Antwerp to Gallipoli Part 17

The transport was late, the sun going, and I went down to the other end of the yard to get a picture of some Russians I had seen two days before. We had walked through their ward then, and I remembered one very sick boy, to whom one of the nurses with us had given a flower she was wearing, and how he had smiled as he put it to his face with his gaunt, white hand. "It doesn't take long," she had said, "when they get like that. They have so little vitality to go on, and some morning between two and five"--and sure enough his bed was empty now.

A troop-train was rushing by, as I came back, covered with green branches and flowers. They went by with a cheer--that cheer which sounds like a cheer sometimes, and sometimes, when two trains pa.s.s on adjoining tracks so fast that you only catch a blur of faces, like the windy shriek of lost souls.

Then came a sound of band music, and down the road, outside the high wire fence, a little procession led by soldiers in gray-blue, playing Chopin's "Funeral March." Behind them came the hospital hea.r.s.e, priests, and a weeping peasant family. The little procession moved slowly behind the wailing trumpets--it was an honor given to all who died here, except the enemy--and must have seemed almost a sort of extravagance to the convalescents crowding up to the fence who had seen scores of their comrades buried in a common trench. Opposite us the drums rolled and the band began the Austrian national hymn. Then they stopped; the soldier escort fired their rules in the air. That ended the ceremony, and the hea.r.s.e moved on alone.

Then the convalescents drifted back toward us. Most of them would soon be ready for the front again, and many glad of it, if only to be men in a man's world again. One of the nurses spoke of some of the others she had known. One man slashed his hand with his knife in the hope of staying behind. Even the bravest must gather themselves together before the leap. Only those who have seen what modern guns can do know how much to fear them.

"For a week or so after they come in lots of them are dazed; they just lie there scarcely stirring. All that part of it--the shock to their nerves--we see more of than the doctors do. When the word comes to go out again they have all the physical symptoms of intense nervous excitement, even nausea sometimes." The train came at last--two long sections of sleeping-cars. An officer stepped off, clicked his heels, and saluted, and the orderlies started unloading the men. Those who could walk at all were helped from the doors; the others--men with broken hips, legs in casts, and so on--were pa.s.sed out of the windows on stretchers held over the orderlies' heads. In the receiving-ward they were set down in rows before the three tables, most of them clutching their papers as they came. Each man gave his name and regiment, and such particulars, and the address of some one of his family to whom notice could be sent. It was one clerk's duty to address a post-card telling his family of his condition and that he was in the hospital.

These cards were already ruled off into columns in each of which the words "Lightly wounded," "Wounded," "Severely wounded," "Ill," "Very ill" were printed in nine of the languages spoken in Austria-Hungary.

The clerk merely had to put a cross on the proper word. Here, for instance, is the Lightly wounded column, in German, Hungarian, and the other dialects: "Leicht verwundet, Konnyen megse-besult, Lehce ranen, Lekko raniony, Lecko ranenki, Leggiermente Jcrzto, Lako ranjen, Lahko ranjen, Usor ranit."

A number were Russians--fine, big, clear-eyed fellows with whom these genuine "Huns" chatted and laughed as if they were their own men. On one stretcher came a very pale, round-faced, little boy about twelve, with stubbly blond hair clipped short and an enchanting smile. He had been carrying water for the soldiers, somebody said, when a piece of shrapnel took off one of his feet. Possibly he was one of those little adventurers who run away to war as boys used to run away to sea or the circus. He seemed entirely at home with these men, at any rate, and when one of the Hungarians brought him a big tin cup of coffee and a chunk of black bread, he wriggled himself half upright and went to work at it like a veteran.

As soon as the men were registered they were hurried out of their uniforms and into the bathroom. At the door two nurses in white--so calm and clean and strong that they must have seemed like G.o.ddesses, in that reek of steam and disinfectants and festering wounds--received them, asked each man how he was wounded, and quickly, as if he were a child, snipped off his bandages, unless the leg or arm were in a cast, and turned him over to the orderlies. Those who could walk used showers, the others were bathed on inclined slabs. Even the worst wounded scarcely made a sound, and those who could take care of themselves limped under the showers as if they had been hospital boarders before, and waited for, and even demanded, with a certain peremptoriness, their little bundle of belongings before they went on to the dressing-room.

