The Note-Book of an Attache Part 5

Provisions were very scarce. We saw a Turco, who had apparently lost his regiment and who spoke scarcely any French, vainly trying to find some food. He walked about through the cafes waving a one hundred franc note in each hand and ceaselessly demanding something to eat.

After supper a council of war was held in order to decide upon our course of action for the morrow. Captain Parker was eager to hunt for a vortex of the battle where, he held, the primary decision must have been lost and won and the fighting would have been most intense; while the action on all the other parts of the line must have been contingent upon the results at this "tactical center." This "focus"

could not have been to the north or west of Paris, because the great bodies of French troops are to the east; nor was it on the battle line nearest Paris, for everything we saw today in and behind the zone of operations testified to the contrary. In all the actions we have so far observed, the Germans were retiring deliberately in a retreat evidently determined by some ulterior cause. We noted many places where severe fighting had taken place, but in every case it bore the unmistakable signs of being merely a hotly contested rearguard action.

We so far have neither seen nor heard of any great German defeat such as must somewhere have occurred in order to start a general retreat, and to force such numerous rearguard actions. A victorious German army does not suddenly begin to retire unless compelled to do so by a gigantic and crus.h.i.+ng defeat at some one point; such a defeat must mean days of losses so frightful that the beaten army is physically exhausted and its morale shaken.

From a military point of view it was of vital importance to discover this spot and to study the battlefield for lessons in tactics. Captain Parker maintained that it would be more profitable to find this center than to give way to our inclination to go forward into the actual fighting; that if we could locate it, it would be best to stay upon the abandoned field of the German defeat to study how the battle had been fought. He pointed out that the opportunity would be equivalent to being upon the field of Waterloo or Gettysburg the day after action ceased. As a result of the conference, it was finally decided to accept Captain Parker's contention and hunt for the battlefield of the great and decisive French victory, rather than to turn north toward the constant booming of cannon. We shall, therefore, continue to work our way to the eastward toward Chalons-sur-Marne, beating back and forth across the country and carefully covering all the ground.

_At the Front, Sat.u.r.day, September 12th._ We slept last night in beds which had recently been occupied by German officers and spent a very chilly night therein on account of the cold, wet wind which blew in through the many shattered windows. We woke to the rumbling of distant cannon, which might more correctly be called a trembling of the air rather than a true sound. Still h.o.a.rding our provisions, we ate a frugal breakfast of stale bread and of tea made from the dried leaves of linden trees. We started off at half-past seven, receiving a very friendly G.o.d-speed from our aged host and hostess.

All morning we made our way in an easterly direction, beating back and forth across the country in order to cover as much ground as possible.

When we turned to the north the sound of cannon became louder and when we swung to the south it grew fainter. We studied the country carefully and, when possible, talked with any of the Allied officers we chanced to meet. They usually knew thoroughly the events which had taken place in the particular neighborhood in which they had operated, but were astonis.h.i.+ngly ignorant of what had gone on at any distance.

What they told us was always very valuable, because it a.s.sisted us to piece together the fabric of the campaign as a whole.

Beyond Vauchamps we came upon a scene where there had been heavy artillery fighting. The fields were plowed up by innumerable sh.e.l.ls and many dead horses were strewn along the gutters, with here and there a dead soldier who had fallen in the road and been hurriedly thrown aside so that he should not hinder traffic.

The highway was elevated a bit above the level country which stretched on either side, and at one spot we saw where two German guns had fought from behind this slight protection. They had been placed in holes sunk a few inches into the ground, and the loose earth had been piled up to form a little mound in front, preventing bullets from flying under the gun s.h.i.+eld. Empty cartridge cases were strewn about and a pile of unused ammunition was stacked up like cordwood. The German guns had been in sight of a French battery across the fields and a direct-fire artillery duel had taken place between the two. The craters of thirty-two French sh.e.l.ls were within twenty paces of the emplacements and the ground was strewn with splinters and shrapnel cases. There were several very dead German artillerymen who had evidently been working the guns when direct hits had been made upon the material of the battery. No limbers or caissons had been with the guns, but a caisson had been placed in a field about two hundred yards behind, and men ran up and down across the field carrying ammunition in wicker baskets, each of which holds three sh.e.l.ls. We picked up four of these sh.e.l.l baskets as curiosities and managed to find room for them in our machine.

As we advanced we became more and more convinced of the correctness of Capt. Parker's theory that there had been a big focal center of the battle somewhere still to the east of us, and that the actions along the rest of the line of contact from Paris to Lorraine had occurred with reference to this vortex.

