Antwerp to Gallipoli - Arthur Ruhl
We whirled past them down the road a bit, then walked up a gentle slope
to the right. Over this low ridge, from the English trenches,
rifle-bullets whistled above our heads. In the shelter of a brick
farmhouse a dozen or so German soldiers were waiting, after trench
service, to go back to La Bassee. They were smallish, mild-looking men,
dusted with the yellow clay in which they had burrowed--clothes, boots,
faces, and hands---until they looked like millers.
"How are the English?" some one asked. "Do they know how to shoot?"
A weary sort of hoot chorused out from the dust-covered men.
"Gut genug!" they said. The house was strewn with rusty cartridge clips
and smashed brick. We waited while our chaperon brought the battalion
commander--a mild-faced little man, more like a school-teacher than a
soldier--and it was decided that, as the trenches were not under fire at
the moment, we might go into them. He led the way into the
communication trench--a straight-sided winding ditch, shoulder-deep, and
just wide enough to walk in comfortably. Yellow clay was piled up
overhead on either side, and there was a wooden sidewalk. The ditch
twisted constantly as the trenches themselves do, so as not to be swept
by enfilading fire, and after some hundreds of yards of this twisting,
we came to the: first-line trench and the men's dugouts.
It was really a series of little caves, with walls of solid earth and
roofs of timber and sand-bags, proof against almost anything but the
plunging flight of heavy high-explosive shells. The floors of these
caves were higher than the bottom of the trench, so that an ordinary
rain would not flood them, and covered with straw. And they were full
of men, asleep, working over this and that--from one came the smell of
frying ham. The trench twisted snakelike in a general north and south
direction, and was fitted every few feet with metal firing-shields,
loopholed for rifles and machine guns. In each outer curve facing the
enemy a firing platform, about waist-high, had been cut in the earth,
with similar armored port-holes.
The Germans had been holding this trench for three months, and its whole
outer surface was frosted a sulphurous yellow from the smoke of exploded
shells. Shrapnel-casings and rusted shell-noses were sticking
everywhere in the clay, and each curve exposing a bit of surface to
the enemy was honeycombed with bullet holes. In one or two places
sand-bags, caves, and all had been torn out.
Except for an occasional far-off detonation and the more or less
constant and, so to speak, absent-minded cracking of rifles, a mere
keeping awake, apparently, and letting the men in the opposite trenches
know you are awake, the afternoon was peaceful. Pink-cheeked youngsters
in dusty Feldgrau, stiffened and clapped their hands to their sides as
officers came in sight, heard English with an amazement not difficult to
imagine, and doubtless were as anxious to talk to these strange beings
from a world they'd said good-by to, as we were to talk to them.
At one of the salient angles, where a platform had been cut, we stopped
to look through a periscope: one cannot show head or hand above the
trench, of course, without drawing fire, and looks out of this curious
shut-in world as men do in a submarine--just as the lady in the
old-fashioned house across from us in New York sits at her front window
and sees in a slanting mirror everything that happens between her and
the Avenue.
We had not been told just where we were going (in that shut-in ditch one
had no idea), and there in the mirror, beyond some straggling barbed
wire and perhaps seventy-five yards of ordinary grass, was another clay
bank--the trenches of the enemy! Highlanders, Gurkhas, Heaven knows
what--you could see nothing--but--over there was England!
So this was what these young soldiers had come to--here was the real
thing. Drums beat, trumpets blare, the Klingelspiel jingles at the
regiment's head, and with flowers in your helmet, and your wife or
sweetheart shouldering your rifle as far as the station--and you should
see these German women marching out with their men!--you go marching out
to war. You look out of the windows of various railway trains, then
they lead you through a ditch into another ditch, and there, across a
stretch of mud which might be your own back yard, is a clay bank, which
is your enemy. And one morning at dawn you climb over your ditch and
run forward until you are cut down. And when you have, so to speak,
been thrown in the stream for the others to cross over, and the trench
is taken, and you are put out of the way under a few inches of French
earth, then, perhaps, inasmuch as experience shows that it isn't worth
while to try to keep a trench unless you have captured more than three
hundred yards of it, the battalion retires and starts all over again.