Discipline, possibly, though one could easily fancy that all this organized kindness and comfort suddenly enveloping them was enough to raise them for the moment above thoughts of pain.

As they lifted the man on the dressing-table and loosened the pillow-like bandage under his drawn-up thigh, a thick, sickening odor spread through the room. As the last bit of gauze packing was drawn from the wound, the greenish pus followed and streamed into the pan.

The jagged chunk of sh.e.l.l had hit him at the top of the thigh and ploughed down to the knee. The wound had become infected, and the connecting tissues had rotted away until the leg was now scarcely more than a bone and the two flaps of flesh. The civilian thinks of a wound, generally, as a comparatively decent sort of hole, more or less the width of the bullet itself. There was nothing decent about this wound.

It was such a slash as one might expect in a slaughtered ox. It had been slit farther to clean the infection, until you could have thrust your fist into it, and, as the surgeon worked, the leg, partly from weakness, partly from the man's nervousness, trembled like a leaf.

First the gauze stuffed into the cavity had to be pulled out. The man, of an age that suggested that he might have left at home a peasant wife, slightly faded and weather-worn like himself, cringed and dug his nails into the under side of the table, but made no outcry. The surgeon squeezed the flesh above and about the wound, the quick-fingered young nurse flushed the cavity with an antiseptic wash, then clean, dry gauze was pushed into it and slowly pulled out again.

The man--they had nicknamed him "Pop"--breathed faster. This panting went into a moan, which deepened into a hoa.r.s.e cry, and then, as he lost hold of himself completely, he began a hideous sort of sharp yelping like a dog.

This is a part of war that doctors and nurses see; not rarely and in one hospital, but in all hospitals and every morning, when the long line of men--'"pus tanks' we called 'em last winter," muttered one of the young doctors--are brought in to be dressed, There was such a leg that day in the Barracken Hospital; the case described here was in the American Red Cross Hospital in Vienna.

Such individual suffering makes no right or wrong, of course. It is a part of war. Yet the more one sees of it and of this cannon fodder, the people on whom the burden of war really falls, how alike they all are in their courage, simplicity, patience, and long-suffering, whether Hungarians or Russians, Belgians or Turks, the less simple is it to be convinced of the complete righteousness of any of the various general ideas in whose name these men are tortured. I suspect that only those can hate with entire satisfaction and success who stay quietly at home and read the papers.

I remember riding down into Surrey from London one Sunday last August and reading an editorial on Louvain--so well written, so quivering with n.o.ble indignation that one's blood boiled, as they say, and one could scarcely wait to get off the train to begin the work of revenge.

Perhaps the most moving pa.s.sage in this editorial was about the smoking ruins of the Town Hall, which I later saw intact. I have thought occasionally since of that editorial and of the thousands of sedentary fire-eaters and hate-mongers like the writer of it--men who live forever in a cloud of words, bounce from one nervous reaction to another without ever touching the ground, and, rejoicing in their eloquence, go down from their comfortable breakfasts to their comfortable offices morning after morning and demand slaughter, annihilation, heaven knows what not --men who could not endure for ten minutes that small part of war which any frail girl of a trained nurse endures hour after hour every morning as part of the day's work.

If I had stayed in London and continued to read the lies of but one side, I should doubtless, by this time, be able to loathe and despise the enemy with an entire lack of doubt, discomfort, or intelligence.

But having been in all the countries and read all the lies, the problem is less simple.

How many people who talk or write about war would have the courage to face a minute, fractional part of the reality underlying war's inherited romance? People speak with pleasant excitement of "flashing sabres"

without the remotest thought of what flashing sabres do. A sabre does not stop in mid-air with its flashing, where a Meissonier or a Detaille would paint it--it goes right on through the cords and veins of a man's neck. Sabre wounds are not very common, but there was one in the Vienna hospital that morning--a V-shaped trench in which you could have laid four fingers fiat, down through the hair and into the back of the man's neck, so close to the big blood-vessel that you could see it beat under its film of tissue--the only thing between him and death. I thought of it a day or two later when I was reading a book about the Austrian army officer's life, written by an English lady, and came across the phrase: '"Sharpen sabres!' was the joyful cry."

