Part 16
One little trouble of mine, and of friends of mine, in Stara Zagora, was the question of food. There was one pretty good restaurant, set apart for the military _attachés_ and high staff officers, but after they had dined well, while we hung around, sniffing their fat meats, there was nothing left for us. We were reduced to eating in a filthy little place, where the food was vile, and the chief method of washing plates was by the tongues of the hungry serving wenches, as I saw, through the kitchen door. Our billeting arrangements, also, left much to be desired, and with two inseparable companions, Horace Grant, of the _Daily Mirror_, and a young Italian photographer named Console, I slept in a pestilential house, so utterly foul that I dare not describe it. One little additional discomfort, to me, was the merry gamboling of a tribe of mice, who played hide and seek over my body as I lay in a coffinlike bed, and cleaned their whiskers on the window sill.
We were heartily glad to move forward from General Headquarters to the Turkish village of Mustapha Pasha, on the river Maritza, which had just been captured by the Bulgarians on their way to the siege of Adrianople.
My most dominant memory of this village, which was the headquarters of the Bulgarian Second Army, may be summed up in the two words, mud and oxen. The “roads” were just quagmires, in which endless teams of oxen, with some buffaloes, dragging interminable batteries of heavy guns, ammunition wagons, and forage, wallowed deep. Stones, piled loosely, about a foot broad, at the edge of the track, made the only dry foothold for those who walked. But the Bulgarian army trudged through the slime, battalion after battalion, with flowers on their rifles, led forward by priests, dancing and waving their arms in an ecstasy of war fever, inspired by hatred of the Turk. The oxen snarled and snuffled, and constantly I had to avoid being tramped down by holding on to their curly horns or thrusting myself away from their wet nozzles. Strange groups of volunteers followed the army--family groups, with old grandfathers and grandmothers and grandma-aunties, with uncles and cousins and brothers, laden with tin pots and bundles, and armed with old sporting guns and country knives, and any kind of weapon useful for carving up a Turk.
One night, when the guns were furious round Adrianople, and the sky was lurid with bursting shells, I saw a division of Serbian cavalry pass through Mustapha Pasha. They had traveled far, and every man was asleep on his horse, which plodded on in the track of an old peasant with a lantern. I shall never forget the sight of those sleeping riders in the night.
Horace Grant, Console, and I were billeted in a farmhouse a mile or so outside Mustapha Pasha, kept by a tall, bearded Bulgarian peasant with his wife and mother, and three dirty little children. We slept on divans, as hard as boards, and fed on gristly old chickens killed beyond the doorposts. The family regarded us as though we had come from a far planet--mysterious beings, of incomprehensible ways--and our ablutions in the mornings, when we stripped to the waist and washed in a pail, filled them with deep wonderment. It was our local reputation as “The men who wash their bodies” which liberated us from military arrest.
On the way to Mustapha Pasha and back again to our farmhouse, we had to pass a cemetery which was used as a camp. It was never a pleasant journey at night, because we stumbled over loose boulders, fell into three feet of mud, and were attacked by packs of wolflike dogs whose fierce eyes shone through the darkness. One night I felt a prick in the shoulder, and found I had run up against the sword of a Bulgarian officer who was feeling his way along the wall in pitch darkness. But it was when the Bulgarians were suddenly replaced by Serbians that we were challenged by a sentry and arrested by the guard, which rushed out at the sound of his shots. They could make nothing of us, and suspected the worst, until some peasants in the neighborhood came up and identified us as three men strangely addicted to cold water, but under the protection of Bulgarian headquarters.
Along the valley of the Maritza, on the way to Adrianople, which was closely invested, the Turkish villages had been fired, and we saw the smoke rising above the flames, and then tramped through their ruins. Looting was strictly forbidden, under pain of death, but in one village old men and women were prowling about in a ghoullike way, and filling sacks with bits of half-burnt rubbish. Suddenly an old woman began to scream, and we saw her struggling with a Bulgarian soldier who threatened to run his bayonet through her body. The others fled, leaving their sacks behind.
