The Project Gutenberg eBook, True Stories of the Great War, Volume V (of 6), by Various, Edited by Francis Trevelyan Miller

TRUE STORIES OF THE GREAT WAR

TRUE STORIES
OF THE
GREAT WAR

TALES OF ADVENTURE—HEROIC DEEDS—EXPLOITS
TOLD BY THE SOLDIERS, OFFICERS, NURSES,
DIPLOMATS, EYE WITNESSES
Collected in Six Volumes
From Official and Authoritative Sources
(See Introductory to Volume I)
VOLUME V
Editor-in-Chief
FRANCIS TREVELYAN MILLER (Litt. D., LL.D.)
Editor of The Search-Light Library
1917
REVIEW OF REVIEWS COMPANY
NEW YORK

Copyright, 1917, by
REVIEW OF REVIEWS COMPANY

CONTENTS

This group of stories for VOLUME V has been selected by the Board of Editors according to the plan outlined in "Introductory" to Volume I. It includes episodes from thirty-one story-tellers—tales of Dragoons, Marines, Bishops, Foreign Legion, Fleet Surgeon, Scouts, Exiles, Soldiers, Spies and Eye-Witnesses. The selections have been made from the most authoritative sources in Europe and America. Full credit is given in every instance to the original source.

VOLUME V—THIRTY-ONE STORY-TELLERS—142 EPISODES

© International Film Service.

THE BALLOON CORPS EXPERIENCE THE SENSATIONS OF THE POLAR EXPLORER

DROPPING A BOMB FROM A DIRIGIBLE

It is Pleasanter to See This in a Volume Than Overhead!

A FEW MINUTES BEFORE THIS WAS A GERMAN BATTLE PLANE

But the Aircraft Guns Got His Range. The Insert Shows a Naval Plane

© International Film Service.

SOMEONE IS ALWAYS WATCHING IN THE FIRST LINE TRENCH

A British Trench at Orvillieres

TALES OF THE DARING RIDES OF A FRENCH TROOPER

With the Twenty-second Regiment of Dragoons

Told by Lieut. Christian Mallet, of the Dragoons

This famous 22nd regiment of Dragoons was raised in 1635 and took part in all the great wars in which the French were engaged before the Revolution. It fought under the Republic and then with Napoleon's armies—at Austerlitz (1805); Jena (1806); Eylau (1807); Oporto (1809). It saw service with the Army of the Sambre and Meuse, the Army of the Rhine, the Grande-Armee, in the War in Spain, the Campaign in Saxony, the Campaign in France (1814). The regiment was disbanded in 1815 at the close of the Napoleonic Wars and was not raised again until 1873. The first great charge of the 22nd Dragoons in the Great War occurred on the night of September 10-11, 1914. It has since been fighting heroically "For France and Civilization." Lieut. Mallet has fought his way up in the ranks with the Dragoons. He presents the unconquerable spirit of France in his book: "Impressions and Experiences of a French Trooper." It is dedicated: "To my Captain, Count J. de Tarragon, and to my two comrades, 2nd Lieut. Magrin and 2nd Lieut. Clère—who fell all three on the field of honour in defense of their country." One of his stories is recorded herewith by permission of his publishers, E. P. Dutton and Company: Copyright 1916.

[1] I—STORY OF PEASANT GIRL ON THE YSER

The battle finished (September 10, 1914) the pursuit of the conquered army commenced and kept the whole world in suspense, with eyes fixed on this headlong flight towards the north, which lasted till the end of the month, and which was to be the prelude of the great battles of the Yser.

The region round Verberie was definitely cleared of Germans and was become once more French. The little town for some days presented an extraordinary spectacle.

We entered the town after having received the formal assurance of the 5th Chasseurs, who went farther on, that all the country was in our hands. Some divisional cyclists were seated at the roadside. We asked them for news of the 22nd, and their reply wrung our hearts. They knew nothing definite, but they had met a country cart full of our wounded comrades, who had told them that the regiment had been cut up.

No one could tell us where the divisional area was to be found. The division itself appeared to have been dismembered, lost and in part destroyed. We thought that we were the only survivors of a disaster, and, once the horses were in shelter in an empty abandoned farm stuffing themselves with hay, we wandered sadly through the streets destroyed by bombardment and by fire in search of such civilians as might have remained behind during the invasion.

A little outside the town we at last found a farm where two of the inhabitants had stayed on. The contrast between them was touching. One was a paralysed old man unable to leave his fields, the other was a young girl of fifteen, a frail little peasant, and rather ugly. Her strange green eyes contrasted with an admirable head of auburn hair, and she had heroically insisted on looking after her infirm grandfather, though all the rest of the family had emigrated towards the west. She had remained faithful to her duty in spite of the bombardment, the battle at their very door and the ill-treatment of the Bavarian soldiers who were billeted in the farm. Distressed, yet joyous, she prepared a hasty meal and busied herself in quest of food, for it was anything but easy to satiate eleven men dying of hunger when the Germans, who lay hands on everything, had only just left.

She wrung the neck of an emaciated fowl which had escaped massacre, and, by adding thereto some potatoes from the garden, she served us a breakfast, washed down with white wine, which made us stammer with joy, like children. One needs to have fasted for five days to have felt the cutting pains of hunger and of thirst in all their horror, to appreciate the happiness that one can experience in eating the wing of a scraggy fowl and in drinking a glass of execrable wine tasting like vinegar. She bustled about, and her pitying and motherly gestures touched our hearts. While we ate she told us the most astonishing story that ever was, a story acted, illustrated by gestures, which made the scenes live with remarkable vividness.

She told us how, faithful to her oath, she was alone when the Bavarians came knocking at her door, how she lived three days with them, a butt for their innumerable coarsenesses, sometimes brutally treated when the soldiers were sober, sometimes pursued by their gross assiduities when they were drunk; how one night she had to fly half naked through the rain, slipping out through the venthole of the cellar, to escape being violated by a group of madmen, not daring to go to bed again, sleeping fully dressed behind a small copse; how at last French chasseurs had put the Bavarians to flight and had in their turn installed themselves in the farm, and how among them she felt herself protected and respected.

She attached herself to her new companions, whom she looked after like a mother for three days. Then they went away, promising to return, and she was left alone.

But the next day at dawn, uneasy at the row that came from the town, she decided to go in search of news. She put on a shawl and slipped through the brushwood and thickets as far as the first houses. She was afraid of being seen, and made herself as small as possible, keeping close to the walls, crossing gardens and ruined houses. The terrible noise increased, and she went towards it. She wanted to see what was going on, and a fine virile courage sustained her. The shells fell near her; no matter, she had only a few more steps to go to turn the corner of a street. She arrived on the place as the battle was finishing.

Her fifteen chasseurs were there, fifteen corpses at the foot of the barricade. One of them, who still lived, raised himself on seeing her, and held out his arms towards her. Then, forgetting all danger, in a magnificent outburst of feminine pity, she braved the rain of fire and dashed to the centre of the place. She knelt by the young fellow, enveloped him in her shawl to warm him and rocked him in her arms till he closed his young eyes for ever, thankful for this feminine presence which had made his last sufferings less bitter.

While she remained kneeling on the pavement wet with blood, a last big calibre shell knocked over, almost at her feet, a big corner house, which in its fall buried the German and French corpses in one horrible heap. She fell in a faint on the stones, knocked over by the windage of the shell, which had so nearly done for her.

During the latter part of her discourse she straightened her thin figure to the full, her strange eyes sparkled, and she appeared to be possessed by some strong and mysterious spirit which made us tremble. She became big in her rustic simplicity—big, as the incarnation of grief and of pity, and of the peasant in her gave place to a living image of the war—an image singularly moving and singularly beautiful.

II—WITH THE WARRIORS FROM THE MARNE

From the next day Verberie became in some degree the rallying point for all soldiers who had lost touch with their units. Elements of all sorts of regiments, of all arms, of all races even, arrived on foot, on horseback, on bicycles, in country carts. There were dragoons, cuirassiers, chasseurs, artillerymen, Algerian Light Infantry and English. Bernous, khaki uniform, blue capes, rubbed shoulders with dolmans, black tunics and red trousers.

In this extraordinary crowd there were men from Morocco mounted on Arab horses and wearing turbans; there were "Joyeux" who wore the tarboosh, and ruddy English faces surmounted by flat caps. All the uniforms were covered with dirt and slashed and torn. Many of the men had bare feet, and some carried arms and some were without. It was the hazard of the colossal battle of the Marne, where several millions of men had been at grips, which had thrown them on this point. All were animated by the same desire for information, and particularly of the whereabouts of their respective regiments. From every direction flowed in convoys, waggons, artillery ammunition waggons, stragglers from every division and from every army corps. The mix-up and the confusion were indescribable. One heard shouting, swearing, neighing of horses, the horns of motor-cars, and the rumble of heavy waggons, which shook the houses.

Faces drawn with fatigue were black with dust and mud and framed in stubbly beards. Everyone was gesticulating, everyone was shouting and a bright autumn sun, following upon the storm, threw into prominence amongst the medley of clothing the luminous splashes of gaudy colours and imparted an Oriental effect to the crowd.

III—STORY OF THE PRIEST—AND TWO CHASSEURS

Having eaten, washed and rested, I walked the streets, drinking the morning air and taking deep breaths of the joie de vivre, of the strength and vitality mingled with the air. I looked on every side to see whether I could not find some acquaintance in the crowd, some stray trooper from my regiment.

So it was that the hazard of my walk brought me to a scene which moved me to tears and which rests graven so deeply on my memory that I can see its smallest detail with my eyes shut. The Gothic porch of the church, with its fine sculptures of the best period, was open, making in the brightness of the morning a pit of shade, at the foot of which some candles shone like stars. On the threshold of the porch, gaily lighted by the morning sun, a priest, whose fine virile face I can still recall, held in his hand the enamel pyx, and his surplice of lace of a dazzling whiteness contrasted with the muddy boots and spurs. One could guess that after having traversed some field of battle, consoling the wounded and the dying, he had dismounted to officiate in the open air under the morning sun.

Before him, on a humble country cart and lying on a bed of straw, were stretched the rigid bodies, fixed in death, of two chasseurs who had fallen nobly while defending the bridge over the river. All around, kneeling in the mud of the porch, a semicircle of bare-headed soldiers, overcome by gratitude and humility, were assembled to accomplish a last duty and pay their last respects to the two comrades who were lying before them and who were sleeping their last sleep in their bloodstained uniforms, and assisted at the supreme office. The priest finished the De profundis, and in a clear voice pronounced the sacred words "Revertitur in terram suam unde erat et spiritus redit ad Deum qui dedit illum." The officiant gave the holy-water sprinkler to the priest, who sprinkled the bodies and murmured "Requiescat in pace." "Amen," responded the kneeling crowd, and a great wave of religious feeling passed over the kneeling men, the greater part of whom gave way to overmastering emotion.

I can still see a big devil of an artilleryman, with his head between his hands, shaken by convulsive sobs. Having given the absolution, the priest raised the host sparkling in the sunlight for the last time and pronounced the sacramental words. I moved off, deeply affected by the grandeur of the scene.

IV—DEPRAVED SOLDIERS IN A DRAWING ROOM

By the 12th a good number of 22nd Dragoons and some officers of the regiment had rejoined at Verberie. We formed from this débris an almost complete squadron under the command of Captain de Salverte, who had succeeded in getting through the lines by skirting the forest.

