Part 8
“As I was telling you,” resumed Radovitch, “dynamite was the one thing we felt the need of more than anything else, and yet--perhaps the one big thing we did wouldn’t have been half so big (and maybe it would have failed completely) if we’d had the powder to go about the job the way we planned to do it in the first place. Did you ever hear what happened to the Austrian force that was camped in the ---- Valley last spring?”
“I remember reading one of their bulletins,” I replied, “which admitted losing a battalion or two in a flood in that region. But that was due to ‘natural causes,’ wasn’t it? Didn’t a broken dam have something to do with it?”
“Natural causes and a busted dam did have something to do with it,” said Radovitch with a grin; “but nature in this case had some active assistance, and that was where we came in. It wasn’t just a battalion that went down-stream, either; it was more like two of their big regiments--the whole of the main force they had shivvied together to bottle us up with. It was the best thing we did by a mile; and, as I told you, it wouldn’t have been half the clean-up it was if we’d had in the first place the powder to do it in the ‘regular way.’ If we _had_ had the powder, we’d never have given Providence a chance, and, believe me, it was nothing but Providence that could have worked things round the way they finally came out.
“You see, it was this way,” went on Radovitch, settling back comfortably and smiling the pleased smile of reminiscence that sits on the face of a man who recalls events in which he has taken keen pride and enjoyment, “the most open approach to our mountain country was by the gorge up which ran the cart-road. There was a good-sized area of watershed draining out this way, so that the little river running through the gorge was a pretty powerful stream even in low water--a good bit bigger than the old Firehole in Yellowstone Park. This river flowed out of the main mass of the mountains into a fine bowl of an uplands valley, and then on out of that, through a rough range of foothills, in another gorge. At the head of this last gorge is a natural site to store water, and there--as a project of an old Government reclamation scheme that had been held up halfway for lack of money to go on with--a high dam had been built which backed up a deep, narrow lake four or five miles long.
“The Austrians had a small force in the little village in the valley of the lake, and patrolled four or five miles of the cart-road into the mountains, but the main lot of them were camped below the second gorge in an open, triangle-shaped valley that ran up from the plain to the foothills. It was a good, safe, healthy, well-drained camp, well above the top marks of spring high-water. The only threat to it was the lake behind the dam in the valley above, but, unluckily for them, they didn’t know all the facts about that dam.
“The truth was that this dam was built to hold up a lake half again as deep as the one then there, but poor engineering and scamp contracting combined to make it too weak to stand the pressure up to the level intended. The English engineer who came to inspect it put a mark about two-thirds of the way up, and warned that it wouldn’t be safe to ever let the water rise above that height. As a precaution, it had been the custom every February or March, before the spring thaw came, to drain off the water of the lake during the month or two before the run-off was the greatest, so that there was plenty of margin against the floods shoving up the level above the danger-point. The Austrians were good enough engineers to know that it was a rotten dam, but they didn’t seem to have the sense to start lowering the water level before the spring freshets set in.
“Of course we didn’t have to set up nights to figure what a break in the dam--if only it came sudden enough--would do to the main Austrian camp; but the contriving of ways and means to bring about that ‘sudden break’ seemed to have us guessing from the first. The simple and natural thing would have been to try and work down a couple of raiding parties on either side of the lake, rush the guards at the dam with knives (as we did later at the bridge I told you of), plant two or three charges of dynamite, touch off the fuses, and beat it back to the hills. If we’d had enough powder, probably that’s the thing we’d have tried, but with what success it’s hard to say. The chances against anything like a ‘clean job’ were anywhere from ten to fifty to one. In the first place, there was the chance of some of the raiders running into an Austrian patrol or sentry and starting something before they ever got near the dam. Then there was the chance that the rush at the dam might not go off quietly enough to keep from bringing the force in the village down on us and making it hopeless to try and place the powder, even if we had cleaned up the guards. Or, if we did get the powder placed, there was the chance that we might fail to explode it (as happened at the bridge); or even if it did explode, it was no cinch that the dam would go all at once, or that the camp below wouldn’t be warned in time to get clear. Yes, I’m sure it was a good fifty-to-one that one of these things would have upset the apple-cart if we’d happened to be in shape to try and do the job with dynamite. And once we’d showed our hand, of course, the Austrians had only to let the water out of the lake or move the lower camp, and the game was up for good.
