The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 Part 18

In the unavoidable absence of the combination Chief of Staff and War Minister von Falkenhayn, the new Quartermaster General von Wild did the honors in the long Louis XIV. Room where the Great General Staff eats together--an interesting sight, for it represents the round-up of the brains of the German Army. Gen. von Wild, until his promotion, commanded a division against the English at Ypres and spoke in generous terms of his opponents.

"The English are excellent fighters," he said. "I have walked over many of the battlefields in the North--gruesome sights, beyond words to describe. From what I saw, I am convinced that the English losses have been much heavier than ours."

Gen. von Wild said that a puzzling and unexplainable feature of these battlefields was that so many of the dead were found lying on their backs with rigid arms stretched straight up toward heaven--a ghastly spectacle.

Here, too, was a German General who knew more about the American Army than most Americans, the Bavarian General, Zoellner, the great General Staff's specialist on Americana, and it was interesting to note that, in spite of its own pressing problems, the General Staff is still taking a keen interest in those of America and deriving valuable lessons.

"I have been particularly interested in the Mexican troubles," Gen.

Zoellner said. "To my mind, the lesson for America is the need of a larger standing army. I was particularly impressed by the speed of your mobilization and your dispatch in landing your expeditionary force at Vera Cruz. I was also especially interested in your splendid Texas cavalry division. We have nothing like it in the German Army, because such a body of men could not be developed in a closely settled country.

You may not know that only a short time before being sent to Mexico the Texas cavalry had received brand-new drill and exercise instructions, but in spite of this they acquitted themselves splendidly, showing the remarkable adaptability of your soldiers.

"In sending your coast artillery as infantry regiments to Mexico you antic.i.p.ated us in a rather similar use of our marine divisions on the coast. The most valuable lesson we have learned from you is typhus vaccination. This we owe to the American Army. I believe it goes back to the fact that your Gen. Wood was a medical man before becoming Chief of Staff."

Gen. Zoellner intimated that the whole German Army either had been or was being vaccinated against typhoid on the American plan. "And there is also a very American flavor about our volunteer automobile corps--their dash and speed they have learned that from you Americans," he concluded.

My previously formed suspicion that the Germans were making war on the American plan, managing their armies like so many subsidiary companies of a big trust, was fully confirmed by my second visit to the office of the Great General Staff. Instead of a picturesque bunch of Generals spending anxious days and sleepless nights over their maps with faithful attendants trying to coax them to leave off dispatch writing long enough to eat a sandwich, I found a live lot of army officials, keeping regular office hours and taking ample time out for meals. The staff was quartered in a handsome old munic.i.p.al building; the ground floor, devoted to living purposes, quite like an exclusive club; the business offices upstairs.

Gen. von Haenisch took me aloft and explained to me how business was done. A good telephone operator, it developed, was almost as important as a competent General--the telephone "central" the most vital spot of an army. Here were three large switchboards with soldiers playing telephone girl, while other soldiers, with receivers fastened over their heads, sat at desks busy taking down messages on printed "business"

forms. In the next room sat the staff officers on duty, waiting for the telephone bell to jingle with latest reports from the front. There was no waiting because numbers were "engaged" or operators gossiping; you could get Berlin or Vienna without once having to swear at "long distance." Gen. von Haenisch had his chief of field telephone and telegraph trot out what looked like a huge family tree, but turned out to be a most minute chart of the entire telephone system of the --nth Army. It showed the position of every corps and division headquarters'

regiment, battalion, and company, and all the telephone lines connecting them, even to the single trenches and batteries.

Gen. von Haenisch suggested having some fun with Gen. von X., commanding the army next door on the right, and I was made Acting Chief of Staff for two minutes, getting von X.'s Chief of Staff on the phone and inquiring if there was "anything doing."

"No; everything quiet here," came the rea.s.suring answer.

An art exhibition within sound of the guns at the front by the well-known Munich artist, Ernst Vollbehr, the Kaiser's own war painter with the --nth army, was another real novelty. The long-haired painter, wearing the regulation field gray uniform, brought his portfolio of sketches into the billiard hall of the headquarters and showed them with sprightly running comment:

"Here is the library of Brimont. You can see most of the books lying on the ground. It wasn't a comfortable place to paint because there were too many sh.e.l.ls flying around loose. Here is the Cathedral of Dinant.

Very much improved aesthetically by the sh.e.l.ls knocking the ugly points of the towers off. Here is a picture of Rheims Cathedral looming through the fog, as seen from the German lines. I painted this picture of the battle of the Aisne from a captive balloon. Here is a picture of the surrender of Maubeuge, showing two of the 40,000 French prisoners. I can usually paint better during a battle because there's n.o.body looking on over my shoulder to distract my attention. I have about 140 sketches done in all. His Majesty has most of them now, to pick out those he wants painted. This sketch of a pretty young Frenchwoman is 'Mlle. Nix zu Macken,' so nicknamed by some sixty-odd hungry but good-natured Landsturm men quartered in a tavern of a French village, where she was the only woman left. Every time they made signs indicative of a desire for food she would laugh and say in near-German, 'Nix zu macken,' and that's how she got her name."

