
I wanted to be put through the torture-
chamber ahead of all the remaining pas-

247

LONDON, A YEAR LATER

sengers. He asked why he should do that.
I showed him the letter that, after weeks of
experiment, I found of all my letters, was
the one that produced the quickest results.
It is addressed vaguely, "To His Majesty's
Officers." I call it Exhibit A.

I explained that for purposes of getting
me out of the goods-shed and on board the
steamer he could play he was one of his
Majesty's officers. The idea pleased him.
He led me into the examination-room, where,
behind a long table, like inspectors in a vot-
ing-booth on election day, sat French police
officials, officers of the admiralty, army,
consular, and secret services. Some were
in uniform, some in plain clothes. From
above, two arc-lights glared down upon them
and on the table covered with papers.

In two languages they were examining a
young Englishwoman who was pale, ill, and
obviously frightened.

"What is your purpose in going to Lon-
don?" asked the French official.

248

LONDON, A YEAR LATER

"To join my children."

To the French official it seemed a good
answer. As much as to say: "Take the
witness," he bowed to his English colleagues.

"If your children are in London," de-
manded one, " what are you doing in France ? "

"I have been at Amiens, nursing my hus-
band."

"Amiens is inside our lines. Who gave
you permission to remain inside our lines?"

The woman fumbled with some papers.

"I have a letter," she stammered.

The officer scowled at the letter. Out
of the corner of his mouth he said: "Permit
from the 'W. O.' Husband, Captain in the
Berkshires. Wounded at La Bassee."

He was already scratching his vise upon
her passport. As he wrote, he said, cor-
dially: "I hope your husband is all right
again." The woman did not reply. So
long was she in answering that they looked
up at her. She was chilled with waiting in
the cold rain. She had been on a strain, and

249

LONDON, A YEAR LATER

her lips began to tremble. To hide that fact,
and with no intention of being dramatic, she
raised her hand, and over her face dropped
a black veil.

The officer half rose.

"You should have told us at once, mad-
am," he said. He jerked his head at the
detective and toward the door, and the
detective picked up her valise, and asked
her please to follow. At the door she looked
back, and the row of officials, like one man,
bent forward.

One of them was engaged in studying my
passport. It had been viseed by the rep-
resentatives of all the civilized powers, and
except the Germans and their fellow gun-
men, most of the uncivilized. The officer was
fascinated with it. Like a jig-saw puzzle, it
appealed to him. He turned it wrong side
up and sideways, and took so long about it
that the others, hoping there was something
wrong, in anticipation scowled at me. But
the officer disappointed them.

250

LONDON, A YEAR LATER

"Very interestin'," he said. "You ought
to frame it."

Now that I was free to leave the detention
camp I perversely felt a desire to remain.
Now that I was free, the sight of all the
other passengers kicking each other's heels
and being herded by Tommies gave me a
feeling of infinite pleasure. I tried to ex-
press this by forcing money on the detective,
but he absolutely refused it. So, instead, I
offered to introduce him to a King's mes-
senger. We went in search of the King's
messenger. I was secretly alarmed lest he
had lost himself. Since we had left the Bal-
kans together he had lost nearly everything
else. He had set out as fully equipped as
the white knight, or a "temp. sec. lieuten-
ant." But his route was marked with lost
trunks, travelling-bags, hat-boxes, umbrellas,
and receipts for reservations on steamships,
railroad-trains, in wagon-lits, and dining-cars.

A King's messenger has always been to
me a fascinating figure. In fiction he is

251

LONDON, A YEAR LATER

resourceful, daring, ubiquitous. He shows
his silver staff, with its running greyhound,
which he inherits from the days of Henry
VIII, and all men must bow before it. To
speed him on his way, railroad-carriages are
emptied, special trains are thrown together,
steamers cast off only when he arrives. So
when I found for days I was to travel in
company with a King's messenger I fore-
saw a journey of infinite ease and comfort.
It would be a royal progress. His ever-pres-
ent, but invisible, staff of secret agents
would protect me. I would share his special
trains, his suites of deck cabins. But it was
not like that. My King's messenger was
not that kind of a King's messenger. In-
deed, when he left the Levant, had it not
been for the man from Cook's, he would
never have found his way from the hotel to
the right railroad-station. And that he now
is safely in London is because at Patras we
rescued him from a boatman who had placed
him unresisting on a steamer for Australia.