That night, in a dirty little eating house, a Hungarian correspondent protested to his friends against the ruthless way in which the Bulgars had burned those Turkish homesteads. Upon leaving the restaurant he was arrested by military police and flung into a filthy jail, with the warning that he would rot to death there unless he changed his opinion about the burning of the villages, and agreed that the Turks had fired them on their retreat. He decided to change his opinion. Later, however, he was riding alone when he was set upon by Bulgarian police, who seized his horse, flung him into a ditch, and kicked him senseless. It was a warning against careless table conversation.
We soon discovered that, instead of being treated as war correspondents, we were in a position more like that of prisoners of war. Strict orders were issued that we were not to go beyond a certain limit outside Mustapha Pasha, and the severity of the censorship was so great that my harmless descriptive articles about the scenes behind the lines, as well as my feeble sketches, were mostly canceled. I have to confess that I became a rebel against these orders, and, with my two companions, not only broke bounds, day after day, but smuggled through my articles at a risk which I now know was extremely rash. I hired a carriage with three scraggy horses, a chime of bells, and a Bulgarian giant, at enormous expense. It had once belonged to a Bulgarian priest, and was so imposing that when we drove out to the open country, toward Adrianople, we used to be saluted by the Bulgarian army.
I remember driving one day to a spur of hills overlooking the city of Adrianople, from which we could see the six minarets of the Great Mosque, and the high explosives bursting above its domes and rooms. A German--Doctor Bauer--and an Austrian--von Zifferer--accompanied us, and we picnicked on the hill with an agreeable excitement at getting even this glimpse of the “real business.” I played a game of chess with von Zifferer, who carried a pocket set, and this very charming young Austrian accepted my lucky victory with good nature, and then asked a question which I always remembered:
“How long will it be before you and I are on opposite sides of a fighting line?”
It was not very long.
My experiences as a war correspondent in Bulgaria were farcical. I saw only the back wash of the bloody business--and I have a secret and rather wicked suspicion that the war correspondent of the old type did not see so much as his imaginative dispatches and thrilling sketches suggested to the public, nor one-thousandth part as much as that little body of men in the World War, who had absolute liberty of movement, and the acknowledged right of going to any part of the front, at any time. In Bulgaria, all we saw of the war was its slow-moving tide of peasant soldiers, trudging forward dejectedly, the tangled traffic of guns and transport, the misery--unimaginable and indescribable--of the wounded and the prisoners, stricken with cholera, packed, like slaughtered cattle, into railway trucks, tossed in heaps on straw-filled ox wagons, jolted to death over the ruts and boulders of unmade roads: Horrible pictures which gave me a little apprenticeship, but not much, for the sights of the war that was to come.
One little scene comes to my mind vividly. It was at dawn, in a way side station. King Ferdinand had arrived with his staff. The fat old man with piggy eyes was serving out medals to heroes of the siege of Adrianople. They were all wounded heroes, some of them horribly mutilated, so that, without arms or legs, they were carried by soldiers into the presence of the King. Others hobbled up on crutches, white and haggard. Others were blind. I could not see any pleasure in their faces, any sense of high reward, when they listened to Ferdinand’s gruff speech while he fastened a bit of metal to their breasts. In the white mist of dawn they looked a ghastly little crowd of broken men.
I have already told, in a previous chapter, how old Fox Ferdinand conversed with me on the bridge over the Maritza at Mustapha Pasha. His friendliness then did not allow me to escape his wrath a few days later, when he saw me considerably outside the area to which correspondents were restricted, and he sent over a staff officer to tell me that I should be placed under arrest unless I withdrew immediately.
