Part 3

A battle! It was a battle because the reporters could get some account of it and the fighting in Alsace was hidden under the cloud of secrecy. A superficial survey was enough to show that it had been only a reconnaissance by the Germans with some infantry and guns as well as cavalry. Their defeat had been an incident to the thrust of a tiny feeling finger of the German octopus for information. The scouting of the German cavalry patrols here and there had the same object. Waiting behind hedges or sweeping around in the rear of a patrol with their own cavalry when the word came by telephone, the Belgians bagged many a German, man and horse, dead and alive.

Brussels and London and New York, too, thrilled over these exploits supplied to eager readers. It was the Uhlan week of the war; for every German cavalryman was an Uhlan, according to popular conception. These Uhlans seemed to have more temerity than sense from the accounts that one read. But if one out of a dozen of these mounted youth, with horses fresh and a trooper’s zest in the first flush of war, returned to say that he had ridden to such and such points without finding any signs of British or French forces, he had paid for the loss of the others. The Germans had plenty of cavalry. They used it as the eyes of the army, in co-operation with the aerial eyes of the planes.

A peasant woman came out of the house beside the battlefield with her children around her; a flat-chested, thin woman, prematurely old with toil. “_Les Anglais!_” she cried at sight of us. Seeing that we had some lances in the car, she rushed into her house and brought out half a dozen more. If the English wanted lances they should have them. She knew only a few words of French, not enough to express the question which she made understood by gestures. Her eyes were burning with appeal to us and flashing with hate as she shook her fist toward the Germans.

When were the English coming? All her trust was in the English, the invincible English, to save her country. Probably the average European would have passed her by as an excited peasant woman. But pitiful she was to me, more pitiful than the raging officer and his dog battery, or the infantry awkwardly entrenching back of Louvain, or flag-decked Brussels believing in victory: one of the Belgians with the true _shipperke_ spirit. She was shaking her fist at a dam which was about to burst in a flood.

It was strange to an American, who comes from a land where every one learns a single language, English, that she and her ancestors, through centuries of living neighbour in a thickly-populated country to people who speak French and to French civilisation, should never have learned to express themselves in any but their own tongue--singular, almost incredible, tenacity in the age of popular education! She would save the lance heads and garner every grain of wheat; she economised in all but racial animosity. This racial stubbornness of Europe--perhaps it keeps Europe powerful in jealous competition of race with race.

The thought that went home was that she did not want the Germans to come; no Belgian wanted them; and this was the fact decisive in the scales of justice. She said, as the officer had said, that the Germans were “out there.” Across the fields one saw nothing on that still August day; no sign of war unless a Taube overhead, the first enemy aeroplane I had seen in war. For the last two days the German patrols had ceased to come. Liége, we knew, had fallen. Looking at the map, we prayed that Namur would hold.

“Out there” beyond the quiet fields that mighty force which was to swing through Belgium in flank was massed and ready to move when the German staff opened the throttle. A mile or so away a patrol of Belgian cyclists stopped us as we turned toward Brussels. They were dust-covered and weary; the voice of their captain was faint with fatigue. For over two weeks he had been on the hunt of Uhlan patrols. Another _shipperke_ he, who could not only hate but fight as best he knew how.

“We had an alarm,” he said. “Have you heard anything?”

When we told him no, he pedalled on more slowly, and oh, how wearily! to the front. Rather pitiful that, too, when you thought of what was “out there.”

One had learned enough to know, without the confidential information that he received, that the Germans could take Brussels if they chose. But the people of Brussels still thronged the streets under the blankets of bunting. If bunting could save Brussels, it was in no danger.

There was a mockery about my dinner that night. The waiter who laid the white cloth on a marble table was unctuously suggestive as to menu. Luscious grapes and crisp salad, which Belgian gardeners grow with meticulous care, I remember of it. One might linger over his coffee, knowing the truth, and look out at the people who did not know it. When they were not buying more buttons with the allied colours, or more flags, or dropping nickel pieces in Red Cross boxes, they were thronging to the kiosks for the latest edition of the evening papers, which told them nothing.

And one had to make up his mind. Clearly, he had only to keep in his room in his hotel in order to have a great experience. He might see the German troops enter Belgium. His American passport would protect him as a neutral; Minister Brand Whitlock and Secretary of Legation Hugh Gibson would get him out of trouble.

“Stick to the army you are with!” an eminent American had told me.

“Yes, but I prefer to choose my army,” I had replied.

The army I chose was not about to enter Brussels. It was on the side of the _shipperke_ dog mitrailleuse battery which I had seen in the streets of Haelen, and the peasant woman who shook her fist at the invader, and all who had the _shipperke_ spirit.

