With the French in France and Salonika
Date: 2009-12-31T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: World War; 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives

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Title: With the French in France and Salonika

Author: Richard Harding Davis

Release date: December 31, 2009 [eBook #30812]
Most recently updated: January 5, 2021

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WITH THE FRENCH IN FRANCE AND SALONIKA ***

WITH
THE FRENCH

IN FRANCE AND
SALONIKA

BY

RICHARD HARDING DAVIS

AUTHOR OF “WITH THE ALLIES”

ILLUSTRATED

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1916

Copyright, 1916, By
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

Published April, 1916

BOOKS BY RICHARD HARDING DAVIS

Published BY CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

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General Sarrail, commanding the Allied armies in Greece, making his first landing in Salonika.

TO THE MEMORY

OF

JUSTUS MILES FORMAN

PREFACE

This book was written during the three last months of 1915 and the first month of this year in the form of letters from France, Greece, Serbia, and England. The writer visited ten of the twelve sectors of the French front, seeing most of them from the first trench, and was also on the French-British front in the Balkans. Outside of Paris the French cities visited were Verdun, Amiens, St. Die, Arras, Chalons, Nancy, and Rheims. What he saw served to strengthen his admiration for the French army and, as individuals and as a nation, for the French people, and to increase his confidence in the ultimate success of their arms.

This success he believes would come sooner were all the fighting concentrated in Europe. To scatter the forces of the Allies in expeditions overseas, he submits, only weakens the main attack and the final victory. At the present moment, outside of her armies for defense in England and for offense in Flanders, Great Britain is supporting armies in Egypt, German East Africa, Salonika, and Mesopotamia. No one who has seen in actual being one of these vast expeditions, any one of which in the past would have commanded the interest of the entire world, can appreciate how seriously they cripple the main offensive. Each robs it of hundreds of thousands of men needed in the trenches, of the transports required to carry those men, of war-ships to convoy them, of hospital ships to mend them, of medical men, medical stores, aeroplanes, motor-trucks, ambulances, machine-guns, field-guns, siege-guns, and millions upon millions of rounds of ammunition.

Transports that from neutral ports should be carrying bully beef, grain, and munitions, are lying idle at a rent per day of many hundreds of thousands of pounds, in the harbors of Moudros, Salonika, Aden, Alexandria, in the Persian Gulf, and scattered along both coasts of Africa. They are guarded by war-ships withdrawn from duty in the Channel and North Sea. What, in lives lost, these expeditions have cost both France and Great Britain, we know; what they have cost in millions of money, it would be impossible even to guess.

For these excursions far afield it is not the military who are responsible. There is the highest authority for believing neither General Joffre nor Lord Kitchener approves of them. They are efforts launched for political effect by loyal and well-meaning, but possibly mistaken, members of the two governments. By them these expeditions were sent forth to seize some place in the sun already held by Germany, to prevent other places falling into her hands, or in the hope of turning some neutral power into an ally. It was merely dancing to Germany’s music. It postponed and weakened the main attack. This war should be fought in France. If it is, Germany will be utterly defeated; she cannot long survive such another failure as Verdun, or even should she eventually occupy Verdun could she survive such a victory. When she no longer is a military threat all she possessed before the war, and whatever territory she has taken since she began the war, will automatically revert to the Allies. It then will be time enough to restore to Belgium, Serbia, Poland, and other rightful owners the possessions of which Germany has robbed them. If you surprise a burglar, his pockets stuffed with the family jewels, would you first attempt to recover the jewels, or to subdue the burglar? Before retrieving your possessions would it not be better strategy to wait until the burglar is down and out, and the police are adjusting the handcuffs?

In the first chapter of this book is reprinted a letter I wrote from Paris to the papers of the Wheeler Syndicate, stating that in no part of Europe was our country popular. It was a hint given from one American speaking in confidence to another, and as from one friend to another. It was not so received. To my suggestion that in Europe we are losing friends, the answer invariably was: “We should worry!” That is not a good answer. With a nation it surely should be as with the individuals who compose it. If, when an individual is told he has lost the good opinion of his friends, he sings, “I don’t care, I don’t care!” he exhibits only bad manners.

The other reply made to the warning was personal abuse. That also is the wrong answer. To kill the messenger of ill tidings is an ancient prerogative; but it leads nowhere. If it is true that we are losing our friends we should try to find out whose fault it is that we lost them, and our wish should be to bring our friends back.

Men of different countries of Europe repeatedly told me that all of a century must elapse before America can recover the prestige she has lost since this war began. My answer was that it was unintelligent to judge ninety million people by the acts, or lack of action, of one man, and that to recover our lost prestige will take us no longer than is required to get rid of that man. As soon as we elect a new President and a new Congress, who are not necessarily looking for trouble, but who will not crawl under the bed to avoid it, our lost prestige will return.

In the meantime, that France and her Allies succeed should be the hope and prayer of every American. The fight they are waging is for the things the real, unhyphenated American is supposed to hold most high and most dear. Incidentally, they are fighting his fight, for their success will later save him, unprepared as he is to defend himself, from a humiliating and terrible thrashing. And every word and act of his now that helps the Allies is a blow against frightfulness, against despotism, and in behalf of a broader civilization, a nobler freedom, and a much more pleasant world in which to live.

Richard Harding Davis.

April 11, 1916.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER | | PAGE
I. | President Poincaré Thanks America | 3
II. | The Mud Trenches of Artois | 35
III. | The Zigzag Front of Champagne | 55
IV. | From Paris To the Piræus | 79
V. | Why King Constantine Is Neutral | 97
VI. | With the Allies in Salonika | 111
VII. | Two Boys Against an Army | 152
VIII. | The French-British Front in Serbia | 165
IX. | Verdun and St. Mihiel | 188
X. | War in the Vosges | 210
XI. | Hints for Those Who Want To Help | 223
XII. | London, a Year Later | 245

ILLUSTRATIONS

General Sarrail, commanding the Allied armies in
Greece, making his first landing in Salonika

Frontispiece

| FACING PAGE
President Poincaré on a visit to the front | 18

“Of another house the roof only remained, from under
it the rest of the building had been shot away”

48

The stone roof over this glass chandelier in the Arras
cathedral was destroyed by shells, and the chandelier
not touched

50

General Franchet d’Espéray | 70

King Constantine of Greece and commander-in-chief of
her armies

102

“In Salonika the water-front belongs to everybody” | 122

“On one side of the quay, a moving-picture palace,
... on the other a boat unloading fish”

124

Outside the Citadel, which is mediæval, Salonika is
modern and Turkish

126

“The quay supplied every spy—German, Bulgarian,
Turk, or Austrian—with an uninterrupted view”

139

“Hills bare of trees, from which the snow that ran
down their slopes had turned the road into a sea
of mud”

154

American war correspondents at the French front in
Serbia

160

Headquarters of the French commander in Gravec,
Serbia

170

After the retreat from Serbia | 176

The ruined village of Gerbéviller, destroyed after their
retreat by the Germans

190

“Through these woods ran a toy railroad” | 192
A first-line trench outside of Verdun | 200

A valley in Argonne showing a forest destroyed by
shells

208

War in the forest | 216

A poster inviting the proprietors of restaurants and
hotels and their guests to welcome the soldiers who
have permission to visit Paris, especially those
who come from the districts invaded by the Germans

228

All over France, on Christmas Day and the day after,
money was collected to send comforts and things
good to eat to the men at the front

232

A poster advertising the fund to bring from the trenches
“permissionaires,” those soldiers who obtain permission
to return home for six days

236

“Very interestin’. You ought to frame it” | 252
“They have women policemen now” | 262

WITH THE FRENCH
IN FRANCE AND SALONIKA

CHAPTER I

PRESIDENT POINCARÉ THANKS AMERICA

Paris, October, 1915.

While still six hundred miles from the French coast the passengers on the Chicago of the French line entered what was supposed to be the war zone.

In those same waters, just as though the reputation of the Bay of Biscay was not sufficiently scandalous, two ships of the line had been torpedoed.

So, in preparation for what the captain tactfully called an “accident,” we rehearsed abandoning ship.

It was like the fire-drills in our public schools. It seemed a most sensible precaution, and one that in times of peace, as well as of war, might with advantage be enforced on all passenger-ships.

In his proclamation Commandant Mace of the Chicago borrowed an idea from the New York Fire Department. It was the warning Commissioner Adamson prints on theatre programmes, and which casts a gloom over patrons of the drama by instructing them to look for the nearest fire-escape.

Each passenger on the Chicago was assigned to a life-boat. He was advised to find out how from any part of the ship at which he might be caught he could soonest reach it.

Women and children were to assemble on the boat deck by the boat to which they were assigned. After they had been lowered to the water, the men—who, meanwhile, were to be segregated on the deck below them—would descend by rope ladders.

Entrance to a boat was by ticket only. The tickets were six inches square and bore a number. If you lost your ticket you lost your life. Each of the more imaginative passengers insured his life by fastening the ticket to his clothes with a safety-pin.

Two days from land there was a full-dress rehearsal, and for the first time we met those with whom we were expected to put to sea in an open boat.

Apparently those in each boat were selected by lot. As one young doctor in the ambulance service put it: “The society in my boat is not at all congenial.”

The only other persons originally in my boat were Red Cross nurses of the Post unit and infants. In trampling upon them to safety I foresaw no difficulty.

But at the dress rehearsal the purser added six dark and dangerous-looking Spaniards. It developed later that by profession they were bull-fighters. Any man who is not afraid of a bull is entitled to respect. But being cast adrift with six did not appeal.

One could not help wondering what would happen if we ran out of provisions and the bull-fighters grew hungry. I tore up my ticket and planned to swim.

Some of the passengers took the rehearsal to heart, and, all night, fully dressed, especially as to boots, tramped the deck. As the promenade-deck is directly over the cabins, not only they did not sleep but neither did any one else.

The next day they began to see periscopes. For this they were not greatly to be blamed. The sea approach to Bordeaux is flagged with black buoys supporting iron masts that support the lights, and in the rain and fog they look very much like periscopes.

But after the passengers had been thrilled by the sight of twenty of them, they became so bored with false alarms that had a real submarine appeared they were in a mood to invite the captain on board and give him a drink.

While we still were anxiously keeping watch, a sail appeared upon the horizon. Even the strongest glasses could make nothing of it. A young, very young Frenchman ran to the bridge and called to the officers: “Gentlemen, will you please tell me what boat it is that I see?”

Had he asked the same question of an American captain while that officer was on the bridge, the captain would have turned his back. An English captain would have put him in irons.

But the French captain called down to him: “She is pilot-boat No. 28. The pilot’s name is Jean Baptiste. He has a wife and four children in Bordeaux, and others in Brest and Havre. He is fifty years old and has a red nose and a wart on his chin. Is there anything else you would like to know?”

At daybreak, as the ship swept up the Gironde to Bordeaux, we had our first view of the enemy.

We had passed the vineyards and those châteaux the names of which every wine-card in every part of the world helps to keep famous and familiar, and had reached the outskirts of the city. Here the banks are close together, so close that one almost can hail those on shore; but there was a heavy rain and the mist played tricks.

When I saw a man in a black overcoat with the brass buttons wider apart across the chest than at the belt line, like those of our traffic police in summer-time, I thought it was a trick of the mist. Because the uniform that, by a nice adjustment of buttons, tries to broaden the shoulders and decrease the waist, is not being worn much in France. Not if a French sharpshooter sees it first.

But the man in the overcoat was not carrying a rifle on his shoulder. He was carrying a bag of cement, and from the hull of the barge others appeared, each with a bag upon his shoulder. There was no mistaking them. Nor their little round caps, high boots, and field uniforms of gray-green.

It was strange that the first persons we should see since we left the wharf at the foot of Fifteenth Street, North River, the first we should see in France, should not be French people, but German soldiers.

Bordeaux had the good taste to burn down when the architect who designed the Place de la Concorde, in Paris, and the buildings facing it was still alive; and after his designs, or those of his pupils, Bordeaux was rebuilt. So wherever you look you see the best in what is old and the smartest in what is modern.

Certainly when to that city President Poincaré and his cabinet moved the government, they gave it a resting-place that was both dignified and charming. To walk the streets and wharfs is a continual delight. One is never bored. It is like reading a book in which there are no dull pages.

Everywhere are the splendid buildings of Louis XV, statues, parks, monuments, churches, great arches that once were the outer gates, and many miles of quays redolent, not of the sea, but of the wine to which the city gives her name.

But to-day to walk the streets of Bordeaux saddens as well as delights. There are so many wounded. There are so many women and children all in black. It is a relief when you learn that the wounded are from different parts of France, that they have been sent to Bordeaux to recuperate and are greatly in excess of the proportion of wounded you would find in other cities.

But the women and children in black are not convalescents. Their wounds heal slowly, or not at all.

At the wharfs a white ship with gigantic American flags painted on her sides and with an American flag at the stern was unloading horses. They were for the French artillery and cavalry, but they were so glad to be free of the ship that their future state did not distress them.

Instead, they kicked joyously, scattering the sentries, who were jet-black Turcos. As one of them would run from a plunging horse, the others laughed at him with that contagious laugh of the darky that is the same all the world over, whether he hails from Mobile or Tangiers, and he would return sheepishly, with eyes rolling, protesting the horse was a “boche.”

Officers, who looked as though in times of peace they might be gentlemen jockeys, were receiving the remounts and identifying the brands on the hoof and shoulder that had been made by their agents in America.

If the veterinary passed the horse, he was again marked, this time with regimental numbers, on the hoof with a branding-iron, and on the flanks with white paint. In ten days he will be given a set of shoes, and in a month he will be under fire.

Colonel Count René de Montjou, who has been a year in America buying remounts, and who returned on the Chicago, discovered that one of the horses was a “substitut,” and a very bad “substitut” he was. His teeth had been filed, but the French officers saw that he was all of eighteen years old.

The young American who, in the interests of the contractor, was checking off the horses, refused to be shocked. Out of the corner of his thin lips he whispered confidentially:

“Suppose he is a ringer,” he protested; “suppose he is eighteen years old, what’s the use of their making a holler? What’s it matter how old he is, if all they’re going to do with him is to get him shot?”

That night at the station, as we waited for the express to Paris, many recruits were starting for the front. There seemed to be thousands of them, all new; new sky-blue uniforms, new soup-tureen helmets, new shoes.

They were splendidly young and vigorous looking, and to the tale that France now is forced to call out only old men and boys they gave the lie. With many of them, to say farewell, came friends and family. There was one group that was all comedy, a handsome young man under thirty, his mother and a young girl who might have been his wife or sister.

They had brought him food for the journey; chocolate, a long loaf, tins of sardines, a bottle of wine; and the fun was in trying to find any pocket, bag, or haversack not already filled. They were all laughing, the little, fat mother rather mechanically, when the whistle blew.

It was one of those shrill, long-drawn whistles without which in Europe no train can start. It had a peevish, infantile sound, like the squeak of a nursery toy. But it was as ominous as though some one had fired a siege-gun.

The soldiers raced for the cars, and the one in front of me, suddenly grown grave, stooped and kissed the fat, little mother.

She was still laughing; but at his embrace and at the meaning of it, at the thought that the son, who to her was always a baby, might never again embrace her, she tore herself from him sobbing and fled—fled blindly as though to escape from her grief.

Other women, their eyes filled with sudden tears, made way, and with their fingers pressed to their lips turned to watch her.

The young soldier kissed the wife, or sister, or sweetheart, or whatever she was, sketchily on one ear and shoved her after the fleeing figure.

“Guardez mama!” he said.

It is the tragedy that will never grow less, and never grow old.

One who left Paris in October, 1914, and returned in October, 1915, finds her calm, confident; her social temperature only a little below normal.

A year ago the gray-green tidal wave of the German armies that threatened to engulf Paris had just been checked. With the thunder of their advance Paris was still shaken. The withdrawal of men to the front, and of women and children to Bordeaux and the coast, had left the city uninhabited. The streets were as deserted as the Atlantic City board walk in January. For miles one moved between closed shops. Along the Aisne the lines had not been dug in, and hourly from the front ambulances, carrying the wounded and French and British officers unwashed from the trenches, in mud-covered, bullet-scarred cars, raced down the echoing boulevards. In the few restaurants open, you met men who that morning had left the firing-line, and who after déjeuner, and the purchase of soap, cigarettes, and underclothes, by sunset would be back on the job. In those days Paris was inside the “fire-lines.” War was in the air; you smelled it, saw it, heard it.

To-day a man from Mars visiting Paris might remain here a week, and not know that this country is waging the greatest war in history. When you walk the crowded streets it is impossible to believe that within forty miles of you millions of men are facing each other in a death grip. This is so, first, because a great wall of silence has been built between Paris and the front, and, second, because the spirit of France is too alive, too resilient, occupied with too many interests, to allow any one thing, even war, to obsess it. The people of France have accepted the war as they accept the rigors of winter. They may not like the sleet and snow of winter, but they are not going to let the winter beat them. In consequence, the shop windows are again dressed in their best, the kiosks announce comedies, revues, operas; in the gardens of the Luxembourg the beds are brilliant with autumn flowers, and the old gentlemen have resumed their games of croquet, the Champs-Élysées swarms with baby-carriages, and at the aperitif hour on the sidewalks there are no empty chairs. At many of the restaurants it is impossible to obtain a table.

It is not the Paris of the days before the war. It is not “gay Paris.” But it is a Paris going about her “business as usual.” This spirit of the people awakens only the most sincere admiration. It shows great calmness, great courage, and a confidence that, for the enemy of France, must be disquieting. Work for the wounded and for the families of those killed in action and who have been left without support continues. Only now, after a year of bitter experience, it is no longer hysterical. It has been systematized, made more efficient. It is no longer the work of amateurs, but of those who by daily practise have become experts.

In Paris the signs of war are not nearly as much in evidence as the activities of peace. There are many soldiers; but, in Paris, you always saw soldiers. The only difference is that now they wear bandages, or advance on crutches. And, as opposed to these evidences of the great conflict going on only forty miles distant, are the flower markets around the Madeleine, the crowds of women in front of the jewels, furs, and manteaux in the Rue de la Paix.

It is not that France is indifferent to the war. But that she has faith in her armies, in her generals. She can afford to wait. She drove the enemy from Paris; she is teaching French in Alsace; in time, when Joffre is ready, she will drive the enemy across her borders. In her faith in Joffre, she opens her shops, markets, schools, theatres. It is not callousness she shows, but that courage and confidence that are the forerunners of success.

But the year of war has brought certain changes. The search-lights have disappeared. It was found that to the enemy in the air they were less of a menace than a guide. So the great shafts of light that with majesty used to sweep the skies or cut a path into the clouds have disappeared. And nearly all other lights have disappeared. Those who drive motor-cars claim the pedestrians are careless; the pedestrians protest that the drivers of motor-cars are reckless. In any case, to cross a street at night is an adventure.

From a photograph by Underwood and Underwood.
President Poincaré on a visit to the front.

Something else that has disappeared is the British soldier. A year ago he swarmed, now he is almost entirely absent. Outside of the hospital corps, a British officer in Paris is an object of interest. In their place are many Belgians, almost too many Belgians. Their new khaki uniforms are unsoiled. Unlike the French soldiers you see, few are wounded. The answer probably is that as they cannot return to their own country, they must make their home in that of their ally. And the front they defend so valiantly is not so extended that there is room for all. Meanwhile, as they wait for their turn in the trenches, they fill the boulevards and cafés.

This is not true of the French officers. The few you see are convalescents, or on leave. It is not as it was last October, when Paris was part of the war zone. Up to a few days ago, until after seven in the evening, when the work of the day was supposed to be finished, an officer was not permitted to sit idle in a café. And now when you see one you may be sure he is recovering from a wound, or is on the General Staff, and for a few hours has been released from duty.

Reproduction of placard warning France against spies.

It is very different from a year ago when every officer was fresh from the trenches—and, fresh is not quite the word, either—and he would talk freely to an eager, sympathetic group of the battle of the night before. Now the wall of silence stretches around Paris. By posters it is even enforced upon you. Before the late minister of war gave up his portfolio, by placards he warned all when in public places to be careful of what they said. “Taisez-vous! Méfiez-vous. Les oreilles ennemies vous écoutent.” “Be silent. Be distrustful. The ears of the enemies are listening.” This warning against spies was placed in tramways, railroad-trains, cafés. A cartoonist refused to take the good advice seriously. His picture shows one of the women conductors in a street-car asking a passenger where he is going. The passenger points to the warning. “Silence,” he says, “some one may be listening.”

There are other changes. A year ago gold was king. To imagine any time or place when it is not is difficult. But to-day an American twenty-dollar bill gives you a higher rate of exchange than an American gold double-eagle. A thousand dollars in bills in Paris is worth thirty dollars more to you than a thousand dollars in gold. And to carry it does not make you think you are concealing a forty-five Colt. The decrease in value is due to the fact that you cannot take gold out of the country. That is true of every country in Europe, and of any kind of gold. At the border it is taken from you and in exchange you must accept bills. So, any one in Paris, wishing to travel, had best turn over his gold to the Bank of France. He will receive not only a good rate of exchange but also an engraved certificate testifying that he has contributed to the national defense.

Another curious vagary of the war that obtains now is the sudden disappearance of the copper sou or what ranks with our penny. Why it is scarce no one seems to know. The generally accepted explanation is that the copper has flown to the trenches where millions of men are dealing in small sums. But whatever the reason, the fact remains. In the stores you receive change in postage-stamps, and, on the underground railroad, where the people have refused to accept stamps in lieu of coppers, there are incipient riots. One night at a restaurant I was given change in stamps and tried to get even with the house by unloading them as his tip on the waiter. He protested eloquently. “Letters I never write,” he explained. “To write letters makes me ennui. And yet if I wrote for a hundred years I could not use all the stamps my patrons have forced upon me.”

These differences the year has brought about are not lasting, and are unimportant. The change that is important, and which threatens to last a long time, is the difference in the sentiment of the French people toward Americans.

Before the war we were not unduly flattering ourselves if we said the attitude of the French toward the United States was friendly. There were reasons why they should regard us at least with tolerance. We were very good customers. From different parts of France we imported wines and silks. In Paris we spent, some of us spent, millions on jewels and clothes. In automobiles and on Cook’s tours every summer Americans scattered money from Brittany to Marseilles. They were the natural prey of Parisian hotel-keepers, restaurants, milliners, and dressmakers. We were a sister republic, the two countries swapped statues of their great men—we had not forgotten Lafayette, France honored Paul Jones. A year ago, in the comic papers, between John Bull and Uncle Sam, it was not Uncle Sam who got the worst of it. Then the war came and with it, in the feeling toward ourselves, a complete change. A year ago we were almost one of the Allies, much more popular than Italians, more sympathetic than the English. To-day we are regarded, not with hostility, but with amazed contempt.

This most regrettable change was first brought about by President Wilson’s letter calling upon Americans to be neutral. The French could not understand it. From their point of view it was an unnecessary affront. It was as unexpected as the cut direct from a friend; as unwarranted, as gratuitous, as a slap in the face. The millions that poured in from America for the Red Cross, the services of Americans in hospitals, were accepted as the offerings of individuals, not as representing the sentiment of the American people. That sentiment, the French still insist in believing, found expression in the letter that called upon all Americans to be neutral, something which to a Frenchman is neither fish, fowl, nor good red herring.

We lost caste in other ways. We supplied France with munitions, but, as a purchasing agent for the government put it to me, we are not losing much money by it, and, until the French Government protested, and the protest was printed all over the United States, some of our manufacturers supplied articles that were worthless. Doctor Charles W. Cowan, an American who in winter lives in Paris and Nice and spends his summers in America, showed me the half section of a shoe of which he said sixty thousand pairs had been ordered, until it was found that part of each shoe was made of brown paper. Certainly part of the shoe he showed me was made of brown paper.

When an entire people, men, women, and children, are fighting for their national existence, and their individual home and life, to have such evidences of Yankee smartness foisted upon them does not make for friendship. It inspired contempt. This unpleasant sentiment was strengthened by our failure to demand satisfaction for the lives lost on the Lusitania, while at the same time our losses in dollars seemed to distress us so deeply. But more harmful and more unfortunate than any other word or act was the statement of President Wilson that we might be “too proud to fight.” This struck the French not only as proclaiming us a cowardly nation, but as assuming superiority over the man who not only would fight, but who was fighting. And as at that moment several million Frenchmen were fighting, it was natural that they should laugh. Every nation in Europe laughed. In an Italian cartoon Uncle Sam is shown, hat in hand, offering a “note” to the German Emperor and in another shooting Haitians.

The legend reads: “He is too proud to fight the Kaiser, but not too proud to kill niggers.” In London, “Too Proud to Fight” is in the music-halls the line surest of raising a laugh, and the recruiting-stations show pictures of fat men, effeminates, degenerates, and cripples labelled: “These Are Too Proud to Fight! Are You?”

The change of sentiment toward us in France is shown in many ways. To retail them would not help matters. But as one hears of them from Americans who, since the war began, have been working in the hospitals, on distributing committees, in the banking-houses, and as diplomats and consuls, that our country is most unpopular is only too evident.

It is the greater pity because the real feeling of our people toward France in this war is one of enthusiastic admiration. Of all the Allies, Americans probably hold for the French the most hearty good-feeling, affection, and good-will. Through the government at Washington this feeling has been ill-expressed, if not entirely concealed. It is unfortunate. Mr. Kipling, whose manners are his own, has given as a toast: “Damn all neutrals.” The French are more polite. But when this war is over we may find that in twelve months we have lost friends of many years. That over all the world we have lost them.

That does not mean that for the help Americans have given France and her Allies, the Allies are ungrateful. That the French certainly are not ungrateful I was given assurance by no less an authority than the President of the republic. His assurance was conveyed to the American people in a message of thanks. It is also a message of good-will.

It recognizes and appreciates the sympathy shown to France in her present fight for liberty and civilization by those Americans who remember that when we fought for our liberty France was not neutral, but sent us Lafayette and Rochambeau, ships and soldiers. It is a message of thanks from President Poincaré to those Americans who found it less easy to be neutral than to be grateful.

