Where Wars Go to Die

by W. D. Wetherell

  Austrian prisoners in uniform wandered freely everywhere, without a guard. Some drove wagons, others dug ditches, and hundreds loitered up and down in idleness. We learned that by paying fifty dinars to the government, you could have one for a servant. All the legations and consulates were manned with them. And the prisoners were glad to be servants, for there was no decent place for them to live, and scanty food. Now and then an Austrian officer passed along, in full uniform and with his sword.

  “Escape?” said one government official we interrogated. “No, they do not try. The roads are metres deep in mud, the villages are depopulated and full of disease, there is no food … It is difficult enough to travel by train in Serbia—on foot it would be impossible. And there are the guards along the frontier.”

  We passed a big hospital where pale prisoners leaned from windows upon dirty blankets, dragged themselves in and out of the doors, and lay propped up on piles of drying mud along the road. These were only survivors; for out of the sixty thousand Austrians captured in the war, twelve thousand were already dead of typhus.

  Beyond the square was the street again, between rough one-story houses, and we were in the market-place. A dull roar rose from the haggling of hundreds of peasants in ten different national costumes—homespun linen embroidered with flowers, high fur hats, fezzes, turbans, and infinite varieties and modifications of Turkish trousers. Pigs squealed, hens squawked; underfoot were heaped baskets of eggs and herbs and vegetables and red peppers; majestic old men in sheepskins shuffled along with lambs in their arms. Here was the centre of the town. There were two or three restaurants and foul-smelling cafes, the dingy Hotel Orient, the inevitable American shoe-store, and amid cheap little shops, sudden windows ablaze with expensive jewelry and extravagant women’s hats.

  Along the sidewalks elbowed a multitude of strangely assorted people: gypsies, poverty-stricken peasants, gendarmes with great swords, in red and blue uniforms, tax-collectors dressed like generals, also with swords, smart army officers hung with medals, soldiers in filthy tatters, their feet bound with rags—soldiers limping, staggering on crutches, without arms, without legs, discharged from the over-crowded hospitals still blue and shaking from the typhus—and everywhere the Austrian prisoners. Government officials hurried by with portfolios under their arms. Fat Jewish contractors hobnobbed with political hangers-on over maculate cafe tables. Women government clerks, wives and mistresses of the officers, society ladies, shouldered the peasant women in their humped-up gay skirts and high-colored socks. The government from Belgrade had taken refuge in Nish, and a mountain village of twenty thousand inhabitants had become a city of one hundred and twenty thousand—not counting those who died.

  For the typhus had swept the town, where people were living six and ten in a room, until everywhere the black flags flapped in long, sinister vistas, and the windows of the cafes were plastered with black paper death-notices.

  We crossed the muddy Nishava River on the bridge which leads to the heavy, arabesqued gate of the ancient Turkish citadel, which was Roman before the Turks, and where Constantine the Great was born. On the grass along the foot of the great wall sprawled hundreds of soldiers, sleeping, scratching themselves, stripping and searching their bodies for lice, tossing and twisting in fever. Everywhere about Nish, wherever there was a spot of worn grass, the miserable people clustered, picking vermin from each other.

  Such was Nish, as we first saw it. Two weeks later we returned, after the rains had altogether ceased, and the hot sun had dried the streets. It was a few days after the feast of St. George, which marks the coming of the spring in Serbia. On that day all Serbia rises at dawn and goes out into the woods and fields, gathering flowers and dancing and singing and feasting all day. And even here, in this filthy, overcrowded town, with the tragic sadness of war and pestilence over every house, the streets were a gay sight. The men peasants had changed their dirty heavy woolens and sheepskins for the summer suit of embroidered dazzling linen. All the women wore new dresses and new silk kerchiefs, decorated with knots of ribbon, with leaves and flowers—even the ox-yokes and the oxen’s heads were bound with purple lilac branches. Through the streets raced mad young gypsy girls in Turkish trousers of extravagant and gorgeous colors, their bodices gleaming with gold braid, gold coins hung in their ears. And I remember five great strapping women with mattocks over their shoulders, who marched singing down the middle of the road to take their dead men’s places in the work of the fields.

