those yellow pine boxes
it was late in the short afternoon, and getting close on to twilight, when we got back into the town. except for the soldiers there was little life stirring in the twisting streets. there was a funeral or so in progress. it seemed to us that always, no matter where we stopped, in whatsoever town or at whatsoever hour, some dead soldier was being put away. still, i suppose we shouldn't have felt any surprise at that. by now half of europe was one great funeral. part of it was on crutches and part of it was in the graveyard and the rest of it was in the field.
daily in these towns back behind the firing lines a certain percentage of the invalided and the injured, who had been brought thus far before their condition became actually serious, would die; and twice daily, or oftener, the dead would be buried with military honors.[pg 316] so naturally we were eyewitnesses to a great many of these funerals. somehow they impressed me more than the sight of dead men being hurriedly shoveled under ground on the battle front where they had fallen. perhaps it was the consciousness that those who had these formal, separate burials were men who came alive out of the fighting, and who, even after being stricken, had a chance for life and then lost it. perhaps it was the small show of ceremony and ritual which marked each one—the firing squad, the clergyman in his robes, the tramping escort—that left so enduring an impress upon my mind. i did not try to analyze the reasons; but i know my companions felt as i did.
i remember quite distinctly the very first of these funerals that i witnessed. possibly i remember it with such distinctness because it was the first. on our way to the advance positions of the germans we had come as far as chimay, which is an old belgian town just over the frontier from france. i was sitting on a bench just outside the doorway of a parochial school conducted by nuns, which had been taken over by the conquerors and converted into a temporary receiving hospital for men who were too seriously wounded to stand the journey up into germany. all the surgeons on duty here were germans, but the nursing force was about equally divided between nuns and lutheran deaconesses who had[pg 317] been brought overland for this duty. also there were several volunteer nurses—the wife of an officer, a wealthy widow from düsseldorf and a school-teacher from coblenz among them. catholic and protestant, belgian and french and german, they all labored together, cheerfully and earnestly doing drudgery of the most exacting, the most unpleasant sorts.
one of the patronesses of the hospital, who was also its manager ex officio, had just left with a soldier chauffeur for a guard and a slightly wounded major for an escort. she was starting on a three-hundred-mile automobile run through a half subdued and dangerous country, meaning to visit base hospitals along the german frontier until she found a supply of anti-tetanus serum. lockjaw, developing from seemingly trivial wounds in foot or hand, had already killed six men at chimay within a week. four more were dying of the same disease. so, since no able-bodied men could be spared from the overworked staffs of the lazarets, she was going for a stock of the serum which might save still other victims. she meant to travel day and night, and if a bullet didn't stop her and if the automobile didn't go through a temporary bridge she would be back, she thought, within forty-eight hours. she had already made several trips of the sort upon similar missions. once her car had been fired at and once it had been wrecked, but she was going again. she was from near[pg 318] cologne, the wife of a rich manufacturer now serving as a captain of reserves. she hadn't heard from him in four weeks. she didn't know whether he still lived. she hoped he lived, she told us with simple fortitude, but of course these times one never knew.
it was just before sundown. the nuns had gone upstairs to their little chapel for evening services. through an open window of the chapel just above my head their voices, as they chanted the responses between the sonorous latin phrases of the priest who had come to lead them in their devotions, floated out in clear sweet snatches, like the songs of vesper sparrows. behind me, in a paved courtyard, were perhaps twenty wounded men lying on cots. they had been brought out of the building and put in the sunshine. they were on the way to recovery; at least most of them were. i sat facing a triangular-shaped square, which was flanked on one of its faces by a row of shuttered private houses and on another by the principal church of the town, a fifteenth-century structure with outdoor shrines snuggled up under its eaves. except for the chanting of the nuns and the braggadocio booming of a big cock-pigeon, which had flown down from the church tower to forage for spilt grain almost under my feet, the place was quiet. it was so quiet that when a little column of men turned into the head of the street which wound past the front of the church[pg 319] and off to the left, i heard the measured tramping of their feet upon the stony roadway fully a minute before they came in sight. i was wondering what that rhythmic thumping meant, when one of the nursing sisters came and closed the high wooden door at my back, shutting off the view of the wounded men.