Painter Vollbehr was authority for the following Kaiser anecdote:

"One day as the Kaiser was motoring along a chaussee he met a herd of swine under the guardians.h.i.+p of a bearded Landsturm man, who drove them rapidly to one side to keep them from being prematurely slaughtered by the imperial auto. As the motor slowed up the Kaiser asked him if he was a farmer by profession. 'No; professor of the University of Tubingen,'

came the answer, to the great amus.e.m.e.nt of the Over War Lord."

Human Doc.u.ments of the War

Swift Reversal to Barbarism

By Vance Thompson.

[From The New York Sun, Sept. 13, 1914.]

I.

There is in Brussels--if the Uhlans have spared it--a mad and monstrous picture. It is called "A Scene in h.e.l.l," and hangs in the Musee Wiertz.

And what you see on the canvas are the fierce and blinding flames of h.e.l.l; and amid them looms the dark figure of Napoleon, and around him the wives and mothers and maids of Belgium scream and surge and clutch and curse--taking their posthumous vengeance.

And since Napoleon was a notable Emperor in his time, the picture is not without significance today. Paint in another face; and let it go at that.

War is a bad thing. Even h.e.l.l is the worse for it.

War is a bad thing; it is a reversal, sudden and complete, to barbarism.

That is what I would get at in this article. One day there is civilization, authentic, complex, triumphant; comes war, and in a moment the entire fabric sinks down into a slime of mud and blood. In a day, in an hour, a cycle of civilization is canceled. What you saw in the morning was suave and ordered life; and the sun sets on howling savagery. In the morning black-coated men lifted their hats to women.

Ere nightfall they are slas.h.i.+ng them with sabres and burning the houses over their heads. And, the grave old professors who were droning plat.i.tudes of peace and progress and humanitarianism are screaming, ere today is done, shrill senile clamors for blood and ravage and rapine.

(Not less shrill than others is the senile yawp of that good old man Ernst Haeckel, under whom I studied in my youth.)

A reversal to barbarism.

Here; it is in the tearoom of the smartest hotel in Munich; war has come; high-voiced women of t.i.tle chatter over their teacups; comes swaggering in the Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria; he has just had his sabre sharpened and has girt his abdomen for war. His wife runs to him.

And she kisses the sabre and shouts: "Bring it back to me covered with blood--that I may kiss it again!" And the other high-voiced women flock to kiss the sword.

A reversal to barbarism.

It has taken place in an hour; but yesterday these were sweet patrician ladies, who prattled of humanity and love and the fair graces of life; and now they would fain wet their mouths with blood--laughingly as harlots wet their mouths with wine.

The unclean and vampirish spirit of war has swept them back to the habits of the cave-dwelling ages of the race. In an hour the culture so painfully acquired in slow generations has been swept away. Royalty, in the tearoom of the "Four Seasons," is one with the blonde nude female who romped and fought in the dark Teutonic forests ere Caesar came through Gaul.

Reversal to barbarism.

War is declared; and in Berlin the Emperor of Germany rides in an open motor car down Unter den Linden; he is in full uniform, sworded, erect, hieratic; and at his side sits the Empress--she the good mother, the housewife, the fond grandmother--garmented from head to foot in cloth the color of blood.

Theatricalism? No. The symbolism is more significant. The symbol bears a savage significance. It marks, as a red sunset, the going down of civilization and the coming of the dark barbarism of war.

II.

BREAKING POINT OF CIVILIZATION.

There was war; and the whole machinery of civilization stopped.

Modern civilization is the most complex machine imaginable; its infinite cogged wheels turn endlessly upon each other; and perfectly it accomplishes its multifarious purposes; but smash one wheel and it all falls apart into muddle and ruin. The declaration of war was like thrusting a mailed fist into the intricate works of a clock. There was an end of the perfected machine of civilization. Everything stopped.

That was a queer world we woke in. A world that seemed new, so old it was.

Money had ceased to exist. It seemed at that moment an appalling thing.

I was on the edge and frontier of a neutral State. I had money in a bank. It ceased to be money. A thousand-franc note was paper. A hundred-mark note was rubbish. British sovereigns were refused at the railway station. The Swiss shopkeeper would not change a Swiss note.

What had seemed money was not money.

Values were told in terms of bread.

It was a swift and immediate return to the economic conditions of barbarism. Metals were h.o.a.rded; and where there had been trade there was barter. And it all happened in an hour, in that first fierce panic of war.

Traffic stopped with a clang as of rusty iron. The mailed fist had dislocated the complex machinery of European traffic. Frontiers which had been mere landmarks of travel became suddenly formidable and impa.s.sable barriers, guarded by harsh, hysterical men with bayonets.