  From The War in Eastern Europe, by John Reed; Charles Scribner’s Sons; New York, 1916.

  That Sepia Waste

  —Winston Churchill

  One night we entered the danger zone. There had been an entertainment in the little salon which, packed with passengers, had gradually achieved the temperature and humidity of a Turkish bath. For the ports had been closed as tight as gaskets could make them, the electric fans, as usual, obstinately “refused to march.” After the amateur speechmaking and concert pieces an Italian violinist, who had thrown over a lucrative contract to become a soldier, played exquisitely; and one of the French sisters we had seen walking the deck with the mincing steps of the cloister sang, somewhat precariously and pathetically, the Ave Maria. Its pathos was of the past, and after she had finished, as we fled into the open air, we were conscious of having turned our backs irrevocably yet determinedly upon an era whose life and convictions the music of the composer so beautifully expressed.

  On deck a fine rain was blowing through a gap in our burlap shroud, a phosphorescent fringe of foam hissed along the sides of the ship, giving the illusory appearance of our deadlights open and ablaze, exaggerating the sinister blackness of the night. We were, apparently, a beacon in that sepia waste where modern underseas monsters were lurking.

  There were on board other elements which in the normal times gone by would have seemed disquieting enough. The evening after we had left New York, while we were still off the coast of Long Island, I saw on the poop a crowd of steerage passengers listening intently to harangues by speakers addressing them from the top of a pile of life rafts. Armenians, I was told, on their way to fight the Turks, all recruited in America by one frenzied woman who had seen her child cut in two by a German officer. Twilight was gathering as I joined the group, the sea was silvered by the light of an August moon floating serenely between swaying stays. The orator’s passionate words and gestures evoked wild responses from his hearers, whom the drag of an ancient hatred had snatched from the peaceful asylum of the west. This smiling, happy folk, which I had seen in our manufacturing towns and cities, were now transformed, atavistic—all save one, a student, who stared wistfully through his spectacles across the water. Later, when twilight deepened, when the moon had changed from silver to gold, the orators gave place to a singer. He had been a bootblack in America. Now he had become a bard. His plaintive minor chant evoked, one knew not how, the flavour of that age-long history of oppression and wrong these were now determined to avenge. Their conventional costumes were proof that we had harboured them—almost, indeed, assimilated them. And suddenly they had reverted. They were going to slaughter the Turks.

  On a bright Saturday afternoon we steamed into the wide mouth of the Gironde, a name stirring vague memories of romance and terror. The French passengers gazed wistfully at the low-lying strip of sand and forest, but our uniformed pilgrims—the American lawyers, doctors, newspaper correspondents, movie photographers, and millionaires—crowded the rail and hailed it as the promised land of self-realization.

  A richly colored watering-place slid into view, as in a moving-picture show. There was, indeed, all the reality and unreality of the cinematograph about our arrival; presently the reel would end abruptly, and we should find ourselves pushing our way out of the emptying theatre into a rainy street. The impression of unreality in the face of visual evidence persisted into the night when, after an afternoon of anchor, we glided up the river, our decks and and ports ablaze across the land. Silhouettes of tall poplars loomed aga
inst the blackness; occasionally a lamp revealed the milky-blue facade of a house. This was France! War-torn France—at last vividly brought home to us when a glare appeared on the sky, growing brighter and brighter until, at a turn of the river, abruptly we came abreast of vomiting furnaces, thousands of electric lights strung like beads over the crest of a hill, and below these, dim rows of houses, all of a sameness, stretching along monotonous streets. A munitions town in the night! One could have tossed a biscuit on the stone wharfs where workmen, crouching over their tasks, straightened up at the sight of us and cheered. And one cried out hoarsely, “Vous venez nous sauver, vous Americains”—“You come to save us” …

  The skies were of a darkness seldom known in America. The countryside was no longer smiling. After some two hours of progress we came, in that devastated district near the front, to a sepia expanse where many monsters were clumsily cavorting like dinosaurs in the primeval slime. At some distance from the road others stood apparently tethered in line, awaiting their turn for exercise. These were the far-famed tanks. Their commander, or chief mahout—as I was inclined to call him—was a cheerful young giant of colonial origin, who has often driven them serenely across No Man’s Land and into the German trenches. He had been expecting us, and led me along a duck board over the morass, to where one of these leviathans was awaiting us.

