Francis Rolt-Wheeler

“ This morning a German force attacked us at Visé, bombarded the town and crossed the Meuse on pontoon bridges."
"How can Germany invade us, sir?" asked Deschamps, the head boy of the school. "You told us, sir, that Belgium is perpetually neutral by agreement of all the nations of Europe."
"She is so, by every law of international honor, by every pledge, by solemn covenants sealed and sworn to by Germany herself," came the reply. "Civilization, humanity, progress, liberty—all the things which men have fought and died for—depend on the faith of a plighted word. ”

“ His experience at Beaufays had taught the boy to put his fingers to his ears, but it was the first time he had heard a .75, the famous "Soixante-Quinze" which the French believed—and rightly—to be the best field-gun in the world. It cracked deafeningly, stridently. The flame which darted out of the muzzle was long and thin and seemed to lick the air as though envious of the shell's flight. The smell of the powder was acrid and bitter, somewhat like the taste of an unripe persimmon, Horace thought.
"One thousand, five hundred!" the battery commander called. ”

“ As yet, they were not a fighting army, they were advancing into the plains of Belgium, to take up the forward charge when the fall of the Liége forts would enable the establishment of a sound line of communication.
In these marching men, there was no hint of parade. These troops were prepared for war. They swung along by tens, by hundreds, by thousands, by tens of thousands, grimly organized and made for slaughter. The eye reeled with the steady onward motion, the brain dizzied with the ponderous human force of it all. ”

“ Horace felt his desire to see a battle slipping away quite rapidly.
"Probably action against cavalry," Croquier continued. "I hope so. We're considerably too close for an infantry attack to be comfortable."
Then, with majestic grandeur, the heavy artillery began to speak. As it opened, the crackling of the rifle-fire spread all round the horizon and the machine-guns yapped from a hundred points ahead. But, over all, the great guns boomed. It was as though, in the middle of a fight between terriers, two lions had sprung into the arena and deafened all other noise with their roars. ”

“ There was something terrible and malign in the slow rising of that goblin dome, in its sudden ferocity and in its noiseless disappearance.
"That shell will strike several miles away," the old reservist said, "perhaps where men are now fighting. If so, then you have seen a burden of death, of suffering and of carnage starting on its way. War is a horrible thing, boys, a horrible thing! But," he added sadly, "it is a necessity from which the world will never be free." ”

“ Rank by rank, company by company, regiment by regiment, the sun glinting on their field equipment, the sun burning the frames already wearied by the march from garrisons in Germany, the sun waiting to turn the slain bodies of those marching men to sights of which a soldier even fears to dream, years after the war is over. ”

“ For example, a man standing at 1000 yards range is in a danger zone 65 yards wide, within which he will be shot; if lying down, the danger zone is reduced to 13 yards, or, in other words, he is five times as likely to be shot when standing up, irrespective of the fact whether the enemy can see him or not."
The sonorous tumult of the battle increased steadily. The dome of the sky beat like the parchment of an angry drum. High-explosive shell and shrapnel was bursting overhead, filling the air with splinters of shell and bullets. ”

“ A solid blast of flame outlines the fire trench. In the white glare of searchlights and star-shells illumining the scene as though by a continuous river of lightning, the wave is seen to waver. Some fall flat, others sink down quietly, others, again, drop to hands and knees and crawl on, yet others, clutched by the wounded in their death-grip, [Pg 330] free themselves with a bayonet thrust—their brothers, their comrades!—and rush on.
The machine guns claim their prey by scores, by hundreds every minute. It does not stop the wave. ”

“ The Siege-Gun explains the fall of Liége, the weakness of fortifications explains trench warfare, the defense at Ypres explains the poison gas, and the trench deadlock foreshadows the tank.
The United States is in the war. It is our war. We must know all that can be known. We must do all that can be done. We have entered the war on a high and noble plane, and we must know what are the fundamental principles at stake. War is neither a gathering of heroes nor a shambles. ”

