My Year of the War Part 15

"You hate to see him go?" I asked.

"It is for France!" she answered.

We had cakes and tea and a merrier--at least, a more heartfelt--party than at any mayor's reception in time of peace. Everybody talked. For the French do know how to talk, when they have not turned grim, silent soldiers. I heard story on story of the German occupation; and how the mayor was put in jail and held as a hostage; and what a German general said to him when he was brought in as a prisoner to be interrogated in his own house, which the general occupied as headquarters.

Among the guests was the wife of a French general in her Red Cross cap. She might see her husband once a week by meeting him on the road between the city and the front. He could not afford to be any farther from his post, lest the Germans spring a surprise. The extent of the information which he gave her was that all went well for France.

Father Joffre plays no favourites in his discipline.

Happy, happy Lorraine in the midst of its ruins! Happy because her adored tricolour floats over those ruins.

XIII A Road Of War I Know

Other armies go to war across the land, but the British go across the sea. They take the Channel ferry in order to reach the front. Theirs is the home road of war to me; the road of my affections, where men speak my mother tongue. It begins on the platform at Victoria Station, with the khaki of officers and men, returning from leave, relieved by the warmer colours of women who have come to say good-bye to those they love. In five hours from the time of starting one may be across that ribbon of salt water, which means much in isolation and little in distance, and in the trenches.

That veteran regular--let us separate him from the crowd--is a type I have often seen, a type that has become as familiar as one's neighbours in one's own town. We will call him the tenth man. That is, of every ten men who went to the front a year ago in his battalion, nine are gone. All of the hardships and all of the terrors of war he has witnessed: men dropped neatly by a bullet; men mangled by sh.e.l.ls.

His khaki is spotless, thanks to his wife, who has dressed in her best for the occasion. Terrible as war itself, but new, that hat of hers, which probably represented a good deal of looking into windows and pricing; and her gown of the cheapest material, drooping from her round shoulders, is the product of the poor dress-making skill of hands which show only too well who does all the housework at home.

The children, a boy of four and a girl of seven, are in their best, too, with faces scrubbed till they shine.

You will see like scenes in stations at home when the father has found work in a distant city and is going on ahead to get established before the family follow him. Such incidents are common in civil life; they became common at Victoria Station. What is common has no significance, editors say.

When the time came to go through the gate, the veteran picked the boy up in his arms and pressed him very close and the little girl looked on wonderingly, while the mother was not going to make it any harder for the father by tears. "Good-bye, Tom!" she said. So his name was Tom, this tenth man.

I spoke with him. His battalion was full with recruits. It had been kept full. But, considering the law of chance, what about the surviving one out of an original ten?

"Yes, I've had my luck with me," he said. "Probably my turn will come.

Maybe I'll never see the wife and kids again."

The morning roar of London had begun. That station was a small spot in the city. There were not enough officers and men taking the train to make up a day's casualty list; for ours was only a small party returning from leave. The transports, unseen, carried the mult.i.tudes.

Wherever one had gone in England he had seen soldiers and wherever he went in France he was to see still more soldiers.

England had become an armed camp; and England plodded on, "muddled" on, preparing, ever preparing, to forge in time of war the thunderbolt for war which was undreamed of in time of peace when other nations were forging their thunderbolts.

Still the recruiting posters called for more soldiers and the casualty lists appeared day after day with the regularity of want advertis.e.m.e.nts. Imagine eight million men under arms in the United States and you have the equivalent to what England did by the volunteer system. The more there were the more pessimistic became the British Press. Pessimism brought in recruits. Bad news made England take another deep breath of energizing determination. It was the last battle which was decisive. She had always won that. She would win it again.

They talk of war aboard the Pullman, after officers have waved their hands out of the windows to their wives, quite as if they were going to Scotland for a weekend instead of back to the firing-line. British phlegm this is called. No, British habit, I should say, the race-bred, individualistic quality of never parading emotions in public; the instinct of keeping things which are one's own to one's self. Personally, I like this way. In one form or another, as the hedges fly by the train windows, the subject is always war. War creeps into golf, or shooting, or investments, or politics. Only one suggestion quite frees the mind from the omnipresent theme: Will the Channel be smooth? The Germans have nothing to do with that. It is purely a matter of weather.

Bad sailors are more worried about the crossing than about the sh.e.l.l- fire they are going to face.

With bad sailors or good sailors, the significant thing which had become a commonplace was that the Channel was a safely-guarded British sea lane. In all my crossings I was never delayed. For England had one thunderbolt ready forged when the war began. The only submarines, or destroyers, or dirigibles that one saw were hers.