It was my good fortune to be presented by Paul Benazet, a close personal friend of the President, and both an officer of the army and a deputy. As a deputy before the war he helped largely in passing the bills that called for three years of military service and for heavier artillery. As an officer he won the Legion of Honor and the Cross of War. Besides being a brilliant writer, M. Benazet is also an accomplished linguist, and as President Poincaré does not express himself readily in English, and as my French is better suited to restaurants than palaces, he acted as our interpreter.

The arrival of important visitors, M. Cambon, the former ambassador to the United States, and the new prime minister, M. Briand, delayed our reception, and while we waited we were escorted through the official rooms of the Élysée. It was a half-hour of most fascinating interest, not only because the vast salons were filled with what, in art, is most beautiful, but because we were brought back to the ghosts of other days.

What we actually saw were the best of Gobelin tapestries, the best of Sèvres china, the best of mural paintings. We walked on silken carpets, bearing the fleur-de-lis. We sat on sofas of embroidery as fine as an engraving and as rich in color as a painting by Morland. The bright autumn sunshine illuminated the ormulu brass of the First Empire, gilt eagles, crowns, cupids, and the only letter of the alphabet that always suggests one name.

Those which we brought back to the rooms in which once they lived, planned, and plotted were the ghosts of Mme. de Pompadour, Louis XVI, Murat, Napoleon I, and Napoleon III. We could imagine the first Emperor standing with his hands clasped behind him in front of the marble fireplace, his figure reflected in the full-length mirrors, his features in gold looking down at him from the walls and ceilings. We intruded even into the little room opening on the rose garden, where for hours he would pace the floor.

But, perhaps, what was of greatest interest was the remarkable adjustment of these surroundings, royal and imperial, to the simple and dignified needs of a republic.

France is a military nation and at war, but the evidences of militarism were entirely absent. Our own White House is not more empty of uniforms. One got the impression that he was entering the house of a private gentleman—a gentleman of great wealth and taste.

We passed at last through four rooms, in which were the secretaries of the President, and as we passed, the majordomo spoke our names, and the different gentlemen half rose and bowed. It was all so quiet, so calm, so free from telephones and typewriters, that you felt that, by mistake, you had been ushered into the library of a student or a Cabinet minister.

Then in the fourth room was the President. Outside this room we were presented to M. Sainsere, the personal secretary of the President, and without further ceremony M. Benazet opened the door, and in the smallest room of all, introduced me to M. Poincaré. His portraits have rendered his features familiar, but they do not give sufficiently the impression I received of kindness, firmness, and dignity.

He returned to his desk and spoke in a low voice of peculiar charm. As though the better to have the stranger understand, he spoke slowly, selecting his words.

“I have a great admiration,” he said, “for the effectiveness with which Americans have shown their sympathy with France. They have sent doctors, nurses, and volunteers to drive the ambulances to carry the wounded. I have visited the hospitals at Neuilly and other places; they are admirable.

“The one at Juilly was formerly a college, but with ingenuity they have converted it into a hospital, most complete and most valuable. The American colony in Paris has shown a friendship we greatly appreciate. Your ambassador I have met several times. Our relations are most pleasant, most sympathetic.”

I asked if I might repeat what he had said. The President gave his assent, and, after a pause, as though, now that he knew he would be quoted, he wished to emphasize what he had said, continued:

“My wife, who distributes articles of comfort, sent to the wounded and to families in need, tells me that Americans are among the most generous contributors. Many articles come anonymously—money, clothing, and comforts for the soldiers, and layettes for their babies. We recognize and appreciate the manner in which, while preserving a strict neutrality, your country men and women have shown their sympathy.”

The President rose and on leaving I presented a letter from ex-President Roosevelt. It was explained that this was the second letter for him I had had from Colonel Roosevelt, but that when I was a prisoner with the Germans, I had judged it wise to swallow the first one, and that I had requested Colonel Roosevelt to write the second one on thin paper. The President smiled and passed the letter critically between his thumb and forefinger.

“This one,” he said, “is quite digestible.”

I carried away the impression of a kind and distinguished gentleman, who, in the midst of the greatest crisis in history, could find time to dictate a message of thanks to those he knew were neutrals only in name.

CHAPTER II

THE MUD TRENCHES OF ARTOIS

Amiens, October, 1915.

In England it is “business as usual”; in France it is “war as usual.” The English tradesman can assure his customers that with such an “old-established” firm as his not even war can interfere; but France, with war actually on her soil, has gone further and has accepted war as part of her daily life. She has not merely swallowed, but digested it. It is like the line in Pinero’s play, where one woman says she cannot go to the opera because of her neuralgia. Her friend replies: “You can have neuralgia in my box as well as anywhere else.” In that spirit France has accepted the war. The neuralgia may hurt, but she does not take to her bed and groan. Instead, she smiles cheerfully and goes about her duties—even sits in her box at the opera.

As we approached the front this was even more evident than in Paris, where signs of war are all but invisible. Outside of Amiens we met a regiment of Scots with the pipes playing and the cold rain splashing their bare legs. To watch them we leaned from the car window. That we should be interested seemed to surprise them; no one else was interested. A year ago when they passed it was “Roses, roses, all the way”—or at least cigarettes, chocolate, and red wine. Now, in spite of the skirling bagpipes, no one turned his head; to the French they had become a part of the landscape.

A year ago the roads at every two hundred yards were barricaded. It was a continual hurdle-race. Now, except at distances of four or five miles, the barricades have disappeared. One side of the road is reserved for troops, the other for vehicles. The vehicles we met—for the most part two-wheeled hooded carts—no longer contained peasants flying from dismantled villages. Instead, they were on the way to market with garden-truck, pigs, and calves. On the drivers’ seat the peasant whistled cheerily and cracked his whip. The long lines of London buses, that last year advertised soap, mustard, milk, and music-halls, and which now are a decorous gray; the ambulances; the great guns drawn by motor-trucks with caterpillar wheels, no longer surprise him.

The English ally has ceased to be a stranger, and in the towns and villages of Artois is a “paying guest.” It is for him the shop-windows are dressed. The names of the towns are Flemish; the names of the streets are Flemish; the names over the shops are Flemish; but the goods for sale are marmalade, tinned kippers, The Daily Mail, and the Pink ’Un.

“Is it your people who are selling these things?” I asked an English officer.

The question amused him.

“Our people won’t think of it until the war is over,” he said, “but the French are different.

“They are capable, adaptable, and obliging. If one of our men asks these shopkeepers for anything they haven’t got they don’t say, ‘We don’t keep it’; they get him to write down what it is he wants, and send for it.”

It is the better way. The Frenchman does not say, “War is ruining me”; he makes the war help to support him, and at the same time gives comfort to his ally.

A year ago in the villages the old men stood in disconsolate groups with their hands in their pockets. Now they are briskly at work. They are working in the fields, in the vegetable-gardens, helping the Territorials mend the roads. On every side of them were the evidences of war—in the fields abandoned trenches, barbed-wire entanglements, shelters for fodder and ammunition, hangars for repairing aeroplanes, vast slaughter-houses, parks of artillery; and on the roads endless lines of lorries, hooded ambulances, marching soldiers.

To us those were of vivid interest, but to the French peasant they are in the routine of his existence. After a year of it war neither greatly distresses nor greatly interests him. With one hand he fights; with the other he ploughs.

We had made a bet as to which would see the first sign of real war, and the sign of it that won and that gave general satisfaction, even to the man who lost, was a group of German soldiers sweeping the streets of St. Pol. They were guarded only by one of their own number, and they looked fat, sleek, and contented. When, on our return from the trenches, we saw them again, we knew they were to be greatly envied. Between standing waist-high in mud in a trench and being drowned in it, buried in it, blown up or asphyxiated, the post of crossing-sweeper becomes a sinecure.

The next sign of war was more thrilling. It was a race between a French aeroplane and German shrapnel. To us the bursting shells looked like five little cotton balls. Since this war began shrapnel, when it bursts, has invariably been compared to balls of cotton, and as that is exactly what it looks like, it is again so described. The balls of cotton did not seem to rise from the earth, but to pop suddenly out of the sky.

A moment later five more cotton balls popped out of the sky. They were much nearer the aeroplane. Others followed, leaping after it like the spray of succeeding waves. But the aeroplane steadily and swiftly conveyed itself out of range and out of sight.

To say where the trenches began and where they ended is difficult. We were passing through land that had been retrieved from the enemy. It has been fought for inch by inch, foot by foot. To win it back thousands of lives had been thrown like dice upon a table. There were vast stretches of mud, of fields once cultivated, but now scarred with pits, trenches, rusty barbed-wires. The roads were rivers of clay. They were lined with dugouts, cellars, and caves. These burrows in the earth were supported by beams, and suggested a shaft in a disused mine. They looked like the tunnels to coal-pits. They were inhabited by a race of French unknown to the boulevards—men, bearded, deeply tanned, and caked with clay. Their uniforms were like those of football players on a rainy day at the end of the first half. We were entering what had been the village of Ablain, and before us rose the famous heights of Mont de Lorette. To scale these heights seemed a feat as incredible as scaling our Palisades or the sheer cliff of Gibraltar. But they had been scaled, and the side toward us was crawling with French soldiers, climbing to the trenches, descending from the trenches, carrying to the trenches food, ammunition, and fuel for the fires.

A cold rain was falling and had turned the streets of Ablain and all the roads to it into swamps. In these were islands of bricks and lakes of water of the solidity and color of melted chocolate. Whatever you touched clung to you. It was a land of mud, clay, liquid earth. A cold wind whipped the rain against your face and chilled you to the bone. All you saw depressed and chilled your spirit.

To the “poilus,” who, in the face of such desolation, joked and laughed with the civilians, you felt you owed an apology, for your automobile was waiting to whisk you back to a warm dinner, electric lights, red wine, and a dry bed. The men we met were cavemen. When night came they would sleep in a hole in the hill fit for a mud-turtle or a muskrat.

They moved in streets of clay two feet across. They were as far removed from civilization, as in the past they have known it, as though they had been cast adrift upon an island of liquid mud. Wherever they looked was desolation, ruins, and broken walls, jumbles of bricks, tunnels in mud, caves in mud, graves in mud.

In other wars the “front” was something almost human. It advanced, wavered, and withdrew. At a single bugle-call it was electrified. It remained in no fixed place, but, like a wave, enveloped a hill, or with galloping horses and cheering men overwhelmed a valley. In comparison, this trench work did not suggest war. Rather it reminded you of a mining-camp during the spring freshet, and for all the attention the cavemen paid to them, the reports of their “seventy-fives” and the “Jack Johnsons” of the enemy bursting on Mont de Lorette might have come from miners blasting rock.

What we saw of these cave-dwellers was only a few feet of a moat that for three hundred miles like a miniature canal is cut across France. Where we stood we could see of the three hundred miles only mud walls, so close that we brushed one with each elbow. By looking up we could see the black, leaden sky. Ahead of us the trench twisted, and an arrow pointed to a first-aid dressing-station. Behind us was the winding entrance to a shelter deep in the earth, reinforced by cement and corrugated iron, and lit by a candle.

From a trench that was all we could see of the war, and that is all millions of fighting men see of it—wet walls of clay as narrow as a grave, an arrow pointing to a hospital, earthen steps leading to a shelter from sudden death, and overhead the rain-soaked sky and perhaps a great bird at which the enemy is shooting snowballs.

In northern France there are many buried towns and villages. They are buried in their own cellars. Arras is still uninterred. She is the corpse of a city that waits for burial, and day by day the German shells are trying to dig her grave. They were at it yesterday when we visited Arras, and this morning they will be hammering her again.

Seven centuries before this war Arras was famous for her tapestries, so famous that in England a piece of tapestry was called an arras. Now she has given her name to a battle—to different battles—that began with the great bombardment of October a year ago, and each day since then have continued. On one single day, June 26, the Germans threw into the city shells in all sizes, from three to sixteen inches, and to the number of ten thousand. That was about one for each house.

This bombardment drove 2,700 inhabitants into exile, of whom 1,200 have now returned. The army feeds them, and in response they have opened shops that the shells have not already opened, and supply the soldiers with tobacco, post-cards, and from those gardens not hidden under bricks and cement, fruit and vegetables. In the deserted city these civilians form an inconspicuous element. You can walk for great distances and see none of them. When they do appear in the empty streets they are like ghosts. Every day the shells change one or two of them into real ghosts. But the others still stay on. With the dogs nosing among the fallen bricks, and the pigeons on the ruins of the cathedral, they know no other home.

As we entered Arras the silence fell like a sudden change of temperature. It was actual and menacing. Every corner seemed to threaten an ambush. Our voices echoed so loudly that unconsciously we spoke in lower tones. The tap of the captain’s walking-stick resounded like the blow of a hammer. The emptiness and stillness was like that of a vast cemetery, and the grass that had grown through the paving-stones deadened the sound of our steps. This silence was broken only by the barking of the French seventy-fives, in parts of the city hidden to us, the boom of the German guns in answer, and from overhead by the aeroplanes. In the absolute stillness the whirl of their engines came to us with the steady vibrations of a loom.

In the streets were shell holes that had been recently filled and covered over with bricks and fresh earth. It was like walking upon newly made graves. On either side of us were gaping cellars into which the houses had dumped themselves or, still balancing above them, were walls prettily papered, hung with engravings, paintings, mirrors, quite intact. These walls were roofless and defenseless against the rain and snow. Other houses were like those toy ones built for children, with the front open. They showed a bed with pillows, shelves supporting candles, books, a washstand with basin and pitcher, a piano, and a reading-lamp.

In one house four stories had been torn away, leaving only the attic sheltered by the peaked roof. To that height no one could climb, and exposed to view were the collection of trunks and boxes familiar to all attics. As a warning against rough handling, one of these, a woman’s hat-box, had been marked “Fragile.” Secure and serene, it smiled down sixty feet upon the mass of iron and bricks it had survived.

Of another house the roof only remained; from under it the rest of the building had been shot away. It was as though after a soldier had been blown to pieces, his helmet still hung suspended in mid-air.

In other streets it was the front that was intact, but when our captain opened the street door we faced a cellar. Nothing beside remained. Or else we stepped upon creaky floors that sagged, through rooms swept by the iron brooms into vast dust heaps. From these protruded wounded furniture—the leg of a table, the broken arm of a chair, a headless statue.

From a photograph by R. H. Davis.
“Of another house the roof only remained, from under it the rest of the building had been shot away.”

From the débris we picked the many little heirlooms, souvenirs, possessions that make a home. Photographs with written inscriptions, post-cards bearing good wishes, ornaments for the centre-table, ornaments for the person, images of the church, all crushed, broken, and stained. Many shop-windows were still dressed invitingly as they were when the shell burst, but beyond the goods exposed for sale was only a deep hole.

The pure deviltry of a shell no one can explain. Nor why it spares a looking-glass and wrecks a wall that has been standing since the twelfth century.

In the cathedral the stone roof weighing hundreds of tons had fallen, and directly beneath where it had been hung an enormous glass chandelier untouched. A shell loves a shining mark. To what is most beautiful it is most cruel. The Hôtel de Ville, which was counted among the most presentable in the north of France, that once rose in seven arches in the style of the Renaissance, the shells marked for their own.

And all the houses approaching it from the German side they destroyed. Not even those who once lived in them could say where they stood. There is left only a mess of bricks, tiles, and plaster. They suggest the homes of human beings as little as does a brickyard.

We visited what had been the headquarters of General de Wignacourt. They were in the garden of a house that opened upon one of the principal thoroughfares, and the floor level was twelve feet under the level of the flower-beds. To this subterranean office there are two entrances, one through the cellar of the house, the other down steps from the garden. The steps were beams the size of a railroad-tie. Had they not been whitewashed they would look like the shaft leading to a coal-pit.

A soldier who was an artist in plaster had decorated the entrance to the shaft with an ornamental façade worthy of any public building. Here, secure from the falling walls and explosive shells, the general by telephone directed his attack. The place was as dry, as clean, and as compact as the admiral’s quarters on a ship of war. The switchboard connected with batteries buried from sight in every part of the unburied city, and in an adjoining room a soldier cook was preparing a most appetizing luncheon.

From a photograph by R. H. Davis.

The stone roof over this glass chandelier in the Arras cathedral was destroyed by shells, and the chandelier not touched.

Above us was three yards of cement, rafters, and earth, and crowning them grass and flowers. When the owner of the house returns he will find this addition to his residence an excellent refuge from burglars or creditors.

Personally we were glad to escape into the open street. Between being hit by a shell and buried under twelve feet of cement the choice was difficult.

We lunched in a charming house, where the table was spread in the front hall. The bed of the officer temporarily occupying the house also was spread in the hall, and we were curious to know, but too proud to ask, why he limited himself to such narrow quarters. Our captain rewarded our reticence. He threw back the heavy curtain that concealed the rest of the house, and showed us that there was no house. It had been deftly removed by a shell.

The owner of the house had run away, but before he fled, fearing the Germans might enter Arras and take his money, he had withdrawn it and hidden it in his garden. The money amounted to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. He placed it in a lead box, soldered up the opening, and buried the box under a tree. Then he went away and carelessly forgot which tree.

During a lull in the bombardment, he returned, and until two o’clock in the morning dug frantically for his buried treasure. The soldier who guarded the house told me the difference in the way the soldiers dig a trench and the way our absent host dug for his lost money was greatly marked. I found the leaden box cast aside in the dog-kennel. It was the exact size of a suitcase. As none of us knows when he may not have to bury a quarter of a million dollars hurriedly, it is a fact worth remembering. Any ordinary suitcase will do. The soldier and I examined the leaden box carefully. But the owner had not overlooked anything.

When we reached the ruins of the cathedral, we did not need darkness and falling rain to depress us further, or to make the scene more desolate. One lacking in all reverence would have been shocked. The wanton waste, the senseless brutality in such destruction would have moved a statue. Walls as thick as the ramparts of a fort had been blown into powdered chalk. There were great breaches in them through which you could drive an omnibus. In one place the stone roof and supporting arches had fallen, and upon the floor, where for two hundred years the people of Arras had knelt in prayer, was a mighty barricade of stone blocks, twisted candelabra, broken praying-chairs, torn vestments, shattered glass. Exposed to the elements, the chapels were open to the sky. The rain fell on sacred emblems of the Holy Family, the saints, and apostles. Upon the altars the dust of the crushed walls lay inches deep.

The destruction is too great for present repair. They can fill the excavations in the streets and board up the shattered show-windows, but the cathedral is too vast, the destruction of it too nearly complete. The sacrilege must stand. Until the war is over, until Arras is free from shells, the ruins must remain uncared for and uncovered. And the cathedral, by those who once came to it for help and guidance, will be deserted.

But not entirely deserted. The pigeons that built their nests under the eaves have descended to the empty chapels, and in swift, graceful circles sweep under the ruined arches. Above the dripping of the rain, and the surly booming of the cannon, their contented cooing was the only sound of comfort. It seemed to hold out a promise for the better days of peace.

CHAPTER III

THE ZIGZAG FRONT OF CHAMPAGNE

Paris, October, 1915.

In Artois we were “personally conducted.” In a way, we were the guests of the war department; in any case, we tried to behave as such. It was no more proper for us to see what we were not invited to see than to bring our own wine to another man’s dinner.

In Champagne it was entirely different. I was alone with a car and a chauffeur and a blue slip of paper. It permitted me to remain in a “certain place” inside the war zone for ten days. I did not believe it was true. I recalled other trips over the same roads a year before which finally led to the Cherche-Midi prison, and each time I showed the blue slip to the gendarmes I shivered. But the gendarmes seemed satisfied, and as they permitted us to pass farther and farther into the forbidden land, the chauffeur began to treat me almost as an equal. And so, with as little incident as one taxis from Madison Square to Central Park, we motored from Paris into the sound of the guns.

At the “certain place” the general was absent in the trenches, but the chief of staff asked what I most wanted to see. It was as though the fairy godmother had given you one wish. I chose Rheims, and to spend the night there. The chief of staff waved a wand in the shape of a second piece of paper, and we were in Rheims. To a colonel we presented the two slips of paper, and, in turn, he asked what was wanted. A year before I had seen the cathedral when it was being bombarded, when it still was burning. I asked if I might revisit it.

“And after that?” said the colonel.

It was much too good to be real.

I would wake and find myself again in Cherche-Midi prison.

Outside, the sounds of the guns were now very close. They seemed to be just around the corner, on the roof of the next house.

“Of course, what I really want is to visit the first trench.”

It was like asking a Mason to reveal the mysteries of his order, a priest to tell the secrets of the confessional. The colonel commanded the presence of Lieutenant Blank. With alarm I awaited his coming. Did a military prison yawn, and was he to act as my escort? I had been too bold. I should have asked to see only the third trench.

At the order the colonel gave, Lieutenant Blank expressed surprise. But his colonel, with a shrug, as though ridding himself of all responsibility, showed the blue slip. It was a pantomime, with which by repetition, we became familiar. In turn each officer would express surprise; the other officer would shrug, point to the blue slip, and we would pass forward.

The cathedral did not long detain us. Outside, for protection, it was boarded up, packed tightly in sand-bags; inside, it had been swept of broken glass, and the paintings, tapestries, and the carved images on the altars had been removed. A professional sacristan spoke a set speech, telling me of things I had seen with my own eyes—of burning rafters that spared the Gobelin tapestries, of the priceless glass trampled underfoot, of the dead and wounded Germans lying in the straw that had given the floor the look of a barn. Now it is as empty of decoration as the Pennsylvania railroad-station in New York. It is a beautiful shell waiting for the day to come when the candles will be relit, when the incense will toss before the altar, and the gray walls glow again with the colors of tapestries and paintings. The windows only will not bloom as before. The glass destroyed by the Emperor’s shells, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men cannot restore.

The professional guide, who is already so professional that he is exchanging German cartridges for tips, supplied a morbid detail of impossible bad taste. Among the German wounded there was a major (I remember describing him a year ago as looking like a college professor) who, when the fire came, was one of these the priests could not save, and who was burned alive. Marks on the gray surface of a pillar against which he reclined and grease spots on the stones of the floor are supposed to be evidences of his end, a torture brought upon him by the shells of his own people. Mr. Kipling has written that there are many who “hope and pray these signs will be respected by our children’s children.” Mr. Kipling’s hope shows an imperfect conception of the purposes of a cathedral. It is a house dedicated to God, and on earth to peace and good-will among men. It is not erected to teach generations of little children to gloat over the fact that an enemy, even a German officer, was by accident burned alive.

Personally, I feel the sooner those who introduced “frightfulness” to France, Belgium, and the coasts of England are hunted down and destroyed the better. But the stone-mason should get to work, and remove those stains from the Rheims cathedral. Instead, for our children’s children, would not a tablet to Edith Cavell be better, or one to the French priest, Abbé Thinot, who carried the wounded Germans from the burning cathedral, and who later, while carrying French wounded from the field of battle, was himself hit three times, and of his wounds died?

I hinted to the lieutenant that the cathedral would remain for some time, but that the trenches would soon be ploughed into turnip-beds.

So, we moved toward the trenches. The officer commanding them lived in what he described as the deck of a battleship sunk underground. It was a happy simile. He had his conning-tower, in which, with a telescope through a slit in a steel plate, he could sweep the countryside. He had a fire-control station, executive offices, wardroom, cook’s galley, his own cabin, equipped with telephones, electric lights, and running water. There was a carpet on the floor, a gay coverlet on the four-poster bed, photographs on his dressing-table, and flowers. All of these were buried deep underground. A puzzling detail was a perfectly good brass lock and key on his door. I asked if it were to keep out shells or burglars. And he explained that the door with the lock in tact had been blown off its hinges in a house of which no part was now standing. He had borrowed it, as he had borrowed everything else in the subterranean war-ship, from the near-by ruins.

He was an extremely light-hearted and courteous host, but he frowned suspiciously when he asked if I knew a correspondent named Senator Albert Beveridge. I hastily repudiated Beveridge. I knew him not, I said, as a correspondent, but as a politician who possibly had high hopes of the German vote. “He dined with us,” said the colonel, “and then wrote against France.” I suggested it was at their own risk if they welcomed those who already had been with the Germans, and who had been received by the German Emperor. This is no war for neutrals.

Then began a walk of over a mile through an open drain. The walls were of chalk as hard as flint. Unlike the mud trenches in Artois, there were no slides to block the miniature canal. It was as firm and compact as a whitewashed stone cell. From the main drain on either side ran other drains, cul-de-sacs, cellars, trap-doors, and ambushes. Overhead hung balls of barbed-wire that, should the French troops withdraw, could be dropped and so block the trench behind them. If you raised your head they playfully snatched off your cap. It was like ducking under innumerable bridges of live wires.

The drain opened at last into a wrecked town. Its ruins were complete. It made Pompeii look like a furnished flat. The officer of the day joined us here, and to him the lieutenant resigned the post of guide. My new host wore a steel helmet, and at his belt dangled a mask against gas. He led us to the end of what had been a street, and which was now barricaded with huge timbers, steel doors, like those to a gambling house, intricate cat’s cradles of wire, and solid steel plates.

To go back seemed the only way open. But the officer in the steel cap dived through a slit in the iron girders, and as he disappeared, beckoned. I followed down a well that dropped straight into the very bowels of the earth. It was very dark, and only crosspieces of wood offered a slippery footing. Into the darkness, with hands pressed against the well, and with feet groping for the log steps, we tobogganed down, down, down. We turned into a tunnel, and, by the slant of the ground, knew we were now mounting. There was a square of sunshine, and we walked out, and into a graveyard. It was like a dark change in a theatre. The last scene had been the ruins of a town, a gate like those of the Middle Ages, studded with bolts, reinforced with steel plates, guarded by men-at-arms in steel casques, and then the dark change into a graveyard, with grass and growing flowers, gravel walks, and hedges.

