Part 8

I had come over the German-Dutch border that noon, and had been subjected to the usual frisking. There had also been a little trouble--also as usual.

The clerk at the desk in the Adlon did not know me. He was a new man. He had, however, been witness to the very effusive welcome which the _chef de réception_ gave me.

That did not interest me until I came down from my room and approached the desk for the purpose of leaving word for a friend of mine where I could be found later.

The clerk was engaged in earnest conversation with a stockily built man of middle age. I had to wait until he would be through.

After a second or so I heard my room number mentioned--237. Then the sound of my name fell. I noticed that the clerk was fingering one of the forms on which a traveler in Central Europe inscribes his name, profession, residence, nationality, age, and what not for the information of the police.

"He is a newspaper correspondent?" asked the stocky one.

"So he says," replied the clerk.

"You are sure about that?"

"Well, that is what it says on the form."

"What sort of looking fellow is he?" inquired the stockily built man.

"Rather tall, smooth shaven, dark complexion, wears eye-glasses," replied the clerk.

I moved around the column that marks the end of one part of the desk and the beginning of another part that runs at right angles to the first.

The clerk saw me and winked at the man to whom he had been talking. The detective was in the throes of embarrassment. He blushed.

"Can't I be of some assistance to you?" I remarked in an impersonal manner, looking from clerk to detective. "You seem to be interested in my identity. What do you wish to know?"

There was a short but highly awkward pause.

"I am not," stammered the detective. "We were talking about somebody else."

"I beg your pardon," said I and moved off.

I have always taken it for granted that the detective was a new man in the secret service. Still, I have often wondered what sort of detective service it must be that will employ such helpless bunglers.

It may be no more than an _idée fixe_ on my part, but ever since then I have taken _cum grano salis_ all that has been said for and against the efficiency of the German secret service, be it municipal or international. At Bucharest there was maintained for a time, allegedly by the German foreign service, a man who was known to everybody on the Calea Victoriei as the German _Oberspion_--chief spy. The poor devil cut a most pathetic figure. All contentions to the contrary notwithstanding, I would say that secret service is not one of the fortes of the Germans. They really ought to leave it alone. That takes keener wits and quicker thinking on one's feet than can be associated with the German mind.

The Austrians were rather more efficient, and the same can be said of the Hungarian detective forces. In both cases the secret-service men were usually Poles, however, and that makes a difference. There is no mind quite so nimble, adaptive, or capable of simulation as that of the Pole. In this the race resembles strongly the French, hence its success in a field in which the French are justly the leaders.

For the food sharks the German detective was no match. He might impress a provident _Hausfrau_ and move her to tears and the promise that she would never do it again. The commercial hoarder, who had a regular business besides and kept his books accordingly, was too much for these men. So long as no informer gave specific details that left no room for thinking on the part of the detective, the food shark was perfectly safe. The thousands of cases that came into the courts as time went on showed that the detectives, and inspectors of the Food Authorities, were thoroughly incorruptible. They also showed that they at least were doing no hoarding--in brains.

VII

IN THE HUMAN SHAMBLES

Somber as this picture of life is, its background was nothing less than terrifyingly lurid.

For some minutes I had stood before a barn in Galicia. I was expected to go into that barn, but I did not like the idea. Some fourscore of cholera patients lay on the straw-littered earthen floor. Every hour or so one of them would die. Disease in their case had progressed so far that all hope had been abandoned. If by any chance one of the sick possessed that unusual degree of bodily and nerve vigor that would defeat the ravages of the germ, he would recover as well in the barn as in a hospital.

The brave man wishes to die alone. Those in the barn were brave men, and I did not wish to press my company upon them in the supreme hour. Still, there was the possibility that some might question my courage if I did not go into the barn. Cholera is highly contagious. But when with an army one is expected to do as the army does. If reckless exposure be a part of that, there is no help.

I stepped into the gloom of the structure. There was snow on the ground outside. It took a minute or two before my eyes could discern things. Some light fell into the interior from the half-open door and a little square opening in the wall in the rear.

Two lines of sick men lay on the ground--heads toward the wall, feet in the aisle that was thus formed. Some of the cholera-stricken writhed in agony as the germ destroyed their vitals. Others lay exhausted from a spasm of excruciating agony. Some were in the coma preceding death. Two were delirious.

There was an army chaplain in the barn. He thought it his duty to be of as much comfort to the men as possible. His intentions were kind enough, and yet he would have done the patients a favor by leaving them to themselves.

As I reached the corner where the chaplain stood, one of the sick soldiers struggled into an upright position. Then he knelt, while the chaplain began to say some prayer. The poor wretch had much difficulty keeping upright. When the chaplain had said "Amen" he fell across the body of the sick man next to him.

The exertion and the mental excitement had done the man no good. Soon he was in a paroxysm of agony. The chaplain was meanwhile preparing another for the great journey.