Be joyful if you can, when you know what war is, and, knowing it, know also that it is the only way to do your necessary work. The absurd and disgusting thing is the ignorance and cowardice of those who can slaughter an army corps every day for lunch, with words, and would not be able to make so trivial a start toward the "crushing" they are forever talking about as to fire into another man's open eyes or jam a bayonet into a single man's stomach. Among the Utopian steps which one would most gladly support would be an attempt to send the editors and politicians of all belligerent countries to serve a week in the enemy's hospitals.

Chapter XV

East Of Lemberg--Through Austria-Hungary to the Galician Front

We left Nagybiesce in the evening, climbed that night through the high Tatras, stopped in the morning at Kaschau long enough for coffee and a sight of the old cathedral, rolled on down through the country of robber barons' castles and Tokay wine, and came at length, in the evening, to Munkacs and the foot of the high Carpathians.

This was close to the southernmost point the Russians touched when they came pouring down through the Carpathian pa.s.ses, and one of the places in the long line where Germans and Austro-Hungarians joined forces in the spring to drive them back again. Munkacs is where the painter Munkacsy came from. It was down to Munkacs, through Silesia and the Tatras, that the troop-trains came in April while snow was still deep in the Carpathians. Now it was a feeding-station for fresh troops going up and wounded and prisoners coming down.

The officers in charge had no notion we were coming, but no sooner heard we were strangers in Hungary than we must come in, not only to dinner, but to dine with them at their table. We had red-hot stuffed paprika pods, Liptauer cheese mixed salmon-pink with paprika, and these and other things washed down with beer and cataracts of hospitable talk.

Some one whispering that a bit of cheese might come in handy in the breakfastless, cholera-infested country, into which we were going that night, they insisted we must take, not merely a slice, but a chunk as big as a small trunk. We looked at the soup-kitchen, where they could feed two thousand a day, and tasted the soup. We saw the dressing-station and a few wounded waiting there, and all on such a breeze of talk and eloquent explanation that you might have thought you had stepped back into a century when suspicion and worry and nerves were unknown.

The Hungarians are like that--along with their indolence and romantic melancholy--lively and hospitable and credulous with strangers. Nearly all of them are good talkers and by sheer fervor and conviction can make almost any phrase resemble an idea and a real idea as good as a play.

Hungarians are useful when trenches must be taken by storm, just as the sober Tyrolean mountaineers are better for sharp-shooting and slow resistance.

One of the interesting things about the Austro-Hungarian army, as well, of course, as an inevitable weakness, is the variety of races and temperaments hidden under these blue-gray uniforms--Hungarians, Austrians, Croatians, Slovaks, Czechs. Things in universal use, like post-cards and paper money, often have their words printed in nine languages, and an Austro-Hungarian officer may have to know three or four in order to give the necessary orders to his men. And his men cannot fight for the fatherland as the Germans do; they must rally round a more or less abstract idea of nationality. And one of the surprises of the war, doubtless, to many people, has been that its strain, instead of disintegrating, appears to have beaten this loose ma.s.s together.

At the table that evening was a middle-aged officer and his aid on their way to a new detail at the front. They were simple and soldier-like and, after the flashing bosoms of the sedentary hinterland, it was pleasant to see these men, who had been on active service since the beginning, without a single medal. The younger Hungarian was one of those slumbering daredevils who combine a compact, rugged shape--strong wrists, hair low on the forehead--with the soft voice and shy manners of a girl. He spoke a little German and English in the slow, almost plaintive Hungarian cadence, but all we could get out of him about the war was that it had made him so tired--so 'mude'. He had gone to school in Zurich but could not tell our Swiss lieutenant the name of his teacher--he couldn't remember anything, any more, he said, with his plaintive smile. He had a little factory in Budapest and had gone back on furlough to see that things were ship-shape, but it was no use, he couldn't tell them what to do when he got there. Common enough, our captain guide observed. He had been in the fighting along the San until invalided back to the Presse-Quartier, and there were times, then, he said, when for days it was hard for him to remember his own name.

We climbed up into the mountains in the night and he had us up at daylight to look down from creaking, six-story timber bridges built by the Austro-Hungarian engineers to replace the steel railroad bridges blown up by the Russians. We pa.s.sed a tunnel or two, a big stockade full of Russian prisoners milling round in their brown overcoats, and down from the pa.s.s into the village of Skole. Here we were to climb the near-by heights of Ostry, which the Hungarians of the Corps Hoffmann stormed in April when the snow was still on the ground, and "orientiren"

ourselves a bit about this Carpathian fighting.