The graves were old, the monuments and urns above them moss-covered, but one was quite new, and the cross above it said that it was the grave of a German aviator. As they passed it the French officers saluted. We entered a trench as straight as the letter Z. And at each twist and turn we were covered by an eye in a steel door. An attacking party advancing would have had as much room in which to dodge that eye as in a bath-tub. One man with his magazine rifle could have halted a dozen. And when in the newspapers you read that one man has captured twenty prisoners, he probably was looking at them through the peep-hole in one of those steel doors.

We zigzagged into a cellar, and below the threshold of some one’s front door. The trench led directly under it. The house into which the door had opened was destroyed; possibly those who once had entered by it also were destroyed, and it now swung in air with men crawling like rats below it, its half-doors banging and groaning; the wind, with ghostly fingers, opening them to no one, closing them on nothing. The trench wriggled through a garden, and we could see flung across the narrow strip of sky above us, the branch of an apple-tree, and with one shoulder brushed the severed roots of the same tree. Then the trench led outward, and we passed beneath railroad tracks, the ties reposing on air, and supported by, instead of supporting, the iron rails.

We had been moving between garden walls, cellar walls; sometimes hidden by ruins, sometimes diving like moles into tunnels. We remained on no one level, or for any time continued in any one direction. It was entirely fantastic, entirely unreal. It was like visiting a new race of beings, who turn day into night; who, like bats, molochs, and wolves, hide in caves and shun the sunlight.

By the ray of an electric torch we saw where these underground people store their food. Where, against siege, are great casks of water, dungeons packed with ammunition, more dungeons, more ammunition. We saw, always by the shifting, pointing finger of the electric torch, sleeping quarters underground, dressing stations for the wounded underground. In niches at every turn were gas-extinguishers. They were as many, as much as a matter of course, as fire-extinguishers in a modern hotel. They were exactly like those machines advertised in seed catalogues for spraying fruit-trees. They are worn on the back like a knapsack. Through a short rubber hose a fluid attacks and dissipates the poison gases.

The sun set, and we proceeded in the light of a full moon. It needed only this to give to our journey the unreality of a nightmare. Long since I had lost all sense of direction. It was not only a maze and labyrinth, but it held to no level. At times, concealed by walls of chalk, we walked erect, and then, like woodchucks, dived into earthen burrows. For a long distance we crawled, bending double through a tunnel. At intervals lamps, as yet unlit, protruded from either side, and to warn us of these from the darkness a voice would call, “attention à gauche,” “attention à droite.” The air grew foul and the pressure on the ear-drums like that of the subway under the North River. We came out and drew deep breaths as though we had been long under water.

We were in the first trench. It was, at places, from three hundred to forty yards distant from the Germans. No one spoke, or only in whispers. The moonlight turned the men at arms into ghosts. Their silence added to their unreality. I felt like Rip Van Winkle hemmed in by the goblin crew of Hendrik Hudson. From somewhere near us, above or below, to the right or left the “seventy-fives,” as though aroused by the moon, began like terriers to bark viciously. The officer in the steel casque paused to listen, fixed their position, and named them. How he knew where they were, how he knew where he was himself, was all part of the mystery. Rats, jet black in the moonlight, scurried across the open places, scrambled over our feet, ran boldly between them. We had scared them, perhaps, but not half so badly as they scared me.

We pushed on past sentinels, motionless, silent, fatefully awake. The moonlight had turned their blue uniforms white and flashed on their steel helmets. They were like men in armor, and so still that only when you brushed against them, cautiously as men change places in a canoe, did you feel they were alive. At times, one of them thinking something in the gardens of barb-wire had moved, would loosen his rifle, and there would be a flame and flare of red, and then again silence, the silence of the hunter stalking a wild beast, of the officer of the law, gun in hand, waiting for the breathing of the burglar to betray his presence.

The next morning I called to make my compliments to General Franchet d’Espéray. He was a splendid person—as alert as a steel lance. He demanded what I had seen.

“Nothing!” he protested. “You have seen nothing. When you return from Serbia, come to Champagne again and I myself will show you something of interest.”

I am curious to see what he calls “something of interest.”

“I wonder what’s happening in Buffalo?”

There promised to be a story for some one to write a year after the war. It would tell how quickly Champagne recovered from the invasion of the Germans. But one need not wait until after the war. The story can be written now.

We know that the enemy was thrown back across the Aisne.

We know that the enemy drove the French and English before him until at the Forest of Montmorency, the Hun was within ten and at Claye within fifteen miles of Paris.

But to-day, by any outward evidence, he would have a hard time to prove it. And that is not because when he advanced he was careful not to tramp on the grass or to pick the flowers. He did not obey even the warnings to automobilists: “Attention les enfants!”

On the contrary, as he came, he threw before him thousands of tons of steel and iron. Like a cyclone he uprooted trees, unroofed houses; like a tidal wave he excavated roads that had been built by the Romans, swept away walls, and broke the backs of stone bridges that for hundreds of years had held their own against swollen rivers.

General Franchet d’Espéray.
“He was a splendid person, as alert as a steel lance.”

A year ago I followed the German in his retreat from Claye through Meaux, Château Thierry to Soissons, where, on the east bank of the Aisne, I watched the French artillery shell his guns on the hills opposite. The French then were hot upon his heels. In one place they had not had time to remove even their own dead, and to avoid the bodies in the open road the car had to twist and turn.

Yesterday, coming back to Paris from the trenches that guard Rheims, I covered the same road. But it was not the same. It seemed that I must surely have lost the way. Only the iron signs at the crossroads, and the map used the year before and scarred with my own pencil marks, were evidences that again I was following mile by mile and foot by foot the route of that swift advance and riotous retreat.

A year before the signs of the retreat were the road itself, the houses facing it, and a devastated countryside. You knew then, that, of these signs, some would at once be effaced. They had to be effaced, for they were polluting the air. But until the villagers returned to their homes, or to what remained of their homes, the bloated carcasses of horses blocked the road, the bodies of German soldiers, in death mercifully unlike anything human and as unreal as fallen scarecrows, sprawled in the fields.

But while you knew these signs of the German raid would be removed, other signs were scars that you thought would be long in healing. These were the stone arches and buttresses of the bridges, dynamited and dumped into the mud of the Marne and Ourcq, châteaux and villas with the roof torn away as deftly as with one hand you could rip off the lid of a cigar-box, or with a wall blown in, or out, in either case exposing indecently the owner’s bedroom, his wife’s boudoir, the children’s nursery.

Other signs of the German were villages with houses wrecked, the humble shops sacked, garden walls levelled, fields of beets and turnips uprooted by his shells, or where he had snatched sleep in the trampled mud, strewn with demolished haystacks, vast trees split clean in half as though by lightning, or with nothing remaining but the splintered stump. That was the picture of the roads and countryside in the triangle of Soissons, Rheims, and Meaux, as it was a year ago.

And I expected to see the wake of that great retreat still marked by ruins and devastation.

But I had not sufficiently trusted to the indomitable spirit of the French, in their intolerance of waste, their fierce, yet ordered energy.

To-day the fields are cultivated up to the very butts of the French batteries. They are being put to bed, and tucked in for the long winter sleep. For miles the furrows stretch over the fields in unbroken lines. Ploughs, not shells, have drawn them.

They are gray with fertilizers, strewn with manure; the swiftly dug trenches of a year ago have given way to the peaked mounds in which turnips wait transplanting. Where there were vast stretches of mud, scarred with intrenchments, with the wheel tracks of guns and ammunition carts, with stale, ill-smelling straw, the carcasses of oxen and horses, and the bodies of men, is now a smiling landscape, with miles of growing grain, green vegetables, green turf.

In Champagne the French spirit and nature, working together, have wiped out the signs of the German raid. It is as though it had never been. You begin to believe it was only a bad dream, an old wife’s tale to frighten children.

The car moved slowly, but, look no matter how carefully, it was most difficult to find the landfalls I remembered.

Near Feret Milton there was a château with a lawn that ran to meet the Paris road. It had been used as a German emergency hospital, and previously by them as an outpost. The long windows to the terrace had been wrecked, the terrace was piled high with blood-stained uniforms, hundreds of boots had been tossed from an upper story that had been used as an operating-room, and mixed with these evidences of disaster were monuments of empty champagne-bottles.

That was the picture I remembered. Yesterday, like a mantle of moss, the lawn swept to the road, the long windows had been replaced and hung with yellow silk, and, on the terrace, where I had seen the blood-stained uniforms, a small boy, maybe the son and heir of the château, with hair flying and bare legs showing, was joyfully riding a tricycle.

Neufchelles I remembered as a village completely wrecked and inhabited only by a very old man, and a cat, that, as though for company, stalked behind him.

But to-day Neufchelles is a thriving, contented, commonplace town. Splashes of plaster, less weather-stained than the plaster surrounding them, are the only signs remaining of the explosive shells. The stone-mason and the plasterer have obliterated the work of the guns, the tiny shops have been refilled, the tide of life has flowed back, and in the streets the bareheaded women, their shoulders wrapped in black woollen shawls, gather to gossip, or, with knitting in hand, call to each other from the doorways.

There was the stable of a large villa in which I had seen five fine riding-horses lying on the stones, each with a bullet-hole over his temple. In the retreat they had been destroyed to prevent the French using them as remounts.

This time, as we passed the same stable-yard, fresh horses looked over the half-doors, the lofts were stuffed with hay; in the corner, against the coming of winter, were piled many cords of wood, and rival chanticleers, with their harems, were stalking proudly around the stable-yard, pecking at the scattered grain. It was a picture of comfort and content. It continued like that all the way.

Even the giant poplars that line the road for four miles out of Meaux to the west, and that had been split and shattered, are now covered with autumn foliage, the scars are overgrown and by doctor nature the raw spots have been cauterized and have healed.

The stone bridges, that at Meaux and beyond the Château Thierry sprawled in the river, again have been reared in air. People have already forgotten that a year ago to reach Soissons from Meaux the broken bridges forced them to make a détour of fifty miles.

The lesson of it is that the French people have no time to waste upon post mortems. With us, fifty years after the event, there are those who still talk of Sherman’s raid through Columbia, who are so old that they hum hymns of hate about it. How much wiser, how much more proud, is the village of Neufchelles!

Not fifty, but only one year has passed since the Germans wrecked Neufchelles, and already it has been rebuilt and repopulated—not after the war has for half a century been at an end, but while war still endures, while it is but twenty miles distant! What better could illustrate the spirit of France or better foretell her final victory?

CHAPTER IV

FROM PARIS TO THE PIRÆUS

Athens, November, 1915.

At home we talk glibly of a world war. But beyond speculating in munitions and as to how many Americans will be killed by the next submarine, and how many notes the President will write about it, we hardly appreciate that this actually is a war of the world, that all over the globe, every ship of state, even though it may be trying to steer a straight course, is being violently rocked by it. Even the individual, as he moves from country to country, is rocked by it, not violently, but continuously. It is in loss of time and money he feels it most. And as he travels, he learns, as he cannot learn from a map, how far-reaching are the ramifications of this war, in how many different ways it affects every one. He soon comes to accept whatever happens as directly due to the war—even when the deck steward tells him he cannot play shuffle-board because, owing to the war, there is no chalk.

In times of peace to get to this city from Paris did not require more than six days, but now, owing to the war, in making the distance we wasted fifteen. That is not counting the time in Paris required by the police to issue the passport, without which no one can leave France. At the prefecture of police I found a line of people—French, Italians, Americans, English—in columns of four and winding through gloomy halls, down dark stairways, and out into the street. I took one look at the line and fled to Mr. Thackara, our consul-general, and, thanks to him, was not more than an hour in obtaining my laisser-passer. The police assured me I might consider myself fortunate, as the time they usually spent in preparing a passport was two days. It was still necessary to obtain a visé from the Italian consulate permitting me to enter Italy, from the Greek consulate to enter Greece, and, as my American passport said nothing of Serbia, from Mr. Thackara two more visés, one to get out of France, and another to invade Serbia. Thanks to the war, in obtaining all these autographs two more days were wasted. In peace times one had only to go to Cook’s and buy a ticket. In those days there was no more delay than in reserving a seat for the theatre.

War followed us south. The windows of the wagon-lit were plastered with warnings to be careful, to talk to no strangers; that the enemy was listening. War had invaded even Aix-les-Bains, most lovely of summer pleasure-grounds. As we passed, it was wrapped in snow; the Cat’s Tooth, that towers between Aixe and Chambéry, and that lifts into the sky a great cross two hundred feet in height, was all white, the pine-trees around the lake were white, the streets were white, the Casino des Fleurs, the Cercle, the hotels. And above each of them, where once was only good music, good wines, beautiful flowers, and baccarat, now droop innumerable Red Cross flags. Against the snow-covered hills they were like little splashes of blood.

War followed us into Italy. But from the war as one finds it in England and France it differed. Perhaps we were too far west, but except for the field uniforms of green and the new scabbards of gun-metal, and, at Turin, four aeroplanes in the air at the same time, you might not have known that Italy was one of the Allies. For one thing, you saw no wounded. Again, perhaps, it was because we were too far south and west, and that the fighting in Tyrol is concentrated. But Bordeaux is farther from the battle-line of France than is Naples from the Italian front, and the multitudes of wounded in Bordeaux, the multitudes of women in black in Bordeaux, make one of the most appalling, most significant pictures of this war. In two days in Naples I did not see one wounded man. But I saw many Germans and German signs, and no one had scratched Mumm off the wine-card. A country that is one of the Allies, and yet not at war with Germany, cannot be taken very seriously. Indeed, in England the War Office staff speak of the Italian communiqués as the “weather reports.”

In Naples the foreigners accuse Italy of running with the hare and the hounds. They asked what is her object in keeping on friendly terms with the bitterest enemy of the Allies. Is there an understanding that after the war she and Germany will together carve slices off of Austria? Whatever her ulterior object may be, her present war spirit does not impress the visitor. It is not the spirit of France and England. One man said to me: “Why can’t you keep the Italian-Americans in America? Over there they earn money, and send millions of it to Italy. When they come here to fight, not only that money stops, but we have to feed and pay them.”

It did not sound grateful. Nor as though Italy were seriously at war. You do not find France and England, or Germany, grudging the man who returns to fight for his country his rations and pay. And Italy pays her soldiers five cents a day. Many of the reservists and volunteers from America who answered the call to arms are bitterly disappointed. It was their hope to be led at once to the firing-line. Instead, after six months, they are still in camp. The families some brought with them are in great need. They are not used to living on five cents a day. An Italian told me the heaviest drain upon the war-relief funds came from the families of these Italian-Americans, stranded in their own country. He also told me his chief duty was to meet them on their arrival.

“But haven’t they money when they arrive from America?” I asked.

“That’s it,” he said naïvely. “I’m at the wharf to keep their countrymen from robbing them of it.”

At present in Europe you cannot take gold out of any country that is at war. As a result, gold is less valuable than paper, and when I exchanged my double-eagles for paper I lost.

On the advice of the wisest young banker in France I changed, again at a loss, the French paper into Bank of England notes. But when I arrived in Salonika I found that with the Greeks English bank-notes were about as popular as English troops, and that had I changed my American gold into American notes, as was my plan, I would have been passing rich. That is what comes of associating with bankers.

At the Italian frontier, a French gentleman had come to the door of the compartment, raised his hat to the inmates, and asked if we had any gold. Forewarned, we had not; and, taking our word for it, he again raised his hat and disappeared. But, on leaving Naples, it was not like that. In these piping times of war your baggage is examined when you depart as well as when you arrive. You get it coming and going. But the Greek steamer was to weigh anchor at noon, and at noon all the port officials were at déjeuner; so, sooner than wait a week for another boat, the passengers went on board and carried their bags with them. It was unpardonable. It was an affront the port officials could not brook. They had been disregarded. Their dignity had been flouted. What was worse, they had not been tipped. Into the dining-saloon of the Greek steamer, where we were at luncheon, they burst like Barbary pirates. They shrieked, they yelled. Nobody knew who they were, or what they wanted. Nor did they enlighten us. They only beat upon the tables, clanked their swords, and spoiled our lunch. Why we were abused, or of what we were accused, we could not determine. We vaguely recognized our names, and stood up, and, while they continued to beat upon the tables, a Greek steward explained they wanted our gold. I showed them my bank-notes, and was allowed to return to my garlic and veal. But the English cigarette king, who each week sends some millions of cigarettes to the Tommies in the trenches, proposed to make a test case of it.

“I have on me,” he whispered, “four English sovereigns. I am not taking them out of Italy, because until they crossed the border in my pocket, they were not in Italy, and as I am now leaving Italy, one might say they have never been in Italy. It’s as though they were in bond. I am a British subject, and this is not Italian, but British, gold. I shall refuse to surrender my four sovereigns. I will make it a test case.”

The untipped port officials were still jangling their swords, so I advised the cigarette king to turn in his gold. Even a Greek steamer is better than an Italian jail.

“I will make of it a test case,” he repeated.

“Let George do it,” I suggested.

At that moment, in the presence of all the passengers, they were searching the person of another British subject, and an Ally. He was one of Lady Paget’s units. He was in uniform, and, as they ran itching fingers over his body, he turned crimson, and the rest of us, pretending not to witness his humiliation, ate ravenously of goat’s cheese.

The cigarette king, breathing defiance, repeated: “I will make of it a test case.”

“Better let George do it,” I urged.

And when his name was called, a name that is as well known from Kavalla to Smyrna in tobacco-fields, sweetmeat shops, palaces, and mosques, as at the Ritz and the Gaiety, the cigarette king wisely accepted for his four sovereigns Italian lire. At their rate of exchange, too.

Later, off Capri, he asked: “When you advised me to let George make a test case of it, to which of our fellow passengers did you refer?”

In the morning the Adriaticus picked up the landfall of Messina, but, instead of making fast to the quay, anchored her length from it. This appeared to be a port regulation. It enables the boatman to earn a living by charging passengers two francs for a round trip of fifty yards. As the wrecked city seems to be populated only by boatmen, rowing passengers ashore is the chief industry.

The stricken seaport looks as though as recently as last week the German army had visited it. In France, although war still continues, towns wrecked by the Germans are already rebuilt. But Messina, after four years of peace, is still a ruin. But little effort has been made to restore it. The post-cards that were printed at the moment of the earthquake show her exactly as she is to-day. With, in the streets, no sign of life, with the inhabitants standing idle along the quay, shivering in the rain and snow, with for a background crumbling walls, gaping cellars, and hills buried under acres of fallen masonry, the picture was one of terrible desolation, of neglect and inefficiency. The only structures that had obviously been erected since the earthquake were the “ready-to-wear” shacks sent as a stop-gap from America. One should not look critically at a gift-house, but they are certainly very ugly. In Italy, where every spot is a “location” for moving-pictures, where the street corners are backgrounds for lovers’ trysts and assassinations, where even poverty is picturesque, and each landscape “composes” into a beautiful and wondrous painting, the zinc shacks, in rigid lines, like the barracks of a mining-camp, came as a shock.

Sympathetic Americans sent them as only a temporary shelter until Messina rose again. But it was explained, as there is no rent to pay, the Italians, instead of rebuilding, prefer to inhabit the ready-to-wear houses. How many tourists the mere view of them will drive away no one can guess.

People who linger in Naples, and by train to Reggio join the boat at Messina, never admit that they followed that route to avoid being seasick. Seasickness is an illness of which no one ever boasts. He may take pride in saying: “I’ve an awful cold!” or “I’ve such a headache I can’t see!” and will expect you to feel sorry. But he knows, no matter how horribly he suffers from mal de mer, he will receive no sympathy. In a Puck and Punch way he will be merely comic. So, the passengers who come over the side at Messina always have an excuse other than that they were dodging the sea. It is usually that they lost their luggage at Naples and had to search for it. As the Italian railroads, which are operated by the government, always lose your luggage, it is an admirable excuse. So, also, is the one that you delayed in order to visit the ruins of Pompeii. The number of people who have visited Pompeii solely because the Bay of Naples was in an ugly mood will never be counted.

Among those who joined at Messina were the French princess, who talked American much too well to be French, and French far too well to be an American, two military attachés, the King’s messenger, and the Armenian, who was by profession an olive merchant, and by choice a manufacturer and purveyor of rumors. He was at once given an opportunity to exhibit his genius. The Italians held up our ship, and would not explain why. So the rumor man explained. It was because Greece had joined the Germans, and Italy had made a prize of her. Ten minutes later, he said Greece had joined the Allies, and the Italians were holding our ship until they could obtain a convoy of torpedo-boats. Then it was because two submarines were waiting for us outside the harbor. Later, it was because the Allies had blockaded Greece, and our Greek captain would not proceed, not because he was detained by Italians, but by fear.

Every time the rumor man appeared in the door of the smoking-room he was welcomed with ironic cheers. But he was not discouraged. He would go outside and stand in the rain while he hatched a new rumor, and then, in great excitement, dash back to share it. War levels all ranks, and the passengers gathered in the smoking-room playing solitaire, sipping muddy Turkish coffee, and discussing the war in seven languages, and everybody smoked—especially the women. Finally the military attachés, Sir Thomas Cunningham and Lieutenant Boulanger, put on the uniforms of their respective countries and were rowed ashore to protest. The rest of us paced the snow-swept decks and gazed gloomily at the wrecked city. Out of the fog a boat brought two Sisters of the Poor, wrapped in the black cloaks of their order. They were petitioners for the poor of Messina, and everybody in the smoking-room gave them a franc. Because one of them was Irish and because it was her fate to live in Messina, I gave her ten francs. Meaning to be amiable, she said: “Ah, it takes the English to be generous!”

I said I was Irish.

The King’s messenger looked up from his solitaire and, also wishing to be amiable, asked: “What’s the difference?”

The Irish sister answered him.

“Nine francs,” she said.

After we had been prisoners of war for twenty-four hours John Bass of the Chicago Daily News suggested that if we remained longer at Messina our papers would say we thought the earthquake was news, and had stopped to write a story about it. So, we sent a telegram to our consul.

The American consul nearest was George Emerson Haven at Catania, by train three hours distant. We told him for twenty-four hours we had been prisoners, and that unless we were set free he was to declare war on Italy. The telegram was written not for the consul to read, but for the benefit of the port authorities. We hoped it might impress them. We certainly never supposed they would permit our ultimatum to reach Mr. Haven. In any case, the ship was allowed to depart. But whether the commandant of the port was alarmed by our declaration of war, or the unusual spectacle of the British attaché, “Tommy” Cunningham, in khaki while three hundred miles distant from any firing-line, we will never know.[A] But the rumor man knew, and explained.

“We had been delayed,” he said, “because Italy had declared war on Greece, and did not want the food on board our ship to enter that country.”

The cigarette king told him if the food on board was the same food we had been eating, to bring it into any country was a proper cause for war.

At noon we passed safely between Scylla and Charybdis, and the following morning were in Athens.

CHAPTER V

WHY KING CONSTANTINE IS NEUTRAL

Athens, November, 1915.

We are not allowed to tell what the situation is here. But, in spite of the censor, I am going to tell what the situation is. It is involved. That is not because no one will explain it. In Greece at present, explaining the situation is the national pastime. Since arriving yesterday I have had the situation explained to me by members of the Cabinet, guides to the Acropolis, generals in the army, Teofani, the cigarette king, three ministers plenipotentiary, the man from St. Louis who is over here to sell aeroplanes, the man from Cook’s, and “extra people,” like soldiers in cafés, brigands in petticoats, and peasants in peaked shoes with tassels. They asked me not to print their names, which was just as well, as I cannot spell them. They each explained the situation differently, but all agree it is involved.

To understand it, you must go back to Helen of Troy, take a running jump from the Greek war for independence and Lord Byron to Mr. Gladstone and the Bulgarian atrocities, note the influence of the German Emperor at Corfu, appreciate the intricacies of Russian diplomacy in Belgrade, the rise of Enver Pasha and the Young Turks, what Constantine said to Venizelos about giving up Kavalla, and the cablegram Prince Danilo, of “Merry Widow” fame, sent to his cousin of Italy. By following these events, the situation is as easy to grasp as an eel that has swallowed the hook and cannot digest it.

For instance, Mr. Poneropolous, the well-known contractor who sells shoes to the army, informs me the Greeks as one man want war. They are even prepared to fight for it. On the other hand, Axon Skiadas, the popular barber of the Hôtel Grande Bretagne, who has just been called to the colors, assures me no patriot would again plunge this country into conflict.

The diplomats also disagree, especially as to which of them is responsible for the failure of Greece to join the Allies. The one who is to blame for that never is the one who is talking to you. The one who is talking is always the one who, had they followed his advice, could have saved the “situation.” They did not, and now it is involved, not to say addled. The military attaché of Great Britain volunteered to set the situation before me in a few words. After explaining for two hours, he asked me to promise not to repeat what he had said. I promised. Another diplomat, who was projected into the service by William Jennings Bryan, said if he told all he knew about the situation “the world would burst.” Those are his exact words. It would have been an event of undoubted news value, and as a news-gatherer I should have coaxed his secret from him, but it seemed as though the world is in trouble enough as it is, and if it must burst I want it to burst when I am nearer home. So I switched him off to the St. Louis convention, where he was probably more useful than he will ever be in the Balkans.

While every one is guessing, the writer ventures to make a guess. It is that Greece will remain neutral, or will join the Allies. Without starving to death she cannot join the Germans. Greece is non-supporting. What she eats comes in the shape of wheat from outside her borders, from the grain-fields of Russia, Egypt, Bulgaria, France, and America. When Denys Cochin, the French minister to Athens, had his interview with the King, the latter became angry and said, “We can get along without France’s money,” and Cochin said: “That is true, but you cannot get along without France’s wheat.”

The Allies are not going to bombard Greek ports or shell the Acropolis. They will not even blockade the ports. But their fleets—French, Italian, English—will stop all ships taking foodstuffs to Greece. They have just released seven grain ships from America, that were held up at Malta, and ships carrying food to Greece have been stopped at points as far away as Gibraltar. As related in the last chapter, the Greek steamer on which we sailed from Naples was held up at Messina for twenty-four hours until her cargo was overhauled. As we had nothing in the hold more health-sustaining than hides and barbed-wire, we were allowed to proceed.

