Antwerp to Gallipoli - Arthur Ruhl
First the gauze stuffed into the cavity had to be pulled out. The man,
of an age that suggested that he might have left at home a peasant wife,
slightly faded and weather-worn like himself, cringed and dug his nails
into the under side of the table, but made no outcry. The surgeon
squeezed the flesh above and about the wound, the quick-fingered young
nurse flushed the cavity with an antiseptic wash, then clean, dry gauze
was pushed into it and slowly pulled out again.
The man--they had nicknamed him "Pop"--breathed faster. This panting
went into a moan, which deepened into a hoarse cry, and then, as he lost
hold of himself completely, he began a hideous sort of sharp yelping
like a dog.
This is a part of war that doctors and nurses see; not rarely and in one
hospital, but in all hospitals and every morning, when the long line of
men--'"pus tanks' we called 'em last winter," muttered one of the young
doctors--are brought in to be dressed, There was such a leg that day in
the Barracken Hospital; the case described here was in the American Red
Cross Hospital in Vienna.
Such individual suffering makes no right or wrong, of course. It is a
part of war. Yet the more one sees of it and of this cannon fodder, the
people on whom the burden of war really falls, how alike they all are in
their courage, simplicity, patience, and long-suffering, whether
Hungarians or Russians, Belgians or Turks, the less simple is it to be
convinced of the complete righteousness of any of the various general
ideas in whose name these men are tortured. I suspect that only those
can hate with entire satisfaction and success who stay quietly at home
and read the papers.
I remember riding down into Surrey from London one Sunday last August
and reading an editorial on Louvain--so well written, so quivering with
noble indignation that one's blood boiled, as they say, and one could
scarcely wait to get off the train to begin the work of revenge.
Perhaps the most moving passage in this editorial was about the smoking
ruins of the Town Hall, which I later saw intact. I have thought
occasionally since of that editorial and of the thousands of sedentary
fire-eaters and hate-mongers like the writer of it--men who live forever
in a cloud of words, bounce from one nervous reaction to another without
ever touching the ground, and, rejoicing in their eloquence, go down
from their comfortable breakfasts to their comfortable offices morning
after morning and demand slaughter, annihilation, heaven knows what not
--men who could not endure for ten minutes that small part of war which
any frail girl of a trained nurse endures hour after hour every morning
as part of the day's work.
If I had stayed in London and continued to read the lies of but one
side, I should doubtless, by this time, be able to loathe and despise
the enemy with an entire lack of doubt, discomfort, or intelligence.
But having been in all the countries and read all the lies, the problem
is less simple.
How many people who talk or write about war would have the courage to
face a minute, fractional part of the reality underlying war's inherited
romance? People speak with pleasant excitement of "flashing sabres"
without the remotest thought of what flashing sabres do. A sabre does
not stop in mid-air with its flashing, where a Meissonier or a Detaille
would paint it--it goes right on through the cords and veins of a man's
neck. Sabre wounds are not very common, but there was one in the Vienna
hospital that morning--a V-shaped trench in which you could have laid
four fingers fiat, down through the hair and into the back of the man's
neck, so close to the big blood-vessel that you could see it beat under
its film of tissue--the only thing between him and death. I thought of
it a day or two later when I was reading a book about the Austrian army
officer's life, written by an English lady, and came across the phrase:
'"Sharpen sabres!' was the joyful cry."
Be joyful if you can, when you know what war is, and, knowing it, know
also that it is the only way to do your necessary work. The absurd and
disgusting thing is the ignorance and cowardice of those who can
slaughter an army corps every day for lunch, with words, and would not
be able to make so trivial a start toward the "crushing" they are
forever talking about as to fire into another man's open eyes or jam a
bayonet into a single man's stomach. Among the Utopian steps which one
would most gladly support would be an attempt to send the editors and
politicians of all belligerent countries to serve a week in the enemy's
hospitals.
Chapter XV
East Of Lemberg--Through Austria-Hungary to the Galician Front
We left Nagybiesce in the evening, climbed that night through the high
Tatras, stopped in the morning at Kaschau long enough for coffee and a
sight of the old cathedral, rolled on down through the country of robber
barons' castles and Tokay wine, and came at length, in the evening, to
Munkacs and the foot of the high Carpathians.