It is characteristic of the limited knowledge which troops in battle have of what goes on outside of their immediate geographical vicinity, that we ran almost into the great battle area for which we were searching before anyone gave us a hint of its location. It was at Vertus that we were told by a French officer that terrific fighting had taken place in the upland plateau to the south of us, around a place called Fere Champenoise; that the Germans had there made their main attack with close to a quarter of a million men; that a frightful battle had raged, a battle in which the Germans were at first, during some thirty-six hours, victorious, but that, with the arrival of reinforcements, the Ninth French Army under General Foch had turned the tide and finally routed them. The officers said that the fighting and slaughter had been frightful; that the combined casualties of the two sides were close to two hundred thousand on a front of something over twenty miles and a depth of about fifteen miles. They said that the battle area was contained roughly within a circ.u.mference drawn through the villages of Champaubert, Coligny, Pierre-Morains, Clamanges, Sommesous, Gourgancon, Corroy, and Sezanne.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "THE DEAD WERE SCATTERED FAR AND WIDE"

[Our automobile on one of the battlefields of the Marne]]

As we conferred with the officers a constant stream of reinforcements for the French army was pa.s.sing, coming from Fere Champenoise and marching toward Ay and Epernay; regiments of infantry, ammunition trains, caissons, transports, and cavalry, all marching endlessly toward the booming guns to the northward.

We turned our machine to the south with a feeling of the greatest awe at the thought of what two hundred thousand casualties must mean. We were silent for some minutes as the machine sped along, and then Captain Parker remarked: "At Gettysburg or at Waterloo the total forces engaged amounted to only about one hundred and sixty thousand!"

We ran toward the slope of the plateau, pa.s.sing slowly an endless, unbroken line of transports. Beyond Bergeres-Les-Vertus an infantry brigade was resting beside the road and the tired men were cooking and eating.

We tried to comprehend the battle as a whole by studying a great many fields, any one of which would a few years ago have been considered an entire battle in itself. The dead were scattered far and wide; and in the fields and among the grain-stacks the wounded cried out their piteous faint appeals. Little groups of German stragglers were hiding in the forests, and squads of alert French soldiers hunted them down, beating through the cover as eager setter dogs search for grouse. In one field of about six acres lay nine hundred German dead and wounded; across another, where a close-action fight had raged, two hundred French and Germans lay mixed together, all mashed and ripped. Here was the curious sight of a German and Frenchman lying face to face, both dead, and each one transfixed by the other's bayonet.

The very birds of the air and the beasts of the field lay dead and rotting amid the general destruction. We saw feathers and bits of chickens and halves of cows. On one occasion Hall maintained that "it"

had been a cow, while I thought "it" was a horse, and no piece large enough for a certain identification could be found. Of some of the villages which had been peaceful and beautiful a week ago, there remained now only chimneys, ashes, and bits of walls rising from smouldering gray debris. A French village wrecked by battle looks very much wrecked indeed, in contrast with its habitual orderly and toy-like appearance.

I was not so horrified in viewing these ghastly sights as I had expected, because I could not put from me a sense of their unreality.

The human mind is incapable of comprehending to the full such terrible happenings. One kept endlessly saying to oneself: "Can all this which we are seeing really have taken place in this once quiet French countryside, almost within the suburbs of Paris? It seems impossible--unbelievable!"

In the little upland village of Clamanges was a field hospital which had been established by the Germans when they first occupied the place on the night of September 7th. They had held it until their retreat on the 10th, when their retirement was so precipitate that they had been unable to take with them their wounded.

In this war it is the custom to convert the village churches into hospitals. The chairs and benches are thrown out into the graveyard and the floor is covered with straw upon which the wounded are laid in long rows extending the length of the nave. The altar is converted into the pharmacist's headquarters and bottles and medicaments are piled thereon, while bandages, for want of room, are sometimes hung upon the statue of the Virgin, who has, in this unique service, an air of sublime and compa.s.sionate contentment. An operating room is usually established in the vestry or in the Parish House and a Red Cross flag is hung from the steeple. Any sh.e.l.l holes in the roofs and walls are stopped with sections of tenting. As we approached Clamanges, we detected a sickening, subtle, sweetish odor which crept stealthily to us through the air and filled us with an insinuating disgust. The Colonel said simply, "That is gangrene."

The streets of the village were muddy and littered, and there were innumerable ominous flies everywhere. The town was crammed with German wounded. In the church long rows of them, touching feet to head and arm to arm, so that the attendants had to step gingerly between as they made their slow way about. The neighboring peasant houses were packed full with the overflow. In the halls lay the bodies of men who had died of gangrene, and as no one had time to attend to the dead, the piles of them grew and increased. We were told that there were thirteen hundred wounded in the village, among whom labored sixty attendants. They were all severely wounded, since the Germans had dragged with them all their slightly wounded, these being good a.s.sets.

