Читать книгу Behind the Scenes in Warring Germany - Edward Lyell Fox - Страница 6

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A note from Dr. Roediger of the Foreign Office directed me to report early in January at ten o'clock at that building on Moltkestrasse and Königsplatz, where lives and works that marvelous central organization of the German army, the Great General Staff. There I found waiting Dawson, the photographer who had accompanied me from America, and a plump, smiling, philosophical Austrian, Theyer, a Cino-operator who was to go along with Dawson and make "movies" of the front.

Climbing endless wooden stairways in the old building, I was finally shown into a room that only lacked wax flowers under glass to recall the Rutherford B. Hayes period of interior decorating. Presently the door opened to admit an officer whom I liked at the first glimpse, and in his careful, groping English Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann of the Grosser General Stab introduced himself. He explained that he would accompany us on our trip to the front and bring us back to Berlin; whereupon I blessed the Staff for giving me an officer with merry eyes and delightful personality. He would do everything in his power—not small as I later learned—to have me shown the things I wanted to see in that forbidden city, the army front.

That afternoon I bought a dunnage bag such as navy men the world over use, and remembering Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann's advice to carry as little as possible, I packed only a change of boots, socks, under-clothing, and flannel shirts. Come to think of it, an elaborate series of cloth maps, each a minutely described small district of the whole Western front, took up as much room as anything else. And as I had heard officers say that a hypodermic with a shot of morphine was good to carry in case one was hit, that went in, too. During our conversation at the General Staff, Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann had emphasized the point that it must be understood that this trip I was about to make was entirely upon my own responsibility. A suit of army gray green was desirable and a hat or gloves of a similar neutral color, prevented me from being a conspicuous mark.

I think I was at Anhalter Bahnhof the next night half an hour before the gate opened for the Metz train. There were no sleeping compartments available, so securing a day compartment to themselves, Dawson and Theyer withdrew to concoct a series of movie narratives, while the Ober-Lieutenant induced the conductor to lock me up with him in a nearby compartment meant for four, After the train had pulled out we discussed the war between the United States and Japan, which all well informed people whom I have met in Germany, diplomatic, naval, and army, believe must soon come. For the first time I noticed that the Ober-Lieutenant's uniform was different from any of the thousands of uniforms that I had seen in Germany; trimmed with blue of a shade that I had never before noticed, and across his left chest I observed an order, and that was also as totally different, a bar about four inches long and one inch high, wound with the black and white of the iron cross and yellow and red. Pinned to it were two golden bars, bearing strange words: Heroland, and some outlandish word that I have forgotten.

"You're puzzled at my uniform," smiled the Ober-Lieutenant. "It does not surprise me. There are but two others in Germany. My uniform is that of the regiment of German Southwest Africa. The Emperor created it a special regiment after our campaign there." And I found myself looking at the tiny golden bars, and wondering what deeds of daring this merry-eyed man had performed there. His medals bore now the names of battles in Africa. "My regiment," he explained, "is still in Africa. Since August I have been with the General Staff in Berlin."

We talked long that night, while the train rushed towards the Southwest. He told me of his experiences in German Southwest Africa, and of the ways of the natives there. We slept that night, each sprawled out on a compartment seat, and I awoke with a huge arc lamp glaring through the window. My watch showed seven and when I drowsily heard the Ober-Lieutenant say that we were in Frankfort, and that the train stopped half an hour, and would I like to get out for coffee?

I rubbed open my eyes. We passed the photographers' compartment, to find them both asleep, but then photographers in warring Germany can have nothing but easy consciences; they see so little.

Long after day had broken—with the photographers still sleeping—we passed the brown mountains of the Rhine, and at Bingen, where we saw the old robber's castle clinging to the cliffs, with the watch tower on an islet below, the train stopped. Opening one of the wide car windows we saw a commotion under a shed of new boards, and there swarmed forth the women of Bingen, with pails of smoking coffee and trays of sandwiches. We saw them crowding past, and then by stretching our necks we were able to see, three cars down, one after another helmeted head and gray-green pair of shoulders pop forth, while the women smiled happily and passed up the coffee and bread.

"I think a car full of soldiers for the front was joined on during the night," observed Herrmann.

Our train passed through Lorraine which those who generalize like to tell us was the cause of this war, forgetting Lombard Street and Honest John Bull. I had heard how they hated the Germans, these people of Lorraine, but at every station there were the women and girls with the cans of coffee and the plates of Butterbrot. One saw no poverty there, only neat, clean little houses—no squalor. Germany is wise in the provisions made for the contentment of her working classes.

