Читать книгу The History of the World War I - Various Authors - Страница 19

Table of Contents

The Yser the Belgian's last ditch.

A little piece of the Low Countries, so small I walked across it in two hours, was all that remained of Belgium in the last days of October. A tide-water stream, the Yser, ebbed and flowed through the sunken fields, and there King Albert with his remnant of an army stopped the German military machine in its advance on Calais. If he and his forty thousand men had been crushed back ten miles farther they would have been fighting on French soil. The Yser was the last ditch in Belgium.

The Belgians were able to hold that mere strip of land against more men and better artillery because they had determined to die there. Some of those who had not yet paid the price of death told me. They were not tragic about it. There was no display of heroics. They said it seriously, but they smiled a little, too, over their wine glasses, and the next morning they were back in the firing-line.

I counted on my American passport and my permit de sejour in Paris seeing me through the zone of the fighting, and they did. At the station at Dunkirk, when I admitted I had no laisser passer, an obliging gendarme led me to his commander, and he placed his visée on my passport without question. He asked me whether I was a correspondent, and I confessed to it, but it seemed only to facilitate the affair. Earlier experiences had made me feel that the French gendarmes were my natural enemies, but I have had a kindlier regard for them since.

Troop trains.

The train I was on had ten cars full of French and Belgian soldiers. The Belgians had all been recently re-equipped. On other troop trains which passed us going forward there were many more Belgian soldiers, some of whom I had seen only a few hours earlier in the streets of Calais without rifles. As their trains passed now I could see them studying the mechanism and fondling their new firearms.

Coming in through the suburbs of Dunkirk we passed hundreds of children perched on the fences singing the Marseillaise. Nor were their voices flat and colorless like most school children's. They felt every word they sang, and they put their little hearts into it. Looking back along the side of the cars at the faces of soldiers leaning out, I could see they were touched by the faith of the children.

In Dunkirk.

As I rattled along on the cobbles of Dunkirk half an hour later I heard an explosion with a note unfamiliar to me. It sounded close, too, but it did not seem to bother the people of the street. A few children ran behind their mothers' skirts and a young girl hurried from the middle of the street to the protection of an archway, but that was all.

Standing up in the fiacre I could see a thin smoke about three hundred feet away in a garden in the direction from which the explosion came, and high in the evening sky I could barely make out an aeroplane. "A German bomb?" I asked the driver in some excitement.

"Oh, yes," he replied, cracking his whip, "we usually get three or four every afternoon about this time, but they have not hurt any one."

Dunkirk that night answered the description of what a threatened town which was not afraid should look like. It had none of the depressing atmosphere of Calais. All the refugees and the wounded were passed on to a safer place. It was full of French, English, and Belgian soldiers, with a scattering of sailors and breezy officers from both the French and English navies. They kept the waiters in the cafés on the run, and there was only an occasional bandage showing from under a cap or around a hand to indicate these men were engaged in any more serious business than a manœuvre.

Armored motor-car.

In the street, however, in front of the statue of Jean Bart, an armored Belgian motor-car was standing. It was built with a turret where the tonneau usually is and it was covered with thick sheet steel right down to the ground. Just in front of the driver was a slit with a lip extending over it, giving it somewhat the effect of the casque belonging to an ancient suit of armor. That was the only opening except the one for the barrel of the rapid-fire gun in the turret. The armor was dented in a dozen places where bullets had glanced off, but it had only been penetrated at one spot, about six inches from the muzzle of the gun. From the soldier at the steering gear I learned that that bullet had passed over the shoulder of the man in the turret.

Bombardment of Nieuport.

Twenty-four hours later, at Nieuport, when the German shells seemed to be falling in every street and on every house, I saw this car again, going forward at not less than forty miles an hour. The turret was being swung to bring the gun-muzzle forward, as if the gunner were expecting to go into action almost immediately. As the last of the Belgian trenches were just the other side of the town, I have no doubt that he did.

A walk to the firing line.