I was arrested, and locked up for a time, with Horace Grant and Console, for the crime of accompanying a colleague to the railway station at Mustapha Pasha! That was when S. J. Pryor, of _The Times_, was leaving G.H.Q. to go back to Sofia. Being, as I thought, the proud owner of a carriage and three horses, to say nothing of my Bulgarian giant, I offered to give him with his luggage a lift to the station. He accepted gladly, but at the hour appointed I discovered that carriage, horses, giant, and all had disappeared from their stables. As I found out later, they had been “pinched” by G.H.Q. Pryor had not too much time to get his train, and Grant and Console and I volunteered to carry some of his bags. We arrived in time, but were immediately confronted by a savage Bulgarian general, who spluttered with fury, called up some hairy savages with big guns, and ordered them to lock us up in a baggage shed. Little S. J. Pryor was extremely distressed at this result of our service to him, but he could not delay his journey.
My friends and I were liberated from the shed after some hours of imprisonment, and conducted, under mounted escort, to Mustapha Pasha. A few nights later we were informed that we had been expelled from General Headquarters and must proceed back to filthy old “Cascara Sagrada.” I had a violent scene with the Bulgarian staff officer and censor who conveyed this order, and told him that I intended to stay where I was, unless I was forcibly removed by the Bulgarian army!
He took me at my word, and that night, when Grant and I were finishing a filthy but comforting meal in our old farmhouse, far outside the village, there was a heavy clump at the door, followed by the entry of six hairy-looking ruffians with fixed bayonets. One of them removed his sheepskin hat and plucked from his matted hair a small piece of paper, which was a written order for our expulsion signed by the General in Command of the Second Army.
I shall never forget Console at the moment of their arrival. Having finished his supper, he was lying asleep on the divan, but, suddenly awakened, sat up with all his hair on end, and grabbed a large loaded revolver from beneath his pillow. We did not allow him to indulge in a private massacre, but adopted a friendly demeanor to our guards--for we were their prisoners, all right--and gave them mugs of peasant wine as a token of good will. After a frightful scramble for our belongings, which were littered all over the room, we accompanied the hairy men to an ox wagon, where we sat in the straw, jolted in every limb and in every tooth, for the three miles back to the old station.
On the way we passed a battalion of Serbian infantry, and one of the officers carried on a cheery conversation with me in German. When he heard that I was a correspondent of _The Graphic_, he was delighted and impressed.
“Come with us!” he shouted. “We will show you some good fighting!”
“I would like to,” I answered, “but I am a prisoner of these Bulgarians.”
He thought I was joking, and laughed loudly.
Guarded by our soldiers--they were really a simple and sturdy little crowd of good-natured peasants--we were taken across a railway line to a dark train. Our guards laughed, shook hands, pushed us gently into the train, and said, “_Dobra den, Gospodin!_”
Then we had a surprise. The train was pitch dark, but not empty. It was filled with correspondents of all nationalities, who, like ourselves, had been expelled! They were without food or drink or light; they had been there for half a day and part of a night; and they were furious.
That journey was a comedy and a tragedy. The train moved away some time in the night, and crawled forward that day and night toward “Cascara Sagrada,” as Nodeau called that town of filth. We starved, parched with thirst, cramped together. But we laughed until we cried over the absurdity of our situation and a thousand jests.
Marinetti, the arch Futurist, was there, and after making impassioned love to a Bulgarian lady who could not understand his Italian or French, he recited his great Futurist poem, “L’Automobile,” very softly at first, then with his voice rising higher, as the “automobile” gained speed, until it was like the bellow of a bull. In a wayside station, soldiers came running toward our carriage, with their bayonets handy, thinking some horrible atrocity was in progress. Marinetti was delighted with the success of Futurist poetry in Bulgaria!
At Stara Zagora I found wires were being pulled in London and Sofia, on my behalf, through the means of S. J. Pryor, who was a loyal friend, and one of the dearest men in the world. (He is my “Bellamy” in _The Street of Adventure_.) In a few days, Grant, Console, and I, alone among the expelled crowd, received permits to return to the Bulgarian headquarters, where our reappearance created consternation among the staff officers and censors, who thought they were well rid of us.