The dead had been laid under one of the eaves. A warm wind had sprung up and the sun was shining. The snow on the roof began to melt. The dripping water laved the faces of the dead. Out in the field several men were digging a company grave.

So much has been written on the hardships endured by the wounded at the front that I will pass by this painful subject. What tortures these unfortunates suffered is aptly epitomized by an experience I had in the hospital of the American Red Cross in Budapest.

The man in charge of the hospital, Dr. Charles MacDonald, of the United States Army, had invited me to see his institution. I had come to a small room in which operations were undertaken when urgency made this necessary. During the day a large convoy of very bad cases had reached Budapest. Many of them were a combination of wounds and frostbite.

In the middle of the room stood an operation-table. On it lay a patient who was just recovering consciousness. I saw the merciful stupor of anesthesia leave the man's mind and wondered how he would take it. For on the floor, near the foot end of the operation-table, stood an enameled wash-basin, filled with blood and water. From the red fluid protruded two feet. They were black and swollen--frostbite. One of them had been cut off a little above the ankle, and the other immediately below the calf of the leg.

The amputation itself was a success, said the nurse. But there was little hope for the patient. He had another wound in the back. That wound itself was not serious, but it had been the cause of the man's condition, by depriving him temporarily of the power of locomotion. When he was shot, the man had fallen into some reeds. He was unconscious for a time, and when he recovered his senses he found that he could no longer move his legs.

He was lying in a No Man's Land between the Austro-Hungarian and Russian lines. For two days his feeble cries were unheard. Finally, some ambulance-men came across him. By that time his feet had been frozen. The wound in his back was given some attention at a first-aid station behind the line. The surgeons decided that the amputation of the feet could wait until Budapest was reached. Meanwhile the poison of gangrene was gaining admission to the blood.

The man's face was yellow. His whole body was yellow and emaciated. The lips no longer served to cover the teeth.

He was breathing pantingly--in short, quick gasps.

Slowly his mind shook off the fetters of the ether. A long breath--a faint sigh. The eyes opened.

They were Slav eyes of blue-gray. I saw in them the appeal of the helpless child, the protest of a being tortured, the prayer for relief of a despairing soul.

The man's lips moved. He wanted to say something. I bent over to catch the sibilant tones.

I had not caught them, and indicated that by a shake of the head. The man repeated. He spoke in Polish, a language I do not know. To assure the man that I would find means of understanding him, I patted his cheek, and then called an orderly.

"He says that he would like you to fetch his wife and his children," said the orderly-interpreter, as he righted himself. "He says he is going to die soon, and wants to see them. He says that you will have to hurry up. He says that he will say a good word to the Lord for you if you will do him this favor."

"Ask him where they live," I said to the orderly. If it were at all possible I would do the man this kindness.

It was some village near Cracow. That was a long way off. If the man lived for two days his wish could be met.

"Tell the man that I will telegraph his wife to come as quickly as possible, but that she can't be here for a day or so," I instructed the interpreter.

A shadow of disappointment swept over the patient's face.

"Ask him if he knows where he is," I said.

The man did not know. I told the orderly to make it clear to him that he was in Budapest, and that his home in Galicia was far away. He was to be patient. I would bring his wife and children to him, if it could be done at all. Did the wife have the money to pay the railroad fare?

The patient was not sure. I read in his eyes that he feared the woman would not have the money. I eased his mind by telling him that I would pay the fares.

Deeper gratitude never spoke from any face. The poor fellow tried to lift his hands, but could not. To assure him that his wish would be granted I once more patted his cheeks and forehead and then left the room, followed by the orderly and the wash-basin.

"There is no use telegraphing," said Doctor MacDonald. "He won't live longer than another hour, at the most."

Ten minutes later the man was dead. The operation-table was being wheeled down the corridor by the orderly. I had just stepped out of a ward.

The orderly stopped.

"You won't have to bring the woman here," he said, as he lifted the end of the sheet that covered the face.

As reward for my readiness to help the poor man, I have still in my mind the expression of relief that lay on the dead face. He had passed off in gladsome anticipation of the meeting there was to be.

I covered up the face and the orderly trundled the body away.

Some months later I sat in a room of the big military hospital in the Tatavla Quarter of Constantinople. On a bench against the wall opposite me were sitting a number of men in Turkish uniform. They were blind. Some of them had lost their eyes in hand-to-hand combat, more of them had been robbed of their sight in hand-grenade encounters.

Doctor Eissen, the oculist-surgeon of the hospital, was about to fit these men with glass eyes. In the neat little case on the table were eyes of all colors, most of them brownish tints, a few of them were blue.

One of the Turks was a blond--son of a Greek or Circassian, maybe.

