the red glutton
as we went along next day through the town of maubeuge we heard singing; and singing was a most rare thing to be hearing in this town. in a country where no one smiles any more who belongs in that country, singing is not a thing which you would naturally expect to hear. so we turned off of our appointed route.
there was a small wine shop at the prow of a triangle of narrow streets. it had been a wine shop. it was now a beer shop. there had been a french proprietor; he had a german partner now. it had been only a few weeks—you could not as yet measure the interval of time in terms of months—since the germans came and sat themselves down before maubeuge and blew its defenses flat with their 42-centimeter earthquakes and marched in and took it. it had been only these few weeks; but already the germanizing brand of the conqueror was[pg 335] seared deep in the galled flanks of this typically french community. the town-hall clock was made to tick german time, which varied by an even hour from french time. tacked upon the door of the little café where we ate our meals was a card setting forth, with painful german particularity, the tariff which might properly be charged for food and for lodging and drink and what not; and it was done in german-gothic script, all very angular and precise; and it was signed by his excellency, the german commandant; and its prices were predicated on german logic and the estimated depth of a german wallet. you might read a newspaper printed in german characters, if so minded; but none printed in french, whether so minded or not.
so when we entered in at the door of the little french wine shop where the three streets met, to find out who within had heart of grace to sing o strassburg, o strassburg, so lustily, lo and behold, it had been magically transformed into a german beer shop. it was, as we presently learned, the only beer shop in all of maubeuge, and the reason for that was this: no sooner had the germans cleared and opened the roads back across belgium to their own frontiers than an enterprising tradesman of the rhein country, who somehow had escaped military service, loaded many kegs of good german beer upon trucks and brought his precious cargoes overland a hundred miles[pg 336] and more southward. certainly he could not have moved the lager caravan without the consent and aid of the berlin war office. for all i know to the contrary he may have been financed in that competent quarter. that same morning i had seen a field weather station, mounted on an automobile, standing in front of our lodging place just off the square. it was going to the front to make and compile meteorological reports. a general staff who provided weather offices on wheels and printing offices on wheels—this last for the setting up and striking off of small proclamations and orders—might very well have bethought themselves that the soldier in the field would be all the fitter for the job before him if stayed with the familiar malts of the vaterland. believe me, i wouldn't put it past them.
anyway, having safely reached maubeuge, the far-seeing rheinishman effected a working understanding with a native publican, which was probably a good thing for both, seeing that one had a stock of goods and a ready-made trade but no place to set up business, and that the other owned a shop, but had lost his trade and his stock-in-trade likewise. these two, the little, affable german and the tall, grave frenchman, stood now behind their counter drawing off mugs of pilsener as fast as their four hands could move. their patrons, their most vocal and boisterous patrons, were a company of musketeers who had marched in[pg 337] from the north that afternoon. as a rule the new levies went down into france on troop trains, but this company was part of a draft which for some reason came afoot. without exception they were young men, husky and hearty and inspired with a beefish joviality at having found a place where they could ease their feet, and rest their legs, and slake their week-old thirst upon their own soothing brews. being german they expressed their gratefulness in song.
we had difficulty getting into the place, so completely was it filled. men sat in the window ledges, and in the few chairs that were available, and even in the fireplace, and on the ends of the bar, clunking their heels against the wooden baseboards. the others stood in such close order they could hardly clear their elbows to lift their glasses. the air was choky with a blended smell derived from dust and worn boot leather and spilt essences of hops and healthy, unwashed, sweaty bodies. on a chair in a corner stood a tall, tired and happy youth who beat time for the singing with an empty mug and between beats nourished himself on drafts from a filled mug which he held in his other hand. with us was a german officer. he was a captain of reserves and a person of considerable wealth. he shoved his way to the bar and laid down upon its sloppy surface two gold coins and said something to a petty officer who was directing the distribution of the refreshments.
[pg 338]
the noncom. hammered for silence and, when he got it, announced that the herr hauptmann had donated twenty marks' worth of beer, all present being invited to co?perate in drinking it up, which they did, but first gave three cheers for the captain and three more for his american friends and afterward, while the replenished mugs radiated in crockery waves from the bar to the back walls, sang for us a song which, so far as the air was concerned, sounded amazingly like unto every little movement has a meaning all its own. their weariness was quite fallen away from them; they were like schoolboys on a frolic. indeed, i think a good many of them were schoolboys.