Antennae these of the great fleet waiting with the threat of stored lightning ready to be flashed from gun-mouths; a threat as efficacious as action, in nowise mysterious or subtle, but definite as steel and powder, speaking the will of a people in their chosen field of power, felt over all the seas of the world, coast of Maine and the Carolinas no less than Labrador. Thousands of transports had come and gone, carrying hundreds of thousands of soldiers and food for men and guns to India; and on the high road to India, to Australia, to San Francisco, shipping went its way undisturbed by anything that dives or flies.

The same white hospital ships lying in that French harbour; the same line of grey, dusty-looking ambulances parked on the quay!

Everybody in the one-time sleepy, week-end tourist resort seems to be in uniform; to have something to do with war. All surroundings become those of war long before you reach the front. That knot of civilians, waiting their turn for another examination of the same kind as that on the other side of the Channel, have shown good reasons for going to Paris to the French Consul in London, or they might not proceed even this far on the road of war. They seem outcasts--a humble lot in the variegated costumes of the civil world--outcasts from the disciplined world in its pattern garb of khaki. Their excuse for not being in the game is that they are too old or that they are women.

For now the war has sucked into its vortex the great majority of those who are strong enough to fight or work.

A traveller might be a spy; hence, all this red tape for the many to catch the one. Even red tape seems now to have become normal.

War is normal. It would seem strange to cross the Channel in time of peace; the harbour would not look like itself with civilians not having to show pa.s.sports, and without the white hospital ships, and the white-bearded landing-officer at the foot of the gangway, and the board held up with lists of names of officers who have telegrams waiting for them.

For the civilians a yellow card of disembarkation and for the military a white card. The officers and soldiers walk off at once and the queue of civilians waits. One civilian with a white card, who belongs to no regiment, who is not even a chaplain or a nurse, puzzles the landing- officer for a moment. But there is something to go with it--a correspondent's licence and a letter from a general who looks after such things. They show that you "belong"; and if you don't belong on the road of war you will not get far. As well try to walk past the doorman and take a seat in the United States Senate chamber during a session.

Most precious that magical piece of paper. I happen to be the only American with one, unless he is in the fighting line--which is one sure way to get to the front. The price of all the opera boxes at the Metropolitan will not buy it; and it is the pa.s.sport to the welcoming smile from an army chauffeur, whom I almost regard as my own. But its real value appears at the outskirts of the city. There the dead line is drawn; there the sheep are finally separated from the goats by a French sentry guarding the winding pa.s.sageway between some carts, which have been in the same place in the road for months.

The car spins over the broad, hard French road, in a land where for many miles you see no signs of war, until it turns into the grounds of a small chateau opposite a village church. The proprietor of a drygoods store in a neighbouring city spends his summers here; but this summer he is in town, because the Press wanted a place to live and he was good enough to rent us his country place. So this is home, where the five British and one American correspondents live and mess. The expense of our cars costs us treble all the rest of our expenses. They take us where we want to go. We go where we please, but we may not write what we please. We see something like a thousand times more than we can tell. The conditions are such as to make a news reporter throw up his hands and faint. But if he had his unbridled way, one day he might feel the responsibility for the loss of hundreds of British soldiers' lives.

"It may be all right for war correspondents, but it is a devil of a poor place for a newspaper man," as one editor said. Yet it is the only place where you can really know anything about the war.

We become part of the machinery of the great organization that encloses us in its regular processes. No one in his heart envies the press officer who holds the blue pencil over us. He has to "take it both going and coming." He labours on our behalf and sometimes we labour with him. The staff are willing enough to let us watch the army at work, but they do not care whether or not we write about their war; he wants us both to see it and to write about it. He tells us some big piece of news, and then says: "That is for yourselves; you may not write it."

People do not want to read about the correspondents, of course.

They want to read what the correspondents have to tell about the war; but the conditions of our work are interesting because we are the link between the army and the reading public. All that it learns from actual observation of what the army is doing comes through us.

We may not give the names of regiments and brigades until weeks after a fight, because that will tell the enemy what troops are engaged; we may not give the names of officers, for that is glorifying one when possibly another did his duty equally well. It is the anonymity of the struggle that makes it all seem distant and unreal--till the telegram comes from the War Office to say that the one among the millions who is dear to you is dead or wounded. Otherwise, it is a torment of unidentified elements behind a curtain, which is parted for an announcement of gain or loss, or to give out a list of the fallen.

The world wants to read that Peter Smith led the King's Own Particular Fusiliers in a charge. It may not know Peter Smith, but his name and that of his regiment make the information seem definite.

The statement that a well-known millionaire yesterday gave a million dollars to charity, or that a man in a checked suit swam from the Battery to Coney Island, is not convincing; nor is the fact that one private unnamed held back the Germans with bombs in the traverse of a trench for hours until help came. We at the front, however, do know the names; we meet the officers and men. Ours is the intimacy which we may not interpret except in general terms.