I again found my officer, M. Chatelin, whom I had last seen in the little clearing near Gilocourt, surrounded by lurking enemies, and whom I had hardly dared hope to see again alive; also M. de Thézy, my comrade Clère and others.

We were all sorry to hear that Lieutenant Roy had fallen on the field of battle with several others, and that Major Jouillié had been taken prisoner. As for Captain de Tarragon, it was stated that he might have escaped on foot with his orderly and that he might be somewhere in the neighbourhood with a contingent of escaped men, but any precise information was wanting.

The night before I had slept in the drawing-room of the château belonging to M. de Maindreville, the mayor. Its appearance merits some brief description, so that those who are still in doubt as to the savagery of the Germans may learn to what degree of bestiality and ignominy they are capable of attaining.

This fine drawing-room was a veritable dung heap. The curtains were torn, the small billiard-table lay upside down in the middle of the room, a litter of rotting food covered the floor, the furniture was in matchwood, the chairs were broken, the easy-chairs had had their stuffing torn out of them and the glass of the cabinets was smashed. One could see that all small objects had been carried off and all others methodically broken. On the first floor the sight was heart-breaking. Fine linen, trimmed with lace, was soiled with excrement; excrement was everywhere, in the bath, on the sheets, on the floor. They had vomited on the beds and urinated against the walls; broken bottles had shed seas of red wine on the costly carpets. An unnamable liquid was running down the staircase, obscene designs were traced in charcoal on the wall-papers and filthy inscriptions ornamented the walls.

I have told enough to give an idea of the degrading traces left by a contemptible enemy. I have exaggerated nothing; if anything, I have understated the truth.

And this is the people that wants to be the arbiter of culture and of civilisation! May it stand for ever shamed and reduced to its true level, which is below that of the brute beast.

V—THE SEARCH FOR CAPTAIN DE TARRAGON

On the morning of the 12th, under the command of Captain de Salverte we crossed the Oise by a bridge of boats, the stone bridge having been destroyed by dynamite some days before. We went north to billet at Estrée-Saint Denis, which was to be the definite rallying point of the 22nd Dragoons. We were followed by several country carts, full of dismounted troopers, saddles, lances, cloaks and odds and ends of equipment.

Acting on very vague information, I set out on the 13th to look for Captain de Tarragon. I was mounted on a prehistoric motor bicycle, requisitioned from the village barber. I scoured the country seeking information from everyone I met. I received the most contradictory reports, made a thousand useless detours and was exasperated when overtaken by night without having found any trace of him.

I followed the road leading to Baron and to Nanteuil-le-Haudoin, along which but a few days before the corps of Landwehr, asked for by von Kluck, had marched with the object of enveloping our army, and along which it had just been precipitately hustled back. The sky was overcast and the day was threatening. At each step dead horses with swelled bellies threatened heaven with their stiff legs. A score of soldiers were lying in convulsed attitudes, their eyes wide open, with grimacing mouths twisted into a terrifying smile, and with hands clasping their rifles. Involuntarily I trembled at finding myself alone at nightfall in this deserted country, where no living being was to be seen, where not a sound was to be heard except the cawing of thousands of crows and the purr of my motor, which panted on the hills like an asthmatic old man, causing me the liveliest anxiety.

Fifteen hundred mètres from Baron, after a last gasp, my machine stopped for ever, and, as I was ignorant of its mechanics, I was compelled to leave it where it was and continue my journey on foot through the darkness.

The proprietor of the château of Baron put me up for the night. As at Verberie, everything had been burnt, soiled and destroyed. Nothing remained of the elegant furniture beyond a heap of shapeless objects. Next morning with the aid of a captain on the staff who requisitioned a trap for me, I got back to Verberie and found Captain de Tarragon there. He had slept at the farm of La Bonne Aventure, quite near to where I lay.

When he saw me, after the mortal anxieties through which he had lived, believing his squadron lost and cut up, he was overcome by such a feeling of gratitude and joy that I saw tears rise to his eyes while he shook me vigourously by the hand. He had already sent forward my name for mention in the order for the day with reference to the affair at Gilocourt and the death of poor Dangel. I was recommended for the military medal, and my heart swelled with pride and joy, while I was carried back to Estrée-Saint-Denis, stretched out in a country cart with a score of dismounted comrades.

A few days afterwards I was promoted corporal and proudly sported the red flannel chevrons bought at a country grocer's shop.

VI—TALES OF THE DRAGOONS

Once the half-regiment was reconstituted after a fashion, though many were missing (a detachment of fifty men without horses having returned to the depot), we were attached to the 3rd Cavalry Division, which happened to be in our neighbourhood, ours having left the area for some unknown destination. Until the 1st of October our lot was bound up with that of the 4th Cuirassiers, who marched with us.

On the 23rd of September, as supports for the artillery, we were present at violent infantry actions between Nesle and Billancourt. The 4th Corps attacked, and the furious struggle extended over the whole country. My troop was detached as flank guard and, in the thick morning fog, we knocked up against a handful of German cavalry, whom, in the distance, we had taken for our own men.

We charged them at a gallop, and we noticed that they were tiring and that we were gaining on them. One of them drew his sabre and cut his horse's flanks with it, whilst a non-commissioned officer turned and fired his revolver without hitting us; but, thanks to the fog, they got away. We did not tempt providence by following them too far for fear of bringing up in their lines.

At night we were sent to reconnoitre some fires which were reddening the horizon and which, from a distance, seemed vast conflagrations. We came upon a bivouac of Algerian troops, who were squatting on their heels, warming themselves, singing strange African melodies and giving to this corner of French soil an appearance of Algeria.

On hearing the sound of our horses they sprang to arms with guttural cries, but when they had recognised that we were French they insisted on embracing our officer and danced round us like children.

We billeted at Parvillers in a half-destroyed farm, and there at daybreak a sight that suggested an hallucination met our eyes. Some ten German soldiers were there in the courtyard dead, mowed down by the "75," but in such natural attitudes that but for their waxen colour one could have believed them alive. One was standing holding on to a bush, his hand grasping the branches. His face bespoke his terror, his mute mouth seemed as if in the act of yelling and his eyes were dilated with fear. A fragment of shell had pierced his chest. Another was on his knees, propped against a wall, under cover of which he had sought shelter from the murderous fire. I approached to see where his wound was and it took me a moment to discover it, so intact was the corpse. I saw at last that he had had the whole of the inside of his cranium carried away and hollowed out, as if by some surgical instrument. His tongue and his eyes were kept in place by a filament of flesh, and his spiked helmet had rolled off by his side. An officer was seated on some hay, with his legs apart and his head thrown back, looking at the farm.

All these eyes fixed us with a terrifying immobility, with a look of such acute terror that our men turned away, as if afraid of sharing it; and not one of them dared to touch the magnificent new equipment of the Germans, which would have tempted them in any other circumstances. There were aluminum water-bottles and mess tins, helmet plates of shining copper and sculptured regimental badges dear to the hearts of soldiers, and which they have the habit of collecting as trophies.

VII—LAST CHARGE OF THE HORSEMEN

The dawn of the 25th broke without a cloud over the village of Folies. A heat haze hid the early morning sun. The enemy were quite near, and the sentries on the barricades gave the alarm. The cuirassiers and dragoons, leaving their horses under cover, had been on watch in the surrounding country since the morning to protect the village and the batteries of "75's," which were firing from a little way back.

A non-commissioned officer and I had remained mounted. M. de Thézy sent us to investigate some horsemen whose shadows had loomed through the mist and whom we had seen dismount in an apple orchard near the village of Chocques. We set off at a quiet trot, convinced that we had to deal with some French hussars whom I had seen go that way an hour before. We crossed a field of beetroot and made straight towards them. They seemed anchored to the spot, and when we were within one hundred mètres, and they showed no signs of moving, our confidence increased. The fog seemed to grow thicker and our horses, now at the walk, scented no danger. We were within fifty mètres of them when a voice spoke out and the word "carbine" reached us distinctly, carried by a light breeze. The non-commissioned officer turned to me, his suspicions completely stilled, and said, "We can go on, they are French, I heard the word carbine." At the same instant I saw the group come to the shoulder and a dozen jets of fire tore the mist with short red flashes. A hail of bullets fell all around us, and we had only just time enough to put between them and ourselves as much fog as would conceal us, for before turning tail we had seen the confused grey mass of a column coming out of the village. We had only to warn the artillery and then there would be some fun.

The lieutenant of artillery was two kilomètres back perched on a ladder. Having listened to what we had to say, he turned towards his gun and cried through a megaphone, "2600, corrector 18." We were already far off, returning at the gallop to try to see the effect, and it was a fine sight.

Leaving the horses in a farm, we slipped from tree to tree. There was the column, still advancing. A first shell, ten mètres in front of it, stopped it short; immediately a second fell on the left, wounding some men, and a horse reared and upset its rider. A third shell struck mercilessly into the centre of the column and caused an explosion which sent flying, right and left, dark shapes which we guessed to be fragments of bodies. It rained shell, which struck the road with mathematical precision, sowing death and panic. In the twinkling of an eye the road was swept clean. The survivors bolted in every direction like madmen, and the agonising groans of a dying horse echoed through the whole countryside.

On the 1st of October we rejoined our division and the first half-regiment at Tilloy-les-Mofflaines. Up to the 20th we passed through a period of great privation and fatigue owing to the early frosts. We were unable to sleep for as many as five days on end, and when at night we had a few hours in which to rest, we passed them lying on the pavement of the street, propped up against some heap of coal or of stones, holding our horses' reins, each huddled up against his neighbour to try and keep warm.

VIII—DIARY OF A FRENCH TROOPER

Here are extracts from my diary, starting from 8th of October:

8th October.—All night we guarded the bridge at Estaires, after having constructed a formidable barricade. Damp and chilly night, which I got through lying on the pavement before the bridge; drank a half-litre of spirits in little sips to sustain me. This is the most trying night we have passed, but the spirits of all are wonderful.

9th October: Twenty minutes to four, two kilomètres from Estaires, scouting amongst beetroot fields.—Has the supreme moment come? A little while ago I firmly believed it had; now I am out of my reckoning, so incomprehensible and widespread is the struggle which surrounds us.

We have evacuated Estaires and the bridge over the Lys, which we were guarding, to rejoin our horses on foot. After some minutes on the road the first shells burst. My troop received orders to fight dismounted, and here we are, lying down as skirmishers amongst the beetroot, in the midst of a heavy artillery and musketry fire. I am on the extreme right, and a moment ago two shrapnel shells came over and burst six or eight mètres above my head, peppering the ground with bullets. Never, I imagine, have I come so near to being hit.

For the moment it is impossible to understand what is going on; the whole of the cavalry which was on in front of us—chasseurs, dragoons and all the cyclists—have fallen back, passing along the road on our flank. We, however, have had no order to retire. The peasants with their wives and children are running about the country like mad people. It is a sorry sight. A moment ago I saw an old man and a little girl fall in their hurry to escape from their farm, which a shell had just knocked to pieces. They are like herds of animals maddened by a storm.

At dusk the Germans are 500 mètres off. We have orders to take up our post in the cemetery of Estaires. I have hurt my foot and each step in the ploughed land is a torture. I have noted a way which will lead me to the bridge on the other side of the town.

I brought up my patrol at the double. When I got back I saw the troop retiring.

