Antwerp to Gallipoli Part 18

Sweeping up through this long front on a fine autumn morning is to see the very glitter and bloom of war. Wounds and suffering, burned towns, and broken lives--all that is forgotten in the splendid panorama--men and motors and fliers and guns, the cheerful smell of hay and coffee and horses, the clank of heavy trucks and the jangle of chains, all in beautiful harvest country; in the contagion of pushing on, shoulder to shoulder, and the devil take the hindmost, toward something vastly interesting up ahead.

Every one is well and strong, and the least of them lifted up and glamoured over by the idea that unites them. All the pettinesses and smallness of every-day existence seem brushed aside, for no one is working for money or himself, and every man of them may be riding to his death.

Flippant young city b.u.t.terflies jump to their feet and gravely salute when their elders enter, the loutish peasant flings up his chin as if he would defy the universe. What a strange and magic thing is this discipline or team-work or whatever you choose to call it, by which some impudent waiter, for instance, who yesterday would have growled at his tips, will to-day fling his chin up and his hands to his sides and beam like a boy, merely because his captain, showing guests through the camp, deigns to peer into his mess-can and, slapping him affectionately on the cheek, ask him if the food is all right!

We whizzed into the village of Kamionka, on the upper Bug, across which the Russians had been driven only a few days before. Their trenches were just within the woods a scant mile away, and the smoke of their camp-fires curled up through the trees. Across the much-talked-of Bug, which resembles here a tide-water river split with swampy flats, were the trenches they had left. They trailed along the river bank, bent with it almost at a right angle, and the Austro-Hungarian batteries had been so placed that a crisscross fire enfiladed each trench. From the attic observation station into which we climbed, the officers directing the attack could look down the line of one of the trenches and see their own sh.e.l.ls ripping it to pieces. "It was a sight you could see once in a lifetime," said one of the young artillery-men, still strung up with the excitement of the fight--exactly what was said to me at Ari b.u.mu by a Turkish officer who had seen the Triumph go down.

That attic was like a scene in some military melodrama, with its tattered roof, its tripod binoculars peering at the enemy, the businesslike officers dusty and unshaven, the field-telegraph operator squatting in one corner, with a receiver strapped to his ear. We walked across the rafters to an adjoining room, where there were two or three chairs and an old sofa, had schnapps all round, and then went out to walk over the position.

In front was the wabbly foot-bridge run across by the pioneers, and on the swampy flats the little heaps of sod thrown up by the first line as they pushed across--wading up to their necks part of the way--under fire.

On the near bank the Austro-Hungarian trenches had run between the tombs of an old Jewish burying-ground, and from the earth walls, here and there, projected a bone or a crumbling skull. The Russian trenches on the other bank wound through a farmyard in the same impersonal way-- pig-pens, orchard, chicken-coops, all thought of merely as shelter. It was just to the left of a pig-pen that a Russian officer had held his machine gun until the last minute, pouring in a flank fire. "He did his work!" was the young officer's comment.

We lunched with a corps commander and dined with a genial old colonel and his staff, and between times motored through level farming country to a position to the northward on the Rata, a tributary of the Bug.

Both sides were watching each other here from their sausage-shaped captive balloons, and a few aeroplanes were snooping about but at the moment all was quiet. The Austro-Hungarians had been waiting here for over a fortnight, and the artillery-men had polished up their battery positions as artillery-men like to do when they have time. Two were in a pasture, so neatly roofed over with sod that a birdman might fly over the place until the cows came home without knowing guns were there.

Another, hidden just within the shadow of a pine forest, was as attractive as some rich man's mountain camp, the gun positions as snug as yacht cabins, the officer's lodges made of fresh, sweet-smelling pine logs, and in a little recess in the trees a shrine had been built to St.

Barbara, who looks out for artillery-men.