252

«l^l^

;

»
.

"Very interestin'. You ought to frame it."

LONDON, A YEAR LATER

I pointed him out to the detective. He
recalled him as the gentleman who had
blocked the exit gate at the railroad-station.
I suggested that that was probably because
he had lost his ticket.

"Lost his ticket! A King's messenger!"
The detective was indignant with me. "Im-
possible, sir!"

I told him the story of the drunken bands-
man returning from the picnic. "You can't
have lost your ticket," said the guard.

"Can't I?" exclaimed the bandsman tri-
umphantly. "I've lost the bass-drum!"

Scotland Yard reproved the K. M. with
deference, but severely.

"You should have told us at once, sir,"
he said, "that you were carrying despatches.
If you'd only shown your credentials, we'd
had you safe on board two hours ago."

The King's messenger blushed guiltily.
He looked as though he wanted to run.

"Don't tell me," I cried, "you've lost
your credentials, too!"

253

LONDON, A YEAR LATER

"Don't be an ass !" cried the K. M. "I've
mislaid them, that's all."

The detective glared at him as though he
would enjoy leading him to the moat in the
tower.

"You've been robbed!" he gasped.

"Have you looked," I asked, "in the un-
likely places ?"

"I always look there first," explained the
K. M.

"Look again," commanded the detective.

Unhappily, the K. M. put his hand in
his inside coat pocket and, with intense
surprise, as though he had performed a con-
juring trick, produced a paper that creaked
and crinkled.

"That's it!" he cried.

"You come with me," commanded Scot-
land Yard, "before you lose it again."

Two nights later, between the acts at
a theatre, I met a young old friend. Twenty
years before we had made a trip through
Central America and Venezuela. To my

254

LONDON, A YEAR LATER

surprise, for I had known him in other wars,
he was not in khaki, but in white waistcoat
and lawn tie and tail-coat. He looked as
though he had on his hand nothing more
serious than money and time. I complained
that we had not met since the war.

"It's a chance, our meeting to-night,"
he said, "for I start for Cairo in the morning.
I left the Dardanelles last Wednesday and
arrived here only to-day. "

"Wednesday!" I exclaimed. "How could
you do it?"

"Torpedo-boat from Moudros to Malta,"
he explained, "transport to Marseilles, troop
train to Calais, and there our people shot
me across the Channel on a hospital ship.
Then I got a special to town."

"You are a swell!" I gasped. "What's
your rank?"

"Captain."

That did not explain it.

"What's your job?"

"King's messenger."
255

LONDON, A YEAR LATER

It was not yet nine-thirty. The anti-
treating law would not let me give him a
drink, but I led him to where one was. For
he had restored my faith. He had replaced
on his pedestal my favorite character in
fiction.

On returning to London for the fourth
time since the war began, but after an ab-
sence of months, one finds her much nearer
to the field of operations. A year ago her
citizens enjoyed the confidence that comes
from living on an island. Compared with
Paris, where at Claye the enemy was within
fifteen miles, and, at the Forest of Mont-
morency, within ten miles, London seemed
as far removed from the front as Montreal.
Since then, so many of her men have left for
the front and not returned, so many German
air-ships have visited her, and inhumanly as-
sassinated her children and women, that she
seems a part of it. A year ago an officer en-
tering a restaurant was conscious of his uni-
form. To-day, anywhere in London, a man

256

LONDON, A YEAR LATER

out of uniform, or not wearing a khaki arm-
let, is as conspicuous as a scarlet letter-box.
A year ago the lamps had been so darkened
that it was not easy to find the keyhole to
your street door. Now you are in luck if you
find the street. Nor does that mean you
have lingered long at dinner. For after nine-
thirty nowhere in London can you buy a
drink, not at your hotel, not even at your
club. At nine-thirty the waiter whisks your
drink off the table. What happens to it
after that, only the waiter knows.