We passed through the town, which had a sinister look by night, reddened by the flames from many fires. The whole population is in flight, leaving houses open to the streets, and crowding up the roads. All the windowpanes are broken by the bombardment; somewhere, in the middle of the town, a building is burning and the flames mount to the sky. There are barricades in every street. We have reached the horses, which are two kilomètres from the town, and we grope for them in the dark. Mine is slightly wounded in the foreleg. Long retreat during the night (the second during which we have not slept—a storm wets us to the skin).

Arrived at Chosques at five in the morning. We get to bed at 6.30 and we are off again at 8 o'clock. I ask myself for how many days men and horses can hold out.

10th October.—In the afternoon we again covered the twenty kilomètres which separated us from Estaires. Hardly had we settled down to guard the same bridge as yesterday when we were sent to La Gorgue. On the way stopped in the village, as shells commenced to fall. The 1st troop took refuge in a grocer's, where we were parked like sheep. A large calibre shell burst just opposite with a terrible row. I thought that the house was going to fall in. Lieutenant Niel, who had stayed outside, was knocked over into the ditch and wounded. We are falling back with the horses to La Gorgue, and we are passing a third night, without sleep, on the road, Magrin and I on a heap of coal. Horses and men have had nothing to eat, the latter are benumbed, exhausted, but gay as ever.

11th October.—We get to a neighbouring farm at Estrem to feed the horses. They have scarcely touched their hay and oats before an order comes telling us to rejoin at the very place from which we have come. The Germans are trying to take the village from the east, thanks to the bridge which they captured the day before yesterday, but we have been reinforced by cyclists, and the 4th Division is coming up. We are holding on; the position is good. The belfry of the town hall has just fallen. We are going back to Estrem.

Three hours passed in a trench without greatcoats. Magrin and I are so cold that we huddle up one against the other and share a woollen handkerchief to cover our faces. We put up at Calonne-sur-la-Lys. And so it goes on up to the 17th, the date on which we re-enter Belgium, passing by Bailleul, Outersteene and Locre. It is not again a triumphal entry on a fine August morning, it is a march past ruins and over rubbish heaps.

At Outersteene, however, we were received with touching manifestations of confidence and enthusiasm; an old tottering and broken-down teacher had drawn up before the school a score of young lads of seven to ten years old, who watched us passing and sang the Marseillaise with all their lungs, while the old man beat the time.

The village had been evacuated only three days ago, and it was from the thresholds of its houses, partly fallen in and still smoking, that this song rose, a sincere and spontaneous outburst.

(Lieut. Mallet tells "How We Crossed the German Lines"; "The Charge of Gilocourt"; "The Escape in the Forest of Compiegne"; "The Two Glorious Days at Staden"; "The Funeral of Lord Roberts"; "The Attack at Loos.")

FOOTNOTE

[1] All numerals throughout this volume relate to the stories herein told—not to chapters in the original sources.

"TO RUHLEBEN—AND BACK"—LIFE IN A GERMAN PRISON

Where the British Civilian Prisoners Are Held in Detention Camp

Told by Geoffrey Pyke, an English Prisoner

This is a picturesque and thrilling story of a real adventure. The author, a young Englishman, entered Germany at the outbreak of the War, was discovered, imprisoned, and transferred to the great detention camp at Ruhleben. Here he made one of the most marvelous escapes on record, and after undreamed-of dangers and hardships arrived in safety at the Dutch front. Mr. Pyke in relating his experience says: "I was caught up in a vast mechanism ... that bounds the German Empire and tossed from one part to another, was beaten, crushed, and hammered ... the machine took me and threw me in jail, and then in another jail, and then in another, and then back into the first. Finally vomiting me, in a fit of either weariness, mercy or disgust, into a concentration camp for untrained civilians." Finally escaping from Ruhleben on July 9th, 1915. "Had only the 4,500 other inhabitants of Ruhleben escaped at the same time, in a species of general stampede, and one or two other people in Berlin or elsewhere died or been called off, matters might have arranged themselves very satisfactorily." The escaped prisoner has collected his experiences into a volume entitled: "To Ruhleben—And Back," from which we present a single chapter by permission of his publishers, Houghton, Mifflin and Company.

[2] I—HERR DIREKTOR OF THE PRISON

I forget now how many times I saw the Direktor of the prison, though at the time, the days on which I did were as distinct to me as wounds, which a man cannot see, but which he knows individually and intimately. In order to obtain audience of this gentleman, it was necessary, when the warder unlocked the door at 6.30 and the pitchers were put out, to ask to see the Herr Direktor. At half-past nine you were taken out of the cell, let through the door at the end down one flight and through to the floor which you could see over the railings of the balcony. Here again you were put into a cell, and the door was locked, and time passed by. Nothing else happened. In half an hour, or an hour, you were lined up in the passage with any others who also had requests. One by one you would go into that little office. You would bow at the entrance. "Ja?" would remark the bald-headed old gray-beard, with an Iron Cross of '70 hanging from his coat. "Ja?" And you would state your request. A vast ledger opposite him, the old bird, for he looked exactly like the Jackdaw of Rheims, would enter and sign and countersign in it. His decision was given in a curt "Ja" or "Nein," or "Das geht nicht,"[3] and you would be standing in the line outside, among those whose chance had not yet come. You had succeeded; you had failed—who knows what luck would attend you on these expeditions. Every request to write a letter had to be made in this manner. The shiny-headed old bird, with the head jailer in attendance his hand stiffly at his sword, would enter your name, the name of the addressee, and the reason for writing it, in his vast ledger. "Ja? Nein. Das geht nicht," and it is all over. Time after time I craved permission to write to His Excellency the American Ambassador, to request him to tell my people at home that I was alive. It was granted at the third request. What agony were those mornings, pacing up and down in the cell downstairs, waiting to be put into line. What could I say to the old boy to persuade him? Hundreds of passionate words rose in my mind, as I paced up and down that cell, waiting for the moment. "Bitte, Herr Direktor, kann ich ein brief schreiben?"[4] was all that I could stammer out, almost before I had reached the threshold of his office. "Ja? Nein. Das geht nicht," and I, after staring at him with eyes like a rabbit's fastened on a snake, unable to find words to say more, aching with the dull misery of refusal, have passed away, giving place to someone else who, in his turn, also succeeds or fails.

I used to try once a fortnight, and though I have since discovered that even the letters I wrote were never sent, yet nevertheless I always had a hope of their getting through. Regularly as clockwork every other Monday, after the Hell of Sunday, I would request to see the Direktor. For the first ten weeks, I persevered in this. Then suddenly I began to go to pieces. I missed one Monday, and put off asking the old bald-pate until Tuesday. When the moment came round on the Tuesday morning, I funked again. Wednesday came, and again I funked. On Thursday, I managed to push the words asking to see the Direktor from between my lips. Then with a rush, realising there was no going back, I felt all courage return to me. My head became as clear as a bell, and arguments to meet every objection of the Direktor's came to my mind. He had let me write several times previously, and I had not troubled him now for seventeen days. I was confident. Again I repeated my request gently to myself.... Suddenly I realised I was standing before him, and that I must speak. I must say something. I had come there to say something. Unless I asked him something, he would say I was not to be brought before him again. My eyes fixed on the large pimple on the top of his head. I could not take them away. The pimple was not quite in the centre of the cranium, but occupied, so to speak, the position halfway betwixt centre-forward and right outside. He wore it where a comedian wears a top hat the size of a five-shilling bit in attempts to be funny. My thoughts followed it. It was unique, and magnificent. "Have YOU any superfluous hair?" I thought. I should love to breathe very gently on the shiny surface, just to see if it becomes misty, or whether it still shines through everything. I wondered if it was very sensitive, so sensitive that he could feel what was reflected in it, or whether it was pachydermatous, and safe to dig pins into. He was going to move. He was just finishing off the entry he was making in the ledger. He was going to look up at me and say, "Ja wohl?"—Speak, say something—speak—speak....

It was evening. I was in my cell. The light was fading fast. I was thinking how on the morrow I would try again, how it only needed careful preparation, and I should be as able as anybody to say what I wanted to,—to speak.

II—SOLITARY CONFINEMENT AT THE POLIZEIGEFANGNIS

After you have been in solitary for some time, it becomes increasing difficult to retain your judgment. I know that first I would make up my mind that I was going to be in prison for two years, and then a great and irresistible hope would arise within me, that I should be sent to a concentration camp called Ruhleben, that I had had a whisper of from my friends. I had hoped for some sort of a trial to know how long I was going to remain where I was. Every day that passed at ten o'clock, when I imagined that anyone, before whom I might be brought, had come down to his office, I would put on the one collar I had. Every day at six I would take it off again, preserving it for the next day. At times I became convinced that, because I was not yet of age, I was to be kept for a few months more, and that the day after my twenty-first birthday, I was to be sentenced to some ghastly sort of punishment, like solitary for two years, or for life. (There seemed absolutely no difference between these two, and I dreaded the one as much as the other. Both appeared interminable, and I had no hopes of coming out sane, even after the shorter period. I pictured myself moaning about the London Law Courts in a celluloid collar, picking up a little copying work here, and a little there, until I finally sank into a mumbling old age at twenty-five, and died in delirium tremens at thirty.)

Another fact made me terribly despondent, and, fight how I would, was gradually making me utterly hopeless. About fourteen days after my companions of the British Relief Committee had gone, a new-comer had arrived. He spoke German absolutely perfectly, but with an Austrian accent. I had heard him say something to the warder. I will not tell his story, for he is at the present moment in another prison in Berlin, though not in solitary, and is, I know, writing his reminiscences in readiness for when the war shall come to an end. Let it suffice, however, to say that he had been discovered, soon after war broke out, writing articles for a London paper. He was arrested at the flat he happened to be living in, and, after a large amount of palaver, was given twenty-four hours to leave the country in. He was accompanied to the frontier. Within a fortnight he was back again. He had gone to London, had seen his paper, had come back to Holland, and at the frontier had pretended to be an Austrian waiter who had been expelled from England. He so exasperated his interrogators at the frontier by his eternal repetition of his ill treatment at the hands of his dastardly English employers, that they finally let him pass. However, in the end he was caught—as we all are—and recognised. He had been told that he was to be sent to this place Ruhleben, and, when one day he disappeared, I naturally surmised that he had been taken there. He was very good to me, for he had managed to get permission to buy fruit; I had been refused it. So he used to buy double the quantity, and daily, on going down the stairs, smuggle me an apple. "If he," I argued, "who has done this thing twice, and who is hoary with old age (he was about thirty-five), gets sent to this camp Ruhleben, after being here for three weeks, and I, who have only done it once, and am not yet of age, and have been here nine weeks, and have not been sent there, then there is no hope of my ever getting there. They would have sent me there by now, were they going to do so at all." Afterwards, I found, of course, that he had never been sent anywhere near Ruhleben, but simply to another prison. I heard the most wonderful stories about his doings there, from a friend who was sent to prison for a time. He would appear for exercise dressed in flamboyant pink running shorts, a vest and socks to match—and a top hat. What on earth for? Well, if the walls of prison don't supply you with humour or whimsicality, you must undertake the task yourself.

The best of luck to him. He probably thinks I am still in that Polizeigefängnis.

