Читать книгу Behind the Scenes in Warring Germany - Edward Lyell Fox - Страница 7

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Two hours after the crawling military train had set us down in what used to be the Gare du Nord in Lille, but which is now the Nord Bahnhof, I was hurriedly getting into a fur-lined military undercoat in the Hotel d'Europe. About to go up in one of Germany's war planes, I was determined to be comfortable, if not mentally, physically. Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann laughed when he saw me appear, as bulky with clothing as a polar explorer, and said: "We shall have to hurry if we are to reach the aviation base before dark." We hurried.

I have ridden with Robertson, Strang, and other race drivers. I have had my blood turned to ice when they skidded their cars around hairpin turns. But I never rode before with a chauffeur of the German army who was in a hurry; nor shall I again—if I can help it. Bound for a place near Lens, so small that it appears only on the wonderful Automobilkartes that the Germans have made of all Europe, the brown leather-coated soldier-chauffeur began to distance everything on the road. It was one of those long, rakish motors, painted field gray green, that the Benz Company manufactures only for the army, cabalistic black letters and numerals marking its hood. As, with the muffler cut out, we roared through the streets of Lille, I saw the civilians pause to watch us pass with sullen eyes. Poor Herrmann had his arm working like a restless semaphore, returning salutes, and as we thundered through the silenced business streets at mile a minute speed, military trumpetings warned the poor bewildered citizens of Lille of our approach. The car began its mad dance through the outskirts of the city and down between the sentinel poplars toward Lens. Not two months before I had been riding down Fifth Avenue on the roof of a slumbering bus; to-day I was speeding in a German car through captured France.

Ahead we saw the gray canvas tops of a transport train. The trumpet blared, but those mud-splashed, creaking wagons had the right of way. What if the two lancers who rode as a rear guard did recognize the officer in our car? After all, he was only an officer, and they were bringing ammunition for the entrenched battle line. So our soldier-chauffeur swore, but indifferent to his "Donnerwetters," the drivers astride the transport horses stolidly held their course as, with an angry rasping of the tires, we skidded over to the side of the road, and rushed on in a splatter of mud. I looked at Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann and shouted: "They knew their business, those fellows back there."

"Certainly," he replied, "their work is most important. They were entirely right in not turning off the road for an officer's automobile. Everything depends on the transports, you know."

Whereupon I began to have a greater respect for the light, rattling supply wagons that we passed by the dozen on the road to Lens, and found myself thinking how unjustly those men might be regarded. "What did you do in the war?" ... "I drove a supply cart." ... How unheroic it sounds. Yet the Ober-Lieutenant told me that those men astride the bulky, unpicturesque dray horses were often put to the severest tests of courage.

"During our drive on Paris," he said, "the French would often succeed in covering a segment of road with their long range artillery, and continually drop shells upon it. They knew, of course, that our infantry, by making a detour through the fields, could avoid this death zone, but they shelled on, knowing that our transport trains would have to go by the road. So the transports would make a rush for it, and of course many were killed."

Another mile passed without our seeing any more of the gray wagon trains, and now the distant artillery grumbled louder. Two Uhlans cantered by, scanning us, and further on we passed another patrol. A corral of the familiar gray-topped wagons beside red brick farm buildings showed the location of a base of supplies, and in front of the house we saw a naked soldier unconcernedly scrubbing himself in a tub of water. And always the sullen roaring guns grew steadier and more disconcertingly clear.

"On this section of the line," Ober-Lieutenant explained, "the Staff told me that the French generally begin their heaviest firing every day at half past three."

I asked him why that was—it was like the curtain going up in a theater at a certain time. But he did not know, and could not even guess. I was wondering how much further we were going to rush towards that unearthly booming when at a muddy crossroad, patrolled by a Uhlan, as motionless as Remington might have painted him, we made a quick turn and plowed away. Apparently we were bound for a weather-beaten house and barn, half hidden by a leafless clump of willows, apparently shorn by shrapnel, for the broken branches hung down dead in a perfect arc as though the projectile had burst, perhaps right there above the tiny moss-banked stream, and sprayed its leaden shower.

