Edward Lyell Fox

“ What an awful thing it is not to be able to go a hundred yards without seeing a grave. I noticed that Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann no longer sat hunched with the blue collar of his cape turned up to his ears and staring straight ahead; restlessly he seemed ever glancing from left to right. I wondered what he, a soldier, who had been decorated for bravery in German Southwest Africa, thought of these things that he so restlessly saw. ”

“ You wondered which were the French and which were the German trenches. Now a white spot suddenly appeared, exactly upon one of the black lines, and in fancy you heard the explosion of a shell and the groans of men, and you wondered if observers had seen officers coming up and if that shell had been particularly well aimed. A patch of earth, purplish gray in that hastening dusk, and illimitable lines of black stretching away, puffing white smoke quickly coming, quickly going; that was the battlefield as I saw it below the clouds. ”

“ Only a few hours before, when approaching a battery, Hauptmann Kliewer told us the same thing. I remember his words: "Altogether we make too plain a mark. We must separate."... How uneasy you feel, walking along this way. Not only are you gauging your own interval of thirty paces, but you are careful to keep an eye on the others, ready to warn them if they draw too close; and they are keeping an eye on you. You expect something to happen. Uneasy, you watch the sky, but no shrapnel is bursting nearby. Ahead somewhere the artillery is booming, but here everything is quiet. ”

“ We have caught up with the awful refuse of battle. Near Szillutten we see that which no longer horrifies—the slain dead; and then the bloody road of retreat, where German shells split the Russian ranks, and lumped the road with things in brown that only the wheels of the heavy guns can flatten down; a furrowing of frozen ruts, shining with the pounding of transports, the packed snow broken, here and there, to reveal stiff objects, bits of brown cloth matted with flesh. ”

“ Blackened walls, gaping holes, roofless skeletons of houses; and within, a chaos of plaster and falling floors, one house after another, some almost razed to the ground, others with only their tops shot off, but all desolation and ruin. It was not the destruction that made me stop in the square and stare about me, for I had become sated with shelled houses, all the way from Charleville to Lille; it was amazement at the artillery fire that could lay low an entire block and not even drop a shell. ”

“ An intolerant old warrior who cares not what the newspapers say in his praise, who is bored with the thousands of letters and presents that are being sent him from all parts of Germany, who when this war is over has not the slightest desire to become Minister of War—Field Marshal von Hindenburg is a military genius with a kind German heart in spite of his grim exterior, fond of a glass of good wine and a good story, but accomplishing both work and play in the fascination of strategical study. ”

“ They knew the number of houses in every Belgian village and the number of soldiers that could be billeted in those houses. They knew the location of every church steeple in Belgium, and whether or not to recommend it as an observation post. They knew what roads their troops could march on without being seen by the aviators of the enemy—what roads were hidden from the sky by the interlacing branches of the big trees. They even knew the best places for their own aviators to land. Every conceivable thing that a modern army should know about a future battleground the British army knew.... ”

“ Across the silent stretches of snow there comes the clear scattering cracks of carbines.
"A Russian patrol!" remarks Tzschirner, and he unbuttons his holster, while our red haired mechanician removes the caps from the rifles. "One can never tell," continues Tzschirner, "down which road their patrols may ride."
This puzzles me. "But how can they get through the German lines?" I asked him.
"There is no line, as in the West. We have driven the Russians from East Prussia, but there are many roads down which their patrols can sneak from a frontier village and run back to the troops." ”

“ Hauptmann Kliewer is calling us, so we leave the men around the kitchen table, who, unlike most of the German soldiers we have met, seem too exhausted to talk, and file through a latched door into a room that might have been in a farmhouse somewhere near Monroe, New York. The little black, pillow-seated chairs, the old-fashioned piano with its rack of torn music, the red-cushioned stool with the stuffing coming out, a hideous colored print of Antwerp on the wall, the oil lamp with the buff china shade, it all seems so utterly un-European. ”