The infantry trenches along the river, cut in the clean sand and neatly timbered and loopholed, were like model trenches on some exposition ground. Through these loopholes one could see the Russian trenches, perhaps a mile away, and in between the peasant women, bright red and white splashes in the yellow wheat, were calmly going ahead with their harvest. All along the Galician front we saw peasants working thus and regarding this elaborate game of war very much apparently as busy farmers regard a draghunt or a party of city fishermen. At one point we had to come out in the open and cross a foot-bridge. "Please-- Lieutenant," one of the soldiers protested as the officer with us stepped out, standing erect, "it is not safe!" The officer crouched and hurried across and so did we, but just before we did so, up out of the field where they had been mowing, straight through this gap, came a little company of barefooted peasant women with their bundles of gleanings on their heads, and talking in that singsong monotone of theirs, as detached as so many birds, they went pat-patting across the bridge. If one of these women could but write her impressions of war!

They had done their part, these peasant women and old men and children.

All over Galicia, round the burned villages, right through barbed-wire entanglements up to the very trenches, stretched the yellow wheat.

Somehow they had ploughed and sowed and brought it to harvest, and now with scythes, with knives even, sometimes, they were getting it under cover. At home we know gleaners generally only in rather sentimental pictures; here we saw them day after day, barefooted women and children going over the stubble and picking up the forgotten wheat heads and arranging them in one hand as if they were a bouquet. There will be no wheat wasted this year.

And with them everywhere were the Russian prisoners, swinging scythes, binding grain, sometimes coming down the road, without even a guard, sprawled in the sun on a load of straw. It would be hard to find a place where war seemed more a vast theatricalism than in some of these Hungarian and Galician neighborhoods. There seemed to be no enmity whatever between captors and prisoners. Everywhere the latter were making themselves useful in the fields, in road-making, about railroad yards, and several officers told me that it was surprising how many good artisans, carpenters, iron-workers, and so on, there were among them.

The Russians got exactly the same food as the Hungarian soldiers, and were paid a few cents a day for their work. You would see men in the two uniforms hobn.o.bbing in the open freight-cars as the work-trains rolled up the line, and sometimes a score or so of husky Russians working in the wheat, guarded by some miniature, lone, Landsturm man. Of all the various war victims I had seen, these struck me as the most lucky--they could not even, like the wounded, be sent back again.

We drove back through the dark that night, and in the bright, waving circle of an automobile search-light, with the cool breath from the pines in our faces, saw that long "front" roll back again. Now and then a soldier would step into the white circle and, holding up his arm, struggle between his awe of this snorting motor with its imperial double-eagle flag and its sharp-voiced officers m.u.f.fled in gray coats-- between his peasant's habit of taking off his hat and letting such people blow by, and his soldier's orders to stop every-thing that pa.s.sed. He stopped us, nevertheless, and the pa.s.s was laboriously read in the light of his electric lamp before we went on again.

In the dark and quiet all the countless joints and wheels of the vast organism were still mysteriously turning. Once, in a cloud of dust, we pa.s.sed troops marching toward the front--tired faces, laughing faces-- the shout "Man in the road !" and then the glimpse of a couple of Red Cross men kneeling by a soldier who had given out on the way; once, in the black pines, cows driven by two little frightened peasant children; once a long line of bearded Jews, bound, with packs on their backs, for what was left of their homes; a supply-train, a clanking battery, and now and then other motors like ours with shrouded gray figures, streaking by in a flashing mist of dust.

Next day, swinging southward into another sector of the front, over beautiful rolling hills, rather like the Genesee Valley, we drummed up a hill and came out at the top in a village square. It had once been a white little village clinging to the skirts of an old chateau--the village of Swirz and Count Lavasan's chateau--and both were now black and tumbled walls.

In the centre of the square people were singing--a strange little crowd and strange, mournful singing. We thought at first it was a funeral service, for the women were weeping as they sang, but as the auto-mobile swept up beside them, we saw that it was men the women were crowding round--live men, going away to war.

They were men who had not been called out because the Russians held the country, and by one of fate's ironies, now that the enemy had been beaten and driven home, they must go out and fight. At a little table by the side of the square sat the recruiting officer with his pen and ledger, and the village school-master, a grave, intelligent-looking young man, who must have held such a place in this half-feudal village as he would have done a hundred years ago, was doing his best to glamour over the very realistic loss of these wives and sweethearts with patriotism's romance. He sang and obediently they all wailed after him the old song of scattered Poland--"Poland is not lost" "Yeszcze Polska me Zginela Poki my zygemy..."