This was close to the southernmost point the Russians touched when they
came pouring down through the Carpathian passes, and one of the places
in the long line where Germans and Austro-Hungarians joined forces in
the spring to drive them back again. Munkacs is where the painter
Munkacsy came from. It was down to Munkacs, through Silesia and the
Tatras, that the troop-trains came in April while snow was still deep in
the Carpathians. Now it was a feeding-station for fresh troops going up
and wounded and prisoners coming down.
The officers in charge had no notion we were coming, but no sooner heard
we were strangers in Hungary than we must come in, not only to dinner,
but to dine with them at their table. We had red-hot stuffed paprika
pods, Liptauer cheese mixed salmon-pink with paprika, and these and
other things washed down with beer and cataracts of hospitable talk.
Some one whispering that a bit of cheese might come in handy in the
breakfastless, cholera-infested country, into which we were going that
night, they insisted we must take, not merely a slice, but a chunk as
big as a small trunk. We looked at the soup-kitchen, where they could
feed two thousand a day, and tasted the soup. We saw the
dressing-station and a few wounded waiting there, and all on such a
breeze of talk and eloquent explanation that you might have thought you
had stepped back into a century when suspicion and worry and nerves were
unknown.
The Hungarians are like that--along with their indolence and romantic
melancholy--lively and hospitable and credulous with strangers. Nearly
all of them are good talkers and by sheer fervor and conviction can make
almost any phrase resemble an idea and a real idea as good as a play.
Hungarians are useful when trenches must be taken by storm, just as the
sober Tyrolean mountaineers are better for sharp-shooting and slow
resistance.
One of the interesting things about the Austro-Hungarian army, as well,
of course, as an inevitable weakness, is the variety of races and
temperaments hidden under these blue-gray uniforms--Hungarians,
Austrians, Croatians, Slovaks, Czechs. Things in universal use, like
post-cards and paper money, often have their words printed in nine
languages, and an Austro-Hungarian officer may have to know three or
four in order to give the necessary orders to his men. And his men
cannot fight for the fatherland as the Germans do; they must rally round
a more or less abstract idea of nationality. And one of the surprises
of the war, doubtless, to many people, has been that its strain, instead
of disintegrating, appears to have beaten this loose mass together.
At the table that evening was a middle-aged officer and his aid on their
way to a new detail at the front. They were simple and soldier-like
and, after the flashing bosoms of the sedentary hinterland, it was
pleasant to see these men, who had been on active service since the
beginning, without a single medal. The younger Hungarian was one of
those slumbering daredevils who combine a compact, rugged shape--strong
wrists, hair low on the forehead--with the soft voice and shy manners of
a girl. He spoke a little German and English in the slow, almost
plaintive Hungarian cadence, but all we could get out of him about the
war was that it had made him so tired--so 'mude'. He had gone to school
in Zurich but could not tell our Swiss lieutenant the name of his
teacher--he couldn't remember anything, any more, he said, with his
plaintive smile. He had a little factory in Budapest and had gone back
on furlough to see that things were ship-shape, but it was no use, he
couldn't tell them what to do when he got there. Common enough, our
captain guide observed. He had been in the fighting along the San until
invalided back to the Presse-Quartier, and there were times, then, he
said, when for days it was hard for him to remember his own name.
We climbed up into the mountains in the night and he had us up at
daylight to look down from creaking, six-story timber bridges built by
the Austro-Hungarian engineers to replace the steel railroad bridges
blown up by the Russians. We passed a tunnel or two, a big stockade
full of Russian prisoners milling round in their brown overcoats, and
down from the pass into the village of Skole. Here we were to climb the
near-by heights of Ostry, which the Hungarians of the Corps Hoffmann
stormed in April when the snow was still on the ground, and "orientiren"
ourselves a bit about this Carpathian fighting.