As our motor, which had been heavily crawling along the farmhouse lane, finally sogged in the mud, refusing to go further, I followed Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann out of the machine, across the yard to where a sentry stood before the barn door. They exchanged words and then the barn door slid back a trifle, a youngish man, wearing the black leather helmet and coat of the aviation corps, appearing in the aperture. Excusing himself, Herrmann drew him aside and now and then I heard their voices raised in assent; they were evidently discussing my proposed flight. I guessed that Herrmann wanted to know exactly how much danger there would be. Conjecturing that he was apparently satisfied that the risk was a minimum, and that the aviator had been instructed to bring me nowhere near the firing line, I waited for their conference to break up.

Their talk evidently finished to the satisfaction of both, introductions were in order. Then the aviator, Hals, shouted a command into the barn and instantly there issued from the gloom within, four soldiers. I watched them roll back the creaking door and then, as though it were a fragile thing, they began slowly to push out the aeroplane—a monoplane I judged, as its long, tapering fuselage protruded into the farm yard, and then I saw with a start that the wings were a biplane's—a strange craft.

Events passed with bewildering rapidity. Half in a daze I saw the tall, solemn-looking aviator survey my warm clothing with an approving nod. The next instant I was buckling on a steel head protector, and when I noticed the machine again, it had been wheeled out into the flat, neighboring field. A level place I observed, packed hard with shale and dirt, made into a landing place for the planes. I caught a glimpse, at the extreme end of the field near the house, of two soldiers, fitting two wooden objects, painted the drab green of the field, into two pairs of prepared holes, one thirty feet behind the other. They were stout hoops, supported by posts, and rimmed with electric light bulbs. I noticed that the rear was perhaps two feet less in diameter than the other, and that when you stood directly in front of them, they gave the effect of concentric circles, their circumference but a foot apart.

"What is that for?" I asked Hals, and he explained that if it grew dark, the lights were lit, and if from above the aviator saw two fiery circles concentric, he knew that he could fly straight for them and alight in safety.

"But I hope," he added, "that nothing will prevent us from landing in daylight."

I did not like that "nothing will prevent us." I found myself wondering what could prevent us, deciding finally that it was only the usual jocular way of the aviator to frighten his passenger unduly before the flight begins. Had I but known!

I was hurrying across the field towards the aeroplane, its fish-like tail bearing the black inscription "B 604/14," which I later came to know meant biplane number 604 of the year 1914. Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann was wishing me luck and in the same breath whispering admonitions to the grave aviator. I climbed up into the observer's compartment and found myself staring, first at the brown propeller blades only the length of the wagon in front of me, then at the brass petrol tank overhead, and the thick, curving celluloid shield behind, through which I could see the black sleeved arms of the aviator, moving towards the levers. I glanced down at Herrmann, who looked a little nervous I thought. Two soldiers were grasping the brown wings on my left. The brown propeller began to spin, lazily at first, then faster, while the engine that I could have reached forward and touched, began its roaring. A quick comparison between the observer's compartment of this machine, and the one in which I had sat at the Doeberitz Flugplatz near Berlin came to me—that one had the tiny, brass, bomb-dropping levers, two on each side of the rail; these were all in one line and on the left; that one had a writing shelf that fell out from the front wall of the tiny tonneau, so had this, and I touched the lever that brought the shelf sloping down towards my knees; the floor of that machine had seemed solid, though perhaps not, for this was cut to admit the insertion of an observing device which, protruding up between my knees, offered a lens on which the eyes might be cupped by a shield as on a Graflex camera. I was wondering if four bombs dangled from the four releasing hooks below, when the engine started, smiting my ears with a mad roaring, and driving cold air against my face. I remembered to pull down my goggles and the next moment I felt a shudder run the length of the machine as it lurched forward, running over the field, to rise slightly, bump gently on its rubbered wheels, and then gliding upward on a gradual slant, sail towards the willows, dead sentinels grotesquely standing at the far end of the field with their shrapnel-torn branches dangling against the gray-ringed dreariness of sky.

One or two little spasms of fear and, as the aeroplane climbed towards a wood, I began to want to recognize instantly all the objects on the earth. They spread out, unrolling as on a huge panorama, a patchwork of many shaded woods and fields; there the brownish ribbon of a road losing itself like a thread in the gray distance, here little groups of absurdly small brick houses, off to the right a church steeple and beside it the uneven blackened walls of a shell-riddled building. The motor had settled now into an ever-increasing clamor, in which, if you caught one false beat, you would have cause for alarm. No longer visible, the propeller blades had lost their individuality in a grayish blur out there in front, shadowy scimiters whirling too fast for the eye to see. You thought of the engine and the blades but a moment, and then they seemed to become a part of you, and I wonder now if my heart did not try to synchronize its beat with theirs.