there appeared a little procession, headed by a priest in his robes and two altar-boys. at the heels of these three were six soldiers bearing upon their shoulders a wooden box painted a glaring yellow; and so narrow was the box and so shallow-looking, that on the instant the thought came to me that the poor clay inclosed therein must feel cramped in such scant quarters. upon the top of the box, at its widest, highest point, rested a wreath of red flowers, a clumsy, spraddly wreath from which the red blossoms threatened to shake loose. even at a distance of some rods i could tell that a man's inexpert fingers must have fashioned it.
upon the shoulders of the bearers the box swayed and jolted.
following it came, first, three uniformed officers, two german nurses and two surgeons from another hospital, as i subsequently learned; and following them half a company of soldiers bearing their rifles and wearing side arms. as the small cortège reached a point opposite us an officer snapped an order and everybody halted, and the gun-[pg 320]butts of the company came down with a smashing abruptness upon the cobbles. at that moment two or three roughly clad civilians issued from a doorway near by. being belgians they had small cause to love the germans, but they stopped in their tracks and pulled off their caps. to pay the tribute of a bared head to the dead, even to the unknown dead, is in these catholic countries of europe as much a part of a man's rule of conduct as his religion is.
the priest who led the line turned my way inquiringly. he did not have to wait long for what was to come, nor did i. another gate farther along in the nunnery wall opened and out came six more soldiers, bearing another of these narrow-shouldered coffins, and accompanied by a couple of nurses, an officer and an assistant surgeon. at sight of them the soldiers brought their pieces up to a salute, and held the posture rigidly until the second dead man in his yellow box had joined the company of the first dead man in his.
just before this happened, though, one of the nurses of the nunnery hospital did a thing which i shall never forget. she must have seen that the first coffin had flowers upon it, and in the same instant realized that the coffin in whose occupant she had a more direct interest was bare. so she left the straggling line and came running back. the wall streamed with woodbine, very glorious in its autumnal[pg 321] flamings. she snatched a trailer of the red and yellow leaves down from where it clung, and as she hurried back her hands worked with magic haste, making it into a wreath. she reached the second squad of bearers and put her wreath upon the lid of the box, and then sought her place with the other nurses. the guns went up with a snap upon the shoulders of the company. the soldiers' feet thudded down all together upon the stones, and with the priest reciting his office the procession passed out of sight, going toward the burial ground at the back of the town. presently, when the shadows were thickening into gloom and the angelus bells were ringing in the church, i heard, a long way off, the rattle of the rifles as the soldiers fired good-night volleys over the graves of their dead comrades.
on the next day, at hirson, which was another of our stopping points on the journey to the front, we saw the joint funeral of seven men leaving the hospital where they had died during the preceding twelve hours, and i shan't forget that picture either. there was a vista bounded by a stretch of one of those unutterably bleak backways of a small and shabby french town. the rutted street twisted along between small gray plaster houses, with ugly, unnecessary gable-ends, which faced the road at wrong angles. small groups of townspeople stood against the walls to watch.[pg 322] there was also a handful of idling soldiers who watched from the gateway of the house where they were billeted.
seven times the bearers entered the hospital door, and each time as they reappeared, bringing one of the narrow, gaudy, yellow boxes, the officers lined up at the door would salute and the soldiers in double lines at the opposite side of the road would present arms, and then, as the box was lifted upon the wagon waiting to receive it, would smash their guns down on the bouldered road with a crash. when the job of bringing forth the dead was done the wagon stood loaded pretty nearly to capacity. four of the boxes rested crosswise upon the flat wagon-bed and the other three were racked lengthwise on top of them. here, too, was a priest in his robes, and here were two altar boys who straggled, so that as the procession started the priest was moved to break off his chanting long enough to chide his small attendants and wave them back into proper alignment. with the officers, the nurses and the surgeons all marching afoot marched also three bearded civilians in frock coats, having the air about them of village dignitaries. from their presence in such company we deduced that one of the seven silent travelers on the wagon must be a french soldier, or else that the germans had seen fit to require the attendance of local functionaries at the burial of dead germans.