I had looked back at it through the "histories" and the amputated feet
and hands in the hospital at Budapest--now, in the muggy air of a late
August morning we were to tramp over the ground itself. There were, in
this party of rather leisurely reporters, a tall, wise, slow-smiling
young Swede who had gone to sea at twelve and been captain of a
destroyer before leaving the navy to manage a newspaper; a young Polish
count, amiably interested in many sorts of learning and nearly all sorts
of ladies--he had seen some of the Carpathian fighting as an officer in
the Polish Legion; one of the Swiss citizen officers--one can hear him
now whacking his heels together whenever he was presented, and fairly
hissing "Oberleutnant W---, aw Schweiz!" and a young Bulgarian
professor, who spoke German and a little French, but, unlike so many of
the Bulgarians of the older generation who were educated at Robert
College, no English. The Bulgarians are intensely patriotic and there
was nothing under sun, moon, or stars which this young man did not
compare with what they had in Sofia. German tactics, Russian novels,
sky-scrapers, music, steamships--no matter what--in a moment would come
his "Bei uns in Sofia"--(With us in Sofia) and his characteristic
febrile gesture, thumb and forefinger joined, other fingers extended,
pumping emphatically before his face.
Then there was our captain guide from the regular army, a volunteer
automobile officer, a soldier servant for each man--for the Austrians do
such things in style--and even, on a separate flat car, our own motor.
The Carpathians here are in the neighborhood of three thousand five
hundred feet high--a tangle of pine-covered slopes as steep as a roof
sometimes, and reminding one a bit of our Oregon Cascades on a
much-reduced scale. You must imagine snow waist-deep, the heights
furrowed with trenches, the frosty balsam stillness split with screaming
shells and shrapnel and the rat-tat-tat of machine guns; imagine
yourself floundering upward with winter overcoat, blanket, pack, rifle,
and cartridge-belt--any one who has snow-shoed in mountains in midwinter
can fancy what fighting meant in a place like this. Men's feet and
hands were frozen on sentry duty or merely while asleep--for the
soldiers slept as a rule in the open, merely huddled in their blankets
before a fire--the severely wounded simply dropped in the snow, and for
most of them, no doubt, that was the end of it.
Puffing and steaming in our rain-coats, we climbed the fifteen hundred
feet or so to the top of the mountain, up which the Russians had built a
sort of cork-screw series of trenches, twisting one behind the other.
We reached one sky-line only to find another looking down at us.
Barbed-wire entanglements and "Spanish riders" crossed the slopes in
front of them--it was the sort of place that looks to a civilian as if
it could hold out forever.
The difficulty in country like this is, of course, to escape flanking
fire. You fortify yourself against attack from one direction only to be
enfiladed by artillery from some ridge to right or left. That was what
the Austrians and Germans did and, following their artillery with an
infantry assault, captured one of the upper Russian trenches. From this
it was only a matter of a few hours to clear out the others. Except for
the visits of a few peasants the battle-field had scarcely been touched
since the snow melted. The hillside was peppered with shell holes, the
trenches littered with old hand-grenades, brown Russian over-coats, the
rectangular metal cartridge clip cases---about like biscuit tins--which
the Russians leave everywhere, and some of the brush-covered shelters in
which the Russians had lived, with their spoons and wet papers and here
and there a cigarette box or a tube of tooth-paste, might have almost
been lived in yesterday.
The valley all the way back to Skole was strung with the brush and
timber shelters in which the Russians had camped--the first of thousands
of cut-up pine-trees we were to see before we left Galicia. All the
drab and dreary side of war was in that little mountain town--smashed
houses; sidewalks, streets, and fences splashed with lime against
cholera; stores closed or just keeping alive, and here and there signs
threatening spies and stating that any one found carrying explosives or
building fires would be shot. I went into one fairly clean little cafe,
where it seemed one might risk a cup of tea--you are not supposed to
drink unboiled or unbottled water in such neighborhoods--and the dismal
old Jew who kept the place told me that he had been there since the war
began. He made a sour face when I said he must have seen a good deal.
A lot he could see, he said, six months in a cellar "gesteckt."
There was a certain amount of cholera all through eastern Galicia,
especially among the peasants, not so well housed, often, as the
soldiers, and not nearly so well fed and taken care of. Every one who
went into Galicia had to be vaccinated for cholera, and in the army this
had all but prevented it. In a whole division living in a
cholera-infected neighborhood there would be only one or two cases, and
sometimes none at all. The uncomfortable rumor of it was everywhere,
however, and one was not supposed to eat raw fruit or vegetables, and in
some places hand-shaking, even in an officers' mess, was prohibited.