Getting out of Dunkirk was rather more of a problem than going in. To obtain permission to ride toward the Belgian line in any kind of conveyance was an elaborate performance, and quite properly so, as I soon learned. There were preparations for defence going on there which should not have been publicly known. The country was full of spies. Four suspects had been picked up on the boat coming from Folkestone. If I had realized what I was to see in the next few miles I would not have attempted what I did. But, as I was anxious to get on and the firing-line was only twenty miles away, I decided to walk.

A French hat and a French suit of clothes, I think, were alone responsible for my success in passing through the city gate. Two military automobiles were stopped and forced to show their credentials, but I strolled through unmolested. Once outside, the reservists guarding the various barricades let me pass as soon as I showed them my passport viséd in Dunkirk. I was stopped many times, too, trying each time not to give an appearance of too great interest in the works of defence being built all around me.

Sand-dune barricades.

Even though this cannot be published for some time I do not feel free to tell what these defences were. I have no doubt there are complete descriptions of these works in the hands of the German army, their spy system is so thorough, but I would not care to have any military secrets escape through anything I write. I think I can go so far as to say, though, that I received a liberal education in how to barricade sand-dunes and low-lying fields.

Ten miles out of Dunkirk I was surprised to see a civilian on a bicycle, as civilians were no longer permitted to go near the theatre of war on bicycles, a precaution taken against spies. As he approached I recognized Mr. J. Obels, the Belgian correspondent of the Chicago Daily News, whom I had last seen under arrest near Brussels when the German army first passed through Belgium. He told me he had been kept in prison seventeen days by the German military governor of Brussels, but, once released, was given every possible kind of pass. I was relieved to see him alive and free.

As Obels left me to continue his journey to Dunkirk and on to London to deliver his own "copy," he advised me to go directly to Furnes, the most considerable town in what was left of Belgium, and have my passport viséd again. So I continued down the long, flat highway, bordered on both sides by sunken fields, toward the cannonading I could now hear ahead. The road had been fairly full of automobiles, motor-trucks, motorcycles, and bicycles over its whole length, but it became crowded now with the addition of a long string of Parisian motor-buses taking several infantry regiments forward. A whole artillery division of yellow French "Schneiders" also took up its share of the wide road, and at the barricades there were traffic blockades lasting at times for ten minutes.

The road to Furnes.

All the way from Dunkirk I had been struck by the character of the land. As I approached Furnes, the dykes were being opened and half the fields were already inundated. It seemed a poor country for military operations. There were at most three highways, all defended. They could only be taken at a price no army could afford, and any departure from them meant being mired in the heavy fields, now being hastily harvested of a bumper crop of sugar-beets: at one place a whole French regiment in uniform was gathering the beets preparatory to inundation. With the dykes open these fields would be covered with four feet of water half the time. The only possible course for an army was over the sand-dunes, which lay a mile to the north, looking like the imitation mountains you see in the scenic-railways at every amusement resort in the United States.

Tommies' battles on the sand-dunes.

A reservist with whom I walked a mile or so told me Dunkirk had never been successfully attacked except over those sand-dunes, and the English and French had fought some of the bloodiest battles of history there against the Spanish, when they held Dunkirk. I doubt, though, that they were as bloody as the battle I was to see within a few hours.

Belgian soldiers.

The old Flemish town of Furnes had much less military precision about it than Dunkirk. It was on the very edge of the battle, and an occasional shell was dropping in the town. One exploded as I crossed the bridge and entered a narrow street, but it was on the far side of town, too far away for the soldiers halted in the street to notice. These were tired and dirty men, but not too tired to be courteous. They were also passing jokes among themselves, and laughing. By that, even if I had not known their uniforms, I could have told they were Belgians.

The enemy held at the Yser.

