Italy at War and the Allies in the West Part 5

Some idea may be had of the variety of artillery in use on the French front when I mention that there are at least eleven calibers of guns, howitzers, and mortars, ranging in size from 9 inches to 20.8 inches, in action between Switzerland and the Somme. All of these, with a very few exceptions, are mounted on railway-trucks. In fact, the only large calibered piece not thus mounted is the Schneider mortar, a very efficient weapon, having a remarkably smooth recoil, which has a range of over six miles. It is transported, with its carriage and platform, in six loads, each weighing from four to five tons, about four hours being required to set up the piece ready for firing. Nearly all of these railway guns are, I understand, naval or coast-defense pieces, some of them being long-range weapons cut down to form howitzers or mortars, while others have been created by boring to a larger caliber a gun whose rifling had been worn out in use. For example, the 400-millimetre, already referred to as having proved so effective against Douaumont, was, I am told, made by cutting down and boring out a 13.6-inch naval gun. But the master gun, the very latest product of French brains and French foundries, is the huge 520-millimetre (20.8-inch) howitzer which has just been completed at the Schneider works at Creusot. This, the largest gun in existence, has a length of 16 calibers (that is, sixteen times its bore, or approximately 28 feet), and weighs 60 tons. It fires a sh.e.l.l 7 feet long, weighing nearly 3,000 pounds, and carrying a bursting charge of 660 pounds of high explosive. Its range is 18 kilometres, or a little over eleven miles, though this can probably be increased if desired. This is France's answer to the German 42's, and, just as the latter shattered the forts of Liege, Antwerp, and Namur, so these new French t.i.tans will, it is confidently believed, humble the pride of Metz and Strasbourg.

So insistent has been the demand from the front for big guns, and yet more big guns, that new batteries are being formed every day.

Generally speaking, the French plan is to a.s.sign short-range howitzers and mortars to the division; the longer range, horse-drawn guns--_hippomobile_ the French designate them--to the army corps; while the tractor-drawn pieces and those mounted on railway-carriages are placed directly under the orders of the chief of artillery of each army.

A new, and in many respects one of the most effective weapons produced by the war is the trench mortar. These light and mobile weapons, of which the French have at least four calibers, ranging from 58-millimetres to 340-millimetres, are under the direction of the artillery, and should not be confused with the various types of bomb-throwers, which are operated by the infantry. The latest development in trench weapons is the Van Deuren mortar, which takes its name from the Belgian officer who is its inventor. Its chief peculiarity lies in the fact that its barrel consists of a solid core instead of a hollow tube like all other guns. Attached to the base of the sh.e.l.l is a hollow winged shaft which fits over the core of the gun, the desired range being obtained by varying the length of the powder-chamber: that is, the distance between the end of the barrel and the base of the sh.e.l.l proper. The gun is fired at a fixed elevation, and is so small and light that it can readily be moved and set up by a couple of men in a few minutes. In no branch of the artillery has such advancement been made as in the trench mortars, which have now attained almost as great a degree of accuracy as the field-gun. Such great importance is attached to the trench mortars by the Italians that they have formed them into a distinct arm of the service, entirely independent of the artillery, the officers of the trench-mortar batteries, who are drawn from the cavalry, being trained at a special school.

The city of Verdun, or rather the blackened ruins which are all that remain of it, stands in the centre of a great valley which is shaped not unlike a platter. Down this valley, splitting the city in half, meanders the River Meuse. The houses of Verdun, like those of so many mediaeval cities, are cl.u.s.tered about the foot of a great fortified rock. From this rock Vauban, at the order of Louis XIV, blasted ramparts and battlements. To meet the constantly changing conditions of warfare, later generations of engineers gradually honeycombed the rock with pa.s.sages, tunnels, magazines, store-rooms, halls, and casemates, a veritable labyrinth of them, thus creating the present Citadel of Verdun. Then, because the city and its citadel lie in the middle of a valley dominated by hills--like a lump of sugar in the middle of a platter--upon those hills was built a chain of barrier forts: La Chaume, Tavannes, Thiaumont, Vaux, Douaumont, and others.

But when, at Liege and Namur, at Antwerp and Maubeuge, the Germans proved conclusively that no forts could long withstand the battering of their heavy guns, the French took instant profit by the lesson.