Every article, every dispatch, every letter, pa.s.ses through the censor's hand. But we are never told what to write. The liberty of the Press is too old an inst.i.tution in England for that. Always we may learn why an excision is made. The purpose is to keep information from the enemy. It is not like fighting Boers or Filipinos, this war of walls of men who can turn the smallest bit of information to advantage.

Intelligence officers speak of their work as piecing together the parts of a jig-saw puzzle. What seems a most innocent fact by itself may furnish the bit which gives the figure in the picture its face. It does not follow because you are an officer that you know what may and what may not be of service to the enemy.

A former British officer who had become a well-known military critic, in an account of a visit to the front mentioned having seen a battle from a certain church tower. Publication of the account was followed by a tornado of sh.e.l.l-fire that killed and wounded many British soldiers.

Only a staff specialist, trained in intelligence work and in constant touch with the intelligence department, can be a safe censor. At the same time, he is the best friend of the correspondent. He knows what is harmless and what may not be allowed. He wants the Press to have as much as possible. For the more the public knows about its soldiers, the better the morale of the people, which reflects itself in the morale of the army.

The published casualty lists giving the names of officers and men and their battalions is a means of causing casualties. From a prisoner taken the enemy learns what battalions were present at a given fight; he adds up the numbers reported killed and wounded and ascertains what the fight cost the enemy and, in turn, the effect of the fire from his side. But the British public demanded to see the casualty lists and the British Press were allowed to gratify the desire. They appeared in the newspapers, of course, days after the nearest relative of the dead or wounded man had received official notification from the War Office.

Officers' letters from the front, so freely published earlier in the war, amazed experienced correspondents by their unconscious indiscretions. The line officer who had been in a fight told all that he saw. Twenty officers doing the same along a stretch of front and the jig-saw experts, plus what information they had from spies, were in clover. Editors said: "But these men are officers. They ought to know when they are imparting military secrets."

Alas, they do not know! It is not to be expected that they should. Their business is to fight; the business of other experts is to safeguard information. For a long time the British army kept correspondents from the front on the principle that the business of a correspondent must be to tell what ought not to be told. Yet they were to learn that the accredited correspondent, an expert at his profession, working in harmony with the experts of the staff, let no military secrets pa.s.s.

At our mess we get the Berlin dailies promptly. Soon after the Germans are reading the war correspondence from their own front we are reading it, and laughing at jokes in their comic papers and at cartoons which exhibit John Bull as a stricken old ogre and Britannia who Rules the Waves with the corners of her mouth drawn down to the bottom of her chin, as she sees the havoc that von Tirpitz is making with submarines which do not stop us from receiving our German jokes regularly across the Channel.

Doubtless the German messes get their Punch and the London ill.u.s.trated weeklies regularly. In the time that it took the English daily with the account of the action seen from the church tower to reach Berlin and the news to be wired to the front, the German guns made use of the information. Neutral little Holland is the telltale of both sides; the ally and the enemy of all intelligence corps. Scores of experts in jig-saw puzzles on both sides seize every sc.r.a.p of information and piece them together. Each time that one gets a bit from a newspaper he is for a sharper Press censorship on his side and a more liberal one on the other.

We six correspondents have our insignia, as must everyone who is free to move along the lines. By a glance you may tell everybody's branch and rank in that complicated and disciplined world, where no man acts for himself, but always on someone else's orders.

"Don't you know who they are? They are the correspondents," I heard a soldier say. "D. Chron., that's the Daily Chronicle; M. Post, that's the Morning Post; D. Mail, that's the Daily Mail. There's one with U.S.A.

What paper is that?"

"It ain't a paper," said another. "It's the States--he's a Yank!"

The War Office put it on the American cousin's arm, and wherever it goes it seems welcome. It may puzzle the gunners when the American says, "That was a peach of a shot, right across the pan!" or the infantry when he says, "It cuts no ice!" and there is no ice visible in Flanders; he speaks about typhoid to the medical corps which calls it enteric; and "fly-swatting" is a new word to the sanitarians, who are none the less busily engaged in that n.o.ble art. Lessons for the British in the "American language" while you wait! In return, the American is learning what a "stout-hearted thruster" and other phrases mean in the Simon-pure English.

The correspondents are the spoiled spectators of the army's work; the itinerants of the road of war. n.o.body sees so much as we, because we have nothing to do but to see. An officer looking at the towers of Ypres Cathedral a mile away from the trench where he was, said: "No, I've never been in Ypres. Our regiment has not been stationed in that part of the line."