as we came out a private who stood in the doorway spoke to us in fair english. he had never been in america, but he had a brother living in east st. louis and he wanted to know if any of us knew his brother. this was a common experience with us. every third german soldier we met had a brother or a sister or somebody in america. this soldier could not have been more than eighteen years; the down on his cheeks was like corn silk. he told us he and his comrades were very glad to be going forward where there would be fighting. they had had no luck yet. there had been no fighting where they had been. i remembered afterward that luck was the word he used.
we went back to the main street and for a[pg 339] distance the roar of their volleying chorus followed us. men and women stood at the doors of the houses along the way. they were silent and idle. idleness and silence seemed always to have fallen as grim legacies upon the civilian populace of these captured towns; but the look upon their faces as they listened to the soldiers' voices was not hard to read. their town was pierced by cannonballs where it was not scarified with fire; there was sorrow and the abundant cause for sorrow in every house; commerce was dead and credit was killed; and round the next turning their enemy sang his drinking song. i judge that the thrifty frenchman who went partner with the german stranger in the beer traffic lost popularity that day among his fellow townsmen.
we were bound for the railway station, which the germans already had rechristened bahnhof. word had been brought to us that trains of wounded men and prisoners were due in the course of the afternoon from the front, and more especially from the right wing; and in this prospect we scented a story to be written. to reach the station we crossed the river sambre, over a damaged bridge, and passed beneath the arched passageway of the citadel which the great vauban built for the still greater louis xiv, thinking, no doubt, when he built it, that it would always be potent to keep out any foe, however strong. next to its stupid massiveness what most impressed[pg 340] us this day was its utter uselessness as a protection. the station stood just beyond the walls, with a park at one side of it, but the park had become a timber deadfall. at the approach of the enemy hundreds of splendid trees had been felled to clear the way for gunfire from the inner defenses in the event that the germans got by the outer circle of fortresses. after the germans took the forts, though, the town surrendered, so all this destruction had been futile. there were acres of ragged stumps and, between the stumps, jungles of overlapping trunks and interlacing boughs from which the dead and dying leaves shook off in showers. one of our party, who knew something of forestry, estimated that these trees were about forty years old.
"i suppose," he added speculatively, "that when this war ends these people will replant their trees. then in another forty years or so another war will come and they will chop them all down again. on the whole i'm rather glad i don't live on this continent."
the trains which were expected had not begun to arrive yet, so with two companions i sat on a bench at the back of the station, waiting. facing us was a line of houses. one, the corner house, was a big black char. it had caught fire during the shelling and burned quite down. its neighbors were intact, except for shattered chimneys and smashed doors and riddled windows. the concussion of a big[pg 341] gunfire had shivered every window in this quarter of town. there being no sufficient stock of glass with which to replace the broken panes, and no way of bringing in fresh supplies, the owners of the damaged buildings had patched the holes with bits of planking filched from more complete ruins near by. of course there were other reasons, too, if one stopped to sum them up: few would have the money to buy fresh glass, even if there was any fresh glass to buy, and the local glaziers—such of them as survived—would be serving the colors. all france had gone to war and at this time of writing had not come back, except in dribbling streams of wounded and prisoners.
these ragged boards, sparingly nailed across the window sockets, gave the houses the air of wearing masks and of squinting at us through narrow eye slits. the railroad station was windowless, too, like all the buildings round about, but nobody had dosed the openings here, and it gaped emptily in fifty places, and the raw, gusty winds of a north european fall searched through it.
in this immediate neighborhood few of the citizens were to be seen. even those houses which still were humanly habitable appeared to be untenanted; only soldiers were about, and not so very many of them. a hundred yards up the tracks, on a siding, a squad of men with a derrick and crane were hoisting captured french field guns upon flat can to[pg 342] be taken to berlin and exhibited as spoils of conquest for the benefit of the stay-at-homes. a row of these cannons, perhaps fifty in all, were ranked alongside awaiting loading and transportation. except for the agonized whine of the tackle-blocks and the buzzing of the flies the place where we sat was pretty quiet. there were a million flies, and there seemed to be a billion. you wouldn't have thought, unless you had been there to see for yourself, that there were so many flies in the world. by the time this was printed the cold weather had cured europe of its fly plague, but during the first three months i know that the track of war was absolutely sown with these vermin. even after a night of hard frost they would be as thick as ever at midday—as thick and as clinging and as nasty. go into any close, ill-aired place and no matter what else you might smell, you smelled flies too.
as i sit and look back on what i myself have seen of it, this war seems to me to have been not so much a sight as a stench. everything which makes for human happiness and human usefulness it has destroyed. what it has bred, along with misery and pain and fatted burying grounds, is a vast and loathsome stench and a universe of flies.