A year ago the only women in London in
uniform were the nurses. Now so many
are in uniform that to one visitor they pre-
sented the most surprising change the war
has brought to that city. Those who live
in London, to whom the change has come
gradually, are probably hardly aware how
significant it is. Few people, certainly few
men, guessed that so many positions that
before the war were open only to men, could
be filled quite as acceptably by women. Only

257

LONDON, A YEAR LATER

the comic papers guessed it. All that they
ever mocked at, all the suffragettes and
"equal rights" women ever hoped for seems
to have come true. Even women policemen.
True, they do not take the place of the real,
immortal London bobby, neither do the
"special constables," but if a young girl is
out late at night with her young man in
khaki, she is held up by a policewoman and
sent home. And her young man in khaki
dare not resist.

In Paris, when the place of a man who
had been mobilized was taken by his wife,
sister, or daughter, no one was surprised.
Frenchwomen have for years worked in
partnership with men to a degree unknown
in England. They helped as bookkeepers,
shopkeepers; in the restaurant they always
handled the money; in the theatres the ush-
ers and box openers were women; the gov-
ernment tobacco-shops were run by women.
That Frenchwomen were capable, efficient,
hard working was as trite a saying as that

258

LONDON, A YEAR LATER

the Japanese are a wonderful little people.
So when the men went to the front and the
women carried on their work, they were
only proving a proverb.

But in England careers for women, out-
side those of governess, typist, barmaid, or
show girl, which entailed marrying a marquis,
were as few as votes. The war has changed
that. It gave woman her chance, and she
jumped at it. "When Johnny Comes March-
ing Home Again" he will find he must look
for a man's job, and that men's jobs no longer
are sinecures. In his absence women have
found out, and, what is more important, the
employers have found out that to open a
carriage door and hold an umbrella over a
customer is not necessarily a man's job.
The man will have to look for a position his
sister cannot fill, and, judging from the pres-
ent aspect of London, those positions are rap-
idly disappearing.

That in the ornamental jobs, those that
are relics of feudalism and snobbery, women

259

LONDON, A YEAR LATER

should supplant men is not surprising. To
wear gold lace and touch your hat and
whistle for a taxicab, if the whistle is a me-
chanical one, is no difficult task. It never
was absolutely necessary that a butler and
two men should divide the labor of serving
one cup of coffee, one lump of sugar, and
one cigarette. A healthy young woman
might manage all three tasks and not faint.
So the innovation of female butlers and foot-
men is not important. But many of the jobs
now held in London by women are those
which require strength, skill, and endurance.
Pulling on the steel rope of an elevator and
closing the steel gates for eight hours a day
require strength and endurance; and yet
in all the big department stores the lifts are
worked by girls. Women also drive the vans,
and dragging on the brake of a brewery-
wagon and curbing two draft-horses is a
very different matter from steering one of
the cars that made peace hateful. Not
that there are no women chauffeurs. They

260

LONDON, A YEAR LATER

are everywhere. You see them driving lorries,
business cars, private cars, taxicabs, ambu-
lances.

In men's caps and uniforms of green,
gray, brown, or black, and covered to the
waist with a robe, you mistake them for
boys. The other day I saw a motor-truck
clearing a way for itself down Piccadilly.
It was filled with over two dozen Tommies,
and driven recklessly by a girl in khaki of
not more than eighteen years. How many
indoor positions have been taken over by
women one can only guess; but if they are
in proportion to the out-of-door jobs now
filled by women and girls, it would seem as
though half the work in London was carried
forward by what we once were pleased to
call the weaker sex. To the visitor there ap-
pear to be regiments of them. They look
very businesslike and smart in their uni-
forms, and whatever their work is they are
intent upon it. As a rule, when a woman
attempts a man's work she is conscious.

