Paths of Glory: Impressions of War Written at and Near the Front Part 13

"Only the other day--at La Fere I think it was--two of our cooks at daybreak went so far forward with their wagon that they were almost inside the enemy's lines. Sixteen bewildered Frenchmen who had got separated from their company came straggling through a little forest and walked right into them. The Frenchmen thought the cook wagon with its short smoke funnel and its steel fire box was a new kind of machine gun, and they threw down their guns and surrendered. The two cooks brought their sixteen prisoners back to our lines too, but first one of them stood guard over the Frenchmen while the other carried the breakfast coffee to the men who had been all night in the trenches. They are good men, those cooks!"

So at last I found out at second hand what one German soldier had done to merit the bestowal of the Iron Cross. But as we came away, I was in doubt on a certain point and, for that matter, am still in doubt on it: I am in doubt as to which of two men most fitly typified the spirit of the German Army in this war--the general feeding his men by thousands into the maw of destruction because it was an order, or the pot-wrestling private soldier, the camp cook, going to death with a coffee boiler in his hands--because it was an order.

Chapter 9

Viewing A Battle from a Balloon

She was anch.o.r.ed to earth in a good-sized field. Woods horizoned the field on three of its edges and a sunken road bounded it on the fourth.

She measured, I should say at an offhand guess, seventy-five feet from tip to tip lengthwise, and she was perhaps twenty feet in diameter through her middle. She was a bright yellow in color--a varnished, oily-looking yellow--and in shape suggestive of a frankfurter.

At the end of her near the ground and on the side that was underneath --for she swung, you understand, at an angle--a swollen protuberance showed, as though an air bubble had got under the skin of the sausage during the packing and made a big blister. She drooped weakly amids.h.i.+ps, bending and swaying this way and that; and, as we came under her and looked up, we saw that the skin of the belly kept shrinking in and wrinkling up, in the unmistakable pangs of acute cramp colic.

She had a sickly, depleted aspect elsewhere, and altogether was most flabby and unreliable looking; yet this, as I learned subsequently, was her normal appearance. Being in the business of spying she practiced deceit, with the deliberate intent of seeming to be what, emphatically, she was not. She counterfeited chronic invalidism and she performed competently.

She was an observation balloon of the pattern privily chosen by the German General Staff, before the beginning of the war, for the use of the German Signal Corps. On this particular date and occasion she operated at a point of the highest strategic importance, that point being the center of the German battle lines along the River Aisne.

She had been stationed here now for more than a week--that is to say, ever since her predecessor was destroyed in a ball of flaming fumes as a result of having a bomb flung through the flimsy cloth envelope by a coursing and accurate aviator of the enemy. No doubt she would continue to be stationed here until some such mischance befell her too.

On observation balloons, in time of war, no casualty insurance is available at any rate of premium. I believe those who ride in them are also regarded as unsuitable risks. This was highly interesting to hear and, for our journalistic purposes, very valuable to know; but, speaking personally, I may say that the thing which most nearly concerned me for the moment was this: I had just been invited to take a trip aloft in this wabbly great wienerwurst, with its painted silk cuticle and its gaseous vitals--and had, on impulse, accepted.

I was informed at the time, and have since been reinformed more than once, that I am probably the only civilian spectator who has enjoyed such a privilege during the present European war. a.s.suredly, to date and to the best of my knowledge and belief, I am the only civilian who has been so favored by the Germans. Well, I trust I am not hoggish.

Possessing, as it does, this air of uniqueness, the distinction is worth much to me personally. I would not take anything for the experience; but I do not think I shall take it again, even if the chance should come my way, which very probably it will not.

It was mid-afternoon; and all day, since early breakfast, we had been working our way in automobiles toward this destination. Already my brain chambered more impressions, all jumbled together in a ma.s.s, than I could possibly hope to get sorted out and graded up and cla.s.sified in a month of trying. Yet, in a way, the day had been disappointing; for, as I may have set forth before, the nearer we came to the actual fighting, the closer in touch we got with the battle itself, the less we seemed to see of it.

I take it this is true of nearly all battles fought under modern military principles. Ten miles in the rear, or even twenty miles, is really a better place to be if you are seeking to fix in your mind a reasonably full picture of the scope and effect and consequences of the hideous thing called war. Back there you see the new troops going in, girding themselves for the grapple as they go; you see the re-enforcements coming up; you see the supplies hurrying forward, and the spare guns and the extra equipment, and all the rest of it; you see, and can, after a dim fas.h.i.+on, grasp mentally, the thrusting, onward movement of this highly scientific and most unromantic industry which half the world began practicing in the fall of 1914.