  You crawl through a greasy hole in the bottom, and the inside is as full of machinery as the turret of the Pennsylvania, and you grope your way to the seat in front beside that of the captain and conductor, looking out through a slot in the armour over a waste of water and mud. From here you are supposed to operate a machine gun. Behind you two mechanics have started the engines with a deafening roar, above which are heard the hoarse commands of the captain as he grinds in the gears. Then you realize that the thing is actually moving, that the bosses on the belt have managed to find a grip on the slime—and presently you come to the brink of what appears, to your exaggerated sense of perception, a bottomless chasm, with distant steep banks on the farther side that look unattainable and insurmountable. It is an old German trench which the rains have widened. You brace yourself, you grip desperately a pair of brass handles in front of you, while leviathan hesitates, seems to sit up on his haunches, and then gently buries his nose in the pasty clay and paws his way upward into the field beyond. It was like sitting in a huge rocking chair. That we might have had a bump, and a bone-breaking one, I was informed after I had left the scene of the adventure. It all depends on the skill of the driver. The monsters are not as tractable as they seem …

  The English officer directed our chauffeur to Bapaume, across that wilderness which the Germans had so wantonly made in their retreat to the Hindenburg line. Nothing could have been more dismal than our slow progress in the steady rain, through the deserted streets of this town. Home after home had been blasted—their intimate yet harrowing interiors were revealed. The shops and cafes, which had been thoroughly looted, had their walls blown out, but in many cases the signs of the vanished and homeless proprietors still hung above the door. The church, the great cathedral on its terrace, the bishop’s house, all dynamited, all cold and wet and filthy.

  It was dismal, but scarcely more dismal than that which followed; for at Bapaume we were on the edge of the battle-field of the Somme. And I chanced to remember that the name had first been indelibly impressed on my consciousness at a comfortable breakfast-table at home, where I sat looking out on a bright New England garden. In the headlines and columns of my morning newspaper I had read again and again, during the summer of 1916, of Thiepval and La Boisselle, of Fricourt and Mametz and the Bois des Trones. Then they had had a sinister but remote significance; now I was to see them, or what was left of them.

  As an appropriate and characteristic setting for the tragedy which had happened here, the indigo afternoon could not have been better chosen. Description fails to do justice to the abomination of the desolation of that vast battle-field in the rain, and the imagination refuses to reconstruct the scene of peace—the chateaux and happy villages, the forests and pastures, that flourished here so brief a time ago. In my fancy the long, low swells of land, like those of some dreary sea, were for the moment like subsiding waves of the cataclysm that had rolled here and extinguished all life. Beside the road only the blood-red soil betrayed the sites of powdered villages; and through it, in every direction, trenches had been cut. Between the trenches the earth was torn and tortured, as though some suddenly fossilizing process, in its moment of supreme agony, had fixed it thus.

  On the hummocks were graves, graves marked by wooden crosses, others by broken rifles thrust in the ground. Shattered gun-carriages lay in the ditches, modern cannon that had cost priceless hours of skilled labour, and once we were confronted by one of those monsters, wounded to death, I had seen that morning. The sight of this huge, helpless thing oddly recalled the emotions I had felt, as a child, when contemplating dead elephants in a battle picture of the army of a Persian king.

  From A Traveller in War-Time, by Winston Churchill; Macmillan; New York, 1918.

