Part 1

MY YEAR OF THE GREAT WAR

_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_

GOING TO WAR IN GREECE THE WAYS OF THE SERVICE THE VAGABOND WITH KUROKI IN MANCHURIA OVER THE PASS THE LAST SHOT MY YEAR OF THE GREAT WAR

MY YEAR OF THE GREAT WAR

BY FREDERICK PALMER

Author of “The Last Shot,” “With Kuroki in Manchuria,” “The Vagabond,” etc.

Toronto McClelland, Goodchild & Stewart Limited

COPYRIGHT, 1915 BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY

_First Edition_ OCTOBER _Second, Third and Fourth Editions_ NOVEMBER _Fifth Edition_ DECEMBER

Printed in U. S. A.

TO THE READER

In “The Last Shot,” which appeared only a few months before the Great War began, drawing from my experience in many wars, I attempted to describe the character of a conflict between two great European land-powers, such as France and Germany.

“You were wrong in some ways,” a friend writes to me, “but in other ways it is almost as if you had written a play and they were following your script and stage business.”

Wrong as to the duration of the struggle and its bitterness; right about the part which artillery would play; right in suggesting the stalemate of intrenchments when vast masses of troops occupied the length of a frontier. Had the Germans not gone through Belgium and attacked on the shorter line of the Franco-German boundary, the parallel of fact with that of prediction would have been more complete. As for the ideal of “The Last Shot,” we must await the outcome to see how far it shall be fulfilled by a lasting peace.

Then my friend asks, “How does it make you feel?” Not as a prophet; only as an eager observer, who finds that imagination pales beside reality. If sometimes an incident seemed a page out of my novel, I was reminded how much better I might have done that page from life; and from life I am writing now.

I have seen too much of the war and yet not enough to assume the pose of a military expert; which is easy when seated in a chair at home before maps and news despatches, but becomes fantastic after one has lived at the front. One waits on more information before he forms conclusions about campaigns. He is certain only that the Marne was a decisive battle for civilisation; that if England had not gone into the war the Germanic Powers would have won in three months.

No words can exaggerate the heroism and sacrifice of the French or the importance of the part which the British have played, which we shall not realise till the war is over. In England no newspapers were suppressed; casualty lists were given out; she gave publicity to dissensions and mistakes which others concealed, in keeping with her ancient birthright of free institutions which work out conclusions through discussion rather than taking them ready-made from any ruler or leader.

Whatever value this book has is the reflection of personal observation and the thoughts which have occurred to me when I have walked around my experiences and measured them and found what was worth while and what was not. Such as they are, they are real.

Most vital of all in sheer expression of military power was the visit to the British Grand Fleet; most humanly appealing, the time spent in Belgium under German rule; most dramatic, the French victory on the Marne; most precious, my long stay at the British front.

A traveller’s view I had of Germany in the early period of the war; but I was never with the German army which made Americans particularly welcome for obvious reasons. Between right and wrong one cannot be a neutral. By foregoing the diversion of shaking hands and passing the time of day on the Germanic fronts, I escaped having to be agreeable to hosts warring for a cause and in a manner obnoxious to me. I was among friends, living the life of one army and seeing war in all its aspects from day to day, instead of having tourist glimpses.

Chapters which deal with the British army in France and with the British fleet have been submitted to the censor. In all, possibly one typewritten page fell foul of the blue pencil. Though the censor may delete military secrets, he may not prompt opinions. Whatever notes of praise and of affection which you may read between the lines or in them spring from the mind and heart. Undemonstratively, cheerily as they would go for a walk, with something of old-fashioned chivalry, the British went to death.

Their national weaknesses and strength, revealed under external differences by association, are more akin to ours than we shall realise until we face our own inevitable crisis. Though one’s ancestors had been in America for nearly three centuries and had fought the British twice for a good cause he was continually finding how much of custom, of law, of habit, and of instinct he had in common with them; and how Americans who were not of British blood also shared these as an applied inheritance that has been the most formative element in the crucible of the races which has produced the American type.

My grateful acknowledgments are due to the American press associations who considered me worthy to be the accredited American correspondent at the British front, and to _Collier’s_ and _Everybody’s_; and may an author who has not had the opportunity to read proofs request the reader’s indulgence.

FREDERICK PALMER.

British Headquarters, France.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I WHO STARTED IT? 1

II “LE BRAVE BELGE!” 20

III MONS AND PARIS 29

IV PARIS WAITS 36

V ON THE HEELS OF VON KLUCK 47

VI AND CALAIS WAITS 73

VII IN GERMANY 82

VIII HOW THE KAISER LEADS 95

IX IN BELGIUM UNDER THE GERMANS 113

X CHRISTMAS IN BELGIUM 129

XI THE FUTURE OF BELGIUM 142

XII WINTER IN LORRAINE 159

XIII SMILES AMONG RUINS 177

XIV A ROAD OF WAR I KNOW 200

XV TRENCHES IN WINTER 214

XVI IN NEUVE CHAPELLE 226

XVII WITH THE IRISH 246

XVIII WITH THE GUNS 262

XIX ARCHIBALD THE ARCHER 284

XX TRENCHES IN SUMMER 290

XXI A SCHOOL IN BOMBING 310

XXII MY BEST DAY AT THE FRONT 316

XXIII MORE BEST DAY 335

XXIV WINNING AND LOSING 344

XXV THE MAPLE LEAF FOLK 350

XXVI FINDING THE BRITISH FLEET 368

XXVII ON A DESTROYER 374

XXVIII SHIPS THAT HAVE FOUGHT 378

XXIX ON THE “INFLEXIBLE” 393

XXX ON THE FLEET FLAGSHIP 400

XXXI SIMPLY HARD WORK 412

XXXII HUNTING THE SUBMARINE 421

XXXIII THE FLEET PUTS TO SEA 425

XXXIV MANY PICTURES 433

XXXV BRITISH PROBLEMS 446

MY YEAR OF THE GREAT WAR

I

WHO STARTED IT?

The ultimate arbitrament--The diplomatist’s status--The causes in the aims and ideals of the peoples--Europe’s economic relation to the rest of the world--The economic cause--“Biological necessity”--England’s position--Her complacency--The “German Wedge”--The German system--Modern efficiency methods--“A machine civil world”--The Kaiser’s mission--A German the world over--Germany’s plans and ambitions--Her war spirit-- Activities in Italy--The Austrian situation--The Slav-Teuton racial hatred--France, a nation with a closed-in culture--The Kaiser’s “peace”--The Germanic “isolation.”

Who started it? Who is to blame? The courts decide the point when there is a quarrel between Smith and Jones; and it is the ethics of simple justice that no friend of Smith or Jones should act as judge. When the quarrel is between nations, the neutral world turns to the diplomatic correspondence which preceded the breaking-off of relations; and only one who is a neutral can hope to weigh impartially the evidence on both sides. For war is the highest degree of partisanship. Every one engaged is a special pleader.

I, too, have read the White and Blue and Yellow and Green Papers. Others have analysed them in detail; I shall not attempt it. One learned less from their dignified phraseology than from the human motives that he read between the lines. Each was aiming to make out the best case for its own side; aiming to put the heart of justice into the blows of its arms. Obviously, the diplomatist is an attorney for a client. Incidentally, the whole training of his profession is to try to prevent war. He does try to prevent it; so does every right-minded man. It is a horror and a scourge, to be avoided as you would avoid leprosy. When it does come, the diplomatist’s business is to place all the blame for it with the enemy.

One must go many years back of the dates of the State papers to find the cause of the Great War. He must go into the hearts of the people who are fighting, into their aims and ambitions, which diplomatists make plausible according to international law. More illumining than the pamphlets embracing an exchange of despatches was the remark of a practical German: “Von Bethmann-Hollweg made a slip when he talked of a treaty as a scrap of paper and about hacking his way through. That had a bad effect.”

Equally pointed was the remark of a practical Briton: “It was a good thing that the Germans violated the neutrality of Belgium; otherwise, we might not have gone in, which would have been fatal for us. If Germany had crushed France and kept the Channel ports, the next step would have been a war in which we should have had to deal with her single-handed.”

I would rather catch the drift of a nation’s purpose from the talk of statesmen in the lobby or in the club than from their official pronouncements. Von Bethmann-Hollweg had said in public what was universally accepted in private. He had let the cat out of the bag. England’s desire to preserve the neutrality of Belgium was not altogether ethical. If Belgium’s coast had been on the Adriatic rather than on the British Channel, her wrongs would not have had the support of British arms.

Great moral causes were at stake in the Great War; but they are inextricably mixed with cool, national self-interest and racial hatreds, which are also dictated by self-interest, though not always by the interests of the human race. One who sees the struggle of Europe as a spectator, with no hatred in his heart except of war itself, finds prejudice and efficiency, folly and merciless logic, running in company. He would return to the simplest principles, human principles, to avoid confusion in his own mind. Not of Europe, he studies Europe; he wonders at Europe.