We had walked on down the trenches, turned a bend where two trees had
been blown up and flung across it, when there was a dull report near by,
followed a moment later by a tremendous explosion out toward the enemy's
trench. "Unsere Minen!" ("One of our bombs!") laughed a young soldier
beside me, and a crackle of excitement ran along the trench. These
bombs were cylinders, about the size of two baking-powder tins joined
together, filled with dynamite and exploded by a fuse. They were thrown
from a small mortar with a light charge of powder, just sufficient to
toss them over into the opposite trench. The Germans knew what was
coming, and they were laughing and watching in the direction of the
English trenches.
"Vorsicht! Vorsicht!"
There was a dull report and at the same moment something shot up from
the English trenches and, very clear against the western sky, came
flopping over and over toward us like a bottle thrown over a barn.
"Vorsicht! Vorsicht!" It sailed over our heads behind the trench, there
was an instant's silence, and then "Whong!" and a pile of dirt and black
smoke was flung in the air. Again there was a dull report, and we sent
a second back--this time behind their trench--and again--"Vorsicht!
Vorsicht!"--they sent an answer back. Four times this was repeated. A
quainter way of making war it would be hard to imagine. They might have
been boys playing "anty-over" over the old house at home.
Bombs of this sort have little penetrating power. If thrown in the open
they go off on the surface much like a gigantic firecracker. They are
easy to dodge by daylight, when you can see them coming, but thrown at
night as part of a general bombardment, including shrapnel and heavy
explosive shells, or exploding directly in the trench, they must be
decidedly unpleasant.
The bomb episode had divided us, two officers and myself waiting on one
side of the bend in the trench toward which the bombs were thrown, the
others going ahead. It was several minutes before I rejoined them, and
I did not learn until we were outside that they had been taken to
another periscope through which they saw a space covered with English
dead. There were, perhaps, two hundred men in khaki lying there, they
said, some hanging across the barbed-wire entanglements at the very foot
of the German trench, just as they had been thrown back in the attack
which had succeeded at Neuve Chapelle. Several Englishmen had got clear
into the German trench before they were killed. Here was another
example of the curious localness of this dug-in warfare, that one could
pass within a yard or two of such a battle-field and not know even that
it was there.
By another communication trench we returned to the little house. The
sun was low by this time and the line of figures walking down the-road
toward the automobiles in its full light. Perhaps the glasses of some
British lookout picked us up--at any rate the whisper of bullets became
uncomfortably frequent and near, and we had just got to the motors when
--Tssee--ee--rr... BONG! a shell crashed into the church of La Bassee,
only three hundred yards in front of us.
Before ours had started, another, flying on a lower trajectory, it
seemed, shrieked over our heads and burst beside the road so close to
the first motor that it threw mud into it. Apparently we were both
observed and sought after, and as the range of these main highways, up
and down which troops and munitions pass, is perfectly known, there was
a rather uncomfortable few minutes ere we had whirled through La Bassee,
with the women watching from their doors--no racing motors for them to
run away in!--and down the tree-arched road to ordinary life again.
No, not exactly ordinary, though we ourselves went back to a comfortable
hotel, for the big city of Lille, which had shown trolley-cars and a
certain amount of animation earlier in the day, was now, at dusk, like a
city of the dead. The chambermaid shrugged her shoulders with something
about a "punition" and, when asked why they were punished, said that
some French prisoners had been brought through Lille a week or two
before, and "naturally, the people shouted 'Vive la France!'"
So the military governor, as we observed next morning in a proclamation
posted on the blank wall across the street, informing the inhabitants
that they "apparently did not, as yet, understand the seriousness of the
situation," ordered the city to pay a 'fine of five hundred thousand
francs, and the citizens for two weeks to go within doors at sundown and
not stir abroad before seven next morning. Another poster warned people
that two English aviators had been obliged to come down within the city,
that they were still at large, and that any one who hid them or helped
them escape would be punished with death, in addition to which the
commune would be punished, too.
It was through black and silent streets, therefore, that our troop was
led from the hotel in which we were lodged to one in which we dined.
Here everything was warm and light and cheerful enough. Boyish
lieutenants, with close-clipped heads after the German fashion, were
telling each other their adventures, and here and there were older
officers, who looked as if war had worn them a bit, and they had come
here to forget for a moment over a bottle of champagne and the talk of
some old friend. The bread was black and hard, but the other food as
usual in France, with wine plenty and cheap, and even some of the
round-shelled, coppery oysters--captured somehow, in spite of blockades
and bombardments--just up from Ostend. It was bedtime when we emerged
into the black streets again, to discover, with something like surprise,
a sky full of stars and a pale new moon.