Whatever course Greece follows, her dependence upon others for food explains her act. To-day (November 29) there is not enough wheat in the country to feed the people for, some say three—the most optimistic, ten—days. Should she decide to join Germany she would starve. It would be deliberate suicide. The French and Italian fleets are at Malta, less than a day distant; the English fleet is off the Gallipoli peninsula. Fifteen hours’ steaming could bring it to Salonika. Greece is especially vulnerable from the sea. She is all islands, coast towns, and seaports. The German navy could not help her. It will not leave the Kiel Canal. The Austrian navy cannot leave the Adriatic. Should Greece decide against the Allies, their combined war-ships would pick up her islands and blockade her ports. In a week she would be starving. The railroad from Bulgaria to Salonika, over which in peace times comes much wheat from Roumania, would be closed to her. Even if the Germans and Bulgarians succeeded in winning it to the coast, they could get no food for Greece farther than that. They have no war-ships, and the Gulf of Salonika is full of those of the Allies.

From a photograph by Underwood and Underwood.
King Constantine of Greece and commander-in-chief of her armies.

In two years he led his people to victory in two wars. If now they desire peace and in this big war the right to remain neutral, he thinks they have earned that right.

The position of King Constantine is very difficult. He is supposed to be strongly pro-German, and the reason for his sympathy that is given here is the same as is accepted in America. Every act of his is supposed to be inspired by family influences, when, as he has stated publicly through his friend Walter Harris of the London Times, he is pro-English, and has been actuated solely by what he thought was best for his own people. Indeed, there are many who believe if the terms upon which Greece might join the Allies had been left to the King instead of to Venizelos, Greece now would be with the Entente.

Or, if Greece remained neutral, no one could better judge whether neutrality was or was not best for her than Constantine. In the three years before the World War, he had led his countrymen through two wars, and if both, as King and commander of her armies, he thought they needed rest and peace, he was entitled to that opinion. Instead, he was misrepresented and abused. His motives were assailed; he was accused of being dominated by his Imperial brother-in-law. At no time since the present war began has he been given what we would call a “square deal.” The writer has followed the career of Constantine since the Greek-Turkish war of 1897, when they “drank from the same canteen,” and as Kings go, or until they all do go, respects him as a good King. To his people he is generous, kind, and considerate; as a general he has added to the territory of Greece many miles and seaports; he is fond of his home and family, and in his reign there has been no scandal, no Knights of the Round Table, such as disgraced the German court, no Tripoli massacre, no Congo atrocities, no Winter Garden or La Scala favorites. Venizelos may or may not be as unselfish a patriot. But justly or not, it is difficult to disassociate what Venizelos wants for Greece with what he wants for Venizelos. The King is removed from any such suspicion. He is already a King, and except in continuing to be a good King, he can go no higher.

How Venizelos came so prominently into the game is not without interest. As long ago as when the two German cruisers escaped from Messina and were sold to Turkey, the diplomatic representatives of the Allies in the Balkans were instructed to see that Turkey and Germany did not get together, and that, as a balance of power in case of such a union, the Balkan States were kept in line. Instead of themselves attending to this, the diplomats placed the delicate job in the hands of one man. At the framing of the Treaty of London, of all the representatives from the Balkans, the one who most deeply impressed the other powers was M. Venizelos. And the task of keeping the Balkans neutral or with the Allies was left to him.

He has a dream of a Balkan “band,” a union of all the Balkan principalities. It obsesses him. And to bring that dream true he was willing to make concessions which King Constantine, who considered only what was good for Greece, and was not concerned with a Balkan alliance, thought most unwise. Venizelos also was working for the good of Greece, but he was convinced it could come to her only through the union. He was willing to give Kavalla to Bulgaria in exchange for Asia Minor, from the Dardanelles to Smyrna. But the King would not consent. As a buffer against Turkey, he considered Kavalla of the greatest strategic value, and he had the natural pride of a soldier in holding on to land he himself had added to his country. But in his opposition to Venizelos in this particular, credit was not given him for acting in the interests of Greece, but of playing into the hands of Germany.

Another step he refused to take, which refusal the Allies attributed to his pro-German leanings, was to attack the Dardanelles. In the wars of 1912-13 the King showed he was an able general. With his staff he had carefully considered an attack upon the Dardanelles. He submitted this plan to the Allies, and was willing to aid them if they brought to the assault 400,000 men. They claim he failed them. He did fail them, but not until after they had failed him by bringing thousands of men instead of the tens of thousands he knew were needed.

The Dardanelles expedition was not required to prove the courage of the French and British. Beyond furnishing fresh evidence of that, it has been a failure. And in refusing to sacrifice the lives of his subjects the military judgment of Constantine has been vindicated. He was willing to attack Turkey through Kavalla and Thrace, because by that route he presented an armed front to Bulgaria. But, as he pointed out, if he sent his army to the Dardanelles, he left Kavalla at the mercy of his enemy. In his mistrust of Bulgaria he has certainly been justified.

Greece is not at war, but in outward appearance she is as firmly on a war footing as is France or Italy. A man out of uniform is conspicuous, and all day regiments pass through the streets carrying the campaign kit and followed by the medical corps, the mountain batteries, and the transport wagons. In the streets the crowds are cheering Denys Cochin, the special ambassador from France. He makes speeches to them from the balcony of our hotel, and the mob wave flags and shout “Zito! Zito!”

In a play Colonel Savage produced, I once wrote the same scene and placed it in the same hotel in Athens. In Athens the local color was superior to ours, but George Marion stage-managed the mob better than did the Athens police.

Athens is in a perplexed state of mind. She does not know if she wants to go to war or wants peace. She does not know if she should go to war, on which side she wants to fight. People tell you frankly that their heart-beats are with France, but that they are afraid of Germany.

“If Germany wins,” they asked, “what will become of us? The Germans already are in Monastir, twenty miles from our border. They have driven the Serbians, the French, and the British out of Serbia, and they will make our King a German vassal.”

“Then, why don’t you go out and fight for your King?” I asked.

“He won’t let us,” they said.

When the army of a country is mobilized, it is hard to understand that that country is neutral. You expect to see evidences of her partisanship for one cause or the other. But in Athens, from a shop-window point of view, both the Allies and the Germans are equally supported. There are just as many pictures of the German generals as of Joffre, as many post-cards of the German Emperor as of King George and King Albert. After Paris, it is a shock to see German books, portraits of German statesmen, composers, and musicians. In one shop-window conspicuously featured, evidently with intent, is an engraving showing Napoleon III surrendering to Bismarck. In the principal bookstore, books in German on German victories, and English and French pamphlets on German atrocities stand shoulder to shoulder. The choice is with you.

Meanwhile, on every hand are the signs of a nation on the brink of war; of armies of men withdrawn from trades, professions, homes; of men marching and drilling in squads, companies, brigades. At times the columns are so long that in passing the windows of the hotel they take an hour. All these fighting men must be fed, clothed, paid, and while they are waiting to fight, whether they are goatherds or piano-tuners or shopkeepers, their business is going to the devil.

CHAPTER VI

WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA

Salonika, December, 1915.

We left Athens on the first ship that was listed for Salonika. She was a strange ship. During many years on various vessels in various seas, she was the most remarkable. Every Greek loves to gamble; but for some reason, or for that very reason, for him to gamble on shore is by law made difficult. In consequence, as soon as the Hermoupolis raised anchor she became a floating gambling-hell. There were twenty-four first-class passengers who were in every way first class; Greek officers, bankers, merchants, and deputies, and their time on the steamer from eleven each morning until four the next morning was spent in dealing baccarat.

When the stewards, who were among the few persons on board who did not play, tried to spread a table-cloth and serve food, they were indignantly rebuked. The most untiring players were the captain and the ship’s officers. Whenever they found that navigating their ship interfered with their baccarat we came to anchor. We should have reached Salonika in a day and a half. We arrived after four days. And all of each day and half of each night we were anchored in midstream while the captain took the bank. The hills of Eubœa and the mainland formed a giant funnel of snow, through which the wind roared. It swept the ship from bow to stern, turning to ice the woodwork, the velvet cushions, even the blankets. Fortunately, it was not the kind of a ship that supplied sheets, or we would have frozen in our berths. Outside of the engine-room, which was aft, there was no heat of any sort, but undaunted, the gamblers, in caps and fur coats, their breath rising in icy clouds, crouched around the table, their frozen fingers fumbling with the cards.

There were two charming Italians on board, a father and son—the father absurdly youthful, the boy incredibly wise. They operate a chain of banks through the Levant. They watched the game but did not play. The father explained this to me. “My dear son is a born gambler,” he said. “So, in order that I may set him an example, I will not play until after he has gone to sleep.”

Later, the son also explained. “My dear father,” he whispered, “is an inveterate gambler. So, in order that I may reprove him, I do not gamble. At least not until he has gone to bed.” At midnight I left them still watching each other. The next day the son said: “I got no sleep last night. For some reason, my dear father was wakeful, and it was four o’clock before he went to his cabin.”

When we reached Volo the sun was shining, and as the day was so beautiful, the gamblers remained on board and played baccarat. The rest of us explored Volo. On the mountains above it the Twenty-Four Villages were in sight, nestling on the knees of the hills. Their red-tiled houses rose one above the other, the roof of one on a line with the door-step of the neighbor just overhead. Their white walls, for Volo is a summer resort, were merged in the masses of snow, but in Volo itself roses were still blooming, and in every garden the trees were heavy with oranges. They were so many that they hid the green leaves, and against the walls of purple, blue, and Pompeian red, made wonderful splashes of a gorgeous gold.

Apparently the captain was winning, for he sent word he would not sail until midnight, and nine of his passengers dined ashore. We were so long at table, not because the dinner was good, but because there was a charcoal brazier in the room, that we missed the moving-pictures. So the young Italian banker was sent to bargain for a second and special performance. In the Levant there always is one man who works, and one man who manages him. A sort of impresario. Even the boatmen and bootblacks have a manager who arranges the financial details. It is difficult to buy a newspaper without dealing through a third party. The moving-picture show, being of importance, had seven managers. The young Italian, undismayed, faced all of them. He wrangled in Greek, Turkish, French, and Italian, and they all talked to him at the same time. Finally the negotiations came to an end, but our ambassador was not satisfied.

“They got the best of me,” he reported to us. “They are going to give the show over again, and we are to have the services of the pianist, the orchestra of five, and the lady vocalist. But I had to agree to pay for the combined entertainment entirely too much.”

“How much?” I asked.

“Eight drachmas,” he said apologetically, “or, in your money, one dollar and fifty-two cents.”

“Each?” I said.

He exclaimed in horror: “No, divided among the nine of us!”

No wonder Volo is a popular summer resort, even in December.

The next day, after sunset, we saw the snow-capped peak of Mount Olympus and the lamps of a curving water-front, the long rows of green air ports that mark the French hospital ships, the cargo lights turned on the red crosses painted on their sides, the gray, grim battleships of England, France, Italy, and Greece, and a bustling torpedo-boat took us in tow, and guided us through the floating mines and into the harbor of Salonika.

If it is true that happy are the people without a history, then Salonika should be thoroughly miserable. Some people make history; others have history thrust upon them. Ever since the world began Salonika has had history thrust upon her. She aspired only to be a great trading seaport. She was content to be the place where the caravans from the Balkans met the ships from the shores of the Mediterranean, Egypt, and Asia Minor. Her wharfs were counters across which they could swap merchandise. All she asked was to be allowed to change their money. Instead of which, when any two nations of the Near East went to the mat to settle their troubles, Salonika was the mat. If any country within a thousand-mile radius declared war on any other country in any direction whatsoever, the armies of both belligerents clashed at Salonika. They not only used her as a door-mat, but they used her hills to the north of the city for their battle-field. In the fighting, Salonika took no part. She merely loaned the hills. But she knew, whichever side won, two things would happen to her: She would pay a forced loan and subscribe to an entirely new religion. Three hundred years before Christ, the people of Salonika worshipped the mysterious gods who had their earthly habitation on the island of Thasos. The Greeks ejected them, and erected altars to Apollo and Aphrodite, the Egyptians followed and taught Salonika to fear Serapis; then came Roman gods and Roman generals; and then St. Paul. The Jews set up synagogues, the Mohammedans reared minarets, the Crusaders restored the cross, the Tripolitans restored the crescent, the Venetians re-restored Christianity. Romans, Greeks, Byzantines, Persians, Franks, Egyptians, and Barbary pirates, all, at one time or another, invaded Salonika. She was the butcher’s block upon which they carved history. Some ruled her only for months, others for years. Of the monuments to the religions forced upon her, the most numerous to-day are the synagogues of the Jews and the mosques of the Mohammedans. It was not only fighting men who invaded Salonika. Italy can count her great earthquakes on one hand; the United States on one finger. But a resident of Salonika does not speak of the “year of the earthquake.” For him, it saves time to name the years when there was no earthquake. Each of those years was generally “the year of the great fire.” If it wasn’t one thing, it was another. If it was not a tidal wave, it was an epidemic; if it was not a war, it was a blizzard. The trade of Asia Minor flows into Salonika and with it carries all the plagues of Egypt. Epidemics of cholera in Salonika used to be as common as yellow fever in Guayaquil. Those years the cholera came the people abandoned the seaport and lived on the plains north of Salonika, in tents. If the cholera spared them, the city was swept by fire; if there was no fire, there came a great frost. Salonika is on the same latitude as Naples, Madrid, and New York; and New York is not unacquainted with blizzards. Since the seventeenth century, last winter was said to be the coldest Salonika has ever known. I was not there in the seventeenth century, but am willing to believe that last winter was the coldest since then; not only to believe it, but to swear to it. Of the frost in 1657 the Salonikans boast the cold was so severe that to get wood the people destroyed their houses. This December, when on the English and French front in Serbia, I saw soldiers using the same kind of fire-wood. They knew a mud house that is held together with beams and rafters can be rebuilt, but that you cannot rebuild frozen toes and fingers.

In thrusting history upon Salonika, the last few years have been especially busy. They gave her a fire that destroyed a great part of the city, and between 1911 and 1914 two cholera epidemics, the Italian-Turkish War, which, as Salonika was then Turkish, robbed her of hundreds of her best men, the Balkan-Turkish War, and the Second Balkan War. In this Salonika was part of the spoils, and Greece and Bulgaria fought to possess her. The Greeks won, and during one year she was at peace. Then, in 1914, the Great War came, and Serbia sent out an S. O. S. call to her Allies. At the Dardanelles, not eighteen hours away, the French and English heard the call. But to reach Serbia by the shortest route they must disembark at Salonika, a port belonging to Greece, a neutral power; and in moving north from Salonika into Serbia they must pass over fifty miles of neutral Greek territory. Venizelos, prime minister of Greece, gave them permission. King Constantine, to preserve his neutrality, disavowed the act of his representative, and Venizelos resigned. From the point of view of the Allies, the disavowal came too late. As soon as they had received permission from the recognized Greek Government, they started, and, leaving the King and Venizelos to fight it out between them, landed at Salonika. The inhabitants received them calmly. The Greek officials, the colonel commanding the Greek troops, the Greek captain of the port, and the Greek collector of customs may have been upset; but the people of Salonika remained calm. They were used to it. Foreign troops were always landing at Salonika. The oldest inhabitant could remember, among others, those of Alexander the Great, Mark Antony, Constantine, the Sultan Murad, and several hundred thousand French and English who over their armor wore a red cross. So he was not surprised when, after seven hundred years, the French and English returned, still wearing the red cross.

“In Salonika the water-front belongs to everybody.”

One of the greatest assets of those who live in a seaport city is a view of their harbor. As a rule, that view is hidden from them by zinc sheds on the wharfs and warehouses. But in Salonika the water-front belongs to everybody. To the north it encloses the harbor in a great half-moon that from tip to tip measures three miles. At the western tip of this crescent are tucked away the wharfs for the big steamers, the bonded warehouses, the customs, the goods-sheds. The rest of the water-front is open to the people and to the small sailing vessels. For over a mile it is bordered by a stone quay, with stone steps leading down to the rowboats. Along this quay runs the principal street, and on the side of it that faces the harbor, in an unbroken row, are the hotels, the houses of the rich Turks and Jews, clubs, restaurants, cafés, and moving-picture theatres. At night, when these places are blazing with electric lights, the curving water-front is as bright as Broadway—but Broadway with one-half of the street in darkness. On the dark side of the street, to the quay, are moored hundreds of sailing vessels. Except that they are painted and gilded differently, they look like sisters. They are fat, squat sisters with the lines of half a cantaloupe. Each has a single mast and a lateen-sail, like the Italian felucca and the sailing boats of the Nile. When they are moored to the quay and the sail is furled, each yard-arm, in a graceful, sweeping curve, slants downward. Against the sky, in wonderful confusion, they follow the edge of the half-moon; the masts a forest of dead tree trunks, the slanting yards giant quill pens dipping into an ink-well. Their hulls are rich in gilding and in colors—green, red, pink, and blue. At night the electric signs of a moving-picture palace on the opposite side of the street illuminate them from bow to stern. It is one of those bizarre contrasts you find in the Near East. On one side of the quay a perfectly modern hotel, on the other a boat unloading fish, and in the street itself, with French automobiles and trolley-cars, men who still are beasts of burden, who know no other way of carrying a bale or a box than upon their shoulders. In Salonika even the trolley-car is not without its contrast. One of our “Jim Crow” street-cars would puzzle a Turk. He would not understand why we separate the white and the black man. But his own street-car is also subdivided. In each there are four seats that can be hidden by a curtain. They are for the women of his harem.

“On one side of the quay, a moving-picture palace, ... on the other a boat unloading fish.”

From the water-front Salonika climbs steadily up-hill to the row of hills that form her third and last line of defense. On the hill upon which the city stands are the walls and citadel built in the fifteenth century by the Turks, and in which, when the city was invaded, the inhabitants sought refuge. In aspect it is mediæval; the rest of the city is modern and Turkish. The streets are very narrow; in many the second stories overhang them and almost touch, and against the skyline rise many minarets. But the Turks do not predominate. They have their quarter, and so, too, have the French and the Jews. In numbers the Jews exceed all the others. They form fifty-six per cent of a population composed of Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Bulgarians, Egyptians, French, and Italians. The Jews came to Salonika the year America was discovered. To avoid the Inquisition they fled from Spain and Portugal and brought their language with them; and after five hundred years it still obtains. It has been called the Esperanto of the Salonikans. For the small shopkeeper, the cabman, the waiter, it is the common tongue. In such an environment it sounds most curious. When, in a Turkish restaurant, you order a dinner in the same words you last used in Vera Cruz, and the dinner arrives, it seems uncanny. But, in Salonika, the language most generally spoken is French. Among so many different races they found, if they hoped to talk business—and a Greek, an Armenian, and a Jew are not averse to talking business—a common tongue was necessary. So, all those who are educated, even most sketchily, speak French. The greater number of newspapers are in French; and notices, advertisements, and official announcements are printed in that language. It makes life in Salonika difficult. When a man attacks you in Turkish, Yiddish, or Greek, and you cannot understand him, there is some excuse, but when he instantly renews the attack in both French and Spanish, it is disheartening. It makes you regret that when you were in college the only foreign language you studied was football signals.

Outside the Citadel, which is mediæval, Salonika is modern and Turkish.

At any time, without the added presence of 100,000 Greeks and 170,000 French and English, Salonika appears overpopulated. This is partly because the streets are narrow and because in the streets everybody gathers to talk, eat, and trade. As in all Turkish cities, nearly every shop is an “open shop.” The counter is where the window ought to be, and opens directly upon the sidewalk. A man does not enter the door of a shop, he stands on the sidewalk, which is only thirty-six inches wide, and makes his purchase through the window. This causes a crowd to collect. Partly because the man is blocking the sidewalk, but chiefly because there is a chance that something may be bought and paid for. In normal times, if Salonika is ever normal, she has a population of 120,000, and every one of those 120,000 is personally interested in any one else who engages, or may be about to engage, in a money transaction. In New York, if a horse falls down there is at once an audience of a dozen persons; in Salonika the downfall of a horse is nobody’s business, but a copper coin changing hands is everybody’s. Of this local characteristic, John T. McCutcheon and I made a careful study; and the result of our investigations produced certain statistics. If in Salonika you buy a newspaper from a news-boy, of the persons passing, two will stop; if at an open shop you buy a package of cigarettes, five people will look over your shoulder; if you pay your cab-driver his fare, you block the sidewalk; and if you try to change a hundred-franc note, you cause a riot. In each block there are nearly a half dozen money-changers; they sit in little shops as narrow as a doorway, and in front of them is a show-case filled with all the moneys of the world. It is not alone the sight of your hundred-franc note that enchants the crowd. That collects the crowd; but what holds the crowd is that it knows there are twenty different kinds of money, all current in Salonika, into which your note can be changed. And they know the money-changer knows that and that you do not. So each man advises you. Not because he does not want to see you cheated—between you and the money-changer he is neutral—but because he can no more keep out of a money deal than can a fly pass a sugar-bowl.

The men on the outskirts of the crowd ask: “What does he offer?”

The lucky ones in the front-row seats call back: “A hundred and eighteen drachmas.” The rear ranks shout with indignation. “It is robbery!” “It is because he changes his money in Venizelos Street.” “He is paying the money-changer’s rent.” “In the Jewish quarter they are giving nineteen.” “He is too lazy to walk two miles for a drachma.” “Then let him go to the Greek, Papanastassion.”

A man in a fez whispers to you impressively: “La livre turque est encore d’un usage fort courant. La valeur au pair est de francs vingt-deux.” But at this the Armenian shrieks violently. He scorns Turkish money and advises Italian lire. At the idea of lire the crowd howl. They hurl at you instead francs, piastres, paras, drachmas, lepta, metalliks, mejidis, centimes, and English shillings. The money-changer argues with them gravely. He does not send for the police to drive them away. He does not tell them: “This is none of your business.” He knows better. In Salonika, it is their business.

In Salonika, after money, the thing of most consequence is conversation. Men who are talking always have the right of way. When two men of Salonika are seized with a craving for conversation, they feel, until that craving is satisfied, that nothing else is important. So, when the ruling passion grips them, no matter where they may meet, they stop dead in their tracks and talk. If possible they select the spot, where by standing still they can cause the greatest amount of inconvenience to the largest number of people. They do not withdraw from the sidewalk. On the contrary, as best suited for conversation, they prefer the middle of it, the doorway of a café, or the centre aisle of a restaurant. Of the people who wish to pass they are as unconscious as a Chinaman smoking opium is unconscious of the sightseers from up-town. That they are talking is all that counts. They feel every one else should appreciate that. Because the Allies failed to appreciate it, they gained a reputation for rudeness. A French car, flying the flag of the general, a squad of Tommies under arms, a motor-cyclist carrying despatches could not understand that a conversation on a street crossing was a sacred ceremony. So they shouldered the conversationalists aside or splashed them with mud. It was intolerable. Had they stamped into a mosque in their hobnailed boots, on account of their faulty religious training, the Salonikans might have excused them. But that a man driving an ambulance full of wounded should think he had the right to disturb a conversation that was blocking the traffic of only the entire water-front was a discourtesy no Salonikan could comprehend.

The wonder was that among so many mixed races the clashes were so few. In one place seldom have people of so many different nationalities met, and with interests so absolutely opposed. It was a situation that would have been serious had it not been comic. For causing it, for permitting it to continue, Greece was responsible. Her position was not happy. She was between the Allies and the Kaiser. Than Greece, no country is more vulnerable from an attack by sea; and if she offended the Allies, their combined fleets at Malta and Lemnos could seize all her little islands and seaports. If she offended the Kaiser, he would send the Bulgarians into eastern Thrace and take Salonika, from which only two years before Greece had dispossessed them. Her position was indeed most difficult. As the barber at the Grande Bretange in Athens told me: “It makes me a headache.”

On many a better head than his it had the same effect. King Constantine, because he believed it was best for Greece, wanted to keep his country neutral. But after Venizelos had invited the Allies to make a landing-place and a base for their armies at Salonika, Greece was no longer neutral. If our government invited 170,000 German troops to land at Portland, and through Maine invade Canada, our neutrality would be lost. The neutrality of Greece was lost, but Constantine would not see that. He hoped, although 170,000 fighting men are not easy to hide, that the Kaiser also would not see it. It was a very forlorn hope. The Allies also cherished a hope. It was that Constantine not only would look the other way while they slipped across his country, but would cast off all pretense of neutrality and join them. So, as far as was possible, they avoided giving offense. They assisted him in his pretense of neutrality. And that was what caused the situation. It was worthy of a comic opera. Before the return of the allied troops to Salonika, there were on the neutral soil of Greece, divided between Salonika and the front in Serbia, 110,000 French soldiers and 60,000 British. Of these, 100,000 were in Salonika. The advanced British base was at Doiran and the French advanced base at Strumnitza railroad-station. In both places martial law existed. But at the main base, at Salonika, both armies were under the local authority of the Greeks. They submitted to the authority of the Greeks because they wanted to keep up the superstition that Salonika was a neutral port, when the mere fact that they were there proved she was not. It was a situation almost unparalleled in military history. At the base of a French and of a British army, numbering together 170,000 men, the generals who commanded them possessed less local authority than one Greek policeman. They were guests. They were invited guests of the Greek, and they had no more right to object to his other guests or to rearrange his house rules than would you have the right, when a guest in a strange club, to reprimand the servants. The Allies had in the streets military police; but they held authority over only soldiers of their own country; they could not interfere with a Greek soldier, or with a civilian of any nation, and even the provost guard sent out at night was composed not alone of French and English but of an equal number of Greeks. I often wondered in what language they issued commands. As an instance of how strictly the Allies recognized the authority of the neutral Greek, and how jealously he guarded it, there was the case of the Entente Café. The proprietor of the Entente Café was a Greek. A British soldier was ill-treated in his café, and by the British commanding officer the place, so far as British soldiers and sailors were concerned, was declared “out of bounds.” A notice to that effect was hung in the window. But it was a Greek policeman who placed it there.

