Antwerp to Gallipoli - Arthur Ruhl
Another breakfast like this, another day of rain and fog, another '"Q?"
--it was in some such state of mind as this that I packed up one night
and took the early train for Folkestone.
Folkestone, Friday.
Sunshine at last--a delicious autumn afternoon--clean air, quiet, and
the sea. Far below the cliff walk, trawlers crawling slowly in; along
the horizon a streak of smoke from some patrolling destroyer or
battleship. And all along this cliff walk, Belgians--strolling with
their children, sitting on the benches, looking out to sea. Just beyond
that hazy white wall to the east--the cliffs of France--the fight for
Calais is being fought--they can almost hear the cannon.
In the stillness, as they drift by, you catch bits of their talk:
"It was two o'clock in the morning when we left Antwerp."
"And imagine--it was not three metres from our doorstep that the shell
burst."
"We walked forty kilometres that night and in the morning-------"
On the balcony of some one's summer-house, now turned into a hospital,
four Belgian soldiers, one with his head bandaged, are playing cards--
jolly, blond youngsters, caps rakishly tipped over one ear, slamming the
cards down as if that were the only thing in the world. In the garden
others taking the sunshine, some with their wheel-chairs pushed through
the shrubbery close to the high iron fence, to be petted by nurse-maids
and children as if they were animals in a sort of zoo.
The Belgians strolling by on the cliff walk smile at this quaint
picture, for sun and space and quiet seem to have wiped out their
terror--that passed through is as far away as that now hidden in the
east. Is it merely quiet and sun? Perhaps it is the look of a "nice
little people" who know that now they have a history. "Refugees," to be
sure, yet one can fancy them looking back some day from their tight
little villages, canals, and beet-fields, on afternoons like this, as on
the days of their great adventure--when they could sit in the sun above
the sea at Folkestone and look across the Channel to the haze under
which their sons and husbands and brothers and King were fighting for
the last corner of their country.
Calais, Saturday.
Belgian officers, parks of Belgian military automobiles; up-country a
little way the Germans going down in tens of thousands to win their
"gate to England"--yet we came across on the Channel boat last evening
as usual and had little trouble finding a room. There were tons of Red
Cross supplies on board--cotton, chloroform, peroxide; Belgian soldiers
patched up and going back to fight; and various volunteer nurses,
including two handsome young Englishwomen of the very modern aviatrix
type--coming over to drive motor-cycle ambulances--and so smartly gotten
up in boots and khaki that a little way off you might have taken them
for British officers. At the wharf were other nurses, some of whom I
had last seen that Thursday afternoon in Antwerp as they and their
wounded rolled away in London buses from the hospital in the Boulevard
Leopold.
This morning, strolling round the town, I ran into a couple of English
correspondents. There were yet several hours before they need address
themselves to the arduous task of describing fighting they had not seen,
and they talked, with a good humor one sometimes misses in their
correspondence, of German collectivism and similar things. One had
spent a good deal of time in Germany.
"They're the only people who have solved the problem of industrial
cities without slums--you must say that for them. Of course, in those
model towns of theirs, you've got to brush your teeth at six minutes
past eight and sleep on your left side if the police say so--they're
astonishing people for doing what they're told.
"One day in Dresden I walked across a bit of grass the public weren't
supposed to cross. An old gentleman fairly roared the instant he saw
me. He was ready to explode at the mere suggestion that any one could
think of disobeying a rule made for all of them.
"'Das kann man nicht thun! Es ist verboten!'"
The other quoted the answer of an English factory-owner to some of his
employees who did not want to enlist. "They've done a lot for working
men over there," the man said. "Accident-insurance, old-age pensions,
and all that--what do we want to fight the Kaiser for? We'd just about
as soon be under Billy as George." And X------said to them: "If you were
under Kaiser Billy, you'd enlist right enough, there's no doubt of
that!"
Boulogne, Saturday.
He sat in the corner of our compartment coming down from Calais this
afternoon, an old Algerian soldier, homeward bound, with a big, round
loaf of bread and a military pass. He had a blue robe, bright-red, soft
boots, a white turban wound with a sort of scarf of brown cord and baggy
corduroy underneath, concealing various mysterious pockets.
"Paris? To-night?" he grunted in his queer French. The big Frenchman
next him, who had served in Africa in his youth and understood the
dialect, shook his head. "To-morrow morning!" he said. He laid his
head on his hand to suggest a man sleeping, and held up three fingers.