“ Through the trees that fringe Goldap on the east, there gleamed a huge campfire that spread its yellow light on a ruined wall; as long as we could, we watched the black forms that must have been soldiers, passing across the flames. The motor rumbled on; signs of the retreat began to appear. In the ditch beside the road, I saw a dead horse, a second dead horse, a third dead horse. An abandoned Russian cannon leaned against the night, its long howitzer barrel pointing an angle of ruin into the sky. One thought of that as a symbol of the Russian rout. ”

“ I saw a bristle of barbed entanglements trampled in the snow and just behind them a trench, a deep long grave that days before the living had dug for themselves—a pit filled with clay and snow and men. I had never seen such men before. They were men postured like jumping jacks only their legs and arms were still. They were men who seemed standing on their heads, their feet over the trench top, turned soles up to the sky. ”

“ You knew then that you were flying away from the battle firing line, but even as you looked, what seemed to be a row of broken boxes, moved across the glass, hesitated and paused there as the aeroplane hovered above them; and in that moment a yellowish box which seemed to stand apart from the others, and which you guessed to be the great house of the village, was blotted out by the spewing gray white smoke of a grenat and when the glass cleared you saw that the yellow box had changed to a jagged shape, red with flames. ”

“ It is a green night, a green land, a universe gone mad, for the sky was never meant to shine with those hideous lights. And the rockets spread their fiery trail and spill their hideous glare; and the line of fire brightens and grows dim and brightens again; perhaps as men are falling and others are springing to their places, and I turn my glasses on the glistening fields, and think I can see the columns of fours, the mounds of the dirt, the color of the mud, and I can hear the bullets panging in the mud at our feet. How they must be riddling the bodies of the dead! ”

“ As we walked out into the court, you could hear the cannon more plainly, a steady crashing seeming ever to grow in violence as though one new battery after another was being unlimbered to make work for the surgeons in little school houses the countryside round. In great indignation, the surgeon drew a fragment of metal from his pocket and explained that two days ago an English aviator had dropped the bomb of which that was a part, only eighty meters from the hospital. But I scarcely heard him. From the manure-strewn courtyard across the street floated a cheer. ”

“ As we walked through the station gates I understood why three million Socialists who had fought their Emperor in and out of the Reichstag, suddenly rallied to his side, agreeing "I know no parties, only Germans." I felt as I thought of the young faces of the soldiers, cheerfully starting down into the unknown hell of war, that undoubtedly among their number were Socialists. In this national crisis partizan allegiance counted for nothing, they had ceased dealing with the Fatherland in terms of the mind and gave to it only the heart. ”

“ There will be no end to this war until we have peace conditions which we shall judge to be worthy of our nation and worthy of our sacrifice. This war was forced upon us. We shall go through with it. We do not finish until we have an uncontestable victory. The heart and soul of the whole country is in this fight. Between all the German kings and confederated princes, there is absolute unswerving unity. We are one idea, one hope, one ideal, one wish. ”

“ Above the bluish walls of Augustowo the tops of the green pines laid against a leaden sky. Over there was the battle, the dense forest an impenetrable curtain, through which reverberated the pang of shrapnel and the roar of grenaten.
"I must tell you," hesitated Tzschirner, as our motor, lurching through the mud of Augustowo, turned toward the woods. "It is very dangerous. The forest is filled with Russians and they will shoot. It may not be agreeable." ”

“ The English have attacked, to be beaten back. The young German officer has just telephoned his report to his Colonel, and is pouring himself a second glass of cognac. They are the same at night as they are in the day, these trenches; they have the same bored men lounging in the dugouts, waiting for an attack; the same tensely watchful men in the rifle pits, scanning the enemy's line. I heard a harmonica. The dead still lay where they fell, the wounded were getting first aid, and you could hear the whining harmonica above the scattering spatter of the shrapnel. ”