For some time I had been the oldest inhabitant of the prison. The usual denizen of the place came for a day or two, and then went on his way through that process called Law and Justice. My position gradually came to give me tiny privileges. For instance, they became quite convinced that I was going mad, for, apart from my habit of walking round and round the exercise yard at nearly five miles per hour, every night I would repeat the Jabberwocky. It had taken me a whole week with my broken-down memory to piece together the odd bits of lines and verses that I still carried in my head; and another week to evolve Mr. Kipling's "If." I would suddenly shout loudly into the solid blackness that "All mimsey were the borrow-groves and the moamwraths outgrabe," I knew quite well that borrogoves was the correct litany, but I preferred borrow-groves; so borrow-groves it was. "One two, one two and through and through the vorpel blade went snicker snack. He left it dead and with its head he went galumphing back," and I would make that "snicker snack" all slow and creepy, like Captain Hook; and would rise to a triumphant roar as I announced the fact that he "galumphed" back, in preference to any other form of locomotion that might have been available, glorying at his ability to resist temptations such as taxi-cabbing, taking the tube, or walking, and, above all, the insidious run.

"If you can make one heap of all your winnings,
And risk it on one turn of pitch and toss,
And lose; and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss."
If (and I shouted as if I was praying for life itself)
"If you can force your heart, and nerve, and sinew
To serve their turn, long after they are gone,
And so hold on, when there is nothing in you,
Except the will, which says to them, 'hold on.'"

And I would repeat it softly to myself, until loudly again, pacing madly up and down the cell, I would argue, "Yes, that's all very well, you know, but your will is the very thing that suffers before your heart and nerve and sinew are anywhere near gone. Why, it's the very base, the very foundation of all things, that it attacked, and then what are you going to do, Mr. Rudyard?" Nevertheless, I found an odd sort of comfort, and they were nearly always my prayer to the setting sun as the darkness stole in.

I also used to hum, whistle, and sing. This was strictly forbidden by one of the thirty-three regulations pasted on the back of the door. One night in December, when the darkness had been extra oppressive,—I was in darkness for eighteen out of the twenty-four hours—and I had been singing loud enough for the warders to hear, one came up and, rapping on the door, said that such behaviour was forbidden, nevertheless, he would ask the Herr Direktor as an especial favour, if I might be permitted to whistle occasionally. This is what comes of being the oldest inhabitant of a jail. The next day there was solemnly filled into the ledger by the chief warder, and countersigned by the Direktor, "Erlaubnis zu nummer acht und fünfzig zu singen und zu pfeifen."[5]

III—IN A CELL AT THE STADT VOGTEI

I shall never forget the day on which, after thirteen weeks, in January, 1915, I left prison—to go to another. Nothing, I was convinced, could be more of a living Hell than those thirteen weeks at the Polizeigefängnis. I was escorted out into the street. There was snow upon the pavements: it had been summer when I saw them last. Our route lay round the corner. Here, after passing through a low door in an immensely thick wall, once again I found myself in an atmosphere, not merely of red tape, but of the very essence from which tape, and redness, are made. Those innumerable bureaux: those ticketings, docketings, searching of clothes, etc., occupied a couple of hours, until I found myself in a bright and beautiful cell thirteen feet by six. This was the famous Stadt Vogtei prison. "Vogtei," literally translated, means a bailiff's office, but why a prison should be called "The City Bailiff's Office," or why the city bailiff's office should be a prison, I am at a loss to say.

Notwithstanding the bailiff, it was quite a good prison. Large numbers of English people—five to six hundred in all—had been here before they were sent to Ruhleben "for purposes of quarantine" as the official report says. It was a gentleman's prison; it was intended for those who had sentences for minor offences to serve, e.g. two to three months. But this did not frighten me, as I knew of its character as a depot for Ruhleben. I was full of hope. We had two meals of skilly a day instead of one. I was allowed to talk to the others during the two hours' exercise they were good enough to allow, and I could buy almost anything I wanted—bar newspapers.

I had another experience here that nearly killed me. There was the usual shelf for bowl, spoon, etc., and from the side hung a fat little book with one hundred and thirty-three rules. It contained all the punishments for all the various main crimes, worked out in permutations and combinations. Things such as "for not cleaning out of the cell for the first time the prisoner is to be punished by the three days' withdrawal of the midday hot meal, or instead one day withdrawal of the hot meal, and a second day withdrawal of the cold meal (breakfast), or, in lieu thereof.... In addition to which ... or as an alternative ... in substitute thereof.... But for the second offence, or dirtiness of a second degree, or unpunctuality of the third degree, or noise of the twentieth degree, the prisoner shall be punished by withdrawal of ... whereof ... in lieu of this can be subtituted ..." etc. etc.

On the outside of this little fat book with its one hundred and thirty-three rules was a diagram of the shelf from which it hung, showing exactly in what order the washing bowl, the eating bowl, the spoon, the fork, the soap were to be placed. And not merely was there a front view, but also two side views were given: one showing the side of the shelf with one towel hanging somnolently from a nail, and the other side view showing the other end of the shelf with the booklet itself hanging even more somnolently from another nail. But yes, there was something more: for not merely was there a picture of the booklet, but the picture of the booklet had the picture of the booklet pasted on the booklet's cover, and, what is more, the side which bore this diagram faced outwards, and the right-hand top corner was against the wall. Thus was it according to the picture. But it so happened that this was impossible, for the two were incompatible. Either the picture had to face inwards, or the left-hand top corner must touch the wall. But both together was contrary to the nature of the book. Feeling rather jolly at my new environment, I pointed this out to the jailer, who wasn't a bad sort of fellow, when he came in. At first he didn't grasp it, but when he did, he took serious note of it with pen and ink. Next day, in came the prison governor, a military-looking fellow, and he went straight to the booklet at the side of the cupboard, and examining the diagram on the cover, studied the incompatibility carefully for a long time. He turned round, and after looking whimsically at me, and then at the warder for some time, as if trying to make up his mind as to who was the biggest fool, said, "H'm," very definitely, and went away.

Alas, I only remained here five days. I had hardly finished breakfast when the warder came round with a list and said I was to "pack up," though, since I had nothing to pack, his orders were rather superfluous. Again weary hours of waiting in the bureau, and then, for the first time in my life, I saw the inside of Black Maria.

I had imagined it to have cells all the way down the side, but there were only two. There were seven of us, including a woman and a policeman. Heaven knows what the woman was "in" for, and though I several times formulated the question mentally, I could never manage to get it out. The policeman was quite a nice fellow, and let us talk, and joined in himself with an air of a busy man sparing a moment to play with some children. It soon became plain that one of the men was the woman's husband, or ought to have been if he wasn't. The others were gentlemen, sentenced for petty offences, who were being taken to the town hall to be enlisted in the army. They did not seem to relish the prospect, but "at any rate," they said, "it would be a change." I looked through the grille to see what I could of Berlin streets. There were not many people on them, and the greater number were women and in black, but the quietness of the place was nothing to what I was to see later. There were a few luxury-selling shops, such as flower sellers, that were closed, but the majority seemed able to get along. That Teutonic spectacle, extraordinary but obviously sensible, of women going about without hats could be seen everywhere. And then we suddenly drove into the inevitable yard. Two gates unbarred and locked themselves automatically as one passed.

IV—"MY THIRD PRISON—MOABIT: CELL 1603"

It was the great prison—Moabit. A huge central hall surmounted by a dome, with wings going in all directions and the end of each wing connected by another great building, each with six storeys of cells, and each of these with its iron balcony with glass flooring. There was noise, and clanging of doors everywhere. I was told to stand at the commencement of one of the wings, just off the dome. There was a huge clock, and I noticed it had a bell attached to it. At any rate, I thought, I shall hear the hour strike. The number of my cell, I can remember it now, was 1603, "the year Queen Elizabeth died," I remarked to myself, as it was unlocked, and I went in. It was a larger cell than I had hitherto had—about fourteen feet by six. There was electric light and a table and seat that folded down from the wall. The window was, as usual, above my head, but this time it was made of frosted glass. There was a horrid suggestion of permanency about the place that made me feel rather bad. I asked the warder who gave me my prison underclothing—I was allowed to keep my own suit—whether one was always in solitary here, and for how long one came. "Immer im einzelhaft"—always in solitary,—and for three to four months and upward, he said. "Never less?" I asked. "No, never," he replied. "Come with me," he continued, and I was taken down into the very bowels of this terrible edifice, till, finally, I joined a vast squad of criminals. He left me. We then filed down devious passages once more, and finally were led into a vast room with about two hundred and seventy showers in it. When bathed, I was locked into a large, bare cellar just opposite, and here I was soon joined by two others, one an elderly middle-aged man of about fifty-six, and the other an evil-looking devil of about thirty-four. They sat down on the bench. I was walking up and down. They were an interesting couple. They were about to be examined by an Untersuchungsrichter, or examining magistrate, and the younger one was coaching the other in what to say. The elder seemed too numbed to agree or disagree, though he seemed to have a tendency towards the truth, which the other promptly suppressed, but just sat there, his hands on his knees, seemingly deaf. Once the younger strode up to him threateningly as if to hit him. He ground his teeth and swore that by God, if the old man were to say that he'd ——. Then he tried a different tack; he argued, he elucidated, he showed the simplicity of his ideas, and how, above all, it would help themselves.

When the young one became bellicose I had felt no inclination to help the old man. Why, I knew not. I think I felt that nothing, least of all truth, should stand in the way of man's salvation from that place, and that if the old man hadn't got enough gumption to tell what seemed to be a few well-concocted lies, well, he ought to be made to, since it involved the fate of the younger man, who was not yet reduced to the state of an incapacitated jelly. It was the same old story: Fate had beaten the old man, but had not succeeded in persuading the young one that he also was beaten; the young one refused to acknowledge it. It was blind instinct that told him to lie, though he knew with clever lawyers against him, and, worst of all opponents, the law, the chances of his getting through to freedom were remote. I had noticed hitherto that it was always the young men who felt the strain most, seemed most conscious of the inhuman cruelty of prison, and I was to find out later that it was generally the young ones who recovered easiest. Sometimes the older ones don't recover. A man I was to meet later was afflicted with sudden decay of the optic nerve, and is now gradually going blind, purely as a result of solitary.

The door opened suddenly, and they were taken out, and as they passed me I saw the younger and villainous one look at the old man, in a manner in which threats, prayers, and above all, the desire to instil the wish to live were all inexpressibly mixed. They passed. I never saw them again. I often wonder where they are. There are lots like them.

I was taken back to my cell. I was now sinking fast. I saw little hopes of recovery. I was quickly becoming a broken-down creature, and though physically I should have lasted out for years, mentally I saw there was a crash not far ahead. I had seen it happen with other men before. As it was, mentally I was fast becoming a species of cow. I would stand for hours at a time, leaning my head into the corner, my hands in my pockets, staring at the floor. I would find that for hours I had been saying to myself "My dear sir"—I always called myself "my dear sir" when talking out loud,—"you really must make an effort to get out. I mean it's simply too stupid to spend the best years of your life in a box like this. Use your wits. Do something. Go on, you juggins, get out somewhere. Think!" and so on, from twelve till three. I became absolutely impersonal, and found it difficult to have likes and dislikes about anything. I absolutely forgot what flowers smelt like. Milk I could not imagine. Fruit, tobacco, fish, were mere names to me. I had forgotten what they were. I could not understand the meaning of the term "red."

Though I longed to be free, I felt that human beings would be perfectly unbearable. I no longer considered myself as one. I felt perfectly decorporealised: I was merely a mind contemplative and a poor one at that. And yet I longed for their company. I still kept up my nightly habit of repeating a few verses from any poem I could remember, and after the light had gone out—for here there was electric light—I would rise solemnly in the dark, and make the most fiery speeches to the Cambridge Union—poor Cambridge Union. I would then proceed to oppose my own motion, pick holes in it, show up the proposer as an impostor and a charlatan. A seconder would then arise, who with all the sarcasm of a Voltaire would rend the immediate speaker adjective from substantive, verb from adverb, until quivering with the laceration received, the latter would be thrown, a bleeding proposition, into the waste deserts of verbosity.

