Frederick Palmer

“ To-day he seems in the midst of a fantastic world, whose horror makes it impossible of realisation. To-morrow, as his car takes him along a pleasant by-road among wheat-fields where peasants are working and no soldier is in sight, it is a world of peace, and one thinks that he has mistaken the roar of a train for the distant roar of gun-fire. Again, it seems the most real of worlds, an exclusive man’s world, where nothing counts but organised material force, and all those cleanly, well-behaved men in khaki are a part of the permanent population. ”

“ Most vital of all in sheer expression of military power was the visit to the British Grand Fleet; most humanly appealing, the time spent in Belgium under German rule; most dramatic, the French victory on the Marne; most precious, my long stay at the British front.
A traveller’s view I had of Germany in the early period of the war; but I was never with the German army which made Americans particularly welcome for obvious reasons. Between right and wrong one cannot be a neutral. ”

“ One thinks of them as demons with subtle intelligence and long reach, their gigantic fists striking here and there at will, without a visible arm behind the blow. An army guards against the blows of an enemy’s demons with every kind of cover, every kind of deception, with all resources of scientific ingenuity and invention; and an army guards its own demons in their lairs as preciously as if they were made of some delicate substance which would go up in smoke at a glance from the enemy’s eye, instead of having barrels of the strongest steel that can be forged. ”

“ Hasty shelter trenches gridiron the land; such trenches as breathless men, dropping after a charge, threw up hurriedly with the spades that they carry on their backs, to give them a little cover. And there is the trench that stopped the Germans—the trench which they charged but could not take. It lies among shell-holes so thick that you can step from one to another. In places its crest is torn away, which means that half a dozen men were killed in a group. But reserves filled their places. They kept pouring out their stream of lead which German courage could not endure. ”

“ England had Lord Kitchener, who could hold the imagination and the confidence of the nation through the long months of preparation, when there was little to show except repetition of drills here and there on gloomy winter days. It required a man with a big conception and patience and authority to carry it through, and recruits with an unflinching sense of duty. The immensity of the task of transforming a non-military people into a great fighting force grew on one in all its humdrum and vital details as he watched the new army forming. ”

“ Where an army officer has a change when he leaves the trench for his billet, there is none for the naval officer, who, unlike the army officer, is Spartan-bred to confinement. The army pays its daily toll of casualties; it lies cramped in dugouts, not knowing what minute extinction may come. The Grand Fleet has its usual comforts; it is safe from submarines in a quiet harbour. Many naval officers spoke of this contrast with deep feeling, as if fate were playing favourites, though I have never heard an army officer mention it. ”

“ They talk of war aboard the Pullman, after officers have waved their hands out of the windows to their wives, quite as if they were going to Scotland for a week-end instead of back to the firing-line. British phlegm that is called. No, British habit, I should say, the race-bred, individualistic quality of never parading emotions in public, the instinct of keeping things which are one’s own to one’s self. Personally, I like this way. In one form or another, as the hedges fly by the train windows, the subject is always war. War creeps into golf, or shooting, or investments, or politics. ”

“ Any one who, from an eminence, has seen one battle fought visualises another readily when the positions lie at his feet. Looking out on the field of Gettysburg from Round Top, I can always get the same thrill that I had when, seated in a gallery above the Russian and the Japanese armies, I saw the battle of Liao-yang. In sight of that Plateau d’Amance, which rises like a great knuckle above the surrounding country, a battle covering twenty times the extent of Gettysburg raged, and one could have looked over a battle-line as far as the eye may see from a steamer’s mast. ”

“ Other men may have publicity as individuals in a single newspaper or magazine, but the readers of a thousand newspapers take their news from Paris through him without knowing his name.
Oh, the magic of a military pass and the companionship of an officer in uniform! It separates you from the crowd of millions on the other side of the blank wall of military secrecy and takes you into the area of the millions in uniform; it wins a nod of consent from that middle-aged reservist on a road whose bayonet has the police power of millions of bayonets in support of its authority. ”

“ Is the sport of war dead? Not for Archibald! Here you see your target—which is so rare these days when British infantrymen have stormed and taken trenches without ever seeing a German—and the target is a bird, a man-bird. Puffs of smoke with bursting hearts of death are clustered around the Taube. One follows another in quick succession, for more than one Archibald is firing, before your entranced eyes. ”

“ France has, say, three million soldiers; Germany, five; Austria, four—and England had, perhaps, a hundred thousand men, perhaps more, on board this fleet which defended the English land and lands far over seas without firing a shot. One American regiment of infantry is more than sufficient in numbers to man a Dreadnought. How precious, then, the skill of that crew! Man-power is as concentrated as gun-power with a navy. Ride three hundred miles in an automobile along an army front, with glimpses of units of soldiers, and you have seen little of a modern army. ”

“ While stronger men were under shell-fire at the front, they were under the fire of Belgian hate as relentless as their own hate of England. You saw them always in the good restaurants, but never in the company of Belgians, these ostracised rulers. In four months they had made no friends; at least, no friends who would appear with them in public. A few thousand guards in Belgium in the companionship of conquest and seven million Belgians in the companionship of a common helplessness! Bayonets may make a man silent, but they cannot stop his thinking. ”

“ In many qualities we are different—a distinct type; but in nothing are we more like the British than in our attitude toward the soldier and toward war. The character of any army reflects the character of its people. An army is the fist; but the muscle, the strength of the physical organism behind the blow in the long run belong to the people. What they have prepared for in peace they receive in war, which decides whether they have been living in the paradise of a fool or of a wise man. ”

