War trail

“ The sun was near setting when we struck the small grove of timber at the junction of the two streams, and there in a dusty game trail we found the moccasined footprints of men—a war party, of course—traveling north. ”

“ Wounded warriors, now resolving themselves into helpless, suffering farmers, simple tillers of the soil, save for the tatters of their blue and gray uniforms which alone indicated what they had been, lay by the roadsides and along mountain trails, abandoned by their comrades. Others lay mangled, their forms beaten out of all recognition. Scattered over all, wherever road or trail passed, lay guns and cartridges, sometimes in heaps, where they had been dumped out of the fleeing wagons. ”

“ The relief was but temporary: the juice cooled our lips and tongues, but there is an acrid principle in some of these plants that soon acted, and our thirst became more intense than ever.
Some talked of returning on the trail in search of water—of going back even to the stream—more than twenty miles distant.
Under such circumstances, even military command loses its authority. Nature is stronger than martial law.
I cared not if they did return; I cared not who left me, so long as the trappers remained true. ”

“ Now these nations have learned war, and the war-path becomes a beaten trail, so constantly do they go to and fro to take the scalps of their enemies. So they make a trench, and by a law which all agree to obey, pursuit shall not be carried across this boundary. The warrior might come into the enemy’s country, but when he was driven back, after he had crossed the line, he should be safe. ”

“ Day after day the American troops moved slowly forward, over rugged, difficult ground, broken by ravines and steep hills, through dense underbrush, in the face of deadly fire from artillery and nests of machine guns hidden in every vantage point, through incessant rain and mud and fog and penetrating cold, pushing the enemy steadily back, until they reached Sedan, cut the German Army’s most important line of communication, and so brought the end of the war in sight. ”

“ It was in rain and mist after the battle, while the dead still lay on the field, that I went over the Ridge and along the path of the Canadian charges, wondering how they had passed through the curtains of fire when I saw shrapnel cases so thick that you could step from one to another; wondering how men could survive in the shell-craters and the poor, tumbled trenches in the soft, shell-mashed earth; wondering at the whole business of their being here in France, a veteran army two years after the war had begun. ”

“ I imagined war as a desperate continuous series of battles, in which I should ride along the trenches picturesquely haloed with bursting shell, varied by innumerable encounters with Uhlans, or solitary forest rides and immense tiring treks over deserted country to distant armies. ”

“ The road was a place of constant travel. Endlessly it unrolled a pageant of the times. War’s varied movement was here, the multiplicity of it all; and also the unity as of the sound of the sea, or the waving of grass on a prairie. Troops, incoming or outgoing,—infantry, artillery, cavalry,—were to be found upon it. The commissariat went up and down with white-covered wagons. Foragers appeared, coming in to camp with heterogeneous matters. Ordnance wagons, heavy and huge, went by with a leaden sound. Mules and negroes abounded—laughter, adjuration, scraps of song. ”

“ In these great bases, in the marvellous railway organisation, in the handling of the vast motor transport in all its forms, in the feeding and equipment of the British Army, we have the scaffolding and preparation of war, which, both in the French and English Armies, have now reached a perfection undreamt of when the contest began. But the war itself—the deadly struggle of that distant line to which it all tends? It is in the flash and roar of the guns, in the courage and endurance of the fighting man, that all this travail of brain and muscle speaks at last. ”

“ Between the double cordon of the armies, moving along the broad and narrow corridor that separated their lines, we were excluded from the world. Around us lay the sleepers, shuddering in unutterable nightmares, and in our diversified roadway there was nothing but the ruins of villages, the shattered walls, the holed ground, the catacombs of [Pg 263] trenches, deflowered woods, the sinuous storm-marked track of war's desolation. We, Gabrielle and I, alone lived in this camerated solitude. ”

“ Never to me or my comrades had the American woman and American language, seemed so dear as when in this distant land she had brought to us a breath of home.
A few more days of marching brought us again to the sound of battle and the distant booming of guns. Here again were signs of war’s withering touch. We began to meet hurrying French and American battalions with cannon, machine guns, airplanes, and all the seeming clutter of moving columns. Here and there were fleeing citizens, mostly women, old men and children, with wagons piled high with their household goods. ”

“ The guns looked old, mailed, dead warriors; the gunboats sleeping forms; the grey troops battle-lines in a great war picture, the three horsemen by the cross-roads a significant group in the same; the dead and wounded over all the fields, upon the slope, in the woods, by the marshes, the jetsam, still and heavy, of war at its worst. For a moment longer the wide and dreary stretch rested so, then with a wild suddenness sound and furious motion rushed upon the scene. ”

“ To the north the encampments of the enemy are spread out below, and from hundreds of campfires the blue smoke rises to float away as gently as though all were peaceful. Beneath this silver cloud that hangs around the mountain, there is an angry brow; the demons of war are there. ”

“ Some few miles of the original battlefields showing the opposing fronts, the original trenches, the deep pock-marks of the shell holes, no man's lands with its markings of secret, nightly warfare should be kept intact in order that posterity may appreciate in some little measure what life in the front line meant in the Great War.
Everywhere as one goes through the battle area, there can be seen one ever-recurring mark of battle that will endure—the graves of those who fell. The war area is in truth one vast cemetery. ”

“ Suppose an army invading hostile territory without the aid of local guides:—it falls into a fatal snare and is at the enemy’s mercy. A ravine on the left, a mountain on the right, a pathway so perilous that the horses have to be roped together and the chariots carried in slings, no passage open in front, retreat cut off behind, no choice but to proceed in single file. Then, before there is time to range our soldiers in order of battle, the enemy is overwhelming strength suddenly appears on the scene. Advancing, we can nowhere take a breathing-space; retreating, we have no haven of refuge. ”