Russian prisoners were working about the station as they were all over
eastern Austria-Hungary--big, blond, easy-going children, apparently
quite content. Our Warsaw Pole talked with one of them, who seemed to
mourn only the fact that he didn't have quite so big a ration of bread
as he had had as a soldier. He had come from Siberia, where he had left
a wife and three children--four, maybe, by this time, he said; some
rascally Austrian might have made another one.
Beyond Skole we left the mountains--looking back at that imposing wall
on the horizon, one could fancy the Russians coming down from the north
and thinking, "There we shall stand!"--and rode northward through a
pleasant, shallow, valley country, past Ruthenian settlements with their
three-domed churches and houses steep-roofed with heavy thatch. Some of
these Ruthenians, following the Little Russians of the south, Gogol's
country, were not enthusiastic when the Russians came through. Among
others, the Russian Government had made great propaganda, given money
for churches and so on, so that the apparently guileless peasants
occasionally revealed artillery positions, the Austrians said, by
driving their cattle past them or by smoke signals from cottage
chimneys. We stopped for dinner at Strij, another of those drab, dusty,
half-Jewish towns filled now with German and Austro-Hungarian soldiers,
officers, proclamations, and all the machinery of a staff headquarters,
and the next morning rolled into Lemberg. The Russians captured it in
the first week of the war, held it through the winter, and then, after
the Czar had, from a balcony in the town, formally annexed it to the
empire forever and a day, in April, the Austro-Hungarians retook it
again in June.
There were smashed windows in the railroad station, but otherwise, to a
stranger coming in for the first time, Lemberg seemed swinging along, a
big modern city of some-two hundred thousand people, almost as if nothing
had happened.
With an officer from General Bom-Ermolh's staff, and maps, we drove out
to the outlying fortifications, where the real fighting had taken place.
The concrete gun positions, the permanent infantry protections with
loopholes in concrete, and all the trenches and barbed wire, looked
certainly as if the Russians had intended to stay in Lemberg. The full
explanation of why they did not must be left for the present. What
happened at one fortified position, a few miles southwest of Lemberg,
was plain enough.
Here, in pleasant open farming country was a concrete and earth fort,
protected by elaborate trenches and entanglements, in front of which,
for nearly a mile across the fields, was an open field of fire.
Infantry might have charged across that open space until the end of the
war without getting any nearer, but the offensive did not, of course,
try that. Over behind distant clumps of trees and a wooded ridge on the
horizon they planted their heavy batteries. On a space perhaps three
hundred yards long some sixty of these heavy guns concentrated their
fire. The infantry pushed up under its protection, the fort fell, and
the garrison was captured with it.
It is by such use of artillery that herds of prisoners are sometimes
gathered in. Just before the charging infantry reaches the trench, the
cataract of artillery fire, which has been pouring into it, is suddenly
shifted back a few hundred yards, where it hangs like a curtain shutting
off escape. The success of such tactics demands, of course, finished
work from the artillery-men and perfect co-ordination between artillery
and infantry. At lunch a few days later in Cracow, a young Austrian
officer was telling me how they had once arranged that the artillery
should fire twenty rounds, and on the twenty-first the infantry, without
waiting for the usual bugle signal to storm, should charge the trenches.
At the same instant the artillery-men were to move up their range a
couple of hundred yards. The manoeuvre was successful and the Russians
caught, huddled under cover, before they knew what had happened.
Though Lemberg's cafes were gay enough and the old Jews in gaberdines,
with the orthodox curl dangling before each ear, dozed peacefully on the
park benches, still the Russians were only a few hours' motor drive to
the eastward, and next morning we went out to see them. All of the
country through which we drove was, in a way, the "front"--beginning
with the staff head-quarters and going on up through wagon-trains,
reserves, horse camps, ammunition-stations, and so on, to the first-line
trenches themselves.
Sweeping up through this long front on a fine autumn morning is to see
the very glitter and bloom of war. Wounds and suffering, burned towns,
and broken lives--all that is forgotten in the splendid panorama--men
and motors and fliers and guns, the cheerful smell of hay and coffee and
horses, the clank of heavy trucks and the jangle of chains, all in
beautiful harvest country; in the contagion of pushing on, shoulder to
shoulder, and the devil take the hindmost, toward something vastly
interesting up ahead.