The rest of that civilian tour was very civil, indeed--a sort of
loop-the-loop of Belgium, with scarce a pause for breath. You can
imagine _that cosmopolitan menagerie trooping next morning up the stone
stairs of the castle of the Counts of Flanders in Ghent; at noon
inspecting old lace in Bruges, and people coming home from church, the
German guard changing, and the German band playing in the central
square; at two o'clock lunching in one of the Ostend summer hotels, now
full of German officers; at four pausing for a tantalizing moment in
Middelkerk, while the German guns we were not allowed to see on the edge
of the town were banging away at the British at Nieuport down the beach.
Next day Brussels--out to Waterloo, in a cloud of dust--the Congo
Museum--the King's palace at Laaken, an old servitor with a beard like
the tall King Leopold's leading these vandals through it, and looking
unutterable things--a word with the civil governor, here--a charming
lunch at a barracks, there--in short, a wild flight behind the man with
the precious "Ausweis."
We saw and sometimes met a good many German officers in a rather
familiar way. Many of the younger men reminded one of our university
men at home; several of the older men resembled their well-set-up
English cousins. This seemed particularly true of the navy, which has
acquired a type--lean, keen, firm-lipped young men, with a sense of
humor--entirely different from the German often seen in cafes, with no
back to his head, and a neck overflowing his collar. Particularly
interesting were those who, called back 'into uniform from responsible
positions in civil life, were attacking, as if building for all time,
the appallingly difficult and delicate task of improvising a government
for a complex modern state, and winning the tolerance, if not the
co-operation, of a conquered people confident that their subjection
was but for the day.
Our progress everywhere was down a continuous aisle of heel-clickings
and salutes. Sometimes, when we had to pass through three rows of
passport examiners between platform and gate, these formalities seemed
rather excessive. In the grenadier barracks in Brussels we had been
taken through sleeping-rooms, cool storerooms with their beer barrels
and loops of sausages--"all made by the regiment"--and were just
entering the kitchen when a giant of a man, seeing his superior
officers, snapped stiff as a ramrod and, as it is every German
subordinate's duty to do, bellowed out his "Meldung"--who and what the
men in his room were, and that they were going to have meat and noodle
soup for dinner.
No Frenchman, Englishman, or American could be taught, let alone achieve
of his own free will, the utter self-forgetfulness with which this vast
creature, every muscle tense, breathing like a race-horse, roared, or
rather exploded: "Herr Hauptmann! Mannschafts-Kuche-desten-Landwehr-
Regiments! Belegt-mit-einem-Unter-offizier-und-zehn-Mann! Wir essen
heute Suppe mit Nudeln und Fleisch! Zu Befehl!"
He had stepped down a century and a half from the grenadiers of the
Great Frederic, and even our hosts may have smiled. It was different
with the soldiers' salute, or the ordinary coming to attention, which we
saw repeated scores of times a day. Whatever men might be doing,
however awkward or inconvenient it might be, whether any one saw them or
not, they stopped short at the sight of these long, gray-blue coats and
stiffened, chin up, eyes on their superior, hands at their sides. If
they were talking, they became silent; if laughing, their faces smoothed
out, and into their eyes came an expression which, when you have seen it
repeated hundreds of times, you will not forget. It is a look of
seriousness, self-forgetfulness, of almost religious devotion, not to
the individual, but to the idea for which he stands. I saw a soldier
half-dressed, through a barracks window under which we passed, sending
after his officer, who did not even see him, that same look, the look of
a man who has just volunteered to charge the enemy's trench, or who sees
nothing absurd in saying the Germans fear God and nothing else in the
world!
One seemed to see the soul of Germany, at least of this "great time," in
these men's eyes. The Belgian soul we did not see much of, but there
came glimpses of it now and then.
In Antwerp we stopped in a little cafe for a cup of chocolate. It was a
raw, cheerless morning, with occasional snowflakes whipping by on the
damp north wind, the streets were all but deserted, and in the room that
used to be full of smoke and talk there were only empty tables, and you
could see your breath.