“ While the guns roar from the North Sea to the Mediterranean, and the greatest armed host that history has ever known is still locked in a life-and-death struggle on a dozen fronts, another war, more potent and permanent perhaps than the one which now engulfs Europe, lurks beyond the distant horizon of peace. ”

“ We now set firm foot upon the spacious high-road, and were about to proceed with the elated feelings that made us think we could defy the world, and laugh at the book of fate or the tricks of the treacherous and fickle goddess, when, at our first step, a hoarse voice called on us to surrender, and up sprung four German soldiers from their hiding-place, behind a rock on the verge of the wood, and each presented a rifle at our heads. ”

“ He will have reported himself, and have been ordered, with his company, into the trenches. And on the third night, had you followed him, you might see him peering over the parapet at the lines of the Hun, across No Man's Land, and listening to the whine of bullets and the shriek of shells over his head, with a star shell, maybe, to throw a green light upon him for a moment.
So it is that a warrior comes and that a warrior goes in a land where war is war; in a land where war has become the business of all every day, and has settled down into a matter of routine. ”

“ One has but to think of the various places from which these men and stores must come, of the thousands of horses and hundreds of wagons; of the millions of rounds of ammunition, speeding from different points over different railroads, and when disembarked by roads, by lanes, even by small bypaths to the appointed place on the battle front, to realize what a marvelous feat is mobilization of a modern army at the time of an outbreak of war. ”

“ But as we approached the front—though still miles and miles behind the fighting-line—the signs of war became increasingly apparent: base camps, remount depots, automobile parks, aviation schools, aerodromes, hospitals, machine-shops, ammunition-dumps, railway sidings chock-a-block with freight-cars and railway platforms piled high with supplies of every description. ”

“ To smooth the scarred and broken earth, and plant
The fields again. But—if we must—
We'll deal first with those war-lords, break
Their knees and bring them to the dust.
For France's sake
We'll fight until we drop. ”

“ Women who had fled with empty hands from little châteaux on the hillsides of France, with empty hearts too because they had no hope for husbands still fighting in the inferno, described to me the scenes which still made them pant like wild animals caught after a chase. And with my own eyes I saw the unforgettable drama of the French army in retreat, blowing up bridges on its way, shifting to new lines of defence, awaiting with its guns ready for a new stage of the enemy's advance. ”

“ For these the chief interest will not lie in the walls of the ruined church or the relics of the departed jubé, if any there be, but out in the open, pleasant fields where, in trenches that the kindly hand of nature will gradually obliterate, the brave men of four nations met in one of the fiercest and bloodiest death grapples of the great war. ”

“ All along it, where you had let yourself think there was only the foe, there is an underground world swarming with French soldiers, watching and fighting, or ready to fight, day and night, up to any move that the enemy may attempt to make, and sworn and resolved for France and freedom to push on to the end. And that is the view that all of us have got to take when the horror of the war and its limitless and frowning horizon is upon us. We must get right up to our difficulties and meet them face to face. ”

“ And, finally, that good temporary bases or lines of defense at the confluence of the great valleys, covered by strategic reserves, combined with great mobility and frequent offensive movements, will be the best means of defending the country?
I cannot terminate this article without remarking that mountainous countries are particularly favorable for defense when the war is a national one, in which the whole people rise up to defend their homes with the obstinacy which enthusiasm for a holy cause imparts: every advance is then dearly bought. ”

“ But greater than such deeds, of which there have been inspiring hundreds, is the patient endurance shown by men whose world has narrowed down to that little corner of a great war which they are [221] fighting for their country. To fight on night and day in the trenches, under avalanches of murdering metal and storms of rending shrapnel, calls for higher qualities than those short, sharp gusts of conflict which in former days were called battles. ”

“ The battlefield was a wild pandemonium of men, and the imagination of people who have never seen war will hardly visualize such scenes, with lads laughing and smoking while others lay dead, with groups fighting and falling round blockhouses while others were eating German sausages and joking in captured emplacements, with stretcher-bearers carrying men back under heavy shell-fire and German prisoners dodging their own barrage-fire on their way to our lines. ”

“ Imagine hundreds of miles of wide, white roads, hard-surfaced and graded for the war, leading to a sector of the line. To make and keep these roads, itself is a master's job. Imagine the roads filled all day with two long lines of trucks, passing and repassing; one line carrying its guns and camp outfit, its whole paraphernalia of war, going to the battle front in the hills ”

“ Every one who isn't a slug likes to go to the War Zone, every one who isn't an animated suet-pudding wants to see a battlefield, or a devastated village, or a trench, or a dug-out, and we all want souvenirs de la guerre, shell cases, bits of bomb or shrapnel, the head of the Crown Prince on a charger, or the helmet of a Death's Head Hussar. And do we not all love adventure, and variety—unless fear has made imbeciles of us, and the chance of distinguishing ourselves, of winning the Legion of Honour in a shell-swept village, or the Croix de Guerre under the iron rain of a Taube? ”

“ I see twenty million of men on the long line that used to be their battlefront, breaking up with joyous cries, now that the thunder of the guns has ceased, and turning north, south, east and west, but always towards home. I see our own armies coming westward, war-weary, perhaps, but full of cheer. ”

“ It brought the older and the later war into almost startling nearness, and made us realize, as perhaps nothing else could have done, how the future visitor will trace the movements in which we have had a part; and when we have been dust for centuries, will follow the path of our battalions from hill to hill, from stream to stream, from the border of a wood to the open ground where the bloody conflict was hand to hand, and will comment upon the history we have made. ”