261

LONDON, A YEAR LATER

She is more concerned with the fact that
she is holding down a man's job than with
the job. Whether she is a lady lawyer, lady
doctor, or lady journalist, she always is sur-
prised to find herself where she is. The girls
and women you see in uniform by the thou-
sands in London seem to have overcome
that weakness. They are performing a man's
work, and their interest is centred in the
work, not in the fact that a woman has made
a success of it. If, after this, women in Eng-
land want the vote, and the men won't give
it to them, the men will have a hard time
explaining why.

During my few days in England, I found
that what is going forward in Paris for blind
French officers is being carried on in London
at St. Dunstan's, Regent's Park, for blind
Tommies. At this school the classes are
much larger than are those in Paris, the
pupils more numerous, and they live and
sleep on the premises. The premises are
very beautiful. They consist of seventeen

262

From a photograph by Brown Bros.

" They have women policemen now."

LONDON, A YEAR LATER

acres of gardens, lawns, trees, a lake, and a
stream on which you can row and swim,
situated in Regent's Park and almost in the
heart of London. In the days when London
was farther away the villa of St. Dunstan's
belonged to the eccentric Marquis of Hert-
ford, the wicked Lord Steyne of Thackeray's
"Vanity Fair." It was a country estate.
Now the city has closed in around it, but it
is still a country estate, with ceilings by the
Brothers Adam, portraits by Romney, side-
boards by Sheraton, and on the lawn sheep.
To keep sheep in London is as expensive as
to keep race-horses, and to own a country
estate in London can be afforded only by
Americans. The estate next to St. Dun-
Stan's is owned by an American lady. I
used to play lawn-tennis there with her
husband. Had it not been for the horns of
the taxicabs we might have been a hundred
miles from the nearest railroad. Instead,
we were so close to Baker Street that one
false step would have landed us in Mme.

263

LONDON, A YEAR LATER

Tussaud's. When the war broke out the
husband ceased hammering tennis-balls, and
hammered German ships of war. He sank
several — and is now waiting impatiently
outside of Wilhelmshaven for more.

St. Dunstan's also is owned by an Amer-
ican, Otto Kahn, the banker. In peace
times, in the winter months, Mr. Kahn makes
it possible for the people of New York to
listen to good music at the Metropolitan
Opera House. When war came, at his coun-
try place in London he made it next to pos-
sible for the blind to see. He gave the key
of the estate to C. Arthur Pearson. He also
gave him permission in altering St. Dun-
Stan's to meet the needs of the blind to go
as far as he liked.

When I first knew Arthur Pearson he and
Lord Northcliffe were making rival collec-
tions of newspapers and magazines. They
collected them as other people collect postal
cards and cigar-bands. Pearson was then,
as he is now, a man of the most remarkable

264

LONDON, A YEAR LATER

executive ability, of keen intelligence, of
untiring nervous energy. That was ten years
ago. He knew then that he was going blind.
And when the darkness came he accepted
the burden; not only his own, but he took
upon his shoulders the burden of all the
blind in England. He organized the Na-
tional Institute for those who could not see.
He gave them of his energy, which has not
diminished; he gave them of his fortune,
which, happily for them, has not diminished;
he gave them his time, his intelligence. If
you ask what the time of a blind man is
worth, go to St. Dunstan's and you will
find out. You will see a home and school
for blind men, run by a blind man. The
same efficiency, knowledge of detail, in-
tolerance of idleness, the same generous ap-
preciation of the work of others, that he put
into running The Express and Standard, he
now exerts at St. Dunstan's. It has Pear-
son written all over it just as a mile away
there is a building covered with the name of

265

LONDON, A YEAR LATER

Selfridge, and a cathedral with the name of
Christopher Wren. When I visited him in
his room at St. Dunstan's he was standing
with his back to the open fire dictating to a
stenographer. He called to me cheerily,
caught my hand, and showed me where I
was to sit. All the time he was looking
straight at me and firing questions:

"When did you leave Salonika? How
many troops have we landed? Our posi-
tions are very strong, aren't they?"