V—GHASTLY HOURS UNDER GERMAN BRUTALITY

It was just about this time that I nearly got myself shot for attempted murder. I was so used to the darkness that I found electric light rather trying to the eyes, and therefore turned the racket upwards toward the ceiling in order to have but reflected light. A little later in came the warder. He saw the upturned bracket, and lifting the hilt of his sword, hit me sharply over the head. In a flash I was on him. I had raised my fists on each side for a smashing blow on his temples. He was unable to get away, for he was so short that my arms could have nailed him as he tried. He saw there was no escape, and the sight of my face blazing with fury and wretchedness made him drop his sword. I relished that moment, I gloated over it. I kept my fists going backwards and forwards nearly touching his temples, but never quite. I tried to imagine the agony in his rabbit-like mind, waiting for the crushing blow to fall upon him, and wondering what it would feel like. Suddenly he turned a sickly green. His hat was knocked all on one side. I saw beneath his uniform a fat little vulgar bourgeois, incapable of a thought outside the satisfying of his own senses. He turned from green to a pasty yellow. He glanced piteously up into my distorted face. I drove him back towards the door, growling and hissing at him, my fists going like a steam hammer on each side of his head. His agony became worse. His eyes flew from one side to the other, like a rabbit looking for escape. His little pointed flaxen beard wobbled and, such was his panic, so did his stomach. Suddenly my mind changed, and taking him by the shoulders, and putting my knee, as far as it was possible, into his belly, I pushed him backwards, and he sat down violently and disconsolately in the passage outside, his sword underneath him, and his hat rolling away into the darkness. I slammed the door, and after a time he got up and locked it. I knew nothing would happen to me, for he was not permitted to hit me, but had I hit him back, I gasp to think of the number of years I should now be doing.

This, the third prison I had been in, was the worst. Physically it was slightly better: there was more space, light, two good meals a day, but the very last drop of individuality was taken away from you. It was not permitted even to arrange the bowls on the shelf as you liked. I never saw daylight, for our exercise took place at half-past six in the dark. It was now the 20th of January. I had been arrested in the early days of October. Since then I had been residing in a lavatory. I found it dull.

Despite the warder's announcement that nobody ever came there for less than three or four months, I was suddenly taken away again after five days, and Black Maria drove me back once more to the Polizeigefängnis of the Alexanderplatz. I was too miserable by now to care where I was sent or what they did to me. I was beginning to lose the power of appreciating anything—whatever its nature. I found some new arrivals at Alexanderplatz. The place was full as usual with neutrals who were under suspicion: Dutch, Swedes and Danes. One Dutchman had been there for seven weeks in solitary. I was just reaching the final depths of despair when, one night, just as I had got my first foot into bed, the door was flung open, and into the gloom a voice shouted "'raus."[6] I "raused" timidly and in my nightshirt, and was told to dress quickly. I did so, surmising I was to go to another prison. I began to feel quite numb, and I no longer hoped for anything. Downstairs in the bureau a very pleasant policeman took charge of me, and after having signed the receipts for the acceptance of my carcase, he made the usual remark, "Kommen Sie mit," and off we went. I thought it odd that we should go alone: they usually fetch the criminals in batches. "Where are we going to?" I asked. "Ruhleben," he said.

VI—ON THE ROAD TO RUHLEBEN PRISON

For a moment I could hardly feel. I hardly dared feel. I just breathed quietly to myself, and thought how nice the air tasted. I was going to see human beings again. For a time the words were rather meaningless, and then I gradually began to revive under their warmth. We went out into the street to the Alexanderplatz station. I had a fine opportunity to run away here, though I should have been a fool to have done so, and to have invited prison again. In any case, I had no glasses with me, and I was very short-sighted. We had gone up on to the platform, and I was chuckling and giggling like a schoolgirl at seeing life once again, when the policeman discovered it was the wrong one. "Run," he said, "there's our train over there." I ran like a leopard. In ten bounds I had slipped through the crowd and had lost him. I ran on down the stairs, and into the street. How glorious it all seemed, and I roared aloud with laughter, at which a sallow-faced woman in black seemed offended and turned round to stare. I rushed on, up the other set of stairs and in time my captor appeared. The idea of bolting had just entered my head and flown, but "no," I said, "wait till we get to Ruhleben, and have got tired of that, then we'll see what can be done."

Meanwhile, I stared out into the darkness from the brightly-lit carriage as we steamed through the suburbs of Berlin. I got a glimpse of a tiny room, in which numbers of steaming dishevelled women were crowded together bending over machines and needlework. They were being sweated. That was their daily life. They too, lived in what was really a prison, though no law stopped them roaming whence they would. I was in the world once more....

(The prisoner relates numerous stories of his experiences, of which the above is but a single instance. He describes the prison; how it feels waiting to be shot; the impressions of a lunatic on release from solitary confinement and his daring escape with Mr. Edward Falk, District Commissioner in the Political Service of Nigeria.)

FOOTNOTES

[2] All numerals relate to stories herein told—not to chapters from original sources.

[3] "That is impossible."

[4] "Please, Herr Direktor, may I write a letter?"

[5] "Permit to Number 58 to sing and to whistle."

[6] "Out!"

AN AMERICAN AT BATTLE OF THE SOMME WITH FRENCH ARMY

Army Life With the Soldiers Along the Somme

Told by Frederick Palmer, American War Correspondent

Mr. Palmer was the only accredited correspondent who had freedom of the field in the Battles of the Somme. At the time of this writing he has been officially appointed as a member of the staff of General Pershing, with the American Armies in France. This American has become a world figure. His life has been spent on the battlefields of the modern wars: The Greek War, the Philippine War, the Macedonian Insurrection, the Central American Wars, the Russian-Japanese War, the Turkish Revolution, the Balkan Wars. At the beginning of the Great War, he was with the British army and fleet. His descriptions of the fighting are unsurpassed in the war's literature—it is "the epic touch of great events." He has made a notable historical record in his book entitled "My Second Year of the War," in which he presents graphic pictures of the grim fighting along the Somme, with admirable descriptions of the heroism of the Canadians, the Australians and the fighters from all parts of the Earth, who are giving their lives "to make the world safe for Democracy." A single chapter from Mr. Palmer's book is here reproduced by permission of his publishers, Dodd, Mead and Company: Copyright 1917.

[7] I—STORY OF THE BATTLE RIDGE ON THE SOMME

Sometimes it occurred to one to consider what history might say about the Ridge and also to wonder how much history, which pretends to know all, would really know. Thus, one sought perspective of the colossal significance of the uninterrupted battle whose processes numbed the mind and to distinguish the meaning of different stages of the struggle. Nothing had so well reflected the character of the war or of its protagonists, French, British and German, as this grinding of resources, of courage, and of will of three powerful races.

... It is historically accepted, I think, that the first decisive phase was the battle of the Marne when Paris was saved. The second was Verdun, when the Germans again sought a decision on the Western front by an offensive of sledge-hammer blows against frontal positions; and, perhaps, the third came when on the Ridge the British and the French kept up their grim, insistent, piece-meal attacks, holding the enemy week in and week out on the defensive, aiming at mastery as the scales trembled in the new turn of the balance and initiative passed from one side to the other in the beginning of that new era.

This scarred slope with its gentle ascent, this section of farming land with its woods growing more ragged every day from shell fire, with its daily and nightly thunders, its trickling procession of wounded and prisoners down the communication trenches speaking the last word in human bravery, industry, determination and endurance—this might one day be not only the monument to the positions of all the battalions that had fought, its copses, its villages, its knolls famous to future generations as in Little Round Top with us, but in its monstrous realism be an immortal expression, unrealized by those who fought, of a commander's iron will and foresight in gaining that supremacy in arms, men and material which was the genesis of the great decision.

The German began drawing away divisions from the Verdun sector, bringing guns to answer the British and French fire and men whose prodigal use alone could enforce his determination to maintain morale and prevent any further bold strokes such as that of July (1916).

His sausage balloons began to reappear in the sky as the summer wore on; he increased the number of his aeroplanes; more of his five-point-nine howitzers were sending their compliments; he stretched out his shell fire over communication trenches and strong points; mustered great quantities of lachrymatory shells and for the first time used gas shells with a generosity which spoke his faith in their efficacy. The lachrymatory shell makes your eyes smart, and the Germans apparently considered this a great auxiliary to high explosives and shrapnel. Was it because of the success of the first gas attack at Ypres that they now placed such reliance in gas shells? The shell when it lands seems a "dud," which is a shell that has failed to explode; then it blows out a volume of gas.

"If one hit right under your nose," said a soldier, "and you hadn't your gas mask on, it might kill you. But when you see one fall you don't run to get a sniff in order to accommodate the Boche by asphyxiating yourself."

Another soldier suggested that the Germans had a big supply on hand and were working off the stock for want of other kinds. The British who by this time were settled in the offensive joked about the deluge of gas shells with a gallant, amazing humor. Going up to the Ridge was going to their regular duty. They did not shirk it or hail it with delight. They simply went, that was all, when it was a battalion's turn to go.

II—GUNNERS IN THE FURNACE OF WAR

July heat became August heat as the grinding proceeded. The gunners worked in their shirts or stripped to the waist. Sweat streaks mapped the faces of the men who came out of the trenches. Stifling clouds of dust hung over the roads, with the trucks phantom-like as they emerged from the gritty mist and their drivers' eyes peered out of masks of gray which clung to their faces. A fall of rain comes as a blessing to Briton and German alike. German prisoners worn with exhaustion had complexions the tint of their uniforms. If the British seemed weary sometimes, one had only to see the prisoners to realize that the defensive was suffering more than the offensive. The fatigue of some of the men was of the kind that one week's sleep or a month's rest will not cure; something fixed in their beings.

It was a new kind of fighting for the Germans. They smarted under it, they who had been used to the upper hand. In the early stages of the war their artillery had covered their well-ordered charges; they had been killing the enemy with gunfire. Now the Allies were returning the compliment; the shoe was on the other foot. A striking change, indeed, from "On to Paris!" the old battle-cry of leaders who had now come to urge these men to the utmost of endurance and sacrifice by telling them that if they did not hold against the relentless hammering of British and French guns what had been done to French villages would be done to their own.

Prisoners spoke of peace as having been promised as close at hand by their officers. In July the date had been set as Sept. 1st. Later, it was set as Nov. 1st. The German was as a swimmer trying to reach shore, in this case peace, with the assurance of those who urged him on that a few more strokes would bring him there. Thus have armies been urged on for years.

Those fighting did not have, as had the prisoners, their eyes opened to the vast preparations behind the British lines to carry on the offensive. Mostly the prisoners were amiable, peculiarly unlike the proud men taken in the early days of the war when confidence in their "system" as infallible was at its height. Yet there were exceptions. I saw an officer marching at the head of the survivors of his battalion along the road from Montauban one day with his head up, a cigar stuck in the corner of his mouth at an aggressive angle, his unshaven chin and dusty clothes heightening his attitude of "You go to ——, you English!"

