Where Wars Go to Die

by W. D. Wetherell

  Souvenirs? The idea never entered my head. And my kodak, which I had been so prompt to use to commemorate various events, seemed a vulgar, inquisitive instrument, and was left unheeded in the bottom of the cart. Each step brought us face to face with the horrors of warfare. Toward Villeroy a number of battered Parisian taxicabs gave us the first hint of General Gallieni’s clever maneuver which saved the capital—and then the wind brought towards us a nauseating odor, which paralyzed our appetites, and sent us doggedly onwards: the stench of the battlefield.

  The girls in the cart drew closer together, shivering, though the air was warm and muggy. No one murmured as we passed the first bloated carcasses of dead horses and came upon that far more horrid sight—human bodies—swelled to twice their natural size, lying as death had met them—some in piles, some further apart—all unrecognizable, but once proud mothers’ petted darlings. I think they were our enemies. I did not stop to investigate; the flies bothered us so terribly, and long low mounds with red kepis piled on them told of the graves of France’s defenders. Far ahead I could discover groups of men with shovels, hastily burying those who remained. To the right a lazy column of dense smoke rose reluctantly in the heavy air. I fancied it came from a funeral pyre; we certainly smelled tar and petrol. The ground beneath rocked with the thundering of the distant cannon, and as one peal burst louder a flock of jet black crows mounted heavenward, mournfully cawing in the semi-twilight.

  Again the wind shifted in our direction, bringing with it that same loathsome smell.

  From My Home in the Field of Honour, by Frances Wilson Huard; Grosset & Dunlap; New York, 1916.

  The Swathe of Stillness

  —Henry Beston

  After Dieulouard a strange stillness pervaded the air; not a stillness of death and decay, but the stillness of life that listens. The sun continued to shine on the brown moorland hills across the gray-green river, the world was quite the same, yet one sensed that something had changed. A village lay ahead of us, disfigured by random shells and half deserted. Beyond the still, shell-splattered houses, a great wood rose, about a mile and a half away, on a ridge that stood boldly against the sky. Running from the edge of the trees down across an open slope to the river was a brownish line that stood in a little contrast to the yellower grass. There slowly rose from this line a great puff of grayish-black smoke which melted away in the clear, autumnal air.

  “See,” said our lieutenant calmly, with no more emotion than he would have shown at a bonfire. “Those are the German trenches. We have just fired a shell into them.”

  Two minutes more took us into the dead, deserted city of Pont-a-Mousson. The road was now everywhere screened carefully with lengths of light-brown burlap, and there was not a single house that did not bear witness to the power of a shell. The sense of “the front” began to possess me, never to go, the sense of being in the vicinity of a tremendous power. A ruined village, or a deserted town actually on the front does not bring to mind any impression of decay, for the intellect tends rather to consider the means by which the destruction has been accomplished. One sees villages of the swathes so completely blown to pieces that they are literally nothing but earthy mounds of rubbish, and seeing them thus, in a plain still fiercely disputed night and day between one’s own side and the invisible enemy, the mind feels itself in the presence of force, titanic, secret, and hostile …

  A room in a bourgeois flat on the third floor of a deserted apartment house had been assigned to me. It was nine o’clock, and I was getting ready to roll up in my blankets and go to sleep. The street below was black as pitch save when a trench light, floating serenely down from the sky, illuminated with its green-white glow the curving road and the line of dark, abandoned, half-ruinous villas. There was not a sound to be heard outside of an occasional rifle shot in the trenches, sounding for all the world like the click of giant croquet balls. I went round to the rear of the house and looked out of the kitchen windows to the lines. A little action, some quarrel of sentries, was going on behind the trees, just where the wooded ridge sloped to the river. Trench light after trench light rose, showing the disused railroad tracks running across the un-harvested fields. Gleaming palely through the French window at which I was standing, the radiance revealed the deserted kitchen, the rusty stove, the dusty pans, and the tarnished water-tap above the stone sink. The hard, wooden crash of grenades broke upon my ears …