He told the stenographer she need not
wait, and of an appointment he had which
she was not to forget. Before she reached
the door he remembered two more things she
was not to forget. The telephone rang, and,
still talking, he walked briskly around a
sofa, avoided a table and an armchair, and
without fumbling picked up the instru-
ment. What he heard was apparently very
good news. He laughed delightedly, saying:
" That's fine ! That's splendid ! "

A secretary opened the door and tried to
266

LONDON, A YEAR LATER

tell him what he had just learned, but was
cut short.

"I know," said Pearson. "So-and-so has
just phoned me. It's fine, isn't it?"

He took a small pad from his pocket,
made a note on it, and laid the memorandum
beside the stenographer's machine. Then
he wound his way back to the fireplace and
offered a case of cigarettes. He held them
within a few inches of my hand. Since I
last had seen him he had shaved his mus-
tache and looked ten years younger and, as
he exercises every morning, very fit. He
might have been an officer of the navy out
of uniform. I had been in the room five
minutes, and only once, when he wrote on
the pad and I saw that as he wrote he did
not look at the pad, would I have guessed
that he was blind.

"What we teach them here," he said,
firing the words as though from a machine-
gun, "is that blindness is not an 'affliction/
We won't allow that word. We teach them

267

LONDON, A YEAR LATER

to be independent. Sisters and the mothers
spoil them ! Afraid they'll bump their shins.
Won't let them move about. Always lead-
ing them. That's bad, very bad. Makes
them think they're helpless, no good, in-
valids for life. We teach 'em to strike out
for themselves. That's the way to put heart
into them. Make them understand they're
of use, that they can help themselves, help
others, learn a trade, be self-supporting.
We trained them to row. Some of them
never had had oars in their hands except
on the pond at Hempstead Heath on a
bank holiday. We trained a crew that
swept the river."

It was fine to see the light in his face.
His enthusiasm gave you a thrill. He might
have been Guy Nickalls telling how the
crew he coached won at New London.

"They were the best crews, too. Uni-
versity crews. Of course, our coxswain could
see, but the crew were blind. We've not
only taught them to row, we've taught them

268

LONDON, A YEAR LATER

to support themselves, taught them trades.
All men who come here have lost their eye-
sight in battle in this war, but already we
have taught some of them a trade and set
them up in business. And while the war
lasts business will be good for them. And it
must be nursed and made to grow. So we
have an 'after-care' committee. To care for
them after they have left us. To buy raw
material, to keep their work up to the mark,
to dispose of it. We need money for those
men. For the men who have started life
again for themselves. Do you think there
are people in America who would like to
help those men?"

I asked, in case there were such people,
to whom should they write.

"To me," he said, "St. Dunstan's, Re-
gent's Park."*

I found the seventeen acres of St. Dun-
stan's so arranged that no blind man could

*In New York, the Permanent Blind Relief War Fund
for Soldiers and Sailors of Great Britain, France, and Bel-

269

LONDON, A YEAR LATER

possibly lose his way. In the house, over
the carpets, were stretched strips of mat-
ting. So long as a man kept his feet on mat-
ting he knew he was on the right path to
the door. Outside the doors hand-rails
guided him to the workshops, schoolrooms, ex-
ercising-grounds, and kitchen-gardens. Just
before he reached any of these places a brass
knob on the hand-rail warned him to go
slow. Were he walking on the great stone
terrace and his foot scraped against a board
he knew he was within a yard of a flight of
steps. Wherever you went you found men
at work, learning a trade, or, having learned
one, intent in the joy of creating something.
To help them there are nearly sixty ladies,
who have mastered the Braille system and
come daily to teach it. There are many
other volunteers, who take the men on walks

gium is working in close association with Mr. Pearson.
With him on the committee, are Robert Bacon, Elihu Root,
Myron T. Herrick, Whitney Warren, Lady Arthur Paget,
and George Alexander Kessler. The address of the fund is
590 Fifth Avenue.