The hatred of the British was a strengthening factor in the defense. Should they, the Prussians, be beaten by New Army men? No! Die first! said Prussian officers. The German staff might be as good as ever, but among the mixed troops—the old and the young, the hollow-chested and the square-shouldered, mouth-breathers with spectacles and bent fathers of families, vigorous boys in their late 'teens with the down still on their cheeks and hardened veterans survivors of many battles east and west—they were reverting appreciably to natural human tendencies despite the iron discipline.

It was Skobeloff, if I recollect rightly, who said that out of every hundred men twenty were natural fighters, sixty were average men who would fight under impulse or when well led, and twenty were timid; and armies were organized on the basis of the sixty average to make them into a whole of even efficiency in action. The German staff had supplied supreme finesse to this end. They had an army that was a machine; yet its units were flesh and blood and the pounding of shell fire and the dogged fighting on the Ridge must have an effect.

It became apparent through those two months of piece-meal advance that the sixty average men were not as good as they had been. The twenty "funk-sticks," in army phrase, were given to yielding themselves if they were without an officer, but the twenty natural fighters—well, human psychology does not change. They were the type that made the professional armies of other days, the brigands, too, and also those of every class of society to whom patriotic duty had become an exaltation approaching fanaticism. More fighting made them fight harder.

III—DEAD BODIES STRAPPED TO GUNS

Such became members of the machine-gun corps, which took an oath never to surrender, and led bombing parties and posted themselves in shell-craters to face the charges while shells fell thick around them, or remained up in the trench taking their chances against curtains of fire that covered an infantry charge, in the hope of being able to turn on their own bullet spray for a moment before being killed. Sometimes their dead bodies were found strapped to their guns, more often probably by their own request, as an insurance against deserting their posts, than by command.

Shell fire was the theatricalism of the struggle, the roar of guns its thunder; but night or day the sound of the staccato of that little arch devil of killing, the machine gun, coming from the Ridge seemed as true an expression of what was always going on there as a rattlesnake's rattle is of its character. Delville and High Woods and Guillemont and Longueval and the Switch Trench—these are symbolic names of that attrition, of the heroism of British persistence which would not take No for answer.

You might think that you had seen ruins until you saw those of Guillemont after it was taken. They were the granulation of bricks and mortar and earth mixed by the blasts of shell fire which crushed solids into dust and splintered splinters. Guillemont lay beyond Trônes Wood across an open space where the German guns had full play. There was a stone quarry on the outskirts, and a quarry no less than a farm like Waterlot, which was to the northward, and Falfemont, to the southward and flanking the village, formed shelter. It was not much of a quarry, but it was a hole which would be refuge for reserves and machine guns. The two farms, clear targets for British guns, had their deep dugouts whose roofs were reinforced by the ruins that fell upon them against penetration even by shells of large caliber. How the Germans fought to keep Falfemont! Once they sent out a charge with the bayonet to meet a British charge between walls of shell fire and there through the mist the steel was seen flashing and vague figures wrestling.

Guillemont and the farms won and Ginchy which lay beyond won and the British had their flank of high ground. Twice they were in Guillemont but could not remain, though as usual they kept some of their gains. It was a battle from dugout to dugout, from shelter to shelter of any kind burrowed in the débris or in fields, with the British never ceasing here or elsewhere to continue their pressure. And the débris of a village had particular appeal; it yielded to the spade; its piles gave natural cover.

IV—THE ARTILLERYMEN IN THE WOODS

A British soldier returning from one of the attacks as he hobbled through Trônes Wood expressed to me the essential generalship of the battle. He was outwardly as unemotional as if he were coming home from his day's work, respectful and good-humored, though he had a hole in both arms from machine-gun fire, a shrapnel wound in the heel, and seemed a trifle resentful of the added tribute of another shrapnel wound in his shoulder after he had left the firing-line and was on his way to the casualty clearing station. Insisting that he could lift the cigarette I offered him to his lips and light it, too, he said:

"We've only to keep at them, sir. They'll go."

So the British kept at them and so did the French at every point. Was Delville Wood worse than High Wood? This is too nice a distinction in torments to be drawn. Possess either of them completely and command of the Ridge in that section was won. The edge of a wood on the side away from your enemy was the easiest part to hold. It is difficult to range artillery on it because of restricted vision, and the enemy's shells aimed at it strike the trees and burst prematurely among his own men. Other easy, relatively easy, places to hold are the dead spaces of gullies and ravines. There you were out of fire and there you were not; there you could hold and there you could not. Machine-gun fire and shell fire were the arbiters of topography more dependable than maps.

Why all the trees were not cut down by the continual bombardments of both sides was past understanding. There was one lone tree on the skyline near Longueval which I had watched for weeks. It still had a limb, yes, the luxury of a limb, the last time I saw it, pointing with a kind of defiance in its immunity. Of course it had been struck many times. Bits of steel were imbedded in its trunk; but only a direct hit on the trunk will bring down a tree. Trees may be slashed and whittled and nicked and gashed and still stand; and when villages have been pulverized except for the timbering of the houses, a scarred shade tree will remain.

Thus, trees in Delville Wood survived, naked sticks among fallen and splintered trunks and upturned roots. How any man could have survived was the puzzling thing. None could if he had remained there continuously and exposed himself; but man is the most cunning of animals. With gas mask and eye-protectors ready, steel helmet on his head and his faithful spade to make himself a new hole whenever he moved, he managed the incredible in self-protection. Earth piled back of a tree-trunk would stop bullets and protect his body from shrapnel. There he lay and there a German lay opposite him, except when attacks were being made.

Not getting the northern edge of the woods the British began sapping out in trenches to the east toward Ginchy, where the many contours showed the highest ground in that neighborhood. New lines of trenches kept appearing on the map, often with group names such as Coffee Alley, Tea Lane and Beer Street, perhaps. Out in the open along the irregular plateau the shells were no more kindly, the bombing and the sapping no less diligent all the way to the windmill, where the Australians were playing the same kind of a game. With the actual summit gained at certain points, these had to be held pending the taking of the whole, or of enough to permit a wave of men to move forward in a general attack without its line being broken by the resistance of strong points, which meant confusion.

V—STALKING A MACHINE GUN IN ITS LAIR

Before any charge the machine guns must be "killed." No initiative of pioneer or Indian scout surpassed that exhibited in conquering machine-gun positions. When a big game hunter tells you about having stalked tigers, ask him if he has ever stalked a machine gun to its lair.

As for the nature of the lair, here is one where a Briton "dug himself in" to be ready to repulse any counter-attack to recover ground that the British had just won. Some layers of sandbags are sunk level with the earth with an excavation back of them large enough for a machine-gun standard and to give the barrel swing and for the gunner, who back of this had dug himself a well four or five feet deep of sufficient diameter to enable him to huddle at the bottom in "stormy weather." He was general and army, too, of this little establishment. In the midst of shells and trench mortars, with bullets whizzing around his head, he had to keep a cool aim and make every pellet which he poured out of his muzzle count against the wave of men coming toward him who were at his mercy if he could remain alive for a few minutes and keep his head.

He must not reveal his position before his opportunity came. All around where this Briton had held the fort there were shell-craters like the dots of close shooting around a bull's-eye; no tell-tale blood spots this time, but a pile of two or three hundred cartridge cases lying where they had fallen as they were emptied of their cones of lead. Luck was with the occupant, but not with another man playing the same game not far away. Broken bits of gun and fragments of cloth mixed with earth explained the fate of a German machine gunner who had emplaced his piece in the same manner.

Before a charge, crawl up at night from shell-crater to shell-crater and locate the enemy's machine guns. Then, if your own guns and the trench mortars do not get them, go stalking with supplies of bombs and remember to throw yours before the machine gunner, who also has a stock for such emergencies, throws his. When a machine gun begins rattling into a company front in a charge the men drop for cover, while officers consider how to draw the devil's tusks. Arnold von Winkelried, who gathered the spears to his breast to make a path for his comrades, won his glory because the fighting forces were small in his day. But with such enormous forces as are now engaged and with heroism so common, we make only an incident of the officer who went out to silence a machine gun and was found lying dead across the gun with the gunner dead beside him.

VI—TALKS WITH THE MEN IN THE REAR

The advance on the map at our quarters extended as the brief army reports were read into the squares every morning by the key of figures and numerals with a detail that included every little trench, every copse, every landmark, and then we chose where we would go that day. At corps headquarters there were maps with still more details and officers would explain the previous day's work to us. Every wood and village, every viewpoint, we knew, and every casualty clearing station and prisoners' inclosure. At battalion camps within sight of the Ridge and within range of the guns, where their blankets helped to make shelter from the sun, you might talk with the men out of the fight and lunch and chat with the officers who awaited the word to go in again or perhaps to hear that their tour was over and they could go to rest in Ypres sector, which had become relatively quiet.

They had their letters and packages from home before they slept and had written letters in return after waking; and there was nothing to do now except to relax and breathe, to renew the vitality that had been expended in the fierce work where shells were still threshing the earth, which rose in clouds of dust to settle back again in enduring passive resistance.

There was much talk early in the war about British cheerfulness; so much that officers and men began to resent it as expressing the idea that they took such a war as this as a kind of holiday, when it was the last thing outside of Hades that any sane man would choose. It was a question in my own mind at times if Hades would not have been a pleasant change. Yet the characterization is true, peculiarly true, even in the midst of the fighting on the Ridge. Cheerfulness takes the place of emotionalism as the armor against hardship and death; a good-humored balance between exhilaration and depression which meets smile with smile and creates an atmosphere superior to all vicissitudes. Why should we be downhearted? Why, indeed, when it does no good. Not "Merrie England!" War is not a merry business; but an Englishman may be cheerful for the sake of self and comrades.

Of course, these battalions, officers and men, would talk about when the war would be over. Even the Esquimaux must have an opinion on the subject by this time. That of the men who make the war, whose lives are the lives risked, was worth more, perhaps, than that of people living thousands of miles away; for it is they who are doing the fighting, who will stop fighting. To them it would be over when it was won. The time this would require varied with different men—one year, two years; and again they would turn satirical and argue whether the sixth or the seventh year would be the worst. And they talked shop about the latest wrinkles in fighting; how best to avoid having men buried by shell-bursts; the value of gas and lachrymatory shells; the ratio of high explosives to shrapnel; methods of "cleaning out" dugouts or "doing in" machine guns, all in a routine that had become an accepted part of life like the details of the stock carried and methods of selling in a department store.

Indelible the memories of these talks, which often brought out illustrations of racial temperament. One company was more horrified over having found a German tied to a trench parados to be killed by British shell fire as a field punishment than by the horrors of other men equally mashed and torn, or at having crawled over the moist bodies of the dead, or slept among them, or been covered with spatters of blood and flesh—for that incident struck home with a sense of brutal militarism which was the thing in their minds against which they were fighting.

VII—WITH STEEL HELMETS AND GAS MASKS

With steel helmets on and gas masks over our shoulders, we would leave our car at the dead line and set off to "see something," when now the fighting was all hidden in the folds of the ground, or in the woods, or lost on the horizon where the front line of either of these two great armies, with their immense concentration of men and material and roads gorged with transport and thousands of belching guns, was held by a few men with machine guns in shell-craters, their positions sometimes interwoven. Old hands in the Somme battle become shell-wise. They are the ones whom the French call "varnished," which is a way of saying that projectiles glance off their anatomy. They keep away from points where the enemy will direct his fire as a matter of habit or scientific gunnery, and always recollect that the German has not enough shells to sow them broadcast over the whole battle area.