[pg 323]
as the cortège—i suppose you might call it that—went by where i stood with my friends, i saw that upon the sides of the coffins names were lettered in big, straggly black letters. i read two of the names—werner was one, vogel was the other. somehow i felt an acuter personal interest in vogel and werner than in the other five whose names i could not read.
wherever we stopped in belgium or in france or in germany these soldiers' funerals were things of daily, almost of hourly occurrence. and in maubeuge on this evening, even though dusk had fallen, two of the inevitable yellow boxes, mounted upon a two-wheeled cart, were going to the burying ground. we figured the cemetery men would fill the graves by lantern light; and knowing something of their hours of employment we imagined that with this job disposed of they would probably turn to and dig graves by night, making them ready against the needs of the following morning. the new graves always were ready. they were made in advance, and still there were rarely enough of them, no matter how long or how hard the diggers kept at their work. at aix-la-chapelle, for example, in the principal cemetery the sexton's men dug twenty new graves every morning. by evening there would be twenty shaped mounds of clay where the twenty holes had been. the crop of the dead was the one sure[pg 324] crop upon which embattled europe might count. that harvest could not fail the warring nations, however scanty other yields might be.
in the towns in occupied territory the cemeteries were the only actively and constantly busy spots to be found, except the hospitals. every schoolhouse was a hospital; indeed i think there can be no schoolhouse in the zone of actual hostilities that has not served such a purpose. in their altered aspects we came to know these schoolhouses mighty well. we would see the wounded going in on stretchers and the dead coming out in boxes. we would see how the blackboards, still scrawled over perhaps with the chalked sums of lessons which never were finished, now bore pasted-on charts dealing in nurses' and surgeons' cipher-manual, with the bodily plights of the men in the cots and on the mattresses beneath. we would see classrooms where plaster casts and globe maps and dusty textbooks had been cast aside in heaps to make room on desktops and shelves for drugs and bandages and surgical appliances. we would see the rows of hooks intended originally for the caps and umbrellas of little people; but now from each hook dangled the ripped, bloodied garments of a soldier—gray for a german, brown-tan for an englishman, blue-and-red for a frenchman or a belgian. by the german rule a wounded man's uniform must be brought[pg 325] back with him from the place where he fell and kept handily near him, with tags on it, to prove its proper identity, and there it must stay until its owner needs it again—if ever he needs it again.
we would see these things, and we would wonder if these schoolhouses could ever shake off the scents and the stains and the memories of these present grim visitations—wonder if children would ever frolic any more in the courtyards where the ambulances stood now with red drops trickling down from their beds upon the gravel. but that, on our part, was mere morbidness born of the sights we saw. children forget even more quickly than their elders forget, and we knew, from our own experience, how quickly the populace of a french or flemish community could rally back to a colorable counterfeit of their old sprightliness, once the immediate burdens of affliction and captivity had been lifted from off them.
from a jumbled confusion of recollection of these schoolhouse-hospitals sundry incidental pictures stick out in my mind as i write this article. i can shut my eyes and visualize the german i saw in the little parish school building in the abandoned hamlet of colligis near by the river aisne. he was in a room with a dozen others, all suffering from chest wounds. he had been pierced through both lungs with a bullet, and to keep him[pg 326] from choking to death the attendants had tied him in a half erect posture. a sort of hammocklike sling passed under his arms, and a rope ran from it to a hook in a wall and was knotted fast to the hook. he swung there, neither sitting nor lying, fighting for the breath of life, with an unspeakable misery looking out from his eyes; and he was too far spent to lift a hand to brush away the flies that swarmed upon his face and his lips and upon his bare, throbbing throat. the flies dappled the faces of his fellow sufferers with loathsome black dots; they literally masked his.