270

LONDON, A YEAR LATER

around Regent's Park and who talk and read
to them. Everywhere was activity. Every-
where some one was helping some one: the
blind teaching the blind; those who had
been a week at St. Dunstan's doing the
honors to those just arrived. The place
spoke only of hard work, mutual help, and
cheerfulness. When first you arrived you
thought you had over the others a certain
advantage, but when you saw the work the
blind men were turning out, which they could
not see, and which you knew with both your
eyes you never could have turned out, you
felt apologetic. There were cabinets, for
instance, measured to the twentieth of an
inch, and men who were studying to be
masseurs who, only by touch, could dis-
tinguish all the bones in the body. There
was Miss Woods, a blind stenographer. I
dictated a sentence to her, and as fast as I
spoke she took it down on a machine in
the Braille alphabet. It appeared in raised
figures on a strip of paper like those that

271

LONDON, A YEAR LATER

carry stock quotations. Then, reading the
sentence with her fingers, she pounded it
on an ordinary typewriter. Her work was
faultless.

What impressed you was the number of
the workers who, over their task, sang or
whistled. None of them paid any attention
to what the others were whistling. Each
acted as though he were shut off in a world
of his own. The spirits of the Tommies were
unquenchable.

Thorpe Five was one of those privates
who are worth more to a company than the
sergeant-major. He was a comedian. He
looked like John Bunny, and when he laughed
he shook all over, and you had to laugh with
him, even though you were conscious that
Thorpe Five had no eyes and no hands.
But was he conscious of that? Apparently
not. Was he down-hearted? No! Some
one snatched his cigarette; and with the
stumps of his arms he promptly beat two
innocent comrades over the head. When

272

LONDON, A YEAR LATER

the lady guide interfered and admitted it
was she who had robbed him, Thorpe Five
roared in delight.

"I bashed 'em!" he cried. "Her took
it, but I bashed the two of 'em!"

A private of the Munsters was weaving
a net, and, as though he were quite alone,
singing, in a fine barytone, "Tipperary."
If you want to hear real close harmony, you
must listen to Southern darkeys; and if you
want to get the sweetness and melancholy
out of an Irish chant, an Irishman must
sing it. I thought I had heard "Tipperary"
before several times, and that it was a march.
I found I had not heard it before, and that
it is not a march, but a lament and a love-
song. The soldier did not know we were
listening, and while his fingers wove the
meshes of the net, his voice rose in tones of
the most moving sweetness. He did not
know that he was facing a window, he did
not know that he was staring straight out
upon the city of London. But we knew, and

273

LONDON, A YEAR LATER

when in his rare barytone and rare brogue
he whispered rather than sang the lines:

" Good-by, Piccadilly—

Farewell, Leicester Square,
It's a long, long way to Tipperary "

— all of his unseen audience hastily fled.

There was also Private Watts, who was
mending shoes. When the week before Lord
Kitchener visited St. Dunstan's, Watts had
joked with him. I congratulated him on
his courage.

"What was your joke?" I inquired.

"He asked me when I was a prisoner with
the Germans how they fed me, and I said:
'Oh, they gave me five beefsteaks a day.' '

"That was a good joke/' I said. "Did
Kitchener think so?"

The man had been laughing, pleased and
proud. Now the blank eyes turned wist-
fully to my companion.

"Did his lordship smile?" he asked.

Those blind French officers at the Crillon
274

LONDON, A YEAR LATER

in Paris and these English Tommies are
teaching a great lesson. They are teaching
men who are whining over the loss of money,
health, or a job, to be ashamed. It is not
we who are helping them, but they who are
helping us. They are showing us how to
face disaster and setting an example of real
courage. Those who do not profit by it are
more blind than they.

THE END.

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Davis, Ricnard Harding, 1864

-1916.
With the French in France

and Salonika,

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