They promptly left the citadel and the forts nearest to it and established themselves in trenches on the surrounding hills, taking with them their artillery. This trench-line ran through certain of the small outlying forts, such as Tavannes, Thiaumont, Douaumont, and Vaux, and that is why you have read in the papers so much of the desperate fighting about them. Thus the much-talked-of fortress of Verdun was no longer a fortress at all, but merely a sector in that battle-line which extends from the Channel to the Alps. Barring its historic a.s.sociations, and the moral effect which its fall might have in France and abroad, its capture by the Germans would have had no more strategic importance, if as much, than if the French line had been bent back for a few miles at Rheims, or Soissons, or Thann. The Vauban citadel in the city became merely an advanced headquarters, a telephone exchange, a supply station, a sort of central office, from the safety of whose subterranean casemates General Dubois, the commander of the city, directed the execution of the orders which he received from General Nivelle at Souilly, twenty miles away. Though the citadel's ma.s.sive walls have resisted the terrific bombardments to which it has been subjected, it has neither guns nor garrison: they are far out on the trench-line beyond the encircling hills. It has, in fact, precisely the same relation to the defense of the Verdun sector that Governor's Island has to the defense of New York. This it is important that you should keep in mind. It should also be remembered that Verdun was held not for strategic but for political and sentimental reasons. The French military chiefs, as soon as they learned of the impending German offensive, favored the evacuation of the city, whose defense, they argued, would necessitate the sacrifice of thousands of lives without any corresponding strategic benefit. But the heads of the Government in Paris looked at things from a different point of view. They realized that, no matter how negligible was its military value, the people of other countries, and, indeed, the French people themselves, believed that Verdun was a great fortress; they knew that its capture by the Germans would be interpreted by the world as a French disaster and that the morale of the French people, and French prestige abroad, would suffer accordingly. So, at the eleventh hour and fifty-ninth minute, when the preparations for evacuating the city were all but complete, imperative word was flashed from Paris that it must be held. And it was. Costly though the defense has been, the result has justified it. The Crown Prince lost what little military reputation he possessed--if he had any to lose; his armies lost 600,000 men in dead and wounded; and the world was shown that German guns and German bayonets, no matter how overwhelming in number, cannot break down the steel walls of France.

It was my great good fortune, when the fate of Verdun still hung in the balance, to visit the city and to lunch with General Dubois and his staff in the citadel. Though the valor of the French infantry kept the Germans from entering Verdun, nothing could prevent the entrance of their sh.e.l.ls. Seven hundred fell in one day. Not a single house in a city of 40,000 inhabitants remains intact. The place looks as though it had been visited simultaneously by the San Francisco earthquake, the Baltimore fire, and the Johnstown flood. But once in the shelter of the citadel and we were safe. Though German sh.e.l.ls of large caliber were falling in the city at frequent intervals, the casemate in which we lunched was so far beneath the surface of the earth that the sound of the explosions did not reach us. It was as though we were lunching in a New York subway station: a great, vaulted, white-tiled room aglare with electric lights. We sat with General Dubois and the members of his immediate staff at a small table close to the huge range on which the cooking was being done, while down the middle of the room stretched one of the longest tables I have ever seen, at which upward of a hundred officers--and one civilian--were eating.

This lone civilian was a _commissaire_ of police, and the sole representative of the city's civil population. When the Tsar bestowed the Cross of St. George on the city in recognition of its heroic defense, it was to this policeman, the only civilian who remained, that the Russian representative handed the badge of the famous order.

The _dejeuner_, though simple, was as well cooked and well served as though we were seated in a Paris restaurant instead of in a besieged fortress. And the first course was fresh lobster! I told General Dubois that my friends at home would raise their eyebrows incredulously when I told them this, whereupon he took a menu--for they had menus--and across it wrote his name and "Citadel de Verdun,"

and the date. "Perhaps that will convince them," he said, pa.s.sing it to me. By this I do not mean to imply that the French commanders live in luxury. Far from it! But, though their food is very simple, it is always well cooked (which is very far from being the case in our own army), and it is appetizingly served whenever circ.u.mstances permit.

After luncheon, under the guidance of the general, I made the rounds of the citadel. Here, so far beneath the earth as to be safe from even the largest sh.e.l.ls, was the telephone-room, the nerve-centre of the whole complicated system of defense, with a switchboard larger than those in the "central office" of many an American city. By means of the thousands of wires focussed in that little underground room, General Dubois was enabled to learn in an instant what was transpiring at Douaumont or Tavannes or Vaux; he could pa.s.s on the information thus obtained to General Nivelle at Souilly; or he could talk direct to the Ministry of War, in Paris. I might add that one of the most difficult problems met with in this war has been the maintenance of communications during an attack. The telephone is the means most generally relied upon, but in spite of multiplying the number of lines, they are all usually put out of commission during the preliminary bombardment, the wires connecting the citadel with Fort Douaumont and Fort de Vaux, for example, being repeatedly destroyed.