the smells and the flies; they were here in this railroad station in sickening profusion. i call it a railroad station, although it had lost its functions as such weeks before. the only[pg 343] trains which ran now were run by the germans for strictly german purposes, and so the station had become a victualing point for troops going south to the fighting and a way hospital for sick and wounded coming back from the fighting. what, in better days than these, had been the lunch room was a place for the redressing of hurts. its high counters, which once held sandwiches and tarts and wine bottles, were piled with snowdrifts of medicated cotton and rolls of lint and buckets of antiseptic washes and drug vials. the ticket booth was an improvised pharmacy. spare medical supplies filled the room where formerly fussy customs officers examined the luggage of travelers coming out of belgium into france. just beyond the platform a wooden booth, with no front to it, had been knocked together out of rough planking, and relays of cooks, with greasy aprons over their soiled gray uniforms, made vast caldrons of stews—always stews—and brewed so-called coffee by the gallon against the coming of those who would need it. the stuff was sure to be needed, all of it and more too. so they cooked and cooked unceasingly and never stopped to wipe a pan or clean a spoon.
at our backs was the waiting room for first-class passengers, but no passengers of any class came to it any more, and so by common consent it was a sort of rest room for the red cross men, who mostly were germans, but[pg 344] with a few captured frenchmen among them, still wearing their french uniforms. there were three or four french military surgeons—prisoners, to be sure, but going and coming pretty much as they pleased. the tacit arrangement was that the germans should succor germans and that the frenchmen should minister to their own disabled countrymen among the prisoners going north, but in a time of stress—and that meant every time a train came in from the south or west—both nationalities mingled together and served, without regard for the color of the coat worn by those whom they served.
probably from the day it was put up this station had never been really and entirely clean. judged by american standards continental railway stations are rarely ever clean, even when conditions are normal. now that conditions were anything but normal, this maubeuge station was incredibly and incurably filthy. no doubt the german nursing sisters who were brought here tried at first, with their german love for orderliness, to keep the interior reasonably tidy; but they had been swamped by more important tasks. for two weeks now the wounded had been passing through by the thousands and the tens of thousands daily. so between trains the women dropped into chairs or down upon cots and took their rest in snatches. but their fingers didn't rest. always their hands were busy[pg 345] with the making of bandages and the fluffing of lint.
by bits i learned something about three of the women who served on the so-called day shift, which meant that they worked from early morning until long after midnight. one was a titled woman who had volunteered for this duty. she was beyond middle age, plainly in poor health herself and everlastingly on the verge of collapse from weakness and exhaustion. her will kept her on her feet. the second was a professional nurse from one of the university towns—from bonn, i think. she called herself sister bartholomew, for the german nurses who go to war take other names than their own, just as nuns do. she was a beautiful woman, tall and strong and round-faced, with big, fine gray eyes. her energy had no limits. she ran rather than walked. she had a smile for every maimed man who was brought to her, but when the man had been treated, and had limped away or had been carried away, i saw her often wringing her hands and sobbing over the utter horror of it all. then another sufferer would appear and she would wipe the tears off her cheeks and get to work again. the third—so an assistant surgeon confided to us—was the mistress of an officer at the front, a prostitute of the berlin sidewalks, who enrolled for hospital work when her lover went to the front. she was a tall, dark, handsome girl, who looked[pg 346] to be more spaniard than german, and she was graceful and lithe even in the exceedingly shapeless costume of blue print that she ware. she was less deft than either of her associates but very willing and eager. as between the three—the noblewoman, the working woman and the woman of the street—the medical officials in charge made no distinction whatsoever. why should they? in this sisterhood of mercy they all three stood upon the same common ground. i never knew that slop jars were noble things until i saw women in these military lazarets bearing them in their arms; then to me they became as altar vessels.
lacking women to do it, the head surgeon had intrusted the task of clearing away the dirt to certain men. a sorry job they made of it. for accumulated nastiness that waiting room was an augean stable and the two soldiers who dawdled about in it with brooms lacked woefully in the qualities of hercules. putting a broom in a man's hands is the best argument in favor of woman's suffrage that i know of, anyhow. a third man who helped at chores in the transformed lunch room had gathered up and piled together in a heap upon the ground near us a bushel or so of used bandages—grim reminders left behind after the last train went by—and he had touched a match to the heap in an effort to get rid of it by fire. by reason of what was upon them the clothes burned slowly, sending up a smudge of acrid smoke to[pg 347] mingle with smells of carbolic acid and iodoform, and the scent of boiling food, and of things infinitely less pleasant than these.
