Part 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV

ON THE BACK OF THE BIRD OF WAR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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