For this reason several alternative means of communication have always to be provided, among these being flares and light-b.a.l.l.s, carrier-pigeons, of which the French make considerable use, and optical signalling apparatus, this last method having been found the most effective. Sometimes small wireless outfits are used when the conditions permit. On a few occasions trained dogs have been used to send back messages, but, the pictures in the ill.u.s.trated papers to the contrary, they have not proven a success. In the final resort, the most ancient method of all--the despatch bearer or runner--has still very frequently to be employed, making his hazardous trips on a motor-cycle when he can, on foot when he must.

In the room next to the telephone bureau a dozen clerks were at work and typewriters were clicking busily; had it not been for the uniforms one might have taken the place for the office of a large and busy corporation, as, in a manner of speaking, it was. On another level were the bakeries which supplied the bread for the troops in the trenches; enormous storerooms filled with supplies of every description; an admirably equipped hospital with every cot occupied, usually by a "shrapnel case"; a flag-trimmed hall used by the officers as a club-room; and, on the upper levels, mess-halls and sleeping-quarters for the men. Despite the terrible strain of the long-continued bombardment, the soldiers seemed surprisingly cheerful, going about their work in the long, gloomy pa.s.sages joking and whistling. They sleep when and where they can: on the bunks in the fetid air of the casemates; on the steps of the steep staircases that burrow deep into the ground; or on the concrete floors of the innumerable galleries. But sleeping is not easy in Verdun.

A short distance to the southwest of Verdun, on the bare face of a hill, is Fort de la Chaume. Like the other fortifications built to defend the city, it no longer has any military value save for purposes of observation. Peering through a narrow slit in one of its armored _observatoires_, I was able to view the whole field of the world's greatest battle--a battle which lasted a year and cost a million men--as from the gallery of a theatre one might look down upon the stage, the boxes, and the orchestra-stalls. Below me, rising from the meadows beside the Meuse, were the shattered roofs and fire-blackened walls of Verdun, dominated by the stately tower of the cathedral and by the great bulk of the citadel. The environs of the town and the hill slopes beyond the river were constantly p.r.i.c.ked by sudden scarlet jets as the flame leaped from the mouths of the carefully concealed French guns, which seemed to be literally everywhere, while countless geyser-like irruptions of the earth, succeeded by drifting patches of white vapor, showed where the German sh.e.l.ls were bursting. Sweeping the landscape with my field-gla.s.ses, a long column of motor-trucks laden with ammunition came within my field of vision. As I looked there suddenly appeared, squarely in the path of the foremost vehicle, a splotch of yellow smoke shot through with red. When the smoke and dust had cleared away, the motor-truck had disappeared. The artillery officer who accompanied me directed my gaze across the level valley to where, beyond the river, rose the great brown ridge known as the Heights of the Meuse.

"Do you appreciate," he asked, "that on three miles of that ridge a million men--400,000 French and 600,000 Germans--have already fallen?"

Beyond the ridge, but hidden by it, were Hill 304 and Le Mort Homme of b.l.o.o.d.y memory, while on the horizon, looking like low, round-topped hillocks, were Forts Douaumont and de Vaux (what a thrill those names must give to every Frenchman!) and farther down the slope and a little nearer me were Fleury and Tavannes. The fountains of earth and smoke which leaped upward from each of them at the rate of half a dozen to the minute, showed us that they were enduring a particularly vicious hammering by the Germans.

There are no words between the covers of the dictionary which can bring home to one who has not witnessed them the awful violence of the sh.e.l.l-storms which have desolated these hills about Verdun. In one week's attack to the north of the city the Germans threw five million sh.e.l.ls, the total weight of which was forty-seven thousand tons.

Eighty thousand sh.e.l.ls rained upon one shallow sector of a thousand yards, and these were so marvellously placed that the crater of one cut into that of its neighbor, pulverizing everything that lived and turning the man-filled trenches into tombs. Hence there is no longer any such thing as a continuous line of trenches. Indeed, there are no longer any trenches at all, nor entanglements either, but only a series of craters. It is these craters which the French infantry has held with such unparalleled heroism. The men holding the craters are kept supplied with food and ammunition from the chain of little forts--Vaux, Douaumont, and the others--and the forts, themselves battered almost to pieces by the torrents of steel which have been poured upon them, have relied in turn on the citadel back in Verdun for their reinforcements, their ammunition, and their provisions, all of which have had to be sent out at night, the latter on the backs of men.