My empty appointment as the representative of the American press with the British army was, at least, taken seriously by the policeman at the War Office in London when I returned from trips to France. The day came when it was good for British trenches and gun positions; when it was worth all the waiting, if one wished to see the drama of modern war intimately.

III

MONS AND PARIS

The English base--Stories of the wounded--The cataclysm a reality-- London after Mons--The call to Englishmen--The “Fog of war”-- From Dieppe to Paris--The red trousers of the French--Empty Paris--Can the German machine be held?--“The French have not had their battle yet!”

Back from Belgium to England; then across the Channel again to Boulogne, where I saw the last of the French garrison march away, their red trousers a throbbing target along the road. From Boulogne the British had advanced into Belgium. Now their base was moved on to Havre. Boulogne, which two weeks before had been cheering the advent of “Tommee Atkeens” singing “Why should we be downhearted?” was ominously lifeless. It was a town without soldiers, a town of brick and mortar and pavements whose very defencelessness was its security should the Germans come.

The only British there were a few stray wounded officers and men who had found their way back from Mons. They had no idea where the British army was. All they realised were sleepless nights, the shock of combat, overpowering artillery fire, and resisting the onslaught of outnumbering masses.

An officer of Lancers, who had ridden through the German cavalry with his squadron, dwelt on the glory of that moment. What did his wound matter? It had come with the burst of a shell in a village street which killed his horse after the charge. He had hobbled away, reached a railroad train, and got on board. That was all he knew.

A Scotch private had been lying with his battalion in a trench when a German aeroplane was sighted. It had hardly passed by when showers of shrapnel descended and the Germans, in that grey-green so hard to see, were coming on as thick as locusts. Then the orders came to fall back, and he was hit as his battalion made another stand. He had crawled a mile across the fields in the night with a bullet in his arm. A medical corps officer told him to find any transportation he could; and he, too, was able to get aboard a train. That was all he knew.

These wounded had been tossed aside into eddies by the maelstrom of action. They were interesting because they were the first British wounded that I had seen; because the war was young.

Back to London again to catch the mail with an article. One was to “commute” to the war from London as home. It was a base whence one sallied forth to get peeps through the curtain of military secrecy at the mighty spectacle. One soaked in England at intervals and the war at intervals. Whenever one stepped on the pier at Folkestone it was with a breath of relief, born of a sense of freedom long associated with fields and hedges on the other side of the chalk cliffs which seemed to make the sequestering barrier of the sea complete.

Those days of late August and early September, 1914, were gripping days to the memory. Eager armies were pressing forward to a cataclysm no longer of dread imagination but of reality. That ever deepening and spreading stain from Switzerland to the North Sea was as yet only a splash of fresh blood. One still wondered if one might not wake up in the morning and find the war a nightmare. Pictures that grow clearer with time, which the personal memory chooses for its own, dissociate themselves from a background of detail.

They were very quiet, this pair that sat at the next table in the dining-room of a London hotel. I never spoke to them, but only stole discreet glances as we all will in irresistible temptation at any newly-wedded couple. Neither was of the worldly type. One knew that to this young girl London was strange; one knew the type of country home which had given her that simple charm which cities cannot breed; one knew, too, that this young officer, her husband, waited for word to go to the front.

Unconsciously she would play with her wedding-ring. She stole covert glances at it and at him, of the kind that bring a catch in the throat, when he was not looking at her--which he was most of the time, for reasons which were good and sufficient to others than himself. Apprehended in “wool-gathering,” she mustered a smile which was so exclusively for him that the neighbour felt that he ought to be forgiven his peeps from the tail of his eye at it because it was so precious.

They would attempt little flights of talk about everything except the war. He was most solicitous that she should have something which she liked to eat, while she was equally solicitous about him. Wasn’t he going “out there”? And out there he would have to live on army fare. It was all appealing to the old traveller. And then the next morning-- she was alone, after she had given him that precious smile in parting. The incident was one of the thousands before the war had become an institution, death a matter of routine, and it was a commonplace for young wives to see young husbands away to the front with a smile.

One such incident does for all, whether the war is young or old. There is nothing else to tell, even when you know wife and husband. I was rather glad that I did not know this pair. Then I should be looking at the casualty list in the newspaper each morning and I might not enjoy my faith that he will return alive. These two seemed to me the best of England. I used to think of them when gossip sought the latest turn of intrigue under the mantle of censorship, when Parliament poured out its oral floods and the newspapers their volumes of words. The man went off to fight; the woman returned to her country home. It was the hour of war, not of talk.