In matters much more important, the fact that the Allies were in a neutral seaport greatly embarrassed them. They were not allowed to censor news despatches nor to examine the passports of those who arrived and departed. The question of the censorship was not so serious as it might appear. General Sarrail explained to the correspondents what might and what might not be sent, and though what we wrote was not read in Salonika by a French or British censor, General Sarrail knew it would be read by censors of the Allies at Malta, Rome, Paris, and London. Any news despatch that, unscathed, ran that gantlet, while it might not help the Allies certainly would not harm them. One cablegram of three hundred words, sent by an American correspondent, after it had been blue-pencilled by the Greek censors in Salonika and Athens, and by the four allied censors, arrived at his London office consisting entirely of “ands” and “thes.” So, if not from their censors, at least from the correspondents, the Allies were protected. But against the really serious danger of spies they were helpless. In New York the water-fronts are guarded. Unless he is known, no one can set foot upon a wharf. Night and day, against spies and German military attachés bearing explosive bombs, steamers loading munitions are surrounded by police, watchmen, and detectives. But in Salonika the wharfs were as free to any one as a park bench, and the quay supplied every spy, German, Bulgarian, Turk or Austrian, with an uninterrupted view. To suppose spies did not avail themselves of this opportunity is to insult their intelligence. They swarmed. In solid formation spies lined the quay. For every landing-party of bluejackets they formed a committee of welcome. Of every man, gun, horse, and box of ammunition that came ashore they kept tally. On one side of the wharf stood “P. N. T. O.,” principal naval transport officer, in gold braid, ribbons, and armlet, keeping an eye on every box of shell, gun-carriage, and caisson that was swung from a transport, and twenty feet from him, and keeping count with him, would be two dozen spies. And, to make it worse, the P. N. T. O. knew they were spies. The cold was intense and wood so scarce that to obtain it men used to row out two miles and collect the boxes thrown overboard from the transports and battleships. Half of these men had but the slightest interest in kindling-wood; they were learning the position of each battleship, counting her guns, noting their caliber, counting the men crowding the rails of the transports, reading the insignia on their shoulder-straps, and, as commands and orders were wigwagged from ship to ship, writing them down. Other spies took the trouble to disguise themselves in rags and turbans, and, mixing with the Tommies, sold them sweetmeats, fruit, and cigarettes. The spy told the Tommy he was his ally, a Serbian refugee; and Tommy, or the poilu, to whom Bulgarians, Turks, and Serbians all look alike, received him as a comrade.

From a photograph, copyright by American Press Association.
“The quay supplied every spy—German, Bulgarian, Turk, or Austrian—with an uninterrupted view.”

“You had a rough passage from Marseilles,” ventures the spy. “We come from the peninsula,” says Tommy. “Three thousand of you on such a little ship!” exclaims the sympathetic Serbian. “You must have been crowded!” “Crowded as hell,” corrects Tommy, “because there are five thousand of us.” Over these common spies were master spies, Turkish and German officers from Berlin and Constantinople. They sat in the same restaurants with the French and English officers. They were in mufti, but had they appeared in uniform, while it might have led to a riot, in this neutral port they would have been entirely within their rights.

The clearing-houses for the spies were the consulates of Austria, Turkey, and Germany. From there what information the spies turned in was forwarded to the front. The Allies were helpless to prevent. How helpless may be judged from these quotations that are translated from Phos, a Greek newspaper published daily in Salonika, and which any one could buy in the streets. “The English and French forces mean to retreat. Yesterday six trains of two hundred and forty wagons came from the front with munitions.” “The Allies’ first line of defense will be at Soulowo, Doiran, Goumenitz. At Topsin and Zachouna intrenchments have not yet been started, but strong positions have been taken up at Chortiatis and Nihor.” “Yesterday the landing of British reinforcements continued, amounting to 15,000. The guns and munitions were out of date. The position of the Allies’ battleships has been changed. They are now inside the harbor.” The most exacting German General Staff could not ask for better service than that! When the Allies retreated from Serbia into Salonika every one expected the enemy would pursue; and thousands fled from the city. But the Germans did not pursue, and the reason may have been because their spies kept them so well informed. If you hold four knaves and, by stealing a look at your opponent’s hand, see he has four kings, to attempt to fight him would be suicide. So, in the end, the very freedom with which the spies moved about Salonika may have been for good. They may have prevented the loss of many lives.

During these strenuous days the position of the Greek army in Salonika was most difficult. There were of their soldiers nearly as many as there were French and British combined, and they resented the presence of the foreigners in their new city and they showed it. But they could not show it in such a way as to give offense, because they did not know but that on the morrow with the Allies they would be fighting shoulder to shoulder. And then, again, they did not know but that on the morrow they might be with the Germans and fighting against the Allies, gun to gun.

Not knowing just how they stood with anybody, and to show they resented the invasion of their newly won country by the Allies, the Greeks tried to keep proudly aloof. In this they failed. For any one to flock by himself in Salonika was impossible. In a long experience of cities swamped by conventions, inaugurations, and coronations, of all I ever saw, Salonika was the most deeply submerged. During the Japanese-Russian War the Japanese told the correspondents there were no horses in Corea, and that before leaving Japan each should supply himself with one. Dinwiddie refused to obey. The Japanese warned him if he did not take a pony with him he would be forced to accompany the army on foot.

“There will always,” replied Dinwiddie, “be a pony in Corea for Dinwiddie.” It became a famous saying. When the alarmist tells you all the rooms in all the hotels are engaged; that people are sleeping on cots and billiard-tables; that there are no front-row seats for the Follies, no berths in any cabin of any steamer, remind yourself that there is always a pony in Corea for Dinwiddie. The rule is that the hotel clerk discovers a vacant room, a ticket speculator disgorges a front-row seat, and the ship’s doctor sells you a berth in the sick bay. But in Salonika the rule failed. As already explained, Salonika always is overcrowded. Suddenly, added to her 120,000 peoples, came 110,000 Greek soldiers, their officers, and with many of them their families, 60,000 British soldiers and sailors, 110,000 French soldiers and sailors, and no one knows how many thousand Serbian soldiers and refugees, both the rich and the destitute. The population was quadrupled; and four into one you can’t. Four men cannot with comfort occupy a cot built for one, four men at the same time cannot sit on the same chair in a restaurant, four men cannot stand on that spot in the street where previously there was not room enough for one. Still less possible is it for three military motor-trucks to occupy the space in the street originally intended for one small donkey. Of Salonika, a local French author has written: “When one enters the city he is conscious of a cry, continuous and piercing. A cry unique and monotonous, always resembling itself. It is the clamor of Salonika.”

Every one who has visited the East, where every one lives in the streets, knows the sound. It is like the murmur of a stage mob. Imagine, then, that “clamor of Salonika” increased by the rumble and roar over the huge paving-stones of thousands of giant motor-trucks; by the beat of the iron-shod hoofs of cavalry, the iron-shod boots of men marching in squads, companies, regiments, the shrieks of peasants herding flocks of sheep, goats, turkeys, cattle; the shouts of bootblacks, boatmen, sweetmeat venders; newsboys crying the names of Greek papers that sound like “Hi hippi hippi hi,” “Teyang Teyang Teyah”; by the tin horns of the trolley-cars, the sirens of automobiles, the warning whistles of steamers, of steam-launches, of donkey-engines; the creaking of cordage and chains on cargo-hoists, and by the voices of 300,000 men speaking different languages, and each, that he may be heard above it, adding to the tumult. For once the alarmist was right. There were no rooms in any hotel. Early in the rush John McCutcheon, William G. Shepherd, John Bass, and James Hare had taken the quarters left vacant by the Austrian Club in the Hotel Olympus. The room was vast and overlooked the principal square of the city, where every Salonikan met to talk, and the only landing-place on the quay. From the balcony you could photograph, as it made fast, not forty feet from you, every cutter, gig, and launch of every war-ship. The late Austrian Club became the headquarters for lost and strayed Americans. For four nights, before I secured a room to myself by buying the hotel, I slept on the sofa. It was two feet too short, but I was very fortunate.

Outside, in the open halls on cots, were English, French, Greek, and Serbian officers. The place looked like a military hospital. The main salon, gilded and bemirrored, had lost its identity. At the end overlooking the water-front were Serbian ladies taking tea; in the centre of the salon at the piano a little Greek girl taking a music lesson; and at the other end, on cots, British officers from the trenches and Serbian officers who had escaped through the snows of Albania, their muddy boots, uniforms, and swords flung on the floor, slept the drugged sleep of exhaustion.

Meals were a continuous performance and interlocked. Except at midnight, dining-rooms, cafés, and restaurants were never aired, never swept, never empty. The dishes were seldom washed; the waiters—never. People succeeded each other at table in relays, one group giving their order while the other was paying the bill. To prepare a table, a waiter with a napkin swept everything on it to the floor. War prices prevailed. Even the necessities of life were taxed. For a sixpenny tin of English pipe tobacco I paid two dollars, and Scotch whiskey rose from four francs a bottle to fifteen. On even a letter of credit it was next to impossible to obtain money, and the man who arrived without money in his belt walked the water-front. The refugees from Serbia who were glad they had escaped with their lives were able to sleep and eat only through the charity of others. Not only the peasants, but young girls and women of the rich, and more carefully nurtured class of Serbians were glad to sleep on the ground under tents.

The scenes in the streets presented the most curious contrasts. It was the East clashing with the West, and the uniforms of four armies—British, French, Greek, and Serbian—and of the navies of Italy, Russia, Greece, England, and France contrasted with the dress of civilians of every nation. There were the officers of Greece and Serbia in smart uniforms of many colors—blue, green, gray—with much gold and silver braid, and wearing swords which in this war are obsolete; there were English officers, generals of many wars, and red-cheeked boys from Eton, clad in businesslike khaki, with huge, cape-like collars of red fox or wolf skin, and carrying, in place of the sword, a hunting-crop or a walking-stick; there were English bluejackets and marines, Scotch Highlanders, who were as much intrigued over the petticoats of the Evzones as were the Greeks astonished at their bare legs; there were French poilus wearing the steel casque, French aviators in short, shaggy fur coats that gave them the look of a grizzly bear balancing on his hind legs; there were Jews in gabardines, old men with the noble faces of Sargent’s apostles, robed exactly as was Irving as Shylock; there were the Jewish married women in sleeveless cloaks of green silk trimmed with rich fur, and each wearing on her head a cushion of green that hung below her shoulders; there were Greek priests with matted hair reaching to the waist, and Turkish women, their faces hidden in yashmaks, who looked through them with horror, or envy, at the English, Scotch, and American nurses, with their cheeks bronzed by snow, sleet, and sun, wearing men’s hobnailed boots, men’s blouses, and, across their breasts, war medals for valor.

All day long these people of all races, with conflicting purposes, speaking, or shrieking, in a dozen different tongues, pushed, shoved, and shouldered. At night, while the bedlam of sounds grew less, the picture became more wonderful. The lamps of automobiles would suddenly pierce the blackness, or the blazing doors of a cinema would show in the dark street, the vast crowd pushing, slipping, struggling for a foothold on the muddy stones. In the circle of light cast by the automobiles, out of the mass a single face would flash—a face burned by the sun of the Dardanelles or frost-bitten by the snows of the Balkans. Above it might be the gold visor and scarlet band of a “Brass Hat,” staff-officer, the fur kepi of a Serbian refugee, the steel helmet of a French soldier, the “bonnet” of a Highlander, the white cap of a navy officer, the tassel of an Evzone, a red fez, a turban of rags.

This lasted until the Allies retreated upon Salonika, and the Greek army, to give them a clear field in which to fight, withdrew, 100,000 of them in two days, carrying with them tens of thousands of civilians—those who were pro-Germans, and Greeks, Jews, and Serbians. The civilians were flying before the expected advance of the Bulgar-German forces. But the Central Powers, possibly well informed by their spies, did not attack. That was several months ago, and at this writing they have not yet attacked. What one man saw of the approaches to Salonika from the north leads him to think that the longer the attack of the Bulgar-Germans is postponed the better it will be—for the Bulgar-Germans.

CHAPTER VII

TWO BOYS AGAINST AN ARMY

Salonika, December, 1915.

On the day the retreat began from Krivolak, General Sarrail, commanding the Allies in Serbia, gave us permission to visit the French and English front. The French advanced position, and a large amount of ammunition, six hundred shells to each gun, were then at Krivolak, and the English base at Doiran. We left the train at Doiran, but our French “guide” had not informed the English a “mission militaire” was descending upon them, and in consequence at Doiran there were no conveyances to meet us. So, a charming English captain commandeered for us a vast motor-truck. Stretched above it were ribs to support a canvas top, and by clinging to these, as at home on the Elevated we hang to a strap, we managed to avoid being bumped out into the road.

The English captain, who seemed to have nothing else on his hands, volunteered to act as our escort, and on a splendid hunter galloped ahead of and at the side of the lorry, and, much like a conductor on a sight-seeing car, pointed out the objects of interest. When not explaining he was absent-mindedly jumping his horse over swollen streams, ravines, and fallen walls. We found him much more interesting to watch than the scenery.

The scenery was desolate and bleak. It consisted of hills that opened into other hills, from the summit of which more hills stretched to a horizon entirely of mountains. They did not form ridges but, like men in a crowd, shouldered into one another. They were of a soft rock and covered with snow, above which to the height of your waist rose scrub pine-trees and bushes of holly. The rain and snow that ran down their slopes had turned the land into a sea of mud, and had swamped the stone roads. In walking, for each step you took forward you skidded and slid several yards back. If you had an hour to spare you had time for a ten-minute walk.

In our motor-truck we circled Lake Doiran, and a mile from the station came to a stone obelisk. When we passed it our guide on horseback shouted to us that we had crossed the boundary from Greece, and were now in Serbia. The lake is five miles wide and landlocked, and the road kept close to the water’s edge. It led us through little mud villages with houses of mud and wattle, and some of stone with tiled roofs and rafters, and beams showing through the cement. The second story projected like those of the Spanish blockhouses in Cuba, and the log forts from which, in the days when there were no hyphenated Americans, our forefathers fought the Indians.

From a photograph copyright by Medem Photo Service.
“Hills bare of trees, from which the snow that ran down their slopes had turned the road into a sea of mud.”

Except for some fishermen, the Serbians had abandoned these villages, and they were occupied by English army service men and infantry. The “front,” which was hidden away among the jumble of hills, seemed, when we reached it, to consist entirely of artillery. All along the road the Tommies were waging a hopeless war against the mud, shovelling it off the stone road to keep the many motor-trucks from skidding over a precipice, or against the cold making shelters of it, or washing it out of their uniforms and off their persons.

Shivering from ears to heels and with teeth rattling, for they had come from the Dardanelles, they stood stripped to the waist scrubbing their sun-tanned chests and shoulders with ice-water. It was a spectacle that inspired confidence. When a man is so keen after water to wash in that he will kick the top off a frozen lake to get it, a little thing like a barb-wire entanglement will not halt him.

The cold of those hills was like no cold I had ever felt. Officers who had hunted in northern Russia, in the Himalayas, in Alaska, assured us that never had they so suffered. The men we passed, who were in the ambulances, were down either with pneumonia or frost-bite. Many had lost toes and fingers. And it was not because they were not warmly clad.[B]

Last winter in France had taught the war office how to dress the part; but nothing had prepared them for the cold of the Balkans. And to add to their distress, for it was all of that, there was no fire-wood. The hills were bare of trees, and such cold as they endured could not be fought with green twigs.

It was not the brisk, invigorating cold that invites you out of doors. It had no cheery, healthful appeal to skates, toboggans, and the jangling bells of a cutter. It was the damp, clammy, penetrating cold of a dungeon, of an unventilated ice-chest, of a morgue. Your clothes did not warm you, the heat of your body had to warm your clothes. And warm, also, all of the surrounding hills.

Between the road and the margin of the lake were bamboo reeds as tall as lances, and at the edge of these were gathered myriads of ducks. The fishermen were engaged in bombarding the ducks with rocks. They went about this in a methodical fashion. All around the lake, concealed in the reeds and lifted a few feet above the water they had raised huts on piles. In front of these huts was a ledge or balcony. They looked like overgrown bird-houses on stilts.

One fisherman waited in a boat to pick up the dead ducks, and the other hurled stones from a sling. It was the same kind of a sling as the one with which David slew Goliath. In Athens I saw small boys using it to throw stones at an electric-light pole. The one the fisherman used was about eight feet long. To get the momentum he whirled it swiftly above his head as a cowboy swings a lariat, and then let one end fly loose, and the stone, escaping, smashed into the mass of ducks. If it stunned or killed a duck the human water-spaniel in the boat would row out and retrieve it. To duck hunters at home the sport would chiefly recommend itself through the cheapness of the ammunition.

On the road we met relays of water-carts and wagons that had been up the hills with food for the gunners at the front; and engineers were at work repairing the stone bridges or digging détours to avoid those that had disappeared. They had been built to support no greater burden than a flock of sheep, an ox-cart, or what a donkey can carry on his back, and the assault of the British motor-trucks and French six-inch guns had driven them deep into the mud.

After ten miles we came to what a staff officer would call an “advanced base,” but which was locally designated the “Dump.” At the side of the road, much of it uncovered to the snow, were stores of ammunition, “bully beef,” and barb-wire. The camp bore all the signs of a temporary halting place. It was just what the Tommies called it, a dump. We had not been told then that the Allies were withdrawing, but one did not have to be a military expert to see that there was excellent reason why they should.

They were so few. Whatever the force was against them, the force I saw was not strong enough to hold the ground, not that it covered, but over which it was sprinkled. There were outposts without supports, supports without reserves. A squad was expected to perform the duties of a company. Where a brigade was needed there was less than a battalion. Against the white masses of the mountains and the desolate landscape without trees, houses, huts, without any sign of human habitation, the scattered groups of khaki only accented the bleak loneliness.

At the dump we had exchanged for the impromptu motor-truck, automobiles of the French staff, and as “Jimmie” Hare and I were alone in one of them we could stop where we liked. So we halted where an English battery was going into action. It had dug itself into the side of a hill and covered itself with snow and pine branches. Somewhere on one of the neighboring hills the “spotter” was telephoning the range. The gunners could not see at what they were firing. They could see only the high hill of rock and snow, at the base of which they stood shoulder high in their mud cellars. Ten yards to the rear of them was what looked like a newly made grave reverently covered with pine boughs. Through these a rat-faced young man, with the receivers of a telephone clamped to his ears, pushed his head.

From a photograph by William G. Shepherd.
John T. McCutcheon. | John F. Bass.
Richard Harding Davis. | James H. Hare.
American war correspondents at the French front in Serbia.

“Eight degrees to the left, sir,” he barked, “four thousand yards.”

The men behind the guns were extremely young, but, like most artillerymen, alert, sinewy, springing to their appointed tasks with swift, catlike certainty. The sight of the two strangers seemed to surprise them as much as the man in the grave had startled us.

There were two boy officers in command, one certainly not yet eighteen, his superior officer still under twenty.

“I suppose you’re all right,” said the younger one. “You couldn’t have got this far if you weren’t all right.”

He tried to scowl upon us, but he was not successful. He was too lonely, too honestly glad to see any one from beyond the mountains that hemmed him in. They stretched on either side of him to vast distances, massed barriers of white against a gray, sombre sky; in front of him, to be exact, just four thousand yards in front of him, were Bulgarians he had never seen, but who were always with their shells ordering to “move on,” and behind him lay a muddy road that led to a rail-head, that led to transports, that led to France, to the Channel, and England. It was a long, long way to England. I felt like taking one of the boy officers under each arm, and smuggling him safely home to his mother.

“You don’t seem to have any supports,” I ventured.

The child gazed around him. It was growing dark and gloomier, and the hollows of the white hills were filled with shadows. His men were listening, so he said bravely, with a vague sweep of the hand at the encircling darkness, “Oh, they’re about—somewhere. You might call this,” he added, with pride, “an independent command.”

You well might.

“Report when ready!” chanted his superior officer, aged nineteen.

He reported, and then the guns spoke, making a great flash in the twilight.

In spite of the light, Jimmie Hare was trying to make a photograph of the guns.

“Take it on the recoil,” advised the child officer. “It’s sure to stick. It always does stick.”

The men laughed, not slavishly, because the officer had made a joke, but as companions in trouble, and because when you are abandoned on a mountainside with a lame gun that jams, you must not take it lying down, but make a joke of it.

The French chauffeur was pumping his horn for us to return, and I went, shamefacedly, as must the robbers who deserted the babes in the wood.

In farewell I offered the boy officer the best cigars for sale in Greece, which is the worse thing one can say of any cigar. I apologized for them, but explained he must take them because they were called the “King of England.”

“I would take them,” said the infant, “if they were called the ‘German Emperor.’”

At the door of the car we turned and waved, and the two infants waved back. I felt I had meanly deserted them—that for his life the mother of each could hold me to account.

But as we drove away from the cellars of mud, the gun that stuck, and the “independent command,” I could see in the twilight the flashes of the guns and two lonely specks of light.

They were the “King of England” cigars burning bravely.

CHAPTER VIII

THE FRENCH-BRITISH FRONT IN SERBIA

Salonika, December, 1915.

The chauffeur of an army automobile must make his way against cavalry, artillery, motor-trucks, motor-cycles, men marching, and ambulances filled with wounded, over a road torn by thousand-ton lorries and excavated by washouts and Jack Johnsons. It is therefore necessary for him to drive with care. So he drives at sixty miles an hour, and tries to scrape the mud from every wheel he meets.

In these days of his downfall the greatest danger to the life of the war correspondent is that he must move about in automobiles driven by military chauffeurs. The one who drove me from the extreme left of the English front up to hill 516, which was the highest point of the French front, told me that in peace times he drove a car to amuse himself. His idea of amusing himself was to sweep around a corner on one wheel, exclaim with horror, and throw on all the brakes with the nose of the car projecting over a precipice a thousand yards deep. He knew perfectly well the precipice was there, but he leaped at it exactly as though it were the finish line of the Vanderbilt cup race. If his idea of amusing himself was to make me sick with terror he must have spent a thoroughly enjoyable afternoon.

The approaches to hill 516, the base of the hill on the side hidden from the Bulgarians, and the trenches dug into it were crowded with the French. At that point of the line they greatly outnumbered the English. But it was not the elbow touch of numbers that explained their cheerfulness; it was because they knew it was expected of them. The famous scholar who wrote in our school geographies, “The French are a gay people, fond of dancing and light wines,” established a tradition. And on hill 516, although it was to keep from freezing that they danced, and though the light wines were melted snow, they still kept up that tradition and were “gay.”

They laughed at us in welcome, crawling out of their igloos on all fours like bears out of a cave; they laughed when we photographed them crowding to get in front of the camera, when we scattered among them copies of L’Opinion, when up the snow-clad hillside we skidded and slipped and fell. And if we peered into the gloom of the shelters, where they crouched on the frozen ground with snow dripping from above, with shoulders pressed against walls of icy mud, they waved spoons at us and invited us to share their soup. Even the dark-skinned, sombre-eyed men of the desert, the tall Moors and Algerians, showed their white teeth and laughed when a “seventy-five” exploded from an unsuspicious bush, and we jumped. It was like a camp of Boy Scouts, picnicking for one day, and sure the same night of a warm supper and bed. But the best these poilus might hope for was months of ice, snow, and mud, of discomfort, colds, long marches carrying heavy burdens, the pain of frost-bite, and, worst of all, homesickness. They were sure of nothing: not even of the next minute. For hill 516 was dotted with oblong rows of stones with, at one end, a cross of green twigs and a soldier’s cap.

The hill was the highest point of a ridge that looked down into the valleys of the Vardar and of Bodjinia. Toward the Bulgarians we could see the one village of Kosturino, almost indistinguishable against the snow, and for fifty miles, even with glasses, no other sign of life. Nothing but hills, rocks, bushes, and snow. When the “seventy-fives” spoke with their smart, sharp crack that always seems to say, “Take that!” and to add, with aristocratic insolence, “and be damned to you!” one could not guess what they were firing at. In Champagne, where the Germans were as near as from a hundred to forty yards; in Artois, where they were a mile distant, but where their trench was as clearly in sight as the butts of a rifle-range, you could understand. You knew that “that dark line over there” was the enemy.

A year before at Soissons you had seen the smoke of the German guns in a line fifteen miles long. In other little wars you had watched the shells destroy a blockhouse, a village, or burst upon a column of men. But from hill 516 you could see no enemy; only mountains draped in snow, silent, empty, inscrutable. It seemed ridiculous to be attacking fifty miles of landscape with tiny pills of steel. But although we could not see the Bulgars, they could see the flashes on hill 516, and from somewhere out of the inscrutable mountains shells burst and fell. They fell very close, within forty feet of us, and, like children being sent to bed just at dessert time, our hosts hurried us out of the trenches and drove us away.

While on “516” we had been in Bulgaria; now we returned to Serbia, and were halted at the village of Valandova. There had been a ceremony that afternoon. A general, whose name we may not mention, had received the medaille militaire. One of the French correspondents asked him in recognition of which of his victories it had been bestowed. The general possessed a snappy temper.

“The medal was given me,” he said, “because I was the only general without it, and I was becoming conspicuous.”

It had long been dark when we reached Strumnitza station, where we were to spend the night in a hospital tent. The tent was as big as a barn, with a stove, a cot for each, and fresh linen sheets. All these good things belong to the men we had left on hill 516 awake in the mud and snow. I felt like a burglar, who, while the owner is away, sleeps in his bed. There was another tent with a passageway filled with medical supplies connecting it with ours. It was in darkness, and we thought it empty until some one exploring found it crowded with wounded and men with frozen legs and hands. For half an hour they had been watching us through the passageway, making no sign, certainly making no complaint. John Bass collected all our newspapers, candles, and boxes of cigarettes, which the hospital stewards distributed, and when we returned from dinner our neighbors were still wide awake and holding a smoking concert. But when in the morning the bugles woke us we found that during the night the wounded had been spirited away, and by rail transferred to the hospital ships. We should have known then that the army was in retreat. But it was all so orderly, so leisurely, that it seemed like merely a shifting from one point of the front to another.