“But the hundred or so sticks of forty per cent. ‘giant’ we had in stock were out of the question to tackle the job with, and so no move was made that might have stirred the enemy’s suspicions of what we had in pickle for him. So, far from taking any precautions as the flood season approached, he only let the water go on rising in the lake and extended the main camp a hundred yards nearer the river. We talked over a hundred plans in the long winter nights, but it was not till the snow began to turn slushy at noonday, along towards the middle of March, that we hit on one that seemed to promise a chance of success.
“We had been hoping all along that the Austrians might let the water go on piling up behind the dam until it gave way, but it was not till one day when our scouts brought word that the gates had now been opened, with the evident intention of holding the lake at a level which they figured at about ten feet above the danger-point, that it occurred to us that we might do something to help the good work along. Nobody ever recalled afterwards whose idea it was, but a dozen of us--officers and men together, in the Serbian fashion--suddenly found ourselves waving our arms and getting red in the face discussing a plan for building a little dam of our own, backing up as big a lakeful of water behind it as we could, and then turning it loose on the big lake below at the crest of the spring floods. If any of us had had any engineering sense we’d have known that we couldn’t build--with no tools but a few axes and spades, and no materials but what nature had put there--a dam in a year big enough to be of any use, let alone in a month. But having no sense to speak of in things of that kind, we went ahead with the job, and, with the luck of fools, pulled it off.
“There was a fine site for a dam at the upper end of the cart-road gorge, where it looked as though a solid barrier thirty feet high would back up a lake something like three-quarters of a mile long and from a quarter to half a mile wide. We began by building a ‘crib’ of pine-trunks thirty feet wide--which was to be filled with boulders and gravel. On our pencil plan of it, it was to be heavily buttressed from below and slope from both sides till it was only ten feet wide at the top. Our idea was to make it as much like a fort as possible, so that if the Austrians piped it off from an aeroplane they would think we were only working on defences. A hole was to be left in the middle for the river to flow out through, as we didn’t intend to store water till the big rains and thaws set in. As it was rainy or windy every day from the time we started to work, the Austrians--as far as we ever knew--did no flying over the mountains, so that we had no worry on that score.
“Upwards of five hundred husky Serbs can do a deal of work, but it didn’t take more than three days of log-rolling and rock-packing to show that--even at the pace we were hitting it--that hundred-yard-long, thirty-feet-high dam wouldn’t be finished before the next season, and that, even if we did get it done some time, the stuff we were putting in it was too loose to stop water. It was at this stage of things that I had _my_ big idea. I had worked in hydraulic mines in the West, and while we had nothing to rig up a pipe and nozzle from, there _was_ a chance to divert a little mountain torrent that came tumbling down from the snows only a few yards below our dam site. Why not, I suggested, build up only a narrow crib of boulders and pine logs to act as a barrier, and then bring over this little torrent--it was flowing about a hundred miner’s inches at this time--and let it sluice down the loose ‘conglomerate’ from the four-hundred-foot-high cliff through which it flowed? Because no one had anything else to offer, we decided to try the thing.
“We used up a good half of our poor little store of powder in making the cut to bring over the stream, but the job was mostly easy digging, and we finished it in three days. My young ‘hydraulic’ sure tore down a lot of rock and gravel, but, as we couldn’t rig up anything to confine it properly, it only spread out in a big ‘fan,’ which in turn was sluiced away by the river. That fairly stumped us, and when on top of it a big storm came on and brought down a flood that washed away all our cribbing, we chucked up in disgust our project of ‘harnessing nature’ against the Austrian and began to plan raids again.
“All that night it rained cats and dogs, and when I looked out of my hut the next morning the river was over its banks and humping it like a ‘locoed’ mustang. But the funny thing was that the cascade from the little stream we had diverted seemed to have disappeared. At first I thought it had bucked its way back into its old channel, but when I went down to look I found that it had been ‘swallowed’ up by the cliff. Five times as big as on the night before, it came tumbling down over an up-ended stratum of slate, to disappear in a foamy yellow-white spout into a deep crack it had sluiced into the soft ‘conglomerate.’ At the bottom of the cliff it came boiling out from under the angling slate-layer in a stream that looked to be about equal parts of gravel and water. My baby ‘hydraulic’ had evidently undermined a sloping section of the cliff for a hundred feet or more, and only the tough slate stratum was staving off a big cave-in. How big a cave-in it was going to be, and what it was going to lead to, I never guessed.
“The warm rain kept plugging down all day, and was still pelting hard when I went to sleep that night. Towards morning I was waked up with a roar a hundred times louder than any snow-slide I ever heard, and then came a jar that rocked the whole valley. I felt sure a piece of the cliff had come down, but didn’t have the least hunch that anything like what the first daylight showed up had come off. The first thing I saw as the dark slacked off was the shimmer of a flat stretch of water in the bottom of the valley, a lake--just as if it had been dropped from the sky--right where we’d been trying to start one ourselves.