We drew near Metz, cupped by the distant blue ring of the fortified Vosges where last August the army of the Crown Prince smashed the French invasion. I saw beside a road four graves and four wooden crosses and wondered if on one of those broiling summer days, a gray motor of the Red Cross had not stopped there to bury the wounded. A field flew by, serried with trenches that rotated like the spokes of a great wheel; but the trenches were empty and the road that followed the wire fence close by the tracks, was bare of soldiers. There was no need longer for trenches, or that barbed entanglement of rusted wire, for the guns rumbled now far beyond the guardian hills.

The shadows of a domed station fell over the train, likewise the shadows of supervision, for I was to see none of the fortifications of Metz. Historic Metz that guards the gate to Germany by the south, was not for a foreigner's eyes. For only ten minutes was I in Metz and, although it was the natural thing to do to spend them waiting on the station platform, I had a feeling, though, that had I wished otherwise and attempted to go out into the city, a soldier would have barred the way. Never, not even in the captured French and Belgium cities that I later saw, did I gain the impression of such intense watchfulness as prevailed at Metz.

"We are going to the Great Headquarters now," said Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann, explaining for the first time our destination. Whereupon, I forgot my disappointment at not seeing Metz, and wondered if he had not deliberately withheld this as a surprise for me. The Great Headquarters! You thought of it as the place of mystery. In Berlin you remembered hearing it spoken of only vaguely, its location never named. You had heard it kept in darkness, that all lighted windows were covered, lest French flyers seek it by night. You knew that from the Great Headquarters three hundred miles of battle line were directed; that it was the birthplace of stratagems; the council table around which sat the Falkenheim, Chief of the General Staff, Tirpitz, ruler of the Navy. Perhaps the Emperor was there!

I think I must have turned over in my mind for half an hour a certain question, before deciding that it was not a breach of military etiquette to put it to Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann.

"Where," I finally asked, "is the Great Headquarters located?"

"At Charleville," he promptly answered. "We shall not arrive there until evening." And then, getting out a number of those marvelous maps of the General Staff that show every tree, fence and brook, in the desired district, he traced for me the route the train was following. "We cross the Frontier into France, just beyond Fentsch and then go diagonally northwest through Longuion, Montmédy and Sedan to Charleville. We are going behind the battle line, out of artillery range, of course, but still the French flyers watch this line," and Herrmann bent down to glance towards the sky. "We may get some excitement."

There is something discomfortingly casual in the way these Prussian officers talk of danger, and from the moment I saw the frontier post, with its barber-pole stripings, slip by unguarded, and realized that frontier guards were a thing of the past and that I was now with the invaders in France, I could not help but feel that an aeroplane bomb was the thing to be expected.

We passed, on a siding, a troop train filled with new troops from Bavaria. One of the compartment doors was open and I saw that the floor was strewn with straw. The soldiers grinned and waved to us and pointed to the blue and white streamers so that we might know from what part of Germany they came.

When we were approaching Audun le Roman, which is just across the frontier on the road to Pierrepont, I saw on a hill not a quarter of a mile from the train a row of gray plastered houses. Through them, the gray sky showed in ragged, circular patches, framed by the holes in their walls. Sunken roofs, shattered floors, heaps of black débris, the charred walls gaping with shell holes; beside one house, a garden surprisingly green for so early in the year, serenely impassive to the story of the ruined walls—that row of little houses was as a guidepost. At last we followed the road to war.

I saw in the next field a black swarm of birds pecking at the plowed ground. Plow furrows? One wondered.... For a mile we did not see a living thing, only the black birds, that feed on death.

"This place," observed Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann, whose face seemed to have lost some of the former indifference to war, "was apparently under heavy artillery fire when the Crown Prince invaded towards Longwy."

At Pierrepont I saw the first formal sign of the German occupation. Near the railroad station in a little square, where you could not miss it, loomed a large wooden sign, that began with "nichts" and ended with "verboten." Then the train passed over a trestle and across the dirty little road that ran beneath. I saw a German soldier hurrying towards a squatty peasant house. I could see the door open and a blue-smocked old man appear on the threshold. Why had the soldier hurried towards him; what was the old man saying? Stories? You felt them to be in every little house.

The train crept on. I saw a French inn with a German flag painted over the red signboard. The tracks ran between fields scarred on either side with the brown, muddy craters of shells. At the Longuion Station I watched a German soldier standing on a ladder, painting out all French words within the sweep of his brush. Further on I saw a two-wheeled cart in a deserted farmhouse yard; its shafts were tilted up, and a load of bags rotted on the ground, as though the owner, unhitching the horse, had fled.

Almost stopping, so slowly did the train move, it approached a tunnel that the retreating French had blown up. Inky darkness closed in, and the Ober-Lieutenant was saying that the Germans were digging the tunnel out, when a yellow torch flared against the window. I sprang to open it and saw the ghostly forms of soldiers standing along the rails.