XVI
In 1912, to which year I have now come in these anecdotes of journalistic life, England was not without troubles at home and abroad, but nothing had happened, or seemed likely to happen (except in the imagination of a few anxious and farseeing people), to touch more than the surface of her tranquillity, to undermine the foundations of her wealth, or to menace her security as a great imperial Power.
It was a very pleasant place for pleasant people, if they had a social status above that of casual, or sweated, labor. The aristocracy of wealth still went through the social ritual of the year, in country houses and town houses, from the London season to Cowes, from the grouse moors to the Riviera, agreeably bored, and finding life, on the whole, a good game, unless private passion wrecked it.
The great middle class, with its indeterminate boundaries, was happy, well-to-do, with a comfortable sense of ease and security, apart from the ordinary anxieties, tragedies, failures, of private and domestic life. People with “advanced” and extraordinary views made a lot of noise, but it hardly broke into the hushed gardens of the country houses of England. Labor was getting clamorous, with mock heroic threats of revolution, but was no real menace to the forces of law and order. Women were beginning to put forward claims to political equality with men, but their extravagance of talk had not yet been translated into wild action. The spirit of England was, in the mass, rooted to its old traditions, and its social habits were not overshadowed by any dread.
As a descriptive writer and professional onlooker of life (writing history and fiction in my spare time), I had, perhaps, some deeper consciousness than most people outside my trade, of dangers brewing in the cauldron of fate. I touched English life in most of its phases, high and low, and was aware, vaguely, perhaps a little morbidly, of undercurrents beating up strongly below all this fair surface of tranquility. As I shall tell later, I came face to face with three bogies of threatening aspect. One was Ireland in insurrection. Another was industrial conflict in England, linked up with that Irish menace. A third was war with Germany. Meanwhile, I chronicled the small beer of English life, and described its social pageantry--royal visits, the Derby, Henley, Fourth of June at Eton, the Eton and Harrow match, Ascot, Cowes, the Temple Flower Show, garden fêtes, Maud Allen’s dancing, the opera, the theater, fancy dress balls.
There was a new passion for “dressing-up,” in that England before the war. It seemed as though youth, and perhaps old age, desired more color than was allowed by modern sumptuary laws.
I attended a great fancy dress ball at the Albert Hall--one of many, but the most magnificent. All “the quality” was there, the most beautiful women in England, and the most notorious. I went, superbly, as Dick Sheridan, in pale blue silk, with lace ruffles, a white wig, white silk stockings, buckled shoes, a jeweled sword. It was strange how different a man I felt in those clothes. The vulgarity of modern life seemed to fall from me. I was an eighteenth-century gentleman, not only in appearance, but in spirit. I was my own great grandfather!
London that night was a queer sight anywhere within a mile of Kensington. Sedan chairs, carried by sturdy porters in old liveries, conveyed little ladies in hooped dresses and high wigs. Columbines flitted by with Pierrots. Out of taxicabs and hansoms and old growlers came parties of troubadours, English princesses with horned headdresses, Spanish toreadors, Elizabethan buccaneers, Stuart cavaliers.
At the ball I saw the faces of my friends strangely transfigured. They, too, were their own ancestors. One of those I encountered that night was a fellow journalist named “Rosy” Leach. He swaggered in the form of a Stuart gentleman, and said, “What a game is this life!” The next time I met him was when he wore another kind of fancy dress--khaki-colored--with high boots caked up to the tabs in the mud of the Somme fields. “Death is nothing,” he said, after we had talked a while. “It’s what goes before--the mud and the beastliness.” He was killed in one of those battles, like many others of those who danced with Columbine and the ladies of the gracious past.