  I am a light sleeper, and the arrival of the first shell awakened me. Kicking off my blankets, I sat up in bed just in time to catch the swift ebb of a heavy concussion. A piece of glass, dislodged from a broken pane by the tremor, fell in a treble tinkle to the floor. For a minute or two there was a full, heavy silence, and then several objects rolled down the roof and fell over the gutters into the street. It sounded as if some one had emptied a hodful of coal onto the house-roof from the height of the clouds. Another silence followed. Suddenly it was broken by a swift, complete sound, a heavy boom-roar, and on the heels of this noise came a throbbing, whistling sigh that, at first faint as the sound of ocean on a distant beach, increased with incredible speed to a whistling swish, ending in a HISH of tremendous volume, and a roaring, grinding burst. The sound of a great shell is never a pure bang; one hears, rather, the end of the arriving HISH, the explosion, and the tearing disintegration of the thick wall of iron in one grinding hammer-blow of terrific violence.

  I got up and went to the kitchen window. More lumps, fragments of shell that had been shot into the air by the explosion, rained down upon the roof. A house on one of the silent streets between the city and the lines was on fire, great volumes of smoke were rolling off into the starlit night, and voices were heard all about murmuring in the shadows. I hurried on my clothes and went down to the cellar.

  From A Volunteer Poilu, by Henry Beston; Houghton Mifflin; Boston, 1916.

  Little Household Gods Shiver and Blink

  —Edith Wharton

  From the thronged high-road we passed into the emptiness of the deserted Poperinghe, and out again on the way to Ypres. Beyond the flats and wind-mills to our left were the invisible German lines, and the staff-officer who was with us leaned forward to caution our chauffeur: “No tooting between here and Ypres.” There was still a good deal of movement on the road, though it was less crowded with troops that near Poperinghe; but as we passed through the low line of houses ahead, the silence and emptiness widened about us. That low line was Ypres; every monument that marked it, that gave it an individual outline, is gone. It is a town without a profile.

  The motor slipped through a suburb of small brick houses and stopped under cover of some slightly taller buildings. Another military motor waited there, the chauffeur relic-hunting in the gutted houses.

  We got out and walked toward the centre of the Cloth Market. Not a human being was in the streets. Endless lines of houses looked down on us from vacant windows. Our footsteps echoed like the tramp of a crowd, our lowered voices seemed to shout. In one street we came upon three English soldiers who were carrying a piano out of a house and lifting it onto a hand-cart. They stopped to stare at us, and we stared back. It seemed an age since we had seen a living being. One of the soldiers scrambled into the cart and tapped out a tune on the cracked key-board, and we all laughed with relief at the foolish noise. Then we walked on and were alone again.

  We had seen other ruined towns, but none like this. Ypres has been bombarded to death, and the outer walls of its houses are still standing, so that it presents the distant semblance of a living city, while near by it is seen to be a disembowelled corpse. Every window-pane is smashed, nearly every building unroofed, and some house-fronts are sliced clean off, with the different stories exposed, as if for the stage-setting of a farce. In these exposed interiors the poor little household gods shiver and blink like owls surprised in a hollow tree. A hundred signs of intimate and humble tastes, of humdrum pursuits, of family association, cling to the unmasked walls. Whiskered photographs fade on morning-glory wallpapers, plaster saint
s pine under glass bells, antimacassars droop from plush sofas, yellowing diplomas display their seals on office walls. It was all so still and familiar that it seemed as if the people for whom these things had a meaning might at any moment come back and take up their daily business. And then—crash! the guns began, slamming out volley after volley all along the English lines, and the poor frail web of things that had made up the lives of a vanished city hung dangling before us in that deathly blast.

  We were turning to go when we heard a whirr overhead, followed by a volley of machine guns. High up in the blue, over the centre of the dead city, flew a German aero-plane; and all about it hundreds of white shrapnel bursts out in the summer sky like the miraculous snow-fall of Italian legend. Up and up they flew, on the trail of the Taube, and on flew the Taube, faster still, till quarry and pack were lost in mist, and the barking of the mitrailleuse died out.

  So we left Ypres to the death-silence in which we had found her.