What had once been a little rose garden was piled high with a gigantic heap of b.l.o.o.d.y accoutrements which had been taken from wounded men as they were brought in. Under a tree in a corner of the churchyard a surgeon had set up a big kitchen table which he used for operations; the ground underneath was black and caked. In a near by corner of the church walls was a great pile of boots and stained clothes which had been cut from shattered limbs, and I expect one might have discovered even more ghastly objects had one ventured to turn over the rags. The attendants were nearly all French, although two German doctors and several German orderlies had stayed behind with their wounded. All worked heroically to cope with their great task.

In the rush of battle it had been impossible to obtain food for the wounded, so that for days these men had gone hungry, and one heard the agonizing sound of dying men crying piteously for bread. The French attendants themselves went hungry in order to give their charges such small pittances of food as were obtainable. We watched an orderly who entered the church with a single loaf of bread which had just been secured and which was to be divided among several hundred wounded. He used a great knife as if he hoped to make up for the smallness of the supply by the largeness of the implement. Slowly and with sober care he cut slice after slice, each one so thin that the light shone through it. Every head was turned toward him and each burning pair of eyes was fixed upon the precious bread with an expression of animal dumbness, which reminded one of the intent eyes of a hungry dog as it watches a hoped-for morsel. As he advanced step by step, the wounded stretched up shriveled hands, or propped themselves on one elbow to make more appealing gestures, their faces all contorted by the pains the movement caused them. They made no sound, for their attention was too intently fixed upon that bread. One, however, who had been overlooked, burst into screams and wailings until the mistake had been properly remedied. We Americans held a Council of War and unanimously decided to contribute our jealously h.o.a.rded supply of provisions; we thereby became as angels in the eyes of those poor creatures. A French attendant remarked as he handed a sliver of our only loaf of bread to a shattered man: "Il va mourir tout a l'heure, mais cela lui fera grand plaisir en mourant!"

The dying are frightful sights, and parts of them are often already mortified, as they lie in the straw, entirely occupied with breathing.

They breathe eternally little short breaths, a hundred or a hundred and ten to the minute, like some sort of pump. They wish pa.s.sionately not to die, and yet they know with desperate certainty that they are going to die. They lie down there in a tiny, little black h.e.l.l of their own and fight with all their might and main, feeling that they will die instantly if they skip one little short breath. (I was going to say they fight with all their soul and body, but they no longer really possess either of these). They have no time to speak, or listen, or move, or be helped, as every particle of energy must be used for the next respiration. A jumbled heap lies in the straw covered with a blanket to keep off the flies. An attendant looks at its side in search of the fluttering little pulsation of breath. If it is there, "he" is living; if all is still, "it" is dead, and they carry it out and dump it in the hall with the other bodies.

The little village of Ecury-le-Repos had been deserted by every one but its Mayor, who mistook us for Germans, and as such faced us bravely and with dignity. He very correctly refused to believe that we were not of the enemy until he had examined our papers. His village was not a pleasant sight. He said that it had been taken and retaken many times and that there had been fighting in its streets as recently as yesterday; its houses were battered and rent by sh.e.l.ls and many had burned down and still smouldered; no earthquake could have ruined them more thoroughly. The narrow village streets were littered ankle deep with a muddy, rotting pot-pourri in which one detected broken gla.s.s, bits of brick, cartridges, roof slates, broken bottles, shreds of clothing, sh.e.l.ls, fragments, shrapnel cases, and kepis. Dead men lay in the gutters, covered with filth to such an extent that one almost failed to recognize what they were.

In their last retreat the Germans had dragged their desperately wounded into halls and doorways in order that they might be out from under foot, and there they still lay. Half of them were mercifully already dead. We looked into one hallway only. Here amidst a stifling stench, five Germans were propped up; three were dead and the other two barely alive; all were covered black with flies and the living and the dead were eaten by white, weaving ma.s.ses of maggots.

Ecury-le-Repos is situated in a little circular hollow, with elevated table-lands all around. Here where the table-lands begin to dip down, the Germans had defended themselves against the advancing French. As they faced southward toward the oncoming enemy, they had the village in its cup-like hollow at their backs. At one point German infantry to the number of about two hundred had been placed on the crest facing across the bare level plateau, while in front of them some two hundred and fifty paces distant was a pine wood through which the French were advancing. The Germans had evidently had no time to entrench but had quickly lain down in skirmish order in the outer edge of a potato field; each soldier had then pushed up in front of him, as protection, a little heap of potatoes and loose earth. A hundred paces to the right of this German skirmish line, two mitrailleuses had been skillfully thrust forward some fifty yards in advance, and concealed in small trenches hurriedly dug. They could thus fire across the front of their own infantry and take in the flank any French who advanced.