We climbed higher and higher. Although minutes ago, objects had ceased to seem strange by their magical tininess, you could sense the growing height now by the development of color; you never knew that the drab winter earth could have so many hues and wondrous shades of brown, gray, green, ochre, and purple; they separated each into fantastic tintings, as though earth's beauties were not for those who dwelt upon it. The long army transport that we had passed on the road, was just a gray worm, crawling along in its brown dirt. And over there by the village, in that field where the thin bluish smoke wraiths were crawling, must be the field kitchens ... and that multitude of specks, a regiment off duty, back from the trenches, waiting to be fed.

A gust felt cold on my cheek. The machine was turning. Now faintly, almost lost in the roaring of our motor, I imagined I heard once more that other sound, the grumbling of the guns, and now I thought of it as the hungry growls of some monster, already sated with the puny living things in that other world beneath us, but which ever grumbled for more. And then suddenly I saw a white cloud appear in the gray sky, and then the white cloud was gone and there came a second, a third, a fourth white cloud, then no more for a minute it seemed, and then four more again. And you knew that over there the enemy's shrapnel was bursting. Fascinated, I watched the pure ringing, billowing beauty of the smoke, celestial, white roses that bloomed out of nothing, dropped death from their petals, and died themselves in the gray sepulcher of sky. We banked away; we saw the white clouds no more.

I was conjecturing in a feverish sort of way how far we had been from the trenches and if that shrapnel line had been bursting over them, or if the enemy, spotting a base of some kind, had begun to shell it, when growing out of the air there approached a sound. Scarcely audible at first, like the faint whining of the wind, gathering its frenzy, now whistling, screaming, shrieking, I heard somewhere near in the void, the song of a shell. And when writing on the observer's table, I was trying to jot down how it felt, I heard another, nearer it seemed, and the pencil fell from my fingers, rolling down until it stopped by the ledge while I sat staring at it and trying not to think what might have occurred had we been a few seconds faster or the shell a few seconds slower. And then I felt myself slide forward in the seat and I knew that the machine was diving down. There was no danger, I felt; of course the aviator was all right, No shrapnel had burst near us but then, we might have been within rifle range. No! Absurd! Yet I quickly glanced over my shoulder and felt centuries younger when I saw the smile on Hals' solemn face. And then, as unexpectedly as it had begun, the downward bolt ceased. Hals was rattling the celluloid screen. It dawned on me that he wanted to tell me something. I leaned back and he leaned forward. I could hear him but faintly although he shouted. "Those shells were on the same elevation as we, or we could not have heard them. So I dove." And there they were screaming their death song overhead now, although I could no longer hear them.

We flew towards a yellow château and then once more began to climb. Of course we were out of the path of the shells, but Hals had not then known that we were in the line of howitzers. The minutes passed, and slowly I admitted that the danger was over. A stinging pain, moreover, was settling above my eyes, and what I might have put down to the quick breathing of excitement, I realized now to be the gasping of the lungs in a rarified atmosphere. High indeed we were climbing, for the earth seemed to shrink and its many colors to blend themselves in a vague tinting suffusion of purple and gold, the veil of a dream.

Heaven only knows what the officers must think who sit in the observing compartment as did I, though they know that this upward climb has a purpose, a purpose of war, as I was soon to see. More faint, then befogged, became the diaphanously veiled earth. Clouds interspersed, graying the vision, clouds and a drifting, wet mist that settled in beads on the glass of my goggles so that I was continually rubbing away with my gloved fingers. We were hidden now, from the earth, and the earth from us. Marching gray gloom all around, ghostly wet wisps that straggled past, caressing one's face. In that Nomad's void, in which even the voice of the engine seemed hesitant and more subdued, I began to feel as if I was making some awful intrusion—into what I did not know, but one felt the guilt of an appalling, defying presumption.