The song stopped, there was a word of command, and the little squad started away. The women clung to their men and cried aloud. The children hanging to their skirts began to wail, too. There was something creepy and horrible, like the cries of tortured animals, in that uncontrolled crying there in the bright morning sunshine. The schoolmaster spoke to them bluntly, told them to go back to their homes and their work, and obedient, and a little quieter now, they drifted away, with ap.r.o.ns to their faces and their little children clinging to their skirts--back to their cottages and the winter ahead.

This picture did not fit in very well with our rollicking military panorama, but we were soon over the hills, and half an hour later were breakfasting on pate-de-foie-gras sandwiches and champagne, with a charming old corps commandant, at a round table set outdoors in a circle of trees that must have been planted for that very purpose. Cheered and stiffened by many bows and heel clickings and warming hospitality, we hurried off to an artillery position near the village of Olszanica.

Just under the brow of a hill we were stopped and told that it was dangerous to go farther, and we skirted off to the right under cover, to the observation station itself. More little Swiss chalets, more hospitable officers, and out in front, across a mile of open country, the Russian trenches. Through a periscope one could see Russians exercising their horses by riding them round the circle--as silent and remote and of another world as a picture on a biograph screen.

"You see that clump of trees," said the young officer, "one of their batteries is just behind there. Those aren't real trees, they were put there by the Russians." I swung the gla.s.s to the left, picked up a company of men marching. "h.e.l.lo, h.e.l.lo," he whispered, then after a moment's scrutiny: "No--they're our men." After all, war isn't always so different from the old days, when men had a time for fighting and a time for going in to powder their wigs! The division commander, standing a little behind us, remarked: "We shall fire from the right-hand battery over behind the hill and then from the left--the one you pa.s.sed near the road." Then turning to an officer at the field telephone he said; "You may fire now."

There was a moment's pause, from over the woods behind us came a "Whr-r-rong !" and out over the sunny fields a sh.e.l.l went milling away to send back a faint report and show a puff of cotton above the trenches to the right. It was a bit short--the next fell better. Another nod, another "Whr-r-row?/" from somewhere behind us, and this time the cottony puff was just short of the clump of trees where the Russians had concealed their battery. I picked up the spot through the gla.s.s and-- one might have known !--there was One of those eternal peasants calmly swinging his scythe about fifty yards short of the spot where the shrapnel had exploded. I could see him straighten up, glance at it, then go on with his mowing again.

There was a certain elegance, a fine s.p.a.ciousness about these artillery-men and their work which made one more content with war again.

No huddling in muddy trenches here, waiting to be smashed by jagged chunks of iron--everything clean, aloof, scientific, exact, a matter of fine wires crossing on a periscope lens, of elevation, wind pressure, and so on, and everything in the wide outdoors, and done, so to say, with a magnificent gesture.

People drive high-power motor-cars and ride strong horses because of the sense of power it gives them--how about standing on a hill, looking over miles of splendid country to where a huddle of ants and hobby-horse specks--say a battalion or two--are just crawling around a hill or jammed on a narrow bridge, and then to scatter them, herd them, chase them from one horizon to another with a mere, "Mr. Jones, you may fire now," and a wave of the hand!

The division commander took us back a mile or so to his headquarters for lunch, the Russians slowly waking up and sending a few perfunctory sh.e.l.ls after us as we went over the hill, and here was another genial party, with three "Hochs" for the guests at the end. Even out here in empty Galicia the soldiers got their beer. "We're not quite so temperate as the Russians," the general smiled. "A little alcohol--not too much--does 'em good."

A young lieutenant who sat next me regaled me with his impression of things in general. The Russians had squandered ammunition, he said, in the early days of the war--they would fire twenty rounds or so at a single cavalryman or anything that showed itself. They were short now, but a supply would come evidently every now and then, for they would blaze away for a day or so, then there would be a lull again. They were short on officers, too, but not so much as you might think, because they kept their officers well back of the line, generally. Their artillery was better than the infantry, as a rule; the latter shot carelessly and generally too high.