  Chapter Four:

  Lie

  The status, influence, and respect that serious creative writers enjoyed in 1914–18 did not come without a cost. They were establishment figures, the pals of press barons, prime ministers, and kings, well paid and much honored, and thus with a stake in preserving the status quo, not only politically and socially, but in terms of victory and what it would take to insure it. When they were asked to contribute to the war effort with their writing, they knew what was expected of them—at the minimum, a certain flexibility in regards to the truth; at the maximum, a willingness to lie.

  “Prevaricate” might be the most generous verb to apply here, or, borrowing a term from our own day, “slant.” Rudyard Kipling, himself one of the most enthusiastic slanters, would publish after the war—and the death of his son in combat—this bitter couplet from “Epitaphs of War.”

  “If any question why we died

  Tell them, because our fathers lied.”

  The pressure on writers to do this was enormous, and their response—speaking now in their defense—was probably sincere and not cynical. They saw the war as a fight for civilization and they genuinely hated the enemy. They felt guilty at not taking part in the battles themselves. They had their status, their careers, their income to worry about. Many of them were given official duties and titles, to which their vanity was not immune. Some had sons serving in the trenches; all had friends and relatives there. They had genuine respect for the fighting men. Taken on tours of the battlefields, they were shown what the military staff wanted them to see and kept tight on the leash.

  Lie? They wouldn’t have seen it that way. “Propagandize” is the worst they would have admitted to, a word that did not then carry the negative connotation it has today. Words contributing to victory were to them no bad thing.

  The war was going badly now, becoming the endless nightmare writers only slowly realized was upon them. The year 1916 saw the bloodlettings at Verdun and on the Somme, catastrophes which not only killed hundreds of thousands of young men, but affected the Western imagination in ways that were and are incalculable.

  Yet there were writers willing to portray these battles as total victories, never mind the death toll or the continued stalemate. Take the infamous First Day of the Somme, July 1, 1916, and the British writers’ response.

  “The most bloody defeat in the history of Britain,” wrote C. E. Montague, who served in the trenches.

  “And our Press came out bland and copious and graphic, with nothing to show that we had not had quite a good day—a victory really. Men who lived through the massacre read the stuff open-mouthed.”

  Even today’s historians have to reach to explain how truly terrible July 1 was.

  “The casualties suffered by the British on the opening day of the Battle of the Somme,” Martin Middlebrook points out,

  “[s]tands comparison not only with other battles, but
with complete wars. The British Army’s loss on that one day easily exceeds the battle casualties in the Crimean War, the Boer War, and the Korean War combined.”

  John Keegan puts the July 1 casualties, on the British side alone, at over sixty thousand killed, wounded, and missing, or, to bring it home to Americans, about the same number of names that appear on the Vietnam Memorial in Washington; many of these casualties occurred in the battle’s first ten minutes.

  “To the British army, it was and would remain their greatest military catastrophe of their national history. The Somme marked the end of an age of vital optimism in British life that has never been recovered.”

  It’s well to remember that last line when reading some of the writers included in this chapter.

  What angered the soldiers most—and can still anger you today—was the manly breeziness of style many writers felt the need for when writing of the war. Montague, whose wartime job included shepherding VIP writers on their official tours of the trenches, wrote how they invariably adopted

  “a certain jauntiness of tone that roused the fighting troops to fury against the writer. Through his dispatches there ran a brisk implication that regimental officers and men enjoyed nothing better than ‘going over the top;’ that a battle was just a rough, jovial picnic; that a fight never went on long enough for these men; that their only fear was lest the war should end on this side of the Rhine. This, the men reflected in helpless anger, was what people at home were offered as faithful accounts of what their friends in the field were thinking and suffering.”

  And writers could be guilty of something far worse than jauntiness. Many of them too easily believed tales of German atrocities … Huns poisoning the wells, Huns spreading influenza germs, Huns putting ground glass in Red Cross bandages … the better to whip up war fever and spur enlistments. Twenty-five years later, this would come back to haunt the world, when a new German army, a new German regime, committed atrocities that made World War I’s seem like harmless misdemeanors. Because a credulous public had been sold crucified nuns and burning babies in the First War, they were fatally slow to buy Auschwitz and ovens in the Second.