Behind the Scenes in Warring Germany

table, as if their training in the array had consisted of passing platters of food, the s

hidden by the smart jackets and shaven heads of the Prussian officers, sitting opposite; then I saw a soldier open

d the Iron Cross. "The Marquis, you know, has one of the best collections in France. He has several Rubens, I believe, but I have never seen them,

nd at Commander von Arnim, the rather frail, reserved, iron-grayed aristocrat who leads the Fourth Army Corps. Finding no trace of emotion there, you scanned the line of his staff, whose faces, thoughtful, mature, or as young and dapper as musical comedy ever staged

he restaurants closed at one o'clock? Just then I saw that Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann, who had been talking with Commander von Arnim, wanted to speak

" said Ober-Lieu

lle?" I ask

ond Bavarian Corps Staff for dinner. Meanwhi

rs, but that it was simply the home of one of these young men who had invited all his brother officers from a nearby garrison to a luncheon; and that now we were leaving to catch a train. But as the motor lurched soggily from the soaked driveway I took a last glance at the chateau; a wisp of blackish smoke beaten low by the rain, was creeping along the brick chimney, and an old servant was sweeping away the mud that our boots had left o

o see an increasing number of mounds, some four, some thirty feet long, incongruously protruding from the flat ground. And I began to see little wooden crosses, turned the deeper yellow that new wood turns in the rain, a

the long, sinister mounds behind, and I began to think: What an awful thing it is not to be able to go a hundred yards without seeing a grave. I noticed that Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann no longer sat hunched with the blue collar of his cape turn

ty thousand men were engaged." He paused. "There were six thousand dead. Every

enue of wooden crosses and then, still in the open country, the car stopped. I saw tha

because the French had a position there. Then they took up positions in the cemetery," and, with a wave of his hand, the Captain indicated an ancient brick wall that had seemed

such sacrifice, and then to find that point abandoned. For the moment you seem to think of it as being typically futile of war; and then its place in the vast strategical contemplation of a battle line three hundred miles long emerges from your temporarily befogged vision.

that must have burst in that rain-filled crater by the iron-railed shaft; as I saw a clutter of rifle butts, smashed off against a tombstone, perhaps, so that the metal parts could be taken back to an ordnance factory to be molded again, I was thinking of the men who had fought here, and whether the

turn to headquarters with us for tea?" he was saying, and

asants in wooden shoes flattening themselves against the walls to escape the muddy spray from our tires, and we stopped in what seemed to be the village center. Down the street I could see the last hooped

proclamation-Avis!-pasted to the wall of a church. Worded by the Germans and signed by the French

"goose steps," to the proud clapping of their boots on the cobbled court, while others marched by briskly in twos, saluting. It was the barest rudimentary training that they were being put through-but it was stiffening them for the firing line-and as they drilled these raw troops, I could hear in the distance the drumming of the guns. It seemed to electrify these stocky little fellows in the new uniforms, for their feet stamped the louder, and their saluting hands snapped up like automatons; and I wondered if it were hard to content yourself with harmless drilling in a manure-strewn yard, with the music of war playing for you to march; or if behind any of those stupid, utterly peas

w laboring class of Saxony is notoriously poor and short-lived, their years taken by work in the mines. N

s if to make up to those rain-soaked men who crouched in the trenches but six kilometers away, streamed down, as in a glory before its setting, a

rt filled with dr

rmann, detailed by

Fox along the

aven men who lay there as men dead, although, at the sound of our approach, their eyes turned in a disinterested stare. I observed

s fever?" I ask

er. He is swea

the rounds with him, for, with true German consideration and thoroughness

towards the door, "we had two hundred wounded in

o be transported from here before the

at stuck from my pocket. Two weeks before I would have done so, but as you come to see the wounded in this war, you feel-rightly or wrongly; I do not know-that it is the grossest banalism to d

non more plainly, a steady crashing seeming ever to grow in violence as though one new battery after another was being unlimbered to make work for the surgeons in little school houses the countryside round. In great indignation, the surgeon drew a fragment of metal from his pocket and explained that two days ago an English aviator had dropped th

ches with Captain Kliewer's party (another group of correspondents had come to Lille). We will all meet in Commines for luncheon and in the afternoon you may see a field batte

d suppose his patent umbrella did not work. In three motors, one for Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann and I, and the others for Captain Kliewer's party, we raced through Lille long before dawn, to get into the trenches before daylight would reveal our approach to the Fren

, I rode away from Commines, Hauptmann Kliewer following with an officer in another car. Poole was telling us that the Major who sat beside him at luncheon said that last night the English had dropped four shells into Commines, evidently taking a long chance on hitting headquarters; and Reed came back with another officer's story of how the enemy's observers had seen a motor leaving Commines and had put three grenaten in the field beside the road not forty yards away. And as the gray-green army auto car soughed down the heavy roads and you saw the puddled fields beginning to mirror a suddenly sunlit sky, you wondered if the enemy's observers could see your car too, and you caught yourself, every now and the

on of beautiful riding that should have been done in a park. We turned out, our wheels spinning in mud up to the hubs, to let one of the big gray motor ambulances painted with huge red crosses, rumble by, with its red load for the field

from the German batteries had been flying overhead, but the muffler cut-out had drowned their wicked whine. We were in Houthem, and across the muddy fields there was that row of trenches where the German line seems to come to a point, and where there was a colonel of whom we

d enter the house, I concluded they were arranging for our visit to the battery, and climbed out with the others to look around. We stood at the intersection of one narrow, muddy road with another that seemed to lead off at right angles towards the trenches. I looked up the village street, at the end of which a red brick church laid its high whi

f them came over. "I'm a German-American," he said, introducing himself.

