Behind the Scenes in Warring Germany

history of the world, the black fishhook line stopped moving across northern France and fastening its barb in Belgium, it ceased to move. Day after day, as we read the newspapers we saw that the

at line of ink is

ditch that has been dug across Europe from the English Channel to Mulhausen. You can walk about three hundred miles under ground, eat three meals a day, and sleep on officers' cots without once having to expose yourself in the open. You will realize as you see second, third, and f

was fed by a segment of the front about two miles long. When you recall the terrific fighting near the Channel ports, this average is not high for the whole line. So when you glance at the little map in your newspaper think of it as meaning three thousand wounded men a day, ninety thousand a month, and

muddy brown water, and three quarters of a million more, too, whom they have just relieved, lying on beds of straw, too exhausted to remove their uniforms until

with themselves during the day? It was at Lille, the fifth night after I had left Berlin, that I met five other American correspondents, a Hollander and a Norwegian, who were in Hauptmann Kliewer's party. After dinner in the Hotel de Europe, Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann, who had gone with Haupt

tically explaining as being a cousin of his, rode in the first car. This officer, who had never traveled the road to Arras before, was acting as our guide; soon we understood Dunn's apologetic way, for after one challenge upon an

rows of gaping shell torn houses, while one by one the stars turned to tiny icicle tips, and day slowly came on. I think after crossing the Ypres Canal at Douai, that we followed every blind a

n. How close were we now? Probably six kilometers. Two miles riding up the road to Arras with the battlefield of October 1st, the muddy, desolated fields on either side. It was up this road that the French artillery made its retreat, across those fields that their infantry poured with the Duke of Altenburg's Saxonians in hot pursuit. Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann h

e discerned by the French artillery observers. Evidently having been telephoned that we were coming, two gray cloaked officers were waiting for us outside a little brown shack that I guessed was re

ng by an abrupt runaway into a trench that dug in a plowed field, led away at right angles from the road. More than a thousand meters from the French trench, and with rifle fire yet to begin, and shielded by the very fact that you walked in a narrow pit seven feet under ground, comparatively less in danger than you had been in the motor from Mouchy le Preux on, you nevertheless tingled with a strange exhilaration. Keeping one eye on the top of the trench, prepared to duck, lest it suddenly became uniform in height and expose your head to the open field, gazing the rest of the time at the bottom of the pit, lest you sli

hat other point on the line where I had been two days before, where the French cannonade before and after luncheon, always beginning at the same time. And then directly above me I heard the disconcerting burst of shrapnel and I saw the pretty billowing whi

lush against the track, with their side walls torn off so that the trains might pass without smashing into them; and I had seen everything in the disordered rooms of those houses. Here it was the same, only this time war had invaded homes with a trench instead of a train. First one, then through a doorway into a second room in utter disorder. I saw concentric holes that marked the entrance and exit of a shell and the confusion of turmoil and pillage. A bureau with the drawers emptied out, clothing strewn on the floor, a baby's high chair overturned, a crucifix lyin

a little. Come," and turning into the pit, he led the way towards the highway. We were walking parallel to the French, and they were only two hundred meters away. And I th

apnel and the spatter of the balls on the soaked field, you were uneasy; but now as you gazed up and down the trench, which you have thought of not in so commonplace a way as to call it "tr

afety of their existence is torturing them to death? But that was before I went into the a

e work on it. Made bombproofs out of some of their old rifle pits and dug new ones along what was the

soldiers sitting inside playing cards by candlelight or smoking and talking, and all looking so comfortably bored; just as you would imagine them sitting in a Friedrichstrasse

nitches had been dug, three in a line and the other below. And in the upper nitches, tiled in various attitudes suggestive of destruction, were three toy battleships, flying tiny

t reenforced with bags of sand, and watched. His manner, the stiffened pose of the gray-green shoulders, the boot braced in the ground, set him off in increasing alertness and vigilance. In one of the dugouts I heard the whine of a ha

of sandbags six feet high; and thrust through this gray wall, I saw a machine gun, with a soldier dabbing it with oil, while a

after he had introduced us, "is in c

the Germans were watching theirs, and in an empty field, a quarter of a mile away, grenaten were bursting with terrific din. Yet perversely you half doubted that the French were there at all. Subconsciously the thing didn't seem possible, a lin

s apparently no firing. With absurd stealth-I imagine they must have both grinned-I stuck my head up over the top of the trenches. I saw about a quarter of a mile away a fringe of trees with white and yellow houses showing through, and further forward, just off the macadam road, a house of grayish stone. The sky was