Every street and every courtyard in Furnes was full of Belgian soldiers. They were resting for the day, waiting to go forward at night-fall to relieve the men on the firing line only five miles away. Even above the noises of the street I could hear the answer of their small field artillery to the heavy assault of the German guns. Nothing I heard the soldiers say, however, would have given the idea that the Belgians considered themselves outclassed by their enemy. They seemed superbly unconscious of the absurdity of their position. This was the tenth day they had held the Germans at the Yser, and they had done it with rifles and machine guns, taking punishment every minute from the big fieldpieces the Germans had brought against them. So far they had lost twelve thousand men at that ditch, but the thought of giving it up had evidently not even occurred to them. They could not give it up, one of them explained to me later, it was all they had left. There was a little irritation in his tone, too, as he said it, such as one might feel toward a child who was slow at grasping a simple fact.

Military automobiles and wagons.

The town square was full of military automobiles and a few provision wagons. I did not see any fieldpieces or machine guns. Every last one was right up on the firing-line. My feet were tired from walking over the Belgian blocks, and I held tenaciously to the sidewalk passing around the square, though it was mostly taken up with café tables and bay trees in boxes. At one point the tables were empty and a single sentry was sauntering up and down. I stopped to ask him the way to the gendarmerie, and, in the middle of giving me the directions, he came to attention, as a door opened behind me, and saluted.

Two Belgian generals.

Two men came out of the door, one rather tall, with an easy manner, and smartly dressed as a general in the Belgian army. The other was older, also a general, wearing, if anything, the more gold braid of the two. They entered a waiting automobile and drove off as casually as two men at home might leave their office for their club.

Something about the first of the two men impressed me as familiar. I had only seen his back, but that had arrested my attention. I thought possibly I had seen him at the beginning of the war in Brussels, so I asked the sentry his name.

King Albert.

"That is our king, Albert," he said quite simply.

During the next couple of days I saw the King of Belgium a number of times. He spent his nights at a small villa on the seashore at La Panne, a hundred yards possibly beyond the hotel where I spent mine. He passed through the streets as unnoticed as any one of the other Belgians who had retreated from Antwerp and Ghent ahead of the army, but preferred the chilly nights in an unheated seaside hotel in Belgium to comfort somewhere beyond. It seemed to be a point of courtesy on the part of the Belgians not to bother their king with ceremony at this trying time. I doubt if he cares much for ceremony, anyhow. Searching around for a single adjective to describe him, I should call him off-handed. His manner, even then, while alert, was casual. It is easy to see why the Belgians love him. If kings had always been as simple and direct as Albert, I am inclined to think democracy would have languished.

Luncheon at La Panne.

At La Panne, which I reached at noon on a little steam railway running from Furnes, I had luncheon with several Belgian soldiers and a Belgian in civilian clothes, who told me I would see all the fighting I was looking for at Nieuport, just beyond. The civilian, a tall youth with a blond beard, volunteered to show me the way to the beach, the shortest route, and ended by going all the way. He told me he was recovering from an "attack of Congo," which I take to be an intermittent fever. He had just been mustered out of the civic guard and was waiting for a uniform to join the army. He had the afternoon free and his Belgian sense of hospitality impelled him to see that the stranger was properly looked after.

For several miles along the wide, flat beach, which stretches unobstructed as far as Ostend, except for the piers at Nieuport-les-Bains and Westende, there were Belgian soldiers bathing in the shallow water. Some of them, cavalrymen, were riding naked into the deeper water, and this, mind you, was late October. They were even playing jokes on one another, and did not seem to be paying any attention to the fifteen English and French cruisers and gunboats which were standing off the shore almost opposite them, keeping up a steady stream of fire obliquely along the beach at the sand dunes just beyond the pier at Nieuport-les-Bains. In these dunes, five miles away, big German guns were hidden.

Fishermen unconcerned.

