Should you feel like giving up the theatre this evening, or taking a street-car instead of a taxi, or not opening that bottle of champagne, the money would be very welcome to Dr. du Page and his wounded. Should you feel that that is too much to give, it might be well for you to remember that he has given something, too. He gave his wife. She was returning from America, where she had gone to collect funds to carry on the work of the hospital. She sailed on the Lusitania....
To reach the Belgian firing-line is not easy because, the country being as flat as a ballroom floor, the Germans see and shoot at you. So one needs to be cautious. So dangerous is the terrain in this respect that the ambulances and motor-lorries and ammunition-trains could not get up to the trenches at all had not the Belgians, with great foresight, done wholesale tree-planting. Most people do not number nursery work among the duties of an army, but nowadays it is. From France and England the Belgians imported many saplings, thousands if not tens of thousands of them, and set them out along the roads exposed to German fire, and now their foliage forms a screen behind which troops and transport can move with comparative safety. In places where trees would not grow the roads have been masked for miles with screens made from branches. To have one of these screens between you and the Germans is very comforting.
On our way up to the front we made a détour in order that I might call on a friend, Mrs. A. D. Winterbottom, who, before her marriage to a British officer, was Miss Appleton of Boston. In "Fighting in Flanders" I told about a very brave deed which I saw performed by Mrs. Winterbottom. She was quite angry with me for mentioning it, but because she is an American of whom her countrypeople have every reason to be proud, I am going to tell about it again. It was during the last days of the siege of Antwerp. The Germans had methodically pounded to pieces with their great guns the chain of barrier forts encircling the city. Waelhem was one of the last to fall. When at length the remnant of the garrison evacuated the fort they brought back word that a score of their comrades, too badly wounded to walk, remained within the battered walls. So Mrs. Winterbottom, who had brought over from England her big touring-car and was driving it herself, said quietly that she was going to bring them out. The only way to reach the fort was by a straight and narrow road, a mile long, on which German shells were bursting with great accuracy and frequency. To me and to the Belgian officers who were with me, it looked like a short-cut to the cemetery. But that didn't deter Mrs. Winterbottom. She climbed into her car and threw in the clutch and jammed her foot down on the accelerator, and went tearing down that shell-spattered highway at top speed. She filled her car with wounded men and brought them safely back, and then returned and gathered up the others who were still alive. I have seen few braver deeds.
Mrs. Winterbottom remained with the Belgian army throughout the great retreat into Flanders, and when it settled down into the trench life on the Yser, she was officially attached to a division, with which she has remained ever since, moving when her division moves. She lives in a one-room shack which the soldiers have built her immediately in the rear of the trenches and within range of the enemy's guns. Her only companion is a dog, yet she is as safe as though she were on Beacon Hill, for she is the idol of the soldiers. She has a large recreation tent, like the side-show tent of a circus, but painted green to escape the attention of the German airmen, and in this tent she entertains the men during their brief periods of leave from the trenches. She gives them coffee, cocoa, milk, and biscuits; she provides them with writing materials—I forget how many thousand sheets of paper and envelopes she told me that they used each week; and she keeps them supplied with reading matter. Three times a week she gives "her boys" a phonograph concert in the first-line trenches. You must have experienced the misery and monotony of existence in the trenches to understand what these "concerts" mean to the tired and homesick men. I asked her if there was anything that the people at home could send her, and she replied rather hesitantly (for she is personally bearing the entire expense of this work) that she understood that some small metal phonographs were procurable which could easily be carried about and would not warp from dampness, for the trenches on the Yser are very wet. She also said that she would welcome phonograph records of any description and French books. The last I saw of her she was wading through a sea of mud, in rubber boots and a rubber coat and a sou'wester, to carry her "canned music" to the men on the firing-line. They ought to be very proud of Mrs. Winterbottom back in her own home town.
The Belgian trenches are very much like those on other sectors of the Western Front, except that they are made of sand-bags instead of earth, are muddier and are nearer the enemy, being separated from the German positions, for a considerable distance, only by the Yser, which in places is only forty yards across. In fact, a baseball player could easily sling a stone across the river into Dixmude, or what remains of it, for, like most of the other Flemish towns, it is now only a blackened skeleton. Many cities have been destroyed in the course of this war, but none of them, unless it be Ypres, so nearly approaches complete obliteration as Dixmude. Pompeii is a living, breathing city compared to it. Despite all that has been printed about the devastation in the war zone, I believe that when the war is over and the hordes of curious Americans flock Europeward, they will be stunned by the completeness of the desolation which the Germans have wrought in northeastern France and Belgium.