presently a train rolled in and we crossed through the building to the trackside to watch what would follow. already we had seen a sufficiency of such trains; we knew before it came what it would be like: in front the dumpy locomotive, with a soldier engineer in the cab; then two or three box cars of prisoners, with the doors locked and armed guards riding upon the roofs; then two or three shabby, misused passenger coaches, containing injured officers and sometimes injured common soldiers, too; and then, stretching off down the rails, a long string of box cars, each of which would be bedded with straw and would contain for furniture a few rough wooden benches ranging from side to side. and each car would contain ten or fifteen or twenty, or even a greater number, of sick and crippled men.
those who could sit were upon the hard benches, elbow to elbow, packed snugly in. those who were too weak to sit sprawled upon the straw and often had barely room in which to turn over, so closely were they bestowed. it had been days since they had started back from the field hospitals where they had had their first-aid treatment. they had moved by sluggish stages with long halts in between. always the wounded must wait[pg 348] upon the sidings while the troop trains from home sped down the cleared main line to the smoking front; that was the merciless but necessary rule. the man who got himself crippled became an obstacle to further progress, a drag upon the wheels of the machine; whereas the man who was yet whole and fit was the man whom the generals wanted. so the fresh grist for the mill, the raw material, if you will, was expedited upon its way to the hoppers; that which already had been ground up was relatively of the smallest consequence.
because of this law, which might not be broken or amended, these wounded men would, perforce, spend several days aboard train before they could expect to reach the base hospitals upon german soil, maubeuge being at considerably less than midway of the distance between starting point and probable destination. altogether the trip might last a week or even two weeks—a trip that ordinarily would have lasted less than twelve hours. through it these men, who were messed and mangled in every imaginable fashion, would wallow in the dirty matted straw, with nothing except that thin layer of covering between them and the car floors that jolted and jerked beneath them. we knew it and they knew it, and there was nothing to be done. their wounds would fester and be hot with fever. their clotted bandages would clot still more and grow stiffer[pg 349] and harder with each dragging hour. those who lacked overcoats and blankets—and some there were who lacked both—would half freeze at night. for food they would have slops dished up for them at such stopping places as this present one, and they would slake their thirst on water drawn from contaminated wayside wells and be glad of the chance. gangrene would come, and blood poison, and all manner of corruption. tetanus would assuredly claim its toll. indeed, these horrors were already at work among them. i do not tell it to sicken my reader, but because i think i should tell it that he may have a fuller conception of what this fashionable institution of war means—we could smell this train as we could smell all the trains which followed after it, when it was yet fifty yards away from us.
be it remembered, furthermore, that no surgeon accompanied this afflicted living freightage, that not even a qualified nurse traveled with it. according to the classifying processes of those in authority on the battle lines these men were lightly wounded men, and it was presumed that while en route they would be competent to minister to themselves and to one another. under the grading system employed by the chief surgeons a man, who was still all in one piece and who probably would not break apart in transit, was designated as being lightly wounded. this statement is no[pg 350] attempt upon my part to indulge in levity concerning the most frightful situation i have encountered in nearly twenty years of active newspaper work; it is the sober, unexaggerated truth.
and so these lightly wounded men—men with their jaws shot away, men with holes in their breasts and their abdomens, men with their spine tips splintered, men with their arms and legs broken, men with their hands and feet shredded by shrapnel, men with their scalps ripped open, men with their noses and their ears and their fingers and toes gone, men jarred to the very marrow of their bones by explosives—these men, for whom ordinarily soft beds would have been provided and expert care and special food, came trundling up alongside that noisome station; and, through the door openings from where they were housed like dumb beasts, they looked out at us with the glazed eyes of dumb suffering beasts.
as the little toylike european cars halted, bumping together hard, orderlies went running down the train bearing buckets of soup, and of coffee and of drinking water, and loaves of the heavy, dark german bread. behind them went other men—bull-necked strong men picked for this job because of their strength. their task was to bring back in their arms or upon their shoulders such men as were past walking. there were no stretchers. there was no time for stretchers. behind this train[pg 351] would be another one just like it and behind that one, another, and so on down an eighty-mile stretch of dolorous way. and this, mind you, was but one of three lines carrying out of france and belgium into germany victims of the war to be made well again in order that they might return and once more be fed as tidbits into the maw of that war; it was but one of a dozen or more such streams, threading back from as many battle zones to the countries engaged in this wide and ardent scheme of mutual extermination.
half a minute after the train stopped a procession was moving toward us, made up of men who had wriggled down or who had been eased down out of the cars, and who were coming to the converted buffet room for help. mostly they came afoot, sometimes holding on to one another for mutual support. perhaps one in five was borne bodily by an orderly. he might be hunched in the orderly's arms like a weary child, or he might be traveling upon the orderly's back, pack-fashion, with his arms gripped about the bearer's neck; and then, in such a case, the pair of them, with the white hollow face of the wounded man nodding above the sweated red face of the other, became a monstrosity with two heads and one pair of legs.