I had looked back at it through the "histories" and the amputated feet and hands in the hospital at Budapest--now, in the muggy air of a late August morning we were to tramp over the ground itself. There were, in this party of rather leisurely reporters, a tall, wise, slow-smiling young Swede who had gone to sea at twelve and been captain of a destroyer before leaving the navy to manage a newspaper; a young Polish count, amiably interested in many sorts of learning and nearly all sorts of ladies--he had seen some of the Carpathian fighting as an officer in the Polish Legion; one of the Swiss citizen officers--one can hear him now whacking his heels together whenever he was presented, and fairly hissing "Oberleutnant W---, aw Schweiz!" and a young Bulgarian professor, who spoke German and a little French, but, unlike so many of the Bulgarians of the older generation who were educated at Robert College, no English. The Bulgarians are intensely patriotic and there was nothing under sun, moon, or stars which this young man did not compare with what they had in Sofia. German tactics, Russian novels, sky-sc.r.a.pers, music, steamships--no matter what--in a moment would come his "Bei uns in Sofia"--(With us in Sofia) and his characteristic febrile gesture, thumb and forefinger joined, other fingers extended, pumping emphatically before his face.

Then there was our captain guide from the regular army, a volunteer automobile officer, a soldier servant for each man--for the Austrians do such things in style--and even, on a separate flat car, our own motor.

The Carpathians here are in the neighborhood of three thousand five hundred feet high--a tangle of pine-covered slopes as steep as a roof sometimes, and reminding one a bit of our Oregon Cascades on a much-reduced scale. You must imagine snow waist-deep, the heights furrowed with trenches, the frosty balsam stillness split with screaming sh.e.l.ls and shrapnel and the rat-tat-tat of machine guns; imagine yourself floundering upward with winter overcoat, blanket, pack, rifle, and cartridge-belt--any one who has snow-shoed in mountains in midwinter can fancy what fighting meant in a place like this. Men's feet and hands were frozen on sentry duty or merely while asleep--for the soldiers slept as a rule in the open, merely huddled in their blankets before a fire--the severely wounded simply dropped in the snow, and for most of them, no doubt, that was the end of it.

Puffing and steaming in our rain-coats, we climbed the fifteen hundred feet or so to the top of the mountain, up which the Russians had built a sort of cork-screw series of trenches, twisting one behind the other.

We reached one sky-line only to find another looking down at us.

Barbed-wire entanglements and "Spanish riders" crossed the slopes in front of them--it was the sort of place that looks to a civilian as if it could hold out forever.

The difficulty in country like this is, of course, to escape flanking fire. You fortify yourself against attack from one direction only to be enfiladed by artillery from some ridge to right or left. That was what the Austrians and Germans did and, following their artillery with an infantry a.s.sault, captured one of the upper Russian trenches. From this it was only a matter of a few hours to clear out the others. Except for the visits of a few peasants the battle-field had scarcely been touched since the snow melted. The hillside was peppered with sh.e.l.l holes, the trenches littered with old hand-grenades, brown Russian over-coats, the rectangular metal cartridge clip cases---about like biscuit tins--which the Russians leave everywhere, and some of the brush-covered shelters in which the Russians had lived, with their spoons and wet papers and here and there a cigarette box or a tube of tooth-paste, might have almost been lived in yesterday.

The valley all the way back to Skole was strung with the brush and timber shelters in which the Russians had camped--the first of thousands of cut-up pine-trees we were to see before we left Galicia. All the drab and dreary side of war was in that little mountain town--smashed houses; sidewalks, streets, and fences splashed with lime against cholera; stores closed or just keeping alive, and here and there signs threatening spies and stating that any one found carrying explosives or building fires would be shot. I went into one fairly clean little cafe, where it seemed one might risk a cup of tea--you are not supposed to drink unboiled or unbottled water in such neighborhoods--and the dismal old Jew who kept the place told me that he had been there since the war began. He made a sour face when I said he must have seen a good deal.

A lot he could see, he said, six months in a cellar "gesteckt."

