My Year of the War Part 11

My last look at a Belgian bread-line was at Liege, that town which had had a blaze of fame in August, 1914, and was now almost forgotten. An industrial town, its mines and works were idle. The Germans had removed the machinery for rifle-making, which has become the most valuable kind of machinery in the world next to that for making guns and sh.e.l.ls. If skilled Belgians here or elsewhere were called upon to serve the Germans at their craft, they suddenly became b.u.t.ter-fingered. So that bread-line at Liege was long, its queue stretching the breadth of the cathedral square.

As most of the regular German officers in Belgium were cavalrymen-- there was nothing for cavalry to do on the Aisne line of trenches--it was quite in keeping that the aide to the commandant of Liege, who looked after my pa.s.s to leave the country, should be a young officer of Hussars. He spoke English well; he was amiable and intelligent.

While I waited for the commandant to sign the pa.s.s the aide chatted of his adventures on the pursuit of the British to the Marne. The British fought like devils, he said. It was a question if their new army would be so good. He showed me a photograph of himself in a British Tommy's overcoat.

"When we took some prisoners I was interested in their overcoats,"

he explained. "I asked one of the Tommies to let me try on his. It fitted me perfectly, so I kept it as a souvenir and had this photograph made to show my friends."

Perhaps a shade of surprise pa.s.sed over my face.

"You don't understand," he said. "That Tommy had to give me his coat! He was a prisoner."

On my way out from Liege I was to see Vise--the town of the gateway--the first town of the war to suffer from frightfulness. I had thought of it as entirely destroyed. A part of it had survived.

A delightful old Bavarian Landsturmman searched me for contraband letters when our cart stopped on the Belgian side of a barricade at Maastricht, with Dutch soldiers on the other side. His examination was a little perfunctory, almost apologetic, and he did want to be friendly. You guessed that he was thinking he would like to go around the corner and have "ein Glas Bier" rather than search me. What a hearty "Auf wiedersehen!" he gave me when he saw that I was inclined to be friendly, too!

I was glad to be across that frontier, with a last stamp on my Pa.s.sierschein; glad to be out of the land of those ghostly Belgian millions in their living death; glad not to have to answer again their ravenously whispered "When?" When would the Allies come?

The next time that I was in Belgium it was in the British lines of the Ypres salient, two months later. When should I be next in Brussels?

With a victorious British army, I hoped. A long wait it was to be for a conquered people, listening each day and trying to think that the sound of gun-fire was nearer.

The stubborn, pa.s.sive resistance and self-sacrifice that I have pictured was that of a moral leaders.h.i.+p of a majority shaming the minority; of an ostracism of all who had relations with the enemy. Of course, it was not the spirit of the whole. The American Commission, as charity usually must, had to overcome obstacles set in its path by those whom it would aid. Belgian politicians, in keeping with the weakness of their craft, could no more forego playing politics in time of distress than some that we had in San Francisco and some we have heard of only across the British Channel from Belgium.

Zealous leaders exaggerated the famine of their districts in order to get larger supplies; communities in great need without spokesmen must be reached; powerful towns found excuses for not forwarding food to small villages which were without influence. Natural greed got the better of men used to turning a penny any way they could.

Rascally bakers who sifted the brown flour to get the white to sell to patisserie shops and the well-to-do while the bread-line got the bran, required shrewd handling, and it was found that the best punishment was to let the public know the pariah part they had played. In fact that soon put a stop to the practice. It meant that the baker's business was ruined and he had lost his friends.

A certain percentage of Belgians, as would happen in any country, saw the invasion only as a visitation of disaster, like an earthquake. A flat country of gardens limits one's horizon. They fell into line with the sentiment of the ma.s.s. But as time wore on into the summer and autumn of the second year, some of them began to think, What was the use? German propaganda was active. All that the Allies had cared for Belgium was to use her to check the German tide to Paris and the Channel ports! Perfidious England had betrayed Belgium!

German business and banking influences, which had been considerable in Belgium before the war, and the numerous German residents who had returned, formed a busy circle of appeal to Belgian business men, who were told that the British navy stood between them and a return to prosperity. Germany was only too willing that they should resume their trade with the rest of the world.

Why should not Belgium come into the German customs union? Why should not Belgium make the best of her unfortunate situation, as became a practical and thrifty people? But be it a customs union or annexation that Germany plans, the steel had entered the hearts of all Belgians with red corpuscles; and King Albert and his "schipperkes" were still fighting the Germans at Dixmude. A British army appearing before Brussels would end casuistry; and pessimism would pa.s.s, and the German residents, too, with the huzzas of all Belgium as the gallant king once more ascended the steps of his palace.

Worthy of England at her best was her consent to allow the Commission's food to pa.s.s, which she accompanied by generous giving. She might seem slow in making ready her army--though I do not think that she was--but give she could and give she did. It was a grave question if her consent was in keeping with the military policy which believes that any concession to sentiment in the grim business of war is unwise. Certainly, the Krieg ist Krieg of Germany would not have permitted it.

There is the very point of the war that ought to make any neutral take sides. If the Belgians had not received bread from the outside world, then Germany would either have had to spare enough to keep them from starving or faced the desperation of a people who would fight for food with such weapons as they had. This must have brought a holocaust of reprisals that would have made the orgy of Louvain comparatively insignificant. However much the Germans hampered the Commission with red tape and worse than red tape through the activities of German residents in Belgium, Germany did not want the Commission to withdraw. It was helping her to economize her food supplies. And England answered a human appeal at the cost of hard- and-fast military policy. She was still true to the ideals which have set their stamp on half the world.

XI Winter In Lorraine

Only a winding black streak, that four hundred and fifty miles of trenches on a flat map. It is difficult to visualize the whole as you see it in your morning paper, or to realize the labour it represents in its course through the mire and over mountain slopes, through villages and thick forests and across open fields.

Every mile of it was located by the struggle of guns and rifles and men coming to a stalemate of effort, when both dug into the earth and neither could budge the other. It is a line of countless battles and broken hopes; of charges as brave as men ever made; a symbol of skill and dogged patience and eternal vigilance of striving foe against striving foe.

From the first, the sector from Rheims to Flanders was most familiar to the public. The world still thinks of the battle of the Marne as an affair at the door of Paris, though the heaviest fighting was from Vitry- le-Francois eastward and the fate of Paris was no less decided on the fields of Lorraine than on the fields of Champagne. The storming of Rheims Cathedral became the theme of thousands of words of print to one word for the defence of the Plateau d'Amance or the struggle around Luneville. Our knowledge of the war is from glimpses through the curtain of military secrecy which was drawn tight over Lorraine and the Vosges, shrouded in mountain mists. This is about Lorraine in winter, when the war was six months old.

But first, on our way, a word about Paris, which I had not seen since September. At the outset of the war, Parisians who had not gone to the front were in a trance of suspense; they were magnetized by the tragic possibilities of the hour. The fear of disaster was in their hearts, though they might deny it to themselves. They could think of nothing but France. Now they realized that the best way to help France was by going on with their work at home. Paris was trying to be normal, but no Parisian was making the bluff that Paris was normal. The Gallic lucidity of mind prevented such self-deception.

Is it normal to have your sons, brothers, and husbands up to their knees in icy water in the trenches, in danger of death every minute?

This att.i.tude seems human; it seems logical. One liked the French for it. One liked them for boasting so little. In their effort at normality they had accomplished more than they realized; for one-sixth of the wealth of France was in German hands. A line of steel made the rest safe for those not at the front to pursue the routine of peace.

When I had been in Paris in September there was no certainty about railroad connections anywhere. You went to the station and took your chances, governed by the movement of troops, not to mention other conditions. This time I took the regular noon express to Nancy, as I might have done to Ma.r.s.eilles, or Rome, or Madrid, had I chosen.

The sprinkling of quiet army officers on the train were in the new uniform of peculiar steely grey, in place of the target blue and red. But for them and the number of women in mourning and one other circ.u.mstance, the train might have been bound for Berlin, with Nancy only a stop on the way.

The other circ.u.mstance was the presence of a soldier in the vestibule who said: "Votre laisser-pa.s.ser, monsieur, s'il vous platt!" If you had a laisser-pa.s.ser, he was most polite; but if you lacked one, he would also have been most polite and so would the guard that took you in charge at the next station. In other words, monsieur, you must have something besides a railroad ticket if you are on a train that runs past the fortress of Toul and your destination is Nancy. You must have a military pa.s.s, which was never given to foreigners if they were travelling alone in the zone of military operations. The pulse of the Frenchman beats high, his imagination bounds, when he looks eastward. To the east are the lost provinces and the frontier drawn by the war of '70 between French Lorraine and German Lorraine. This gave our journey interest.

Nancy, capital of French Lorraine, is so near Metz, the great German fortress town of German Lorraine, that excursion trains used to run to Nancy in the opera season. "They are not running this winter," say the wits of Nancy. "For one reason, we have no opera--and there are other reasons."

An aeroplane from the German lines has only to toss a bomb in the course of an average reconnaissance on Nancy if it chooses; for Zeppelins are within easy reach of Nancy. But here was Nancy as brilliantly lighted at nine in the evening as any city of its size at home.

Our train, too, had run with the windows unshaded. After the darkness of London, and after English trains with every window- shade closely drawn, this was a surprise.

It was a threat, an antic.i.p.ation, that darkened London, while Nancy knew fulfilment. Bombardment and bomb-dropping were nothing new to Nancy. The spice of danger gives a fillip to business to the town whose population heard the din of the most thunderously spectacular action of the war echoing among the surrounding hills. Nancy saw the enemy beaten back. Now she was so close to the front that she felt the throb of the army's life.

"Don't you ever worry about aerial raids?" I asked madame behind the counter at the hotel.

"Do the men in the trenches worry about them?" she answered. "We have a much easier time than they. Why shouldn't we share some of their dangers? And when a Zeppelin appears and our guns begin firing, we all feel like soldiers under fire."

"Are all the population here as usual?"

"Certainly, monsieur!" she said. "The Germans can never take Nancy. The French are going to take Metz!"

The meal which that hotel restaurant served was as good as in peace times. Who deserves a good meal if not the officer who comes in from the front? And madame sees that he gets it. She is as proud of her poulet en ca.s.serole as any commander of a soixante-quinze battery of its practice. There was steam heat, too, in the hotel, which gave an American a homelike feeling.

In a score of places in the Eastern States you see landscapes with high hills like the spurs of the Vosges around Nancy sprinkled with snow and under a blue mist. And the air was dry; it had the life of our air. Old Civil War men who had been in the Tennessee Mountains or the Shenandoah Valley would feel perfectly at home in such surroundings; only the foreground of farm land which merges into the crests covered with trees in the distance is more finished. The people were tilling it hundreds of years before we began tilling ours. They till well; they make Lorraine a rich province of France.

With guns pounding in the distance, boys in their capes were skipping and frolicking on their way to school; housewives were going to market, and the streets were spotlessly clean. All the men of Nancy not in the army pursued their regular routine while the army went about its business of throwing sh.e.l.ls at the Germans. On the dead walls of the buildings were M. Deschanel's speech in the Chamber of Deputies, breathing endurance till victory, and the call for the cla.s.s of recruits of 1915, which you will find on the walls of the towns of all France beside that of the order of mobilization in August, now weather-stained. Nancy seemed, if anything, more French than any interior French town. Though near the border, there is no touch of German influence. When you walked through the old Place Stanislaus, so expressive of the architectural taste bred for centuries in the French, you understand the glow in the hearts of this very French population which made them unconscious of danger while their flag was flying over this very French city.

No two Christian peoples we know are quite so different as the French and the Germans. To each every national thought and habit incarnates a patriotism which is in defiance of that on the other side of the frontier. Over in America you may see the good in both sides, but no Frenchman and no German can on the Lorraine frontier. If he should, he would no longer be a Frenchman or a German in time of war.

At our service in front of the hotel were waiting two mortals in goatskin coats, with scarfs around their ears and French military caps on top of the scarfs. They were official army chauffeurs. If you have ridden through the Alleghenies in winter in an open car, why explain that seeing the Vosges front in a motor-car may be a joy ride to an Eskimo, but not to your humble servant? But the roads were perfect; as good wherever we went in this mountain country as from New York to Poughkeepsie. I need not tell you this if you have been in France; but you will be interested to know that Lorraine keeps her roads in perfect repair even in war time.

Crossing the swollen Moselle on a military bridge, twisting in and out of valleys and speeding through villages, one saw who were guarding the army's secrets, but little of the army itself and few signs of transportation on a bleak, snowy day. At the outskirts of every village, at every bridge, and at intervals along the road, Territorial sentries stopped the car. Having an officer along was not sufficient to let you whizz by important posts. He must show his pa.s.s. Every sentry was a reminder of the hopelessness of being a correspondent these days without official sanction.

The sentries were men in the thirties. In Belgium, their German counterpart, the Landsturm, were the monitors of a journey that I made. No troops are more military than the first line Germans; but in the snap and spirit of his salute the French Territorial has an elan, a martial fervour, which the phlegmatic German in the thirties lacks.

Occasionally we pa.s.sed scattered soldiers in the village streets, or a door opened to show a soldier figure in the doorway. The reason that we were not seeing anything of the army was the same that keeps the men and boys who are on the steps of the country grocery in summer at home around the stove in winter. All these villages were full of reservists who were indoors. They could be formed in the street ready for the march to any part of the line where a concentrated attack was made almost as soon after the alarm as a fire engine starts to a fire. Now, imagine your view of a cricket match limited to the bowler: and that is all you see in the low country of Flanders. You have no grasp of what all the noise and struggle means, for you cannot see over the shoulders of the crowd. But in Lorraine you have only to ascend a hill and the moves in the chess game of war are clear.

A panorama unfolds as our car takes a rising grade to the village of Ste. Genevieve. We alight and walk along a bridge, where the sentry of a lookout is on watch. He seems quite alone, but at our approach a dozen of his comrades come out of their "home" dug in the hillside.

Wherever you go about the frozen country of Lorraine it is a case of flus.h.i.+ng soldiers from their shelters. A small, semicircular table is set up before the lookout, like his compa.s.s before a mariner. Here run blue pencil lines of direction pointing to Pont-a-Mousson, to Chateau- Salins, and other towns. Before us to the east rose the tree-clad crests of the famous Grand Couronne of Nancy, and faintly in the distance we could see Metz.

"Those guns that I hear, are they firing across the frontier?" I asked.

For some French batteries command one of the outer forts of Metz.

"No, they are near Pont-a-Mousson."

To the north the little town of Pont-a-Mousson lay in the lap of the river bottom, and across the valley, to the west, the famous Bois le Pretre. More guns were speaking from the forest depths, which showed great scars where the trees had been cut to give fields of fire.

This was well to the rear of our position, marking the boundaries of the wedge that the Germans drove into the French lines, with its point at St. Mihiel, in trying to isolate the forts of Verdun and Toul.