Finally, you see the finished fabrics of the trade coming back; and by that I mean the dribbling streams of the wounded and, in the fields and woods through which you pa.s.s, the dead, lying in windrows where they fell. At the front you see only, for the main part, men engaged in the most tedious, the most exacting, and seemingly the most futile form of day labor--toiling in filth and foulness and a desperate driven haste, on a job that many of them will never live to see finished--if it is ever finished; working under taskmasters who spare them not--neither do they spare themselves; putting through a dreary contract, whereof the chief reward is weariness and the common coinage of payment is death outright or death lingering. That is a battle in these days; that is war.

So twistiwise was our route, and so rapidly did we pursue it after we left the place where we took lunch, that I confess I lost all sense of direction. It seemed to me our general course was eastward; I discovered afterward it was southwesterly. At any rate we eventually found ourselves in a road that wound between high gra.s.sy banks along a great natural terrace just below the level of the plateau in front of Laon. We saw a few farmhouses, all desolated by sh.e.l.lfire and all deserted, and a succession of empty fields and patches of woodland.

None of the natives were in sight. Through fear of prying hostile eyes, the Germans had seen fit to clear them out of this immediate vicinity.

Anyhow, a majority of them doubtlessly ran away when fighting first started here, three weeks earlier; the Germans had got rid of those who remained. Likewise of troops there were very few to be seen. We did meet one squad of Red Cross men, marching afoot through the dust. They were all fully armed, as is the way with the German field-hospital helpers; and, for all I know to the contrary, that may be the way with the field-hospital helpers of the Allies too.

Though I have often seen it, the Cross on the sleeve-band of a man who bears a revolver in his belt, or a rifle on his arm, has always struck me as a most incongruous thing. The noncommissioned officer in charge of the squad--chief orderly I suppose you might call him--held by leashes four Red Cross dogs.

In Belgium, back in August, I had seen so-called dog batteries. Going into Louvain on the day the Belgian Army, or what was left of it, fell back into Brussels, I pa.s.sed a valley where many dogs were hitched to small machine guns; and I could not help wondering what would happen to the artillery formation, and what to the discipline of the pack, if a rabbit should choose that moment for darting across the battle front.

These, however, were the first dogs I had found engaged in hospital- corps employment. They were big, wolfish-looking hounds, s.h.a.ggy and sharp-nosed; and each of the four wore a collar of bells on his neck, and a cloth harness on his shoulders, with the red Maltese cross displayed on its top and sides. Their business was to go to the place where fighting had taken place and search out the fallen.

At this business they were reputed to be highly efficient. The Germans had found them especially useful; for the German field uniform, which has the merit of merging into the natural background at a short distance, becomes, through that very protective coloration, a disadvantage when its wearer drops wounded and unconscious on the open field. In a poor light the litter bearers might search within a few rods of him and never see him; but where the faulty eyesight fails the nose of the dog sniffs the human taint in the air, and the dog makes the work of rescue thorough and complete. At least we were told so.

Presently our automobile rounded a bend in the road, and the observation balloon, which until that moment we had been unable to glimpse, by reason of an intervening formation of ridges, revealed itself before us.

The suddenness of its appearance was startling. We did not see it until we were within a hundred yards of it. At once we realized how perfect an abiding place this was for a thing which offered so fine and looming a target.

Moreover, the balloon was most effectively guarded against attack at close range. We became aware of that fact when we dismounted from the automobile and were clambering up the steep bank alongside. Soldiers materialized from everywhere, like dusty specters, but fell back, saluting, when they saw that officers accompanied us. On advice we had already thrown away our lighted cigars; but two noncommissioned officers felt it to be their bounden duty to warn us against striking matches in that neighborhood. You dare not take chances with a woven bag that is packed with many hundred cubic feet of gas.

At the moment of our arrival the balloon was drawn down so near the earth that its distorted bottommost extremity dipped and twisted slackly within fifty or sixty feet of the gra.s.s.