And then I realized that we had been slowly descending through the clouds, for suddenly to the left I saw a patch of the purplish dream veil, and in a moment we were gliding down through the clouds and running just beneath them. Hals was shouting and pointing down. And I saw the battlefield.

At first you thought of a cotton field, of white blown buds and then, as your vision shook off the spell of the bursting shells, you discerned down there a purplish, grayish patch of the earth, of which you were no longer a part, so remote, that only by peering down between your knees into the graflex-like observing glass set in the bottom of the car, could you distinguish even vaguely a single object in that colorous haze of distance. And then gradually there took shape in the glass, as in a crystal ball, accented lines and dabs of color, and there grew before you the black, zigzagging scars of the trenches—although you knew them to be brown with wet clay—and behind them more black lines, only straighter—and you guessed those to be reserve pits—and behind them, approaching at right angles, more black lines, only fewer and further apart—and these you judged the approach trenches. As you stared with the glass your eye never ranged the whole battle line, always the white puffing smoke obscured the view in tiny, white, swift-dispelling clouds, that rose from the area between the zigzagging lines. You wondered which were the French and which were the German trenches. Now a white spot suddenly appeared, exactly upon one of the black lines, and in fancy you heard the explosion of a shell and the groans of men, and you wondered if observers had seen officers coming up and if that shell had been particularly well aimed. A patch of earth, purplish gray in that hastening dusk, and illimitable lines of black stretching away, puffing white smoke quickly coming, quickly going; that was the battlefield as I saw it below the clouds.

Possibly my eyes were accustoming themselves to the great height, for in the glass between my feet objects were becoming clearer. From the thinnest thread the black lines had thickened perceptibly and now as it grew darker, I began to see innumerable, tiny, yellow-red tongues that had a way of darting out from the black lines and as suddenly withdrawing, and I began to think I heard a faint sound like the broken rolling of a drum, and somewhere very far off some one seemed to be beating a bass drum with less frequent but perfectly timed strokes, and there came up to me the booming of the battle—or did I imagine it? Observers tell me it is next to impossible to hear.

Even clearer became the battlefield, clearer though it was ever darkening, and it dawned upon me that we were descending; approaching that patch of black-lined land where the pygmies played with death. It was with a weird trembling fascination that you saw the picture in the glass become more and more distinct. It looked like a relief map now, with objects coming out of the purplish gray haze, and you wondered at the geometrical precision of it all. By staring steadily at the black scarred lines you slowly discerned another color and there at intervals, which gave that same impression of mathematical exactness, you made out darker colored dots. "The soldiers!" Involuntarily the words escaped me. And then the black lines seemed to march across the glass and were gone and you saw now only the parallels of the approach trenches, one at one extreme of the lines, the other but half visible on the outer edge.

You knew then that you were flying away from the battle firing line, but even as you looked, what seemed to be a row of broken boxes, moved across the glass, hesitated and paused there as the aeroplane hovered above them; and in that moment a yellowish box which seemed to stand apart from the others, and which you guessed to be the great house of the village, was blotted out by the spewing gray white smoke of a grenat and when the glass cleared you saw that the yellow box had changed to a jagged shape, red with flames. Fascinated, you watched the burning house, and then you realized that the celluloid shield behind you was rattling from violent rapping. Hals was shouting something; finally I guessed what it was—"Want to go down?" I shook my head no. As he bent to the levers, I think he chuckled.

I wondered if what immediately followed had anything to do with that mirth. My muscles were cramped from bending over the glass. I tried now the naked eye, but the gray dusk was blackening and the fringe of flame on the trenches becoming redder and more vivid. But this flame, which should have been even more lurid, began to grow dim and to wane away, like a thousand guttering candles, and I knew then that we were climbing once more; why, only the man behind me knew.

The flickering trenches slid by and away; below us the earth had become calm, luminous blue, pricked here and there with yellow pin points of light; but still I thought I heard that measured, muffled beating as of a great drum, only presently it became harsher as though the drummer was wielding his stick with sudden fury, an insanely growing fury; and you felt a wind on your face, then it was gone, and you felt it again, for the aeroplane had begun to swing round in a slow circle, a nightbird you thought, seeking something below. And then again came the roars, two, one almost upon the other; they seemed ahead on our right somewhere; and again I felt the wind on my cheek, but not again; we were flying straight now.