Farther on, and even right up to the pier at Nieuport, we passed, along the beach behind the shrimp fishermen, who seemed even less interested in the novel fight on land and sea. The barelegged men and women were as industriously taking advantage of the low-tide as if nothing at all were happening. The French and English warships were directly opposite them, and, by this time, they were drawing the German fire. German shells, probably from siege guns, were plumping down into the water all around them only a couple of miles off-shore, but, though the shrimpers looked up occasionally when the explosion of a shell fairly shook the face of the ocean, their attention would be directed again to their work before the column of water raised by the shell had had time to fall again. The shelling kept up about an hour, but none of the warships was struck. They kept moving at full-speed in an uneven line, making it impossible to get their range.

A panorama of battle.

Germans try to cross the Yser.

Just before we reached the pier heavy cannonading began inland. We climbed the sand dunes and there we came suddenly upon a perfect panoramic view of the battle all the way from the dunes across the inundated fields to Dixmude in the distance. The whole line of battle for ten miles was in the midst of a German attack, covered by a terrific artillery fire. Over the white, red-tiled cottages of the fishermen, almost lost among the lesser sand dunes, we could make out the Belgian line by the fire of their rifle and machine guns. At two points we could see the Yser Canal and at one of these the Germans were trying to throw across a pontoon bridge.

We could see it only through the smoke of breaking shells, but it was the most exciting event I have ever witnessed. At three miles or more, though, the figures of the men were so small, it was hard to keep the fact in mind that those who dropped were not merely stooping, but had been shot. Eager to get closer, we ran over the sand dunes, but never got another view of it.

Running to see a battle.

My Belgian friend knew his way and we trotted along a raised path among the fields toward Nieuport. It was under fire, but it seemed worth the risk to get close enough so we could see the pontoons being rushed into the water. As we neared Nieuport, however, the firing became much more active and we stopped for second thought. After catching our breath, we decided to pass through the edge of Nieuport and to go on to the village of Ramscapelle to the south of it. Few shells seemed to be breaking there.

Almost under fire.

Along the cross road we took, alternately running and walking. The Belgian trenches were perhaps a half mile beyond us, and we could make out the tap-tap of the rifle fire which had been only a continuous cracking a mile in the rear. Into this the machine guns cut with a whir. Spent bullets dropped here and there in the inundated field to the west of us, but the German shell fire must have been right in the trenches.

Somewhere before we reached Ramscapelle we crossed a road with military automobiles going both ways, but my desire to get behind the sheltering buildings of Ramscapelle was too strong at the moment to take it in.

Fires and explosions in Ramscapelle.

About a hundred yards from the village there was a house on the edge of a canal, and we stopped behind it, safe from bullet-fire, to catch our breath again. It was as far as we were destined to get. All at once shells began dropping on the village, and I have not seen shells drop so fast in so small an area. In the first minute there must have been twenty. Three fires broke out almost at once. Between the explosions we could hear the falling tiles.

The short October day grew unexpectedly dusk and the fires in the village reflected in the water on the fields. After the bombarding had been going on without the least let-up for fully fifteen minutes, a bent old woman, a man perhaps older but less bent, and a younger woman appeared on the road to Furnes just beyond us, hurrying along without once looking back. They were the only people we saw and the destruction of the town looked like the most ruthless piece of vandalism. It had a military purpose, however. The Germans were concentrating an attack on it with the hope of reaching Furnes. They occupied it that night, but were later driven out again. I have learned since some of the villagers remained through that bombardment, and were killed in their houses.

Destruction of Ramscapelle.

While we stood sheltered by the house on the canal, speculating as to which one of the houses still standing in Ramscapelle would be hit next, the light from those on fire reflected on the dark, brackish water of the canal, which was running in with the tide. Presently we noticed something in the water, and, stooping down in the twilight, we made out the body of a man face downward. The color of the coat and the little short skirt to it showed it was the body of a German soldier. It passed on and was followed by three more before we left. They had been in the water several days.

The fire from the trenches died down at dusk and we made our way back along the empty crossroad. Half way back to the dunes we passed a Red Cross motor ambulance, headed toward Ramscapelle. On the seat beside the driver was a young English woman. She was wearing the gray-brown coat and gray-brown puttees of the English soldier. We called out to her we thought the town was empty, but the only answer we got from the speeding ambulance was an assuring wave of the young woman's hand, which was evidently meant to inform us she knew where she was going.