Both he and the officer at my left--a big, farmer-like commissary man-- spoke most amiably of the Russians. The latter told of one place where both sides had to get water out of the same well. And there was no trouble. "No," he said, in his deep voice, "they're not hose," using the same word "bad" one would apply to a naughty boy. They were a particularly chipper lot, these artillerymen, and when I told the young lieutenant, who had been a.s.signed to speak French to me under the notion that I was more at home in that language, that I had stopped at Queens Hotel instead of the St. Antoine in Antwerp, and that the Belgian army had crossed the Scheldt, and the pontoon bridge had been blown up directly in front of the hotel, he said that he would "certainly engage rooms there for the next bombardment," as he waved good-by.

We were presented, while in Lemberg, to General Bom-Ermolli, and lunched at the headquarters mess. We also met Major-General Bardolf, his chief of staff, and chief of staff of the a.s.sa.s.sinated Crown Prince. The latter described to us the campaign about Lemberg, and it was interesting to hear the rasping accent he gave to a word like "Durchbrechung," for instance, as if he were a Prussian instead of an Austrian, and to observe the frankness with which he ascribed the difference that had come over the spirit of the Austro-Hungarian army to the coming of Mackensen and the Germans.

West of Lemberg the pleasant country lost its war-time air and in Przemysl the two or three lonely Landsturm men guarding the wrecked fortifications, twice taken and twice blown up by retreating armies, lit candles to take us through the smashed galleries, and accepted a few h.e.l.lers when we came out, with quite the bored air of professional museum guides.

The town of Przemysl itself was untouched. The greater part of the visible damage to the forts, some distance outside the town, was done by the dynamite of the retreating army. In one place, however, we saw the crater of one of the 42-centimetre sh.e.l.ls which have been talked about oftener than they have been used. The Austrian "thirty-point-fives"

have done much of the smashing ascribed to the "forty-twos," and ordinary work, like that of bombarding a city or infantry trenches, by cannon of smaller caliber. A genuine forty-two had been dropped here, however, we were told, on a building used by the Russians to store ammunition, and the building had simply disappeared. There was nothing left but a crater sixty or seventy feet across and eighteen to twenty feet deep.

We trailed westward, through Tarnow, where the great drive first broke through, and on to the pleasant old university city of Cracow on the frontier of the Poland of which it was once the capital, and to which it belonged until the part.i.tion of 1795. It was toward Cracow that the Russians were driving when they first started for Berlin, and they were but a stone's throw away most of the winter. We got to Cracow on the Emperor's birthday and saw a military ma.s.s on the great parade-ground with the commandant of the fort standing uncovered and alone facing the altar, behind him his staff, and perhaps a hundred yards behind them and stretching for a quarter of a mile down the field, the garrison. At the intervals in the ma.s.s the whole garrison fired salutes, the volleys going down the field, a battalion at a time, now and then reinforced by the cannon on Kosciusko Hill.

Cracow is Polish in atmosphere and feeling, and even in the few hours we were there one heard a good deal of Polish hopes and ambitions. The independence which Russia was to grant must come now, it would appear, from some one else. The Poles want a king of their own, but apparently they preferred to be under the wing of Austria rather than of Germany.

The Germans, who had laid rather a firm hand on the parts of Poland they had occupied, might not fall in with this notion and one could detect here one of those clouds, "no bigger than a man's hand," which dramatists put in the first act, and which often swell to interesting proportions before the final curtain goes down.

Chapter XVI

In The Dust Of The Russian Retreat

Warsaw had fallen, and Ivangorod, and the centre of the German and Austro-Hungarian armies, sweeping across eastern Europe like beaters across a prairie, was now before Brest-Litovsk. This was the apex of this central triangle of Russian forts, a city and a rail-road centre as well as a fortress, and the last strongly fortified place on the direct road to Moscow. It seemed as if the Russians must make a stand here, and even though we were four or five days getting there, the heavy artillery was not yet up, and there might still be time.

We wound through the green hills and under the ruined castles of northern Hungary in the afternoon, rolled slowly up across Silesia and into Russian Poland in the night, and came at noon to Radom, only sixty-five miles south of Warsaw. Hindenburg had been here in October, 1914, when he invaded Poland to draw off the Russians from Galicia, then the Russian offensive had rolled over the place. The Russians had held it all the winter; now they were a hundred and fifty miles eastward-- beyond the Vistula and the Bug--"boog," not "bug," by the way--and just hanging to the edge of Poland.