So violent and long-continued have been the hurricanes of steel which have swept these slopes, that the surface of the earth has been literally blasted away, leaving a treacherous and incredibly tenacious quagmire in which horses and even soldiers have lost their lives.

General Dubois told me that, only a few days before my visit to Verdun, one of his staff-officers, returning alone and afoot from an errand to Vaux, had fallen into a sh.e.l.l-crater and had drowned in the mud. Indeed, the whole terrain is pitted with sh.e.l.l-holes as is pitted the face of a man who has had the small-pox. So terrible is the condition of the country that it often takes a soldier an hour to cover a mile. What was once a smiling and prosperous countryside has been rendered, by human agency, as barren and worthless as the slopes of Vesuvius.

Verdun, I repeat, was held not by gun-power but by man-power. It was not the monster guns on railway-trucks, or even the great numbers of quick-firing, hard-hitting 75's, but the magnificent courage and tenacity of the tired men in the mud-splashed uniforms, which held Verdun for France. Though their forts were crumbling under the violence of the German bombardment; though their trenches were pounded into pudding; though the unceasing barrage made it at times impossible to bring up food or water or reinforcements, the French hung stubbornly on, and against the granite wall of their defense the waves of men in gray flung themselves in vain. And when the fury of the German a.s.saults had in a measure spent itself, General Nivelle retook in a few hours, on October 24, 1916, Forts Douaumont and de Vaux, which had cost the Germans seven months of incessant efforts and a sacrifice of human lives unparalleled in history.

The fighting before Verdun ill.u.s.trated and emphasized the revolution in methods of attack and defense which has taken place in the French army. At the beginning of the war the French believed in depending largely on their light artillery both to prepare and to support an attack, and for this purpose their 75's were admirably adapted. This method worked well when carried out properly, and before the Germans had time to bring up their heavy guns; it was by resorting to it that the French won the victory of the Marne. But the Marne taught the Germans that the surest way to break up the French system of attack was to interpose obstacles, such as woods, wire entanglements, and particularly trenches. To destroy these obstacles the French then had to resort to heavy-calibered pieces, with which, as I have already remarked, they were at first very inadequately supplied. In the spring of 1915 in Artois, and in the autumn of the same year in Champagne, they attempted to break through the German lines, but these attacks were not supported by sufficient artillery and were each conducted in a single locality over a limited front. Then, at Verdun, the Germans tried opposite tactics, attempting to break through on a wide front extending on both sides of the Meuse. So appalling were their losses, however, that, as the attack progressed, they were compelled by lack of sufficient effectives to constantly narrow their front until finally the action was taking place along a line of only a few kilometres. This permitted the French to concentrate both their infantry and their artillery into dense formations, and before this concentrated and intensive fire the German attacking columns withered and were swept away like leaves before an autumn wind.

The French infantry--and the same is, I believe, true of the German--is now to all intents and purposes divided into two cla.s.ses: holding troops and attacking, or "shock" troops, as the French call them. The latter consist of such picked elements as the Cha.s.seur battalions, the Zouaves, the Colonials, the First, Twentieth, and Twenty-first Army Corps, and, of course, the Foreign Legion. All these are recruited from the youngest and most vigorous men, due regard being also paid to selecting recruits from those parts of France which have always produced the best fighting stock--and among these are the invaded districts. Shock troops are rarely sent into the trenches, but when not actively engaged in conducting or resisting an attack, are kept in cantonments well to the rear. Here they can get undisturbed rest at night, but by day they are worked as a negro teamster works his mule. As a result, they are always "on their toes," and in perfect fighting trim. In this way mobility, cohesion, and enthusiasm, all qualities which are seriously impaired by a long stay in the trenches, are preserved in the attacking troops, who, when they go into battle, are as keen and hard and well-trained as a prize-fighter who steps into the ring to battle for the champions.h.i.+p belt.