  From Fighting France, by Edith Wharton; Charles Scribner’s Sons; New York, 1919.

  The Gothas

  —Mildred Aldrich

  On Wednesday night I went to bed early. I wakened suddenly with the impression that I heard someone running along the terrace under my window. I sat up and listened, half believing that I had been dreaming, when I saw a ray of light in the staircase—my door was open.

  I called out, “Qui est la?”

  Amelie’s trembling voice replied, “Cest moi, madame,” and I had the sudden wide vision of possibilities, which I am told is like that of a drowning man, for I realized she was not coming to me in the middle of the night for nothing, when she appeared in the doorway, all dressed, even to her hood, and with a lighted candle in her hand.

  “Oh, Madame?” she exclaimed, “you were sleeping? You heard nothing?” and at that moment I heard the cannon. “Oh, mon Dieu, Madame, what is happening out at the front? It is something terrible, and you slept!”

  I listened.

  “That is not at the front, Amelie,” I said. It is much nearer, in the direction of Paris. It’s the guns of the forts.” At that moment a bomb exploded, and I knew at once. “It’s the Gothas, Amelie. Give me something to put on. What time is it?”

  “Nearly midnight.”

  It took me less than ten minutes to dress—it was bitterly cold—and I wrapped myself in my big military cloak, put a cap over my tumbled hair, and a big fur round my neck, grabbed my field glasses, and went out into the orchard, which looks directly across the fort at Chelles in the direction of Paris.

  It was a beautiful night, cold and still, white with moonlight, and the sky spangled with stars. For three hours we stood there listening to that bombardment, seeing nothing—ignorant of what was going on. The banging of the guns, the whirring of the moteurs, the exploding shells seemed over us and around us—yet we could see nothing. It only took us a little while to distinguish between the booming of the guns at Chelles and Vauclure, endeavouring to prevent the Gothas from passing, by putting up barrage firing, and the more distant bombs dropped by the flyers that had arrived near or over the city.

  It was all the more impressive because it was so mysterious. At times it seemed as if one of three things must have been happening—either that we were destroying the fleet in the air, or they were destroying us, or that Paris was being wiped out. It did not, during those hours that I stood there, seem possible that such a cannonading could be kept up without one of these results. It was our first experience, and I assure you that it was weird. The beauty of the night, the invisibility of the machines, our absolute ignorance of what was going on, the humming of the motors overhead, the infernal persistent firing of the cannon and the terrific explosion of the bombs, followed, now and then, by a dull glow in the west, was all so mysterious.

  It was four o’clock when we finally went into the house, leaving silence under the stars and the moonlit night. Amelie stirred up the embers, threw on a little wood, put the screen around me, made me a hot drink and I sat there to wait for daybreak. It seemed strange to go out of doors in the morning, and see nothing changed, after such a night.

  From The Peak of the Load, by Mildred Aldrich; Small, Maynard and Co.; Boston, 1918.

  It Is No Pleasure to Tell What I Saw

  —Richard Harding Davis

  At a distance of six miles, as you approach from Paris along the valley of the Marne, Rheims has more the appearance of a fortress than a church. But when you stand in the square beneath and look up, it is entirely ecclesiastic, of noble and magnificent proportions, in design inspired, much too sublime for the kings it has crowned. It has been called “the most beautiful structure produced in the Middle Ages.” On the west facade, rising tier upon tier, are five hundred and sixty statues and carvings. The statues are of angels, martyrs, patriarchs, apostles, the vices and virtues, the Virgin and Child. In the centre of these is the famous rose window; on either side giant towers.

  At my feet down the steps leading to the three portals were pools of blood. There was a priest in the square, a young man with white hair and with a face as strong as one of those of the saints carved in stone, and as gentle. He explained the pools of blood. After the Germans retreated, the priests had carried the German wounded up the steps into the nave of the cathedral and for them had spread straw upon the stone flaggings.