It is not an uncommon thing for one to feel quite safe within a couple of hundred yards of an artillery concentration. That corner of a village, that edge of a shattered grove, that turn in the highway, that sunken road—keep away from them! Any kind of trench for shrapnel; lie down flat unless a satisfactory dugout is near for protection from high explosives which burst in the earth. If you are at the front and a curtain of fire is put behind you, wait until it is over or go around it. If there is one ahead, wait until another day—provided that you are a spectator. Always bear in mind how unimportant you are, how small a figure on the great field, and that if every shell fired had killed one soldier there would not be an able-bodied man in uniform left alive on the continent of Europe. By observing these simple rules you may see a surprising amount with a chance of surviving.

One day I wanted to go into the old German dugouts under a formless pile of ruins which a British colonel had made his battalion headquarters; but I did not want to go enough to persist when I understood the situation. Formerly, my idea of a good dugout—and I always like to be within striking distance of one—was a cave twenty feet deep with a roof of four or five layers of granite, rubble and timber; but now I feel more safe if the fragments of a town hall are piled on top of this.

The Germans were putting a shell every minute with clockwork regularity into the colonel's "happy home" and at intervals four shells in a salvo. You had to make a run for it between the shells, and if you did not know the exact location of the dugout you might have been hunting for it some time. Runners bearing messages took their chances both going and coming and two men were hit. The colonel was quite safe twenty feet underground with the matting of débris including that of a fallen chimney overhead, but he was a most unpopular host. The next day he moved his headquarters and not having been considerate enough to inform the Germans of the fact they kept on methodically pounding the roof of the untenanted premises.

After every battle "promenade" I was glad to step into the car waiting at the "dead line," where the chauffeurs frequently had had harder luck in being shelled than we had farther forward. Yet I know of no worse place to be in than a car when you hear the first growing scream which indicates that yours is the neighborhood selected by a German battery or two for expending some of its ammunition. When you are in danger you like to be on your feet and to possess every one of your faculties. I used to put cotton in my ears when I walked through the area of the gun positions as some protection to the eardrums from the blasts, but always took it out once I was beyond the big calibers, as an acute hearing after some experience gave you instant warning of any "krump" or five-point-nine coming in your direction, advising you which way to dodge and also saving you from unnecessarily running for a dugout if the shell were passing well overhead or short.

I was glad, too, when the car left the field quite behind and was over the hills in peaceful country. But one never knew. Fifteen miles from the front line was not always safe. Once when a sudden outburst of fifteen-inch naval shells sent the people of a town to cover and scattered fragments over the square, one cut open the back of the chauffeur's head just as we were getting into our car.

"Are you going out to be strafed at?" became an inquiry in the mess on the order of "Are you going to take an afternoon off for golf to-day?" The only time I felt that I could claim any advantage in phlegm over my comrades was when I slept through two hours of aerial bombing with anti-aircraft guns busy in the neighborhood, which, as I explained, was no more remarkable than sleeping in a hotel at home with flat-wheeled surface cars and motor horns screeching under your window. A subway employee or a traffic policeman in New York ought never to suffer from shell-shock if he goes to war.

The account of personal risk which in other wars might make a magazine article or a book chapter, once you sat down to write it, melted away as your ego was reduced to its proper place in the cosmos. Individuals had never been so obscurely atomic. With hundreds of thousands fighting, personal experience was valuable only as it expressed that of the whole. Each story brought back to the mess was much like others, thrilling for the narrator and repetition for the polite listener, except it was some officer fresh from the communication trench who brought news of what was going on in that day's work.

Thus, the battle had become static; its incidents of a kind like the product of some mighty mill. The public, falsely expecting that the line would be broken, wanted symbols of victory in fronts changing on the map and began to weary of the accounts. It was the late Charles A. Dana who is credited with saying: "If a dog bites a man it is not news, but if a man bites a dog it is."

Let the men attack with hatchets and in evening dress and this would win all the headlines in the land because people at their breakfast tables would say: "Here is something new in the war!" Men killing men was not news, but a battalion of trained bloodhounds sent out to bite the Germans would have been. I used to try to hunt down some of the "novelties" which received the favor of publication, but though they were well known abroad the man in the trenches had heard nothing about them.

Bullets, shells, bayonets and bombs remained the tried and practical methods there on the Ridge with its overpowering drama, any act of which almost any day was greater than Spionkop or Magersfontein which thrilled a world that was not then war-stale; and ever its supreme feature was that determination which was like a kind fate in its progress of chipping, chipping at a stone foundation that must yield.

VIII—VICTORY!—"THE RIDGE IS TAKEN"

The Ridge seeped in one's very existence. You could see it as clearly in imagination as in reality, with its horizon under shell-bursts and the slope with its maze of burrows and its battered trenches. Into those calm army reports association could read many indications: the telling fact that the German losses in being pressed off the Ridge were as great if not greater than the British, their sufferings worse under a heavier deluge of shell fire, the increased skill of the offensive and the failure of German counter-attacks after each advance.

No one doubted that the Ridge would be taken and taken it was, or all of it that was needed for the drive that was to clean up any outstanding points, with its sweep down into the valley. A victory this, not to be measured by territory; for in one day's rush more ground was gained than in two months of siege. A victory of position, of will, of morale! Sharpening its steel and wits on enemy steel and wits in every kind of fighting, the New Army had proved itself in the supreme test of all qualities.

(This American correspondent relates thirty-one remarkable narratives of adventure, all of which equal in human interest and historical importance, the single narrative given above. He tells about his experiences "Forward with the Guns;" "The Brigade that Went Through;" "The Storming of Contalmaison;" "The Mastery of the Air;" "The Tanks in Action;" "The Harvest of Villages;" "Five Generals and Verdun"—all of which are notable historical records.)

FOOTNOTE

[7] All numerals throughout this volume relate to the stories herein told—not to chapters in the original sources.

AN AMERICAN'S EXPERIENCES "INSIDE THE GERMAN EMPIRE"

Told by Herbert Bayard Swope, an American in Berlin

These experiences and observations inside the German Empire in the third year of the War form an invaluable narrative. They have been recognized by one of the leading American universities as the most important contribution of a journalist to the literature of the Great War. Hon. James W. Gerard, American Ambassador to the German Empire, says: "The facts and experiences ... (of Herbert Bayard Swope), gathered first-hand by the author, whose friendship I value and whose professional equipment I admire, form an important contribution to contemporaneous history." Mr. Swope says: "My volume is based upon a series of articles I wrote for the New York World, and I am grateful to Mr. Ralph Pulitzer of that paper, for permission to use the material in this form." This inspiring book is published by The Century Company: Copyright, 1917, with whose authority this chapter is given.

[8] I—JOURNEYS IN THE SPY-BESIEGED LAND

Germany to-day is a giant fortress completely ringed by besiegers. Every man, woman, and child, all the beasts of burden and food, are checked and located. The doors have been locked against travelers seeking to enter and those seeking to depart. Only in exceptional cases are visitors received, and in rarer instances are natives permitted to leave.

The police are able at all times to account for every one of the population, passport issuance has been made extremely difficult, the ordeal of search and inquest at the frontier is severe and thorough, interior travel has been sharply restricted, every foot of the border is guarded against illegal entry, obstacles have been put in the way of mail and telegraph communications, the espionage system has been multiplied in efficiency and extent—all for the safety of the empire. And because this is the underlying reason for them, the Germans have submitted to the restrictions willingly, and, instead of rebelling, aid them.

The spy mania that swept over war-ridden Europe two years ago has lessened in its visible intensity in Germany, but the precaution against spies has been increased. The people have confidence in the safeguards against espionage, and so suspicion has been quieted. How well this confidence is justified can be attested by any one who has been inside the empire in the second year of the war.

A stranger is under observation from the time he enters until he has left. The watchfulness is not obtrusive, it is rarely evident; but it is always thorough. Within twelve hours of a visitor's arrival he must report in person at the nearest police station, and every time he makes a railroad journey this operation must be repeated.

When an American undertakes a voyage to Germany, the wheels of the imperial Government begin to revolve immediately upon the first application for a visé to his passport being made in this country. The first question to be answered concerns the applicant's character, so that Germany may feel sure he does not purpose to aid or abet her enemies; and the second, the actual need of the business that causes him to make the trip. Obtaining a passport from the American Government is attended by many formalities, and these are renewed when the German consul-generals are asked to approve.

Germany insists that a fortnight intervene between the application for a visé and the beginning of the trip. This is to enable her officials to make the necessary investigations, and then to communicate the facts to Berlin and to the traveler's port of arrival.

All travel between America and Germany is through Copenhagen, Stockholm, or Rotterdam. From Copenhagen the traveler enters Germany through Warnemunde; from Stockholm he enters through Sassnitz; and from Rotterdam through Bentheim. Upon his arrival at one of the three neutral cities he must begin the proceedings afresh....

Upon arrival at Warnemunde (the methods throughout the empire are standardized, and are the same at every other entrance point) the travelers are shunted into a long low wooden shed, carrying their hand baggage, having previously surrendered the checks for their heavier luggage. Upon entering the place they are given numbers, and in return surrender their passports to brisk, keen-eyed, non-commissioned officers, whose efficiency has been increased by long practice.

II—"SEARCHED" BY THE SECRET POLICE

Once in the room, the travelers are not permitted to leave except through one door, and that they pass only when their numbers are called. Barred windows and armed sentries prevent any trifling with this system. The numbers are called one by one except in the case of husbands and wives, who are permitted to go through together—and when this is reached, the traveler passes through into a second office, where he is questioned as to his identity and the photographs on the passports are verified.

While he is undergoing this questioning he is being overheard and carefully watched by numbers of the geheim-Polizei (secret police), some of whom are in uniform and others of whom masquerade in civilian attire as new arrivals. If there is any error in his papers it is developed at this point, and he is at once turned about and sent back to Copenhagen. But if it is a case of alles in Ordnung (everything in order), it is so reported, and he is ushered into another room, where, having passed the first two inquisitorial chambers, he is submitted to the grand ordeal, that of search.

And what a search it is! Unless one's credentials are exceptionally strong, one is stripped and one's mouth, ears, nose, and other parts of the body examined. One's fountain pen is emptied, every piece of paper taken away, including visiting cards, and even match-boxes are confiscated. Finger rings, umbrellas and canes are inspected. If bandages are worn, these must be stripped off, too. No distinction is drawn between men and women beyond the fact that women are of course examined before female inspectors.

The bodily search having been completed, that of the clothing is begun. Every article of apparel is felt over carefully and exposed to a strong light for fear there may be writing on the lining. If there is the slightest reason for suspicion, the travelers are given a sponge bath of water with a large admixture of citric acid, which has the effect of making apparent any writing on the body that may have been done with invisible ink. The Germans say that these precautions have been necessitated by the ingenious ruses employed by spies, whose entrance into the country is considered a greater menace than is their departure, since in entering they bring with them instructions to their confederates already within the empire awaiting orders.

The next step is the examination of the baggage, and this is done in a manner to make the American customs inspection seem childish. The interior and exterior measurements of the trunks are taken to guard against false sides, tops, and bottoms, and then one by one every article the trunks contain is put through a separate inspection....