“ It was a cold, invisible inferno, which, every morning and evening, spewed up its ghastly tale of dead and wounded; which, every evening and morning, yielded up its line of staggering, weary, war-dulled figures, glad to exchange the peril of death for the miserable existence which was all that was possible behind the trenches in the plain of Champagne that first fearful winter. ”

“ Every one of the seventeen wires running to the switchboard is working. Horace is on the alert, his fingers as electric as the wires he is handling.
A growing nervousness runs through the lines, making the whole army tingle like a single human organism vibrant with life.
All the world is in activity or in readiness.
Medical troops pass by, carrying out the wounded from the bombardment.
An enemy patrol dashes forward to destroy the wire, knowing that it will never return alive. It is met by a storm of rifle-fire, but those who survive, cut. A hole is made. The last German falls. ”

“ The infantry drew nearer, passing on the road just below the gun position, stricken, beaten, war-dulled—and dismayed. It does not take many minutes of fighting in the open against machine-guns [Pg 206] to break the spirit and numb the hope of victory. A machine-gun spitting 600 bullets to the minute, swaying its muzzle from side to side like a jet of murder, is the material embodiment of the very spirit of slaughter. ”

“ Modern war, like ancient war, consists only in the spirit of the fighters and the skill of the commanders. There's not a great deal of difference between a bayonet and flint knife, a rifle is but an explosive form of bow and arrow, and the great 42-centimeter siege-gun of the Boches is only a sling-shot made a little bigger and throwing a little farther. The morale of men, my boy, and the strategy of generals are the wonders of war, as they were in the days of Rameses, Cæsar and Napoleon. ”

“ Red mouths of death opened. From trench [5] and fort, rifle-fire ran its crackling harmony to the crash of the 6-inch guns and the insistent rattle of the ear-rasping machine gun. In this hideous repertory of noise, the Hotchkiss machine-guns, used in the forts, and the Berthier guns, used by the infantry and drawn by a dog team, joined their concert of destruction.
It was no discredit to the German soldiers that they fell back. No one, neither General von Emmich, his officers, nor his men, expected to find the Belgian trenches so strongly held. ”

“ Advancing imperceptibly, inch by inch, until he felt that he was within reach, suddenly Horace threw himself forward, holding his coat outstretched before him as he fell with all his weight on the eagle.
The rending beak and talons of the savage bird entangled in the yielding cloth. Horace, dragged over the ground by his captive's struggles, felt blindly with his hands until he grasped the creature's neck. ”

“ Retreat amid the wounded, retreat in hopeless rear-guard actions with dead on every side, retreat on roads crowded with homeless and hopeless refugees fleeing anywhere away from the advancing [Pg 251] horror of war, retreat without food, retreat without sleep, retreat in rain, in mud, in blazing heat, in choking thirst, retreat under the reproachful eyes of deserted women, retreat under the stinging shame of defeat, retreat until the heart was as weary as the feet and death would be a boon. ”

“ Germany has always stated that it was a matter of honor with her to keep Belgium intact. Those guns you hear, Monroe, mark Germany's denial of her national and international honor. History, with all its dark and bloody deeds, has never seen a more dastardly flaunting of disgrace and treachery. Observe that Germany had invaded Luxemburg, invaded France, invaded Belgium, declared war on Russia, and authorized Austria to invade Servia before a single hostile act had been committed by Russia, France, Belgium, or England. ”

“ It was one of these aged villagers, who, when a German officer asked him why he troubled to dig graves instead of burning the bodies, answered fiercely.
"From every French soldier's grave, ten soldiers will grow!"
Gutted houses, torn and charred hayricks, scraps of clothing, broken motor-cars, scraps of shells, and fires where the bodies of scores of horses were being burned, marked the line of the storm of war.
Ah! There is a farmhouse standing, almost untouched. The road to it is covered with shell-splinters. There are white figures there. ”