The most striking feature of the new French system of attack is the team-work of the infantry, artillery, and airplanes. The former advance to the a.s.sault in successive waves, each made up of several lines, the men being deployed at five-yard intervals. The first wave advances at a slow walk behind a curtain of artillery fire, which moves forward at the rate of fifty yards a minute, the first line of the wave keeping a hundred to a hundred and fifty yards, or, in other words, at a safe distance, behind this protecting fire-curtain. The men in this first line carry no rifles, but consist exclusively of grenadiers, automatic riflemen, and their ammunition carriers, every eighth man being armed with the new Chauchat automatic rifle, a recently adopted weapon which weighs only nineteen pounds, and fires at the rate of five shots a second. Three men, carrying between them one thousand cartridges, are a.s.signed to each of these guns, of which there are now more than fifty thousand in use on the French front. The automatic riflemen fire from the hip as they advance, keeping streams of bullets playing on the enemy just as firemen keep streams of water playing on a fire. In the second line the men are armed with rifles, some having bayonets and others rifle grenades, the latter being specially designed to break up counter-attacks against captured trenches. A third line follows, consisting of "trench cleaners,"

though it must not be inferred from their name that they use mops and brooms. The native African troops are generally used for this trench-cleaning business, and they do it very handily with grenades, pistols and knives.

When the first wave reaches a point within two hundred to three hundred yards of the enemy's trenches, a halt of five minutes is made to re-form for the final charge. In addition to the advancing curtain-fire immediately preceding the troops, a second screen of fire is dropped between the enemy's first and second lines, thus preventing the men in the first line from retreating and making it equally impossible for the men in the second line to get reinforcements or supplies to their comrades in the first. Still other batteries are engaged in keeping down the fire of the hostile artillery while the big guns, mounted on railway-trucks, sh.e.l.l the enemy's headquarters, his supports, and his lines of communication.

The attack is accompanied by and largely directed by airplanes, certain of which are a.s.signed to regulating the artillery fire, while others devote themselves exclusively to giving information to the infantry, with whom they communicate by means of dropping from one to six fire-b.a.l.l.s. As the aircraft used for infantry and artillery regulation are comparatively slow machines, they are protected from the attacks of enemy aviators by a screen of small, fast battle-planes--the destroyers of the air--which, in several cases, have swooped low enough to use their machine-guns on the German trenches. If it becomes necessary to give to the infantry some special information not provided for by the prearranged signals, the aviator will volplane down to within a hundred feet above the infantry and drop a written message. I was told that in one of the successful French attacks before Verdun such a message proved extremely useful as by means of it the troops advancing toward Douaumont, which was then held by the Germans, were informed that the enemy was in force on their right, but that there was practically no resistance on their left. Acting in response to this information from the skies, they swung forward on this flank, and took the Germans on their right in the rear. Just as a football team is coached from the side-lines, so a charge is nowadays directed from the clouds.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Australians on the Way to the Trenches.

Despite gas, bullets, sh.e.l.ls, rain, mud, and cold the British soldier remains incorrigibly cheerful. He is a born optimist.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Fire Trench.

"Figures, looking strangely mediaeval in their steel helmets, crouched motionless, peering out into No Man's Land."]

One of the picturesque developments of the war is _camouflage_, as the French call their system of disguising or concealing batteries, airplane-sheds, ammunition stores, and the like, from observation and possible destruction by enemy aviators. This work is done in the main by a corps specially recruited for the purpose from the artists and scene painters of France. It is considered prudent, for example, to conceal the location of a certain "ammunition dump," as the British term the vast acc.u.mulations of sh.e.l.ls, cartridges, and other supplies which are piled up at the railheads awaiting transportation to the front by motor-lorry. Over the great mound of sh.e.l.ls and cartridge-boxes is spread an enormous piece of canvas, often larger by far than the "big top" of a four-ring circus. Then the scene painters get to work with their paints and brushes and transform that expanse of canvas into what, when viewed from the sky, appears to be, let us say, a group of innocent farm-buildings. The next day, perhaps, a German airman, circling high overhead, peers earthward through his gla.s.ses and descries, far beneath him, a cl.u.s.ter of red rectangles--the tiled roofs of cottages or stables, he supposes; a patch of green--evidently a bit of lawn; a square of gray--the cobble-paved barnyard--and pays it no further attention. How can he know that what he takes to be a farmstead is but a piece of painted canvas concealing a small mountain of potential death?