Every one is well and strong, and the least of them lifted up and
glamoured over by the idea that unites them. All the pettinesses and
smallness of every-day existence seem brushed aside, for no one is
working for money or himself, and every man of them may be riding to his
death.
Flippant young city butterflies jump to their feet and gravely salute
when their elders enter, the loutish peasant flings up his chin as if he
would defy the universe. What a strange and magic thing is this
discipline or team-work or whatever you choose to call it, by which some
impudent waiter, for instance, who yesterday would have growled at his
tips, will to-day fling his chin up and his hands to his sides and beam
like a boy, merely because his captain, showing guests through the camp,
deigns to peer into his mess-can and, slapping him affectionately on the
cheek, ask him if the food is all right!
We whizzed into the village of Kamionka, on the upper Bug, across which
the Russians had been driven only a few days before. Their trenches
were just within the woods a scant mile away, and the smoke of their
camp-fires curled up through the trees. Across the much-talked-of Bug,
which resembles here a tide-water river split with swampy flats, were
the trenches they had left. They trailed along the river bank, bent
with it almost at a right angle, and the Austro-Hungarian batteries had
been so placed that a crisscross fire enfiladed each trench. From the
attic observation station into which we climbed, the officers directing
the attack could look down the line of one of the trenches and see their
own shells ripping it to pieces. "It was a sight you could see once in
a lifetime," said one of the young artillery-men, still strung up with
the excitement of the fight--exactly what was said to me at Ari Bumu by
a Turkish officer who had seen the Triumph go down.
That attic was like a scene in some military melodrama, with its
tattered roof, its tripod binoculars peering at the enemy, the
businesslike officers dusty and unshaven, the field-telegraph operator
squatting in one corner, with a receiver strapped to his ear. We walked
across the rafters to an adjoining room, where there were two or three
chairs and an old sofa, had schnapps all round, and then went out to
walk over the position.
In front was the wabbly foot-bridge run across by the pioneers, and on
the swampy flats the little heaps of sod thrown up by the first line as
they pushed across--wading up to their necks part of the way--under
fire.
On the near bank the Austro-Hungarian trenches had run between the tombs
of an old Jewish burying-ground, and from the earth walls, here and
there, projected a bone or a crumbling skull. The Russian trenches on
the other bank wound through a farmyard in the same impersonal way--
pig-pens, orchard, chicken-coops, all thought of merely as shelter. It
was just to the left of a pig-pen that a Russian officer had held his
machine gun until the last minute, pouring in a flank fire. "He did his
work!" was the young officer's comment.
We lunched with a corps commander and dined with a genial old colonel
and his staff, and between times motored through level farming country
to a position to the northward on the Rata, a tributary of the Bug.
Both sides were watching each other here from their sausage-shaped
captive balloons, and a few aeroplanes were snooping about but at the
moment all was quiet. The Austro-Hungarians had been waiting here for
over a fortnight, and the artillery-men had polished up their battery
positions as artillery-men like to do when they have time. Two were in
a pasture, so neatly roofed over with sod that a birdman might fly over
the place until the cows came home without knowing guns were there.
Another, hidden just within the shadow of a pine forest, was as
attractive as some rich man's mountain camp, the gun positions as snug
as yacht cabins, the officer's lodges made of fresh, sweet-smelling pine
logs, and in a little recess in the trees a shrine had been built to St.
Barbara, who looks out for artillery-men.
The infantry trenches along the river, cut in the clean sand and neatly
timbered and loopholed, were like model trenches on some exposition
ground. Through these loopholes one could see the Russian trenches,
perhaps a mile away, and in between the peasant women, bright red and
white splashes in the yellow wheat, were calmly going ahead with their
harvest. All along the Galician front we saw peasants working thus and
regarding this elaborate game of war very much apparently as busy
farmers regard a draghunt or a party of city fishermen. At one point we
had to come out in the open and cross a foot-bridge. "Please--
Lieutenant," one of the soldiers protested as the officer with us
stepped out, standing erect, "it is not safe!" The officer crouched and
hurried across and so did we, but just before we did so, up out of the
field where they had been mowing, straight through this gap, came a
little company of barefooted peasant women with their bundles of
gleanings on their heads, and talking in that singsong monotone of
theirs, as detached as so many birds, they went pat-patting across the
bridge. If one of these women could but write her impressions of war!