The Iron Ration Part 12

But that seems _de trop_. I will leave that to some modern Verestchagin and his canvases.

There is a "still-life" of death that comes to my mind.

Not long after that I was in the Carpathians. General Brussilow was trying out his ma.s.s tactics.

The slaughter of man reached there aspects and proportions never before heard of. It was not the machine murder of the West Front--that is to say, it was not so much a factory for the conversion of live men into dead as it was a crude, old-fashioned abattoir.

On the slope of a ma.s.sive mountain lies an old pine forest. In the clearings stand birches, whose white trunks pierce the gloom under the roof of dense, dark-green pine crowns. Where the clearings are, patches of late-summer sky may be seen. Through the pale blue travel leisurely the whitest of clouds, and into this background of soft blue and white juts the somber pine and the autumn-tinged foliage of the birch.

The forest is more a temple of a thousand columns than a thing that has risen from the little seeds in the pine cones. The trunks are straight and seem more details of a monument than something which has just grown.

There is a formal decorum about the trees and their aggregate. But the soft light under the crowns lessens that into something severely mournful.

The forest is indeed a sepulcher. On its floor lie thousands of dead Russians--first as close together as they can be packed, and then in layers on top of one another. It would seem that these bodies had been brought here for burial. That is not the case, however. The wounds in the tree trunks, cut by the streams of machine-gun bullets from the red trenches at the edge of the forest, indicate what happened. The first wave of Russians entered the forest, was decimated, and retreated. The second one met a similar fate. The third fared no better. The fourth came. The fifth. The sixth--twice more the Russian artillery urged on the Russian infantry.

Here they lie. Their bodies are distended by progressing dissolution.

Narrow slits in the bloated faces show where once the merry and dreamy Slav eye laughed. Most mouths are open, still eager for another breath of air. Distended nostrils tell the same tale. From one mouth hangs a tongue almost bitten off. A face close by is but a mask--a sh.e.l.l splinter has cut off the back of the head, which now rests on the shoulder of the man.

To-morrow will come the Austro-Hungarian burial parties, dig holes and bury these human relics. Meanwhile the pines sough sorrowfully, or maybe they soughed like this before.

Still a little later I was standing at an ancient stone bridge in the Voros Torony defile in the Transylvanian Alps. It was a late afternoon in the late fall. In the defile it was still, save for an occasional artillery detonation near the Roumanian border, where the fight was going on.

The red of the beeches and oaks fitted well into the narrative I heard, and the song of the Alt River reminded that it, too, had played a part in the drama--the complete rout of the Second Roumanian army, a few days before. The breeze sweeping through the defile and along its wooded flanks brought with it the odor of the dead. The underbrush on each side of the road was still full of dead Roumanians. The gutter of the road was strewn with dead horses. Scores of them hung in the tree forks below the road. On a rock-ledge in the river dead men moved about under the impulse of the current.

The narrative:

"Do you see that little clearing up there?"

"The one below the pines?"

"No. The one to the left of that--right above the rocks."

"Yes."

"I was stationed there with my machine-guns," continued the Bavarian officer. "We had crept through the mountains almost on our bellies to get there. It was hard work. But we did it.

"At that we came a day too soon. We were entirely out of reach of Hermannstadt, and didn't know what was going on. For all we knew the Roumanians might have turned a trick. They are not half-bad soldiers. We were surprised, to say the least, when, on arriving here, we found that the road was full of traffic that showed no excitement.

"We heard cannonading at the head of the gorge, but had no means of learning what it was. We had been sent here to cut off the retreat of the Roumanians, while the Ninth Army was to drive them into the defile.

"For twenty-four hours we waited, taking care that the Roumanians did not see us. It was very careless of them, not to patrol these forests in sufficient force, nor to scent that there was something wrong when their small patrols did not return. At any rate, they had no notion of what was in store for them.

"At last the thing started. The German artillery came nearer. We could tell that by the fire. At noon the Roumanians began to crowd into the defile. A little later they were here.

"We opened up on them with the machine-guns for all we were worth. The men had been told to sweep this bridge. Not a Roumanian was to get over that. We wanted to catch the whole lot of them.

"But the Roumanians couldn't see it that way, it seems. On they came in a mad rush for safety. The artillery was sh.e.l.ling the road behind them, and we were holding the bridge almost airtight. Soon the bridge was full of dead and wounded. Others came and attempted to get over them. They fell. Still others pressed on, driven ahead by the maddened crowd in the rear.

"The machine-guns continued to work. Very soon this bridge was full of dead and wounded as high as the parapet. And still those fools would not surrender. Nor did they have sense enough to charge us. There were heaps of dead in front of the bridge, as far as the house over there.

"That should have been a lesson to them. But it wasn't. On they came.

Some of them trampled over the dead and wounded. Those more considerate tried to walk on the parapet. The machine-guns took care that they did not get very far.

"By that time those shot on top of the heap began to slide into the river. Those not under fire scrambled down to the river and swam it--those who could swim; the others are in it yet. You can see them down there and wherever there is sand-bank or rock-ledge. But those who swam were the only ones that escaped us. That crowd was so panicky that it didn't have sense enough even to surrender. That's my theory.

"It was an awful sight. Do you think this war will end soon?"

In private life the narrator is a school-teacher in a little village in the Bavarian highlands.

VIII

PATRIOTISM AND A CRAVING STOMACH

Napoleon had a poor opinion of the hungry soldier. But it is not only the man-at-arms who travels on his belly--the nation at war does the same.

I have found that patriotism at a groaning table in a warm room, and with some other pleasant prospects added, is indeed a fine thing. The amateur strategist and politician is never in finer mettle than when his belt presses more or less upon a grateful stomach and when the mind has been exhilarated by a good bottle of wine and is then being tickled by a respectable Havana.

But I have also sat of nights--rainy nights at that--in the trenches and listened to what the men at the front had to say. They, too, were reasonably optimistic when the stomach was at peace. Of course, these men had their cares. Most of them were married and had in the past supported their families with the proceeds of their labor. Now the governments were feeding these families--after a fashion. What that fashion was the men came to hear in letters from home. It made them dissatisfied and often angry.

I sat one night in the bombproof of an advanced position on the Sveta Maria, near Tolmein. My host was an Austrian captain whose ancestry had come from Scotland. A certain Banfield had thought it well to enter the Austro-Hungarian naval service many years ago, and the captain was one of his descendants.

Captain Banfield was as "sore" as the proverbial wet hen. He hadn't been home in some fourteen months, and at home things were not well. His wife was having a hard time of it trying to keep the kiddies alive, while the good Scotchman was keeping vigil on the Isonzo.

That Scotchman, by the way, had a reputation in the Austrian army for being a terrible _Draufganger_, which means that when occasion came he was rather hard on the Italians. He would have been just as ruthless with the profiteers had he been able to get at them. Most uncomplimentary things were said by him of the food sharks and the government which did not lay them low.

But what Captain Banfield had to complain of I had heard a thousand times. His was not the only officer's wife who had to do the best she could to get along. Nor was that cla.s.s worse off than any other. After all, the governments did their best by it. The real hardships fell upon the dependents of the common soldier.

I had made in Berlin the acquaintance of a woman who before the war had been in very comfortable circ.u.mstances. Though a mechanical engineer of standing, her husband had not been able to qualify for service as an officer. He was in charge of some motor trucks in an army supply column as a non-commissioned officer. The little allowance made by the government for the wife and her four children did not go very far.

But the woman was a good manager. She moved from the expensive flat they had lived in before the mobilization. The quarters she found in the vicinity of the Stettiner railroad station were not highly desirable.

But her genius made them so.

The income question was more difficult to solve. A less resourceful woman would have never solved it. But this one did. She found work in a laundry, checking up the incoming and outgoing bundles. Somebody had to suffer, however. In this case the children. They were small and had to be left to themselves a great deal.

I discussed the case with the woman.

"My children may get some bad manners from the neighbors with whom I have to leave them," she said. "But those I can correct later on. Right now I must try to get them sufficient and good food, so that their bodies will not suffer."

In that kind of a woman patriotism is hard to kill, as I had ample opportunity to observe.

At Constantinople I had made the acquaintance of the Baroness w.a.n.genheim, widow of the late Baron w.a.n.genheim, then amba.s.sador at the Sublime Porte. Hearing that I was in Berlin, the baroness invited me to have tea with her.

Tea is a highly socialized function, anyway, but this one was to be the limit in that respect. The repast--I will call it that--was taken in one of the best appointed _salons_ I ever laid eyes on. Taste and wealth were blended into a splendid whole.

The maid came in and placed upon the fine marquetry taboret a heavy old silver tray. On the tray stood, in glorious array, as fine a porcelain tea service as one would care to own.