The war had scarcely touched Budapest and Vienna--scarcely touched the ordinary city surfaces, that is to say. In hotels and cafes, streets and parks, life flowed on almost as brightly as ever. Farther north, in the Hungarian towns and villages, life still went on as usual, but one felt the grip of war--you might not go there nor move about without a military pa.s.s. Beyond Radom, where now in the pleasant park the very literary Polish young people were strolling, reading as they walked, there was, so to speak, no ordinary life at all--only the desert of war and the curious, intense, and complicated life of those who made it.

Our car was. .h.i.tched to a long transport-train--for it would be another two days before the automobiles would come back for us from the front-- and we rode into this deserted Polish country toward Ivangorod.

It had all been fought over at least twice--railroad stations and farm buildings burned, bridges dynamited, telegraph-poles cut down. The stations now were mere board shelters for a commandant and a soldiers'

lunch-room; the bridges, timber bridges flung across by the pioneers; and the sawed-off telegraph-poles, spliced between railroad rails to save cutting new ones, were stuck back into the ground like forks. The Russians had a rather odd way of burning stations and leaving the rails, the important thing, intact, but here and there they had neatly destroyed them for miles by exploding a cartridge under the end of each.

The country is level here--fields interspersed with dark pine forests, planted in the European fashion, to be grown and harvested like any other crop--parks of living telephone-posts, thick as the quills of a porcupine. And through these pines and across the fields were the eternal Russian trenches, carefully built, timber-lined, sometimes roofed and sodded over, with rifle holes under the eaves. Barbed-wire entanglements, seven rows deep sometimes, trailed in front of them, through timber, through the long gra.s.s and flowers of marsh-land, a wicked foggy band against the green as far as one could see. Along the Galician front and in the Carpathians I had seen mile after mile of such trenches, timber-work, wires, and Spanish riders left behind, good as new, until it began to seem as if war were a peculiarly absurd game, consisting princ.i.p.ally in chopping down good trees and digging ditches, and then going somewhere else.

In front of Ivangorod great preparations had been made. There was no town here, but the great fortress, with its citadel, barracks, machine-shops, gardens, church, and protecting forts, was almost a city in itself. It had a garrison of twenty thousand, and its gigantic concrete walls, covered over with earth and gra.s.s, its, moat and barbed wire, looked formidable enough. It had no modern heavy artillery, however, and even if it had, artillery in a fixed, known spot is comparatively helpless against the mobile guns, screened by hills and timber, besiegers can bring against it. Elaborate earthworks had, therefore, been thrown up several miles to the west of the fortress, but these became useless when the enemy, crossing the Vistula to north and south, swung round to cut off the one way out--the railroad to Brest-Litovsk.

The Russians might have shut themselves in and waited--not very long, probably--until the big "thirty-point-fives" smashed the fort to pieces.

They chose to get out in time, blew up the railroad bridge across the Bug, burned the barracks, and, with enough dynamite to give a good imitation of an earthquake, tumbled the walls and galleries of the fortress into melancholy heaps of rock.

It was dusk when we rolled into Ivangorod and into the thick of that vast and complicated labor which goes on in the rear of an advancing army--all that laborious building up which follows the retreating army's orgy of tearing down--bridge builders, an acre or two of transport horses, blacksmiths and iron-workers, a semi-permanent bakery, the ovens, on wheels, like thrashing-machine engines, dropping sparks and sending out a sweet, warm, steamy smell of corn and wheat. It never stopped, this bakery, night or day, and the bread was piled up in a big tent near by like cord-wood.

And here you could see the amount of trouble that can be made by blowing up a railroad bridge. First, of course, a new timber bridge has to be flung across, and the Vistula is a good two hundred yards wide here and the river was high. Up ahead the army was fighting forward, dependent, for the moment, on what came across that bridge. A train arrives, hundreds of tons of freight which normally would roll across the river in a few puffs of a cigarette. The cars must be opened, each box and sack taken out by hand, carried down a bank, loaded into a wagon; the wagons creep over the pontoons, struggle through the sand on the other side, then each piece must be unloaded and put on a train again.