At a certain very important point on the French front there long stood, in an exposed and commanding position, a large and solitary tree, or rather the trunk of a tree, for it had been shorn of its branches by sh.e.l.l-fire. A landmark in that flat and devastated region, every detail of this gaunt sentinel had long since become familiar to the keen eyed observers in the German trenches, a few hundred yards away. Were a man to climb to its top--and live--he would be able to command a comprehensive view of the surrounding terrain. The German sharpshooters saw to it, however, that no one climbed it. But one day the resourceful French took the measurements of that tree and photographed it. These measurements and photographs were sent to Paris. A few weeks later there arrived at the French front by railway an imitation tree, made of steel, which was an exact duplicate in every respect, even to the splintered branches and the bark, of the original. Under cover of darkness the real tree was cut down and the fake tree erected in its place, so that, when daylight came, there was no change in the landscape to arouse the Germans' suspicions. The lone tree-trunk to which they had grown so accustomed still reared itself skyward. But the "tree" at which the Germans were now looking was of hollow steel, and concealed in its interior in a sort of conning-tower, forty feet above the ground, a French observing officer, field-gla.s.ses at his eyes and a telephone at his lips, was peering through a cleverly concealed peep-hole, spotting the bursts of the French sh.e.l.ls and regulating the fire of the French batteries.

Nearly three years have pa.s.sed since Germany tore up the Sc.r.a.p of Paper. In that time the French army has been hammered and tempered and tested until it has become the most formidable weapon of offense and defense in existence. I am convinced that in organization and in efficiency it is now, after close on three years of experiments and object-lessons, as good, if not better, than the German--and I have marched with both and have seen both in action. Its light artillery is admittedly the finest in the world. Though without any heavy artillery to speak of at the beginning of the war, it has in this respect already equalled if not surpa.s.sed the Germans. It has created an air service which, in efficiency and in number of machines, is unequalled.

And the men, themselves, in addition to their characteristic _elan_, possess that invaluable quality which the German soldier lacks--initiative.

It is worthy of note, in this connection, that the entire reorganization of the French army has been carried out virtually without any action on the part of the French Congress, and with merely the formal approval of the Minister of War. The politicians in Paris have, save in a few instances, wisely refrained from interference, and have left military problems to be decided by military men. But, when all is said and done, it will not be the generals who will decide this war; it will be the soldiers. And they are truly wonderful men, these French soldiers. It is their amazing calm, their total freedom from nervousness or apprehension, that impresses one the most, and the secret of this calm is confidence. They are as confident of eventual victory as they are that the sun will rise to-morrow morning. They are fanatics, and France is their Allah. You can't beat men like that, because they never know when they are beaten, and keep on fighting.

I like to think that sometimes, in that cold and dismal hour before the dawn, when hope and courage are at their lowest ebb, there appears among the worn and homesick soldiers in the trenches the spirit of the Great Emperor. Cheeringly he claps each man upon the shoulder.

"Courage, mon brave," he whispers. "On les aura!"

FOOTNOTES:

[C] A nickname for the Hispana-Suiza.

[D] Though great numbers of American-built airplanes have been s.h.i.+pped to Europe, they are being used only for purposes of instruction, as they are not considered fast enough for work on the front.

[E] Commandant Bunau-Varilla was really sent as a compliment to my companion, Mr. Arthur Page, editor of _The World's Work_.

VII

"THAT CONTEMPTIBLE LITTLE ARMY"

In watching the operations on the British front I have always had the feeling that I was witnessing a gigantic engineering undertaking. The amazing network of rails which the British have thrown over Northern France, the endless strings of lorries, the warehouses bulging with supplies, the cranes and derricks, the repair depots, the machine-shops, the tens of thousands of men whose only weapons are the shovel and the pick, all help to further this impression. And, when you stop to think about it, it is an engineering undertaking. These muddy men in khaki are engaged in checking and draining off an unclean flood which, were it not for them, would soon inundate all Europe. And so, because I love things that are clean and green and beautiful, I am very grateful to them for their work of sanitation.

Because most of the despatches from the British front have related to trenches and tanks and howitzers and flying men and raiding-parties, the attention of the American people has been diverted from the remarkable and tremendously important work which is being played by the army behind the army. Yet one of the most splendid achievements of the entire war is the creation of the great organization which links the British trenches with the British Isles. In failing to take into account the Anglo-Saxon's genius for rapid organization and improvization in emergencies, Germany made a fatal error. She had spent upward of forty years in perfecting her war machine; the British have built a better one in less than three. I said in "_Vive la France!_" if I remember rightly, that the British machine, though still somewhat wabbly and creaky in its joints, was, I believed, eventually going to do the business for which it was designed. That was a year ago. It has already shown in unmistakable fas.h.i.+on that it can do the business and do it well, and it is, moreover, just entering on the period of its greatest efficiency.