“ It is a war of explosions, from bombs thrown by hand within ten yards of the enemy to shells thrown as far as twenty miles and mines laid under the enemy’s trenches; a war of guns, from seventeen-inch down to three-inch and machine guns; a war of machinery, with man still the pre-eminent machine.
Guns mark the limit of the danger zone. Their screaming shells laugh at the sentries at the entrances to towns and at cross-roads who demand passes of all other travellers. Any one who tried to keep out of range of the guns would never get anywhere near the front. ”

“ When an attack or an artillery bombardment is on and you go to as high ground as possible for a bird’s-eye view of battle, all you see is the explosion of the shells; never anything of the guns which are firing. In the distance over the German lines and in the foreground over the British lines is a balloon, shaped like a caterpillar with folded wings—a chrysalis of a caterpillar. ”

“ Thousands of transports had come and gone, carrying hundreds of thousands of soldiers and food for men and guns to India; and on the highroad to India, to Australia, to San Francisco, shipping went its way undisturbed by anything that dives or flies.
The same white hospital ships lying in that French harbour; the same line of grey, dusty-looking ambulances parked on the quay! Everybody in that one-time sleepy, week-end tourist resort seems to be in uniform; to have something to do with war. All surroundings become those of war long before you reach the front. ”

“ The power of chaos that they seem to possess when the fighting-trench and the dugouts and all the human warrens which protect the defenders are beaten as flour is kneaded!
Blind and groping they seem when a dozen shells fall harmlessly in a field; when they send their missiles toward objects which may not be worth shooting at; when no one sees where the shells hit and the amount of damage they have done is guesswork; and helpless without the infantry to protect them, the aeroplanes and the observers to see for them. ”

“ Then it would sound like a bit of dynamite on an anvil struck by a hammer and you would hear the whiz of scores of bullets and fragments.
The smoking brass shell-case is out of Archibald’s steel throat and another shell-case with its charge slipped into place and started on its way before the first puff breaks. The aviator knows what is coming. He knows that one means many, once he is in range.
Archibald rushes the fighting; it is the business of the Taube to sidestep. The aviator cannot hit back except through his allies, the German batteries, on the earth. ”

“ Outside the hotel were no cavalry escorts or commanders, no hurrying orderlies, none of the legendary physical activity that is associated with an army headquarters. An automobile drove up, an officer got out; another officer descended the stairs to enter a waiting car. The wires carry word faster than the cars. Each subordinate commander was in his place along that line where we had seen the puffs of smoke against the landscape, ready to answer a question or obey an order. That simplicity, like art itself, which seems so easy is the most difficult accomplishment of all in war. ”

“ On the hills back of Louvain we came upon some Belgian troops in their long, cumbersome coats, dark silhouettes against the field, digging shallow trenches in an uncertain sort of way. Whether it was them or the Belgian staff officers hurrying by in their cars, I had the impression of the will and not the way and a parallel of raw militia in uniforms taken from grandfather’s trunk facing the trained antagonists of an Austerlitz, or a Waterloo, or a Gettysburg.
Le brave Belge! The question on that day was not, Are you brave? but, Do you know how to fight? ”

“ Spend the night in the trenches and you are taken into the family; into that very human family of soldierdom in a quiet corner; and the old, care-free spirit of war, which some people thought had passed, is found to be no less alive in siege warfare than on a march of regulars on the Indian frontier or in the Philippines. Gaiety and laughter and comradeship and “joshing” are here among men to whom wounds and death are a part of the game. One may challenge high explosives with a smile, no less than ancient round shot. ”

“ That winding road, with a new picture at every turn, now revealed the town of Soissons in the valley of the River Aisne. Soissons was ours, we knew, since yesterday. How much farther had we gone? Was our advance still continuing? For then, the winter trench-fighting was unforeseen and the sightseers thought of the French army as following up success with success. Paris, rising from gloom to optimism, hoped to see the Germans put out of France. The appetite for victory grew after a week’s bulletins which moved the flags forward on the map every day. ”

“ After the scream had been lost to the ear you heard the faint, thudding boom of an explosion from the burst of that conical piece of steel which you had seen slipped into the breech. This was the gunners’ part in chess-board war, where the moves are made over signal wires, while the infantry endure the explosions in their trenches and fight in their charges in the traverses of the trenches at as close quarters as in the days of the cave-dwellers. ”

“ Christmas in Belgium with the bayonet and the wolf at the door taught one to value Christmas at home for more than its gifts and the cheer of the fireside. It taught him what it meant to belong to a free people and how precious is that old England saying that a man’s house is his castle, which was the inception of so much in our lives that we accept as a commonplace. If such a commonplace can be made secure only by fighting, then it is best to fight. At any time a foreign soldier might enter the house of a Belgian and take him away for trial before a military court. ”

“ The laugh of a sturdy young woman who threw some flowers into the tonneau as we passed, in her tribute to the uniform of the army that had saved France, had the spirit of victorious France—France after forty years’ waiting throwing back a foe that had two soldiers to every one of hers. All the land, rich fields and neat gardens and green stretches of woods in the fair, rolling landscape, basked in victory. ”

“ Beyond Dunkirk, one might see wounded Belgians fresh from the front, staggering in, crawling in, hobbling in from under the havoc of shell-fire, their first-aid bandages saturated with mud, their ungainly and impracticable uniforms oozing mud, ghosts of men—these shipperkes of the nation that was unprepared for war, who had done their part, when the only military80 thought was for more men, unwounded men, British, French, Belgian, to stem the German tide. ”