We dined with the officers and they certainly gave no suggestion of men contemplating retreat, for the mess-hall in which dinner was served had been completed only that afternoon. It was of rough stones and cement, and the interior walls were covered with whitewash. The cement was not yet dry, nor, as John McCutcheon later discovered when he drew caricatures on it, neither was the whitewash. There were twenty men around the dinner-table, seated on ammunition-boxes and Standard Oil cans, and so close together you could use only one hand. So, you gave up trying to cut your food, and used the free hand solely in drinking toasts to the army, to France, and the Allies. Then, to each Ally individually. You were glad there were so many Allies. For it was not Greek, but French wine, of the kind that comes from Rheims. And the army was retreating. What the French army offers its guests to drink when it is advancing is difficult to imagine.

From a photograph by R. H. Davis.
Headquarters of the French commander in Gravec, Serbia.

We were waited upon by an enormous negro from Senegal with a fez as tall as a giant firecracker. Waiting single-handed on twenty men is a serious matter. And because the officers laughed when he served the soup in a tin basin used for washing dishes his feelings were hurt. It was explained that “Chocolat” in his own country was a prince, and that unless treated with tact he might get the idea that waiting on a table is not a royal prerogative. One of the officers was a genius at writing impromptu verses. During one course he would write them, and while Chocolat was collecting the plates would sing them. Then by the light of a candle on the back of a scrap of paper he would write another and sing that. He was rivalled in entertaining us by the officers who told anecdotes of war fronts from the Marne to Smyrna, who proposed toasts, and made speeches in response, especially by the officer who that day had received the Croix de Guerre and a wound.

I sat next to a young man who had been talking learnedly of dumdum bullets and Parisian restaurants. They asked him to recite, and to my horror he rose. Until that moment he had been a serious young officer, talking boulevard French. In an instant he was transformed. He was a clown. To look at him was to laugh. He was an old roué, senile, pitiable, a bourgeois, an apache, a lover, and his voice was so beautiful that each sentence sang. He used words so difficult that to avoid them even Frenchmen will cross the street. He mastered them, played with them, caressed them, sipped of them as a connoisseur sips Madeira: he tossed them into the air like radiant bubbles, or flung them at us with the rattle of a mitrailleuse. When in triumph he sat down, I asked him, when not in uniform, who the devil he happened to be.

Again he was the bored young man. In a low tone, so as not to expose my ignorance to others, he said.

“I? I am Barrielles of the Theatre Odeon.”

We were receiving so much that to make no return seemed ungracious, and we insisted that John T. McCutcheon should decorate the wall of the new mess-room with the caricatures that make the Chicago Tribune famous. Our hosts were delighted, but it was hardly fair to McCutcheon. Instead of his own choice of weapons he was asked to prove his genius on wet whitewash with a stick of charred wood. It was like asking McLaughlin to make good on a ploughed field. But in spite of the fact that the whitewash fell off in flakes, there grew upon the wall a tall, gaunt figure with gleaming eyes and teeth. Chocolat paid it the highest compliment. He gave a wild howl and fled into the night. Then in quick succession, while the Frenchmen applauded each swift stroke, appeared the faces of the song writer, the comedian, the wounded man, and the commanding officer. It was a real triumph, but the surprises of the evening were not at an end. McCutcheon had but just resumed his seat when the newly finished rear wall of the mess-hall crashed into the room. Where had been rocks and cement was a gaping void, and a view of a garden white with snow.

While we were rescuing the song writer from the débris McCutcheon regarded the fallen wall thoughtfully.

“They feared,” he said, “I was going to decorate that wall also, and they sent Chocolat outside to push it in.”

From a photograph, copyright by American Press Association.
After the retreat from Serbia.
English Tommies intrenched in the ten-mile plain outside Salonika. “Are they downhearted? No!”

The next day we walked along the bank of the Vardar River to Gravec, about five miles north of Strumnitza station. Five miles farther was Demir-Kapu, the Gate of Iron, and between these two towns is a high and narrow pass famous for its wild and magnificent beauty. Fifteen miles beyond that was Krivolak, the most advanced French position. On the hills above Gravec were many guns, but in the town itself only a few infantrymen. It was a town entirely of mud; the houses, the roads, and the people were covered with it. Gravec is proud only of its church, on the walls of which in colors still rich are painted many devils with pitchforks driving the wicked ones into the flames.

One of the poilus put his finger on the mass of wicked ones.

“Les Boches,” he explained.

Whether the devils were the French or the English he did not say, possibly because at the moment they were more driven against than driving.

Major Merse, the commanding officer, invited us to his headquarters. They were in a house of stone and mud, from which projected a wooden platform. When any one appeared upon it he had the look of being about to make a speech. The major asked us to take photographs of Gravec and send them to his wife. He wanted her to see in what sort of a place he was condemned to exist during the winter. He did not wish her to think of him as sitting in front of a café on the sidewalk, and the snap-shots would show her that Gravec has no cafés, no sidewalks and no streets.

But he was not condemned to spend the winter in Gravec.

Within the week great stores of ammunition and supplies began to pour into it from Krivolak, and the Gate of Iron became the advanced position, and Gravec suddenly found herself of importance as the French base.

To understand this withdrawal, find on the map Krivolak, and follow the railroad and River Vardar southeast to Gravec.

The cause of the retreat was the inability of the Serbians to hold Monastir and their withdrawal west, which left a gap in the former line of Serbians, French, and British. The enemy thus was south and west of Sarrail, and his left flank was exposed.

On December 3, finding the advanced position at Krivolak threatened by four divisions, 100,000 men, General Sarrail began the withdrawal, sending south by rail without loss all ammunition and stores. He destroyed the tunnel at Krivolak and all the bridges across the Vardar, and on his left at the Cerna River. The fighting was heavy at Prevedo and Biserence, but the French losses were small. He withdrew slowly, twenty miles in one week. The British also withdrew from their first line to their second line of defense.

Demir-Kapu, meaning the Gate of Iron, is the entrance to a valley celebrated for its wild and magnificent beauty. Starting at Demir-Kapu, it ends two kilometres north of Gravec. It rises on either side of the Vardar River and railroad line, and in places is less than a hundred yards wide. It is formed of sheer hills of rock, treeless and exposed.

But the fame of Gravec as the French base was short-lived. For the Serbians at Monastir and Gevgeli, though fighting bravely, were forced toward Albania, leaving the left flank of Sarrail still more exposed. And the Gate of Iron belied her ancient title.

With 100,000 Bulgars crowding down upon him General Sarrail wasted no lives, either French or English, but again withdrew. He was outnumbered, some say five to one. In any event, he was outnumbered as inevitably as three of a kind beat two pair. A good poker player does not waste chips backing two pair. Neither should a good general, when his chips are human lives. As it was, in the retreat seven hundred French were killed or wounded, and of the British, who were more directly in the path of the Bulgars, one thousand.

At Gevgeli the French delayed two days to allow the Serbian troops to get away, and then themselves withdrew. There now no longer were any Serbian soldiers in Serbia. So both armies fell back toward Salonika on a line between Kilindir and Doiran railroad-station, and all the places we visited a week before were occupied by the enemy. At Gravec a Bulgarian is pointing at the wicked ones who are being driven into the flames and saying: “The Allies,” and at Strumnitza station in the mess-hall Bulgar officers are framing John McCutcheon’s sketches.

And here at Salonika from sunrise to sunset the English are disembarking reinforcements, and the French building barracks of stone and brick. It looks as though the French were here to stay, and as though the retreating habit was broken.

The same team that, to put it politely, drew the enemy after them to the gates of Paris, have been drawing the same enemy after them to Salonika. That they will throw him back from Salonika, as they threw him back from Paris, is assured.

General Sarrail was one of those who commanded in front of Paris, and General de Castelnau, who also commanded at the battle of the Marne, and is now chief of staff of General Joffre, has just visited him here. General de Castelnau was sent to “go, look, see.” He reports that the position now held by the Allies is impregnable.

The perimeter held by them is fifty miles in length and stretches from the Vardar River on the west to the Gulf of Orplanos on the east. There are three lines of defense. To assist the first two on the east are Lakes Beshik and Langaza, on the west the Vardar River. Should the enemy penetrate the first lines they will be confronted ten miles from Salonika by a natural barrier of hills, and ten miles of intrenchments and barb-wire. Should the enemy surmount these hills the Allies war-ships in the harbor can sweep him off them as a fire-hose rips the shingles off a roof.

The man who tells you he understands the situation in Salonika is of the same mental caliber as the one who understands a system for beating the game at Monte Carlo. But there are certain rumors as to the situation in the future that can be eliminated. First, Greece will not turn against the Allies. Second, the Allies will not withdraw from Salonika. They now are agreed it is better to resist an attack or stand a siege, even if they lose 200,000 men, than to withdraw from the Balkans without a fight.

The Briand government believes that had the Millerand government, which it overthrew, sent troops to aid the Serbian army in August this war would have been made shorter by six months. It now is trying to repair the mistake of the government it ousted. Among other reasons it has for remaining in the Balkans, is that the presence of 200,000 men at Salonika will hold Roumania from any aggressive movement on Russia.

To aid the Allies, Russia at Tannenberg made a sacrifice, and lost 200,000 men. The present French Government now feels bound in honor to help Russia by keeping the French-British armies at Salonika. As a visiting member of the government said to me:

“In this war there is no western line or eastern line. The line of the Allies is wherever a German attacks. France went to the Balkans to help Serbia. She went too late, which is not the fault of the present government. But there remains the task to keep the Germans from Egypt, to menace the railroad at Adrianople, and to prevent Roumania from an attack upon the flank of Russia. The Allies are in Salonika until this war is ended.”

In Salonika you see every evidence that this is the purpose of the Allies; that both England and France are determined to hold fast.

Reinforcements of British troops are arriving daily, and the French are importing large numbers of ready-to-set-up wooden barracks, each capable of holding 250 men. Also along the water-front they are building storehouses of brick and stone. That does not suggest an immediate departure. At the French camp, which covers five square miles in the suburbs of Salonika when I visited it to-day, thousands of soldiers were actively engaged in laying stone roads, repairing bridges and erecting new ones. There is no question but that they intend to make this the base until the advance in the spring.

A battalion of Serbians 700 strong has arrived at the French camp. In size and physique they are splendid specimens of fighting men. They are now road building. Each day refugees of the Serbian army add to their number.

At four o’clock in the morning of the 14th of December, the Greek army evacuated Salonika and that strip of Greek territory stretching from it to Doiran.

From before sunrise an unbroken column of Greek regiments passed beneath the windows of our hotel. There were artillery, cavalry, pontoons, ambulances, and thousands of ponies and donkeys, carrying fodder, supplies, and tents. The sidewalks were invaded by long lines of infantry. The water-front along which the column passed was blocked with spectators.

As soon as the Greeks had departed sailors from the Allied war-ships were given shore leave, and the city took on the air of a holiday. Thus was a most embarrassing situation brought to an end and the world informed that the Allies had but just begun to fight. It was the clearing of the prize-ring.

The clearing also of the enemy’s consulates ended another embarrassing situation. As suggested in a previous chapter, the consulates of the Central Powers were the hot-beds and clearing-houses for spies. The raid upon them by the French proved that this was true. The enforced departure of the German, Austrian, Bulgarian, and Turkish consuls added to the responsibilities of our own who has now to guard their interests. They will be efficiently served. John E. Kehl has been long in our consular service, and is most admirably fitted to meet the present crisis. He has been our representative at Salonika for four years, in which time his experience as consul during the Italian-Turkish War, the two Balkan wars, and the present war, have trained him to meet any situation that is likely to arrive.

What that situation may be, whether the Bulgar-Germans will attack Salonika, or the Allies will advance upon Sofia, and as an inevitable sequence draw after them the Greek army of 200,000 veterans, only the spring can tell.

If the Teutons mean to advance, having the shorter distance to go, they may launch their attack in April. The Allies, if Sofia is their objective, will wait for the snow to leave the hills and the roads to dry. That they would move before May is doubtful. Meanwhile, they are accumulating many men, and much ammunition and information. May they make good use of it.

CHAPTER IX

VERDUN AND ST. MIHIEL

Paris, January, 1916.

It is an old saying that the busiest man always seems to have the most leisure. It is another way of complimenting him on his genius for organization. When you visit a real man of affairs you seldom find him surrounded by secretaries, stenographers, and a battery of telephones. As a rule, there is nothing on his desk save a photograph of his wife and a rose in a glass of water. Outside the headquarters of the general there were no gendarmes, no sentries, no panting automobiles, no mud-flecked chasseurs-à-cheval. Unchallenged the car rolled up an empty avenue of trees and stopped beside an empty terrace of an apparently empty château. At one end of the terrace was a pond, and in it floated seven beautiful swans. They were the only living things in sight. I thought we had stumbled upon the country home of some gentleman of elegant leisure.

When he appeared the manner of the general assisted that impression. His courtesy was so undisturbed, his mind so tranquil, his conversation so entirely that of the polite host, you felt he was masquerading in the uniform of a general only because he knew it was becoming. He glowed with health and vigor. He had the appearance of having just come indoors after a satisfactory round on his private golf-links. Instead, he had been receiving reports from twenty-four different staff-officers. His manner suggested he had no more serious responsibility than feeding bread crumbs to the seven stately swans. Instead he was responsible for the lives of 170,000 men and fifty miles of trenches. His duties were to feed the men three times a day with food, and all day and night with ammunition, to guard them against attacks from gases, burning oil, bullets, shells; and in counter-attack to send them forward with the bayonet across hurdles of barb-wire to distribute death. These were only a few of his responsibilities.

The ruined village of Gerbéviller, destroyed after their retreat by the Germans.
Captain Gabriel Puaux, of the General-Headquarters Staff, and Mr. Davis.

I knew somewhere in the château there must be the conning-tower from which the general directed his armies, and after luncheon asked to be allowed to visit it. It was filled with maps, in size enormous but rich in tiny details, nailed on frames, pinned to the walls, spread over vast drawing-boards. But to the visitor more marvellous than the maps showing the French lines were those in which were set forth the German positions, marked with the place occupied by each unit, giving the exact situation of the German trenches, the German batteries, giving the numerals of each regiment. With these spread before him, the general has only to lift the hand telephone, and direct that from a spot on a map on one wall several tons of explosive shells shall drop on a spot on another map on the wall opposite. The general does not fight only at long distance from a map. Each morning he visits some part of the fifty miles of trenches. What later he sees on his map only jogs his memory. It is a sort of shorthand note. Where to you are waving lines, dots, and crosses, he beholds valleys, forests, miles of yellow trenches. A week ago, during a bombardment, a brother general advanced into the first trench. His chief of staff tugged at his cloak.

“My men like to see me here,” said the general.

A shell killed him. But who can protest it was a life wasted? He made it possible for every poilu in a trench of five hundred miles to say: “Our generals do not send us where they will not go themselves.”

We left the white swans smoothing their feathers, and through rain drove to a hill covered closely with small trees. The trees were small, because the soil from which they drew sustenance was only one to three feet deep. Beneath that was chalk. Through these woods was cut a runway for a toy railroad. It possessed the narrowest of narrow gauges, and its rolling-stock consisted of flat cars three feet wide, drawn by splendid Percherons. The live stock, the rolling-stock, the tracks, and the trees on either side of the tracks were entirely covered with white clay. Even the brakemen and the locomotive-engineer who walked in advance of the horses were completely painted with it. And before we got out of the woods, so were the passengers. This railroad feeds the trenches, carrying to them water and ammunition, and to the kitchens in the rear uncooked food.

The French marquis who escorted “Mon Capitaine” of the Grand Quartier Général des Armées, who was my “guide philosopher and friend,” to the trenches either had built this railroad, or owned a controlling interest in it, for he always spoke of it proudly as “my express,” “my special train,” “my petite vitesse.” He had lately been in America buying cavalry horses.

From a photograph, copyright by Medem Photo Service.
“Through these woods ran a toy railroad.”
This picture shows President Poincaré on the toy railroad en route to the trenches.

As for years he has owned one of the famous racing stables in France, his knowledge of them is exceptional.

When last I had seen him he was in silk, on one of his own thoroughbreds, and the crowd, or that part of it that had backed his horse, was applauding, and, while he waited for permission to dismount, he was smiling and laughing. Yesterday, when the plough horses pulled his express-train off the rails, he descended and pushed it back, and, in consequence, was splashed, not by the mud of the race-track but of the trenches. Nor in the misty, dripping, rain-soaked forest was there any one to applaud. But he was still laughing, even more happily.

The trenches were dug around what had been a chalk mine, and it was difficult to tell where the mining for profit had stopped and the excavations for defense began. When you can see only chalk at your feet, and chalk on either hand, and overhead the empty sky, this ignorance may be excused. In the boyaux, which began where the railroad stopped, that was our position. We walked through an endless grave with walls of clay, on top of which was a scant foot of earth. It looked like a layer of chocolate on the top of a cake.

In some places, underfoot was a corduroy path of sticks, like the false bottom of a rowboat; in others, we splashed through open sluices of clay and rain-water. You slid and skidded, and to hold yourself erect pressed with each hand against the wet walls of the endless grave.

We came out upon the “hauts de Meuse.” They are called also the “Shores of Lorraine,” because to that province, as are the cliffs of Dover to the county of Kent, they form a natural barrier. We were in the quarry that had been cut into the top of the heights on the side that now faces other heights held by the enemy. Behind us rose a sheer wall of chalk as high as a five-story building. The face of it had been pounded by shells. It was as undismayed as the whitewashed wall of a schoolroom at which generations of small boys have flung impertinent spit-balls. At the edge of the quarry the floor was dug deeper, leaving a wall between it and the enemy, and behind this wall were the posts of observation, the nests of the machine-guns, the raised step to which the men spring when repulsing an attack. Below and back of them were the shelters into which, during a bombardment, they disappear. They were roofed with great beams, on top of which were bags of cement piled three and four yards high.

Not on account of the sleet and fog, but in spite of them, the aspect of the place was grim and forbidding. You did not see, as at some of the other fronts, on the sign-boards that guide the men through the maze, jokes and nicknames. The mess-huts and sleeping-caves bore no such ironic titles as the Petit Café, the Anti-Boche, Chez Maxim. They were designated only by numerals, businesslike and brief. It was no place for humor. The monuments to the dead were too much in evidence. On every front the men rise and lie down with death, but on no other front had I found them living so close to the graves of their former comrades. Where a man had fallen, there had he been buried, and on every hand you saw between the chalk huts, at the mouths of the pits or raised high in a niche, a pile of stones, a cross, and a soldier’s cap. Where one officer had fallen his men had built to his memory a mausoleum. It is also a shelter into which, when the shells come, they dive for safety. So that even in death he protects them.

I was invited into a post of observation, and told to make my entrance quickly. In order to exist, a post of observation must continue to look to the enemy only like part of the wall of earth that faces him. If through its apparently solid front there flashes, even for an instant, a ray of sunlight, he knows that the ray comes through a peep-hole, and that behind the peep-hole men with field-glasses are watching him. And with his shells he hammers the post of observation into a shambles. Accordingly, when you enter one, it is etiquette not to keep the door open any longer than is necessary to squeeze past it. As a rule, the door is a curtain of sacking, but hands and bodies coated with clay, by brushing against it, have made it quite opaque.

The post was as small as a chart-room, and the light came only through the peep-holes. You got a glimpse of a rack of rifles, of shadowy figures that made way for you, and of your captain speaking in a whisper. When you put your eyes to the peep-hole it was like looking at a photograph through a stereoscope. But, instead of seeing the lake of Geneva, the Houses of Parliament, or Niagara Falls, you looked across a rain-driven valley of mud, on the opposite side of which was a hill.

Here the reader kindly will imagine a page of printed matter devoted to that hill. It was an extremely interesting hill, but my captain, who also is my censor, decides that what I wrote was too interesting, especially to Germans. So the hill is “strafed.” He says I can begin again vaguely with “Over there.”

“Over there,” said his voice in the darkness, “is St. Mihiel.”

For more than a year you had read of St. Mihiel. Communiqués, maps, illustrations had made it famous and familiar. It was the town that gave a name to the German salient, to the point thrust in advance of what should be his front. You expected to see an isolated hill, a promontory, some position of such strategic value as would explain why for St. Mihiel the lives of thousands of Germans had been thrown upon the board. But except for the obstinacy of the German mind, or, upon the part of the Crown Prince the lack of it, I could find no explanation. Why the German wants to hold St. Mihiel, why he ever tried to hold it, why if it so pleases him he should not continue to hold it until his whole line is driven across the border, is difficult to understand. For him it is certainly an expensive position. It lengthens his lines of communication and increases his need of transport. It eats up men, eats up rations, eats up priceless ammunition, and it leads to nowhere, enfilades no position, threatens no one. It is like an ill-mannered boy sticking out his tongue. And as ineffective.

The physical aspect of St. Mihiel is a broad sweep of meadow-land cut in half by the Meuse flooding her banks; and the shattered houses of the Ferme Mont Meuse, which now form the point of the salient. At this place the opposing trenches are only a hundred yards apart, and all of this low ground is commanded by the French guns on the heights of Les Paroches. On the day of our visit they were being heavily bombarded. On each side of the salient are the French. Across the battle-ground of St. Mihiel I could see their trenches facing those in which we stood. For, at St. Mihiel, instead of having the line of the enemy only in front, the lines face the German, and surround him on both flanks. Speaking not as a military strategist but merely as a partisan, if any German commander wants that kind of a position I would certainly make him a present of it.

From a photograph, copyright by Underwood and Underwood.
A first-line trench outside of Verdun.
The trench enfilades the valley beyond, and the valley is covered with barbed-wire and gun-pits.

The colonel who commanded the trenches possessed an enthusiasm that was beautiful to see. He was as proud of his chalk quarry as an admiral of his first dreadnaught. He was as isolated as though cast upon a rock in mid-ocean. Behind him was the dripping forest, in front the mud valley filled with floating fogs. At his feet in the chalk floor the shells had gouged out holes as deep as rain-barrels. Other shells were liable at any moment to gouge out more holes. Three days before, when Prince Arthur of Connaught had come to tea, a shell had hit outside the colonel’s private cave, and smashed all the teacups. It is extremely annoying when English royalty drops in sociably to distribute medals and sip a cup of tea to have German shells invite themselves to the party. It is a way German shells have. They push in everywhere. One invited itself to my party and got within ten feet of it. When I complained, the colonel suggested absently that it probably was not a German shell but a French mine that had gone off prematurely. He seemed to think being hit by a French mine rather than by a German shell made all the difference in the world. It nearly did.

At the moment the colonel was greatly interested in the fact that one of his men was not carrying a mask against gases. The colonel argued that the life of the man belonged to France, and that through laziness or indifference he had no right to risk losing it. Until this war the colonel had commanded in Africa the regiment into which criminals are drafted as a punishment. To keep them in hand requires both imagination and the direct methods of a bucko mate on a whaler. When the colonel was promoted to his present command he found the men did not place much confidence in the gas masks, so he filled a shelter with poisoned air, equipped a squad with protectors and ordered them to enter. They went without enthusiasm, but when they found they could move about with impunity the confidence of the entire command in the anti-gas masks was absolute.

The colonel was very vigilant against these gas attacks. He had equipped the only shelter I have seen devoted solely to the preparation of defenses against them. We learned several new facts concerning this hideous form of warfare. One was that the Germans now launch the gas most frequently at night when the men cannot see it approach, and, in consequence, before they can snap the masks into place, they are suffocated, and in great agony die. They have learned much about the gas, but chiefly by bitter experience. Two hours after one of the attacks an officer seeking his field-glasses descended into his shelter. The gas that had flooded the trenches and then floated away still lurked below. And in a moment the officer was dead. The warning was instantly flashed along the trenches from the North Sea to Switzerland, and now after a gas raid, before any one enters a shelter, it is attacked by counter-irritants, and the poison driven from ambush.

I have never seen better discipline than obtained in that chalk quarry, or better spirit. There was not a single outside element to aid discipline or to inspire morale. It had all to come from within. It had all to spring from the men themselves and from the example set by their officers. The enemy fought against them, the elements fought against them, the place itself was as cheerful as a crutch. The clay climbed from their feet to their hips, was ground into their uniforms, clung to their hands and hair. The rain chilled them, the wind, cold, damp, and harsh, stabbed through their greatcoats. Their outlook was upon graves, their resting-places dark caverns, at which even a wolf would look with suspicion. And yet they were all smiling, eager, alert. In the whole command we saw not one sullen or wistful face.

It is an old saying: “So the colonel, so the regiment.”

But the splendid spirit I saw on the heights of the Meuse is true not only of that colonel and of that regiment, but of the whole five hundred miles of trenches, and of all France.

February, 1916.

When I was in Verdun, the Germans, from a distance of twenty miles, had dropped three shells into Nancy and threatened to send more. That gave Nancy an interest which Verdun lacked. So I was intolerant of Verdun and anxious to hasten on to Nancy.

To-day Nancy and her three shells are forgotten, and to all the world the place of greatest interest is Verdun. Verdun has been Roman, Austrian, and not until 1648 did she become a part of France. This is the fourth time she has been attacked—by the Prussians in 1792, again by the Germans in 1870, when, after a gallant defense of three weeks, she surrendered, and in October of 1914.

She then was more menaced than attacked. It was the Crown Prince and General von Strantz with seven army corps who threatened her. General Sarrail, now commanding the allied forces in Salonika, with three army corps, and reinforced by part of an army corps from Toul, directed the defense. The attack was made upon Fort Troyon, about twenty miles south of Verdun. The fort was destroyed, but the Germans were repulsed. Four days later, September 24, the real attack was made fifteen miles south of Troyon, on the village of St. Mihiel. The object of Von Strantz was to break through the Verdun-Toul line, to inclose Sarrail from the south and at Revigny link arms with the Crown Prince. They then would have had the army of Sarrail surrounded.

For several days it looked as though Von Strantz would succeed, but, though outnumbered, Sarrail’s line held, and he forced Von Strantz to “dig in” at St. Mihiel. There he still is, like a dagger that has failed to reach the heart but remains implanted in the flesh.