i preserve a memory which is just as vivid of certain things i saw in a big institution in laon. although in german hands, and nominally under german control, the building was given over entirely to crippled and ailing french prisoners. these patients were minded and fed by their own people and attended by captured french surgeons. in our tour of the place i saw only two men wearing the german gray. one was the armed sentry who stood at the gate to see that no recovering inmate slipped out, and the other was a german surgeon-general who was making his daily round of inspection of the hospitals and had brought us along with him. of the native contingent the person who appeared to be in direct charge was a handsome, elderly lady, tenderly solicitous of the frowziest turco in the wards and exquisitely polite, with a frozen politeness, to[pg 327] the german officer. when he saluted her she bowed to him deeply and ceremoniously and silently. i never thought until then that a bow could be so profoundly executed and yet so icily cold. it was a lesson in congealed manners.
as we were leaving the room a nun serving as a nurse hailed the german and told him one of her charges was threatening to die, not because of his wound, but because he had lost heart and believed himself to be dying.
"where is he?" asked the german.
"yonder," she said, indicating a bundled-up figure on a pallet near the door. a drawn, hopeless face of a half-grown boy showed from the huddle of blankets. the surgeon-general cast a quick look at the swathed form and then spoke in an undertone to a french regimental surgeon on duty in the room. together the two approached the lad.
"my son," said the german to him in french, "i am told you do not feel so well to-day."
the boy-soldier whispered an answer and waggled his head despondently. the german put his hand on the youth's forehead.
"my son," he said, "listen to me. you are not going to die—i promise you that you shall not die. my colleague here"—he indicated the french doctor—"stands ready to make you the same promise. if you won't believe a german, surely you will take your own coun[pg 328]tryman's professional word for it," and he smiled a little smile under his gray mustache. "between us we are going to make you well and send you, when this war is over, back to your mother. but you must help us; you must help us by being brave and confident. is it not so, doctor?" he added, again addressing the french physician, and the frenchman nodded to show it was so and sat down alongside the youngster to comfort him further.
as we left the room the german surgeon turned, and looking round i saw that once again he saluted the patrician french lady, and this time as she bowed the ice was all melted from her bearing. she must have witnessed the little byplay; perhaps she had a son of her own in service. there were mighty few mothers in france last fall who did not have sons in service.
yet one of the few really humorous recollections of this war that i preserve had to do with a hospital too; but this hospital was in england and we visited it on our way home to america. we went—two of us—in the company of lord northcliffe, down into surrey, to spend a day with old lord roberts. within three weeks thereafter lord roberts was dead where no doubt he would have willed to die—at the front in france, with the sound of the guns in his ears, guarded in his last moments by the ghurkas and the sikhs of his beloved indian contingent. but on this day of our[pg 329] visit to him we found him a hale, kindly gentleman of eighty-two who showed us his marvelous collection of firearms and oriental relics and the field guns, all historic guns by the way, which he kept upon the terraces of his mansion house, and who told us, among other things, that in his opinion our own stonewall jackson was perhaps the greatest natural military genius the world had ever produced. leaving his house we stopped, on our return to london, at a hospital for soldiers in the grounds of ascot race course scarcely two miles from lord roberts' place. the refreshment booths and the other rooms at the back and underside of the five-shilling stand had been thrown together, except the barber's shop, which was being converted into an operating chamber; and, what with its tiled walls and high sloped ceiling and glass front, the place made a first-rate hospital.
it contained beds for fifty men; but on this day there were less than twenty sick and crippled tommies convalescing here. they had been brought out of france, out of wet and cold and filth, with hurried dressings on their hurts; and now they were in this bright, sweet, wholesome place, with soft beds under them and clean linen on their bodies, and flowers and dainties on the tables that stood alongside them, and the gentlefolk of the neighborhood to mind them as volunteer nurses.