  The curé guided me to the side door, unlocked it, and led the way into the cathedral. From north and south the windows shed a radiance of deep blue, like the blue of the sky by moonlight on the coldest night of winter, and from the west the great rose window glowed with the warmth and beauty of a thousand rubies. Beneath it, bathed in crimson light, where for generations French men and women have knelt in prayer, where Joan of Arc helped place the crown on Charles VII, was piled three feet of dirty straw, and on the straw were gray-coated Germans, covered with the mud of the fields, caked with blood, white and haggard from the loss of it, from the lack of sleep, rest and food. The entire west end of the cathedral looked like a stable, and in the blue and purple rays from the gorgeous windows the wounded were as unreal as ghosts.

  Two of them, done with pack-drill, goose-step, half rations and forced marches, lay under the straw the priests had heaped upon them. The toes of their boots pointed grotesquely upward. The gray hands were clasped rigidly as though in prayer.

  Half hidden in the straw, the others were as silent and almost as still. Since they had been dropped upon the stone floor they had not moved, but lay in twisted, unnatural attitudes. Only their eyes showed that they lived. These were turned beseechingly upon the French Red Cross doctors, kneeling waist-high in the straw and unreeling long white bandages. The wounded watched them drawing slowly nearer, until they came, fighting off death, clinging to life as shipwrecked sailors cling to a raft and watch the boats pulling toward them.

  A young German officer, his smart cavalry cloak torn and slashed, and filthy with dried mud and blood and with his eyes in bandages, groped toward a pail of water, feeling his way with his foot, his arms outstretched, clutching the air. To guide him a priest took his arm, and the officer turned and stumbled against him. Thinking the priest was one of his own men, he swore at him, and then, to learn if he wore shoulder-straps, ran his fingers over the priest’s shoulders, and finding a silk cassock, said quickly in French, “Pardon me, my father; I am blind.”

  As the young curé guided me through the wrecked cathedral his indignation and his fear of being unjust waged a fine battle. “Every summer,” he said, “thousands of your fellow countrymen visit the cathedral. They come again and again. They love these beautiful windows. They will not permit them to be destroyed. Will you tell them what you saw?”

  It is no pleasure to tell what I saw. Shells had torn out some of the windows, the entire sash, glass, and stone frame—all was gone; only a jagged hole was left. On the floor lay broken carvings, pieces of stone from flying buttresses outside that had been hurled through the embrasures, tangled masses of leaden window-sashes, like twisted
coils of barbed wire, and great brass candelabra. The steel ropes that had supported them had been shot away, and they had plunged to the flagging below, carrying with them their scarlet silk tassels heavy with the dust of centuries. And everywhere was broken glass. Not one of the famous blue windows was intact. None had been totally destroyed, but each had been shattered, and through the apertures the sun blazed blatantly.

  We walked upon glass more precious than precious stones. It was beyond price. No one can replace it. Seven hundred years ago the secret of the glass died. Diamonds can be bought anywhere, pearls can be matched, but not the stained glass of Rheims. And under our feet, with straw and caked blood, it lay crushed into tiny fragments. When you held a piece of it between your eye and the sun it glowed with a light that never was on land or sea.

  I have seen a lot of war—and real war is a high-born officer with his eyes shot out, peasant soldiers with their toes sticking stiffly through the straw, and the windows of Rheims, that for centuries with their beauty glorified the Lord, swept into a dust heap.

  From With the Allies, by Richard Harding Davis; Charles Scribner’s Sons; New York, 1918.

  The War Capital of Serbia

  —John Reed

  Nish. We took a tumble-down cab—whose bottom-board immediately fell out—attached to two dying horses and driven by a bandit in a high fur cap, and jolted up a wide street paved with mud and wide-set sharp cobbles. Round about the city the green hills rose, beautiful with new leaves and with every flowering fruit-tree, and over the wide-flung Turkish roofs, and the few mean plaster buildings in the European style, loomed the bulbous Greek domes of the cathedral. Here and there was the slender spire of a minaret, crisscrossed with telephone-wires. The street opened into a vast square, a sea of mud and cobbles bounded by wretched huts, across which marched steel poles carrying hundreds of wires and huge modern arc-lights. At one side an ox lay on his back, feet clewed up to a wooden beam, while peasants shod him with solid iron plates, as they had done it for half a thousand years.