On that Sunday in London when the truth about Mons appeared stark to all England, another young man happened to buy a special edition at a street corner at the same time as myself. By all criteria, the world and his tailor had treated him well and he deserved well of the world. We spoke together about the news. Already the new democracy which the war had developed was in evidence. Everybody had common thoughts and a common thing at stake, with values reckoned in lives, and this makes for equality.

“It’s clear that we have had a bad knock. Why deny it?” he said. Then he added quietly, after a pause: “This is a personal call for me. I’m going to enlist.”

England’s answer to that “bad knock” was out of her experience. She had never won at first, but she had always won in the end; she had won the last battle. The next day’s news was worse and the next day’s still worse. The Germans seemed to be approaching Paris by forced marches. Paris might fall--no matter! Though the French army were shattered, one heard Englishmen say that the British would create an army to wrest victory from defeat. The spirit of this was fine, but one realised the enormity of the task; should the mighty German machine crush the French machine, the Allies had lost. To say so then was heresy, when the world was inclined to think poorly of the French army and saw Russian numbers as irresistible.

The personal call was to Paris before the fate of Paris was to be decided. My first crossing of the Channel had been to Ostend; the second, farther south to Boulogne; the third was still farther south, to Dieppe. Where next? To Havre! Events were moving with the speed which had been foreseen with myriads of soldiers ready to be thrown into battle by the quick march of the railroad trains.

Every event was hidden under the “fog of war,” then a current expression--meagre official bulletins which read like hope in their brief lines, while the imagination might read as it chose between the lines. The marvel was that any but troop trains should run. All night in that third-class coach from Dieppe to Paris! Tired and preoccupied passengers; every one’s heart heavy; every one’s soul wrenched; every one prepared for the worst! You cared for no other man’s views; the one thing you wanted was no bad news. France had known that when the war came it would be to the death. From the first no Frenchman could have had any illusions. England had not realised yet that her fate was with the soldiers of France, or France that her fate and all the world’s was with the British fleet.

An Italian in our compartment would talk, however, and he would keep the topic down to red trousers, and to the red trousers of a French Territorial opposite with an index finger when his gesticulatory knowledge of the French language, which was excellent, came to the rescue of his verbal knowledge, which was poor. The Frenchman agreed that red trousers were a mistake, but pointed to the blue covering which he had for his cap--which made it all right. The Italian insisted on keeping to the trousers. He talked red trousers till the Frenchman got out at his station and then turned to me to confirm his views on this fatal strategic and tactical error of the French. After all, he was more pertinent than most of the military experts trying to write on the basis of the military bulletins. It was droll to listen to this sartorial discourse, when at least two hundred thousand men lay dead and wounded from that day’s fight on the soil of France. Red trousers were responsible for the death of a lot of them.

Dawn, early September dawn, on dew-moist fields, where the harvests lay unfinished as the workers, hastening to the call of war, had left the work. Across Paris, which seemed as silent as the fields, to a hotel with empty rooms! Five hundred empty rooms, with a clock ticking busily in every room! War or no war, that old man who wound the clocks was making his rounds softly through the halls from door to door. He was a good soldier, who had heeded Joffre’s request that every one should go on with his day’s work.

“They’re done!” said an American in the foyer. “The French could not stand up against the Germans--anybody anybody could see that! It’s too bad, but the French are licked. The Germans will be here to-morrow or the next day.”

I could not and would not believe it. Such a disaster was against all one’s belief in the French army and in the real character of the French people. It meant that autocracy was making sport of democracy; it meant disaster to all one’s precepts; a personal disaster.

“Look at that interior line which the French now hold. Think of the power of the defensive with modern arms. No! The French have not had their battle yet!” I said.

And the British Expeditionary Force was still intact; still an army, with lots of fight left in it.

IV

PARIS WAITS

The Paris of the boulevards a dead city--How Marianne goes to war-- The Germans are coming!--Silence and darkness--Moonlight on the Arc de Triomphe--Trust in Joffre and in the army--Turn of the tide--Joffre’s _communiqués_ more definite--Positions regained--The French in pursuit--Paris breathes again--A Sunday of relief--Religious rejoicing at Nôtre Dame--Groups in the cafés--The American Embassy “mobilised for war”--“In spite of ’70, France still lived.”

It was then that people were speaking of Paris as a dead city--a Paris without theatres, without young men, without omnibuses, with the shutters of its shops down and its cafés and restaurants in gloomy emptiness.