Von Strantz having failed, a week later, on October 3, the Crown Prince attacked through the Forest of the Argonne between Varennes and Verdun. But this assault also was repulsed by Sarrail, who captured Varennes, and with his left joined up with the Fourth Army of General Langle. The line as then formed by that victory remained much as it is to-day. The present attack is directed neither to the north nor south of Verdun, but straight at the forts of the city. These forts form but a part of the defenses. For twenty miles in front of Verdun have been spread trenches and barb-wire. In turn, these are covered by artillery positions in the woods and on every height. Even were a fort destroyed, to occupy it the enemy must pass over a terrain, every foot of which is under fire. As the defense of Verdun has been arranged, each of the forts is but a rallying-point—a base. The actual combat that will decide the struggle will be fought in the open.

Last month I was invited to one of the Verdun forts. It now lies in the very path of the drive, and to describe it would be improper. But the approaches to it are now what every German knows. They were more impressive even than the fort. The “glacis” of the fort stretched for a mile, and as we walked in the direction of the German trenches there was not a moment when from every side French guns could not have blown us into fragments. They were mounted on the spurs of the hills, sunk in pits, ambushed in the thick pine woods. Every step forward was made cautiously between trenches, or through mazes of barb-wire and iron hurdles with bayonet-like spikes. Even walking leisurely you had to watch your step. Pits opened suddenly at your feet, and strands of barbed-wire caught at your clothing. Whichever way you looked trenches flanked you. They were dug at every angle, and were not farther than fifty yards apart.

On one side, a half mile distant, was a hill heavily wooded. At regular intervals the trees had been cut down and uprooted and, like a wood-road, a cleared space showed. These were the nests of the “seventy-fives.” They could sweep the approaches to the fort as a fire-hose flushes a gutter. That a human being should be ordered to advance against such pitfalls and obstructions, and under the fire from the trenches and batteries, seemed sheer murder. Not even a cat with nine lives could survive.

A valley in Argonne showing a forest destroyed by shells.
Owing to the attack on the Verdun sector, it is again under fire.

The German papers tell that before the drive upon Verdun was launched the German Emperor reproduced the attack in miniature. The whereabouts and approaches to the positions they were to take were explained to the men. Their officers were rehearsed in the part each was to play. But no rehearsal would teach a man to avoid the pitfalls that surround Verdun. The open places are as treacherous as quicksands, the forests that seem to him to offer shelter are a succession of traps. And if he captures one fort he but brings himself under the fire of two others.

From what I saw of the defenses of Verdun from a “certain place” three miles outside the city to a “certain place” fifteen miles farther south, from what the general commanding the Verdun sector told me, and from what I know of the French, I believe the Crown Prince will find this second attack upon Verdun a hundred per cent more costly than the first, and equally unsuccessful.

CHAPTER X

WAR IN THE VOSGES

Paris, January, 1916.

When speaking of their five hundred miles of front, the French General Staff divide it into twelve sectors. The names of these do not appear on maps. They are family names and titles, not of certain places, but of districts with imaginary boundaries. These nicknames seem to thrive best in countries where the same race of people have lived for many centuries. With us, it is usually when we speak of mountains, as “in the Rockies,” “in the Adirondacks,” that under one name we merge rivers, valleys, and villages. To know the French names for the twelve official fronts may help in deciphering the communiqués. They are these:

Flanders, the first sector, stretches from the North Sea to beyond Ypres; the Artois sector surrounds Arras; the centre of Picardie is Amiens; Santerre follows the valley of the Oise; Soissonais is the sector that extends from Soissons on the Aisne to the Champagne sector, which begins with Rheims and extends southwest to include Chalons; Argonne is the forest of Argonne; the Hauts de Meuse, the district around Verdun; Woevre lies between the heights of the Meuse and the River Moselle; then come Lorraine, the Vosges, all hills and forests, and last, Alsace, the territory won back from the enemy.

Of these twelve fronts, I was on ten. The remaining two I missed through leaving France to visit the French fronts in Serbia and Salonika. According to which front you are on, the trench is of mud, clay, chalk, sand-bags, or cement; it is ambushed in gardens and orchards, it winds through flooded mud flats, is hidden behind the ruins of wrecked villages, and is paved and reinforced with the stones and bricks from the smashed houses.

Of all the trenches the most curious were those of the Vosges. They were the most curious because, to use the last word one associates with trenches, they are the most beautiful.

We started for the trenches of the Vosges from a certain place close to the German border. It was so close that in the inn a rifle-bullet from across the border had bored a hole in the café mirror.

The car climbed steadily. The swollen rivers flowed far below us, and then disappeared, and the slopes that fell away on one side of the road and rose on the other became smothered under giant pines. Above us they reached to the clouds, below us swept grandly across great valleys. There was no sign of human habitation, not even the hut of a charcoal-burner. Except for the road we might have been the first explorers of a primeval forest. We seemed as far removed from the France of cities, cultivated acres, stone bridges, and châteaux as Rip Van Winkle lost in the Catskills. The silence was the silence of the ocean.

We halted at what might have been a lumberman’s camp. There were cabins of huge green logs with the moss still fresh and clinging, and smoke poured from mud chimneys. In the air was an enchanting odor of balsam and boiling coffee. It needed only a man in a Mackinaw coat with an axe to persuade us we had motored from a French village ten hundred years old into a perfectly new trading-post on the Saskatchewan.

But from the lumber camp the colonel appeared, and with him in the lead we started up a hill as sheer as a church roof. The freshly cut path reached upward in short, zigzag lengths. Its outer edge was shored with the trunks of the trees cut down to make way for it. They were fastened with stakes, and against rain and snow helped to hold it in place. The soil, as the path showed, was of a pink stone. It cuts easily, and is the stone from which cathedrals have been built. That suggests that to an ambitious young sapling it offers little nutriment, but the pines, at least, seem to thrive on it. For centuries they have thrived on it. They towered over us to the height of eight stories. The ground beneath was hidden by the most exquisite moss, and moss climbed far up the tree trunks and covered the branches. They looked, as though to guard them from the cold, they had been swathed in green velvet. Except for the pink path we were in a world of green—green moss, green ferns, green tree trunks, green shadows. The little light that reached from above was like that which filters through the glass sides of an aquarium.

It was very beautiful, but was it war? We might have been in the Adirondacks in the private camp of one of our men of millions. You expected to see the fire-warden’s red poster warning you to stamp out the ashes, and to be careful where you threw your matches. Then the path dived into a trench with pink walls, and, overhead, arches of green branches rising higher and higher until they interlocked and shut out the sky. The trench led to a barrier of logs as round as a flour-barrel, the openings plugged with moss, and the whole hidden in fresh pine boughs. It reminded you of those open barricades used in boar hunting, and behind which the German Emperor awaits the onslaught of thoroughly terrified pigs.

Like a bird’s nest it clung to the side of the hill, and, across a valley, looked at a sister hill a quarter of a mile away.

“On that hill,” said the colonel, “on a level with us, are the Germans.”

Had he told me that among the pine-trees across the valley Santa Claus manufactured his toys and stabled his reindeer I would have believed him. Had humpbacked dwarfs with beards peeped from behind the velvet tree trunks and doffed red nightcaps, had we discovered fairies dancing on the moss carpet, the surprised ones would have been the fairies.

In this enchanted forest to talk of Germans and war was ridiculous. We were speaking in ordinary tones, but in the stillness of the woods our voices carried, and from just below us a dog barked.

“Do you allow the men to bring dogs into the trenches?” I asked. “Don’t they give away your position?”

“That is not one of our dogs,” said the colonel. “That is a German sentry dog. He has heard us talking.”

“But that dog is not across that valley,” I objected. “He’s on this hill. He’s not two hundred yards below us.”

“But, yes, certainly,” said the colonel. Of the man on duty behind the log barrier he asked:

“How near are they?”

“Two hundred yards,” said the soldier. He grinned and, leaning over the top log, pointed directly beneath us.

War in the forest.
A cemetery for soldiers killed in the Vosges.

It was as though we were on the roof of a house looking over the edge at some one on the front steps. I stared down through the giant pine-trees towering like masts, mysterious, motionless, silent with the silence of centuries. Through the interlacing boughs I saw only shifting shadows or, where a shaft of sunlight fell upon the moss, a flash of vivid green. Unable to believe, I shook my head. Even the boche watchdog, now thoroughly annoyed, did not convince me. As though reading my doubts, an officer beckoned, and we stepped outside the breastworks and into an intricate cat’s-cradle of barbed-wire. It was lashed to heavy stakes and wound around the tree trunks, and, had the officer not led the way, it would have been impossible for me to get either in or out. At intervals, like clothes on a line, on the wires were strung empty tin cans, pans and pots, and glass bottles. To attempt to cross the entanglement would have made a noise like a peddler’s cart bumping over cobbles.

We came to the edge of the barb-wire, and what looked like part of a tree trunk turned into a man-sized bird’s nest. The sentry in the nest had his back to us, and was peering intently down through the branches of the tree tops. He remained so long motionless that I thought he was not aware of our approach. But he had heard us. Only it was no part of his orders to make abrupt movements. With infinite caution, with the most considerate slowness, he turned, scowled, and waved us back. It was the care with which he made even so slight a gesture that persuaded me the Germans were as close as the colonel had said. My curiosity concerning them was satisfied. The sentry did not need to wave me back. I was already on my way.

At the post of observation I saw a dog-kennel.

“There are watchdogs on our side, also?” I said.

“Yes,” the officer assented doubtfully.

“The idea is that their hearing is better than that of the men, and in case of night attacks they will warn us. But during the day they get so excited barking at the boche dogs that when darkness comes, and we need them, they are worn-out and fall asleep.”

We continued through the forest, and wherever we went found men at work repairing the path and pushing the barb-wire and trenches nearer the enemy. In some places they worked with great caution as, hidden by the ferns, they dragged behind them the coils of wire; sometimes they were able to work openly, and the forest resounded with the blows of axes and the crash of a falling tree. But an axe in a forest does not suggest war, and the scene was still one of peace and beauty.

For miles the men had lined the path with borders of moss six inches wide, and with strips of bark had decorated the huts and shelters. Across the tiny ravines they had thrown what in seed catalogues are called “rustic” bridges. As we walked in single file between these carefully laid borders of moss and past the shelters that suggested only a gamekeeper’s lodge, we might have been on a walking tour in the Alps. You expected at every turn to come upon a châlet like a Swiss clock, and a patient cow and a young woman in a velvet bodice who would offer you warm milk.

Instead, from overhead, there burst suddenly the barking of shrapnel, and through an opening in the tree-tops we saw a French biplane pursued by German shells. It was late in the afternoon, but the sun was still shining and, entirely out of her turn, the moon also was shining. In the blue sky she hung like a silver shield, and toward her, it seemed almost to her level, rose the biplane.

She also was all silver. She shone and glistened. Like a great bird, she flung out tilting wings. The sun kissed them and turned them into flashing mirrors. Behind her the German shells burst in white puffs of smoke, feathery, delicate, as innocent-looking as the tips of ostrich-plumes. The biplane ran before them and seemed to play with them as children race up the beach laughing at the pursuing waves. The biplane darted left, darted right, climbed unseen aerial trails, tobogganed down vast imaginary mountains, or, as a gull skims the crests of the waves, dived into a cloud and appeared again, her wings dripping, glistening and radiant. As she turned and winged her way back to France you felt no fear for her. She seemed beyond the power of man to harm, something supreme, super-human—a sister to the sun and moon, the princess royal of the air.

After you have been in the trenches it seems so selfish to be feasting and drinking that you have no appetite for dinner.

But after a visit to the defenders of the forests of the Vosges you cannot feel selfish. Visits to their trenches do not take away the appetite. They increase it. The air they breathe tastes like brut champagne, and gases cannot reach them. They sleep on pillows of pine boughs. They look out only on what in nature is most beautiful. And their surgeon told me there was not a single man on the sick-list. That does not mean there are no killed or wounded. For even in the enchanted forest there is no enchantment strong enough to ward off the death that approaches crawling on the velvet moss, or hurtling through the tree-tops.

War has no knowledge of sectors. It is just as hateful in the Vosges as in Flanders, only in the Vosges it masks its hideousness with what is beautiful. In Flanders death hides in a trench of mud like an open grave. In the forest of the Vosges it lurks in a nest of moss, fern, and clean, sweet-smelling pine.

CHAPTER XI

HINTS FOR THOSE WHO WANT TO HELP

Paris, January, 1916.

At home people who read of some splendid act of courage or self-sacrifice on the part of the Allies, are often moved to exclaim: “I wish I could help! I wish I could do something!”

This is to tell them how easily, at what bargain prices, at what little cost to themselves that wish can be gratified.

In the United States, owing to the war, many have grown suddenly rich; those already wealthy are increasing their fortunes. Here in France the war has robbed every one; the rich are less rich, the poor more destitute. Every franc any one can spare is given to the government, to the Bank of France, to fight the enemy and to preserve the country.

The calls made upon the purses of the people never cease, and each appeal is so worthy that it cannot be denied. In consequence, for the war charities there is not so much money as there was. People are not less willing, but have less to give. So, in order to obtain money, those who ask must appeal to the imagination, must show why the cause for which they plead is the most pressing. They advertise just which men will benefit, and in what way, whether in blankets, gloves, tobacco, masks, or leaves of absence.

Those in charge of the relief organizations have learned that those who have money to give like to pick and choose. A tale of suffering that appeals to one, leaves another cold. One gives less for the wounded because he thinks those injured in battle are wards of the state. But for the children orphaned by the war he will give largely. So the petitioners dress their shop-windows.

To the charitably disposed, and over here that means every Frenchman, they offer bargains. They have “white sales,” “fire sales.” As, at our expositions, we have special days named after the different States, they have special days for the Belgians, Poles, and Serbians.

For these days they prepare long in advance. Their approach is heralded, advertised; all Paris, or it may be the whole of France, knows they are coming.

Christmas Day and the day after were devoted exclusively to the man in the trenches, to obtain money to bring him home on leave. Those days were les journees du poilu.

The services of the best black-and-white artists in France were commandeered. For advertising purposes they designed the most appealing posters. Unlike those issued by our suffragettes, calling attention to the importance of November 2, they gave some idea of what was wanted.

They did not show Burne-Jones young women blowing trumpets. They were not symbolical, or allegorical; they were homely, pathetic, humorous, human. They were aimed straight at the heart and pocketbook.

They showed the poilu returning home on leave, and on surprising his wife or his sweetheart with her hands helpless in the washtub, kissing her on the back of the neck. In the corner the dog danced on his hind legs, barking joyfully.

They showed the men in the trenches, and while one stood at the periscope the other opened their Christmas boxes; they showed father and son shoulder to shoulder marching through the snow, mud, and sleet; they showed the old couple at home with no fire in the grate, saying: “It is cold for us, but not so cold as for our son in the trench.”

For every contribution to this Christmas fund those who gave received a decoration. According to the sum, these ran from paper badges on a pin to silver and gold medals.

The whole of France contributed to this fund. The proudest shops filled their windows with the paper badges, and so well was the fund organized that in every town and city petitioners in the streets waylaid every pedestrian.

Even in Modena, on the boundary-line of Italy, when I was returning to France, and sharing a lonely Christmas with the conductor of the wagon-lit, we were held up by train-robbers, who took our money and then pinned medals on us.

Until we reached Paris we did not know why. It was only later we learned that in the two days’ campaign the poilus was benefited to the sum of many millions of francs.

In Paris and over all France, for every one is suffering through the war, there is some individual or organization at work to relieve that suffering. Every one helps, and the spirit in which they help is most wonderful and most beautiful. No one is forgotten.

When the French artists were called to the front, the artists’ models of the Place Pigalle and Montmartre were left destitute. They had not “put by.” They were butterflies.

So some women of the industrious, busy-bee order formed a society to look after the artists’ models. They gave them dolls to dress, and on the sale of dolls the human manikins now live.

Nor is any one who wants to help allowed to feel that he or she is too poor; that for his sou or her handiwork there is no need. The midinettes, the “cash” girls of the great department stores and millinery shops, had no money to contribute, so some one thought of giving them a chance to help the soldiers with their needles.

It was purposed they should make cockades in the national colors. Every French girl is taught to sew; each is born with good taste. They were invited to show their good taste in the designing of cockades, which people would buy for a franc, which franc would be sent to some soldier.

A poster inviting the proprietors of restaurants and hotels and their guests to welcome the soldiers who have permission to visit Paris, especially those who come from the districts invaded by the Germans.

The French did not go about this in a hole-in-a-corner way in a back street. They did not let the “cash” girl feel her artistic effort was only a blind to help her help others. They held a “salon” for the cockades.

And they held it in the same Palace of Art, where at the annual salon are hung the paintings of the great French artists. The cockades are exhibited in one hall, and next to them is an exhibition of the precious tapestries rescued from the Rheims cathedral.

In the hall beyond that is an exhibition of lace. To this, museums, duchesses, and queens have sent laces that for centuries have been family heirlooms. But the cockades of Mimi Pinson by the thousands and thousands are given just as much space, are arranged with the same taste and by the same artist who grouped and catalogued the queens’ lace handkerchiefs.

And each little Mimi Pinson can go to the palace and point to the cockade she made with her own fingers, or point to the spot where it was, and know she has sent a franc to a soldier of France.

These days the streets of Paris are filled with soldiers, each of whom has given to France some part of his physical self. That his country may endure, that she may continue to enjoy and teach liberty, he has seen his arm or his leg, or both, blown off, or cut off. But when on the boulevards you meet him walking with crutches or with an empty sleeve pinned beneath his Cross of War, and he thinks your glance is one of pity, he resents it. He holds his head more stiffly erect. He seems to say: “I know how greatly you envy me!”

And who would dispute him? Long after the war is ended, so long as he lives, men and women of France will honor him, and in their eyes he will read their thanks. But there is one soldier who cannot read their thanks, who is spared the sight of their pity. He is the one who has made all but the supreme sacrifice. He is the one who is blind. He sits in perpetual darkness. You can remember certain nights that seemed to stretch to doomsday, when sleep was withheld and you tossed and lashed upon the pillow, praying for the dawn. Imagine a night of such torture dragged out over many years, with the dreadful knowledge that the dawn will never come. Imagine Paris with her bridges, palaces, parks, with the Seine, the Tuileries, the boulevards, the glittering shop-windows conveyed to you only through noise. Only through the shrieks of motor-horns and the shuffling of feet.

The men who have been blinded in battle have lost more than sight. They have been robbed of their independence. They feel they are a burden. It is not only the physical loss they suffer, but the thought that no longer are they of use, that they are a care, that in the scheme of things—even in their own little circles of family and friends—there is for them no place. It is not unfair to the poilu to say that the officer who is blinded suffers more than the private. As a rule, he is more highly strung, more widely educated; he has seen more; his experience of the world is broader; he has more to lose. Before the war he may have been a lawyer, doctor, man of many affairs. For him it is harder than, for example, the peasant to accept a future of unending blackness spent in plaiting straw or weaving rag carpets. Under such conditions life no longer tempts him. Instead, death tempts him, and the pistol seems very near at hand.

All over France, on Christmas Day and the day after, money was collected to send comforts and things good to eat to the men at the front.

It was to save men of the officer class from despair and from suicide, to make them know that for them there still was a life of usefulness, work, and accomplishment, that there was organized in France the Committee for Men Blinded in Battle. The idea was to bring back to officers who had lost their sight, courage, hope, and a sense of independence, to give them work not merely mechanical but more in keeping with their education and intelligence. The President of France is patron of the society, and on its committees in Paris and New York are many distinguished names. The French Government has promised a house near Paris where the blind soldiers may be educated. When I saw them they were in temporary quarters in the Hôtel de Crillon, lent to them by the proprietor. They had been gathered from hospitals in different parts of France by Miss Winifred Holt, who for years has been working for the blind in her Lighthouse in New York. She is assisted in the work in Paris by Mrs. Peter Cooper Hewitt. The officers were brought to the Crillon by French ladies, whose duty it was to guide them through the streets. Some of them also were their instructors, and in order to teach them to read and write with their fingers had themselves learned the Braille alphabet. This requires weeks of very close and patient study. And no nurse’s uniform goes with it. But the reward was great.

It was evident in the alert and eager interest of the men who, perhaps, only a week before had wished to “curse God, and die.” But since then hope had returned to each of them, and he had found a door open, and a new life.

And he was facing it with the same or with even a greater courage than that with which he had led his men into the battle that blinded him. Some of the officers were modelling in clay, others were learning typewriting, one with a drawing-board was studying to be an architect, others were pressing their finger-tips over the raised letters of the Braille alphabet.

Opposite each officer, on the other side of the table, sat a woman he could not see. She might be young and beautiful, as many of them were. She might be white-haired and a great lady bearing an ancient title, from the faubourg across the bridges, but he heard only a voice.

The voice encouraged his progress, or corrected his mistakes, and a hand, detached and descending from nowhere, guided his hand, gently, as one guides the fingers of a child. The officer was again a child. In life for the second time he was beginning with A, B, and C. The officer was tall, handsome, and deeply sunburned. In his uniform of a chasseur d’Afrique he was a splendid figure. On his chest were the medals of the campaigns in Morocco and Algiers, and the crimson ribbon of the Legion of Honor. The officer placed his forefinger on a card covered with raised hieroglyphics.

“N,” he announced.

“No,” the voice answered him.

“M?” His tone did not carry conviction.

“You are guessing,” accused the voice. The officer was greatly confused.

“No, no, mademoiselle!” he protested. “Truly, I thought it was an ‘M.’”

He laughed guiltily. The laugh shook you. You saw all that he could never see: inside the room the great ladies and latest American countesses, eager to help, forgetful of self, full of wonderful, womanly sympathy; and outside, the Place de la Concorde, the gardens of the Tuileries, the trees of the Champs-Élysées, the sun setting behind the gilded dome of the Invalides. All these were lost to him, and yet as he sat in the darkness, because he could not tell an N from an M, he laughed, and laughed happily. From where did he draw his strength and courage? Was it the instinct for life that makes a drowning man fight against an ocean? Was it his training as an officer of the Grande Armée? Was it that spirit of the French that is the one thing no German knows, and no German can ever break? Or was it the sound of a woman’s voice and the touch of a woman’s hand? If the reader wants to contribute something to help teach a new profession to these gentlemen, who in the fight for civilization have contributed their eyesight, write to the secretary of the committee, Mrs. Peter Cooper Hewitt, Hôtel Ritz, Paris.

A poster advertising the fund to bring from the trenches “permissionaires,” those soldiers who obtain permission to return home for six days.

There are some other very good bargains. Are you a lover of art, and would you become a patron of art? If that is your wish, you can buy an original water-color for fifty cents, and so help an art student who is fighting at the front, and assist in keeping alive his family in Paris. Is not that a good bargain?

As everybody knows, the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris is free to students from all the world. It is the alma mater of some of the best-known American artists and architects. On its rolls are the names of Sargent, St. Gaudens, Stanford White, Whitney Warren, Beckwith, Coffin, MacMonnies.

Certain schools and colleges are so fortunate as to inspire great devotion on the part of their students, as, in the story told of every college, of the student being led from the football field, who struggles in front of the grand stand and shouts: “Let me go back. I’d die for dear old ——”

But the affection of the students of the Beaux-Arts for their masters, their fellow students and the institution is very genuine.

They do not speak of the distinguished artists, architects, engravers, and sculptors who instruct them as “Doc,” or “Prof.” Instead they call him “master,” and no matter how often they say it, they say it each time as though they meant it.

The American students, even when they return to Paris rich and famous, go at once to call upon the former master of their atelier, who, it may be, is not at all famous or rich, and pay their respects.

And, no matter if his school of art has passed, and the torch he carried is in the hands of younger Frenchmen, his former pupils still salute him as master, and with much the same awe as the village curé shows for the cardinal.

When the war came 3,000 of the French students of the Beaux-Arts, past and present, were sent to the front, and there was no one to look after their parents, families, or themselves, it seemed a chance for Americans to try to pay back some of the debt so many generations of American artists, architects, and sculptors owed to the art of France.

Whitney Warren, the American architect, is one of the few Americans who, in spite of the extreme unpopularity of our people, is still regarded by the French with genuine affection. And in every way possible he tries to show the French that it is not the American people who are neutral, but the American Government.

One of the ways he offers to Americans to prove their friendship for France is in helping the students of the Beaux-Arts. He has organized a committee of French and American students which works twelve hours a day in the palace of the Beaux-Arts itself, on the left bank of the Seine.

It is hard to understand how in such surroundings they work, not all day, but at all. The rooms were decorated in the time of the first Napoleon; the ceilings and walls are white and gold, and in them are inserted paintings and panels. The windows look into formal gardens and courts filled with marble statues and busts, bronze medallions and copies of frescoes brought from Athens and Rome. In this atmosphere the students bang typewriters, fold blankets, nail boxes, sort out woollen gloves, cigarettes, loaves of bread, and masks against asphyxiating gas. The mask they send to the front was invented by Francis Jacques, of Harvard, one of the committee, and has been approved by the French Government.

There is a department which sends out packages to the soldiers in the trenches, to those who are prisoners, and to the soldiers in the hospitals. There is a system of demand cards on which is a list of what the committee is able to supply. In the trenches the men mark the particular thing they want and return the card. The things most in demand seem to be corn-cob pipes and tobacco from America, sketch-books, and small boxes of water-colors.

The committee also edits and prints a monthly magazine. It is sent to those at the front, and gives them news of their fellow students, and is illustrated, it is not necessary to add, with remarkable talent and humor. It is printed by hand. The committee also supplies the students with post-cards on which the students paint pictures in water-colors and sign them. Every student and ex-student, even the masters paint these pictures. Some of them are very valuable. At two francs fifty centimes the autograph alone is a bargain. In many cases your fifty cents will not only make you a patron of art, but it may feed a very hungry family. Write to Ronald Simmons or Cyrus Thomas, École des Beaux-Arts, 17 Quai Malaquais.

There is another very good bargain, and extremely cheap. Would you like to lift a man bodily out of the trenches, and for six days not only remove him from the immediate proximity of asphyxiating gas, shells, and bullets, but land him, of all places to a French soldier the most desired, in Paris? Not only land him there, but for six days feed and lodge him, and give him a present to take away? It will cost you fifteen francs, or three dollars. If so, write to Journal des Restaurateurs, 24 Rue Richelieu, Paris.