"Three days--Marseilles!" The old goumier's dark eyes blazed curiously,
and he opened and shut his mouth in a dry yawn--like a tiger yawning.
Wounded? No--he pointed to his eyes, which were bloodshot, patted his
forehead to suggest that it was throbbing, rubbed his legs, and scowled.
"Rheumatism!" said the Frenchman. The Algerian pressed his palms
together six times, then held up two fingers. "He's sixty-two years
old!" said the Frenchman, and the old warrior obligingly opened his jaws
and pointed to two or three lone brown fangs to prove it. They talked
for a moment in the vernacular, and the Frenchman explained again,
"Volunteer!" and then, "Scout!"
The old Arab made the motion of sighting along a rifle, then of brushing
something over, and tapped himself on the chest.
"Deux!" he said. "Two Germans--me!" Evidently he was going back to the
desert satisfied.
Train after train passed us, northward bound, some from Boulogne, some
from the trenches north of Paris evidently, bringing artillery caked
with mud--all packed with British soldiers leaning from doors of their
cattle-cars, hats pushed back, pipes in their faces, singing and joking.
At the end of each train, in passenger-coaches, their officers--tall,
slim-legged young Olympians in leather puttees and short tan greatcoats,
with their air of elegant amateurs embarking on some rather superior
sort of sport.
The same cars filled with French soldiers equally brave, efficient,
light-hearted would be as different as Corneille and Shakespeare, as
Dickens and Dumas--and in the same ways!
An Englishman had been telling me in a London club a few nights before
of the "extraordinary detachment" of Tommy Atkins.
"Take almost any of those little French soldiers--they've got a pretty
good idea what the war is about--at any rate, they've got a sentiment
about it perfectly clear and conscious, and they'll go to their death
shouting for la patrie. Now, Tommy Atkins isn't the least like that.
He doesn't fight--and you know how he does fight--for patriotism or
glory, at least not in the same conscious way. He'd fight just as well
against another of his own regiments--if you know what I mean. He's
just--well, look at the soldiers' letters. The Germans are sentimental
--they are all martyrs. The Frenchmen are all heroes. But Tommy Atkins
--well, he's just playing football!"
The idea this Englishman was trying to express was put in another way by
a British sailor at the time of the sinking of the Aboukir, Cressy, and
Rogue.
Imagine, for a moment, that scene--the three great ships going over like
stricken whales, men slipping down their slimy flanks into the sea,
boats overturned and smashed, in the thick of it the wet nose of the
German submarine coming up for a look round, and then, out of that
hideous welter, the voice of a sailor, the unalterable Briton in the
face of all this modern science and sea magic, grabbing an anchor or
whatever it was he saw first, and bellowing:
"Smash the blighter's head!"
There are phrases like these which could only have been said by the
people who say them; they are like windows suddenly opening down cycles
of racial history and difference. At a Regent Street moving-picture
show a few evenings ago two young Frenchwomen sat behind us, girls
driven off the Paris boulevards by the same impartial force which has
driven grubbing peasant women from the Belgian beet-fields. One spoke a
little English, and as the pictures changed she translated for her
companion.
There were pictures of the silk industry in Japan--moths emerging from
cocoons, the breeding process, the hatching of the eggs, the life
history of these anonymous little specks magnified until for the moment
they almost had a sort of personality. And one murmured:
"Comme c'est drole, la nature!"
Sunday.
It was dusk when we reached Boulogne last night--frosty dusk, with the
distant moan of a fog-horn, and under the mist hilly streets busy with
soldiers and bright with lights. It made one think of a college town at
home on the eve of the great game, so keen and happy seemed all these
fit young men--officers swinging by with their walking-sticks, soldiers
spinning yarns in smoky cafes--for the great game of war.
The hotels were full of wounded or officers--to Boulogne comes the
steady procession of British transports--but an amiable porter led me to
a little side street and a place kept by a retired English
merchant-marine officer who had married a Frenchwoman. Paintings, such
as sailor-artists make, of the ships he had served in were on the walls,
a photograph of himself and his mates taken in the sunshine of some
tropical port; and with its cheerful hot stove, the place combined the
air of a French cafe with the cosiness of an English inn.
Very comfortable, indeed, I leaned over one of the tables that ran along
the wall, while two British soldiers alongside gossiped and sipped their
beer, and ran over the columns of La Boulonnaise. Here, too, war seemed
a jolly man's game, and I came to "Military Court Sitting at Boulogne,"
and beneath it the following:
Seventh, eighth, and ninth cases. Thefts by German prisoners of war.
The accused are Antoine Michels, twenty-five years, native of Treves,
Twenty-seventh German Chasseurs, made prisoner at Lens. Henriede Falk,
twenty-seven years, native of Landenheissen (Grand Duchy of Hesse),
Fourth Regiment Dragoons, made prisoner at Lille. Max Benninghoven,
twenty-two years, Seventh German Chasseurs, made prisoner at Bailleul.
"The three had in their possession at the moment of their capture:
Michels, two pairs of earrings, a steel watch, two medals representing
the town of Arras, and a cigar-holder; Falk, a woman's watch and chain
in addition to his own; Benninghoven, a pocketbook, a pack of cards, and
money that did not belong to him.
"All were subjected to a severe examination and condemned: Michels, to
five years in prison and a fine of five hundred francs; Falk, to twenty
years at forced labor..."
And these few words of newspaper type, which nobody else seemed to be
noticing, somehow--as if one had stubbed one's toe--disturbed the
picture. They did not fit in with the rakish gray motor-car, labelled
"Australia," I saw after dinner, nor the young infantryman I ran across
on a street corner who had been in the fighting ever since Mons and was
but down "for a rest" before jumping in again, nor the busy streets and
buzzing cafes. But across them, for some reason, all evening, one
couldn't help seeing Henriede Falk, twenty-seven years old, of
Landenheissen, starting down toward Paris last August, singing
"Deutschland uber Alles!" and wondering what he might be thinking about
the great game of war fifteen years from now.
While I was taking coffee this morning my mariner-host walked up and
down the cafe, delivering himself on the subject of mines in the North
Sea. The Germans began it, now the English must take it up; but as for
him, speaking as one who had followed the sea, it was poor business. Why
couldn't people knock each other out in a stand-up fight like men in a
ring, instead of strewing the open road with explosives?
Walking about town after breakfast, I ran into a young man whom I had
last seen in a white linen uniform, waiting patiently on the orderlies'
bench of the American Ambulance at Neuilly. The ambulance is as hard to
get into as an exclusive club, for the woods are full these days of
volunteers who, leading rather decorative lives in times of peace, have
been shaken awake by the war into helping out overtaxed embassies,
making beds in hospitals, doing whatever comes along with a childlike
delight in the novelty of work. This young man wore a Red Cross button
now and paused long enough to impart the following--characteristic of
the things we non-combatants hear daily, and which, authentic or not,
help to "make life interesting":
1. An English general just down from the front had told him that four
thousand soldiers had been sent out as a burial party after the fighting
along the Yser, and had buried, by actual count, thirty-nine thousand
Germans.
2. In a temporary hospital near the front some fifty German and Indian
wounded were put in the same ward. In the night the Indians got up and
cut the Germans' throats.
I climbed up through narrow, cobblestoned streets to the higher part of
the town. It was pleasant up here in the frosty morning--old houses,
archways, and courts, and the bells tolling people to church.
Up the long hill, as I went down, came three hearses in black and
silver, after the French fashion, with drivers in black coats and
black-and-silver cocked hats. People stopped as they passed, a woman
crossed herself, men took off their hats--farther up the hill a French
sentry suddenly straightened and presented arms.
The three caskets were draped in flags--not the tricolor, but the Union
Jack. No mourners followed them, and as the ancient vehicles climbed
over the brow of the hill the people kept looking, feeling, perhaps,
that something was lacking, wondering who the strangers might be who had
given their lives to France.
Monday.
Paris again--a gray Paris, with bare tree-trunks, dead leaves on the
sidewalk, and in the air the chill of approaching winter.
Across the gray distances one fancies now and then to have seen the
first stray flakes of snow, and in some old street, between tall, gray
houses leaning backward, sidewise, each after its fashion--as some girl,
pale, with shawl wrapped about her shoulders, hurries past with a quick
upcasting of dark eyes, one thinks of Mimi and the third act of "La
Boheme."
Old sentiments, old songs and verses return in this strange, gray
stillness--that spirit so gracious, delicate, penetrating, and personal,
which has drawn so many through the years, becomes more moving and real.
There is more animation in the streets now: shops are opening, cabs
tooting down the Avenue de l'Opera the greater part of the night; but
most of the house-fronts are still shuttered and still. Tourists,
pleasure-seekers, and the banalities they bring are gone--every thought
and energy is with the men fighting on that long line across the north.
It is a Paris of the French--of a France united as never before,
perhaps, purified by fire, ardent, resolute, defending her life and her
precious inheritance.
The Temporary Capital
Tuesday.
A journalist actually protests in print against the big loaves of coarse
bread, long as half a stick of cord-wood and almost as hard--remember
the almost carnivorous joy with which a Frenchman devours bread!--to
which the military government, at the beginning of the war, condemned
Paris.
The explanation was that rolls and fancy bread took too much time and
there were not enough bakers left to do the work--and inspectors see
that the law is obeyed, whether amiable bakers think they have time or
not. And people want light bread, curly rolls, "pain de fantaisie." All
very well for General Gallieni! says the journalist; he likes hard
bread; but why must several million people go on cracking their teeth
because of that idiosyncrasy?
The government is obdurate. If fancy bread were made, only the big
bakers would have time to make it, little ones would be without clients,
and that this highly centralized, paternal government cannot allow.
Hard bread it is, then, for another while at least--"C'est la guerre!"
Thursday.
We have a dining-car on our Bordeaux express to-day, the first since war
was declared. To-morrow night sleeping-cars go back again--more
significant than one might think who had not seen the France of a few
months ago, when everything was turned over to the army and people sat
up all night in day coaches to cover the usual three hours from Dieppe
to Paris.
Down through the heart of France--Tours, Poitiers, Angouleme--past trim
little French rivers, narrow, winding, still, and deep, with rows of
poplars close to the water's edge, and still a certain air of coquetry,
in spite of bare branches and fallen leaves--past brown fields across
which teams of oxen, one sedate old farm horse in the lead, are drawing
the furrow for next spring's wheat. It's the old men who are ploughing
--except for those in uniform, there is scarce a young man in sight. And
everywhere soldiers--wounded ones bound for southern France, reserves
not yet sent up.
Vines begin to appear, low brown lines across stony fields; then, just
after dark, across the Garonne and into Bordeaux, where the civil
government obligingly fled when the enemy was rolling down on Paris in
the first week of September.
Bordeaux, Monday.
Bordeaux is a day's railroad ride from Paris--twelve hours away from the
German cannon, which even now are only fifty miles north of the
boulevards, twelve hours nearer Spain and Africa. And you feel both
these things.
All about you is the wine country--the names of towns and villages round
about read like a wine-card--and, as you are lunching in some little
side-street restaurant, a table is moved away, a trap-door opens, and
monsieur the proprietor looks on while the big casks of claret are
rolled in from the street and lowered to the cellar and the old casks
hauled up again. You are close to the wine country and close to the
sea--to oysters and crabs and ships--and to the hot sun and more
exuberant spirits of the Midi. The pretty, black-eyed Bordelaise--there
are pretty girls in Bordeaux--often seems closer to Madrid than to
Paris; even the Bordelais accent has a touch of the Mediterranean, and
the crisp words of Paris are broken up and even an extra vowel added now
and then, until they ripple like Spanish or Italian. "Pe-tite-a ma-
dame-a !" rattles some little newsboy, ingratiating himself with an
indifferent lady of uncertain age; and the porter will bring your boots
in no time-in "une-a pe-tite-a mi-nute-a."
The war is in everybody's mind, of course--no one in France thinks of
anything else--but there is none of that silence and tenseness, that
emotional tremor, one feels in Paris. The Germans will never come here,
one feels, no matter what happens, and as you read the communiques in La
Petite Gironde and La Liberte du Sud-Ouest the war seems farther away, I
feel pretty sure, than it does in front of the newspaper bill-boards in
New York.
In fact, one of the first and abiding impressions of Bordeaux is that it
is a great place for things to eat--oysters from Marennes, lobsters and
langoustes, pears big as cantaloupes, pomegranates, mushrooms--the
little ones and the big cepes of Bordeaux--yellow dates just up from
Tunis. The fruiterers' shops not only make you hungry, but into some of
them you may enter and find a quiet little room up-stairs, where the
proprietor and his wife and daughter, in the genial French fashion, will
serve you with a cosey little dinner with wine for three francs, in
front of the family grate fire, and the privilege of ordering up
anything you want from the shop-window below.
There are attractive little chocolate and pastry shops and cheerful
semi-pension restaurants where whole families, including, in these days,
minor politicians with axes to grind and occasional young women from the
boulevards, all dine together in a warm bustle of talk, smoke, the
gurgle of claret, and tear off chunks of hard French bread, while madame
the proprietress, a handsome, dark-eyed, rather Spanish-looking
Bordelaise, sails round, subduing the impatient, smiling at those who
wish to be smiled at, and ordering her faithful waiters about like a
drill-sergeant.
And then there is the Chapon fin. When you speak to some elderly
gentleman with fastidious gastronomical tastes and an acquaintance with
southern France of your intention of going to Bordeaux, he murmurs
reminiscently: "Ah, yes! There is a restaurant there..." He means the
Chapon fin. It was famous in '70 when the government came here before,
and to-day when the young King of Spain motors over from Biarritz he
dines there. Coming down on the train, I read in the Revue des Deux
Mondes the recollections of a gentleman who was here in '70-'71 and is
here again now. He was inclined to be sarcastic about the present
Chapon fin. In his day one had good food and did not pay exorbitantly;
now "one needs a quasi-official introduction to penetrate, and the
stylish servants, guarding the door like impassable dragons, ask with a
discreet air if monsieur has taken care to warn the management of his
intention of taking lunch."
We penetrated without apparent difficulty--possibly owing to the exalted
position of the two amiable young attaches who entertained me--and the
food was very good. There were diplomats of all sorts to be seen, a
meridional head waiter, and an interesting restaurant cat. One end of
the room is an artificial grotto, and into and out of the canvas rocks
this enormous cat kept creeping, thrusting his round face and blazing
eyes out of unexpected holes in the manner of the true carnivora, as if
he had been trained by the management as an entertainer. The head
waiter would have lured an anchorite into temporary abandon. Toward the
end of the evening we discussed the probable character of a certain
dessert, suggesting some doubt of taking it. You might as well have
doubted his honor. "Mais, monsieur!" He waved his arms. "C'est
delicieux! ... C'est merveilleux! ... C'est quelque chose"--slowly,
with thumb and first finger pressed together--"de r-r-raf-fi-we!"...
It is to this genial provincial city that the President and his
ministers have come. They distributed themselves about town in various
public and private buildings; the Senate chose one theatre for its
future meeting-place and the Chamber of Deputies another. And from
these places, sometimes the most incongruous--one hears, for instance,
of M. Delcasse maintaining his dignity in a bedroom now used as the
office for the minister of foreign affairs--the red tape is unwound
which eventually sends the life-blood of the remotest province flowing
up to its appointed place at the front.
There must be plenty of real work, for an army like that of France,
stretching clear across the country from Switzerland to the Channel,
could not live unless it had a smoothly running civil machine in the
quiet country behind. Neither of the chambers is in session, and except
that the main streets are busy--one is told that one hundred thousand
extra people are in town--you might almost never know that anything out
of the ordinary had occurred. Things must be very different, of course,
from '71, when, beaten to her knees and threatened with revolution,
France had to decide between surrendering Alsace and Lorraine and going
on with the war.
The theatres are closed, but there are moving-picture shows, an
occasional concert, and twice a week, under the auspices of one of the
newspapers, a conference. I went to one of these, given by a French
professor of English literature in the University of Bordeaux, on the
timely subject: "Kipling and Greater England."
You can imagine the piquant interest of the scene--the polite matinee
audience, the row of erudite Frenchmen sitting behind the speaker, the
table, the shaded lamp, and the professor himself, a slender, dark
gentleman with a fine, grave face, pointed black beard, and penetrating
eyes--suggesting vaguely a prestidigitateur--trying, by sheer
intelligence and delicate, critical skill, to bridge the gaps of race
and instinctive thought and feeling and make his audience understand
Kipling.
Said the reporter of one of the Bordeaux papers next day: "Through the
Kipling evoked by M. Cestre we admired the English and those who fight,
in the great winds of the North Sea, that combat rude and brave. We
admired the faithful indigenes, gathering from all her dominions, to put
their muscular arms at the service of the empire..."
It would, indeed, have been difficult to pay a more graceful compliment
to the entente cordiale than to try to run the author of "Soldiers
Three" and the "Barrack Room Ballads," and with him the nation behind
him, into the smooth mould of a conference--that mixture, so curiously
French, of clear thinking and graceful expression, of sensitive
definition and personal charm, all blended into a whole so
intellectually neat and modulated that an audience like this may take it
with the same sense of being cheered, yet not inebriated, with which
their allies across the Channel take their afternoon tea.