"Zeitung! Zeitung!" they cried, and in answer we tossed out to them all the newspapers in the compartment. You had a feeling that the tunnel was dangerous, for the shaky, temporary wooden trestle was yielding to the train's weight. The tunnel marked the beginning of a destroyed railroad and, as we proceeded, I found myself looking into a house flush against the track. It was like a room on the stage, the fourth wall removed. All the intimate possessions of the owner were before me; the pink wall paper was hideous in its flamboyant bad taste. Herrmann came to my rescue.

"The tracks from now are either repaired or laid new by our engineers. As they retreated, the French blew up everything. In some cases we had to run our line through houses."

The engineers had cut away the half of the house which was in their way and left the remainder to be boarded up.

A gray castle, that crowned a hill, had been the vortex of the terrific fighting that raged around Montmédy. It seemed tranquil enough now. I saw the front door open, and down the terrace there shuffled a squad of baggy red-trousered French prisoners with their watchful guards.

When we passed through Sedan it was almost dark, swarming with the Germans as in 1870. One after another we tarried at the stations of these captured towns. Finally we pulled up to a larger station where the shadowy forms of houses were closer together. I was awakened from my speculations by the Ober-Lieutenant saying: "We are in Charleville, the Great Headquarters."

As I left the train I felt a thrill of anticipation that grew apace during the long explanation that Herrmann was giving the station guards. Outside loomed the vague tops of trees, and the whiteness of a house accentuated against the dark night. Here and there a solitary light burned, but Charleville was a place of darkness.

Herrmann had expected an automobile to be waiting, but when to the saluting click of sentries' heels, we had gone the length of the station front, he said to me: "You please get Mr. Dawson and Mr. Theyer and wait in the dining-room. I shall walk to Headquarters and see what we are to do."

Of course, I suggested going with him. There might be a chance of seeing Falkenheim, who now is responsible for the movements of more than a million men on the West front; perhaps I might even see the Emperor. Perhaps Herrmann guessed why I insisted so strongly on keeping him company on his walk to the Great Headquarters.

"The roads are muddy," he said, in a way that blended consideration with decision. "Remain in there," and he pointed to the door of the station dining-room, "until I return."

Then he showed us into a typical way station restaurant that would have reminded you of any dirty American railroad lunchroom, had not the principal object of furniture been a large buffet, shining with bottled French wines and liqueurs. As I sat down at one of the marble-topped tables, I realized that we were the only civilians in the room, except the three men with white aprons and the pretty low-class French girl who was waiting to take our order.

"Diner," I said briefly, not attempting to remember French after struggling for weeks with German, and fell to studying the room. It apparently was an officers' mess of the General Staff. The clean field-green jackets and the dashing gray capes gave a touch of romance to that dingy dining-room.

We lingered long over the coffee and Theyer, the Austrian, was telling how he had been with Jack London, taking movies for Pathé in the South Sea Islands, when Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann finally returned.

"We must go at once to the hotel," he said, "and go to bed. We shall have to be up by five, and on our way to Lille."

So it was Lille! There was real fighting in that northern section of France.

"How long do we remain in Lille?" I asked, disappointed at being rushed away from the Great Headquarters.

"Five days," he replied, setting my fears at rest. "We shall use Lille as a base and go out to different points on the front."

I knew then why he had been so long in returning; clearly he had been receiving his instructions at the Great Headquarters, and the slight distrust I had come to feel at being rushed away from Metz and now from Charleville was entirely dissipated. After all, they meant business; Lille proved that; and five days at the front!

If ever I return to Charleville and want to go to the Hotel de Commerce, it will be impossible without a guide. I remember going the length of a long street of shady trees, crossing a wide square, and then turning off into a narrow alley where ancient lanterns, well masked, hung over from grilled wall brackets. I remember flashing my electric pocket lamp down on the cobbled street, for just an instant, when Herrmann dropped his gloves. We stumbled down a blind alley that called to mind the habitation of François Villon in "The Lodging for a Night." Then Herrmann was rattling the knocker on the huge oaken doors of a two story flat-roofed house that looked a century old. The door groaned back and I found myself gazing into the blinking eyes of an old portier who held a candle and who would have demanded what we wanted had he not suddenly spied the military gray of Herrmann's cape and at once asked us to come in.

The few hours I slept that night were in a venerable, four-posted bed, in a low-ceilinged, high-casemented room such as you sometimes see on the stage in a romantic play. I remember hearing a rapping on the door, almost as soon, it seemed, as I had closed my eyes.