e gun across the knee, speaking English now for the first time, "that you kept your head

ed in the Bronx-which those who are not New Yorkers may or may not know-and that he was a joiner in a piano factory. Every Sunday afternoon he played baseball in Claremont Park; his team had won a Church League championship. Bullets

bits of wood in a factory. Not a day passed, probably, but that he got his little thrill, and when the war was over he could go back to the Bronx-if he lived-and be a hero among his friends for the rest of his days. And as I wished him good luck and turned to overtake the oth

ttoes lettered by the soldiers on their writing paper-Gott mit uns. You could not pass a rifle pit-and they are about ten yards apart-without seeing those words of the Emperor that have become the slogan of the German army; and you thought as you saw them, not printed under s

owned in his home town. I saw another with three inches of stove pipe protruding from the roof that billed itself as the Schmaltz Kuchen B?ckerie, under which was modestly written in pencil "Here is the best kitchen in the world."

l and a soldier was straining his eyes in the candlelight, reading the tiny Bible which is part of the equipment of every German private. Perhaps I do the man an injustice but I imagined he was reading because he was bored; and that by the time this war is over, more Germans will know their Bible fr

pped and I saw that here were no soldiers on watch a

er we have gone out awhile, we dig sideways in both directions, parallel to this trench. Soon the different little trenc

meter, is moving France, creeping this time, not running wild over the country side, as during those wild August days, but gaining slowly here, losing slowly there, instead of being driven back across their own frontier, as the English newspapers promised they would be long

in which you dared not stand erect for even your chest would be exposed above the bags of sand that lined the top. Crouched beside a soldier I peered through an opening between the bags. I felt that the gray stone house that I had seen before, was approaching nearer. Where were the French? I stared across the plowed

d in the middle of the wall where the garret must be, a circular open window looked almost as if it had been made as a shell. I became conscious that there was somebody in that room and the next moment I saw a figure slowly approach the

ned away. On the battleline, less-here in the outermost ditch-than two hundred meters from the French, they draw pictures and trace hearts, these sentimental people; and yet they have been accused of wantonly burning houses, these Germans, to whom the home is the biggest thing

f his ten by ten room in the ground were covered with genuine Afghanistan rugs. The carved desk, strewn with personal belongings, also had the chateau look, although the rickety washstand seemed to have come from a farmhouse. There was even a tiny window looking out away from the French, a mirror, a hatrack and a stone, and when upon coming out I saw that the door to this

in Germany and that I actually could carry on a conversation from the firing line with somebody in the Hotel Adlon at Berlin-well, you come to expect anything possible of achievement by these

merican that our party had gone ahead-discovered that the water in the pits was rising above our knees. The only thing then that occurred to us when the trench ran close to a road was to climb up out of it. Du

ehind me. The gray stone house! "Do you know," I said f

road, eating our bread and cheese with the French to look at our backs if they cared to, a quarter of a mile away. There was no danger; the

he is valuable to the State, which is not a cynicism, for feeling the tremendous national spirit of Germany, you come to think that there is only one thing worth while in these years, and that is the State; and you feel that such a thing as national pride is more worth while than dollar pride; which is something which would come shamefacedly to most Americans were they to walk through the Ge

on the men and he told me: "The moral influence of shells in breaking courage is terrific. That's why a heavy cannonading always precedes the storming of a trench. Especially is this so at night when you have to keep sending up rockets that light the ground between the trenches so the enemy cannot creep up. You see, during the day, th

many. I would go so far as to say that everything depends upon that three hundred mile ditch in the West. If the Germans hold it, it means this: the war is going to end with Germany in possession of Belgium and a big section of industrial F

A tedious, slipping walk through half a mile of muddy, unro

ad heard no plop of fragments burying themselves into the mud above, I began to be able to look about me. By turning my indispensable electric torch this way and that, I could see in the rear wall of the trench a series of caves dug in t

much. It'll get hotter then and you'll want to remai

ng thus, peering to right and left into the life of the catacombs of mud, that a stentorian cry behind us seemed to spin the Lieutenant round on his heels and I followed him thumping heavily back dow

flying over the trench for an hour now and nothing had happened; and their shriek and heavy boom no longer seemed so terrifying. But then the Lieutenant had strongly hinted about my being in the way. He had told me to get into that dugout and remain there. Was I not really under his orders? Strange things to be reasoning out with you

who were pouring up over the trenches across that muddy field and storming towards you; you never thought of nationality, that was a creation of man's. You thought of nothing; you only felt things. You felt something chaotic going on, an incho