On a map of the world twice the size of a foolscap page, the little finger’s end will cover the area of the struggle. Europe is a very small section of the earth’s surface, indeed. Yet at the thought of a great European war, all the other peoples drew their breath aghast. When the catastrophe came, all were affected in their most intimate relations, in their income, and in their intellectual life. Rare was the mortal who did not find himself taking sides in what would have seemed to an astronomer on Mars as a local terrestrial upheaval.

From Europe have gone forth the waves of vigour and enterprise which have had the greatest influence on the rest of the world, in much the same way that they went forth from Rome over the then known world. The war in this respect was like the great Roman civil war. The dominating power of our civilisation was at war with itself. Draw a circle around England, Scandinavia, the Germanic countries, and France, and you have the hub from which the spokes radiate to the immense wheel-rim. It is a region which cannot feed its mouths from its own soil, though it could amply a little more than a century ago in the Napoleonic struggle. In a sense, then, it is a physical parasite on the rest of the world; a parasite which, however, has given its intellectual energy in return for food for its body.

This war had for its object the delivery of no people from bondage, except the Belgians after the war had begun; it had no religious purpose such as the Crusades; it was not the uprising of democracy like the French Revolution. Those who charged the machine guns and the wives and mothers who urged them on were unconscious of the real force disguised by their patriotic fervour. Ask a man to die for money and he refuses. Ask him to die in order that he may have more butter on his bread and he refuses. This is putting the cause of war too bluntly. It is insulting to courage and to self-sacrifice, assessing them as something set on a counter for sale. For nations do not know why they fight, as a rule. Processes of evolution and chains of events arouse their patriotic ardour and their martial instinct till the climax comes in blows.

The cause of the European war is economic; and, by the same token, Europe kept the peace for forty years for economic reasons. She was busy skimming the cream of the resources of other countries. Hers was the capital, the skill, the energy, the _morale_, the culture, for exploiting the others. All modern invention originated with her or with the offspring of her races beyond seas. Steamers brought her raw material, which she sent back in manufactures; they took forth, in place of the buccaneers of former days seeking gold, her financiers, engineers, salesmen, and teachers, who returned with tribute or sent back the interest on the capital they had applied to enterprise. She looked down on the rest of the world with something of the Roman patrician feeling of superiority to outsiders.

But also the medical scientist kept pace with other scientists and with invention. Sanitation and the preservation of life led to an amazing rapidity of increase in population. There were more mouths to feed and more people who must have work and share the tribute. Without the increase of population it is possible that we should not have had war. Biological necessity played its part in bringing on the struggle, along with economic pressure. The richest veins of the mines of other lands, the most accessible wood of the forests, were taken, and a higher rate of living all over Europe increased the demand of the numbers.

Most fortunate of all the European peoples were the British. Most significant in this material progress was the part of Germany. England had a narrow stretch of salt water between her and the other nations. They could fight one another by crossing a land frontier; to fight her, they must cross in ships. She had the advantage of being of Europe and yet separated from Europe. All the seas were the secure pathway for her trade, guaranteed for a century by the victory of Trafalgar. By war she had won her sea power; by war she was the mistress of many colonies. Germany’s increasing mercantile marine had to travel from a narrow sea front through the channel called British. Rich was England’s heritage beyond her own realisation. Hers the accumulated capital; hers the field of resources under her own flag to exploit.

But she had done more. Through a century’s experience she had learned the strength of moderation. What she had won by war she was holding by wisdom. If some one must guard the seas, if some one must have dominion over brown and yellow races, she was well fitted for the task. Wherever she had dominion, whether Bombay or Hongkong, there was freedom in trade and in development for all men. We who have travelled recognise this.

When the war began, South Africa had no British regular garrisons, but the Boers, a people who had lost their nation in war with her fifteen years before, took up arms under her flag to invade a German colony. India without a parliament, India ruled by English governors, sent her troops to fight in France. In place of sedition, loyalty from a brave and hardy white people of another race and from hundreds of millions of brown men! Such power is not gained by war, but by the policy of fair play; of live and let live. Measurably, she held in trust those distant lands for the other progressive nations; she was the policeman of wide domains. Certainly no neutral, at least no American, envied her the task. Certainly no neutral, for selfish reasons if for no other, would want to risk chaos throughout the world by the transfer of that power to another nation.

England was satiated, as Admiral Mahan said. She had gained all that she cared to hold. It is not too much to say that, of late years, colonies might come begging to her doorstep and be refused. Those who held her wealth were complacent as well as satiated--which was her danger. For complacency goes with satiation. But she, too, was suffering from having skimmed the cream, for want of mines and concessions as rich as those which had filled her coffers, and from the demand of the increased population become used to a higher rate of living. Her vast, accumulated wealth in investments the world over was in relatively few hands. In no great European country, perhaps, was wealth more unevenly distributed. Her old age pensions and many social reforms of recent years arose from a restlessness, locally intensified but not alone of local origin.