“The cliff had broken back a couple of hundred feet or more all the way to the top, and in falling had piled up clear across the head of the gorge. On the near side it was about one hundred and fifty feet high, on the farther side something like sixty.
“With the rain still pouring pitchforks and the snow melting all over the mountains, water was coming down at a rate that had the lake rising at the rate of two feet an hour all morning, and better than half that fast even when it began to spread out over the valley floor in the afternoon. The storm kept right on for three days. The second morning there was twenty-five feet of water at the dam, on the third forty feet and on the fourth near to fifty. The lake by this time was both bigger and deeper than the one we’d planned to make ourselves.
“By good luck the streams ramping down from the mountains into the gorge below the slide kept two or three times its average flow in the river, and so the Austrians--who didn’t know its habits very well--failed to notice that anything unusual had come off up-stream. Our scouts reported that the water in the lower lake had not risen much, and that it seemed to stand at about fifteen feet above the danger mark. The Austrians, they said, did not appear to be paying any more attention to the dam than usual.
“We were hoping that the storm would hold until enough water was backed up to bust the dam on its own, but when it began to clear on the fourth day it was plain the best way out of it was to give the thing a push on our own account. We didn’t have a hundredth of enough ‘giant’ to do the job, so had to rig the best makeshift we could by turning the still husky stream of my ‘hydraulic’ right along the sloping top of the slide and off down into the gorge.
“It was about midday when we set it sluicing, and all afternoon it licked off the loose earth as if it was sugar. By dark half the near end of the slide had slushed away, and the wall that still held was beginning to bulge and cave with the seep forced through from the other side. Half an hour later our pitch-pine torches showed the water bubbling through all the way along, and we knew it was time for us to clear out. It was none too soon either, for the last man was just out of the way when a heavy sort of rolling-grind started, and then--whouf!--out she went.
“I’ve been in ‘Yankee Jim’s’ Canyon of the Yellowstone when the flood behind the break-up of the ice-jam in the lake came down, but that was a rat-a-tat to the roar that sounded now. The mountains themselves were shaking, and the movement started the ‘hanging’ snow-slides all the way down the gorge. It must have been a racket like that when the world was made. The lake was drained of all but mud in ten minutes, and it must have been about twice that long before a new sound broke in--a roar so deep that it seemed to almost be a rumbling from under the earth. But we knew that it was the big dam going--that our work was done for that night.
“The next morning at daybreak every man in shape to stand the climb over a mountain path we knew--the road down the gorge had been scoured out clean--dropped down from three sides on the little Austrian force in the village where the dam had been, and killed or captured the whole bunch. Then we pushed on to the top of the foothills looking down to the plain. Where the main Austrian camp had been was a slither of smooth mud, dotted with the stumps of snapped-off trees; and just that, and no more, was all we could see as far as our eyes could reach.
“And just so,” cried Radovitch, leaping to his feet and shaking a fist toward the serrated sky-line to the north-east, beyond which ran the roads to Monastir and Prilep and Uskub; “just so, when the time comes, will the whole ---- ---- herd of the swine be swept out of Serbia!”
BEATING BACK FROM GERMANY
(AS TOLD BY AN ESCAPED PRISONER).
I was born on a Wisconsin farm, almost within sight of Lake Michigan and only a few miles from the Illinois State line. My father was Irish and my mother German. Like my name, most of my qualities--both good and bad--were those of my father rather than my mother. He died when I was ten, and within a year my mother married our German hired-man. My mother was never unkind to me, but my stepfather was a brute, and from the day of his coming to live with us I date a steadily growing dislike for his race, which has been made worse by a sort of fatality which, in spite of myself, has seemed to work to throw me amongst them all my life.
My stepfather was always rough with me, but until I was sixteen confined himself to a black-snake and horsewhip in beating me. I got on as best I could with him, but when he celebrated my coming to what he called “man’s estate” by starting in on me with a hoe-handle, it was more than I could stand. The second time he tried it I was ready for him and caught him a blow behind the ear with an iron monkey-wrench that laid him out across the chopping-block. Afraid that I had killed him--he was really not hurt much--I ran away, taking nothing with me but the wrench I had in my hand. I never parted with that good old monkey-wrench during all my wanderings of the next ten years, and I felt worse about losing it to the Germans in Flanders than I did about the two fingers their shrapnel bashed off.