In order to understand the workings and the ramifications of this great machine in France (its work in England is another story) you must begin your study of it at the base camps which the British have established at Calais, Havre, Boulogne, and Rouen, and the training-schools at Etaples and elsewhere. Let us take, for example, "Cinder City," as the base camp outside Calais is called because the ground on which it stands was made by dumping s.h.i.+ps' cinders into a marsh. It is in many respects one of the most remarkable cities in the world. Its population, which fluctuates with the tide of war, averages, I suppose, about one hundred thousand. It has many miles of macadamized streets (as sandy locations are chosen for these base camps, mud is almost unknown) lined with storehouses--one of them the largest in the world--with stores, with machine-shops, churches, restaurant, club-rooms, libraries, Y. M. C. A.'s--there are over a thousand of them in the war zone--Salvation Army barracks, schools, bathing establishments, theatres, motion-picture houses, hospitals for men and hospitals for horses, and thousands upon thousands of portable wooden huts. This city is lighted by electricity, it has highly efficient police, fire, and street-cleaning departments, and its water and sewage systems would make jealous many munic.i.p.alities of twice its size. Among its novel features is a school for army bakers and another for army cooks, for good food has almost as much to do with winning battles as good ammunition. But most significant and important of all are the "economy shops" where are repaired or manufactured practically everything required by an army. War, as the British have found, is a staggeringly expensive business, and, in order that there may be a minimum of wastage, they have organized a Salvage Corps whose business it is to sort the litter of the battle-fields and to send everything that can by any possibility be re-utilized to the "economy shops" at the rear. In one of these shops I saw upward of a thousand French and Belgian women renovating clothing that had come back from the front, uniforms which arrived as bundles of muddy, b.l.o.o.d.y rags being fumigated and cleaned and mended and pressed until they were almost as good as new. Tens of thousands of boots are sent in to be repaired; those that can stand the operation are soled and heeled by American machines brought over for the purpose, and even the others are not wasted, for their tops are converted into boot-laces. In one shop the worn-out tubes and springs of guns are replaced with new ones. (Did you know that during an intense bombardment the springs of the guns will last only two days?) In another fragments of valuable metal sent in from the battle-field are melted and reused. (Perhaps you were not aware that a 5-inch sh.e.l.l carries a copper band weighing a pound and a quarter. The weight of copper shot off in this way during a single brief bombardment was four hundred tons.) The millions of empty sh.e.l.ls which litter the ground behind the batteries are cleaned and cla.s.sified and s.h.i.+pped over to England to be reloaded.

Steel rails which the retreating Germans believed they had made quite useless are here straightened out and used over again. Shattered rifles, bits of harness, haversacks, machine-gun belts, trench helmets, sand-bags, barbed wire--nothing escapes the Salvage Corps.

They even collect and send in old rags, which are sold for two hundred and fifty dollars a ton. Let us talk less hereafter of _German_ efficiency.

Even more significant than the base camps of the efficiency and painstaking thoroughness of the British war-machine are the training camps scattered behind the lines. Typical of these is the great camp at Etaples, on the French coast, where 150,000 men can be trained at a time. These are not schools for raw recruits, mind you--that work is done in England--but "finis.h.i.+ng schools," as it were, where men who are supposed to have already learned the business of war are given final examinations in the various subjects in which they have received instruction before being sent up to the front. And the soldier who is unable to pa.s.s these final tests does not go to the front until he can. The camp at Etaples, which is built on a stretch of rolling sand beside the sea, is five miles long and a mile wide, and on every acre of it there are squads of soldiers drilling, drilling, drilling. Here a gymnastic instructor from Sandhurst, lithe and active as a panther, is teaching a cla.s.s of sergeants drawn from many regiments how to become instructors themselves. His language would have amazed and delighted Kipling's Ortheris and Mulvaney; I could have listened to him all day. Over there a platoon of Highlanders are practising the taking of German trenches. At the blast of a whistle they clamber out of a length of trench built for the purpose, and, with shrill Gaelic yells, go swarming across a stretch of broken ground, through a tangle of twisted wire, and over the top of the German parapet, whereupon a row of German soldiers, stuffed with straw and automatically controlled, spring up to meet them. If a man fails to bury his bayonet in the "German" who opposes him, he is sent back to the awkward squad and spends a few days lunging at a dummy swung from a beam.