"There's no such thing. You're a German. Th

"What do Americans think now? Are they more friendly than when I left

n, apparently greatly relieved, he told me so

a shell hit it when the officers were out-Gott sei Dank!-so they moved next door. A shell bursting on the street here"-and he indicated where the road wa

have evidently been hung there by orders, there where all the soldiers, back from the trenches on their relief, might see. For I noticed that there were pictures of captured Russian guns, of General Hindenburg, of the victorious German troops entering Lódz

aben wagons that bring gifts from home to the soldiers free of charge. Presently, his back bending under the weight of a bulky white bag, I saw one of the soldiers come away from the wagon and slowly shuffle down the street. You guessed he had been the one chosen to get the gifts sent to the men of his company, and as he plodded on past the shelled houses, I heard him whistling. There came, a few minutes late

and military necessity, and I walked among the soldiers. They were recruits receiving a last drill in the use of arms, stiffening them before they went down into the trenches. You told yourself that you were glad all the benches had been torn from this church so that these men might be drilled here without being exposed to the shelling that their detected massed presence

es, and the brown tatters of hanging plaster as wounded flesh, for you came to think of this place as being a stricken personality, call it a stricken religion, if you like. But was it

e sky, framed in the hole of a shell; but it was not the shrine that held me; it was the soldiers before it. They were down on one knee, and I wondered if they were Catholics worshiping there while the others drilled. "Feuer!" And each

pen fire." But arguing with yourself that the French had evidently tried to hit the steeple before but had only succeeded in putting a few shell holes in the church roof, you became convinced of the comparative safety of it, and began to climb the spiral stairs. The higher you got, the more rotten the boards became, and I was wondering if there wasn't more danger from my two hundred odd pounds being brought down

e; beyond the flat red-roofed houses I saw a dark green fringe of trees, and then above that a tiny puff of white smoke appeared, then

iewer was saying. "Our trenches

owing towards us, and we heard the shrapnel's peculiar whistling burst and then the heavy shaking roar of grenaten and over to the right, just at

tmann Kliewer, "and the French must know it, for they'

in a soft billow of clouds, and lower, where grenaten struck th

ower since morning," laughed the Hauptmann

I saw a battalion of artillerymen drawn up before the little yellow headquarters, receiving their instructions. I caught one admonition not to be careless with ammunition, and then we were told that we were going to a battery. Down a road, wh

ors any further. Knowing we were officers, the F

ench observe

ptmann

hey probably would have thrown some shells at our automobiles. But here we haven't even that chance. We walk to the

oaching a high-banked railroad track, the road disappearing under a trestle. I suppose the field must have been strewn with the objects of war. I did not see them. I was staring straight ahead at the sky, looking for shells, and getting ready to throw myself

mber saying. "T

rying to destroy the

fficer calmly walking on, where every stride was bringing us nearer the track, I tried to say unconcernedly: "That's wonderful marksmanship. Two in the same place," thinking, "suppose

that ran under the tracks not thirty feet from the bursting shells. Yet I found myself walking on, although my blood had long ago turned cold; and I wonder now if that is the way some men go into act

not of bursting shells; but the firing of our own battery hidden behind the tracks! Sheepishly, we trudged under the tres

ty feet from the water, I saw a hole shaped like a door, and as I looked, an officer darted forth and, scrambling up over the slippery clay, disappeared in a scraggle of bu

, we waited. The boyish-looking artillerymen, rigid gray-green figures, so statuesque that something in the mud mus

in vierta

, the soldiers at the sights began tugging madly on something I could not see; and I knew that the range receiving telephones must be in that cave in the bank, for it dawned upon me now what that shouting meant: "Left

e, the waterproof cover fell in the mud, but instantly the soldier who had just lain the brown shell basket upon a pile of empties, picked up the cover and, neatly folding it, saved that too. And I saw a pile of discharged shell cases; copper was too valuable these days to leave in

my ear drums trembling as though they would break-the long red flash, the roar, the frightened recoil of the barrel, the dark puff of quick dispelling smoke, the air

cator which travels with the projectile through the air. And as I waited, marveling at the detailed accuracy for shooting at an enemy who must be nearly two miles away, the other gun in the battery went off with a roar, and, while my ears throbbed madly, I watched the village hidden among the dense trees about a quarter of a mile away, for an enemy's shrapnel was spreadin

ough the hole of a door into darkness. The first thing I saw by flashing on an electric lamp was a dirt wall, a little artificial Christmas tree that stood

else faded away into shadowy silhouetting darkness. I saw him begin to race his pencil across a little pad and calling the orderly who, standing back in the darkness, I had not seen, he sent him scurrying away. The telephone buzzed. He called into it, lighting as he did a cigarette; from the blackened stubs strewn on the table, it was evident that he smoked constantly. He began scribbling a

was an artillery captain. "The French have opened the village wi

so excited about?" I asked

honed that the French and the

ery was "strategically silenced." I saw the under officers scampering down into the bombproof and their guns transformed into big gray leafless bushes, the boyish soldiers ran into hiding beh

saw a patch of black

n Captain, who had been in

he ruined house, the artillerym

!" one of t

ant j