This dressing-up phase was not restricted to London, or rich folks. There was a joyous epidemic of pageants, in which many old towns and villages of England dramatized their own history and acted the parts of their own ancestors. I was an enthusiast of this idea, and still think that for the first time since the Middle Ages it gave the people of England a chance of revealing their innate sense of drama and color and local patriotism. In most of these pageants the actors made their own costumes, and went to old books to learn something of ancient fashions, heraldry, arms and armor, and the history of things that had happened on their own soil and in their own cathedrals, churches, guild houses, and ruined castles, whose stones are haunted with old ghosts. The children in these pageants made fields of living flowers. Youth was lovely in its masquerade. Some of the pictures made by the massed crowds were unforgetable, as in the Oxford pageant, when Charles held his court again, and in the St. Albans pageant, when the English archers advanced behind flights of whistling arrows. If one had any sense of the past, one could not help being stirred by the continuity of English life, its unbroken links with ancient customs, its deep roots in English soil. At Bury St. Edmunds there was a scene depicting the homage of twenty-two gentlemen to Mary Tudor. Each actor there bore the same name and held the same soil as those who had actually bowed before the Tudor lady. It is why tradition is strong in the character of our race, and steadies it.
There was a comic and pitiful side to these shows, mainly caused by the weather, which was pitiless, so that often the pageant grounds were quagmires, and ancient Britons, Roman soldiers, Saxon princesses, Stuart beauties, had to rush for shelter from rain storms which bedraggled them. But that was part of the game.
London dreamed not at that time of darkened lights, prohibited hours for drink, the heavy hand of war upon the pleasures and follies of youth. Was there more folly than now? Perhaps vice flaunted more openly. Perhaps temptation spread its net with less need of caution--though I doubt whether there has been much change in morals, despite the park pouncing of policemen. There was more gayety in London, more lights in London nights, more sociability, good and bad, a great freedom of spirit, in those days before the war. So it seems to us now.
I was never one of the gilded youth, but sometimes I studied them in their haunts, not with gloomy or reproving eyes, being tolerant of human nature, and glad of laughter.
One wild night began when the policeman on point duty in Piccadilly Circus thought that the last revelers had gone home in the last taxis, but he was a surprised man when life seemed to waken up again and there was the swish of motor cars through the circus and bands of young men walking in evening dress, not, apparently, on their way to bed, but just beginning some new adventure. They advanced upon the Grafton Galleries singing a little ballad that marks the date:
“Hullo, hullo, hullo! It’s a different girl again! Different hair, different clothes, Different eyes, different nose....”
This affair had been kept a dead secret from press and public. It was a “glorious stunt” which had for its amiable object the introduction of all the prettiest girls of the theater world to all the smartest bloods of the universities and clubs. It was entitled the Butterfly Ball.
Certainly there were some astoundingly beautiful girls at this assembly, and not a few of them. The university boys were, for a time abashed by so much loveliness. But they brightened up, especially when the most famous sporting peer of England--Lord Lonsdale--led off the dance with a little girl dressed, rather naughtily, as a teetotum. By the time I left--a kind of Pierrot looking on at the gayety of life--there was a terrific battle in progress between groups of boys and girls, with little white rolls of bread as their ammunition. Not commendable. Not strictly virtuous, nor highly proper, but in its wildness there was the spirit of a youth which, afterward, was heroic in self-sacrifice.... So things happened in London before the war.
A series of articles appearing in _The Daily Mail_, by Robert Blatchford, once a Socialist and still on the democratic side of political life, disturbed the sense of security in the average mind by a slight uneasiness. Not more than that, because the average mind had its inherited faith in our island inviolability and the power of the British Navy. There were articles entitled “Am Tag,” which is bad German, and they professed to reveal a determination in the military and naval castes of Germany to destroy the British fleet, invade England, and smash the British Empire.
Some of the evidence brought forward seemed childish in its absurdity. There were not many facts to a wealth of rhetoric. But they created a newspaper sensation, and were pooh-poohed by the government, as we now know, with utter insincerity--for there were members of that government who knew far more than Blatchford how deep and widespread was German hostility to Great Britain, and how close Europe stood to a world war.
One fantastic little incident connected with those articles of Blatchford’s amused me considerably at the time, though afterward I thought of it as a strange prophecy.