Ambulances and infantry pass.

On the main road from Nieuport to Furnes, which we followed a short distance, there were dozens of ambulances going to the rear and a long column of infantry going forward. Headed toward the rear there were also many wounded men on foot. They had been dressed at Nieuport, but there were not enough ambulances to take them all away. One who was walking slowly and painfully told me he had a bullet in his back.

During the afternoon the Schneiders I had seen had evidently been placed among the sand dunes, and they were now bombarding the German lines over our heads. Crossing over the sand dunes to the beach, we passed under two batteries, though we did not see them. We could tell they were French, though, by the rapidity of the fire. The French seem to be able to fire their guns several times as fast as the Germans or the English.

A cluster of houses belonging to shrimp fishermen was right under these batteries, where they were sure to get some of the return fire. But we noticed there were lights in every one of the cottages. Inside were the same fishermen who were so apathetic about the fight off-shore.

Battle of the sand dunes.

Red flashing of the contact shells.

The view from the sand dunes was what the war artists on English illustrated weeklies try so hard to show. The French batteries were using shrapnel on the German trenches, the shrapnel leaving puffs of white smoke in long, uneven lines; and the Germans were keeping up their steady pounding of contact shells, with a short red flash after each explosion. The firing of the guns on both sides gave the effect of continuous summer lightning.

Into the panorama the fleet off-shore kept up a new attack on the German batteries in the sand dunes just beyond Nieuport-les-Bains. As it was dark now we could see where they were only by the streaks of fire from their guns. These flashes came and went like the strokes of a dagger, as if they were stabbing the dark.

French soldiers.

We went back along the beach to avoid being questioned, turning around constantly to watch the fleet. At Coxyde a whole company of French soldiers was standing along the edge of the water, jumping back in surprise when the little waves advanced on them. They told us they were from the centre of France and had never seen salt water before.

The shore there is lined with new villas made of light colored bricks. One of these had been dynamited, because it belonged to a German and was suspected of having a concrete floor for siege guns. I had heard of cases of this kind before, but I had never had an opportunity to examine one.

Concrete foundations.

My private thought was that the villa had probably been built by a German with a passion for solidity, but, examining it under a half-full moon, I could see the foundations were brick walls two feet thick covered with mosaic backed by reinforced concrete about a foot thick. It seemed like something more than Teutonic thoroughness.

A little later in La Panne I was shown a concrete tennis court belonging to a German which had been punched full of holes. It was in no place thick enough, however, to give cause for suspicion that its real purpose was in any way sinister.

By the time we regained La Panne I was hardly able to walk as I had been going hard all day, a good deal of the way through soft sand. But even if I had been much more tired I would have sensed the atmosphere of that town. To me the little seaside village, built for summer gayety, had more of the romance of war in it than any place I have seen.

The half dozen summer hotels and all the villas were filled with the mothers, wives, and children of the Belgian soldiers whose firing line I had just left. Their homes had been in Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent. Now they were in the last little town in Belgium. To some their soldiers had already returned, and they were dining as merrily as if to-morrow did not hold out a reasonable likelihood of being killed. At the doors of the hotels and on the street were many others waiting, and, as the street had filled up with another French artillery division bivouacked for a few hours, they could not see their men folk until they were close at hand.

Refugees at La Panne.

Now and then as we passed we could hear little gasps of happiness. For some, of course, there were disappointment and bad news. But they must have carried their sorrow to their chambers, as La Panne was all gayety.

A comment on the Belgian soldiers made at the beginning of the war occurred to me: "They shoot the enemy all day; at night they come home and kiss mother. In the morning they kiss mother again and go back to shoot some more."

They certainly showed themselves capable of shaking off the horrors of war before their women folk. To see them there in La Panne that night you might have thought it was all a sham battle if it had not been for a conviction of reality that would not shake off.