For the next few years I did all kinds of farm work, always being employed by Germans because nearly all of the farms in southern Wisconsin are owned by those people. Possibly there were many good people amongst them, but it always seemed to be my luck to get with the others. Hard workers themselves, they were also hard drivers of those who worked for them, and full of mean little tricks for getting more time out of you or for giving you less money. Of course, being quick-tempered and with a sort of standing grudge against all “square-heads” growing up inside of me anyhow, I was in hot water most of the time. The week that went by without a fight was very exceptional. If they were content to go after me with their fists, I usually kept to the same weapons, and hardly recall a time when I didn’t have the best of it. But if they ever tried anything else I always fell back on my trusty monkey-wrench, which I generally carried swung to my belt with a raw-hide. After a while, just as the Indians used to tally their scalps on the handles of their tomahawks, I started cutting a notch on the wooden grip of my monkey-wrench for every time I had dropped--I don’t think I ever killed one--a “square-head” with it. At first--proud of what they stood for--I cut them broad and long, but soon I saw I was using up my limited space too fast, and, to provide for “future developments,” began cutting them smaller. It was surprising how much the notches improved the grip.
By the time I was twenty I was able to run both the engine and the separator of a threshing-machine outfit, and started going west every summer to the Dakotas and Montana to get the benefit of the high harvest pay. My winters I spent in a big factory in Racine, learning to repair and build threshers and tractors. Partly to save the money that I would have had to pay for a ticket, but more for the lark of it, I started beating my way back and forth between the east and the west on the trains. Sometimes I stowed away with a week’s food in an empty furniture car, sometimes I rode the “blind baggage,” but mostly it was the old stand-by of the “bindle-stiff” called “riding the rods.” My nerve was good and my arms strong, and it wasn’t long before I could swing up and disappear inside the “bumpers” of a train doing thirty miles an hour as easily as the conductor swung on to the tail of the caboose by his hand-rail. It was little idea I had that the tricks I learned in those days were going to make all the difference between my starving in a German prison camp and (what is happening now) being fed on chocolates and pink teas in London by way of training for another go at the Huns.
In 1913 I went to South America to set up and run threshing outfits that had been sold to the ranchers by the Racine company I had been working for winters. I had a two years’ contract, and was supposed to go to Uruguay or the Argentine. If I had done that, probably things would have been all right. But at the last moment, as a result of some one else dropping out, I was sent to Rio Grande do Sul, in the southern “pan-handle” of Brazil. But don’t believe that because it was Brazil there were any Brazilians there, or leastways any that counted for anything. The Germans have been swarming into Rio Grande and Santa Catharina for thirty years, and to-day southern Brazil is as “Dutch” as--southern Wisconsin. Probably, in fact, it is more so, for there are over half a million Germans there, and hardly a third that many Brazilians.
I had been avoiding German farms for the last two or three years, but in Rio Grande all the ranchers were Germans, and I had to go wherever an outfit had been sold anyhow. The notches multiplied pretty fast on my old monkey-wrench for about three weeks, but at the end of that time I found myself in jail for knocking out the front teeth of a fat German farmer after I had ducked a prod from his pitchfork. Our agent at Santa Catharina and the American Consul at Santos got me clear, but the former took the occasion to cancel my contract and ship me home before, as he put it, I had ruined the company’s trade in that end of Brazil.
I was breaking prairie with a big gasoline tractor outfit in northern Manitoba when the European War started, and so sure I was that my country was going to take some kind of a stand against the invasion of Belgium that I got ready at once to go home and enlist in case we had to back up the protest with force. I waited, with my grip packed, until it was plain that there was no chance of any move from our brave statesmen at Washington--it must have been three or four weeks before I gave up hope--and then threw up my job, did sixty miles on horseback in nine hours to the railway station, and went to the nearest recruiting office. They would probably have taken me as an American, but I was taking no chances on being rejected. I told them I was an Irish-Canadian, and the next day was being put through the paces by the drill-sergeant. I could have got much more pay and a better billet generally by going into the transport service and driving a motor truck, but I had suddenly become aware that I had been nursing a sort of slumbering desire to kill Germans for the last decade, and I wasn’t going to miss the chance to let that desire wake up. I sewed an extra loop on my belt so that I could have my good old monkey-wrench always handy, and began looking anxiously forward to the time when I should be able to complete my “register” of bashed-up Dutchmen on the handle. I might have to use my rifle for long-range work, I told myself, but for the close-in action in the trenches I was going to do with my wrench what the other fellows did with their bayonets. Lucky it was for my peace of mind in those days that I couldn’t look forward and see what the end of the next eight or ten months had in pickle for me.