In Paris, we hear that on Wall Street there are some very fine bargains. We hear that in gambling in war brides and ammunition everybody is making money. Very little of that money finds its way to France. Some day I may print a list of the names of those men in America who are making enormous fortunes out of this war, and who have not contributed to any charity or fund for the relief of the wounded or of their families. If you don’t want your name on that list you might send money to the American Ambulance at Neuilly, or to any of the 6,300 hospitals in France, to the clearing-house, through H. H. Harjes, 31 Boulevard Haussman, or direct to the American Red Cross.

Or if you want to help the orphans of soldiers killed in battle write to August F. Jaccaci, Hôtel de Crillon; if you want to help the families of soldiers rendered homeless by this war, to the Secours National through Mrs. Whitney Warren, 16 West Forty-Seventh Street, New York; if you want to clothe a French soldier against the snows of the Vosges send him a Lafayette kit. In the clearing-house in Paris I have seen on file 20,000 letters from French soldiers asking for this kit. Some of them were addressed to the Marquis de Lafayette, but the clothes will get to the front sooner if you forward two dollars to the Lafayette Kit Fund, Hotel Vanderbilt, New York. If you want to help the Belgian refugees, address Mrs. Herman Harjes, Hôtel de Crillon, Paris; if the Serbian refugees, address Monsieur Vesnitch, the Serbian minister to France.

If among these bargains you cannot find one to suit you, you should consult your doctor. Tell him there is something wrong with your heart.

CHAPTER XII

LONDON, A YEAR LATER

February, 1916.

A year ago you could leave the Continent and enter England by showing a passport and a steamer ticket. To-day it is as hard to leave Paris, and no one ever wants to leave Paris, as to get out of jail; as difficult to invade England as for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. To leave Paris for London you must obtain the permission of the police, the English consul-general, and the American consul-general. That gets you only to Havre. The Paris train arrives at Havre at nine o’clock at night, and while the would-be passengers for the Channel boat to Southampton are waiting to be examined, they are kept on the wharf in a goods-shed. An English sergeant hands each of them a ticket with a number, and when the number is called the passenger enters a room on the shed where French and English officials put him, or her, through a third degree. The examination is more or less severe, and sometimes the passenger is searched.

There is nothing on the wharf to eat or drink, and except trunks nothing on which to sit. If you prefer to be haughty and stand, there is no law against that. Should you leave the shed for a stroll, you would gain nothing, for, as it is war-time, at nine o’clock every restaurant and café in Havre closes, and the town is so dark you would probably stroll into the harbor.

So, like emigrants on our own Ellis Island, English and French army and navy officers, despatch bearers, American ambulance drivers, Red Cross nurses, and all the other picturesque travellers of these interesting times, shiver, yawn, and swear from nine o’clock until midnight. To make it harder, the big steamer that is to carry you across the Channel is drawn up to the wharf not forty feet way, all lights and warmth and cleanliness. At least ten men assured me they would return to Havre and across the street from the examination-shed start an all-night restaurant. After a very few minutes of standing around in the rain it was a plan to get rich quick that would have occurred to almost any one.

My number was forty-three. After seeing only five people in one hour pass through the examination-room, I approached a man of proud bearing, told him I was a detective, and that I had detected he was from Scotland Yard. He looked anxiously at his feet.

“How did you detect that?” he asked.

“Your boots are all right,” I assured him. “It’s the way you stand with your hands behind your back.”

By shoving his hands into his pockets he disguised himself, and asked what I wanted. I wanted to be put through the torture-chamber ahead of all the remaining passengers. He asked why he should do that. I showed him the letter that, after weeks of experiment, I found of all my letters, was the one that produced the quickest results. It is addressed vaguely, “To His Majesty’s Officers.” I call it Exhibit A.

I explained that for purposes of getting me out of the goods-shed and on board the steamer he could play he was one of his Majesty’s officers. The idea pleased him. He led me into the examination-room, where, behind a long table, like inspectors in a voting-booth on election day, sat French police officials, officers of the admiralty, army, consular, and secret services. Some were in uniform, some in plain clothes. From above, two arc-lights glared down upon them and on the table covered with papers.

In two languages they were examining a young Englishwoman who was pale, ill, and obviously frightened.

“What is your purpose in going to London?” asked the French official.

“To join my children.”

To the French official it seemed a good answer. As much as to say: “Take the witness,” he bowed to his English colleagues.

“If your children are in London,” demanded one, “what are you doing in France?”

“I have been at Amiens, nursing my husband.”

“Amiens is inside our lines. Who gave you permission to remain inside our lines?”

The woman fumbled with some papers.

“I have a letter,” she stammered.

The officer scowled at the letter. Out of the corner of his mouth he said: “Permit from the ‘W. O.’ Husband, Captain in the Berkshires. Wounded at La Bassée.”

He was already scratching his visé upon her passport. As he wrote, he said, cordially: “I hope your husband is all right again.” The woman did not reply. So long was she in answering that they looked up at her. She was chilled with waiting in the cold rain. She had been on a strain, and her lips began to tremble. To hide that fact, and with no intention of being dramatic, she raised her hand, and over her face dropped a black veil.

The officer half rose.

“You should have told us at once, madam,” he said. He jerked his head at the detective and toward the door, and the detective picked up her valise, and asked her please to follow. At the door she looked back, and the row of officials, like one man, bent forward.

One of them was engaged in studying my passport. It had been viséed by the representatives of all the civilized powers, and except the Germans and their fellow gunmen, most of the uncivilized. The officer was fascinated with it. Like a jig-saw puzzle, it appealed to him. He turned it wrong side up and sideways, and took so long about it that the others, hoping there was something wrong, in anticipation scowled at me. But the officer disappointed them.

“Very interestin’,” he said. “You ought to frame it.”

Now that I was free to leave the detention camp I perversely felt a desire to remain. Now that I was free, the sight of all the other passengers kicking each other’s heels and being herded by Tommies gave me a feeling of infinite pleasure. I tried to express this by forcing money on the detective, but he absolutely refused it. So, instead, I offered to introduce him to a King’s messenger. We went in search of the King’s messenger. I was secretly alarmed lest he had lost himself. Since we had left the Balkans together he had lost nearly everything else. He had set out as fully equipped as the white knight, or a “temp. sec. lieutenant.” But his route was marked with lost trunks, travelling-bags, hat-boxes, umbrellas, and receipts for reservations on steamships, railroad-trains, in wagon-lits, and dining-cars.

A King’s messenger has always been to me a fascinating figure. In fiction he is resourceful, daring, ubiquitous. He shows his silver staff, with its running greyhound, which he inherits from the days of Henry VIII, and all men must bow before it. To speed him on his way, railroad-carriages are emptied, special trains are thrown together, steamers cast off only when he arrives. So when I found for days I was to travel in company with a King’s messenger I foresaw a journey of infinite ease and comfort. It would be a royal progress. His ever-present, but invisible, staff of secret agents would protect me. I would share his special trains, his suites of deck cabins. But it was not like that. My King’s messenger was not that kind of a King’s messenger. Indeed, when he left the Levant, had it not been for the man from Cook’s, he would never have found his way from the hotel to the right railroad-station. And that he now is safely in London is because at Patras we rescued him from a boatman who had placed him unresisting on a steamer for Australia.

“Very interestin’. You ought to frame it.”

I pointed him out to the detective. He recalled him as the gentleman who had blocked the exit gate at the railroad-station. I suggested that that was probably because he had lost his ticket.

“Lost his ticket! A King’s messenger!” The detective was indignant with me. “Impossible, sir!”

I told him the story of the drunken bandsman returning from the picnic. “You can’t have lost your ticket,” said the guard.

“Can’t I?” exclaimed the bandsman triumphantly. “I’ve lost the bass-drum!”

Scotland Yard reproved the K. M. with deference, but severely.

“You should have told us at once, sir,” he said, “that you were carrying despatches. If you’d only shown your credentials, we’d had you safe on board two hours ago.”

The King’s messenger blushed guiltily. He looked as though he wanted to run.

“Don’t tell me,” I cried, “you’ve lost your credentials, too!”

“Don’t be an ass!” cried the K. M. “I’ve mislaid them, that’s all.”

The detective glared at him as though he would enjoy leading him to the moat in the tower.

“You’ve been robbed!” he gasped.

“Have you looked,” I asked, “in the unlikely places?”

“I always look there first,” explained the K. M.

“Look again,” commanded the detective.

Unhappily, the K. M. put his hand in his inside coat pocket and, with intense surprise, as though he had performed a conjuring trick, produced a paper that creaked and crinkled.

“That’s it!” he cried.

“You come with me,” commanded Scotland Yard, “before you lose it again.”

Two nights later, between the acts at a theatre, I met a young old friend. Twenty years before we had made a trip through Central America and Venezuela. To my surprise, for I had known him in other wars, he was not in khaki, but in white waistcoat and lawn tie and tail-coat. He looked as though he had on his hand nothing more serious than money and time. I complained that we had not met since the war.

“It’s a chance, our meeting to-night,” he said, “for I start for Cairo in the morning. I left the Dardanelles last Wednesday and arrived here only to-day.”

“Wednesday!” I exclaimed. “How could you do it?”

“Torpedo-boat from Moudros to Malta,” he explained, “transport to Marseilles, troop train to Calais, and there our people shot me across the Channel on a hospital ship. Then I got a special to town.”

“You are a swell!” I gasped. “What’s your rank?”

“Captain.”

That did not explain it.

“What’s your job?”

“King’s messenger.”

It was not yet nine-thirty. The anti-treating law would not let me give him a drink, but I led him to where one was. For he had restored my faith. He had replaced on his pedestal my favorite character in fiction.

On returning to London for the fourth time since the war began, but after an absence of months, one finds her much nearer to the field of operations. A year ago her citizens enjoyed the confidence that comes from living on an island. Compared with Paris, where at Claye the enemy was within fifteen miles, and, at the Forest of Montmorency, within ten miles, London seemed as far removed from the front as Montreal. Since then, so many of her men have left for the front and not returned, so many German air-ships have visited her, and inhumanly assassinated her children and women, that she seems a part of it. A year ago an officer entering a restaurant was conscious of his uniform. To-day, anywhere in London, a man out of uniform, or not wearing a khaki armlet, is as conspicuous as a scarlet letter-box. A year ago the lamps had been so darkened that it was not easy to find the keyhole to your street door. Now you are in luck if you find the street. Nor does that mean you have lingered long at dinner. For after nine-thirty nowhere in London can you buy a drink, not at your hotel, not even at your club. At nine-thirty the waiter whisks your drink off the table. What happens to it after that, only the waiter knows.

A year ago the only women in London in uniform were the nurses. Now so many are in uniform that to one visitor they presented the most surprising change the war has brought to that city. Those who live in London, to whom the change has come gradually, are probably hardly aware how significant it is. Few people, certainly few men, guessed that so many positions that before the war were open only to men, could be filled quite as acceptably by women. Only the comic papers guessed it. All that they ever mocked at, all the suffragettes and “equal rights” women ever hoped for seems to have come true. Even women policemen. True, they do not take the place of the real, immortal London bobby, neither do the “special constables,” but if a young girl is out late at night with her young man in khaki, she is held up by a policewoman and sent home. And her young man in khaki dare not resist.

In Paris, when the place of a man who had been mobilized was taken by his wife, sister, or daughter, no one was surprised. Frenchwomen have for years worked in partnership with men to a degree unknown in England. They helped as bookkeepers, shopkeepers; in the restaurant they always handled the money; in the theatres the ushers and box openers were women; the government tobacco-shops were run by women. That Frenchwomen were capable, efficient, hard working was as trite a saying as that the Japanese are a wonderful little people. So when the men went to the front and the women carried on their work, they were only proving a proverb.

But in England careers for women, outside those of governess, typist, barmaid, or show girl, which entailed marrying a marquis, were as few as votes. The war has changed that. It gave woman her chance, and she jumped at it. “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again” he will find he must look for a man’s job, and that men’s jobs no longer are sinecures. In his absence women have found out, and, what is more important, the employers have found out that to open a carriage door and hold an umbrella over a customer is not necessarily a man’s job. The man will have to look for a position his sister cannot fill, and, judging from the present aspect of London, those positions are rapidly disappearing.

That in the ornamental jobs, those that are relics of feudalism and snobbery, women should supplant men is not surprising. To wear gold lace and touch your hat and whistle for a taxicab, if the whistle is a mechanical one, is no difficult task. It never was absolutely necessary that a butler and two men should divide the labor of serving one cup of coffee, one lump of sugar, and one cigarette. A healthy young woman might manage all three tasks and not faint. So the innovation of female butlers and footmen is not important. But many of the jobs now held in London by women are those which require strength, skill, and endurance. Pulling on the steel rope of an elevator and closing the steel gates for eight hours a day require strength and endurance; and yet in all the big department stores the lifts are worked by girls. Women also drive the vans, and dragging on the brake of a brewery-wagon and curbing two draft-horses is a very different matter from steering one of the cars that made peace hateful. Not that there are no women chauffeurs. They are everywhere. You see them driving lorries, business cars, private cars, taxicabs, ambulances.

In men’s caps and uniforms of green, gray, brown, or black, and covered to the waist with a robe, you mistake them for boys. The other day I saw a motor-truck clearing a way for itself down Piccadilly. It was filled with over two dozen Tommies, and driven recklessly by a girl in khaki of not more than eighteen years. How many indoor positions have been taken over by women one can only guess; but if they are in proportion to the out-of-door jobs now filled by women and girls, it would seem as though half the work in London was carried forward by what we once were pleased to call the weaker sex. To the visitor there appear to be regiments of them. They look very businesslike and smart in their uniforms, and whatever their work is they are intent upon it. As a rule, when a woman attempts a man’s work she is conscious. She is more concerned with the fact that she is holding down a man’s job than with the job. Whether she is a lady lawyer, lady doctor, or lady journalist, she always is surprised to find herself where she is. The girls and women you see in uniform by the thousands in London seem to have overcome that weakness. They are performing a man’s work, and their interest is centred in the work, not in the fact that a woman has made a success of it. If, after this, women in England want the vote, and the men won’t give it to them, the men will have a hard time explaining why.

From a photograph by Brown Bros.
“They have women policemen now.”

During my few days in England, I found that what is going forward in Paris for blind French officers is being carried on in London at St. Dunstan’s, Regent’s Park, for blind Tommies. At this school the classes are much larger than are those in Paris, the pupils more numerous, and they live and sleep on the premises. The premises are very beautiful. They consist of seventeen acres of gardens, lawns, trees, a lake, and a stream on which you can row and swim, situated in Regent’s Park and almost in the heart of London. In the days when London was farther away the villa of St. Dunstan’s belonged to the eccentric Marquis of Hertford, the wicked Lord Steyne of Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair.” It was a country estate. Now the city has closed in around it, but it is still a country estate, with ceilings by the Brothers Adam, portraits by Romney, sideboards by Sheraton, and on the lawn sheep. To keep sheep in London is as expensive as to keep race-horses, and to own a country estate in London can be afforded only by Americans. The estate next to St. Dunstan’s is owned by an American lady. I used to play lawn-tennis there with her husband. Had it not been for the horns of the taxicabs we might have been a hundred miles from the nearest railroad. Instead, we were so close to Baker Street that one false step would have landed us in Mme. Tussaud’s. When the war broke out the husband ceased hammering tennis-balls, and hammered German ships of war. He sank several—and is now waiting impatiently outside of Wilhelmshaven for more.

St. Dunstan’s also is owned by an American, Otto Kahn, the banker. In peace times, in the winter months, Mr. Kahn makes it possible for the people of New York to listen to good music at the Metropolitan Opera House. When war came, at his country place in London he made it next to possible for the blind to see. He gave the key of the estate to C. Arthur Pearson. He also gave him permission in altering St. Dunstan’s to meet the needs of the blind to go as far as he liked.

When I first knew Arthur Pearson he and Lord Northcliffe were making rival collections of newspapers and magazines. They collected them as other people collect postal cards and cigar-bands. Pearson was then, as he is now, a man of the most remarkable executive ability, of keen intelligence, of untiring nervous energy. That was ten years ago. He knew then that he was going blind. And when the darkness came he accepted the burden; not only his own, but he took upon his shoulders the burden of all the blind in England. He organized the National Institute for those who could not see. He gave them of his energy, which has not diminished; he gave them of his fortune, which, happily for them, has not diminished; he gave them his time, his intelligence. If you ask what the time of a blind man is worth, go to St. Dunstan’s and you will find out. You will see a home and school for blind men, run by a blind man. The same efficiency, knowledge of detail, intolerance of idleness, the same generous appreciation of the work of others, that he put into running The Express and Standard, he now exerts at St. Dunstan’s. It has Pearson written all over it just as a mile away there is a building covered with the name of Selfridge, and a cathedral with the name of Christopher Wren. When I visited him in his room at St. Dunstan’s he was standing with his back to the open fire dictating to a stenographer. He called to me cheerily, caught my hand, and showed me where I was to sit. All the time he was looking straight at me and firing questions:

“When did you leave Salonika? How many troops have we landed? Our positions are very strong, aren’t they?”

He told the stenographer she need not wait, and of an appointment he had which she was not to forget. Before she reached the door he remembered two more things she was not to forget. The telephone rang, and, still talking, he walked briskly around a sofa, avoided a table and an armchair, and without fumbling picked up the instrument. What he heard was apparently very good news. He laughed delightedly, saying: “That’s fine! That’s splendid!”

A secretary opened the door and tried to tell him what he had just learned, but was cut short.

“I know,” said Pearson. “So-and-so has just phoned me. It’s fine, isn’t it?”

He took a small pad from his pocket, made a note on it, and laid the memorandum beside the stenographer’s machine. Then he wound his way back to the fireplace and offered a case of cigarettes. He held them within a few inches of my hand. Since I last had seen him he had shaved his mustache and looked ten years younger and, as he exercises every morning, very fit. He might have been an officer of the navy out of uniform. I had been in the room five minutes, and only once, when he wrote on the pad and I saw that as he wrote he did not look at the pad, would I have guessed that he was blind.

“What we teach them here,” he said, firing the words as though from a machine-gun, “is that blindness is not an ‘affliction.’ We won’t allow that word. We teach them to be independent. Sisters and the mothers spoil them! Afraid they’ll bump their shins. Won’t let them move about. Always leading them. That’s bad, very bad. Makes them think they’re helpless, no good, invalids for life. We teach ’em to strike out for themselves. That’s the way to put heart into them. Make them understand they’re of use, that they can help themselves, help others, learn a trade, be self-supporting. We trained them to row. Some of them never had had oars in their hands except on the pond at Hempstead Heath on a bank holiday. We trained a crew that swept the river.”

It was fine to see the light in his face. His enthusiasm gave you a thrill. He might have been Guy Nickalls telling how the crew he coached won at New London.

“They were the best crews, too. University crews. Of course, our coxswain could see, but the crew were blind. We’ve not only taught them to row, we’ve taught them to support themselves, taught them trades. All men who come here have lost their eyesight in battle in this war, but already we have taught some of them a trade and set them up in business. And while the war lasts business will be good for them. And it must be nursed and made to grow. So we have an ‘after-care’ committee. To care for them after they have left us. To buy raw material, to keep their work up to the mark, to dispose of it. We need money for those men. For the men who have started life again for themselves. Do you think there are people in America who would like to help those men?”

I asked, in case there were such people, to whom should they write.

“To me,” he said, “St. Dunstan’s, Regent’s Park.”[C]

I found the seventeen acres of St. Dunstan’s so arranged that no blind man could possibly lose his way. In the house, over the carpets, were stretched strips of matting. So long as a man kept his feet on matting he knew he was on the right path to the door. Outside the doors hand-rails guided him to the workshops, schoolrooms, exercising-grounds, and kitchen-gardens. Just before he reached any of these places a brass knob on the hand-rail warned him to go slow. Were he walking on the great stone terrace and his foot scraped against a board he knew he was within a yard of a flight of steps. Wherever you went you found men at work, learning a trade, or, having learned one, intent in the joy of creating something. To help them there are nearly sixty ladies, who have mastered the Braille system and come daily to teach it. There are many other volunteers, who take the men on walks around Regent’s Park and who talk and read to them. Everywhere was activity. Everywhere some one was helping some one: the blind teaching the blind; those who had been a week at St. Dunstan’s doing the honors to those just arrived. The place spoke only of hard work, mutual help, and cheerfulness. When first you arrived you thought you had over the others a certain advantage, but when you saw the work the blind men were turning out, which they could not see, and which you knew with both your eyes you never could have turned out, you felt apologetic. There were cabinets, for instance, measured to the twentieth of an inch, and men who were studying to be masseurs who, only by touch, could distinguish all the bones in the body. There was Miss Woods, a blind stenographer. I dictated a sentence to her, and as fast as I spoke she took it down on a machine in the Braille alphabet. It appeared in raised figures on a strip of paper like those that carry stock quotations. Then, reading the sentence with her fingers, she pounded it on an ordinary typewriter. Her work was faultless.

What impressed you was the number of the workers who, over their task, sang or whistled. None of them paid any attention to what the others were whistling. Each acted as though he were shut off in a world of his own. The spirits of the Tommies were unquenchable.

Thorpe Five was one of those privates who are worth more to a company than the sergeant-major. He was a comedian. He looked like John Bunny, and when he laughed he shook all over, and you had to laugh with him, even though you were conscious that Thorpe Five had no eyes and no hands. But was he conscious of that? Apparently not. Was he down-hearted? No! Some one snatched his cigarette; and with the stumps of his arms he promptly beat two innocent comrades over the head. When the lady guide interfered and admitted it was she who had robbed him, Thorpe Five roared in delight.

“I bashed ’em!” he cried. “Her took it, but I bashed the two of ’em!”

A private of the Munsters was weaving a net, and, as though he were quite alone, singing, in a fine barytone, “Tipperary.” If you want to hear real close harmony, you must listen to Southern darkeys; and if you want to get the sweetness and melancholy out of an Irish chant, an Irishman must sing it. I thought I had heard “Tipperary” before several times, and that it was a march. I found I had not heard it before, and that it is not a march, but a lament and a love-song. The soldier did not know we were listening, and while his fingers wove the meshes of the net, his voice rose in tones of the most moving sweetness. He did not know that he was facing a window, he did not know that he was staring straight out upon the city of London. But we knew, and when in his rare barytone and rare brogue he whispered rather than sang the lines:

“Good-by, Piccadilly—
Farewell, Leicester Square,
It’s a long, long way to Tipperary”

—all of his unseen audience hastily fled.

There was also Private Watts, who was mending shoes. When the week before Lord Kitchener visited St. Dunstan’s, Watts had joked with him. I congratulated him on his courage.

“What was your joke?” I inquired.

“He asked me when I was a prisoner with the Germans how they fed me, and I said: ‘Oh, they gave me five beefsteaks a day.’”

“That was a good joke,” I said. “Did Kitchener think so?”

The man had been laughing, pleased and proud. Now the blank eyes turned wistfully to my companion.

“Did his lordship smile?” he asked.

Those blind French officers at the Crillon in Paris and these English Tommies are teaching a great lesson. They are teaching men who are whining over the loss of money, health, or a job, to be ashamed. It is not we who are helping them, but they who are helping us. They are showing us how to face disaster and setting an example of real courage. Those who do not profit by it are more blind than they.

The End.

Footnotes:

[A] Later we were sorry we had not been held longer in captivity. The telegram reached our consul, and that gentleman at once journeyed to Messina not only to rescue us, but to invite us to a Thanksgiving Day dinner. A consul like that is wasted on the Island of Sicily. The State Department is respectfully urged to promote him to the mainland.

[B] It has been charged that the British troops in the Balkans wore the same tropic uniforms they wore in the Dardanelles. This was necessarily true, when first they landed, but almost at once the winter uniform was issued to all of them. I saw no British or French soldier who was not properly and warmly clad, with overcoat, muffler, extra waistcoat, and gloves. And while all, both officers and men, cursed the cold, none complained that he had not been appropriately clothed to meet it.        R. H. D.

[C] In New York, the Permanent Blind Relief War Fund for Soldiers and Sailors of Great Britain, France, and Belgium is working in close association with Mr. Pearson. With him on the committee, are Robert Bacon, Elihu Root, Myron T. Herrick, Whitney Warren, Lady Arthur Paget, and George Alexander Kessler. The address of the fund is 590 Fifth Avenue.

Transcriber’s Note’s:

1. Minor changes have been made to correct obvious typesetters’ errors; otherwise, every effort has been made to remain true to the author’s words and intent.

2. In several instances, pages have been renumbered slightly to accommodate placement of illustrations.

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Table of Contents

- WITH THE FRENCH

- IN FRANCE AND SALONIKA

- RICHARD HARDING DAVIS

- BOOKS BY RICHARD HARDING DAVIS

- Published BY CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

- PREFACE
- CONTENTS
- ILLUSTRATIONS
- WITH THE FRENCH IN FRANCE AND SALONIKA

- CHAPTER I

- PRESIDENT POINCARÉ THANKS AMERICA

- CHAPTER II

- THE MUD TRENCHES OF ARTOIS

- CHAPTER III

- THE ZIGZAG FRONT OF CHAMPAGNE

- CHAPTER IV

- FROM PARIS TO THE PIRÆUS

- CHAPTER V

- WHY KING CONSTANTINE IS NEUTRAL

- CHAPTER VI

- WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA

- CHAPTER VII

- TWO BOYS AGAINST AN ARMY

- CHAPTER VIII

- THE FRENCH-BRITISH FRONT IN SERBIA

- CHAPTER IX

- VERDUN AND ST. MIHIEL

- CHAPTER X

- WAR IN THE VOSGES

- CHAPTER XI

- HINTS FOR THOSE WHO WANT TO HELP

- CHAPTER XII

- LONDON, A YEAR LATER

- The End.

- Footnotes:

- Transcriber’s Note’s:

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE