My Year of the War Part 5

Slightly-wounded Belgians and Belgian stragglers roamed the streets of Calais. Some had a few belongings wrapped up in handkerchiefs.

Others had only the clothes they wore. Yet they were cheerful; this was the amazing thing. They moved about, laughing and chatting in groups. Perhaps this was the best way. Possibly relief at being out of the h.e.l.l at the front was the only emotion they could feel. But their cheerfulness was none the less a dash of sunlight for Calais.

The French were grim. They were still polite; they went on with their work. No unwounded French soldiers were to be seen, except the old Territorials guarding the railroad and the highways. The military organization of France, which knew what war meant and had expected war, had drawn every man to his place and held him there with the inexorable hand of military and racial discipline. Calais had never considered caring for wounded, and the wounded poured in. I saw a motor-car with a wounded man stop at a crowded corner, in the midst of refugees and soldiers; a doctor was leaning over him, and he died whilst the car waited.

But the journalists were saying that stories of wounded men were likewise stale. So they were, for Europe was red with wounded. Train after train brought in its load from the front, and Calais tried to care for them. At least, it had buildings which would give shelter from the rain. On the floor of a railway freight shed the wounded lay in long rows, with just enough s.p.a.ce between them to make an alley.

Those in the row against one of the walls were German prisoners.

Their green uniforms melted into the stone of the wall and did not show the mud stains. Two slightly wounded had their heads together whispering. They were helplessly tired, though not as tired as most of the others, those two stalwart young men; but they seemed to be relieved, almost happy. It did not matter what happened to them, now, so long as they could rest.

Next to them a German was dying, and others badly hit were gla.s.sy- eyed in their fatigue and exhaustion. This was the word, exhaustion, for all the wounded.

They had not the strength for pa.s.sion or emotion. The fuel for those fires was in ashes. All they wanted in this world was to lie quiet; and some fell asleep not knowing or caring probably whether they were in Germany or in France. In the other rows, in contrast with this chameleon, baffling green, were the red trousers of the French and the dark blue of the Belgian uniforms, sharing the democracy of exhaustion with their foe.

A misty rain was falling. In a bright spot of light through a window one by one the wounded were being lifted up on to a seat, if they were not too badly hit, and on to an operating-table if their condition were serious. A doctor and a st.u.r.dy Frenchwoman of about thirty, in spotless white, were in charge. Another woman undid the first-aid bandage and still another applied a spray. No time was lost; there were too many wounded to care for. The thing must be done as rapidly as possible before another train-load came in. If these attendants were tired, they did not know it any more than the wounded had realized their fatigue in the pa.s.sion of battle. The improvized arrangement to meet an emergency had an appeal which more elaborate arrangements of organization which I had seen lacked. It made war a little more red; humanity a little more human and kind and helpless under the scourge which it had brought on itself.

Though Calais was not prepared for wounded, when they came the women of energy and courage turned to the work without jealousy, without regard to red tape, without fastidiousness. I have in mind half a dozen other women about the streets that day in uniforms of short skirts and helmets, who belonged to a volunteer organization which had taken some care as to its regimentals. They were types not characteristic of the whole, of whom one practical English doctor said: "We don't mind as long as they do not get in the way." Their criticisms of Calais and the arrangements were outspoken; nothing was adequate; conditions were filthy; it was shameful. They were going to write to the English newspapers about it and appeal for money. When they had organized a proper hospital, one should see how the thing ought to be done. Meantime, these volunteer Frenchwomen were doing the best they knew how and doing it now.

A fine-looking young Frenchman who had a sh.e.l.l-wound in the thigh was being lifted on to the table. He shuddered with pain, as he clenched his teeth; yet when the dressing was finished he was able to breathe his thanks. On the seat was a Congo negro who had been with one of the Belgian regiments, coal black and thick-lipped, with bloodshot eyes; an unsensitized human organism, his face as expressionless as his bare back with holes made by sh.e.l.l-fragments.

A young Frenchwoman--she could not have been more than nineteen --with a face of singular refinement, sprayed his wounds with the definiteness of one trained to such work, though two days before it had probably never occurred to her as being within the possibilities of her existence. Her coolness and the coolness of the other women in their silent activity had a charm that added to one's devout respect.

The French wounded, too, were silent, as if in the presence of a crisis which overwhelmed personal thoughts. Help was needed at the front; they knew it. On sixty trains in one day sixty thousand French pa.s.sed through Calais. With a pa.s.s from the French commandant at Calais, I got on board one of these trains down at the railroad yards at dawn.

This lot were Turcos, under the command of a white-haired veteran of African campaigns. An utter change of atmosphere from the freight shed! Perhaps it is only the wounded who have time to think. My companions in the officers' car were as cheery as the brown devils whom they led. They had come from the trenches on the Marne, and their commissariat was a boiled ham, some bread and red wine.

Enough! It was war time, as they said.

"We were in the Paris railroad yards. That is all we saw of Paris--and in the night. Hard luck!"

They had left the Marne the previous day. By night they could be in the fight. It did not take long to send reinforcements when the line was closed to all except military traffic and one train followed close on the heels of another.

They did not know where they were going; one never knew. Probably they would get orders at Dunkirk. Father Joffre, when there was a call for reinforcements, never was in a panicky hurry. He seemed to understand that the general who made the call could hold out a little longer; but the reinforcements were always up on time. A long head had Father Joffre.

Now I am going to say that life was going on as usual at Dunkirk; that is the obvious thing to say. The nearer the enemy, the more characteristic that trite observation of those who have followed the roads of war in Europe. At Dunkirk you might have a good meal within sound of the thunder of the guns of the British monitors which were helping the Belgians to hold their line. At Dunkirk most excellent patisserie was for sale in a confectionery shop. Why shouldn't tartmakers go on making tarts and selling them? The British naval reserve officers used to take tea in this shop. Little crowds of citizens who had nothing to do, which is the most miserable of vocations in such a crisis, gathered to look at armoured motor-cars which had come in from the front with bullet dents, which gave them the atmosphere of battle.

Beyond Dunkirk, one might see wounded Belgians, fresh from the field of battle, staggering in, crawling in, hobbling in from the havoc of sh.e.l.l-fire, their first-aid bandages saturated with mud, their ungainly and impracticable uniforms oozing mud, ghosts of men-these "schipperkes" of the nation that was unprepared for war who had done their part, when the only military thought was for more men, unwounded men, British, French, Belgian, to stem the German tide.

Yet many of these Belgians, even these, were cheerful. They could still smile and say, "Bonne chance!"

Indeed, there seemed no limit to the cheerfulness of Belgians. At a hospital in Calais I met a Belgian professor with his head a white ball of bandages, showing a hole for one eye and a slit for the mouth. He had been one of the cyclist force which took account of many German cavalry scouts in the first two weeks of the war. A staff motor-car had run over him on the road.

"I think the driver of the car was careless," he said mildly, as if he were giving a gentle reproof to a student.

By contrast, he had reason to be thankful for his lot. Looked after by a brave man attendant in another room were the wounded who were too horrible to see; who must die. Then, in another, you had a picture of a smiling British regular, with a British nurse and an Englishwoman of Calais to look after him. They read to him, they talked to him, they vied with each other in rearranging his pillows or bedclothes. He was a hero of a story; but it rather puzzled him why he should be. Why were a lot of people paying so much attention to him for doing his duty?

In the cavalry, he had been separated from his regiment on the retreat from Mons. Wandering about the country, he came up with a regiment of cuira.s.siers and asked if he might not fight with them. A number of the cuira.s.siers spoke English. They took him into the ranks. The regiment went far over on the Marne, through towns with French names which he could not p.r.o.nounce, this man in khaki with the French troopers. He was marked. C'est un Anglais! People cheered him and threw flowers to him in regions which had never seen one of the soldiers of the Ally before.

Yes, officers and gentlemen invited him to dine, like he was a gentleman, he said, and not a Tommy, and the French Government had given him a decoration called the Legion of Honour or something like that. This was all very fine; but the best thing was that his own colonel, when he returned, had him up before his company and made a speech to him for fighting with the French when he could not find his own regiment. He was supremely happy, this Tommy. In waiting Calais one might witness about all the emotions and contrasts of war --and many which one does not find at the front.

VI In Germany

Never had the war seemed a more monstrous satire than on that first day in Germany as the train took me to Berlin. It was the other side of the wall of gun and rifle-fire where another set of human beings were giving life in order to take life. The Lord had fashioned them in the same pattern on both sides of the wall. Their children were born in the same way; they bled from wounds in the same way--but why go on in this vicious circle of thought?

My impressions of Germany were brief, and the clearer perhaps for being brief, and drawn on the fresh background of Paris and Calais waiting to know their fate; of England staring across the Channel, in a suspense which her stoicism would not confess, to learn the result of the battle for the Channel ports; of England and France straining with all their strength to hold, while the Germans exerted all theirs to gain, a goal; of Holland, stolid mistress of her neutrality, fearing for it and profiting by it while she took in the Belgian foundlings dropped on her steps--Holland, that little land at peace, with the storms lashing around her.

The stiff and soldierly-appearing reserve officer with bristling Kaiserian moustache, so professedly alert and efficient, who looked at the mottled back of my pa.s.sport and frowned at the recent visa, "A la Place de Calais, bon pour aller a Dunkerque, P.O. Le Chef d'Etat- Major," but let me by without questions or fuss, aroused visions of a frontier stone wall studded with bayonets.

For something about him expressed a certain character of downright militancy lacking in either an English or a French guard. I could imagine his contempt for both and particularly for a "sloppy, undisciplined" American guard, as he would have called one of ours.

Personal feelings did not enter into his thoughts. He had none; only national feelings, this outpost of the national organism. The mood of the moment was friendliness to Americans. Germany wished to create the impression on the outside world through the agency of the neutral press that she was in | danger of starving, whilst she ama.s.sed munitions for her summer campaign and the Allies were lulled into confidence of siege by famine rather than by arms. A double, a treble purpose the starving campaign served; for it also ensured economy of foodstuffs, whilst nothing so puts the steel into a soldier's heart as the thought that the enemy is trying to beat him through taking the bread out of his mouth and the mouths of the women and children dependent upon him.

Tears and laughter and moods and pa.s.sions organized! Seventy millions in the union of determined earnestness of a life-and-death issue! Germany had studied more than how to make war with an army. She had studied how the people at home should help an army to make war.

"With our immense army, which consists of all the able-bodied youth of the people," as a German officer said, "when we go to war the people must be pa.s.sionate for war. Their impulse must be the impulse of the army. Their spirit will drive the army on. They must be drilled, too, in their part. No item in national organization is too small to have its effect."

Compared to the, French, who had turned grim and gave their prayers as individuals to hearten their soldiers, the Germans were as responsive as a stringed instrument to the master musician's touch. A whisper in Berlin was enough to set a new wave of pa.s.sion in motion, which spread to the trenches east and west.

Something like the team-work of the "rah-rah" of college athletics was applied to the nation. The soft pedal on this emotion, the loud on that, or a new cry inaugurated which all took up, not with the noisy, paid insincerity of a claque, but with the vibrant force of a trained orchestra with the bra.s.ses predominant.

There seemed less of the spontaneity of an individualistic people than of the exaltation of a religious revival. If the army were a machine of material force, then the people were a machine of psychical force.

Though the thing might leave the observer cold, as a religious revival leaves the sceptic, yet he must admire. I was told that I should succ.u.mb to the contagion as others had; but it was not the optimism which was dinned into my ears that affected me as much as sidelights.

When I took a walk away from a railway station where I had to make a train connection, I saw a German reservist of forty-five who was helping with one hand to thresh the wheat from his farm, on a grey, lowering winter day. The other hand was in a bandage. He had been allowed to go home until he was well enough to fight again. The same sort of scene I had witnessed in France; the wounded man trying to make up to his family the loss of his labour during his absence at the front.

Only, that man in France was on the defensive; he was righting to hold what he had and on his own soil. The German had been fighting on the enemy's soil to gain more land. He, too, thought of it as the defensive. All Germany insisted that it was on the defensive. But it was the defensive of a people who think only in the offensive. That was it--that was the vital impression of Germany revealed in every conversation and every act.

The Englishman leans back on his oars; the German leans forward.

The Englishman's phrase is "Stick it," which means to hold what you have; the German's phrase is "Onward." It was national youth against national middle-age. A vessel with pressure of increase from within was about to expand or burst. A vessel which is large and comfortable for its contents was resisting pressure from without. The French were saying, What if we should lose? And the Germans were saying, What if we should not win all that we are ent.i.tled to? Germany had been thinking of a mightier to-morrow and England of a to- morrow as good as to-day. Germany looked forward to a fortune to be won at thirty; England considered the safeguarding of her fortune at fifty.

It is not professions that count so much as the thing that works out from the nature of a situation and the contemporaneous bent of a people. The Englishman thought of his defence as keeping what he already had; the German was defending what he considered that he was ent.i.tled to. If he could make more of Calais than the French, then Calais ought to be his. A nation, with the "closed in" culture of the French on one side and the enormous, unwieldy ma.s.s of Russia on the other, convinced of its superiority and its ability to beat either foe, thought that it was the friend of peace because it had withheld the blow. When the striking time came, it struck hard and forced the battle on enemy soil, which proved, to its logic, that it was only receiving payment of a debt owed it by destiny.

Bred to win, confident that the German system was the right system of life, it could imagine the German Michael as the missionary of the system, converting the Philistine with machine-guns. Confidence, the confidence which must get new vessels for the energy that has overflowed, the confidence of all cla.s.ses in the realization of the long- promised day of the "place in the sun" for the immense population drilled in the system, was the keynote. They knew that they could lick the other fellow and went at him from the start as if they expected to lick him, with a diligence which made the most of their training and preparation.

When I asked for a room with a bath in a leading Berlin hotel, the clerk at the desk said, "I will see, sir." He ran his eye up and down the list methodically before he added: "Yes, we have a good room on the second floor." Afterwards, I learned that all except the first and second floors of the hotel were closed. The small dining-room only was open, and every effort was made to make the small dining-room appear normal.

He was an efficient clerk; the b.u.t.tons who opened the room door, a goose-stepping, alert sprout of German militarism, exhibiting a punctiliousness of attention which produced a further effect of normality. Those Germans who were not doing their part at the front were doing it at home by bluffing the other Germans and themselves into confidence. The clerk believed that some day he would have more guests than ever and a bigger hotel. All who suffered from the war could afford to wait. Germany was winning; the programme was being carried out. The Kaiser said so. In proof of it, mult.i.tudes of Russian soldiers were tilling the soil in place of Germans, who were at the front taking more Russian soldiers.

Everybody that one met kept telling him that everything was perfectly normal. No intending purchaser of real estate in a boom town was ever treated to more optimistic propaganda. Perfectly normal--when one found only three customers in a large department store! Perfectly normal--when the big steamship offices presented in their windows bare blue seas which had once been charted with the going and coming of German ships! Perfectly normal--when the spool of the killed and wounded rolled out by yards like that of a ticker on a busy day on the Stock Exchange! Perfectly normal--when women tried to smile in the streets with eyes which had plainly been weeping at home!

Are you for us or against us? The question was put straight to the stranger. Let him say that he was a neutral and they took it for granted that he was a pro-Ally. He must be pro-something.

As I returned to the railway station after my walk, a soldier took me in charge and marched me to the office of the military commandant.

"Are you an Englishman?" was his first question. The guttural, military emphasis which he put on "Englishman" was most significant. Which brings us to another factor in the psychology of war: hate.

"If men are to fight well," said a German officer, "it is necessary that they hate. They must be exalted by a great pa.s.sion when they charge into machine-guns."

Hate was officially distilled and then instilled--hate against England, almost exclusively. The public rose to that. If England had not come in, the German military plan would have succeeded: first, the crushing of France; then, the crushing of Russia. The despised Belgian, that small boy who had tripped the giant and then hugged the giant's knees, delaying him on the road to Paris, was having a rest. For he had been hated very hard for a while with the hate of contempt--that miserable pigmy who had interfered with the plans of the machine.