A man was scrubbing behind the bar, and a pale girl in black came out
from behind the cashier's counter to make our chocolate. It was good
chocolate, as Antwerp chocolate is likely to be, and as we were getting
ready to go out again I asked her how things were. She glanced around
the room and answered that they used to have a good business here, but
the good times were gone--"les beaux jours sont partis." Two others
drifted over and asked questions about the bombardment. She answered
politely enough, with the air of one to whom it was an old story now--
she had left on the second day, when the building across the way was
smashed, and walking, catching rides, stumbling along with the other
thousands, had got into Holland. As to why the city fell so quickly--
she pulled her shawl about her shoulders and murmured that there were
things people did not know, if they did they did not talk about them.
And the Germans--how were they? They had no complaints to make, the girl
said; the Germans were well behaved--"tres correct." Possibly, then--it
was our young Italian who put the question--the Belgians would just as
soon... I did not catch the whole sentence, but all at once something
flashed behind that non-committal cafe proprietress's mask. "Moi, je
suis fiere d'etre Belge!" said the girl, and as she spoke you could see
the color slowly burning through her pale face and neck--she was proud
to be a Belgian--they hoped, that one could keep, and there would come a
day, we could be sure of that--"un jour de revanche!"
But business is business, and people who run cafes must, as every one
knows, not long indulge in the luxury of personal feelings. The
officers turned up their fur collars, and we buttoned up our coats, and
she was sitting behind the counter, the usual little woman in black at
the cafe desk, as we filed out. Our captain paused as we passed, gave a
stiff little bow from the waist, touched his cap gallantly, and said:
"Bon jour, mademoiselle!" And the girl nodded politely, as cafe
proprietresses should, and murmured, blank as the walls in the Antwerp
streets: "Bon jour, monsieur!"
Chapter IX
The Road To Constantinople
Rumania and Bulgaria
The express left Budapest in the evening, all night and all next day
rolled eastward across the Hungarian plain, and toward dusk climbed up
through the cool Carpathian pines and over the pass into Rumania.
Vienna and the waltzes they still were playing there, Berlin and its
iron exaltation, slow-rumbling London--all the West and the war as we
had thought of it for months was, so to speak, on the other side of the
earth. We were on the edge of the East now, rolling down into the
Balkans, into that tangle of races and revenges out of which the first
spark of the war was flung.
Since coffee that morning the lonely train had offered nothing more
nourishing than the endless Hungarian wheat-fields, with their rows of
peasants, men and women, working comfortably together, and rows of
ploughs creeping with almost incredible leisure behind black
water-buffalo cattle; but as we rolled down into Predeal through the
rain, there, at last, in the dim station lamps, glittered the brass
letters and brown paint of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons
Lits--and something to eat.
The cars of this beneficent institution--survivors of a Europe that once
seemed divided between tourists and hotel-keepers--outdash the most
dashing war correspondents, insinuate themselves wherever civilians are
found at all, and once aboard you carry your oasis with you as you do in
a Pullman through our own alkali and sage-brush. The steward (his
culture is intensive, though it may not extend beyond the telegraph-
poles, and includes the words for food in every dialect between Ostend
and the Golden Horn) had just brought soup and a bottle of thin
Hungarian claret, when the other three chairs at my table were taken by
a Rumanian family returning from a holiday in Budapest--an urbane
gentleman of middle age, a shy little daughter, and a dark-eyed wife,
glittering with diamonds, who looked a little like Nazimova.
"Monsieur is a stranger?" said the Rumanian presently, speaking in
French as Rumanians are likely to do, and we began to talk war. I
asked--a question the papers had been asking for weeks--if Rumania would
be drawn into it.
"Within ten days we shall be in," he said.
"And on which side?"
"Oh!" he smiled, "against Austria, of course!"
That was in April. When I came through Rumania three months later
soldiers were training everywhere in the hot fields; Bucarest was full
of officers, the papers and cafes still buzzing with war talk. Rumania
was still going in, but since the recapture of Lemberg and the Russian
retreat the time was not so sure--not, it seemed, "until after the
harvest" at any rate.
I asked the Rumanian what he thought about Italy. "Italy began as a
coquette. She will end"--he made the gesture of counting money into his
hand--"she will end as a cocotte." He waved a forefinger in front of his
face.