By this time I thought I knew what Hals had planned. Those pausing, slow, swinging circles had been made in order to get the exact source of the sound, and now Hals was flying towards it—his object the location of one of the enemy's batteries, a new battery, I judged as yet unknown to the Germans, possibly the one that had dropped the shell on the yellow house. Now, had Hals known that the shell was from a battery just getting into action? Because they are men of air as well as of earth, have these soldier-fliers strange powers?

I noticed that the tiny lights from what must be a farmhouse down there, had a way of increasing and as suddenly decreasing from two to four to two; and always the vanishing lights would be patches, not pinpricks, more vivid, too, as though they were not shone through glass, but came from doors that opened into illuminated rooms. And I was wondering why these doors always kept opening and closing. The place must be a brigade headquarters or something equally important. That was it! Soldiers were constantly coming and going. And as regularly appearing, these patches of light grew more lurid, and the guns raged on, I thought with a smile that the firing might well be the slamming of those farmhouse doors, for just then the two had perfectly synchronized—the sudden flaring lights, the faint sound of guns. And then it happened again, one upon the other, and I must have risen to my feet for it dawned upon me—There's the battery over there! Those lights that I thought were part of the farmhouse! Our motor seemed to thunder unnaturally loud then, again they flashed down there, again the faint boom tore up to us. "Kollosal!" Hals had spotted the French guns.

Of the race back through the night, I have only the most feverish recollections. I knew we were flying faster than ever before, for the fuselage was throbbing madly and you had a feeling that to escape an awful strain put upon it, the engine was trying to tear itself loose. And then you thought of the need for this speed. Had I been careless with the electric torch? Had we been seen? Might not even now the enemy be after us? Perhaps a telephone call from the battery down to the trenches where the muzzle of an aeroplane gun was tilted to the sky. Or had they telephoned their own aeroplanes to put up after us? Why the speed that Hals evidently deemed necessary?

You knew, too, that somewhere down there, shells from the German batteries were whining towards the enemy's positions. You knew, too, that to reach the earth, you would have to bolt down through this battle-filled sky. The chances were one in five thousand that we would be in the line of our own shell fire. You did not like to think of that one chance. The machine had ceased to shake. I imagined that Hals was looking down on all sides. The wind, certain signal of a turn, struck my cheek. The slow swinging circles began as before. And then, just upon sighting the French battery, Hals suddenly drove the machine forward. Off to the left, what had seemed an unnaturally bright point of light grew incredibly fast into a circle of light and beside it a smaller circle, and their circumferences seemed to be restlessly moving, intersecting here and there with exasperating frequency, although gradually becoming steadier and finally becoming almost concentric, intersecting not at all, the smaller though seeming to have moved in front of the larger, shifting from side to side, although never touching the outer fiery rim. And suddenly I remembered the two circular frameworks, fitted with the electric bulbs, in the field by the shrapnel-scarred willows and I recalled the explanation of them, that they were guide posts for an aviator at night, and that once he had them concentric, he knew that he was flying true to his landing field.

So we were almost home now—home!—the thought made you grimace—miles away! And in a moment now we must drop, begin that bolt down through that zone, through which the shells of our own batteries were flying. And I heard that most disconcerting of all sounds that you hear in the air, the shutting off of the motor—an instant, and as we slid forward, I felt for the brass handles to brace myself, and no longer sped round by the motor's power, the propeller blades became as the strings of a monstrous harp through which the rushing wind wailed a weird song; and we bolted down.... If a shell passed I did not hear it. Gaining in violence, the wind shrieked through the slowly spinning blades, shrieked as though the very air had gone mad; and just when you had begun to doubt that it was beyond human skill to bring an aeroplane to earth through the night like this, you felt a sudden forward horizontal glide, and the next moment the rubber tired wheels were bouncing over the hardened field, and the shadowy forms of soldiers seemed to spring out of the earth, laying hold of the wings as though to make it captive, and the concentric lights were gleaming just in front; and a voice you knew to be Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann's was calling, with a trace of relief, you thought: "Well, how was it?"

Laboriously climbing down from the fuselage, I looked for the aviator, Hals.

"He ran off to telephone," a soldier said.

"The French battery," I said aloud.

As we motored back to Lille, I heard a German howitzer open fire.