Every sort of liquid is confiscated. The perfumes of the women are poured into a big tub, and such liquors as the men may be carrying are treated in a similar manner. The contents of travelers' alcohol or spirit lamps are carefully emptied into air-tight containers for later use. The reason for the drastic regulation against taking any liquid, however small the quantity, into Germany was the danger of the fact that high explosives such as nitroglycerine can be carried in small vessels. On several occasions, the Germans say, railroads and bridges have been blown up by the enemy travelers who carried the means of destruction in this way. In this connection the additional precaution is taken by the authorities of prohibiting all travelers from putting their heads out the windows of the coupés while crossing bridges.

All written or printed matter, such as books, newspapers, pamphlets, magazines, is taken away. Upon request the traveler may have these forwarded to his point of destination after they have been censored and deleted. As every point on the German border is carefully guarded, it is virtually impossible for any one to enter the country except at stated points. All the roads are closed, and the border fields are carefully patrolled.

Upon his arrival in Berlin, or wherever he may be bound, the traveler must present himself in person at the nearest police station. There his passport is again viséd, and he is given official permission to remain for a given period. But every time he makes a trip he must report himself going and coming....

III—THE COUNTRY THAT WENT "SPY MAD"

In every hotel are to be met spies in the form of guests, waiters, chambermaids, telephone operators, and bartenders. In the early part of the war these last proved their worth often, for men otherwise cautious and reticent became outspoken under the influence of a few Scotches or cocktails, which are still in vogue in Germany despite their American origin.

At one of the biggest of the Berlin hotels it is a noticeable fact that all the floor waiters are young, active, highly intelligent men. When they are asked why they are not serving at the front all have excuses on the score of health. The truth is that they are all governmental agents whose duty it is to familiarize themselves with the details of every visitor's business. That they do well. Every stranger's papers are thoroughly investigated, no matter how securely they may be locked up, before he has been in the city two days, assuming he leaves them in his room. Two members of the American diplomatic corps who made short stays in Berlin can tell singular stories on this point.

The chief of the floor waiters at this hotel—and it is illustrative of all the others—is a polished-mannered young fellow of about thirty-two who speaks English, French, Italian, Spanish, and Danish with the same facility that he reads them, and he reads them as well as he does his native German. I noticed the chief of the telephone operators, who while discharging the duties of his lowly job wore livery, attending the races in an English sport-coat, with glasses strung over his shoulders, and he went to and from the course in a taxicab, the height of luxury in wartime Berlin. One would hardly credit his income solely to the measly wages he received from his work at the switch-board. He, too, as well as his assistants, was an accomplished linguist.

It must not be thought that espionage is confined to the Americans. On the contrary, even the subjects of Germany's allies receive this attention. Austrian, Bulgarian, or Turkish, it makes no difference; all are put under the scrutiny of the secret eyes and ears of the Kaiser. Almost it is more difficult to obtain a passport permitting one to travel to Austria than it is to obtain one for a journey to America, and the examination at the Austrian border is just as severe as at the frontier between Germany and Denmark.

German spies travel on all the transatlantic liners running from Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Holland to America, and back again. They find out as much as they can about their fellow-travelers, so that the secret police may be forewarned as to whom and what they are to receive. These agents are rarely employed by the German Government for the secret transmission of mail; that is usually done by men of solid reputation, American or other neutrals who are persuaded to accept the task on the ground of a service to the empire. Obviously, they must be violently pro-German before they are asked to assume the undertaking.

The difficulty of communication is one of the severe hardships that the German Government and people suffer. Mails to and from the empire are seized by the Allies, and if delivered at all, are so belated as to make them valueless. Only such cables as the Allies choose to pass are permitted transmission. Male Germans are not permitted to travel on the seas. So German communication is restricted to the wireless, to supposedly neutral couriers, and to submarines, both of the commercial type as the Deutschland, and of the war type, which have been secretly conveying important German mail to Spanish waters, where it is loaded upon friendly neutral vessels, which carry it into Spanish ports and thence forward it to America and other points. This last method has been a carefully guarded secret of the German Government. Mail sent out by Spain is not seized and censored by the Allies....

IV—A VISIT TO GENERAL LORINGHOVEN

To get the official view of the situation held by the officers of the general staff, I called on General von Freytag-Loringhoven at the general staff building in Berlin, where the great Moltke long presided. He received me in a room the distinguishing features of which were maps, not only showing the disposition of the German forces, but immense wall-sized ones on which were diagrammed the present locations of the Allies, showing their number, their commanders (designated by name and locations of headquarters), with their relative ranks indicated by little parti-coloured flags. I had just returned from the Somme, and as I saw how each of the French and British lines was clearly marked, I expressed my surprise.

The general smiled.

"Yes, our intelligence department is pretty thorough," he said, "but it is no better on the Somme than our enemy's is, for in France, where we stand on occupied soil, almost every civilian is an aid to the Allies.

"But despite that, despite all the French and English can do at the Somme," he went on, "they will never break through."...

I asked the general for his impressions of the French and British soldiers. He answered:

"The French are better soldiers. They are better schooled and drilled. They have been at it longer and they are enormously brave and sacrificing. But the British are proving their worth, too. They are all of them warlike and like to fight, but they don't know how as yet. You can't make a soldier in a few weeks or months; it takes time and patience.

"The French artillery is exceptional. The French artillery officers have always been of high repute. They are teaching much to the English and Russians, and these forces are showing a corresponding betterment.

"Because of their greater experience, I should say the French are better officered than the English. The Russian officers are a poor lot. There is no sympathy between them and their men. The men are brave enough, but are sheep-like in their lack of intelligence...."

In September, I stood in the general's field headquarters and watched the big guns drop shells all around the famous "windmill of Pozières" on the high ridge which had been taken by the British and was being used by their artillery observers, who gamely held on, although the position was anything but comfortable.

While we watched the bombardment a squadron of English fliers passed overhead. I ducked and made for the bomb-proof.

"Don't worry," said the general, "the fliers rarely bomb us. Our aviators generally leave their generals' headquarters alone, and they usually do the same by us. It is a sort of understood courtesy."...

While I stood in his observation-point with Wenninger an iron-gray quartermaster sergeant passed. He had been in the east against the Russians as well as in the west. In reply to my question as to his opinion of the schools of fighting, he answered:

"I'd rather face twenty infantry attacks from the Russians than bring up food to the first lines here (British). Their damned artillery makes it hell."

V—"AT THE SOMME, I MET VON PAPEN"

At the Somme I met Captain von Papen, the former German military attaché, who was sent home by America. After six weeks on the firing line he was made chief of staff to General Count Schweinitz, commanding the Fourth Guard Division and holding the Grevillers-Warlencourt-Ligny line. He has proved himself an efficient officer.

Captain Boy-Ed, the naval attaché, who was sent back to Germany at the same time, is now chief intelligence officer at the admiralty in Berlin. He is very bitter toward America, while von Papen is friendly. Dr. Dernburg, the other propagandist who was returned to the fatherland, is philosophical as regards his work in America, and is without rancour over his treatment. He is living in Berlin, working on housing plans for the poor, but he has lost the confidence of his Government....

All the world knows Hindenburg. Germany's Iron Man, the hero of the Masurian Swamps, a colossal wooden statue of whom stands opposite the Reichstag in the Sieges-allee, the Avenue of Victory, in Berlin's Tiergarten. But who is Ludendorff?

Ludendorff is Germany's man of mystery, the grim, inscrutable, silent man whose picture is on sale in every shop, whose name is in every mouth, but whose real personality is hidden even from his own countrymen.

Ludendorff is Hindenburg's indispensable right-hand man....

There are those who say that Ludendorff is Hindenburg's brain, and that Hindenburg's greatest successes have been planned by his silent, retiring assistant. Hindenburg, when in the mood, becomes very talkative and chatty, and at such times he often attributes his success to his assistant. There is a perfect harmony between the two; Ludendorff plans and Hindenburg decides....

On August 28 (1914) it was announced that the Russians were fleeing across the border. The news grew. Five army corps and three cavalry divisions had been annihilated. More than ninety thousand prisoners were taken. Tannenberg, one of the greatest victories of the war, had changed the whole face of affairs in the east.

There have been bigger battles and longer battles, and there have been battles of more significance in the history of the war, but there has been no other battle in which the result has been so overwhelming and complete a victory for either side.

Just what happened at Tannenberg and in the Masurian Swamps is still a secret. There have been stories that a hundred thousand men were drowned in the swamps. There have been tales of dikes released and men swept away in a swirl of rushing waters. All that is known certainly is that a Russian army disappeared.

(This American war correspondent then gives his impressions of men and events within the German Armies, telling many interesting tales of Boelcke, the German "knight of the air" who shot down thirty-eight enemy aeroplanes before he was killed in collision with one of his own German machines.)

FOOTNOTE

[8] All numerals relate to stories herein told—not to chapters in the original sources.

"DIXMUDE"-AN EPIC OF THE FRENCH MARINES

Story of the Murder of Commander Jeanniot

Told by Charles Le Goffic of the Fusiliers Marins—Translated by Florence Simmonds

The story of the French Marines is one of the epics of the World's Wars. Such is the story of the Bretons. At Dixmude, under command of their own officers, retaining not only the costume, but the soul and language of their profession they were still sailors. Grouped with them were seamen from all the naval stations. The heroism of these sailors is told in the volume entitled "Dixmude," published by J. B. Lippincott Company. From these interesting stories, we here relate "The Murder of Captain Jeanniot."

[9] I-GREAT HEARTS OF THE FRENCH MARINES

I had opportunities of talking to several of these "Parigots," and I should not advise anyone to speak slightingly of their officers before them, though, indeed, so few of these have survived that nine times out of ten the quip could be aimed only at a ghost. The deepest and tenderest words I heard uttered concerning Naval Lieutenant Martin des Pallières were spoken by a Marine of the Rue des Martyrs, George Delaballe, who was one of his gunners in front of the cemetery the night when his machine-guns were jammed, and five hundred Germans, led by a major wearing the Red Cross armlet, threw themselves suddenly into our trenches.

"But why did you love him so?" I asked.

"I don't know.... We loved him because he was brave, and was always saying things that made us laugh, ... but above all because he loved us."

Here we have the secret of this extraordinary empire of the officers over their men, the explanation of that miracle of a four weeks' resistance, one against six, under the most formidable tempest of shells of every caliber that ever fell upon a position, in a shattered town where all the buildings were ablaze, and where, to quote the words of a Daily Telegraph correspondent, it was no longer light or dark, "but only red." When the Boches murdered Commander Jeanniot, his men were half crazy. They would not have felt the death of a father more deeply. I have recently had a letter sent me written by a Breton lad, Jules Cavan, who was wounded at Dixmude. While he was in hospital at Bordeaux he was visited by relatives of Second-Lieutenant Gautier, who was killed on October 27 in the cemetery trenches.

"Dear Sir," he wrote to M. Dalché de Desplanels the following day, "you cannot imagine how your visit went to my heart.... On October 19, when my battalion took the offensive at Lannes, three kilometers from Dixmude, I was wounded by a bullet in the thigh. I dragged myself along as best I could on the battlefield, bullets falling thickly all around me. I got over about five hundred meters on the battlefield and reached the road. Just at that moment Lieutenant Gautier, who was coming towards me with a section, seeing me in the ditch, asked: 'Well, my lad, what is the matter with you?' 'Oh, Lieutenant, I am wounded in the leg, and I cannot drag myself further.' 'Here then, get on my back.' And he carried me to a house at Lannes, and said these words, which I shall never forget: 'Stay there, my lad, till they come and fetch you. I will let the motor ambulance men know.' Then he went off under the fire. Oh, the splendid fellow!"