Five o'clock! And I heard the portier shuffling down the hall and then the hollow, rapping sound of another early morning call on the Ober-Lieutenant's door. Below in the alley panted one of the gray-green army motors waiting to bring us to the station. Cold sprouts, coffee, and a roll, and we had climbed into a compartment of the train for Lille. From now on, soldiers with fixed bayonets composed the train crew. We crossed a wooden trestle built by German pioneers high above a green swirl of water between pretty trees, and on the left we saw the ruins of a stone bridge dynamited by the French. We rushed out at St. Vincennes to eat at an officers' mess, and as the train moved on I saw at a siding a long line of cars, their sides and roofs marked with the Red Cross; and even as we passed I saw two stretchers being borne along the track and lifted with their wounded through the open windows of one of the cars. I saw a white bandaged leg as the stretcher tilted and then the attendants inside the car covered it from sight. Hourly the front drew nearer.

Trenches appeared. The train suddenly slid into a station and stopped. We were in Lille. While two soldiers were loading the luggage, photograph apparatus and all, upon a small truck, Herrmann suddenly plucked my arm. "Look," he exclaimed, pointing up at the huge glass-domed roof. I saw there a big hole, edged with splintered glass, and a fragment of blue sky beyond. "That's the hole made by a French aeroplane bomb. The Staff told me to look for it when we came to Lille. The bomb never exploded and was picked up on the tracks over there."

Not the most reassuring thought in the world, that French fliers had marked this place for destruction. In the waiting-rooms I saw nothing but soldiers—fresh troops with clean uniforms, unshaven men whose clothes were brownish with the mud of the trenches. By that time I had become used to being saluted, and to enjoy the click of a sentry's heels. While Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann was telephoning for a military automobile I noticed one of the Landwehr guards begin to eye suspiciously the photographers and their formidable luggage. I saw him call another of the dark-coated Landwehr, and they were obviously on the point of making a possible arrest when the Ober-Lieutenant returned, averting the situation.

We were, the Ober-Lieutenant informed us, to wait in the Café de Paris,—which was just across the square from the station,—until he returned.

"The telephones have all been cut," he explained with a smile. "I shall have to walk to Headquarters and bring back a motor for us. I may be gone half an hour, or an hour, but please remain in the café. Remember Lille is a captured city."

So we crossed the square, Dawson, Theyer and I, while the wind brought us the grumbling of heavy cannon from the West where, not fifteen miles away, the Germans were making their terrific drive on that segment of the Allies' line, extending out from the Channel shore. Boo-omm, Boo-omm, Boo-omm, with the last syllable prolonged like a low note on the piano. Army transports rattled over the cobbled square; one of the gray motors with its muffler cut out, snorted past; and then the eye began to take in its surroundings.

There on my left, as I went away from the station, I saw a place of destruction, an entire block of ruined buildings, their shattered sides rearing with hideous ugliness against the perspective of untouched houses beyond. Blackened walls, gaping holes, roofless skeletons of houses; and within, a chaos of plaster and falling floors, one house after another, some almost razed to the ground, others with only their tops shot off, but all desolation and ruin. It was not the destruction that made me stop in the square and stare about me, for I had become sated with shelled houses, all the way from Charleville to Lille; it was amazement at the artillery fire that could lay low an entire block and not even drop a shell. The undisturbed cobbles in the square confirmed this conclusion. What deadly accuracy! How, if something be marked for destruction in this war, can it escape? I stood in the square for several minutes and counted thirty-eight soldiers and sixty civilians walk past the ruins and no one so much as turned his head to glance even indifferently upon them.

"How long," I asked the fatherly, white-haired Frenchman who brought us our coffee in the Café de Paris, "is it, since those buildings over there were destroyed?"

"A month, sir," he said, and in a moment he added wearily, "Our city has been captured and recaptured three times."

And it was easy then to know why they had all walked by without the slightest interest in the ruins beside them; think of people becoming bored with destruction! A typical French café with its big window, the Paris gave a view of the sidewalk. I saw a beautiful, dark-eyed French boy, dirtily clad, selling post cards of Lille to a good natured German infantryman. The soldier went away and then, what appeared to be the other members of the firm, a bigger and a smaller boy, darted from a doorway to divide the spoils with the dark-eyed youngster who had closed the deal. I saw five different parties of German soldiers come into the Café de Paris, and I heard not even a loud word or jest against the French; and three black-bearded Frenchmen played dominoes nearby. The soldiers ordered their coffee, or wine, paid for it, and minded their own business, just as they would at home, perhaps even more scrupulously so.

Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann was an hour longer than he expected, but he had good news for me.

"I have a car outside," he said hurriedly. "We shall bring Mr. Dawson and Mr. Theyer to the Staff and then I shall take you to an aeroplane base not far from here. It has been arranged for you to go up—if you wish."

Hmm! The battle line could not be more than forty kilometers away, and a French flyer had almost wrecked the Lille station.

"A fine day for flying," observed the Ober-Lieutenant. "You can see much," and he smiled. "A fine day also for the French fliers."

"Schön," I said, but refused to believe that a German aeroplane was ever hit. "Let's go."