This action was one of a series which had taken place along this line of hills. The German flanks were not unprotected, but owing to the fact that the country was much broken and obscured by woods, such a force would be partly hidden from its neighbors to the right and left, and largely independent in repelling any attack made against it.

A body of French infantry three to four hundred strong had advanced to the edge of the woods, facing the Germans, and had there taken up a skirmish position. The opposing bodies had then fired at each other a collective total of about twenty-five thousand rounds across a perfectly flat field. We were able to estimate the number of men engaged on either side from the impressions which their feet, elbows, and bodies had made in the soft earth, and we could judge how many rounds per man had been fired by counting the little piles of empty cartridges which had acc.u.mulated beside each rifleman. When we arrived upon the scene the wounded had nearly all been removed, but the dead were still untouched, and we were able to see that, as a result of this fusillade of twenty-five thousand rounds, only three Germans and six Frenchmen had been killed outright.

After this rifle contest, the French had made a bayonet charge across the open. The Germans had fired until the French had advanced about half way and had hit a score, after which they temporarily ceased firing and the French then promptly "charged home." The two German mitrailleuses were unperceived by the advancing French, and as the French pa.s.sed them in flank, the mitrailleuses opened fire; at the same moment the Germans suddenly fired a scattering rifle volley.

Attacked in front and on the flank, every Frenchman but one was. .h.i.t, and sixty dead still lay in a row across the field as if cut down by a mowing machine. The sole survivor of the fatal cross-fire was a boy with a tiny black moustache. Undaunted, he had charged alone in among the Germans and had received many bayonets in his heroic body. He lay on his back among the German cartridges fifty yards ahead of the row of his dead comrades.

Behind the crest of the plateau we could see the emplacements of four guns at intervals of about forty yards, but they had not been used in this engagement and may have been sh.e.l.ling some more distant objective.

Before leaving this field we gathered a quant.i.ty of potatoes and put them in the German sh.e.l.l baskets which we had picked up earlier in the day, in order that our gift to the field hospital might not leave us totally without food. We felt rather unhappy at not being able to pay for them, but "a la guerre comme a la guerre."

Just outside of Fere Champenoise on the road running west toward Broussy-le-Grand, we came upon the scene of an action in which the casualties had been exceedingly heavy. The neighborhood was absolutely deserted and as the wounded had been removed and there were no peasants about we could find no one to elucidate for us what had taken place. The action was not easy to unravel and the following conclusions were unverified by any eyewitnesses.

We, however, judged by the condition of the dead and other circ.u.mstantial evidence that the fight had taken place at the very beginning of the great battle--that is, on the morning of Tuesday, the 8th, when the French were slowly pushed back from the vicinity of Fere Champenoise. The road ran through the middle of an open field, with heavy forests on either side, some three hundred yards away to the north and south. A French regiment had evidently taken up a defensive position to the left of the road and parallel with it, thus facing the woods to the north and some four hundred yards away. These woods were held by a regiment of Imperial Guard and a battery of artillery had been placed some three hundred yards behind them. The Guards had advanced one hundred and fifty yards into the open and then formed a firing-line. In some inexplicable manner they had accomplished this manoeuvre without casualties.

The two firing-lines were thus facing one another across two hundred and fifty yards of open field; the men lying shoulder to shoulder were plainly visible to their opponents. The German firing-line was marked by nine dead. The shooting of the Guard was excellent and thus in marked contrast to the poor shooting of other German organizations which we had observed. The French position was marked by more than three hundred dead, and the roots and lower branches of some pine saplings near by were riddled with bullets; indeed, some of these had actually been cut down by rifle fire, and I estimated that there was on an average at least one bullet for every two square inches of bark.

Nearly all the French must have been put out of action before the Germans finally charged, for the latter had only some twenty men killed in crossing the open to the French position. This is such a small loss to suffer when pus.h.i.+ng home a bayonet charge, that the only explanation would be that few French were left to resist this final dash. In one place there was a pile of eleven dead Frenchmen who had evidently been killed in a desperate last stand.

Throughout this action the French had manifestly stood their ground very stubbornly, despite desperate losses, and had at no time broken or retreated. There were only ten dead behind their firing-line and these had been killed with the bayonet while fighting in the open.

Another French regiment adjacent to them, in some woods farther west, had suffered no less heavily, and the woods were here literally dotted with the bodies of the dead. Our conclusion was that all the Frenchmen had been put out of action. It should be remembered that the ratio of wounded to killed is at least four to one. Colonel Allen said that he could not imagine worse destruction than these two regiments suffered.

Evidently it was part of the price the French army so willingly paid for their great victory.