By far the most interesting day I spent on the Belgian front was not in the trenches but in a long, low, wooden building well to the rear. Over the door was a sign which read: "Section Photographique de l'Armée Belge." Here are brought to be developed and enlarged and scrutinized the hundreds of photographs which are taken daily by Belgian aviators flying over the German lines. In no department of war work has there been greater progress during recent months than in photography by airplane. Every morning at break of dawn scores of Belgian machines—and the same is true all down the Western Front—rise into the air, and for hour after hour swoop and circle over the enemy's lines, taking countless photographs of his positions by means of specially made cameras fitted with telescopic lenses. (The Allied fliers on the Somme took seventeen hundred photographs during a single day.) Most of these photographs are taken at a height of eight thousand to ten thousand feet,[F] though very much lower, of course, when an opportunity presents itself, and always with the camera as nearly vertical as possible. As soon as an aviator has secured a sufficient number of pictures of the locality or object which he has been ordered to photograph, he wings his way back to his own lines, the plates are immediately developed at the headquarters of the Section Photographique or in a dark room on wheels. If the first examination of the negative reveals anything of interest, it is at once enlarged, often to eight times the size of the original. As a result of this remarkable system of aerial espionage, there is nothing of importance which the Germans can long conceal from the Allies. They cannot extend their trench lines by so much as a yard, they cannot construct new positions, they cannot mount a machine-gun without the fact being registered by those eyes which, from dawn to dark, peer down at them from the clouds. At all of the divisional headquarters are large plans of the opposing enemy trenches, which are corrected daily by means of these airplane photographs and by the information collected through the elaborate system of espionage which the Allies maintain behind the German lines. To deceive the aerial observers, each side resorts to all manner of ingenious tricks. To suggest an impending retirement, columns of men are marched down the roads which lead to the rear; trenches which are not intended to be used are dug; and there are, of course, hundreds of dummy guns, some of which actually fire. The officer in command of the Belgian Photographic Section had heard that I was in Dunkirk in May, 1915, when it was shelled by a German naval gun, at a range of twenty-three and one-half miles.[G] So he gave me as a souvenir of the experience a photograph, taken from the air, of the gun emplacement after it had been discovered and bombed by the Allied aviators, and the gun removed to a place of safety. I reproduce the photograph herewith. The numerous white spots all about the emplacement are the craters caused by the bombs which were rained upon it.
Another of these monster guns was so ingeniously concealed in an imitation thicket that for a fortnight or more it defied the efforts of scores of airmen to locate it. Though hundreds of airplane photographs of the country behind the German trenches were brought in and minutely examined, there was nothing about them to suggest the hiding-place of a gun of so large a caliber until some one called attention to the deep ruts left by motor-trucks which had left the highway at a certain point and turned into the innocent-looking patch of woods. Why were the wheel-ruts shown on the plate so black? Because the vehicle must have sunk deep into the soft soil. Why did it sink so deeply? Because it was heavily laden. Laden with what? With large-caliber shells, perhaps. But still it was only a supposition. A few days later, however, it was noticed that at a certain point on the westward edge of that patch of woods there seemed to be a slight discoloration. This discoloration became more pronounced on later photographs which were brought in. Every one in the Section Photographique hazarded a guess as to its cause. At length some one suggested that it looked as though the leaves of the trees had been burned. But what burned them? There was only one answer. The fiery blast from a big gun hidden amid those trees, of course! Acting on that hypothesis, a score of aviators were sent out with orders to pour upon the wood a torrent of high explosive. The next few hours must have been very uncomfortable for the German gun-crew. In any event, the big piece was hauled out of danger under cover of darkness and the bombardments of the towns behind the Belgian lines abruptly ceased.
The Allied air service does not confine its observations to the trenches; it keeps an ever-wakeful eye on all that is in progress in the regions for many miles behind the front. To illustrate how little escapes the eye of the camera, the officer in charge of the Photographic Section showed me a series of photographs which had been taken of a village at the back of Dixmude, a few days previously, from a height of more than a mile. The first picture showed an ordinary Flemish village with its gridiron of streets and buildings. Cutting diagonally across the picture was a straight white streak which I knew to be a road leading into the country. At one point on this road were a number of tiny squares—evidently a row of workmen's cottages. The commandant handed me a powerful magnifying-glass. "Look very closely on that road," he said, "and you will see three specks." I saw them. They were about the size of pin-points.
"Those are three men," he continued. "The man at the right lives in the first of this row of cottages. The man in the middle lives in the fourth house in the row. But the man at the left is a farmer, and lives in this isolated farmhouse out here in the country."