“ Berlin they like to watch the gay uniformed officers ascending and descending the long flights of gray steps; for there the cleverest of German military youths are schooled for the General Staff. Like the tourists, I stood across the street to-day and watched the old building and the people ascending or descending the long flights of gray steps. Only I saw civilians, men alone and in groups, women with shawls wrapped around their heads, women with yellow topped boots, whose motors waited beside the curb, and children, clinging to the hands of women, all entering or leaving by the gray gate ”

“ We are passing through Posheruni, the silent houses echoing back our motor in a hollow, dismal sound.
We enter a woods, the tall pines crowding close to the road; and it seems as though the road has been the path of a storm, as if lightning has struck one upon another of the trees here, for torn white they seem to have fallen into each other's branches, leaning like stricken things, while finding those whom they sought, the shells have daubed them red and flung up bits of torn cloth into their shattered boughs, there to hang, perhaps, as a signal that the black winged birds might see. ”

“ When you recall the terrific fighting near the Channel ports, this average is not high for the whole line. So when you glance at the little map in your newspaper think of it as meaning three thousand wounded men a day, ninety thousand a month, and a tenth as many dead. Remember also the Ypres Canal, where soldiers have gone mad and thrown themselves into red water, and at the same time the field of Soissons, strewn twice with the dead; of men in the trenches of the Argonne, undermined, dynamited, their bodies blown as high as leafless forest trees. ”

“ The car climbed the hill. Near Mlinisko we passed a clanking transport, near Turowka, a mired limousine of the Flying Corps. The rain froze to hail and as we crossed the great open plain to Suwalki, snow came, a slow, steady fall, unnaturally white in the headlight's glow. Progress became even slower. Ahead the road seemed choked with wagons, but always there opened up a lane through which drove this soldier shaving the hub of transports with the nicety of a race driver.
And then we came up with the artillery, two batteries to pound away at the crumbling Russian front. ”

“ All this time the grumble of the guns had grown more distinct. We were nearing Augustowo. A horde of prisoners stolidly shuffled and I saw that their hands and faces were black with the battle. The German light wounded commenced to straggle along, holding a white bound hand, or unconcernedly handling a cheap cigar while the other arm hung cradled in a sling. I thought they all looked tired but their step was alert. And always the roll of the guns grew louder, monstrous drums insanely beating their Miserere from somewhere beyond the tops of the pines. ”

“ More than ever one marveled at the system that takes men out of the London gutters and transforms them into regulars, into a sergeant who could stand amid the humiliation of that prison camp and not once forget that he was a soldier of England. That single man was one of the greatest tributes to the regular army of England that I have ever seen. ”

“ It is all color and noise—unearthly colors, unearthly noises. I stand at the edge of an Inferno. The heavens streak with a sulphurous green, and the earth is scarred with flame. I see the rockets swishing up from the trenches, breaking with the weird [124] light that would reveal any enemy creeping up, and falling in a shower of sparks, like shooting stars. It gives a strange confirmation of an old saying that when a star falls some one dies.
I see the steady, streaming, reddish line of rifle fire and the yellow flash of shells. I hear their fierce, harsh croaking and their deafening boom. ”

“ French fliers had marked this place for destruction. In the waiting-rooms I saw nothing but soldiers—fresh troops with clean uniforms, unshaven men whose clothes were brownish with the mud of the trenches. By that time I had become used to being saluted, and to enjoy the click of a sentry's heels. While Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann was telephoning for a military automobile I noticed one of the Landwehr guards begin to eye suspiciously the photographers and their formidable luggage. ”

“ Tzschirner stopped the car. We listened; everything was still. We drove on. We came upon an abandoned howitzer and in the snow a magnum of unexploded shells, a great stain that had turned black, and a yellow mound of fresh clay.
"A gun position," said Tzschirner briefly. "Our soldiers made advance too rapidly for the Russians to retreat."
There are thirty kilometers on the road from Suwalki to Augustowo and the thirty kilometers were strewn with the tangle and débris of war. I found myself counting caps—round Russian caps of goatskin and fur, and the black peaked caps of muster day. ”