“ The Kaiser's Army, for the last dozen years, has been coiled like a snake, watching its chance to strike.
"Austria-Hungary is a ramshackle empire. Her people are disunited. Only one-third of her people are of Teutonic stock, though Austria is German in her rule. More than one-half of the population is Slav. The empire is a mass of disorganized units held together by force and since Austria lacks this force, she is compelled to depend on German force as an ally. Hence, whatever is done by Austria entangles Germany and Austria cannot take any action without Germany's permission." ”

“ To such shells it will make no difference whether the cupolas be raised or lowered.
"If it be true," the old reservist added, his voice rising with a note of presage, "if it be true what is whispered about these new German siege howitzers, then destruction will rain upon the forts of Liége as though the skies were a mouth of flame.
"Perhaps never before, in the history of the world, has so much hung upon the range and power of a modern weapon. We await the eruption of a man-forged volcano which may engulf us all in its fiery lava." ”

“ French knew that absolute mobility was the only condition of a fighting retreat. He knew, now, his desperate situation, and he knew, too, the crucial nature of his position. The fate of France now hung on the stiffness of his retiring line. For this, however, he had the most marvelous troops in the world for such a purpose, the British regulars. His original position being slightly to the northward of the Fifth French Army, he was more than a day behind in commencing the retreat. He was fighting an army three times as large as his own. ”

“ General Von Zwehl, one of the grimmest warriors in all the German Army, had brought the great siege-guns up the heights overlooking the Aisne, after four nights and three days of continuous marching. The thirteen traction-engines couldn't move the guns, for there had been wet weather, and General Von Zwehl had tailed the infantry on with long ropes. Like the slaves of Egypt who hauled blocks of stone for the pyramids, the German soldiers slaved under blows, curses, and threats of death. During the last twenty-four hours of this march, the 18,000 troops and the guns covered 41 miles. ”

“ Little by little the German line was pushed back, little by little the soil of France was rewon.
But, for Horace, the end was not yet.
One bright spring morning, while busy at his switchboard in the little shelter which had been constructed for the telephone, the boy heard a thin, high whistle and a small shell crashed through the roof. It struck the floor and exploded, thin splinters flying in every direction. ”

“ Horace listened, his hopes for personal safety rising, for he realized that his captor—if captor he should prove—was a man as well as a soldier.
"The blame is on the officers, then?"
"No," the German answered, shaking his head, "the blame is on War, on the horrible, necessary thing itself, War. The officers can't control the cruelties which go hand-in-hand with war any more than we can, at least, not individually. They are taught that an invaded country must be terrorized. Should any officer weaken, he would be suspected and refused promotion. They're as much a part of the system as we are. ”

“ Yesterday's clouds have fled and the golden sunshine floods the ravaged fields; it pours into [Pg 333] the windows of field hospitals on the French and German sides alike, it blesses with the hope of the future the soldier who will recover and eases the pain of him who looks upon his last sun; it shows the African sharpening his steel for the next charge, and the general planning the next assault; it shines into distant countries whence men are coming to take the places of those that have gone before. ”

“ They saw their Cathedral in flames, they saw the shells deliberately aimed for it, they saw their inoffensive dead in the bombarded streets and they saw a just vengeance in allowing the German wounded to burn alive in the pyre of their own making. The mob, hoarse with rage and growing wilder every minute, raised its rifles to fire at the wounded men who had been carried out. ”

“ There are no prisoners, no wounded, after they have leaped into a trench. Their trail is the trail of savage death.
All the next day the bombardment increased in violence, and Horace, at his military switchboard, plugged calls to distant quarters for reënforcements. Everywhere along the line, when the early dusk fell, men were standing to arms or marching to the threatened sector.
One section of trench was wiped out with the concentration of high explosive shells; wire, fire trench, communication trench and their living defenders being blown into an unrecognizable, pockmarked mass. ”