The upper end, reaching much farther into the air, underwent convulsive writhings and contortions as an intermittent breeze came over the sheltering treetops and buffeted it in puffs. Almost beneath the balloon six big draft horses stood, hitched in pairs to a stout wagon frame on which a huge wooden drum was mounted.

Round this drum a wire cable was coiled, and a length of the cable stretched like a snake across the field to where it ended in a swivel, made fast to the bottom of the riding car. It was not, strictly speaking, a riding car. It was a straight-up-and-down basket of tough, light wicker, no larger and very little deeper than an ordinarily fair- sized hamper for soiled linen. Indeed, that was what it reminded one of--a clothesbasket.

Grouped about the team and the wagon were soldiers to the number of perhaps a third of a company. Half a dozen of them stood about the basket holding it steady--or trying to. Heavy sandbags hung pendent- wise about the upper rim of the basket, looking very much like so many canvased hams; but, even with these drags on it and in spite of the grips of the men on the guy ropes of its rigging, it b.u.mped and bounded uneasily to the continual rocking of the gas bag above it. Every moment or two it would lift itself a foot or so and tilt and jerk, and then come back again with a thump that made it s.h.i.+ver.

Of furnis.h.i.+ngs the interior of the car contained nothing except a telephone, fixed against one side of it; a pair of field gla.s.ses, swung in a sort of harness; and a strip of tough canvas, looped across halfway down in it. The operator, when wearied by standing, might sit astride this canvas saddle, with his legs cramped under him, while he spied out the land with his eyes, which would then be just above the top of his wicker nest, and while he spoke over the telephone.

The wires of the telephone escaped through a hole under his feet and ran to a concealed station at the far side of the field which in turn communicated with the main exchange at headquarters three miles away; which in its turn radiated other wires to all quarters of the battle front. Now the wires were neatly coiled on the ground beside the basket. A sergeant stood over them to prevent any careless foot from stepping on the precious strands. He guarded them as jealously as a hen guards her brood.

The magazine containing retorts of specially prepared gas, for recharging the envelope when evaporation and leakage had reduced the volume below the lifting and floating point, was nowhere in sight. It must have been somewhere near by, but we saw no signs of it. Nor did our guides for the day offer to show us its whereabouts. However, knowing what I do of the German system of doing things, I will venture the a.s.sertion that it was snugly hidden and stoutly protected.

These details I had time to take in, when there came across the field to join us a tall young officer with a three weeks' growth of stubby black beard on his face. A genial and captivating gentleman was Lieutenant Brinkner und Meiningen, and I enjoyed my meeting with him; and often since that day in my thoughts I have wished him well. However, I doubt whether he will be living by the time these lines see publication.

It is an exciting life a balloon operator in the German Army lives, but it is not, as a rule, a long one. Lieutenant Meiningen was successor to a man who was burned to death in mid-air a week before; and on the day before a French airman had dropped a bomb from the clouds that missed this same balloon by a margin of less than a hundred yards--close marksmans.h.i.+p, considering that the airman in question was seven or eight thousand feet aloft, and moving at the rate of a mile or so a minute when he made his cast.

It was the Lieutenant who said he had authority to take one of our number up with him, and it was I who chanced to be nearest to the balloon when he extended the invitation. Some one--a friend--removed from between my teeth the unlighted cigar I held there, for fear I might forget and try to light it; and somebody else--a stranger to me-- suggested that perhaps I was too heavy for a pa.s.senger.

By that time, however, a kindly corporal had boosted me up over the rim of the basket and helped me to squeeze through the thick netting of guy lines; and there I was, standing inside that overgrown clotheshamper, which came up breast high on me--and Brinkner und Meiningen was swinging himself nimbly in beside me. That basket was meant to hold but one man.

It made a wondrously snug fit for two; the both of us being full-sized adults at that. We stood back to back; and to address the other each must needs speak over his shoulder. The canvas saddle was between us, dangling against the calves of our legs; and the telephone was in front of the lieutenant, where he could reach the transmitter with his lips by stooping a little.

The soldiers began unhooking the sandbags; the sergeant who guarded the telephone wire took up a strand of it and held it loosely in his hands, ready to pay it out. Under me I felt the basket heave gently. Looking up I saw that the balloon was no longer a crooked sausage. She had become a big, soft, yellow summer squash, with an attenuated neck. The flaccid abdomen flinched in and puffed out, and the snout wabbled to and fro.