The Paris the host of the idler and the traveller, the Paris of the boulevards and the night life provided for the tourist, the Paris that sparkled and smiled in entertainment, the Paris exploited to the average American through Sunday supplements and the reminiscences of smoking-rooms of transatlantic liners, was dead. Those who knew no other Paris and conjectured no other Paris departed as from the tomb of the pleasures which had been the passing extravaganza of relief from dull lives elsewhere. The Parisienne of that Paris spent a thousand francs to get her pet dog safely away to Marseilles. Politicians of a craven type, who are the curse of all democracies, had gone to keep her company, leaving Paris cleaner than ever she was after the streets had had their morning bath on a spring day when the horse chestnuts were in bloom and Madame was arranging her early editions on the table of her kiosk--a spiritually clean Paris.

Monsieur, would you have America judged by the White Way? What has the White Way to do with the New York of Seventy-second Street or Harlem? It serves the same purpose as the boulevards of furnishing scandalous little paragraphs for foreign newspapers. Foreigners visit it and think that they understand how Americans live in Stockbridge, Mass., or Springfield, Ill. Empty its hotels and nobody but sightseers and people interested in the White Way would know the difference.

The other Paris, making ready to stand siege, with the Government gone to Bordeaux with all the gold of the Bank of France, with the enemy’s guns audible in the suburbs and old men cutting down trees and tearing up paving-stones to barricade the streets--never had that Paris been more alive. It was after the death of the old and the birth of the new Paris that an elderly man, seeing a group of women at tea in one of the few fashionable refreshment places which were open, stopped and said:

“Can you find nothing better than that to do, ladies, in a time like this?”

And the Latin temperament gave the world a surprise. Those who judged France by her playful Paris thought that if a Frenchman gesticulated so emotionally in the course of every-day existence, he would get overwhelmingly excited in a great emergency. One evening, after the repulse of the Germans on the Marne, I saw two French reserves dining in a famous restaurant where, at this time of the year, four out of five diners ordinarily would be foreigners surveying one another in a study of Parisian life. They were big, rosy-cheeked men, country born and bred, belonging to the new France of sports, of action, of temperate habits, and they were joking about dining there just as two sturdy Westerners might about dining in a deserted Broadway. The foreigners and _demi-mondaines_ were noticeably absent; a pair of Frenchmen were in the place of the absentees; and after their dinner they smoked their black briar-root pipes in that fashionable restaurant.

Among the picture post-cards then on sale was one of Marianne, who is France, bound for the front in an aeroplane with a crowing French cock sitting on the brace above her. Marianne looked as happy as if she were going to the races; the cock as triumphant as if he had a spur through the German eagle’s throat. However, there was little sale for picture post-cards or other trifles, while Paris waited for the siege. They did not help to win victories. News and not _jeux d’esprit_, victory and not wit, was wanted.

For Marianne went to war with her liberty cap drawn tight over her brow, a beat in her temples, and her heart in her throat; and the cock had his head down and pointed at the enemy. She was relieved in a way, as all Europe was, that the thing had come; at last an end of the straining of competitive taxation and preparation; at last the test. She had no channel, as England had, between her and the foe. Defeat meant the heel of the enemy on her soil, German sentries in her streets, submission. Long and hard she had trained; while the outside world, thinking of the Paris of the boulevards, thought that she could not resist the Kaiser’s legions. She was effeminate, effete. She was all right to run cafés and make artificial flowers, but she lacked beef. All the prestige was with her enemy. In ’70 all the prestige had been with her. For there is no prestige like military prestige. It is all with those who won the last war.

“But if we must succumb, let it be now,” said the French.

On, on--the German corps were coming like some machine-controlled avalanche of armed men. Every report brought them a little nearer Paris. Ah, monsieur, they had numbers, those Germans! Every German mother has many sons; a French mother only one or two.

How could one believe those official _communiqués_ which kept saying that the position of the French armies was favourable and then admitted that von Kluck had advanced another twenty miles? The heart of Paris stopped beating. Paris held its breath. Perhaps the reason there was no panic was that Parisians had been prepared for the worst.

What silence! The old men and women in the streets moved as under a spell, which was the sense of their own helplessness. But few people were abroad, and those going on errands apparently. The absence of traffic and pedestrians heightened the sepulchral appearance to superficial observation. At the windows of flats, inside the little shops, and on by-streets, you saw waiting faces, every one with the weight of national grief become personal. Was Paris alive? Yes, if Paris is human and not bricks and stone. Every Parisian was living a century in a week. So, too, was one who loved France. In the prospect of its loss he realised the value of all that France stands for, her genius, her democracy, her spirit.

One recalled how German officers had said that the next war would be the end of France. An indemnity which would crush out her power of recovery would be imposed on her. Her northern ports would be taken. France, the most homogeneous of nations, would be divided into separate nationalities--even this the Germans had planned. Those who read their Shakespeare in the language they learned in childhood had no doubt of England’s coming out of the war secure; but if we thought which foreign civilisation brought us the most in our lives, it was that of France.