here, advancing toward us with the gait of a doddering grandsire, would be a boy in his teens, bent double and clutching his[pg 352] middle with both hands. here would be a man whose hand had been smashed, and from beyond the rude swathings of cotton his fingers protruded stiffly and were so congested and swollen they looked like fat red plantains. here was a man whose feet were damaged. he had a crutch made of a spade handle. next would be a man with a hole in his neck, and the bandages had pulled away from about his throat, showing the raw inflamed hole. in this parade i saw a french infantryman aided along by a captured zouave on one side and on the other by a german sentry who swung his loaded carbine in his free hand. behind them i saw an awful nightmare of a man—a man whose face and bare cropped head and hands and shoes were all of a livid, poisonous, green cast. a shell of some new and particularly devilish variety had burst near him and the fumes which it generated in bursting had dyed him green. every man would have, tied about his neck or to one of his buttonholes, the german field-doctor's card telling of the nature of his hurt and the place where he had sustained it; and the uniform of nearly every one would be discolored with dried blood, and where the coat gaped open you marked that the harsh, white cambric lining was made harsher still by stiff, brownish-red streakings.
in at the door of the improvised hospital filed the parade, and the wounded men dropped[pg 353] on the floor or else were lowered upon chairs and tables and cots—anywhere that there was space for them to huddle up or stretch out. and then the overworked surgeons, french and german, and the german nursing sisters and certain of the orderlies would fall to. there was no time for the finer, daintier proceedings that might have spared the sufferers some measure of their agony. it was cut away the old bandage, pull off the filthy cotton, dab with antiseptics what was beneath, pour iodine or diluted acid upon the bare and shrinking tissues, perhaps do that with the knife or probe which must be done where incipient mortification had set in, clap on fresh cotton, wind a strip of cloth over it, pin it in place and send this man away to be fed—providing he could eat; then turn to the next poor wretch. the first man was out of that place almost before the last man was in; that was how fast the work went forward.
one special horror was spared: the patients made no outcry. they gritted their teeth and writhed where they lay, but none shrieked out. indeed, neither here nor at any of the other places where i saw wounded men did we hear that chorus of moans and shrieks with which fiction always has invested such scenes. those newly struck seemed stunned into silence; those who had had time to recover from the first shock of being struck appeared buoyed and sustained by a stoic quality which[pg 354] lifted them, mute and calm, above the call of tortured nerves and torn flesh. those who were delirious might call out; those who were conscious locked their lips and were steadfast in all our experience i came upon just two men in their senses who gave way at all. one was a boy of nineteen or twenty, in a field hospital near rheims, whose kneecap had been smashed. he sat up on his bed, rocking his body and whimpering fretfully like an infant he had been doing that for days, a nurse told us, but whether he whimpered because of his suffering or at the thought of going through life with a stiffened leg she did not know. the other was here at maubeuge. i helped hold his right arm steady while a surgeon took the bandages off his hand. when the wrapping came away a shattered finger came with it—it had rotted off, if you care to know that detail—and at the sight the victim uttered growling, rasping, animal-like sounds. even so, i think it was the thing he saw more than the pain of it that overcame him; the pain he could have borne. he had been bearing it for days.
i particularly remember one other man who was brought in off this first train. he was a young giant. for certain the old father of frederick the great would have had him in his regiment of grenadier guards. well, for that matter, he was a grenadier in the employ of the same family now. he hobbled[pg 355] in under his own motive power and leaned against the wall until the first flurry was over. then, at a nod from one of the shirt-sleeved surgeons, he stretched himself upon a bare wooden table which had just been vacated and indicated that he wanted relief for his leg—which leg, i recall, was incased in a rude, splintlike arrangement of plaited straw. the surgeon took off the straw and the packing beneath it. the giant had a hole right through his knee, from side to side, and the flesh all about it was horribly swollen and purplish-black. so the surgeon soused the joint, wound and all, with iodine; the youth meanwhile staring blandly up at the ceiling with his arms crossed on his wide breast. i stood right by him, looking into his face, and he didn't so much as bat an eyelid. but he didn't offer to get up when the surgeon was done with treating him. he turned laboriously over on his face, pulling his shirt free from his body as he did so, and then we saw that he had a long, infected gash from a glancing bullet across the small of his back. he had been lying on one angry wound while the other was redressed. you marveled, not that he had endured it without blenching, but that he had endured it at all.