"These things don't help any, of course," said Doctor Eissen, as he laid a pair of blue eyes on a spoon and held them into the boiling water for sterilization. "But they lessen the shock to the family when the man comes home.

"Poor devils! I have treated them all. They are like a bunch of children. They are going home to-day. They have been discharged.

"Well, they are going home. Some have wives and children they will never see again--dependents they can no longer support. Some of them are luckier. They have nobody. The one who is to get these blue eyes used to be a silk-weaver in Brussa. He is optimistic enough to think that he can still weave. Maybe he can. That will depend on his fingers, I suppose. It takes often more courage to live after a battle than to live in it."

The dear government did not provide glass eyes. Doctor Eissen furnished them himself, and yet the dear government insisted that a report be made on each eye he donated. The ways of red tape are queer the world over.

"And when the blind come home the relatives weep a little and are glad that at least so much of the man has been returned to them."

In the corridor there was waiting a Turkish woman. Her son was one of those whom Doctor Eissen was just fitting with eyes. When he was through with this, he called in the woman. The young blind _asker_ rose in the darkness that surrounded him.

Out of that darkness came presently the embrace of two arms and the sob:

"_Kusum!_" ("My lamb!").

For a moment the woman stared into the fabricated eyes. They were not those she had given her boy. They were glass, immobile. She closed her own eyes and then wept on the broad chest of the son. The son, glad that his _walideh_ was near him once more, found it easy to be the stronger of the two. He kissed his mother and then caressed the hair under the cap of the _yashmak_.

When the doctor had been thanked, the mother led her boy off.

Blind beggars are not unkindly treated in Constantinople. There is a rule that one must never refuse them alms. The least that may be given them are the words:

"_Inayet ola!_" ("God will care for you!").

Not long after that I sat on the shambles at Suvla Bay, the particular spot in question being known as the Kiretch Tépé--Chalk Hill.

Sir Ian Hamilton had just thrown into the vast amphitheater to the east of the bay some two hundred thousand men, many of them raw troops of the Kitchener armies.

Some three thousand of these men had been left dead on the slopes of the hill. As usual, somebody on Gallipoli had bungled and bungled badly. A few days before I had seen how a British division ate itself up in futile attacks against a Turkish position west of Kütchük Anafarta. The thing was glorious to look at, but withal very foolish. Four times the British assailed the trenches of the Turks, and each time they were thrown back. When General Stopford finally decided that the thing was foolish, he called it off. The division he could not call back, because it was no more.

It was so on Chalk Hill.

A hot August night lay over the peninsula. The crescent of a waning moon gave the dense vapors that had welled in from the Mediterranean an opalescent quality. From that vapor came also, so it seemed, the stench of a hundred battle-fields. In reality this was not so. The Turkish advance position, which I had invaded that night for the purpose of seeing an attack which was to be made by the Turks shortly before dawn, ran close to the company graves in which the Turks had buried the dead foe.

There is little soil on Gallipoli. It is hardly ever more than a foot deep on any slope, and under it lies lime that is too hard to get out of the way with pick and shovel. The company graves, therefore, were cairns rather than ditches. The bodies had been walled in well enough, but those walls were not airtight. The gases of decomposition escaped, therefore, and filled the landscape with obnoxious odor.

I had been warned against this. The warning I had disregarded for the reason that such things are not unfamiliar to me. But I will confess that it took a good many cigarettes and considerable will-power to keep me in that position--so long as was absolutely necessary.

When I returned to Constantinople everybody was speaking of the stench in the Suvla Bay terrain. There were many such spots, and returning soldiers were never slow in dwelling on the topic they suggested. The war did not appear less awesome for that.

But the shambles that came closest to the general public was the casualty lists published by the German government as a sort of supplement to the Berlin _Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung_, the semi-official organ of the German Imperial Government. At times this list would contain as many as eight thousand names, each with a letter or several after it--"t" for dead, "s v" for severely wounded, "l v" for lightly wounded, and so on.

It was thought at first that the public would not be able to stand this for long. But soon it was shown that literally there was no end to the fortitude of the Germans.

I was to spend some time on the Somme front. I really was not anxious to see that field of slaughter. But certain men in Berlin thought that I ought to complete my list of fronts with their "own" front. Hospitals and such no longer interested me. Wrecked churches I had seen by the score--and a ruined building is a ruined building. I said that I would visit the Somme front in case I was allowed to go wherever I wanted. That was agreed to, after I had signed a paper relieving the German government of all responsibility in case something should happen to me "for myself and my heirs forever."

The front had been in eruption three weeks and murder had reached the climax when one fine afternoon I put up at a very unpretentious _auberge_ in Cambrai.

The interior of the Moloch of Carthage never was so hot as this front, nor was Moloch ever so greedy for human life. Battalion after battalion, division after division, was hurled into this furnace of barrage and machine-gun fire. What was left of them trickled back in a thin stream of wounded.