It was nearly ten o'clock, now but Belgian soldiers relieved from the firing line and off duty for the night were still coming into La Panne. In the Hotel Des Arcades, which incidentally, has no arcades, the bar and the dining room were full of soldiers. Officers and their men were eating and drinking together in the pleasant democratic way they have in the Belgian army. Room was made for us at the long central table in the dining room, and all at the table were solicitous to see that we were at once given plenty to eat and drink. Several of the fifteen men at the table had hands or heads bandaged, but that did not seem to detract from their gayety.

Spirit of the Belgian soldiers.

A joke was being told as we sat down, and every one was taking a lively interest in it, the narrator was a bearded man of fifty, and he was telling to the delight of the others how his son had once got the better of him in Brussels before the war. There were other stories of matters equally foreign to war. The private on one side of me told me he was the manager for Belgium of an American typewriter. The lieutenant on the other side was in ordinary times an insurance agent. All the men there were in business and talked and acted like a company of young American business men.

My first hint that these men had been through any trying experience was the apology offered by a new-comer for being late. He entered rather gravely and said something about having to take the word to his sister of his brother-in-law's death. The whole company turned grave then and conversation from being general was carried on for a few minutes between those near together. I asked the typewriter agent, to fill an awkward pause, whether they had seen much action, and he told me their story.

The fight on the road to Nieuport.

This was a crack mitrailleuse company of Brussels. It had been in the fight from Liège back to Malines and from Antwerp back to Dixmude and Nieuport. Three days before it was told to hold a road into Nieuport. It was a road the Germans must take, if they were to advance, but the Belgians would not give way. They were too clever with their rapid-fire guns to be rushed, and the German bayonet charges only blocked the road with their dead. Again and again the gray line came on, but each time it crumpled before their fire. They were attacked every hour of the day or night, but they were always ready. Finally the Germans got their range and dropped shell after shell right among them.

"They blew us all to pieces," the story went on in a low tone at my elbow. "Those shells don't leave many wounded, but they littered the place with arms and legs. They got a good many of us, but they did not seem to be able to get our guns."

I asked what their loss had been, and he looked around the table, counting, before he answered.

"Let's see, now," he said. "We lost some at Dixmude first. I think there were just seventy last Monday." This was Thursday. "We had a pretty bad time," he ended; looking down.

"How many are there now?" I asked, and he answered with a sweep of his hand around the table. "Five or six more," he said. There were eighteen of them at table now. That meant twenty-three or twenty-four—out of seventy.

"The dogs suffered, too," he added. "We've only got eight out of twenty, and I just heard the dogs around here have already been pressed into service."

Courtesy of the machine gunners.

When I went to bed four of the members of that shattered mitrailleuse company climbed three flights of stairs to see that I had a comfortable room. And these men had just come out of a trench where they had lost more than two thirds their number in three days stopping one of the main lines of the German advance.

Back to the lines.

In the twilight of early morning, when the cannonading had at last died down, I heard the movement of troops in the street and saw my friends of the night before falling into line and getting their equipment straight. By the time I reach the sidewalk they were moving off, some of the men helping the dogs with the mitrailleuse.

"Big fight last night," said the typewriter agent smiling. "Company that relieved us got it hard. We must hurry back."

They were all very alert and soldierlike in the chill of the morning, but they were a pitifully small company as they passed up the road and were lost in the sand dunes.

In August and September, while on the western front were being fought the great initial struggles of the Great War, Turkey, long under German political influence, was making ready to cast her lot with the Teutonic Powers. Germany had already made diplomatic and military moves which indicated that she was certain of a Turkish alliance. The strongest figures of the Ottoman Empire, Enver Pasha and Talaat Bey were strongly pro-German, although the latter endeavored for a time to conceal his real sentiments and intentions under a cloak of pretended neutrality. The causes which induced Turkey to side with the Central Powers rather than with the Allies are explained in the narrative which follows.