Crater fighting is taught in an ingenious reproduction of a crater, by an officer who has had much experience with the real thing and who explains to his pupils, whose knowledge of craters has been gained from the pictures in the ill.u.s.trated weeklies, how to capture, fortify, and hold such a position. In order to give the men confidence when the order "Put on gas-masks!" is pa.s.sed down the line, they are sent into a real dugout filled with real gas and the entrances closed behind them. As soon as they find that the masks are a sure protection, their nervousness disappears. In order to accustom them to lachrymal sh.e.l.ls, they are marched, this time without masks, through an underground chamber which reeks with the tear-producing gas--and they are a very weepy, red-eyed lot of men who emerge. They are instructed in trench-digging, in the construction of wire entanglements, "knife-rests," chevaux-de-frise, and every other form of obstruction, in revetting, in the making of fascines and gabions, in sapping and mining, in the most approved methods of dugout construction, in trench sanitation, in the location of listening-posts and how to conceal them; they are shown how to cut wire, they are drilled in trench raiding and in the most effective methods of "trench cleaning." The practical work is supplemented by lectures on innumerable subjects. As it is extremely difficult for an officer to make his explanations heard by a battalion of men a.s.sembled in the open, a series of small amphitheatres have been excavated from the sand-dunes, the tiers of seats being built up of petrol tins filled with sand. In one of these improvised amphitheatres I saw an officer ill.u.s.trating the proper method of using the gas-mask to a cla.s.s of 600 men.

On these imitation battle-fields, any one of which is larger than the field of Waterloo, the men are instructed in the gentle art of bombing, first with "dubs," which do not explode at all, then with toy-grenades which go off harmlessly with a noise like a small firecracker, and finally, when they have become sufficiently expert, with the real Mills bomb, which scatters destruction in a burst of noise and flame. To attain accuracy and distance in throwing these destructive little ovals is by no means as easy as it sounds. The bombing-school at Etaples will not soon forget the American baseball player who threw a bomb seventy yards. The hand-grenade is the unsafest and most treacherous of all weapons and even in practice accidents and near-accidents frequently occur. The Mills bomb, which has a scored surface to prevent slipping, is about the shape and size of a large lemon. Protruding from one end is the small metal ring of the firing-pin. Three seconds after this is pulled out the bomb explodes--and the farther the thrower can remove himself from the bomb in that time the better. Now, in line with the policy of strict economy which has been adopted by the British military authorities, the men receiving instruction at the bombing-schools were told not to throw away the firing-pins, but to put them in their pockets, to be turned in and used over again. The day after this order went into effect a company of newly arrived recruits were being put through their bomb-throwing tests. Man after man walked up to the protecting earthwork, jerked loose the firing-pin, hurled the bomb, and put the firing-pin in his pocket. At last it came the turn of a youngster who was obviously overcome with stage fright. To the horror of his comrades, he threw the firing-pin and put the live bomb in his pocket!

In three seconds that bomb was due to explode, but the instructor, who had seen what had happened, made a flying leap to the befuddled man, thrust his hand into his pocket, drew out the bomb, and hurled it. It exploded in the air.

Near Etaples, at Paris Plage, is the largest of the British machine-gun schools. Here the men are taught the operation not only of all the models of machine-guns used by the Allies, but they are also shown how to handle any which they may capture from the Germans. Set up on the beach were a dozen different models, beginning with a wonderfully ingenious weapon, as beautifully constructed as a watch, which had just been brought in from a captured German airplane and of which the British officers were loud in their admiration, and ending with the little twenty-five-pound gun invented by Colonel Lewis, an American. Standing on the sands, a few hundred yards away, were half a dozen targets of the size and outline of German soldiers. "Try 'em out," suggested the officer in command of the school. So I seated myself behind the German gun, looked into a ground-gla.s.s finder like that on a newspaper photographer's camera, swung the barrel of the weapon until the intersection of the scarlet cross-hairs covered the mirrored reflection of the distant figures, and pressed together a pair of handles. There was a noise such as a small boy makes when he draws a stick along the palings of a picket fence, a series of flame-jets leaped from the muzzle of the gun, and the targets disappeared. "You'd have broken up that charge," commented the officer approvingly. "Try the others." So I tried them all--Maxim, Hotchkiss, Colt, St. Etienne, Lewis--in turn.

"Which do you consider the best gun?" I asked.