f cartridges slung over his shoulder. Then another darted up from another pit and you knew they were bringing ammunition for the gun. In an ecstasy you followed them. At the second little passageway they turned and you turned too and

slapping impact of fragments of grenaten in the mud. Then a swift rush of air, as of a mighty exhalation, and rockets from our trenches began to swish, one after the other, in short flaming arcs that terminated in a burst of greenish light, turning the night into a mad radiance so that we might

eir gun barrels and see the patch of the open field that their loop hole framed. I saw a confusion of color-the green, unearthly haze of the rockets; a wavering red hue of fire that had a way of rushing at you, vanishing and then appearing further back, rushing at you agai

into segments, that it was no longer a steady oncoming line, rather a slowly squirming thing like the curling parts of some monstrous fiery worm that had been chopped to bits and was squirming its life away out there on the mud. And it dawned upon you in horror that the fiery red lines had been lines of men, shooting as they had come; and that, when one li

ttack had failed and now they were sweeping the field with machine gun fire so that the Germans could not form and storm in turn. Their shells, too, no longer exploded behind our trenches, but in front, and you knew that

till swished upward, making their parabola of sparks and keeping the night hideous with their bursting green. The Lieutenant was running d

nutes." From out of the pits, as we passed, I heard a groan. Thinking the man might be alone, I paused and turned on my lamp. Its white light found a circle of brown mud and then mo

the Lieutenant, as he looked

commonplace to the soldier as it does to the surgeon; otherwise he should go mad. There was a business-like air about the Lieutenant now, rather different, you thought, from that ru

Lieutenant into

ess a shell should strike the roof. But I think t

stand without bumping your head against the logged roof, and while he picked up the field telephone, whose slender tendrils crept up through the roof like a vine, I glanced around me. Over there in the corner one saw a red rubber wash basin, evidently folding, for it was creased in many places; it rested upon an empty ammu

hall leave blanks for the number of our killed and wounded and telephone it to

a look around while he was writing his r

ere by now most of the rifles were silent, one man in each pit watching through the oblong hole between the sand bags, lest the enemy creep up, for their cannonading had ceased and shells no longer fe

ou heard muffled uproars as though what had begun and ended here was happening there now. It was quiet out there, too quiet, not even the wounded groaned; there were no wounded; the artillery had turned them into dead. In the feeble starlight nothing was vi

e innumerable graves, but which you knew to be the bodies of men, fallen as they had come at the charge; in twos-threes-I counted ten in a perfect row; and behind them were more of these lumps which seemed to be of the earth, for they were the color of that blackish field; and there the mounds seemed h

ieutenant in

nd he reached down under the empty cartridge box. "Cognac,"

ose," I

red out the liquid. "There's only one

the amber color when footfalls came from without. The under-officer saluted and handed him a bit of paper. Putting down the cognac and returning the salute, the Lieutenant picked up the telephone. I heard

y stone factory. Through the paling of a picket fence I saw soldiers moving about in the yard, and going in we walked along a narrow cobbled driveway between dingy workshops until the officer opened a door, and we went into what had been a storeroom. I saw rows of pens, each as wide as a cot and filled with straw, and in the straw lay men. You thought of them as being too exhau

es buried in the straw; and they were wild, unshaven faces, yellowish with mud, and bleary with sleepless eyes that somehow could not sleep now

an, aren't you?"

tton on his cap that he belonged

joined my regiment. I was the cashier of a bank in Juarez, and I lived a

and obligingly answering certain questi

the trenches forty-eight hours and then out for twenty-four hou

n did during the last t

afraid some of the boys will be laid up this time with the typhoid vaccine. We're fresh troops, you know, and

ould be planted during the fall had been sown by German soldiers, and that when the crops were ready

with their supplies; the officer told me a thousand soldiers rested, bathed and were fed every day in the factory. We saw the room where they bathed, one tub running the entire length of the machine room-overhead the motionles

Infantry who have the room for this hour. The

he street, waiting for our car, three of them passed with shiny shaven faces and puffi

day, these trenches; they have the same bored men lounging in the dugouts, waiting for an attack; the same tensely watchful men in the rifle pits, scanning the enemy's line. I heard a harmonica. The dead still lay where they fell, the wounded were getting first aid, and you could hear th

of heavy guns, blotched with the red of splitting shells, quivering insanely to a machine gun's steady beat; night of death, with the wounded turning white, waiting for the hours just bef

he foothills of the Vosges-it is the same night and day; and bullets are wh