the train stayed with us perhaps half an hour, and in that half hour at least a hundred men must have had treatment of sorts. a signal sounded and the orderlies lifted up the few[pg 356] wasted specters who still remained and toted them out. almost the last man to be borne away was injured in both legs; an orderly carried him in his arms. seeing the need of haste the orderly sought to heave his burden aboard the nearest car. the men in that car protested; already their space was overcrowded. so the patient orderly staggered down the train until he found the crippled soldier's rightful place and thrust him into the straw just as the wheels began to turn. as the cars, gathering speed, rolled by us we could see that nearly all the travelers were feeding themselves from pannikins of the bull-meat stew. wrappings on their hands and sometimes about their faces made them doubly awkward, and the hot tallowy mess spilt in spattering streams upon them and upon the straw under them.
they were on their way. at the end of another twenty-four hour stretch they might have traveled fifty or sixty or even seventy miles. the place they left behind them was in worse case than before. grease spattered the earth; the floor of the buffet room was ankle deep, literally, in discarded bandages and blood-stiffened cotton; and the nurses and the doctors and the helpers dropped down in the midst of it all to snatch a few precious minutes of rest before the next creaking caravan of misery arrived. there was no need to tell them of its coming; they knew. all through[pg 357] that afternoon and night, and through the next day and night, and through the half of the third day that we stayed on in maubeuge, the trains came back. they came ten minutes apart, twenty minutes apart, an hour apart, but rarely more than an hour would elapse between trains. and this traffic in marred and mutilated humanity had been going on for four weeks and would go on for nobody knew how many weeks more.
when the train had gone out of sight beyond the first turn to the eastward i spoke to the head surgeon of the german contingent—a broad, bearded, middle-aged man who sat on a baggage truck while an orderly poured a mixture of water and antiseptics over his soiled hands.
"a lot of those poor devils will die?" i suggested.
"less than three per cent of those who get back to the base hospitals will die," he said with a snap of his jaw, as though challenging me to doubt the statement. "that is the wonder of this war—that so many are killed in the fighting and that so few die who get back out of it alive. these modern scientific bullets, these civilized bullets"—he laughed in self-derision at the use of the word—"they are cruel and yet they are merciful too. if they do not kill you outright they have a little way, somehow, of not killing you at all."
[pg 358]
"but the bayonet wounds and the saber wounds?" i said. "how about them?"
"i have been here since the very first," he said; "since the day after our troops took this town, and god knows how many thousands of wounded men—germans, englishmen, frenchmen, turcos, some belgians—have passed through my hands; but as yet i have to see a man who has been wounded by a saber or a lance. i saw one bayonet wound yesterday or the day before. the man had fallen on his own bayonet and driven it into his side. shrapnel wounds? yes. wounds from fragments of bombs? again, yes. bullet wounds? i can't tell you how many of those i have seen, but surely many thousands. but no bayonet wounds. this is a war of hot lead, not of cold steel. i read of these bayonet charges, but i do not believe that many such stories are true."
i didn't believe it either.
the train which followed after the first, coming up out of france, furnished for us much the same sights the first one had furnished, and so, with some slight variations, did the third train and the fourth and all the rest of them. the station became a sty where before it had been a kennel; the flies multiplied; the stenches increased in volume and strength, if such were possible; the windows of the littered waiting room, with their cracked half panes, were like ribald eyes[pg 359] winking at the living afflictions which continually trailed past them; the floors looked as though there had been a snowstorm.
a train came, whose occupants were nearly all wounded by shrapnel. wounds of the head, the face and the neck abounded among these men—for the shells, exploding in the air above where they crouched in their trenches, had bespattered them with iron pebbles. each individual picture of suffering recurred with such monotonous and regular frequency that after an hour or so it took something out of the common run—an especially vivid splash of daubed and crimson horror—to quicken our imaginations and make us fetch out our note books. i recall a young lieutenant of uhlans who had been wounded in the breast by fragments of a grenade, which likewise had smashed in several of his ribs. he proudly fingered his newly acquired iron cross while the surgeon relaced his battered torso with strips of gauze. afterward he asked me for a cigar, providing i had one to spare, saying he had not tasted tobacco for a week and was perishing for a smoke. we began to take note then how the wounded men watched us as we puffed at our cigars, and we realized they were dumbly envying us each mouthful of smoke. so we sent our chauffeur to the public market with orders to buy all the cigars he could find on sale there. he presently returned with the front and rear seats of the automobile piled[pg 360] high with bundled sheaves of the brown weed—you can get an astonishingly vast number of those domestic french cigars for the equivalent of thirty dollars in american money—and we turned the whole cargo over to the head nurse on condition that, until the supply was exhausted, she give a cigar to every hurt soldier who might crave one, regardless of his nationality. she cried as she thanked us for the small charity.