For nine days the "drum" fire never ceased. From Le Transloy to south of Pozières the earth rocked. From the walls and ceilings of the old citadel at Cambrai the plaster fell, though many miles lay between it and the front.

Perhaps the best I could say of the Somme offensive is that none will ever describe it adequately--as it was. The poor devils really able to encompass its magnitude and terrors became insane. Those who later regained their reason did so only because they had forgotten. The others live in the Somme days yet, and there are thousands of them.

I could tell tales of horror such as have never before been heard--of a British cavalry charge near Hebuterne that was "stifled" by the barbed wire before it and the German machine-guns in its rear and flanks; of wounded men that had crawled on all-fours for long distances, resting occasionally to push back their entrails; of men cut into little pieces by shells and perforated like sieves by the machine-guns; and again of steel-nerved Bavarians who, coming out of the first trenches, gathered for a beer-drinking in an apple orchard not far from Manancourt.

But that seems _de trop_. I will leave that to some modern Verestchagin and his canvases.

There is a "still-life" of death that comes to my mind.

Not long after that I was in the Carpathians. General Brussilow was trying out his mass tactics.

The slaughter of man reached there aspects and proportions never before heard of. It was not the machine murder of the West Front--that is to say, it was not so much a factory for the conversion of live men into dead as it was a crude, old-fashioned abattoir.

On the slope of a massive mountain lies an old pine forest. In the clearings stand birches, whose white trunks pierce the gloom under the roof of dense, dark-green pine crowns. Where the clearings are, patches of late-summer sky may be seen. Through the pale blue travel leisurely the whitest of clouds, and into this background of soft blue and white juts the somber pine and the autumn-tinged foliage of the birch.

The forest is more a temple of a thousand columns than a thing that has risen from the little seeds in the pine cones. The trunks are straight and seem more details of a monument than something which has just grown. There is a formal decorum about the trees and their aggregate. But the soft light under the crowns lessens that into something severely mournful.

The forest is indeed a sepulcher. On its floor lie thousands of dead Russians--first as close together as they can be packed, and then in layers on top of one another. It would seem that these bodies had been brought here for burial. That is not the case, however. The wounds in the tree trunks, cut by the streams of machine-gun bullets from the red trenches at the edge of the forest, indicate what happened. The first wave of Russians entered the forest, was decimated, and retreated. The second one met a similar fate. The third fared no better. The fourth came. The fifth. The sixth--twice more the Russian artillery urged on the Russian infantry.

Here they lie. Their bodies are distended by progressing dissolution. Narrow slits in the bloated faces show where once the merry and dreamy Slav eye laughed. Most mouths are open, still eager for another breath of air. Distended nostrils tell the same tale. From one mouth hangs a tongue almost bitten off. A face close by is but a mask--a shell splinter has cut off the back of the head, which now rests on the shoulder of the man.

To-morrow will come the Austro-Hungarian burial parties, dig holes and bury these human relics. Meanwhile the pines sough sorrowfully, or maybe they soughed like this before.

Still a little later I was standing at an ancient stone bridge in the Vörös Torony defile in the Transylvanian Alps. It was a late afternoon in the late fall. In the defile it was still, save for an occasional artillery detonation near the Roumanian border, where the fight was going on.

The red of the beeches and oaks fitted well into the narrative I heard, and the song of the Alt River reminded that it, too, had played a part in the drama--the complete rout of the Second Roumanian army, a few days before. The breeze sweeping through the defile and along its wooded flanks brought with it the odor of the dead. The underbrush on each side of the road was still full of dead Roumanians. The gutter of the road was strewn with dead horses. Scores of them hung in the tree forks below the road. On a rock-ledge in the river dead men moved about under the impulse of the current.

The narrative:

"Do you see that little clearing up there?"

"The one below the pines?"

"No. The one to the left of that--right above the rocks."

"Yes."

"I was stationed there with my machine-guns," continued the Bavarian officer. "We had crept through the mountains almost on our bellies to get there. It was hard work. But we did it.

"At that we came a day too soon. We were entirely out of reach of Hermannstadt, and didn't know what was going on. For all we knew the Roumanians might have turned a trick. They are not half-bad soldiers. We were surprised, to say the least, when, on arriving here, we found that the road was full of traffic that showed no excitement.

"We heard cannonading at the head of the gorge, but had no means of learning what it was. We had been sent here to cut off the retreat of the Roumanians, while the Ninth Army was to drive them into the defile.

"For twenty-four hours we waited, taking care that the Roumanians did not see us. It was very careless of them, not to patrol these forests in sufficient force, nor to scent that there was something wrong when their small patrols did not return. At any rate, they had no notion of what was in store for them.

"At last the thing started. The German artillery came nearer. We could tell that by the fire. At noon the Roumanians began to crowd into the defile. A little later they were here.