there were professional nurses, of course;[pg 330] but, under them, the younger women of the wealthy families of this corner of surrey were serving; and mighty pretty they all looked, too, in their crisp blue-and-white uniforms, with their arm badges and their caps, and their big aprons buttoned round their slim, athletic young bodies. i judge there were about three amateur nurses to each patient. yet you could not rightly call them amateurs either; each of them had taken a short course in nursing, it seemed, and was amply competent to perform many of the duties a regular nurse must know.
lady aileen roberts was with us during our tour of the hospital. as a daily visitor and patroness she spent much of her time here and she knew most of the inmates by name. she halted alongside one bed to ask its occupant how he felt. he had been returned from the front suffering from pneumonia.
he was an irishman. before he answered her he cast a quick look about the long hall. afternoon tea was just being served, consisting, besides tea, of homemade strawberry jam and lettuce sandwiches made of crisp fresh bread, with plenty of butter; and certain elderly ladies had just arrived, bringing with them, among other contributions, sheaves of flowers and a dogcart loaded with hothouse fruit and a dozen loaves of plumcake, which last were still hot from the oven and which radiated a mouth-watering aroma as a footman bore them in behind his mistress. the patient[pg 331] looked at all these and he sniffed; and a grin split his face and an irish twinkle came into his eyes.
"thank you, me lady, for askin'," he said; "but i'm very much afeared i'm gettin' better."
we might safely assume that the hospitals and the graveyard of maubeuge would be busy places that evening, thereby offering strong contrasts to the rest of the town. but i should add that we found two other busy spots, too: the railroad station—where the trains bringing wounded men continually shuttled past—and the house where the commandant of the garrison had his headquarters. in the latter place, as guests of major von abercron, we met at dinner that night and again after dinner a strangely mixed company. we met many officers and the pretty american wife of an officer, frau elsie von heinrich, late of jersey city, who had made an adventurous trip in a motor ambulance from germany to see her husband before he went to the front, and who sent regards by us to scores of people in her old home whose names i have forgotten. we met also a civilian guest of the commandant, who introduced himself as august blankhertz and who turned out to be a distinguished big-game hunter and gentleman a?ronaut. with major von abercron for a mate he sailed from st. louis in the great balloon race for the james gordon ben[pg 332]nett cup. they came down in the canadian woods and nearly died of hunger and exposure before they found a lumber camp. their balloon was called the germania. there was another civilian, a member of the german secret-service staff, wearing the norfolk jacket and the green alpine hat and on a cord about his neck the big gold token of authority which invariably mark a representative of this branch of the german espionage bureau; and he was wearing likewise that transparent air of mystery which seemed always to go with the followers of his ingenious profession.
during the evening the mayor of maubeuge came, a bearded, melancholy gentleman, to confer with the commandant regarding a clash between a german under-officer and a household of his constituents. orderlies and attendants bustled in and out, and somebody played viennese waltz songs on a piano, and altogether there was quite a gay little party in the parlor of this handsome house which the germans had commandeered for the use of their garrison staff.
at early bedtime, when we stepped out of the door of the lit-up mansion into the street, it was as though we had stepped into a far-off country. except for the tramp of a sentry's hobbed boots over the sidewalks and the challenging call of another sentry round the corner the town was as silent as a town of tombs. all the people who remained in this[pg 333] place had closed their forlorn shops where barren shelves and emptied showcases testified to the state of trade; and they had shut themselves up in their houses away from sight of the invaders. we could guess what their thoughts must be. their industries were paralyzed, and their liberties were curtailed, and every other house was a breached and worthless shell. among ourselves we debated as we walked along to the squalid tavern where we had been quartered, which of the spectacles we had that day seen most fitly typified the fruitage of war—the shattered, haunted forts lying now in the moonlight beyond the town, or the brooding conquered, half-destroyed town itself.
i guess, if it comes to that, they both typified it.