"we can feed them—yes," she said, "but we have nothing to give them to smoke, and it is very hard on them."
a little later a train arrived which brought three carloads of french prisoners and one carload of english. among the frenchmen were many alpine rangers, so called—the first men we had seen of this wing of the service—and by reason of their dark blue uniforms and their flat blue caps they looked more like sailors than soldiers. at first we took them for sailors. there were thirty-four of the englishmen, being all that were left of a company of the west yorkshire regiment of infantry. confinement for days in a bare box car, with not even water to wash their faces and hands in, had not altogether robbed them of a certain trim alertness which seems to belong to the british fighting man. their puttees were snugly reefed about their shanks and their khaki tunics buttoned up to their throats.
[pg 361]
we talked with them. they wanted to know if they had reached germany yet, and when we told them that they were not out of france and had all of belgium still to traverse, they groaned their dismay in chorus.
"we've 'ad a very 'ard time of it, sir," said a spokesman, who wore sergeant's stripes on his sleeves and who told us he came from sheffield. "seventeen 'ours we were in the trench, under fire all the time, with water up to our middles and nothing to eat. we were 'olding the center and when the frenchies fell back they didn't give our chaps no warning, and pretty soon the dutchmen they 'ad us flanked both sides and we 'ad to quit. but we didn't quit until we'd lost all but one of our officers and a good 'alf of our men."
"where was this?" one of us asked.
"don't know, sir," he said. "it's a blooming funny war. you never knows the name of the place where you're fighting at, unless you 'ears it by chance."
then he added:
"could you tell us, sir, 'ow's the war going? are we giving the germans a proper 'iding all along the line?"
we inquired regarding their treatment. they didn't particularly fancy the food—narsty slop, the sergeant called it although it was reasonably plentiful; and, being true englishmen, they sorely missed their tea. then, too,[pg 362] on the night before their overcoats had been taken from them and no explanations vouchsafed.
"we could 'ave done with them," said the speaker bitterly; "pretty cold it was in this 'ere car. and what with winter coming on and everything i call it a bit thick to be taking our overcoats off of us."
we went and asked a german officer who had the convoy in charge the reason for this, and he said the overcoats of all the uninjured men, soldiers as well as prisoners, had been confiscated to furnish coverings for such of the wounded as lacked blankets. still, i observed that the guards for the train had their overcoats. so i do not vouch for the accuracy of his explanation.
it was getting late in the afternoon and the fifth train to pull in from the south since our advent on the spot—or possibly it was the sixth—had just halted when, from the opposite direction, a troop-train, long and heavy, panted into sight and stopped on the far track while the men aboard it got an early supper of hot victuals. we crossed over to have a look at the new arrivals.
it was a long train, drawn by one locomotive and shoved by another, and it included in its length a string of flat cars upon which were lashed many field pieces, and commandeered automobiles, and even some family carriages, not to mention baggage wagons and[pg 363] cook wagons and supply wagons. for a wonder, the coaches in which the troops rode were new, smart coaches, seemingly just out of the builders' hands. they were mainly first and second class coaches, varnished outside and equipped with upholstered compartments where the troopers took their luxurious ease. following the german fashion, the soldiers had decorated each car with field flowers and sheaves of wheat and boughs of trees, and even with long paper streamers of red and white and black. also, the artists and wags of the detachment had been busy with colored chalks. there was displayed on one car a lively crayon picture of a very fierce, two-tailed bavarian lion eating up his enemies—a nation at a bite. another car bore a menu:
russian caviar
servian rice meat english roast beef
belgian ragout french pastry
upon this same car was lettered a bit of crude verse, which, as we had come to know, was a favorite with the german private. by my poor translation it ran somewhat as follows:
for the slav, a kick we have,
and for the jap a slap;
the briton too—we'll beat him blue,
and knock the frenchman flat.