Another flag was appearing too frequently in her channel. A wedge was being forced into her complacency. A competitor who worked twelve hours a day, while complacency preferred eight or ten, met the Englishman at every turn. A navy was growing in the Baltic; taxes pressed heavily on complacency to keep up a navy stronger than the young rival’s. Who really was to blame for the clerks’ pay being kept down, while the cost of living went up? That cheap-living German clerk! What capitalist was pressing the English capitalist? The German! The newspapers were always hinting at the German danger. Certain interests in England, as in any other country, were glad to find a scapegoat. Why should Germany want colonies when England ruled her colonies so well? Germany--always Germany, whatever way you looked, Germany with her seventy millions, aggressive, enterprising, industrious, organised! The pressure of the wedge kept increasing. Something must break.

Does any one doubt that if Germany had been in England’s place she would have struck the rival in the egg? But that is not the way of complacency. Nor is it the way of that wisdom of moderation, that live and let live, which has kept the British Empire intact.

Germany wanted room for her wedge. In Central Europe, with foes on either side, she had to hold two land frontiers before she could start her sea wedge. She was the more readily convinced that England had won all she held by war because modern Germany was the product of war. By war Prussia won Schleswig-Holstein; by war Germany won Alsace-Lorraine, and welded the Germanic peoples into a whole. It was only natural that the German public should be loyal to the system that had fathered German success.

Thus, England reveres its Wellingtons, Nelsons, Pitts, and maintains the traditions of the regiments which fought for her. Thus, we are loyal to the Constitution of the United States, because it was drafted by the forefathers who made the nation. If it had been drafted in the thirties we should think it more fallible. It is the nature of individuals, of business concerns, of nations, to hold with the methods that laid the foundations of success till some cataclysm shows that they are wrong or antiquated. This reckoning may be sudden loss of his position in a crisis for the individual, bankruptcy for the business concern, war for the nation. One sticks to the doctor who cured him when he was young and perhaps goes to an early grave because that doctor has grown out of date.

The old Kaiser, Bismarck, and von Moltke laid the basis of the German system. It was industry, unity, and obedience to superiors, from bottom to top. Under it, if not because of it, Germany became a mighty national entity. Another Kaiser, who had the merit of making the most of his inheritance, with other generals and leaders, brought modern methods to the service of the successful system. A new, up-to-date doctor succeeded the old, with the inherited authority of the old.

That aristocratic, exclusive German officer, staring at you, elbowing you if you did not give him right of way in the street, seemed to express insufferable caste to the outsider. But he was a part of the system which had won; and he worked longer hours than the officers of other European armies. Seeming to enjoy enormous privileges, he was really a circumscribed being, subject to all the rigid discipline that he demanded of others, bred and fashioned for war. Wherever I have met foreign military attachés observing other wars, the German was the busiest one, the most persistent and resourceful after information; and he was not acting on his own initiative, but under careful instructions of a staff who knew exactly what it wanted to know. “Germany shall be first!” was his motto; “Germany shall be first!” the motto of all Germans.

In the same way that von Moltke constructed his machine army, the Germany of the young Kaiser set out to construct a machine civil world. He had a public which was ready to be moulded, because plasticity to the master’s hand had beaten France. Drill, application, and discipline had done the trick for von Moltke--these and leadership. The new method was economic education plus drill, application, and discipline.

It is not for me to describe the industrial beehive of modern Germany. The world knows it well. The Kaiser, who led, worked as hard as the humblest of his subjects. From the top came the impetus which the leaders passed on. Germany looked for worlds to conquer; England had conquered hers. The energy of increasing population overflowed from the boundaries, pushing that wedge closer home to an England growing more irritably apprehensive.

Wherever the traveller went he found Germans, whether waiters, or capitalists, or salesmen, learning the language of the country where they lived, making place for themselves by their industry. Germany was struggling for room, and the birth rate was increasing the excess of population. The business of German nationalism was to keep them all in Germany and mould them into so much more power behind the sea wedge. The German teaching--that teaching of a partisan youth which is never complacent--did not contemplate a world composed of human beings, but a world composed of Germans, loyal to the Kaiser, and others who were not. Within that tiny plot on the earth’s surface the German system was giving more people a livelihood and more comforts for their resources than anywhere else, unless in Belgium.