"Elle n'est plus vierge!" he said.
The wife demurred. Italy was poor and little, she must needs coquette.
After all, il faut vivre--one must live.
Something was said of America and the feeling there, and the wife
announced that she would like of all things to see America, but--she did
not wish to go there with her husband. I suggested that she come with
me--an endeavor to rise to the Rumanian mood which was received with
tolerant urbanity by her husband, and by the lady who looked like
Nazimova with very cheering expressions of assent.
"When you return from Constantinople," she flashed back as they left the
table, "don't forget!"
These were the first Rumanians I had met. They were amiable, they spoke
French--it almost seemed as if they had heard the tales that are usually
told of their little capital, and were trying to play the appropriate
introduction to Bucarest.
Here it is, this little nation, only a trifle larger than the State of
Pennsylvania, a half-Latin island in an ocean of Magyars and Slavs. On
the north is Russia, on the south the grave and stubborn Bulgars (Slav
at any rate in speech), on the west Hungary, and here, between the
Carpathians and the Black Sea, this Frenchified remnant of the empire of
ancient Rome. Their speech when it is not French is full of Latin
echoes, and a Rumanian, however mixed his blood, is as fond of thinking
himself a lineal and literal descendant of the Roman colonists as a New
Englander is of ancestors in the Mayflower. At the Alhambra in Bucarest
next evening, after the cosmopolite artistes had done then-perfunctory
turns and returned to their street clothes and the audience, to begin
the more serious business of the evening, the movie man in the gallery
threw on the screen--no, not some military hero nor the beautiful Queen
whose photograph you will remember, but the head of the Roman Emperor
Trajan! And the listless crowd, drowsing cynically in its tobacco smoke,
broke into obedient applause, just as they would at home at the sight of
the flag or a picture of the President.
Bucarest, like all the capitals of Spanish America, is another "little
Paris," but the Rumanians, possibly because unhampered by sombre Spanish
tradition or perhaps any traditions at all, succeed more completely in
borrowing the vices and escaping the virtues of the great capital they
are supposed to imitate. It would be more to the point to call Bucarest
a little Buenos Aires. There is much the same showiness; a similar
curious mixture of crudeness and luxury. But Buenos Aires is one of the
world's great cities, and always just beyond the asphalt you can somehow
feel the pampa and its endless cattle and wheat. The Rumanian capital
is a town of some three hundred thousand people in a country you could
lose in the Argentine, and there is nothing, comparatively speaking, to
offset its light-mindedness, to suggest realities behind all this life
of patisserie.
You should see the Calea Vittorei on one of these warm summer evenings
between five and eight. It is a narrow strip of asphalt winding through
the centre of the town, with a tree-shaded drive at one end, and the
hotels, sidewalk cafes, and fashionable shops at the other, and up and
down this narrow street, in motors, in open victorias driven by Russian
coachmen in dark-blue velvet gowns reaching to their heels, all Bucarest
crowds to gossip, flirt, and see.
Down the centre in the open carriages flows a stream of women--and many
look like Nazimova--social distinctions so ironed out with enamel,
paint, and powder that almost all might be cafe chantant singers or
dressmakers' marionettes. Some cities have eagles on their crests, and
some volcanoes. If you were going to design a postage-stamp for
Bucarest, it struck me that the natural thing would be a woman in the
corner of an open victoria--after seeing scores of them all alike, you
feel as though you could do it in a minute: one slashing line for the
hat, two coal-black holes, and a dash of carmine in a patch of marble
white, and a pair of silk-covered ankles crossed and pointed in a way
that seems Parisian enough after one has become used to the curious
boxes in which women enclose their feet in Berlin. Coming up from
Bulgaria, which is not unlike coming from Idaho or Montana; or from
Turkey, where women as something to be seen of men in public do not
exist; or even across from the simple plains of Hungary, these enamelled
orchids flowing forever down the asphalt seem at the moment to sum up
the place--they are Bucarest.
Officers in light blue, in mauve and maroon--mincing butterflies, who
look as if an hour's march in the sun would send them to the hospital,
ogle them from the sidewalk. Along with them are many young bloods out
of uniform, barbered and powdered like chorus men made up for their
work. You will see few young men in Europe with whom the notion of
general conscription and the horrors of war can be associated with less
regret.