[pg 364]
altogether the train had quite the holidaying air about it and the men who traveled on it had the same spirit too. they were bavarians—all new troops, and nearly all young fellows. their accouterments were bright and their uniforms almost unsoiled, and i saw that each man carried in his right boot top the long, ugly-looking dirk-knife that the bavarian foot-soldier fancies. the germans always showed heat when they found a big service clasp-knife hung about a captured englishman's neck on a lanyard, calling it a barbarous weapon because of the length of the blade and long sharp bradawl which folded into a slot at the back of the handle; but an equally grim bit of cutlery in a bavarian's bootleg seemed to them an entirely proper tool for a soldier to be carrying.
the troops—there must have been a full battalion of them—piled off the coaches to exercise their legs. they skylarked about on the earth, and sang and danced, and were too full of coltish spirits to eat the rations that had been brought from the kitchen for their consumption. seeing our cameras, a lieutenant who spoke english came up to invite us to make a photograph of him and his men, with their bedecked car for a background. he had been ill, he said, since the outbreak of hostilities, which explained why he was just now getting his first taste of active campaigning service.
[pg 365]
"wait," he said vaingloriously, "just wait until we get at the damned british. some one else may have the frenchmen—we want to get our hands on the englishmen. do you know what my men say? they say they are glad for once in their lives to enjoy a fight where the policemen won't interfere and spoil the sport. that's the bavarian for you—the prussian is best at drill, but the bavarian is the best fighter in the whole world. only let us see the enemy—that is all we ask!
"i say, what news have you from the front? all goes well, eh? as for me i only hope there will be some of the enemy left for us to kill. it is a glorious thing—this going to war! i think we shall get there very soon, where the fighting is. i can hardly wait for it." and with that he hopped up on the steps of the nearest car and posed for his picture.
having just come from the place whither he was so eagerly repairing i might have told him a few things. i might for example have told him what the captain of a german battery in front of la fère had said, and that was this:
"i have been on this one spot for nearly three weeks now, serving my guns by day and by night. i have lost nearly half of my original force of men and two of my lieutenants. we shoot over those tree tops yonder in accordance with directions for range and distance which come from somewhere else over field tele[pg 366]phone, but we never see the men at whom we are firing. they fire back without seeing us, and sometimes their shells fall short or go beyond us, and sometimes they fall among us and kill and wound a few of us. thus it goes on day after day. i have not with my own eyes seen a frenchman or an englishman unless he was a prisoner. it is not so much pleasure—fighting like this."
i might have told the young bavarian lieutenant of other places where i had been—places where the dead lay for days unburied. i might have told him there was nothing particularly pretty or particularly edifying about the process of being killed. death, i take it, is never a very tidy proceeding; but in battle it acquires an added unkemptness. men suddenly and sorely stricken have a way of shrinking up inside their clothes; unless they die on the instant they have a way of tearing their coats open and gripping with their hands at their vitals, as though to hold the life in; they have a way of sprawling their legs in grotesque postures; they have a way of putting their arms up before their faces as though at the very last they would shut out a dreadful vision. those contorted, twisted arms with the elbows up, those spraddled stark legs, and, most of all, those white dots of shirts—those i had learned to associate in my own mind with the accomplished fact of mortality upon the field.
[pg 367]
i might have told him of sundry field hospitals which i had lately visited. i could recreate in my memory, as i shall be able to recreate it as long as i live and have my senses, a certain room in a certain schoolhouse in a french town where seven men wriggled and fought in the unspeakable torments of lockjaw; and another room filled to capacity with men who had been borne there because there was nothing humanly to be done for them, and who now lay very quietly, their suetty-gray faces laced with tiny red stripes of fever, and their paling eyes staring up at nothing at all; and still another room given over entirely to stumps of men, who lacked each a leg or an arm, or a leg and an arm, or both legs or both arms; and still a fourth room wherein were men—and boys too—all blinded, all learning to grope about in the everlasting black night which would be their portion through all their days. indeed for an immediate illustration of the products of the business toward which he was hastening i might have taken him by the arm and led him across two sets of tracks and shown him men in the prime of life who were hatcheled like flax, and mauled like blocks, and riddled like sieves, and macerated out of the living image of their maker.
but i did none of these things. he had a picture of something uplifting and splendid before his eyes. he wanted to fight, or he thought he did, which came to the same thing.[pg 368] so what i did was to take down his name and promise to send him a completed copy of his picture in the care of his regiment and brigade; and the last i saw of him he was half out of a car window waving good-by to us and wishing us auf wiedersehen as he was borne away to his ordained place.
as we rode back through the town of maubeuge in the dusk, the company which had sung o strassburg in the franco-german beer shop at the prow of the corner where the three streets met were just marching away. i thought i caught, in the weaving gray line that flowed along like quicksilver, a glimpse of the boy who was so glad because he was about to have some luck.
in two days fourteen thousand wounded men came back through maubeuge, and possibly ten times that many new troops, belonging to the first october draft of a million, passed down the line. in that week fifty thousand wounded men returned from the german right wing alone.
he's a busy red glutton. there seems to be no satisfying his greed.