The lieutenant began telling me things in badly broken but painstaking English--such things, for example, as that the baglike protuberance just above our heads, at the bottom end of the envelope, contained air, which, being heavier than gas, served as a balance to hold her head up in the wind and keep her from folding in on herself; also, that it was his duty to remain aloft, at the end of his tether, as long as he could, meantime studying the effect of the German sh.e.l.l-fire on the enemy's position and telephoning down instructions for the better aiming of the guns--a job wherein the aeroplane scouts ably reenforced him, since they could range at will, whereas his position was comparatively fixed and stationary.

Also I remember his saying, with a tinge of polite regret in his tone, that he was sorry I had not put on a uniform overcoat with shoulder straps on it, before boarding the car; because, as he took pains to explain, in the event of our cable parting and of our drifting over the Allies' lines and then descending, he might possibly escape, but I should most likely be shot on the spot as a spy before I had a chance to explain. "However," he added consolingly, "those are possibilities most remote. The rope is not likely to break; and if it did we both should probably be dead before we ever reached the earth."

That last statement sank deep into my consciousness; but I fear I did not hearken so attentively as I ought to the continuation of the lieutenant's conversation, because, right in the middle of his remarks, something had begun to happen.

An officer had stepped up alongside to tell me that very shortly I should undoubtedly be quite seasick--or, rather, skysick--because of the pitching about of the basket when the balloon reached the end of the cable; and I was trying to listen to him with one ear and to my prospective traveling companion with the other when I suddenly realized that the officer's face was no longer on a level with mine. It was several feet below mine. No; it was not--it was several yards below mine. Now he was looking up toward us, shouting out his words, with his hands funneled about his mouth for a speaking trumpet. And at every word he uttered he shrank into himself, growing shorter and shorter.

It was not that we seemed to be moving. We seemed to be standing perfectly still, without any motion of any sort except a tiny teetering motion of the hamper-basket, while the earth and what was on it fell rapidly away from beneath us. At once all sense of perspective became distorted.

When on the roof of a tall building this distortion had never seemed to me so great. I imagine this is because the building remains stationary and a balloon moves. Almost directly below us was one of our party, wearing a soft hat with a flattish brim. It appeared to me that almost instantly his shoulders and body and legs vanished. Nothing remained of him but his hat, which looked exactly like a thumb tack driven into a slightly tilted drawing board, the tilted drawing board being the field.

The field seemed sloped now, instead of flat.

Across the sunken road was another field. Its owner, I presume, had started to turn it up for fall planting, when the armies came along and chased him away; so there remained a wide plowed strip, and on each side of it a narrower strip of unplowed earth. Even as I peered downward at it, this field was transformed into a width of brown corduroy trimmed with green velvet.

For a rudder we carried a long, flapping clothesline arrangement, like the tail of a kite, to the lower end of which were threaded seven yellow-silk devices suggesting inverted sunshades without handles.

These things must have been s.p.a.ced on the tail at equal distances apart, but as they rose from the earth and followed after us, whipping in the wind, the uppermost one became a big umbrella turned inside out; the second was half of a pumpkin; the third was a yellow soup plate; the fourth was a poppy bloom; and the remaining three were just amber beads of diminis.h.i.+ng sizes.

Probably it took longer, but if you asked me I should say that not more than two or three minutes had pa.s.sed before the earth stopped slipping away and we fetched up with a profound and disconcerting jerk. The balloon had reached the tip of her hitch line.

She rocked and twisted and bent half double in the pangs of a fearful tummy-ache, and at every paroxysm the car lurched in sympathy, only to be brought up short by the pull of the taut cable; so that we two, wedged in together as we were, nevertheless jostled each other violently. I am a poor sailor, both by instinct and training. By rights and by precedents I should have been violently ill on the instant; but I did not have time to be ill.

My fellow traveler all this while was pointing out this thing and that to me--showing how the telephone operated; how his field gla.s.ses poised just before his eyes, being swung and balanced on a delicately adjusted suspended pivot; telling me how on a perfectly clear day--this October day was slightly hazy--we could see the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and the Cathedral at Rheims; gyrating his hands to explain the manner in which the horses, trotting away from us as we climbed upward, had given to the drum on the wagon a reverse motion, so that the cable was payed out evenly and regularly. But I am afraid I did not listen closely. My eyes were so busy that my ears loafed on the job.