There was a certain amount of cholera all through eastern Galicia, especially among the peasants, not so well housed, often, as the soldiers, and not nearly so well fed and taken care of. Every one who went into Galicia had to be vaccinated for cholera, and in the army this had all but prevented it. In a whole division living in a cholera-infected neighborhood there would be only one or two cases, and sometimes none at all. The uncomfortable rumor of it was everywhere, however, and one was not supposed to eat raw fruit or vegetables, and in some places hand-shaking, even in an officers' mess, was prohibited.

Russian prisoners were working about the station as they were all over eastern Austria-Hungary--big, blond, easy-going children, apparently quite content. Our Warsaw Pole talked with one of them, who seemed to mourn only the fact that he didn't have quite so big a ration of bread as he had had as a soldier. He had come from Siberia, where he had left a wife and three children--four, maybe, by this time, he said; some rascally Austrian might have made another one.

Beyond Skole we left the mountains--looking back at that imposing wall on the horizon, one could fancy the Russians coming down from the north and thinking, "There we shall stand!"--and rode northward through a pleasant, shallow, valley country, past Ruthenian settlements with their three-domed churches and houses steep-roofed with heavy thatch. Some of these Ruthenians, following the Little Russians of the south, Gogol's country, were not enthusiastic when the Russians came through. Among others, the Russian Government had made great propaganda, given money for churches and so on, so that the apparently guileless peasants occasionally revealed artillery positions, the Austrians said, by driving their cattle past them or by smoke signals from cottage chimneys. We stopped for dinner at Strij, another of those drab, dusty, half-Jewish towns filled now with German and Austro-Hungarian soldiers, officers, proclamations, and all the machinery of a staff headquarters, and the next morning rolled into Lemberg. The Russians captured it in the first week of the war, held it through the winter, and then, after the Czar had, from a balcony in the town, formally annexed it to the empire forever and a day, in April, the Austro-Hungarians retook it again in June.

There were smashed windows in the railroad station, but otherwise, to a stranger coming in for the first time, Lemberg seemed swinging along, a big modern city of some-two hundred thousand people, almost as if nothing had happened.

With an officer from General Bom-Ermolh's staff, and maps, we drove out to the outlying fortifications, where the real fighting had taken place.

The concrete gun positions, the permanent infantry protections with loopholes in concrete, and all the trenches and barbed wire, looked certainly as if the Russians had intended to stay in Lemberg. The full explanation of why they did not must be left for the present. What happened at one fortified position, a few miles southwest of Lemberg, was plain enough.

Here, in pleasant open farming country was a concrete and earth fort, protected by elaborate trenches and entanglements, in front of which, for nearly a mile across the fields, was an open field of fire.

Infantry might have charged across that open s.p.a.ce until the end of the war without getting any nearer, but the offensive did not, of course, try that. Over behind distant clumps of trees and a wooded ridge on the horizon they planted their heavy batteries. On a s.p.a.ce perhaps three hundred yards long some sixty of these heavy guns concentrated their fire. The infantry pushed up under its protection, the fort fell, and the garrison was captured with it.

It is by such use of artillery that herds of prisoners are sometimes gathered in. Just before the charging infantry reaches the trench, the cataract of artillery fire, which has been pouring into it, is suddenly shifted back a few hundred yards, where it hangs like a curtain shutting off escape. The success of such tactics demands, of course, finished work from the artillery-men and perfect co-ordination between artillery and infantry. At lunch a few days later in Cracow, a young Austrian officer was telling me how they had once arranged that the artillery should fire twenty rounds, and on the twenty-first the infantry, without waiting for the usual bugle signal to storm, should charge the trenches.

At the same instant the artillery-men were to move up their range a couple of hundred yards. The manoeuvre was successful and the Russians caught, huddled under cover, before they knew what had happened.

Though Lemberg's cafes were gay enough and the old Jews in gaberdines, with the orthodox curl dangling before each ear, dozed peacefully on the park benches, still the Russians were only a few hours' motor drive to the eastward, and next morning we went out to see them. All of the country through which we drove was, in a way, the "front"--beginning with the staff head-quarters and going on up through wagon-trains, reserves, horse camps, ammunition-stations, and so on, to the first-line trenches themselves.